There used to be a saying in pro basketball "Give the ball to Jordan." In this episode we talk about the case for giving the best leads to the best sellers and what to do with everyone else.
There used to be a saying in pro basketball "Give the ball to Jordan." In this episode we talk about the case for giving the best leads to the best sellers and what to do with everyone else.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads. Let's go. We've got a great topic today. I'm joined by Brian Elcesser, owner of Elcesser Ventures. He does consulting with startups, with technology companies. He works with a ton of organizations to help them crush it. We heard you going to talk about who should get the best leads. Brian's point is give the best leads to the best salespeople. Let's dig in, brian. Good to see you.
Speaker 2:Corey. Hey man, thanks for having me Happy to chat and, yes, give the best leads to the best people, brian that's not fair.
Speaker 1:That's not fair.
Speaker 2:Life's not fair. I love it. I think we reached out. We got connected through LinkedIn. I put a post up on this. Get the best leads to the best people. We're not in an environment where companies have the ability to burn money the way they once did. It's just what it is. We were burning a lot of money in tech tons of cash Because VC was like everyone was a unicorn. Everyone was raising money. I had an idea. I could raise money off the idea For a little while. There it was nutty. I did that.
Speaker 1:I raised half a million dollars off a slide deck.
Speaker 2:Off a slide deck. That is exactly the point Right now. Negative, the pattern is full. 80% of growth rounds are down. You have only 50% of the Series A and seed happening. There's not a lot of cash out there.
Speaker 2:So the big question becomes from founders and leaders and what do I do to make it so I can survive? You're seeing lots of risks happen in our industry right now. You're seeing a lot of teams that are being let go. Am I okay with that? I'm not okay with that. I feel bad for those people because I feel like salespeople have been getting the shorn into the stick in our industry for too long. I'm a huge advocate for our industry. That said, if we want our industry to survive, if we want to do better, we need to be willing to iterate. One of the things that we need to iterate on is get your best leads in the hands of your best people. If you think 100% of quota is truly what that number is at 100%, what would happen if you gave all of the best leads to your top closer? Would they be at 100% of quota or would they be much higher?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, if you've got one person at 100% and the other half of the leads go to another person who's at 40%, all of the leads go into the best person. First of all, let me ask you this You've led a lot of sales teams, Somebody at 100% of quota. How busy is their calendar realistically?
Speaker 2:I actually usually find their calendar busy right 60% to 70% busy. What are they doing at the other 40% to 30%? So busy but not slammed? They're not slammed. Or if they are slammed, it's not consistently slammed. It's not five days a week slammed, it's not weekends slammed, it's not night slammed. And there's someone listening to this right now going you're out of your mind. Man Like you, literally are going to work someone to their core until they die and they can't move. A true top performer and I've worked with a handful of them. You're right. I've led a lot of sales teams and I would say that there's top performers, the 1%. They don't stop. They don't want to stop because it's not in their blood or DNA to stop. They'd rather talk to a customer, get under their call, talk to a customer, get under their call, talk to a customer.
Speaker 2:That's what they'd like to do, because that's what they just enjoy working with people and closing business. Now there are AID players. That's not a top performer. Let's just be very clear. An AID player is someone that can hit quota. They're going to be at 105%, 100% of quota every single month.
Speaker 2:That is not someone that's considered a top performer. Are they towards the top? Yes, are they top? No, because they are definitely performing. They're doing what you're asking of them. But if you told them, hey, I need you to do more, they're going to look at you and have had the conversation and say why? I don't understand. Aren't I doing enough? Yeah, that's not the mentality of a top performer. What's the top performer do?
