189: Les Lent — The Profession of Sales

Well, most people get into sales because they have a gift of gab. They're good at talking. I know I certainly did a lot of others. But you don't get great at sales until you learn to listen and then learn some repeatable processes. So today's show is all about how to develop better listening and thinking in the sales process and then how to identify and codify your process. We've talked around this before, but we have a great sales consultant, sales training expert on the show today. So whether you're actively involved in sales or whether you need to develop a solid sales function in your business to scale, this show's for you. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Last Lent, who lives near Old Sacramento. Right?

Correct.

But comes into my area all the time over in Berkeley and we sail the same club where I've been a member for like 26 years.

Oh, very cool.

And we're both friends of the founder and like that, so. Oh, it's great to have you on the show. We're going to talk about sales today and I think before we get into the core idea of what'll supercharge your sales and I think in our show today are things that'll not just your sales personally, but like the whole organization getting that going up. And Les is grown sales organizations and taken companies from very early stages through, I want to say, over 300 million. Is that right?

Yes, that's correct. That's the top end.

And he worked with a guy, Jerry Leo, who worked with a guy, Jack Daly, who most of our listeners and audience know really, really well. And Jack's a personal friend. We've had him on the show before as well. We're going to talk about a very related aspect to some of that, but we all need to talk more about these same kinds of things. So give. Tell us a little longer form, maybe background on your. Your sales before we get into the core idea of the book.

Sure, sure. So my first venture into sales was an absolute failure. I was wishing exactly right out of the gate. Right out of the gate. So not unlike a lot of people, extroverted chatty types. A lot of people would tell me, hey, you've got the gift of gab. You should check out sales. So I did. And I got a job as a real estate agent selling residential real estate a very long time ago.

Yeah.

And failed. Epic, miserable failure because. And part of the reason I failed was I really didn't understand what industry I was in. I thought I was in the real estate business, selling real estate. So I was an expert, or subject matter expert, rather, on contract law and the marketplace and all of the things that you would think a realtor needed to know. And what was missing was really having any understanding of sales as a process. Right. So if anybody's ever told you you should be in sales because you have the gift of gab, do not take their advice.

But that is really why most of us start. Right? You're a little chatty or you're extroverted or both. And you're like, oh, you're a pitch man. You should go into sales.

Exactly, exactly. And that's where things start to come off the rail. So failed at that after struggling for a year to kind of figure it out, and went back to a different career, Fast forward probably 10, 15 years later, got a job in sales. And this time I was truly a subject matter expert. When I went into it, and I had some early success, it was the. I want to say it was the mid-90s, so everybody was having early success. Right. The economy was doing well. And about a year and a half, two years in, my early success was starting to fade just a teeny, tiny bit. And I was.

You had a little recession right there. 92, 93.

Yeah. Well, I started selling second time around, about 95. So I'd gotten past that. But what I started to discover is I was realizing that I could actually do this for a living and make a career out of it. I started reading books and started educating myself on sales as a process. And once I kind of got that in my head, that sales was not some dark art or some magic, that there was actually a process involved in it, I became a student of the game. And that early success, while it waned just a little bit, as I started really studying different sales processes and methodologies, I realized that sales was not this mysterious black box, or as a lot of people like to call it, sales as a soft skill. Sales is not a soft skill. It's a hard job, and there's a lot of moving parts to it. So once I had kind of crossed that path and really started focusing on sales as a process, I started to see some significant success and actually was working for a Fortune 50 company that had brought Jerry Leo into the organization to do some sales training. And I heard him say at the beginning of this session, I heard him say, the profession of sales is for sales professionals. And for the very first time, that really resonated with me, that sales actually was a noble profession, I think. And he's not the first person that said this, but he followed that statement up with, until you do your job as a sales professional, nobody else in the organization has a job. So, you know, around the end of the 90s, going into the early 2000s, I was really starting to make a dent as a sales professional and moving a lot up the ranks into sales management, which is a whole different process in and of itself, and was able to take a lot of the things that I had learned and push them down to sales teams of anywhere from seven to 10 people. And then ultimately, before I started doing consulting, I was running a $300 million book of business with 60. I think I had 65 salespeople, six or seven sales managers, a couple biz dev guys, and all using sales process and methodology that I had discovered through working with Jerry as a consultant and, you know, reading a lot of books and putting stuff into practice, which I think is probably the one thing, the smartest thing I ever did, was not just to read the books, but actually take something out of everything I read and apply it in some way, shape, or form to whatever it was I was doing at the time. So then in 2009, again, at the end of a little bit of an economic turmoil, I got caught up in a downsizing. So I was working for a very large company, and there were some redundancies, and. And I was given a severance package and the opportunity to go out and try something new. And that's when I decided that I might see if I can take what I've learned over the previous decade and apply it in different industries for different companies to see if what I had learned how to do for myself would have any value or application to companies in other industries. So that was 10 years ago, and I haven't slowed down since.

