0285: Sales Driven Agency: Helping Founders Become Predictable, Sustainable and Scalable with Joey Gilkey

Hi, this is Joey Gilke with salesdrivenagency.com and you are listening to EA Interviews.

EA Interviews, episode 285, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week, join Mario Ficcini for today's expert authority effect interview sales. You probably want more for your company. I know I do. And it's something that me and my team are always, always thinking about. And I am super excited to have CEO Joey Gilke here today to be talking about sales in his company, Sales Driven Agency, because he has done some impressive things and he's going to be sharing them with you right after we thank our sponsor. Every business needs a book, including yours. Visit freebusinessbook publishingcourse.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's free businessbook publishingcourse.com Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Joey Gilke. Joey, how are you feeling today?

What's up, Mario, man? Appreciate you having me on. Feeling pretty, pretty honored and humbled to share the stage with you here.

Well, I appreciate that. I always appreciate the kind words, but the pleasure and honor is mine because I was looking at your one sheet and I don't want to read off of it, but holy smokes, you've done so many good things working with such big companies and increasing the sales and growing those companies. So let's just dive in and talk about that. Sales are vital. They're lifeblood for any company. What would you say most people are doing wrong with them and what can they improve?

Yeah, I think honestly, man, there again. And there's B2C, there's B2B, there's high ticket, there's low ticket, there's all these different sales that we can make, right? I operate mostly in the high ticket B2B. However, a lot of principles we talk about are very applicable across the spectrum. The biggest mistake, honestly, is just not knowing who you serve. You know, there's no shiny object there. There's no software tool that helps you get there. It's, it's who is your tribe, who is it that you can serve better than anyone else? Because when you can really nail down on the dream client, understanding who it is you serve, you understand their pain points, their goals, et cetera. The opportunities for sales open up tremendously. And you can have the shiny objects, you can have the tactics and the strategies. But if you're not talking to your audience how they want to be talked to, if you're not solving the pain points that they have, if you're not helping them achieve the goals that they want to achieve, the tactics, the strategies, all those things kind of fall to the wayside. They're not going to be effective. So the biggest thing is just not knowing who it is you serve.

How many companies do you deal with that really don't know that or don't have it dialed it into the point where it's very little work for you? Do you have to walk everyone through some sort of an exercise to dial it in or do most of the companies come to you already knowing who they're serving?

Yeah, I would say that, you know, we have fairly aggressive qualification process internally in terms of who we actually even allow to get in the room with us, you know, and that I think that's there's a level of ego and arrogance there. Right. Of do they even deserve to be in the room? But there is some qualification process for us of.

Certain things that we're looking for in an ideal customer. Right. We're dialed into who our tribe is and part of our tribe is someone who does either have an aggressive desire to dial it in and they want help with that, or they already have it dialed in and we can just take off from day one. And so I would say for us, 80%, 70% have it fairly dialed in on at least a general idea of who they want to serve and they want to kind of turn that up to level 10 and we can help them with that before we start getting into all the sales operations and helping hire, train and manage salespeople and all that fun stuff. That's number one. If they don't have that foundation, they're just not likely going to be a good fit. And the other 30% who don't have it figured out, they're aggressively trying to figure it out and they're, they're asking for help and say, hey, we get that. We see the value in really niching down. We see the value and really defining who it is. We just don't know how to practically do that, but we're willing to let you captain that with us to help us get there.

I want to dive deeper in this part and I, I'm going to ask you about PCM next, but this is so vitally important because I think a lot of people like you're saying they might have an idea, but it's just not super crystal concrete. And you know, I've heard of scenarios too where you do exercises, you do this, you dial it and then 612 months, something changes, the market changes, the business changes. And you have to readjust because now you're also going after a new audience or super refining the one you existingly have. So if someone's out there right now in expert authority world going, hey, we're doing, we're doing good business, we have an idea, do you have some steps or a checklist or, you know, what are the things you look for when you're going, here's how we're going to take you from that 70, 80% to 90, 95. How do you refine it to that point?

Yeah, so there's really two main categories when I'm, when we're making an ideal customer profile or a dream customer profile, depending on how small of a niche you're willing to go after. You're, you know, I look at first three things before we talk about those two categories. The three things I look for is who are the folks who I have? So if you could draw three circles and in the circles I want you to think about who have I enjoyed working with the most? What were the most profitable projects I've ever done or projects or deals or whatever. And third, who have I solved the biggest problems for and had the best results for? And typically, if there's an overlap in all three of those, that's probably someone that's operating in your ideal dream markets you want to go for. So that's a, that's a very brief exercise. You can just scratch that on a piece of paper once you actually get a little bit closer to who that is. Some of the exercises we're looking for is defining the demographics, which are the things that we always typically want to define. Right. The location, the size, the revenue, the titles of the decision makers. How many types of decision makers are there? But then there's the psychographics, which a lot of that's not the stuff that, that's just plastered on a website. It's not plastered on LinkedIn necessarily. That takes deeper research. That takes really knowing your tribe, asking the hard questions. The psychographics are the internal things. Why do they make their decisions? What does their day to day look like? What pain points come with that day to day? What are the goals that they really want to achieve based on where they're at as a demographic? Right. So if they're at a certain size, certain location, certain whatever on the demographic side, what is, what goals typically come with that or what pain points typically arise from that? Other things are like, what content are these people consuming, what channels are they Present on all these things are going to really play into your sales process, right? If you know what they're consuming, their pain points, their goals, what channels they're operating on. You now have a pretty solid.

You have the bones of a solid campaign already because you know where they're spending time. Okay, well, that's where you're going to go find them. You know the content they're consuming. Okay. That's the content we need to create. You know, their pain points and goals. Well, that's how you provide your solution to either solve that pain point or help them achieve that goal. And so when you can start nailing that down and asking the hard questions, not just demographically, but also psychographically, if you don't know that, ask them. It's really easy to bribe 20 people in your ideal market to ask them questions. People are a lot more willing to give you information than you probably think.

What would you say is a good way to, let's say, entice them.

To do that? Do you offer them, hey, a gift card? Do you say, hey, take this survey just because. Do you say, we'll give you just straight up cash? What have you found works best to get these.

So I'll. We do a. I mean, we've done a wide array of things. So when I created my, what I would consider my greatest success in terms of me starting a business that was super profitable the for us to create, I knew who, who I wanted to serve, right? That was, that was pretty nailed down. But in terms of knowing exactly what they needed, I knew the lane in which, you know, that they probably needed, but I didn't know the specifics and how I was going to create the offer on that. And so what I did was I built a list of a hundred and that list of 100, pretty simply put, I said, hey, like, I know you probably get asked to go out for coffee all the time. I know you probably get asked to do go out for drinks all the time. Obviously, we don't live in the same city, Right. And so what I'd love to do is I'm going to send you a coffee. And so if they don't drink coffee, I'll do tea or whatever. You can use a service like I believe it's called Thanks I.O. or postal I.O. where you can actually just virtually send them a gift card. And you'd be surprised. I mean, a lot of people are like, I don't want the coffee, but I'll give you 10 minutes. Right? That's all I'm Asking for. And it's the way that I position it. Right. So it's a. Hey, let's just say I'm reaching out to Sally. Hey, Sally, you know I operate in your space. I'd be lying to say if you weren't an ideal customer, but I don't today have anything to sell you. However, what I do want to do is understand how I can better serve your market.

Better than what I'm currently doing today. And I know that's a tall ask because I know you're super busy. However, if you would give me 10 minutes to just rattle off 20 questions that I can gather some information from you, I would love to send you a thank you, a gift card, et cetera. And so I don't over glamorize the gift card. It's more about serving their space than it is about the gift card that they'll take a flyer on you.

