What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Transforming the C-Suite: Why Every Leader Needs a Sales-Driven Mindset
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Doug from CEO Sales Strategies takes us on a remarkable journey through the evolution of sales leadership, beginning with his first entrepreneurial venture at just six years old in his father's industrial machinery business. That early lesson—realizing he could earn $10 in eight minutes selling a part versus working 40 hours for the same amount—sparked a lifelong passion for sales efficiency that led him to build 36 businesses throughout his career.
The conversation dives deep into why a sales-driven mindset must originate at the C-suite level to effectively permeate an organization. Today's flattened competitive landscape means every department—from operations to customer service—needs to approach their role with revenue generation in mind. "If it's not at the C-suite level, it's not likely to trickle down through the other parts of the organization," Doug emphasizes, sharing how one company reversed a dangerous revenue decline by implementing rigorous training and accountability structures.
Perhaps most compelling is Doug's systematic approach to building elite sales teams. Rather than chasing unicorn performers, he advocates clearly defining success criteria and focusing on elevating your bottom performers. This strategy often reveals hidden stars—illustrated dramatically by one salesperson who went from earning $140,000 to $2.1 million in commissions within a single year through proper training and accountability. "These elite performers will continue to compete," Doug notes, explaining how raising the floor creates healthy competition that lifts the entire organization.
The discussion explores eight critical metrics every sales leader should track, from initial attempts through repeat business, providing a comprehensive framework for measuring and optimizing sales performance. Doug also addresses the essential role of technology in modern sales, warning that companies not embracing automation and AI tools risk being outpaced by more innovative competitors. Finally, he shares insights on cultivating strong sales cultures through consistent training and accountability, lamenting the decline of comprehensive sales training programs as "lazy application of principles."
Want to transform your organization's sales performance? Subscribe now and check out Doug's upcoming masterclasses on predictable revenue generation and effective follow-up systems—two critical areas where most companies leave substantial money on the table.
Growth marketing tips & tech insights from those who’ve done it.
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Hey everybody, really fascinating chat for me and, I think, a lot of you around the sales-driven mindset, particularly within the C-suite, with a true expert in this field, doug from CEO Sales Strategies. How are you?
Speaker 2:Hey Evan, Good Thanks for having me on here. I'm really grateful.
Speaker 1:Excited to chat. You've been at this business for many years and have some really unique and actionable insights. Before that, maybe introduce yourself and the journey you've been on at CEO Sales Strategies.
Speaker 2:Well, I actually started this back when I was about age five. So I actually I grew up in Newburyport, massachusetts, where I know you. You know that because we're from a similar area here and I worked for my dad's business and about the age of six we actually got pushed out in front of customers. He had an industrial machinery repair and sales company and we actually sold at age six and I found it fascinating old at age six and I found it fascinating Now. They helped me. You know, I mean I had a. You know the employees and my family helped me do it.
Speaker 2:But I don't know if my dad did this because he wanted to teach us this or if he just had really low cost labor because I was getting like 25 cents an hour right At that time. But long story short, I learned the power of leverage at that point because I remember looking at a part and saying, hmm, this costs $10. I just sold it for 20 and we made $10 and I work 40 hours a week and I get $10. So I did this in eight minutes. So my little six-year-old brain was like something's a little better here if we can figure out how to create this in your own life. And so I did.
Speaker 2:And you know I started just kind of doing the entrepreneurial pursuit and having other people come in. My first one was a paper route. I hired all the kids in the neighborhood, my brothers. I wasn't old enough to get one, so my brothers said, yeah, sure, I'll go get one. And I did their paper route and I got my cut and everybody got paid. So I was. It was my first sales management job, I guess. And then all the way through my life I've built about 36 businesses, whether by myself or collectively with other people, and primarily the most of them have been well, every business is a sales driven business.
Speaker 2:But most of them are focused in that area.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a great story. It's amazing how so many innovators and entrepreneurs start at such a young age it's definitely something in the mindset and the brain and fast forwarding to the C-suite. You know, why is that such a beyond obvious revenue, meeting goals, meeting targets? Why is such a sales first mentality throughout not just the organization but the C-suite, so important, particularly these days in what could be a challenging environment.
Speaker 2:Well, if it's not at the C-suite level, it's likely not to trickle through the organization. And the reality is that I feel, anyways, business is more competitive than ever before. And it's not this trite, oh yeah, business is more competitive than ever. This, you know, trite, oh yeah, business is more competitive than ever. We're not, we're now no longer generally even competing, just in our area of it. You know, like, let's say that we we had a restaurant, for example, and we were like hey, we're in Chelmsford, massachusetts and we've been in this business for 35 years. Well, guess what? There are another restaurants now that are.
