Transcript of Why the Setter-Closer Model Still Wins (And How to Build One That Actually Scales)

Most founders think they have a sales problem. They don't. They have a systems problem wearing a sales costume. No real onboarding, no documented process, no playbooks, a sales manager who was just the best rep in the room 6 months ago, and a marketing team optimizing for the cheapest lead instead of the right one. Today I'm sitting down with Josh Troy. Josh has spent over a decade inside high-ticket, High Velocity Sales. He's built and run outsourced sales operations for some of the fastest moving companies in the space, and he thinks about sales the way I do, not as a conversation, but as an operating system. We're getting into the setter closer model, AI in sales operations, the war between marketing and sales, and why the person you call a sales manager is probably 3 jobs you haven't filled yet. This is The Vault Unlocked. Let's unlock it.

Josh, welcome to the show.

What's up, Kayvon?

Well, you know, I'm excited because I know we're going to be talking about something that's obviously very dear to my heart, which is sales, because that's everything I've actually built my entire career on. Uh, but before we go into that, cause I know we're going to get in the nitty-gritty, I just think it's important. Tell us a little bit of who Josh is and where, you know, what you've done to end up where you are today.

Totally. Yeah. And, uh, that's always such a broad question, right? I, it's, there's so many different things I could start with and I don't want to be too long-winded, but I'll kind of tie it together, the thread that's most relevant to this podcast. Uh, but, but real quick before I even do that, like we were just talking about, I just had my first baby. Super excited. Not really taking any calls, but I was like, dude, I'm not rescheduling this podcast with Kayvon because I know, you know, we're going to be able to take this deep. So I'm excited for the content we're going to get into. Anyways, my name is Josh Troy. You know, I've been in sales and high-ticket, high-velocity sales literally my entire career, far over a decade now. I think it's like 12, 13 years or something like that. And, you know, my story really starts off in outbound sales. And so I started my first company when I was 21 years old. Fun fact about me, not really the purpose of the podcast, but I got sober when I was 20 years old. So I've never even had a legal sip of alcohol.

I've been sober for over 13 years now. And, and that's a big part of my story. But, you know, I turned 21, I started my first video production agency. And, you know, I know when you hear video production, there's such a wide range. I wasn't doing these like short little social media reels, we were producing commercials, our average ticket size was between $25,000 to $50,000. Towards the end there, the highest I sold was $300,000 for a 60-second spot. So it was really like high-end, high-value production. And so when I first started that business, first of all, I didn't know anything about marketing. But second of all, I didn't have the money, or I didn't think I had the money. And I, I say that now with some business maturity, because if I knew what I know now about reinvestment, I would I would have grown that company a lot faster and I probably would have started marketing from day one. But at that time it ended up being great because even though I didn't have a budget for, for marketing, um, I had a lot of willpower. I was willing to do whatever it took.

So I was in my mom's garage. I remember it was summertime. It was like 100 degrees outside. I'm freaking stripping sweat. Actually, I'll even tell you this. I usually leave this detail out, but it's fresh in mind since I just had a baby. At that time, uh, I was living with my parents. I just started this business. My, uh, inside the house, my older sister, she had a baby and my mom was helping, you know, kind of raise her. My, my, uh, my sister was a nurse. Anyways, the point is, uh, I was inside the house and the fricking baby was crying all day, so I couldn't make cold calls there. I'd go in the backyard and her dogs would bark the entire time because they were put outside because of baby. So. It was so much chaos. I ended up being in like a shed in her garage, dripping sweat, cold calling. And so all I had was a bunch of willpower and, you know, Google. I didn't even have like ZoomInfo or Apollo or any of these data providers. I would just call straight down, uh, you know, with search queries. And that was how I built that entire company.

I've hung up. I've got hung up on more times than most people have made dials. Yeah. I'm sure you know how that goes, right? Like I have been hung up so many times and, uh, And through something, it was really interesting. Everybody hates cold calling for the most part. And I learned to absolutely love it because it was a very unique superpower of mine. Like there was very few people that could decide that they needed business, pick up the call and find it. And so to me, it became the truest definition of generating money out of thin air. And so, um, to skip through a couple highlights that brought me towards today, uh, I built the company based on outbound, uh, even towards the point of me selling it just to be right-sized. It was a very small transaction. Uh, it was actually actually just a couple of years ago, I already have WFS Group, which is now known as Curvy on Blue. I already had the company and I was pretty far removed from that business. And it was more of a distracting asset than anything. So, uh, I sold that. And even at that time, the number one source of business was still outbound.

And so, uh, built it based on outbound. At that point in time, I realized that digital marketing agencies, uh, they, they ran the media for the ads that we produced. So my thought was if we could make partnerships with them, You know, we'd be able to produce a lot more content because they already have the clients and kind of the value exchange was they said, hey, you know, we want to learn how to do outbound sales. We're marketers. We don't really have the outbound sales engine. A lot of marketing companies were really interested in that. And I said, okay, well, I want to learn direct response inbound marketing because I couldn't even imagine, Kevon, you know how spoiled closers are these days? They get a calendar full of inbound leads.

Yeah. I mean, now I wanted to let you keep going before we get in there, but yeah, you said it yourself. Like back in our day, I'm going to say, even when you said cold calling, we didn't get a list or I don't know what you— I never got a list. Like I had to actually go do the work to find the list. There wasn't internet back then or even AI for sure where you're like, hey, give me the list of the 10 top real estate agents in the, you know, in this local area. Like I was calling on real estate agents and mortgage brokers. I had to come up with a list. I had to dial the list.

Absolutely.

I had to meet them. So when I look at that now, back in the day, people call that outbound cold calling, what you want to call it. I actually call that business development, like depending on how far you take it. Like for me, it was cold call them, book a meeting, get a meeting in person, meet them, market them, close the deal. That's the full cycle, right?

That is 100% right. In fact, like that, When I started selling, and again, we're not talking about decades ago, this is 12, 13 years ago. And it's crazy how much has changed. But when I first started selling, Zoom didn't exist, or maybe it had existed, but I didn't know a single person that like, Zoom was not a thing that people are like, what's a Zoom meeting? Right? Like nobody was on Zoom. And so it was a phone call to an in-person meeting. And my follow-up wasn't just like some virtual blast. It was sending like cookie cakes and, you know, random, thoughtful stuff to try to penetrate the decision makers. But very, very different time.

It is. And so you made that comment like sales reps today, they just getting in, they have no idea. I feel like when we say that, you and I say that we sound like those old farts. Oh, back in the day, I'll tell you, you know, it's so true. Like, I mean, we both run sales agencies and the complaints I get from these salespeople, I just shake my head and I'm like, you have no idea. Like, that's what changed my world. Now the problem with it is I've turned lazy too. Like, I don't like cold calling. I think it's like, why would I cold call when I know how to do digital marketing and drive quality warm leads to a book call? I just think about the reward, the effort versus reward. Is it there or not? But what I do believe in, I'll just say this, is there's nothing better than cold calling. Like, I mean, if you want to get to someone quicker, faster, essentially cheaper, cold calling is where it's at. Like, my original sales trainer, Or say mentor in all sales till this day. He won't even go digital marketing. He tried it for like a year.

He's like, bullshit. He still pure hammers the phones day in, day out, making millions. I mean, this guy's a multi, multi-millionaire. Yeah. Built 3 companies all from the single phone and that's it.

