HOW TO WIN WITH OUTBOUND INTO BOTH SMB AND ENTERPRISE

Today, everybody wants sales to work like manufacturing, like we're making or assembling deals like we assemble microwaves or cars. And conventional logic says this is possible. And if the market exists and it's kind of a commodity sell or a well-known established need, it can work. In certain very narrow situations. But for the rest of us in the real world, we have to become great at outbound. Outbound seems like it's overwhelming. It is a little nerve-wracking. We're bugging people if we don't do it right. And, but the key difference about outbound, when you become good At outbound, your income is under your control. With inbound, you know it's going to be competitive because they're not just going to contact one company. They're probably going to contact a minimum 2, 3, maybe more. And they don't really know what they're looking for. They don't know the capabilities. So they flip-flop and will naturally push you towards being a commodity. Because that gives them all the power. And to think of the uniqueness requires thinking, which requires calories and effort. This is what I love about outbound, is that we get to initiate the conversation. We get to set the ground rules. We get to set the relationship, the tone, the tempo, instead of the client treating us like we're a vendor. I always hated that word. When you'd be in that first meeting and you'd hear the word vendor, you felt like a vending machine, and your product is just a candy bar in the machine, and it's a little different than the candy bar next to it. And if we let our clients think that we're a commodity, what always happens? It's a coin toss. It goes to the, the lowest price or the prettiest color on the website or the packaging instead of the real capabilities of the product, the real things. Because let's think, think about it. Think about all the things that you buy. When do you really get to learn about the distinctions? Is it the first time you try it? No, no. It's probably months into using it. And then you might realize, hey, this isn't enough. This isn't powerful enough. This isn't flexible enough. This doesn't fit me anymore. And then they look again. We go and buy another thing because we always try and cheap out. Why wouldn't we? We see it as a thing, no different than the other thing. Except for the price. Let's get into this interview. I think you're going to enjoy this one. Here's a rep who worked his way up, and we talk about the differences between inbound and outbound, how to build up that connection with the client, keeping them focused on your differentiators, not your competitors. But before we do, you know what? You have to look at sales as a performance profession. What do I mean by that? Most people look at it as a knowledge profession. I've got 10 years of experience in sales. I know how to sell. Well, knowing how to sell and selling well on each call is different. Very different. So how do you become better at sales? You can just Put in your 10,000 hours, but if you do the math, that's 5 years of dedicated practice, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Are we really doing that? So it's more like 10, 15 years, but it's also deliberate practice. And deliberate practice is different than just activity. Deliberate practice is You plan, you execute, you review. Very different than being busy making 50 dials a day. That's monkey work. Are you getting better?

A little bit.

A little bit. I get it. Like, I get up and I'm redoing a lot of my interviews. Redoing meaning editing them, repackaging them, Connecting them up on themes. There's 15 years of interviews, so there's a lot of content here. And I notice since I've been doing it— I started it this year— and every day it becomes— I become a little bit better at it. There's a little bit of repetition helps. Repetition is the mother of skill. But this is a very simple Kind of almost administrative, not much creativity to it, a little bit of technology. Now, conversing with a stranger is a different skill, and to become good at it requires lots of reps. And if you get reps with people hanging up on you or telling you what you want to hear and brushing you off, or— All the rejection that we get, we're not really getting the deep rep.

Because today, you know, for a full 8 hours of cold calling, you may get 1 or 2 reasonable conversations.

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Here we go.

Hey, Nick, thanks for joining us. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian.

Yep.

So my name is Nick. I live in Orlando now, currently director of marketplace at a Series A health tech company called Healthy. Been in the professional world now for, oh, about 6 and a half years. Started out as a just SDR and kind of worked my way through a couple of different types of sales roles and now in almost like a tech partnerships role.

Well, it didn't start there. You were in marketing.

Yeah, that is true. I had an interesting transition.

What went wrong?

