HOW TO CRUSH YOUR NUMBER EVEN IN THE MOST HARDEST OF MARKETS

We all think our job is really hard and probably is, or at least it is for us. Today's guest has had a track record of hard jobs. Imagine being the first rep or one of the first reps in North America when your company is half a world away and may not understand how North America works, has insanely high expectations, and Us in sales, we're there to fulfill it. Well, that's what we're going to be talking about today. You know, how do you do that? Do you send out your 50 spam messages a day and make your 100 dials or whatever it is that people think sales is? Here's a hint. It's a whole lot more than an activity. And certainly in this market, it's not effective. In this market, Market I came out of. And it just happens that this guest just hired somebody I used to work with, and I found that out in the interview. So, be a little surprised about that. And there's the key thing that you're going to get out of this. I'll sum it up at the end about what a great sales leader does that most sales leaders will never do. And I'll I'll explain why it's so critical. And if it's not there, that's probably the number one reason sales leaders fail at companies, certainly at startup companies where it really is up to us because, you know, the marketing hasn't kicked in. The category really hasn't been defined. The problem that you solve may be a latent problem, not an active problem. And there's a million alternatives, or what we call competitors. So this is a great example interview. Certainly in my course, Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting, kind of the number one demographic in there is people who sell security— security software, security hardware. Why is it so hard? There's a million alternatives and everybody's doing the spamming, which means even a well-written email isn't really going to get attention. And everyone's targeting the person in charge. In this case, they call it CISO, C-I-S-O, Chief Information Security Officer. And I can't imagine any persona within a company that gets more spam? Maybe the CEO. Maybe, maybe not. Let's get into this interview, and I want to give you an update on what's going on with brevitypitch.com. It's no longer just role-playing a sales call. What we did is we sat down with hundreds of clients, we got their calls, we interviewed them, What I wanted to find out from the sales leader is what happens at the end of the quarter, because this is where people— it goes from subjective to objective. Meaning, until a sale either closes or doesn't close, it's very subjective. You know, sure, it'll happen. Oh, it's in procurement. Ah, they're definitely going to do it. At the end of the quarter becomes the litmus test for what's really going on With the salespeople. And what we did is we extracted out of those millions of calls where things go wrong. And they typically don't go wrong at the end. They go wrong in the middle. And what we did is we then built up drills, 5-minute drills per day, covering these Advanced skills that people know they should do, but they cave. They, they think that if they do what the client wants at that immediate moment, they will ensure the deal. And it does just the opposite. It kills the deal. And a lot of people won't attribute this. They'll say, oh, well, they asked me to. Well, our job is not just to play fetch. Our job is to help the client buy, teach them how to buy. And they're the only one more overconfident than a sales rep is a champion that has no economic power or has never done it before, or Grossly underestimates what they're up against internally at the company. I'm not saying the company doesn't need it, want it, or can afford it, but that doesn't mean they're going to buy it. And the results that we've gotten from these drills, 5 minutes a day, there's not a— it's not a time commitment issue. It's a comfort instinct issue. They may already Most likely they know they should be doing this, but it's hard. They're not ready. It's a pop quiz and you've got 3 to 5 seconds to answer, and we always pick the safe one. The safe one is doing whatever the client wants, which is usually the worst possible thing. They underestimate how hard it is. Get you and your sales manager, go to brevitypitch.com. And check it out. See it. If you're not ready yet, go on to YouTube and search Brevity AI. There's— we did a bunch of internal webinars. They put them up in there so you can kind of see where these drills are coming from and the impact that they can have on your team. You may think your team's already doing it. That's what we found out in the calls. Less than 5% are doing this, and it's killing the forecast at the end of the quarter because they are real deals that got mismanaged. It's not a— I hate to say it— competence issue. It's an instinct issue. Because until reps understand these traps are going to kill the deal and practice it enough So that they have the confidence to do it, they will revert to their instincts. brevitypitch.com. Here we go with the interview. Notice any changes in sales recently? Last 5, 10 years since you started?

