Gurmeet Judge

Why Your Sales Process is Broken (And What to Do Instead)

• Gurmeet Judge

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Building a strong sales department and developing talent are essential to scaling a business. The right team, backed by training and coaching, creates consistent revenue, improves forecasting, shortens sales cycles, and increases win rates. This builds an owner-independent company with the structure, capability, and confidence to grow sustainably over time.

In this episode, I speak with Ken Lundin, President and Founder of RevHeat and unseat.ai, who has driven over $1B in B2B revenue. Author of “Strategic Selling Unleashed” and a Forbes-cited expert, Ken breaks down how to fix broken sales systems, build sales-enabled organizations, and scale sustainably using emotional intelligence, structured processes, and AI—while debunking common sales myths and tackling middle-management challenges.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kglundin/
https://revheat.com/

Chapters
00:00 The Importance of Sales in Business Growth
03:09 Understanding the Disconnect Between Technical Skills and Sales
05:58 The Role of Process in Sales Success
09:01 The Emotional Aspect of Sales
11:56 Identifying Top Sales Performers
14:55 The Challenge of Middle Management in Sales
17:51 The Mindset of Successful Sales Professionals
21:04 The Future of Sales in the Age of AI
24:02 Attributes of Successful Business Owners
26:57 The Dual Sales Process: Internal vs. External
30:08 Ken Lundin's Journey in Sales
30:10 Navigating Bankruptcy and Business Resilience
34:36 Lessons from Setbacks: The Value of Experience
42:57 The Importance of Goal Setting in Business
49:17 Integrating Sales Teams Post-Acquisition
57:56 Accelerating Growth: Strategies for Business Owners

The Importance of Sales in Business Growth

SPEAKER_02

I have a belief, and the belief is this it's incumbent upon the company to make the employees see how they can meet their personal goals through the company. And when they can no longer do that, it's totally cool if they separate ways. The biggest problem that companies see is passive management of middle management. That's where you'll drop the ball on any consulting or training that you ever buy. You do something for individual contributors, you do something for experts, you do something for anyone who is an individual within your organization. If you do not have a way for middle managers to help them be accountable and responsible to the new skill or thing, in other words, if you don't put change management in, change don't happen. Most employees feel like they're gonna sit down in the middle of a hurricane, and if they're just quiet and still enough for long enough, the winds will pass and they can go back to the way they've always done it. Look, change management is at the core of growing sales and changing the direction of your company. It's at the core of almost any initiative for real significant leverage to move the bar up. Yet somehow we don't talk about any of those things. My belief 75% of the sales process can be put into a process. Do this thing, ask this question, have this outcome, direct to this, etc. The other 25% though.

SPEAKER_01

Hi there. Welcome to Business Leadership Podcast. In this episode, I had a discussion with Ken Lendon. Ken is a president and founder of RevHeat and also unseat.ai. With over 20 years of experience and over a billion in a generator revenue, he helps B2B companies systematically scale sales through data-driven frameworks. He's also author of Strategic Selling Unleashed. Ken is a keynote speaker, he's a four-sided expert and a frequent podcast guest. Now it was a very interesting discussion, and Ken shared insights on fixing sales systems for scalable growth. He also shared lessons from bankruptcy, the power of emotional intelligence, and structured processes and thriving in the AI era. We also discussed common sales myths, middle management challenges, and building a sales-enabled organization. I hope you enjoyed this discussion as much as I did. And if you do find a value in this discussion, uh please send us your feedback, subscribe and share with your friends. We are working very hard to uh send your meaningful discussions on a weekly basis with the business owners, coaches, consultants to help you grow and scale your business. And uh your feedback is very important to uh to us, so please send us your feedback. Thank you again for your time. Uh until next time, please welcome Ken Linden. I guess welcome to Business Leadership Podcast. Today we have uh Ken London with us. Ken, um, you know, sales is something, it's it's an oxygen for every company. You you know, everybody's trying to grow a company. So you've been helping business leaders to grow their revenue, you know, scale their businesses. So looking forward to learning from you, looking forward to uh to our discussion. Thank you so much for time today.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I appreciate it. It's certainly it's certainly an interesting topic these days because I think everybody thinks they know what they need to do, and they might.

Understanding the Disconnect Between Technical Skills and Sales

SPEAKER_01

But if you don't get it wrong more normally, so to your point, you know, we all think we we have work expert on the sales, but what do we get it right normal or sorry wrong normally that uh we we dropped a ball on this?

SPEAKER_02

So let's set the stage bigger first, right? Let's just start with the truth about this whole thing. So if you're above$10 million, you're already in the top 1% of all companies on the planet, right? Less than 1% of companies exceed 10 million. So, first, let's go ahead and give anyone who's listening to this that's in that status their due. Like fantastic. Congratulations. Problem also becomes, though, that because most companies are founded by technically super intelligent people, right? Really, your company. Technically, one of them, definitely, super, super like fantastic technical people. And then we have this kind of rub that's like, well, man, if I can figure out this problem over here, I can certainly figure out sales, can't I? You know, and we've worked with companies from 3 million to Samsung. And when I went into Samsung, they didn't even have a formal B2B sales process for their 600 North American sellers. So to say that sales is a mystic thing would be an understatement because even companies who have had a lot of product-led gross success don't necessarily get it right all the time. And I think most of the time that comes down to the following. Quite frankly, anything I can teach you about sales, you've heard it somewhere. The problem becomes what order do you execute the things on in order to make sure that you can scale at whatever level you'd like to? Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01

What interesting. You mentioned a lot of things. Let me unpack the first one, then we get to the second one. And I'm going to speak from experience as well. The first one. You mentioned companies started with the very technical people. The challenge there is, and I experienced that challenge as well. Can the tech people who are from technical background, any uh any area, technicality is a logical, you know. When you when you when you are playing, you know, one plus two or three, it's it's a logic. It's gonna give you the logic back. And it doesn't matter engineering background, computer science background, or any other mechanical background, all these professions are logic. Yeah, sales has no logic to it. It's a lot of emotional, a lot of uh, you know, a lot of we have to we have to wait for a lot of things, a lot of commitment, a lot of uh, you know, hard work. I think that's where the disconnected and people who come from technical bracket background, they think just because they're good at the logical side of it, they're gonna get the sales very well. But but that's what you know, some you know, you you find out that that's not what it's about. The sales is a lot more emotional, a lot more understanding people than simply being logical. It's does that make sense? It does, though.