That's crazy. Well, I mean, it's, you know, at that time it's actually funny. I paid a, I do feel like a dinosaur when we talk about this and it's funny because we're, we're young guys relative to this, right? But, uh, I remember I paid a full-stack web developer to build a bot, which was like some automated, uh, system where it would take a keyword in a Google query and then it would, it would run the search results and it would look for certain things on the website. It was basically its own scraper, like a custom scraper. I had to build that and, and I had all these little fancy things. And what's so funny about that is I called it in, in, in artificial, sorry, artificial intelligence lead generation bot. And it, and like, it was funny because AI didn't exist back then and it had nothing to do with AI, but I heard that term somewhere.

Yeah.

That's what I ended up calling it. But anyways, after that, man, it was like, you know, learned direct response, learned inbound marketing, got into, uh, you know, a lot more high ticket, high velocity. And I realized how much faster you could scale if the lead flow component was more predictable. So that's for sure.

Which I love what you just said. The lead component is more predictable.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and you said something interesting too. You said, well, I don't like to do that anymore because it's not leveraged enough for my time. And I think that's exactly it, right? A common— I don't know if you've ever dealt with this— a common question I get is, well, why do you have a setter-closer model? Why don't we just have the closers dialing also? And it's interesting because it all comes down to that question of, well, what is their time worth? And so I build activity models out, right? Financial models show economics, activity models show capacity. And so the question is, what is worth the time for the skillset and the talent and the responsibility set of, you know, the sales reps? And so when you break it down, if you have really good closers, it is not leveraged enough, the dollar per hour activity, it's not leveraged enough for them to be dialing. Plus if they're any good, they're going to fill their calls with their calendar with calls. Now it's this up and down lead flow faucet. It's like rollercoaster lead flow. And so for so many reasons, that what you said exactly that, that's why there's an SDR AE or a setter closer model that works the best.

Well, I mean, that model has been around forever and there's a reason for that. And you just nailed it. I like how you said the activity. If you have your best closer and they're going to take an hour, where do you want them? With the hottest lead or cold calling people, right? We know that answer. Just hearing you speak, I love it. It tells me that you know something called sales operations.

Oh yeah.

When I say sales operations, what does that mean to you?

Oh, interesting. I don't typically define it, but I guess if I did, I would say it's the systems, the processes, the methodologies and the frameworks, the overall orchestration of the revenue motion. And so, you know, when so many people think of sales, they just often talk about what's said on the phone, what's said on the call, maybe objection handling, maybe someone throws in a follow-up or two in the conversation. But when I think of sales operation, it's all the connective tissue. So it's, it's everything from the call models to the sales process design itself, uh, to, you know, lead to close ratio, CRM systems, reactivation campaigns. It's, it's how to be the most efficient and maximize revenue from the leads that you generate, not just what's said on the phone. And there's, there's a whole host of things that are under that term.

There is. And I, and I agree with you. I mean, just, just the operations side of like even the finance side, all the reporting. I mean, everything that go— the dailies, the dollars, the connection rate, the, all of the The things that happen is all underneath that.

Yep.

So when we go in that conversation now, 'cause I know that's kind of your expertise, what are you seeing right now just in today's world, today's marketplace? I mean, even with all the new CRMs, like my favorite CRM, I just logged in the other day 'cause I don't really get into the CRMs anymore where I'm at in my agency. And I, yeah, they have a full AI bot. I've never, it never sounded anything better than I've ever heard in my life. And it's like, and it fully sits there and says, who do you want me to call for you?

Yeah.

I go, okay, with automation, obviously automated email, automated SMS, automated basically dialing, even though we can say, oh, it's not the same as humans. No, it's not. But is every human gonna call every lead? We know that answer.

Right.

I don't care how good your product is. I don't care how good your operation is. You know, If you're at a big scale level, you're not calling every single lead. Now we have bots that can call every single lead. What is there like? What do you even need a salesperson for? That's where I'm looking at going, my God.

Yeah, well, it's an interesting question. And also I'd be super curious with the tool that you— and we could talk offline about— I'm super curious the tool that you're actually using, because in my experience, I have just not found an AI dialer that is that great at all. And I think it depends on the actual the industry and the use case, right? If you have like a really very, very, very low connection rate type of dialing motion or a very low ticket product that doesn't require much trust, like it's more effective. I haven't seen a lot of great use cases, but what I'll, what I'll highlight is what you're saying, which is the fact that the output— so the best AI enablement use cases right now for sales operations are things that, things that massively increase coverage and capacity. And so it creates so much leverage. And so one of my favorite ones that we build is the call analysis, AI-enabled call analysis.

Yeah.

Same exact concept, man, is like you used to, you know, when we were first getting into sales, the only way to get an insight from a sales call was to listen to it. And it's hard because all of everything you want to know is on the sales calls. And so the whole concept of taking that qualitative data and turning it into quantitative touchpoints and data, that's like the most valuable thing. For example, instead of saying, because you're always managing based on statistical significance without 100% coverage, right? If you only listen, let's say, say as an example, you're a sales manager, you have 5 sales reps, 8 calls a day. That's 40 calls a day, 40 hours roughly, maybe worth the calls. You're a sales manager. You have 8 hours in the day and other responsibilities. You'll never listen to 100% of the sales calls. But what AI allows us to do is run all of those. And if you have a proper configuration, you can say things like, out of the last 32 calls, 17 of them gave this objection. Now that's so much more actionable. The feedback loop to marketing is significantly different other than saying in the past, well, out of the couple calls we heard, this came up, but I don't really know if that's the reason that sales are lower right now.

So, um, now what I'll say when I talk about AI call analysis or, you know, the umbrella term call intelligence, I'm not referring to like the Gongs of the world and, you know, uh, all these other solutions out there because, yeah, there's many.

Yeah.

Well, the issue with them is that, uh, really good head start a few years ago, they were super impressive, but I can't even count how many people that I've met that, you know, deployed one of those call intelligence tools and never really used it for anything other than more efficiently scrubbing calls. And so The reason why is because they're all trained on generic LLMs. So it's just, it's comparing and evaluating your call and your process and your tactics to just generic stuff online. So what we do, and really just this year got to the point where, you know, we can do this at a really robust level, is we build out all the co— the custom, uh, context engineering in, in our own AI, uh, call analysis models where now it's like the process is documented, our scorecards are regimented. I mean, It's really like a CRM. It's only as good as the configuration you have. And so that's helping us take things to an entire new level. Now, what does that do for a sales organization? Well, a manager that, let's say, that could only manage 8 reps can now manage 20, as an example.

So you get so much more leverage. That leverage in OpEx, you know, the operational leverage drops to the bottom line. And so those are some of the most exciting use cases for us right now.

Yeah, I love that. So let me ask you this. How do you get— when I say compliance, I'm going to say Compliance on the sales reps, because here's the thing.

Yeah.

The AI, the AI can listen to the call.

Yeah.

The AI can break down the call. The AI, as you know, can send the sales rep an email and a text message and a nice PDF with everything that went wrong on that call. But still there's the compliance of the sales rep to actually open the email, read the PDF, and actually take the training or, you know, want to learn to grow, to bring it to the next call?

Yeah. I mean, you know, we call it adult babysitting for a reason. You know, that's, that's what it, that's what sales management is, man. It's just repetitive, mundane things over and over and over and over again. I mean, to a certain extent, you just have to have consequences in a sales organization. Um, you have to have those. And so if people aren't following process, they're terminated, right? That's one of the short answers. But the more in-depth answer is I have found a long time ago that most sales reps, want to follow process. They do, especially by the way, if you have earned their trust and confidence that you know what you're doing and that the thing you're telling them to do will get them more results, therefore more income. That always is the prerequisite. But if you do that, I am convinced that they want to follow it. So the question becomes, well, why aren't they following it? And what I've learned and what I've observed managing dozens of sales teams and consulting with a lot of different companies is they have so much complexity in their organization. Now let's start with the basics. First off, they don't even have proper onboarding.

