0:01
Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith.
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Talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack.
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Listen to find out how the best of the best achieved success with their team and CRM technology.
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And remember, unless you were the lead dog, the view never changes.
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Welcome to sales lead dog.
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My guest for today’s episode is Doug C Brown.
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Doug is the CEO of CEO Sales Strategies.
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Doug, welcome to Sales lead dog.
0:37
Hey, Chris, welcome.
0:39
Not welcome, but thank you for welcoming me.
0:41
I’m, I’m appreciative to be here.
0:43
Yeah, Yeah, that’s awesome.
0:45
Tell me a bit about CEO sales strategies.
0:48
Well, it, it was founded due to all the previous experience that I had building companies and building other people’s companies, right.
0:56
And what I realized is there’s an actual sales optimization system within everything that we’ve ever done.
1:03
And you know, if I apply a system to the process of what we affectionately call the 2X process, if people are like, well, why not ten X?
1:14
I’m like, it’s hard to lift 1000 lbs if you can’t lift 100, right?
1:18
So, so you know, we took that process and all the processes that I’ve been working over the years and baked it into a step by step methodology to help companies get predictable, scalable revenue in, in their life.
1:36
And that’s, that’s how it all came together.
1:40
What is there a common thread or common theme that you’re seeing with clients that you’re working with recently?
1:47
Yeah, there’s always, there’s always.
1:51
So there’s a, there’s a few like right now, you know, people are, are still wondering why they don’t have predictable revenue, right.
2:00
And I would say the there’s a few common themes that caused that issue.
2:05
1 is truthfully not knowing what they want.
2:08
The second is not calculating the math the way they’re supposed to.
2:14
The third would be not understanding their right fit buyer and then holding metrics to those categories.
2:21
Those are a few mistakes I see.
2:24
But I also see people now like with AI, right?
2:27
And they’re trying to figure out how do I implement AI into my life to make this easier, better, you know, into my CRM or what, You know, all these questions come up.
2:38
But so I, you know, those are kind of the common threads that I hear from people.
2:42
Yeah.
2:42
Yeah.
2:43
I I see the same thing on my side.
2:46
So, yeah, not nothing.
2:47
You’re saying they’re surprising me.
2:49
So when you started your career, did you envision this journey that you’re on right now?
2:54
Oh, hell, no.
2:57
No, no, no.
3:00
I started working at the age of 3 for my dad’s business, actually.
3:04
Yeah, I was sweeping floors.
3:06
And by the age 5 and a half six, they pushed us out in front of clients and we started writing orders and selling.
3:14
And you know, of course, you know, I had an adult or two there that was helping me along because at that age you couldn’t read my writing anyway.
3:22
Well, you can’t probably read it today, but the, you know it, something happened way back when and I remember the moment actually, I saw I sold a part for $20 that we paid $10.00 for and I was getting $0.25 an hour.
3:39
So I was like 40 hours, $0.25.
3:42
You know, I make this or I just did this in 8 minutes, like, like, you know, and so then I, I was like, well, I sold five or six of these today.
3:52
So it started kicking in my brain that there is a leveraged way of doing things in life.
3:58
But I never thought like if you asked me back when I was, you know, 18 years old, hey, do you think you’re ever going to be working with all these companies doing all this stuff?
4:08
No, no, I was more interested in being a professional musician at that point in my life.
4:15
So tell me about your first sales job.
4:19
What were the maybe two or three big takeaways that that really helped you launch this career of yours?
4:27
Yeah.
4:27
You know, the the interesting part is I didn’t really like as I I worked for my dad from the time I was 3 till the time I was 18, almost 19 actually.
4:37
And you know, I never really looked at it as a sales job, even though we were selling, right?
4:44
So I think the first epiphany is that selling is human.
4:49
It’s like one of those things that a lot of people have a negative connotation around people who are selling.
4:55
And it’s like you’re selling every day yourself.
4:57
You just don’t.
4:58
It’s not maybe baked into the formalization process that if you were going to a company, but you know, you sell yourself on what, what do I want for lunch, right.
5:09
This restaurant, that restaurant that’s a sale really when it comes down to it.
5:13
So that was the first epiphany I had.