The Role of Process in Sales Success

SPEAKER_02

I'm gonna blow your mind. Okay. The real problem is technical people don't understand. They think they can figure out the problem by being analytical, but then at the same time, out of the other side of their mouth, they say that it's an art, not a science. And they try to hack the guy who can sell you know ice cubes to Eskimos. And they want the person who's already sold in their industry, and they don't have any idea if they're a good seller, but man, if they got relationships, let me bring them in. So here's where I'll blow your mind. Anything where I want a preordained outcome, you can put a process to. So you can put a process to sales, and if you don't, it's one of the reasons it's getting in the way of a company's ability to successfully grow sales. Because you can't repeat it. And if you can't repeat it, you can't scale it. But we want to go out and we, you know, everybody who's listening to this is right, they've hired a salesperson and then they fired them. I'll bet you most everybody who listens to this has turned over at least 35% of their sales force. And know how I know that sales is the highest turnover profession in the world at 30%.

SPEAKER_01

So is it a wrong expectation we set, or we just hire people without giving them a system and process to scale, and we simply just throw them in a job? It is is that what we're talking about? Yeah, you have infrastructure bankruptcy. You don't have anything, you just throw them in on a job.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and you wonder, you go, okay, look, I'm good at I'm good at selling. Like when you started your company, right? The first time you hired sales people, you're like, I'm good at selling. So if I get a salesperson who can sell, they'll be great. And then they suck. And you're like, this person was much better at selling me on their selling skills than they were on selling my product and services. It must be a them problem. And then we fire them. Then we go hire another one because now we've learned that they stick. Then we go hire another one. We pay more money because ah, that must be it. I was being too cheap. I need to go upscale and hire a more senior-level seller. Yeah. And then they leave the company. And not once. If you were doing this, if you were building a software, if you were doing anything else and you ran into the same failure three times in a row, I guarantee you you wouldn't be saying it's the computer's fault.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

It's the programmer. And in sales, the executive and the infrastructure is the programming that determines whether or not somebody can be successful.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, you know, you expect them to understand the business the way you understand the business, and you keep hiring these people. I mean, if you're making a damn many mistakes and, you know, learning from mistakes is expensive. You know, this is the most expensive way of learning, finding out what works, what doesn't work, but other ways finding somebody expert like you and have those shortcuts and cover those blind spots and get there much faster.

The Emotional Aspect of Sales

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you can. I mean, and whether you do it with me or not, I think there's an idea that you have to understand that it's so weird. Like when we really do this, and we do a ton of things with like companies with software engineers and complex sales and professional services that take experts and SMEs in the sales process. And they get that they hire different specialties. Like, as an example, you might hire somebody with UIUX experience, right? You might hire somebody through a design department. You may actually hire somebody who can do the ones and zeros, backend, front-end programming. If you're a marketing agency, you may hire people who understand copy. You can understand people who landing page construction and funnels and ads and buyers. You know, I've got four people on my marketing team because the specialties matter. And then all of a sudden, as a CEO, the one thing we can't get by is why we can't hack that growth thing. And you hired, right? You thought you hired the specialist. But would you hire an advanced level solutions architect, website designer, mechanic without actually giving them a system to flow into? We do that with sales all the time. It leads to the 30% turnover. It's the fact that the average salesperson is only in a company 18 months. And you know what? The most profitable, they don't become profitable for you until between the second and third year. It's insane.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And if you don't uh find a way how to uh you know get your salespeople to make money, if they're not making money, if they're not you know being compensated and the business not growing, I mean, who wants to stay in that business like that?

Identifying Top Sales Performers

SPEAKER_02

Well, it's interesting too, right? Because whether it's a simple solution or it's a complex solution that you're selling, first of all, you all think it's complex. Like everybody says my stuff's different, it's bespoke, it's harder, it's more difficult. It must be because we haven't hired a salespeople's had success, therefore, it must be hard. Yeah. But the truth is you haven't done anything to teach them how to sell your stuff, and you're leaving it on them to determine what the value problem there are things. So think about it this way, too. Let's say that remember back, hearken back to the days when you just started hiring salespeople in. You were so worried about their product set and whether they could get products smart, but you didn't understand one thing. When you were talking to people and getting referrals, they were way down the sales pipeline. They were gonna make a decision already. They decided to do the project, they already had priority. Now hire a sales team that starts going outbound or inbound, and they've got to start way up here in the trust circle. They don't have implied trust. And so if you don't have the way, voice a customer, case studies, things that you can build that allow them to build that trust with your customers and clients, you're just leaving it up to chance.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, Las Vegas has a better chance of winning than you do.

