Lean RevOps, Trust-First Selling & AI That Actually Helps w/ Tony Dicks | RevIntel [Archive]

So guys, we are back. Another episode. I think we are approaching, I think, 400 episodes now. We've got to get— we got that done in what, just over a year from last May 2023? Yeah. So a little bit over a year now. A little bit over a year. Today I'm with Tony, Mr. RevOps CRO at Cloudtoss. I've known him now for 5 years. He's helped me hire some quite some amazing talent. Obviously a great mind to pick at. And look, Tony, jump right into it. Who are you? What do you do? And why should people stay on this podcast for the next hour?

Why should they stay on the podcast for the next hour? That's the most difficult one of the questions. So I will go ahead, though, and start out with my name is Tony Dix. I operate as the chief revenue officer at the CloudTask Marketplace. Among other things. And I would say that, listen guys, my background is running sales teams, running brand teams globally and domestically, and I'm a Lean Six Sigma black belt. So at the end of the day, when we start talking about systematizing your marketing and your sales using AI, using all the cool new stuff and technology, then I've got some perspective that may interest you related to that. I may have also undergone or dealt with some challenges that you faced. So hopefully you'll be able to get some value out of the conversation.

Why should they stay though? Why should they stay?

Because of that. Because you'll get— hopefully I've experienced some challenges that you may be going through that I either figured out an answer for or ran an experiment on so that you don't have to experiment with it for yourself. Hopefully. So if that's the case, I don't want to miss out on that because it's all about experimentation, right? If you could go ahead and scratch some things off the list of experiments, you're—

that I had this conversation with my business partner about 4 years ago and it was— I got through it. So I've been through my chain of events since a young boy going to from the UK, then living in America and wanting to fit in and going through the motions. I learned that very quickly. So Tony, I want to ask you, I've heard a number of times this line Lean Six Sigma, and the only time I've ever heard those phrases were in college at fraternities and sororities. So what, what is Lean Six? I understand it's a business kind of certification, but what is Lean Six Sigma for those that don't have an clue what it is.

Yeah, uh, Lean Six Sigma is a methodology. It's really a decision-making methodology that comes from the manufacturing industry. And to be fair, I came out of undergrad in 2002, started working for GE, and that's when I did my Green Belt Six Sigma. And I can tell you that having done a Green Belt, having done a Black Belt, and gotten certified, which means that you did— you've done projects of a certain valuation that you delivered on in order to get certified, that in general, the average company that tries to apply Six Sigma to sales and marketing does not do an awesome job of it. It virtually doesn't exist. It doesn't matter how long they've been running it. Go to Motorola, go to GE, go to whichever company you want to check out, and I bet if you go ahead and look behind the curtain that they're really not running Six Sigma appropriately for commercial operations. And the reason why is because marketing and sales is the function where everybody thinks they can do it, everybody thinks it needs to be done a little differently, and there's a severe lack of standardization. So if you don't do the same thing the same way every time because everybody's got an opinion and everybody's opinion counts, guess what? You're not going to be able to create a system that you do consistently. That also allows you to look at it, find where there might be a kink, a bottleneck, and then remove that bottleneck. Everybody's business is different, but the framework is a framework, bro. You selling stuff, you selling stuff, right? How can you sell stuff without a list of people, some sequences that you might be running, whether you automate them or not, and some way to track performance?

So when did you discover you had a knack for diving deep into this It's a common problem. I'm in the same world as you, but into this problem of solving an unorganized and unplanned, a bad process-driven sales and marketing system that doesn't work. When did you kind of find out, hey, this is, this is something I want to be involved in?

You know what? I found out this was something I wanted to be involved in when I went broke. Doing mortgages, 100% commission at 23. I left GE. I got exposed to some of these things. I read a lot of Rich Dad Poor Dad books. I was highly interested in real estate. So I kind of wanted to align some of my career to selling something that was involved in something I was already really interested in, right? Like real estate investing. And when I jumped out there to do that with a shop that seemed like it could be cool, I was— I ran out of money in 4 months. And the reality is, is that for me, the drive is really around how do I dogfood test my ideas? Because I was a typical sales personality. And by the way, putting this out there is to say it's not bad. You know, you break up these ones, you got people that are analytical drivers, more of the communicator. What is it called? They have another one that's called like an expressive and another one called an amiable. And you've got these different archetypes, if you will, that you'll find more commonly in certain work functions. And in sales, we tend to have a lot of folks that because of the nature of it or the old school nature of it was like, you know, gift of gab, shaking hands, kissing babies, ooh, what a personality. But that's not the only way to sell, right? But I was that archetype at that time and hitting that wall, I felt like I don't wanna feel this way anymore. I don't wanna be chasing my food in the dark all the time. And one of the things is, is that I have a lot of ideas, I don't know how to differentiate a good idea from a true opportunity that I should pursue. So that, I would say, was really a defining moment that kind of put me on the track of at least— I didn't know it was necessarily Six Sigma at that time, but it put me on the track of being like, I want to figure out ways to make things more predictable and profitable. I'll go to the next step. Interestingly enough, after I got back on my feet, I moved and I started working with Enterprise Rent-A-Car. And that's where I learned from that experience, and I could go into detail, but from that experience was where I learned that actually I could programmatically deliver a sales pitch and get amazing results every time. Because I started out, those first 30 days, I started out, In enterprise rental car, you sell rental insurance to people that are renting a car primarily because their car's in the shop, which means they have insurance. But what they had over there was a matrix, right? And the deal was is that everybody that came through, you weren't scored on just getting them in a car. The deal was your performance was based on the customer service score for your branch, which means that they had to have a good experience. And to your sales, which were 3 different levels of insurance sales that were happening when they rent that car. And the deal is, is at that time I was like, well, how do I sell some stuff that, you know, they don't need? Well, guess what? The first thing is, is that you may have something someone needs, but your ability to figure out— not that you've got something that's interesting for people to buy, but what problem does it solve— directly correlates with the outcomes you get from the standpoint of conversion. Right? That's one. So I go to the training, right? And I'm like, dude, I don't know how to sell this stuff. Like, people come in, they got a car, they tell me they don't want it. Like, hey, you want this insurance? No, they don't want it, you know? So I— so, so the guy tells me this. It was basically the assumptive sale. He was like, Tony, this is what I want you to do when you go back to your branch. Don't talk about all these features and benefits and all these things. Just go ahead and when you You go around the car, you check everything out. I want you to look at the person and say, I assume that you don't want to have any responsibility for anything that happens to this car while it's in your position. Is that correct? They answer, and normally they'll be like, yeah, I don't want to have any responsibility. All right, cool, sign right here. It's gonna, it's gonna just add, you know, X number of dollars per month to your, uh, per day to your rate, and you'll have exactly what you want. And that was it. And then shut up. So you can imagine, Shane, bro, I go in there with this information and literally I remember the first time I tried it. I get with a client and I'm sitting there nervous. I'm like, you probably saw my jaw. But I forced these words out and I shut up. And you know what? She said yes and she bought. And then I went and I did it again. That person said yes and bought. And then I went and did it again. They used to run these little competitions. That day I was out half a day because I won the competition that said you could get a paid other half a day. Whoever's got the most full boats, that means I sold all 3 levels of insurance in that time frame and I didn't do anything special. So it turned out saying less actually got me more in that case. And then the last part I'll share that I think is very important is guess what I learned after that? That was the training wheels. Don't be shy about being on training wheels. I'm in a new space. Give me the training wheels, give me the script. How many salespeople, I don't want a script, I want to sound like a robot. That's on you, bro. Yeah, the script is just a guide so that I'm not saying too much and I'm not saying too little so that this person is compelled to buy, right? So by the time I started getting comfortable, I took the training wheels off.