Seems it's gotten harder for some reason.

Why?

I don't know. It's a great question. I'm sure we can go deep into that, but I mean, obviously I feel much better about my ability, my skills, how I can get things done. However, I think the outside conditions, some of the way things have changed with how people approach sales has made it harder for everybody, whether you're good at sales or not. So I think especially the last 4 or 5 years, really seen that because of You know, whatever happened around the COVID timeframe, but it seems to be getting harder. That's my perspective. And you have to keep treating it as a craft and trying to get better because it's getting harder and harder. So if you don't do that, you're going to get left behind from what I've seen.

And I think it's a lot like war, meaning when one side comes up with a weapon, what does the other side do? They come up with, uh, an anti-weapon. Come up with aircraft, then you come up with radar and anti-aircraft. You come up with hacking and then firewalls and security. And I think in sales we're running into that because, you know, I'm old enough to remember when email came around and They never had like, um, easily described email addresses at first. It was like, um, J713. So it was hard to guess emails. And there were no data companies. You would buy a phone book. And I thought to myself, just imagine if you could have everyone's email address. How great that would be. Or even phone number, direct number. So remember, you have to go through a receptionist or a directory. And I think that's what we're running into today. Everybody has access to infinite amount of information for free or nearly free. They stuff it into a product. And if you've seen what's going on in email today, It's the craziness gone absurd because Google's getting good at identifying junk. So now you have to find products that warm up the domain. And I don't know about you, but my spam folder, some good stuff, a lot of good stuff falls into my spam folder. So this is what's been happening. Somebody comes up with a piece of sales tech, they have success, and people go berserk with it.

Now, the email was a little bit before my time, but I was, I was around. I just wasn't doing sales emails back then. But I, I think, you know, back at some point, you, you can tell me, I mean, you, you could probably get 70, 80% open rates on certain things when email first started thriving, and it was great. And then it got ruined by marketers, salespeople, and it just keeps getting worse and worse over time. But it, you know, everything at some point makes a ton of sense. Like what you were talking about, I'm sure emails used to be really, really effective and there was a lot of great things with that, but then it's changed substantially, but then people don't change with it. They just do more, do more emails or do more cadences that have 18 touches instead of 12, whatever it is. So email is a great example. I feel like It's, I don't want to say dead, but it's just, I don't think anybody's really looking at their email. And you can imagine your buyers who work at a big company, probably they have a high title. They have 150 internal emails, let alone the spam stuff from people like us trying to get in front of them. So email is really tough, but then also keeps progressing to, to other areas too. I mean, whether that be cold calling and how that changed, maybe, maybe quite frankly, cold calling is making a little comeback because it's You know, more refreshing. I don't know for sure. And then, you know, LinkedIn, you talk about the pitch slaps on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn's great. I know you use it very effectively and it's been a huge part of your success. And same with me. I really have dived deep into LinkedIn, but there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. And then now it's like the second you connect with Brian, like, oh, Brian seems like a nice guy. And then you immediately pitch me whatever it is. I'm like, okay, well, that ruined it, right?

Right. And I think the issue there is it's just bad selling, not bad technology. You know, there was a little bit of a discussion about, um, the Cadence tools and how they've created a, a generation of lazy salespeople. Well, we always do the same thing. We copy the unicorn. Because for 15 years it was predictable revenue, but nobody thought to themselves, how hard is it really to sell Salesforce in 2003? It's as much as, or as close to taking an order as there is. You're competing against Excel, some internal cobbled-together thing. Or some other thing that they host that nobody uses. Every company I worked at had a CRM. We never used it though. You know, and when my company got bought by IBM, they, they had a CRM. No one used it. We tried to use it. It was Siebold, uh, Post-it with this HTML thing stuck on it. And it was like, to go from cell to cell took a while, right? It was not instantaneous. And my manager goes, we're doing a spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet was just the forecast. It wasn't every little stupid voicemail you left and email you sent. And even when we had cold calling and email, when it did work We didn't do it the way people are doing it today. Right? The way people are doing it today is like they're selling magazine subscriptions or newspapers or long-distance service. I don't know if you remember that. It was probably the '90s before that stopped. The phone would ring from dinner time for 3 hours straight. Sprint, MCI, AT&T, Mike's long-distance service. And it didn't work because, uh, first we had caller ID, so we had technology anti-technology. And today you pick up your phone, it says spam call. Oh, I gotta pick that up. Or they have some other thing that, you know, makes it look like it's local to trick you, and you let it go to voicemail. I mean, everybody screens their calls, right? But when you see a friend call, someone's helping you, and this puts the whammy on sale. What do you mean? You speak of witchcraft, Brian. When do I get to talk about me and what I want? And that's all they do. Look through your inbox. Doesn't work on you, but every sales leader goes, gotta work on someone. The key is it only works on dumb people. So now you've got a pipeline full of dumb people and then they're wondering why it doesn't close.