SPEAKER_01

Definitely. So definitely the pro, you know, process comes in, sales process systems comes in. But how important is a product, uh, product knowledge? You know, I know I don't you mentioned that people put a lot of emphasis on it. You know, not knowing some sometimes I find that, you know, I don't need to know a lot of product. It's simply I just need to connect with the person out of the side and understand what the person's needs are more than my product knowledge. You know, as long as I understand somebody's needs, what they prop what problem they're trying to solve, I can even solve the problem with the 5% of the product knowledge that I have for my for my business.

SPEAKER_02

I agree with that. And I think what we've got to understand is there's two ways that companies choose to go to market with sales and complex sales. One of them is they say we want to do craft-led sales. And craft-led sales is where you want somebody, whether it's a subject matter expert internally or a BD person, you want them to take the ball all the way and they need to be the technical expert regardless of who they end up across from. This is why those organizations stall. Okay. They're selling complex stuff and they're not okay with having multiple people in a deal. The other way, though, is we have a BD person and they've literally just got to play facilitator or quarterback through the entire process. They've got to be able to connect the dots. They've got to be able to understand the big picture, but they don't need to be able to understand all the minutiae that goes in because they've got technical people behind you. You know, I used to work as a you know inside client-facing fractional CSO for companies back, I don't know, seven, eight, nine years ago when we started the company. And I told everyone I can be client-facing with you, making an impact in three and a half weeks. And they were like, No. Didn't matter how technical it was. I did it for a mystery shopping company and I did it for a company that sold mobile applications to Google. They're like, no. And I go, well, tell me this. Do you have a bunch of really smart technical people? Do you pride yourself on your knowledge? They said, yes. I said, cool, I'll be ready in three and a half weeks. So it's like, all right, Ken, we're we're paying you. Whatever, right? We'll do it. I come back, sit in that meeting with Google, sit in that meeting with NBC, sit in those meetings with QSR brands, sit in those meetings, and they're just like, I don't know what happened. And so the three and a half weeks I spent was focusing on what the problems were your customer has. Because guess what? The second they want to talk about something technical, hey Johnny, coming in. Why don't you come join the conversation with me? Yeah. Right? Because the idea is here's what we miss. Everybody knows it, but no one, very few do it. You're so myopically focused on you. Like it's all about me. It's my product, it's my service, it's what we can do, it's why you should buy. And the truth is no one cares. Your prospect doesn't give a damn about that.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

The Challenge of Middle Management in Sales

SPEAKER_02

What can you do for them? So what you said is right. If I can figure out the problems that they have, oh my gosh. Look how simple it is. Because they just want to know more than anything, do they understand and care about the problem that I have as much as I understand and care about the problem I have?

SPEAKER_01

And that doesn't come that easy, right? You definitely gotta understand people in a different level. You, you know, the the the question you ask, or oh, you know, your attitude, your, your, your thought process, all that matters, you know, as a person, what do you bring to the table before you could understand somebody's problem, right? So you gotta go and work and go work on yourself to to be to be the salesperson who's who's willing to understand and who's has a right mindset to ask right questions.

SPEAKER_02

You want I can tell you right now how you can identify your next top performer that's gonna work for your company. Anyone listening? So I'd tell you exactly right now, I'll tell you how to identify that person in your organization. Yeah, they're that person who says, comes to you in the morning or sometime of the week and says, while I was Googling last night, eating popcorn and drinking a glass of wine, I noticed that CEOs, CIOs, VPs seem to be struggling with this in 2026. How do we fix that? That person who's innately curious, where did that go? Do you know how many hours I sat in front of, sat with my feet up on my on my table in my my coffee table in my living room, TV on in the background, and going, man, I gotta understand this thing better. And that was before AI. Yeah, that's how you're gonna find your next top performer because it's the person who is curious. They start curious and they stay curious.

SPEAKER_01

Very, very interesting. So let's talk about the people you work with, Ken. You know, people who take on our systems, you know, or they take on a process that you approach. And and you know, I'm I'm sure majority of them they succeed, they get their goals, but some of them they the one drops the ball. Where do you think the struggle is? Where you know, when you're giving them everything what they need, what what do they struggle again? Is it a discipline set of things or or or execution? What do this what are these people's struggles are?

The Mindset of Successful Sales Professionals

SPEAKER_02

The biggest problem that companies see is passive management of middle management. That's where you'll drop the ball on any consulting or training that you ever buy. You do something for individual contributors, you do something for experts, you do something for anyone who is an individual within your organization. If you do not have a way for middle managers to help them be accountable and responsible to the new skill or thing, in other words, if you don't put change management in, change don't happen. Middle management is the primary friction layer in any change management initiative. Because we, as the executive level, often go, yeah, Ann'll do that. Anne gets it. Johnny's got it. And then you look back four months from now, you spent 300,000 on something, and you're like, I don't know where that went. That's the number one reason that that people won't actually get through a process.

SPEAKER_01

But these middle managers passing on the whatever they'll think is is uh the way sales should be, not exactly what it should be, right? They're trying to translate whatever's told them on an executive level so they can train their the the the staff.

SPEAKER_02

If they're good. If they're good, but but they're gonna have their own version of it. They they're gonna have their own version of it that they may not incorporate the new version of it in. Yeah. Right? Most here's how most employees feel these days, and it just sucks. But most employees feel like they're gonna sit down in the middle of a hurricane, and if they're just quiet and still enough for long enough, the winds will pass and they can go back to the way they've always done it. Look, change management's at the core of growing sales and changing the direction of your company. It's at the core of almost any initiative for real significant leverage to move the bar up. Yet somehow we don't talk about any of those things. And just think about it this way people crave homeostasis. Right? I don't care what you're I'm a fitness guy, but I don't care what your fitness level is, I don't care about body positive, I don't care about any of that. But I'm gonna tell you one thing. There is nobody, zero, who can tell me that if you are overweight, out of shape by a lot, that it's actually healthier for you. 67% of America, though, just stays there is obese.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Right? And that's not because they're lazy, it's just because change management is a pain in the ass and they go back to their old ways.

