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0:17
Business. The Small Business Show is the official podcast of Garuda promo and branding solutions.
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Hello everyone. You're listening to the Small Business show.
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My name is Suya Ho. You can also call me the Promo Guy.
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Today. My guest, Gary Graff, founder and CEO of elevated eight IO, author of the zero to 100
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million sales, blueprint book, and the go host, grits and greatness planner.
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A serial entrepreneur since 2002, Gary has started and successfully exist six companies,
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including large outbound sales call center, radio, advertising networks, and an award
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winning egg fragrance digital marketing agency.
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Born in Denmark, Gary now lives in Medellin, Colombia.
1:01
How are you doing, Gary? I'm doing great.
1:05
Thanks for promo dive in.
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But before that, I really do want to learn more about, your know so you started from
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Denmark and you started a few businesses.
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Can you walk us through the process? And why do you enjoy doing what you do?
1:21
Yeah, no, absolutely. My journey is I worked the last 2025 years in sales and marketing hand in hand.
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I was an entrepreneur since 19 years old and kind of a coincidence, learned the
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significance of putting sales first, right?
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Surviving by never having a revenue problem.
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So I learned that by working in some hardcore outbound sales call centers where you learn
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all the principles of persuasion and how to really push all the right buttons.
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Not necessarily having the best products at hand, admittedly, but I learned a lot about
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sales and I was able to then develop and build that by adding high value add products that
1:54
contribute, make an impact for companies and combining that with affordable pricing.
2:12
Then you really got a winning combo if you know how to sell and position.
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So, as you mentioned in your intro, I've done a couple of different projects.
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About 15 years ago, the Danish government had a program that quote unquote, successful
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companies could apply for investment subsidy up to a million dollars if you would export
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your services to third world countries.
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For example, Nicaragua was where I went.
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As long as you had a business case that would create a job impact, help create innovation.
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And we certainly succeeded in doing all of the criteria because we basically grew to 5000
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Advertisers 300 million under management and employed 300 people at its peak, but employed
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thousands of people that then went on to work at Silicon Valley and big companies
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subsequently.
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So very proud of that venture.
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Sold that agency back in 2020 and just tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew
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up next.
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Right. I want to say, how can I use all these blessings in terms of learnings?
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I've worked with thousands of companies, know what kind of works, look under the hood in
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terms of what is required to really create a winning sales formula.
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And that's what gave birth to my newest project, which is Elevate IO, where we work a lot
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with addiction treatment center mental health care.
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Because for me, it's a vertical where that's in high demand, there's a lot of people
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suffering.
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So I wanted to make sure that whoever I'm helping with generating leads, getting patients
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at a profitable rate, that their solution, their service can help a lot of people in great
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need.
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For me, helping people out, suffering mental health, that's a staggering problem.
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That was for me a priority instead of not to necessarily just help tech companies that are
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paying zero taxes or personal or injured lawyers, just to name a few examples of companies
4:01
I've worked, big industries I worked with in the past.
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For me, it was very important to strategically choose some industries that I can
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indirectly make an impact.
4:21
Thank you for sharing. And if listeners wondering, gary actually mentioned that experience in chapter I think
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it's chapter one in his book, like why he decided to drop everything in Denmark and go to
4:23
a foreign country and really to set up a new company there.
4:37
So, very interesting story. Gary, I do want to ask you, and I think you brought to this concept, to me for MVP, which
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in your case stands for Minimal Viable Product.
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Do you in the camp that believe that if you have a system and then once you find an MVP,
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you are able to create basically any business, and if you like to scale it to a million or
4:49
even 10 million, if you wish to get into it, I agree.
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I think that's why it's so critical.
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And obviously it's a popularized concept by Eric Reese, the minimum viable product.
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But what a lot of folks that I've spoken with, they fail is that they're not deploying
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enough MVPs to kind of prove the concept before they're starting to expand or they target
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too big of a geo, they're targeting too many verticals.
