How To Use Data To Scale Your Sales Team

Hey guys. What's up? Matt here. Welcome to the episode of Coffee is for Closers. Today we've got David Duncan who is the sales manager of an online sort of fitness company. But I'll let him kind of go into that. And a little while ago he came to us to try and get some help, you know, learning how to be a better sales manager. Learning how to be someone that can take the data, look at it, analyze it, and then tactically and strategically make changes in order to push the business forward. And that is what we're going to be going over today. So if you guys want to hear more about the nitty gritty, the tactical actual changes that people can make to their sales processes with their teams and that kind of good stuff to make sure you stay all the way through to end. All right, Dave, what's going on, buddy?

All right. How's it going, Matt? Sales director though, not sales manager.

Sorry, is there, is there a difference?

Yeah, yeah, one's. One's managing like the day to day bullshit and the one's a bit more strategic, so.

Okay. Okay. It's probably different company to company, I guess, depending on how the. Depending on how the management structure works.

Yeah.

Okay. So tell us a little company. What did you do so people can get some background?

Yeah. So work for a company called Sveness. We do in home personal training. So it's kind of a unique service where the trainer comes actually to your house, condo, gym or outside, meets you in a park or ever. They'll work out of you one on one. So it kind of formed during COVID when kind of gym shut down.

Oh yeah.

And people couldn't get out in public so the company kind of blew up and basically, you know, I kind of joined about nine months ago actually from a tech company.

Okay.

Didn't have, you know, any fitness sales experience. So I kind of reached out to you needed help. I was like, Matt, help me. Going into this new company about fitness sales looks hard.

Yeah. Business sales are. It's an interesting one. I think it's a really good place to be able to start. You can get tons of volume, you know, lots of emotional selling and lots of, you know, objections and money because it's a non ROI based product and you know, you can get, you just get a vast swath of people from like the super rich to the super broke to really motivate, not motivated. Like you get such a crazy variety of individuals that I think it really accelerates your selling.

Yeah, I think it's definitely different from like a B2B, like, tech product while I was selling. And I'd been following you and Jeremy for a couple of years in my previous job. And it was. It's not that I couldn't apply a lot of emotional stuff. I just didn't see how it connected compared to when you're now truly selling an emotional product. You can't fall back on software demo.

Yeah, yeah.

You're selling a result and an intangible outcome. So it forces you to be. Be better.

Exactly. Okay, so what sort of made you come? So you. You sort of had a bit of a sea change, came over to this new company, new role. Sales director. Right. The big D sales. Right. And you were like. Because you came to us, like, I guess actually before you'd started, I think. Is that right?

Yeah, I think it was sort of Facebook ad. I think you guys. One of your. I think it was either yours or. I think it was. One of your stories on Facebook was you were showing about how your appointment centers was doing like 400 calls a day from a dialer. And I was like, oh, wow, that's a. That's a lot. Then the tech you had set up was. Was pretty. Like, it looked pretty advanced compared to, like, what I was using. So I was like, my guys are. My guys are only doing like a hundred calls manually. So I was like, what are you guys doing? So that. That's kind of what prompted me to reach out. Learn your secrets.

Okay. Okay. And then we sort of took you through a bit of a. Like, let's have a look at the data. Let's have a look at the structure of the people and how everything being run. And I guess, like, what did we. What do we do? Like, what were the changes that. Some of the changes that made that were really kind of, I guess, tangibly effective.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think if you think of it like a top of the top of the funnel, I look at like three. Three areas, like increasing schedule percentage, increasing show percentage, and then increasing the win rate.

Yep.

I started off with like, schedule percentage. Just looking at, first of all, how many calls the guys were doing. Tight. You tell. You told me to go away in time, how long it took them to, you know, time do the call update, CRM had notes, things like that. And it was taking them like eight minutes compared to like one and a half minutes. So you were like, you know, they should be doing 300 calls a day, not 100. So that. That was, first of all was just like, volume.

Yeah.

