This Ex-recruiter transformed his sales skills and will hit 750K this year…

Hey guys, welcome back to yet another episode of Top Billers Toolkit, where me and my twin brother Ben interview top billers from all around the globe to unlock the secrets to their success. Today's guest is a legend in the sales world, Marcus Kauke. Marcus spent years in the world of recruitment, billing substantial numbers and working his way up the corporate ladder. One day he came to the conclusion that he wasn't serving his customers in the best way possible, and in order to do that, He needed to become better at sales and better understanding the psychology of human beings. And so Pandora's box was opened. Marcus is now a leading high-performance sales coach that transforms the results of sales teams. He's on track to hit $750K this year, but more importantly, he's helped his enterprise clients generate a whopping $7.5 billion of top-line revenue. Today we're going to be talking about how how slowing down the sales call can actually get you better results. We'll be discussing why asking powerful questions can transform the direction of a sales call, and we'll be talking about why all recruiters should be doubling down on their sales to increase their billing numbers. So grab a cuppa or a glass of wine depending on when you're listening to this, and let's get into it, shall we? Hello Marcus, how are you?

I'm very well, thank you. Delighted to be here.

Awesome. Um, for anyone that doesn't know Marcus, we, me and Ben, have known Marcus for quite a long time. He was our, and still is, our sales trainer. He's a legend. We love him dearly. And thank you, Marcus, for coming on to share your wisdom. Um, we always start this, um, podcast off with the same question, which is, what's the number one tool in your toolkit, would you say, Marcus? Whether that be a mindset, a strategy, or a piece of software.

Um, When you ask the question, the first thing that sprang to mind was time. I'm willing to be patient and slow things down, and that's a superpower in sales. I'm intrinsically lazy, and the motto for our business is double the money for half the work. But there is a caveat that there must be no reduction in the quality or the experience. But if you're constantly looking to subtract to improve, it means that you're spending more time on useful, productive activity And time is the one thing you can never get back. It may be infinite, but for you it's finite. So don't squander a moment of it.

It's really interesting. Why, why does slowing things down get better results in that, in your customer's case, Marcus?

Well, first of all, most salespeople are in a hurry and most recruiters are in a hurry because we're conditioned to behave transactionally. No one likes to be sold. No one likes to have someone try to dip their hand in their pocket and take out their wallet. And most selling is driven by coercion, manipulation, selfishness. What they don't need is yet another tedious pitch about how great and unique your database is. It's exactly the same as everyone else's, give or take a few thousand names. And you're using LinkedIn, so it's exactly the same database, and you're using word search, and you sound just like everyone else. You become a commodity. Well, if you slow things down, it means that you can focus on developing the medium-term pipeline instead of focusing on the short term. And if you can just weather the first 6 to 9 months, then your short, your medium-term pipeline becomes short term, But now you've had time to multi-thread and speak to a dozen people within the organization and show up consistently being timely, relevant, and valuable, being credible, being reliable, and earning the right to intimacy. So when they move from passive to active looking, you consistently demonstrated low self-orientation because what buyers don't need is someone else trying to put them under pressure to make a decision that they're not ready to make. So our job is to meet our customer where they are, not where we wish they were. And just because you have a quota to hit doesn't affect them one iota, and they don't give a damn. They don't care that you're not going to make your mortgage payment. They don't care that you're going to get thrown out or fired What they do care about is, can I find someone who is going to succeed in the job for which I hire them, improve over time, and stay? But instead, most recruiters fixate on the placement and making sure they just make it through the guarantee period. Well, that's not really very good. That's a bit like being a slaver in Rome selling, you know, warm bodies, and they're a commodity. You don't treat them like human beings. These are living, breathing human beings. The work that we do as recruiters is crucial. It's really important work. This is people's livelihoods. It affects their families. It affects their career path. How dare anyone make a placement for the money? Trying to squeeze a candidate in, convince them to take a shit job with a terrible employer Grow a moral spine and some moral fiber.

