HOW THIS ONE TRAITS MADE THIS REPS CAREER

Got a great one for you today and a superpower that keeps coming up and one that I'm really my favorite, that's focus. And the term this guest uses is ruthless prioritization. Just think about it. We only have time and so many of us squander it and just feel comfortable being busy instead of Really working on the deals that are most likely to close in the order they are most likely to close. And this seems obvious, but only in hindsight, because we, we have to have that judgment, that ability to kind of sense when a deal is real, when the people that we're talking to are telling us, or what we're hearing is what is being said. And we get a sense of how this is going to play out. It is the thinking moves ahead, like in chess and like in any game, and including life. Too often we do what we're told and we get dragged around from meeting to meeting and we think we're working. Yeah, we're doing what our boss tells us, but are we closing business? Are we working on real deals? We get in— into the office or open our computer in the morning and we see nothing but distractions. Other people's priorities. We open our email, we look at our phone, we get on social. Do we have any goals? And then the end of the day comes and we— sure, we're busy and we got a lot of to-dos. And did we get anything that mattered done? We're going to talk about this today because this is a superpower of the very best reps. They typically don't work on the most deals. They typically are not the grinders. You know the person, 80, 100 hours a week flying here, flying there, meeting, meeting, meeting. But they do have control over their calendar. And, you know, I think the best entry-level course for salespeople is just do a search for the 10 things that require no talent. And they're the basics of any career. But there are things that take focus, take proactivity. Being on time, that takes forethought. Things always take longer. There's always traffic. There's always technical glitches and problems with technology getting on the meeting. So you got to be there early. Are you prepared? Okay, that takes forethought. Did you give a little extra? Well, that takes a little bit of energy. These things that we look at as table stakes, but yet how many of us are really good at it? Can you tell me how many meetings you have next week and with who on what days and times? Not that you're supposed to memorize them, but how well do you handle your time? You control your time. You control your thoughts. This personal responsibility is so critical in sales because we don't get any do-overs. We can't buy another week, a day, or a month into our calendar. A comp plan has an expiration date on it. And the quarter ends whether you got the deal or not, or you're ready or not. And here we're going into a different season and things change. And we're— humans are very reactive creatures. We don't think ahead. We think in the moment. It takes a lot of prefrontal cortex energy to think ahead. It's proactive. It is not innate. It is something that we have to set aside time for, sit down with a piece of paper or some kind of thing to get it out of our head so that we can memorize it, or Look at it and analyze it and ask yourself, are you working on too many deals? I bet you are. Everybody does. Everyone I talk to. Do you have them in the order that they're going to close? Well, you know, the CRM does that for me. Yeah, but when do you look at it? The old school days where we used to write it on a whiteboard, you know, the win list, although primitive, pretty effective because it kept you focused. Whether whatever you use, are you really looking at it in the order of priority? Let's get into the interview. I'll sum it up at the end. I really enjoyed this one. I think you'll get a lot out of it in the distinctions that salespeople learn as they go through their career. Here we go. Hey, Matt, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Excellent. So my name is Matt Barnes. I am 53 years old. I know you're not normally supposed to mention that, but I think it has, has some relevance. I've been around the block. So I am the Key Account Sales Director at Walters Kluwer Tax and Accounting in the UK. Walters Kluwer, though, is a global company, so we specialize in professional information software solutions and services in various different sectors such as tax and accounting, healthcare, care, legal and regulatory governance, risk and compliance. So we're in over— we have offices in over 40 countries. We have customers in over 180 countries. So a big, big organization, €4.6 billion turnover, just under 20,000 employees. So in the UK, we're a 250-staff outfit, and I've been with them about 7 and a half years. So in total, though, I've been selling in the tax accounting industry for pretty much all of my selling life. So about 25-odd years. So seen a lot change over that period of time.

How do you keep up with all the excitement in the tax and accounting space?

We have people that do that for us. I am often asked, what is it that you do? And you say, I'm a salesperson. What do I sell? Accountancy software. And everybody looks at you as if you've got 2 heads. Yeah, yawn, yawn, yawn. So I am not an expert in the tax and accounting field. I understand it. I understand the pain that our customers go through staying up to date with legislation, trying to make their processes as efficient as possible. We have guys within the business that that's what they do, and they guide us as to what we need to be telling our customers and assuring them that they're in safe hands, that they're going to be compliant.

And what attracted you to that space?