Now, do you do this on video the phone? Is there a best way you found to make it simple and easy for them?

I do both. I use Calendly for scheduling. And Calendly allows. You can set it up to where the. The person can choose their preference. And so 50, 50. Some will choose zoom, some will choose phone call. I just for something like that. Right. If it's not my sales process and it's more about me doing research and they're really doing me a favor, I'm gonna let them choose. I have my preferences. I always want to see someone and be in front of someone and talk to someone. But if it's not a prospect call, it's not a call. Working someone through a sales process and it's more of them doing a favor, I'm gonna let them kind of make that preference. So Calendly allows you to do that. But usually a phone call is pretty sufficient.

What is the point when you know you have it so refined that you feel confident you've identified the ideal prospect? Their list. You got all this data because I've heard of people going into scenarios where you go, oh, we're refining it, we're doing these things. And then you just get in this rabbit trail of doing so much of it. When do you flip back and start implementing it?

Yeah, for me, it's. Well, it's actually interesting. Is so of those 100 people, the first five. I'm going to. I'm going to think about what it is my offer is going to be as it relates to that ideal customer profile. I already have a general idea. Right. And so I'm Going to ask a bunch of questions, but then I'm going to actually pitch them. So here's what I was thinking about doing. Can you please shoot holes in this? Tell me what your thoughts would be here? And then they helped me refine it on those first five calls, and then I kind of refine it and I go to the next five calls, do the same thing. By the time I'm done with 20 of those calls, you know that cost me 200 bucks, right? $10 gift cards, 20 people, 200 bucks, and I've got a refined offer. And to be quite honest, this is not necessarily the goal of doing it this way, but I've probably got six or seven prospects out of those 20 calls because they're like, if you can actually do that for me, when you actually roll it out, will you let me know? And so not only does it help me create an offer, but it also helps me create the first few clients if I really wanted to roll out something new. Right? And listen, I haven't rolled out anything new in a long time outside of additions to what I've already currently been doing. But if you're thinking about niching down and creating a specific offer for a specific market, that's a fantastic strategy to not only just gather data and help you refine an offer, but also potentially to get the first couple of customers out of it.

When you're working on offers for yourself and you're taking this data from existing people, you know, maybe you've helped them, maybe you not. Maybe you just know you can help them solve the problem. Do you. Do you have people ask you questions? Do you just do all of this on your own? Is there a best way to achieve this without wasting your time so that way you get the maximum result?

Yes. I mean, I usually have a fairly scripted amount of questions, but I also let it kind of go where it wants to go, right? And people are going to. People are going to. Are going to allow me to, or they're going to at least say things in those calls that I wasn't even thinking about. And it, you know, like you kind of. The last question you asked, how do you kind of protect yourself from just always reiterating going down the rabbit hole? It's very easy to do that. And as entrepreneurs, we kind of do have shiny object syndrome. So we always think the grass is greener, you know, in the next field or whatever. I'm a big fan of Project Done versus Project perfect. If you could. I'd much rather ship a project, get it Going get data back and then if I have to make an iteration, I'm going to make an iteration. That is an 80, 20 iteration. If you guys have heard of burrito principles or 80 20, I always want to see how do I maximize what I'm charging someone and the results that I'm getting for them, while minimizing the amount of effort or things that have to go into it. That's how we increase our profit margin. I don't know if that answered your question, but that's for me, that's how I'm thinking through. How do I protect my time? How do I also create offers around that time with them?

Yeah, and that's great insight because it's fun to get that data back. And you know, I've done surveys and different things myself, but it's very easy to start going down that path, going, Well, I got 80, maybe I should go for 200, 300, whatever the case is. And.

You have to implement it like you're saying you can't just have all this data and stare at it and have this beautiful spreadsheet of whatever. I mean, you'd be better best served if you did eight of them and implemented it and never made it to 10 or 20. Now I'm not saying to stop at 10 or 20, but the implementers always win. So when it comes time to implement, do you work with your team on that? Do you get some help? Okay, so you're not trying to do all this on your own and process it?

No, I mean, thankfully I've been fortunate enough to be at a place now where I've got a fantastic team. You know, they do a lot of the day to day in the weeds. I would say today, as it stands today, I'm talking, you know, everything we've been talking about before, things that I've done in the past, before we got to where we're at today, I would say I operate far more in the CEO role now where it's captain the ship, leading the team, motivating the team, making sure that all the directors are doing what they should be doing and, and making sure they're aligned with our core value. So I do have the team that kind of does that. Now if you're, if you're a solo shop or you got a one or two person shop and you're spread pretty thin, you know, do what you can. But you're exactly right, ship it, do implement what you found and you can make iterations down the road, prioritize getting revenue in the door. Because revenue opens up more freedom and opportunity and flexibility for you to then have that playground to play on, to optimize your offers and grow your team. Exactly. Yeah. You know, delegation is an art. A lot of folks don't understand how difficult it is to delegate, but once you've done it a few times, it becomes a lot easier. Right. It's. I should say it's. It's. It's not hard. Or. Excuse me, it's not difficult to delegate. It's just hard. Right. That's what I really mean to say is delegation is really just having documented processes for your team to do, trusting your team to do it. Which is the difficult part. Right. Or the hard part is relinquishing control.

Until you get the right people in place. Because I agree 100%. The first iteration of my team years ago was.

Man, what if they messed this up? It's like, well, you're not that great at 90% of what you're doing anyway. Because I wasn't in my zone of genius. Because you're just doing everything. When you start, it's like, there. There was times I'm like. They flat out told me, I think I'm gonna mess this up. I go, I assure you, you can't do it any worse than I am.

Literally. Because I know what I'm good at. This is one of the things I'm really good at. Some of the other stuff. I frankly, have just fired myself. I'm like, I shouldn't touch that.

Yep.

So.

And most people should. They should fire them. That's actually what's funny is I have a fire yourself academy is one of our lower ticket offers. Yeah.

That's fantastic. Because when you get the right people in place, like my team that I have now, I'm very thankful for, because I can. You know, it's taken a minute or two, but I'm very thankful now because especially with the production of the show and our author clients and the SAS that I developed, there's things I just, hey, I need this. And it's like a message through basecamp. It's not this big thing that really involves me, and I have to micromanage it. If I have to do any of that, I'm like, what can I be doing better with the processes and systems? Because I shouldn't even be involved. This is not my strength. I don't want to do it. But it has to get done. And what I love is hiring the people that love doing whatever it is that thing is, because there's, you know, we can all do stuff, but I'm not the best at graphic design. I know how to do Photoshop, though. But I love having people that love it day in, day out.

Well, even as your company progresses. I would say that. And you talked about my one shooter. I have had a very fortunate. A very successful career in sales. I could be the best salesperson at my company by far. It's easy for me to sell. I'm also the owner, which comes with some authority. It's a little bit easier to close a deal than it is for a salesperson whose only job is to close the deal. However, what I've learned from mentors and coaches in the past is that if I want to get to a certain level, I've got to even be willing to relinquish control of things that I'm good at. Right? And even things that I enjoy to some degree if I really want to progress. And I can jump in whatever I want. Right. Like, I've built my company to where I can jump into a really big deal. If a deal comes in, it's a quarter million dollars. Cool. I'm probably going to jump into that deal because it's a bigger deal, and I want to make sure that not. Not that I don't trust my team, but it's just. I love that hunt still. I love the. I love the clothes, so I still get that dopamine hit. However, for me to really relinquish control of even something that I know I'm the best at in my particular company, I had to realize that's an investment that I need to make, a sacrifice I need to make to achieve my dreams. One thing I've realized is a quote that I really enjoyed is, you've got to sacrifice for your dreams. Otherwise, your dream becomes the sacrifice. And for me, I had bigger aspirations and dreams that I needed to get out of the cockpit of sales and move more into a leadership CEO role in order for me to actually go after that dream that I want, which is a sacrifice.