5:14
The the second epiphany was that you really don’t need a ton of sales skills actually, and and to be able to sell.
5:25
What you do need is the ability to care about people and play in a win win fashion because they’re always looking to solve a problem, gain an opportunity or achieve a goal.
5:37
And so you don’t need formalized sales training around that really to, to make a sale, you know, and the third thing is, is that if you want to make more sales, you should have a process around it because that you do need, because it’s like a dance.
5:55
And you know, if you step on the, the partner’s foot, they don’t appreciate it.
6:01
And that’s because there’s no process to it, right?
6:04
So those are probably the first three things I learned out.
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One of the fourth thing is you can make a lot more money than just working for an hourly wage, right?
6:11
So that was pretty, pretty cool.
6:14
Hey, we’re taking a quick break to thank you for listening to and supporting the Sales Lead Dog podcast.
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6:33
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No fluff, just real strategies that work.
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So go to crmshouldntsuck.com to order your free copy right now.
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7:28
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7:37
OK, let’s get back to this episode of the Sales Lead Dog podcast.
7:42
All right, so tell me about the, the transition to where you started, CEO sales strategies.
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Why did you feel the need that you had to create this business?
7:56
I just wanted to help more people.
7:58
I don’t, I don’t like what’s going on in the world, Chris, as far as inflation and all the things that are going on, right.
8:03
And you know, I’m growing a little older and I start looking at statistics on retirement and the average person runs out of money between 8 and 12 years after retirement.
8:13
Yep.
8:14
And I’m like, wait a minute, you know, I know a lot of people in their 70s and 80s.
8:19
That means they run out of money, right?
8:21
And so I started this whole thing thinking, all right, why don’t I just teach people revenue growth strategies and teach them how to sell to make an extra 100, a $150,000 a year from what they’re already making.
8:34
And then I looked at everything I’ve done over the past for people like Tony Robbins or Chet Holmes or, you know, any big name company.
8:43
And then I looked at all the unknown company names and the hundreds or thousands of those people I’ve interfaced with.
8:51
And I said, what is the common thread that gets somebody to be able to produce A6 multi 6 or 7 figure income through selling?
8:59
And I looked through everything.
9:00
And then I’m like, well, there’s a lot of, a lot of similarities to what it takes to actually build revenue.
9:06
And I’m like, OK, that’ll work, right?
9:08
I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll help people do that.
9:10
And, and it wasn’t really much more of a thought than that.
9:13
It was like, what can I do to give back to people that I can do cost effectively for them and also get them a really Big Bang for their buck?
9:23
And that’s how CEO sales strategy started out.
9:27
I we just pulled the name out of the air, to be quite honest with you.
9:31
It was like we were searching.
9:33
We’re like, you know, we’ve sold the CEOs and business owners our whole life.
9:37
When we see what names around sales strategies and that one happened to be a be available.
9:46
What when people are reaching out to you.
9:47
We talked, you know, start off the episode talking about this.
9:51
You know, I see the same thing on my side where there’s consistent things people there seem to to reaching out to us for.
9:58
But when you engage with the client, what is the first thing you ask them?
10:05
What do you truthfully want?
10:08
Like, like it stuns a lot of them because they’re like, what do you mean?
10:12
I’m hiring you to help me grow my company.
10:14
Yeah.
10:14
To what level and why?
10:18
Right.
10:18
I want to know those reasons and the reason behind that is because if we build a plan on a, a goal that is not true, then it doesn’t really help them.
10:32
So, you know, I was just talking with the gentleman.
10:34
He’s got a $7,000,000 HVAC company, heating and air conditioning company.
10:41
He said, hey, do you think you can help me?
10:42
I said I suspect what do you want?
10:45
And he said, well, I want to grow from 7 to 9 million in the next 12 months.
10:50
I said, OK, is that a truthful goal?
10:52
He goes, well, I’d like it to be there, but if we get to 10, it would be OK.
10:56
And I’m like, buddy, if you tell me 20 million and we design a program to go from 7 to 20 million, which is doable.
11:06
And you don’t want to work that way and you don’t want to put in the energy, the effort, the funds that’s going to be required to do that.
11:14
You’re not going to, you’re not going to do it, right?
