The key to growing your business is having a predictable sales pipeline. There are a lot of statistics and figures that go into the sales and revenue formulas, and often times there is a limited budget to meet your goals. This episode breaks down the complex processes to highlight the must haves, discuss outbound vs. inbound lead generation efforts, and detail the importance of having a defined a audience and goal.
Thanks for listening!
The key to growing your business is having a predictable sales pipeline. There are a lot of statistics and figures that go into the sales and revenue formulas, and often times there is a limited budget to meet your goals. This episode breaks down the complex processes to highlight the must haves, discuss outbound vs. inbound lead generation efforts, and detail the importance of having a defined a audience and goal.
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to the grove show where we make it easier for entrepreneurs and leaders to grow their businesses. You'll hear from real leaders with real stories about their successes and failures. So you don't have to make the same mistakes. We won't break out textbooks or talk theory only raw stories from the front lines with actionable takeaways.
Unknown:The gross show is sponsored by Heil sound, world class microphones for stage studio, broadcast and podcast. Find your sound it Heil, sound.com, and five, Reggie, are your outbound sales campaigns not driving the engagement you're looking for? Revenue leaders rely on reggie.ai to write high performing sales copy that cuts through the noise and books more meetings. Want to see how it works, head over to reggie.ai/growth show and learn how to put the power of best practices in AI into the hands of your sales team. Here's the next episode of the Grow show.
Eric Watkins:All right. Welcome back to episode two of the Grow Show. Before we get started. Scott, Jeff, how'd you feel about episode one? Little introductions? warm and fuzzies?
Scott Scully:After paying you guys off, saying nice things to me, I feel poor. But yeah, it was a good start, I think. Yeah, I
Jeff Winters:think we're off and running. My wife has no idea who you were talking about. I mean, I mean, but other than that, I think we're in a good spot.
Eric Watkins:Well, we're excited about it. And we're excited to actually get into some content for this episode. And, you know, these are stories from the front line. So the whole goal of this is not in the textbooks, not in theory, this is in practice, real life, sales, business consulting, that's going to help you and your company. So the first topic today, something we're all very passionate about, we felt like it would be necessary to start here is a predictable sales pipeline. It's what we do for a living. It's what I've been living in for nine years. Scott's why you started abstract and what you did before, Jeff Savar consulting, the same deal. So why don't we start with Scott, from your standpoint? What does a predictable sales pipeline mean? And why is it so important?
Scott Scully:In its easiest form? It's, you know, a predictable number of new sales meetings on a weekly monthly basis, right? But when I think about it, there's a lot that goes into it, it's really knowing your own business development formula. It's like, what do I sell? How much does it cost? How many people do I have selling? What's my client base look like? What's my retention rate look like? And, and really, in order to know that you are growing, going and going forward, or even staying at the same level, you need to know, you know, how long a client lasts? Or if you're going on sales calls, how many it's going to take to sell a client? What's that revenue look like? It's really a math formula. And if someone wants to grow by a million dollars, and they, you know, have their their clients are $20,000 each? Well, that's a, that's a lot of clients. So, you know, then they're gonna have to look at how many new sales meetings that they go on and what their close rate is. And if they close it at a 10% rate, and want to grow by a million dollars, and their clients are only $20,000, then is that possible? Right? What what what do I have to have going on to make sure that I get there, there's a lot of people that say, I want to grow, and in the first couple of years, they probably do organically by putting the shingle up sown their friends and family getting some referrals, then all of a sudden, that becomes less predictable. And then they get into this zone of Oh, my God, now I'm up, I'm running. I've got a couple of employees, what do I do next? They're worried about those employees, feeding them meeting payroll, and then growing the business. And a lot of people don't have it clearly defined. Like, I want this exact amount of revenue next year, that equates to this much growth. Here's what my clients are worth. Here's when I lose clients. Here's my close rate. And here's the exact number of new sales meetings that I need in order to get to my goal. A lot of times, owners are the salespeople. You know, if it's a roofing company, maybe they're on the roof. When the hell are they doing the activity necessary to build the pipeline? Or maybe I now have a salesperson or two, or even if you have an entire sales organization, salespeople, it's the last thing in the world that they want to do. Like we spend$1.8 million here are in generating leads for our salespeople because they don't want to generate their own leads right now. And even if they're good at it, maybe they're in the sales process on a sales pitch. And when they're doing that they're not, you know, generating that pipeline. So it's, it's almost impossible to do it on your own or, and in fact, I would say it is impossible unless you're in the business, it takes a ton of people, which we're going to talk about a ton of different types of individuals, lots of process to get there. Honestly, the only way that I would ever feel good about owning a business is knowing that I had consistent sales meetings, so that if I lose a client, I know how I'm going to replace them. So my people are safe. Or if I want to grow, I know that I'm actually going to grow, and how I'm gonna get there. It's, to me, it's everything. Everything else, if there's business coming through the door, and if you're growing, everything else you can solve. Absolutely. But you can't, if the business doesn't exist, right?
