Darrell Amy is the author of the Revenue Growth Engine and the co-host of one of the top sales podcasts, Selling from the Heart. Darrell knows and understands how to grow revenue quickly.
He's the owner of a successful sales and marketing organization that specializes in sales training and sales and marketing alignment to achieve revenue growth. Over the past 27 years he's worked with hundreds of companies and trained thousands of salespeople. He's seen marketing and sales ideas that work well--and many ideas that failed miserably.
"Darrell Amy, he tackles two of the biggest challenges sales leaders face today - aligning marketing and sales and executing an effective outbound attack to fill the top of the funnel." - Mike Weinberg, author of bestsellers New Sales. Simplified., Sales Management. Simplified., and Sales Truth.
In this episode Darrell discusses:
Connect with Darrell
Official Website
Buy the book here
Blog
Revenue Growth Podcast
The Sales Vitamin Podcast Official Website
Episode Blog Post and Transcript
Darrell Amy is the author of the Revenue Growth Engine and the co-host of one of the top sales podcasts, Selling from the Heart. Darrell knows and understands how to grow revenue quickly.
He's the owner of a successful sales and marketing organization that specializes in sales training and sales and marketing alignment to achieve revenue growth. Over the past 27 years he's worked with hundreds of companies and trained thousands of salespeople. He's seen marketing and sales ideas that work well--and many ideas that failed miserably.
"Darrell Amy, he tackles two of the biggest challenges sales leaders face today - aligning marketing and sales and executing an effective outbound attack to fill the top of the funnel." - Mike Weinberg, author of bestsellers New Sales. Simplified., Sales Management. Simplified., and Sales Truth.
In this episode Darrell discusses:
Connect with Darrell
Official Website
Buy the book here
Blog
Revenue Growth Podcast
The Sales Vitamin Podcast Official Website
Episode Blog Post and Transcript
Official Website The Sales Vitamin Podcast
Episode Blog Post and Transcript
John (0s): Hey, what's up. Everybody. You're listening to the sales vitamin podcast. I'm your host, John Bossong I'll be deconstructing the playbooks of some of the most successful sales authors, leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, field sales professionals. We're going to discuss their strategies, their perspectives, and their insights. So sit back, relax and get ready to take your vitamins because here we go.
John (38s):
What's up, everybody. Welcome to the sales vitamin podcast, where every episode is a vitamin for your professional sales development. Today's guest is Darryl Amy. He's the author of the revenue growth engine and the cohost of one of the top sales podcasts selling from the heart. Amy is also an expert at sales and marketing. He's got a great knack for it as well. They're all started in the copier industry and now owns and operates a successful sales and marketing consulting firm.
John (1m 9s):
I really enjoyed our conversation and you're going to get a ton of value and sales vitamins out of his sales concepts and ideas to grow revenue. He's also going to share some thoughts on aligning your sales and marketing teams. This episode is full of sales vitamins. Darryl discusses the importance of aligning sales and marketing. How the idea for the book came to him. Sales growth, sales training, adding value, and much, much more. You will also get Darrell's one sales vitamin that will immediately improve your sales results.
John (1m 41s):
So sit back and relax because it's time to take your sales vitamins with Darryl. Amy,
Intro (1m 49s):
Welcome to the sales vitamin podcast dedicated to helping you improve your sales skills, strategies, and systems. So you can maximize your sales performance, grow your revenue, and increase your income. Get ready to learn what they don't teach you in school. And now your host serving up sales vitamins one episode at a time, John Bossom
John (2m 16s):
What's up, everybody great to be here. We have a great guest today on the sales vitamin podcast, we are going to be talking with the author, Darrell Amy, his new book, the revenue growth engine, how to align sales and marketing to accelerate growth. I'm excited to have him. He's also the cohost of the selling from the heart podcasts with Larry Levine. He's been in the business 25 years as a professional salesperson, and he's going to be dishing out a ton of sales vitamins today.
John (2m 47s):
Darrell, we are so excited to have you. Thanks for having me. John is great to be here, man, right off the bat. I just kind of wanted to talk about, you know, the whole idea behind the I've done some research on it and you know, you you're aligning the sales and marketing. And how did this all come about and how long of a process has this been for you? I know it's already a bestselling book, so that's a, that's a cool deal in itself. So, but how did this, how did this come about this, this book in itself?