Wow. That's a great expert authority insight.

And that's inspiring me, to be honest, because I recently shared something, and people got a kick out of it because I said I got to. I just got promoted to head of sales.

And there was like, three people out of hundreds. They're like, isn't it your company? Well, yeah. But I found myself slipping back into doing just a bunch of everything, and I'm like, I already have over a dozen people that do stuff for me. Why am I. Guess I was bored or who knows what. But you know what I mean, it's like, it's easy to slip back in. And I go, no, you know, this year I'm not. I'm doing just this. I'm. Do I narrow down the zone of genius? You know, this is one of the things I do. There's a few others and. But that's inspiring to say. Okay. Now, I mean, I can't even imagine someone else hosting my show. It's like, right. Would you still do. Would you still be doing that? But I know the thing is a thought exercise to go, even if you're good at it, what should you be focusing your time on? What is the highest and best use of your time?

That's right. Yeah. And listen, there's. People have different goals. Right. If you're achieving the goals you want, you're happy and you're filled with joy and you're still in a sales role, like, that's great. That's what I want for you. But for me, I know myself. I know what I want deep down for my life, for my personal life, for my investments, for my companies, for my employees. And I know that we couldn't get there if I stayed in this space. What's funny is by releasing myself from that and becoming that more CEO leader, I realized that's my actual zone of genius. Now it's a new one. I didn't really know that was mine until I took it on. And now it's like, man, this is. I'm better at this than I am at sales, you know? And so now I'm in a different zone of genius I didn't even know existed for me.

Which has been really cool. Really cool to explore that.

Yeah. It's interesting because there's been a few times where I've literally fired myself, like I said, and just focused. And every time I've done it, things just work easier the less I touch.

Yep. I mean, my team, I literally. There are. There are softwares and tools like my project management tool that we use. We use ClickUp.

In our company. And I think the last time I logged into it was maybe six, eight months ago. If I get in there, my team's like, please don't touch anything. Don't touch the templates, don't touch the workflows, don't touch the projects. You can look.

They'Ve actually joked about, like, we're just going to give you a read only access. How about that? Well, that's just funny because it's like, you know, as a. As A visionary. As someone who's got ideas for days, you know, my temptation is to go and try to fix everything. And it's like, you know, honestly, if I go in and fix things, I break them and. And then I have to fix what I broke. And by I fix it, I mean my team will have to fix it and I will leave them in a, in a wasteland of broken processes. And so I have taught my team and empowered my team to tell me to go away in certain parts of my company, which I think is. Is incredibly freeing, believe it or not.

Yeah, it's interesting. We think we're doing a good job. And I can tell you, two out of the two times the servers crashed years ago were because I felt like I was needing to touch them and I didn't need to.

So you just can't help yourself.

I got an idea. Let's implement it right this second. No, how about do anything but this? You already have people. I want to ask you, now that we're talking about it, what are your zones of genius that you know, here's I play, here's what I do. No one else does this but me, and the rest I just leave alone.

Yeah. Honestly, for me, my day to day is two things. Well, three. Three things. I guess you can lump two of them together. One is, is I have, I have always had natural leadership abilities. So I played sports from the age of three until I graduated college. I played Division 1 football. And I've always had that leadership. Just naturally, if no one's going to take leadership, I'm going to step up. That's just kind of what I've been. Um, and as I was early on in my career, my early on in my journey, I didn't really get to flex that muscle because in my career I did. But not in my, in my business. Right. Cause I'm starting from scratch. I'm building everything out. I'm trying to wear a thousand hats. I'd say the past three to four years as I've kind of really, you know, made it into this, this role as more of a CEO, captain of the ship type of thing. My zone of genius is just empowering people. You know, I think really sitting down with the people on my team, especially as it relates to the growth side of things. So my sales, my marketing, and really empowering them to take ownership of their role. Really empowering them to take ownership of their, of their, their outcomes. Right. That being said, a great leader does not make necessarily a great manager. And so I am, though my Zone of genius is leading. I need to have management in place because I'm not a great manager. I'm not. I look at it from a metaphorical perspective. I'm great at captain the ship and turning the wheel and getting everyone excited about the destination we're heading towards. I'm not good at walking the deck and looking at all the rowers and making sure we're running in sync and those types of things. So that's, that's more or less my zone of genius. The other right now is just content creation and strategy. So I think I really excel in, again, a lot of it is because I know my market super well. And so for me, creating content is basically my day. That's why we built out this studio, was because I want to be able to come in here, click a couple buttons and just rock and roll and create high quality content for my market, create courses, create coaching, do my webinars and all the teaching I do online.

And then also just serve clients super well through that. So I have moved into a zone of genius of content creation and strategy and leadership and empowering people.

Excellent. And the new studio, which looks great by the way, was that your sole focus for buying the building or a large part of it?

Honestly, I bought this building, not know. So I have an awesome office building that's in another part of town and I bought this building as sheerly as an investment. It's. It's 5,000 square feet, it's two stories. The top floor was offices. That kind of where like they were apartments that were converted to offices. I reconverted them back to apartments and I and I short term rental them Airbnb and VRBO. Upstairs, that's about 1800 square feet. The downstairs is about 2,500 square feet. And that's now the offices. Well, when I bought the building, there was a tenant already in the bottom and they were going to stay when I bought it. I bought it for a steal. And then I had to increase prices just to kind of make the pro forma work with my bank. And, and they said we can't afford it, so they left. And then I was basically left with the dump. You know, the bottom, the bottom was a train wreck. Um, and I was like, I'm not gonna rent this out. I can't rent this out for what it is. And so I ended up deciding I'm gonna renovate this and move our offices over here. And just the way it worked out, I was like, this room in the back's perfect. It has no Windows, you can control the lighting. We'll paint everything black. We'll do the foam on every wall and bring that in. So it wasn't actually my intention. Um, it just happened to align really well with my transition of my company to where I was going to begin creating a lot more content with having the ability now to have a studio where I can do that.

That's fantastic. And that what I'm hearing in there is a lot of resourcefulness, because everyone thinks that you need. Let me rephrase that. Not everyone. There's a niche, people that I like to think we think for ourselves and don't just whatever, but.

They think everything has to be perfect. And that's right. You know, I've heard people say it's a goal. I want to build a studio, I want to do this. And there's nothing wrong with that. However, if you get stuck with something like you did, what's the. You know, what's a good way to turn it into something more valuable? And I love that. I love doing that too. Because not everyone can take a lump of coal and turn it into a diamond. They just see the lump of coal and they go, it's trash. Yep. But the people who can transform that, it's like, I. I consider it like a superpower or something. Because most people just walking by and then two years later, when you have a whole new thing that's complete, they're like, when did this thing come up there?

Oh, it's hilarious. I mean, and the amount of people that come by the building and like, man, I remember this building back in the day. Knoxville's a fairly small town, you know, couple, couple hundred thousand. And they're like, remember this building? And now they see it now they're like, this place is like an event space. Right? It's this massive, you know, very cool, hip co working. We've got a stage for acoustic concerts, we've got TVs everywhere and digital whiteboards and these glass wall conference rooms and cool studio in the back. And it's pretty cool to. Someone had a vision for this building and it happened to be me, and people got pretty excited about that. So, yeah, I love. I'm just. I wouldn't say I'm a creative in the sense that I'm not like a. An agency creative, where I'm like a digital, you know, marketing type of creative, but I am a creative in terms of. I'm very strategic in how I think. And I think I'm a master problem solver. And so I think you're right. There probably is a gift there. But what's something you said was you don't need to have being resourceful. A phrase that I used to live by before I had resources was you don't need resources to be resourceful. You know, resourcefulness is not tied to having resources. Now that I have resources, I just get to basically pour gas on it and turn it up 10 notches. But that's something that people can take away. You don't need to have. I mean, this studio. Even though I had resources when I bought this building, it started off with very simple equipment, very. You know, if you look back at some of the earlier content from it, it was not nearly as nice as it is today. And I'm sure it'll be even nicer a year from now. What's actually funny is a tenant who wants to move into the building is a video production agency and they want to use the studio and they want to supply even more equipment. So maybe I'll get even better stuff next time you see me.