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They're not really proving the concept at a small scale before they start doubling down on
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product development, process automation, tools, technology, all the needed investments to
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really scale things up.
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And I learned that the hard way. Like, you talked about a few successes that I've had, I've had at least three to four
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times the failures.
5:48
So my book is very much accumulation of learnings what not to do, seeing what the smartest
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people that I've worked with, what they do perfectly, and trying to identify those
5:48
patterns and then just doubling down on it.
6:00
And one thing is to just very quickly, when you go to market with a product or solution,
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is putting sales first.
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It's talking with prospective customers. It's asking for their money.
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Elaborating on the pitch, the solution the next step.
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Elaborating on the roadmap of what they can expect if they are to sign up and they get
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some real feedback before you start saying we should develop this feature or we just have
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this solution, or we added that extra service level, then all the clients will come
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running to us.
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That's the typical pitch that entrepreneurs typically say when they're out raising money
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or they're trying to expand, or they're trying to justify why they haven't yet succeeded.
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There's always a good reason excuse, well, the best way to eradicate that is just go out
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and pitch, get some signatures, and then the proof is in the pudding.
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Now it's just executing on what people actually are willing to buy and pay for.
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That's actually a good advice there.
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Even if you're a small company or if you're a major company, sometimes they will spend
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years to develop what they would think is the perfect product.
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But once they introduce to the market, no one likes that anymore.
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We move on to another cycle. Versus if you have a minimal viable product, maybe not everyone will get into it, but at
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least you have customer and customer, once you actually have it running, you have errors
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or you have improvement.
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You have upgrades, right? In the digital world, then if you're smart, make those upgrades and it becomes better and
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better.
7:22
Amen. So talk to us a little bit.
7:25
For some of us who just started out right, we may be in our backyard playing out a product
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or in a business quenching our product.
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How would you advise us to create a sales plan to hit a first million?
7:39
That's a great question. It's a great question.
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Well, first and foremost, the statistics are you're up against the wall, right?
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What if 97% of businesses cease to exist and only a small percentage of that remaining
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folks that actually succeed ever make it beyond annual recurring revenue?
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So what do you need to do is, again, put your sales plan first.
8:02
What does that look like? Is very quickly identifying are you the person that can execute it?
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Yes or no? If you're not, again, like I put in chapter five of my book, one thing that I've been good
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at is very quickly identifying what makes me happy.
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What am I good at? What can I double down on and then delegate the rest?
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Like, I'm no financial guru, I need a CFO for that.
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I'm certainly not an operational wizard.
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I need a CEO to do that. But there's nobody that could do the chief sales officer role better than I, so I can
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craft that sales plan.
8:31
So if you're an entrepreneur, I won't say introverted means being a sales bad sales,
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actually, I find a lot of introverted profiles being phenomenal, data driven, concise,
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eloquently speaking sales individual.
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But as a founder, if you don't have that in your DNA, if everything is resistant, you're
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like, oh, I don't like to do all this sales and create it, then find a partner that can
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complement you on your skill set.
8:59
Obviously, finding the right partner is key, and it's not easy.
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Partnerships is also something that can go very sour.
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So be very diligent about who you partner up with.
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If you can't find that, then go to find some consultant, because it's a little bit like
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you do want to shorten your learning curve.
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You want to stand on the shoulders of giant, somebody who's proven the approach before, so
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that you can deploy.
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So there's no need to go into a learning process where you spend years in determining how
9:23
many emails should be in a sequence.
9:31
What is the ideal length?
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Which time range should you do it? Can you add attachments or not?
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How lengthy should they be? What should be the expected open rate be?
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How do I structure discovery, call, demo, call, all of that.
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There's a playbook for if you've done that elsewhere to some success, you can replicate
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and adjust it.
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So again, go out and find that needed expertise so that you can build that sales plan.
9:55
But it should be put as one of the first priorities.