That's really great. There's, you know, there's sales training, sales coaching. There's just a forever need for that kind of thing. And smart companies will avail themselves of coaches in all categories. But one of the first places to go is somebody can help produce some results in this area, right?

Absolutely.

I love what you said in the opening here that we get started knowing, like, how to do that, and I'm a person, you know, if you look at my Gallup strengths, communication is in my top five. And. But communication, as they see it is putting ideas into words, which is great. Like, I can talk without a lot of prompt and fill the silence, which is great. If you're going to be on the radio or host a podcast. But it isn't what's ever made me effective in sales. The, in fact, if anything, it gets in the way. It's that listening piece, right? The that listening a little longer, a little deeper, asking questions and then saying the one thing that they need to hear. And if what you have is actually what they need to buy.

Absolutely, absolutely. It's the, you know, the two most powerful skills that any sales professional needs to have and to. To constantly craft and hone and practice are the skill of asking really good questions and the skill of listening with the intent to understand. And it sounds really simple. I'm not the first person to say it. I know Jack has said it for decades, Jerry said it for a very long time, and I'm going to keep saying it until I'm done doing this. But that sales in a nutshell is asking questions and listening. It sounds really simple, and it is, but it's not easy because it requires thought and work. But yeah, that's the core of it right there.

Well, people ask me all the time, well, pitch me your thing. Tell me what you do, right? Tell us how this goes. And I usually will stop, at least when I'm being smart and say, well, before I just rant on forever and ever about myself and my world, why don't you tell me what you're looking for? What do you need? What have you already done? What do you know about me? And then I listen for the few little things to say that'll actually make some difference.

Difference, Exactly. Exactly. And what you just described is like I, sometimes I'll call it bait. When I'm doing coaching and either listening to recorded sales calls or actually conducting sales calls. As an observer, anytime a prospective customer or an ex, even an existing client says, tell me a little bit about what you do, or. Or they. They throw out that bait. It's like catnip. And if you're not careful, as a sales professional, it's really easy to just go on a rant that lasts for days or it feels like it lasts for days because the customer just wants to hear that bare minimum. But if you start really telling them everything they could possibly want to know without the context of why they're asking what it is that you do or how that you do it, it's really easy to miss.

And yet if you refuse to say anything, sometimes that can seem evasive or manipulative. So I'll usually say something like, well, I help companies scale up, right? But let's Talk a little bit more about your specific situation. Give me some background and then exactly my remarks and not waste your time.

Exactly, exactly. I'm not saying to just ignore the question or don't take the bait. What I'm saying is don't turn that into a self serving 35 minute long infomercial about everything you can do.

Right. Let me walk you through my slides.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Buckle up. Put your helmet on. I got, I got something to show you.

Yeah. Do you need a bathroom break before we get started? So the profession of sales deck is the book. We'll talk about it. But why don't we tell some stories first? Because I think stories bring it to life even better. So talk about the event sales company.