Guess what?

I knew now I wasn't as nervous when I was going to say it, and I started also, uh, having like customer stories in my head where Hey, guess what? You know what, there's an example right there of somebody that didn't have the insurance. How did they feel? What did they have to do? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What happened to get them in there? And as those started coming to my head as well, now all of a sudden I'm creating more relevant storylines. Not just, I assume not, you tell me no. Now all of a sudden I can be like, well, all right, just something to consider though. This is what happened to a guy last week. You're saying that's what you want. If that's what you want, cool. I want to make sure you're happy, but If you want to avoid that, you could do this. Boom. So that's where that kind of series of events, which I would say was like a year and a half, was probably hitting rock bottom, discovering I don't want this anymore, going into another situation where I fortunately got introduced to an approach that was built on consistency. And I could tell you this, that after 5, 6 months, normally to get promoted to assistant manager, it was 6 months. No, I'm sorry, 1 year. They were trying to promote me to assistant manager in 6 months. I had already gotten up to the next level in 4 months. My— I had a record. I never went 1 month without being in the President's Club or the Sales Club because they did it every month. I was always at the dinners and I had a record for the area for sales in the whole region in the same course. I left after 6 months, by the way. I flipped that into a role in pharmaceutical sales. But that's just to give you an idea of how impactful that was. And I've carried that thing kind of— I've carried—

Wow, that's a huge snippet to jump into. So, all right, let's break that down. A lot of what I do, Tony, in this is I built this podcast at first to get me through a very hard time in my life. Right. And it was the hardest time in my life, which was a separation. With my wife, uh, a whole kind of massive crisis. And I didn't— it was so much so that the business was—

you didn't—

you saw sales driven when we was doing our thing. And then there was a big point of a huge dip, right? And there was no more clients, there was no more passion, there was no more drive in me. And the only thing I knew how to do very, very well was build conversations with people, right? And, and based on true stories.. And like I said, fast forward 18 months into this, this podcast is what it is today because it's about a story of underdogs, CEOs that were underdogs, business owners, CROs, whatever, just people that have made it in life. They've gone from underdog to top dog and it's because they followed a process and they trusted in their ability to just say, let me just, let me just take that jump. Let me just take that jump.

Fuck it.

Let me see what happens. And then you do, you get into it. And what I'd love to know— my story has been shared on this multiple times, but question one: how old were you when you went through that, that rock bottom and then kind of bounced back?

That was between—

seems like that's a very, very common age where you get these big, big lessons, right? So walk me through then, which I'm actually going through right now, and I'm helping a client transition their orthodox old ways of thinking cold calling is the only silver bullet to make fast engagement conversion happen versus educating an entire market and drawing attention, building curiosity, and then taking them through that way. But for you, it's one more point. It's funny that you mentioned Enterprise Car because literally last week I just went to Enterprise Car and I went through that same conversation. He's like, but he just said, English guy, bored, 9-to-5er. You don't want insurance, do you? And for me, it's like, I'm just like, nope, absolutely not. And then what I do, because I know, I take my phone and I'm going all the way around that car. I do it. That's my insurance to tell them. But from then till now, what kind of things have you seen change from being in enterprise sales and learning a script and then kind of like just adding color to this blank canvas. And now today you're sitting in hundreds of conversations a month, speaking at a level where companies are generating billions of dollars. How do you see the sales process, even with Six Sigma, changing from then till now?

What's changed mostly between since then to now is literally the way people buy, the access to information, comfort with the internet. And the thing that's important about what you talk about there, Shane, like if you— for me, look, the educational piece is the difference between one representative and another representative. And there's— look, any of you all listening, you got to admit that it's true. Who hasn't called for customer service and they get told one thing by somebody? If you hang up and you call back, you get told something different. And that's the consistency of— so today it's not about content, it's about context. Because right now, what's going to happen with more AI, more BS information on the internet? Where do we go to get our information? The internet. You know, now all of a sudden, if you talk to 5— let's talk about sales. If you talk to 100 people and ask them what's a lead, you can get 100 different definitions of what a lead is. At some point, you have to decide, right? But the first thing is to build trust in who you're receiving information from. And I don't need somebody to tell me the price of the car, the color of the car anymore when I can go online and I probably checked out your lot before I got there. If you don't have a website where I could check out your inventory, shame on you. You might lose the business to somebody else that was there when I was ready. If you're not there when the person is researching information, you're already out if you're waiting for them to talk to you in person. And then if you think that your job is to go ahead and kiss, kiss, uh, shake hands and kiss babies and just you know, not answer questions directly, you're going to get some sales, but you're not going to keep those customers over the long term. Because the reality is, is that the more educated the buyer becomes about what they're buying, then the more— the higher the standard is going to be on the level of service you give them. So if I buy some outsourced lead gen services, or if I buy your CRM product the first time and I don't know what I'm doing, It's happened to me with HubSpot.

Sorry, HubSpot.

Shout out to HubSpot. There's a lot of good information there. But guess what? Sometimes HubSpot wasn't running its own play. So when I first got— became a HubSpot partner, I said to them, I'm dealing with dental practices in my area. The average dental practice with 4 chairs should be able to generate $1 million in revenue. That's $250,000 a chair. All right. In their practice. However, in my area, on average, they're at about $650,000. In revenue. My objective is to go find those customers who are underperforming and help them with solutions that get them to that million-dollar mark. My question for you, HubSpot, is, is your CRM indicated for that target market? Is it a good choice for that? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, people are using it. There's some dental practices using it. But you know what happened then when I went through their training and they said Hey, who is our ideal target, you know, for our platform at this time? Businesses generating $3 million to $10 million in annual revenue. Caught you in a lie. You decide whoever was there decided they were going to take my money and think about their top line and place that over my bottom line. And that was another experience that was a sucky experience.

