WHY THIS REP CHOOSE B2B SALES OVER ALL THE OTHER ALTERNATIVES

Today's interview is a great case of what I call new smart versus old smart, or how they work together. Now, let me define it. Old smart is what we grew up with. Most of you went to school, elementary school, high school, where you went to a building at a certain time, sat in certain seats, listened to lectures, questions, case studies. Took a test to determine if you knew that stuff. Now, part of that was just the structure. The structure meaning you go to a building, you're not at home in front of your computer or TV. They take away all the distractions, make you sit in a seat, make you behave and be quiet and listen to them. And they didn't really tell you why you needed this other than you have to pass it to listen to more stuff. From them. Now, is there anything wrong with this? No, a lot of us need it. Certainly as children, we don't have the self-discipline, the curiosity, the drive to go learn about history or to learn about math. It doesn't really apply to us. We want to eat, play, and have fun. Now, as we become adults, we tend to go into college, which has pretty much the identical structure but a little bit more freedom. But then we go into work. And we take a job and we have to learn a whole bunch of other stuff. And sometimes the company gives us some level of training on this. Now, I'll give you my origin story, which is kind of the new smart, meaning that there isn't either a school available or it's too expensive, it's too far away, the times don't work, whatever it is. You want to take a different route, or they just haven't matured that content to the point of teaching it. Which was my case when I kind of get out of high school and I end up working at this factory, tiny little factory. And one of the machines that we built had a computer in it. And this is at a time and a place where I'd open up the help wanted section every Sunday looking for a job. And say there were 30 pages, 29 of them would be for software engineers. So I didn't have to be Nostradamus to learn that, hey, there's something about this software engineering thing. There's a lot of demand and not enough supply. So, you know, I wrote down the things that they wanted and I talked to the software engineer. There was 2 of them at this company. And I said, well, how do I learn this? And they kind of liked it because no one cared about what they did. They didn't understand what they did. And at the time, they say, well, you got to get a computer at home. And I saved up and I got this little Radio Shack computer at the time. And I had to learn how to type. Now, my driver wasn't that I was a geek excited about computers. My driver was I wanted a job that paid money. And working in that little tiny factory assembling stuff, I was making A little above minimum wage, but it was not a career. There was no future with it. So I saw the software engineering as that future. But I go to enroll in schools, and I can only go at night. And the night schools, they'd have some computer courses, but they were so old. No one used COBOL anymore. No one really did anything with machine language anymore. They were You know, 5, 10 years behind where the market was. So I didn't really focus on them. I just wanted to get a degree because I thought that was a requirement. So here's what I did. I learned how to type, which got me a job at a software company as a tester. All they cared was if you could type fast enough. And, you know, it was the lowest of the low. It was basically you ran tests of what the developers did. Now, that wasn't going to be good enough for me. So, I spent my nights and weekends learning, playing with their computer, spending $500 a month on long-distance calls to get access to it 24/7. And I taught myself. Now, I got some coaching, but no real structure. I could ask people questions, but it was really kind of— Playing. That's the new smart. Now, today's case is we've got somebody who had the best opportunity in the old smart world. He was lucky enough to get a scholarship into the best prep school in the United States, then was lucky enough to get into an Ivy League college, one of the best in the world. This is the education that each parent would dream for their child, including me, if I had a kid. But if anybody said, if I had the opportunity to go to this school, would you go? I'd go as fast as you can for just the connections and having the resume value of it. Now, the learning part of it, here's the key. The best advice he got was from a professor At Princeton to say, hey, if you really want to become an entrepreneur, sales is probably the best role for you. Now, if his dad wasn't a salesperson, I can imagine the fight they would get into that after all this time and hassle of getting into these great schools, you do what doesn't really require a degree to begin with. But he now had to apply The new smart. Now, the new smart applies to sales. Why? Because we tell our company, oh, we need training. They give us product training. Oh, they hire somebody like me or somebody else to come in for 2 days and talk through it. And it's not that we don't do it in the right way. You sit in the right chairs, you ask the right questions, you do the right role plays or tests, but it's not knowing it. You can't learn how to play the guitar in 2 days. You can't learn how to cook in 2 days. This is a lifetime profession, a performance, a skill that has to be applied every day. And how do you do that? You've gotta have the new smart. The new smart is it's up to you. You have to be curious, interested, and motivated. You have to test— or the market tests you every day. But you have to listen to the grade from the market and then reiterate and assume that it is you and not just the words or the process or the steps. And that's really what the courses are about. It does require the new smart. Sorry, but that, that's the reality. I can't do it for you. It's not a done-for-you service. You still have to do the talking. You still have to do the connecting, the questioning, the listening, the Getting the next step in the process. So it is kind of the quintessential new smart, but going to school for it isn't going to get you better. Reading a book isn't going to get you better. You can't learn how to swim by reading a book. Yes, it'll give you some hints, some tips, some tricks, some case studies and stories, and so maybe some motivation. But are you going to be a better swimmer after reading the book? Maybe. Maybe we have some tips and you'll apply them. But how about if you dedicated a year to becoming a great salesperson? Now, I got some data. Yep, me, who I don't really care about data. One of the students compared the success that they had before the course and after the course. This is the Winning the Complex Sale. He's now in the Start the Conversation, learning that part. And the income, which is all you really care about— I'll give you the other statistics later and I'll share them on LinkedIn— is that he felt it was a 25 to 30% income increase in one year. So let's say you make $100K, that's $25K in your pocket. You make $200K, that's, you know, $50K to $60K in your pocket. You make $300K, you get the point. So the ROI is there. The scary part is that you don't have to do it every year. You bought the course, you've applied it, you've learned it, and now you're getting good at it. Now it sticks with you and it compounds, meaning that at the end of your career, it's just not 25, 30% better. It may mean you're 300% better. And over a 20-year period, It's, you know, better ROI than Bitcoin or any other crypto coin out there. So if you're wondering about the ROI, the difference is he has the new smart mentality. He shows up, he does the work, he listens to the one-on-ones, he attends one-on-ones, he asks questions, and then he applies it and gets better. Can you do that? The new smart. Hey, Scott, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a— why'd you get into sales?