See, and that's what's so great because not only did you make it better already and add that value, but whenever you decide to exit from it.

It'S already worth more already and it's only going to continue to go up because now other people are seeing it and the value came from, you know, your head. It came from.

It's pretty cool. Just look, seeing was really cool. Yeah, it worked out perfect. And what's funny is I still have the other office building contain like a really iconic building in town and I didn't want to let go of it. But I've gotten creative with that too to where I'm subletting it to a point where it pays for what I would pay and I still get to use it whenever I want.

So nice.

Again, resourceful, creative, strategic thinking there.

So this also I love that we're talking about the vision. I love that we're talking about dialing in and knowing who you're talking to because you can do a hundred million dollar campaign, you're talking to the wrong person. Kind of pointless. Let's talk about the pcm. How important is this and how can people do it better?

Yeah. So and refresh me on pcm, the.

Profits, conversions and margin.

Oh, got it. Yeah, we changed the letter. That's why it's hilarious. You said that. So we changed it to for us we call it the exponential growth formula or exponential revenue growth formula. And we changed the letters around. That's what he's like Ah, that sounds super familiar. What is it? So it's actually leads times win rate times client value. So when we think about growth, we think about growth differently. So most folks, when they think I want to take my business from, let's just use a round number, a million. I want to double my business to 2 million. So going from 1 million to 2 million is a tall task, right? To go 100% growth in a year is tough for some folks. And when you say, hey, I want to go from a million to 2 million, what do most people think of when they want to do that? I need more leads, right?

Instantly goes to. Well, let's just do easy Math here. If 10 leads per month, closing at 20%, average deal is $50,000. And I close, that means I'm closing two deals per month, which means I'm closing $100,000 in business per month times 12 months, roughly 1.2 million. Okay? So therefore, if I want to double my business, I need to go from 10 leads a month to 20.

Easy math, right? Just double my leads. I'm going to keep my conversion rate the same, my client buy the same. But what we find is that's really difficult, right? It's more expensive. How am I going to get twice as many leads?

All you have to do is run a Facebook campaign on ads and update your limit on the credit card, right?

Super easy. Yeah, Just up your prices. And so that's how most people think though, and that's why they're always chasing these silver bullets of, I need to try this thing, right? LinkedIn, automation. I need to try this next thing, which is account based marketing. I need to try whatever it is. And I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm not saying leads is bad. However, I think a lot of us are struggling with what we call lead disease. You know, lead disease is the other 80% of that 20% win rate. Where's the other 80%? Why are they falling out? If they're qualified, why are you not closing eight of those 10 deals and you're only closing two? Well, that's one way to grow. I can. There's three categories. We have leads, we have win rate. Win rate is how many of those leads are we closing? And then we have client value. What is the average annualized value of a client for your business? And so the three ways you can grow is you can double any one of those categories, right? I can go from 10 leads to 20 leads. Hard to do. I can go from closing 20% to closing 40%. Also hard to do. Going from $50,000 in client value to $100,000 in client value. Hard to do. Right. All those things will get you from 1 million to 2 million. However, I'm about sustainable, predictable, scalable growth that doesn't go away overnight. Right. And so the way that I think about it is the magic numbers I want you to remember is 26%. If I can increase all three of those categories, how many leads I have, the client or the win rate, and the client value by only 26%. If you multiply all three of those after you've grown them 26%, you're going to double your business overnight. And so all that is, if you think about the numbers, 10 leads instead of going from 10 to 20, 10 to 12 and a half. Yeah, 13. So that's not hard. How do I find two to three extra leads a month? Close rate. I don't have to go from 20 to 40, I go from 20 to 25. Right. So instead of closing one of every five deals, how do we get better at our sales process to close one of every four deals and then the last one is client value? Instead of just doubling our prices overnight, which is inevitably going to hurt our conversion rate, why don't we work on getting it up from 50,000 to 62,500 or getting it from 10,000 to 12,500 on an average deal? So if you do all three of those and you do the multiplication, feel free to scratch it on a napkin. I promise you it's going to be double what your first number was and it's more sustainable. It's not going to go away overnight. And I promise you, you keep increasing by 26%, that's when you start seeing that that's what we call exponential revenue growth formula is because you'll start seeing exponential revenue growth, you'll go from 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 8, 8 to 16 really fast by just doing 26% incremental growth.

That's that compound effect going into effect that the banks are taking advantage of for the compound interest.

That's right. It's no different than anything in finance world. You can do it in your business growth model. Just think of it as there's three levers I need to pull on instead of always obsessing over leads and having lead disease.

And also we should be capitalizing in our own finances, not just the banks. I want to make that clear as well.

Very clear. What is.

So do you do this 26% year over year?

Yeah. So it is. I mean, it is what you want it to be. I'm just throwing. Doubling your business out. You know, that's the, that's the thing I'm always trying to do is how do I. How do I double my business? So, you know, the next year. And again, this is all averages. So I'm looking at 10 leads per month. I want to get to a 12 and a half lead per month average over the course of this year. And when I do that, and I do the same thing with win rate and just send the client value, it's going to double my business. Then the next year, my goal, and I might get there a lot faster than I think. Right. The more you emphasize sales process, the more you get really strategic with how you do sales. And the more dialed in you get, the easier it is to make that 26% jump. And then I go from 12 and a half leads to roughly 15 and a half, you know, 16 leads the next year or per month on average. And then I go from a 25% close rate to a 31% close rate. How do we go from closing one of every four to one of every three? At some point you're going to hit a cap. And then it is. It's a matter of pouring on the leads, and it's a matter of growing client value. But most people who are probably listening to this are probably not at a point where they've hit that cap in all three categories. And so, yes, my goal is to year over year grow at least double.

That's fantastic. That's very fantastic because it doesn't seem like a big deal when you're doing it one year at a time. Now, if you're impatient and can't delay gratification, of course, let's go grow 10,000% this month. Okay. But when you break it over five or 10 years, it's not that big of a deal. It's just natural progress that you'd be doing anyway.

Yep. And it's more sustainable. Right. Like going growing by 10,000%. You probably found some silver bullet that worked for today or this quarter or this half or this year. But what happens when an algorithm change happens? What happens when that, that that growth channel is saturated with everyone else who figured it out, just like you did, you know, and so that's my thing is if you grow sustainably, you're actually going to. It's the tortoise in the hare kind of. You know, what's funny is it's got a little bit of both. It's both tortoise and hair. It's. It's the stability of the tortoise. Right. Because slow and steady is what they think is very stable and how he's going about his race. But at a certain point, if you can grow each one of those by 26% and double your business, there's a little bit of hair involved there too.

Yeah. And it's year after year, like you said, you might grow a ton one year, and then hopefully.

At worst case scenario, you just don't grow again. But generally, what I hear happen is you grow that 10,000% in the next year, you're worse off because of it.