I had an interesting transition from college to the professional world. I was always into startups. And so I did a student startup at the University of Akron. And when I graduated, I had a really tough job finding, or yeah, tough time finding a job in Ohio. Midwest companies really like to see the classical professional internship, wasn't too keen on a student startup. And so when I graduated, worked for this digital marketing In a digital marketing role for a luxury skincare startup. It was 3 of us. It was going okay. But one of my mentors at Akron came to me and said, hey, are you learning everything you want to in this role? And I was like, not really. And I had some sales experience doing door-to-door energy sales. And so when he offered me an SDR role down in Orlando and I was living in freezing Akron, Ohio, I kind of jumped on it and 3 weeks later moved to Florida, sold my car to afford my first month's rent, and thankfully things improved from there.

Yeah. How'd you like it the first year?

You know, down in Florida it was tough because I knew nobody. And, you know, Josh Kalkanis, who's a— he's in sales now. He worked at Mend with me. And so he quickly became one of my best friends and I joined that company as employee. 15, like 3 SDRs. We all started on the same exact day, hired the Predictable Revenue team to come out and kind of train us on the Aaron Ross model, did outbound for 4 months, kind of like, I guess, was leading that team of the 3 of us figuring out the Predictable Revenue model and then moved over to inbound, kind of out of a need. We got so many inbound requests that our AEs couldn't properly like qualify all of them. So I kind of became that like key qualifier, built out an inbound sales playbook, just kind of hand in hand with the CEO because there's 20 of us in the company then and did inbound for 8 months and I loved inbound. And I think if you ask anybody, they'd rather do inbound than outbound. So it was a great, you know, first 8, 9 months getting into sales and then it was, you know, inbound picked up so much we needed another AE to take on some leads. And so I went from the inbound SDR to kind of like SMB AE Yeah.

How'd you like that? Was that better because you had more control or?

Yeah. You know, when I joined this company, I couldn't tell you the difference between Medicare and Medicaid. I knew so little about just the healthcare world in general, and it had probably been several years since I saw a primary care doc. And so I actually found it incredibly useful doing all of those inbound calls and being an SMB AE because the primary person I was talking to was the end user. Like they were the decision maker, but also the person who's actually gonna be using our platform, you know, to run their practice every day. And I think it actually really helped me as I got into much bigger, bigger deals because even though I was talking to an ops person or something, I knew exactly how they were thinking for the people under them are gonna use the platform.

And don't you think it's smarter to have people start with inbound as SDRs versus starting with cold outbound? Or maybe start with list building or even—

That's a really good question. I think the, I think it almost depends on what industry you're playing in because what I found was it was easier for us to start folks on outbound because just to get a decision maker to the next call, Where maybe you have an AE with you or even the AE is taking it. You didn't need as much healthcare experience as it is when, when we got inbound requests, whether it was the provider themselves or someone kind of running the healthcare org. They had a lot of very deep industry domain qualifying questions.

Okay, I see.

That an SDR would just fumble through unless it wasn't your first healthcare job, you might be able to get through. I think that's kind of the difference with like if you're a salesperson selling a sales tool, totally like start out, you know, doing list building, doing outbound, doing inbound first, get used to it and then go after the tougher stuff on outbound. We almost use outbound more as like the training tool to get you to inbound.

Yeah, you make a good argument there because I work with people solely on cold outbound and they have a hard time understanding how different it is than inbound.

You know, if it's inbound, they're already aware of the problem.

There's already curiosity and it's kind of more about how does it work? How's it different? How much does it cost? Who else is using it?

Yeah, that's why I'm actually really glad I had a marketing degree going into sales because you're right, you're at a totally different part of that buyer journey when you're doing inbound versus outbound. Like outbound, you're trying to create that needs awareness.

Inbound, you get to Yeah, it's like you have no idea where they're at. They could be quite aware of it or have zero interest or need for it.

And that's what I like, there's such complex things about healthcare was when we were doing this in 2018 before COVID and we were selling virtual care technology, the laws in every state were different as to whether a provider could get paid by insurance for doing virtual visits. And so in outbound and even half the inbound calls, like they wanted me to really be their lawyer and be like, can I get paid for this? And we really had to be that type of expert. So it wasn't even like, you know, needs awareness of the solution. It was needs awareness of like the regulatory pieces of can I even try this?

And what helped you get good at being an AE? What were some of the key milestones?