Why did I get into sales, Brian, is such a good question. I got into sales because I have always wanted to start my own company. From day one, I failed that kind of computer science. I couldn't take the engineering route. And I had an amazing professor at Princeton say, hey, if you want to get into sales, if you want to— or sorry, if you want to start your own company, Go learn sales. It is the number one thing every entrepreneur can learn, whether you're selling to your investors, your employees, your customers. And so I have been on this perilous journey for the past 10 years.

Yeah.

What'd your parents think?

So father, father is actually a— been in sales his whole life, entrepreneur. So there was a lot of push towards sales career and mom should have been in sales. She's a natural. Natural salesperson.

You're kind of an anomaly. Um, you know, great education, right? Popped right off your LinkedIn profile. Because the natural thing that pops into my mind is then why sales?

Yeah.

That was a huge investment. Absolutely.

So, I mean, it comes, it really comes back to, you know, what I had mentioned in the beginning of kind of why I got into this. I think a lot of folks graduating from Princeton or similar organization would shun a sales career. I think that's changing though. I work with a lot of alumni and folks from our team, and there's a great innovation center there, and you're seeing a lot more folks say, hey, let's not go the investment banking consulting route. Let's, you know, everybody wants to get into startups now. It's like, well, what are you going to do in startups? You know?

Right.

There's only one CEO role.

Yeah, exactly.

That's taken. And how'd you like it when you first started?

I hated it. I, I very much questioned everything. You know, it was—

it is orthogonal to kind of the educational route.

Absolutely. There's no— I mean, if you look at universities today, business schools today, there are very few, you know, sales majors or, you know, anything. I mean, you're starting to see a lot more stuff come up around entrepreneurship, but that's why, um, I'm a huge fan, um, of what Mark Roberge is doing. And, you know, he started teaching a a great course over at Harvard Business School, which is one of the first sales— and it has marketing, of course, go-to-market, but really focusing on the tactical things that most MBA students had never thought about.