11:15
So what’s the real, real number?
11:18
And it really came down to like, hey, if I could get a 5 or 10% lift in the company, I’d be happy, right?
11:24
And so we get really clear on that point because when we do, we can build a mathematical metrics based plan to help you get there.
11:34
And then what we do in the mathematical metrics based program is we work in all the numbers, you know, money out, money in equals something, right?
11:42
So it’s like, all right, what’s our churn rate, what’s our customer return rate, what’s our cost of sale?
11:47
What’s the inflationary rate going to do this year, right.
11:50
All those things you want to figure in and that will give us a true number of how many sales we actually have to make to get to the goal.
11:56
Yeah, that’s the key.
11:57
There’s knowing your numbers.
11:59
It’s because the numbers aren’t going to lie.
12:01
If you are really focused on the numbers, it’s not just like, hey, let’s go by $2 million this year, OK.
12:09
What’s behind that number?
12:11
There’s so much to go it into trying to figure out where is that 2,000,000 going to come from?
12:16
It’s not going to just come out of thin air or because you are making a wish on a star.
12:21
You know it.
12:22
It’s got to come from somewhere.
12:24
Yeah, Yeah.
12:25
I mean, everybody gets lucky once in a while and wins the lottery.
12:28
But you’re you’re right.
12:29
I mean, it’s not like they’re going to with high probability.
12:32
It ain’t it’s not going to happen.
12:34
I actually had a guy tell me one time you want to go from 5 million to 50 million in a year.
12:39
And I said, well, how much were you willing to, you know, put aside for a marketing prospecting budget?
12:46
And he goes not, not nothing.
12:49
And I’m like, dude, unless you have, you know, 5 million this year that we’re going to throw at this, It’s, it’s, it’s too, it’s a big lift, right?
12:57
And I can show it to him in the numbers.
12:59
So I think it’s really super important that people realize that.
13:04
And, you know, those people who are like, oh, well, that makes sense.
13:07
You know, another rule around that is build your life 1st and then build your business around that versus building your business around your, your, you know, your life, you know, because the business will take on a life of its own.
13:22
And I’ve talked to many, many CEO or a business owner.
13:26
It’s like, man, this thing is just out of control.
13:28
And I’m, you know, I’m more stressed than I ever want to be.
13:32
And, you know, as you get older, like I am now, Chris, you realize, like it’s like I wasn’t worth the 12 years of headache, right?
13:40
Oh, yeah.
13:41
No, exactly.
13:43
I, I do a lot of coaching.
13:44
I don’t do as much as I used to, but with entrepreneurs.
13:47
And that’s the part that I love.
13:49
That line that you have to understand.
13:51
In fact, it’s one of our core values is work life balance.
13:55
Your company will consume you if you let it and you know, so that’s where you need to have structure, you need to have processes, you need to really have.
14:07
And I’d love, you need to check out all your listeners, check out Doug’s LinkedIn page because I love his image at the top and because it’s all about, you know, the first line I’m reading to your predictable sales revenue growth starts with clarity.
14:26
And that that’s the word there.
14:27
The keyword is clarity.
14:29
That if you don’t really have that clarity around your business, where are the gaps, where are the issues that are blocking our ability to grow?
14:39
That’s, you know, my world.
14:40
When we do CRM, that’s a big part of what we focus on is that, you know, I can give you the perfect technology platform, but if you’re not addressing all the things around the technology, your data, your, your sales processes, you know, everything that’s touching CRM, it’s not going to matter.
14:57
The chaos eventually is going to consume it and you’re not going to be happy a year from now.
15:02
You think I spent all this money, but I’m not going in the direction I want to go in.
15:06
And it’s because you don’t have that clarity.
15:08
Well, and, and in fact, Chris, that if people grow too fast unmanaged like that, it could be more dangerous than them not growing at all.
15:18
I, I’ve seen many a company implode.
15:22
My father’s business, for example, toward the end, he just, he, he had built originally a business on his back.
15:30
And I remember when I was a little kid, especially, it would be like a Christmas and he’d get a phone call and it’d be like, hey, I got to fly to Georgia.
15:40
This machinery, he had an electric machinery industrial repair company.