They don't even have a training system. They don't— or sorry, training center. They don't have playbooks. They don't have the process documented to begin with. So how can you enforce something that was not standardized to start? So I think it starts with really, really good process playbooks and training. And then the enforcement piece is the sales management motion. And so we call this the rep development motion. And the way it's different than performance management, right? Because like maybe they're performing, but they're not following process stuff. And so the rep development motion, every single week we create what's called a SIP. It stands for a success implementation plan, not to be confused with the PIP.

Yeah.

PIP is typically assigned when someone is not performing. Yeah. The difference is a SIP, they might be doing well, but the theory is, the concept is there's always room for improvement. So the SIP, every rep has that. It's basically an individualized development plan. And every Monday it's kind of reset with what their focus is for that week. And so what I have found is the more specific you can be in the development instruction, the better the results. And what you're talking about right now is a really big thing. Like, I am convinced that sales managers do not know how to develop reps. I mean, 90% plus of them, and most of them are just a good rep that got promoted, right? They don't have any professionalized management training.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so now you're coming into what I say, there's like 3 different really You know, people hire a sales manager not realizing that there's actually 3 buckets that I call them. And number 1 is there's actual true sales manager.

Yep.

There's a sales trainer, which we were talking about before the show. And then there's what I call as a sales coach. And those are very, very 3 different people. And I tell people this, like, oh, I know someone who's all 3. No, no, no, no. Like, do you find me someone who's all 3 of those? Truly all 3 of those? Those are the unicorns. Let's go capture them. Let's bring them in and do studies on them. It's knowing, A, as a sales manager, let's use the umbrella term, which one of those are you truly? And then as a business owner and/or business, knowing what department or what your team needs more of. Now, if you have someone like you, which it sounds like you run a very tight ship of sales operations, let's say, and there's lots of sales and a lot of, handholding through systems and processes and policies, well, maybe you don't need so much of a sales manager. Maybe there is that room for where you need more of a sales coach. 'Cause I don't think AI is ever gonna be a true sales coach, right? So, well, what is a sales coach?

Well, exactly what I was saying, it's coaching the players to be better at their job. A sales coach, like we have an in-house coach. Every single time a sales rep goes to the coach, we'll say, hey, go to Coach Terry. They leave Coach Terry, make a sale. Coach Terry never once talked to them about their sales, never talked about the product, never talked about the service. It was coaching them as the human beings because as you know, sales is direct reflection of the salesperson.

That's it. Oh, 100%. And you bring up a really good topic here. I never called it the sales coach specifically, but, but like we have a corporate trainer as an example in addition to the sales managers. And one of the, this is actually one of the biggest topics that I like to discuss with potential people that, it, you know, want to outsource sales because in marketing it's so commonly understood. Nobody even thinks they're going to build a marketing team and hire one guy or, you know, one girl, one person to run marketing. Nobody thinks that. They know it's a graphic designer, it's a media buyer, it's a funnel builder, it's a copywriter, it's a lifecycle marketer, email marketer. There's so many different specialties, but for some reason they'll look at a sales team or a sales organization and they'll say, Let's hire a sales manager. And it's like, there are so many different functions and responsibilities. Um, and by the way, that's why there's so many failed sales manager hires because the playbook, the responsibility set to begin with is completely incorrect. Yeah.

Right.

We, we break it down to the core 4. We call, uh, for a sales manager, we call it call analysis, rep develop— or sorry, call analysis, pipeline management, performance management, and training center optimization. Because training centers were all the leverage of everything. you know, comes into and then the thread through them all is rep development, right? But then we have recruiting, then we have sales enablement, then we have training, right? We have, we have so many different things that actually come together.

And then you also have systems inside, like, you know, systems and then the RevOps team, right?

That actually— Yeah.

Then you have to have numbers and then you got to understand even the nuances, like How many days is it taking for someone to book a call? And what happens when it gets to a point, like for us, we know after 2 days the no-show rate goes to 50%. So who's watching that number all day? And then what are the triggers that you need to do to prevent that number? Because people just think it's more salespeople, but that's not necessarily the truth. So—

Dude, I'll give you an unpopular opinion, and I think you'll agree with this. The funny thing about what we do in outsourced sales is because there's a, you know, there's a premium on how we charge it. I think the misconception is that we're way more expensive than doing it in-house. And the funny thing is, if they really compare the accurate numbers, there's no way they could do what we actually do in-house for less. We have the efficiencies, we have the economies of scale, and we can have these fractional players where they're full-time FTEs for us, but they only need 5% of their time on that account. Because what typically happens is, oh, I could hire a sales manager for less than that. Well, yeah, that's a very small piece of the puzzle. And what about everyone else?

Well, then I always go, okay, so who's going to be the hiring manager? Who's gonna be the interviewer? Exactly. Who's gonna be your system, your rev ops person? Who's gonna be the manager assistant for the sales manager? Okay, who's gonna be the trainer? Who's gonna be the— it's just like, it goes on and on and on, right? I deal with that, as you know, the agency, we deal with that all the time. And it's interesting because they don't see all that. They don't see like, I'm basically your HR department, your recruiter, your developer, your sales trainer, your sales manager. And as you know, you're probably sitting on the marketing calls. So now I'm operating as a sales director and a CRO for your company.

And even accounting, dude, it goes around finance, everything.

Yeah.

Like finance, accounting, compensation accounting is like the most challenging type of accounting. Maybe the one exception is like a really complex business that has really in-depth WIP schedules, you know, work in progress. Complicated stuff, but typically sales compensation accounting is one of the most challenging. And, you know, we do all of that. So anyways, we could go back into it, but I just, I had to say that because when you're on the concept, there are so many different hats to run a proper sales function and everybody groups it together and says sales manager.

Yeah. And it's just one of many of a sales department. Right. So let me ask you this, cause I know you work and this is, this is the fight that I always have. And I actually try not to have it. It just seems like it's always there in the business for some reason is the sales versus marketing, the MQL versus SQL. What's your thoughts on that?

We have a slide on it. I always like to say if we have a slide on it in our engagement deck, it shows how important it is. 'Cause it's like, it's literally an expectation going into the engagement of like, hey, you know, working with our clients, There's a very clear line drawn in the sand. You know, one of the most expensive things is the gap between marketing and sales. We have to have a really strong feedback loop and we have to have a clear line of separation. So it's super important. I'll also say that we have something we call the Golden Formula, which is lead flow times sales performance equals revenue. The importance of that is there's only two variables to get to the desired outcome, and each side has to own their variable. In a really, you know, regimented way. And we have to be on the same page with the accountability. So there's a few things that I've found that make a significant difference in smoothing out that relationship. And by the way, most of these big problems— you ever heard of the difference between problems and polarities, by the way?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Explain to us.

Well, you know, I love this. I read it in some book. I can't remember what, but it made a big difference to me because I was always frustrated solving the same things. I'm like, why isn't it fixed yet? And I read in some book that problems are things that can be resolved and come to a final state. Polarities are things that will always be there and you'll always have to manage for the optimal outcome. So, so many of these concepts we talk about in sales operations and the one you brought up between marketing and sales, it's just a polarity. It will never go away. So how do you manage it for the optimal outcome? And there's a handful of things that I found that make a really big difference. One of the first things is, uh, remove the word lead quality from your vocabulary because it's not helpful for anybody. It's very subjective. Nobody knows what to mean, what it means, and it's not actionable. If you say, oh, the lead quality is low, how and what do we do about it and how do we correct it on the marketing side? Right. So for sales, we take a lot of ownership.