Yes. Yeah, honestly, because what happens is, what happens when you go to 10,000%, you're going to massively skyrocket your overhead. The amount of people you hire. You're going to hire so fast that you're going to make so many mistakes. You have to build processes and systems with duct tape that are eventually going to break. And so what. What happens when you do that is like you said, yeah, you're gonna have a massive success for 10,000. And if you're a SaaS company, you're looking for an exit in the next 24 months. Great, cool. Pack the books full of revenue. That's great. But most of us want longevity. Most of us want something a little bigger. Most of us probably aren't running a SaaS company who's looking to exit for, you know, a hundred million, a billion dollars in the next 24 months. And so that's what I would encourage you to start thinking about is, is prioritizing not slow growth, but safe growth.

Would you ever advise. So would you ever advise some, obviously the 26%. Would you advise someone to do both? Where you're doing this and your stability plan is for 10 years, but if there is an opportunity.

Go for it.

Yeah. No. And what's gonna happen, typically, the reason I talk about 26% is really for people to wrap their mind around the possibility of incremental growth equals exponential growth. If you combine it with all three categories, what I really. When you start getting under the hood, you're going to start figuring things out and you're going to be able to. Your leads are going to increase quite a bit. Right. If you could figure out how to grow your leads by 26%, you can probably figure out how to grow them by 50. And if you figure out how to grow them by 50, you could probably figure out how to grow them by 100. However, I don't Want you to just get obsessed with that one category because you know you can grow it. Also think about the others. Right? Because, you know, we think about it like conversion rate optimization. Like these E commerce companies, they. They're obsessed with traffic and they know that If I do one, if I have 1,000 people visiting my website today and I have a 1% conversion rate that I'm going to close 10 sales worth this much money. And they're like, well, let's just pour on the gas for ads and let's go after 2,000 people to our website per day so I can have 1% conversion rate and close 20 sales. Cool. That's. That's a way to do it. Well, what happens if you go from 1% to 3% with the same traffic? I have a thousand people closing at 3% now. I've got 30 sales in a day. What happens now when I figure out how to double my traffic and go from 1000 to 2000 and I'm also converting at a 3% conversion rate. You went from 10 sales a day to 60 sales a day.

Really fast. Right. And so do you have the people.

In place to handle it?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Unless it's all automated or it is a SaaS or some sort of training or something, you're just pumping them in and it's automated.

And so having the scalability is the other part. A lot of people think of scalability as, you know, we're moving super fast and we just have this exponential growth curve. It's a hockey stick growth. It's not. Yes, that is technically scalable, but if something breaks, then it's no longer scalable. And so that's where I think people make the mistake. And we get obsessed with scale. You know, it drives me nuts with the amount of people who are like, scale this, scale that, let's scale, you know, and it's like, yeah, it's scalable to a point, but the moment something breaks, you're. You're kind of up a creek and you got to fix it again and.

So that there's no recovery built into it.

That's right. That's right.

Yeah, that's how I thought about that when I was even designing the show and the workflow and the production of it. Because I was like, I personally, I'm very much akin to you where, hey, let's go shoot 20, 40, 50, let's do a year's worth of episodes this week. However, all you need is the power to go out and you have a big problem. Versus a controllable problem that's recoverable from. And even in between the shows, it's like how many, you know, or people that do back to back sales meetings? Oh, I got 15 meetings back to back all day. Did you give yourself a lunch break? Because at some point you're not going to be able to maintain this pace. I love figuring out the frequencies.

You can't even. It's the pace, but it's also usually there's a level of fatigue. And so you might have 15 calls and you might be optimal for seven or eight of them and you start losing your optimal and then your conversion rate takes a hit on the, on the second day. You'd almost be better off doing eight calls a day and be consistent there.

Than you would because it's only taken 10 or 20% of your energy instead of draining your gas tank.

Exactly. And so it's all about that, that balance. And yes, you can pour and you can push the throttle down on, on any one of these categories at any given time, but most of us haven't focused on all three. I would say if you are focusing on all three and you're cognizant of all three and you know that you're able to move the needle for all three of them, then you've, you've probably earned the right to start pouring the gas on one or the other that, you know, you can really impact. And usually that's leads. Um, but I usually tell it this way because most people are just going to get obsessed with leads because it's the easy way out, or at least it seems like the easy way.

Well, yeah, if you, especially if you have a SaaS or training or something automated where it's literally going through infus soft and it swipes the card, everyone's happy, they get delivered. I mean, who wouldn't want to increase the mrr? But at the same point, you're dealing with people at some point, even if it's a sass or computer or anything software related or technical, you're dealing with people at the end of the day. And not everyone is the terminator and wants to walk around like a robot, just.

You know what I mean, pressing.

Buttons and making sales. Yep, that's exactly right. And I think the other thing too is people don't. The last part of that, the client value part, people are afraid to increase their prices, you know, and so that's why they get so focused on leads is because they don't want to focus on client value. There's a great Analogy of the savvy businessman went to this barbershop, and he's been going there for 10 years, and he's really good friends with the owner, the barber, and got the same haircut 10 years straight. And he's sitting there talking to the barber, and he's like, hey, John, you seem like you're stressed out today. And the barber's like, yeah, it's just I'm back to. Back to back all day long. I have no margin in my life. He goes, savvy businessman goes, well, just double your prices, man. I've been coming for 10 years. You've been charging me 10 bucks for a haircut. Start charging 20. He goes, Double my prices, I'll lose half my customers. It's like, yeah, well, that's the same revenue. That's the same revenue. And now you have more margin to grow on top of that. And so it's just incremental growth and less work. And so you can. You can choose to pack your schedule again now with $20 haircuts instead of 10, and then double your prices again, or increase your prices again and you might lose half, but you're doing the same amount of revenue. And so it's just a matter of iterations and incremental growth. And a lot of us are just afraid to do that. We get stuck in our ways.

And to the point we started this great conversation on, you're also going to be attracting, I would say, a higher caliber of clientele if, you know, oh, I'm going to lose half the people while someone that's willing to pay 20, but, you know, someone that's willing to pay 10 but not 20, that's a different person. And conversely, someone that's willing to pay 20 and not 40, 100%.

And you're. And you're starting to get more in your niche, right, of who you actually want to serve. I mean, if someone brought a Ferrari to me and said, hey, this is 30 grand, I'd be like, what's wrong with it? Right? Whereas if someone said, hey, it's $380,000, like, okay, that's about right. You know, like, that's on that clientele. And so a $30,000 Ferrari wouldn't make sense to me, and I would instantly say, what's wrong with it? A lot of us treat our price in the same way. We think that the cheaper we are, the easier it is to make the sale. Sometimes it's the adverse effect. People might look at it and say, it's cheap, therefore it's probably not optimal.

That is a great expert authority insight and I encourage everyone to do that because I've said some of this before because it's like, why do you want to have 10,000 people at $10?

You know, I didn't bring it up while you were saying it. I wanted to let you roll. But you're saying, hey, let's just go from 10 leads to 12 or whatever if they're 50 or $100,000 deals, it's a pretty good month. You don't need 10,000 leads.

That's right. And so stop focusing so much there. Again, don't neglect it, but don't obsess about it. I think that's what most of us are making decisions today based on how can we grow our lead volume and grow our pipeline. And unfortunately, it's just, I think you're leaving a lot on the table by pursuing putting more on the table, if that makes sense.

Well, I appreciate everything you've been sharing so far. I want to ask you though, how did you get into this?

Great question.

What's the backstory? Because clearly you know what you're doing now.

Yeah. So my, you know, for me, I kind of got thrown with the wolves at a pretty young age. So I was in the Fortune 100 world. Worked for what was an IT recruiting company, but there was a global IT services branched this company.

And as a pretty young kid, I believe I was 23, 24, I did really well in sales.