Right. Yeah. They're taught product-market fit, TAM, all the acronyms that have gone wild, the glamorous side of it. But that's not the real world.

Exactly.

The market just doesn't sit out here, oh, you got a product, we've got a match. That's not how it works.

Exactly. Products are supposed to sell themselves, right?

Yeah, that didn't happen, did it?

No.

Now there's, you know, obviously there's a lot of different flavors of sales, right? And so where I started to kind of focus on was more of that enterprise B2B sales cycle, because I really felt like as a salesperson, you can add a ton of value through that process. You're not just taking orders.

Right.

You're not, you know, just checking off the box. And I love when, you know, we— a few companies ago, I was working with a company called Catalant, helping them break into and disrupt basically the Fortune 500 consulting market. And one of the things that became very apparent as we were working with these big organizations is, oh my gosh, I can actually start to problem solve at the organizational level for big companies out there like Shell, AB InBev, Boeing. And that is something that most people don't think about with sales. You know, I like to think it's organizational problem solving.

And so what business or what type of sale did your dad do? Because I'm sure there was some osmosis going on there.

Yeah, so he had— he, a number of— kind of started out selling solar panels back in the 1980s, door-to-door.

So it was B2C?

Yeah, very much B2C. And then he started moving into, um, uh, actually like, uh, Blockbuster franchise and ended up kind of franchising that. And so it was still very B2C. It was actually a few mentors in my life, including that professor, that really started to guide me towards B2B. I always like to say, like, this might not be right, but in B2C, I like to think, I like to think that marketing is king or queen, whereas in B2B, I like to think sales is king or queen.

Definitely. No one's gonna see an ad and make— change the way they do business.

Right.

You know, you'll see an ad and get interested in a car, a solar panel, a new way of doing things.

Exactly.

But to change a company takes time. You have to talk to a lot of people. Now, how about the hard part of sales, the rejection, the grind?

Oh yeah, the cold calling.

All the stuff, I mean, because when you do really well in school, It's take a test, perform the test, do a paper. It's, it's a knowledge-based performance. Sales, it's a trust-based, it's a relationship-based performance. It's strategy.

It's totally—

Right.

I like to think, you know, as a few, few thoughts kind of coming through my head when you ask that. I would say it comes back to my initial thought, which is I learned this early on of a belief that I have of PPA, power of a positive attitude. There's books, there's all sorts of literature around this, but it really came to the forefront with my older brother who spent 12 years Navy special warfare. How he was able to get through the grind of becoming a Navy SEAL is through PPA. And PPA isn't rose-colored glasses. I was just talking to a BDR last week about this. He hadn't booked 4 meetings and he was really stressed out. I was like, I get it. PPA. Let's find the opportunity in the difficulty. Not saying the world is great. It's saying, hold on. Don't let those stressors, don't let that norepinephrine and that cortisol freak your brain out and now you're in your lizard brain, right? You need to stay top-down in that prefrontal cortex and really understand, okay, let's— is this a fit? Should we continue the conversation?

And did you develop that in sales or was that in school or was that hanging around with your brother or—

That was my own personal— I graduated, yeah, I graduated college and, you know, a lot of my friends and classmates were going business school route and that. And I, to your point, I feel like the traditional way of learning didn't align with my brain, but learning is the most crucial thing I need to focus on. So I really did kind of my own little coursework of like, okay, let's figure out how we learn. Like, how do brains work? Like, how do start to think with our different systems. I was fortunate that I was really influenced by Daniel Kahneman, who was teaching at Princeton, and his book Thinking Fast and Slow. That notion, which so many other things have been built upon, has really helped me understand those basics, as well as I was fortunate enough to work— or I got introduced to A guy named Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, who was the person who discovered left brain, right brain. At that time, he had just released a new book and I figured, okay, if I'm trying to learn, let's figure out how the brain learns. And so I was very fortunate to start there and then slowly move into a world where I understood how meditation and exercise and things of that nature and literally having positive thoughts You can grow those areas in your brain.