I don't want anybody to say lead quality. Now you can address lead quality, but it needs to be a specific thing backed by a lot of data. So the second thing we have is what we call a validation sequence. Validation sequence is a process of exactly how it sounds, validating lead flow or a new process or a new offer. So when we come into a brand and they have a new offer or service or whatever, it needs to be validated. And so the levels of the validation sequence are number one, lead quality, right? Now, again, we don't use lead quality like poor lead quality, but as a topic, we need to validate that. So in other words, do we have the right ICP on the call? If we have the right ICP and we're talking to the right people, is the sales rep performing? So sales performance is number two. This is where everyone gets stuck though. A lot of the times they'll have good avatars, good prospects, pretty good sales reps, and they're still not getting the conversions that they want and they get stuck. Well, at that point, number 3 is pitch design.

You have to transition and iterate through multiple versions of pitch design. I have sold so many things in my career where nothing about the offer changed, but the way that we pitched it did. And that's what made all the difference. So you have, uh, lead quality, sales performance, pitch design. Which could also mean process, like tweaking the sales process. And the last thing is offer design. If you've really exhausted those options, you might not have an irresistible offer that's resonating to the, to the degree that you want, right? So, so two more things on this topic. So, so first of all, remove the word lead quality. Second of all, run a validation sequence. Third of all, use a validation matrix. So the sequence is the concept and the methodology of how we do that. A validation matrix is how we document this. Because it's all about data. So we'll take that concept, lead quality, rep performance, pitch design, and offer design. We break that out. It's a series of columns in a spreadsheet and they'll grade a few dozen calls with every single one of those touchpoints so we can get data confidence on this is the thing, right?

It's like, hey, we just analyzed 30 calls. 25 of them were actually good calls and pretty decent conversations, but half of them had this same objection when it came to the pitch. And the thing that blocked them moving forward. So it gives you that clarity. That is super helpful. And sharing that information with marketing makes all the difference because it gives them the visibility, right? Like it's not— I used to say a long time, like, why is it just a sales manager's job to listen to sales calls? Why doesn't marketing do that? Because it's the same data that they need. And there's two parts of a sales call, rep insights and lead insights. And they need the lead insights to know how to optimize the campaigns. So since I don't manage marketers, this is a process that we follow to give them the data that they need to make the right decisions. And the last thing, Kevon, I know it's a long answer, but you said it's how important it is. The last one, man, is a form. You have some sort of disposition form in the actual CRM. You have a, a non-subjective way that you qualify a lead that the team has to be trained on based on some simple criteria.

And after every single call, they fill out that disposition form in the CRM. So now you again have quantitative data linked to actual contacts that marketing knows now how to optimize for it. And so that kind of combination of things, it's not a problem that will be resolved. It's a polarity, but you'll do way, way better with it. Yeah.

But everything you're saying is like, sounds all great. You're assuming that marketing's doing that and taking that and listening, right? So the challenge is I find if marketing is trying to get, for instance, oh, cheapest book call, 100%.

That's, that is a process.

People are like, ROAS is not the, like, like, like marketers can cheat ROAS so easily and like literally harpoon the back end of the business.

Well, so let's stem off of that though. After we just talked about the process and kind of the best practices, now you actually have SQLs. So if you have a smart marketing team and if you don't, you have to communicate this stuff to them. They can start optimizing the media buying and the campaigns based on the SQLs, not the cheapest lead. And so if you're optimizing for SQLs, or once you get enough data, you're optimizing for actual buyers. Now you're going to be paying more for people that are a lot more qualified. And so, um, but listen, we don't, we, in our company, we say control the controllables. We're not media buyers, but since lead flow times sales performance equals revenue, it's our most important relationship. And frankly, if there's a media buyer that we know, cause we've done this for a long time, if we know that they suck, We gotta bring somebody in that's advanced that knows how to run this the right way.

Yeah, I agree with you. I was gonna say, if you believe this or not, I was at, and I love this 'cause this was at a market, I was at a marketing conference and a marketer on stage said this and I was like, I wish every one of my clients was here. 'Cause it's different when a salesperson says it, as you know. But he said, that's what he said. He stood on stage, he said, listen, if your sales team has to do marketing over the phone, marketing isn't doing their job. If marketing can't get the sale, like, you know, can't produce leads, quality leads for the sales teams, basically like you just said, the offer product is not doing their job.

I'll tell you what, man, I agree 100%, but I have a couple of caveats to add, but I agree 100%. It's so important. Now, before I say what the caveat is, one of the most frustrating parts about that, it's really hard to explain to people why it's not the same when they come to the call with little marketing. Like, because, you know, what do the clients say? Well, then just communicate the stuff that the ads would have said, or why don't you just spend more time with them, work a longer sales process, do XYZ. It's— there's something about it that is so hard when you start right back here and now you're spending so much time with them just to get to the point to actually have the sales conversation and dialogue. But it's frustrating for people because to them they're like, it's the same person just a little bit less awareness, why can't you just increase awareness? And now it's the same thing, but it's hard because of a concept called peak interest, right? Peak interest is super important, and that's why speed to lead is so important in sales. Peak interest is— and peak buying state is what you want somebody in to have a sales conversation.

It deteriorates quickly. So if somebody is not in that peak interest state, they don't have the level of awareness, the interest dies off. As the sales rep is in the process of trying to take them there. I think a lot of people fundamentally don't understand how marketing actually works. It's not like they saw one ad or one video most of the time that got them to that level of awareness. It's been over a period of time that they've been conscious of it to make it really a good lead, right?

Yeah.

So even if we do that on the sales call, it doesn't completely solve the problem. So that's the frustration. Here's the caveat I wanted to mention. Um, You're correct. It is true. It's the most important thing. But we have a training called 10 Steps to Wires from Strangers. That's like our proprietary selling methodology, right? And we have a step called Step 0. And Step 0 is exactly the topic you're talking about, where it's like, hey, in an ideal world, yes, our conversions will be much lower if marketing doesn't do their job. But if it hits your calendar, We're not flushing leads down the toilet. No, you got to do the very best you can. And so step 0 is the concept of doing that marketing piece, basically increasing level of awareness and then taking them into a sales process. It's how to modify our process to take a lead that's less aware or not fully ready.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So what are you seeing, some things in the marketplace today? You know, I like— it's changed. The marketplace is changing a little bit. I personally have seen, for instance, no-shows are, you know, just on average, I've talked to a lot of people, they're seeing a little bit more increase in no-shows.

Yeah.

Just, I think the market is just where it's at today, just with everything going on. But what are you seeing, some things sticking out right now when it comes to whether the lead, I'm not going to use the word lead quality, but the leads that are showing up and or the conversations that are happening, the offers that you're working on, is there any common threads that you're seeing that's changing from the last couple years?

Yeah, you know, funnels and sales topics kind of come in and out like clothing trends, right? I think you and I may have talked about that once before. You know, it was like in 2020, VSLs were all the rage, dude. And you're getting $25K one-call closes and it was a surge and a perfect storm of so many things, right? Ad costs were at an all-time low. Demand was at an all-time high because people were staying at home, they didn't have much to do, there was fear and uncertainty with their current job. Like, there's so many different factors that made a lot of people just want to spend more money online, um, because we're talking about remote sales operations, of course. And so, uh, one big thing, obviously, ad costs. If you look at it with Meta, and this is one of the frustrating things, they're a public company, they need to continue to increase their own, you know, what is it, shareholder value.

So you don't have a year where ad costs are lower.