Just circumstances, really. So it was in the mid-'90s when I first joined a business that is actually a competitor of mine now, and I was with them for 18 years. I spent 4 years doing a slightly different role within that business. So it was just purely in the right place at the right time. In that period in the UK, the accountancy profession was going through substantial changes. self-assessment was on the doorstep. So just got to sort of like that industry. And over the years, as I say, I've just felt this is where I belong.

Cool. And what separates you as a salesperson, do you think?

Yeah, good question. And I know you've asked this before on some of your podcasts, and there's been some really quite interesting answers that have come back. I've got, I think it was Katie, yeah, Katie Moore that you did a podcast with, and she came up with some really interesting points around that. So for me, she mentioned the word prioritization. Now, in my previous job, there was a guy I really looked up to, one of the sort of the owners of the business, and he advised me, it was about ruthless prioritization. And that ruthless prioritization is not just around sort of your qualifications. So this is, you know, what is it that's going to deliver the results for me and for the business? But it's around your time. Your time is your biggest asset, and your customer's time is their biggest asset. So don't waste their time because they're gonna, they're gonna not respect you for that. But at the same time, I don't want to be wasting my time. So I try and invest my time as my asset and to say, if I'm going to be invested in this, there needs to be something that is going to one, benefit you, but at the same time, I'm going to get the results from it at the end of it. And this is as relevant for business or in a professional life as it is for your personal life. So I have family. I try and do everything that I need to do with my family, including, you know, the daughter wants to go and do this eventing, and the son wants to do this and do that, and the wife wants to go out and have meals and everything else. I want to go and play my sport, and I want to socialize with my guys. So that time is equally as important for me. So I have to be similar in my personal life as I'm in my professional life. And not really wanting to dwell on this too much, but at the moment my mother is not very well. She's been diagnosed with cancer. So we know we have little time left with her, hopefully as long as it can be. So we're now prioritizing as ruthlessly as possible our time with her to maximize what we can do with her in the time that she's got left. So this whole ruthless prioritization piece is part of my ethos really. It's making sure I focus in on exactly what I need to do to get the results that I want.

And that, you know, it sounds obvious, but most people don't do it. Most people are happy being busy.

I think it's been even more prevalent with the advent of COVID where You know, as sales guys, and everyone always sort of says, you sales guys, you're off playing golf and doing this and having a great time. You're never working. You're always entertaining. And you come in with these, you know, expenses claims that, you know, we're all sat in the office doing the real work. So with COVID I found that you are expected to be at your desk the whole time. Yeah. So your your calendar, your diary became the focus for everyone else. So suddenly you're going from meeting to meeting to meeting. I don't think I've ever been busier than during COVID and I haven't been spending, you know, those hours in the car or on the train going up to see customers because I've not had to do that. I've not been able to do that. So instead, I've had much more time to be doing the bits behind the scenes and involved in a lot more meetings. And I have to say, you have to. And as a company, Wolters Kluwer are trying to encourage people to say, if you don't feel you're needed on that meeting, say no.

Yeah.

Which is good. It sometimes doesn't go down very well with your boss if you say to them, sorry, I don't feel this is my— this is for me. I'm going to duck out here. Thanks for the invite. Well, yeah, sorry, what?

You had that frustration because your manager thinks that you can just get your job done, given whatever time they give you, but they can fill it up with all the things that they'd like to fill it up with. And, you know, I always— I was like the first one out of the QBR. I was the first one. They'd be calling me and I'd be in the car back to the airport, right?

See, I I now miss those QBRs because of—

Oh no, it hasn't gotten that bad.

