S6E13 - AJ Mahar and Butch Hudson The Science of High-Velocity Transactional Sales: Proven Scripts That Make Money Tomorrow

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What's up, everybody? Welcome to another killer episode of the Surf and Sales podcast, brought to you by our good friends at Win AI. Meet your new AI sales assistant. Taking notes is distracting. Updating the CRM is time consuming. Win AI joins you on your virtual meeting so you can focus on your customer and not your keyboard. I'm Scott Lease here with my partner and co host and co founder of the Circle Surf and Sales Summit, Richard Harris. What's going on, brother? How are you?

I am good, man. Got to go to the warriors game last night. That was fun. And we were. Steph was down to two three pointers before he hit his 4,000. And you know, as you know that.

You missed the Milestone game.

Yeah. GP2 went off last night. Gary Payton and. And so they kept trying to feed the ball at the end of stuff, but nobody would give him a pick. Like, it was just like, why is nobody giving him a pick? So anyway, so I'm good.

Unfortunately for you, the warriors don't give a about your being there as it pertains to his record.

The good news is I'm going next week to Denver, but that doesn't mean I want Steph to go cold on three points. So I'll be there for the Denver game too.

Good stuff. We are joined today by two guys who work for a company called Cellfire. And we're joined by A.J. mayer, sales performance coach, and Butch Hodson, head of sales performance. And these guys are here because they have written a book and it's called Sales Lab Scripting the proven Playbook to scientifically crush your sales goals. And we welcome you guys to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having us.

Yes, thank you.

All right, so context wise, first of all, tell everybody a little bit about Cell Fire. Let's have AJ answer that one. And then Butch, maybe you can tell us what the inspiration was to write this book.

Yeah. So Fire. So we're a company that we offer a couple different services, but we have a sales CRM that we have built. So you'll learn. Butch and I have a history of working for multiple startups, specifically in high velocity sales. And each of those startups, we had our own internal sales CRM because it was too difficult to take some of these big box CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot and make them very specific to what we did. And so we had our own and we decided, a couple, our founders decided back in 2020 to start the to build a sales CRM that they could sell to other people. That's Kind of how Cell Fire started. And then Butch and I decided to write a book, sales lab scripting, which we'll talk about. And one of the founders read the book before it was actually published and he said, we need your coaching services and selling to be part of our package. So we kind of sell a package deal where we sell a CRM for plus sales coaching where we help other companies scale. We also use AI but I don't know if you want to add anything else to that, but that's kind of the origin story.

Yeah. So you know, when you say sell CRM, it's a really broad, you know, topic. And I think one thing to clarify is like we're not trying to compete or replace the hubspots or the salesforces of the world. It's really a unique sales CRM that is really focused on transactional high velocity sales, which I'm sure we'll, we'll talk about here in a little bit. But the, the other thing was, okay, we didn't want to just have a traditional sales CRM. And Scott, you've preached this before of like not just another sales tool. Like we wanted to add a CRM that was like the dream for transactional sales reps and managers like everything they wish Salesforce could do from a reporting standpoint where dashboards aren't confusing and HubSpot, like just for high velocity sales. What are the things that salespeople love the most? Build that in a CRM. But we wanted to take it up a notch where we had a coaching element where if imagine a team of people that are gonna help you build scalable processes where it's not just a sales tool. So you combine coaching and scalability and sales training and leadership and management with the sales CRM. Then you have a coaching plus CRM type of concept and platform that is unique where you know, HubSpot and a salesforce, they don't offer, you know, those services.

But I've always thought about, about this, Richard, because you know, these old spam cannon tools and CRM tools, like they get you to buy the product and then it's sort of off you go, Right. But they don't take care of their own churn problem necessarily because you go arm this company with this new tool and you expect it to do wonders for them, but they don't freaking know how to sell. They don't know how to use the tool, they don't know how to run a proper sales process. Then the company fails. Well, if you're selling that, that tool now you just churn the customer. And I used to ask the Kyle's and the Manny's and all these type of people like how come you don't have a services branch to the business? And the answer was always, well VCs don't care about services based revenue but they do now. I think, I think it's changing a little bit.