Jeff Winters:Yeah, and you touched on it there for a second, but I bet there's, there's people out there listening right now, that could go through, it could be could have some risk. You know, if you own a business, you got some risks. We were talking earlier, off the mics about some some times when things weren't going so good, like where we got in a tough spot, or maybe somebody had too much on their AmEx, or maybe you know, we were going to million dollar, a million dollars on the last cup. Yeah, like somebody had to call their family members because they weren't going to be able to meet payroll on Wednesday, on Sunday. Now, those those things worked out for us, but they don't, they don't work out for everybody. And you know, the moment you start getting customers is the moment you start being at risk of losing customers. And you want to talk about a way for business owners and entrepreneurs to keep themselves out of a tough spot, the number one piece of advice I can give, is make sure those those customers keep coming in and make sure you got the predictable sales pipeline for the safety and continuity of your business. For this for your people. For your family like this is this is real stuff for people at a lot of stages of business, and I can't and I think everybody sitting around this table would agree I cannot possibly say it strongly enough. predictable sales pipeline is the antidote for business risk.
Eric Watkins:I like that. And when you you know, I guess when you look at growing your business, and it started with the, you know, the Aaron Ross Predictable Revenue, who ran and lead Salesforce, and a lot of people kind of subscribe to that thinking. He talked about seeds, nets and spears. And so when you look at that, that's your referrals, that's your inbound leads coming to you. And then spear is that your outbound leads that you're going to get. And we've talked about this, right, you start your business, you hang the shingle, you just mentioned it, you know, the easiest thing to do is go get referrals, friends and family, maybe connections from the industry you left from. And that's great, lowest cost of sale, like everybody wants a referral, we'll take as many as we can possibly get. And then that gets to a point where you have so much business, you got to hire that first employee. And when you hire that first employee, all of a sudden you find out Wait, I'm not making as much money as I was before I hired this person. So then what do you have to do, you have to go find more business. And that problem never stops, starts at two people. Now. It's still there at 2 million people. So from there logically, I feel like a lot of people go to the net, the inbound leads, you know, the Google AdWords, the PPC, the website, the social, because it's a, it's a really close extension of referrals, right? It's somebody coming to you there's typically a problem or pain, and it's an easier sale. Ultimately, that's good, but you still can't control that revenue fully. And if you can't fully control it, you're not going to have predictability. So what people find is they get into that last bucket. And to truly predict your sales, you need the outbound approach. And that's tough. It takes a lot of work takes a lot of time and energy to be able to do it. And I just, I thought it'd be relevant for this. Not that we're the model that every company should go off of. But in 2021, you know, we did 2.5 million and MRR monthly recurring revenue. It's a lot of business, right? We sold a lot of business. And the way it broke down is we had 18%. From referrals from our clients. We had 24% from inbound, so leads coming to us and we have a web development team and content we're getting better and better. I actually expect that number to go up but 57% of our revenue came from outbound And that's me grouping email and the inbound. And you could argue that's outbound as well, right? When businesses say, you know, hey, I'm doing well in sales, you know, we're primarily just growing from referrals and marketing and an inbound leads. they very well may be closing out of business, but I look at it as like, you're missing out on double the revenue, right? If you had a good outbound approach, but it's tough, right? A lot of people don't do it. Scott, what do you why do you feel like people hesitate to kind of make that move into committing to an outbound approach?
Scott Scully:That's a good question. First of all, I'm gonna comment in the Just Say,$2
Eric Watkins:million in recurring revenue, 2.5 million.