It's got that bad? Well, you miss the social piece, don't you? I mean, the QBRs, you'd obviously during the day you'd have your bit mixing and talking the relevant bit. Some would be really interesting, some might not be so interesting, and I won't say what the not so interesting bits were in some of those QBRs. Ours were always, we tried to add value and we we tried to get engagement from the whole sales team so that there was ownership on it, there was involvement with it. So those were good for me, a typical sales guy. I used to love the post-meeting interaction. You know, if we were staying out, we'd go for something. And often from that, that's where you'd pick up the really valuable bits of knowledge, the share, the, I've got this problem with with this deal or with this customer that's wanting this, what would you guys do? And you have that, it's probably the best part of the actual few days that you have is that interaction with your colleagues, the sharing, the mentoring. You know, we've got an amazing ethos within Wolters Kluwer about helping out your colleagues. So I'm 25 years experience in this, and as I said to you before this call, you know, I'm not professing to be the bee's knees in this, but it's lovely when my colleagues come up and say, Matt, you've got grey hair, what would you do here on this and how would you react on that one? And hopefully they'll take some value in what I'm saying. But I remember, you know, going back to the mid-'90s when I started selling and being extremely naive. completely naive in the approach that I had. And it was some of my mentors within the business then that I still treat as friends now. You know, they've retired, they're not working anymore, but I still will phone them up and go, what would you do now? How would you have reacted to this? And I think that's so important with any culture. And within Wolters Kluwer, they really try to push that. we have sort of initiatives that we do, that we have this feedback capacity that I can feedback to if I wanted to, and was really brave, to Nancy McKinstry or Karen Abramson, who, you know, who the big cheese is in this business. If I wanted to, I'm sure that I could feedback. I probably wouldn't, but it is that culture of positive feedback. And where you're getting that 360-degree feedback from colleagues and everything else, you soon start to learn of what turns people off against you, what people will not want to help you. So I try and leverage within Wolters Kluwer that all of my colleagues, they're my biggest asset as well, as well as my time. I've got this brilliant expertise within the business that I will leverage to help me close whatever I can close.

Because that after-hours time Listening to all those little case studies, the successes and the fails.

The fails, yeah.

Right, you know, what are the red flags that this is a false positive, that you're wasting your time, that you've got a champion who's not a champion? And, you know, because certainly with the younger people, they react instead of proact. And as you've been through it enough, you know, you get a sense of who's most likely to close.

Definitely. And learning on that failure, because we often will talk, you know, in our QBRs, it'll be like significant deals won. And we'll go, oh, you know, I was amazing. I did this and this and this. It was all me. It was none of you lot. You know, even though I had to bring a load of people to come and help me, it was all my excellence. No, not at all. And everybody knows that it's a business-wide thing, but it is that, okay, we focused on that. So let's have the top 5 deals that we didn't win. And then everyone goes quiet. They don't say, yeah, I was really bad. I was really good on that one, but really bad on this one. And it is learning. So what would we do differently next time? Is it functionality that we're missing? Is it the delivery of the message we're giving? Are we not listening to the pain points effectively enough for the client? And therefore, you know, pushing benefits rather than features. And that's where I see the learning curve as being. The older you get, the wiser you get. Yes, you might now be called old school, which I've had leveraged at me by some of my newer colleagues that, oh yes, Matt, he's old school. Yep, maybe, but it works for me. So it's absolutely fascinating. Just sharing those experiences.

And what do you see the old school people doing differently?

I've witnessed new people joining, and I know I alluded to this earlier, I know I did it in my early days, is that you're so keen, you get sometimes so embroiled in what it is that you're selling, you spend your first month or two learning it, and trying to go, I've got to get to the point where I've now got to go and start pitching this to a prospect, or even if it's a customer with a cross-sell opportunity. So you're there desperate to show them the knowledge you've built up, and you go into demo mode, demo, demo, demo. And I know I did this in my early days, absolutely know I did it. I was so embroiled in what the software would do that I could spend 2 hours showing it and not letting them say a word at all until I had my initial sort of training, you know, the spin, you know, what's your pain, and then deep diving that into what does that actually impact your business and how much, you know, if I can sort that, will it give you financially or time-wise back. And I see that so often now with the newer people that join, and yes, they need to go through that training and have that arm around the shoulder and say, that's not what you should be doing. Negotiation's another one. I remember going on a course, and always with training, I absolutely absorb training. I love training. I like reading about, you know, books like yourselves, for example. I went on a negotiation course, and all that I learned from that course that I came out with that's just set me up for life is it's easy to say no. Just say no. It's not, it's not going to sort of turn everybody off. It actually might make them sorry. I can't. There's no discount. That is the price. Whereas in my early days, I used to feel embarrassed. I need there to be a discount.

Obligated.

Yeah, yeah. Obligated, definitely. And I do remember in one of my early sales where I knew what I needed to hit a certain target. And the chap said, I want a discount. So I said, well, if you sign today, I can do it for this. And he turned around and said, you're just like a double glazing salesman. And I thought, oh my God, that's so bad. That's so bad that I've done that. And you learn from it, don't you? You pick up that experience. It's just like, no. Or why? Why would I? Why would I have to discount? So those sort of things, I'll look and I'll try and see if there's traits within the others. But at the end of the day, everyone should have their own style. It shouldn't be indoctrinated as to what you should be doing, but certainly guidance is around it, in my view.