Sorry, go ahead, Sam. So I've just, that was really interesting, Marcus. How, for someone that doesn't know about the concept of slowing things down in a sales call, what, how does someone do that? Is it about taking control of a conversation? Is it about asking better questions? How does someone who's never done that before start thinking about how they can start slowing a conversation down?

Well, the first thing is the agreement you have with yourself and your level of preparation and practice. The reason most salespeople turn up lacking confidence is because they're expecting to get a hard time. Well, if they've rehearsed the dozen hard times that they are ever likely to face in their industry, I mean, let's be honest, As a recruiter, how many original objections have any of your listeners ever heard? Because I guarantee it's the square root of nothing. Okay, they've never heard an original objection. And if they have, it's a lie or a smokescreen. And they've never been asked an original question. And they've never been asked for an original piece of information. So nothing that they do in the sale cannot be planned for. And on the odd occasion, something happens that's out of the ordinary. All the planning and all the rehearsal has been done. So that gives you breathing space to think. So you stay calm. The best salespeople I know have a massive tolerance for boredom because you're going to have the same conversation 10,000 times in a year. 20,000 times in a year. It takes a certain kind of perverse mind to put up with that. But if you take every conversation as an opportunity to learn about another human being and you're curious about what makes them tick, I've never been bored, even with boring people, because I'm fascinated how they bore me because that might be a very useful skill. Henry Kissinger used it to beat the Russians in negotiations. He developed that incredibly boring delivery style deliberately because the thought of 3 weeks stuck in a room with Henry Kissinger speaking at this pace was enough to drive them fucking crazy. So they gave concessions.

That's brilliant.

Isn't it just? But you slow down. When people are in a hurry, they tend to make bad decisions. They make terrible decisions. They make bad decisions about who they retain. They make bad decisions about who they hire. They make bad decisions about how they prioritize the use of their time. And in a high-pressure, fast-paced environment where people live in fear because the manager is coercive or manipulative or bullying or persecuting, You switch off the prefrontal cortex. That's the clever part of the brain. That's where reason, logic, and language reside. When you put them under pressure and you put them in front of an actual living, breathing customer who can spend money, and you have them put the customer under pressure or appear to be a threat because their behavior or their language is self-serving, you trigger a disgust and contempt response in the buyer's brain, in a part of the brain called the insula circumvent. Now we know a lot. We've learned a lot in the last 20 years because the neuroscience has taught us how the brain responds and what the predictable behaviors are likely to be. We've learned about things like heuristics, which are shortcuts to idiocy. They're fast decision-making processes that the brain uses in order to conserve energy, but very often they're based on terrible criteria. So for example, familiarity bias or attribution bias. If you feel that you own something and the price drops, you will anchor a price. So let's say your gold is worth $1,000 an ounce and it drops to $500. Okay, but someone offers you $750,000, that's a really good deal at the time. But you're anchored to the $1,000,000. And if you need the money, you'll probably hang on and watch the gold price continue to drop. Yeah, and we see the same thing in pipeline, people hanging on to deals that they shouldn't because of their attachment. And this is another really important superpower. The ability to detach from emotionally from the outcome. And when you're desperate and when you're working on contingency and only 1 in 20 or 1 in 12 of your placements is going to land, you're constantly put into stress. So the most important question any recruiter can ask at this stage is, how do I do fewer assignments and get paid upfront for doing the work so that I can guarantee my full attention on the placement and get paid a premium for delivering value in the form of a human being who solves a business problem, not fill a vacancy. Because every job has a job to be done. They serve a job to be done and they have to execute their part in serving that job. So how many recruiters even bother to ask, or even know to ask, what the company's job to be done is? If they're owned by private equity, the job to be done is feed the valuation numbers so the general partners in the private equity fund can raise the next fund. It's got nothing to do with building a successful business. Well, if you understand the motivation and the driver then their crazy behavior makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I love the, the, the, the— when you told me that, Marcus, of, you know, detaching yourself from the deal, especially emotionally, and how that changed mine and Ben's mindset to a sales call. That was definitely one of the big aha moments. One thing that me and Ben come into contact with a lot is recruiters who shy away from challenging hiring managers, and I'm sure this kind of ties into becoming detached, but Recruiters might shy away from getting on the phone with a hiring manager or a CEO for that extra 30 minutes to ask some more questions about the job brief. They may be a bit too scared to ask for time or to challenge the hiring manager when they feel like they're wrong. What, for a recruiter who's maybe still worried about challenging hiring managers or decision makers, to do their job better, what words of wisdom would you give them, Marcus?