Speaker 2:You always had competition, but now transportation is so easy, technology is so easy, I can order from wherever and people will deliver it to my house. So, no matter what business we're in, whether it's a restaurant or a corporation of high magnitude, there's no longer this. We're the only one thing. And the internet has flattened the world of transfer of information. And at this point, if it's not at the C-suite level, then it's not likely to trickle down through the other parts of the organization.
Speaker 2:And every part of the organization should be a sales-first mentality, and that means operations should be a sales-first mentality. Customer service shouldn't be just about serving customers. It should be how do we upsell, cross-sell or downsell this client as well as take care of them on the back end? So all of this IT you named it, you named the department or the division within the company. They all must be a sales mentality for us, because business works very easily on a premise of money out, money in, equals something, and if we're not bringing much more money in than money's going out, then we have a negative at the end of that equal sign, and vice versa. So that's why it's so important.
Speaker 1:Wow, it's a great point, strategic alignment, and so you know it sounds great. Of course it's not easy to align sales teams, which tend to be the rogue folks doing their own thing, with broader business objectives. So any top line strategies for that alignment, what have you seen that works?
Speaker 2:Well, with sales folks. I find it's actually not that hard to do because it's usually what's going on is there's lack of accountability in the sales arena of the company, right? So we can look at our management, we can look at our, our, our management, we can look at our executive management and if they're not actively involved in that sales process and pushing the sales message and the sales message process through it's, it's not gonna. You know it's. It's like.
Speaker 2:I spent 12 years in the military, evan, and oh, you're welcome. You know, if I saw the general hanging out just having coffee, I wasn't really that worried about, you know, being a corporal or a sergeant or whatever. Right, I would do my job, but it wasn't like if they weren't driving leadership from the top, then the rest of the ranks will tend to follow that leadership and it's just so important that they do that and having the accountability on top of that. So, for example, you know I went into a corporation and you know there wasn't a huge company but they were doing about $50 million and their sales manager was not really doing it, the owner wasn't really doing it and they were in a decline and they fell from 50 million to 48 million in six weeks and they were in that kind of decline. Well, people there were starting to leave, even their good people, and they had a terrible, terrible retention rate of their people. Well, we went in and we just turned that around and we then installed training in with their sales team four days a week and they were all like, what are you doing? Nobody trains four days a week. It's like, look, let's hold accountability to what your people are doing.
Speaker 2:Plus, by nature, people have a human need to want to grow. So let's teach them how to grow. Let's teach them how to make more money. So let's teach them how to grow. Let's teach them how to make more money. Let's let's. Now you, as the CEO, have to be actively involved in the push of this whole process. No-transcript around the process. And they got so enthused you know that they were just, you know, out there killing it, and not literally, but out there killing it in the sales arena. And what happened? Operations started getting happier. What happened? Customer service was happier, right, human resources, which you know some people would argue they're always happy, but the reality is they were happier. So the whole company started running much better because we had that accountability and that focus in that sales only first direction, as you're referring to.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Let's talk a little bit about building elite sales teams. Everyone's seen those star elite performers in action, but they're kind of a rarity. I mean you have you know your average salesperson out there. How do you replicate the success of those few elite salespeople to build an entire team of performance that's not just based on a few outstanding individuals?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's on the front end in most cases. So the thing is is that there is natural talent that rises to the top, but there's also talent that rises to the top because they're just willing to work harder than anyone else at it. So, on the front end, we have to be really clear about what we're looking for as an elite performer, and that's where most people drop the ball. They never define what actually is an elite performer in this company. They look at the person who's just blazing the trail of the you know. Let's say, there's a sales team of I don't know 10, right, there might be one or two that are just, you know, lighting it up in the sales team, and people are like, wow, this is a unicorn. No, it's a human being who's doing something differently than everybody else is. And so what, what is that person? What are the characteristics? What do we want that person to, you know, on all the team level, to be doing? Now I also have a, you know I I've been fortunate enough to literally hire I don't know how many I mean certainly well over a thousand salespeople in my career. So I have a bit of a bias on this, which is we get very descriptive on the front end of who we want. We run the ad that's targeting that particular. You know just as we would in marketing what's our ideal client profile, what's our ideal right fit buyer right, and we run the description of the ad toward that person and we'll attract more of those people.