So first of all was like, volume and Then, then also amount of outreach. So 12 times in seven days compared to, you know, maybe a few times then giving up. So that was like the first thing that like, straight away allowed me to weed out some people in the team that weren't, you know, they weren't committed to that because I kind of joined a team. They've just been getting away 80 calls, getting over 10 hours, getting paid, whatever, just screwing around, really.

So, yeah, when you start looking at time. Right. People can't hide. So it's like, well, if it takes you this long to do this and you do this many of that, that's four hours a day. What do you do for the rest of your job? You know, so it's like, yeah, so.

That, that, that's always a good place to start, you know, and that enabled. So with a schedule percentage, we. When I first joined, we were like 22. So schedule is like number of leads we scheduled into a book call. Yeah, it was about 22%.

Okay.

And now it's about 35%.

Okay.

That's like, that's not the schedule percentage.

Yeah. And that's. That's over. Like, what kind of, what kind of volume of. I guess bookings is an over, like two closers.

5,700 leads, roughly.

Okay. So 7% is, you know, 10% would be 570. So we're looking at an additional 400 calls a month, something like that.

Probably a few more than that. Probably like 700 calls. Additional booked. And then. Yeah, and then the second thing was. So then we moved down the funnel into like show up, Right?

Yeah.

Fitness, you said, you know, and you said this, like, fitness sales is going to be one of the lowest sharp breaks you're going to get. People are very emotional and flippant.

Yeah.

And we had, we didn't have a. We didn't have a calendar system in. Yeah, we looked at this sort of.

Like people were manually booking into diaries and all kinds of stuff.

They had to have their own CRM diary. But there wouldn't be, first of all, you know, there wouldn't be any reminders sent out.

Yeah.

It would be an email reminder, but not a phone call reminder, text reminder. But also you couldn't control the priority of those meetings. So like, now we have it where our best reps, we can give them more. Yeah, it was like, actually before it was worse because you had some of the reps that would been with a company for a while that had close relationships with the SDRs, the kind of appointment centers so they'd get More. Even though they weren't that good.

Yeah. Okay, that's a problem.

So it can, it can be even worse if you don't, if you don't do anything about that. So we, we, we saw the scheduling system out there. So we're like 33 show rate before that. Now we're like 50, which is a bit better. We've got a landing page set up to warm up, warm up the people before the call as well.

Yeah, like our FAQ page.

Yeah, we have kind of like, you know, it's got like a vsl, a lot of like, case studies, proof.

Yeah. I think it's important because, like, these are all, you know, these are all like, like little things, like 7% here, 5% there, 8% there, 10% there. It's such a compounding effect on a business. And that's why starting top of funnel is so important because, like, if you, A lot of businesses, they come in and they're just like, they come to us and like, okay, we want to train our sales team to be, to be better because they're losing people on this. Objection. And like, I spoke to one guy a while ago and they're doing big, not like they're doing like over a hundred million a year. And I was like, I could definitely do that, but I guarantee you, if you just gave me like a week in your data and CRM, I could probably find you 2% at the top and like, and that would, that would equate to far more money.

Yeah. Diminishing returns at some point. And also the process is always easier to fix than try and get people to do stuff.

Exactly. There's a really important thing, like if you can fix the process, then the, the, the, the issue really comes when you have, like, when everything is a variable and nothing is a constant. That's when like, everything kind of gets stuck down because you've got, like, if you haven't got people on like a script, then you don't know what's everybody. So you can't bank at the right things are being done if you don't have an auditing process for that, if you don't have, like, decent enough data, if you don't have, like, everyone knows the client journey and what everyone has to do from step A to step B to step C or whatever. And then so like, there's no constant. So like the analogy that I give people is like, when you're a sniper, like, the gun, when you're learning how to shoot, the gun is the constant. So like, then all you have to do is focus on shooting it straight. Like so basically stop yourself from making mistakes because that gun and a vice is never going to miss, right? Like if you take out all external factors and just shoot a gun, it's gone fucking dead straight, right? And if that scope is set up correctly again, it's going to be exactly where it should be because it's engineered to do that, right? So the things that make people miss are variables. Now the number one variable is the person shooting. So if you can make the person shooting a constant, then you can start to focus on the other variables which is like wind, elevation, distance, etc. Which is the things that you really need to dial in. But like people, there's no point learning how to adjust for windage and elevation and distance, right. If you suck like you know. Right, right.