Darrell (3m 19s):
Well, so I was getting ready to speak at a conference last year and in the conference about half the room was marketing professionals and about half the room was sales leaders. And I've spent my career in both. I w at a university, I went straight into the sales profession, absolutely of sales junkie loves sales. And it was about 17 years ago when I actually started my own business doing sales training. My very first client came to me and said, Hey, Daryl, everything you taught our sales team about this selling model is fantastic, but our marketing doesn't say anything about that.
Darrell (3m 56s):
And we need a website. Do you build websites? So being my first client, I kind of reached back to, I said, yes, sir, we build websites. I pulled my marketing degree out of my hip pocket, dusted it off. And so I've been on this journey over the last 17 years, John, which has been really an interesting journey where I've had one foot in the sales space and I've had the privilege of training thousands now of salespeople in the technology space. But at the same time have also had a foot in the marketing world, which has been a wild journey.
Darrell (4m 29s):
I've owned a seven figure agency in the marketing world now in the, and, and that's coming on 17 years. And so I've seen that whole evolution of what's going on in marketing. And so anyhow, I still have land at this conference and the marketing people are just Gaga about the latest gadgets and strategies and shiny objects, which is great. And I'm a bit of a closet nerd, or my wife might say, not so much a closet or just a nerd. So I love all that stuff.
Darrell (4m 59s):
And at the same time I could see the sales leaders are in the rooms with their arms. They'd go on, come on, man. Really, you know, we just want some leads, all the leads and give us are garbage, you know, and, and the, the sales or the marketing people are looking back going, you just don't get it. And in the back of the room, there's a couple of business owners they're drinking their coffee, and I can see they're rolling their eyes, looking at this going can't, y'all just figure this out. And that was, as I was preparing for that conference, I realized, you know, the goal here, and I think this is instructive for salespeople and marketing people as well, is the goal at the end of the day, Stephen Covey said begin with the end in mind.
Darrell (5m 39s):
And when you begin with the end in mind, good things happen. Well, what is the end that we have in mind? And if you think about it from a sales perspective, we're here to generate revenue, right? We want to generate revenue, revenue equals gross profit equals commissions, and lots of good things happen right from that. And so what I began to realize is just looking at that big room was if we get everybody focused on revenue as the goal and how we drive that revenue, then we can get people together on the same page.
Darrell (6m 11s):
And in terms of the listeners, you know, and I, once again, I'm a sales junkie and, and on selling from the heart, you talked to my friend, Larry earlier in an earlier episode, we, we are passionate about helping salespeople succeed by leveraging authenticity. And, and what, what I've noticed with salespeople is, you know, we gotta remember at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is drive revenue. And we've got a lot of ideas on how to do that, but that's where the book came from is just going, how do we get, you know, marketing and sales aligned?
John (6m 49s):
One thing I saw that was interesting to me was you talk about two things. You either got the new revenue that you go get, or the cross selling of, of your current customer base. And I really think that is kind of how prospecting goes. So talk about that a little bit. You really key on that and in your book. And I thought, that's it
Darrell (7m 12s):
Interesting? Well, this was my lights on moment. And, you know, always what I was doing when I do sales training. I always say, you know, how many, how many of you like making money, right? Everyone likes to make money. Well, and I, you know, if I'm going to get up in the morning, if I'm going to shower, shave, you know, and put on a suit or get on zoom now, which is what we do, right? Yeah. I want to make some money. So how do you make money? Well, what I realized is if you boil it all down to its most basic level, and this is something I think is all salespeople, we should pay attention to, there are really only two ways to make money.
Darrell (7m 49s):
Or in this case, we'd say there's two ways to generate revenue. And what I'm about to say is going to sound really simple, but it's actually very profound. You know, there are two ways or are easy. We get more net new clients, right? We go grab some new logos or we sell more to our current clients. Now here's what I realized, John. And this is where I got really excited is if you, in most people in most companies, by the way, are good at one or the other, you know, go into a lot of companies I've been in, in involved in many sales teams that are really good at getting net new business.
Darrell (8m 26s):
It reminds me of a story. I was, I was down in South Florida working with a client. We were getting ready to launch a revenue growth workshop. And so I get to conduct these revenue growth workshops all over the country and all different kinds of businesses. So we go in, we're getting ready to conduct the revenue growth workshop, like all good workshops. I say, you know, why are you here? Why are we here? And they said, we want to grow net new business. And I said, great. What, you know, what's your goal? And they said, well, we'd like to hit steady 10% year over year growth in net new business.