So one thing that's been challenging, which is a difference, is that people are paying way more for the same leads and the same opportunity. And so I think that, uh, it's a much more important or more attention needed on the efficiency. You can be pretty inefficient in prior years, call it 2020 to 2022, the end or early 2023. You could do really well being pretty inefficient. And I think that companies are really realizing like, that's not going to cut it. Uh, we need lead to close rates to increase. We need reactivation campaigns. We need really strong setter motions. And we have a big focus on expansion revenue, which is, you know, upsells and ascension for existing customers to be able to increase LTV, which also helps with company profitability. So that's a big, big change. Uh, we work with our clients on rolling out expansion revenue. Because most of the industry and most of these companies are so focused on front-end profitability. It's like, if they don't, it's feast or famine, you know, if they don't make all their money on a front-end ROAS, they're screwed. And I just don't like that business model. We like to give our clients a lot more sustainability.

So we help build out that backend and expansion revenue. That's one big theme in itself. The other theme I would say, and these are the two that come to mind for me right now, is, uh, trust is a real big thing again. And so the trust is the trust, man. And like, Credibility and authority is very different. We're leaning a lot heavier on sales enablement and conviction assets is what we call them in the actual sales process. People want a lot more proof. They want a lot more time with you and they want to know that you're the real deal. And so I actually believe that a lot of the company, because there's different philosophies out there. I've always sold with what we call a closing deck. Always for 13 years, I've always used a closing deck and a closing deck is an actual deck.

Like you actually would share your screen Wow. You see, we—

almost for almost 13 years, Kayvon, and I love it.

So, and I'm going to say you've done probably, if not, I mean, I'm going to assume over hundreds of millions of dollars like I have in my agency.

Yeah.

I think this is really interesting, right? Like this is where I want people to hear this is here's an amazing, you obviously you have an amazing operation. I was actually talking to someone the other day and I was like, there's only 2 people that I know that run a good operation and you are one of them. them.

Thank you, man. I appreciate that.

Two others I would say outside, obviously I would say myself and another group, but it's interesting because I've done, like we've done over $500 million in the last like 6, 7 years. Never once used a deck. I don't use the deck and yet you, same numbers, you use a deck. So I just tell people it's not, there's no perfect sales process. There's just, it's auto, it's there. It's what works. It's what I tell people, it's what works and what feels good for the salespeople.

Dude, we call it Jedi mind tricks. Our chief sales officer, my partner Ry Guy, he always says, he says, it's Jedi mind tricks. Whatever you believe is going to work is the thing that does. And so I totally agree with that. But here's the funny thing too. There's so many different ways to skin the cat. You seem like somebody like myself that always wants to be the best. Like that's why we're obsessed with the details. So dude, let's be honest here. I'm sure it's the same for you. You know how many times over the years I've questioned, should we get rid of the deck?

Yeah.

You've probably considered at times, should we use a deck?

100%. I was going to 100%. I was talking to someone the other day. I was talking to my manager the other day and I'm like, do you think we should turn this more into a SaaS sale? Like where you do a demo? And, and he was like, no, it's not what we do. And I'm like, good point. Okay.

But yeah, let me share. This is interesting. Let me share it because I even know Cole Gordon. I've talked to him about this. He does, he teaches no deck at all. I mean, like in his training, it's like, they teach like the Google Doc bullet point thing. Now I agree. Anytime I get into the conversation of don't use a sales deck, I agree with all the points they make, but then I say, but why don't you still use a sales deck and not do any of those things? So the most common thing to simplify it is they say, don't use a sales deck because it's the quickest way to create objections because you'll talk people out of deals. Because it seems too salesy, because it's a little bit too fabricated, because you can't flow organically. It's a little bit too rigid. It's all the same stuff. But for us, we have a very simple deck. You do not want to have too much content because I agree all of those things. And we practice something called pitch personalization. And so pitch personalization is how to use the same sales presentation but go through it and pitch it differently to every prospect you talk to.

And that's all about just tying back and anchoring to the core desires and the dominant buying motives in the discovery. So it's the same stuff. We just do it with the deck and there's very little content. It's minimal. So we can kind of share the narrative that we want on it. So we have a certain way we do it. But so, so when people say don't use a sales deck because of these things, I say I agree with those things. Therefore I use a sales deck and I make sure to not do that. Yeah. I want to make another comment, but speak to that real quick.

Oh, I wouldn't. I think, I think what you're doing is incredible. Like, I think it's great. Like, I have not— like, it comes down to like What you just said is like the conviction and it works. Like if it's working, like I would say, if it's working, why wreck it, right? So you, from the sounds of it, you guys have nailed obviously a sales presentation that works and it's personalized per, you teach it to every one of your reps. So your reps are coming in and they know this is what we're going to sell. So when they show up, they're not having that belief that, oh, this is salesy. Oh, there's going to be objection. They have the belief said, this is what needs to sell. And thus it works. I was going to use an example of even one that's even more minute than deck, no deck, right? Because that's a pretty big, you know, a big fundamental change.

Yep.

Price before offer or price after offer.

Yeah, right. That's a whole other one. And show every price point or just lead with one and have some pocket drops. There's so many things.

Let's, let's, let's, so I've, we've, I've mastered the one-call close. That's what, like more what we do. Now obviously today it's maybe 2 calls now, but you know, ideally it's the 1-call close. And when it comes to price, it's 1. You don't offer, I know there's all, like we had an expert come in and offer 3, our closing rate tanked, tanked. 1, we offer exactly what the price is. And then after, if there's nothing left, then you go, okay, suppose, can't make any promises. Suppose we can, I don't know, turn this into a couple, you know, monthly payment plan. Would that make a world of a difference for you? Right. Then I'm going to introduce that because here's what I believe. Maybe it's what I believe, right? And what I believe is the energy put out. Sales reps will always find a way to go to the cheapest price. You give them an option, they'll go to the cheapest price, especially rookie salespeople, right? And like beginning medium salespeople.

Absolutely.

So I always, one price, it's what it is. It's clear. It's that. Now, Now, when it comes to presenting, I don't do the value stack. It's here. And I've tested this personally for me, and I tell my sales reps, if you're so gung-ho that you have to put the value, then the price, go. I'm not gonna change your juju in Rack of Sale. But I can tell you right now, I've tested both ways multiple times, and I'm price first. And I'll tell you why. Price first. Then I go in and here's what you can expect. And then you just a little bit of details, anchoring everything to obviously the dreamland and where they are to where they want to go. And then you shut up and you, and you just, you shut up and you wait for their response. Now, why I like doing the price first is because in their brains, as they hear this shock, oh, $20 grand, and you're saying, oh, you're gonna get X and you're gonna get Y, they can start justifying that a little bit to themselves. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, that makes sense. So then when you get to the price, they can put that, like they can actually put the value stack themselves instead of me showing it.

I have the ickies, like I use the word ickies, like I can't handle because I know it, like the value stack, oh, you're going to get this and it's valued at $3,000. Like that works on webinar and on stage.

Yeah.

You do that one-on-one. Oh, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.

No, I agree. We don't value stack at all, assigning a value. Yeah. Yeah, listen, here's the thing with what you're— you're— the subject you're talking about. For me, makes no difference. I would sell both of those. Now, you know this more than anybody, right? This is what I've experienced. There are some things that I personally may do differently on a sales call, but I have to optimize for what's going to work at scale. Yeah, that's like so important because like I'm not my entire sales force, you know? Like obviously we have a lot of sales reps, and so There, like, there's ways that I might do things. And then I think, how hard is that going to be to teach and scale and duplicate, et cetera. So, uh, I like what you're saying. And I've played with all of this as well. I like what you're saying about price first and then justify the value. For us, what I've just, what I've landed on is with the sales team, the way that we feel for the most part is that when you go through the entire offer and can tie them down on the actual thing itself before price, Now it's, it gives so much more clarity that like the price is the objection, right?

