Recurring Impact = Recurring Revenue = Sales Success with Jacco van der Kooji

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions, especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or Miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how.

To book more meetings, close more deals.

Faster and and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff.

What up everybody?

Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today, I mean honestly, this man needs no introduction. In fact, I'm pretty sure I heard him a while back say like you can only introduce yourself because no one else will get it quite right. But I'm going to do it my best here because I have not in my entire career met somebody who is more energetic, more has more love and energy for this industry, but also just the scientific mind than Jocko from Winning by Design. He is someone who I have looked up to, who I view as a friend, who I view as a very, very strong mentor because he is one of the best SaaS business minds in the entire industry and leads Winning by Design, which is the best consulting company in the world when it comes to SaaS right now. He has been sharing his ideas, his concepts, his blueprints for the scientific method of selling for years. In fact, the number one recommended set of books I tell every sales leader is the Wayne by Design Blueprints for sales development, I count executives, SaaS, metrics, scaling. Like, they have put so much phenomenal content out there. And one time on stage, I said, honestly, I feel like these are a competitive advantage. And I almost feel bad telling people about them because they're so, so good. Right. And so Jucko has cracked the code on the true science of not just sales, but scaling companies for massive success. And so we're gonna cover as much as we possibly can on this episode today. Jocko, I'm incredibly grateful to have you and just grateful for who you are. Welcome to.

Well, you know, what do I do after that, Katie?

Just. Just smile. Just smiling.

Okay. Okay. Let's bring it back down to normal level, right?

Let's see. I don't know if we can after that. That's one of my jams right there. So we'll. We'll have to go back to that one to end it. So, Jogo, my man, this is going to be fun because, you know, we've had many of conversations privately. We've done one publicly. And so we're going to dive into some of this here. And I want to get right into kind of just the initial concept of this bow tie, right? Like when you talk about the sales bow tie, because most times in sales, everyone talks funnels. You introduced this concept of the bow tie in sales and SaaS. What does that mean? And why does it completely trounce the funnel?

Yes. Well, thank you all for listening to us to KD and I right here as we are jamming. Look, when you look at the funnel, what a funnel does, it brings things in from the top to the bottom, right? And my wife once said to me is like when you put people in a funnel and you put quotas on it so people can hunt them down, you put bogeys on their head. Being called customers before you know, is no wonder that customers run away with you if you think of people like that. And so one of the first things I wanted to do is no longer have that funnel perspective. That warmongering terminology where we're talk targets and we're talking about minefield analysis and stuff like that. I feel like what we. What we think, the way we think, the way we speak, the way we write things down is ultimately who we become. And therefore, we should be very, very cautious about using too many analogies that. That. That don't apply. Before I even start, I'll give an example. What is, you know, when we think about, you know, like. Like sales, what other, you know, when we draw analogies to that. What, where do we pull our analogies from? Kevin, do you know, you know, what are the world's other worlds that we pull our analogies from?

You know, so there's definitely war analogies. There's a lot of sports analogies, right? Like, you know, hitting, you know, hunting. So I guess hunter is like, I don't know what category that falls into, but like, you know, it's almost like a prime, a lot of primal language, I feel that's right.

And so you kind of like have three tiers of going bad, right? First, not, not going bad, but three tiers of taking a direction. Think about the first tier. The first tier were using a sports analogy. Hitting a ball at the park, you know, like home plate, first base and stuff like that, right? And which is, you know, like second tier that we go to is war terminology, minefield analysis, bomb dropping, you know, like killing it on a call. And then the third one is very violent rape. I felt raped. I was held over a barrel. Right? So those are like three tiers of like words and how you go back and often you can determine that. Now I can say we can do better than that. I can say like, hey, what, what are the better ways of describing it? Now when you look at these analogies, they actually don't really apply, you know, third one for sure now, but the, the first two when. Often when we look at sports in sports, and having been a former athlete in sports, you primarily, you know, perform 10% of the time and you practice 90% of the time. And I'm being kind on the 90. It could easily be 99 of the time. Right? You see a lot of practice and very little gamesmanship games. If you see in obviously in war, I would love to see that. It is like hardly any application, but it's all practice. It's over the top. Perfection, perfection, perfection. Drill, drill, drill. And so although there is relevance to that, you know, like if we want to live in a world like that and if you would treat sales like that, then we also have to do all the training and all the. And so on and so forth. But we don't live in a world like that. We live in a world where that's almost always game, game, game with a very little amount of practice. I believe that we in marketing, sales and customer success. If I look at sales, I believe that we are recreating a new category for the future. A category where you don't need university level degrees, where you don't need four years sitting in school hammering. It's eminent. I'm not against it. I'm saying in our current world that will not be the best. Maybe we can create in sales a new world with a new terminology and a new way of thinking that will be the gold standard for future generations to come. That is what I like to believe. And obviously you and I have had many conversations about what form and shape that would take place. The funnel that we speak about is one of those old representations, those old signals where you know, like it's like, yeah, to me it's like a dog whistle on something. Like it's like, yeah. Like immediately when I see it I go like, okay, here we go again. And the out. The outcome of that, primarily a maniacal focus on closing deals. That's the outcome of a funnel, like maniacal focus on closing deals. And I felt we've moved on from that. It was great. It has helped us. It's time to move on.

