Empower or Control: Sean Shannon on Breaking Through the Founder-Led Growth Ceiling

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The first thing you need to understand is dogs or pack animals. The second thing is that they can't speak. The third thing is they can smell. Really? Really. They've got incredible, you know, olfactory senses. What your dog was doing was going down and bringing back to the pack the smell. I found food.

Wow.

Right? So I would tell that story to my salespeople once a year and I'd say, how are we doing a good job of allowing you to roll around in your wins so that you can come back to the pack of us and share the goodness that you found.

Step into the world of success with your brand amplified. The ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anica Jackson and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success before. Sean Shannon and I use up all of our time talking about being lecturers at universities. I thought let's go ahead and push record. And I'm so thrilled to have you here, Sean, to give your advice, your wisdom and your expertise to the your brand amplified audience. So thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Of course. Before we get into what you're doing now, I want to talk about your broadcasting foundation. You spent three decades in a challenging sales environment. Local broadcasting, we know that that's changed a lot I mean, even podcasts have, you know, I know for the ad network I'm on, we have deals with Cumulus, with SiriusXM, so that podcasts are now a larger part of that ecosystem. But not going into rabbit holes that I could go down. What drew you to broadcasting?

I graduated from college with a political science degree.

Okay.

I went into political science because it was the one major that you could get into at the University of Washington without a minimum gpa.

Oh.

I majored in Theta Chi my first two years. So you're either gonna. When you come out with a political science degree, you're either going to law school or you're going into marketing and sales. And I just wandered into radio sales because a couple of my friends were selling local radio and I looked like a lot of fun and they were decent money. And, you know, we. We like to say that radio is a place where C students can make pretty good money.

That is not an answer I would have expected. But I love how refreshing you are. And obviously you've been amazing at sales and really, you cut your teeth on it, but you found it something that you're really good at and you rose from sales roles to a senior VP role, market president. What was that pivotal moment or realization that made you realize this is something, you know? Yeah, I majored in political science. Now I'm going into marketing. I'm really good at this sales thing, and I can do something more than being an individual contributor. I can actually lead these teams.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting and there are a couple of, you know, sort of inflection points for me. One was I was working for a great local broadcasting company called Fisher Broadcasting. And we owned ABC affiliates and I think five different markets. We owned radio stations in one market in Seattle. And I got accepted into this leadership and coaching program. Six month long program, two full days off site with a cohort of 12 people. There were three requirements down to the program. You needed to have a project that would forward your career, a project that would also forward the company's objectives. And third, it had to be beyond your current capabilities. Really cool. So, you know, all sorts of projects, you know, wandered into this leadership and coaching program. Hey, we need a new traffic system at the TV station. I think we should create some kind of daycare for our working moms. You know, really cool projects. Mine was, I think we should buy more radio stations. And so I had to March into our CEO's office and say, hey, my project is to buy more radio stations. And he said, you know, Actually, I've already got a working group together on that. And over the course of an hour, long conversation just led me around the tree, asking me to make a powerful request about this. And I kept asking to be a part of the team. Finally, he grabbed me by the ear, honestly, just by the ear, and he said, sean, what's the most powerful question you can possibly ask? I want to lead the. I want to lead the team. He says, yes, you lead the team. So I led the team that, you know, we identified all of our acquisition targets. I went to four different banks, secured us a $40 million line of credit to make the purchase. You know, made first contact with all the acquisition clients, put together the performance, went in to do the due diligence, and closed it. And it was cool. I'm 31 years old, and I thought, you know, I think I can maybe lead some people. And so I moved to Portland to the radio stations that we bought and led sales. Now, I will tell you, I was terrible. Terrible. Everything that makes you a great individual contributor in sales makes you a terrible sales leader, because great individual contributors are focused 100% on themselves, and they are chasing the high that you get when you help a client get success when you close a sale. And it's really all about your scoreboard. And you are the great individual contributors are control freaks, complete control briefs. They want to control every single variable they possibly can. When you move into sales leadership, you lose control. You're now dependent on the performance of others for your performance. Right? The salespeople don't report to the sales leader. The sales leader reports to the sales people. Right? I would go for lunch for 45 minutes and get back, and my sales people would say, where you been? I needed you. It's like, what am I on a leash here? And so all of my control freak, individual contributor reflexes just made me a micromanaging asshole. Terrible. And got coached after my first year by probably one of the very best sales managers that that's ever been, Rick Harter. Rick was his brother, friend of mine, and, you know, really gave me a master's degree in how to lead a sales organization. I sent letters to every one of the people that worked for me in those first two years, apologizing to them. I said, you know what? I hope I'm a better manager today than I was when you were working for me. But I learned on your dime you didn't deserve that, but thank you.