15:45
You know, this, this machine’s down.
15:47
They’re losing, you know, $100,000 an hour.
15:49
I got to go and it’s like, well, jeez, dad, it’s Christmas, right?
15:53
It’s like, so you know, eventually he just after about 20 years, he just literally went one day and turned the key on the building that he owned.
16:04
And he said, I’m done.
16:06
And so I went to him and I said, Dad, no, no, no, let’s sell this thing.
16:09
You’ve got 20 years of goodwill.
16:10
But you know, he was just like, I, I’ve had enough.
16:13
So, so it, you know, it can happen and it does happen more often.
16:18
And most times people get astray from where they want to be in business because they don’t understand the process of how to build that particular business, nor do they understand what their truthful, clear goal is in doing that.
16:33
And that’s where they kind of get in challenge.
16:35
And you’re right.
16:35
I mean, you add technology to that same thing, that technology amps up the process.
16:41
You know, it could be, it could be one of those things that it’s only going to magnify some of the, the, the the holes that were already there and now the holes become bigger.
16:50
Oh, yeah, exactly.
16:51
And that’s what, you know, what we want to prevent.
16:53
Like we want to know where all those issues are going to because we’re going to put a giant spotlight on them once we start putting our doing our work.
17:01
And that’s, you know, if you’re not prepared for that, you’re going to get steamrolled.
17:06
So once you’ve established clarity with a client, what’s next?
17:10
Well, we apply the numbers to it, right?
17:12
And then once we apply the numbers to it, we have a clear plan.
17:16
Then we then we know what metrics we’re going to track, right?
17:20
So traditionally we track normally 11 or 12 different metrics, but depends on the company, right?
17:26
Because certain companies have different needs and you know, but I mean on the sales side it’s pretty easy.
17:34
It’s the how many outbounds or how many touches we trying to get right.
17:38
What’s our connection rate, what’s our response rate, what’s our appointment setting ratio, you know, to the appointment setting ratio, how many closes we getting, follow up closes, transactional value, increased buying frequency.
17:51
And so we’re looking, you know, how many new clients are being spawned from that relationship, IE referrals for a lot of people, right?
18:00
And it’s pretty straightforward in that, in that capacity.
18:03
But there are a lot of sub metrics in between that you can measure as well.
18:06
Even on those 11 metrics, for example, you know, appointment set, appointment not kept or you know, appointment set, appointment abandoned, right?
18:15
We look at those, those metrics cause the metrics tell us something’s here.
18:20
And then we, we can deep dive into what the story is and we might find, for example, appointment set, but no follow up in between the appointments.
18:29
So there’s more abandoning appointments than needs to be or appointment set.
18:35
But the message was set with the, you know, set with the wrong decision maker.
18:40
And then the person they said it with went up to the CEO and said, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this and the CEO and Nah, we ain’t doing that.
18:47
And so appointment won’t set right.
18:50
So we want to look at all these these ratios in the micro measurements in between because those things are how you really dial things in.
18:58
Yeah, Yep, it is, It’s all about the numbers and and it’s reality.
19:03
It’s not that, hey, let’s have wishful thinking here.
19:08
And then a year later you’re like, we didn’t hit our numbers.
19:11
Why?
19:12
You have no, no clarity.
19:13
You have no understanding of why you missed and, and the majority of people out there don’t know their numbers.
19:20
That’s that’s the thing, right?
19:22
They they conceptually get it.
19:24
Their CPA runs the books or whatever.
19:26
They look at the numbers, right.
19:28
But you know, even famous people or semi famous people, like I remember when I first started working with Chet Holmes, he wrote a book called the Ultimate Sales Machine.
19:37
Unfortunately, he’s not with us any longer here on the earth.
19:40
But Chet was fantastic.
19:43
Guy had a really great thing going.
19:46
And I remember him saying to me one day, you know, we’re like 24% bleeding on the front end of our machine.
19:54
And I said, that sounds high.
19:55
You know, I know where he was doing radio ads and those are expensive and things like that.
19:59
But I was like, there’s got to be something there.
20:01
So I started looking at all the metrics and one glaring thing stood out at to me first, and that was his refund rate.