Well, the first thing I would do is focus on your medium-term pipeline. So you're not trying to sell a vacancy or sell a candidate, and try to understand their business. Um, one of my partners, Moed Amin, was, uh, heavily involved in the original research with Challenger, and he was a sales, uh, director at CEB when they were taking Challenger to market. And he's interviewed 428 C-level executives. And his research was really clear. 100% of them would not buy from people they did not consider to be honest.

Wow.

Okay. 80% of them said that if you understand my company, you get a 2 out of 5. If you understand my company and my market, i.e., the context in which I operate, you have 4 out of 5 as a starting position. So we need to, first of all, do our research. We need to understand the role of the person that we're going to be speaking to and how they serve the job to be done that the company is trying to accomplish. We need to understand how they are measured, what they prioritize, the kind of nature, the nature of their role. Are they a manager or are they a player manager? Are they a player with a manager as title? Is this their first hire? Have they hired many? Has there been a revolving door because they consistently fail to create— either hire the right people or create the conditions for them to be successful? Now, I would want to do my research on Glassdoor. I'd probably speak to alumni who used to work at the company. To get a sense of the manager and their management style. Are they a manager who coaches or are they a manager who tries to command and control? Do they spend their time on ride-alongs and on calls and planning and strategizing, or do they have a tendency to rescue, be the hero, steal the credit, or bang their, uh, the desk and beat their chest and say, you've got to work harder, more pipeline, and shove more shit in at the top. Because I think if you're going to place someone, you, you really first of all need to understand the environment that they're going to be spending the next, you know, 18 months, 2 years, 3 years in, and they're going to be spending more time in there than they are with their family. They're contracted for 8 hours, but how many people do you know who work 8 hours? Yeah?

Yeah.

The only people I know who work 8 hours are people who are either not engaged or have finally cracked it so they can do their job within the 8 hours for which they're contracted. Now they constitute 2%. The other 98% work long hours, they give a lot of their time for free, and they resent it. So we should be focusing on understanding the human being who's going to be hiring and work out what challenges that they're facing, so that instead of selling a candidate, you're selling a solution to a major problem that they face in their day-to-day lives. So I had a client, um, in recruitment who works in life sciences. And we worked out that placing a chief medical officer would mean that they could raise £300 million. So we got 50% of Firstgear's total gross guaranteed emoluments as a fee on a third, third, third. So about a £220 grand fee. What other people would have done for about 120. Hmm. Now that's a much healthier fee because it means I don't have to go out and replace it with more suspects and prospects and all that effort. Because my motto is double the money, half the work. So if they're afraid to challenge the manager, I would do the research and work out a hypothesis about the specific challenges that they are facing that are caused by Bad recruitment. Now, 95% of management problems start in hiring the wrong people. You might want to start with something like, Ben, tell me something. A lot of hiring managers are telling me that they hire people who interview and reference like James Bond. And then 3 months later, they seem to have turned into his cousin Basil then, or Mr. Bean. Now, I don't suppose that's something that happens to you, is it? All right. Okay. Um, tell me something. What's your plan to prevent that from ever happening again? Now, is that a more interesting question? Because now you're getting into the meaty stuff. Because they probably haven't been asked that by other tedious commoditized recruiters.

Hmm.