How's—

what's a good company? But the people you have selling could be selling dreams, selling lies, doing whatever so they can make their commission, and that could throw off everything from a customer experience standpoint. And keeping me as a customer over the long term is the actual game, not just getting the money now, but keeping it— customer lifetime value. That should be the metric that we use to measure this.

I agree. Business— I agree. We just— so we It's funny you just spoke about HubSpot too, because what was it? We started off with Pipedrive at the beginning of the year. Pipedrive then went to— played around with Atio, which is looking really, really sweet. It looks sharp, really sharp. But then the integration piece was the necessity and the amount of software that we're using. Everything integrates with HubSpot, making it an easy choice. And just like you said, HubSpot is a fantastic company. It's very confusing to buy. There are also massive concessions that you might miss out on, like 90% discounts working with your web development studio that could give you that. So you don't have to spend $500 a quarter. You're spending whatever. It's like $100, $200. We didn't, we didn't get that. We got, we got shafted., right? And we ended up paying a big bill. But on top of that, speaking to this fricking sales rep, yes, we want to do this, this, this, this, this. As soon as we purchased, this chick jetted. We needed help. She's not there. My first experience, and it will lead me to the next point, my first experience with HubSpot, a multi-billion dollar brand, was that it sucked. It was awful. Right. Luckily, I had an integration partner that could help, like, kind of solve the problem for me. But again, the experience that you have in today's buying journey is half the reason why people are either receptive to buying or they want to neglect that buying or stay as far away as possible. So the question for you is, in today's environment, how do you build trust with new customers the right way?

You know, I always liked it. And it's funny because anything I mentioned is probably something that already existed for years and it's just about a matter of knowing about it. But I've always liked insight selling, right? I appreciate when people give me the information. I want you to not, not serve me if it doesn't make sense. I want you to educate me through the process. I don't want you to just be freaking telling me some stuff that you feel like is going to get me over the buying curve. No, I mean, I want you to lead me to the right path because you know what's going to happen if you go ahead and let me know. For example, let's go ahead and stay on the CRM thing, right? Digital is difficult. Digital has made things more complicated. There's an opportunity for it to be easier for you. But if you don't know how to harness digital, you don't understand it. Then you're that person that's out there with these ideas and you just want your ideas to come to life, but you have no clue how to connect the dots. And you sometimes will not let your team do their jobs because you've got opinions and fears that are involved. So that's a space where when someone is selling SEO services, well, you know what, SEO guy, tell me a little bit about SEO. Anybody that does SEO knows it's going to take you about 6 months before you actually get results. So who is the person out there that's telling you something different, and why do you want to believe it more? I mean, this information is available online. Are you reading it, or are you looking for something to support your biases? These are things that we deal with as being bad buyers, right? I want somebody to tell me what I want to hear, but then I'm mad when that salesperson tells me what I want to hear.

I buy it, and now I'm disappointed.

Did you create that environment or did they create that environment? Right. So these are things that, you know, so insight selling for me is like, you know what, again, teach me, educate me, show me that you're competent to build trust.

Right.

And you know what? Keep it real. Be honest. At the end of the day, just because it's not a fit doesn't mean I'm not going to buy. But you have to have some level of ethics and pride in yourself to say, you know what, I'm not going to take that money. I, I am— I love to not take people's money. I love to say, hey, you know what, you might buy it from someone, but you ain't gonna buy it from me because you're not ready for it. If I give you this Ferrari and you haven't even taken your driver's lessons, you can't even drive a Honda Accord or Honda Civic, why am I putting you in this Ferrari? Well, he wants it. You know what? And I could say like, hey, you might get to a point where I'm like, you know, put the Ferrari over there, we'll hold on to it. But I know I'm doing you wrong. I'm doing you dirty. Because you're going to hop in there with your lack of skills and you're going to crash it. It's expensive, it performs well, but is it for you at this stage in your knowledge of using this thing? So it'd be nice. I said you need a Jeep Grand Cherokee instead if you're learning how to drive, you know, Grand Cherokee, something else, something that, you know, you could throw away. But, you know, that for me builds credibility, right? Is that you're, you're teaching me and you know what, Even if you say, if I decide, you know what, Shane, thanks for that insight, bro, but I'm gonna do it anyway, at least you gave me the information and I can't say Shane did this to me.

Sorry, I had to tell the wife to turn the TV down. That's the joys of working from home, right?

Yeah, yeah, right. You got the soundproofing.

Look, in terms of this, by the buyer's trust, by enablement, having the right process to be a top seller in today's environment are definitely some of the foundations that you need. But to become a business owner, which is a lot of the transition that a lot of these viewers are making, and it's from, again, like we were, we were salesmen working for somebody, which is where you have to kind of earn your stripes and then how it happens, right? Wherever you start, it has to start somewhere. But then you get into that environment where you sell, you become a top performer, and then the things your manager tells you to do pisses you off because you know that you could do it better than him, right? Or you know, there comes a point, it just happened the other day, there was a client of mine and he said something to me and I was just like, wow, you're an idiot. This is public, but don't be that— don't be that client where you, you literally can shoot yourself in the foot for saying the wrong thing and losing all credibility, right? That just shows if you know what to do or not to do. And when that point happens, that's when you have that— that idea comes, I can do this better than him, I should be CEO, I should be the owner of this company, or I could go do it myself. So what makes somebody a good business owner versus being a good salesman?