20:09
He had almost a 16% refund rate on the front end of the machine.
20:14
And I was like, man, why?
20:15
They were running them from a radio ad into a call queue, from the call queue into a $229 program that was a 2 1/2 hour live training.
20:25
And it was awesome.
20:27
The training was awesome.
20:28
So I’m like, the content’s good.
20:29
What’s going on?
20:30
So then I’m digging and digging and digging.
20:32
And I realized that the presenters actually invoking the response rate for the for the refund.
20:39
And they were saying this, Chris, they were going, hey, we’re almost at the end of this training.
20:45
If we haven’t earned our $229 today, if you don’t think we’ve delivered the 100 X value, if you don’t think that we deserve that 229, we’ll we’ll refund that for you right here, right now.
20:57
Just call 1800, get a refund.
20:59
That’s 1800.
21:00
Get a refund.
21:01
That’s one, right?
21:02
And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, right.
21:05
So all I did is I went in and I started tweaking the script a little bit.
21:08
Instead of them saying that, it was like we had them add up their numbers.
21:12
And we’d say, go around the room.
21:14
We’d say, Chris, what have you found so far during this training?
21:18
And you’d be like $254,000.
21:22
OK, you know, next, Joe, what did you get right?
21:25
And we’d add them all up.
21:26
And if we guys, guys, we got $32,643,000 on this call today, you know, I think we’ve earned our $229.
21:34
What do you think everybody would go?
21:36
Yep.
21:38
And that rate fell from almost 16% to under 1% within two days and it never, ever came back.
21:46
Now, if you think about they’re producing 1000 leads a week, that’s a lot of volume pushing through the funnel, right?
21:56
And so that’s and and some and of the volume pushing through the funnel was buying on the back end sometimes upwards to a $300,000 program or product, right.
22:07
So that’s what an example for people of what measure your metrics because those tell the story.
22:14
Yeah, You know, that reminds me of the client we’re working with that when we did our process, we uncovered 1 issue related.
22:22
It was process, a combination of processing technology, $3,000,000 savings direct to the bottom line and very similar story where it was around you had 24 hours after they signed the sales contract where they could cancel the contract, but they weren’t they, they get the person to sign and no one was following up with them.
22:49
And so buyer’s remorse would kick in and they call the next day and say, you know what, I’m scared, I don’t want to do this.
22:56
And that’s $3,000,000.
23:00
You’re doing all this work, spending all this money and all this time to get them to the point where they signed the contract.
23:07
One extra phone call from someone the next day or you know that hey, we signed the contract.
23:13
We’re so excited.
23:14
Here’s what we’re going to be working with you.
23:15
Do you have any questions, any concerns?
23:18
Just do a little bit extra hand holding, show them a little bit extra love.
23:22
And if you can drop that number from three million now to maybe half a million, everything that we’re looking at to invest in your tech, it’s paid for, you know that you don’t have to do anything else.
23:34
It’s paid for.
23:35
And we see that time after time after time.
23:39
Yeah, because businesses we work with.
23:41
Yeah.
23:41
And because businesses are in the business, working in the business every day, and they don’t see sometimes the obvious.
23:47
And that’s, you know, it sometimes takes a guy like you or myself to actually look at and go, why is this parrot, you know, in the fish tank, right?
23:57
And it’s like, and so they’re like, what parrot or whatever, right?
24:03
And so sometimes that’s just all it takes.
24:07
In fact, we won’t, we will not even work with companies any longer unless we do a sales optimization study on the front end because they’ve been burned by other entities going in and just say, no, I can fix this problem.
24:19
But they don’t even know what the they, they don’t know what the cause of the problem is.
24:22
They just try to treat the symptom and sometimes the cause needs to be removed in order for the problem to go away.
24:30
And you found that obviously.
24:32
And I mean, like you said, even that’s, you know, two and a half million dollars, you know, per per year, let’s say, right.
24:41
Because then then the question is how long has that been going on?
24:44
No, five years Is 12.5 million gone out the out the door.
24:49
In that case, 3,000,000, it would have been 15,000,000.
24:51
So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not unusual.
24:58
Is the is the song, I think Tom Jones saying or something like that.