Yeah. And I think it, I think it's, I also think so. You know, long before, right before I started this, I was at that company, Mastery Scott and we had a services piece, right. But were selling like, you know, this was 2012, this was like API management services. This is where. How does Amex talk to best Buy? So there was this services piece. But I agree with you in the sales tool space.

I feel like sales tool spaces try to be high velocity, right? They're a medium velocity tool in my opinion. They're medium, you know, but, but just for the sake of those listening and I know all three of you will have an answer. Define high velocity. When does it go from high velocity to medium velocity? And then I do have a question of is yours is what y' all built really just for high velocity? So anyway, so but I'd love to hear the definite question of that because I think people think it's a one call close and maybe that's what it is. And but does that also mean what, what deal size does it have? Decision makers and but like what is high velocity mean?

Sure. I could take first our first stab at it of our impression. So high high velo and transactional is kind of inter. Interchangeable. But what we deem as transactional sl high velocity would be if you look at the cell cycle from initial point of contact to like initial outreach, first point of contact to close, we look at that to be within a 90 day cell cycle. Really within 30 days. So like from initial outreach or initial first point of contact to close, that is within a 30 day sales cycle, we deem that transactional. Whether you're selling a product, whether you're selling a software or service. If it's initial point of contact to close within 30 days, we would consider that high velocity. Now in our book and things that we teach, we teach a two call approach to that between setting an appointment and then running a presentation and closing. But to your point Richard, doesn't mean it couldn't happen in one call. Does it mean it's always going to happen in two calls? Sometimes it could take a third call, fourth call. But really transactional of like man, if you can Crank out as many sales as possible within a 30 day sales cycle. That's what we kind of look at now. There's a lot of moving parts to that between price points and stuff like that. You could have a transactional software that's $2,500 a month subscription. You might not sell 30 of those a month if you're a sales rep versus a product that might be $200 a month. That is. So like there's different levels of transactional. But I look at that cell cycle of 30 days.

I've got, I got a follow up question for you and maybe AJ if you jump in on this. Does number of decision makers involved in the decision affect how you define transactional or high velocity?

Yeah, well, typically what we see is the customers that we work with. It may take a couple levels to get to the decision maker. So maybe we're talking to a gatekeeper. Maybe there's multiple decision makers. It isn't really like enterprise sales where you have to run a presentation with this person so that you can then get to the next person and there's like multiple levels. That's typically not what we're working with. It's typically you're cold calling or it's a warm lead and you're getting past one or two people, then you get to the final decision maker. Or maybe there are multiple decision makers and you try to get everybody on a presentation. It's possible that we run a presentation or two to. Because if someone can't make it, but usually it's not super far down the funnel.

Scott, what's your definition of high velocity? Because I've worked with you where we called high velocity one to two call close. I know from your background, you know, like at Main Street Hub, which I kind of know is a part of this connection with you all. What's your definition? Do you agree with them? Has it evolved from where you used to be? Like what? What's your deck? And you've written, by the way, in fairness to Scott, he's written a book about this. So I'm, that's why I'm curious to his opinion.

Yeah, well, these guys are reading the book ten years after mine. So there's, you could argue, a more modern take.

Because you paved the way. You paved the way.

Yeah, well, somebody has to, you know, be the full trail.

You're the Aaron Ross. You're the Aaron Ross of transactional sales. As I, as I once told you at Denver, when you wrote that book.

Before you wrote that book.

I don't know that my definition is any different than, than theirs at all. You know, and I don't want to search for splinters of, of differences. I, I would say that my definition has changed over the years a little bit. I mean when I first got started in sales twenty something years ago, it was transactional sales, high velocity sales. Meaning if you had the potential to have one call closes, that was enough for me as like a definition of oh, this is transactional sales. If you're making like a hundred plus dials a day, smashing out calls. That was transact transactional, high velocity kind of sales. Yeah. Now.

People are starting to try to use this transactional term for deal cycles that are under 90 days. And, and I'm like, what are you talking about? That is not transactional. So I like cringe over that. So I agree with Butch that like 30 days is kind of the marker. Like if you can close deals within one to two calls in a week or two, like that's transactional sales. If you're going over 30 days, that's not high velocity transactional sales to me.