Right.

Yeah.

And because you did well in school, but then sales was learning a different thing.

Totally.

Right.

And I, you know, it's—

Books don't really help.

No, no.

I mean, they give you, they give you a foundation, a baseline, right? But then it's all about, you know, sales is a performance sport. I grew up playing sports my entire life.

Which ones?

I ended up growing up playing football, hockey, and lacrosse, and then ended up playing lacrosse at Princeton. That education that I had on the field was almost, if not better, than the education I got in the classroom. You start to see things like going to do extra wind sprints afterwards, right? practiced, like practicing, like it, you know, I guess you practice tests, but like you don't practice behaviors or like motions or mental models. And that's where you start to do that in sports. Right. And that, in my opinion, really applies to sales, obviously coaching as well.

Right. And I think too many reps think it's knowledge. Like if I pass the sales test, I'll make my quota.

Right. It's a numbers game.

Look at, I mean, lacrosse, you throw a ball through the basket, you hit through the goal, right? It's not a lot of knowledge, right? It's a lot of repetition, hustle, you know, quick thinking.

Yeah. And it's, you don't have that, like, that similar type of performance. And that's where I really, really started to embrace sales is when, you know, big meetings, you know, you get it, you get a meeting with the chief strategy officer of AmerisourceBergen, which is the 6th largest company at the time. You head down to their fancy headquarters. It's all amazing. You know, you're nervous. You've got the butterflies in your stomach. It's a big, big deal. This could change the course of our company, not just like your quota.

Yeah.

And nothing in school really prepares you for that, whereas sports, right? Sports really starts to prepare you for that. You have a sense of like how you can mentally prepare.

Right, because school would teach you what to present. Sports teaches you how to present.

I love that.

And how the nuances—

Absolutely.

And that the 14th, 15th time you practice it is not a waste of time.

Right. And just the work ethic, right? It's so much about sales is like consistency. You have to do your outbound, you have to do your prospecting. Even if you have 6 or 7 deals you're about to close, if you take 2 weeks off from this behavior, it's going to impact your success.

Yeah.

I always thought— yeah, because great sales is the merger of kind of the hustle and the working smart. You know, the hustle, you know, just doing the grind won't make you number one in B2B.

Right.

Might make new number, but I've never found the grinder to be the top rep. And being smart, you'll get the big deals, but not enough maybe.

Right.

You know, yeah, I think that's spot on. You really have to have— there, I think that, you know, there is knowledge in sales that you leverage, right? Like All the methodologies that you talk about on this podcast that I'm a huge fan of, like Challenger Customer, elements of Sandler, like things like that. Those are the tools in your toolkit. We have to know how to use them. You have to know which behaviors and which knowledge to access at that specific time.

Right.

And much like lacrosse, if you don't practice it enough, you're not going to have that ability at that moment that you need it.

Absolutely.

Right, because you are running on the primitive brain at that time.

Right.

You can't do an analysis while you're running, weaving, getting a stick in the head.

Yeah, totally. Yes, absolutely. We also have to like— there's, to your point, the smart folks are also strategically thinking, how can I be the number one rap? Yes, I'm going to have to make all those cold calls. Yes, I'm going to have to run all these meetings and do follow-up and make sure the admin is there. But hold on, is anybody sending personalized cookies to Fortune 500 leaders as a way of standing out to get a meeting? Right. Things like that, that we, we had success with a lot, like Catalin. Yeah.

Cool. And like, what were some of the pivot points that got you successful in the larger deals? Are you a top-down person? You bottom-up?

You—

Yeah, great question. So I would say both. Yeah, uh, I, it, I mean, it starts with, with knowing your product and knowing the pain points that that solves, knowing kind of the impact of the benefits of those, of those things, and then Really going out and making sure that you're targeting the right folks, especially if you're going after kind of bigger enterprise sales, right? You're only working a few big deals at a time. And so making sure you're selecting that target is so crucial. Then when you're selecting that target, I definitely, I always love to start top down, start top down with appropriate messaging, obviously more strategic, you know, operational, and then kind of tactical when you get into the weeds with some of the more junior folks.

