When Hugo Mahoney took on the job of Sales & Marketing Director at Lexis Nexis three years ago he knew it was going to be a challenge. The company had been selling books, journals and other information to legal and tax professionals for over 200 years, and, in simple terms, it needed to change.

 

“We have an excellent pedigree in selling those traditional forms of information,” explains Mahoney. “Our aim over the past three years has been to maintain excellence in that area while developing our technology offering. This is where we provide large corporates with information that is embedded in their workflow. Basically this means an accountant, rather than having to look for the information he needs in one of our journals, can access it on his PDA.”

 

These contracts are obviously major pieces of business and have the potential to generate significant long-term revenue for Lexis Nexis, so it is easy to see why they have been so keen to develop that side of the business. However, when Mahoney joined three years ago it was clear that it would not be easy to make the shift.

 

“We’ve had to transform the entire department,” he says. “We had a team of salespeople who had only ever done transactional selling. They were great at selling books, but they struggled when it came to accessing senior corporate decision-makers, understanding their needs, providing suitable solutions, and building that all-important rapport. My challenge was to change the people, the systems, and the culture of the entire sales and marketing department.”

 

 

It was a job for which his career up until that point made Mahoney ideally suited. “I’ve always been attracted to the tough side of sales,” he claims, and his CV seems to bear witness to the fact. When he left university 20 years ago he joined the labour market during a recession that was almost as fierce as the one we’re currently experiencing. He knew he wanted to work in sales, but almost the only sector that was hiring salespeople in the last 1980s was pharmaceuticals.

 

So, he cut his teeth cold calling in the tough world of pharmaceutical sales, before moving to Coca-Cola to take on the sales department of an under-performing division in the South of England. There are few sales roles that are more competitive than pharmaceutical sales, but with the drink vending industry Mahoney managed to find one.

 

He stayed at Coca-Cola for several years, moving to international accounts and then to sell to pubs, bars and restaurants, before joining Energis. It was a telecommunications provider that had got into trouble in the dotcom boom, and Archie Norman was assembling a turnaround management team. It was where Mahoney first became interested in the process of transforming businesses.

 

Energis was eventually sold to Cable & Wireless for 2005 and shortly afterwards Mahoney moved to his current role. He now heads a team of 150 salespeople and another 150 in marketing, PR and customer training.

 

 

He believes that, three years later, while he has not reached the final destination of where he wants to take his department, he is making good progress. He says: “We’ve created a fresh, vibrant culture and on every important metric we are showing good improvement. As part of Reed Elsevier we don’t release individual business unit performance, but I can tell you that we have increased our activity by 30%. That’s people working 30% harder and so creating more pipeline and input.”

 

He says he achieved that increase in activity simply by telling people that that was what he expected from them. “If you set the bar higher, people will achieve it,” he says.

 

He has also focused heavily on recruiting the right salespeople. “The quality of our people is crucial,” he says. “We run a rigorous selection procedure, and we look not only for traditional factors such as knowledge of the market, a talent for networking and excellent communications skills, but also for certain qualities. We want people who are curious about how their customers work, how they make money and how we can help them make more. We need people who are driven, who are flexible in how they approach sales, who take measured risks, and who show a sense of urgency in their work.”

 

While those are the qualities that, in his eyes, mark out the top salespeople from their ordinary colleagues, from those who can move from basic transactional sales to relationship-based sales, he has further advice for those who want to make it to the very top of the tree in the sales profession.

 

“Don’t be afraid of hard work,” he says. “I’m here at 7.20 every morning, despite living in Oxfordshire. There’s absolutely no substitute for hard work in this game. I don’t believe in lucky breaks.”

 

He continues: “You should also get yourself a coach or mentor. Look for someone who has around ten to fifteen years more experience than yourself, and go to them regularly for advice on what you’re doing, where you should be heading, and the choices you should be making.”

 

“Remember also that life and your career should be about continual development,” says Mahoney. “You never win with last year’s result, so take every opportunity for training and development that you can. Finally, don’t hesitate to use your personal network. When I began here we went round every manager and asked them to list all the people they knew who were managers in large corporates. It generated a fantastic list of prospects for us.”

 

Looking ahead, Mahoney knows he has much work still to do at Lexis Nexis. His immediate focus however is getting through the recession. “We didn’t see it coming,” he admits. “Who did? And there’s no getting away from it, it’s tough out there. Our customers are trying to do more with less, and so we need to demonstrate the value we offer. Ultimately they’re asking us to help them justify the investment to their colleagues. We need to rise to that challenge.”

 

He concludes by pointing out that the recession is not an entirely bad thing. “It is presenting new opportunities,” he explains. “Many contracts that our competitors had held onto because their clients were too apathetic to look elsewhere are now coming up for grabs. As and when that happens we intend to be right there, ready to show those customers how well we understand their businesses, and how our range of products can benefit them.”

 

Alex Blyth