What they will have been asked is, have you got any vacancies, gov? Let me market you a really great candidate who you'll never have the like of before. But 20 other recruiters have got their CV out in the market as well.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I feel like that's tied to market, because what you were just talking about previously, Marcus, is about doing research and understanding your customer. And I feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, Marcus, and maybe you can add to this, But I realized the more that I understood my customers, when I had, you know, the more conversations I had with recruiters, the better equipped I was to ask better questions. And that was almost a formula for me to know what questions to ask.

Absolutely. Product and market knowledge are there not for you to use other than to ask better questions. Occasionally, you might throw, you know, the odd Easter egg along the way. As a treat and a reward, but your job is to gather information principally in the early stages because you are qualifying for both sides. Let's be honest, they recruit once in a blue moon typically, and they're not very good at it. You know, interviews have— I think the last data I saw had about 14%— this competency-based interviews, by the way— about a 14% effectiveness rate. So that means 86% of competency-based interviews fail to uncover the data that's required to predict whether someone will succeed in the role, get better over time, and stay. Now, most people see recruitment as a chore. Why do we not see it as a business solution to really difficult problems where people happen to be the fix? Why are we not selling it as a high-value value-add instead of as a commodity, and we're flogging bodies and we're playing word search. But back in 2001, whenever it was, I was getting 36% of first year's total guaranteed gross emoluments when everyone else was doing 12% of base salary. It was a hard market then. We were just going into the next dip and, you know, we were coming into massive spending freezes and all sorts of stuff. It was messy as hell. And people still paid me vast amounts of money. I made in one month on two placements.

How did you do that above your competition, Marcus? Out of curiosity, what was your kind of formula?

Well, I mean, this one was quite interesting because I completely screwed up the cold call, um, because I'd done my research and I'd spent about 3 hours researching two companies. One company called Zygon, uh, which did product information management software for catalogs like Argos and that kind of thing, and Then the other one was for Docent, which was Michael Milken's e-learning company. And Michael Milken was the guy who was in the insider trading scams back in the 2000s, and he was put into prison, and he miraculously recovered from incurable testicular cancer to get early release. Anyway, long story short, I did the Docent pitch to Nick Devine, the sales director of Zygon, and he bore with me for about 2 minutes because I was not very good. And he said, Marcus, that pitch is brilliant, but you clearly know nothing about my company. I looked up at my screen, I can still remember blushing, I probably am now. And I thought, oh Christ, what have I done? I'm so sorry. Let me redeem myself with an email. I won't take up any more of your time. And my email had The Fool on the Phone as the subject line, which was self-deprecating enough to get me his foot in the door. And I worked out, but because I understood what his problem was, I could probably get placements for both the marketing director and the channel director within 4 weeks. I had the candidates lined up. I knew what he was looking for and what he was trying to accomplish. And then I placed them within 4 weeks, which meant that both of them were producing 3 months earlier. So I gave him 300 grand in additional revenue just from the channel manager. So paying my additional fee of 90s, or my fee of 96, just on one placement, he made a 3x return on investment. And there I learned about paying by numbers. So if I can work out how you are measured and I can find a way of helping you accomplish that more simply, with less friction, with less pushback, with less fallout, chances are I will have your attention. And I want to be seen as their ally, their strategic partner. So they share with me what their plans are so I can help them get where they want to, and I can meet them where they're going to be. I can help them see around corners. If they tell me what they're trying to accomplish, my network, my, the way my mind works allows me to do that. Now it's a learned skill. I didn't pop out my mother's wheelbarrow to do this. I had to learn it. And it came— comes with a lot of practice, a lot of preparation. But when you do, and you take yourself out of the equation, you halve the level of complexity by doing that. Because the moment you make yourself the issue and your agenda the issue, then what actually happens is the customer stops worrying about what they should be focused on, which is solving their problem. And now they're trying to work out how they can protect themselves from you being a threat. I mean, that's a really stupid thing to do, even inadvertently. And it's entirely preventable. And it happens all the time. You know that 31% of all pipeline across all 26 verticals was probably closable, but the salesperson blew it because they didn't read the room. 31%. I mean, think how much less prospecting and how many fewer people you would need and how much more money you could make if you just rekindled that stuff. Now, a lot of that you can probably recover in the next 90 days.