25:01
But yeah, that’s Yep, that’s funny.
25:05
So what do you think, you know, from the, I’m trying to think of what’s the right way to say this?
25:14
You know, so you’ve got owner of a business or head of sales, it’s reaching out to you how many of these companies that you work with are in denial?
25:26
You know, that they just, they’ve been doing the same thing for so long that they’re in a rut and maybe they don’t even know it, but there is that sense of denial about what’s really going on in their business.
25:39
How much do you see that and how do you address?
25:41
I see it, I see it.
25:44
I see the form of denial more as a a lot of times they know what it is, but it’s a fear that they have.
25:50
So instead of actually coming forth and saying, I’m afraid of what’s going to happen here, they dig in emotionally and, and you know, I should say, dig in and express emotionally that no, this is just not what this is, right?
26:02
Right.
26:05
The, the, the craziest one I ever experienced was I did a sales optimization study on this company.
26:15
They were doing $50 million and they had an 82% turnover rate of their employee base per year.
26:25
And then through and they were on the edge of, of a mass exodus of their sales crew.
26:34
So that company was no longer gonna be 50 million.
26:37
It probably would have been 4030 million by the time they, you know, and I calculated that 62% of the top salespeople were going to take a mass exodus.
26:51
And I went to the owner and I said, this is what I see.
26:55
And he said to me, you’re not that good.
27:00
And I said, you have an 82% turnover rate of your employee base annually.
27:07
And he goes, well, hey, we’re doing 50 million.
27:10
I said it’s going to happen.
27:13
He said, I don’t think so.
27:16
It was almost 4 weeks to the day he called me.
27:18
And he goes, my salespeople are leaving in droves.
27:24
How did you know?
27:25
I said, well, you just need to talk to the internal teams of people.
27:30
And I said, you have three people there.
27:32
I bet they’re still there.
27:33
And I named him.
27:34
He goes, yeah, they’re staying.
27:35
I said, no wonder they’re torturing the rest of your whole sales team and your operations team and your fulfilment on this and customer service and they’re rude about it.
27:46
But you know, you don’t see it.
27:49
You don’t want to see it, right?
27:51
He goes, I see it now ’cause he had lost $2,000,000 in in four weeks, he saw the number starting to decline.
28:00
And he said, well, what do you think?
28:02
I said, well, strap in, you’re, you’re still got a ways to go.
28:05
And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, I need help, Right.
28:07
And so we did.
28:08
I did help.
28:10
We were able to get back over half the people who left.
28:13
Oh, no kidding.
28:14
Yeah.
28:14
Which was amazing.
28:16
That’s huge.
28:17
And then we put in the the metrics based system and we did training and all of that stuff that, you know, we would do Chris.
28:24
And over the next two years they went from 48 million to 110 million.
28:28
Yeah, I tell you it’s, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve, you know, when we started working with a, with a client and you know, it’ll be some variation of, hey, we don’t need you to look at our sales process.
28:41
Our sales process is dialed in.
28:42
We’ve done a whole bunch of work on that.
28:44
We’re good there.
28:45
We just want you to look at this, this and this and I’ll be like, OK, you know, that’s, you know, let’s take a look and you know it.
28:55
It’s again, it’s a variation of denial that they they want band aids a lot of times when really they need, they need like open heart surgery, you know it.
29:08
And that’s the part that I find, I guess I should be surprised by doing this so long, but I’m always still surprised when we come across that.
29:16
Well, it’s, it’s human nature, right?
29:18
So I have a client that we’re working with.
29:24
They’re a brain health company, right?
29:25
They do brain and memory health.
29:27
And I listen to a client, you know, calls coming in and these are people who, you know, are having a they’re starting to forget things.
29:36
They’re starting to, you know, and some of them are worse than others and some of them are forgetting things kind of like in mid sentence, like they’ll be talking and be like, oh, Chris, what were we talking about?
29:48
You know, that type of thing, right.
29:50
Well, looking at all the studies and you know, when they’re starting to get to that point, they better do something quickly to start to stave that off a halt it or it’s going to go beyond that point.
30:03
And once it gets beyond that point, it’s not like you can pull a part of the brain out and put a plastic piece in and replace that, right?