And so then talk to us then how it turned into that bow tie. Right. So the first half of the bow tie kind of can look like a funnel on its side, but then what you've talked about is that how then it expands on the second side. That's what makes it the bow tie. And to your earlier point, right, Funnel is so much about getting people out where what I love about the concept of the bow tie is also what are you getting out of the people you've gotten in? Right. How is that kind of growing? So what's the second half of that bow tie?

Yeah, and so I'll put it up here right beside me. And so what you'll see, the key to understanding is that the, that the deal does not close is not won by the time that a client commits to it. Now, while we refer to that middle point of a bow tie, the end of the first part of the journey is a mutual commitment of both the customer and the seller, both of them agreeing to move forward. Now, historically, you know, companies would make a profit on an upfront one year payment or upfront three, five year payment with annual support contracts following. And so they would make all the profit today. That, as we all know, is no longer the case with recurring revenue. It takes on average, if you look at the top 40 SaaS companies, it takes on average 21 months for them to make a profit out of a deal. That means we need a renewal of the deal. Whether you're on an annual contract or a monthly contract, you are going to need a renewal. And that brings up an idea and a thought that smarter people than I ever was came up with. And that's the idea of first principles. First principles. I like it. And in this case I use a sports analogy with my fans, the Golden State warriors, knowing what kind of basketball fan you are, Katie. And so but the Golden State warriors changed the game the moment in time. They moved from the two point game perspective where the tallest players that are guarding the basket in generally win the most physical, tall players. And they said, hey, we're going to move that perimeter out to a three point shot. Simply why? Because the mathematics behind the three point line started to favor the mathematics of the two point line. And as a result all you know, everybody in the league had to change the gameplay till today that we even see last night game was once again lost on a three point shot. The first principles of the game changed. Now we see this in all around us and so too do we see this in our business. The first principles, Kevin, of our business have changed. No longer is they who win the most deals win. No, that is no longer growth. It is those who establish recurring revenue. That's where growth come from. Recurring revenue. Recurring revenue. And the simple principle of recurring revenue is you need to deliver recurring impact. If you don't deliver what your customer want, you know what, you're not going to get that revenue. So recurring revenue is the result of recurring impact. The right side of the bow tie is all about delivering impact to your customer.

And so let's talk about what needs to change on the sales side to actually not only deliver that recurring impact, but like kind of set the stage for that. Because so many salespeople are, it's like, okay, hey, I won, I won, here you go. Right? And they pass it off and they just move to the next one. And like they're not getting that mutual commitment. They're not always getting the actual goals those people are looking for. So how does sales need to change a bit to actually set up for this recurring impact?

Now what you need to know, if I don't give you a solution that delivers you recurring impact, what's going to happen? Kevin?

Going to leave, going to churn, Going to go somewhere else?

You're going to go somewhere else. So what we want to make sure, we want to make sure that the impact is delivered. Now what does that mean for the sales function? What do I need to do there?

So I guess one, you need to know what impact means to the customer.

It's not that hard, right?

Like what is the impact they're looking for? And then sell accordingly.

Okay. And then so what, what the sales professional need to do is really need to figure out what is the impact and does that match up to what we do? Because if it doesn't, it's got to churn. Now, there are occasions that clients start to learn what the different kind of impact is. But that's as simple as this. What is the impact? Now, the client may know it already or may not know it. And that is the difference because between consultative selling and provocative selling. Consultative selling, the client is already knowing what they want. They already are educated and you help them think it through. You ask a few questions. Provocative means that, hey, I actually already know the situation we're in, but they don't know it yet.

Right?

You know, like, and so what you'll see is that one is consultative, one is provocative. And you know, like, often we are taught that these techniques are, you know, like either you are a consultative salesperson or provocative salesperson. Truth be told, over the years I find that you, in a regular conversation, you hop between them like in a matter of minutes, you know, like, you ask a few questions and then you provoke. You know, like, you may even pitch towards three minutes as later and be a real, you know, like a pitch on a specific feature. That's all perfectly fine. It's just in context of what's happening. There is no like a one size fit all.

And I think that's one of the things that I've loved about kind of your content and what you put out there is in a lot of places it's very, it's like methodology agnostic. It's like, look, these are the principles, these are the concepts. If you want to apply it in this way. If you want to apply it this way. But they're kind of almost universal in a lot of different ways. Right. Whereas a lot of companies get stuck, I'm a challenger. We do medic, we do med pick, we do bant, we do like all these different things. But then they don't realize how they can be applied. That only represents a very small stage of the sales process because you all have kind of rolled out this idea of spiced as a term, but that it overlays all the different kind of qualification or funnel metrics we've added in the past. So could you walk us through spiced, but also how it works with things doesn't kick things out.

So yeah, like, and you help me out here, think and pick one of the methodologies. Right? So I'm having an AS sales development rep and SDR qualify a deal. Which methodology Am I using? Pick one of them.

Banned band.

Okay. Then I'm gonna hand it off to a sales professional. What is methodology are they using?

They're probably using Matic, Medic.

Okay, now does Band and Matic, do they map to each other?

They do not.

They do not. Okay. Now in my medic, I'm gonna, I'm in this case, I'm gonna ask clients a few questions. I'm using a question based sales technique. Which technique am I using?

Challenger.