Darrell (8m 59s):
Good. You know, what did you do last year? 9.8%. I started laughing. I said, well, why am I here? You know, we've got to get it checked. Well, it sounds like, you know, you guys should keep doing what you're doing. Good job. Right? Yeah. But then we looked at the other side of revenue growth and I said, well, what about cross selling more to your existing clients? And this particular company is a technology company that invested hundreds of thousands. Maybe even more than that in a whole new line of offering of software and professional services that they wanted to sell to their client base.
Darrell (9m 34s):
And when I asked how they were doing in that, you know, they all lean back in their chairs and, you know, eyes started rolling and going, Oh my goodness. Darryl has just been, it's been a real struggle. Well, here's what I realized. Yes. And that's where the problem needed to be fixed. If you can grow 10% year over year in net new and simultaneously grow 10% year over year in cross sell revenue or we'd measure revenue per client, you can actually double your revenue in less than four years.
Darrell (10m 6s):
Wow. And, and so as salespeople, you know, you can look at that at a company level for the sales vitamin listeners. I would be, I'd be thinking, okay, if I could grow my net new business, total number of customers and simultaneously grow my revenue per client, I got a potential to double my business in, you know, in three, four years organically with just getting smart about how we do things. Yeah. And that's where I get excited. That's exponential revenue growth.
Darrell (10m 37s):
Oh, that's cool. Now part of the title is aligning sales and marketing. Where do you see with the companies that you've worked with? You know, you've worked with a ton and just a lot of sales professionals, where does that misalignment come from? And why is it misaligned so much, do you think in the, in the corporate structure? Well, yeah. And certainly, I mean, you've seen it, right. I mean, yeah. Marketing people are thinking, one thing I was talking to inside our selling from the heart insiders group, I was talking to a, a professional in the banking industry who was, you know, we're talking about alignment one day and he just laughed.
Darrell (11m 20s):
He said, yeah. I went out to see a customer this morning. And they had received something from our marketing department department that I'd never even seen before. So I'm getting asked questions about a new program that, you know, they've done all this big campaign about there's obvious, obvious areas of misalignment all over the place when it comes to sales and marketing, you know? And, and I think, you know, you have the classic, all of these leads are garbage, right. And marketing. So excited. I send over lead salespeople go, this is garbage marketing people go.
Darrell (11m 52s):
No, it's not. Yes, it is. No, it's not. It's just like this stop. Here's, here's where I've seen alignment. And I noticed this when I took my car in recently to get alignment, you've ever driven a car that's out of alignment, right. Pulling the one side, pulling to the other, you know, and it's really frustrating to, to drive down the road to align a vehicle. They actually put it up on the rack and they focus on a dot on the wall, off in the distance. And when they do that, then they're able to get the wheels into alignment. Well, what is, what is the thing that we need to focus on to align sales and marketing?
Darrell (12m 27s):
I believe John, that what we need to focus on is our ideal clients and prospects. You know, if you think about any whatever business that you're in, whatever industry that you're in, I really am a firm believer that not all clients are created equal, right. There are some clients that are better than others. In fact, yeah. I love going through this exercise and inside revenue growth engine, I walk salespeople and sales teams through this exercise is just basically saying, okay, who's who are your favorite clients?
Darrell (13m 2s):
Like, I think everyone listening to the podcast right now, if you were to even hit pause and just go, okay, who are my three favorite clients? And write those down and start to write down, well, what do you like about them? What do you enjoy about working with them? But then also take that a step further and say, okay, if those three clients, if each one of them bought everything that I could sell them, like all of our products, all of our services, all of our solutions, what would that client be worth over the next 10 years?
Darrell (13m 35s):
And, you know, and, and just add that up. Yeah. And, and first of all, this is really fun, exciting exercise, but, but then what w what I challenge challenge you to do is also after that, then go back to your just bread and butter average client and go, okay, let's look at that average client, this smaller one, you know, that's maybe not quite so, so fun to work with the ones that are kind of our safety blanket, right? The bread and butter up and down the street, you know, client what's that client worth over 10 years.