I love the plug, Marcus.

I thought I'd love to be really subtle.

No, you were. That was actually very, very, very slick. One of the things that we learned from you, Marcus, which was again another aha moment, was understanding the difference between asking a powerful question and asking generic surface-level questions. From your opinion, what's the difference between asking powerful questions and those kind of generic surface-level ones?

Well, I believe that every buyer deserves the most well-prepared well-rehearsed and provocative salespeople. Whether you're in recruitment or selling construction or aircraft carriers, it doesn't make any difference. What buyers are looking for is someone who helps them advance their understanding of their real problem and the choices that are available to them to solve their problem. Now, if you believe that you sell recruitment, then chances are you will try and ask questions about vacancies and fees and HR and other drivel like that. If on the other hand, you think as your customer, and this comes back to how I define sales. Sales is and should be the most noble act we perform in business. Now, selling is the facilitation of buying. It means that we help the buyer make the best possible decision for themselves for now and the future, whether they buy from us or not. Now, that means that if our candidate is a bit average, but there's another candidate that another recruiter has, you should recommend the other candidate because your job is to serve the customer. And, and bad salespeople have a tendency to serve themselves before the customer. But customers pick up on that because we've got 3 billion years of evolutionary hardwiring, and there's basically the reason why you exist, because your ancestors were cautious and ran away from danger. Now, what great questions do is they create contrast between where the buyer is and where they could be, between the status quo and the better future. But the way most people use questions— and this is why I've stopped teaching technique altogether, because my fear is that you'll use the damn stuff The last thing I want is people going in and using a ninja move because it worked once in another context. And when I train people, when I coach people, we build the building blocks and we create frameworks so that when you're in the moment, you've got the building blocks to adapt to the context in which you are selling. And that's what great questions do, because great questions are how you create differentiation. You differentiate not only through the questions, but through the quality of your listening and how you then respond. So you don't necessarily go out and ask the question you want to ask because your buyer is 12 steps away from that. And you can see the finish line. So our questions need to enter the buyer's workflow in a unique and original way that challenges the status quo and offers them a better alternative and a clear path from where they are to where they want to be. Now, it's important to understand that buyers do not ever buy your product or service outright. They rent it and they rent it for only as long as it's fit for purpose. Your candidates will be rented for as long as they are fit for purpose. If they are not fit for purpose, they will not rent from you. They'll rent from someone else. And if you understand that they only ever rent, it makes you shift your thinking that Everyone you talk to is a future customer. They're not a prospect or a suspect, because at least 40% of your marketplace, your total addressable market, will buy your service at some point in the future. But only about 3% are in the market now. So great questions help you to establish where they are in their buying journey, what their risk appetite is, what their preferences are, what they've tried in the past. Because human beings want to be understood. They want to have someone else feel what they feel, understand what they understand. Now, you don't have to agree with it. What people are looking for is being understood, feeling like someone else is connected with them. And most of us, especially our leaders, are targeted to focus on driving revenues, building relationships, and developing strategy. But because of the pressure and because of the rush and because of the bad business model that most of these organizations are running under and dodgy money behind them that's creating the conditions where they have to behave badly, What you end up with is a high churn rate. You end up with customers who are unhappy. You end up with high staff turnover yourself. So what great questions do is they shift the buyer closer towards understanding the cause of their problem instead of just bringing you the symptom. It helps them move towards understanding what might be possible and has you be part of co-developing the solution they ultimately go with, because I want their fingerprints all over the solution. I don't want to come to them with a recommendation that has my ideas and none of theirs. If 80 to 90% of it is their data, they're not going to argue with it. They're not even going to quibble over the price. Be delighted to spend that premium. This was, uh, exactly what they want.