Now, this is your perception. Was this other people's perception as well?

Yes. Oh, I was Affirmed in my opinion of myself. But that's, you know, so like when I work with sales organizations now, in fact, I'm working with one that's looking for a new sales leader. Hey, we're thinking about promoting somebody into that position. Let's stop down for a second. But just know that it's going to be a lot heavier lift than you think it's going to be, because you're going to have to untrain their individual contributor reflexes and train them with a leader's mindset, which is to say, I am in control of nothing. And my success is now dependent on my ability to unleash the potential of the people that work for me instead of trying to control everything.

Amazing.

Yeah. The second inflection point for me was in 2004, I had an epiphany. So when I started off in radio in 1988, we had a real simple value proposition which was if you want to reach tens, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, you really only got four or five choices. You can buy some radio, some tv, outdoor, newspaper, magazine, right? Those are your choices. Direct mail. In 2004, we tipped over to where 80% of, you know, everybody in our country had access to broadband Internet, which meant that they could stream anything they wanted to. And suddenly there were thousands of places that advertisers could reach tens of thousands of folks. And I thought, all right, our value proposition is no longer valid. What therefore is our value proposition? And it dawned on me that what it was is that we had these relationships with these small and medium sized businesses and we knew those businesses intimately. We really understood how consumers viewed value in their industry and how to create messaging. And so I said, you know, we really need to flip the value proposition from being about selling audience to being about selling messaging. And began to go back, finish my mba because I wanted to have a broader base of understanding. And when I took my first vice president of sales role, I reallocated money out of our sales teams, you know, expenditures to create an in house agency. So I had a creative director, I had multimedia designers, a videographer, a web designer, so that we could take these concepts that we were using in one medium and give them to a client to use in whatever mediums they wanted to. And it completely changed the nature of our relationships with our clients.

It's such a great way to pivot the business to serve your clients in the best possible way to add that extra value and let them see that you really saw them and, and cared about their success.

Yes, I was working for a company called Odyssey. When we decided that we were going to write Roll out, you know, our own white label digital solution so that we could provide our advertisers with SEO SEM, all the digital things that they were moving budget toward, we were the alpha market to do it because we had the infrastructure in place to provide all of the creative that was going to go into that. So, you know, Seattle became Odyssey's number one digital performer. And it was certainly about how well we sold, but it was also how we sold and what we sold. Right. And we were able to take because we were looking at clients holistically and we weren't there to sell them a radio campaign. We were there to sell them a marketing strategy. We were just in a much more powerful position to offer these other extensions to what we're doing.

And amazingly, so far ahead of the curve because we see every company doing that now. We see whether you're a Netflix or an Amazon or you're Netflix using Amazon's advertising services, we're really seeing that every one of these organizations that is supposedly an entertainment solution or selling a digital storefront for us, like Amazon is now really moving into how do we better serve these small businesses that are part of our ecosystem and how do we best deliver value for them to reach the right people that. Because we know we have an audience already built in.

Yeah. And you know the thing that I see more small business owners doing, medium sized business owners, quite frankly, organizations in general, if you are not the disruptor, you're probably solving for yesterday's problem. And it was a massive disruption for that sales team when we change that value proposition. Right. It was a whole new set of learnings that they, that I and I needed to create training materials to help give these people a mini masters in marketing so that they could confidently walk in and ask really powerful questions of clients that they weren't used to asking. Right. So you've got to be willing to disrupt yourself.

Ellen. We've obviously continued to see disruption in broadcast radio and in everything else.

And it's rolling at a faster pace than it ever has, hasn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think about you teaching social media marketing and man, what you were teaching two years ago is completely archaic. It is no longer valid. But the fundamentals always are.

Exactly, exactly. But we have to teach more to how do you use, for instance, generative AI to fast track to use it as a thought partner perhaps, or a great aid in the work that you're doing to get results more quickly so that you can be more, you know, adaptive to the market.

It's completely right. And I think about AI in the sales field right now. The average salesperson spends 60% of their time prospecting for clients. And effectively what they're doing is that they're using the marketing budget in sales and they're using it really ineffectively. We think about marketing as one to many and the brand is the hero and sales is one to one and the salesperson is the hero. We can now using, you know, AI SDR agents do one to one selling at scale. So we can put together a program that has a salesperson reaching out to hundreds of clients a day using Agentic AI to scrape LinkedIn for ICP clients and begin to drift them messaging. But the key is, is that the messaging's gotta come from the voice of the individual salesperson. So it comes right back to the fundamentals, which is the message is really what it's about.