Yeah, I think that 90 day period does get bucketed in a lot from people we talk to. And it, because it's, then it's really like, okay, well then it's really not always 90 days and you're looking at four to six months. And then you're in the complete opposite. And then you know, you're also, you gotta look at if your sales are based on quarterly goals. That might be a little bit different if you're a sales rep who's more enterprise level. But these transactional sales reps, they're based off of bi weekly sales targets or monthly sales targets, which means they're having to create that, that, that sales cycle within a 30 day time period anyway. But I think that's a good point.

One of the, one of the main reasons that I wrote the book that I did was because it always pissed me off that transactional sales reps had this like asterisk, if you will, like or somehow less than, not as good as an enterprise career path.

You're telemarketers. You were telling.

Yeah, yeah. And this career path was like, oh, you're supposed to go from transactional to mid to enterprise or whatever. But the reality is if you're self aware enough, you know where to play. I don't want to be in a 24 month sales cycle. I don't want to sell someplace where I close one deal a quarter. Like I'm not built that way. What the am I going to do come home. Come home once a quarter and tell my significant other, hey, I closed the deal finally. What am I going to say the other 89 days? Oh, hey, babe, I move this deal from stage two to stage three. Like, I can't do that. Right? And so I gravitated towards this environment to. To cut my teeth and spent the first half of my career there. So I applaud, you know, you guys continuing the tradition, if you will, of, like, somebody paying attention to this arena. What is it, AJ about this arena that drew you and has kept you?

Good question. Good question.

Yeah. So I started working for a company called profit Fuel in 2009. It was actually a. My first real job out of college, so I didn't really know any better. So I got on the phones and I just. It was. It was. I didn't have any. I didn't understand enterprise sales versus transactional. But our environment was super fun. And about nine months in, so Butch was actually working there. That's where we met. About nine months in, we started. Butch started a team called Team 19. Prior to that, everybody had their own pitch. It was the wild, wild west. And Butch's pitch was the same thing over and over again. And he was the number one sales rep in our office, and he dared our CEO or bet our CEO he could write a script for everybody. And so I was part of that team. We tested it out for 30 days, and our sales, I don't remember exactly, like, doubled or tripled. And from there, I just realized, like, the light bulb hit. I was like, oh, there is a science to this. There is a process to this. And it kind of just gave me, like, a future. I could kind of envision the future. Like, we could do this to other products. And I just thought of, like, this could be a business. And so I. We just kind of, like, made. That's kind of what you're. What's in our book now is it stemmed from that one script that we have, and we've just built it out. And so that kind of excited me in it because it's all I knew. And we saw tremendous success in my first year.

Yeah. Any. Anything you want to add there, Butch, about what. What has kept you in this kind of world, and it makes it exciting and fun for you?

Well, one. What's more exciting than transactional? Where you're getting. You. You're striving for wins on a daily or weekly basis, and there's that rush and ad of, like, feeling accomplished. Imagine I'm not built for enterprise sales either, Scott. And part of that is, like, imagine going through months of, like, not knowing, like, if you. If you're winning or not. And like, for me, you know that I think transactional is always that pull that, like, I could directly put forth action today that could make me money today as well, too, and. Or this week or this month. And I think, you know, it also depends on the personality and what you're. What you're built and shrinks. My strengths that I've just naturally been drawn to is more. More transactional versus enterprise. You made a good point about a significant other. Like, imagine, like, hey, I haven't hit any sales this quarter, but I've met a few CEOs on golf courses and done a lot of other things. And I don't worry, babe, I'm networking. I'm networking for these larger enterprise deals.

That just never did it for me. Never doubt me.

Yeah.

I think I just. The environment avoid that by. By not telling my spouse a lot about my sales deals because then, then all of a sudden I have a new CRO and CFO in my business. Right. So, anyway, go ahead. I'm sorry I interrupted you. I'm here for the terrible comedic relief.

It's all good. I think the environment of transactional sales is super fun. You know, our office, and I'm sure pretty much every office across the country has a gong. So if you're making multiple sales in a day and you got your walkout song and everybody's clapping for you, it's a high dopamine hit. And you got teams, you got chance. I just think it's just a lot more fun and it just creates a really good environment as well.