So like people are important as well.

But yeah, so, but you can, all that, all that stuff is a process. Like just like the way you lie behind a gun. Like everything is process like that. And then it's actually far more of a skill set to read what's happening with the wind, to read what's happening with everything. Like that's the real skill is dialing in. The scope is the skill, right? Just sitting down and shooting straight. Like anyone can be taught that. It's not super difficult. It's like the other parts, right? So like it's the same in sales. Like what you want to do is you want to make as many consistencies as possible which would be like processing everything. It's like if you know what's going to happen at every step of the way, then from there you start to remove variables because you can put your hand on heart and say well I know that's good, I know that's good, I know that's good. Well let's work on the things that like could be really variable and you know what I mean, Is it the people? Is it this? So if you just got a dial in process first you're going to get like a 10x result over like focusing on like. Objection. Handling.

And I agree. And one thing I did, even taking your stuff step further was run data on show rate by day. So we found out that days have a 65% show rate compared to a Wednesday at 43. We ran like three months of data and now I'm getting it by hour of the day. So then I can craft the, the sales rep schedules around on that. So we actually have a sales team that run, run seven days a week, pretty much 9:00am to 11:00pm Eastern time shifts. So we're able to just reach out to leads multiple times per day. Even if you don't catch in the morning, catch in the evening.

Yeah.

Weekends, everyone else is sleeping. So that, that was key as well. And then also even taking it a step further from like Calendly which only sends the automatic phone notifications if the customer replies, it doesn't actually go back to the rep because. Yeah, yeah, Calendly toll free number. So we've actually set it up. So we set up like I use like a console to do this, but he set out between our just call dialer, make API. So it actually sends automatic text confirmations from the individual's phone number within the dialer and reminders and everything. So it's all personalized from each rep's individual number and the replies go back to the rep.

So have you seen a deliverability issue since the. Since the need to register all numbers?

Oh, the C name stuff. Yeah, yeah. So we use like reputation ID monitoring, softw where you can. Yeah, I mean this is like next level stuff. But you kind of gave me a lot of the.

Yeah, like we've been registering our phone numbers for years, so. Like the fact that.

Exactly. You've already been doing a lot of that stuff. But not a lot of companies do this. Like.

No, they don't.

You're kind of way ahead of that. You know even I had a lot of experience before, but sometimes, especially when you, when you're like a bigger company, like I was in a bigger tech company, I was doing 50 million, you're just really running the team. You're not really kind of like, you know, it's difficult with the advanced tech stuff that's kind of left to what they call rev ops or like sales ops.

Yeah, yeah.

You're so close to the ground in this space that you can kind of be a lot more kind of creative than I was in this. So.

Yeah, absolutely.

That was huge. That was definitely huge. Yeah.

And what do you say? Like. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yep. Okay, keep going.

No, no, then, so that, then the win rate. So again like you said, the scripting is so important because when I joined there was no scripts. So let. You had 10 different salespeople saying 10 different things.

Not using just means it's impossible from a management standpoint to actually go like. Well, I mean, I guess this, this works or this doesn't work. Like there's no consistency. We're using gong. We're trialing GONG right now.

Yeah, yeah.

What were your thoughts on that, do.

You like expensive, but yeah, I mean if you got the money like you have, then pretty good. If you, if you haven't got as much. We use. We're trialing Zoom iq. So it's the Zoom IQ version of it?

Yeah, yeah. I've been seeing. We were gonna try both, but I heard GONG from like, from like. I spoke to Pace Mor and they've been using GONG for a while, doing all their like sales rep analysis and stuff like that. So they can tell I know a lot about it.

I piloted it in my last company. I would. I mean obviously it's an awesome tool. The thing, the thing I'm using it with, it's got the same thing as Zoom iq. The way I'm setting it up is around the indicators. Right. So in terms of. I want to know when an objection's mentioned, show me how this person handled this objection. So I set all the objections up and then it will show me how they're actually handling it. So I can skip through and do training. Just that. So it's gonna be awesome for your, your managers to do that. Yeah, I'd love to set it up.