Yeah, because I think that's what people mean when they say be authentic. It means create your own personality, because the trainings that I've been through that require you to change your personality They just don't work. You know, you just don't go from this person to this person in 2 days.

No, absolutely not. I mean, salespeople tend to be fairly outgoing, don't they? They tend to be pretty gregarious, often can talk far too much, and that sort of trait you need to trained to hone in, because a salesman that doesn't stop talking, that's not a good habit. Not a good salesperson. You know, the proverbial two of them. So that's certainly something again that people will learn, they'll quickly pick that up. You know, I've still, you know, I've got a few colleagues that do tend to talk a lot, and when there's a lot talking, a lot No one else gets a word in edgewise. And that's sometimes when the person that has the value add doesn't actually get to speak. And that's dangerous.

Yeah, I mean, it's great at the beginning, but then wrap it down.

Initiate, sit back, listen. Yeah.

And what motivates you? I mean, it sounds like you got a little bit of overhead there with the family and everything.

But So yeah, so a very good question. And I always think that one of the best salespeople is the one that's really, really hungry, needs the money, because they're not just going to sit back and go, I've got to this percent. It's going to be, now I need the kickers. Now I need to really start ramping it up to get the benefits of overachievement. So I always view the 100% target as being, that's an absolute given. If I don't achieve that, then I'm not doing my job. And over the years, with one exception, I've always achieved and overachieved. But when you start overachieving, if it's a decent comp plan, then it encourages you to go that extra step further. So I have a family that's can absorb money very, very quickly, as can I, as can I, to say the honest truth. So I think my boss knows that and he loves it because he just will say, well, Matt's not going to stop, he's not going to take the foot off the pedal. Once he reaches a certain stage, I'm then saying, what do I now need to do to get to the next stage? So concepts like sandbagging to me just don't exist. I'm not interested in the next half or the next year. I want it now. So it makes me— it's almost greedy, but it's just typical financial security, isn't it?

Well, you need a motive, otherwise you just react. Yeah, right. You're in service, not sales.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So you talked to something in one of your podcasts about That's just order taking. So, you know, you will get those that you don't have to do a lot of work for, and you sit there with your order pencil and you go, thank you very much.

That'd be nice.

It's, yeah, very nice. It's your run rate, you know, your stuff that you take for granted is going to come in, but that won't get you very far against your number. It's that the bigger picture So it's those ones that you go, this is what's going to make my number for this year. And I've got to initiate those now for next year because the sales cycle can be quite long in some of these situations. So it's always looking at what does my pipeline look like for, you know, the immediate month is obviously priority one, then your quarter, then your half year, then the end of year. And then it's right, what's going to see me through to next year? What activity do I need to be doing now? And that ruthless prioritization comes in where you go, that looks like a good deal, but in reality it's a lot of work, a lot of effort. Am I going to qualify out?

Yeah.

And that's sometimes the hardest because it will raise the biggest eyebrows. Why did you qualify on that deal? Because it wasn't going to happen, or it was only going to happen and we had a 10-20% chance. I'm not spending my valuable time on that one, because I don't think it's going to come in. And I'll end up not doing my numbers. And that's not going to do you or me any favors.

And what keeps you going? Because sales has this weird reward system where you have— so let's say you have a good year, you've had many good years. But then, in most companies, January 1st, you start over again.

It's depressing, isn't it? Isn't it? It's absolutely depressing.

It's this, right? Because you go and it's like, you know, the hangover, I used to call it. How do you go from this commission rate down to this commission rate without losing your enthusiasm?

Yeah, it's tough. So end of year, so the end of January, December, so hopefully you're hitting even more kickers. So your January pay packet's great. Um, you then started off in January with the, as you say, the rates down the the bottom, they're the pits. If you've got a good comp plan, so ours is good, it's done on a, you know, regardless of what, if it's not done on a quarterly bonus commission, it's you start, if you can get to your 25% of your target in month 1, you've hit your quarterly bonus effectively. So it's 25/50. So that gives me the incentive to say, right, it's January, the rates shocking, I need to be up to 25%, 50% within a couple of months to try and start getting that higher rate in. But it is also a question of budgeting. So, you know, if you just— if basically January pays good, you're going to have a few months where it's not so great. But that psychological piece is the differentiator, I think, for people in sales that have been in it a long time, know what's coming. And you just have to accept that that's the fact, that's going to be the case, but it drives you to get much better results very, very quickly. But we'll have all been through that, we know that's the score.