And they moved me into a more leadership role to the global IT services side of this company and ended up helping build out the southeastern division of this global IT services company. Handed a lot more responsibility than I probably deserve, to be quite honest. Got my teeth kicked in a few times.

And helped grow 115 person sales team for the southeastern division. And so that's where I really got into the sales operations, sales, hiring, training, managing. That's where I got to lead. But I hated corporate. And so for me life was too short to do a job. I didn't really feel like I enjoyed much. And the reason I didn't really enjoy it was not because it was corporate, but because what comes to corporate typically is boundaries of innovation and creativity. Right. There are things that I wanted to implement in my sales organization that, you know, though we had a lot of zeros in our budget to pull it off, they did not want to do it because it was not according to protocol. And because it wasn't according to protocol, they were slow to move. It was like moving the Titanic. So I Said, I want to go to a more nimble environment. And so I start up a conversation with a gentleman who I knew from the church that I attend who said, hey, you know, we're hiring for our agency. And this was not a digital marketing agency, which is actually where I operate today. This is for a risk management consulting firm, slash commercial insurance agency. Okay? And so I jumped in, took a VP of sales role and built that from one million in revenue to nine and a half million in revenue in 18 months.

And I knew at that point, I love being in the small business world, right, Where I can operate and be flexible. And though the budget has a lot less zeros, I could be innovative and creative and I could do things how I wanted to do them. And I made a big impact. I mean, going from one million to nine and a half million. The owner of that company's life was changed, right, in terms of just his legacy, the wealth he had built, which I thought was cool. Now I wish I would have saw more of that upside. And so that's why I ended up leaving. I got poached to be the VP of sales of a digital marketing agency. If people are familiar with HubSpot, a HubSpot agency, and ended up moving into that role had very, very similar growth results. And that was the final time when I was like, you know what? I love growing these things. I'm good at it. I love seeing that these families of these owners of these companies who took a chance and started a business on their own and they let me in. I love that they've changed the trajectory of their life, but I want that for myself. I want to build a legacy, I want to build wealth, not just make good money as a sales leader. And so I ended up deciding, I'm going to leave and start my own thing. Initially, the first three months before I made a pivot, I thought to myself, because I know how to grow a digital marketing agency, I'm going to start a digital marketing agency. Duh. Right? That's what I thought. What I didn't know was I'm great at selling digital marketing services. I'm great at building a sales organization. Organization for. For a digital marketing agency. I don't love delivering digital marketing services. And so though I was getting into these big accounts when I started my own thing and I was getting these massive SaaS companies, and I hated the delivery side. And so I said, you know what? I'm freaking done with this. I'm not doing. I'm not running an agency anymore. But what happened Was in that time I got in with a mastermind with other digital marketing agencies and I really realized these are my people, this is my tribe. Going back to the very beginning of picking your tribe and knowing who you serve, these are the people I really enjoyed. They're creatives, they're really enjoyable to be around. They're down to earth. These are the people I want to serve and I know I can. Right, because I took a different path to owning an agency than a traditional agency owner. Traditional agency owner is a creative, they're a strategist, they're a technician. They probably worked for someone at one time doing marketing. They probably got some side gigs at some point, probably became a 1099 contractor at some point and then probably ended up starting an agency because they had a couple of projects that they got through word of mouth, but they never had a sales career like I did and decided to start an agency. So I said, okay, cool. This is my niche. These are the people I want to serve. I can serve them uniquely because I know how to sell digital agency services. They love delivering it. They don't love selling it. I love selling it. Don't love delivering it. Perfect match. So I ended up starting what was my first successful business in this space, which was essentially an outsourced sales agency. So I would. Agencies would hire me and my team and I would have the sales team that I would build for my company and I would just basically outsource them to theirs. So my team would go sell for them and went super well after that exit. Ended up saying, I still want to stay in this space. And it's basically where I am today, which is instead of being an outsourced sales agency, I am now essentially a consulting firm that builds internal sales operations at high ticket B2B companies, mostly digital marketing agencies.

That's impressive. And I want to ask you about the. The larger companies, even when you're starting out, how do you approach the bigger companies versus most people who go after, you know, all the businesses across the country, the smaller businesses. Is it any harder to go after the big names than the small names? And how do you do it?

Yes and no. It's not harder to get attention and opportunity in that space. It's harder to get a deal done because they move so slow and they have like RFP processes and you're not just going to deal with the CEO who can cut you check when they're ready to move forward. You're going to deal with a department and they have a bunch of people that need to sign off. So it's harder to get a deal. It's a longer sales cycle in the enterprise world. Right. I've sold into the Fortune 10s of the world and I've sold into the mom and pop shops down the street. Both have their pros and their cons. Right. The mom and pop shop has a lower budget, so it's harder to get them to part with their money to help you solve their problems. Enterprise has a ton of budget, but they move so slow because they're again corporate. And so it's not harder to get attention if you know what you're doing. And so that's the next question is, do you know what you're doing? And that's where I usually come in.

Well, we can go and talk about that if you'd like, but up to you.

Yeah, why don't you touch on that for a minute or two.

Yeah. So the biggest thing I look at sales like fishing with spears as opposed to fishing with nets. A lot of folks think about sales in terms of fishing for nets. And what I mean by that is if you think about a traditional, I'm just gonna call it a sales funnel. I don't mean necessarily like a Facebook funnel or click funnels. I just mean a funnel, meaning there's usually a wider top and a skinnier bottom. Right. And that represents working people from unqualified lead to qualified marketing lead to qualified sales lead to closed deal. And it's skinnier at the bottom because your conversion rate is not gonna be a hundred percent. So therefore it's skinnier than what it is at the top. And so the traditional way of doing sales is I'm going to go after thousands and hope for tens or dozens of sales out of that. And so I'm going to go after what we call, we call spam your tam. So you are spamming your total addressable market. Spam your TAM is really this one to many sales approach. So it's a lot of automation, it's a lot of blasted campaigns, right. Sending out 100 emails a day hoping for a 1% conversion on that to get a meeting. That's a way of selling. That's fishing with nets, right? When you fish with nets, the downside is you don't know what you're going to get. When you throw it out there, you throw it into a cove and whatever comes up, it could be minnows, it could be a bass, it could be whatever. If it comes up, it's. It is what you got in your net. And so I don't like doing that because it doesn't fit my ideal customer profile perfectly. But with fishing with spears, you're methodical, you're systematic, you know where to go, you look for em, when you see em, you take your shot. And when you do it, it's usually instantaneous. You know, when you got them. And so we talk about that funnel and you flip it upside down. Really, who do you want to fall at the bottom? Not who is going to fall at the bottom? Maybe, I'm not sure. It's one of these 1,000, 2,000, 3,000. Who, who are the 20, 30, 40 customers that you really want to work with? You know, we call it, you've heard of maybe Dream 100 or Dream 500, building your dream list of clients. Instead of saying I hope they fall out of a funnel, that maybe they came through my ad or content or, or maybe they came through an automated email sequence, instead of doing that, say here's the people I want. And now let's create campaigns for each individual one and reverse engineer how we're going to get them in the door. That's how you need to start thinking about sales. Instead of going one to many, go one to one. And yes, it takes more time per outreach, but your conversion rate is also astronomically higher. Right, but when you say campaign, you.

Don'T mean a specific campaign for that person. With Facebook ads and the same mediums, it could be who do I know that knows them that you know, it.