Challenger. Or I can use Spin, or I can use any one of them. Right. And so I'm using. So now what I have, I talked about, hey, I have consultative technique, I have a provocative sales technique called Challenger. I have Medic and I have Band. Okay, so I have already four different methodologies. All these acronym ladders don't match up. Map up to each other. And so we would say is like, well, how would you map those if, if we don't even map these things together, how in the world is a customer going to feel? And oh, by the way, is any one of these talking specifically about impact?

No, I think they supposedly. Right, supposedly the I in medicine is there, but it's not, it's not most of them. It's one little letter in the whole process and it's like the last letter.

That's right. And then, no, you know, also what you'll see in many cases it, you know, they refer primarily to the impact as a form of a value proposal, right. That they want to say like, hey, what's the value I'm selling? They use it in order to price against, not in order to, you know, like. And so what we'll see is now that doesn't make them wrong. It doesn't make Matic at all wrong. No, Matic is a great specialized tool. Think of yourself as a carpenter. You have a whole toolbox, right? You know, like you just don't have a hammer and hammer everything. You have all kinds of tools. A matic like that could be a chisel, could be whatever you wanted to see it at. But the combination of all the tools is what makes it work. Now in this case, I need to be as an operator, I need to make sure that all these things interact with each other. Now for that, what we are simply creating is a methodology programmer interface where we program and where we are able to interconnect those two. All we use for that and we do that within the back of our mind is it's got to be focused in a new and modern world where recurring revenue is A result of recurring impact. If we do that, and now we connect and plug Medic in and now we say, hey, Medic is great. That by itself is not a problem. But now overlay, the impact based framework and band is fine, but overlay and start thinking about how we would do impact and so on. And when you overlay everything, you can connect everything. And for me, that is the key. And the simplest form is like handing it off to a customer success rep for the onboarding process.

Right, interesting. And so when you talk about that overlay, right, how can companies start to move towards that? Because it really does feel in so many places like people feel they have to choose, right? They're like either everything's kind of either or versus that true blend and that overlay. Like if, you know, a VP's listening, this goes, okay, I'm liking this. I like where this is going. How do they start to overlay impact into each of those stages?

Okay, I'm going to talk to you about something tricky.

Let me clear my throat and it's tricky. Like what? Like Jesus, dude, these are all my chance right now.

Oh, you. I got more for you. Okay, okay, that's what I said. What do I got on the board today when we start now? Here, here's what I want to talk about. Think about the following. There is a third shift that is happening, you know, like the shift is away from the funnel, the shift is towards impact. And the third shift that, that, that, that is happening is. We have historically deployed managers to manage. Oh my God, did he just say that? Yes, we deployed managers to become managers.

Oh no.

Oh no, no, no, no, no. Okay, here's why this is wrong. Okay. So many people, when they become managers, their thought is, I love to manage because I love to manage my people and help them get better in generally, whenever you have grown up, in any world, whether it's the prefect in school, whatever you did when you moved up and stood out from everybody, your general idea was to pass on your knowledge and to help other people succeed as well. That's generally the nature. We even call that leader. Right? But that's not what we do as managers. As managers, we have become to criticize, volumetric measure and tell people they need to work harder. It's more like cracking the whip, you know, like, it's more like back to the factory, standing with a desk that overlooks everybody and so we can physically call out who's not working. It's like looking at people's slack light and see if they're green. Or red, whether they're at the desk or not. That's managing nowadays. That's not what we became managers for. And so many cases. And I remember, you know, like, a client of mine named Andrew who said, you know, when I became a manager, I became it to help people get better. But every day that I become a manager, there's new forecasts I need to deliver, there's a new number I need to do, there's a new report I need to write. There's new. This new dot. And it's taking away from me, coaching my folks. And this is where we're at today. We are today at that. The manager's responsibility primarily is that towards management and not towards their people. As a result, what we see. And that's, you know, applying, if we see even medicine. Matic is being used not to help people sell in the field. Matic is used wrongfully. I'm not, you know, I'm not. This is not Matic's problem in itself. Matic is used as a deal inspection tool to verify if people have done their job. It's a micromanagement tool. And as a result, people will start hating Matic. Not the problem of Matic people. It's just a problem of how you apply the hammer. If you apply the hammer and start people hitting people on the fingers instead of on the nails, they're going to pull their hand back and say, I don't want to work with that any longer. What we need are. And as a result, what has happened because of this? People in the field don't know exactly what to do. How do I, you know, like D and letter Decision process. Oh, determine the decision process. Yes, but how? What is the framework for that? Give me an example, like another example that is unique every time. Give me a standard framework I can think about what we call a blueprint. None of that existed in the past. And if things don't exist and they don't have them, guess what these people are going to do in the field?

Whatever they think is right, they think is right.

They're gonna hack it, right? And then what we see is, oh, my gosh, Jerry is a scrapper. Look how good he does. He figures it out all by himself. Wonderful. Yeah, that's wonderful if you try to get to $1 million. It's not wonderful if you're trying to get to $100 million, because scrappers are great in order to cut the path. They're unique. We need them. But all this sales hacking essentially results in that everybody in the field has their own way of doing things. Those are called habits. And habits are starting to form a process now. Think about that. We have the wrong funnel. We're not really focused. We're teaching people to close maniacally, focus on closing deal. And we give them war sports, like terminology. And he says, go get them. And then we throw money at them if they do it right. Voila, ladies and gentlemen, voila. Which.

Is a great recipe.

