250: Dan Morris — The 4 Rs to A Maximized Sales Process

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Hey, good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone, wherever you are, whenever you are. We're talking today about stuff, sales, getting the sales dialed in. And this is a always evergreen topic, right? And so we got Dan Morris on the show today to talk all about sales getting the sales right in the team. Stay tuned. So my name is Bill Gallagher. I am your scaling coach, host of the show. The show is all about scaling and growing the business, no matter the time, the place, the industry, whatever it is. We've got all kinds of good stuff on the world of scaling, growth, business growth@scalingcoach.com Stitcher, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube. I don't know where. Wherever you go to get your stuff. We got you hundreds and hundreds of episodes there now, tips, interviews with entrepreneurs, gurus, etc. Today we're talking all about sales. So go find all that and more@scalingcoach.com welcome the show. Dan, where are you today?

Hey Bill, thanks very much for having me. I'm in upstate New York today.

Oh, but that accent is very Upstate.

New York is very upstate New York. Yeah, it's very much, very much imported. I've been, I've been living in the US now for 12 years and spent a long time in Boston and then moved to New York City and got a bit more fresh air middle of last year. And yeah, it's, it's good up here. A little colder than where you are though, I'm sadly.

Oh yes, you know, we've had high 60s, early 70s, Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is. You know, freedom units. I'm not sure about.

I find it. I found myself stopping the conversion now. But wait, I think we're celebrating our third day above freezing right now. So that probably means knowing the Northeast that it's going to snow next Week, so we'll see how we get on. But it's a sunny day here, and it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

One day that got over 80 recently. 27 Celsius.

Right. And was that a day where you got out surfing or not?

It is, yeah.

Excellent.

And. And we even had a little wind in the warm. It's good, it's good, it's good.

Yeah.

Things are. Things are good.

Oh, we've got a big challenge that we're getting ready for here. My fiance and I are about to train to ride 980 miles in September, a cycle. So we need to start getting outside to do some TR training fairly soon. It's all a stationary bike so far.

You got to get that back. The arms, especially the sit bones, used to.

Yeah, it's gonna be a long challenge.

I know we're gonna actually get into the topic eventually. But what'll be Your longest rides? 100 mile days.

Oh, 100, 110, I think is a. Is the longest days. But of course, the, the hills can be a big challenge in the middle of that. So we just had a briefing webinar, and there's a. There's a large group that. And there's a couple of days that look like they're long distance and very hilly as well. So lots of good challenges for us to train for. Just need to get it all scheduled so that we can get ahead and be ready.

I think the longest ride that I've done is about 110 miles with about 5,000ft of climbing in the day. That felt like. And more than anything else, I mean, my legs, my legs are okay because I had trained, but the, the butt in saddle time was like, oh, my butt sore.

That's what the team are telling us for sure. They're just saying the best. The best training you can do is just get out and ride and ride more and ride more. And some of them are saying, look, think of it as three 35 mile rides in a day. That's a good way of breaking it down. Stop for a break, do another 35 miles. But yeah, I've never done one that long before, ever.

I think it might have been 40 miles.

Not yet.

Oh, yeah. All right.

I like these sorts of challenges. We trained for the marathon in New York City. The last one that they ran a couple of years ago, had never done one above a 10k before that. Then got a half marathon done, then did the marathon. So I like these sorts of challenges. It's always, it's about stepping up to the next level all the time. Very thematic with what we're talking about here.

So I, I don't do those anymore, but for a while, for some years I did a bunch and I did about 45 major endurance events, mostly triathlon, a handful of marathons, a number of century rides, some long distance swims.

Cool.

And I have this insight. Here's the wisdom. The best thing about a marathon is how easy it makes a half marathon. A century ride makes a metric century. A piece of cake. Right? It's all about degrees. Right. I think the. A marathon, I mean, you know, and I'm sure if you do an ultra, then the marathon becomes a cakewalk. Right.

Well, that's interesting. That's on the potential considerations for the future. I know a couple of people who've done the sort of Ironman triathlons and that sort of stuff and just loved those sorts of events. But I never actually asked them whether it, it made them just want to do a marathon because it was simpler.