And what do you wish you learned a lot earlier? You know, we heard about the ruthless prioritization.

Yeah, I think we sort of talked about it with the mistakes that people are making, So for me, I probably wasted 18 months initially before I realized that I should be selling benefits, not features. So that, looking back on it, was probably a little bit frustrating because I could have had better results in those years, I think. But as I say, the excitement of the product you're selling getting embedded in a new business at the time was sort of paved over that one. So I think really the— also it's understanding the benefit that your colleagues bring into the picture because they're often, you know, sales, you can think of yourself as pretty autonomous. It's just down to me. This is my problem, I own the number, I'm not going to bring to my boss, you know, oh, here's the problem. I'm going to say to him, I've got a bit of a problem, but I've solved it with this. You know, I'm almost self-employed in that respect. But understanding the wealth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom that your colleagues can bring in and inviting them in, so welcoming them in to your pitches, to conversations will far outweigh what I've got in, in my brain here. They've got much bigger brains than me. They're much more brilliant at understanding process and how it's going to deliver these benefits. I'll be there to help coordinate, facilitate, but making sure I have the right people in with me at the right time with the right people from the customer prospect that I'm talking to. And that took me a bit of time to understand as well.

And is that how you'd characterize your selling style, is kind of what I would call like, we're all in this together, where it's, you're selling like a team? Some people, like when I hear old school, I think relationship, that it's all about how well they like me. I think it's a lot more to it than that. It's like, it's not about just the product or the service.

No, I would like to, and again, there's, I've listened to some of your podcasts about your trusted advisor and everything else. So I would hope that the empathy piece is very much focused in on Matt's our, you know, account manager or the person dealing with us. He's the one that we will look to to do the right thing for us. And that's not— they'll soon understand that, you know, I'm not a technical person. You know, I don't understand behind the scenes. I'm not an accountant. But what I will do is I'll make sure that I always have them, the customer, at the heart of what we should be doing to make sure that their experience is good. But I will facilitate getting the right people in at the right time with their right people having qualified it all. So that's the important thing— qualified. This is what we're going to be covering because this is what they want to hear. I'm not passing it over to someone else to then feature dump. We're focusing in on the exact areas that they want to hear about, and I've already done the prelim, the warm-up piece, if you know what I mean.

And when you are in those QBRs or you're talking to the younger colleagues, what's the most common thing you see either being done wrong or where you just wish you could hit them with a magic wand and say, please get this, this will save you so much time?

It's been quite weird because we've Over the past 18 months, we've still been expanding, so it is exciting times within Wolters Kluwer Tax and Accounting in the UK. You know, often you hear of people in the past 12, 18 months having to decrease in size, so I've got a load of new colleagues that I've never met yet.

Yeah.

I've seen them on Zoom or Teams, Hundreds of times, so I haven't picked up on some of those, but I've sort of— they've done demonstrations to me and everything else to just give feedback on. And as I said, I think sometimes it's that I just want to show you what I need to show you without doing the prequalification as to this is why I should be showing it. That's probably the biggest one for me is that. It's that basic SPIN selling concept. Tell me what I want to hear. Tell me what you're going to do for me. And it's amazing how often that will get overlooked in people's early days of sales. Cool.

Hey, I appreciate your time today. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

I'm on LinkedIn. So please hook up with me there. I'd be delighted to get some feedback. I would absolutely love to get feedback from yourself as well, Brian, following this to see if there's anything further we can do. So we've, as I said, Wolters Kluwer in 40 countries. We've got very big operations in the United States. So I can certainly introduce you to some colleagues in the US, hopefully representing the UK. It's come across okay. I'd be really interested to get your feedback on it. But yeah, let's see where we go from here. It'll be brilliant if you come over to the UK. I've already had express directive to say get Brian in to come in and talk to our guys. So if you are doing that, or else our US colleagues would love to engage with you in more detail there. I'm sure as a result you're going to get a lot of UK and global followers from Walter So next steps, absolutely entertain, and hopefully this is the first of a few future meetings.