This is going to work out great, people. Not to worry. We're going to work out great. SAS changed all that. And thankfully, SaaS did not only change the model, it also changed the cultural nature of the salespeople who were selling it and the marketing people. And so we have a, you know, you and I and the folks listening have. Have a chance here to start anew, leverage the knowledge that we have gained, and build a new world for ourselves.

And I think that's huge. I even talk about this with my managers a lot, is. There's a lot of, you know, the old way of managing is telling people what to do. Here's what to do. What is more revenue. We need more revenue. Y' all go get it. And then people thought they were getting really philosophical. It's like, but you gotta tie the why to it. Okay, here's what we need. More revenue. Why? Because we're going to go public or because we have to report to the board. But then this mysterious thing at the bottom called the how always just gets overlooked. It's like, well, how are we actually going to get more revenue? What are the baseline things underneath the type of customers we're going after, the metrics leading to it and going through all that. And I think that I still remember, I think this was Rainmaker, God, maybe seven years ago now, the first one, and you were on st, and you started, like, walking through the different metrics at each part and how they tie back to, like, a strategy? I was like, this. This.

Yes.

I'm, like, looking around at everybody. I'm like, why are you not crying from joy right now? Because I'm crying from joy. This gets me excited. And so when you think about managers coaching and working with the how, How. Right. This is the next question. How do they walk that line between, you know, working on a how, but also that micro managing this, where it does come across as, like, you know, my way or the highway. Right. Like, how can they kind of blend that together?

So it comes from a very basic. Yeah, like, research. And it's. It's currently used a lot. And I encourage people to listen, to look this up. It's, it's, it's research about human failability by James Reason of the, of the. I forgot the university. It will pop up in a second. But James Reason has done a research on human fallibility. And what he pointed out is that in many cases, when we see human failure, it is not the result of humans failing. It's the result of systemic errors that have caused the human to fail. Then this has resulted in what they call the Swiss cheese model, where you say, like, hey, there's a number of things that need to go wrong before things really go wrong. It's like, like three mistakes in a row will really lead to a mistake. It's not one. Right? And, and we see this all around us. That constantly happen. Now, what he also says in here and what we found historically over the year test, we, we found a way how you can test yourself to see if you've been raised right. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you in the audience listening to do two things. Okay? I'm gonna ask two questions, and then I want you to answer that in your mind. Okay? If I need to double my sales, if my CEO comes to me and says, tell me what you need, but I need you to double your sales, what do you need from me? That's question number one, right? Question number two, things are going really well. Really well. What is your first action? What are you going to do more off? I want to do this when I get the money. My CEO says, oh, you've done extremely well. Here's more money. Go spend it. What, as a sales leader, do you do now, in most circumstances, when you ask this a person and when you give them some time to think about it, question number one, If I need twice, if I need to deliver twice as much revenue, I'm going to ask of my marketing department twice as many leads. And I'm going to ask of my boss, whatever, CEO, twice as many salespeople, you want twice as much, Give me twice as many leads, give me twice as many people to work on, and I can do it. Okay, give me 1.7 times as many people because we're becoming more effective. But your first gut reaction is, hey, in order to funnel, in order to get twice as much at the bottom, I need to get twice as much at the top, right? Well, that's not the case, because what we notice is that essentially since the way how revenue engines works, they propagate and there's a conversion rate, and conversion rates multiply. And when we start convert, creating conversion rates and multiplications. We essentially create an exponential curve, not a linear curve, multiple times. Now, what we can say with an exponential curve is small adjustment all across will have a disproportionate amount of impact. So as Bruce Lee once said, do you. Who do you fear? Do you fear the most? And he said, I do not fear the person who trained for 10,000 steps. I fear the person who trained for one particular kick 10,000 times. That is the concept of. And now we've all seen before this model. More leads. I need more leads. I need more leads. I need 2,000 leads, 1,000 leads. That's number one question. Number two question. If things go well, and your first response is, hey, I need to hire more people, give me more money, I'm going to hire more people. Then you essentially have in today's world, being brainwashed by your environment, which is very normal. I was part of that crew too. Very normal. You've been brainwashed in understanding, if things go right, blame the people. Sorry, if things go right, hire people, and if things go wrong, blame the people. That is essentially not the case. Human beings have an influence. When you. Early on, early on, you know, key people can make a huge difference. But once you are surpassing 5, $6 million in revenue, your systems and processes start to take over and no longer is it dependent, can it be dependent on a single person. There's simply too much growth needed in order to sustain that.

Yeah, And I think you talked about that in the science of selling, like the superstar culture, where, like, that's how a lot of companies get initially built. And so then they're always searching for these superstars. Right. And they model their quotas, their conversion rates, everything off of, like, how a superstar performs versus how normal people perform in that. Right. And I hope people caught what you were saying around, like the small changes in multiple places is what gives you the exponential. Right. The idea of putting more leads in is that linear thinking, more leads at the top, more sales at the bottom, it's linear. Versus if I could convert the leads 4% better, get my show rate up 5%, close them 5% higher, and bring the ACV up 3% all of a sudden with the same amount of leads. We talked about this even internally here we have two themes that we talk about a lot less, but better, and aim small, miss small. Aim small, miss small. Don't aim at 30 opportunities. Aim at three conversations a day. Like aim small, miss small. Right. And so then it stacked up over time. So, like, talk a little Bit more on the linear versus exponential because like that's something that I don't think people grasp enough that has huge, huge implications.