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And I would say if you're the founder also, like the chief Sales officer and lack of a
9:58
better terminology, obviously you don't want to create a sales playbook.
10:09
A blueprint right out of the gate. You want to prove the concepts.
10:12
And as you start experimenting, A, B, testing what's working and so forth, and you crack
10:12
the code and something, this pitch works, these Snippets works.
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Here's the best process. Here's the next three emails we always send out in this sequence.
10:23
Now you document it, right? And then you put it into your playbook next, so that when you add the next sales rep,
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there's no question it's like, here's what's expected.
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I did it like this. With your full dedication, you should be in this range.
10:34
All the guesswork is left out of the equation because what many founders do, and my firm
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belief is that's why the percentage of failure rates are so high is because they go out
10:34
and say, great product, there's some buy in and so forth.
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Let's go out, let's hire a sales rep from another company, potentially a competitor.
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Put him on, go do your thing.
10:54
There's a big difference in a good sales rep or sales manager, VPs sales, have they
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followed an already existing playbook that was created?
11:03
There's a difference of being an architect or being an executor.
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Not everybody has the same skill set. So if you create the playbook and it's well executed, you can put people in to follow it,
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right?
11:15
And it's so mission critical because this failure rate in sales is astronomic, right?
11:20
What is it? Two out of three reps across all industries never hit the quota, right?
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It's like one out of three that you hire will be you're hitting quota, not even
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necessarily even making you profitable.
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The tenure rate, the cost of hiring and so forth, really impact your bottom line.
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So if you create a sales onboarding plan, like, here's what to expect.
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The first 30 days we're going to train you in the industry, the market, the product, the
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competition.
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Here's all the scripts, the emails you send out.
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Here's all our value proposition. Here's an elevator pitch.
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You give them a robust playbook on what to do.
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You're going to increase the likelihood of them becoming successful and that feeds off
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onto the next ones.
11:59
Right. Because they come on board. You're basically enabling to grow your team because other people will feed off that
12:01
success.
12:05
Then you create mentor programs and career development plans.
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And that's why for me, most people, they put the sales plan at the end.
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I think it should be the very first thing you do. And that's just a few of the elements.
12:16
You go to my book, there's a whole chapter on how to create a sales playbook.
12:19
Yeah, that's a lot of good point. I think you're know, Gary.
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There are more than one guess now on the small positions that tell know, do what you do
12:23
best in your company and list out things that you don't like to do or you hate to do or
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you're not good at and find someone else, either a partner or you hire a company to do it.
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For example, think about how much time people spend on creating an accounting system or
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creating their accounting software.
12:46
There are software that do that? Yes, they charge money.
12:49
Yes, if you hire accountant, they also charge you money.
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But then the money that you spend can save you hours, if not tens of hours, for a certain
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process.
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There are a lot of tools out there that make your job a lot easier.
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You might have to pay a cost for it, but you have to think about the rewards that you'd be
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getting that free up so much of your time.
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Maybe you hire a virtual assistant who handles all the data entry work that you hate to do
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that you have to do.
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So that could save you a lot of time to do what you do best and really do like the system
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that you have in place.
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And I think it's the first I've heard since doing the show.
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You actually have to have a cell system in place.
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If you don't mind to tell me more a little bit, Jerry.
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So what if we're developing a product or maybe we develop a service?
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At what point do you think that we should go out and test the market?
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Is it completely ready or do we have a concept that we know that we have a customer for?
13:51
When would you suggest people to start approaching potential prospect?
13:56
It depends on obviously your domain expertise, right.
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If you're entering a new industry, a new domain, it can be difficult to go out and pitch
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because there's going to be a lot of unknown factors that you don't know.
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But if you're somewhat already experienced in that industry, maybe you've been working for
14:07
another company or running a similar product with your own company, then deploying it.
14:16
I would say already conceptualization, that's when you go out and pitch it, because that's
14:16
how you can adjust whatever the service level agreement or the features that include it.