So I'm a millennial. I can't necessarily speak for the other generation after me, Gen Z or whatever it is, but I guess to their defense, they've maybe been taught some of the wrong tactics. So they've been taught, they've been taught the cadence tools and all that type of stuff and pressing the easy button. And it's just like, boom. And if you are at a unicorn type company that is crushing it, has an amazing product and a ton of inbound, some of that works obviously a little bit easier because people are, people are coming to you. But that's the exception, maybe the 0.1%, if that, and everybody else is Not in that case. Even big companies sometimes struggle with this to have a good brand. They still can't use these tools and they're like, why is this not working? So you got to have a lot of perspective of, okay, where are you working? What have you done in the past? And I think that's where I'm at. So I understand it, but I think most salespeople are just going, you know, job to job and they don't get it and they're just doing more of this and then it just keeps getting worse and worse. So I don't fully blame them. the sales reps because they have probably been taught this and they don't know anything better necessarily. But eventually, if you're doing stuff and it's not working, I mean, it's like the definition of insanity, right? You're just banging your head against the wall. So at some point you have to push back to the— your manager or the leaders. And if you're not closing deals, they're going to fire you anyway. So you got to figure out a better way to do it, you would think. And then, you know, now there's a lot of noise too with AI tools and insights, all these different things that keep popping up. I mean, that's flooding a lot of what I see on LinkedIn and other areas. And again, there's technology is always going to be there. It's always going to get better. You have to embrace it to some capacity. It's going to help salespeople make the profession. It should, in theory, makes the profession better, but they get abused, right? When something starts working, then everybody starts doing it. And then there's another pop-up and now there's 100 companies doing the same thing and it, and it ruins whatever that thing may have been. And then the last thing is that just the buyers have so much information, right? So they don't have to talk to salespeople most of the time. They can find everything out. ChatGPT, Google website, LinkedIn, and that plus all these tools that are bombarding people just makes it really, really hard to get stuff done.

Yeah. And that point is critical because that's the point that everyone's been making for 20 years. There's so much information out there, but why would they look? There has to be active pain to look. I mean, do you purposely look on the internet for obscure things that you don't know you need, don't know are available? How do you find out about them?

Google, ChatGPT, uh, website.

It pops up, or you're searching for something else, or some friend tells you, or you hear about it. And the mistake that people are making— they think that you're going to find that person before they find you. Okay, do tow truck companies, um, you know, swarm the highways trying to find people who are broken down?

Nope.

Why not?

It's such a chance that it's going to happen. It's just a complete waste of time. I would imagine they, maybe somebody tried it at some point and they're like, this is a complete waste of time.

Your car breaks down. What do you do? Do you wait for a tow truck?

I'm calling them ASAP.

Are you going to look for an ad? Are you waiting for a salesperson to call you?

First thing that pops up on Google for me. That's what, that's what I'm going to do.