Speaker 2:The top performer is exactly what I opened with, which is that there is no end. They would rather just keep working. They want to take the lead. They want to work the lead. They want to sell the lead. That's it. They want to get another one in. They want to sell it. They want to get another one. They want to sell it. Why? Usually those individuals are exceedingly money motivated, case in point. So I was VP of sales at Saster for two years and by far one of the best environments I've had the opportunity to work at in terms of seeing that efficiency, seeing that growth, seeing what is possible with a true top performer team. I had a team of four AEs, I had two SDRs all right, all top performers. My AE team and I and the SDRs, we did $25 million a year With four salespeople. With four salespeople, average deal size, average deal size was $80,000. Wow, that's a lot of deals. That's a lot of deals.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of deals and that's what 300, 325 deals.
Speaker 2:And when you're getting those deals, when you're doing that work, amazing things can happen.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the thing with Saster. So Saster sells if I'm correct, saster sells sponsorships to technology companies prison conferences. Is that that's right Generalization, fair generalization? Ok, you have a very clearly defined target market. You know who your customers are. Sure, and I think that's where a lot of okay. So I'm gonna tie two things together here. You know who your customers are. You go out and get them.
Speaker 1:We talk about how a lot of organizations end up in a spot where their sales team isn't necessarily hitting as much of their goal as they could. I think what happened over the last several years is companies were using growth capital capital that they raised from venture capitalists for research and development within their sales team, trying to see what worked, experiments to see what type of people would work, how many people needed to work, what markets they needed to work in. They were not doubling down on what they knew worked. They were just throwing money and seeing what might work, which is running experiments, which is a good thing to do, but not with growth capital, because that's the most expensive money you're ever gonna spend.
Speaker 2:I mean respectfully, corey, I think that's a paintbrush, and what I mean is that it's broad stroke, right, like? I think that it's not exactly. Was there some of that experimentation happening, trying to figure things out? Yup, there was, but I interviewed several. So when I was at Sastra, one of the other things I had was I had an interview series with CROs and CEOs and even some CMOs, where I would invite them on, I'd have a conversation with them and some of it ended up on the Sastra podcast. There was a lot of interesting conversations I had. There was only one or two individuals that I ever invited on that interview series that said that they had experimentation money. Everyone else had to be dialed into an ICP, had to be dialed into their target market. Yeah, Generally, if you're putting all money towards that, no, what I think you're spot on about is this idea of headcount spawns growth. Well, that's my point.
Speaker 1:So they didn't know they were experimenting. That's kind of what I'm trying to get at. It wasn't their purposefully running experiments. It's that they were hiring people who weren't ready to do the job, hoping that they'd be able to do the job, and then, oh, let's train them, because I was on a consulting firm. Oh, let's hire them to come train us, we'd show up. I do these assessments that test skills across nine different categories before we do engagements with clients. It's disgusting how low many people score Insanity. And these are folks that got hired because they got through the HR process. They got through whatever interview process they have in place. They put them in a seat, give them some kind of territory and then hope that they work out Well then they've been the leads.
Speaker 2:This is so okay. So, case in point, right, like a few things, you're spot on, and so I said earlier that we need to innovate, we need to iterate if we're going to survive. Okay, there's some things that have to happen. I hope that whoever's listening to this right now, I want you to stop what you're doing and I want you to identify yourself today as your own brand. Okay, stop right now and identify that you are the CEO of your own brand.
Speaker 2:We are past the point of brand loyalty to sales professionals. There's not a brand out there that is loyal to you, okay, and if there is, they're usually very large and yes, I'm not creating broad paint strokes, but I'm gonna put it out there. Okay, tell me about a company that has you sign an agreement for it. That is a contract, not an at will employment document. Find it for me. If you can produce that for me in sales, I will take this back 100%, undo what I said, I haven't seen one, but it doesn't exist, not in sales. Yeah, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 2:You're an at will employee. They can fire you without cause. They can get. Just say today's the day. It's over. Now, here's the interesting part okay, when you are still hitting your goals and growing, and I know several leaders that I look up to and respect that have had this very thing happen, where they've exceeded the expectation or the goal is so outlandishly high that it has no mathematical sense as to how it ever was derived in the first place. Nor did they bring the sales team along for that journey, and then the sales team on either end of that is being ousted. There is a problem with loyalty in sales. Stop what you're doing today and identify yourself as a brand.