Could be more organic, it could be, it could be network, it could be referral, it could be email, it could be social selling on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, it could be direct mail, it could be gifting. You can introduce video, handwritten letters. Like all those things are tactical things that you can, once you know who you're going after, right. Knowing your tribe, you can decide which of these grab bag am I going to go into and pick out to go after this in reverse engineer, how I'm going to get these people in the door. And when you do it that way, yes, if you go after 100 people versus going after 1,000 people. If I go after 1,000 people with the spam, your TAM approach and I get a 1% conversion rate, that's 10 deals. Well, what if I go after 100 and I'm methodical with a spear and I get a 20% conversion rate? Well, that's 20 deals. That's double the amount of deals. I went after 110 the amount of.

People and I would say they appreciate it more too, because it's a higher level experience right from the start.

You never lose brand. That's the other downside of the spam. Your tam is you hurt your brand. You don't know who's coming out the bottom. You're typically a commodity. You're not gonna charge as much. But when you come in with authority, right, Expert authority show. Here we go. When you come in with authority, when you come in with value, right? And it's obviously tailored, it's obviously thought for. It's always obviously something that can only be sent to this person. Like they're not going to be like f off, go away. Like they would if you just automate everything else, right. They're going to be appreciative at the very least. And what's interesting is even if someone's appreciative but they don't want to buy, they might have a referral for you. That's ideal as well because you've now provided value in the relationship even though you didn't have to.

I.

This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing. And I'm in 150% agreement. And it's funny you mentioned that with the expert authority effect because I've been telling people for years it's less effort, it's more profitable, it's more enjoyable. And to the point of, look who you attract. Expert authority world. Is Joey awesome or what?

It's because he qualifies and he has the heart and wants to give. I will never have someone on the show to fill space. I already have a wait list and I don't want people who are just kicking it with a stick that just want screen time. This is who I wanted to attract. And it's surreal right now in this moment because you're talking about everything I did years ago before I started this. And I'm so glad you are and I thank you because more people need to hear it and clearly you're successful with it. And I just see it as a way to free people's lives. Up to your point of they have no margin to the barber. I don't want people just working their tail off 24 7. And I know there's people who are successful. They have the money, but they have no time. They don't have the relationships. It's like work with the 10 or 20 or maybe 50 or whatever the amount is at a higher degree. I mean, it just pays dividends. You know, it does.

And you keep your, you keep your sanity, you enjoy what you do a lot more. You know, you don't value your clients as much if they pay 10 bucks as you do. If they pay you a thousand and.

They don't value you. I mean, you're bringing a massive value.

You're a commodity.

You're just nonchalantly like, yeah, I just bought this building and I did this thing and we went from 1.5 to 9.5 in 18 months. And I, I didn't want to, I almost joked, oh, it took 18 months, why didn't you do it in 12? Like, who cares if it took 24? Yeah, that's awesome growth. And I'm pretty sure your clients are happy with you.

Yeah, you know, I like to think so. We throw guarantees on our work and we have awesome, awesome, awesome customers. You know, I hire client success managers and client success people for the very reason of we want to create an experience. Right. You pay us to get a return on your investment and simultaneously you don't pay for the experience, but when we give you the experience, it makes, when we do the return that, you know, tenfold. Right. It's not just that we got what you hoped for, but you got more than you hoped for. And we over delivered. And you're excited to pass our name on to other ideal customers that we want to work with because it was a no brainer. It was a fantastic. We call it the Disney World experience. When you go to Disney World or you go to Harry Potter World or whatever you're into, if you go to anything Disney related, you are immersed. Is that the word? Immersed in the, the Disney culture. Everything from the food you eat to the streets you walk down to the employees, what they're wearing, to the name tags they have on everything is immersing into. And it's creating an experience for you. And I think thinking about your client's journey very similarly is, is, is creating an experience for them.

Yeah. It's not just transactional.

No. And when you do that, retention skyrockets. That's just another growth lever that increases client value. Right. It also decreases client acquisition. Right. If you have a client renew with you or buy again from you, it costs you zero dollars to have them renew if you treat, you know, and whereas if you lose them, you have to spend money to then replace them with some other client. And so the most profitable thing you can do is retain clients and have clients be able to refer other clients because that is a zero dollar cost per acquisition. No ad budget, no marketing budget. You just treated people the right way and you create an experience. And out of that came the fruit of a zero cost per acquisition deal.

Another great expert authority insight. I want to ask you one more thing before we. Well, two more things before we go to the imperfect action round and thank our sponsor. One of them is what is the biggest success story you've had? Out of everyone you've mentioned, what's the biggest one that comes to mind?

I mean, I can talk about a revenue success, which is always fun, but, you know, we. I'll start there. So.

I'll start there and I'll talk about a more sentimental one that's probably more at this level of the folks who are listening. So we had one client who this was back when I was running Tribe, which was our outsourced sales agency, right. We'd outsource our sales or people to outsource their sales to us, and we go out and hunt. And we had one client who great company, probably doing 4 or 5 million in revenue and out of Atlanta. They had a very unique product, patented product, unique to the marketplace.

A game changer if they could get in the door with the right companies and with working with them. We went from.

Starting with them to six months later, they had a pipeline valued at $150 million of deals as a $4 million company.

And a lot of that was just because we got dialed on who we served. Right. What's funny about that is the total amount of prospects that we went after in those six months to generate $150 million pipeline was 36. 36 fish that we went with a spear after which generated $150 million in deals.

That was a pretty awesome success story. But more tangible than that, I would say there are daily success stories that I love in our company where we are able to help a business owner more specifically, typically an agency owner who's a creative, who's a strategist, who's a technician who has to sell to pay the bills. They've dreamed of being out of sales to either go focus on their craft or go focus on being the leader of their company and scaling it. The successes that I love, more than $150 million in pipeline is having an agency owner like take that deep breath and say, I don't have to sell anymore. We've got the sales operation running. I've got salespeople that are higher trained than managed. Thank you, Joey. And the sales driven agency team. I can now go do what I want to do. Like that. That is just one of those heartwarming. I would love to do that all day over work with these enterprise Companies and make them hundreds of millions of dollars because it changed their life, it changed their enjoyment of what they do. They could love their business again. And so for me, that is the successes that I love seeing. I'm privileged to see that on a regular basis.

That's incredible. I'm glad you have the heart for it. And it's inspiring to get to the point where everyone, I mean, just hearing that on a daily basis, I'm thankful with the show, I'm around awesome people like you, but not everyone has that benefit. And to be delivering it consistently like you're talking about, you know, you might be get a couple hits in there and good. Advertise the heck out of them, market them, have the testimonials on video. However, when you are at the level of competency where you can just. It's predictable. It might get boring for you because it's just every day. But that's that level of mastery. You want to be at the expert authority level. And I think everyone should be at it. So thank you for being a great example. I got one quick question and we're gonna do the imperfect action round. It is the wheel of whatever.

All right, let's do it.

Oh, look at that spin. Oh, yellow or black?

Let's go with yellow.

It's interesting. Which one? This one? Yeah. Yellow. So my question. Well, on camera it looks like.

There we go.

It's yellow.

Nice.

Painted it yellow and said it's yellow. So my question for you is, with all you've accomplished, I mean, it sounds like you've done more in your lifetime already than most people do in a lifetime, which is awesome. Where are you going the next 10 or 20 years? What's your end game?

That's a great question. My end game right now is I'm focused on my main company in terms of the Immediate this next 12 months, we've got an awesome offer ladder that we're really tightening up. But once I had that humming, my goal is to fire myself from CEO and hire a full time CEO that will take over the day to day. And then I want to go build a mergers and acquisitions play. And so my goal is to build.