Afterward, you know, so much simpler. You're like, oh, the run, like, hey, that's easy.

This is the fast bit. This is the easy part even. That's great. Well, I should be asking you for some tips and you know, perhaps you can share some, some training insights with me after the show.

Well, I'm, I'm a mediocre runner and I'm not a particularly good cyclist, but I'm really bad as a swimmer. It's the transitions I've got nailed.

Solid, excellent.

I, I recently traded out all of my, I got rid of, sold off all my race bikes and that kind of thing. And I had quite a, quite a bunch. And then I got, I have one urban bike today, kind of a commuter city bike kind of thing. And I installed. I noticed that I was becoming more of a candy ass in the whole thing. And I installed a seat post thing. This little. It's called, I think it's from the company, I think is redshift shout out to these people. But it's like this little seat post thing that. It's got a spring load thing in it.

Oh, cool.

So you get a little, little bounce. Oh, it takes. And, and then I, they have another thing with like this elastomer bit.

In.

The, in the whatchamacallit in the handlebar, the stem attachment thing there. And just to take the impact off.

The road, I suppose.

Oh yeah, just a little bit. Now it does add a little bit of weight, but if I was doing. Not racing so much where you tend to be a little more weight obsessed, but climbing maybe a little less so. But for like, cross country stuff. Ooh. I would consider that. That I love it. Like, it's great without having a full suspension bike.

A lot of people who did the ride last year have reported what they. What they call cyclist palsy, where they. They lose the feeling in their fingers and stuff like that afterwards. So I've never experienced that and I certainly. It's not a race, it's. It's an endurance event. It's nine days and so, you know, it would be good to know, but it's Lands End to John o'. Groats. The whole. The whole distance from the southernmost tip. The northernmost tip of the United Kingdom.

Oh, yeah. That's kind of cool in the summer or something.

Yeah, well, it's in September, so it's. As you get into Scotland, you're never going to know what the weather's going to be like. So you've got to be ready for a bit of everything, I think.

Yeah. And then do you camp every night?

Yes.

And so you need like a fresh pair of bibs for every day.

And we've got a laundry service, so you. A couple of days, then you don't have to carry too much stuff. But it's all organized by Deloitte. It's actually a very large event. A thousand people are going to run it, ride it, and so we're taking part and they're organizing all the logistics, which is going to be fantastic. We're just hoping we can go, of course. Touch wood, but got to try it anyway.

So listen up. We're almost nine minutes into the show and we promised to talk about sales. We'll probably put a queue here so people can jump ahead to this point, but folks should know that Dan's developed and now has an agency that works in this managing partner of Mind Racer Consulting. Sounds very sexy. That's a good sexy business name. Mind Racer and has done a lot of work. I mean, the work that you do and as I looked about your stuff is all very related to what we're doing overall in scaling up, but applied specifically to sales. And so let's just talk about some of the examples and that kind of thing. You shared a story about a service business to kick us off. Talk about the work that you did there with the salespeople and the focus and like that.

Yeah, sure. So over the last 15 years, I've been helping the founding teams in the US, in the UK and Australia to develop sales processes and accelerate growth and so we've baked these learnings down over the last few years to a point where we've got a really repeatable framework. And so any opportunity to look at a business, you need to have an objective view in order to be able to work out what to improve. Right. So very much aligned with the people, the strategy, the execution, the cash that you're talking about. All of the time, what we're doing is just zooming in on that sales process and going, okay, let's have an objective look at all of the component parts of a sales process and work out where they actually are. So go into a service business. For example, one of the first times, as I was, I was baking this together, look at the customers that they'd already got. Right? Let's review exactly where we are. We had a sales team, we had a number of people who were prospecting, booking meetings, a number of people who were closing. And we had a logistical challenge which was we would run out of real estate, we needed a bigger office or we needed to find another way. So we applied this logic. Let's find a way of making the same people more productive. So the review stage was let's have a look at all the assets that we've got, let's have a look at all the customers that we've got, let's work out who we really serve best, and then refine our strategy so that we're doing more to reach those people. So in this particular case, the business had got some multimillion dollar revenue. They'd done well by talking to almost the entire market. But what we were able to do is zoom in. What we're able to zoom in and actually see, okay, here are people that we should be spending more of our outbound resources talking to. And the ultimate result of that was we improved the conversion rate from meeting to deal by 225% and the average order value increased 40% with the same team. If you continue doing that review and then refine and roll out those changes, almost. It's the Agile method. You refine and roll out until you get to the point of mastery fluency, we call it.