Ah, eventually those. That is one of my absolute favorite clients and the timing of your question is pretty interesting because I actually headed out there to work with them again tomorrow to do some sales training. But the, the company's based in Southern California and they're basically, they sell all inclusive wedding packages. And just for the record, my core business I focus and target companies that are engaged in B2B selling or business to business or as I jokingly refer to sometimes as belly to belly. This particular company is not B2B play. It's a business to consumer play. However, it's a highly emotional sale. It's a very large ticket ticket. Yeah. You're laughing. Yeah. Wedding. It's a little emotional as you can might have my guess.

Yeah, they want shows on it like Bridezilla and.

Exactly, exactly. And it's a pretty high ticket item. Right. And, and you're. It's really hard to show an ROI when you're selling an event that's you know, the only remnants of it are going to be videotape and pictures. That being said, I met them go 10 years ago almost and they were doing about like 8 million bucks and they had a great value proposition. An absolutely great value proposition. It was a hassle free, all inclusive venue. The cake, the invitations, you name it, everything. It was all bundled together and there was a, it was just packed with value and they did a great job. The one thing that was missing from their value proposition or actually let me back up, they had a great value proposition, they had terrific marketing. They really could go into a new market, open a new venue or a couple of venues in a similar market or same market and then they would just turn on this marketing engine faucet and they would get, the phone would start ringing off the hook with really high qualified leads. People Calling and saying, hey, I'd like to come and tour your property. I'd like to learn a little bit more about you. And the beauty of this particular type of sale is very few people spend their weekend shopping for weddings if, in fact, they're not planning on getting married. Right. It's not something most people would do on a weekend. So the leads that they were generating were incredibly high qualified. And when I had met with the CEO, he had sat through an open seat workshop that we had done in Southern California. So when I met with the CEO, he had shared with me that they had process for everything they did. If somebody bought a wedding, they had a process for how they booked it. They had a process for all the steps involved in booking all of the different components of the wedding. Everything was covered. They had checklists for their checklists, but they were only getting about 25 or 26% conversion rate. So for every hundred inbound qualified leads that they'd get, they'd only book 25 or 26 for every hundred, which they felt was kind of low. And they didn't think that they were getting a low conversion rate because they had a bad product or a suspect product or even bad leads. They. They came to realize that their actual sales process, when a prospective bride and groom would come in and do the tour in that one hour, that they had to really influence and connect and go through all the steps of a sales cycle. That was the piece that hadn't been documented, it hadn't been thought through, it was inconsistent from location to location, and quite frankly, it was even inconsistent among the same people. So if. If one Salesperson had done 10 sales calls over the course of a week, there was no consistency from one to the next, even within the same person. So I went out, did some investigating. I watched their sales process, thought about the nature of the sale, and applied some of the same logic that we had talked about earlier in this call about asking really good questions and then listening with the intent to understand. And when we captured and created a sales playbook or a process for what that sales call should look like once the bride and groom came in, how they were greeted all the way through to the end, where they were presented a proposal to conduct their ceremony in their wedding at that particular location, and we did it with intent and deliberation and applied best practices, in other words, we created a process for what that sales call should look like. They saw a swing from the mid-20s, like 25, 26% conversion rate up to, in some instances, 36. And 37%. And we were able to tie that directly back to the experience that the buyer was having with the seller because nothing else had changed. The quality of the leads hadn't changed, the marketing efforts hadn't changed. That was, I want to say, nine, ten years ago. That company has since increased in size by 10 times and now they've got a sales team of over 120 sales professionals. And we've taken that sales process and fine tuned it even further. So they're still seeing the same types of results, but they've got it now to where they can actually scale and onboard salespeople a lot faster because they've got a process to do.

So isn't it great? I think it's worth underscoring that 10x growth, which I think of as our big scale clients are the companies that are looking for that core thing that we can repeat and refine. So we create a sales book. It's not that it doesn't ever change, it gets refined over time. But we find something that's repeatable and then we can iterate and improve it and do a lot more of that rather than doing, you know, a bunch of different things all the time. Everything's completely different. It's very hard to scale any kind of business like that until we find some repeatability.