SPEAKER_01

But in a sales to a point, uh, Ken, that's a great point. Taking care of yourself and and the exercise definitely impacts your mindset and the how important the mindset is in a sales. And you know, walking in a sales, in the first few seconds, you know what you got across the table. And having that kind of attitude, that kind of mindset, it comes from taking care of yourself, it comes from reading books, it comes from being trying to figure out that was what the problem needs to be solved. All of that work you need to do, and then fitness is just part of it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I was at a I was in a meeting yesterday, believe it or not, it was President's Day. And uh so I have a rep who wants to work, and he had questions, and it's the CEO and I work too. And so it's a senior rep and the CEO and I. And even with him, one of the things that came out of that meeting though is you have to be, everybody says they have a growth mindset. And first of all, you know, they don't. Like, they don't show me. Like, I'm gonna judge you by your walk, not your talk. But that's one of the things he had to do is he had to figure out okay, wait a second, like, wait a second. Some of the stuff you're saying makes sense. And I'm like, I don't care if you believe everything I say, but try one thing, yeah, and then you know what? If it sucks, come tell me why. Right? It didn't work at all. Awesome. Because I gotta try something to be different, and so you're you're absolutely what it's you know. The Tony Robbins said the mind follows the body, body follows the mind. I don't know which it is, but I do know this. Um I'm in a phase of my business where I have to walk in the office every day being the best version of myself. So I went, I'm going harder at the gym than I have in five years.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

The Future of Sales in the Age of AI

SPEAKER_02

Because my mind is definitely gonna follow my body.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I find harder I push in a gym, harder I push on a sales or or in a in a in a business. I think they're both related. I don't know how they're related, but they're both related. You know, if every time when I have a growth, I just go push hard in a gym or do a run a marathon or whatever we gotta do. But that's harder I push, harder I push in a business, they both gotta relate to each other. Yeah. Let's talk about salespeople. You know, sales professionals were listening to us. So somebody to perform high, you know, definitely you gotta you you bring a lot to the table. Somebody gotta follow you as well, what needs to be done um so they can be successful. They gotta bring the mindset. But what do you look for in a sales professional? You know, by just by looking at them, do you know this person can follow what you're trying to do and they can get their goals, whatever they're trying to achieve? So, what are some of the things that that they look for? Anything that's very important for salespeople to have?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, we look at salespeople objectively, down. I'm really good at hiring. I mean, I've been doing it for a long time, you know, but we've got a process that was. Other consultants we've worked through that's hired over 100,000 salespeople, substantially more successful than anything on the market. And the basis for that is we're looking at the 21 core selling competencies objectively through a partner that helps us do a survey on it. Like, and we're managing that based upon what the role takes. Does the role take farming, like or hunting, account management? Does it require relationship building? Is it more transactional? Can they be consultative sellers? Do they know how to make a value prop? So we're looking at 21 very important things. But then when you get into the interview process, the other side of it is we make sure that we've got a scoring matrix for each stage that everybody can go through. So that if you run five interviews, you objectively scored each person as they went through, because otherwise the last two have an unfair advantage because they were the most recent before you made a decision. And so we're really looking to objective put it into an objective process. But I'm looking for one particular fact that I think will really benefit your audience. And that is I want somebody who can be a student and a teacher in the same conversation. Right? Can they be a student while I'm asking questions, trying to figure things out? And can they learn and can they clarify and can they get things? And then when given the opportunity, can they teach me something? Because that's a really great key indicator about whether or not they can actually do consultative selling. And I'll tell you right now, if you're not a consultative seller, you better figure it out because AI is going to replace you. You can do all the arguments on LinkedIn. I promise you. I said earlier, if I want a predetermined outcome, I can put it into a process. I actually believe, and I didn't believe this five years ago, but I do believe it now. I actually believe that you could interact with a salesperson in a Zoom meeting who's AI. That's where it's going.

Attributes of Successful Business Owners

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. But if you have that consultative approach, no way I can replace you. I mean, you you there's no human, you know, it's that's that's it's that's a human side of things. You how do you connect with the people? How do you communicate with the people? There's no technology gonna replace you in that area.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. The top 20% of sellers are selling fine, and they'll all they'll make more and more money.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Because it part of the sales will sell AS solutions as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, they'll make more and more money, and they'll make it because they're insulated from the impact. Because think about it this way. So I've talked a lot and thrown a lot of junk out there, but 75, my belief, 75% of the sales process can be put into a process. Do this thing, ask this question, have this outcome, direct to this, et cetera. The other 25%, though, it's the special sauce of people who are really special at it. You know, and that's something we pay a lot of attention to because, you know, we work with all sorts of industries and we have small transactional companies we work with all the way up to what I wrote my first book on, which was strategic selling at the really, really top enterprise level, two companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft. And I can tell you right now that that high-end consultative seller, the person who's making not OTE, they're not making a couple hundred thousand, they're making 500,000 and 600,000 and 700,000. Those are the people aren't gonna have to worry about their jobs. But you know what? If you've changed jobs every every 18 months, if people hire you and you're more worried about salary than you were about commissions, I'd start getting better at sales, or I'd get better at something else.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. Great point. So you we talk about how what we need in a salespeople. How about business owners that come to you? They have us they're trying to solve a sales problem. Yeah, you know, not everybody's gonna work out, definitely. You know, they they gotta have a mindset to execute. You know, you can give them all that knowledge, all that system that you want to give them. They also gotta go and execute in the company. What do you look for in a business owner as a partner? You know, in and just by looking at some of them, you you know, you can tell, you know, the person's gonna be able to execute or or they're gonna struggle with something.