And then at that point, this iterative thing is unique. I mean, not unique, but common to all of ours. And there are different terms for it, like the. We've heard a lot of people talking this year about the OODA loop in pivot strategy and things like that. But in all things, this review, refine and roll out kind of a flow makes a massive difference.

It really does. So what we've done is we've broken it down into five stages. And so there's the, there's the review, the refine, the rollout, the replace. But when we actually look at the component parts of a sales organization, it either doesn't exist, in a lot of cases it's being drafted, but it hasn't been released. And a lot of, you know, there's a lot of sort of overthinking going on and a lot of, you know, not really sharing things with the team and half baking things and not getting them out there. That gets stuff stuck all the time. Then beyond that it's been released, but is it current? Then after that has it been refined for each ideal customer? So as a business grows, you can afford to talk to more groups of potential customers. And then the final stage is fluency. It's fluent and reviewed quarterly to make sure that everybody retains the knowledge and is working with the fluency of that knowledge. And if you can get those elements of your sales process to be present first of all and then move them toward fluency, with refine and rollout, your business accelerates. And we're often working with businesses a little smaller than some of the ones that you're working with. It's often founder and early team before they can afford to spend the 300, $400,000 for a full time VP of Sales. So they don't necessarily have that initial person who's able to help them build that process. So it's the time and experience to actually plug in and help them get those things built and executed and rolled out that these things work best with.

Well, you know, so the mistake that I've made and that I see again and again, and I meant it more than once, is focusing on hiring a sales rock star. And for sure that helps somebody who's super persuasive and charismatic and affable and like is generating friendship and beginning a dialogue and then it just makes you feel great about the purchase and pulls it like that's fantastic except that doesn't scale that well. And I found and then I'm looking for the next rock star. And you know, I've come across a couple, a handful in my whole career across different industries and companies and that kind of thing. And that's not the same thing as building a playbook. We talked before with Jack Daly about that process and then really refining and honing in on who's that ideal customer. And like that. We work with a lot of SaaS companies in our practice because of where we are because of the potential for growth, the investment and so on. Talk about the SaaS business that you worked with and how that went. What kind of work were they doing like that?

Yeah, sure. SaaS business. We started working with them January 2020. They've actually been around for six or seven years and had been on the roller coaster. They'd been up there with some big clients and then they'd won some smaller clients and they'd had great partners. And then those partners had faded out and they changed and pivoted where they were going. And after a few years in business, they knew they wanted a bit of fresh energy to work out what their next steps were going to be. So the review was really, really straightforward because they had a lot of data. They were able to see that here are the people who are paying for the service right now, here are the people who are using the platform most often. Here are the partners that are actually working with these particular types of customers. So the review was relatively quick. We were able to get in with these guys and help them stop doing the stuff that wasn't productive. So the refine stage, they're very dialed in team. They really knew what they were doing. They just needed to be able to go through a process which helped them go, oh yeah, we already do this very well, but we're also using our energy doing three or four other things. Let's pare that back. Let's focus on rolling out in this particular very tight audience. So they focused on one ideal customer and they already had some really excellent partners. And so as Covid was hitting, what they were used to be doing was going to a lots of different trade shows and networking with partners and coming back with mutual leads and so on. And so they needed to review and refine their sales process and their marketing process to deal with the situation we all went through last year. The two things happened at a very good time because they were able to focus on one ICP ideal customer profile. They were able to really refine their marketing strategy to do a lot of co webinars with their partners who also access that same end customer. That was such a hit that that's been the strategy that's delivered most of their revenue throughout of last year. So they found people were that the partners that they were working with were more than open to doing these educational shared webinars to help the end customer. They were able to refine the partnerships, the integrations they did with some tech partners, the marketing partnerships they did with some training partners who help people with the skills associated with their platform. It's a sales enablement platform. And then they kept doing that. And then as they gathered momentum, we then worked on growing. The team added the right people and they 5x their revenue last year. So, you know, they're in a place where they've got really great momentum and a really good plan going into 21. And it's been a real joy working with those guys to execute.