Yeah, I gotta imagine with the things that you were selling that that would, they feel the pain that you solve.

Yeah, and I would say, I am not afraid to leave money on the table in like in these big enterprise deals. Like one of the, you know, the old notion of like land and expand strategy, especially in enterprise, I think it's so crucial. And I think you have a lot of sales leaders say either you get full list price are not worth our time.

Well, certainly, because a lot of products, you know, if you try and get the enterprise deal on the first try, the likelihood of it going through is diminished greatly. If you get a pilot project, adding more to it, because you've already got the paperwork done, you've already—

Absolutely.

Got the technical decision done. You just got to get the implementation done.

I've always said that the bigger the enterprise, the more risk-averse they are and the folks that you're dealing with are, right? They're not working at a startup taking a high risk, you know, trying to be, you know, get 10x every year. Like, if they just improve 10% year over year, they'll climb that corporate ladder. But if they bring in a product that fails in what, you know, some way, shape, or form, that jeopardizes their career. Because I've always found that land and expand is able to reduce that risk factor, especially working with like an unproven startup, which is what I've done my whole career.

Well, you're at a pretty great, good company now, right? So give us a sense of the size of your deals, who you go after, what your process is.

Yeah. So I started working at Lattice in November of last year. And I could not love Lattice anymore. I've been just so impressed with, of course, the product, which is number one kind of product in this space, but really more importantly, like the leadership and the culture. Right. And as part of that, like how that leadership and culture is going to help me to kind of get to where I want to get to. Where we focus. So we focus on selling to really HR leaders, a people management platform that includes performance management, engagement, and employee development. And I would say that deal sizes so far, they've ranged from $80,000 ARR all the way up to, I think, one like $169,000 ARR.

So that's an HR department. Yeah.

Right.

This is not a profit center.

Right, right.

They're not change agents, right?

No, it's— and it's, uh, it's so spot on. It's funny, um, Mark Roberge's counterpart professor at Harvard Business School, I told him about this opportunity. He said, well, why would you do that? HR is so disempowered. I don't care what all these talent people say. Like, they, you know, they're not a sales leader. They're not, you know, they're not— they don't have typically traditionally a seat at the table. Now, I do believe that that is changing.

Yeah.

And I think in the past year, you're starting to see, holy moly, like talent always has been so crucial, but now you don't have to live 20 miles from where an office is of your company that you want to work for. Meaning power has shifted From the employer to the employee, in my opinion. And therefore, people leaders, HR leaders are now increasingly valuable. The trick is connecting the dots.

Well, you got to find somebody who has that mindset because, right, I mean, nobody went to Harvard Business School to become an HR leader, right? It's just It attracts a certain type of person with a certain skillset and political ability.

Yeah. And honestly, it's even going above that, looking at the CEO. Does the CEO invest in their people or do they say they invest? What is their track record for the past year around investing in people initiatives, systems, Anything of that nature, because you can pretty quickly get a sense of are they aligned with like our ideal customer profile today?

And if they're not, do you just deprioritize them or do you still go after them?

Or if it's, if it's pure outbound, I will deprioritize them.

Yeah, absolutely.

If it's inbound, I will really focus on kind of qualifying pretty hard. And it's, you know, I've really never been in a position that I've worked at for a market leader I've always worked for like the scrappy startup that's trying to disrupt, you know, the 800-pound gorilla. And so it, it actually has been quite wonderful to really take an approach with some of these inbound leads of why should we be talking? There are, you know, 3,000 other customers right now that are using Lattice. I've got 4 other people that want to talk today.

Yeah. Right.

Is it education?

Is it interest?

Yeah, DQ pretty early.

Yeah.

And where do you want to take your career?