Yeah, great question. So I've come to— there's a book from Robert Kiyosaki called The Cashflow Quadrant. Talks about moving from employee to sole proprietor to business owner to investor. And when you look at that book, then, you know, the deal is, is that you'll have one perspective. But now, after years of experience, I've got a different perspective. Perspective. That, that star salesperson that was a star employee somewhere, right, as they move into being a solopreneur— and they should make that step— they have an opportunity now to figure out how to, uh, actually implement their systems on their own, right? That's equivalent to taking the, the training wheels off. But there are quote-unquote business owners with employees and all this good stuff that are actually just solopreneurs with employees. And I say that because the difference between this person over here that's got a scalable system where they can get other people that don't necessarily have the same skills and abilities as them to produce something consistently at the same level of quality— that means you've got systems. This person over here, that's a solopreneur living off of their success as an individual. And then they set up a business, right? But nobody's got any guidance, nobody's got any SOPs, nobody's got any coaching. They just have statements and, and ideas of what's going to be happening. It's going to be grandiose, but nothing else to support them, no supporting structure. That means you don't have a business system. You're not a business owner at that point. You're a solopreneur with people working for you, and it's a dangerous place to be. Because you're responsible to an extent for these people's livelihood. When you decide to take on employees, it's like having kids as a parent, right? And you got to nurture them, you got to grow them, you got to help them to grow. You can't just be like, yo, do things that I said and, and make it great and walk away. And everybody's not built for that, right? So it's to the person to know what do you want to deal with, because you can design your business to work for you. That's what you need to do. And you don't have to have a billion-dollar business. You know what? There's a person with generating, uh, $10 million in revenue that's walking away with the same amount as that real estate agent that sold several properties. And who knows, they go home, they both have $300,000 to spend. They go home, they both have $400,000 to spend, right? So the deal is, is that are you building something because you want to do the things necessary to be successful in this, uh, stage of a business owner versus a solopreneur? Or are you just doing it because you think that's what everybody wants you to do or that's what success looks like? Are you thinking about what makes you feel good about yourself or what you think other people are thinking about you? Well, if you're basing your thing on what other people are thinking about you before you think about what you think about yourself and what works for you and what you want your life to look like, and I think that comes down to values.

So for you, it'd be interesting for people to learn what good values are then and how it kind of makes you who you are, to be trusted, to walk the path, to be responsible for others. And you're absolutely right, when you are like— at first you become a business owner because of ego, because you think you can do something better than somebody else. But then you realize there is another mouth to feed, and you are— you and that person, let's say it's two people that started, you become very, very under-resourced very, very quickly. And you need to hire another person and then you need to start doing processes and then people start telling you they have problems and this happens and that happens. And just like you said, I got to the point where, yeah, people need certain new things for their new baby that's coming or this is happening. They got problems with their— and you become dad. And for me, I own this very proudly that I did not like being CEO after a while. I didn't know because there are other elements that come with it when you're building a business. There's the payroll, right? And if money ain't coming in from clients, that mismatch on that thing, if you don't have that huge cushion, that is going to start to affect you. Then like the emotional intelligence, that starts to affect you. And the only thing that mattered to me was in that— when I was 32, which is now 6 years ago, I read Seven Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen Covey. I'm sure you've read that book. And the one thing that stuck true to me was my values. And as long as my values were aligned, that I'm honest, I always was truthful with everybody. I was 100% show them the cash flow, show them the business, everything that they needed to know what was happening when, and start to modify to work well with people. My values were the thing that helped me stay afloat. But for yourself, what would you say are the most important values that Tony possesses that has helped you transition from a salesman to being an executive at a company responsible for hundreds of meetings a month? People in the— like, you've got tons of people to deal with. What are those values like for you?

Well, I guess I want to answer that with two things, right? And I want to rewind a little bit then for those of you all who like, and you know what, you're right, Shane, there are a lot of people that decide to start their own business because they just feel like, yeah, I don't want to report to anybody. I would say that if you think about starting a business and that's the only reason you have for it, I want to make money, I don't want to report for anybody, I want to be my own boss, scratch it right now. You're— everybody's got a boss. Only difference is your boss becomes your customers or your boss becomes your employees or whatever it may be. So you need something more than that. And I suggest that your drive should be is I want to solve this problem for these people, and I believe that we could do a better job solving this problem for those people delivered this way. And so I'm going to take on that challenge because if it's anything other than that, you could get lucky. But you know what? The idea is to have self-actualization, right? And to feel satisfied in what you're doing. And it can only be because you're out there solving problems for people., right, in a better way. Next part, I guess, going into the part around the values, for me is it's a lot about, um, I like to see people have good experiences. I like to— I don't want to be involved with people having crappy freaking experience. So I guess the idea would be is, um, I came up in sales as under-promise and over-deliver. And that value for me is like one of my biggest values. It doesn't matter if I'm talking to a person internally, like an employee or a customer. The idea is I want to understand what the need is. I want to deliver. I want to over-deliver on that. And I don't want to be making a bunch of promises that I can't, I can't actually deliver on..

And just that by itself changes the dynamic. So Tony, what's it like building a business in 2024? You service hundreds of customers at CloudTask. You help hundreds of clients build or create throughput so that their shitty lead generation strategy with their crappy VP, uh, that's underperforming. And they think just by saying, I think I can have 30 meetings a month and you should do it because You just should do it. So describe what it's like being the CRO at CloudToss Marketplace and helping hundreds of companies solve that problem every day. You see me? I'm back. Am I back? Have you lost me? One sec. Right now. So I had a bit of a technical glitch.