Now see, a great leader would really help reps with this, would walk through where the deal is, what do you think's going to happen not only next, but after that, maybe even work it backwards from procurement back to where it is today. And why will it happen this quarter? Yeah, I put a suspicious tone on that, didn't I? But I think a great leader would coach the reps to develop this skill, which is called judgment of— oh, you got all these variables, all these symptoms, but what is causing it? What is the diagnosis of it? I heard a great doctor on a podcast talk about it, comparing, you know, people go online and they do Google searches based off of the symptoms they have, but of course it can be anything from being cured with an aspirin all the way up to brain surgery. So how do you determine that? And he goes, that's what doctors do. They judge based off of the symptoms, the patient, the historic history. Comparing it against other things. Is it just psychological? Is it just stress? Or is it physical? They dig in, they ask questions, they talk through it. And that's what we have to do with our deals. We talk about the diagnosis on— with our customers, but are we talking about it with our own deals, with how we spend our time? Do you have a weekly cadence of some kind, something that you know right off the top of your head Monday morning? Or are you at the whim of people putting stuff in your inbox and your calendar? Because that feeling busy can be a drug. That distraction keeps us comfortable that we are working, we are doing something. But are we doing something that matters to generate revenue that generates income? One of the constant themes that I've heard Interviewing the great salespeople is that they are ruthless with their time, ruthless with their prioritization, and they hate wasting time. Because the idea, especially with larger deals, the idea of wasting 3, 6, 9 months on a deal that doesn't close— what is that? Especially when you, you get to a certain point where you're like, oh, it's interfering with your personal life, with your vacation schedule. With the quality of your life, with the stress. And the weird thing is that leadership teaches us how to take an order, how to win the at-bats, as we call it. But that's really inbound, the easy deals. Not that they're easy when you're in them, but more the beauty contest deals. Existing accounts, or you're up against the known competitors. The people are in market, they have pain, they're going to do something. Most likely they're going to buy you or a competitor. Now, if you got enough of those, congratulations, you're in a great situation. Then you have to learn how to win the complex sale and keep the deal moving, because what usually happens is they delay it or they buy as little as possible and inch their way into a commitment. Of course, they tell you that they're going to buy an enterprise whatever for millions of dollars. Why? Because they want your attention. They want your interest. They want your involvement, your hard work. But they don't want to take risks. How do you manage that? Winning the Complex Sale is the course that solves that problem. The other problem is, well, I don't get any inbound. I don't get any at-bats. How do I get to the pitcher's mound or get it to the batter's box? Well, those are harder. And the days of you cold pitching people, hmm, everyone's doing it. So it doesn't work as well. Just out of sheer volume, it doesn't work as well. So you can either do it better.

Hmm.

Okay. Well, that's a race to the bottom. Or you could do it differently. How do people naturally start conversations with each other? That is a skill. It's much like playing a guitar, learning how to do any other skill, learning how to cook, learning how to engage anybody in a conversation, how to present. Any skill. And when I say skill, it means that there's steps, but it matters how well you do them. How much time you put in between them, how good you are at empathizing with what they want. That's a skill. Start the conversation, get the meeting helps you develop that skill. And it's not press the button. I'm not even going to pretend that it's that. But the silver bullet in everything in a performance turns into the performer. How well do they do it? Takes practice, takes observation of how other people are doing it, takes an open mind, takes handling some feedback, and you develop it. But you got to want to. Most people start off by fighting it. They keep looking for the silver bullet somewhere else. Someone else has got the magic cadence. Well, there's 8 million B2B salespeople out there. Nobody has it. So guess what? It's you. You have to develop you. You can ask your manager to do it, but they'll— it's easier to replace you than it is to develop you. Sorry, that's the reality. That they're focused on the best of the best deals. And anytime you bring them something that's not one of the best of the best deals, they prioritize their time on what they're going to close. It's just reality. Sorry. You are the means of production. You are the silver bullet. It is up to you to develop you, whether you accept it or not. It's not reading a book. It's not even, you know, podcast is great. It's helpful. Hopefully it's a little bit of education and entertainment, but you need to apply the lessons. You need to take a dedicated amount of time. And learn from others. So check out the courses at b2brevenue.com. There's 2 videos, one with an overview of how the course works, the other one on which course is best for you and what you get out of it if you apply your time to it. I can't teach you to play the guitar if you're not willing to play the guitar. I can show you, I can give you examples, but I can't pick up the guitar and put it in your hands And have you practice. Sorry, I wish I could. I'd be a billionaire if I could. It is how to do it, the distinctions, and involves you. You get office hours every other Friday. You get unlimited one-on-ones. They're all recorded, put into the course. You never miss a thing. You get to learn from others. You get to hear what other people are doing and become great at it. What could be better? Time's not on our side. Act now. We'll see you there. Listen to the other podcasts, Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers, The Sales Leadership Show, and B2B Revenue Leadership. Thanks for listening.