Speaker 1:What is the?
Speaker 2:benefit of that, because today, friends, we can make a change in our industry, and the change that we have the opportunity to make right now is to start operating as the consultants that you all are. You're all experts of what you do Now. Some of you are young, right, and maybe getting started in your career and maybe you're not quite an expert yet. That might, this might be the wrong time for you to break out and start consulting or working in that way, but what I'm going to say is that not that we need 8,000 consultants in this world, but we need to realize that, as salespeople, you have the opportunity to run your day. You have the opportunity to work with a variety of different brands and you can go and close great leads that these brands need closed and make money.
Speaker 2:So I'm working on a few things right now. Corey, you and I kind of flash this, but there is a huge, disproportionate, disproportionate amount of people that are looking for great sales talent, but they can't afford it. Yes, and they don't want to afford it. Well, actually, I think there's a portion that can't right. I think venture capital gave them the runway to do it, but they're running on one year or two year less runway and they just literally can't afford it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fair. So if people are in a pickle, I buy that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, on the flip side, you have all these risks happening, and risks are notorious for not just getting rid of people that aren't performing, but that we're performing or that we're above performing and they're just like I don't know why we're paying that person that money and let's just start over, right? Yeah, get rid of everyone. What if we were able to match them? What if we were able to say, hey, brand X that wants to hire great people but can't afford to carry them as a salary, can't afford the risk. What if we can mitigate that? So, coming to a theater near you and soon it's going to be that opportunity we're going to meld the worlds.
Speaker 2:We're going to create opportunities from founders that need access to the talent, and we're going to bring the talent the great opportunity to stand up on their own as their own business or to take on that extra work if they feel like they can do it. We're going to be tech enabled the platforms in stealth. Right now we have a lot that's happening with that platform that is going to revolutionize our business and change the way in which we operate. But we need to get away from this world, this cyclical, psychotic motion of, oh, this brand will be different, they're going to treat me right. They're not going to treat you right. It can't be. It can't be because if they're bootstrapped, they're focused on new performance, which is fine, right, it's what we sign up for, and they're always going to want more. And even when you're producing more, they're going to say, well, I feel like you can produce even more. That's bootstrap business. If you're VC backed, you have 60 days to put a number on the board and you need to come in good to go. So that's paradox. One is we need to fix that problem. The second paradox we need to fix is we need to increase the opportunity for learning and development in our industry.
Speaker 2:Okay, when I got started in sales, at&t gave me six months of sales training. Six months of sales training Wow For the S&B. They gave me six months of sales training. I used some of that training today. I used that training today Because it was so with me and I would go on a call. I had it any minute. If I wanted to take someone with me on a call, I could take one of the managers, I could take a trainer. They had a continuation trainer, two continuation trainer on staff in my office and I could take them with me on the call and I'd close business.
Speaker 2:We don't enable salespeople. We give them a week of product training, two days of company culture training and maybe two or three days of how we run our sales process and we say go, be successful. How are we ever expecting that person to grow? We're taking SDRs that maybe we're at 80 or 90% of a goal that was arbitrary to begin with, based upon the pipeline. Generally Most people aren't goaling them on revenue, which is like I don't know, that's a whole nother kid in Kaboodle. But we're taking these individuals and we're saying, all right, now you're in 88. What skills do they have to close? How do they know how to run that discovery call. How are you training them to do that? And the answer is if you listen to these GONG recordings, or doing so by way of product knowledge, not sales knowledge.