Absolutely. And, and it's amazing to me how many companies that I work with and I'm sure you see the same thing. Well, they'll, they'll, they'll have part of their business process or an element of their business set up in a manner where it's duplicatable. But, and that's the world I live in. It's often the last department that gets that kind of attention is the sales team. So, you know, operationally they're sound. Financially, they're sound. They've got their, you know, if they're building widgets, they've got their bill to materials dialed in. But if you don't have all of your core processes documented in a manner that allows you to duplicate them in different markets, different regions so you can scale up, you're just going to scratch your head and wonder why you can't get past wherever you're at and get to that next level, whatever that next level looks like for you.

Yep. So how about another story? Tell us about the SaaS company.

Oh, the SAS company. There's actually, it's a SAS professional services company and very similar story. You know, they've got a process for building out again based in Southern California. Just coincidentally they have a process for building out an application that rides on top of Salesforce. It's a, it's world class product, industry leader, not a lot of competition and, and when somebody signs on the dotted line and says yeah, I want this application and I want it configured in such a manner, they know exactly how to get that done. They can tell you how many man hours it's going to take. They'll build out the business process. They'll even make suggestions to their clients on best practices around how their workflow automation should go. Again in doing some discovery with them, it come to find out they didn't have a real sales process for, you know, they, they followed the old BAND method. Right. A lot of your listeners probably familiar with band. It was an IBM thing. It's an acronym that stands for budget, authority, need and timeline. So you go through the questions of making sure they have the budget or can they afford it. You're do they have the authority? Am I talking to a decision maker? Do they have a need? Do they actually need what it is that I'm selling and do they need it in a timeline that's consistent with what I'm looking to get done? And if they check all those boxes then they'll start in the scoping and the qualifying sector, not scoping but are qualifying, but just the scoping understanding the real needs so they can build out a proposal and get them to sign on a dotted line. That particular company. We were able to take that Bant process and we didn't abandon it. And I'm not saying that any, anybody should abandon Bant. I just think that there's a much better way of getting that information conversationally by asking much better questions.

Well, you know, if you've been on the other end of that, sometimes it feels like you're being judged and evaluated. Right. Well, do you have any money for this? Okay, well when are you going to do it?

Do we have time for an anecdote about that?

Yeah, sure.

I was shopping for a CRM system for my business a couple of years ago and I'm not going to name the company because it would just be an embarrassment. I filled out an online form, I was interested in this one and I wanted to talk to them. So I filled out an online form. Here's the information. I gave them online. I gave them my name, Les Lent, I gave them my email address, les leslent.com. i gave them my URL leslet.com. i gave them my title owner and I gave them my cell phone number and as soon as I hit submit, two minutes later my phone is ringing, which is what I expected.

Nice integration.

Yeah, very nice. Well done. They're probably using their own software, which I thought was kind of cool.

Yeah.

I get a phone call and I said, hi, can I speak with Les? Speaking. And the gentleman said, hey, this is Bob from ABC Company. You just filled out an online form and I'd love to chat with you about your CRM needs. I said, terrific, I've been expecting your call. And he says, well, before we get started, can you tell me a little bit about your business? And I said, well, here's my website, you can take a quick look at it. And he says, oh, we did just, it looks like you're do sales training and things of that nature. I said, yeah, I do. And he says, well tell me, for a new CRM system, what kind of budget do you have right out of the gate? And I said, well, right now I'm not paying anything for what I'm using, so can we start there? He didn't think that was funny. I thought it was funny. And a couple seconds later we're talking about something. He says, well, tell me who else in your organization is going to be part of this decision making process and do you have the final authority now? You have the same information he does. My name, my website, my title, the whole. But he's following, following a script that's.

Been following a script and not thinking.

And not thinking at all. So we went through, you know, budget authority. I won't bore you with the rest of the story about meat and timeline, but it was kind of embarrassing. Not just for him, but it was embarrassing for me.