Darrell (14m 10s):
And I'll tell you what, John, I've done this exercise with companies across multiple industries and different markets, different size companies in without fail those favorite clients. I call them ideal clients. They usually end up having 20 to 30 times the revenue potential of an bread and butter type client. Wow. And yeah, that's where, you know, if you're going to grow, whether, you know, whether your listing as a sales professional, or you lead a sales team or own a company, if you're going to grow the smart way to grow is by looking at what can I do, do to get more of these ideal clients and how can I set my company up?
Darrell (14m 51s):
How can I set up my approach? How can we focus our effort on these ideal clients? And that's the alignment right now, the focus we're not talking about sales, we're not talking about marketing, we're talking about together. How do we get more ideal clients on board? And that talk about an accelerator in revenue growth. That's where it gets really, really exciting.
John (15m 14s):
Are you working with a lot of what for, for lack of a, you know, I'm in the transportation industry, the equipment leasing industry, very much a outside sales profession, whereas, you know, Larry Levine, the copier industry also very outside B2B, but you'd probably do a lot of work with the, the SaaS industry and the B to B inside sales. Do you see a difference in the type of a model, the revenue growth engine in those? Do you have to tweak anything or is your stuff pretty much good for all industries?
Darrell (15m 48s):
Well, just to set the record straight, I'm an outside sales guy myself. So yeah, I've been involved in that in the B2B space is my specialty and, and selling technology into that space. So, but what I have noticed is the principles that we've talked about so far in terms of driving revenue by net new and cross sell, as well as focusing on ideal clients, those principles work from small business, all the way up to enterprise. And, you know, it's been interesting a couple over the last couple of years, I redesigned the sales training for an enterprise company, and we use the exact same principles that I used last week with a small business that is scaling up from one salespeople, one sales person, they're building a team.
Darrell (16m 38s):
And so the principles are very, very similar in all of it. And, and that's been interesting to me because I'm like you, I'm a B to B sales guy, you know, used to working with VPs of sales and, you know, in, in medium sized organizations, in selling lease, leased equipment and software and all of that. But this is, these principles are applicable to companies and salespeople and across multiple industries and multiple size organizations.
Darrell (17m 10s):
If you can drive more net new and cross sell simultaneously and put the processes in place to do that, you can grow your revenue exponentially. And that gets exciting to me. Oh yeah. What do you see
John (17m 23s):
The Darrell that's lacking from a sales training standpoint when you go into these organizations, or even when you're working with an individual, because before we get to that revenue growth engine side, you've got to have the sales skills either on the individual level or training. Where do you, what do you think's lacking right now that you see in the organizations that you actually work with? Yeah,
Darrell (17m 47s):
I think, well, first of all, John, that's, that's one of my favorite questions. And I think, cause it's an easy question to me, the thing that's lacking the most is business acumen because understanding the client's business and in revenue growth engine, I tell the story of Theodore Levitt, Theodore Levitt was what many would consider the father of modern marketing. He was a Harvard business school professor and he used to walk into his class on day one. And he would hold up a drill bit like from your electric drill, right?
Darrell (18m 17s):
He'll hold up a quarter inch drill bit. And, and he would say nobody in the history of home Depot Lowe's insert hardware store here has ever purchased a drill bit. What they bought was the hole. It just so happened. You need to drill a bit to get a whole right. Seth, Seth Godin. Who's one of my favorite marketing authors took it even further. You said, well, they didn't really want the whole, they wanted to be able to hang the thing on the wall. So when their friends came into their office, you know, blah, blah, blah, but really what, what we've got to remember, I think, and, and this is so critical for salespeople, buyers, don't buy products, they buy the outcomes, those products deliver.
Darrell (19m 1s):
So, you know, whether you're in the transportation business, whether you have the hottest new SAS platform, you sell, whatever you sell, that's not what your clients are buying. What they're buying are, the outcomes that your products deliver. And so I believe John that one of the best, highest leverage, most important things sales professionals can do right now is to up their game in business acumens, specifically understanding the business of their clients and what challenges they're facing and what outcomes they want.
Darrell (19m 37s):
And those outcomes have shifted dramatically in the last four months. Right. Right. I saw a really interesting report from Gartner. They were asking, just doing their, their survey, you know, their amazing survey research, and basically to sum it all up, what they found was the outcomes that clients wanted before the COVID crisis, where things like efficiency, productivity, you know, those, those types of things, the outcomes that a lot of clients in a lot of industries want right now is resiliency and redundancy and you know, and those types of things.