14:26
Like, a very good example I put in my book too, was like when I ran my old agency and we
14:26
were direct sales.
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We were selling to small businesses. Actually we had thousands of small business clients and at one point we came to a position
14:34
where we had to pivot and start selling channel sales.
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So we didn't sell to the direct advertiser. We would go to other marketing agencies and then sell them on a solution that they could
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resell to their advertisers, their small business.
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So we didn't have that product in place and so forth.
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So I basically out of my corner office, start calling out.
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I had obviously outlined in terms of what I envisioned the product of the solution to be.
15:02
But I started pitching and the first couple of calls were brutal, right?
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And I got a lot of input. I took learning, took notes.
15:07
Every call was a little bit slightly improved until I think it was call maybe 15 or 16 to
15:07
one agency and it's like here's how it is.
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And then it dropped down. It's like this is just what I've been looking for.
15:17
Great, because now I had refined the pitched right?
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And instead of going to my fulfillment department and say we need all these different
15:20
features in a solution and service level agreement, I could come and say this is what the
15:20
market needs.
15:29
Matter of fact, I got a signed contract that I went down and delivered to the department.
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That didn't make me the most popular person in the company, but anyhow, I could come and
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say there's revenue on the table here, if we can do this now, can we do that?
15:40
Right? And we found a solution to it, but I would rather do that instead of going into an R and D
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process where you're like figuring out creating something.
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And then obviously the sales guy said nobody in the market wants that.
15:53
I'd rather get that approval at Conceptualization already.
15:56
If you can pull that off, of. Course, yeah, you made it sound easy.
16:00
But there's a lot of important pointer before spending all the money to create something.
16:05
Ultimately no one will buy. You actually start going to people and you are brave enough.
16:11
Right? It's hard for us to be in sales when customer don't give us feedback.
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Even if customer give you not so good feedback, that actually is very helpful.
16:23
Sometimes they tell me no, ask them.
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I will actually ask the question why did you decide not to work with us?
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And if they open up, I keep my mouth shut and I just write down notes.
16:34
Those are really important factor. Sometimes they will tell me competitive analysis, your competitor is cheaper, your
16:36
competitor is better.
16:42
I like that coffee better, or whatever that it is.
16:45
So can you actually make that work in your product and services so that next time when you
16:45
pitch to Prospect B, then you be better, be better.
16:54
Maybe like you said, Gary, ten times, 15 times better.
16:58
You actually create a solid plan that people would love to get into, correct.
17:03
You'Re right on the money. Once we have a process in place, how would you advise us to create a framework so when we
17:05
bring on additional salesforce, they're able to jump on it and know the process quickly
17:05
instead of spending months, sometimes years, to learn what the company actually do?
17:22
Yeah, great. So obviously a sales playbook is an ever evolving document, right, that keeps getting
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optimized, approved, adjusted a very good way.
17:33
As a rule of thumb, I typically tell companies is like, if you don't have a 90 day
17:33
onboarding plan for your new reps, then you're basically not in position to hire somebody,
17:33
right.
17:43
So within that first 90 days, they should be able to work towards code attainment, right.
17:50
And everything you can do to minimize that learning curve, all those things should you
17:50
have in checkboxes.
17:57
Simple stuff that sometimes entrepreneurs or business owners forget, including yours truly
17:57
in the past.
18:03
Many times, it's like you have a set of technology, you invest tens of thousands of
18:03
dollars in a CRM and you configure it.
18:09
Or sales enablement technology, or lead enrichment or proposal tools.
18:13
How the heck do you use it? Create manuals for that, right?
18:16
Make sure if the adoption is not good on the old technology, you're wasting the money.
18:22
Right. It's just like having an 80 foot yacht in the harbor.
18:26
If you don't know how to freaking sail it out of the harbor, it's worthless.
18:28
Right. It's a very high cost of real estate.
18:31
You have to be sure that the CRM technology is adopted.
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Say it goes for pitching, goes for email templates, goes for collateral sharing.