It's like, why doesn't somebody say, but of course you want to ask in a more conversation, well, what's the process going to be like in picking this thing or whatever, but especially when somebody asks out the gate, do you have any budget for this thing? I'm like, oh yeah, I've set aside a million dollars and I'd like to give it all to you right now.

Exactly.

It's so obnoxious. Yeah. Oh, I'm going to name like a really big price, right?

Yeah. And nobody, nobody bought this.

How much of you budgeted for this?

Yeah, that was what they asked. And the reason I share that story is because my client, the one we were just talking about, the SaaS company, they had a similar type product, similar type sale, high ticket, it could be up to six figures for a project. And they weren't asking it that directly. But that was the crux of what they were doing is they were just following the bant and if they could get bant they would say, okay, let's throw all the resources we have at scoping this project out and building out a proposal. And it just wasn't working. And their sales cycle when I got there was in excess of 120 days. They had deals in their pipeline that were over a year old, a lot of them. So when we started digging in and we, we cleaned out the pipeline because if you got something in your pipeline that's that old, it's probably more like a pipe dream. But we, we got all that sorted out and we took that band process and didn't abandon it. But we, we started asking much better questions and we, we took it the sales cycle and put it into a process where we were able to get all the information we needed without alienating the customers and really quickly deciding whether or not we were even a good fit for the customer ver were doing before. As long as they had a pulse and a budget, we were going to try and sell them something. So the end result of building that process out was we were able to reduce our sales cycle from 120 plus days down to the last time I looked it was under 60. I want to say the average for the last six months was 54 day sales cycle for a fairly complex product. And our conversion rate went up, you know, went up from the high 20s into the mid-30s as a result. So it's all about having a duplicable process as it relates to sales instead of it just being that like I said earlier, this mysterious thing that's like let me build some rapport and see if I can get them laughing at my bad jokes and that'll increase my odds of a successfully closed deal.

Well, and it doesn't hurt to have rapport, right? If you, if you want to develop some listings, some communication, you've got to find and get in some sync there. But it's not just about being pals with people people, it's about understanding their pain, having enough communication to, and trust that you can tell them. But I think about like our own sales process. Most of the folks that start with us haven't worked with a coach in this capacity in this way before. It's usually a much bigger endeavor and spend than they've done in this category. There are a few people where I'm taking over for some other coach or that kind of thing, but it's often very much like that where it's like, it's a big step for them to take on a scaling up coach, coach. And they're about to begin a process that's probably going to be two or three years long. And I would say most of the good ones that turn out to be really great relationships are ones where the whole sales process is about two weeks and very often it's all over the phone and I've not met them at all. But if we can understand that and listen, we actually get somewhere.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I have a very similar sales cycle. Difficult. And here's the thing with rapport. A lot of I put sales, the people that are engaged in our profession, I put them into two buckets. You've got salespeople who are the garden variety. The guy that called me and walked me through the bant process, and then you've got sales professionals. And it's like 80, 20, right. 80% of the people that are doing what we do are salespeople. And I'm not. It's not an indictment against them as people. It's just an indictment about a of lot, a lack of process or a lack of understanding about how they should be approaching their marketplace. And salespeople see rapport as a box that needs to be checked. Right. So, you know, they start out conversations really quickly talking about, you know, the sports or the weather or things like that, trying to get a quick win. And all in the name of rapport. And the word rapport literally means when two or more people are in sync or in harmony. And at the beginning of a business call, especially a B2B sales call, there's no harmony, there's no rapport. Rapport is the result of asking really good questions. The rapport is the result of engaging in a really highly thought out sales process and having some trust transfer between the two parties. And rapport is the end result, not some box that gets checked off right out of the gate by asking, how you doing today? That's not rapport building. That's just filling air. Right.

And I think you have to actually, like consciously manage it. Like, I have to think about and be intentional to care about somebody that I've never spoken to before. Be curious, bring that, that curiosity forward. That's more than like, who is this person? What's really going on with this, this person and their business, which is different from can this person make any money? Is this good? Is this worth my time?