Let's rewind that back then. So what's it like? What's it like being CRO? Well, I guess we had two things, right? What's it like starting a business in 2024? And what's it like being a CRO? We're dealing with day to day at CloudTask in the CloudTask marketplace. You know, I'm going to share my answer this way, I think, and I hope it helps people that are listening. One, CloudTAS started out as a BPO company, right? So it essentially was a sales agency building teams to do outbound lead generation primarily for clients. Between 2020 and 2022, we started making the transition from being the people that build all the teams to kind of brokering the deals, meaning connecting small and mid-sized businesses in the United States primarily with offshore individuals that they could hire directly or agencies that they could hire to do marketing, sales, customer success, and customer service stuff, right? Task. I will say that through this experience that I think what I think relates really well for the listeners of this podcast is I've come down to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 things that tend to be repeatedly important in establishing and optimizing and scaling any business concept. First is you need to have a problem that you're solving for some group of people. Are you clear on what that problem is? If you can't state it as a problem yet, do some more research on it. Fortunately, now we have AI that helps us do research. I like it best for that right now, right? But hey, what problems are these people that I think I could serve facing most of the time? And then pick the problem that you're gonna solve, right? Uh, the next one is that's going to dictate what your promise is. So if I use an example like 6-minute abs, then I'm saying there's a problem. There are people out here that want to have chiseled abs but don't have the time to do chiseled abs using traditional approaches to working out. So let me figure out something I could promise. What would make that look different? Oh man, if they could do a workout for 6 minutes a day and get chiseled abs, then boom, that would be amazing. People would want it. Okay, great, right? But after you create that promise, you got to do the next step. Number 3 is product. It doesn't matter if it's a product or service. The word product just means something you're going to deliver, right? To deliver on the promise. Man, if I could just do 6 minutes, if I could do 10 minutes, if I get whatever it is Now you got to build a program. What's that program going to look like then? All right, well, hey, there's going to be a calendar. These are the workouts. These are the different elements that this product has to have so I can deliver on the promise that's going to solve the problem. All right, great. If you don't do that, which I understand— I learned this idea of product management while we're making that transition to digital, and it became hugely important because now all of a sudden it went from I've got an idea of what the platform should look like to you literally need to map it out and say how it's going to function. And you could understand how that would relate whether you have a team of individuals implementing for you or you have automation implementing for you. If you don't have the business rules or the step-by-steps and the rules and the limitations of this is in and this is not identified, then you're not going to have as good a business system at all, right? Next step, now you need the process that supports the product. So when we talk about product, it implies some process steps, but it's not the product. My product is a 6-minute abs. So what's my process then for shipping it out? What's my process for reaching out to prospects and turning them into customers? What's my process for onboarding the customer onto the product? These are the processes we're talking about, not the process of getting 6-minute abs anymore. Difference between product and process. Product delivers on the promise. Process delivers on the product. Next, platforms that you're going to use to support the process. Now you can automate certain things, right? So automate the things you can automate. And then the last step is you're going to delegate the things that you need people to run. Those are going to be manual tasks that people need to do.. But now when you just hire the people that you need to run the process and you know these other things, guess what? Training them and onboarding them to do a good job is going to be easier. And at the end of the day, you're not going to get it right on the first pass, right? All we're trying to do is set a foundation that allows us now to monitor what's happening and identify bottlenecks, remove bottlenecks, update the SOP. Update the software that we use. Update the promise. All of that's going on all the time. It's called continuous improvement. And that's at the heart of Six Sigma as well, right? But the deal is you're building all of this to deliver on a customer promise to solve a problem for a customer that they're facing. And that way, it's always focused on creating the best customer experience possible. And then as you're building out your system and improving it, all you're trying to do is reduce the cost of operating that system reduce the number of errors when operating that system. That means dissatisfied customers, ideally, right? And reduce the amount of time it takes, because that's where your profitability comes from. And that's the game of business right there, right? Everything else is about figuring out how it is to run your thing for the people you want to serve in the way that makes you feel good and operates the way you need to.

Super, super simple and super sharp process, Tony. I think more need to hear, like, again, from This is the difference from having bums on your podcast versus people who have the actual know-how. And this is the thing I want. I would, I would like people to see this as a source of truth because one of the next things is on that piece where the process and everything makes, makes sense. But how to buy a solution, right? Based on what is very important. And I have a, I have a a question in my mind now where do I want to learn or recognize new things to do from Forbes magazine, or do I want to learn it from the podcast that makes sense to me? And hearing from Tony, who actually does this multiple times over and over, right, it, it makes a huge, huge, huge difference. So in terms of you finding information now in today's environment, I used to go to Google And now with AI, I don't go to ChatGPT. I go to Perplexity. I don't know if you've ever had a Perplexity. Yeah, I use Perplexity too. That's my go-to. Exactly. And even on that now, so sources of truth, let's say the news or podcasts, which one are you going with? More trusted source of information.

You can only pick one. If I could only pick one, um, I'm gonna go with, uh, podcast. Okay, relative to your industry too? Relative to whatever subject matter I want to go on. And the reason is, is because I, I will still have to evaluate the person's comments on the podcast, but I feel like there's less of an inclination that the ratings and any driven thing by the network is influencing or anyone else that's a constituent of the network, right? A beneficiary of what they're doing is part of why they're telling me the information.

So I was like, right, sponsored information, of course. And there's political agendas behind everything in certain periods of time, right? Which obviously change things to Google or Perplexity when you're trying to find out ads or direct.

Perplexity only because I use Perplexity to skim the web and find the information I want and kind of contextualize it the way I want it. So I use it as a shortcut and it tells me what the reference sources are. So those two things are why I like Perplexity, because I like to know, all right, well, what did you reference? And then I can go ahead and make adjustments to it based on that, right? Perplexity does not give me more accurate information per se than anything out there.

The car I want to drive to get to the destination I want to get to. It's more— I like to say it's just more concise. It's simple. It's a simple way to compress 14 different pages into one paragraph. And I think that leads us into the next piece, which is enough about Tony. Now I want to hear about Tony's views. So one of the major things that we're doing at Mega is we're deploying voice AI into financial services, financial operations. And at first the notion was let's put AI everywhere and supercharge your business, which is kind of the wrong way to look at it. It's how do we amplify, augment human behavior so you can take C players and turn them into A+ players. So for me, I see it, and Salesforce and HubSpot have done it absolutely perfectly. I don't know if you've ever seen anything that they've kind of released on AgentForce and how they're using AI agents in their system now to really, really supercharge workflows. You can do some incredible things. My views are that AI is here, not as no bubble. It, there are certain things that this thing really, really helps you do so much faster and so much better. So what are your views though, from where you sit on the evolution of AI and I would say 2024, but it's almost a wrap. So let's say going into mid-2025, what are your views on the evolution of AI from this year going into next year?

I would say AI has been evolving really quickly, right? So I mean, my future vision, we already— for me, my future vision of AI is already what we've seen in movies like Terminator and The Matrix and stuff like that. We're going to get there someday. It's going to be there, right? But as far as where we are right now, for me, it's just like any tech. Tech still needs to be controlled by a person. So the deal is, is that one of the lags for me in tech adoption even is understanding— let's take it, let's use a loose example like math, right? Hey, you can give me a calculator, but if I don't know how to do algebra, how am I going to use a calculator to do algebra faster? So to your point, right, it's an amplifier., right? And in order to do that, even things that people, uh, when we think about digital marketing, a lot of people still don't understand digital marketing. They don't understand the tactic. They don't understand how to measure it. The deal is, which one should you be doing? Should you be doing inbound or outbound? Both. You're not doing it for you. You're doing it for the audience that you're trying to engage with at different stages of their journey. And you don't know where those are, but you do know People are searching for answers on Google, and sometimes people are picking up the phone and asking for suggestions from people. If they don't pick up the phone and ask for a suggestion from you, but they're over there researching something that you might be able to help them with online and you're not there, what are you doing for yourself? What are you doing for your business? How much impact are you set up to make? Not as much. So that's a simple answer, right? Uh, when it comes to AI, then Like we're talking about, look, HubSpot's putting some cool little AI tools into the system. So guess what? Some people are going to benefit and some won't. Who will? I know for a fact that one of the things they've added some AI to is, hey, you know what, you want to build a workflow, tell the AI what you want and it'll give you a recommendation of how to build the workflow. Well, great. If you don't know what a workflow is though, and you don't have even the basic idea of how to build one, The likelihood is that you won't be able to manage the AI because sometimes the AI is going to give you the wrong answer. So you still need to go ahead and do some basic training and understanding on what it is you're trying to get done. There are two ways to learn. You can learn through experience, or you could learn in a structured way by also consuming other people's stuff, right? And my mom used to have a saying, you know, smart people learn from their mistakes. Wise people learn from the mistakes of others. That means you're going to have both that have to happen. If you don't do any structured learning for yourself and you just want to learn by experimentation, cool, that's cool, but you're just going to lose more along the way in order to get to the point where you actually know what you're talking about and know how to put these things together. If you balance the two out, say, hey, you know what, I'm going to use the AI tool to make workflows faster, but I'm also going to try to learn about what are some of the best practices in building workflows. What are the things I need to be thinking about? Do I need all these integrations or not? Am I using tools that I don't need or not? That's all going to come down to what's my objective and what are my process steps. It's going to be the answer every time. For you to know that is for you to know that, right? So you need to get comfortable with that idea and then move forward. So I think the AI is going to be great, but you got to know how to wield it. In order to know how to wield it, you're going to have to actually know what talking about without tech, because tech is an amplifier.