For our clients, but it's not gonna happen.

What other stuff are you kind of trialing like that at the moment?

So like we got gong like we've sort of redone our data. We just hired a full time data scientist like, like full time in house to like collate like. But that not just sales, the entire business to code the whole business. Right. So then from there like all the information is like actually edified in code and stored in servers and stuff like that so that we can then like you could then attach an AI to it and just ask it questions about the business. Right. You know, like, what are the rates in January this, you know, like what are the like gross profit that we average during these months and these times it cross references all the data and tells you. But then from there we can look at potentially custom coding our own CRM, which for like what we're doing is probably the next step would be completely custom coding everything. Making our own scheduling system, our own, you know, everything. That's what paste is. Did they. They customed everything because like you get to a point where you just kind of go beyond a lot of the capabilities a lot of the softwares or like you have so many software that like it just becomes a real clunky, complex mess. So like just go on and make your own.

Yeah, yeah, we have that. And with the best feature you need, this is Basically we link it with zoom so it gives you accurate show up rates. So if it records two people attending the zoom, it marks it off as a, as a show. There's no way that it can be cheated.

You have that currently or you had that on your previous.

We have that right now.

Yeah. Right.

So that's what I mean. Because we use our custom CRM.

Yeah. Yeah. There are massive like drawbacks to a custom because like everything's a fuck fight like whenever you do anything. But if you got the coders in house and all that kind of stuff, it shouldn't be too bad. We're messing around with a little bit of AI as well. Been working with a company for about four months now building a few things.

What do you want to do with that?

Like mainly like confirmation shop conversations. Like stuff for our challenges. Right. Because like, you know, we'll have 16,000 registrations, 20,000 registrations. So like we can't call them, we can't text them. You know what I mean? Like, it's just physically like there's too many people. So like. But we can import them into our CRM and then the AI can converse with them in the CRM air.

AI. I saw that. I try to get.

We're not using that. We've been, we've been working with someone pretty closely. It's all been custom coded.

That's cool. That's the game changer that.

Yeah. So like we'll see if it works. It's like in beta at the moment, talking to like a hundred people a day. But you know, we get thousands and thousands and thousands of leads. So like it's sort of a very small segment of what it is we're doing. But if it, if it pulls off then it'll be, it'll be pretty interesting. Um, but yeah, we're just sort of trying to figure out a way to like, we have really good data now. Like our marketing and our sales departments talk really, really well with each other. Like we, we have this sort of constants and we know we put this here, this comes out, put this here, this comes out. Like we have a constant sort of shortage, like ironically a shortage of sales reps. Um, but that's because like, it's just like to find people who we think represent the brand well enough to sell is really difficult.

Selection process of interest.

I like that people just apply and.

From there they have to be from the sales persuasion. Facebook group though. Do you take a lot of them from there or where do they.

No, a lot of them are Clients, like, a lot of them are like inner circle members or 3.0 members a lot, I would say. And then some are like referrals. Some are like, we've had clients that have just like, badgered us into becoming.

Yeah. Hiring and selection. Like. Yeah.

So we make. We. We listen to phone calls. So make them send us recordings, do a role play. Then from there they'll do an interview, usually two. And then they get. We said we have different types of sales reps. So we have, like, we have an inbound and outbound reps. So like. So we've got outbound rep, which is like someone who just calls outbound leads and closes them. They get a different commission because they're not taking any book calls. So. But they almost exclusively get buyer leads. Right. So, like, they're only really talking to customers. They're not talking to leads. Right. It's people who have bought something. But we get like a hundred buyer leads a day, so we have a few guys doing that. Then from there we have, like, our inbound guys who get inbound book calls. And then we have, like an SDR team and then we have a DM setting team. And then we're trialing, like, a new sort of type of almost like a unicorn closer thing, which is like someone who's like a very, very high skill set. And we're basically, like, creating an entire ecosystem around them. They get their own DM set or get their own outbounder. Like.