Scott, so question for you, because now I know you, Scott, and your deals are bigger. They probably have an enterprise price.

Yeah.

On a scale of 1 to 10, are you an 11 on the frustration of your own sales cycle now?

Oh, 100%.

Yes.

A hundred million per cent. I supplement it, though, as you know, because I sell the main thing, which is like six figures, but I sell surfing sales tickets, which is a little cheaper, a little faster.

Right.

So coaching, which is a little cheaper, a little faster. So great. I've got. I have some other things that move a little faster to kind of scratch that itch. But, yeah, it is. It is tough for me.

So I want to. I want to shift to book. Why book? And I am kind of curious how you did it as a partner, because if Scott and I had to write a book together, you know, it would take 10 years.

Like we would take 10 years because Richard would take 10 years of perfectionist.

No, that's not gotten better.

Well, that is a real thing. That is a real thing. Because even in the editing phase, we wanted to be a perfectionist on every chapter. And at some point we had to say, we got to stop making revisions and edits or this thing will never get released. And you know, so there is that. But I could, I can take that one. So AJ and I have worked together for. Since 2009 when I was Director of Sales and then VP of Sales. Even, you know, when we went have gone through multiple company acquisitions. He's been my co pilot for the last decade and a half and it did take us four years. And I'll talk about the origin of that. But AJ and I, you know, I was a VP of sales performance at Yodle Yodle. This was back in 2011. We were the largest SEO company in the country. We had 450 salespeople at the time that we scaled to 850 all doing outbound sales motions. And AJ&I's primary responsibility was to travel to all the offices, 800 salespeople. And just train and preach the methodologies and processes and scripting and listen to call. So like, you know, over years and years, there's no person that, I mean, I've listened and broke down like thousands of sales calls with aj. We think alike on methodology and process. So like that was an agency decision on co authoring. How it kind of started is we have been talking forever. You know, even 10 years ago, like, man, we, we should write a sales book. But I think, you know, a lot of people have that idea of like, hey, I'd like to write a book about something. They just never do it. And then you have the real world and life gets in the way where it's like, when are you going to set aside the time to actually write the book? Because you got full time careers as well too. So it did take us about four years to write. What ended up happening is we've always had the idea of like, if we did write a book, what we'd write a book about. Even six years ago, we were exchanging emails what would be the chapters of our book that we'd end up writing? So what happened was that really sparked the initiative is forever. I've always wanted to write two books in my life Forever. I've wanted to write a book on mental health, like how to deal with panic attacks and depression and anxiety and social issues. And then I wanted to write a sales book.

And there's.

They do correlate because there's a ton of salespeople that don't understand the mental health aspect of everyday life. And that really does impact your. Your job. But I'd always wanted to write the mental health book first because I felt like that was more important than the sales book. So the goal is write two books. But what sparked this is I ended up getting a phone call. This was like three and a half, four years ago. Matt Stewart, who, you know, Scott, who's a co founder in Cell Fire, and a few other people were writing a book and they called me up one day and said, hey, we've been working on this book that is about scaling a company from beginning to end. You know, all the things that need to go into like, scale of the company. We wrote two chapters on sales scripting and like processes. Review that, that those chapters. And when I read it, I got really pissed off because one the people that had told me that we would all write a book one day together about different processes, but then they were writing a book specifically on sales scripting and processes and wanted me to review it to give my thoughts. And I called AJ up, I said, hey, so and so's are writing a book right now. And two of the chapters are about sales scripting and processes. And there's two takeaways I have for this. One.

We need to help them rewrite those chapters. Is terminally off. It doesn't tell the whole story. And two, there's no effing way you could do this in two chapters. It doesn't paint the real picture. You need to write a whole freaking book just on these topics. And then it was like, the next day we're like, let's start writing the book now and let's just do it. Let's stop waiting and making excuses. And we would just make the time. And we had fallen in love with this company, Scribe Media, who used to be Book in the Box. They did. One of our favorite books was David Goggins Can't Hurt Me. We love the audiobook.

I love that book.