Speaker 2:We have an L and D problem in our industry. So the next thing that we need to go and look at is our communities. What's pavilion offering? What is GTM United offering? Like there are communities out there for sales professionals to give them the learning and development environment that they need. Kevin Dorsey has one. Like guys, like we need to go after and up level our industry. If we can treat sales as if it's medicine, as if it's a law, right, you know what they call it. Like you're oh, this is my practice. We practice law, right, we're getting better at it every day. That's what it is they're practicing. That's the same thing we need to get to the mindset of. So I know I'm rambling here, but ultimately, like this, I think, is the same mantra behind getting efficient with your teams, getting the best leads in front of the best people and closing more revenue. We need to re-change how we do and rethink how we're doing things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just Googled this. I mean this is incredibly relevant. Every active state bar member of the Texas bar that means lawyer must complete a minimum of 15 hours of accredited continuing legal education per year. 15 hours per year. Now sales people are getting they're getting pushback from leadership, enablement, whoever. If they want to do 15 hours of training, oh, we're too busy, we got too much going on. We got all these programs and initiatives or things like that. And, like you were talking about a second ago, it's product-centric and the product-centric stuff is often led by the product team and so it's not hey, here's how to sell this product. It's hey, here's what this product does, which is negative when it comes to how to sell the product.
Speaker 2:And then you're going down the road. We wonder why sales people are having benefits conversations around. Here's all the benefits of this product. Here's all the features of this product. It's a Billy Mays commercial it is. It's a ShamWow sale. Rip Billy.
Speaker 1:Mays.
Speaker 2:That is. That's the problem, right, we need to fix it. It doesn't like so I mean like Pavilion. I don't know if you're familiar with Pavilion or no Pavilion, but what Sam Jacobs has built there and I'll openly say that I've been. I've been now supporting his team a bit here for a few months.
Speaker 2:I've been a member of Pavilion for a long time. My one of my earliest bosses was one of the founding like first members, brian Rakowski great guy, I hope you're listening Say hi man. Good kid, we should catch up soon. But that said, brian Rakowski was one of the first members of Revenue Collective, which was what became Pavilion, and it was just a place for you know at the time, executives to go and try to learn what they didn't know, get better Something outside of you know, their networking, yeah. But that said it became is now this community of over 10,000 people, 300 corporations, these huge opportunity to learn from each other and network with each other and grow from each other.
Speaker 2:And in there is this university setting that they got where, literally it doesn't matter the role in the go-to-market, but they have a school for it. And it's a deep dive Like look, go, invest in yourself If your team won't do it for you, go invest in yourself. If your team has an L&D budget, they don't know where to spend it and you're like thinking, hey, maybe I can go and buy I don't know my Peloton license or whatever. Like ha ha, like I don't like. If you're trying to figure out what to do with the money, you have to know there's these resources out there. We have to get better. Lots of resources.
Speaker 1:And if you want a resource on coaching your sales team, I'll send you a copy of our coaching salespeople course and a free request to freestuffatcoachsearmcom and I'll put that over to you. There he is, corey.
Speaker 2:There we go, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1:So it's out there, it exists. Like you're saying, it exists and it's funny. So I write sales books and I always laugh because I say, well, I write books for the audience that reads the least. Because you know, I go over to my buddy's houses. They're doctors. I was there when I went to my friend's house the other day. He's like man I just hit seven feet. I was like what are you talking about? He goes seven feet of textbooks that I've read and he had them stacked up next to it and I was like, wow, that's insane, that's crazy. Right, you know.
Speaker 1:But you have to If you're going to be good at something you have to.
Speaker 2:I mean, you think about it too. And I'll go one level further here. I do believe that there is just as much complexity in professional sales than there is to medicine or to law. There's nothing against people that are in those professions. I think those are insanely incredible professions. I'm a fireman in the EMT. Right, I have to take continuation training. But in order to even become a fireman in EMT, I had to go and do 136 hours of training first for each title. All right now a professional level. Ok, so at a professional level, for medicine, it's years of training. For law, it's years of training for sales. It's what's training Like. We need to do this first right. We need to help these people have a foundation.