Yeah, they have, like, show me some tier stuff you have set up. It's pretty.

It's a little bit beyond that one. It's like their commissions get way higher, but they have way higher KPIs. Like, so it's just like, it's a more difficult thing to do. But, like, if they get it right, they could make an awful lot. But, like, it's all based around, like, having a certain percentage of upsell, having a certain percentage of referral. Like, you know what I mean? And then having, like, contractually guaranteeing a close rate, stuff like that. So. And like, cash with.

With us with a team your size, I guess, like, when you say, like, recruitment's a challenge, is it because you're trying to grow and add more people on and replace people that just aren't good enough or, like, what is kind of.

Well, like, we have a performance management piece, but, like, we don't get. We don't, like, turn over that many. I would say, like, our sales staff turnover is far lower than the average sales staff turnover is 35%. Annually. We're, we're. We're not there.

Yeah. So they work remotely or do you have everyone in?

Like, we want to bring everybody into. We want to bring as many people as possible. Possible into the office. Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's just way better, you know, I mean, not everybody will come, obviously. Like, it's just sort of impossible, but as many people as possible. And we're going to be recruiting, you know, more specifically around the area to, to try and get people in the office because it just builds a way better culture, builds a better brand. You have more, you know, like, it's. The people make more money and stuff like that. Right. So it's easier to train them as well, because you can train them in person. So I feel like there's a real tangible benefit to that. So that's what we're going to be sort of trying to do over the next little bit and aim to have like, you know, a good chunk of our company in an office by, you know, the middle of 2024. If that's admin staff, everybody, like having just a good chunk of people, probably not more than, you know, if we get 50 in office, I'd be stoked.

You know, I mean, it's, it's.

Yeah, yeah. It's not hard to find people if we have thousands of them. Do you know what I mean?

But it's just, they do video interviews. Like, they submit a video on like automatic video and why they want the job. Like.

Yeah. So we have this whole form. They submit it using ClickUp, and then from there, like, we can like review and then contact the people who we want. We also do like, like group intakes. So we'll do like a. Okay, we're looking for 10 people and then from there have like a hundred people apply and then just try and sift through them, you know.

And one of the things we talked about when we were working together is, you know, when it, when you know, it's time to scale, right. Looking at spot utilization rate, around 80 lead flow. But when do you make a decision on, you know, where you are now with so many different departments, like, how. How do you know when to grow to that next? Because you're hiring people at once, not just one rep. Right. So it's not like, oh, we just.

Like, I think, like, for. It depends on the state of the business. Right. So like, sometimes, like, consolidation is a better move than growth, I think, you know, which for me feels like the move at the moment. It's like not to try and ramp it too hard. You know, we onboard so many clients that like, you know, we gotta fix or make that I think way tighter. It's pretty good, you know, but like it's not good enough for like what I want to see. Whether it will ever be good enough for what I want to see is a different story. But I think like, you know, growth for growth's sake, I think is a mistake. And I think, you know, you gotta grow within the confines of the business that you have, not the business that you wish you had, you know, and so customer, like our customers being happy and renewing and resigning is way more important to me, me than like hiring more sales reps or making the business quote unquote bigger. I like, I would rather kind of just make the business better. I agree.

I mean that's where we're at right now, you know, especially with fitness. It's one of those. Well, and with an expensive package like personal training, you know, people are spending hundreds, maybe thousand plus a month, right. For their three, six, nine, twelve month contract. And then it's not once they've hit their goal, let's say they lose 20 pounds for their wedding or they just wanted to kind of like knock off like pounds. It's then how to get them to resign rather than just always focusing on new people at the front end. Right, yeah. So there is that kind of upsell and account management aspect. I think one thing we need to work on, which I'm going to help with, is getting the right leader in there to like reverse engineer. What is. What successful steps does a successful customer take? Yeah, their milestones. Like, you know, did they. Did they rate their first session out of five? How quickly do they get their first session? Like seventh session, 10 session. Right. Really tracking those milestones. But do you track anything in terms of understanding and reverse engineering nearing, I guess, what your best customers are doing and then kind of apply that or how do you kind of.