Yeah, my first several months, um, I would actually sit in my buddy Josh's office for like a couple hours a day, right? Because I had a lot of time where I'm following up on emails, sending out contracts, trying to create my own leads. I could do all that on my computer while I'm next to him and he's on calls, and I can just kind of listen to him go through his talk tracks and how he was able to handle different objections. And so that was super helpful to me just to have that more kind of senior AE kind of guide me into being an AE. And the next thing that I really focused on was the demo. I'm a salesperson that's not afraid to admit I hate the whole negotiation process, but I know I can kill a demo. And so I spend a lot of time with really our entire AE team and we had a weird sales leadership, went through a bunch of VPs of sales, just kind of fine-tuning that. And I ended up taking our demo from like a 45-50 minute screen share down to most of my demos were like 15 to 25 minutes, just keeping it super straight to the point. Like, what is your primary pain point you're trying to solve? And like, great, I'm done. Like, if you want to see other stuff, we can go into all that, but I'm not trying to show you everything. This isn't show and tell.

And a lot of people don't get that. A lot of people give it to a sales engineer to give the demo. And they just go and go like a freight train.

Yeah, that was the, I think the benefit honestly of starting my sales career in a startup. I've had friends who have gone into, you know, the big companies into sales and they are all about the sales process and they have somebody else doing the demos for them. And I think back to my point on doing demos for SMB directly to the end users, that's a huge benefit when you are the salesperson. And, you know, their exact workflows, like their pain points. And so I was really glad that I was doing all my demos myself.

Yeah. And I think you have a good point. Show them, you know, problem solution and then take it where they want to go.

Yeah. Or then you kind of sprinkle in like the magical moments of like the little tiny details, you know, the end users love that might not be exactly what they're looking to solve, but it might be in the back of their mind of, oh, that's actually, you know, a big plus on top of you already solving it. And maybe that's what wins you over the competitor because there's probably a competitor that solves their basic pain point similarly. But there's kind of like magical things you can sprinkle on top might win like their emotional side to get you the deal.

And where do deals typically stall or get stuck or start over?

Yeah, good question. So During COVID it was interesting because it went from like the whole country kind of, you know, has all these different laws as to whether they can use telehealth to like, congrats, you can do whatever you want because of COVID And so what ended up happening was we went from very specific customer types in our ICP to it exploded. And one of the last deals that I won in that role was with a health system where It stalled in a demo period of about 2 and a half months. Not a literal stall, but it's because I think I did 25 to 30 demos.

Mm-hmm.

And the enterprise organization, you're talking to a health system that has dozens of different departments. So whoever's leading the gastro department, mental health, ER, they all want this platform to work for them. And so like talking about, you know, bringing a bunch of stakeholders to the table and needing a lot of buy-in, I always found the demo stage was huge for us. And then the other piece is we were the bolt-on. If you're a healthcare organization, you're using an electronic health record. When you walk into the doctor's office, you see them putting their notes in the computer. That's the EHR. Because we were a bolt-on, we needed the data from our 2 platforms to sync. And some EHRs work great with third-party tools, others don't. And like, that is a straight-up deal breaker once you get to large organizations. And so even if the demo was great, you know, the first question is always like, great, can this integrate with my EHR? And then you're bringing in like, you know, 2 different technical companies to come talk together. And sometimes you're stealing business from the EHR because they might actually have their own solution that they can compete with you. And That's like a big conflict to try to solve there.

Yeah. So if they had one that already has a competitor product, you're basically inviting them in, giving them a heads up that they're buying something else.

And we had a deal with an org out west where their EHR did have a competitive product. The EHR company sent their executives out to this customer to try to like win them over on their product, say, oh, you know, this company's not gonna work. Thankfully, we won that deal, but it was a mess.

Yeah. Did that happen often where they become aware of it and then all of a sudden they end run you?

Not really. I think that was a unique case because this was a flagship customer for this EHR. Oftentimes, the contract value for the basic EHR is so much higher than just the virtual care platform and the EHR contracts could be anywhere from 5 to 10 years and virtual care contracts were much shorter, smaller dollar size. So it wasn't like they were trying to fight tooth and nail most of the time.