So great about this, right? They're 5x revenue. People are like, oh, I don't know if we could sustain 100% growth here. It's true. It creates a whole other kind of crisis. Some businesses do it easier than others. And a SaaS business typically can scale easier than some of the others in terms of the operational, like actually fulfilling the work. It's often a question of turning up more service. And then you need people that like client success, support technical kinds of people to help do that. And that is a challenge in itself. But this business, right when we start up, we're like, okay, I think I could do this. Or I have this idea for a better mousetrap or a. With, you know, we do this thing or. And then you go looking for customers who are willing to pay you for it. You find a whole bunch of sort of different people who dabble around, some who are passionate, some who are less so you got a whole range of things that's still. Even if you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars or even early millions of dollars, you're still in startup mode because you're not yet focused on thing. When you pick, when you say, okay, we're actually going to ignore everybody else. I mean they could do business with you or not. But we're going to focus on a particular. I would you call ICP idea cp Ideal customer profile. The, the acronyms all the time. But, but that, but that idea, one particular core customer profile. We're going to go after this one. We're going to devote everything we're going to. We're going to commit ourselves to this marketing partner or whatever. Now there are issues there, right? So now I'm going to concentrate. I'm betting on a particular direction now.

Yes.

And that commitment can be a little scary.

It can. But here's the benefit of looking at your data and validating. Here are the people. So in any new business, when you launch, just like you say, you go out and you'll work with a lot of very different people, you'll work with different industries, you'll see that they've got similar problems and you'll try and solve them and then you'll prove it by adding as much value as you possibly can. But you realize that taking on a custom project with every new client is just not a scalable thing at all. And you know when you starting to work in a SaaS company, years ago, when I left an agency business and then wanted to work with more technology businesses, I went and trained as a project a product manager on purpose so that I would understand more about the research and be able to talk better to a technology team. And you know, that's where all of this Persona and ideal customer thing comes from. Because if you try and serve too many people, you're just burning all the resources and you're not going to do anything. Well, but you, before you make that jump, to commit to one particular ideal customer, you've got to look at your data and understand these are people who are having a great experience working with what we've already got. And they're actually renewing, they're extending, they're giving us good NPS scores, they're having conversations with us about how else they want to use our service or work with us to develop something in their business. They're the people that are giving you strong indications that you can then focus on those people with your marketing engine and then follow that with the sales engine. And they're the things that can communicate the confidence where teams might just be, well, how could I not work with everybody? And the answer is the cost of acquisition is a lot higher with random acts of marketing than it is with focused acts of marketing to bring in those people to the sales process.

So I think this iteration and review and focusing that builds on the experimentation, the ideas is very much related to your own career arc. Talk a little bit about that. You started off wanting to be a musician, right?

Yeah, that's right. Many years ago, yeah, I was in a band and we really thought we had a shot, but the lead singer got signed to a recording contract and the rest of the band didn't. So we took that as okay, we don't know where else to go with this. So I started a finance career right out of university at a big bank and worked with that framework for a while, but really got choked up by the bureaucracy and the slow moving side of things. And one of my early career mentors said, hey, if you work really hard, you might make it to middle management one day. And I thought, well, you know what, that's a great career, but it's middle management. It's not Where I see I want to be able to go in and have a bigger impact quicker. You know, I like to get things done quickly. That's the mind racer is like once the mind starts going, it's new ideas, it's things, it's this, is that it's dialing stuff in.

Yes.