So let's talk about that in the context of your shift, right from broadcast into now fractional VP of sales. Now you're also a lecturer. What propagated that sales switch in perhaps an industry? And to say, I really want to lean into sales, but it's time for me to do something a little different, you know.

So I spent the last 12 years of my career as a market president. So I had a full P and L between five and seven radio stations, depending which market we want to talk about. But I was overseeing programming and sales and promotions and engineering and business and whole thing. And you know, historically the market president really was 70% sales focused. I'm the face of the organization. I'm going to Chamber commerce, I'm going out on our largest sales calls with our, our clients. And I am my most happy when I'm in front of my. I just, I love asking questions that they haven't asked themselves about their sales and their marketing and taking those things back to the radio ranch and creating solutions that are going to really drive results for them. And I was spending 70% of my time on programming and operations because that's where all the problems were. There was so much disruption going on in terms of how we generated audience that I was spending my time working with those folks on how do we extend ourselves into podcasts, how do we continue to create content that is unduplicable on any other platform, including podcasts. Yeah, my last project was, was to take a failing rock station, which rock music as a format has been dying for 30 years. Right. And radio's been in a steep decline for 10 years. What do we do with this signal? So I took a beautiful legacy brand, 99X, that had been the number one station in Atlanta for 10 years. In the 90s, all of the IP, we still had relationships with all of the old air personalities and they had all stayed friends. So I spent the last 18 months of my broadcast career pulling that crew back together and putting 99x back on here. And it was awesome. It was incredibly rewarding. It was an unbelievably heavy lift. But the station went from number 25, ranked in the market to number two in less than a year because we were feeding a need that could not be met anywhere else. Right.

What an amazing turnaround.

But what really finally I just in. In the reason why I was spending all of that time, that energy, I was spending it defending the fact that we were inside of Cumulus, their most top heavy in terms of talent expenditures, because I wanted to protect, you know, as early as 2007, I'm working for iHeart and my first iPhone is sitting in my hand. And Spotify came out about a year later. And I thought we're in trouble because what large broadcasters want to do is they want to disinvest an ad account. But headcount specifically on the air was where our one differentiator was from any other streaming service. And so it was a heavy lift because I had to fight with the folks I was working for to say this is the smart thing to do. And I just got to the end of it. I said, you know what, I want to get back out and help small, medium sized business owners with their sales and their marketing. And that's what I'm doing now. And I love it.

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Amazing. Well, I will say when I'm in the car with my daughter in the morning on the way to school, we do listen to the radio and I love the fact that there are different personalities present. Right. You want the different hosts playing off of each other and then the backup Hosts and it brings a lot more fun and levity and, and you do feel like these are people that you know and you. It's evident when you hear people call in that they have followed and trusted this show and these people for a very long time. So I, I absolutely see your point. And I can also see why it can be really difficult when you're having to solve issues that are not what you make your heart sing and what makes you really filled with joy and know that you're helping people. So you brought that small business and, and medium sized business perspective to radio, but then wanting to pull out and say, I need to help these organizations directly, not just through this other medium.

You know, listen, I loved the radio business. I love the radio business, but I was a salmon swimming upstream in that thing. Because the radio industry is in the position that it's in based on its own self inflicted wounds. It was financial decisions as opposed to business decisions. The radio should still have a place to play in our lives. But you know what? I'm finding it in podcast now.

Yeah, right.

I'm finding my morning show on Mondays with Smartless. I'm finding my morning show on a couple of days a week with Rich Eisen. It's just interesting how it's changed, but it's good.

The next evolution. And honestly, podcasting is carrying a lot over. But that's a whole other segment that we could do.

Oh, completely. We could spend an hour talking about podcasting.

But I do want to talk about what your world of work looks like now. When you decided to make that shift, what was it? What are you doing? How are you helping small businesses in that same vein?

Yeah. So the short story is that 75% of small business owners who have sales teams don't have individual quotas.

Oh, okay.

Right. And their biggest complaint is I am the person who is going out and doing all the business development. My salespeople are just handling the accounts that I bring in. And what's occurred is that they've got founders magic. They have intuitions around what customers want and what they need. They have a sense of where their margins are and where they can cut corners and where they can. How can I upsize my offer here? How can I downsize my offer here? Right. What are the decisions that I can make? And they have a force of personality that comes when. And you only have it when you believe like a founder believes. Right. And so those poor salespeople have none of that because that owner has never been able to knowledge transfer it all down into a documentable sales process. So I come in and I basically brain dump that person into a documentable sales process, work with that owner on empowering their salespeople to follow their own intuitions, Educate them enough about where they can upsize and downsize so that they can walk in with the confidence that the owner does. And it is remarkable when you can get an owner to make that shift to see how quickly sales just like this, you know, 27% increase with one of my clients in the first year in revenue. And it was all coming from his salespeople, not from him.