And what makes a great rep in this space?

Yeah, I think it's, it's really knowing healthcare. And that's where I think being the SMB account executive and learning everything about the regulations, thinking of this point of view as when I'm a patient, What do I actually do during that whole process? And then where does the staff get involved? The nurse, the provider, then it goes back to the nurse and you leave all of this. And I would always get complimented by the people that I'm demoing to and being like, you actually know healthcare. Like, you're not a salesperson. Like, you could come into our organization and be the person that implements this tool for us. I'm like, yeah, that's, that's kind of how I treated sales was almost like I'm acting like your implementation consultant during the sales process. because it's all about that transfer of ownership. Can you see yourself using this product as I'm demoing it? And I see a lot of people try to come into healthcare with no domain knowledge and really get tripped up, not on sales stuff. Anybody can learn sales tactics, but you actually have to go learn the healthcare side to be able to talk to these people who, you know, they went to school for 15 years just to be a doctor. You've gotta put some of that type of domain work in.

Yeah. So you get, you had to know the product the way a user would know the product.

Yeah, exactly. And that's why I always think it's funny seeing people on LinkedIn that they're a salesperson using a sales tool to sell to other salespeople. And I'm like, that's the easiest sales job in the world. Like you are the end user of your own product. When you do not live the industry that you sell, It's like a second job just to keep up with that industry.

It is. And what they typically do is have a sales engineer who's, or domain expert or whatever come in and that's okay, but you lose context. They now look at that person as the knowledge base, not you.

Yeah.

And from a, I think from a relationship standpoint, that makes the sales process a lot harder because they know that you were there to get the deal won and somebody else is here to actually help me be successful with this product. And when you make that one person, it's a much more, I don't wanna say like honest sale, but the intentions are like, I really wanna solve your problem here.

That's a big difference as opposed to somebody who's just going through their KPIs.

Right.

And how about SMB versus enterprise? Which one did you like better?

Definitely enterprise. You know, I think I got to a point where, you know, even though I loved the demo part of the sales process, it gets really boring too. Like once you know your products just in and out, it's so repetitive. And really enterprise sales is project management. Like that's what it is. It's not so much the negotiations piece, like to an enterprise customer, you know, plus or minus 10% on a contract value.

Okay.

It matters sometimes, but like most of the time if they picked you, they picked you. And I really enjoyed the project management side of enterprise sales, you know, knowing who my champion is on the other side. And, you know, I led an RFP process with this health system up in the Northeast. And there was this guy, I'm just gonna say Chris was his name. He was my point of contact. And I think I looked in my cell phone one day, we talked every single day for about 110 days. And that's the piece of enterprise sales where you really create that relationship with somebody. And then it's great, you know, that was, that one deal was half of my annual quota and it took me 5 months to sign, but it was a 4-year deal, you know, half a million dollars a year. And I was like, you know, great, this is what I want to be doing all day long, not do a, you know, $5,000 deal and I got to do that 100 times just to get the value of this.

And that's it.

And people tend to think that, you know, enterprise sales is just a bigger sale. No, it's much more like project management, mapping it out, understanding the steps, keeping everybody on the same page, keeping the momentum going. It's a lot more fun.

It is. And I think the difference between SMB and enterprise, the sales cycle can often be so short in SMB that you're there to see how much you can meet their needs. In the enterprise world, when your sales cycle is that much longer and you're getting to know these people over a longer period of time, time, you're able to be more consultative and can actually say no a lot more as a salesperson. And you often find yourself, you know, answering questions in a way that's like, I get why you're asking me that question, but I've done this with dozens or hundreds of organizations. You're gonna be much more successful if you use our product in this way. And when you actually start to tell them how to use your product in a way that's better for them based off of credibility, That's so much more fun as a salesperson.

Yeah. And enterprise isn't about, you know, number of times you called or subject line or call to action or all these gimmicky things that people think is selling, you know, in SMB, I think you made the right point, the $5K, you gotta do 100 of them, right? It's a lot of work.