And so working with early stage companies where you can collaborate and make decisions and test was just a great fit for me. And so I got lucky. Early, early in my career. A recruiter convinced me to go and work with a digital agency. He said, I want you to go sell pay per click. And I thought you said paper clips. And I'm like paper clips. And he's like, no, no, no. Google advertising pay per click. I'm like, oh, I've never heard of it. Right. And you know, just as they're changing the rules around what they're going to advertise on today I just saw an article about that. But, but way back then it was one of the fastest growing agencies in the UK and you know, I learned so much there in a fast growing agency that then that agency went on to sell for $100 million, then got into another fast growing company which was a digital signage business. And we thought it was great. I was running that as a startup project. We had hardware, we had software, we were putting this product into the lobby areas of great businesses like Lehman Brothers and all these sorts of large banks. 2007 turned into 2008 and then all of a sudden our pipeline disappeared because they were trying to sell to banks again. That's how I came to the us. The same investors I was working with had an agency project that they wanted to grow in Boston and I had an opportunity to come and help them grow that, that exploded. That got to 61 on the ink list. Then I spun another agency out of that and built that to the point where it just didn't need me anymore. And so I sort of lost interest at that point. And I was like, okay, well I need to go and do something new. So I went traveling and didn't find myself. Many people go traveling to go and find themselves. And I found myself on a beach in Australia, a bit bored, thinking, well, what can I do next? And that's where Mind Racer Consulting came from initially, was to go out and, and work with a bunch of early stage companies and see where there was a project where I could dive in and add value. And that's where I began refining this process. I kept hopping in and helping, hopping in and helping, hopping and helping and so that's where the four Rs came from is really baking in those things that I kept doing early that helped businesses win large clients, help businesses win early clients, help them step up to the next stage. And so that's. That brings us to where we are today. As been a really interesting mission and our bhag is to help a thousand businesses reach the next level of maturity by the end of 2025.

That's awesome. Well, that's not so far away. That's only five years out. Right. When you get that. Another client that you helped figure out their ideal client and refine that process with was this legal tech business. Talk about that some.

Yeah, yeah. So these gents had put together a way of analyzing legal bills that could tell the Fortune companies that are spending hundreds of millions on legal costs that they were overspending and actually put data behind it. Now, this may not be a surprise to anyone who's worked in a large company that large companies spend a lot of money on legal. But these guys actually began to build out a background data system that would show what the partner to associate ratios were and what the actual cost for doing an IPO should be and so on. And they both had brilliant experience in the world of law. They come from that. And they built a platform and they were having lots and lots and lots of meetings. So again, went in, reviewed with them, helped them understand where they were, and then helped refine the documentation and the next steps in the sales process and the exit criteria and those sorts of things. And they then went on from that to roll it out and started winning Fortune 100 CL. And it was a real pleasure to help those guys get what they already knew. They were fantastic openers. But to show them what the steps in the process were that they could go through to regularly close. And now they're growing steadily and doing very nicely as that legal tech business in New York. So it's good fun to build those blocks with them.

So what I love about that is again, it's not just the so you're figuring out a core customer to go after, but you're refining each step. And in order to refine each step, first you have to sort of express it, like get clear about it. I think a lot of times there's this sort of vague, like there's this gray. Okay, there's the sales process. They do selling over there or I do selling, and I haven't stopped to break it down. Well, what actually happens? Okay. People show up in our world at this point and they're dealing with this kind maybe one or two kinds of problems. And we know that people come to us either because they've stalled out, right? They were growing and suddenly they stalled. So they want to re achieve growth or they've been growing and they want to make sure they sustain it. So they don't want to blow up in handling the growth they've got. They want to scale more smoothly. So those are the two things that they deal. And usually they come from one of two sources. One is the most common is somebody else told them. Somebody said, dan, one of your friends called and said, you know, oh, we're working on this. And you're talking, you're like, you know, maybe you should talk to Bill. I worked with that guy and he helped us. Or we used a scaling up coach or you know, it could be general or fairly specific, but there's a kind of referral and that's the vast majority. Right? So those kinds of people show up and then the second one is they discover us on their own. So they start kind of following scaling up and they see, they start listening to the show or that kind of thing. And then eventually they go, you know, maybe this would be easier if we worked with a coach and then it might be with us or it might be one of the other 200 coaches in our world that we recommend. But there's that process, right. And it took a while to figure out what's common among these people, what are the steps, what do they need to know in that kind of thing. But when you figure that out, then it becomes so much more efficient. Right? Right.

Yeah, absolutely. And to relate in mind Racers world, we get a lot of referrals from businesses that have hired lead generation companies for.