So think of the following. What is. If I have, you know, like if there's a 60 day, 90 day sales cycle of something, a platform sales or something like that, what is the premier way? What is the primary way? Sorry, what is the primary way of me communicating with the car? Which tool do I use to communicate with the customers to get them from day zero to day 60, 90 when they assign a mutual commitment?

I think mostly just email. Right? Email.

Email is one. And what else? Email is fine. Email is a great one.

And beyond email, email, phone. I know some companies do use tools for the mutual action plans or slack even. Like that's something I think is happening more often. We're getting a slack channel with the customer channel side.

So. But we know if you have different, may I ask, meetings, you have all. We have zoom sessions.

Yes.

Okay. Right now. Now. So this communication, if we go back down to it, there's essentially like three or four basic ways of communicating. Email, phone call, which is one on one calling. And meetings. Online meetings. Right. Those are the three. Now those three go across the entire cycle. May I ask how, how long was your class on emailing when you, when you became a professional? I'm certain that you went through an emailing class, what to do and how to write professional email. Or did you? I don't know. Were you? No. Oh, kd, you didn't go to email class. Oh, okay. Well, but let's forget that we have primarily meetings, right? So you must have gone through a professional meeting class then, right? You did that, right, Katie?

No. No.

Okay, so you. Okay, so here we are. The things that are most common, the fundamental basic things. This is, you know, having been raised as a boxer, this is like, you know, like I've been raised as a boxer and one of the things, as a boxer I was taught to not drop your hands. Like, you would always be in position. Like, and if you. Anytime you. When the moment class started to the moment class ended, hands up. And anytime they drop 10 push ups. Right? Yeah. This was like you could rat each other out, right? And not ratting. We could because we know, like, look, hands up, hands up. Right? That's a basic skill. But we're not teaching that in sales at all. So we essentially, somewhere along the line you get some advanced skills. But none of this is properly trained, not in context. So where do, may I ask, where would you do, where would you go? To get this knowledge. If you wanted to make yourself better, where would you go historically to get this knowledge?

Ooh, historically, where would I go? I would. Well, when I talk to other reps, right. I said like, who on the team is doing something? I'd learn, try to learn from them. You know, there's conferences like, I mean I know how I did it was books, like just reading and reading and reading on, you know, email copy and copywriting. But. But there's not a lot of great places for it out there.

And many of them are a form of fake news, right? And so you now go to sources that are non certified. And so now and as a result we're going to get cold calling techniques, cold emailing techniques. And we don't know is that in context of my marketing now what I like, I like what you did is you're going to ask to the team and so if that doesn't exist, then let the team get better. Let's test this out. Let's work together. Let's learn from each other right now. This is historically not how it worked. Because in most cases we have to understand that sales historically and fundamentally in its root still today is an individual contributor role. Comp plans have a 90% compensation approach of individual performance. The way it works is that if somebody hits quota, the numbers are set in such a way that you're essentially stealing money out of your peer's pocket. Money is allocated to the one who hits quota away from the one who's not. That means that is not incentivizing team behavior. That is essentially incentivizing, you know, like one, one person wins individual contributor compliance. The way we structure, the way we provide Presidents Club, all that individual approaches. I just want you to understand and open the eyes wide open for everybody. As a person who's been raised in the 80s and 90s way of selling, it's still the same. They're still using very much the same complaints and quota structure and region assignments. And you sit there, you go like, are you guys all. Are you kidding me? Right? Are you like, am I the only one who seeing is okay.

Next. Oh man. No. And it's true. It's funny because obviously too this might be. This actually a great segue to the next question because that's all about the next episode of where sales is is going. So I can pull that together. But what I think is so interesting is you ask people if sales has changed and people are like, well, you know, sales hasn't changed, but the buyer has, right? Because the Buyer has more access to information. The buyer has these things. It's like, well, why aren't we changing? Like, you're right. We're still doing things the same way. They didn't like us 10 years ago. They didn't like us 20 years ago. Let's keep doing the same thing, right? Oh, quota tamen's coming down. Let's keep doing the same thing. So what is that next episode? Like, you know, we've kind of talked bow tie. We've talked recurring impact. Like, what is that next episode? What is the next evolution that you see sales needing to get to? Right. It's going to take us a while to get there, but if you think about that next episode that la de da da da for sales, what's next?

It's you, the listener. It's you. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit. Yeah, I need to explain this. First things first.

Imma say all the words inside my head. I'm fired up inside of the way that things have been.

Okay? Now, first things first, we're using music. Okay? We got, like, why is it that I have to have a collared shirt? Ax cufflinks? Like, what is that image of the ideal sales professional that we see? Okay, So I want you to understand, if we're going to redefine which we are today, I mean, we're in the middle of an evolution and dependent on what your scale of time is, we're in the middle of a revolution. I'm going to point out to you the problem that is occurring and why you, the listener of this podcast, needs to step up. Okay, here's what's happening. When I was cold calling originally, I was sitting in a floor with 20 other cold callers. And when the client didn't like that I was calling them, they would hit and, you know, add us to the Do Not Call list, right? And the national registry of Do Not Call list would then recognize it and would allow us no longer to call that person. The DNC flag would be set. Right. Violation of that protocol could be in the tens of thousands of dollars. I'm talking, you know, like, it easily is a 40 to $50,000 fee or penalty for failure on that. Right? That's the value of it. Okay? Then I started emailing. Now, with emailing, you know, we have companies like Sendgrid and the like that are protecting the people from professional cold emailers and say, like, hey, again, you can raise the DNC flag in the email domain right now. Many were able to circumvent that, you know, we had email automation tools that, you know, like, created the volume of email traffic 10x100x per provider. So my, my inbox is overflowing. You know what tools like Superhuman allowed me to counteract? And now in Superhuman, I cannot only flag an individual kd, I can flag an entire domain. Okay, now if I fly an integral entire domain in ukd, work at Sugar Pop and I, you know, like, sorry, what do you work again?