So I think it's a way to separate like, hey, let's tie down on each piece here. And if they're bought in and then they object, it's like so clear to me that it's the price.

So I love this. Here we go. So the way I eliminate that completely in my sales process is before I even go to price, before I even go new product, I ask a very simple question. How committed are you to changing XYZ? Not, I wanna be very clear, not committed to buying my product. Right, right. How committed are you to actually changing the situation you are or how, you know, how important is it? So that eliminates all the objections, every objection except price.

Here's what I find though, in, in, cuz we have commitment questions as to as well, and we do that right before we transition into the pitch. See, this is fun, man. We got to do this stuff more often. We do that too, right before we transition into the pitch. What I find though is they say, well, I am committed to solving it. I'm just not convinced that this is the solution because they're committing to something without having any of the details. And I know you specifically said it's not to the program.

Yeah.

But my point is, well, that's the thing I want them to commit to is like the actual details of this program, of this offer. Now, again, to go back to my main point here, I think that you could be like Like to me, this point can be successful either way. It's, well, we've proven that you and I—

Well, that's what I'm saying. This is why I'm happy about this conversation is like all these people, it's almost, I want to like, you know, we talked about these sales trainers selling this bullshit. Like all these people saying, I have the secret formula. There is no secret formula to sales. There is formula to sales, but it changes based off of the target, based off of the product, based like there's so many factors. And there's a process, but like, there's no secret sauce. There's, there's more, as you said.

This goes back to what we started the podcast with when we said, like, we're laughing at like sales trainers, not laughing or mocking, like there's talented people. But when we're talking about the difference, sales trainers are talking about like objection handling and discovery questions and all this stuff. This is still under the SalesOps umbrella, what we're talking about right now. It's all the specific process refinement in the order and the sequence of how you do things that can really change and increase close rates. Right. And so, so this is the stuff I obsess over and we just have so much data that we can validate things so much faster than any individual sales team. Now, back to the point, though, real quick on the, on, you know, talking about price point, we do a ton of training on what we call a funding waterfall. And our number one metric that we measure a rep on is CDPBC, which is collected dollars per booked call. We don't look at close rate. We don't look at gross revenue because those are both manipulated.

We call it AAV. APV, average appointment value. But yeah, 100%.

That's the actual same exact thing.

You just gave away the secret sauce of any sales organization right there. It is. That is the, like, and nobody knows that. Close rate means nothing. It's the dollars collected per every, every book call.

Assigned booking. Assigned. Exactly.

Whether they showed up, whether they canceled, whether they're good lead, bad lead, dog got sick, someone ate my homework. It, if it landed on your calendar, it's being counted.

100%. So it's return on rep, it's ROAS on an individual level. And so that's, and by the way, there's, there's, dude, we could do a whole podcast on that one metric. Cause it's like, what do you do when that goes down? And what's the reason? And what rep do you look at it? Like there's so much to it. But what I was going to say is in collected dollar per booked call, it takes everything into consideration. Like we said, show rate, close rate, revenue, average sales price, collection rate. And so you have to train and optimize for all those metrics. And so, and it's, it's, it's a little bit different than just like sales training. And so when you talk about price point, The way I'd finish that is, well, now you have to talk about collection rate and funding waterfall because so many sales reps, like you said, if you have pocket drops, we call them, which are down sales that aren't initially showed, or if you have payment plans, you know, and ways to break it up, the amateur reps, the not best reps, the difference is they drop to those almost immediately and they don't know how to position around it.

And so we train the order, we call it a funding waterfall, of how you maximize collections and how you maximize the average sales price. So regardless if you do price before pitch or after pitch, now it's like, well, what is the process to collecting the money? And I think that is like a really heavily missed thing as well.

Explain that. What do you mean the missed thing, the process to collecting the money?

So what I mean is, uh, that's interesting. All right. So, so what I mean is, let's say that it's, it's, uh, you have payment plans, you offer, it's a $10K price. or sorry, let's say it's $8K painful or it's $12K spread over 6 months. And you could do a full pay, a 2-pay, a 3-pay, or a 6-pay. Let's say those are your options stack that you have. What I'm suggesting is that the first time people get met with resistance of like, wow, that's too expensive for me. They don't have a regimented strategy of how they go through those things. And so all of a sudden, I literally watched a call today. Uh, I needed to give an opinion on something. And he literally said, I mean, it went from this guy, I fully believe, should have been a full pay, and this person put him in a 12-month payment plan and there's no strategy around it. And so how do you go about that talk track to maximize collection rate upfront without blowing out a deal or making it awkward? There's a lot of strategy in that.

Yeah, yeah, there is. I mean, I've said my strategy is I don't talk about any other prices except the until it's near the— until like you're about— they're about to hang up. Like, you know what I mean? Like, what if—

but what if— that's my whole point though. What if they say that they need a payment plan? Like, right after you present price, you show them it's $8K and they say, oh, there's no way I could afford that upfront.

Okay, well, before, before we go into that, then let me ask you, if, if, if you had the $8K, would you be comfortable moving forward? Yes or no? Okay, so there's nothing about the product. Right? So get—

eliminate objection handling to start with. Eliminate.

Well, I don't call that objection handling. I call that eliminating, eliminating all the objections. Like eliminate all the bullshit that they could say. So now it's just price. And then that's when I— it's a little different than I do. And I go, hmm, I can't make any promises here, but suppose, I don't know, I mean, would you be comfortable spending $2,000 a month so that you can XYZ XYZ? And then you just hold. That's the second drop, right? Like, so whatever the second drop and you hold and they might go, ah, it's a lot. I go, okay, well let me ask you, what would be comfortable to you?

Let them come up with it.

Right. And then obviously if it's like, you know, too cheap and you're like, well listen, you know, you figure that out. But yeah.

So what you're saying is very similar to how we do it. My point is exactly that though. What we're talking about right now is very often missed.

Yeah, 100%. They just— Because the sales reps don't care. Like we're talking about, see, we're two seasoned sales reps. Done this, we've had our 10,000 hours, right? Yeah, I totally, I totally hear you. And then the idea though, this is what's— so let's, let's actually take that because this is actually very important because we run sales teams. You're running sales teams at volume. Well, how do you solve for that? Well, very simple. A, what you have right now is AI call analyzer, which was one of the triggers when X happened. What happened? You know what I mean? So like right away they get the training. Hey, you're not doing that. The training goes to the manager. Manager knows John John is keeps fumbling, fumbling. Hey John, we'll keep working with you, working with you. Hey, you're fired because you're not learning, you're not growing, you're clearly not, right? Like, so we do have you, obviously I know you have those things in place, but here's the coolest thing. Like you said, it's never been easier than ever to have these things in place.

Ever. Right. Well, so here's the thing though, going back to that one, even one more step. So what you said is, and I know you're just giving an example, right? Like there's so many examples we could give, but what you said works really well if you only have payment plans. But then we have what we call the funding waterfall. So these days, pretty much every offer, or if they don't, they should, but pretty much every offer has a bunch of different financing sources.

Yeah, funding.

Yeah. They have the pay in full and then they have the—

You said the wrong word though.

What'd I say?

You said financing.

Funding?

We don't, people finance their cars. Okay. We fund people's dreams.

Okay, right on. I love that.

Yeah. I tell them, I literally like, that's like, so if they use the word financing, to get like when we used to use Gong, for instance, Gong is— I think you and I both know what that's about, right? One of the words was like, if they use financing trigger, yeah, financing actually triggers, especially the lower conscious people that we were speaking to. Sorry to say that, like these are a little bit lower conscious. Like they think financing, they in their brains, they were always raised, oh, financing is bad. You don't, you don't take government, you know?