I've had 10 pitches for lead gen this morning.

Oh, absolutely. But here's the, here's the rub. So they're spending money on lead generation and they're getting these leads booked for their team, but they've just got absolutely no repeatable process. So the leads cannot be. And giving them a decent roi. And a lot of the time strong, established lead generation companies will come to us and say, hey, this client could really use some help in developing a repeatable process because they've been used to closing referrals. They've been used to closing people from their network where the trust already exists and they've hired a lead gen company or they've got marketers doing content marketing and there's an inbound which are easier to close than outbound. And we do get a lot of people coming there because they want to add even more value to that company. And we go into the company and the company's got a brilliant founder who absolutely understands every aspect of what the product they've built is and why it works for the existing company. Existing customers, but found it difficult to make that bridge of a repeatable process because they don't see themselves as a salesperson. And they've brought in somebody who can't create a repeatable sales process. But they've been hired from a mega company and they brought in to a startup that doesn't have any of the resources they're used to using. And then they throw leads at them. And what do they do? Well, they talk to the leads, but they don't have the resources there to help them move the deal down the pipeline. And the expectation management is terrible between the CEO and the salesperson because salespeople should just sell, right? And they should be left alone because they just sell well. Well, it doesn't work that way. In the very early stages, you got to develop the building blocks to be able to successfully onboard people so that you can scale. That's how we see it. Most of the times we get brought in where that fire is already burning.

The vast majority of early stage scale ups that we talk to. The CEO is interested in detaching themselves more and more from the business. And if you've been central to sales, you won't detach yourself as easily. If you go looking for somebody who does it as effortlessly and naturally. You've got to break it down into a process, map it out. And I think your message is really great. You're not going to do it all at once. You're going to, you're going to piece it apart and tweak on it iteratively so that it's not all resting on the next rock star. And probably nobody's ever going to do it quite as well as did as a founder. If you're, if you're that person.

Well, there's the founder's magic that we've got to consider here. The founder can always look you in the eye and these days virtually shake your hand and say, we'll, we'll look after you. Nobody, nobody in the world can repeat that and get that same sort of leverage. And the founders don't often recognize, they don't pay attention to how custom the deals they're doing are or how much them being involved in that process individually is. And then they'll bring in salespeople and go, well, well, I did it. Off you go. And there's, there's, there's a learning curve on both sides there. But founders who are not naturally inclined towards sales do just want to, you know, hire somebody to take themselves out of it. And we spend a lot of time trying to make that transition easier and then to give the salesperson who's come in with great confidence that they can add value to this process a much better chance of succeeding. Because we really want to help companies grow, add people, have people be able to stay there in the long term so that they can actually add value to their communities. And that doesn't happen if your salespeople are churning out the door all the time and the CEO keeps getting pulled back into sales because it just doesn't work. And so it's a very, very common problem. And this system is.

Think about that side of that. Right? So now you, you've, you've either on your own or working with a company like yours, you've created a well tuned, tested, proven kind of a process, a playbook or whatever approach that you have with it, or whatever you call it. But now I'm going to recruit somebody into doing that that's a lot easier to fill. And I can tell you, you're coming to work for us. Hey, Dan, we've got this system. You learn and follow these things. Here's what we need to know. The people that win in our system have these traits. It looks to me like you do. If you think that's the same thing, then you can apply this. And the range of result is this and that. Like, I can hire and recruit that all day long. And it's not this, like, Ouija board of. Is this person going to be the next sales God? Right. I'd have to be that. Yeah.

Well, that's the thing, you know, like, that nobody wants a hire to fail. And so everybody sets out with the best intentions. But, I mean, I'm sure lots of people listening have made this mistake. I have brought people in too early.

CEOs who are like, they're hoping and praying, oh, I hope this one turns out. And they're like, he looks really good. But it's almost as if they're trying to convince themselves, oh, I think she's going to be a winner. But there's, there's a huge amount of hope going on there. Not certainty and predictability.