And when you have to do that much, the sales tactics matter so much more because your sales velocity, you've gotta go through. But like you said, in the enterprise world, look, I've talked to you 30 days in a row. I don't need to ask you, hey, you wanna get a meeting on the calendar, you know, to just to meet that, you know, sales manager ask. I probably don't need to do that. Yeah.

And what do you see people doing wrong in your space, either competitors or people you've worked with in the past or?

That's a really good question. What do people do wrong? You know, I, I, now that I'm in a role where I have a couple people under me, I have a bit of a budget for my department and, and I'm looking at buying tools. There is such an emphasis on the sales tactics like we just talked about that they forget about the relationship aspect. And also like, I am a salesperson buying from you. I get what you are trying to do to me right now. So just like treat me like another person. I'm not a buyer. You're not a seller. We're both humans. We get the psychological tricks and that's really what sales should be about. It's one human trying to help another human. Like you're gonna make me so frustrated if you email me 5 days in a row. And literally today I got an email from someone I talked to 6 months ago and the email was like, 5 words and it was like, final follow-up, you know, let me know. I'm like, I'm not responding to that. Oh, the breakup email.

Wow.

Well, that's it because I always have the saying, if you, people treat you the way you act and if you act like a salesperson, you'll get treated like one. And you don't act that way to your enterprise clients or any of your clients because you don't wanna be treated that way.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where the consultative piece comes into play and also the industry expertise. And I think that's where the people that have gotten platforms like LinkedIn right, they're not talking about how great they are in sales on LinkedIn. They're actually sharing like, you know, healthcare expertise or whatever industry that they are in that makes them look more credible to actually know how their product can help you. And I think that's where people get it wrong, where I've been on calls with some of the, like, you know, gurus on LinkedIn because they happen to be the salesperson that responds to my inbound requests. And it's like, camera's not turned on. They're super monotone. They go through some basic qualifying questions and it's like they can't wait to get off the call. And it's like, okay, you really enjoy social media. You're not actually like an amazing salesperson.

Right? Because everyone thinks it's activity or it's the brand in a lot of cases. But what do you want from them? You want, how do you use it? How do other people use it?

What am I missing?

How's it different? What's it like the first 90 days?

And I'm, I'm in the middle of implementing a tool right now. And that's our interaction with their team every single day. It's, they're showing me how their other customers have implemented this tool. I think they've got a flagship customer where like they're allowed to show me like the backend of their portal and how they set it up. And like, that's why they won this from me. Like, I know one or two other tools could do this, but you're actually gonna make me successful with this 90 days from now. And that's why I'm buying you.

Yeah. Great. And what do you think you wish you did earlier? Because, you know, you come in with this SDR, you're right out of college, you're probably starving.

Pretty much. I think when you are an SDR and you're an SMB account executive, you know, we already talked about it could take you 100 deals to get to, you know, one enterprise deal. And when you have that mindset as an SMB AE or as an SDR, you know, it's every lead is valuable. You often forget to say no to save your own time. And that's what I learned as I went from an SMB to an enterprise AE. There will be people that will waste your time. There are activities that are low value. And the more you start to say no, the more you're actually gonna end up closing more over less deals because you're focusing on the deals with the highest likelihood to close. It's like that whole cliché of like 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. It's so true for a salesperson. 80% of the ARR you close will come from 20% of your leads.

That's it. And, you know, because I was doing this experiment with a couple of reps, it's like, okay, take the deals that closed and then how much time, your personal, your time as an individual rep, did it take to close those deals? And it's probably like 30% of their year. So 2/3 of their year was spent on things that didn't help close Those deals. There's a lot of room.

Yeah. And that's what I think I see in startups a lot. This thing of like every deal matters and no, it doesn't because if the customer acquisition cost on an SMB or mid-market customer is so big because you say every deal matters and your mid-market rep has a 10-month sales cycle and now the CAC is gonna be 4 or 5 years to return, that deal is not worth it.

Yeah, because not everyone's a perfect match or a great match.

Yep.

And if you're dealing with somebody who's indecisive or combative, or you're getting the sense that they can't make a decision, backburner them. You don't have to delete them or ignore them. Just put them— yeah, they'll come back.