So it is about. And this is something we see a lot with organizations, right? We see that they're very founder led. The founder has all the knowledge. Whether it's a nonprofit, a for profit, it doesn't really matter. So how do you help with that mindset shift as well to get the founder to get out of their own way and to empower other people?

Yeah, it's a lot of Dr. Phil sessions.

Okay, right.

Where you look and say, so how's that working for you? Right. Part of it is that when I begin to ask the questions that facilitate the knowledge transfer, the light bulb goes on. How much they know that they have told nobody else and they begin to understand. Oh, I get it. Right. But until you get into that conversation and you begin to facilitate all of that hard earned brain locked, you know, intuition and you get it down onto a piece of paper or into a spreadsheet and they go, oh, yeah, now I see why my salespeople have been struggling so much.

27% sales increase in one year. That's pretty phenomenal.

Yeah.

Is this typical of your results?

It is. And I work as a part of an organization, sales acceleration and between 25 and 35% increase in. For. In sales in the first year with, with clients that hire us. Because it's not rocket science. Sales is sales is sales is sales. Right. And when I come in and begin to ask these questions and I begin to format it in, Listen, what's our sales pipeline? Look, what are the steps in our sales process? How long should a client be in any one of those sales processes? You know? Right. Those sales steps introduce that owner to the idea about a half life of a sale, that the longer a sales goes on beyond where it should, the chances of closing begin to decrease by 50% at each of the stages. And when they finally see, okay, yeah, there are five steps in our sales process. I've got two salespeople that are stuck in getting the initial Appointment. Okay, great. We can do some training and some coaching around that. I've got a whole nother group of people that are great conversation starters, but they can't close a spring loaded door. Great, let's have some conversations about gaining commitment. And they begin to see, oh yeah, right, this is not rocket science, but there is some structure that needs to be there. And so not surprising to be able to unlock that kind of growth. Compounding it, there's a bigger problem.

Okay, interesting. We'll definitely have to talk about that. But you mentioned a few things and one thing, when it comes to salespeople, I think also. Okay, so training is a huge component. Compensation could be another motivator.

Right.

Price in the market, is that ever something that you have to look at as well? Because I know that's something. A lot of times we want to price ourselves comparable to competitors, but that might not always be what we should be doing based on the company's level of expertise, what the product and service offering is that they actually are, are delivering.

That's completely it. Yes. A lot of work around pricing. Most of the time I recommend that they raise prices. I mean, it's a bottom line. Most of us, when we think about as an entrepreneur, solopreneur, the owner of a business, we tend to price, you know, sort of what's my cost plus as opposed to saying, well what, where's the ceiling of value for the consumer and how can I find my way closer to it? And what is my price indicating to consumers in terms of how they should view value when they come and purchase from me? And so the real key is to find a place that is, you know, above the mean, but has an offer, an ability for you to create an upsell and a downsell. Right. So that you're able to. And this, again, this is that that owner's intuition, they know how to do that. But when we can pull it into a documentable process, salesperson knows, we have done the market intelligence. We have an understanding of what kind of value we can drive. And we are, you know, and I'll tell you, as a guy selling radio, we knew how to price based on what clients could expect in terms of success. Client gives me $50,000. The campaign needs to drive a minimum of $500,000 in incremental sales for it to be, you know, cost effective. Roi. How do you do that in a steel manufacturer? A little different. Right? You know, or we're doing some work with a company that makes restaurant equipment. How do we help them understand that kind of niche market. But the reality is, is that we need to give our salespeople the ability to understand, okay, here's where the base price is, and here's where you can move up and here's where you can move down. It really is about empowerment. And you know, we talk about what is it that motivates salespeople. Yeah, money's important, but money's just table stakes. What they're really looking for is autonomy. They're looking to be empowered and they're looking to be able to unleash their creative spirits, to make great programs, great decisions for clients.

In part of your discovery and part of the work you do, you discuss five rarely asked questions that can help unlock more revenue. Are these, if we already gone over these questions, are these things that you can share with us?