Darrell (20m 14s):
And so you may be selling the exact same product you were selling four months ago, but the outcomes you're selling are different. And this is really, really critical. I think for sales professionals to, to strongly consider is what are my clients actually buying? And how can I talk about that rather than the product itself?
John (20m 38s):
Yeah. So you almost have to unteach some things that some people have learned when you come in. I mean, when you're talking about looking at outcomes, because it seems from a standpoint and I've been there, you get taught the product, you get taught. Here's what this copier does. Here's why it's so much better. Or here's why this truck is so much better. Right. Rather than here's what it does. And here's the impact it has on your business.
Darrell (21m 3s):
Yeah. It truly, I mean, it really is flipping things upside down, you know, the, that I, I'm a huge fan of challenger and challenger's sale. And we got to talk to Brent Adamson on the song from the heart podcast recently, which was just a totally cool episode. It's going to come out later this summer. Yeah. And you know, when I got done with that conversation, what, what it reminded me of is the fact that if I don't understand your business, I can't challenge you.
Darrell (21m 33s):
Right. I, if I don't understand, like I, I need, I need to understand my product. I need to be very, very fluent in my industry, but I also need that same level of effort made to understand your business and, and your challenges. Otherwise, I can't challenge. You don't have the, I don't have any ground to stand on. So, you know, for sales people right now, I think one of the best things you can do, especially, you know, obviously if you're brand new, you've got to learn sales techniques and you gotta learn the product.
Darrell (22m 7s):
But for those of us who are maturing in our career, now how many times, even though it's a, you know, how many times do you need to mass read how to master the art of selling? I mean, no disrespect to Tom Hopkins, but, you know, we memorize that book. Now the books we need to pick up our books on business, you know, good to great pick up traction, pickup, business books that are going to give you insight and ideas to be able to bring to your clients so that, you know, you can talk about those outcomes.
Darrell (22m 39s):
Yeah. And if you do that, you're going to shine like a star in a pool full of product focused salespeople. Tell me about our total listeners about the masterclass. You know, you've got the book out the revenue growth engine, but you also have a masterclass that's, that's involved with this and you also have a tool kit on the website.
John (23m 2s):
That's actually pretty darn cool. Talk about those and kind of how you weave those into your training.
Darrell (23m 8s):
Well, we really wanted to be able to give, you know, my, my mission and I think every salespeople or salespeople, every sales person, all salespeople should know their why. Right. You know, I'm a big Simon Sinek fan. And, and, you know, if you don't have a why it's, it's hard to, to really drive to the next level of success. My, why is I want to help businesses, great businesses grow because I've noticed I'm on the board of several nonprofits.
Darrell (23m 38s):
And I noticed that the people that really move the needle for nonprofits are businesses. They're able to write the big checks and now, you know, businesses and successful salespeople, we needed to be successful because the not, you know, nonprofits doing amazing work in this world need help right now. So, yeah, that's my, why I want to help businesses grow. In fact, my, my big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 businesses, double revenue to generate $10 billion in net, new nonprofit giving per year.
Darrell (24m 11s):
So where do I go with all that? Well, when I wrote the book, I wanted to make sure that companies had the tools in place to be able to, to really take what's in the book and operationalize it. So we did put together, thanks for bringing that up. We put together a masterclass that explains in eight short lessons goes deep into what is a revenue growth engine. What are the core components of it that a company needs? And we talk about things like driving net new and cross sell, focusing on ideal clients, creating a message around outcomes, and then putting all the processes in place to make all that work and happen.
Darrell (24m 54s):
Every good engine is just really a set of processes, right? Yeah. So the masterclass goes in into that, and then there are tools on the website itself, revenue growth engine.net, where companies can start to put some of these pieces in place for your audience, for salespeople in particular, what's most helpful. You know, you go, well, I'm not a company, I'm a salesperson. Well, I think we all know as salespeople, we are kind of our own companies, right, right. We're entrepreneurs with a, with a territory and an area of opportunity.
Darrell (25m 28s):
So I think that one of the tools would be most helpful is in just one of the exercises we talked about earlier is really understanding who your ideal clients are and thus who your ideal prospects are. And, and then being able to begin to categorize the outcomes that they want. I always, John, I noticed, you know, years ago and odd man, a date myself now in the early nineties, when we, we both graduated from college, you know, they handed me a box of business cards and a price book.