Scott Scully:So just so people realize the extent of it, that's the monthly fee, right? But it's, it's really 12 times that
Eric Watkins:30 million, right? Am I doing my math, so much, I can write
Scott Scully:that that's the, you know, if we saw a couple$100,000 a month, we have to have a significant pipeline in place to add the 5060 new clients a month net to get to that, like we just don't get there without a predictable sales pipeline. We're doing it at a big level. Are you asking why people don't think enough about the predictable sales pipeline? Or why that?
Eric Watkins:Yeah, I think what I saw when I started into account management, you know, and I'd be talking to our clients, you know, the first thing I was surprised of how many don't actually have a sales goal, didn't know they want to grow, but they don't have like a specific goal. And then almost none of them are coming from a spot. And this was right when I started account management, this was six years ago, but almost none of them had an outbound approach. It was all website, social, and then word of mouth referrals. All right,
Scott Scully:I get where you're going. So I think it's because most people that start a business actually don't come from a sales background, I think that they have a good idea for a product or a service. A lot of people have haven't done it before. And they're super concerned about, which is also important. Having a product that maybe solves a problem or the right service or good service. But they don't necessarily understand what they're getting into when they they hang the shingle, and start having a few customers, I just don't think they come from from that background. It's crazy how predictable it can be. And people stay up at night, thinking about the safety of their people in their business. But if you just simply drill into what your average client is, you know what your close rate is, and your retention rate of customers, and you do the math, you know where I'm at now and where I want to grow. And you take those factors into play, you'll backup right into the number of new sales meetings that you have to have. And then you're either there or you're not. And you've got to do the work to figure out who's going to make sure that that happens. But I think the biggest thing is people just don't come from that background. And they're not aware of what they need to do from a sales perspective. And they certainly don't think about, and I don't think there's enough content out there, telling you how easy it could be, like how predictable you how predictable your business could be. That's why I truly feel like a predictable sales pipeline fixes every single problem, because then you at least have money coming in the door, where you can afford to go hire people that know how to solve the problem. And that you know, and then everything's easier.
Jeff Winters:I think that's 1,000% Spot on. I'll give you another one. So if we define outbound as social email cold calling, just for the sake of this discussion, okay, let me just let me just give you a stat on cold calling. Because here's why I think people don't go outbound as often as they should. high growth companies defined as 20% year over year growth are two times more likely to view cold calling as effective versus low growth or negative growth companies who were likely to view cold calling as quote dead or undecided. And I think that is another facet of answering your question of why people don't go outbound because they think cold calling and they think cold calling is dead. Meanwhile, the high growth companies companies growing 2040 6080 100 plus percent year over year they know how wrong that is. And they're proven it out in the numbers and they're thrilled that some of these competitors some of their competitors and lower negative growth companies are are missing the boat thinking that cold I mean, how many talks about content out there Scott to help you I mean, how much content do you see out there on cold calling is dead?
Scott Scully:Most of it? Most didn't you put some did I retract your messages your track?
Jeff Winters:We're not talking about anything I've done in my past. I know that not on this podcast.
Eric Watkins:I think you bring up a good point. But and I think part of the reason is, well, a fast growing companies predictable sales solves all problems, they can invest more money in the right infrastructure to be able to do it right or hire the right company. So I think some people try to do it themselves, and they just don't do it the wrong way. And I think why. And, you know, we're we do this for a living. So we're lucky to see the inside of it, is we're really there's two pipelines. And I don't think we talked enough about this. There's the pre meeting pipeline, and the post meeting pipeline. And a lot of people are just managing, how many, you know, how many deals do I need to close? And how many opportunities? Do I have to close them? But then you need to back that up into how many meetings do I need to hold to get to X amount of opportunities? And then you need to back that up between how many appointments do I need to set? And then how many conversations do I need to have? And then on the other side, you know, there's the pre meeting pipeline, where you're looking at it, of like, I need to start with my target market, what who are the qualified companies that I'm going to go after, I need to identify the KT M's, I need to then have conversations with them. And then based on those conversations, I know my win rates for how many meetings I'm going to set. And I feel like if people were educated about you got to manage this on two sides of the fence, I think people would be more successful with it.