Yeah, yeah. Like we've started doing a lot of our upsells through email. That's a lot of our renewals and stuff like that. I just don't. We should probably renew two a day on email. The team is definitely on that. What we're working at the moment is redoing is completely redoing the first like 90 days of the client journey for each one and having it far more touchpoint point, you know, to like really build the habits with the people early. That's what we're working on at the moment. That's supposed to be done by the end of September and then completely rolled out like active as of what, August, September, October 1st. That's supposed to be done. So it's a really big project. It requires hiring more people and like, you know, really staffing up that side of it and having like a difference between sort of customer service and coaching and sort of really nailing everything down. But that's really the thing that we have to I think re engineer here because like, you know, from an educational standpoint, like you sort of really got to without, without sounding like pejorative, sort of dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. Like you really have to. If, if, if 50% of people can look at it and make sense, like it's not good enough. Like it has to be 80% of people, 90% of people can look at it and have it make sense, you know, and then just figure out like what percentage of people you just, you're willing to not be able to serve.

You know, the way Gong can help with that as well. You can set up keywords like refund, compl, happy that can alert you in Slack. Use the manager or not you obviously, but you're above that. But the, the actual manager saying boom. Unhappy customer mentioned for five minutes into this call, this word refund or termination was mentioned.

Yeah.

So that, that's going to be really good for you at scale like I said. Right. With smaller teams like us, I don't think it's, it's useful but like the amount of reps you have, like there's so much going on and the quality just dissipates. Right?

Yeah. It's really, really difficult to keep on top of everything.

You know, one thing I would like it to do is mark the calls automatically to an embed scorecard. It has a scorecard in built. But the next level of tech is like you plug your script in and then it will listen to all the calls and mark them everything to the script and then spit out and be like, Joe only averages 50 on his calls of covering the objections the right way. Right?

Yeah, right. That's. That, that, that's fantastic. That's sort of what the stuff that we spoke about. I was at Brunson's Mastermind and Pace came up really good talk and his business partner who's like the marketing guy is pretty phenomenal. I don't remember.

Business partner.

Yeah. Yeah. Really, really smart guy. Clearly knows what the hell he's doing. It's funny because we had like identical stats on everything.

Really? Yeah.

Like everything was identical. It was Just like, you know, vsl, we had everything set up the exact same way and we'd never even seen his stuff. Like everything was sort of set up the same way. We were using the same tech stack, but they had transitioned to the all. Like all custom. But they just before that they were using the same tech stack, same stats. Our close rates were higher. Right. But you know, it's. Because it should be. Right, Right.

But they're like everyone else in the.

World, like client sticker. It was crazy because like, like it's a lifetime program, but their program's totally different. Like we can't do things that they can do.

But up to. Yeah. Now I've been following Pace for a while. Like he's, he's like a real estate homogeneous. So he's, he's. He's switched on for sure. He works hard as well.

Yeah, very smart, very good. Does a lot of really cool things for clients. I thought that was really, really interesting. But also like his clientele is like one of the ways that he finds deals. So like it's a really interesting sort of business model that you can really heavily monetize and kind of all angles as long as you hold the people in your ecosystem for long enough. So it was interesting to see kind of his thoughts on customer service and all that kind of good stuff and how he builds a tribe and you know, like what communities really are and stuff like that. But like he'll have a meetup with like what, four or five hundred people in like a random spot, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's my. Those.

He's.

Doesn't matter everything like that. So that's awesome. I mean, how does he manage his team?

He does nothing to do with it.

No, no, no, no. Sorry. I mean, he's sales culture. Right. You know, do you know much about that compared to your. Like, is it similar. So the tech similar. The results?

But yeah, I mean like we've trained a ton of their sales guys so like a ton of their guys came through in a circle, stuff like that. But you know, Pace has got a good name. I don't think doing his sales would be particularly hard. Hard. You know, he's got a phenomenal reputation. He does everything right. He's pretty clean. You know, a couple of recent things that you know, I mean, but other than that, everything. He's got a great reputation, so I feel like he was there.