Right, right, exactly, exactly. And, and the reality of it is, is that even for folks that are in that top 20%. They're truly sales professionals. And I'd put you in that category, obviously. I put myself in that category, and there are a lot of them out there. The tricky bit is that if you're not careful, that other model, that way of just kind of trying to get through the process very quickly, it's really easy, and it's easy to fall into that trap. So it does require an extra level of thought, an extra level of preparation on the front end so you don't wind up just going through the motions. But you're right. I heard you say you've got to care, and that's one of the elements of building trust. I have to demonstrate that I'm competent. I have to demonstrate that I'm candid. I have to demonstrate that I care, and I have to do all of those things consistently if I've got any hope of building trust. And once I have some trust, rapport will be that kind of end result. That's. That's the way I approach it, anyway.

Well, I. So I. We talked about the. The profession of sales, and I think that there are many people who are uncomfortable with it, who feel like it's manipulative, persuasive, sleazy, and some. But I think that's really what you bring to it. I've always thought that as a sales professional, whether I was selling myself a product or service, or selling a company, investment in a company, or selling the company to exit the company in any of those things, I'm looking for and listening for. Does what I have fit your need? Who are you and what are you looking for? For, and can I help you? And that can I help you? Goes to kind of a core like life purpose, which is very distinct from, who is this person? Do they have something I need? How much money can I take from them?

Right, right. No, you're absolutely right. And. And it's funny because I'll do sales presentations, you know, trade associations, things like that, where they'll say, hey, come in and, you know, do 90 minutes on sales and perfect. And I'll actually stand in front of a room full of sales professionals, people that are engaged in our profession. And I'll ask the question, when I say sales, what words come to mind? And, you know, you hear things like sleazy commission breath, you know, the double Cleveland white, white patent leather belt, white patent leather shoes. All of the old jokes that have been around forever about salespeople. And this is coming from a group of people that actually do that for a living. So there's this reputation out there that gets propagated by salespeople that are less than professional. And it's not fair because the reality of it is, is that for most salespeople and sales professionals, we're trying to fill a need for somebody. And when we, when we abandon our agenda to sell and replace that with an agenda to help or provide assistance for somebody, assuming that what we sell is going to help address whatever they're trying to get done, you know, whether it's eliminate a pain or mitigate a fear or provide a most wanted outcome, it doesn't matter what we're trying to do, as long as there's some kind of connection there to what they need and what we have to offer. We abandon that agenda to sell to see if there's a good fit and we've got a much better opportunity of success or probability of success, rather. CEOs hate it when I say that to their salespeople, but I say it quite frequently. It's like, like, you know, on the front end of this, you should probably abandon your agenda to sell them something and replace it with an agenda to understand and see if there's a fit.

So like 15 years plus ago, I was a CEO, an incoming CEO of an established company. And one of the key complaints we had was that everything sucked in our world, that we were doing a bad job operationally. And I'm like, well, well, let's find the data on it. And I was trying to understand what it is, and I couldn't seem to figure it out. I couldn't get the information that backed up what I was hearing anecdotally from my sales team in particular. They were just saying we suck at everything. And I couldn't get it out of our systems either. I couldn't seem to get the right data out of our accounting and CRM and order processing and those kinds of things. So we started measuring something at the end point, at the, essentially at the last point of our delivery and invoice process, we started measuring perfect orders. And it was not good news, but. And you have a story about somebody who had a philosophy around the perfect order. Why don't you tell us about that?