I think, I think you hit the nail on the head. Where I see it being most important is there's— I had the conversation with Jake, Jake Dunlap and John Barrows, and they, again, their whole thing was it's the underlying knowledge through experience that helps you use AI the right way. So financial reviews of software, download all of these, show me the costs, show me which ones I should be using, which ones I should need to get rid of, which ones are delivering ROI. Like, I didn't know about that. John knows that from his stuff in his industry. Jake, how to deliver an amplified sales process by knowing I've gone through thousands of discovery calls that went like this from this structured process. Now, how can I kind of supercharge that with AI? So, but you again, you have a very different view and it seems like it's a very structured process-driven view on how sales and marketing and even the use of AI can kind of collaborate. What's your view on how sales and marketing teams then should be using AI in their businesses based on the operation that you're helping to create that throughput? So inbound, outbound, lead gen.

How do you think they should be using it today? One, they have to create their recipe first, right? You're programming a bot to do something just like you're programming an employee on your team to do something a certain way, right? So the deal is, is that one, they're going to have to identify their processes, classify them, and actually get conscious about what they're doing. Because any of us built— born— and when I'm talking about all this stuff, guys, by the way, keep in mind I'm talking about things that I'm having to try to come to grips with or overcome myself. Not like I'm some super expert out here telling everybody the gospel, you know what I'm saying? But the deal is, is that what I've noticed is that in order to go from analog to digital or automated, you have to start like when we were in our analog world before the internet. I'm going out and I'm talking to people and I am finding people that are interested and I'm making them an offer. And, and, and, and somebody pays me money. And that's how I think about it, because I don't have to go into more detail because that's all I need. Hey, Shane, go out, talk to people, offer them this thing, and then get them to pay you. That's it. Now, when I want to all of a sudden go into systems, I have to start breaking that down. And that's why anytime you get with an agency, it's like, oh, go out, talk to people. Okay, wait, who are we talking to? Because now we need to be specific in order to tell an automation, a random individual off the street or even a Facebook ad system, right? It's automation. I have to be specific because otherwise I'm serving it to everybody. You want to serve it to everyone or not? Who do you want to serve it to? Okay, what do you want me to say to them? Okay, when do you want me to send them a message? Okay, like, it just means that we're starting to break down our high-level generalizations into things more specific. So because computers and automation work in ones and zeros ones and zeros. So if it's not black and white and it's too gray, then it's just going to go haywire. And it's a tough process. I feel personally like it's a, it's a weight. It's like building muscles in the gym. It's like doing them pull-ups you were doing on the video. It's work, guys. But you know what the deal is? It's about the journey, right? The marathon. It's the journey that makes it a little bit fun. So again, If you don't like the work of making that transition, that's fine. It's better for you to know that. But if you're going to take advantage of these new things and try to create a competitive advantage for you, guess what? You got to learn something new. And that new thing is not going to be easy. But I can tell you right now, it's about structured thinking. It's about now going from whatever— get with your team, write down what are all the things that we do to get a customer in marketing, what are all the things that we do in sales,. And then you start trying to connect those dots so that they're now working in sync with each other, right? So you start breaking them out. These are the things, this is how we do it. You start finding the similarities and figuring out what you can cut out. First step is eliminate stuff that you don't need because it doesn't— it's not necessary to get to the goal. Then you start identifying the things that are business, business value-added activities and customer value-added activities. I'm throwing in some Six Sigma language, right? But the idea there is then you start prioritizing. The highest priority is something that's a customer value-added activity. The second— so that's a 9. The second will be something that's a business value-added activity that's scored at a 3. So you create enough variance between the scoring system, right? And then anything that's a non-value-add, give that a 1 or 0 because you don't need to be doing things that don't add value, but you eliminate. Then you go ahead and you standardize. Then you automate, then you delegate and assign it out. And a lot of this is, uh, academic exercise. But guys, once again, I hear a lot of things from the average person that's out there, and the issue with success is that success doesn't— success leaves clues, but it doesn't give you the answers all the time, right? There's a successful person out there that you're looking at, you're saying this is what they did, and it's a false positive. You absolutely should not be doing any of that. Right? False positives. There's false negatives. Hey, that person did that and he did it all the right way and it didn't work. So what? How many times was that experiment run? A thousand or one? You know, these are basic principles of, uh, statistics, of science, of whatever, that because of the nature of sales and marketing, we just never had to deal with that before. That billboard was a billboard out there. It's anybody's guess. How much business that billboard sent to us until we start being able to put special numbers up there and do different things to kind of know what's happening. But again, those of us before the internet— there's a lot of people in decision-making roles right now, most of them were born before the internet. So I mean, when I go in, you're like, well, look, my opinion counts. I don't know, I've been doing this for years and I don't know what drives it. It's a new logic, guys. It's just not the same logic as And as we start getting more scientific about being sales and marketing, get more scientific about how we explore, uncover customer insights, allocate resources based on those customer insights, and measure our results, then we're gonna get better results. But these are skills that have to be developed over time, and you've gotta embrace the learning process. If you're 40 plus like me and you don't wanna learn anymore because you're like, look, I've already done my thing, I just wanna go ahead and cash checks, Cool, but know where you are. Don't get in a conversation about AI. You don't need to. Anything that wasn't built between— for 2020, you probably don't need to talk about. Just keep going. There's somebody that wants how you serve. That's it. Go to the bank and you're the teller at the bank. People are coming in and meeting with you physically and putting money over there. You go drop the deposit. That's fine. That's fine. But there's another segment out here where the puck is going. I haven't been—

I don't go—

I don't— I can't even count on my hand how many times I've gone into the bank branch over the course of the last 10 years. If I— and if— and you know what, there's a bank right now I'm going to break up with. I'm doing more with Robinhood right now because America is still sending me freaking paper and PDFs that I got to go print out and send in with a wet signature. What is that? These are big companies. Do you want to be like Bank of America, or are you able to cut into Bank of America's business in 2024?