That's active pain. Right? They don't swarm the highways and byways looking for people who are broken down because the odds are so low. Nor do they cold call a bunch of people. Hey, you need a tow truck today? No. Why are you calling? What makes you think I need a tow truck? Well, it's my job to sell tow truck service. That's active pain. The other one, when you meant about insanity, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over without getting a different result. In sales, it's beyond insanity. You're not getting the results, so you do more, and then you buy a tool to do 100 times more. Then you hire more reps to do even more. We switched from quality about 15 years ago to 100% quantity today. Everything's numbers. Everybody posts, ah, this is the strategy I built to build my pipeline to $9 million. I go, I can build a pipeline of $9 million in 10 seconds. Open the CRM and type in $9 million. It's just as good as your pipeline. Pipeline is just a pacifier today. See, we went from hiring experienced salespeople and somebody, some accountant said, well, wait a second, we can hire people right out of college for 1/3 the amount. And somebody said, genius. And it was probably a unicorn. And then the people from that unicorn went to monkey.com. who just got seed funding and says, we got to hire more people. And 1 out of 10 companies worked. And then those people went to 10 companies. Or they look at the people at monkey.com and they go, that's working. So I got to copy that. Monkey see, monkey do. Right? Yeah. And you ever notice all these experts on LinkedIn, they all work at unicorn companies. None of them are like these tiny little No, nobody ever heard of companies. Why is that? What are the odds of that? That it just happens to be that all the experts work at unicorns and none of the experts don't work at unicorns. Nobody figures that out either. And everyone's talking about the number of things I do a day. So it's activity-based, not skill-based, not focused. And why is that? It's the dashboard. If a manager doesn't know how to sell, they can look at their dashboard. And I've, I've heard people on other podcasts go, it's pure math. Number of prospects turn into number of proposals that turn into number of closes. Well, it can be that if that's the way you want to view it. And they say, oh, it's just a ratio. If that's true, then what do you do? You put as much on the top as possible because the ratio tells you it's going to come through the bottom. And you do that, and after 3 quarters, it doesn't come through the bottom. What do you do next? Hire another marketing person, another CRO, and start all over again. Well, they didn't. Their cadence was only 16 steps, or they didn't hire enough of these types of people. I think we've lost our way in sales for a lot of people. And some of the people on LinkedIn that are good. Isn't it all personality? If they're good on the phone, they're gregarious, they're, they're the life of the party. They could start a conversation with anybody. But can you teach that? Is that easily transferable?

No, it takes time to, to learn all that. That's unique. And it, it almost sounds more like a, a system problem. I always think of when I was doing stuff in healthcare, I would get frustrated at the system of healthcare and how dysfunctional it may be at times, but I've realized, okay, I probably can't change that. So what, what can I focus on? So it makes me think of the same type of thing. I mean, maybe, hopefully not, but if we've lost our way so much with all the stuff you were mentioning, it's somewhat of a system thing at this point, depending on what industry you're in and all that. Tech and SaaS is probably way heavier with all this compared to anything else. So if you know that as a salesperson, it's almost, that's the problem though. If you don't have the experience, you're going to be getting told all this stuff and you're just going to do it. And then you're going to be like, what the hell's going on? And then it creates this terrible cycle and then you hop around to different companies. And if you can find, like, if you have, are really good at finding unicorns at the right time, I mean, good, good, good luck with that. Give me a call. Yeah, please let me know that if you, if you can just bounce the unicorn to unicorn, cause that sounds amazing, but. The chances of winding up at a place like that are very small, I would imagine. And you have to really know people to get in there early to benefit from it the most. So usually when you find out about it, it's maybe too late and you're already coming in after like the wave has already risen. So there's a lot of things in there, but I mean, ultimately this is what salespeople should be thinking about. How do I actually get better at my craft? How do I learn how to sell, make it more about Them, not me. Be more proactive. All those transactional tactics. You talk about the LinkedIn stuff. There's a lot of gimmicky type stuff and getting away from that and trying to be more of that the partnership. So that's what they should be doing. But it's how do they have the clarity to realize that's the direction they should go? I think people are definitely waking up. It's just you know are they scared to do against what their managers are saying? Are they? But again, if you're not performing, if you're not producing, you're gonna get blamed regardless. So you might as well do something to try to get out, get outside the box, be different, because everybody's doing what you're talking about. And unless if you're at that unicorn situation, it's not going to work very well. So I feel like you have to be different. You have to change it up. You have to, you know, do something outside of the norm. Otherwise, you'll just get left behind, like I said earlier. Yeah.