Sure. They're a distributor, they're based in the Midwest, they sell consumable. They actually, they sell a equipment, big, huge, heavy pieces of equipment into the print and graphic arts industry. So, you know, think about a Hewlett Packard printer or like a big, huge Roland printer. Not the kind you have in your home office, but the kind that, you know is the size of a small Volkswagen. They sell those to print shops in different segments across the country. They're fairly large company. And. And in addition to the heavy equipment, they also sell all the consumables that go into the printer or in the print space. So that's just one example. But they sell silkscreen printing machines, and then it's all about the consumables. Buy the equipment and the consumables, the ink and all of the print materials come along with it. And they had spent a good two or three years focusing on what they called the perfect order. So, you know, customer would call in, they'd place their order. The sales rep would go out and see them and take their order. It would get sent to the distribution center, and the products would get pulled from the warehouse, palletized, wrapped up, put on a truck, and shipped out. And they were obsessed for a number of years in this process that they dubbed the perfect order. And their goal was to have accurate, which means that you got what you ordered instead of, you know, I ordered a widget and you sent me a gadget. The other component was complete, meaning I ordered 10 widgets. You've got 10 widgets and on time. So you wanted it between 10 and 12 on Tuesday. It showed up between 10 and 12 on Tuesday. So accurate, complete, and on time. And over the course of a couple of years, they were setting the standard in their industry and for a lot of other industries that had a distribution model of operational excellence, just absolutely flawless. Coming out, the people in the warehouse were wearing T shirts that said the perfect order. And they lived it and they breathed it, and they were. They were a successful company and they were looking to grow. They were looking for substantial growth. I met them through vistage, I believe it was, and chatting with them, they said, you know, we got a lot of good things going on. However, we're not growing as fast as we would like to.

To.

We can grow through acquisition, but we'd also like to grow organically by just getting more from the customers we already have and finding new customers and introducing them to this whole concept of the perfect order. And we kind of landed on, well, can we take that perfect order and apply it to the sales process? So we called it the perfect sales call. And again, it takes about a month or so of discovery to find out who they're selling to, how they're selling it, what the market looks like, like, and get a flavor for what the culture of the sales team looks like. And it wasn't a drastic shift, but we broke down their entire sales process and reviewed their sales process by market segment and by region and discovered that we could apply a lot of the same philosophy. So if we can document the sales process and the sales call, and we can document, here's what, the things that we need to know about any particular customer in order to really have that market penetration we're looking for or market acquisition. So we created a list of things we need to know and then we created a list of things that we should be paying attention to. And I said earlier, you know, sales is really about asking questions and listening. Well, documenting what you need to know is the asking questions part and paying attention is the listening part. Then we created a series of questions for different sales scenarios. Not, not scripts, but just really good, solid questions. And again, once we documented that and we applied it to the sales team, the sales calls, actually two things happened. Several things happened, but the two most significant things were the customers were having a better experience. Because now when a sales rep showed up, it wasn't just a chit chat. They weren't goodwill ambassadors, it wasn't a donut run. They were coming in and actually having conversations with their customers about how to grow their customer's business. And the results were better experience for the customer, shorter sales calls. So instead of an hour and not much getting done, the sales calls, average calls were getting down to about 45 minutes because they were professionally conducted and they started to see some significant double digit account penetration. So customers that were giving them 60, 70% of their business were now giving them 75% of their business. Customers that were giving them 50, 50% of their business, we're now giving them 70% of their business. So they're boxing out their competitors because they had applied the same thought process around documentation and implementation of a process to sales. It was the same thing they were doing in the warehouse. They just started doing it in the field when they were making sales calls. And it lifted everybody's game. So the inside salespeople were starting to get better and better at their game. And the outside salespeople were able to focus on the customers that really mattered the most, the ones that were going to make a huge impact on the company's top and bottom lines. But again, it was all about building out a process, creating guardrails, if you will, for the salespeople to follow. And here's another side note on all of these stories I have found over the last 10 years. Having done this for, I don't know, 20 or 30 different companies now that but another party that benefits from creating these processes are the sales professionals. Because they'll tell you, and I've heard it said many times, that until they had a playbook and had some process to follow, they weren't sure if they were in the right role. I've heard people say that. I've heard people say, man, I didn't think I was ever going to be able to make the kind of money that I wanted to make until I started following this process. And it's not because I'm super smart. It's most of these playbooks where I facilitate the building of them by asking the right questions and drawing the information out of the stakeholders within the organization. But it's a side benefit. Suddenly salespeople are going, man, I really like my job now because I know what's expected of me, I know how to approach the marketplace and I know what I should expect at the end of a sales call.