Scott Scully:I agree. Let's be real, too. I mean, a lot of people that are listening or thinking, you know, especially maybe older school manager, right, that just knows a certain way or came up a certain way, maybe like me. So it should maybe I should just say the way that I grew up, I had to make my own calls. And I'll really age myself and say that we had traveled to a market and I ripped the pages out of the Yellow Pages,
Eric Watkins:and came home and made phone calls. What are the Yellow Pages Exactly? I've never heard that
Scott Scully:literally, oh, pitch. But we're at a point where it's not happening. I mean, it's, you're, you're never going to get the the activity, the prospecting activity that you want out of any salesperson, it just isn't gonna happen. Also, a lot of the times the person that's super good at setting meetings isn't always, you know, the same person that's super good at having a sales conversation or contracting people, right. And so, you know, there has been a split over the last few years. And now most salespeople expect that you'll be generating leads for them. And if somebody wants to do this internally, and do it the right way, they got to know this inside now. Right? They got to know how to do it that takes multiple different types of individuals. And so I guess we're not talking about this being easy. But we are talking about if you can figure it out, you can solve almost every problem you have in in business, sir, I moved.
Jeff Winters:So I think it's I'm gonna go so far as to say it's a hard and fast rule in today's day and age, that your closers and your meeting setters are different people. I mean, I guess I guess you could do it the other way. But But why would you like a to Scott's point. If you have salespeople that have to set their own meetings, you're now competing to keep that talent with jobs where they won't. And that is, I mean, good luck. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. I mean, I, everybody at this table has gotten their own sales appointments. It takes an average of 10 touches these days to get a sales appointment. So now I'm thinking okay, so now I've got these incredibly talented high expectation, highly compensated salespeople, and I'm telling them to get 10 to tell him they need 10 touches to get a sales appointment, and then they're gonna go potentially close a deal. They're gonna close fewer deals make less money, because they have to go make those touches, as opposed to well, wait a minute, why don't I go over to a company down the street, they're gonna get Wait a minute, they're gonna send me four sales appointments a day. And I'm going to be able to close those and my Commission's gonna be pretty much like, and then you overlay that with 40% of salespeople say getting meetings is the hardest part of their job. And so I think for those people out there, if you want an actionable takeaway upfront, one thing is, you've got a separate set of meetings, from closing deals. Here's people,
Eric Watkins:I love that. And here's a step for you. And I promise this podcast will not be about how great abstract is. But if we have a point, I'm going to make it. We resisted this for a long time. And Scott can tell you, because we spend a lot is as does everybody listening on salespeople. So it was hard for us to understand why they couldn't generate their own meetings, especially because a lot of them were promoted from abstract internally, where what did they do? They said meetings for our clients. However, COVID brought us an interesting opportunity. We had some extra staff. We didn't want to let anybody go we made a commitment to keep everybody on board, and we made a decision to double down on our sale. was development. So that was the first time, we actually expanded our sales development team, to the point where it could sustain our sales goal from the sales development team. We always had partial appointments being set, but it was the first time we made that commitment. And you know what we've done since then, we haven't missed our monthly monthly, not quarterly, not annual, our monthly sales goal by less than 85%, since we made that team, since we made that decision. So like the whole point of like controlling your sales, you got to control the number of meetings you set, and you're not going to do it. If it's not somebody's full time job.
Scott Scully:I think about my past in the in the automotive industry, and we spent a lot of time training people on how to get their own meetings. But this just kind of backs up the separation of it, we'd spend one week setting up enough meetings where we could travel for three or four days and go see six or eight dealers a day for for that time period. And while we're out, of course, we weren't making calls, sending emails generating leads, then we come back to the office, do the same thing travel back out, you know, you're just rotating through that. So half the time, we weren't building a pipeline. And there was a lot of kind of filling the funnel back end. So salespeople can get to a point where they can generate their leads, but they're never going to be doing it all the time. So to me, you asked this before, too, about what a predictable sales pipeline means. Another thing that it means to me is there's a certain number of calls, emails, whatever it may be, there's activity that has to happen. Always, like it's always on. And it can't turn on and off. And you'll hear a lot of salespeople say, Well, I gotta, I gotta fill back up my funnel, and completed my pipeline. Yeah. And what we're saying that's the problem. Like, somebody should never say that, that I need to go rebuild my pipeline. That's the reason sales go up and down. That's the reason sales goals are missed. That's the reason growth goals are missed. And I guess what we're suggesting collectively is, if you had pipeline activity, that never turned off, you know, then your salespeople could be focused on what they're doing. And the pipeline would be going and you'd be in a better spot, period.