Speaker 1:Well, and then going back to the other piece that you're working on, it's about creating a marketplace for talent that doesn't have a ton of friction, because right now it's oh, I'm associated with this one brand and I've got this at-will employment agreement so you can fire me for any or no reason at any time, and then if I want to leave, I've got to go through this whole contrived interview process with this next brand and there's no transparency into what I've done, because we made it illegal for people to show their commission reports, so that creates more friction. And then all of these other things where it's hard to move from place A to place B, be able to show who you are, what you've done in a way that they actually believe, because you can also you know, resumes are the best version of the truth omit every negative thing that's ever happened, so in some senses, people don't tend to believe them.
Speaker 2:It's egregious what legal teams and companies are doing to salespeople when they first get started. Right, I had a young SDR who just literally got started in his career someone that I've known and he was asking for some help and he reached out to me. He's like hey, I got an offer, would you mind looking over the contract? They sent this kid a 14 page contract to be an SDR. Okay Now, like, wow, like first off, no fresh out of college grad is going to go in higher on attorney to go and look at that Right. So what are you signing up for? They had all sorts of clauses in there.
Speaker 2:They listed 10 companies this person couldn't work for for two years Now, like years years, non-compete which is like first off non-compete have been not held up in court forever, right? So there's this whole piece of those being illegal to begin with. This person doesn't know that. Second, the moonlighting clause in there saying that there is literally no work outside of this work this person can do ever.
Speaker 1:Is he allowed to raise a child? Is that okay? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I've missed that chapter Right Like it's incredible. And so by him signing on his, the consideration was a 50 K base salary and the opportunity to earn more.
Speaker 1:But there, oh, let me guess, there was no describe, there was no complaint, it was actually detailed in there.
Speaker 2:They said that that would be no complaint detailed. They said that would be sent separate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have to be better, right? So where who's helping the SDR? This is where pavilion came in, right? This is where, like, some of these other companies came in. Because who's helping that person? No one, unless they know someone. Me, like someone's reaching out to me, which is fine, please reach out. Right, I'm happy to help. But it's incredible what companies will do to the, to the uninitiated, and if we don't check and balance they focus.
Speaker 1:I love this. The focus of the energy is on the legal of the what might happen maybe sometime in the future, and it's not on on this person over here I was this. Yeah, that's fascinating. It's kind of like how companies will focus so much on the financial statements but they won't look at the discovery notes and the CRM data. I told a private equity guy one time I said look, put the financial statement in the closet for a month. Yep, just look at discovery notes. Every time you're tempted to look at the financial statement, just look at discovery notes and you're going to be better off. He goes yeah, I know, but the manager partner won't go for it.
Speaker 2:Here's the other side of this. Right, I'll flip the coin on you. Here's the other side of this, which is very interesting. When you take that same company and say, hey, I'm excited to get started for you, I'd actually, I'll get started on a 1099. I'll become a contractor, yeah, and. And that's where we can operate that way and this way I mitigate the risk. Right, like, if it doesn't work out, it's easier. In your end, you can have a lot of upfront costs. If it did work out, great, we can figure out the way in that's best appropriate for both. Right, 1099, very, very easy way to get started. When you do a 1099, 12 of those pages of that contract are immediately gone. Yeah, gone, they're just there. They don't mean anything anymore because you're not becoming an employee.
Speaker 1:Well, and so 1099 independent contractor. There's a I think it's a 14 point test to determine if you're an employer and independent contractor. The general theme is, if you detail in detail, prescribe and constantly manage what somebody does, they're going to be an employee, even if you call them an independent contractor. But if somebody's in a prospecting role or even a sales role and you say, hey, brian, here's your territory, here's what it takes to be successful, go get them. Tiger, that is, that's going to pass the independent contractor test all day long.
Speaker 2:All day long, twice on Sunday, and guess what? Isn't that what we're doing anyway? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really interesting and it's funny People get so caught up in this world of employee. I heard somebody the other day. They said Well, I wasn't going to take the independent contractor role because they didn't offer benefits. Right, dude, you're single, health insurance costs like $500 a month. That's what you're doing it for. You're literally going to pass up something that is a great opportunity because of health insurance, which you can get lots of places. Yeah, if you've got seven kids and health problems, I know health insurance is very expensive. Take care of your family, figure that stuff out. But if you're single, or if you're married and don't have a bunch of kids and whatnot, it's not that expensive. No, it's definitely not a reason to put a roadblock in your career?