Right. We used to always say that, you know, they always come back. You know, sometimes we always found we were their second or third platform that they used because we were a little more complex. They often went with somebody simpler. But, you know, the people that are loud in the sales process are loud as customers. And so not only are you now talking about CAC, but you're talking about the pain on customer success, the product and engineering demands that they have. And those are not customers that you want to keep around very long.

Yeah, we don't talk about that much, but a bad customer, a bad business Costs a whole lot more than you get.

And I think that's where, you know, you're starting to see more conversations on salespeople's commission structures actually taking some weight into the first, you know, 12 months of them being a customer or so on. And I think that's totally fair because if you are a salesperson, like, yes, you're probably money motivated, you're there to close deals, but salespeople are the life of the business. And so You know, if the churn at the company is super high, there's a level that, yeah, like that's the customer success team's fault. But there's probably a lot of variables that means that's also the sales team's fault.

It is. Yeah, because I've always regretted it. I fell into a trap a couple of times where you're like, oh, the product's a pretty good match, but not a great match. And they're really annoying to work with. And I'm gonna have to live with them after they buy. Yeah. See, that's the difference between, you know, SaaS sales and like what on-prem used to be is that SaaS, you have to live with them. You have to earn that renewal, you know, enterprise, you have to just earn the maintenance.

Yeah. And that's the, it's interesting to see how different SaaS companies, you know, play out where reps start and end and like on-prem, like you mentioned, if you're a territory sales You're closing them, but you're also following up with them, the account management, the upsells where I think you see a lot more problems in SaaS because there's so many reps that are only responsible for getting the contract signed. Then they pass it off to implementation, to customer success and they're like, great, I'm getting paid, your job now.

Right. And customer success is gonna prioritize on likelihood to expand or renew.

Yep.

So it becomes a self-fulfilling problem because the customer's gonna be more of a pain in the butt because they're not getting the help they want.

Yeah, absolutely.

And when you, are you hiring salespeople now? Are you a leader? Is that true?

Yeah. So in my current role as director of marketplace, now I'm on the side where we are the EHR company. And so we have a lot of companies that wanna integrate with us. And so I run our partnerships of all these third-party companies that work with us. And so now under me, I've got some partnership success managers where we're looking at the, you know, acquiring new partners. How do we manage the co-marketing and co-selling with existing partners?

And why'd you choose to do that as opposed to staying an AE?

Yeah, I actually really liked what we just talked about and being able to keep that relationship. And so as I'm looking at acquiring partners, it's thinking about how can I bring value to the partner? But also because it's a product partnership, how am I bringing value to the customer through this? And so there's an additional stakeholder to this process that then because it's the partnership, you know, the co-marketing and co-selling, I have to keep, I'm responsible for keeping this partner/customer happy ongoing. It's a much less transactional thing and that's why I moved into it because the KPIs are a bit less stressful than just like, Great, you were 150% of quota in Q3, but you're 75% in Q4. So we're gonna put you on a PIP and it's like, are you kidding me? And like the salesperson, you're like, your value is so quarter to quarter or month to month where partnerships, it's, you know, year plus long projects that are going on.

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

The best places to follow me are probably LinkedIn and Twitter. Advantage of my last name is all my handles are just Nick Narrow. So that's how you can find me.

Yesterday we had a great office hours in closing the complex sale. Let me tell you kind of the pinnacle that I'm seeing some of the students get to after learning this capability and the magic that they get if they work with both start the conversation, get the meeting, and closing the complex sale, because it solves the 2 major problems in sales— that cold outbound without spamming or robocalling, and managing a large complex sale. There's a student that's been in the course a couple times because he works on huge deals, multiple 7-figure deals. So there's only a few of them a year, and very few of them are inbound. And it's a niche market, but a big market. And he has taken on the challenge of becoming his own champion within these accounts. He likes the challenge, and it's well worth his time and investment. And so if you're in the course already, go down to the one-on-ones. It was posted most recently. Make sure you listen to it. I think I put a must-listen-to on it. When you hear a student being able to do this from scratch, be able to put the org chart, start conversations at all kinds of levels from CEO down talking about them, you really get this level of satisfaction because I hear the excitement in his voice, the control, the power that he now has over his career where there's no deflection, blaming marketing about leads or territory or all this other— you get that there's truth to it, but it doesn't help. Being able to build up his territory and his deals and have control over them without any help externally. Now imagine if you had that capability to be able to build your pipeline without any inbound, without the stupid cadence machines. And I got into a discussion yesterday with a, you know, an SDR manager who thinks they like the sequences and the cadence.