Yeah, one of our favorite books. And the audio is what was so cool is that it was really unique where there's the narrator or writer reading the chapter, but then there is these podcasts at the end of every chapter where they would do these breakdowns and stories. And we thought that was so cool. So, like, we made the decision. We scribe did David Goggins book. We wanted to do a deal with Scribe. So we asked Them to help us write our book, which they agreed to. We did a deal with them and the goal was like write a legit sales book, beginning to end. That needed more than just two chapters about sales, scripting and processes. And that's how it originally got started.

I wanna, I wanna, I wanna.

Go ahead, Scott, you're gonna go. Okay.

I wanna dive into some of the skills and the skill differences between a transactional versus mid market versus enterprise rep. And we'll go over to AJ Maybe to start this. What are some of the skills that are critical for high velocity sales reps? And I'm sure you talk about this in the book, like how to identify these things, how to perfect these skills and so forth. Maybe you can expand on that a little bit.

Yeah, totally. I think the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, you hear the word building rapport all the time in sales. And I think transactional is very different than enterprise sales. Enterprise sales, you know, you have these 6, 9, 12 month, 2 year long relationships, so you got to really get in good with these customers, become their friends. Whereas with us you sometimes have five to 10 seconds to make a good first impression. And if you don't do that, you're getting hung up on. So it is so critical to be getting to the point with these customers. You're not trying to be their best friend. What you're trying to do is come across as an expert who's not going to waste their time. And you've got really great tone, you've got really great speed, and you have a very good process. And so I would say enterprise sales, a lot of it is charisma, a lot of it is you've got a great personality, you're good at making friends, whereas a really good transactional sales rep, you've got a process, you know what you're doing every single time.

You're prepared. When the person answers the phone, you know, you gotta be quick, you gotta make that good first impression. And in 15, 20 seconds you gotta explain what, what it is you do. You got to probably ask, hey, do you have 30 seconds now so I can explain more? You got to be respectful of their time. Whereas, you know, enterprise, it's, it's just very different. You build rapport in very different ways. That's the first thing that comes to mind for me.

But you want to add anything to that?

Yeah, I think really, you know, you know, as far as traits go, you got to be a really good active listener because you're moving fast in a transactional Pitch. So I think being a great listener is a really undervalued skill in the transactional world where you can take what they're. You're saying things that, you know, you're getting to the point really quickly, but you're able to use active listening of what the customer is responding and saying with to then blend what you need to say next. So that is important. I think, really, you know, some of the traits that we have is just. I think that also you need someone who is competitive from a competitive nature because in transactional sales it's, you know, you're going to need someone that can have. Want to like, compete not just with other salespeople and sales teams on a weekly daily level, but also with themselves of wanting to get better. I think, you know, someone that is growth mindset is very undervalued, I think. Well, as well in the transaction world. You deal with a lot of rejection in a transactional world. So you need sales reps that understand, look, I'm going to get told no 90% of the time today. And it's human nature to not love being projected all day long every day. But if you have a growth mindset, you're going to go into, look, what is a good day in the transactional world and transactional world, that's setting a couple appointments, legit appointments for myself. That's a good day. But I'm also going to get told no and yelled at and cussed at and hung up on maybe 30 or 40 or 50 times during that day. If I have a growth mindset, I'm not going to get down in the dumps all the times that I'm getting rejected and getting mentally frustrated and depressed and like irritated. What I'm actually going to do is I'm going to use that as a learning opportunity. Every time I get rejected or cut off or told no, I try a rebuttal. It doesn't work and it's just not working. My growth mindset is, hey, it's a good thing I got rejected. I can go back, I can figure out what I can improve on. And it's just part of the process. So I think that mental aspect of I will stay positive. So positivity is part of that and like push through rejection and not, not. You know, if I do get rejected a ton, I use it as a learning opportunity versus I'm frustrated.

I kind of laugh.

I wish I just get. If you're telling me you get yelled at and cursed at 30 to 50 times a day, I'd Be excited that I'm getting that many pickups.

Right? I'd be like, well, man, that's amazing. I got that. So that's. That's good. Yeah.

I think in a good world, like, if you make 100 dials, I think what we see on average a good connect rate, to your point, Richard, is, you know, like a good connect rate would probably be 20 to 30% if you're. If you're lucky, especially from a cold call kind of outbound perspective. And that's just someone connecting. Doesn't necessarily mean it's a decision maker. The big metric we look at is DM set rate, which is the amount of times in a day you get a decision maker on the phone. How many times do you set an appointment with them? So if you have a 10% DM set rate, which is not great, means.