The Dual Sales Process: Internal vs. External

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I think there's a few key attributes for those who have been really successful. So we've been very fortunate to be involved with five companies who have become unicorns, right? Privately held companies worth a billion dollars. And so it's something we really hold on to because it's less than like one ten thousandth of a percent to get there. So it's a pretty cool thing to be around that. But I think when you look at business owners, you can find a couple things. One, do they have the need to hold on to everything? Two, so if they don't have the need to hold on to everything, but they delegate and then they delegate and they don't check in with those people, then that's a problem. Right. So I think those are two things. There's that, hey, I'm just gonna let them do their job. They don't last, they come with us 90 days, we make some improvements, they they they get the value out of the deal, but they're not the ones who are gonna go from 3 million to 50 million, or you know, we ran a company from two to 78 once. Like they're not gonna do that. So I think a couple of those things are are are true. I think the third thing is that has to be true on it is that they have to understand that things in order to change, things have to change. You know, and so often we come in and we go, well, I'm gonna pay this guy 100 grand and all of a sudden it's gonna fix everything. Well, no, it's probably gonna be 100 grand plus. Man, we better make our marketing more efficient. That's gonna require testing. And it's gonna be, wow, our comp plans are way out of date. No wonder we can't attract anyone who matters because they stink and they're not competitive in the market. Well, that might cost. Right? Oh, well, we've got to make this change. Well, that might cost money. And then we try not to say, oh, come in and hey, here's a thousand things that you have to do that cost money, but you can't be afraid of the idea of changing the status quo. And so a lot of times I'll ask, I'll say, hey, what was the last change you made? How'd it go? Right? What were the blockers? What got in your way? What made it successful? What was the last one you tried to you didn't get through that didn't work? You know, and so I think it really takes a look in the mirror because the secret within my industry is that the founder tends to be the bottleneck in many cases. I agree with that. You know, in our scaling, we've got a smart we've got something called the smart scaling formula, and there's 11 functions in that in order to have an eminently scalable business model like a HubSpot or a Salesforce or what have you. But your weakness in whatever area it's in is the limiting factor on your growth. And if you're not willing to lean into the weaknesses and you just want to talk about the things that are going right, you know, be good knowing you. We'll help you some stuff. But if you come to me because you want to see 300% growth in two years, saddle up and let's go.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. You know, one thing, one thing I realized that when you were talking, Ken, the great point you mentioned, uh, one thing I realized the way people buy buy, the same way the people sell. So, you know, I sometimes ask my clients, hey, listen, how's your customers? You know, how long is your sales cycle to sell you to customers? Yeah, do they make a decision on time? No, they delayed decision, they don't make a decision, you know. Listen, is that what you're doing in your business as well?

SPEAKER_02

No, we absolutely see that's 100% true. Think about it this way, right? I'll give you a more extreme example. So how do you think Walmart and Home Depot buy?

unknown

Price.

Ken Lundin's Journey in Sales

Navigating Bankruptcy and Business Resilience

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, price. Oh, price, right? Everything's like they're gonna buy by the foot, buy the inch, buy the right. They're like lowest price wins, lowest price wins, lowest price wins. We had one of those companies at one point where a client put a$2 million project in front of them. Their own internal math said it would net them$50 million, and they said no because the two million was too expensive. Right? And that's just how they buy. Now think about other things, more like if you think about, I don't know, even like Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, Lamborghini, just to kind of make that. How do you think they buy? Quality. Lendovelly, yeah, value. Quality, premium. And they're gonna pay it. Like back when Peloton was doing great. I mean, Peloton was absolutely that way, right? High-end brand, high-end thing. So you're right to say that. It happens to the big companies and the low companies. And oftentimes, if you're finding that you're like a customer or somebody says, Yeah, our sales cycles are super long. Saddle up because your sales process with them is gonna be super long.

SPEAKER_00

They're gonna put you through the same sales sales cycle that the customer's putting them through.

SPEAKER_02

Well, and a lot of that's because they don't understand how it should go. They don't understand the time value of money, they don't understand the opportunity cost associated with like if they have a problem. They don't dig into their customers' actual priorities. So you can actually shorten them, but you've got to be better because if you let them control it, and most of the time what happens is we see seller, CEOs, whoever's in that environment, allow the prospect to control the rhythms. But if I control the rhythm and helping you get to your solution, understanding your priorities, I can absolutely compress time. Maybe not as much as I would with somebody who's really driven. But if you get the right priority with the right amount of urgency, with the right compelling event timeline, you can make things go faster.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, if the value is so high that you're gonna transform somebody's business, why would they add time to it? If the person is trying to get if the value is so little, definitely they're gonna delay. They're gonna add more time to it. Well, think about it this way, too.

SPEAKER_02

It doesn't matter what you think, it only matters if they think it. Right? So the value is so high, yeah. I don't care that you think it, they better believe it. Because the problem is, once we talked earlier, right, what do businesses do? We think internally. Man, I don't know how they get it. Why don't they understand how great we are? I don't understand anything, right? Yeah. And we guess it will wait us. Well, if they don't understand how great we are oh man, that's on me. Because I didn't convey it the way that they needed to hear it.

SPEAKER_01

What interesting. Yeah, there's always uh two sales process, one in your mind and one on their mind. I think you gotta follow us in their mind. Yeah, you'll get the better decisions. What interesting. Let's talk about your journey, Ken. How do you get uh so uh interested in a sales? How do you get so good at this? And uh what does made you uh you want to uh uh pursue a career in this? Survival.