I know he got, he got like in it. He was in. He got scammed by someone or like.

Yeah, yeah. He was involved in something him and, like, Pete Vargas and a bunch of dudes were in this, like, crypto investment thing, and they got scammed. And anyway, it was a whole thing. I watched the coffee Zillow episode. It was fascinating. Fascinating. But yeah, man. So, all right, so what are the changes that you're looking to make over the next little bit? Kind of like, what are you looking to do to progress the team? Where do you want to take it?

Yeah, so to kind of recap six, I mean, it was interesting. I joined in January, which was like, the best month for fitness, but I just started. So we. We did about 200 customers. Now we're doing around 300. Should be doing 325. So same amount of leads.

Fantastic.

What we're trying to do is kind of like, avoid. What you just said is avoid growth, all costs, Refine the churn, refine the onboarding experience, and then start scaling. We can. We can actually get about 10x the leads that we're getting right now from about 20 a lead. So the mark, the marketing isn't really an issue. It's. It's like the customer success element, which is what we're really working on right now. So the. Yeah, it's like fixing that and then scaling. So, you know, doubling up to around 4. Our target, I think next, by next March, is around 450 customers.

Yeah, well, the thing is, like, you've gotta. You gotta. You gotta, like, do it in spurts, right? So it's like, okay, we've got the sales up to where we need it to be, to where now we can invest in the customer success again. Because, like, you get awesome customer success, and then from there, like, you grow. Yeah, I mean, because you're getting good customer results. But then, like, as you grow, it's difficult, difficult to focus on all areas. So if, even if your customer fulfillment stays the same, but it gets diluted somewhat, it's not as good. You know what I mean? Then it's like, you got to consolidate and then, like, put the. The effort, energy, the time and the thought back into the customer to then get it to a place where, like, you're comfortable to grow again. Otherwise, you just end up with a business that, like, just constantly grows. And then your customer, your customer department gets so heavily diluted that you just end up, like, getting such a bad name that you can't recover from it. Like, which we've seen tons of businesses do.

Danlock.

It's just, you know, it's happened to tons of people. Um, because, like, growing, growing businesses, like, when as soon as you hit a heater with sales and marketing, like you can really ramp that, you know, like if you figure out sales and marketing, then you can grow anything, you know. But it's like just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Yeah, yeah, that's hard balance comment because like I said, and I was saying this at the start, you know, the, the, the negatives are compounded and more people talk about the negatives and positives. So yeah, you start problems in the tea. More complaints. It feels like it's getting worse. It's not. You're just growing. It's growing pains.

Yeah. I mean if you had, if, if you sign up 400 people a month, right, and you have a 1% complaint rate, then you have four complaints a month, right. But like that can seem like a lot like four likes, like four negative Google reviews, do you know what I mean? Or something like that. Whereas like in reality it's 99% of people are complaining.

But people don't remember that We've set up, we've actually set up slack channels for positive reviews, which is the whole team. And then also CS team wins. When they save a deal, they'll, when they save a customer from termination, they'll post the screenshots and they share that as a deal in the deal chat. Like. Yeah, so we do, we do reward kind of like saved deals and positive reviews. But one thing I'm rolling out right now is this bit of software called Referral Rock, which is a complete, it's taken about five, six months to engineer in our custom CRM. But it's a third party bit of tech basically. It's like one of the best referral engine platforms out there. I'm going to turn customers or trainers, our employees, pretty much anyone can have their own account and dashboard where they can send their own link out and they can track their earnings in the dashboard.

Yeah, beautiful.

I think, I think referrals is huge in fitness.

Yeah, I think it's huge in every, in like in every business if you can get referrals, right, you can, I mean like, you know, you like if you spend 25% of a customer on ads, which for an online business is not unreasonable, right. You can give them 20% and you'd still save money.