Right, right, right. No, I get that. That's again, Jedi mind tricks, right? Because like, I agree that those things can make a difference. The wording doesn't bug me that much. It's like when people say, never say the word contract, say agreement.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

To me, I'm like, I've never lost a deal in my life because I called it a contract.

It's great to say contract. Yeah, yeah. Or you never even say agreement. You say a simple agreement. I'm just going to send you a simple agreement. Easy. No issues. Right.

Exactly. So, you know, I agree with what you said. And I also— sorry for saying a thing, uh, it's not to be rude, but yeah, some of the, some of the lower sophisticated avatars, and I don't say that to be rude, there's just people in different situations and we respect that. But some of them do have those triggers that are, that are more important. You have to be a little more careful with them. But, um, but what I was saying was, so funding your dreams options, you'll have to pay in full cash pay, right? And let's say they have, you know, we won't, we won't name our sponsors. I'm joking, but we won't say the names, but let's say it's like funding option 1, funding option 2, funding option 3. And then if they can't qualify for any of those, then it's in-house financing or payment plans. Right.

Yeah. Are you going to the, are you going to the big party next week in Miami for one of yours?

I got in, I did get invited to that and it sounded really fun, but I just had the baby. So I'm with you too.

I want to go, but to fly from our side over over to Florida for one night just doesn't make sense to me.

Exactly, man. I probably would go though, if I didn't have the little, the little guy here. But, but anyway, so, so you have this stack, right? And you have to prioritize them based on different things. And typically it's whatever will net the most amount of money for the client. That's what you want, right? For the business. And so if you have those options though, well then, you know, there's other options depending on what you're selling. Some things would be sort of inappropriate because it would just seem out of place. Days. But then you have credit cards, we call them ZIC. Yeah, zero interest credit cards. Yeah, you have, uh, HELOCs, right? Uh, stock accounts. So you have all the different things where they can liquidate money. And so if you have all these options on how to find money as a closer, when somebody says I can't afford it, the question is, you literally don't have the money, or it's like not in the bank account we're talking about right now? So you have to do an open wallet it and have the conversation to figure out where is the money, how would they find it before you just drop into.

And so I cannot tell you how many times we just will get a zero interest credit card and they're a piff in a couple of days.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But again, in hopes that they obviously have, you know, good credit, everything, right. Is a massive one on that.

So, and that's, and that's the importance of the funding waterfall, because if they don't have the right credit and they can't qualify for the zero interest credit cards, then what's your next option? That's probably the prime lender that will you know, that will qualify high credit but slightly below.

Yeah. The credit. So, so yeah, yeah, yeah.

You have to know which order to consistently go through and you train the reps on that. So it's like clockwork every single time other than just going up expensive, uh, 3-pay, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we, I tell my, I, I mean, I tell my clients now, like, because of the options of credit cards and all the options we have, I tell 'em don't do it now in-house. Fine. If you're doing in-house financing, max 3 months.

100%. We are not a fan of long financing either.

Now you're collecting. Why would you in-house when someone else is willing to give their money up? So this goes to though why I'm out of getting out of my business here, right? Is in going to different clients. I'm done. And I'm just saying, I don't, like, I am done working with clients that are selling to people that are in that position where they can't even afford $5,000, $8,000. Like, get in the business of helping winners win more.

The conversations are so much better and easier.

Easier.

Oh, absolutely. And like, even in our training on funding, we train on the difference between like somebody that like needs help getting creative and somebody that would actually put them in a poor financial position.

Well, yeah, that's a whole different story.

I mean, that's the whole last dollar rule. Like we're not trying to, we have a couple of funny lines. We even say on the calls to kind of soften the mood, but we say like, hey, if it's going to take the cheese off your macaroni, you know, if it's going to turn off the hot water, this isn't for you. So like, yeah. So we're not doing it for sure.

I mean, if you're not ready to pay the rent next month, like this This is, you know, it's not for you. And then I tell, I don't know, I tell my sales guys, there's so much power in saying no. You don't get paid for it, but I will tell you there is so much power in that. And that power you bring to the next conversation to the person that should be saying yes. And you watch what happens.

It creates, it's the mental frame, the posture that they can hold knowing that at the end of the day they can hold that. That's all the posturing that they need.

And I even tell them too, and if you sell somebody to financing and they get denied, That's a sale in my books. Like, you know what I mean? That's nothing that you're—

I'm so surprised slash happy you said that. We actually created a term we call the technical close. And so what that— we track it separately now where if somebody closed a deal, but the— they got rejected for financing, we track that data separately to say their effective close rate would've actually been X. And that's another thing, the going back to the conversation with marketing for the feedback loop.

Well, yeah. Like, look at all—

oh, you want X ROAS? We could have had had that if the leads were better.

100%. And I love it because at that point, like, and I told them, I always say this to the sales, because if they're, if the client has an issue, you better believe I'm gonna have your back. Because if you had sat on the call, convince them to buy, then convince them go outside their comfort zone to put in their Social Security number into some website that they don't even know, you press enter, and then you went through the whole process, they submitted the paperwork, and then they got denied, that's not on I don't care what anybody says, that's a marketing problem. Absolutely.

That's a marketing problem. And so we have a separate tab that tracks all of that. Yeah.

And I don't do that. I love that. Like actually what you're like, I thought you were gonna say, my brain went to, and maybe every 5, what'd you call it?

The— The technical close.

The technical close.

'Cause they technically closed them, but they couldn't—

I almost think it was like, hey, for every 5 technical close, you get a little bonus or something like that. Like, you know what I mean?

Like, 'cause here's why though, there's 2 things. So first of all, so helpful for marketing, like, and the client too. Like a lot of what we do, Kevon, is cover our ass, right? And it's like, I want to, and by the way, like if the data's against me and it's accurate, I got to live with that. That's what it is.

Oh, absolutely.

But if we have that detailed of data, they need to see it and they need to know what I stand by. But the other thing outside of marketing and client optics, it's dude, it's so important for the sales reps because now when we talk to a sales rep, instead of them complaining about, oh, financial capability, it's like, I was like, dude, you didn't even get a technical close. Like they bailed out before you even talked about money. How can you? Yeah. What do you mean financial capability? You don't even know for sure. Cause you didn't take them there. So it solved a lot of problems for us by measuring this whole technical close metric.

Yeah. I think it's, I think it's, I love it. Like I love the fact that you're going that nitty gritty. And again, I could tell that you're, as why you said you love sales operations, your data, you're more of a data scientist kind of brain. And every little nuance matters and the levers, these are all little levers and they do matter. And I do love that you can take that. It's just a safety net with the client, but you can also take that back out to marketing and be like, hey, you know, and then the reality is this, how many of those actually happen, right? Like when you think about 500, 600 booked calls a month, like 10, 20 of those, it's the significance not there. If it's a lot, I personally would There's a marketing problem. But yeah, personally. Yeah. That's it.

That's when you start the conversation.

I just know, because when you're on a good product, like I've been on good, like we, one of my clients right now, we're doing about 2.5 a month. Like there's no ever object, the close is easy. Like we, I don't even need to have great salespeople. And that's the biggest thing too. Yeah. I was going to mention this is when marketing is done right, sale, you don't need a 10 outta 10 closer. Yeah. And you don't want to build a business out of 10 outta 10 closers.

Right. That's a scary business to be in. They call that hero selling. If you're a hero seller, it's gonna be impossible to scale cuz you just need these unicorns to be able to close the lead types. Exactly.