We, we find out, you know, let me think of the ones that I haven't covered yet. Here's a question that most people don't ask themselves. Is my customer mix healthy? Right. 80:20 rule has applied in every sales organization I've walked into and I've walked into at this point in my career, probably hundreds of them. 20% of your clients are going to generate 80% of your revenue. And the question that you have to ask yourself, at least on a yearly basis, if not on a quarterly basis, is, are the 20% that make up that 80% healthy? Are they healthy in terms of our relationship with them? Are they healthy in terms of their industry? Are they healthy in terms of their company? What are going to be the risk factors that might have them sent us a big cancellation? And when we identify those that are less healthy, we need to then ask ourselves the question of the 80% of clients that are only producing 20% of our revenue, what are the top 10 or 15 clients that we need to be cultivating to join our big 20 club? Right. Simple question, but it is not one that most business owners look at. Another question. Is your comp plan working for you or your salespeople working your comp plan? I don't care how clever you are as a sales leader in terms of designing a comp plan, salespeople will find a way to make it as leap the less the least profitable they possibly can for you. Right? And so you, you, you've really got a backwards map the thing to say and how much in the marketplace. I want my salespeople to be paid at the average because we've got a company that's average, or I want my salespeople to be paid the best in the Market. So I have an understanding of where you are in terms of the marketplace, and then begin to build out ote programs that help salespeople get to what they want to make while you keep your cost of sale where it needs to be. Most of the time, we just sort of grab a number out of the air. Hey, you know, want our cost of sale to be 10%. So we're going to commission everybody 10%. And then you end up with 20% of your salespeople that are happier than pigs in a poke and 80% that are leaving every year. Right. So it's just there's some science in there, but there's also a little bit of art. But, you know, I think the one that we didn't talk about there really want to talk about is backwards engineering your ICP so you get your ideal client profile. Who is the client? I want my salespeople out hunting for and searching for. And because they have the ability to buy the most, at the most profit from us. And most of the time, we start with some demographics, psychographics. We start with number of employees, revenue size, right, Those kinds of things. And, you know, how much do they purchase of our product? And then on the other side, we have our value proposition, which our marketing team is really, really concerned about because they're sending all this wonderful communication out around our value proposition. And because the two never talk to each other, you end up with hundreds of MQLs marketing qualified leads that never turn into sales qualified leads. And your sales leader is yelling at your marketing leader. And your marketing leader is yelling at your sales leader. If you backwards engineer your ICP from the value proposition, you're going to be in a more powerful place to get your sales and marketing in line. And here's how you do it, is you sit down and you say, okay. Peter Drucker's famous for saying the vast majority of businesses have no idea what their clients are buying, know what they're selling them, but they don't know what motivates the purchase. So I use Clayton Christensen's jobs theory, right? Which is the idea that people don't buy products and services as much as they hire them to do really specific jobs in their lives. Sort of knows they're selling mattresses, but they know that their customers are buying a better night's sleep. So what's their messaging certa for a better night's sleep. So we do that. We begin to say, okay, here's the product we sell. I'm working with a case through Six Fundraising Co. Right. Really interesting value proposition there. What's the PTA president buying? Well, some of those PTA presidents are buying ease of use, a light lift in terms of fundraiser. Other PTA presidents are buying. I need to increase the amount of money that we are raising this year because the school district cut another position in the school. A third may be looking at the school down the street that's raising twice as much money as them and is tired of having them throw it in their face. Very different jobs to be done. And so you begin to build them into large identifiable segments based on messaging and you begin to build your ICP from there. Now suddenly your sales and your marketing are working together.

Yeah, that's so important. I'm just thinking about a sales call I had this week with somebody and what they really wanted to buy was only a portion of this package. And that right away should tell me they're not my ideal client. They don't see the value necessarily in all of the things that I'm going to help them accomplish. Sure. I can say, oh fine, you can do just this part and I'll make money on it. But it's not really what I want to give people and how I know I can best serve them.

Yeah. So then the question you have to ask yourself is, is, is there a, a first and foremost is this somebody that I would want to work with but they just can't afford it right now or they want, you know, really what it really comes down to is it comes down to money and trust or is this a person I want to work with that doesn't know me and what I do well enough to trust me for the full boat deal? If it's one of those two things, what is a down sized offer that I can make for them that lowers the risk financially and trust wise but gives them enough of what I do to have them want to say I need the full meal deal? Right.

Yeah. Again, another thing we could go down tangent on, but I do want to ask you about something I found really intriguing, which is the framework of Vikings versus farmers. So I was like I have to get to this question before I go down any of these five rabbit holes. I wanted to go down.