Jeff Winters:Period, it's as leaders, we want our leaders to be managing leading indicators, like what are the leading indicators of success in different divisions of our business, there is no better leading indicator of business success in my mind than pipeline. And that is something our teams can 100% control, how many people are you putting on the top of the funnel, we can control that we can manage to that there is if you're out there, and you're listening, and you're thinking we're nuts, I promise you, we're not tomorrow, if you start managing, how many individual prospects go into the top of your funnel, that your sales development or sales team, if you if you haven't separated are going to call or email, you're going to call us back in six months ago. Wow. This The only thing I manage on the sales side, and everything else takes care of itself. And it's magical. I love that.
Scott Scully:Go ahead, Scott was just gonna say, cuz I know it was our goal. When shows her up that somebody would take a few things away what like, what are things that almost anybody could do right now to start getting closer to this
Eric Watkins:first thing is have a sales goal, right? Like for this year, write it down, make it known everybody in the company as a sales rep, build that mentality, like, as a company, we are getting to this goal, you write it down, you make it known, I think you're gonna be more successful. Step two, is look at where you're getting your sales currently. And look at those three channels, like what percentage are coming from referrals? What percentage are coming from inbound? And what percentage are coming from outbound, and fix the weaknesses in your process? Like, plug the gaps? You can do it internally. I wouldn't suggest it we could probably do a whole episode on that. You don't have to work with abstract you don't have to work with sapper. But you have to be doing some sort of outbound approach. I feel like to truly have a predictable sales pipeline. So I would start with making your sales goal known. Knowing your numbers and then plug in the gaps in your strategy. What do you think Jeff?
Jeff Winters:First step is committing to outbound. The first step is in your head, in your boardroom, in your living room, wherever you're conducting the strategy discussions for your business. Commit to outbound and I'll give you a quick stat and then I'll move on just to just to drive this point home. Okay, more than a third of sales appointments. And I'm talking about the difference between high growth companies and super high growth companies, companies grown by 40% annually or 100%. So for those that are growing by 40% annually, on average, somewhere between zero and a third of their appointments are coming from outbound. For companies that are growing by 100%, or greater median growth rate, more than a third of their appointments are coming from outbound. And so like that's to say that companies that are growing at a super high rate are committed even more to outbound step one, philosophically committed outcome. Step two, separate your your meeting getters from your closers, that shows the team, that I can hold different people accountable to different segments of the business. And then And then last is, is get the right technology. You must if you're gonna run outbound, well, you must have the right technology, you must have the right CRM, you must have the right sales engagement tool, you must have the right phone system. Otherwise, you're going to be spinning your wheels and competing with people who have that technology, which has now just become table stakes.
Eric Watkins:One hot take I would say is on if you i we need to separate the appointment setters from the closers, yeah, I would always keep the closers a little bit in the fire, maybe no more than an hour a day. But I think that gratitude for those appointments and the appreciation and the making the most out of every opportunity, having them do just a little bit of that not much where it takes them off the path. I do think that, you know, that may be controversial, but I think that's important.