Speaker 2:However, not everyone's going to be that elite performer and a lot of people think that I'm going to get a hundred percent of those people. However, not everyone's going to be that elite performer and a lot of people think that I'm going to get a hundred percent of these people on my team, and the reality is no, you're not. It's like every single professional team out there. You have a few people who will stand out better than others. I mean you and I from Boston area. We there's not much to talk about the Boston Bruins right now Sorry, bruins, but you know but we do have some elite people who still stand out, even in the games that we're continuously losing, and so those people are always going to perform under bad conditions. Good conditions, it won't matter, it's just in their DNA to do so. So we have to make room for that.
Speaker 2:But what we can do, evan which I've done very successfully is we can train the other bottom half or bottom 80% if they want to use the Pareto principle right. I've never, by the way, I've never found it to ever be 80, 20. It's always different, you know, but there's a smaller percentage that are usually doing that, and then the larger percentage is usually lower in their performance. We can take that bottom part and we can raise that up to past minimal acceptable standards. So that would be where I'd recommend people starting, because let's say that 20% of the team is carrying 80% of the revenue and 80% of the team is only carrying 20% of the revenue, and get that to 50% of the revenue, then you're just going to jump your revenue because the top performers are never, ever going to let the other people beat them. Right, if they're truly elite performers, they have an ego the size of Montana that says if you don't, you know, if you're not there all the time, then you're not who you are, and so those elite performers will continue to compete. Now guess what happens when they compete and the bottom starts to compete? Firstly, you're going to spawn a few new elite performers out of that group.
Speaker 2:By the way, that's what happened with the $48 million company out of that group. By the way, that's what happened with a $48 million company. Two of the bottom folks actually took hold and now they had six people on the top that were high performance. These two outperform the high performers. One of them outperformed the whole team of six that were on the high end. And so what ended up? Because we trained them. We just like grilled and grilled and grilled and trained and trained and trained, and then held accountability, like don't show up tomorrow without your homework done from today, right. And so what ended up happening was those elite performers were kind of kicked off their pedestal and they really didn't know what to do at this point, because this, this one guy in particular, was just blazing the trail, um, and in fact he went from 140 000 in commissions when he started within one year he was doing 2.1 million in commissions, wow. And so, yeah, it was great, right for him and for everybody.
Speaker 2:And what happened was these elite performers who thought they had the company like, oh, you know, the company can't fire us, or whatever they started seeing a bunch of the 80 percenters starting to make their way up.
Speaker 2:So guess what they all did? They all came in line. There was no more arrogance on the top. They were like, yeah, we're going to do our job better, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, and you know, it was humbling for them, and so I found training the bottom up is a really good thing, because you're going to find some of those superstar players that they're looking for in that bottom. It's just that they're not being taken under their wing and moved to a new team, a new place or whatever. And you see this in sporting teams all the time. Right, not everybody's. Tom Brady, you can't go from the New England Patriots down to, you know, to Florida and still continue to win. Not everybody will do that, but we will see a quarterback or running back or or whatever you know player go from a team to a new team and now become the top star on that team. It's because we changed the environment and we gave them a different accountability process.
Speaker 1:Great insight, great analogy there. Let's talk about metrics that matter. Everyone wants to be data-driven, of course, but what KPIs, what data should you follow to really gauge the health and potential of their sales organization? What do you think matters?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. Everybody says they want to be metrics driven, but few actually follow it. So I've actually found that really eight metrics really matter when it comes to the sales team itself growing sales revenue. Now, to answer your question, it really depends on what the outcome is that the organization or even an individual selling wants. But I have found that these eight metrics have served myself and clientele really well. And just measuring the ratios between these metrics and really optimizing these metrics because a lot of the tactics that people talk about, like referrals, they fall into these categories of these eight metrics.
Speaker 2:So the first is attempts outbound, inbound attempts, in other words, ie we reached out to somebody to try to prospect or we have a lead coming in. We want to measure those and you will find in most cases with your sales team members, they're not making enough outbound attempts. So from attempt. The next one is connection. If we're making an attempt, are we actually connecting with the person? Why is that important? It tells us if the medium we're using or the media we're using actually works. You know, I like I talk to people sometimes and they're in the marketing space and they have this list of clients or whatever and they're like I got a. I talked to just one recently. I got 1.5 million people on my list and I said to him how active are they? And he said well, they're active. I said well, if you send something out, how many sales do you get? How many people show up, how many people respond to your posts?