Patient Pop. It was close. Sugar Pop's close. I like Sugar Pop. That works.

You are the patient pop and that Patient Pop, right? If I block that and you go to the next job, you don't carry that weight with you. Oh, but now we bring in LinkedIn. Now we're going to reach out to LinkedIn. Now when we reach out to LinkedIn, you as an individual sales rep are calling on that customer. And guess what? When you get, you know, like blocked flagged, it is no longer the company who takes the hit on that, who previously had to pay $40,000 in fines on for a single violation. No, it's you. It's you who takes the hit on it. Of course you can circumvent that. And I know what you're saying, Jocko. I have a, you know, my company pays for my LinkedIn subscription to sales Navigator. Yes, but you, you know, how many times a day do you know whether you're in Sales Navigator or the regular LinkedIn version, how many of you do get it paid and how many of you are actually using it to the full extent that is needed? Have you said everything? If you look out at that, the outcome is 9 out of 10 sales professionals are using LinkedIn to do forms of cold calling. They get a hit on their career. When they move to the next job, they do it again. They do it again. You do it three times, folks, it's costing you a career in sales. That's the problem. And nobody, this is, this tells you this. You the individual in the world of sales that makes a difference. We called it the individual contributor. We want to change. We have to, we have, you know, what is that? You know, we have to play the odds on the cast. We have to change the odds. We have to start card counting and we have to say it's okay. Now you see this behavior, Katie, already happening all around us? Okay, why I told you about the util. Superhuman. Now, Superhuman does not get paid for by my company. I pay for it myself. Many of you will start to, are starting to see that you're actually buying your own tool stack. You no longer are reliant exclusively of the tool stack of the company. So what you'll see is the evolution has already started. I want to just depict to you what the next chapter looks like in the future. I believe that sales, marketing and customer success functions are ideal jobs to be uberized. Our ideal jobs where you go in, look, at which point in time are you an employee versus a consultant? If you work four years for a company, I. Yeah, let's call it. Call you an employee. Three years employee, two years. What do you mean two years? Well, after two years, you're going to get fired. Well, SDRs and AES are getting fired, are changing their routes. In nine to 18 months, folks, you already are a consultant. They just give you the fakeness of a contract to make you believe that you're an employee. But essentially you're already a consultant. So you might as well start acting and operating and behaving like it. And when you do that, folks, as you know, Katie, Van Life all the way. It's Van Life. It's like, okay, now I'm going to design the way that I'm going to buy the tools I want, I'm going to live the life I want. I'm going to train myself. If you want me to be an individual contributor, then I'll be an individual contributor for you. Here's the things I need to be successful. And then in that approach, we start thinking differently. We no longer start to listen to these fake, you know, like whatever they are on stage, wherever we call them, we look at math, science, we understand what is happening and we simply calculate things and see if they make sense or not. And sometimes in certain circumstances, a few. But in certain cold calling and cold emailing, absolutely makes sense. Most of the cases it will backfire on you and give you back results. Always saying is in which situation are you calculate it. Make sure you know what you're in for before you are trusting somebody else's opinion whose knowledge themselves is a decade old and therefore no longer applicable in today's world.

Yes. And this man, we can try this all the way back to how he opened this y' all is. That's where formulas and blueprints come in. Because they're repeatable, they're frameworks. Yes, you have to tweak them. Yes, you have to make them differently for the situation, the company, the Persona, the prospect. But they're repeatable. That's what allows you to go and pick the companies you want to work for and Once you have those skill sets and frameworks, right. As a consultant, you can go, yeah, you don't have to pay me a base. I know how to do this. I'll go get you, I'll go. Pay me what I bring in or pay me for what generates from it because I have the skill set there. And like those formulas are everything versus having to relearn every single time a new way to sell.

Yeah. And you know, again, like, like imagine what we can now do. We can now live where we want to live. We can work where we want to work. And no longer is wealth have to be located in specifically the business of SaaS in, you know, Boston slash New York and West Coast. Right. You know, like with Internet connectivity, you know, across the U.S. you know, like we can bring that same wealth into all. I mean there's just a better future for when you start, you know, like showing where this is. You don't need a university degree, you don't need to have loans you can start thinking about. I'm not against university degree. I think that it's, you know, like if, you know, if you're trained in a specific field, you may very well apply that to the area of field that you're selling into. Right, that, that works very well. I'm just saying is it's not a requirement. There's other ways of learning that that suits the current market better. And I believe this is where we're, we're growing to. And look, I was raised in a culture that was very alpha, like and I may rather say I was doing telco sales which is very alpha mal and has very bad, you know, like it's very. All the things bad that you can see are, were happening in those days in the 90s. And I wasn't proud of it. I was part of it. I wasn't proud of it. And so it was not created on my watch. But as I was partaking in that, you know, like I decided this, this is not right. You know, and to see people on stage talk about this and, and, and then give these great, you know, like, like movie scene talks and stuff like that, you know, folks, it wasn't right. It. And you know what, I'll tell you the following and we run into this a lot and this is a painful topic. So, you know, like recently one of my most valued members of staff came to a thing and we were just talking about somebody and she said to me, well, that's the reason why I bring my male colleague's name to a meeting with Me, because otherwise the team on the other side won't listen to me.