SPEAKER_02

You know, so yeah, you know, I was you know, I was a I couldn't get in when I was in college. I graduated with a smoking somewhere like a 2.8 GPA, so I was super, super intelligent. You know, with my bachelor's and and came out and then then I you know went through multiple industries and was in like five industries. Today I'd be largely unemployable because everybody wants industry specialization.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You know, but you know, ultimately, you know, what my journey is all the way to where we're talking about the last eight or nine years, though, on the consulting front is I had my first business in 2006. And if anyone listening is, you know, over the age of, I don't know, 40, you remember there was something called the Great Great Recession in 2008.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

Lessons from Setbacks: The Value of Experience

SPEAKER_02

So we held on, but I ended up file in bankruptcy in 2011. And I, you know, I'll never I'll never forget it was first week of December, and we had a knock on our door at our house, and I go to answer the door. You know, we got all the Christmas kind of blow ups on the front yard, and you know, the house is decorated with lights, and my you know, my nine-year-old saddles up next to me. And the guy, I opened the door, and there's a guy here, and there's a guy standing over in my driveway. And he's like, You live here? I said, Yeah, well, can I help you? He says, Yeah, we just bought your house at an auction. So I had less than three weeks to get out of my house with my family over Christmas. So that was how when I learned what bankruptcy really looked like. And that wasn't, and the problem with bankruptcy is it's not the bottom, it's kind of the left edge, and you still got to go through the trough. But I think what was interesting about that moment in time when I look back is what it did for me is it made me understand the true risk that business takes. Because I took it and took it in the face. Right. And then it took me three years emotionally to kind of make it back. And so from that, you know, I, you know, my ex-wife now, but at the time, my wife had said, man, like a couple years later, she's like, You never want to own a business again, do you? And I was like, man, seems like such a wasted lesson, doesn't it? So since then worked towards it, you know, went, took a mid-level sales job after that bankruptcy. Like, here's the one thing I'm gonna tell you if you're a if you're a business owner and you file bankruptcy and you don't have an exit, they treat the time you own the business as if you weren't working at all. So we did that, and then you know, over the next three years, took two promotions, an SVP, an EVP, and then gradually left and started my consulting business. So, yeah, I had to do it out of necessity. I was always a good seller, and I was always good because I could always put the client's interest first. And I always had one concept that I got better than most. Yes and no are both great answers. You know, most people want to stuff their pipeline, they want to talk to you 422 times, even if you're never gonna say yes. Me, on the other hand, no, it just meant not now. And so, because of that, I was able to do a lot more and talk a lot more and make take more meaningful meetings. And so we were able to develop that and bring that through all the way to building a sales methodology that sold a billion and a half dollars in my consulting career. We've helped create almost six billion in market value. Yeah, the last, you know, eight or nine years has been a pretty kick-ass ride.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. That's that's very interesting, Ken. You know, even though, you know, to your point, you know, unfortunately, you know, uh, we go through this, I don't know what you call a failure or just a setback, whatever you want to call it, they can take away all that, you know, that you didn't work in a business, but that's these experiences mature you in such a way that perspective, these much, you know, these these uh setbacks give you, they cannot take that away. And if you if you stick with those perspectives and what you gain out of that, I mean that's a gold. I mean, you know, you will you will bounce back, but yeah, that they can take money away from you, they can take the houses away. But what you learn out of that, that experience, that that you know, nobody's gonna take that away. And because of that experience, you excel later on.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and I think that's true. And I think it's I still point back to decisions I made that uh who would have thought, you know, now I advise CEOs and hundred million dollar and five hundred million dollar companies. Maybe yeah. And I'm going back to you know, my little business and the the mistakes that I made in the first one, and how I instead of doubling down and going deeper in my niche, I went ver I went parallel and I tried to add more, but that created more friction and I created more inventory and that created more cash flow constraints. And there's still all these things, but it's just interesting when you get to live it. And I think, you know, go look at my LinkedIn profile, and here's what you'll find. I'm perfect. Just like everyone else on LinkedIn, right? But come back and listen to this, and I'm gonna tell you the truth is that we all have life experiences. I'm just not gonna run for mine.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and remember what Jordan said that you know, he lost, I don't know how many, you know, was 10,000. You know, the time he didn't make the basketball. You know, it's it's it you know, a lot of successful people like yourself, you know, we just fail more often and we fail so many times. That's what the builds that that experience and excel you to the next step. But wow, but the those are experiences hard to go through. It's not easy to go through. I think that's where the you know the hardship comes in. So you gotta go through experience that will help you achieve whatever the sex success you want to achieve.