In this keynote, Ryan Dohrn shares practical insights on building high‑performing sales teams. He opens with a humorous anecdote about his 12‑year‑old son’s sales instincts, then stresses that effective sales leadership hinges on rigorous accountability—regular reporting and uncomfortable performance conversations. Dohrn argues that without a clear, step‑by‑step acquisition blueprint, sales activity devolves into randomness, likening an unplanned sales effort to trying to assemble a car or build a house without a blueprint. He advocates for a structured advertiser‑acquisition process that precisely defines each stage, eliminates unqualified outreach, and discards wasteful practices such as generic voicemails. Recognizing that 86 % of people learn visually, he calls out the over‑reliance on verbal pitches and urges salespeople to incorporate visual aids to improve comprehension. Finally, he highlights the importance of tracking call‑to‑close ratios and other metrics to pinpoint breakdowns in the funnel, enabling data‑driven improvements. The overall message is that disciplined planning, accountability, qualified prospecting, visual communication, and metric‑driven management are essential for sales success.
Chapters
My 12-year-old son is quite a salesperson, by the way. I don't know if you read in my bio, but my wife actually raises horses and we raise dogs. And so someone came to buy a dog from us. And the gentleman said to my son, he said, oh, little boy, aren't you very sad when these puppies leave? And he says, oh. And I said to the man, I said, oh, listen, sir, you know, everything's for sale here except my wife and my kids. Hahaha. Well, I'm traveling on the road a few weeks ago and my wife still has some puppies for sale. And someone comes to our house and says, oh, little boy, I'd really like to buy this puppy, but I don't want you to be sad when the puppy leaves. He said, sir, everything's for sale except my wife and my kids. The plan of attack that happens with good salespeople starts with understanding that you have to ask a lot of very, very good questions. But also remember something as leaders in the room. You have to have a very high level of accountability with your sales team. Oh, accountability, that's real scary for me. You know, I've got to like ask them to report to me and I've got to be real uncomfortable and ask them if they're doing their job. But it's fundamentally one of the most important pieces of your business, yet you couldn't send it to me if I asked you for it. It's kind of embarrassing, isn't it? Slightly. It's really important for you to understand the acquisition process. Because without a plan, it's very difficult to be successful. Now, I would imagine in this example here that you could put 35 to 100 qualified people into a room that could build a car. We could put the parts of the car in the middle of this room right here, all the parts of the car, and at the end of the day, they will have assembled a car. Would you agree? Probably. Is it going to be efficient? No. How many cars are they gonna get done in a day? Probably 1, maybe, maybe 2. And also, if your sales process is broken and that's the system that you use, you can't accurately identify where in the process something is broken. And so we have to focus on is this: we have to stop randomness. Oh, you don't know the number of salespeople that I work with. Their entire day is It's just random. It's Monday morning. All right, well, it's Monday morning. I guess I need to call 5 or 6 people. No, forget it. Actually, I'll just send 25 emails. I mean, how many times do I walk into organizations, sales organizations, and it is dead quiet? And I'll say to the publisher, are your salespeople here? Oh yeah, they all got here at 8 o'clock this morning. I don't hear anything. Oh, well, you know, they write a lot of emails. Is that your plan? So if you want to build a house, what do you do? Do you just buy a bunch of lumber, show up and say, all right, boys, put it together, start knocking it out? No, there's a blueprint. There's a plan. Any plan is better than no plan at all. We have to fight randomness. So how do we do that? We put specific plans in place. When it comes to advertiser acquisition, we have to accurately understand What is the exact sales process and what are we doing to move people through that process? Stop wasting time on unqualified people. Stop leaving terrible voicemails. Stop calling folks just to check in with them. I'd fire somebody if they leave a voicemail. Hi, it's Ryan from such and such magazine calling to check in with you. Fired. Fired. 86% of people learn visually, but what do we mostly do? As salespeople? Talk, right? 86% of people learn visually, but all we do as salespeople is talk. If you want to have great sales, what do you need to do? Use visuals. We're talking too much, our proposals are too complex, we don't understand our call-to-close ratios, and we're not a known entity to people at all. The sales process is very easy to understand. It's also very easy to derail.