I still want to start my own company. I still— absolutely. I've just been saying— so one of the other really amazing things about Lattice is they have a fund that if anybody at Lattice wants to go start their own company, they will seed that individual or team. And I saw Lattice as an amazing way for me to really get a little more stability in my life after the past year. I had a kid, we bought a house, working for a startup with unknown kind of potential.

You've got enough stress in your life.

Yeah. Sales, it's not not stressful. Again, the PPA, but really making sure that I can grow. And there's specific areas, both tactically sales, I think I can grow, but also from a leadership perspective. And what Lattice has in place today is beyond anything I've worked at before. And so I really felt like this is a company that I can come in and make an impact, make some good money too, and then start to develop those leadership skills, and then hopefully find that brilliant idea or founding team and go start it.

And when you do that, what role do you see yourself? Is it like CEO? Is it VP of sales? Where's your passion lie?

It's a great question. I've always said CEO, because I've been, in my opinion, pretty much a generalist. Like, I like, studied computer science at Princeton. I can code, it's not very well. But really dug into marketing. I love marketing. I love really understanding copyright and also really appreciate the operational aspects of things. I'd say my biggest gap in that regard is more in the finance area, where I started to take a few Coursera corporate finance courses. It's amazing what you can learn The amount of like free and also paid-for materials out there, including podcasts like yours.

Oh God, when I listen to parents or anybody complain about not getting into a great school, not being able to afford school, I go, you realize they're all doing it from their bedrooms right now. And most of the people that they're getting the course have podcasts, have YouTube channels, have Probably 80% of it either free or low cost. Yeah, you know, like Scott Galloway, where he's like, you know, the course that you get at NYU, he's pretty much given away for free on his podcast and YouTube channel and his book, right?

But it requires you to do the work.

That's the difference.

Totally. And I think, you know, you're starting to see these, um, like sales accelerators, right? You can come in, learn how to be a BDR, and put you in, you know, place you into a company. And I think those across the board are going to exponentially increase. I think you're going to find that folks are going to say, why would I spend $200,000 on a liberal arts education if I can go learn the certain skill sets that I need to pursue the career path that I want?

Wow.

Well, that makes logical sense, but like you see, like in the Wall Street Journal where people still have that bias against sales. And let's face it, people aren't talking on the phone when they're teenagers anymore. So that is a foreign skill when you're in your 20s.

Oh yeah. And if you think about it, I mean, sales, which I kind of lump negotiation into sales, Conflict, a little bit of tension.

Right.

I mean, there is a concern how— I don't know if you've noticed this in your experience, Brian, but I've been amazed at how few people will pick up the phone today, not to like a cold call, but just like, hey Brian, had a quick question around what you're trying to do, right? It's all Slack, it's all email, it's all chat. Yeah, there's a lot of kind of the younger generations, and I've always thought like, how's that going to impact I think it is.

I think it is right now because people are having kind of like a service mindset, and that's part of it, but you're not going to sell a big deal by being great at service.

Right.

Everybody might get a repeat.

Right.

We could do that. So I guess that, you know, to find— I don't know what it's going to take to build those people up. I guess What typically happens is they get in their 20s and they start seeing what a house costs, what a car costs. They fall in love, they get married, they see what a kid costs, and all of a sudden they're open-minded to doing these other things.

Well, that's the thing. We do mentoring with a lot of the guys on the current lacrosse team at Princeton, and I've been delightfully surprised at their openness to looking at a career in tech sales. Not specifically tech sales, but I think what they've noticed and they've recognized is you can make a ton of money. You can make as much as those consultants or investment bankers.

More.

I mean, that's what I try to tell them. I stay conservative. I don't promise over-deliver.

They don't believe it.

Because when I tell them that, they don't believe it. And You know, because I didn't go to a great school, but I was a programmer, became a pre-sales guy.

Saw that, Northeastern.

Right. Then became a sales guy. And within 2 years, you know, I was driving around with the CEO, Stanford MBA, Air Force Academy, A-level venture capital. And he goes, you know what? You're making almost twice what I'm making.

