Radical candor drives CRM growth and sales clarity | Phil Spurgeon from QGate

Rick: Pathmonk is the AI for website convergence. With increasing online competition, over 98% of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show your value proposition and support visitors in the buying journey separates you from the competition online. Pathmonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments.

Relevant micro experiences like case studies, intro videos, and much more. Stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50% by adding Pathmonk to your website in seconds, letting the AI do all the work and reach conversions by 50% while you keep doing marketing as usual. Check us out on Pathmonk.com.

Alright everyone, welcome to today’s episode of Pathmonk Presents. Today we are joined by Phil Spurgeon, the head of marketing at QGate. Phil, welcome to the show.

Phil Spurgeon: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Rick: Of course. Happy to have you and excited to get into it, Phil. So let’s start with the basics, okay? Can you give us an idea of what’s the big idea behind QGate and, if you were to explain it to a friend over a coffee, how would you describe what you do?

Phil Spurgeon: In a nutshell, QGate is a CRM consultancy. We help businesses that use Dynamics 365 to grow. So we go in, we look at all your processes end-to-end, figure out what’s working, what’s not, how you would like things to work, and then we help you achieve that through Dynamics.

Rick: Okay. Fairly simple on paper, but then obviously there’s a layer of complexity, I’m sure, that’s in that.

Phil Spurgeon: Exactly. We take a very consultative approach, and we don’t go in with any preconceived ideas. We don’t go in there with a slide deck telling you how to run your business or what your industry is doing. What we tend to go in there with is notepad and pen and ask questions, and be quite vulnerable in that, because you need that humility if you really want to help.

And that’s how we approach it. We are coming at it from a place of “we want to help you achieve your goals,” and yeah, we can’t do that with preconceptions.

Rick: Yeah, no, that’s a fair point. And I think it is a good way to actually get to understand people — you listen to what they have to say. Now, when you do go with that notepad and pen, Phil, what are the key problems that typically you underline — the patterns, let’s say — and that the companies you work with have the most? And on the other end, what kind of experience can they expect when they work with you?

Phil Spurgeon: In terms of common problems, that’s a good question. To be honest, the most common problem is actually around sales optimization. Most businesses don’t map out their sales process when they’re starting out, because quite often it’s a couple of people or one person on their own, and it scales and scales.

And before they know it, they know that the orders are coming in from somewhere — but they don’t quite know from where, or how long they’re taking, or even what it’s costing them. So deconstructing that process is very valuable for a lot of our clients, if nothing else because it gives them clarity on how long that buying process takes, what’s their cost of acquisition — because they just don’t have the visibility.

In terms of what they can expect from us: we approach that process from a place of radical candor — the term we like. We’ll be very honest to the point of direct. But we care about the people we’re talking to. We’re not looking to be rude or insulting. We’re just going to ask some perhaps impertinent questions, even some stupid questions. And we might get told we’re being a bit thick in the process, but if we don’t ask, we don’t know.

And equally, by asking those questions, sometimes people internally within those businesses go, “Actually yeah, why are we doing it that way?” Or, “I’m so glad you’ve asked that. I’ve been wondering it for years.” And we have had those situations where it’s like, “Yeah, why are we doing it that way?”

But I guess the thing that makes QGate special is the team we build around our clients. We have a dedicated business analyst who goes in and just pulls back the bonnet and looks at everything and strips it all back. And then we have a dedicated project manager. We have a dedicated developer. They are supportive throughout the whole process by experts. So the end result is something that’s actually going to serve their business and help them meet their goals.

Rick: Yeah, that’s very important. It feels like you’re adding to their team — and especially when it comes to them being maybe a startup or maybe it’s just two, three, four, five in the team. If you add two people even, it’s gonna make such a huge difference. And it doesn’t sound like you’re mucking about — that radical candor, yeah, it’s what’s gonna help them actually progress. You’re not wasting their time either.

Phil Spurgeon: And this is it — time is the key. Automating processes. A classic one is finance. If you know that there are certain invoices that come in every single month from certain suppliers, and they’re the same value every single month, you don’t need anybody to see those invoices to pay them — not really.

Say you’ve got a PR consultant, and they charge £2,000 a month, every single month, without fail. Okay, that cost is there. It’s been budgeted for. It’s all been approved by the relevant parties. So actually, you just create a flow that says any invoices that come from this person for this amount are automatically approved — go through to finance, who will automatically pay it.

And it’s only a few minutes in marketing and a few minutes in finance, but actually you multiply that across the course of a year, across multiple suppliers, and actually all of a sudden you’re saving yourself a huge amount of time. Plus your suppliers are happy because they’re getting paid faster. That’s a big one. And that’s a key component of the trust you have between you and your supplier — if you are paying on time, you’re reliable, which means on those occasions when you need a favor, they’re much more likely to say yes.