30:10
So, but these people still are in denial that it’s that it’s happening.
30:17
And most of the mostly they’re afraid of it because they’re like, OK, well, now I’ve got to invest my own money, my own effort, my own time into doing this.
30:26
And I can’t halfway it.
30:27
I can’t just take a supplement.
30:29
I can’t just like go for a power walk or say I go to the gym, right?
30:33
It’s now a comprehensive process to retrain the, the brain and body to get to that place where they’re not having that challenge anymore.
30:42
And the crazy part is it works.
30:44
It absolutely works when, when people go through the process, right?
30:48
So that’s not crazy bad.
30:49
It’s crazy amazing, right, that we can take that.
30:52
But people, people won’t, and that’s part of the reasons the gym are so full during January and partially in February and by April, you know, it’s like where all these people go.
31:04
So it doesn’t surprise me in business ’cause it’s just human nature to do that.
31:08
But folks, if you’re gonna hire Chris or hire me or you know, anybody like that, do it right?
31:15
Because band aiding it.
31:19
You know, if you had a sinking boat and all you had is a Band-Aid and you could put it on there, go for it, right?
31:25
But if you had the ability to have that that leak sealed so it never, ever, ever will come apart again, do that.
31:37
Because if you get out 20 miles to sea, unless you can swim one day, you’re going to be in challenge mode beyond coming back.
31:48
And so, yeah, it makes so much sense to do it right.
31:52
In fact, Chris, I, I don’t even do it any longer.
31:54
And if they, if they’re humming and haring about, well, you know, this, I’m not talking about the money aspect.
31:59
I’m talking about we don’t need to fix that when they clearly need to fix that because that’s the linchpin that usually is holding everything else up.
32:09
Oh, yeah, yeah.
32:10
No, it’s like, I make it clear with people like, look, you have to be willing to do the things we’re recommending.
32:16
That’s why you’re hiring us.
32:17
If you’re not, that’s not a fit for us because we don’t want any failures on our track record.
32:24
I only want success stories, you know?
32:26
And that means you have to be willing to do the work, the heavy lifting, the hard stuff.
32:31
Nothing about this stuff is easy.
32:33
It’s hard, but once you get the stuff put in place, life does get better.
32:38
It does get easier, you know, and you can focus on things that are really adding value, you know, and really trying to drive things to the next level.
32:47
I liken it to this.
32:48
I, you know, for years I had, I had, I had something called congenital hip dysplasia and never noticed it.
32:56
I was always in sports and, you know, all that stuff probably exacerbated the, but you know, when I started getting into my 50’s, the I started feeling a little bit my, my leg was kind of kicking out to the right and it feel a little pain in my knee, my ankle, whatever.
33:15
And I was like, well, what’s that?
33:17
And I denied it because, you know, I was in good shape working out all the time.
33:21
Then eventually it got to a point where I was like, I was on the beach one day and it was like, Oh my goodness, this is hurting.
33:26
And, you know, I had a sort of hobble back to the car and I kept denying it.
33:31
But I went to the doctor and then I like, you know, we really need to get you into physical therapy and we really need to do this and do that.
33:40
Otherwise you’re going to end up in a place where we’re going to have to have a hip replacement.
33:44
And I’m like, I’ll work out at the gym.
33:46
And I kept doing it, kept doing it, kept doing it.
33:48
Couple years go by, all of a sudden the problems got worse.
33:52
And then I go back to the doctor and they’re like, hey, dummy, you need a hip replacement.
33:56
There’s nothing that’s going to change that.
33:59
So I denied that for a couple of years until I could not pick my leg up going up the stairs any longer and my back was thrown off, my other hip was thrown off, All this stuff was thrown off.
34:09
And I’m like, finally I gotta, I gotta do this, all right?
34:12
And I go to do it.
34:13
And guess what?
34:14
Now I run into problems with insurance.
34:16
Now I run into problems with the hospital scheduling.
34:18
And it took another six or seven months to do that.
34:20
Oh, I got the flu in between that pushed it off in 90 days.
34:24
It took a year later.
34:26
And here’s the crazy part.
34:28
If I hadn’t just done what they said, I would have not had to have that done.