Darrell (26m 1s):
Right. Which was an inventory of all the products that we sold. Right. And I think what would have been better, of course you need a price book, but what I really wish they would have handed me was an inventory of all the outcomes we deliver. In fact, when we work with clients, now we actually help them develop an outcomes inventory so that, you know, when they're creating sales, collateral and messaging, it leads with the outcomes when they're creating marketing materials and website content and all of that, it leads with the outcomes.
Darrell (26m 34s):
And that becomes kind of the playbook that we're going to play from, right. This is our outcomes inventory. And, you know, I think when you go to the website revenue growth engine.net and go to the free toolkit, one of the areas that you'll want to, as a sales professional take, take this as your own homework, right. Sit down and really begin to understand the outcomes that you can deliver. And that's what you need to talk about this we need to lead with in all your conversations.
John (27m 3s):
Yeah. That's a great point. That's a, those are powerful exercises. I mean, so for me, you know, in transportation, it's reduced downtime or increased uptime, you know, for the copier guy it's toner spend, or, you know, whatever, or reduce downtime on the copier. So those are the outcomes. I think that you're talking about that these businesses need to look for.
Darrell (27m 24s):
Yeah. And I want to challenge you though, if I can challenge you to push back just a little bit more is we've got to get a little deeper than that. And that's, you know, I think a lot of times, as salespeople in marketing professionals, we're guilty of just kind of saying reduce downtime. Right, right. So that what what's underneath that. Right. And John, one of the things I did years ago, I, I got frustrated when I went out on my own, I got frustrated with vertical market research. So we'd get these vertical market briefings.
Darrell (27m 55s):
Right. And right. You could tell that all that they, all that was done to create this was somebody took the product and put it in a blender with a bunch of buzzwords from insert vertical market here created a brochure. It's useless. Right. So I said, we got to get better at understanding these markets. So actually went out. I started interviewing current clients and even just friends. I remember I was at the time I was buying a house. So I've gotten to know the regional manager for the bank where the mortgage company I was working with.
Darrell (28m 29s):
So I took him to lunch one day and I said, Hey, I'm curious, I'm just doing some research here. Can you tell me what happens from the time I, you know, submit this mortgage application until it goes through the whole process. So he started telling me, and in the, in that 30 minute conversation, over a couple sandwiches, I left with a half a dozen core business problems that, that, that industry was facing. And I had a really good insight in terms of how to drive conversations.
Darrell (29m 0s):
I replicated that by lunch or donuts for someone. And tell me about your business and what happens from the time, you know, this, to this I'm in the transportation industry. What happens from the time someone requests, you know, shipment until that shipment's fulfilled, whatever that is, right? Those conversations yielded the golden nuggets. So it wasn't just, you know, uptime or, you know, it was uptime. So that dot, dot.because.dot dot.
Darrell (29m 32s):
So that like there's layers underneath that absolutely get down to the really nitty gritty is when you're able to really drive those great conversations. I think we got to get past the, the marketing buzzwords and get deeper into, you know, the real true issue behind the issue. Yeah.
John (29m 52s):
So if I were to say, Hey, Daryl, what if, if I've got your book and, and well, there's a lot of vitamins in the book, but if I was to say, well, what are the three things that when you were putting this book together, if, if the reader got these three things out of it, what would you say, man, I really hope they get these three things. If they don't get anything else, what are the three things that, you know, from the, the revenue growth engine book that you think you would hope that they would get? Yeah.
Darrell (30m 19s):
Great. Thanks. Great question. I we've talked about two of them and I want to then weave in with a third. So the, the first thing is, think about revenue growth in terms of net new and cross sell. Okay. But don't just think about your total number as a sales person, dig down a layer and go think about it in terms of what do I need to do in terms of net new and cross sell. Cause if you do both of those at the same time, your income will go up dramatically. And that's, you know, that's the end game of all this. I know we're not all in sales, just for fun.
Darrell (30m 51s):
So, you know, and your impact will go up dramatically. So think about revenue in those two ways. Second thing, focus on ideal clients, be obsessive over ideal clients. You may go well, Darryl, what about the rest of my clients? Don't worry. They all want to be ideal clients. They all look up to these types of companies. So the work that you do there is going to lift, you know, those other they'll love it. They'll love that. They'll love it. They'll love that you work with those companies because they want to be those companies. But the third thing I'd say is a word that is not very fun to most salespeople in that process.