Rick: Yeah. That’s a good point. Let’s take a step back for a second, Phil. I just wanna understand a little bit more about — obviously we talked about once you get to the point of the notepad and pen and you’re consulting with these clients — but when it comes to people discovering you then, yeah, are there any marketing channels that have become your go-to, let’s say, for bringing in new customers at this point? How’s that working on the marketing side of things?

Phil Spurgeon: We’ve had a complete rebrand recently, and we’ve repositioned ourselves as well slightly. We’re much more focused on the consultancy. So we’ve turned the tanker, and we’re now trying to build up a good head of speed.

But predominantly our lead sources are referrals — word of mouth. And you understand why: because CRM projects are high stakes, and it’s not something you can afford to get wrong. So the referrals that come in to us… it’s because they know ultimately that we can do the work.

But we also get a fair bit of business by organic search, just on the website. But the website itself plays a fairly important role as a validation tool with the referrals, because I think the last set of referrals have all commented on the website — that they liked our approach.

We’re pretty upfront about how we work, both in terms of our approach but also who we want to work with. We want to work with people who have that forward-thinking mindset, who have ambitious growth goals, because that means they’re going to take this seriously.

And because we lay it all out again in a fairly radical, honest way, we find that we’ve jumped a fair few hurdles by the time the conversation starts in earnest.

Rick: Makes sense. That’s that qualification process — trying to understand, “Do we work for them? Do they work for us?”

Phil Spurgeon: Yeah, exactly. It’s not as much about qualifying OUT as it is qualifying IN.

Rick: Of course. I’m glad you brought up the website because I was going to ask you — since you just had a rebrand, is there anything about the website that you think really works at the moment? Or maybe anything you’ve got your eye on improving already, from the traffic that’s coming through?

Phil Spurgeon: Websites are never finished, right? They’re just abandoned, I think is the saying. But there’s always stuff we can do better.

I’m going through an SEO audit at the minute, just retuning where we tweak things and added an extra service actually specifically focused around sales optimization. And just punching up CTAs and things like that.

But yeah, the website for us is pretty essential because it is that sense-checker for that referral traffic.

But honestly, I think the thing that works best for us is the fact that we have a page on our website where we say: “This is who we want to work with,” and we’re also quite honest in saying, “This is the kind of budget you need.”

Because we’ve spoken to, in the past, some fantastic businesses and we think, “Yep, they’re a great fit” — but they haven’t got any money. And let’s be honest, that is a factor. So talking to somebody who’s got five grand in the bank, it’s like, “You’re lovely, but you can’t afford us.” Or in fact, probably not anyone else in the space.

So we’ve just been very upfront with the realities of working on a Microsoft Dynamics project.

Rick: That’s good. It sounds like that goes across your messaging. That radical candor — in a meeting or when you’re consulting with a client — it’s also on your website. It’s just: “This is who we are, this is what we do, this is who we work with, this is how much you should budget.” It’s so transparent. And I think people appreciate it. Even if they can’t afford it, at least you’ve not wasted their time.

Phil Spurgeon: Yep, exactly.

Rick: Is there anything from your experience — and you can draw from past experiences too — that actually makes a website convert? You talked about sprucing up CTAs and a bunch of other things, but maybe there are tools, tactics, frameworks that have worked wonders for you?

Phil Spurgeon: I think the right tools for the job plays a big part. Obviously I use Analytics — who doesn’t? SEMrush is never closed on my browser. And I’ve got a few other tools in the toolbox that I try and glean as much insight and information from as I can so I can make improvements.

But honestly, for us, it just comes down to, as you said, being completely transparent. That has been the most effective approach on our website to date.

And the company’s been around 27 years — and just being completely honest with how we work, how we want to work with you, who we want to work with, has been, I think, the biggest and most effective change. Beyond all the SEO witchcraft that you have to do to get people to the site in the first place.

Rick: Yeah. I think that’s a good one, and I wish more companies actually adopted that because sometimes we get lost behind the bells and whistles of all sorts of things and it just gets… I don’t know. I personally get fatigued quite a lot from it just by looking at a website and trying to understand, okay, what are you about? What can you offer me? How do you solve my issues?

Sometimes we get lost in that.

Phil Spurgeon: I think for us, it’s about fairness across the board. We’re being fair to our potential clients — that we’re going to have a good working relationship — but also it’s fair to the team. I don’t want the sales guys to waste their time. I don’t want the project management team or the dev team to have to work with somebody who’s just not a good fit for us.

Because it happens — there’s always a client that quibbles everything and sends a thousand emails, and by the time you actually add up the amount of time everybody’s spent fielding all these queries, you’ve not made a penny. And it’s miserable.

Ultimately, we should all be enjoying our jobs. So it’s making sure that everybody end-to-end is happy and content in the relationship.

Rick: You nailed it with that last one. It’s a relationship at the end of the day — a business relationship, but you’re dealing with humans. Your messaging, your way of speaking, it’s a dynamic. It has to fit.