Yeah, it's real. So here's, let's see if we can recap a little bit. And I think it loops back to the beginning. You talked about the call that you had. The person had the information, but they weren't really applying it, they weren't thinking about it. So we've talked about how to be better at sales is to get better at listening, ask better questions, learn to really listen, to care about that. And that, that goes to having a defined process, a process that lays out the questions that's thought that you can repeat again and again. And especially as the sale gets more complex and different people touching it and being involved, how that you move through that but then thinking about it. So the pre call preparation that you're actually, I'm looking down at the, at the lead here in front of me as I call you up and I say, okay, the guy's name is Leslie. It's lesl.com it's les lent.com and so when it comes to the question of asking you, are you the final decision maker? I'm going to say, instead of asking it in that way, I'm going to say, I'm guessing with the company name the way it is that you might be the final decision maker. Right. A little humor and humanity into the whole thing. So I could still actually go through the process but be kind of relatable about it, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. There's so many better ways they could have approached that. And that's just one of them.

Right. And then that's really the last one. So we have a process, it's documented We've learned to listen, ask questions. We're prepared going into it, but now we actually follow the process. And that process might include actually thinking and being related as a human being.

Amen. That's that one word that you said is thinking. And it's. And look, I'm not picking on anybody, but it's so easy. And what I find is that the people that have been doing it the longest are the ones that are the most vulnerable because they've got their routine, they've been there, done that before. And sometimes when we don't, don't stop and think a little bit. Just a little bit, a little bit of thought makes all the difference in the world.

Well, I think about my. Not sort of exactly related, but my phones are answered by a service called callruby. Callruby.com, make sure you mention us when they'll give you some special deal and we'll get credit for it, which is nice. It's an answering service. Right. So they're not really like doing telemarketing, qualifying, that kind of thing. When you call us on our main phone number, they're just answ the call intelligently and relating to as a human being. And when I look at a lot of companies where they've taken their scripts and they've offshored them or sent them, outsourced them, whether within the same country or to another country, and then people follow it so rotely, so religiously that you just feel like you might as well be talking to a bot rather than talking to an actual human. Like, stop, like take your script, fine, but not actually think and be a human in the process.

Right, yeah.

That I think is often missing.

I agree. And look, we're in that relationship business, we're in that connection business. And look, I've built a lot of playbooks with a lot of what people might call scripts, but at the end of the day, you have to make them your own. And if you don't make them your own, you will sound like a robot. And the analogy is if you go see a live play play, people have practiced and rehearsed, but it sounds conversational when you listen to it because they own that stuff. And that's what I try and do with the Playbook, is give some guidance from it.

They've ingrained it.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Well, so the book is the Profession of Sales. You can go to the professionofsales.com and there's a link there to buy the book. You can read more about it. Professionofsales.com less than Clint is the author. Les, thanks so much for being on the show with us today. A reminder to all our listeners that all these shows and many more we're well over 185 recorded now are available at our website or wherever you get your podcast. But you can go to scalingcoach.com and you'll get not only the shows there, but also the the the attached files. The special offers things like that. Scalingcoach.com I'll even give you a copy of the Scaling book for free if you just pay the shipping handling. So go to scalingcoach.com go to the professionofsales.com and we'll talk to everyone again next week. Well, special thanks to the originator of all things Scaling up in the Rockefeller Habits, Vern Harnish. This show was produced by Lucy Summers. Audio production is done at Podfly Audio, edited by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Ayan Kodina and proofread by Tim McGowan. And we'd love it if you went over to itunes and gave us a review. Or wherever you get your podcast, go and like and review them there. That helps us out a bunch. Subscribe to get them every week right there or at Our own website scalingcoach.com if you want to give us some feedback, drop us a line to info scalingcoach.com we love hearing from you. Thanks again for listening. Keep scaling up. Sam.