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Okay, so the Vikings of Lore in the middle ages were an all volunteer force. Yes. These were not conscripted soldiers. So you say to yourself, well, how did they get these guys to volunteer? Well, the way they got them, the volunteer, was if you went on a certain number of missions going and conquering parts of southeastern England and Ireland. After, say, four missions in one of the lands that they had conquested, you were given a plot of land and the ability to build a home and a farm and a family. That was the right end of the rainbow. And it is exactly how we bring salespeople into our businesses. We give them nothing. We say, you must go out and eat what you kill. And they work for three years, four years to go out and conquer as many new accounts. And we begin to reward them with more accounts because they're so good. We've got. And we had somebody leave, we just got to handle this. And by the time they get to the fifth year, they're no longer out there hunting. They're just farming. They're farming a little. And hey, nothing wrong with that. Every sales organization needs some good farmers. But if you have a sales team of nothing but farmers, I'm sorry, all of your eggs are in the baskets of the customers you already have. Right. If you don't have enough farmers, you've got a client retention problem. And so how are you balancing that? About 5 to 10% of salespeople really enjoy hunting. And if you get one of those unicorns, you want to keep them as happy as you possibly can. I had a salesperson back at a sports station I ran in Seattle named Chris Levitt. He loved hunting, never wanted me to give him account. And by the way, he was a big game hunter. Right. Our average account size spend wise with that sports station was about $40,000 a year. Chris went out and closed $200,000 accounts. Wow. And he closed maybe two a year. And I was great with it.

Yeah, right.

You, you do you. How do I enable you to do more? Right. But, you know, so you, you constantly got to, you know, begin to ask yourself the question, all right, well, if I can't hire enough hunters, how do I change my comp plan to incentivize and require my farmers to go back out and hunt? Because they know how to hunt. They've already done It. But they're completely out of practice. So that's the. That's the Vikings of farmers.

Very cool. Learned some history today, right? Yes. And that's a really interesting way to look at teams as I'm launching new products this month and this year and looking at our sales teams that we're bringing on. So very much appreciate what you're bringing to the table.

And, you know, and you think about a sales team, and most. Most of us don't look. We look at individual salespeople. We don't take the approach of team building. Right. On every sales team, I need a lone wolf, you know, somebody that's just out there, like Chris Levitt. He's doing his thing. Right. What's the minimum amount of engagement that I can require from Chris and still have the team cohesive? I need one or two people that are kind of glue, that are fostering because, you know, listen, none of us is as smart as all of us in sales. Right. We want to create collaborative cross learning that's occurring inside of our sales teams and, you know, where accounts can freely move to their very best person in terms of personality. And so, you know, you've got to look at it and say, I can't field a baseball team if I've got nine shortstops because nobody's gonna pitch and nobody's gonna catch. Right?

Yeah.

The other sports analogy that I like to use is that, you know, sales leadership is probably the most difficult place to coach. Because if you think about it, and I use this because I'm in Georgia now, I say, if Kirby Smart had to coach the Alabama game from the parking lot, no ability to see what the team's doing, no ability to under. To see what block got missed, what outcome went wrong. And that's what we asked sales managers to do. They're coaching salespeople on sales calls that they probably have not been on. That is a real art. It's about knowing what questions aren't being asked here. How do I uncover what this salesperson left on the table with the client based on the feedback I'm getting from them. And, you know, it is Dr. Phil, you got better be a bit of psychologist. Even though he's not a psychologist. Wow.

Talk about the kind of clients that you typically work with in your current role. Is there. Are there specific. I mean, you talked about a few categories. Is it primarily B2B? Is there some B2C?

I don't touch B2C. It's all B2B. And they tend to be owner, founder, led Sales organization. So I've grown this company to 15 or 20 million dollars and I've plateaued. And we can't grow past the number of hours in a week that I as the owner can devote to business development. Right. And so you know, that's, I come in and I do that knowledge transfer with them and working with a digital marketing agency out in denver, got my K through 6 fundraising client here, here in Atlanta, have another client in the Rocky Mountain area that is working in the opioid pharmacy platform space. It's all very varied. I mean, but the fundamentals are always the same. Yeah, nice.

And you have that strong base for the fundamentals. So I'm sure it's really interesting to also learn about these different industries.

It really is. And I'll just, I'll throw this in. Yeah. Is that what we're seeing is this convergence between marketing and where marketing ends and where sales begins? And what I bring to the table that may be a little bit unique because I spent my entire career selling marketing services is an understanding of how to get the sales funnel connected from marketing all the way through to sales so that it doesn't come here, hit a wall and have to find its way over. Yeah.

Vitally important. The class that I started teaching this week as we're going back to our pre interview conversation is on advertising and marketing. We talk about ad tech, Martech and med tech. And how do you use that convergence in teams? Because we can't be siloed. We have to look at everything really holistically and how does that funnel work and where, you know the attribution points and there nowadays there are so many different points. You can't necessarily.