That was, I remember we walked through, there was an article that came out and I sent it to my mentee and it showed the top earners in like a typical kind of software organization. And it was like CEO, CFO, number one sales rep. And they're like, wait, what?

And you're just cold calling all day?

Are you cold calling all day or what are you doing? It's like, no, no, no, you're not cold calling all day. You know, it's not boiler room. All these movies and pop culture have really given sales a bad rap. Right.

And I think, you know, if you come out of Stanford, you might get funded, but coming out of most MBAs, even like the top 10, VCs are going to be like, go, come, get some product-market fit, some customers, and then come back.

Yeah, get some traction.

Get some traction.

Totally.

And all those things they need to learn, I watch on YouTube every day, right?

Right.

From people who have done it and people who are venture capitalists.

Yeah. I really feel like, I hope that sales podcasts like yours help to highlight how amazing of a career I specifically think B2B enterprise software sales is.

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

Uh, they can go to LinkedIn. Uh, that would probably be the best place. Uh, I think it's like Scott McKenzie 1.

Yep.

But thanks so much, Brian. It's been such a delight.

What I liked about that interview is that not only did the professor recommend getting into sales, but he did it and he became great at it. Did not look down on it, saw the potential of it, and then became the new smart, learning about all the elements of it, or trying to, coming up with a written process on how to win. And we had a little conversation after the interview where he dug in and he was curious, asking me advice and questions. That is the new smart. And this is a skill that some of us might not have. Where we need structure and discipline and tests and forcing functions. Okay, but I think everyone can develop from it. If you— you can get some of that with the courses, but a lot of it is— it's self-paced, it's self-motivated. A lot of the questions are like, when does it start? It starts as soon as you sign up. Uh, what happens if I miss a one-on-one? Or an office hour. You listen to the recordings. There's more content, more examples and case studies than you probably can consume in the year. Why is it a year? Well, I like to have it contained in some way and have it close out at some point. And you get to talk with other people. There is an element of community to it. It isn't just me talking. There's case studies. There's You know, examples of pretty much every element of either getting a conversation started or winning a large complex sale. Now, the only question comes down to, are you lazy and are you cheap? Now, those aren't good combinations for pretty much any element of sales. And it's really, that's what it comes down to. If you have the employee mindset, the old Smart, that you're not going to do it because you don't have the motivation, the time, and you think it's someone else's responsibility to train you. But if you have the salespreneur mindset where you're looking at my— half my income at least is variable, which means I have control over it. I can either win more deals, and this is the element that the rep broke it down to. Was win rate, deals worked on, which meant focus and not wasting your time on deals that can't or won't close within that comp plan window, and deal size. How do you make them bigger and faster, which makes you more productive? Now, the problem with the new SMART is you don't know who to trust. You don't know who to believe. You don't know who to follow, all of that. Well, all I can say is I've been putting out free content for over 10 years now. The podcast is 12 years old. I started it when I was an active selling rep. I started my own company. I built my own company doing all the things that you were doing after 25 years of startup selling all by myself, the hardest of the hard. Yeah, some of them got bought by bigger companies. But I was a startup guy. And you can watch my YouTube channel. It's 10 years old this September. So there's thousands of free videos there. If I'm not talking to the things that make sense to you, then don't do it. Be the new smart. Know what to learn from. But you have to have the discipline. No one's going to do it for you. You don't have the tests. That's the market. Every day the market gives you a grade. Every quarter or every month, every year, you get a little grade on your, your pay stub. That's your grade. Did you make your grade? You can blame the teacher. You can blame the course. You can blame the school. Doesn't matter. That's the grade. Let's get that grade up. Let's make that money you want. Let's get those meetings you need. We'll see you next time. Here's some excerpts from a one-on-one that I did with one of the students in Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting course. Now, this person really embraced the course after a while. It took a couple of one-on-ones for him to try each step. He kind of fought it, tried to make it work within his current model. And that really didn't have the type of success. And then after he started, he started to get meetings. He started to get conversations. He started to get all the things that I was telling him about. And he started to get excited about it. He started to see the results that I tell you about where his week was full of meetings. Now, I'll let you hear this out. I deleted out kind of the specifics of the steps and the tools and the approach, but they're all in the course. If you're already in it, please listen to the full one-on-ones. When you hear the success that people are having, it's not just the steps. It's the matching of the steps with the appropriate actions and pacing. And then you get people asking to talk with you, which is the goal, which is the fun. So let's listen to it and I'll sum it up at the end and Give you kind of an idea and recommendation if you want to take advantage of this.