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Understand all this information that you as a business owner, it's your passion project,
18:42
it's your baby.
18:48
You know all the ins and outs, but you can't just transfer all that knowledge out of your
18:48
head.
18:53
You need to document it all in a system in chronological, alphabetical order so that it
18:53
can be easily adopted by your reps.
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For them, too. You're giving them the tools.
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If you build that 90 day sales onboarding plan and check off all those boxes of what's
19:04
needed, then you come a long way, because then the rest is just optimizing the process.
19:14
But you'll make sure that once the people you get to that success rate, they'll start
19:14
figuring out a lot of the answers by themselves and be self driven to that extent.
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It's that initial curve. That's where a lot most companies fail.
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And you got to think about the optics, right?
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If you have a company and you hire sales reps and you say, hey, great, now we're taking
19:31
off and we got people, and you've provided equity to some key players and now it's going
19:31
to take off or investment, and you bring on sales reps and five out of five, they fail.
19:45
How does that look? Right? So you want to do everything in your power.
19:49
You're hiring five sales reps, you better have three or four of them sitting there after a
19:49
couple of months, right?
19:54
That would be my two cent, because everybody else is looking, assessing investors, all
19:54
your stakeholders, your employees, everybody who's giving up their job for joining that
19:54
opportunity is, can sales be followed through?
20:05
And that's again, why I would put a sales plan first.
20:08
So I work with a lot of clients and I'm just baffled because they come aboard.
20:12
It's like, what's your cost per lead? What's your closing rate? How do you follow up on that, which system you have placed?
20:16
And they're basically like, I would need to talk with my sales guy about finding how the
20:16
heck are you running your business without those metrics and so forth.
20:23
So basically you're giving a full control to what kind of revenue.
20:27
You're setting some expectations, but you're not measuring the activities of the metrics
20:27
that are supposed to give you those desired KPIs.
20:33
So you got to flip it the other way around and say, okay, we got to have all the
20:33
processes, activities and documentation in place, lay out a set of metrics in terms of how
20:33
many calls, emails, conversations need to be done, the conversion rate from MQL to SQL,
20:33
all that information.
20:47
You got to have fully understanding that's the only way you go out and set targets.
20:52
Yeah, that good stuff. Nowadays with technology, one click of a button, you see all the report and if you plan it
20:54
correctly, then you can see who is performing what actually works for the company.
21:06
So if you like, you could double down on that or you could balance it out maybe with your
21:06
non performing sectors.
21:13
It's easier than ever. The most difficult thing is getting the technologies integrated and seamlessly working
21:15
with the other and getting people to adopt.
21:22
That's the key thing. So it's a lot about configuring it.
21:25
So it's user friendly, right? It's all about it's just like you go to a website, UIUX is the most important thing
21:26
because people don't know how to navigate.
21:32
If it's slow to load and if it's not seeking the right information, it's not doing its
21:32
purpose.
21:37
The same goes for Sales Process and sales tool.
21:40
It's got to make the sales reps job easier so that they can perform better, they can do
21:40
less administrative tasks and focus on speaking with prospects, enabling customers to
21:40
become happy, et cetera.
21:51
Yeah, Gary, thanks for sharing and I really do wanted to I think you're the perfect person
21:51
to answer this, and I've heard it so many times where it's a larger company, they have a
21:51
marketing department where they do social media, maybe they do Google Ads, maybe they do
21:51
other channel that brings in the leads, right?
22:09
And then the sales team takes on after they capture the leads.
22:13
But sometimes they don't talk to each other.
22:15
I don't know why. Like marketing people do not talk to salespeople and vice versa.
22:19
And then their salespeople pushing back.
22:21
Say you're not bringing in good leads, that's why we're not closing them.
22:25
And somehow they got into arguments and fights.
22:28
How would you suggest you balance and make the team collaborate better so we can improve
22:28
the process?