Yeah, that's growing every year. You know, ad costs are growing so you can basically give the CPA to them, a cost practitioner to them. Sorry. But yeah, I think that's for me right now, fixing, fixing the churn and then the referral program stuff. Really taking that to that. We got 700 trainers. So 700 trainers, like 2,000 customers paying with new ones added each month. Obviously, you know, that's, that's a lot of, you know, referrals you could offer. And even in like Alex's new book, he talks about getting, giving away a discount and, and has in exchange for three referrals. The hardest thing about referrals is really tracking it and making it seem worth people's while. Which is why I think to have that kind of platform element so people can keep track of their rewards and their own.

I built out a full referral program a little while ago, but like the problem is that I didn't have a. I didn't know there was a platform to sort of go out there. When I have, I'm going to have a look at it. Referral rock.

Yeah, that's who uses that. Like, because I looked at what like, like you know, the big, the big stock trading platforms like Acorn or PayPal. Their own custom ones though, so you can't really find it. So this is the one I found before and it does, it's good. It's going to do the job. Yeah, I like it.

It's good.

Have a look into that. But yeah, that's, that's kind of where my focus is right now is like definitely on the customer success stuff and referrals. Yeah, we can scale leads up. So sales and marketing is an issue. Issue. I think what, what is going to be more of an issue is like the growing pains that scaling brings. Like I've been with team gone from work 10 to 100 and you know.

You know there's tons of stuff that you got to deal with when it comes to that.

Yeah. So I think your thing about being in the office makes. It definitely works better for like those big environments. Like when you have like 50 plus people having in there, it's very difficult remotely.

Absolutely.

But yeah, man, that's pretty. So I mean I'm really grateful for your, for your help. So we've kind of got off to a good start this year and so it's just working through stuff. Stuff takes time. You gotta wait for devs to do stuff. You've gotta just wait for those little changes to kind of take effect that you're rolling through. Like even things like coaching, like the stuff of zoom coaching someone's with. It takes a couple of months to really get up there.

You know us like you just, you won't know what's working and what's not. So you Gotta be slow and deliberate. And that's the annoying part and that's the reason why people don't do it, you know, like, you gotta be deliberate, gotta be slow. One change at a time. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Watch it go. Watch it go. Like, I mean, I remember when we implemented like the, the tech shop sequence, it's like, oh, look, people are showing up. Sweet. That's a win.

Yeah.

Next. Next.

Yeah, the next thing. Yeah, yeah. So one, the other thing as well as I'd advise is this is something I used to do in my last role is we have quotas, but we also, we, we have a P. We have. You have this. You have a profit and loss, like a P. L for the team, but we actually break it down at the rep level.

Level.

So we look at how many schedules they took, their lead and SDR cost and their seat cost individualized.

Yeah.

So then we set the minimum cash collected quotas based on their actual seat costs as well.

Yeah.

Which means if someone's grabbing more leads, more schedules. Right. They'll. Yeah, they're going to bring in more money so they're going to look better.

Yeah. So similar thing. So basically it's like, how much ad spend did we spend on you versus by the rep?

That's cool.

Yeah. So then. And then from there the scoring of like rep of the month is like a minimum cash collection threshold with a, with a, with the highest roi. Because that, like, that's the most efficient rep because like you might. You work less and like, that's fine. But if you're really efficient, it's like, that's fantastic. If I, if I put 50 grand into you and you return 700, I would rather that than the guy that I put 400 into and returns me a million. You know, it's like, great, perfect. Let's do that.

The only other people I've met that actually really looks at that rep level.

Yeah, we, yeah, we do it for the rep and the SDRs, DM setters, everyone.

And then you look at their churn as well of how. Then take that off as well.

Yeah, yeah. So it's all like for the month and then for like a lifetime, the finance department does it.

Some rep put loads through that's just not miss selling, but high expectations and they don't get fulfilled. Especially in our business as well. So. So problem.

It's a problem in every business. You always get rogue reps doing that shit. Fair enough. It's just about catching them. All right, David, that was awesome. I know. It's late where you are, so let you go to bed. But I really appreciate you coming on and sharing the insights of what it's like kind of being in a growth team and some of the shit that you're doing in the background to maximize everything. You're doing the good. You're doing the good stuff.

Fighting the good fight. Cheers, mate.

Thank you for your service.