That'S not good at all.

Ten decision makers I get. I'm setting one appointment versus if I have a 30% DM set rate, which is pretty good, then like, and these are quick pitches, by the way. But, you know, I'm setting an appointment with three out of 10, but I'm still getting rejected or told no by seven. So, yeah, you know, just in theory, you're going to get rejected a lot. Part of the rejection, though, that you could feel, though, to your point, is not getting anybody. You know, you're going to have these also reps that get mentally frustrated because they have made $60 in a row and haven't been able to connect to a person. And their dm, their actual. Their connect rate for the day is like 5%. Still got to have someone that can turn that into, you know, not being frustrated and staying positive.

Yeah, cool. Holy cow, time is flying. I got one more question before we flip it over to have you guys ask us the question. Right. CRM updates. Biggest challenge we always hear about, particularly at the enterprise level. How do you do it at the transactional level? Because it's happening way faster. And granted, now with AI and some tools and maybe with your service, you have that built in, but how do you stay on top of that stuff? Because transactional sales is great. It's fast, it's quick. However, you still got to forecast, you still got to report to the board, you still got to do all those things. So I see you nodding your head pretty heavily on this one. What's your thought?

Yeah, so I'm in New York City right now. We have an office of our own, sales reps. So part of our coaching services is we can actually sell a customer's product for them with our own sales reps. Or we have packages where we can do all the training, the coaching, write your scripting, and use your sales reps. But I'm here in the belly of the beast here in New York, and we're using our own sales reps, using our own CRM, and in real time, we're looking at, oh, okay. So, like, this thing just happened. It would be great if our software could do this. So we're using our own. We call it a sales lab for many reasons. For we're like sales scientists figuring out what pitch is best, but we're also doing it with our sales CRM and testing different ways of AI. So we have our own unique way of getting new updates because we're experiencing it ourselves as sales reps and sales managers. And then we're also just taking a ton of feedback from our customers on things that need. Need updates as well.

Okay, we've got to pivot now to start to try to wrap up the show once again. We're brought to you by Win AI. Always be winning. Close more deals by making your funnel faster, smarter, and smoother, and streamline your favorite sales tools. Check out Win AI. This is the time of the show where we say, how can we be helpful to you guys? Do you have any questions for us? So fire away.

Yeah, I think I can leave this one. And this could be for either one of you. Just being that AJ And I are new authors and what are some lessons that you learned post book release that if you had to go back and Scott, you've had this a few times with several books. What is something that maybe post launch that you look back on? Maybe it's like the first quarter or two after your initial launch that you said, okay, I would have wished six months post launch, I would have done things a little bit different. What were some learning. Some learning lessons that we could really get some guidance on as we're about to hit the book launch and enter that period?

Yeah, my first book was a little bit of, like, a slow burn. It seemed to pick up momentum the more people got their hands on it. It wasn't like people were super stoked or waiting for my book to come out. Nobody even freaking knew who I was or anything like that.

So.

One smart thing that I did was I reached out to people who had big sales organizations and I just said, hey, I wrote this book. I think it might be relevant for your sales people. Can I send you a box or two? So I started Shipping them all over the place. And then I. I made a few posts on LinkedIn, and I'm, you know, literally, like, writing addresses for hundreds of books. On a Saturday, I put my kids to work making them stamp stuff and address things. I'm. I mailed them all over the place. Right. And that led to people starting to talk about it for reviews to start coming in, and led to, like, more and more kind of purchases. And I still get a good chunk of purchases from that book. So I guess I kind of wish I would have started doing that right from the beginning, you know, a bigger, like, giveaway kind of splash. I knew, like, you're not doing this to make a bunch of money on the book. No, you use it as a calling card. A calling card of sorts to, like, get your name out there, get your company's name out there, bring in, you know, opportunities and leads, if you will, for other things that. That you do. So in the be. In the very beginning, I didn't really. I didn't really understand how powerful that stuff could be. So I think it took me a couple months before I actually decided to do that strategy, and I think. I wish I would have done it straight away.

Great.