And if you're good at picking unicorns, Get into venture capital because that's what they do. And if you're good at it, they'd love to have you. And they're not good at it. It's like 1 out of 100 of their portfolio turns into a unicorn, and that's what they're betting on. All the rest is kind of like sell for scrap. Just to try and save face, not even get money. Most of those acquisitions that you see, there's really no money that changes hands. The VCs are just trying to save face. It makes it look like a success, even though it's a failure. So if you're good at finding a unicorn, get into VC. You'll make a lot more money and they'll appreciate you more because Guess what? As soon as they get that $50 million round, guess what they do? Take you to club? No, they hire 100 people. And they tend to hire a sales manager who's used to treating everybody like a robot because they don't have to treat them like a human being because they're making so much money. It's so easy. And you probably don't learn how to sell.

If you hire 100 people, I'm sure they have the spreadsheets that tell you, oh, it's going to be $1 million in revenue per salesperson, right? Isn't that, isn't that how it usually works out?

Yeah. I mean, look what happened, you know, after the— well, during the pandemic, you know, everyone panicked. Then every— all of a sudden the market was flush with cash, right? Interest rates were cut to nothing. You know, the government flooded the market with cheap money. VCs could just give it away like candy. So everybody hired, overhired, which gives you the— because when you're hired, you're assuming there's demand for your services. Not in sales. You create the demand for your services, which becomes your responsibility, not theirs. And if you fail, what do they do? They promote you. No, they fire you because it has to be your fault. It can't be theirs. And I think a major thing that's changed is everyone thinks that Gen Z and millennials like to make up their own mind. They, they search on their own and they, they don't want to talk to salespeople. They don't want to be sold or connect with other people. I've heard that my whole life about every generation. Everyone thinks they know everything. They got a handle on the market. They don't have any problems. We all have problems. We all want to talk with somebody who does something for us, not to us. And I think that's what people have missed. Also, the sales process that I see today Are about fast, not effective. It doesn't matter how fast you lose the deal; you've already lost it. It matters how well you do, how well you get a deal. And salespeople want to move 100 miles an hour, and clients want to move 10 miles an hour. What kind of friction could that cause?

Not, not good, that's for sure. A lot of deals get lost.

And they're like, give me some time. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing at all. And we don't see it as the reps need to help the client go through the process.

And, and it's because of all the stuff we're talking about. The buying process has gotten more complicated. So there's more people involved. It takes longer. People don't want to stick their neck out there. That just makes it even worse with everything we're talking about. And then you have a rep, they're trying to go fast and numbers game, whatever it is, and skip steps, go straight to the demo, whatever the case. And that just makes it tougher because— The buyers, if they are going to make a decision, a substantial decision, they're sticking their neck out there. They want to feel good about it. It's their reputation, all these different things. So you— they, they want to put, put everybody into the commodity trap. And then all the stuff we're saying just makes it worse because you're acting like a commodity as a salesperson and you're just being more transactional. So it just adds fuel to the fire. So ultimately, they're only going to buy stuff that they really need. Right. Right now that, that's urgent, and that's usually not what we're selling, unfortunately. So yeah, but it's— you just gotta— it's almost like you have to take a step back, and it's like the offensive coordinators from the press box, they see the field and they're looking at everything, and they, they see all this stuff materializing. That's sort of what we're talking about. But unfortunately, I think the, the reps and the managers are just on the field and just next play, like getting after it type thing. And it's, it's how do you take a step back? But eventually when something bad happens, usually that makes people change, or they're like, they get let go, they don't hit quota 2 years in a row, whatever it is, they're not making money. I mean, eventually you have to look yourself in the mirror and be like, man, some of this just doesn't make sense. I need to change it up. But, uh, usually that's what it takes. People don't do it proactively, unfortunately.