Let’s talk about you. On the personal side — not too personal — but I’d love to understand what a typical workday looks like for you, Phil. What are the main things you focus on day-to-day?

Phil Spurgeon: I must admit, I have to be fairly prescriptive in my week, just because there’s a thousand things to do. And if I don’t block my week out in advance, things get mixed.

But there tend to be some staples. Content is always in the diary, along with working on the video content we’re producing — some of that is production side, editing side, and some of it is working with people like our managing director to help him record the piece, make sure he’s hitting the right talking points, or whatever it is.

Typical is a relative term. This week it’s more SEO work, tinkering with the paid search campaigns we’ve got going on. The week after — because I’m giving myself a week off — is going to be gearing up for our podcast that we’re going to be launching.

So: pre-production calls, setting up all the tools that we need to push it out when it’s ready to go, liaising with the guests we’ve got in the works, and all of that kind of stuff.

I guess I work on a rotation of typical weeks, if you like.

Rick: So you switch context based on the week, not necessarily within a day. That’s good — switching context constantly is never productive.

Phil Spurgeon: Obviously there are times when you have to react — if you get a call saying “Would you be interested in an editorial for this?” you’re going to go, “Actually yes I would,” so I’m going to stop my SEO audit and do that, because that’s far more important.

But yeah, I try to keep it structured because in the past I’d start a backlink audit on a Monday and get to Friday and go, “Oh yeah, I haven’t finished that.” Then I’d go, “I’ll finish it next Monday,” at which point it’s out of your head and gets forgotten about.

Rick: Yeah. Fair point.

Okay Phil, we’re coming towards the end. Let’s jump into our rapid fire segment. Quick and easy way to wrap things up. The only unspoken rule is: concise question, concise answer. Ready?

Phil Spurgeon: I’ll give it a go.

Rick: When it comes to content, do you prefer reading, watching, or listening?

Phil Spurgeon: All of them.

Rick: Then let’s pick reading for this. What’s the latest book you picked up and any ideas or gems that really stuck with you?

Phil Spurgeon: Technically the last book I read was Princess and the Pea at bedtime last night. But the book I’m reading at the moment is The Battle of Britain by James Holland — World War II history.

And I guess the takeaway is: scale and complexity can be very overwhelming if you let it. You look at something as complicated as a war machine — making sure you’ve got the right people, the right materials, everything else. But all you need is the right people in the right place, focused on what they’re meant to be delivering, and not getting bogged down in things that just don’t matter. Then actually, you can achieve some pretty incredible things.

Rick: What’s the name of the book again?

Phil Spurgeon: The Battle of Britain by James Holland.

Rick: If you had a magic wand and could fix one frustrating thing in your life with tech, what would it be?

Phil Spurgeon: I would love all the tools I have to talk to… no, not necessarily talk to each other — just a single place where I could look at everything. And it’s not a faff.

So I could plug in so much — analytics, paid search, Tableau, Salesforce — whatever it is — and it would just work without any tinkering. Just open a single dashboard and have everything, and interact with each one as if I was natively in SEMrush or Analytics.

Rick: So you’re looking for the overused “all-in-one platform” claim, but the actual all-in-one platform.

Phil Spurgeon: Exactly that.

Rick: What’s one task that you do on a daily basis that’s repetitive and you’d love to put on autopilot forever?

Phil Spurgeon: Reporting.

Rick: Reporting?

Phil Spurgeon: One hundred percent reporting. With an AI doing it all for me, giving me insights and trends and suggestions. That would be brilliant.

Rick: Very good. Phil, I want to thank you for being on the show with us today. As we close it, I want to give you the last word. If someone forgets everything we talked about today, what is the one thing they should remember about the work you guys are doing?

Phil Spurgeon: I guess you mean QGate. The most important thing to remember is — and maybe it’s more of a life lesson — be open to your own ignorance, because you don’t know what you don’t know.

When we go into a business, we go in with no preconceptions. And actually, if we all embraced failure a little bit more and were a bit more comfortable with getting things wrong, then I think we would all grow a lot faster and we’d be a lot more content as a result.

And I guess our approach to consultancy does embrace that — we’re not afraid to get things wrong, because we know the end result will be all the better for it.

Rick: Let’s close with that wisdom. I love it. Now, if someone wants to get in touch with you and maybe work with you at QGate, how could they do it?

Phil Spurgeon: They can head over to our website, qgate.co.uk. We’re also on LinkedIn, or they can email info@qgate.co.uk as well.

Rick: Perfect. Phil, thank you again for joining us today. It was a great conversation. We learned a lot, and maybe we get to do it another time soon. In the meantime, thanks so much and wish you a wonderful day.

Phil Spurgeon: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Rick: Alright. Bye everyone.

Phil Spurgeon: Bye.