Speaker 1:I have almost 700,000 followers. That and a cup of coffee will get for $5.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's a fascinating uh, analysis and you can't buy a coffee for five bucks at starbucks we know that right, so I don't think.
Speaker 2:Anyways, I'm not sure, um, but no, I agree with you. 100 right, it's, it's like you. So the connection rate will tell you something and it will also tell you whether or not you're actually should be putting your money and efforts into these places, because if you have no connection whatsoever with these people, it's not going to work. Right now that one's a little more difficult to measure than many metrics, but it can be measured. Now, out of the connection, how many responses are coming back and, in particular, how many positive responses. So salesperson reaches out, ghost town, there's no connection. Well, maybe the medium they're using is not right, maybe they're cold calling but they're calling on the wrong hours, maybe they're calling to the wrong phone numbers, whatever, all these metrics will tell us a story, evan, as you know. So, from the response rate now, how many appointments are we setting? How many actual conversations are going to happen, or what is the meaningful dialogue that has to happen that's considered a conversation or an appointment? From there, how many closes are we making? Because we can measure.
Speaker 2:Let's say, I just had an interesting thing that happened. Someone set 164 appointments and only six people showed up to the appointments and I was like, my goodness, this is crazy. Well, turns out that they were talking to the wrong buyer, right, they were talking to the director, where they should have been talking to the CEO. The director was then taking it up the chain, hitting the next executive level, and they go no, we don't need that. So they're like man, we're not going to right. So how many conversions are we getting out of the actual appointments? And then from there, what increased transactional value or what transactional value are we getting? And then from there, how are we spawning repeat business? If we just follow those metrics alone, it tells us a story. Now there's submetrics within, you know, like on the appointment, what's the show ratio, the no show ratio, right, those types of things. But those eight growth, you know, overall arching metrics, those are the ones that I use to measure most companies, and there's three or four other metrics we use too, but those are the primary ones.
Speaker 1:Interesting let's talk about. One of my favorite topics as a techie and geek is technology in sales and selling sales management. There's a whole category that's emerged called sales tech. It's just a massive market map of hundreds, maybe thousands, of companies, but it's also super confusing. I mean, how do you as a C-suite you know leverage tech like AI, automation, other sales tools effectively, Because there's a lot of tech that can kind of waste your time as well.
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing is thank goodness there are people like you and kind of waste your time as well. Well, the first thing is thank goodness there are people like you, Because people like me who even you know I had a tech background, but I'm not the guy who's the most like I want to sit and play with the tech, I want to be out in front of people, talking right and having relationships, so there are people like you who just make my life so much easier. So, thank you. And the reality is right now, with the explosion of AI and all the new tech tools that are coming out, it's very confusing for people to understand what's this or that or how's this work. But to answer your question, firstly, if you're not exploring technology or sales tech today, you're going to be left in the dust, because there are technologies out there today that automate workflow that you're paying for in human manual labor and your competitors are catching wind that you don't have to do that any longer. So your margins are going to be shrunken just because of tech and we're automating workflows all the time. We're looking at what can we do. That's repetitive task and take it out of a human being and it gets done every time, and so it doesn't matter if someone's sick. It still works, right? Unless you know the technology burps which could, right? So then again, that's a whole new conversation. What are we doing for backup technology? Right? Then again, that's a whole new conversation. What are we doing for backup technology? Right? So, as a person running a company today, if you are not deploying or actively looking to deploy what you do, evan, right on the technology side, then you're going to be behind. There's no question about it. You can improve your profitability. You don't actually have to cut headcount in most cases to do this. It's just you're making the headcount much more productive than they ever were, because they don't have to search for certain things, they don't have to think about certain things for certain things. They don't have to think about certain things. Like you know, we're even doing a lot of testing right now with AI setters or AI, you know, inbound.
Speaker 2:Like I called Sirius Satellite Radio yesterday and the first thing that picks up is hi, I'm Harmony, I'm the AI assistant for Sirius Satellite Radio and you know, sirius, you did a good job, right? It wasn't like, oh, I don't want to talk to this thing, right, because you know it's not a human being, because they're saying it's not a human being and thank goodness and appreciate that the integrity they're telling it is not. But I had a conversation with Harmony and Harmony kept trying to upsell me and I'm like, look, I need to talk to somebody because you know the vehicle that I have, I'm selling it and I don't need Sirius in this vehicle anymore. And they finally got to a live person. But the conversation was so great that I wasn't like aggravated by the time I got to a human being. I was hoping that Harmony could actually solve my problem so I didn't have to sit on the line and wait for a human being, right. So when you spin technology the right way, it's a very productive thing.