This was another big thing, Marcus. And you said you want their fingerprints all over the data. Is that what you said?

Well, I want the fingerprints all over the symptom, the problem.

Yes.

All over the solution. And I want to be their ally.

Yes. Can you go a bit more into that? Because that falls into the typical sales tactics that a lot of people do is making themselves the hero. And instead of being the sage, so to speak.

Okay, so, um, one of my partners is a guy called Simon Bowen, and you— if you're in recruitment, definitely check him out. His company is called Models Method, and he takes really sophisticated, uh, complex ideas and explains them simply and visually so your sponsors can sell your ideas internally. My favorite war story was he sold 6 battleships to the U.S. Department of Defense in 14 minutes.

That's brilliant. That's insane. Absolutely amazing.

Um, what Simon does is he helps you distill your message down to what really drives the buyer, and he uses a Venn diagram called the Genius Model. And in the middle is your promise: we believe that these type of customers deserve this type of experience and outcome. Okay, now that's a commitment. That's a decision. It's not a goal. It's a decision to behave in a particular way. We then have to be really clear that our customer is in business for their reasons. They are emotional beings who are naturally skeptical of our industry. I mean, let's face it, recruitment is, you know, one down from being an estate agent and one up from being a lawyer. Yeah, it's not the most popular industry in the world, and frankly, deservedly so, because the experience that most candidates have is poor, and most hiring managers, you're just an interruption. Stop being an interruption. Turn up and be valuable, timely, relevant. That means you do your research. That means you appear, you turn up confident because you've done your research and you know what's going to happen because you've got a plan. Then have some really clear questions based on your research that are going to make the other person think differently, open their eyes to a possibility. Come with a hypothesis that makes them see you as different because your questions are your point of difference. They are the reason why you will be memorable. I mean, I cannot remember a conversation with a buyer or even coaching sessions nowadays where the other person doesn't say, wow, I've never thought of it that way. What an amazing question. And that kind of reaction is what I want because I want them to see me as their ally. I don't want to be their accomplice. Yeah. If I'm trying to lose weight, my wife buys chocolate and cakes and biscuits and, you know, fried stuff. She becomes my accomplice, not my ally. Okay. And the problem is if we accept the crap that they feed us and we tolerate their terrible behavior, treating candidates and not responding and, you know, being slow to give feedback and treating candidates as if they're two a penny. They're not. Good candidates are hard to find. How dare they treat these people that way? They, they don't need your bloody job, okay? Why would they bother to come and work with someone who doesn't even show them the respect to respond and give honest feedback? Yeah, it's disgusting behavior, the way most managers, or many managers, behave. And, and as recruiters, I believe we need to challenge them. And I think we can call them out by operating from the winner's triangle instead of the drama triangle. So the drama triangle, we operate from a victim, persecutor, or rescuer mentality and position. Our ego gets hooked, we're attached, and we take things personally. We judge. If we operate from the winner's triangle, we're vulnerable. We're nurturing, we're assertive, and we can be very powerful from that position. Sam, I hear what you're saying. How do I tell you that you're wrong without causing you any offense? So invite the challenge, invite the fight, because I'm going to fight up front. I don't want to fight later, because one of the things that they're going to tell you on every brief is, must have experience in. Do you know experience in sales at least adds nothing to the actual outcome of the job being executed apart from a fractionally faster ramp-up period? Okay. How many job descriptions have shit in it like must be able to motivate a team? That just shows that the person writing the job, or sorry, copying and pasting the job description has no idea about human beings and motivation. Motivation is an internal force. You cannot motivate someone. You have to understand their motivation and tap into it. You can inspire, bribe, bully, brutalize, coerce, lie to, manipulate, but you can't motivate. And what I see time and time again is indications that hiring managers don't understand how to succeed at recruitment. When they're designing the ideal candidate, are they looking for the predictors of success? Things like habits, cognitive skills, beliefs, values, attitudes. Um, are they interviewing for, um, people having experienced similar contexts to the ones that they're going to face? Now that experience is valuable. So facing similar sorts of challenges might be running a family. It might be, um, dealing with a crisis. So, you know, one of my partners, he's trained in crisis management because he was an emergency first responder for the U.S. Forestry Fire Service. You put him into any situation, he's calm. Those are the people you want leading. Those are the people you want selling. What you don't want is someone who's wired up, coked off their head, worried that they're going to get fired. Um, I mean, I can't imagine recruitment's changed that much apart from you drink water at lunchtime instead of spirits. It used to be so much more fun.