Yeah, you know, here's the problem too. So the attribution was always a four letter word in broadcast because we're working out the top of the funnel. I don't know, tell me what you sold last year and if you sell more this year, consider me the, the, you know, the variable in the experiment, what has happened over the last 15 years, specifically in the small and medium sized business bucket is that the ad spend has dropped to the bottom of the funnel because it's the most attributable place I can put my money. And a lot of companies, you know, say hey listen, I've been spend all my money in, you know, Google AdWords because those people are already in the market for the product or service and I only pay for when they click. Right. But the challenge is McKinsey's done this longitudinal set of studies that Says if you're in the initial consideration set. Right. The sales funnel does not work like this anymore. It goes like this. I start with two or three companies, I add 10 or 11 as I go on research, and then I narrow it down to go out and try and buy one. Right. The companies that start in the initial consideration set have a 300 better chance of closing the sale than those that are added during the research phase because they're known and they're trusted. They have a natural leg up. So what I work with my clients on is how do we become world famous inside of our narrow target market of ICPs. Right. And that requires us to move money out of AdWords and up into things like thought leadership, social media, content development, write a book. What is it that's going to have customers look at us as being the experts in this space? And from a sales consultant, I know that there are other salespeople other going. Why are you spending so much time talking about marketing? It's about getting out and closing deals, but there's no longer that delineator. The line is no longer there.

You know, I'm. I feel very honored that you wanted to be on your brand amplified because I know that you don't accept every opportunity that comes your way to be on podcasts, but it is so important to think about where you want to show up, making sure it is a place where you're able to talk to people who are listening, who are your icp, Right?

Yes, exactly.

And also, you're putting yourself out there as a thought leader. And podcasting has been the number one, even though it could be considered marketing. And I'm just bringing people on. I'm not necessarily unleashing all my own expertise, but it has been the number one lead gen tool I've had and it wasn't even something I planned. Is that right? It just happened organically, and now I'm able to identify great opportunities from that. So.

See, radio works.

Yes, yes, it sure does. Radio podcasting, you know, again, we can go down.

If you're not watching this on YouTube and you're listening to it in your AirPods, this is radio, people. It's just a different transmission.

Too true. Too true. All right, so somebody's listening. Their sales functionality isn't optimal. They're trying to figure out how to diagnose things. What are three to five questions that they should ask themselves right now?

The first question is, do my salespeople truly understand the value proposition that I understand? Just because I think and know does not mean that they know or think. And so stress test how well your salespeople understand your, your value proposition. The second thing is, do you have documented steps in your sales process if you don't figure them out or hire somebody like me, I don't care to figure it out for you. And then begin to look at where your sales are stalling in that process. And, you know, third thing is, what are things that I can do that can fill the top of my funnel as quickly as possible? How can I use AI to help me scale my one to one selling? Because the only thing, quite frankly, that really unclogs a pipeline is a whole bunch of volume at the top of it, making pressure. Right. So work with your salespeople on where they're getting stuck in the sales process. Use AI and every other tool that you possibly can to fill it as full as you possibly can. And then the last and the most important thing I think is make sure that that value proposition is valid in terms of the experience that your cost, current customers are getting. Right. In the process of going out and asking your customers about what they're getting from you in terms of benefits, value equals benefit minus cost. Go back to teaching marketing, okay, what value are you getting? What benefits are you capturing in excess of the cost that you're sending to me? You're going to get a couple of things out of it. One is you're going to either validate or, or invalidate your value proposition. You now know I've got to work on my product or I got to change how I'm going to market. The second thing is more likely because these are current customers, you're going to get testimonials which are again, the most powerful piece of social proof that you can put out. There is a customer that tells you, here's why I love working with you. But you only get it if you go out and see them.

Yeah. And when you get them, it lights you up.

It does.

And especially when you get one. And then they say, I have five or six people to introduce you to who need your services. Even better. Had that happen yesterday. So I'm like, yes. Okay.

That's so awesome.

Thank you. Have to celebrate the wins like you said, when we get them.

We don't celebrate them, do we?

We don't, no.

You know, I'm going to digress for a minute. I have two springer spaniels now. I grew up with two springers. I love springer spaniels. Bird dogs. We live near a creek in north of Seattle where the salmon Came to spawn every fall and my dogs would run down to that creek without us knowing and roll around and in those fish and they stunk eye. There's no way to get the smell of rotten salmon out of a dog's fur. We tried everything. Asked an annual, an animal behaviorist that came into the radio stations one day, you know, after she finished the interview, I said, I got a question. I said I just got my first springer and my springers I grew up with did this thing with the. And we lived near a creek and what do I. Why do they do it and how do I stop it? She said, well, the first thing you need to understand is dogs are pack animals. The second thing is that they can't speak certain things. They can smell. Really? Really. They've got incredible, you know, olfactory senses. What your dog was doing was going down and bringing back to the pack the smell. I found food. Wow. Right. So I would tell that story to my salespeople once a year. I'd say how are we doing a good job of allowing you to roll around in your wins so that you can come back to the pack of us and share the goodness that you found.