Yeah. And plus The market is flooded with new products.

I mean, it's brutal. Brutal.

The cost of starting, let's say SaaS, because everybody knows what it is, everybody uses it. To start a SaaS company has gone from, you used to have to, you know, buy hardware, then you had to buy a database, then you had to buy a piece of middleware, then you had to buy a user interface. That's all free today. You don't have to buy hardware. You get on AWS, you start it up. And now with AI, for every one SaaS company, there's going to be 10 AI companies that does something like it or connects to it. So it's only going to get worse. And if you have a founder who doesn't understand sales, Guess what they're going to do? Just model the company they want to become. But you're not that. It's like a Little League kid going up to the Yankees and going, where do you want me to start? Right? It's like, over there. So I think you have to start thinking like the client. What do they want? From someone they work with, not from a sales rep. Everyone has to put that persona on because they don't know how to sell. Right? If you ever did a dance video, you dance like you know how to dance. I don't know how to dance. A lot of people don't know how to sell, so they act like what they think a salesperson acts like, which is the opposite of authenticity.

Right?

You're, you're playing a character. You're acting.

You put your sales voice on, right? It's a whole different persona.

You start talking in acronyms and digital transformation and, you know, time to market. What all this bullshit that has no meaning because it's been used so often. And the client has to map that to what they want to accomplish. Why not talk in their language about what they care about? Is that a foreign concept? Am I, am I out in left field on this?

No, it makes perfect sense to me. I think it's just everybody gets so caught up in the instant results society, and then you, you think this way and it sounds great, and then you're Oh, that's, that's harder. I have to do something different. I have to plan. I have to think like the customer. And then you're just like, I'm just gonna go press, press some buttons and send some emails out. And I feel like I sent out 100 emails today. That's great. I accomplished a lot. So I think in theory, everyone knows this. They just go back to the bad habits and the easy thing to do. And then they keep getting the same results and it keeps making it harder for everybody else. So hopefully more people will wake up, but it's definitely. The only way to do it.

Did you notice how he prospects? He focuses on the relationship, also known as known, liked, and trusted. The universal belief in sales about why people buy from a particular salesperson. It's the only thing that pretty much every sales expert agrees on. Everything else nobody agrees on. So why don't we do it? One of the reasons is we don't know how. The biggest reason is we think we already are. Well, that's not what people do today. Today it's how do you get more— well, they think it's personalized, they think it's relevant, but how would you know if you don't know the person? You're guessing. But why not build the relationship first, especially when you're talking to a C-suite executive? Whether you go bottom-up or top-down, it's always about them, not us. It gets to us. It gets to us after the deal's closed. Until then, it's about them. And this is what I teach in Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting at scale. Not like you have to become best friends. It's not about friendship. It's about becoming known, liked, and trusted by these people. Not trusted advisor, that's bullshit. Let's face it, how many salespeople do you trust? And would you take their advice? How can you take their advice? It's biased. It's the definition of bias. Bias is when you have a stake in the game. Your income is in the game. They don't trust your advice. They'll take it. They'll listen to you if they think it's about them, that you have their best interest in mind, not just yours. And we think that we're the trusted advisor because it serves us. It feels good. We think we put ourselves on a higher pedestal. Ah, here's the secret. Put them on a higher pedestal and watch what happens. I think if you really listen to somebody who has had great success in the toughest of markets and they tell you this, listen, please.

I didn't.