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I think you gotta keep moving. And so it's like as an example nowadays, what I've learned from it is I have a true north on where my business is going. And I'm not afraid, everything I do is a test. Right. So we'll pivot five or 10 degrees all the time, moving back and left and left and right off of center. But because I have a true north of where we're going, I actually that's something I actually can see it and I know whether or not I'm getting closer or further from the goal. As an example, and this may sound stupid, but I'm a year out from closing my business and filing bankruptcy, but I made the decision to do it. Every other decision after that moment was easier because I had a true north. You know, and so it's the same thing here. You know, today we've got a whole set of marketing campaigns and some other things we're doing to grow our company. But I decided a year ago that the only investments I was gonna make through the year of through 2025 was things that were directly related to growing the company. And I love building infrastructure, and now we've got software engineers and other people who work for us. But, you know, you give yourself that thing and say, I'm gonna solve this really hard problem. But because I'm gonna give myself enough time, I can break it into smaller pieces. Because if you really want to talk about the thing that CEOs and presence companies do that absolutely crushes them, they assign the wrong time frame to the wrong goal. And in sales, it's unbelievable what that means, right? So you have a complex sale where an average sales price is 250,000 and they got to go find a customer. I know because of our experience across those industries, that's nine months to the first deal. And Johnny, the CEO of that company, is actually probably thinking it should be three. They fire the person at six, and they just get on the they just get on the carousel and they keep going round and round and wasting the money six months at a time.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, that's like a just spinning a hamster wheel. See, like you know, you fire somebody, hire somebody again, then you go back again. You're going through that, unless you know, come company gets frustrated with this. Uh but how many years, how all on the time you wasted, even you fire one person and go to second person, first of all, you lost a value valuable resource. Second of all, you just added more delay to that, to that, to the approach. You just add another six months to it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And it's interesting because we, you know, we had a client, and when we he finally did the math, we'd been working with him for about six or nine months when this came to light. And in the the only productive salespeople he had had, still in the company at that moment, but he had 10 sellers. Only four of them had ever been successful, and they'd run through 16 of them in the last four years. Just assume for a second that it's six a year that got wasted. That's almost a million dollars, plus the missed market opportunities, plus all the all the resources they pull from the company because they aren't up to speed. You know, you start talking about a multi-million dollar impact on a company to own 60 million bucks. Right? And then you wonder say that company wants to go look to, you know, acquire or build a platform or sell. Now they're nets off by$2 million a year, and they don't even have any idea. Right? They don't know what's possible because they've never been efficient at sales. We grew a company called Big Nerd Ranch from 10 to 60 million when we worked with them over six years. We only added two additional sellers at 60 million versus what we had at 10. Think about that. They should have been at 15 sellers instead of six if we hadn't done it right. Nine times$140,000 average salary times each year, times net, times the multiple they sold for when they sold it for$32 million. We just got to play the right game. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And and the opportunity cost that the you know, they the company hasn't achieved the goals yet because we just have a broken process, or would you you're just going through your own learning, but the company hasn't achieved the goal. And that's whether they lose competitive advantage over the competition, or whether it's simply just opportunity cost because they they just haven't got there. I mean, that's the biggest cost in a business. Yeah, definitely you want to grow the revenue, but losing that opportunity as a company that's a much bigger cost.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, think about it this way. So that company in in particular, right? We took them from 10 to 60 million, right? So we took them from 10 to 12 and a half million in 90 days, from 10 to 22 and a half million in 18 months. Got them sold around 30 million, stayed with them after they got bought by a publicly traded company. So if you just did straight math on a yearly basis, you'd say, well, that you helped them with 10 million, blah, blah, blah. They invested$840,000 with us, and their return on that investment was$75 million. You can't find that kind of return anywhere. It's systems and infrastructure, and nobody wants to talk about it. They all want to, you know what happens? It's a dirty little secret. You know what they want to do? You know what most people want to do? They want to give you sales training.