Again, an ex. Such a great story and great reframing of something that you thought was a negative and actually for the dogs was a positive. Showing them we're part of this pack. You are our pack leader. We love you.

Yes.

What we found for us. Yeah, amazing. We are going to have your LinkedIn profile I believe is the main source of truth for you, Sean. So people can reach out, connect, follow, hopefully get a free sales assessment from you, a consultation. When we think about small to medium sized businesses, people have different price ranges in mind of what their sweet spot is. What would you say is the minimum, you know, sales cycle or revenue cycle that you would want to work with in an organization, if there is one?

Yeah, that's a great question. Generally, you know, it's most of the clients that I work with. The smallest client I've worked with is about was about 6 to 7 million in rev. And you know, when you get above 50, 60, 70 million, you've probably got most of what I'm going to help you master Mastered. You wouldn't have gotten there if you didn't. I do have a client that's $100 million client, but I'm doing entirely different things for them.

Okay.

But you know it's so it's 5 to 5 to 30 million is really kind of that sweet spot though, you know, listen, I am coaching a Solopreneur right now on his sales process, and he's doing less than a million dollars a year.

Okay.

Right. So if you want me to come in and build a sales plan for you, you know, a minimum is probably going to be a two to three month project that's going to be between 20 and 30 thousand dollars. You're probably not gonna be able afford that if you're not doing 3 to 5 million at a minimum. But if you want to hire me as your sales coach, I walk you through all of the ways that you build your go to market strategy. I help you build out your first sales deck, I help you build out your ideal client profile. We refine your value proposition. I get you in a place where you feel confident enough to pick that phone up. Because in fact, I was just in a networking group. I'll put a plug in Success Champions Network. I founded a chapter in Atlanta, and we're working with one of our EOS implementers today who was saying, I'm just having a hard time picking up the phone. I don't want to be too salesy. Right. And it's my recommendation towards, like, Jacqueline, you've got to know that you're a badass. And even if you don't believe it, when you pick up the phone to call somebody, you've got to tell yourself, I'm God's gift to their business. And they don't want to talk to me. That's their loss. Mm. Right? Yes. So everybody needs a sales coach. I agree.

We all need a lot of different coaches in our lives. And the value of coaching cannot be understated. But you have, as long as you have the right people in your corner. Right. Because there, there are a lot of great programs out there, but they may not be what you need at any one moment in time. So I'm gonna encourage everybody to follow Sean, connect with him on LinkedIn, because I've gotten so much value out of this conversation. And I do go back and I listen to my fully edited episodes and what commercials are playing, and also, you know, what advice did I maybe not pick up on as much or what do I need to read, listen to. To emphasize that to my own self? Because we're actively participating right now in this conversation, and it's been such a delightful conversation. Sean, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto?

Oh, man, that is a really good question. Well, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. If I think about the mantra that I spent most of my sales management career is sit down with a salesperson and listen to them barf on the table all of their problems. And I would say, well, what are you going to do about it? And they would, you know, say it's essentially tell me they're going to solve yesterday's problem. I'd say, well, if you do what you've always done, you're going to get what you've always gotten. Oh, stop it. Sort of hearing that it's truth. Right. We've got to adapt to the change that's going on with our clients.

Yeah, absolutely. And our industry. Well, I, I could keep you on and ask you another couple hours of questions, but we will save that for another time. I'll. I'd love to have you back on.

This has been just a joy.

Thank you. It's for me as well. And thank you to everybody who is listening to this episode or watching it on YouTube if that is your jam. Hopefully you're having as much fun and learning as much as I have. Think about how we can reframe the questions we ask ourselves that we ask our salespeople and that we look at when we're going through the sales process. So many of us are not doing things. We're creating those little hiccups for ourselves because we're not looking at the right things. So use the advice that Sean's given us today to reframe the questions that you're asking, to rethink how you find your ICP and how you're making sure that you are truly adding value for your customer base. With that, I'll be back again with another amazing guest to share their story, their journey and some tips and tricks for you and Sean. We will definitely be having another conversation. This is my invitation to you right now to come back on the show and I have a couple of other podcasts I'm going to introduce you to.

As well as the kid. It's been great.

Thank you everybody. I'll be back again soon. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of youf Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out@yourbrandamplified.com.

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