22:35
Fantastic question. That's probably one of the single most high revenue impact initiatives you can roll out is
22:36
just making sure that those two things are aligned with a unified strategy.
22:47
You're measuring the same metrics, you're focused on the same KPIs.
22:51
So it's not two different entities operating in siloed, not speaking with the other.
22:58
You're never going to get the desired results unless you cultivate that.
23:02
Now how can you do that? There's a lot of different shapes and form depending on your size of the company.
23:06
Are you hiring a marketing agency, external marketing agency, which many companies do?
23:12
How are they collaborating? Are they just having a monthly call with the chief marketing officer, your marketing
23:14
director?
23:20
Or is your VP of sales included in those calls?
23:23
Is there a lead management feedback loop?
23:26
Like in terms of say, what determines a qualified lead?
23:29
Do we have a lead scoring system in place?
23:31
Are we just hoping to get a lot of leads and we're burning through a lot of them and
23:31
wasting our time essentially talking with unqualified prospects that doesn't fit ideal
23:31
customer profile.
23:42
That's number one. If you do it internally right, make sure that you have strong collaboration.
23:48
So you mentioned social media or paid search or content.
23:53
Like very often a marketing team sits and talks about, okay, how can we capture demand?
23:59
There's certain impression share volume that we can capture on social media, google,
23:59
whatever it may be.
24:04
Let's focus on these keywords and create some content for it.
24:08
Failing to never go down to the sales rep and asking like if there's top three questions
24:08
you get from your prospects, like why don't they move forward or what's the key piece of
24:08
information they would like more intelligence on?
24:23
Gather those insights and then start creating some content that can serve twofold.
24:27
One, it can generate leads, it can actually capture impressions.
24:31
But secondly, the sales team can all of a sudden use it in the sales process where the
24:31
customers say, hey, I have this question, how do you go about expert?
24:37
That's a great question. Let me just share with you this article that I found that wrote on the topic.
24:41
So for that may be able to one, it fuels authority, credibility and it just enables them
24:41
to close deals at a higher rate.
24:49
So collaboration in short term aligning metrics, KPIs, getting people in the same room,
24:49
having smarting meetings, I call it where it's right, it's unified metrics.
25:03
It's not hey, did we hit this sales quarter? Did we hit this amount of leads?
25:06
It's like, did we hit this revenue and how can we help each other?
25:09
Now all of a sudden, you get everybody on the same page.
25:12
That goes a long way. Yeah, I think there's a lot of important points in there, Gary.
25:17
I think first you got to talk to each other.
25:19
Like, if you don't talk to each other, if you feel like you're working at different
25:19
department, then you're working at different department.
25:24
And to your point too, salesperson, it's ultimately interacting with the client and close
25:24
them, get the revenue in.
25:32
If you work in sales long enough, then you could probably feel it.
25:36
There are things that the clients would say that you know that they're ready to order.
25:40
And also, you know that when they say certain things that you know that you will not get
25:40
the order from them.
25:45
So if you give the feedback actually to the marketing team, so when they write the
25:45
content, so they can actually, if they're smart to jump up and cater to those who are
25:45
ready to answer the question, then when you go through the leads, I'm sure that you could
25:45
probably help plan it.
26:02
Gary is to. These are the hot clients that are ready to buy these people.
26:07
Maybe this in the market for looking right?
26:10
So you might build relationships so you actually develop different piles of client that
26:10
these are ready to buy.
26:17
These are in the market. And these third sectors, they're never going to buy.
26:22
They just want to look around. Is that true?
26:25
That's absolutely on point, gathering that intelligence, then you can just answer
26:25
sometimes, as you pointed out earlier, I would way rather have a prospect that says no and
26:25
gives me the reason why.
26:38
Because at least I know what to work with, right? And I can adjust my pitch or I can rebuttal that the worst things are the people you never
26:40
speak to that detract you because you just didn't answer the questions before they even
26:40
submit the form or the lead.