Scott Scully:So I mean, we're saying, make sure they have the technology to track can't manage what you can't measure, separate, immediately getting the meetings versus closing the meetings, know your business development formula. And that includes the sales goal. Sure, yeah. You got to know where you're going. And then just like anything, even if you're if you're trying to lose 20 pounds, when are you going to lose 20 pounds by and how are you going to do it. And then you're doing the the activities and things necessary on a daily basis to get to your to the ultimate weight. So this business development formula is super important. I think a big part of building the right, predictable sales pipeline, I think it becomes more predictable. If you've identified a target market or a niche that you've served best, I think it's easier to get more new meetings. If you are specializing or niching. Down, I think that that helps that become a little bit more doable. And then that the last thing, if you don't come from a sales background, I think one of the most important things that you could do is go find a sales mentor right now, right now, like so. Be okay with it. Like, look, we've been doing some classes internally here, where we're getting people to think about running their teams are thinking about how they're running individual business inside of these four walls. And some of the stats that we're going over, like that the average entrepreneur makes$70,000, you can't effing tell me you started a business so that you could make 70 grand, right? The average entrepreneurs actually spends 70 to 80 hours a week, not 40 to 50 20% of them are gone. In a year, within 10 years, 70% of them are gone. And in the first couple of years, people usually don't get to pay themselves. Guess why a sales pipeline. Like I if we were to go pour through those businesses that are out of business, okay, there are some that maybe didn't have the right idea or the right service. But a lot of them, it was because they did have a good product or a good service. And they didn't get it into the market. And they didn't get it. And maybe they did for a little bit. But then after year, one or year two, when they sold everybody they knew and they needed to start getting into that unpredictable zone. They fucked up the sales pipeline. And then they caused themselves a ton of problems, and they're out of business. So go build a predictable sales pipeline. And you know, right now,
Eric Watkins:what I think is important is there might be some people out there who aren't from a sales background, and may be thinking, well, that's great if I have a pipeline, but I literally have no idea what to say to these people when I get out on these meetings. And I think what I would say is I've worked with a lot of clients in the same spot before. And you would be surprised how good you will get by having consistent meetings, like solve that problem first, go out there, make a fool out of yourself, be terrible, and we can do a session on that. And there's plenty of resources out there to have a good sales presentation. Missed 100% of the shots you don't take though, right and a lot of times if you do this in the right way. You just run into people that have the need and you all provide incredible service and you know how to talk about what you do. And that would be a good episode, something we could, we could talk about more how to make the most out of your sales pitches.
Scott Scully:So what are the five things? Five things that someone needs to do immediately?
Jeff Winters:The five things someone needs to do. Can I ask a question? Before I go there? I have a question. I
Eric Watkins:have like literally a question. I'm allowed, you are allowed. So
Scott Scully:all right, are questions allowed in podcast?
Eric Watkins:We're making our own rules is our
Jeff Winters:second and final episode actually dropped
Eric Watkins:the F bomb? I think everything all the rules or the FA are supposed to drop a couple of those. Yeah,
Jeff Winters:listen, FCCS outside. So thank you, everybody. Um, so you've, you've got, I think we'd all agree that ideally, you're running, you're running inbound, you're running outbound concur. Like in an ideal state, you're doing both, like you're doing SEO, you're probably doing some paid, you got your website home, and you do an outbound you do stuff. But there's probably people out there business owners, especially, who have a defined amount of money, and they can kind of choose one or the other. I guess I'm curious from you guys. Where do you where would you counsel them to, to spend that amount of money that they have? If it's limited upfront? Or like, what are the rules of thumb for like, oh, this, you guys should definitely spend it on inbound versus you should you should go out?
Eric Watkins:Scott will have a better answer to this. So I'll say my bad answer first, then he can go. That's how you know, it's
Jeff Winters:going to be good.
Eric Watkins:The first thing I would say is really challenge yourself on Do you have a limited amount of money, because we just talked about, it's the number one problem to solve. So if you have seven people in your service department, and you could maybe get away with six and spend more on your sales, I'd up my budget, and I do a combination of all three. I think, if you don't have a website, it is very tough to be competitive in this day and age. So if you don't have a website, a substantial one, I would spend some money there. But the best form of marketing, in my opinion, and I'm super biased, is picking up the phone and having a conversation with a person like their that is the dollars I would be spending. What do you think's? Did you approve? Do you approve that?
Scott Scully:Of course I do I eat while I've been through this. So I've tell you exactly what I would do. First, I would go build out all the necessary collateral. That makes it easy for myself and my team to say, here's what we do. Here's the problems we solve. Here's why we're different. It's always been a big deal for me to go build the sales decks, the sell sheets, the case studies, the website, the video before I even get to calling on people. Right? Because that's going to make me more impactful when I when I am going on those new sales meetings. I build out the collateral to look much larger than I am when I start, right. Yeah, like, wow, this is a big company that I'm talking to when you're like out of your basement, right? Wondering what we're wondering how you're gonna pay your bills, but I build all those things. You you have to you have to tell people the problems you solve. And then and then I've said it before, if you don't niche down, then I think you're too broad. And I think it's too hard to get there. What problems do you solve? And for whom? And why are you different than the other guys? Make it obvious, then you can start going on your new sales meetings and being more impactful. Those are the first dollars I spent before I even get to it.