Speaker 1:So you know you, yeah, it just amplifies work by you know 10x.
Speaker 2:I have an.
Speaker 1:AI sales agent on LinkedIn that goes out as smartly and precisely identifies potential prospects and leads for me on LinkedIn while I sleep and I wake up, and I have 10 conversations to follow up on, and it required zero effort on my end.
Speaker 2:So this sort of thing is just incredible. You had to set it up, right.
Speaker 1:And configure it and all these things take time, but the investment, the payback for sales.
Speaker 1:tech is amazing. Let's switch gears a little bit to a less data-driven topic culture and talent development. The old joke is that strategy eats culture for breakfast, or culture eats strategy for breakfast. It also eats sales for breakfast. I mean, we've all been in those environments where there's a culture that just nurtures selling and sales, a culture of sales, and that increasingly, is disappearing, I think, with a lot of companies through downturns, downsizing, market uncertainty, not much investment in the sales team in many cases, I find. And how do you build that culture? Is it through the sales kickoffs and the award system and the team building exercises? I mean, particularly with younger hires who may be less experienced and less able to work completely independently, how do you develop the next generation of sales hunter-killers?
Speaker 2:Well, firstly, it's got to come down from, it's got to be on the leadership level. If the company is not focused on that, it's going to be harder to do because the accountability to the actual, clear mission of the company is is is off Right. And you know I'll pick on Disney for a moment. You know, when my kids were little, I used to take them down to Disney. We'd spend a thousand $2,000 in a day or two at Disney and we had a great time, you know. You'd come, you'd come out of the, the parking lot, you know, and then you go out onto the little trolley ride down in, you know, in Florida, and from the trolley ride somebody would greet you and they were always happy and, you know, helpful to see you and they're like would you like to take the monorail? Would you like to go across on the boat? You know, and they would. Really it was great.
Speaker 2:I went there two years ago and my daughters are in their twenties now and we get there and parking, as usual, was insanely priced, so we paid that. We get on and there's nobody to greet us, to take us to the park, to take us on the little ride, and we're waiting there for like 10, 12 minutes and we're like what's going on? Anyways, they finally come by, they bring us in and they go walk to the park. We don't have the boat, we don't have the monorail, and if you have the monorail, we don't even know if it's running on time. I mean, it was just a totally different experience. And when you got in, you know, we went to Epcot actually as well, and when we got into Epcot, it was like people don't even speak the language of the like. If you walked into, like Japan or Mexico, they're not speaking in Spanish, it's, or they're speaking in Japanese, right, they're not. Even you can't even communicate with them in the native language because some of them can't speak it or they wouldn't speak it, right, it was just a very different thing. Well, you know what we spent like two thirds of a day there and we're like, let's get out of here. You know what. We spent like two thirds of a day there and we're like, let's get out of here. So, normally, where I spend a thousand $2,000 a day at Disney, I spent like three $400 and I got out of there.
Speaker 2:Now, I'm saying this story not because I want to beat up on Disney. I'm telling the story, because if the attitude from the top down is not being managed, that we are a sales driven organization and make no mistake, folks, disney used to be one of the most hyper-focused sales driven organizations on the planet. Right, They've got things set up, evan. Like you walk into a place, you know a place, you don't get dumped back out on the main road, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right, if you just saw this thing about goofy, they bring you right through the place, just like a casino does. So you end up at the slot machine, but your kids are like I need the goofy button, I need the goofy this, I need that, right, and so it's done by and so, but that magic isn't there, based on what I saw, because I don't see the accountability.
Speaker 2:So, firstly, if you want to change the culture, it has to start. I don't know Walt Disney. I never met the man. I imagine he was a very culture driven person and certainly a sales genius. And so if we look at any company that has that type of play, that's a good one to model from the years past, but if it's not there at the top, it's hard to push it through in the mid, and so that would be the first place I would start. But let's say it is at the top and you want to push it through the mid. It's about accountability and training, training and accountability over and over. Think US military right.
Speaker 2:And you know I'm telling you, when I was in the military they had a manual for everything how to brush your teeth literally, and so you know, and they would train you on this, because they didn't want a soldier out in the field with a toothache.
Speaker 1:That's an amazing story and I wasn't in the military but I did go through in sales for decades, many, many, many weeks of sales training. It seems that's disappeared. Yeah, that traditional week-long sales training. You go away, you come back completely equipped and trained and directed. Is there sort of a dumbing down of the sales process and the sales force? That needs to be addressed.