I go, is it working?

No.

What percentage? Well, what else are we going to do? I always give the same— learn how to sell. That's not selling, that's marketing. Marketing automation. The only difference is with marketing, they have to opt in. In sales, they don't opt in. And so what does marketing do? They keep enticing people with things that are irrelevant to what they sell. Free Apple Watches, Some ebook that's really just a brochure. Okay, why do they do that? They want leads as the easiest possible. They're just not quality. They're contacts, not leads. What if you could look at your territory and say, okay, here are the people that are most likely in the pain that I can cure. I need to start a conversation with them. Most of the stuff I sold, you couldn't put in an ad because it— you couldn't explain it. It would look like something else. It could be misinterpreted. You don't know what they're seeing. It's like the, the Rorschach pictures that we saw in psychology course in college. It's like, what do you see? It was supposed to be telling you something about the person. What if you could do that? Imagine that power. See, today salespeople think it's a secret, a tip, a trick, and it's a skill. It's a skill like any other performance. Anyone can get up on a stage in front of a microphone, but very few people can entertain an audience. Very few people can get the audience to laugh. To engage, to listen, to appreciate and be entertained. In sales, we have to start conversations to get to the reason why they should be curious and interested in what we do. People don't teach this anymore. You know, when I started, it was, you know, they just gave you a phone. A laptop and a phone book. And it was like, good luck. And I was like, this is brain dead. I'm not doing this all day. So I put the old brain to work and found a smarter way. I would converse with people. I would network. I would get into all kinds of companies in a very creative way. Not a skill that anyone can learn. If you have a little bit of energy, a tiny bit of empathy, and just willing to stick with it. See, today everybody wants just a template and to put it into their machine and see what happens. I get them all day. They don't work because when I need something, I search for it. I don't wait till I get something. I may be curious about it. If you look at your Instagram feed, they present a bunch of things you might be interested in, but that's marketing. What we're selling is very hopefully complex stuff, which is good because it demands a lot of money. The bad part is it takes a while for the other person to understand it. How do you get that time? You know if marketing's getting you inbound or not. What's the quality of it? At most companies, at best, it's a contact with the wrong information except for some screwy Gmail account. Now, there you have no option but to email them.

You don't know—

no real name, ASDF, whatever they put in, or some snide comment. Why not take control over your income instead of having the company have control over it? Because let me tell you one thing that I— it is universal. When you work for a company and whatever they tell you to do isn't working, they blame you. They don't reflect and try and find a smarter thing to do. And 9 out of 10 companies I worked for, what they told me to do didn't work. They told me what to do worked for somebody else that had inbound, that had the great territory, that had existing customers. I didn't. They hired me because they wanted me to create that. But they wanted me to do it their way. And I said, well, your way doesn't work. But I didn't tell them that because I know they wouldn't listen to me or care because it worked for someone else at home office. We are all personally responsible for finding out what works. Start the conversation, get the meeting is a game changer, but you have to stick with it. You have to dig in. And it's counterintuitive. That's the hard part. You have to be open-minded to develop that skill because most of sales, if not all, is counterintuitive. What everyone is doing in your inbox is intuitive. Tell them how great the product is. I know yours is different.

Yours is all about value.

Yeah, why aren't they replying if it's so valuable? It's valuable to you, not them. There's a big difference. If you really want to crush your number this year, go to b2brevenue.com. Check out Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting, and Closing the Complex Sale. And treat sales like what it is— a performance profession. You can go read all the sales books in the world. It'll make you a smarter person, but better salesperson?

Hmm.

That doesn't start until you start trying it. But you have to understand core principles about it. It's not about us. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. If you see my stuff fly by on LinkedIn, give it a little like, a little comment, a little share. I'd appreciate that. Tell a friend about the show.