And it's crazy. This week, this week I'm full of meetings. I was like, what's happening? And like, I what I did was I baked in like I just I very generic, and people are like, oh, like. Like, tell me more about you. Like, immediately. I have like 3, 4 meetings. Like, I already had 2 this— and, and based on the, on the, on the parameters that you suggested for me, like, oh, go after these bigger companies, X amount of employees. So then by the time I'm talking to them, I already know that, okay, they, they typically have budget. I mean, assuming LinkedIn is correct with the employee size. Some of it was, was off, but it's like, okay, there's still like a deal. It can, it can still happen. And, um, but yeah, I was like, whoa, this is— I like, I limited to like 30 connections a day. So then that way it's not like, it doesn't go crazy. 'Cause I remember one of the reps— So doing about 30 a day. Uh, like I said, like this week, like 4 or 5 meetings and, and, and, and they're good meetings, you know, and it's just conversations. Like I say, it's not about like pitching, but it's about working them up to that point where it's like, okay, Yeah, we do need to advertise.

So after teaching this for quite a while, here's the steps that you should take. Take the course once, quickly through it. Find both one-on-ones and office hours that speak to the persona that you want to talk with, whether it be the CEO, the CMO, CRO, developer, marketer, whoever it is that you want to talk to. Because we break it down in gory detail. We break down the persona and what they care about. And then try each step. Try it with your friends. Try it with your coworkers and start to see the results. Now, most people will fight me on it. They'll spend the first month, 2 months, uh, trying to make the system fit into their pitchy email and cold calls. And it works a little better. But it works a whole lot better when you apply it because each step and each pause in between each step has been designed over time to be very effective. And then when you start to see the results, all of a sudden people are replying, people are asking you, people are wanting to talk with you, want to understand what you do. It's almost turning cold outbound into warm Inbound. Now, are they in market? No, no, they're not. But they're a little curious. And it's up to us, and I show you in the course, how do you build off of that. Instead of us telling everybody how great we are and hoping they can understand why they need us. And instead of them arguing about why they don't need us. Because until you have active pain, Everyone's in denial. Think about going to the doctor. Okay, you kind of know you need an operation, but you're like, can I get a prescription? And the doctor's like, he has to ease you, or she has to ease you into the process. Well, let's take an x-ray. Let's see what we're working with here. Oh, can I— how about just a shot? Can I just get a shot till the next time I come in? Then he flips the x-ray up on the light and he points to something. He goes, That's what we're dealing with. That doesn't heal on its own. You have to have surgery for that. He has to build up to that. Until we build up that latent pain into active pain and properly diagnose it and get people to think about what happens if they don't have that operation, they're going to avoid it at all costs. That's why the cold pitch doesn't work. You're just igniting the denial. You're not igniting interest or curiosity. It's just denial. So check out the course, start the conversation, get the meeting. It's all at b2brevenue.com. There's an overview video in the show notes, on my YouTube channel, and on my LinkedIn profile, pretty much everywhere I am. As well as the website b2brevenue.com. Check it out if this is what you need. You know, this student, zero sales experience, but really, you know, just gobbled up this. And the people who gobble it up the fastest and the best are people who try it and get success. It has nothing to do with knowledge. It's like learning how to do a sit-up. Doesn't give you a 6-pack. You have to do the sit-ups. They're not fun at first, but then you get used to them and you start to like appreciating them. And then you start to get the connection between how you look and what you do. And so you start doing the things that make you look better. This is what we have. It's not just knowledge. It is applying it, taking feedback, polishing it up, and applying the system to your clients.