Speaker 2:No, if we can think outside the box behind how like? So. So I'll leave this last one here and this is maybe the last food for thought that I can give. That, I think, is contextually accurate. Right, if we can think, we used to. I just had this conversation earlier with a colleague of mine. Literally just before this call, I hung up and joined this.
Speaker 2:If we can think about the way in which a company is looking at us and what they need solved, what is the reason why they'd wanna work with you? Not like, why do you wanna be there? Fine, okay. What do you wanna earn? Fine, take that away. Just put that in the bucket for a minute. Why do they want you? Like, what are they trying to solve? If we can operate from that standpoint, what are they trying to solve? Okay, how can I support them in that solve? What are some immediate KPIs they can measure against that I can deliver on right now? That support, that solve.
Speaker 2:If we're able to do that, then build a comp plan right there. Right, build a comp plan right there. Make, take care of the solve. And guess what? Friends, you'd be surprised how much money companies will pay you and be happy to, yeah, the framework is this right, companies will pay on bookings and they'll pay on clothes and revenue all day long, twice on Sunday, bar none, and they'll pay more on that deal being closed and in their pocket than they normally would anywhere else they I've seen companies offer up to 50%. 50%, I'll pay a 50%.
Speaker 1:If anybody wants to come be a 1099 contractor for Coach Sierrem, I'll pay a 50% of your one bookings to sell Coach Sierrem right now, do you?
Speaker 2:have a done deal 50%.
Speaker 1:Bring it. It's cause it's worth it.
Speaker 2:to me it is Because it's worth it because it increases the value of the product, it increases what you're doing. Yes, that's why, At the end of the day, your LTV. You'll make money on the LTV as an owner right, we know this you're gonna make money on the LTV, you're mitigating the risk.
Speaker 2:There's no upfront cost. There's no hardcore like oh shit, I have all this overhead. There's no overhead. No, you're paying only on growth. And if you're a sales person and you're good at selling and you know you can close things, you're gonna make sick money. We're talking seven figures doing this, seven, yeah. So I hope everyone that listens to this calls you frankly, because that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. It just makes sense. And here's the thing, right If you for those of you that work at companies that have channel teams, the channel partners guess what they're getting paid. They're getting paid 10 to 50% on year one and year two and maybe year three. There's a lot of cash that's going to them because there's a lot of mouths to feed. You've gotta pay the execs at that company, you gotta pay the sales people at that company and they're probably doing a lot of services. So it's not gonna trickle down to everyone. They're gonna get their meat from that. But there's a lot of cash going around to these folks because it has to and it makes sense for the company because in a steady state world a software company is worth about 10 times A or R, maybe more, maybe less, whatever. But so you go sell a hundred thousand dollar contract that drives a million dollars enterprise value Everybody wants.
Speaker 2:Scott Lease at GTM United right Is also working with a very interesting, a very, very interesting set of criteria. If you're a member of Go To Market United, they have a board in there of deals that people are trying to work. Hey, here's the list of companies I'm training to break into. Now I might have a connection at that company and a good one, right and they just people just want an open door. So I go and I make that introduction, I get them the open door, a deal gets inked. Well, then you share the commission between the two people. It's instant money, right. All I did was open the door and I'm gonna make a paid half a commission. And this idea is that there are deals sitting in your backyard because you have a network of people that you can go and ask for help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I pay 10% just for a meeting with someone that's. You can't do it at companies the person works at because that's not ethical, but at a company where you don't work, getting a meeting with somebody that closes in the next year, I pay 10% on that all day long.