Speaker 2:You know somebody is going to yell at me for this one. I just think it's lazy application of you know the principles right? I mean, if we take any discipline on the planet, we know we're not experts at it in the beginning, no matter how good we are or how we were born. Right, tiger Woods used to be at the top of the golf game. He didn't start just one day grabbing a golf club, going out there and wham whacking in holes. You know over and, over and over again.
Speaker 1:Started at like five like you.
Speaker 2:Exactly right. And so you build skill sets and you build this and you build that. And so, unless the organization is going to take on that and teach people not just sales training but how to grow revenue within the in the organization and, by the way, sales managers, that's your job. That's the only job you have is to grow the revenue amongst the people that you actually manage. So that must mean, if I got to grow the revenue, I've got to teach them how to grow the revenue and I've got to hold accountability and help them grow the revenue.
Speaker 2:And I'm not picking on sales managers. You know people who are running divisions. That's your job, driving the revenue forth, and so if we don't hold hold that accountability to them, it's never going to happen. But yeah, I mean coming in, bringing somebody in for, even on the old days, evan, when they bring them in for three, four, five day sales training, you know that worked better than nothing. But I've seen people now get like here's, here's your online training manual. Go take a look at it and it's like okay, but I have questions, you know well, ask when you have them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember one of the many weeks of sales training they would video me in front of sitting at the desk in front of a customer. Yeah, and you know, actually play it back to you. Yeah, and that was amazing I was. I was always sitting like laid back, you know, I was like kind of relaxed, like chilling, and I looked at myself in horror, aghast at at, uh, well, how I was sitting in front of a customer. Little things that you just never realize. So, yeah, really it's a, it's a lost art. I think the art of-.
Speaker 2:Well, and you help people do this, because the tech side now can look at a lot of this stuff and automatically evaluate it based on the criteria that we set up. I mean, you have video conferencing service. Like, by the way, folks, if you're not recording your phone calls today of your salespeople and analyzing them oh, my goodness right, you can run them through simple phone calls today of your salespeople and analyzing them.
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness Right, you know you can run them through simple frameworks like Bant or Bant, you know 2C or numerous frameworks and, in instance, like, within a minute, you'll have this information back and you can use that to train people.
Speaker 2:And I do this all the time, evan, with people because, like you said, they're like oh, wow, and it's like see, here in the beginning, when you're going hi, evan, how are you doing today? Right, and you're making a cold call, what you're really saying to Evan there is I'm making a cold call and Evan's going to be triggered on the other end from the word how are you doing today? Because that's what happened to you, or at least Evan, when he was in the middle of trying to get dinner and these telemarketers are calling upon, right, I mean, I still get calls like that today and the first thing I was how are you doing today? And it's like strike that from your thing because it'll improve your ratios. So there's like points that we can take out of the scripts that they're using and optimize that. And if we optimize a half a percent here, a quarter percent here, two percent here. All of a sudden they're starting to close better because we've improved across the board 12 percent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love how granular you have to get to really be successful. So, justin, in wrap up here, what are you looking forward to the next few weeks, months, are you? You're out and about what's, what's on your mind, what's up?
Speaker 2:Well, business wise, we're we're releasing. We have two masterclasses we're releasing and one is on reliable, predictable revenue. It's how do you do it, especially the front end of the reliable, predictable revenue model, the metrics model that we deploy and work with. And the second one, frankly, is on follow-up. We're teaching people how to do follow-up. Second one, frankly, is on follow-up. We're teaching people how to do follow-up. It is a complete lost revenue and profit thing that happens to companies, and we built actually a SaaS product around this to actually help people on the personalized, meaningful and relevant follow-up. And how do you automate that process and make it so it's actually personalized, meaningful and relevant to people, not just some autoresponder that comes out or some phone call that goes out right. So those are the two next pushes that we're doing in the company. I've been fortunate enough to have been asked by other companies to help them and I'm working with the other companies and we've been able to even get some ownership in those companies. So that's really when I'm, you know, 2025, that's my focus for 2025.
Speaker 1:Brilliant Well sounds exciting. Can't wait to grab a coffee somewhere in one of our many beach towns. The great fallout here in New England has begun, so we'll see you out enjoying the weather. Take care, doug. Thanks for all the insights and the chat.
Speaker 2:Evan, thanks for having me on. I'm super grateful.
Speaker 1:Thanks and thanks everyone for listening and watching. Take care.