Absolutely. And, you know, then you've got to bring in the person who's going to be able to bring their magic, their charisma. Their secret sauce, their selling skill and apply it to all the knowledge that you're able to now give them and set the expectations about how they should have conversations with you about deals that are about to be done. One other thing I'd like to put into here is the enablement. You know, thinking about what's actually allowed to be included as a value add when you close a deal, thinking about how flexible you might be on scale, pricing those sorts of things and documenting those are things that just help your salespeople to know, hey, it's okay for me to put together something for this prospect who's very well qualified without having to run it up the flagpole to the CEO all the time. Because confusion stops progress. And if it takes you a week to go and get a price for your SaaS platform from a whole panel of different people, then time kills all deals. You can do a great scoping, you can get a really good idea of where they want to be. But if it takes you days and days and days to come back with a firm price and be able to put that forward.

Yeah, giving them latitude. Well, I think there's a lot of fear always in hiring and giving people, salespeople, people latitude because usually the pay systems are a little simplistic and you're like the salesperson just going to do anything to get the deal and then we have to live with that cost. So I've usually tried to pay on net receipts, which would be net of discounts and anything uncollectible and that helps. But the higher order is on net gross margin receipts where I would factor out the cost of goods or the average cost of goods so that I'm not paying on a money losing deal. Right. Even if they've discounted it below where we're making any money, that there's some pain that they're sharing in that process.

Well, that's a really wonderful point as well because they're all considerations as you go through the maturity of the business. Early on you want to make sure the salesperson's getting in and they're able to pull in your resources to make sure that they don't make those sorts of mistakes and then very quickly learn the confidence of defending the price and understanding why they choose it over the competition and so on. And that's why that these days, you know, it can take eight months to ramp up somebody even selling something relatively straightforward to full productivity. If you start getting a very complex enterprise product, you're looking at 10 months to 12 months before they're really up to speed and we're talking about organizations that already have momentum. If you're bringing in early salespeople, you've really got to focus on, on getting that to operate quicker by enabling them quicker and being involved in that discussion. And so you've got to put in the yards before you can take yourself out of the process again. That's something that doesn't happen very often. It mostly happens in the weekly sales meeting or hey, can I gap half an hour with you? And as a startup founder, your calendar is normally pretty full. Right. So how can you squeeze other people in for a conversation about deals unless they're absolutely sure it's going to move forward? So, so setting the guidelines early is always going to be an accelerating factor.

Well, so let's talk a little bit before. Tell people where to go, get more information about your work and read up about your stuff, because there's stuff on your website there that's useful. Let me remind our listeners that we bring a new show like this every week to you, actually three times a week now. We've got a tip show on Tuesdays, a deeper dive on Wednesdays. We record them live now so you could watch them them live on any of the video platforms, Facebook, YouTube, wherever else we're going. And, and then we've got these and then we do a getting real show on Sundays where we, where we get beneath the skin about the leadership journey there for the CEOs. But if our show helped you, please share it, pass along with someone else. Sharing it, promoting it helps us grow the show. Giving us a review makes a massive difference for us on especially on itunes and the other platforms. Subscribe to get our shows every week, three times a week in your feed you can subscribe@scalingcoach.com get the full downloads and old special offer links and things like that there or you can go wherever you get it, like subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on iTunes. Probably the biggest following we have is on itunes today, but we also get people on Spotify and Stitcher and that kind of thing. I want to give big thanks to Vern Hanisch, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework, and our show producer, Lucy Summers working in the background getting everything going, guests prepared, that kind of thing. The audio gets edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions and our shownotes are written up by Ein Kodina proofread by Tim McGowan. If you'd like to get more information on Dan and his company, it's mindracer consultants consulting.com we'll put in the crawl right there now. Mindracer consulting.com and there's downloadable resources there that you've got to work through. Some of these things I think it's really great like get people started with your work. Dan I love that that you've got some stuff there that's a little more than write just your contact information.

Absolutely. Yeah. There's a few downloadable resources there that people can get their hands on easily and so walk through the four R's review, refine, roll out and replace on the website there so people can use that for their own access. And of course if anything we can do to be of support here to help.

Awesome. We'll get started right now with Mind Racer Consulting. Get your sales process dialed in. Thanks again everyone for listening and keep scaling up.

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