Speaker 2:All day long. So that's for the meeting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think this is. You're spot on with this, because here's what. So the whole theme of this is give the best leads to the best people. Well, what I'm hearing you say is we're at a point where we're going to evolve to the best people, going to be able to do their thing and make tons of money at scale, and be able to do it from the boat, and ethical Yep, and ethical, yeah, just because they're good at it, just because they're good. This is the thing I'm good at.
Speaker 2:I'm POCing this concept right now, so I'm selling for multiple brands, okay, and that was my whole thing was trying to get signal on this before I went and build the tech to support it and build something. Oh, you mean the right way. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:You gotta POC your own product, you know. And so before I went and built the whole thing, before I got an MVP up, and now I have two co-founders, mvps on your way. Like we have things framed out, we're gonna be able to do things that nobody else will be able to touch, which is very, very exciting. But in the meantime, pocing my own product and is it possible to sell up other products, and fast, with very limited support Is it possible to go into multiple different types of business, so not just SaaS but services can you sell different types of product with very limited support and to go in and work? The answer that I found is most definitely yes. And so, as a POC working multiple brands, I'm working five and I think I'm saturated at five right.
Speaker 2:But, at five. I'm very consistently able to make change at each one. Yeah, one of the founders yesterday. And this is me putting feathers in my own caps, right, but this is more about that's a joke, more about proving the pudding okay, I'm Native American.
Speaker 1:You can put feathers in your cap all day long. I approve it. Nobody's gonna cancel you.
Speaker 2:Here is no comment. Here is the proof of the pudding. Okay, Okay, this is from a founder. Okay, Love you, man. You've changed my life. This is truly the start of something great. Hope you're having a great time. That's the testimonial you're looking for, go after it, go sell stuff right Like, remove these stupid barriers. Companies are trying to keep you in the box on Because, literally, it's in their best interest to keep you in a box.
Speaker 1:It's not in your Well, you're in a box and you're in meetings, you're talking about things, you're doing process stuff, you're being told to do this and do that and do the other, and if you want to just get good at it, just get good at it. That's it. It's crazy, man Like. So there's a lot of things I've been trying to get good at and I'll give you a couple of examples. I've been trying to get good at stand up and I've been trying to get good at pool and I'm okay at both. Sure, whatever.
Speaker 1:But in the last few weeks I did stand up at Joe Rogan's comedy club and I found three things that I definitely need to work on. So what did I do? Did I go back out and do stand up the next day? No, I went back to writing, because my problems are in writing. It's about getting the connection between the different parts of my bits and making sure that's tight.
Speaker 1:And then, on my pool game, I played in pool tournaments last three weekends. Did I play in one this weekend? No, I went practiced because I know there's a specific reason why I'm not able to compete with the guys that are at the level that I'm trying to play at, and I need to go practice. So, instead of going out and trying to perform, perform, perform. Go back to the fundamentals and practice and, if you're able to recognize what those gaps are, and go attack those. That's gonna build you up to the point where, yeah, maybe you're not comfortable going out and doing a commission only thing with five different brands that you're representing. But if you're not figure out why you're not figure out what the specific gaps are, go fill those in and then go out, call Brian and see if you can hit that seven figure number that he's talking about, because I think it's there.
Speaker 2:It's the last piece here and this is this. I might get canceled on this one for sure, but you're-.
Speaker 1:People are not allowed to cancel people from my show. That is a very specific guideline. If you wanna cancel people, go listen to the Karen podcast. This is sales management.
Speaker 2:Here's what we have right, and that is you have people that are either in this business for the participation trophy or they're in it to go win it. And, frankly, the time of the sales participation trophy the sales participation trophy which was, in my opinion, just getting a job in sales working at a 60 to 70% of attainment oh, it didn't work out. They get another one. Okay, I have my base salary back, my benefits back, I'll try to sell. That day is gone, okay. And if that was you, you might need a new career, and that's okay.