Um, thank you, Mark.

Tony Blair and Perrier. Class.

We're nearly coming to the end of the pod, Marcus, but I'd love to cover these last couple of questions. One thing I know a lot of people do is they listen with happy ears, as you say it. And happy ears, for anyone that doesn't know, is you go into a call wanting the sale so badly that you're not disqualifying people. You're not actively trying to figure out if they are the right fit for, for you or you're the right fit for each other. Therefore you take on business that's not a good fit or you're just wasting your time in the conversation. How do people not have happy years? How do people get rid of happy years?

Well, the first thing is you go in with a plan and you know what ideal, best case, acceptable, worst acceptable, and walk away looks like. And you plan this all in advance. You're not gonna come up against any original moment. In your sales career. I mean, there might be a couple when you first start out, but I've had one original objection in 35 years of sales, and it was a smokescreen. This was an Indian, a Sikh merchant, a Sikh shopkeeper telling someone in barter card that he didn't do barter because it was against his religion. He was taking the piss, and he knew this guy had no cultural awareness and was probably going all PC inside and panicked. And it was the easiest way to get this idiot out the shop. I mean, can you imagine an Indian shopkeeper not bartering? I mean, it just doesn't compute. But the guy was, you know, the salesperson was stupid, ignorant, one way or the other. But you're never going to come across an original objection. So why do we want to disqualify? Well, every time you are pursuing a non-prospect, that is time taken away from anything else. Higher value activities. And think about this, you know, back to the 3%, 15%. If you're spending 99.9955% of your time pursuing non-prospects, how much time in front of the customer can you actually physically do in an 8-hour working day? Not a lot. Now that's an interesting measure. How much time do you spend in front of the customer? Another really interesting metric is the conversion rate of first meeting to second meeting. Track that. On average, across all 26 verticals, the failure rate is 7 out of 8. Now, when you do the maths, on average, cold calling today— and this is based on 120 million cold calls, so it is a very, very good data set, okay? Yeah, it takes 33 to 46 dial attempts to get through cold, and at 15 manual dials an hour, that means you have one connection every 2 to 3 hours.

Wow.

Now you could up that through power dialers and parallel dialers and all that kind of stuff, but most people are still going manual, and it's 15 dials an hour. On average, it is 14 effective connections to get one meeting, and then they blow 7 out of 8. Are you fucking joking? Do the maths. Now, if it's inbound, it's 5 to 11 follow-up calls for every lead. So the reason you disqualify is that time you are never going to get back. Repeat after me, boys: I am dead forever.

I'm dead forever. I'm dead forever.

That whilst time is eternal, for us it's very, very finite and very short. So at some point you have to get angry enough to say, never again. I fucking refuse to waste more time on contingent vacancy where I have a 19 in 20 chance of not making money. I refuse to work with penny-pinching tightasses who make my life a misery. Who pay late, who quibble over fees, who fuck my candidates around. When I've had to spend my Sunday evening calling these people till 9 o'clock at night every weekend, ruined, for you to piss them about and waste perfectly good opportunities because you're too busy? Bollocks to that, I say.

Love that, Marcus. Thank you, mate. This has been an absolute pleasure. Lots of golden nuggets in there. Thank you for coming on the pod and Hopefully you enjoyed it too.

Yeah, it was a great time. I'm sorry I didn't answer any of your questions, but—

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and Spotify. Tune in for another episode next week, and we look forward to seeing you again very soon. Peace and love.