34:32
But when they said I had to have the operation, if I just went the long game with them, within three days, Chris, of having this operation, I was walking around without an assist.
34:44
And seven days later, I’m up and down stairs just like I was when I was 30.
34:50
And, you know, and, you know, you got to watch out because it takes a while to heal.
34:55
But the reality is that why did I wait so long?
34:58
Oh, yeah.
34:59
That the risk of inaction.
35:02
That’s to me, the thing that people don’t seem to be able to calculate mentally, you know, as I could.
35:10
And you said it earlier, you’re talking about the story that the guy had 50 million.
35:14
He’s like, we’re making 50 million.
35:16
We’re good.
35:17
They’re fat, dumb and happy.
35:19
And so it’s just easier to stay where I’m at than it is to keep moving forward and dealing with the issues I have to deal with.
35:29
You know, I’d rather go play golf or whatever, you know, But but everything has a natural rate of decline, even our businesses.
35:36
And so if we don’t, if we don’t pay attention to all these aspects, that’s what happens.
35:42
It’s just the nature of law, you know, law of nature, I should say.
35:47
So yeah, that’s, that’s, I hope people who are listening to this pay pay attention.
35:52
Oh yeah, big time.
35:53
Because it is, it’s, you can’t, the problem’s not going to go away.
35:57
Eventually you’re going to need that hip replacement, you know, that if you’re not doing things to address those root issues, be it with your sales process, with your CRM, with the data that you’re relying on, whatever it is, your hiring practices, whatever, it’s going to bite you eventually, you know, and, and yeah, you just, you can’t avoid it.
36:20
And, and it’s OK if you’re OK with biting it, you know, like, if that’s the truthful goal, like, hey, listen, I like to, I’m a $10 million company.
36:27
I’m OK being a $7,000,000 company.
36:29
You know, if that’s OK, then that’s fine.
36:31
But if it’s not, then you know, it’s like, it’s like brain health.
36:35
Don’t put it off because eventually you won’t be 7, you’ll be 5, you know, and then even it’s harder to come back from that.
36:43
Some people don’t recover at all.
36:44
No, exactly, Doug.
36:46
We’re at our time here in sales lead.
36:48
Doug, I really appreciate you coming on the show.
36:49
This has been a great discussion.
36:51
If people want to reach out, connect with you, if they want to work with CEO Sales strategies, what’s the best way for them to do that?
36:58
Doug, at CEO Sales strategies.com is the best e-mail address.
37:03
I have people who watch my e-mail, so they might answer for me, but certainly reach out there.
37:08
Doug Brown 123 is my LinkedIn.
37:12
If they want to get to know more about me, just personally, just Doug C Brown type in the C please, because if you type in Doug Brown, I’ll come up as a professional hockey player.
37:21
And that’s not me.
37:24
I can’t skate very well.
37:26
And if they want to come to any of our, our, you know, we do some master classes every month.
37:33
We do one or two of them.
37:34
The next one we’re doing is called Stop the Leak and it’s all around one simple thing you can do to increase your sales by, you know, sales revenue by 5 to 20%.
37:45
It’s not fictitious, it’s documented.
37:47
So that is at CEO Sales strategies.com/stop the Leak and you can sign up.
37:55
That’s free to go there.
37:57
And if you have questions or whatever on anything, just reach, reach out to us.
38:01
That’s awesome.
38:02
If you didn’t catch any of that, no worries.
38:04
We have it in our show notes.
38:05
You can get that at impellercrm.com/sales.
38:09
Lead Dog really get not only this episode, but all our 150 plus episodes of Sales Lead Dog.
38:14
So be sure to check that out, get Doug’s contact info, reach out to him and connect and be sure to subscribe so you get all our future episodes of Sales Lead Dog.
38:25
We’d appreciate that.
38:26
Doug, thank you so much for coming on sales lead dog and welcome to the sales lead dog pack.
38:32
Oh, thanks so much for being here.
38:33
I, I, I was trying to figure out what kind of dog I was going to be when I got here.
38:36
So I a lead dog, a lead dog.
38:44
As we end this discussion on sales lead dog, be sure to subscribe to catch all our episodes on social media.
38:51
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39:03
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