26:50
Like, the very first thing we do, typically when we take over client campaigns, we
26:50
typically always install.
26:56
We work a lot with direct response driven campaigns.
26:59
So it's a lot of phone calls, a lot of leads that come through phone calls.
27:01
The best thing you could do is just sit and listen to the calls, just like you'll get all
27:01
the information you need to.
27:07
Like, what's the most common rebuttals?
27:10
What's the main concerns? How is your reps position pricing?
27:14
How are they addressing how you stack up against your competition?
27:20
What are the concerns from contractual terms and services of your agreement?
27:24
All that information is revealed in your calls if you sit down, listen, and if marketing
27:24
does that, collaborates with sales and then enables to address all those questions, you
27:24
can address the concerns before they even get raised.
27:37
And the. Best sales process is when you're just addressing everything that they're like before they
27:37
can start checking out.
27:43
Like, you're probably wondering how we do that great.
27:45
And you're like, Why the heck is that? What's the reason?
27:48
Well, here's how it works, and you elaborate in the process the next steps.
27:52
Here's what it looks like. If you become a client, basically, you're eradicating all concerns.
27:56
You're fueling them with trust, and you're making the decision making process way easier
27:56
because we don't want to force products down a throat.
28:04
That's an old school mentality. I tried that 20 years ago.
28:07
Probably go to jail for some of the things that I sold, right?
28:10
But nowadays you can only sell to people.
28:13
But they have all the information at their fingertips.
28:16
They can do a quick Google search and they can do price comparisons or feature analysis,
28:16
whatever.
28:21
They can see reviews. The only way you can be a good salesperson is enabling people to get to the right decision
28:22
faster, the decision they would make otherwise if they had all the right information in
28:22
front of them so that they can make a smart decision that can make the biggest impact and
28:22
add value to the business.
28:38
That's a good sales rep. I think if people do as you just said, Gary, they probably save money on marketing too.
28:46
So maybe your sales force identified three concerns, right?
28:50
If you hit those three concerns, then you have a customer.
28:53
Then what they could do is they can actually tell the marketing people, these are the
28:53
three main concerns that will close the deal.
28:59
And all you have to focus on is answering questions.
29:03
With this concern, you don't need to focus on the rest of the people because they're not
29:03
really our ideal client.
29:10
So that in turn, you're doing it backwards.
29:12
You could determine the channel that you need to be on, the COVID ad or media that you
29:12
need to be peer on, and what is not relevant, you don't have to be on.
29:22
So you actually save money doing that 100%.
29:27
That's a very good point. A very good point indeed.
29:29
To the degree. Again, if you don't have a unified strategy and alignment between sales and marketing,
29:30
typically your marketing department, if you hire a marketing agency in nine out of ten
29:30
scenarios, and I know this because I sold marketing services to marketing agencies.
29:43
Hundreds of them. Very often.
29:46
Not everybody. But they will go out and say, okay, what's the targeted cost per lead and what's the lead
29:46
volume you're looking for?
29:51
Let's turn on all the bells and whistles and button and try to get that rate.
29:55
Instead of saying, okay, let's go back to sales and understand what are the qualifying
29:55
criteria in more detail, what are the things that we can maybe detract people from even
29:55
clicking on ad, right?
30:07
Why don't we waste money? Maybe we're going to put in some copy, some words in the copy that could detract people
30:09
from clicking on it and wasting our time on that.
30:17
Driving a cost. The cost per lead may look favorable, but the cost per acquisition, the cost per client,
30:18
the cost per patient, whatever industry you're in, is impacted by that.
30:27
So I would way rather make my budget more efficient by saying, okay, let's make sure to
30:27
detract and attract the right people as good as possible from a marketing standpoint so
30:27
that sales are enabled with sales qualified leads at the highest rate possible, save you a
30:27
ton of money.
30:42
Also, frustration, human resources focus.
30:46
We only have X amount of hours in a day and mental capacity to focus on so many things.