Steal some market share being like Bank of America? Answer is probably fucking no. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So what do you— where do you see us going in the next— let's say, let's keep it, let's keep it concise. Where do you think we're going in the next 6 months? What do you— what kind of opportunities will we see with using AI from where you—

so I guess what you were talking about with, uh, with some of the voice AI stuff and enabling people that are at I think we're gonna see more now, and we're seeing it already, of AI now going to the step of not just large language models, but also being able to execute tasks. And those things are gonna be phenomenal as we think about 'em as first something that just kind of covers a lot of what it could do now, right? A basic task. So there's gonna be some limitations and later on some more complex tasks, which is why it's a complement to your actual regular staff and everything like that, but not necessarily replacement. I think we'll see more people actually getting good at understanding how to operate what's under the hood in a structured way so that they can pass that information on so that more people could have success. I think we're at the point of uncovering the frameworks and some, some standard ways to go about programming AI and thinking about your business so you can pull the right things forward and tell it what to do in a way that would be successful for you and your customers.

Dope. And what about the concerns? What are Tony's concerns for the use of AI, the improper use of AI let's say specific to customer experience?

Oh, specific because, well, my concern primarily with AI is like with any tool, people using it and not knowing how to use it. There's nothing more dangerous than having someone with a tool that's very valuable that, you know, they think they know how to use it, they don't have any idea how to use it, right? So you've got more salespeople that think they're marketers right now and they're sending spammy stuff all over the place because they, you know, and they're creating blog posts that mean nothing, but they don't know because they don't have enough product knowledge to understand that you just— whatever that written flowery language it was that ChatGPT just gave you meant nothing, didn't help anybody move from stage 1 to stage 2, you know. So that's what I fear when it comes to customer success and AI. I would say probably, uh, anyone who's out there having one of them, but one of those bots call me and ask me survey questions, um, um, automated. It already existed, what they call them, IVRs, I think. Yeah, yeah, IVRs. Yeah, our systems, right? And that's just being, you know, it's the same old thing, like, oh, we had an IVR, now we got an AI bot doing it. Different tool doing the same stuff at the same crappy level of delivery. That, but, you know, that worries me right now. You know what else worries me is that honestly the tech I have even on my phone. Now that I can see kind of like this number is not in there, it might be spam. Now I also know that sometimes from a customer success standpoint, you're going to be reaching out to me and I don't answer it because you're calling me from some number. I don't know what this number is. I don't know if I want to talk to you. It's spam likely or scam likely or whatever. I actually, I mean, I'm gonna say shout out to Scriptify. Actually, I did a show episode with guys. I was Scriptify with, uh, Devon, who's over there, and he put me onto this thing that happens where it's the— all the regulation now around phone numbers is almost like it was with emails. Yeah. So you can have phone numbers that you're using that are just bad numbers or marked as spam that are affecting whether someone picks up the phone. And again, and I didn't know this stuff existed, so this is the cool thing too about having these conversations and learning new things. We have to be learners forever. If you are not a lifelong learner, there's no such thing as an expert because the way things change now is you could be an expert today and a fool tomorrow because everything's changed. Yeah, the deal is if you're not a lifelong learner, you need to be one. That's what you're up signing up for in this entrepreneurial journey or whatever. And you should be holding your people that work in your organization accountable to that. But I learned this from Devon Chew. And again, what worries me, I'm not only worried as a person that would be running a business, I'm worried as a consumer that I might miss it. You, you sent me, you contacted me about renewing my contract and I didn't know it was you with this bot calling me, so I didn't want to renew and you renewed me anyway. And now we're going back and forth about a financial dispute. Uh, you told me I needed to get my information to the government in by December 31st. You told me, but you sent it to my email. My email is overloaded with a bunch spammy cold outreach messages from people I don't want to talk to. And now I didn't see that message and I'm screwed with some fine from the government.

Like, these are the things that concern me about it.

All right.

So we're approaching the top of the hour. And I think, look, in terms of those concerns, you're absolutely right. The misuse of AI to use it to fool people in their customer experience, a big problem that I see already is people have a lack of creativity and people who do have that creative mind and can see opportunity even when it doesn't exist, those are going to capture some major, major wins. But I think what would be more interesting to wrap it up is if we step into your mind for a bit and see how are you using AI?

To better your life and your job? Right now I'm using AI specifically. It is my brainstorming partner, especially when I'm trying to formulate my own ideas or try to like get down to the bottom of something. It's a frustrating partner sometimes. I can't tell you how many times I spent hours of a day on one thing just because sometimes the prompts are— it's going, it's tired, it conks out, it starts telling me something that's not relevant or what I'm trying to do.

Right?

But that's how I also know that your ability to use the AI and also fact-check the AI is directly correlated with the actual results you get from it. So that's how I'm using it. It's my research partner right now, primarily. And I like it so far. I spend a lot of time on it sometimes, but I tell you what, it's been a lot more helpful to getting down to exactly what we talked about earlier, why I like to use Perplexity. Sifting through a bunch of information out there on the internet, getting to some of the root stuff that I actually want. Discovery is much easier. And what took me a year might be able to— I might be able to get done in a day or like 12 hours of real focus over X amount of time. And that's where I think it's best used right now. If you have AI writing everything for you, there's probably a piece there where at least, you know, it could do the first draft. But you're going to have to know how to make sure it's saying the things you want to say the way you want to say it. And there we go again. If you're depending on AI to be your voice because you ain't figured out your voice yet, you're in—