Well, let me get a head start on that. If you're a big company listening to this podcast right now, you can reach out to us and we will send you a shitload of books, no problem, signed by the authors. So we'll. We'll knock that out now.

Anything you want to add to that?

Yeah. So I had the luxury of asking a whole bunch of other people how to do this. So. So one piece of advice. So I'll pass along the advice I got and followed. One was I created a launch team and went to LinkedIn and I had someone scrape every post that I'd written for, like, six months. And then, much to Scott's chagrin, I used a tool to have it send, like, 800 messages and automated it. I even said, hey, yeah, this is coming from a bot to recruit people. And I would send them a free digital copy if they bought the book. I'd reimburse them if they wrote a review, sent me a picture of it. And I also had a contest of, like, people who post. I'll choose. You know, I'll give everybody a hundred bucks or, you know, pick some winners. So the day that I launched, I had 30 or 40 people hosting about the book. So that was super helpful for me.

To create some. Some juice. And then I wish I'd done what Scott had done in Fact, it's still something I need to work on, which is getting. Reaching out to leaders about getting them copies of the book. You know, the difference now is that so many teams are remote, you know, to send a, you know, I've got to send a digital version to everybody, which I feel like is not quite as exciting as a physical book. The last thing I will tell you that was given to me as advice was when you sign a book, people are more reluctant to throw it away because it has a personal touch to it. Yeah.

It's autographed, right?

It's autographed. Right. Granted, we're nobody special for the most part. Right. You know, I'm, I'm, you know, a half point more special than Scott. But.

That was an interesting piece of advice that I never would have thought of. So when I do send out books, I do sign every book, right?

Yeah.

So anyway, so funny you say that because I was telling my wife, like I, I could to. Could talk at length about like imposter syndrome and my. So my wife that, you know, we. I talked to a few CEOs that I have relationships with that they said, hey, I want a signed copy of the book. And I told my wife, like, that is so weird for me.

Yeah.

To like, who am I to offer something and is that.

Is valu.

To somebody like that is. It's really trippy.

Yeah. Yeah, I run into that a lot. A lot. So. So that's my piece of advice. AJ what question you got for us?

Yeah, yeah, I have a question. You guys advise for a lot of sales companies, CEOs, reps, managers, I'm sure, you know, is there any area of opportunity that you can think of in the transactional, high velocity sales world where you're hearing these CEOs talk about like, they wish they had this, they wish they had that. Is there anything that like, sticks out that you think cell fire or this book could solve?

Question my. Go ahead, Richard.

So I haven't spent as much time in the transactional world, so I, I defer to Scott to change my opinion. I think they have the same challenges as most CROs and CFOs, that they want better data, they want more sales, they want more everything. And I think they don't know what they don't know, particularly early stage transactional sales leaders. Just like early stage enterprise sales leaders, they don't know what they don't know. They lack process. I think if they're at the early stage and even to a certain degree, even after they've gotten their funding and gotten ahead of sales and stuff like that. They still lack a process and that's. I feel like a transactional sale has a much stricter process and scripting necessary to make it work. Because once you figure out the math and the formula, it shouldn't be that hard to repeat it versus an enterprise.

Predictable.

Got to go. Yeah, it's much more predictable in my opinion. I don't think they know how to get to predictability as easily as they would like. That's my. But Scott changed my mind on that one, so.

Well, Scott, I want to. I want to hear your response that Bo. I wanted to add one thing to that because we were talking about the sales CRMs at the beginning of this podcast. One thing that Salesforce and HubSpot don't give a shit about is whoever they're selling the software to, they don't really care whether you hit your sales goals or not. That's completely up to you. Like Salesforce doesn't give a shit whether you're. Your reps are crushing their commissions or hitting their goals. I think that is much different about ourselves, CRM, where because we're tied to the coaching aspect to it, we're neck and neck with our. The people that use our software to helping them hit their goals and crush their goals. I think that's a unique aspect to that.

That's a good point. I've never seen that and I agree with you.

And our book is specifically about that process the proven playbook to scientifically crush your goals. We help you find exactly what those numbers. We know what those numbers are and we tell it to you in the book and here's how you hit them. So I'm happy you said that.

Yeah.