What?

Is that really what she said? She said she needed to bring in he to the team because the buyer, who is all male, otherwise, don't respect her opinion. That's what she's saying. Now you know what the other side is saying? I don't trust the organization. I don't trust them. I don't know who they are, you know, and I is, are F bombs allowed on this?

Absolutely. They are. Absolutely.

Okay. You know what these are saying? What they say, what they don't say they trust you. They say you don't look like me. That's the reason why I don't trust you. And then we can pick whatever you want to do, whatever you're not uncomfortable with. We are using trust and the word trust as a discrimination tool. That's what it really is. In the end, sales professionals are here to solve a problem. You should be valued on your ability to understand the problem, your control and knowledge of the domain, and to fit a solution in that. That's it. And whether you have tattoos that are coming out underneath your blouse, whatever it is, color of your eyes, length of your hair, I don't care. It is not meaningful. That's the world that I was raised in. That's the world that we, all of us listening, have to end. And I don't think we're going to end that by continuing to talk about funnel. We need more leads, hire salespeople, put them on quota, talk war terminology in the process. Right. That's not how we're going to change this. We need to understand that among all the roles, this role is a pivotal role and can be one of the first roles in the world that is built towards a new world with a newer and brighter. And that is what excites me every day.

And I love that I can tell a personal story there. That's why I got into inside Sales, because I had some of those experiences in the field over the phone. I can be anybody. I can be anybody. My name's Kevin Dorsey. You know nothing about me. I can change my voice. I could be whoever I wanted after having some of those experiences. And those are things that, you know, as we continue to go, that I do hope change as the buyer changes. As you put out this and people listen and they say, this isn't right. We're not going to behave that way anymore as we continue this evolution and revolution. Because I love that term as well, depending on where we are in the timeline. So I Got one last question for you here. Go for it, Jaco. Right. And it's kind of the perfect way to end this, right? Because you started talking about life design a little bit. Right. And actually, funny story for people listening at one point. This was a few weeks ago. Jocko and I are texting each other. He's in his van, I'm in Costa Rica. We're both working at the same time, but wherever we needed to be to work. Right. And being able to start to design that lifestyle. The name of this podcast is Live Better Sell Better. Because I have this weird idea that if we lived better, if we did the things that brought us More Energy Besides 40 Red Bulls, if we did the things that brought us more joy and fulfillment, that the sales also improved from it, what would be your live better advice to people listening?

Okay, there's a number of small things, so bring them up. Be yourself. Number one thing, be yourself. Like, you know, like, some of you may not like the music I play, you know, like. And that is that. Be yourself.

Don't like.

This may not be the podcast that you wanted. Right. I love playing music. It changed my mood. I already had music going when Katie and I started this morning. Like, I'm already up. Let's play the music. Let's go. Like, whatever gets you going. But be yourself and then be okay, obviously, with other people not being like that. Hey, that's fine, too. That's perfectly fine. So that's important for me. Second one is that, you know, like, mansana inco porosano is a Latin saying that say, a sound mind and a sound body. Make sure that, you know, like, one of the common advices you always hear is that people say as they get older, I wish I took better care of my teeth when I was younger. And that applies actually to health. You can expand that to health. So that's very important one for me. The most important one, you know, like, as it relates to, like. Like. Like work. I. I can't separate work and life.

Yeah.

And. And, you know, people say, you need to do this or do that. You know, you need to have a life. You need to have this. For me, it's the same thing. And, you know, like. And it doesn't mean that there are days that I work two hours and there are days that I'm up at 2am and I work 16 hours. Right. You know, like, I. Yeah. So. Yeah. So I find these situations, you know, like, that we are living in are no longer challenging for me because I have nowadays the financial power in order to do what I want to do. I'm obviously very conscious that some. Yeah. Many of you have to rent to pay and your kids to feed and. And responsibilities to adhere to. I can tell you this, and this is the biggest one that I still live in. Up to $100,000 more money is great, but. Right. Somewhere between 100 and 150. I can tell it to you now. You will tell it adjusted with inflation rate later on after 150. It is not how much you make, it's how much you get to keep. And that we focus so much on making it that we often forget what it takes to keep. So those are a few things. Take care of your teeth, you know, like, you know, get to 150 as fast as you can and then beyond 150, start thinking about how you get to keep what actually you make a few things and make sure, you know, like for me is realize be true to yourself. And that means that I cannot separate work and life and that sometimes it's bad and sometimes it's good.

And I love that because even the term work life balance I really don't like because it makes it sound like they're on different ends of a teeter totter. Like it's a circle. It's not on other ends. Like it's work life integration. Like, it's really hard to be great at work if home life is awful. And it's really hard to be great at home if work life is awful. Like it all goes together. And I think that integration is what people miss. It can be. And you can't have fun doing what you do. Like you can have fun doing this, especially when you allow yourself to be yourself. When you try to be someone you're not, it's almost impossible to really enjoy what you're doing.