you're—

I mean, eventually you're not going to be getting the most out of AI because that's not what it's designed for, to be your voice. And you're going to sound like everyone else. Give you an example. I checked this. I put a topic into AI, said, write me an article about this topic. I read the article. Besides thinking it was kind of a vanilla article, because by the way, give you background, I did— I spent $30,000 running an experiment one time on, on building a blog, and I hired everything out. It was— they were doing 6 posts a day, blog posts a day. Well, one— I mean, I'm sorry, 6 blog posts a week. One of those was a roundup post, and they were doing posting on social media 6 times a week as well. At the end of, uh, what was I paying? $5,000 a month. So I ran it for 6 months. At the end of 6 months, I was like, well, where's the traffic? Where are those leads? I thought it could be basically a site that was like a money-making website, right? Those things weren't there. Out of 200 visitors, most of them were out of the Philippines where that agency was getting the stuff written. So the deal was— and so I got a coach, right? I got a coach that was— that has a program for building blog sites. And, uh, and paying for the program, I got 2 free coaching sessions. I only used one of the 2 so far, and this was, I don't know, 5 years ago or something like that. And the deal is, is that because when I got into that session, he said, hey, you've got 180 articles here. I can tell you talk about digital marketing. Um, I have 2 questions for you. I have one question for you. I'll ask first, and it was What are you selling? And I— what do you mean, what am I selling? I thought I was going to build an audience, and then I kind of ask them what they want to buy. That's something I've been introduced to somewhere, right? But at this time, when people were already— were past the point of just clicking on anything. So it was a failed strategy built on some stuff that worked before but didn't work at that time. So I wasn't clear on what I was selling in the first place. That directly affected my content strategy.

Sketchy.

And the second thing was he was like, look, a lot of— you got a lot of articles, but there, there's no focus there. They're, they're— they just scratch the surface. They're like so, uh, surface level that there's not enough depth to them, context, that it would make it interesting for people to come back to it and, and think of it as an authoritative source. Yeah, guys, this is what you're giving up when you decide to let AI write all your stuff for you, and you're like, I don't even check it, by the way. What was I not doing with that agency that was cranking that stuff out? I wasn't reading my own stuff. So I'm like, yes, make money and build content and make money. If you don't inspect what you expect, everything you do is going to be suspect and you just got to own it. There ain't no way around it. So if you want to use AI, that's cool. Write your articles, but you got to read the article, review it, or have somebody else do it. And you have to have a platform, just like in politics. What do you stand for? What do you want the market to believe? And then you go out there and you deliver that message. But you got to be able to make sure that your AI and everybody in your organization is delivering the message and knows what that is so they could do it the right way.

That's it. A copy. I'll cut it off right there. Hey, man. Hey, you're the second person that said it, right? There's another guy, Tim Kakir, I think his name is. Turkish guy living in the UK. He, he opened my Pandora's box, dude. I use the, the voice feature now and I speak to it and I've gone into like, I've got some case law that I look into also and I was quoted a lawyer from California, $90,000 for a retainer just look into the case. And I thought, oh, let me actually look into this myself. Here's that, find me case law on this. And it gave me the exact scenarios of when, who is with, and you just like— the opportunity that's in front of us right now is absolutely tremendous. So Tony, last words for you. What, what do you want to— what are your last words? Where can people find you?

And any last words for you? You can find me on LinkedIn, Mr. RevOps.

Am I in there? Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, this does some weird shit on the, um We're still recording, but it does some weird stuff sometimes. So for me, it says your browser is running in incognito mode. Shout out to Podcastle, you need to fix this. You're running in— no, I'm not. I'm running in normal. Exactly. A lot of memory on your— close down some browsers. This is the only one that's open. Uh-huh. What errors, dude?

You had the high CPU usage? I had a CPU usage warning, like what? And it's possible, but I'm like, I'm on this thing all day. I don't have an issue normally. So what's going on now? Yeah, man. Technology, man.

Technology.

When it works well, it works well.

When it doesn't, it doesn't. Where can they find you, Tony?

And what are the— what are your last words? All right. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Mr. RevOps. I believe I did Mr_RevOps, I believe. But yeah, Tony Dix, Mr. RevOps. Also, I will say, since we're talking about AI and we're talking about voice AI, I do want to shout out a couple products that I actually had an opportunity to talk with them and that might be helpful for folks here that might be looking for AI tools. One of them is called SaleMaker at getsalemaker.com. That's a cool one for automating your content creation. I think it'll be pretty dope and it's actually pretty affordable. GetVocal AI for building some agents that can make phone calls and everything like that. I'll actually share some information because I did a show with them where we did even a little demo. It was very cool to be able to go ahead and get that done. So amazing opportunities there. And I would say I want to call out one more. And the one more I want to call out is called Nope, I'm not gonna call out one more right now. I'm not gonna call out one more right now. That's it. I want to call out those two, uh, and I will say, just because I mentioned it earlier, once again, Scriptify for if you do a cold calling. But, um, literally, so link up. I want to be talking to other folks that are moving sales forward, transforming sales, adopting technology, adopting these new processes. Last, and even though we said last thing, I gotta break this out. Very important. This Harvard Business Review issue, I've had this since like 2012, and it's interesting because it says The Secret to Smarter Sales. And this whole, uh, issue, or enough of the articles in the issue, were really about how sales was changing from being this kissing, uh, babies and shaking hands kind of thing to something that required more technical expertise. And that's what we've been talking about. And the deal is, is that that was in 2012 and hot damn, it's 2024. And if, and if it's absolutely true, you know, and when I was in grad school, when I was in grad school, I remember discovering that people didn't really respect the sales profession. They, they're like, I want to go into strategy, I want to do this. Well, how do you have a business if there's no revenue generation going on? Brand management was more sexy and more respectable than sales. Like, and that's got to change. And I think it's happening now with revenue operations and the connection between everything revenue. And I think I just want to say, any of you all who are serious, committed, and on this path of trying to figure out how to sell more predictably and profitably, create selling systems that deliver those results more predictably and profitably. I want to be in conversation with you. I want to learn with you. I want to evolve with you over time. Please connect with me and let's keep the conversation going. And Shane, thanks for having me on the show. I, I love the fact that, you know, everything that I've been there since I've known you, that you're always transparent. And I feel like we learn more from our failures than from our successes, and that's a real important part to us taking our games to the next level. Because acting like everything's a success story all day is not even realistic. You know, again, 2 hits, 2 shots going to the goal, 8 don't. So the more we talk about what's not working, the closer we'll get to what's working. And, um, I hope I could be, you know, a part of your journey.

Well, this is coming from, again, one of the most articulate and well-spoken guests and people I know. Genuinely, dude, you have a narrative and a pattern that is sharp as fuck. So guys, you know, LinkedIn, that's where you find him. He's all over the CloudToss marketplace. He's the guy you want to go to if you want deep insights and you want to know the truth from the falsities and what's going on. Reach out to Tony. All of those links, we'll have those available in the summary. So if you click down here, you'll find those and how to access Tony and get more information. But guys, that's it.

That's a wrap.

So I'll end it here.

Thanks, Shane.