The only thing that I would add is.

They all tend to be very behind on technology and modern kind of sales tactics and acumen. So things that if you're in SaaS, you kind of take for granted. Like everybody used outreach or everybody uses gong or whatever. Like they don't even know what these tools are. A lot of them, you know, you talk about AI and that's all the rage everywhere right now. But like, you're in SaaS and tech, you're in a bubble and you know, you go talk to some shipping container company, they're not. They don't know what these AI tools are or anything like that. So there's always the opportunity for them to learn about new tech. And oftentimes they can end up being a market leader and early adopter by just picking up you know some of this stuff. And then the second thing is exactly what Richard said and what you guys are writing about in. In the book. Sales Lab Scripting. It's. It's just having an actual process. So many times I talk to people, and they're like, yeah, I got eight salespeople. And I'm like, cool. It's like, what. What do they say? Like, I don't know. They all do things, like, a different way, and I'm just like, oh, God, you know, when is. When is this gonna change? When are people gonna learn? Oh, I don't know.

Right now?

Yeah, hopefully right now. Right? We're all. We're all doing our part to try to try to fix that. Well, we appreciate you guys spending time with us this afternoon. Once again, it's AJ Mayer and Butch Hodgson. They're from a company called cellfire, and they have written the proven playbook to scientifically crush your sales goals called Sales Lab Scripting. Anything else you guys want to add before we get on out of here?

No, I think. Hey, we just want to say appreciate you guys putting us on here and letting us talk about the book. And, yeah, the book is. You'll learn in the first chapter. It's for anyone. So if you're an sdr, you can read this book. We have scripts that you can use. If you're an ae, you have scripts to set an appointment, close an appointment, run, run a presentation, and then the back half of the book is for the CEO, the head of sales, who really. Or the CRO who's trying to scale the company. And so it's kind of. It's a book for everybody. So whether you're a sales rep reading this book, sdr, or ahead of sales, you know, we encourage you to take a look and give it a read.

Yeah.

But go ahead, Richard.

No, no, I got. I got something for you, but go ahead.

1. I just want to say thank you, both of you, for having us on. Really, really appreciate. It's an honor to. To. To be on this with you guys. And to second AJ's point, we wanted to write a book where someone could actually read it, use the words that are in the book and make money tomorrow or that day. Like, if you could read. If you read the book today, you could actually apply what's in it and set more appointments, run more demos, close more deals the very next day. Where a lot of other books, you know, it's not that applicable. Where you could literally apply everything in the book strategically, the exact words where, you know, I'VE read books before. It's like, great. These are great theories and broad advice. What are the words do I need to say to get past the gatekeeper? What do I really need to do to make sure my hope my appointment shows up? What are the exact words I need to say? So we wanted to give a playbook to the sales transactional sales world that says read it and you can immediately apply it and make more money. And the early reviews we got back from CEOs even doing founder led sales were amazing. Of just like, hey, we literally read it and applied the exact same things and already started closing some transactional deals from it. We didn't think we could from cold calling.

Yeah, that's. I agree with you. I'm a tactical person that way and I think that's great. So here's my challenge for the two of you, because I do this, and it's actually written in my book, is that I offer a money back guarantee. If someone hates my book, I'll send them their money back. Will you two accept that challenge and let people know today that if they buy your book and they hate it, you'll give them their $12 back?

Yes. But they need to be a subscriber to your podcast and like, make sure.

That's the whole point. The only offer is I'm okay with that. But by the way, I. It's literally they have to leave.

They have to have like leave y' all a five star review. Be like a good subscriber. Like, if you're a loyal podcast listener to the two of you, then absolutely.

I'll tell you this. It's in my book. It's on page one of my book that I will do this. And nobody's asked for it, so don't, don't worry, you're not going to lose.

It just means you wrote something special.

That's right. It means that's how good these guys are too. So. Yeah.

So if they get even one refund request, they're doing worse than you. That's the point you're trying to make.

Is pretty much right.

Yeah.

That's a high bar. That's a high bar.

All right, everybody, we thank AJ and Butch once again. Check out their book, check out the company Sell Fire, and we will see you next time on the surf and sales podcast.

Really fun, guys. Thank you.

Thank you guys so much.