Darrell (31m 29s):
You know, if you boil a business down to its two most basic levels, you have people and processes. If you go in any department in a business, finance, accounting, shipping, and receiving, you know, they all have processes, but when you walk into a sales bullpen, usually it's the wild West. I just got back from Wyoming. And, you know, I can see the sales department that tumbleweeds there, there's a guy flipping a coin and other guy, you know, w we're we're salespeople, we tend to get very relational and which is good, but we need processes and processes in place for prospecting process in place for on-boarding, for managing our clients so that, you know, we, and this is, this is the key to, you know, getting net new and cross sell at the same time is to make sure that we've got the processes in place to be able to do both consistently and efficiently.
Darrell (32m 27s):
And I just, you know, I want to say to all the salespeople out there, and you can get some ideas inside revenue, growth engine, in terms of processes that you can put in place specifically, probably the area of cross selling, maybe that you hadn't thought of before that, you know, in the absence of process, a lot of times we just lean on what we're good at and that's why, that's why, you know, maybe we just see single digit growth instead of the exponential growth we could be experiencing.
John (32m 58s):
Yeah, No, that's fantastic. Alright. So I've got one more question for you, but before, before I ask you that question, tell all the listeners where they can get in touch with you, get the book and, and, and so that they can communicate with you.
Darrell (33m 12s):
Yeah. Excellent. So I'd love to connect with anybody. The fortunate thing about having Amy as your last name is you're pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. So you can get a LinkedIn or Twitter and type in Darrell. Amy, I'd love to and love to connect with you. Our website is revenue growth, engine.net. And of course the book is available on Amazon and soon to be on audible. So awesome. We have a lot of listeners that like to listen to books, it'll be coming out in the next 60 days on audible.
John (33m 46s):
Okay. That's great. And I've, I've been to the website. The website's fantastic, very easy user friendly, lots of pictures.
Darrell (33m 56s):
Hey, I'm a recovering sales guy myself, so it's good. I've been to therapy twice a week. It's going pretty well. And that's,
John (34m 2s):
You can also sign up for the masterclass there. Those tools are there, all of that stuff. So spend some time. So the last question for you is not necessarily about the book, but if you have one sales vitamin to leave our listeners with, from a sales development standpoint, what's that one sales vitamin you're going to give them today. And you've only got one so that you can help them improve. What is that?
Darrell (34m 25s):
John, I've got to go back to what I was saying earlier about business acumen. I think, you know, I know we, I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but this is, you know, this is something that I think is, is so vital in, you know, as sales salespeople, you know, I always tell my, I tell my 15 year old son, every day, I tell him leaders are readers right now, our readers. And, you know, I, I think the best thing that we can do every, every sales person wants to be a value added thought leader.
Darrell (35m 1s):
You know, I don't want to be in the commodity price war world. I want to, I want to rise above it. Well, how do you rise above it? Business acumen, you add value and how do you get business acumen? You read, you ask questions. You have, you know, and, and so I, I think that vitamin right there, I mean, truly is, is a vitamin that is, is really going to help you succeed. And it's a never ending quest to learn more about our client's businesses.
Darrell (35m 32s):
The more we learn, the more valuable we are and the more successful we're going to be. Awesome. That's that's
John (35m 38s):
Fantastic. Darryl, Amy, the book is the revenue growth engine, how to align sales and marketing to accelerate growth, make sure your run to, Amazon get the book, get to his website. Hey, I'm thankful for you coming on today. I know your time's valuable and appreciate all the stuff you're doing for the sales professionals out there. And we're just, it's, it's great to have someone of your caliber on, so I appreciate it.
Darrell (36m 4s):
Well, you're too kind, John. It's I love what the what's going on at the sales vitamin podcasts. And it's just an honor to be here.
John (36m 10s):
Well, thank you so much. And I look forward to everybody here in this episode, in the near future, That's it for today's sales vitamin. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any episodes and please leave a review. It'll mean a lot, whatever platform you listen on, hit the subscribe button, have a great day and remember take your sales vitamin. I would like to thank today's sponsor Renegade, content creation. You can follow what the team at Renegade is doing by visiting them on Twitter and Instagram at Renegade to see that's at Renegade, the number two and C, and you can follow them on LinkedIn as well.
John (36m 51s):
That's the word Renegade, the number two and the letter C if you liked today's episode and you like the content, please subscribe. Leave us a review. It would mean a lot.