30:51
So just making sure that marketing predominantly sends over qualified leads, it's hard to
30:51
quantify the impact because it's not just about you improving and closing at a higher
30:51
rate.
31:00
It's the level of confidence that rep jumps into the next call.
31:04
It's the excitement. Right. It's knowing that here's a prospect that has a need, they have a pain point, and you have
31:06
a solution that can add value to them that just puts you in a whole different state.
31:15
As a person, as a business owner. Sales walking into that conversation, I think.
31:20
You'Re talking about really laser focused.
31:22
And do you know who your clients are talking to?
31:25
Enough. Small business entrepreneur. The common mistakes is we wanted to target everybody.
31:30
But as you know, Gary, even the biggest, the most resourceful company, they don't target
31:30
everyone.
31:36
Like, if you talk about luxury brand, they only showcase their product in certain
31:36
industry.
31:41
If they're a car manufacturer, they only showcase on a certain area.
31:45
They know exactly where they need to go.
31:47
Versus for a small business owner. We want to be everywhere.
31:51
Yeah. Verticalization niche is one of the best marketing sales strategies you can do.
31:58
Because you can own a domain, you can easily scale it.
32:01
You have more insights in the industry. You can deploy it way more efficiently across the board.
32:08
And again, it's hard to be a jack of all trades, but you can be a master of one or two
32:08
subjects.
32:13
That's what people essentially want. They don't care about all your success.
32:16
What you've done is like, have you helped anybody like me?
32:20
My situation, my pain point, tell me something that I can resonate with.
32:24
So very powerful to hone in on.
32:27
And that's not just a vertical. It's also the size of companies you're targeting.
32:31
If it's B to B, if it's a consumer, certain GEOS or Sipcos household income levels really
32:31
drill down on detail of what your ideal customer profile is.
32:41
Don't look to expand before you're penetrated at a satisfactory level.
32:45
Right? Yeah. That's key to success.
32:47
Like, if all your ideal client are at the golf course, for example, you go to the golf
32:47
course.
32:52
If all your ideal clients at the soccer field, you go to the soccer field, go wherever
32:52
they are, and then if you know that none of your ideal clients are there, you don't have
32:52
to spend really effort there until, like Gary said, maybe you own that space.
33:06
Then you're looking to explore, grow your business, then you start looking at other
33:06
sectors.
33:11
So focus, I think, is one of the key to success.
33:14
So, Gary, I know that we're getting to individual questions that people would love to ask
33:14
you about in their business.
33:22
If listener wanted to get in touch with you, what would be the best way to reach out?
33:26
Yeah, you can go to my company website is Elevate IO.
33:32
You can also go to my personal website, Garygarth.com, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube,
33:32
Profile, whatever you feel.
33:38
I check all my messages myself and happy to reply if anybody wants to apply some of these
33:38
concepts, but maybe in doubt of how to execute them, or how to find the right resource, or
33:38
how to craft that winning sales plan, anything of these topics that we have covered today,
33:38
I would say go to Elevate IO, go to the Resources tab.
33:59
I see you have it in the footnotes. You can pick up a copy of my book.
34:03
I will give it away for the first 50 listeners of the show.
34:08
Just go to my website, type in the coupon code, all small letters, small business show.
34:14
That's small business show and you'll get the book discounted from thirty dollars to zero
34:14
dollars for the first 50 listeners.
34:20
I hope to get everybody's feedback.
34:23
I hope to get some testimonials of the reply, one two concept, whatever it is that work
34:23
for you, I'll be more than very happy to hear that.
34:31
Thank you so much for generally gift gary and I'll also put the link in the show notes.
34:36
Thank you so much for coming on today. I learned a lot from you.
34:39
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.
34:43
Thank you for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and share with your friends
34:45
or colleagues who might benefit from the conversation.
34:53
Any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.
34:56
I'd love to connect with you.
34:58
00 p.m.
35:03
Pacific Standard Time. I'll see you next time.
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