Now I'll ask you as a person, but I ask all of you listening. What is the key takeaway? Think about it for a brief second. What is the key takeaway? And then, Katie, up to you, when you picked up. What is the moment in time that, you know, like a light bulb went off or something got re triggered and you go like, dang it, what was the thing? What's the moment?

The human fallibility session. Right. I really loved the concept of it's not one mistake, it's three mistakes that led to the mistake that three to the. I really like. It has me thinking where the places that there's small mistakes leading to what would be caused. Like, oh, this went wrong. Isn't probably what Went wrong. Something went wrong down the line somewhere. And so that was the one that jumped at me the most.

Great. I think that's a great key takeaway. I think all of you will figure out which one you have. And all I'm asking you is whatever your key takes, takeaway is take an action on that. And if you do that with every meeting, whether it is, you know, like whether you are participating as a listener, whether you're participating. But just one key thing. Oh you know, like let me look up that book by James Reason or this is a PDF actually James Reason on human fallibility. Don't go for the paid version. There's a free version out there available online. I'm certain that all of us can search for it and have lots of fun doing that. Human fallibility. James Reason and you know like. And you. Yeah, again, don't take the, don't use the paid version. There's a, there's a free one that shows up in the top 10 result which is of him directly. Now that's the key takeaway. Take an action on something you picked up on and it doesn't always have to be groundbreaking. Could be simple, you know, simple thing. But when you do that you'll eventually you'll start stacking those up and that starts to compound very quickly.

And speaking of free content, where can people go get more of you and what you put out there? Cause I'm telling you what he puts out for free, like they're like they're university level style courses. Like YouTube videos are an hour long and I'm sitting there on a Friday night with a bourbon just like loving every second. Where can they go get more of you? Your team winning by design. Like how can they get more of what you're putting out there?

Yes, well, obviously feel free to reach out via LinkedIn. JockoJaco Vandercoy V A N D Feel free please make a mention in a quote, in a quote like hey, listen to you because otherwise sort of then I know to accept and then. So that's one second. YouTube. YouTube.com WinningByDesign Hundreds of videos, sometimes long, sometimes short. But you know, whatever I feel is a topic. But it's more from. Yeah like from a perspective, from a writer perspective. And then we have a website where you can sign up and sign up for the free model and get all your, your. Yeah, start applying it yourself. And that is called the science of revenue with the word the starting it. The science of revenue dot com. If you go there, you see all the models and blueprints and stuff like that. You can sign up, you get them all for free. Now, what I would love for you, kd, is, you know, like, you know, like, you lead such. Yeah. You lead such a great group. You have such a community that surrounds you. How it was hard for us to get together. Right?

Yeah.

I want to let you know why it is important that you do what you do and why it is important that people think about this. The story here is as follows. There are too many people with voices that shouldn't be amplified. And so the noise level is extremely noisy. And you know, like any people, any person that wakes up and needs to report to the morning that they just had an epiphany overnight, that is not necessarily a great side of content. Right. Maybe it's great side of entertainment. Today we do not differentiate very much between, you know, like, what is like, hey, great entertainment and great knowledge I need in order to do my job. And so for you, for me, you are one of the certified people that I go like. Yes. Hits the nail on the head. Yes. Makes the right emotional statement and the right lead. And so for those of you listening, be cautious to what you hear. Many of I've been asked many times, you know, like, who is the one person that influenced you most? What is the one book that you read? Folks, I don't read books because most of the books are propaganda. Knowing how books are written and having written many of them, I can tell you the model behind books is, hey, get one topic, milk it out for a minimum of 140 pages, up to about 250 pages. Manipulate the front, the font size. There's a very specific formula that, that, that, that publishers want. You step through that. That's a book. Most of it is propaganda. And the moment in time, you publish it. You as a book writer working in sales for the publisher, you have to buy a certain amount, you have to commit a certain event. You have to sell it. I mean, it's like, so when people say, this morning I saw it again, is like, people who do not read books are like, should not be in charge of SaaS, companies. It should not be leaders of companies. Folks, most of the books are propaganda. Reading is important. Propaganda is not. Second, when you listen to people pick the right people, you are becoming those who you are listening to. The voices that you're listening to will form and shape your ideas. Make sure that that is what you want to be. And I can absolutely stand for KD down here and understand that his intent, his mindset, his approach is all done with pure. Based on very pure ethical principles to help you become a better person. Make sure that you have all of those people in the bucket to make sure when you listen to that, that that's a signal channel, obviously, for entertainment, use a noise channel. But separate these two folks. Otherwise, we start to listen to certain voices who are noise, and we think that their entertainment actually is value, and it is not. So to me, there is not a single book, there is not a single voice that I listen to. I listen to a lot, and I listen to a lot of people in the field is where my best resources are coming from. And I listen to persons like you, Katie. I listen to you. It's my preferred channel where I get this.

Thank you. I mean, can't even express how much that means to me and everyone listening. Jocko's who I listen to Jocko. And I hope y' all catch that, too, because I'm still learning. And if I'm still learning, y' all need to still be learning. And I know Jocko's still learning. He says he's not reading. There's some books I know he's reading right now that are really good. That we'll get into that on another conversation. But, my man, thank you so much. This was amazing. I appreciate you. I'm grateful for you. Thank you.

Okay, I have a beat for us. You ready?

Yes.

I'm gonna make it because you said it was your favorite song. So let's. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for listening to us.

Hell, yeah. And we are out.