Eric Watkins:So should we agree on a five? I think we talked about it, like the five things. So let me give my take and see if you guys agree. So first one, I would say establish the sales goal. And make it be let it be known. Like everybody, your whole team leadership team needs to get behind it needs to believe that it's possible, right? And then I would say step, step two is the strategy that you're going to get there, which is your business development formula. What are your streams of revenue? How many opportunities, how many calls, how many appointments do you need to get down to the deals that you need to close? Step three, you got to have outbound and without bound, you got to separate the closers from the appointment setters. Step four. It's something you just said. But I think it's important is know the message that you're taking the market. And do you have the supporting materials to take it they're like, what's the problem yourself and who are you going after? And then how is that message getting out there? And then step five, get a sales mentor, get a consultant, get somebody that you feel like you know, a buddy that has done it, talk to a business who's in a different spot. You'd be surprised how many competitors will actually pick up the phone and talk to you and have a have an honest conversation. We feel like that's a good five.
Scott Scully:Yeah, I think that that immediately that gets you in a spot where you're going to be more successful. Ultimately, though, you need to do it at a big level. So either you come from a sales background, and you're gonna be able to build some of this internally, right, and we'll help you do that. Or yet, you hire outside. But this is super hard to do. So we're gonna make it so those five make it better than it is today, but that they don't solve the entire problem.
Jeff Winters:Definitely not. And let me look for, for those CEOs, business owners who have a sales background, you're going to be selling, like resist the urge to hire a VP of sales or a seller too early. I think the rule of thumb is to sell to you get to a million dollars in revenue, like don't shortchange yourself. And for those that aren't, challenge yourself, and I think Eric alluded to this earlier, challenge yourself to be at least in the sales conversations until you get to a million bucks revenue, because what you're going to learn from those sales conversations is going to be enormously valuable as you seek to build out a better product that customers want, as you seek to figure out the allocation of costs for your marketing mix, you should you got to be in the game, like being in the sat on the sidelines, not being in sales. Previously. There's no excuse to be on the sidelines, especially in the early days, in my opinion,
Scott Scully:I love that you say get in the game, right? There's nobody that probably is as passionate about your product or service as you are. In fact, I took a sales test once with a outside consultant. And I had been doing really well with sales. So I was kind of a little hurt. But I flunked the sales test that we were going to give to our salespeople. But you know, she had a pretty good answer to that. That was, well, you know, the, the product inside and out, you couldn't be more passionate about it. And because of that, you're selling a lot of it, but you don't have the natural characteristics to be a good salesperson. And that just kind of made sense to me. I think some people because they think they're not a salesperson. Don't put themselves in sales situations, but they don't realize they don't realize they probably be the best person to be right in the sales situation.
Eric Watkins:All of our best salespeople. I don't think any of them thought they were going into sales when they started. They really didn't. So it's it's surprising, you know, get in there mix it up.
Scott Scully:So sales pipeline, so predictable sales pipeline,
Eric Watkins:baby, put it put eat sleep and brace. Yeah.
Scott Scully:I think as always, if you have any questions, hit the link below, and reach out to us. And in the second episode, what we're going to be talking about Jeff,
Jeff Winters:in the second episode, we're going to be talking about how to conduct one on ones throughout your organization that will ensure alignment and help you grow amazing leaders faster than you ever could. I can't wait because it's been this very selfishly, this is something that I've come into this organization and learn to just like jumped right in on and I just the impact is ridiculous. And I just have such a great firsthand account of how much these what we call map meetings can change business I'm stuck for
Eric Watkins:I am very excited about that. That might actually be the only thing that I am qualified to talk about. So I can't wait for next week.
Scott Scully:Yeah, looking forward to that conversation. As always, thanks for listening. Reach out if you need any help, and happy selling.
Eric Watkins:Always be growing always be growing always be growing. Thanks for listening to the gross show. Leave us a review and let us know how we're doing or if there's a topic you'd like us to cover in the future.
Unknown:The gross show is sponsored by abstract marketing group whose outsourced sales and marketing services provide you with everything you need to close consistent business for less than the cost of a full time employee sapper consulting what a schedule your sales appointments so you don't have to abstract cloud solutions leveraging the power of the Salesforce platform to solve complex business problems with straightforward solutions.