That's not where you want to be. So I always tell people like a good business, it's, it's a mix. It's a mix. The marketing's good and like, and sales isn't hard. If sales is hard, like it's a grind, there's something going on. And it could be the sales process for sure. Could be the salesperson. But I'm saying if all of those things have been checked out, truly checked out, then, you know, so then I always say this. So I had one client. Oh, you're getting me going now, man. I had this one client. He asked—

wait, well, hold on, pause real quick. Just a quick line. It goes back to the slides again we were talking about. So I have a slide that says a pretty good sales rep with great systems will beat a great sales rep with bad systems any day.

Yeah, 100%.

It's because exactly what we're talking about.

100% agree with you. 100% agree with you. Is, and what you say, a pretty good rep a rep with great systems will outbeat a great rep with poor systems. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. The only way that works is if you're in the one in which you and I, if they're, if they're you and me, you and I don't need systems to be great. But here's the challenge with that. You and I, we don't go and become salespeople. We go and build business.

Exactly.

Exactly. Right?

So I couldn't agree with more. But what I was saying was one of the challenges I saw was, We had a client where like we built like a 100-person sales team for them, right? And the leads were just, they promised they would get better and they were not great, right? And then they start kept saying, oh, your guys suck. And then I started thinking maybe our guys do suck. We gotta go back and like, okay, what is going on? Our guys would leave, they go on other people's accounts and they go become the top closers on those accounts. And it happened not once, not twice.

We've had it internally for ourselves. A client's all pissed that this rep can't close a deal. Well, we're like, well, they're a great rep. We put them on a different offer of our own and they crush it.

Yeah.

Now, now, by the way, some of that to just take some ownership is not all reps sell all offers equally. Well, I was just going to say, yeah, like, but, but let's, let's assume that it was the right ICP. So we call it ICP in hiring, not ideal client profile, ideal candidate profile. So you have to have the right hiring avatar for the business, but let's say it was the right fit. It still happens exactly what you said, where it's It's like they're not performing that well, but then they go crush it somewhere else. And it really does tell you a lot about the offer and the marketing. And it happens time and time again, man.

And also the closer though. Like, so I'll tell you a story that happened with me.

Yeah.

And this is where I was like, and you know, when my earlier days when I was closing, I was on a couple accounts and this one account, I just was like, I couldn't, the leads were good. Like the leads weren't bad, but I just couldn't get it to be, it was hard. It wasn't easy like the other ones, right? So like my close rate was like 15, 18%. Instead of 30, 40% type of thing. And I'm talking to my mentor and he's like, Kavon, do you like the prospects you're speaking to? I'm like, no, man, they fucking drive me crazy. Analyticals are like, it was, there was a Forex trading, it was a Forex trading. It's all analytical people, right? I'm not an analytical person. I thought, especially back then, right? And he goes, do you know anything about Forex trading? I'm like, nah. And then, and then he just, and then I just said, I just stopped. And I'm like, oh my God, Like I never, like, just 'cause you're good at sales doesn't mean you sell everything. And I always tell people, you gotta sell the thing you're in alignment with because when you do that, you become embodied with it.

Yep.

And then you actually ooze it. And then now you're selling. Here's someone, a person, a sales rep with a little skill with 100% conviction.

Yep.

Outsells some sales rep with all the right skills, zero conviction.

Abs dude, 100%. And it's not even just the prospect congruency, it's the offer itself. Yeah, they're not fully bought in on the offer for whatever reason, then, then they're screwed. And it's an energy thing, man. They could be doing all the right things, but for some reason they're not getting people across the finish line. And I'm not going to say the name because there's just enough people that would know who I'm talking about. And I respect and like this person, but there we had one client where it just didn't work out with— it was what I would consider the only time in our business that we had a team that did really well with numbers. We tried it, they didn't do as well, then they left and they started doing better again. And I I spent so much time on it because it was the only time that that had happened to us. And I'm like, what, what could have been the reason? And dude, we, we did not feel in alignment selling to the avatar. It was, uh, again, I won't describe the avatar, but it was like, it was a very, very broke lead with a specific background.

And these sales reps felt like they were taking advantage. And it was just like, I don't know, we couldn't figure it out. Even me, I just resonate with what you said because it was like, I'm like, why Why can't we do this? And you look at it and I'm like, I don't know if I would've wanted to take that guy's money either.

I— Yeah, 100%. No, 100. You couldn't, I couldn't agree with you more. We, we, again, remember I said there's power in saying no. We, I had a, I'm watch too. I'll watch a little bit, but we had a client where like it was gonna be a massive contract. This was gonna be like a $60 grand, just a month, just a, what do you call like a recurring fee just to have us there on top of our commissions. Like this was a big one and I was And I pulled at the last second and everyone's like, "You freaking crazy." I said, "No." I said, like, they were using religion. I'll just say this. They were using religion to females at a certain level where females are in their lives and then where they're going through changes as they get older and their hormonal changes, right? I'm just trying to be very PE, right? PE, whatever it is right now, PC. And I was like, "I can't. I can't.

Like, just, I can't do it." And it was, we've We've had that happen recently. Very, I'm faith-based. That's irrelevant. I don't like using faith type of stuff in conversations. It feels manipulative. If done the wrong, you know, some people, you know, maybe it works for them, but, but I personally don't, I just feels like the wrong time to bring that stuff up. I know some people, it works well if like that's their community. They just, they want people to know that that's their community, but they're not using it in the actual sale.

That's a different story of saying, hey, we're a Christian faith community.

You.

Right. That's very different than, hey, God wants you to do this.

Exactly.

Take a second and just pray. What's God telling you?

Well, and let's go 100%, and that's what I'm saying as well. Now let's take it one step higher than that, even outside of religion or whatever it is. I was literally on the phone with somebody yesterday about this, and to be fair, like, I've talked about it a ton of times, but just yesterday I had a conversation with somebody and he couldn't comprehend why I wasn't going to take on this brand, because again, it financially, it was a pretty large relationship relationship. And he's like, I just don't understand, like, they literally are ready to start today. But one of the things that I have learned is like, you can't make a selfish decision, Kayvon, on behalf of yourself. I personally, yeah, I would like the additional income as a business owner, but I have to make that decision on behalf of my team and my sales management and my sales reps. Because at the end of the day, I know if there's all these problems or, you know, there's these— it's just a bad offer or bad energy. Nobody's going to want to work on it. And I'm not going to be able to force the success there.

I always say that, you know, people often talk about culture internally, but they don't talk about culture and alignment and partnerships enough. And for me, it's like, are we a culture fit for the client? And, you know, if it's not a culture fit, I just know it's going to be chaos for everyone involved. And we don't take it. We part ways. Yeah.

No, I couldn't agree with you more. Culture, I mean, it's everything. It's especially with the sales, like the sales reps got to, the managers, everybody, the whole mechanism, it needs to be aligned and work together and on both sides. Like one of our core pillars is one team. Like it's, we become one team, right? Because it doesn't work when it's their team. Our team is just, is there's division And division, it causes chaos.

We say we're your outsourced in-house sales team.

Yeah, same.

Yeah.

We're that. That's why I love that. I mean, we've gone over here, man. I think there's a part 2 coming up.

What do you think? Hell yeah. I would love to. We could talk a long time.

Here's what I want to do because I think it's super important. I think we should do a part 2. We're going to get this live. We're going to put the show notes. So anybody who wants to work with you, we're going to have all your links in there. But most important, we're going to take the time to say congratulations again. Congratulations to you being a father this week. That's massive, man. Like, this is a huge— like, as a father of two daughters, you know, 2 and a half and 4 and a half, like, I'm going to tell you, your life's going to change in all the greatest ways. And I'm just— I'm happy and excited for you of what's to come.

Thanks so much, dude. I couldn't be happier. And thanks for an awesome conversation. This was cool.

Love it.