A parent hub with my abilities of building out sales operations and go and buying up companies that fit my profile of the companies that I want to own in my portfolio, but also the companies that I know that I can that are good companies that just don't have the sales operation. Case in point, there was an agency that we worked with that they're a unique agency in the sense that they're about 4.2 million when we started with them and they have a unique offer where they are essentially a back office financial agency. So they're an outsourced back office company. So other companies will hire them and they will essentially fractionally be a cfo, accountant, controller and bookkeeper all in one for a retainer. Well, they're a fantastic company, but they didn't have a sales operation. The moment that we applied our sales operation process to it and we built it out, they grew by 2 million in the first 90 days. They grew by 10 million in the first 12 months. And so what I want to do is I want to go buy companies like that and own them to take them to from 14 to 4 or from 4 to 14 million in 12 months. And so that's kind of my 10 year goal is to really build more of a parent company that owns a lot of other companies that I know that I can help that I just happen to build my legacy around the parent company.

Wow, Good for you. Congratulations. I appreciate you're going to do it and appreciate you for sharing it with us. Of course we're going to thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action round. You've heard me say every business needs a book, including yours. And it's true. And that's why you should visit free businessbookpublishingcourse.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. But you know what, don't take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors like Lori, I went from having.

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Promoting my books roasted.

There's no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else again. I've attempted it in the past, it didn't serve me. As a matter of fact, I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process. Adele, if you're looking for an amazing business coach, I highly recommend Mario Ficini or Bill Benner. I can't make a higher recommendation than to work with Mario Ficini. He has been great for me and right now I won't work with Anybody else except for Mario.

Hey, their words, not mine. Visit freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com to get started now. And I look forward to hearing your transformation as the next video success story. Once again, that's freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com and we are back with the imperfect action round. Joey, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Let's rock and roll, man.

All right, three questions for you. Rapid fire, 60 second or less answers. What is the fastest path to the profits?

Fastest path to the profits Sell before you have the service or product done. My biggest thing is get paid to pre launch so you know when you're going after customers or you're launching something new, which again, if you're going from zero to profit, the fastest thing you can do is again, talk to your ideal customers, craft an offer and then ship it pre launch it. So say, hey, we're going to Launch this in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever. Get people to prepay for it at a discount, right, As a thank you for being a part of the pre launch. They know that they're part of the first wave of people who get this. It gets money in the door. It will fund you creating the offer if it's a course, if it's a service, if it's a product, whatever. Get them to pre basically have them seed fund the offer that they bought from you. And so once you've done that, then you can pour gas on it. You have money for ads, you have money for sales campaigns. That's what I would do is sell it before you have it. Obviously know that you can pull it off once you do sell it, but have it sell it before you have it. A lot of people focus too much on perfecting it before they sell it. But you might get in there and find out no one wants to buy it or it's just not the right pitch.

Excellent, Excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Biggest problem is hiring salespeople and not setting them up for success. So a lot of us obviously dream of firing ourselves from sales as the owner who's selling and we want to, you know, our natural inclination is, well, I'll just go hire a salesperson. I pay them salary, they bring me back money. That's what we think the transactional relationship between hiring a salesperson looks like. Unfortunately, there is so much there that you need to have in place to make sure that those salespeople are successful. There's nothing Less profitable than going out and paying money for an employee that's going to leave in 92, 120 to 180 days from now because you invested time, money, resources into that person. And when they leave, you're just at a deficit. And so make sure that they're set up when they come in. Having the processes, having the offers, having the content that they can learn from and the training, and having the infrastructure for them to actually go out and be successful for your company.

Excellent. And number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Ooh, retention is absolutely up there. So in terms of maximum client value, right. If you have a 12 month contract, well, the most profitable thing you can do is create the experience that's going to make them renew for another 12 and another 12 and another 12. Because then it goes from I paid $1000 for a $10,000 customer to I paid $1000 for a $40,000 customer. And so not only are you increasing your client value, your lifetime value, you're also increasing your profit margin on acquisition. So the easiest thing you do is create the experience over, emphasize the results.

And on top of that, just charge more. That's how you do it. Just, just decide today that you're not charging enough and, and, and go ahead and make the leap. Increase your prices by 20, 30%. See what happens if no one buys. Cool. Then you know, you probably just overshot your pricing. Drop it back a little bit. If people are still buying, then keep increasing. Right? That's the easiest way for you to think through. This is how I'm going to do it. The other thing is listen to your clients. Right? I have so many clients. It's really interesting. I've created offers because we have finished with clients on our contract. They have graduated from working with us. The goal is not retention. And they actually came back to me and said, hey, I would love it if you did something like this, this or this. I had enough clients do that to where. Then I created a continuity offer on the back end of our project that maximized the lifetime value.

Great insights. Again, thank you for those. What books would you recommend? Taxport, Authority World.

I am a huge fan of the Go Giver. If you have not read the Go Giver by Bob Berg, just a fantastic book about business principles. You know, I am a big fan in providing value and giving and I think that it comes back to you in tenfold. That's probably one that I would really think about. Another one, just from a mindset perspective, there's one called Max out by Ed Milet, which looks really good. You know, Ed Millett is a fantastic business owner. He's done nine figures in revenue. And he talks a lot about mindset, and he talks a lot about training your mind, training your brain. And I think honestly, the most powerful thing in business is mindset, not skillset. I think we get so focused on the skillset and we don't focus enough on what's our mental, what's our mindset behind it. Because our mind can take us much further oftentimes than our skill set. And you can get the right people.

To be doing the skill set anyway.

Yes, yes. And then the last One is the four Ds of execution. How do you become just a militaristic executor when it comes to getting stuff done?

Excellent. Well, you've smashed this one out of the park. I appreciate everything you've been sharing and the book recommendations are great. Also, no exception there. Where would you like people to learn more?

Sure, yeah. If you are interested in someone building out your sales operation, you can go check us out at www.salesdrivenagency.com pretty easy. They're pretty obvious how you can get in touch with our team. You'll get put in touch with one of our senior advisors. Outside of that, I am open to network on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you do connect with me, please drop a note and say that you got sent from the expert authority or through Mario. And that way I'll at least accept your. I have like a thousand connection requests in my LinkedIn inbox that I don't get to unless people write me a personal note and I know where they came from.

I am very much the same way. I was just telling someone. Someone recently sent me something that said, you're probably sick of all the zoom calls. How about we just jump on the phone? I was like, oh, my gosh.

It's like the phone still works. You know, you can have a great conversation, but.

Oh. I was on a panel the other day and they said, what is the most innovative technology out there right now in sales? I said, your cell phone. It is the most innovative thing to pick up the phone and call someone right now. It is what is working the best, believe it or not.

And it always has. Pick up the phone and it probably will. I absolutely love this. I love being able to see and interact and everything. But, you know, we. We could also be sitting on the boat, relaxing and having the same kind of great conversation.

That's Right. Yep. And you don't have to be put together. You just, you talk. It's awesome.

Yeah. Great people. That's what it is. And I appreciate you for being one of them. This has been a complete pleasure and treasure. And I was gonna wait till we're off the air, but. No, I'm gonna say one last thing. If I ever do a live event with speakers, I'm absolutely gonna reach you, reach out to you because you've, I. You're phenomenal.

Well, I appreciate that, man. That is, that is humbling. I appreciate you saying that. And, and it has been a pleasure to share the stage, the studio time with you.

Well, it's truly been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time, your expertise and everything you've shared with us. It's, I really enjoyed it. So thank you again.

Good man. Well, thanks for having me on. Hope your audience found value in it. We'll talk again.

All right, Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless.

You're already the expert. But have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate and qualify leads while increasing profit for you 24 7? And if so, how well are you promoting it? With the Expert Authority effect publishing method, it's easier and faster than ever. Visit freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com to get started now, once again, that's free. Businessbook publishingcourse.com hey, thanks for listening to today's episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show and also be sure to check out eainterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you tomorrow.