Speaker 2:Change is a good thing, right. Go find the thing that you love. Go find the thing that you can get passionate behind. Go find the thing that you wanna do more of and go live there, right. But for those that like no, I can sell, no, I want to be better. Invest in L&D. Go and get your skills up to the point that you can go and crush it and get enough swagger that you can go and say yes, I will make my bed, I will make my bread by kind of I don't even intend to rhyme, but I will go and do both on my own accord. I don't need a company to consistently provide that for me. I can provide it for myself, and when you make that choice, go own it. Watch what happens. You'll be surprised. It's. It is some incredible opportunity out there, so I yeah.
Speaker 1:That's inspiring.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna end on that right, it's it, man, I think it's good stuff so this is great.
Speaker 1:How can people reach out to you, and is there anything this is gonna launch? Well, I'll say this now this is gonna. It's gonna be a couple of months till this comes out. Is there anything that you want people to know or how they can reach out to you?
Speaker 2:A couple of months till it comes out, so in a couple, if this isn't up yet, in a couple of months, something went drastically wrong. But so I'll say you're gonna wanna go check out Upside that would be at getupsidedcom, and if you think that you have what it takes to be an Upsided seller or an Upsided founder, you should go check this out. That is the company that's in stealth. It won't be stealth in a couple of months. So there's that second piece. So you can get ahold of me in any way you want, like whether it's email, or if you wanna reach out on my website elsehitsreventurescom, or if you wanna get me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty accessible and I'm very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very open to sharing and helping and doing what I can. So by all means, get in touch. Let me know how I can support and, yeah, let's go change the face of this game.
Speaker 1:As they say, the rising tide floats all boats. This man is the tide. Let's watch what he does.
Speaker 2:Let's hope I don't drown.
Speaker 1:Well, you're a trained EMT and firefighter.
Speaker 2:I think that's true. I just became a rescue technician in swimming. We're good.
Speaker 1:There we go. You need to see, this is all, it's all serendipitous. We know that you're here to raise the tide, and so you can actually do it and manage the tide, and swim in the tide.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's great. It's great to be a part of this. Thanks for having me today and I really appreciate the opportunity to connect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for joining. If anybody wants to up level, a couple of things coaching course, free stuff at coachcrmcom. And then Brian mentioned the whole idea of sales development. If you've got folks on your team, with your sales development leader out there and you're just saying, man, this person, they just don't know a lot of things. They need to know. I wrote a 280 page book called Sales Development. Type it into Amazon. It comes up. It's black, it's got sunglasses on the front. Because it's cool, check it out. I've read it.
Speaker 2:It's worthwhile.
Speaker 1:I love the better books, oh sweet, did you know, that was me?
Speaker 2:No, actually that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Ah, that's right, See, now that we get to the end. That was like oh yeah, that was a great book.
Speaker 1:So the reason I wrote that was I was sitting there and said, oh man, I have this consulting firm, closeloop, and the projects that we were really interested in at the time was post-M&A integration of sales teams and so taking sales, sales development, sales engineering, customer success from company A and company B and getting them to work together to combine the entity to find success. Those were the projects we were interested in. And then we had all these other people that were like, hey, I've got this SDR team that's not doing good, Can you train them? I was like I don't want to do that, that's just not fun.
Speaker 1:Because here's the problem with training SDR teams is you've got the people that are either really good and they're like this is basic, I already know this, or you've got the people that are consistently struggling. Guess what. You give them all the things in the world and they're going to struggle anyways. And so I was like, look, let's write this all down, give it to folks and let the guys that want to run around and do one day seminars Do you go? Hire them? Or read the book, one of those things. So that was the motivation behind it.
Speaker 2:I've used it. We've owned it. I had it at AirCall. It's a I did really. I'd love that you wrote that it's a great book.
Speaker 1:Sweet, all right. Well, if you want to see what I'm working on now everybody, go check out coachcmcom. There's a free version on the website. If your managers are struggling to get everything out of you to teams, or if you're worried that you're not in a position to scale and hit those numbers for next year, we can help you with that and subscribe to SalesMeers with a Heartcast. We'll see you next time.