Ah, coach him on this. I don't, because I don't want my bias to get involved. It's hard not to, though. So why do we do this? You can say, oh, my manager makes me do it. Well, cut it out. You know, if you can't sell your manager, you can't sell a client. Which brings me to the— a big takeaway from this interview for anybody who's either in leadership or wants to get into leadership. How he talked about selling up inside the company. I'd say 5%, maybe 10% of sales leaders do this. What do most do? Exactly what they're told by people who have never sold. And in the last couple years, I've been working with a lot of executives trying to get their sales organization Working, and they all think it's a numbers game. Why? Because it serves them, not because it is. If you make it a numbers game, they can put it into their spreadsheets and their dashboards. Everyone loves a dashboard, don't they? I saw a company get funded this week with a dashboard, and you're like, oh yeah, a dashboard and the self-reporting. CRM is just the lies that you required, and then you are surprised when they don't come true. You requested them. You're yelling, lie to me! People lie to you, and then you get mad at them because the lies don't come true. Who's at fault? The liar or the one who requested the lies? Think about it. Now, When you want to become great at sales, you have to be thinking like the client. How does that CISO want to be approached? Do they want to learn? Of course they do. Do they want to see what other people are doing? Yeah, they're interested in that. Do they want to see another product demo? No, not unless there's a reason, not unless there's curiosity. And that's it, because people Don't go from unaware to urgent. They don't. They go through stages. And what most sales reps do, if they're not urgent or at least have interest, they go away. They're finding interest. They're not creating it. And today, interest is more likely to find you than you are to find it. The problem is people don't want to talk to salespeople.

Why?

Because they're pushy. They're already at urgent. Salespeople want to go 100 miles an hour. Clients want to start at 5 miles an hour in a zigzaggy direction because it feels safe. What we need to do is meet them at 5 miles an hour, kind of show them if they go 10 miles an hour, they can do this. 30 miles an hour, they can do that. Pretty soon they're going 50 miles an hour and you're both on the same track. Today it's just like, if it's not forecastable, go find someone else who is. The problem is there isn't. We ran out of volume because everyone's doing it, you know, and these new AI tools and stuff, it's just more dumb things faster. And If you're the numbers game person, that looks like progress. But is it? I tell a lot of reps, it's like they'll send out 100 spam messages a day. And I go, take that same message and post it on LinkedIn. You'll probably get 1,000 people who will see it. Why don't you do that? Well, people don't want to hear the feedback. What's it? This is just a pitch. This is all self-centered. See, if you send it out into the world, people don't have time to critique it. They just delete it. Learn how to prospect like a professional. It's not about the product. It's about the client, what they're up against, what they care about, what they're interested in. And once you have that conversation started, then you have something. And to work with. Cold calling doesn't give you that. Now, I get it. There are certain sales where cold calling is the preeminent and sole way of getting people's attention. And if it works, keep doing it. I would never try and divert anybody away from something that works. But you're probably listening to this podcast Because it's not working. So I teach 2 major courses and the insane amount of value that's in those courses, because it's now, this is the 7th year I'm teaching them. I record everything, meaning that every one-on-one, 30-minute call about the exact problem, like selling security, which I probably have 1,000 students who are doing that.

Wow.

And the insane progress that they're making. Now, the problem is, as soon as they get a meeting, they, they stop learning because they think they have the skill. Well, it is more than just knowing, because there's no limit to how good you can become. Imagine being able to get that conversation started with anyone you wanted to.

It's possible.

Now, then people get the meeting, and most sales leaders think if the people will meet with you, it's a deal. No, it's a start of a deal. Closing the Complex Sale is the other course. Now, both of these courses have office hours, which is an hour meetup every other week, so you can have a live session where your questions can be answered. There's a community where you can post your questions. I cover them in the next office hours. It's all recorded and put back in the course. And now after 6 years, there's 150 of them. So you have just an insane amount of examples, case studies, Q&A, context, and nuance of the complex sale. Where else are you going to get this? From the SDR boys? No, they have 5 years of experience at a unicorn taking orders, and they think they're geniuses. I thought I was a genius too after 5 years of selling, and go work at a company that doesn't have leads, that doesn't have customers, that doesn't have a polished product, no marketing. And then you find out how good of a salesperson you are. Get serious about your career. Go to b2brevenue.com and check out the courses. Thanks for listening. If you see my stuff fly by on LinkedIn, give it a little like, a little comment, a little share. We'll see you next time.