unknown

Right?

The Importance of Goal Setting in Business

SPEAKER_02

And then they don't have anything to deal with the friction that middle management does. You know what the other people who talk about scaling like us do? They don't talk about the three different buckets that you got to choose from to decide do I want my capital back first or do I want to play for ROI? Right? Do I need to go for new business, existing business, or upsells? I can tell you the bucket that's gonna give you money fast. But you come to me and you just want new biz, cool, but let's set the ground rules that that's gonna take longer to matriculate depending on the type of customer you're selling to and what your actual sales process looks like.

SPEAKER_01

The upsell got to be the faster way of growing revenue.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, or that or reduction of churn. Right? Because as an example, what we've noticed is many account management slash CS teams, their their processes for adding value within the customer lifecycle post-customer acquisition is very poor. I mean, think how dramatic that could be. Like you've got a say a$9 million business that goes from that goes for, you know, their turnover increases by 5%. Right. There's something in that place where you could say that they have to add$3 million a year just to stay flat. And that's a that's a game nobody's talking about. So if we can re what if we reduce your turn to 10?

unknown

Right?

SPEAKER_02

Now all of a sudden, let's say it's only got to add a million and a half and then you grow. But everybody just wants to talk about scaling like it's some mystic thing over here, it's a mindset thing. You know what they don't want to talk about is the full go-to-market machine and where the money is. You know, CEO, one of our CEOs, Stacey Henry, said I just want my people to stop stepping over bags of money. Because your your clients already trust you. Why in the world wouldn't you try to serve them?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Interesting. So let's talk business owners. They definitely they need to go on this journey. You know, they gotta they gotta grow business. I mean, you know, um what we saw after COVID, everybody could scale their businesses, you know, where we are, you know, they all juggling the how you know what where would they start where would they start it? You mentioned true north for your you know, how important is a goal setting for whether it's for company, whether it's for salespeople, and how important is that to align that with each other so they can all work in the same area? So talk about the goal setting or whether having the, you know, even for you having the true north, how important was that?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, there's all sorts of studies, and people have heard the ones about Harvard did a study, it lasted 30 years, and those people who actually set a goal and wrote it down were like a hundred times more likely to actually achieve it. So don't believe me, believe Harvard. So it's a bunch of smart people who did a lot of things over a long time. So that's the first thing. And the second thing that I think is interesting is not only are we bad at doing it, we're all great at doing it in our little strategic sessions on an annual basis, and we get all our leadership together, and you know, we have good food and we go out for good dinners and we have drinks and we all feel better about each other, and we talk about a bunch of stuff, and then we go back, and by the end of the first quarter, nothing's changed. You know, and so we but we still call it annual planning. And maybe we set budgets and did some other stuff. But the other problem with annual planning is you're playing a finite game instead of the infinite infinite game, as Simon Sinek would say. Right now, all of a sudden, I can't make an investment that makes sense in October because I didn't budget for it in that calendar year. Are you going out of business in December? No, so maybe it should make sense. You know, but I I just I think at the end of the day, all the data is going to show you this. Setting goals, planning, this type of stuff is really, really important. But let's say it's you're in management. Let's talk about going downstream as I just kind of kid around about annual planning and stuff. But the way to do it is to get it downstream to your people. Because here's what's great. Let's say that I help you set a plan. And let's say you and I are meeting monthly for coaching sessions. I'm no longer managing you based upon what my expectations are. I'm managing you based on what your expectations are. Hey, you know, you said you wanted to buy that new house in six months or go on that vacation, or it's really important for to do this for you and your wife. Oh, wait a second. Did I just flip your mind right there? Because I was just talking personal goals with an individual employee. Because I have a saying, I have a belief, and the belief is this it's incumbent upon the company to make the employees see how they can meet their personal goals through the company. And when they can no longer do that, it's totally cool if they separate ways. Somehow we got into this thing in corporate America. We're like, bleed blue. If you're a Netflix, you gotta bleed red and black, right? If you're at Disney, you gotta wear the ears, whatever it looks like, right? That's not true anymore, especially since COVID. Yeah, COVID was the single most significant change in the employer-employee relationship since the invention of the union. And somehow we're still managing our worlds as if the employer has all the power. So, goal setting, yeah, we should have it. You should have quotas for your salespeople. But you need to understand the difference between a quota and a goal. A quota, something you can put them on a pit plan for and fire them if they don't get it's the minimum standard of what the return is you want for your investment. The goal is how much money do you want to make to go on vacation? They don't get fired for this one, they can get fired for the quota. But we also got to say, but what are you gonna use that for, Johnny? Because here's what you don't know. Our research that we did in 2023 on 12,744 sellers tells you this in the top 10% of sellers, 49% of them were intrinsically motivated. They just want to feel good about the job they're doing and the people they're helping. And you keep building comp plans like they're coin operated, and you just stick money in front of them and they'll run through a wall for you. Got a plan, but you gotta do it right.

Integrating Sales Teams Post-Acquisition

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, you know, if you can align that with the company. So that was a good point that you mentioned that you know the the company's gotta provide that vision that people can align their plan and they can achieve different, you know, whatever the target they want to achieve for their families, right? If that's not working definitely, then they're gonna look for different opportunities that you're gonna find different employees. You you but you're I think that that the means is your company approach or whatever you trying to do as a company, as a business owner, that gotta be big enough that people can achieve their goals inside that. If your goals are too small, how's how can somebody else can achieve their objectives, whatever they're trying to do for their families?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's why execution is so critical when you're a small business. Because honestly, when you're a small business, I can't, I mean, I got four 30 employees, it's really hard to make promises about career trajectory, career longevity, promotions. And I think the one thing you need a sales-enabled organization. And I don't, I think a lot of CEOs miss this point. And that's explaining to people why things are good for them.

unknown

Right?

SPEAKER_02

Because a lot of times the people who aren't selling are like, oh, great, more work. Right? No, I'm already overworked. But the truth is if we start to talk to them, hey, here's the deal. Sales growth is the way that I create new opportunities because we need new positions, we need new specialties, we need more people, we that which means we need more managers, which means we need more executives. And so if you can help me do that too, you even become imminently more valuable. Yeah, we've got to let people know, like, you know, take them on the trip, right? Like, tell them why they're getting in the car with you and where you're going. And then they get to choose. And then culture becomes easy.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. You know, that that is something I've been thinking about. You know, how do I create a company so big that people can play in it and they can achieve whatever they want to achieve? And you know, whether, you know, I know a lot of businesses uh these days they're looking to uh whether acquisitions, you know, maybe acquisition is a faster way to get there. If the sales a little bit slow, let's go get it, get some acquisition, let's do something. Complimentary services and products. But when you have a two companies you take in, you know, whether you're uh you know, uh uh acquiring a company or somebody acquiring you, I see two sales spear teams coming on a on a from a two different perspective. And now they're both just trying to, you know, butt head, nobody's achieving anything because they're going. How do you approach that kind of scenario is where we're simply say, listen, these are our standards, this is how we're going to go, and and this is where we're going to cheap together instead of just going to two, well, even though they're selling two different products and services.

SPEAKER_02

You probably have pretty significant delivery standards to make sure that once customer buys, like the the needs are gonna be met and the process is gonna go exactly the way you see it, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that same thing for how the customer experiences and the front end in sales.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Most people don't. And that's why when you start to do like, so as an example, let's just talk. Like the data says that in when a private equity play, which is usually gonna be involved in either an acquisition or a platform roll up, because we've had a lot of those, in a private equity play, about they say less than 47% of those plays can the private actually actually help you sell more. Right. Most of the time, private equity is doing what they call a multiple arbitrage, which is they're just adding more and more net income together. And the higher the net income, the higher the multiple goes because there's less risk for the purchase, purchaser of the business. But it doesn't mean that you can actually get the ultimate thing out of it. And so, you know, if you're the one acquiring building, like you need to have your processes in place so that you can bring people in and adopt them to it. You know, what we've seen, we've seen some companies that, you know, say we have one client who there's a total of six companies got rolled up. And in that particular play, though, the the sales forces were always at odds. And then the own the previous owners were always at odds with the mothership because the previous owners had three-year buyouts. And those three-year buyouts were only based upon the specific sales growth for their division, for their old company. And so I think there's something else besides just having the infrastructure in place. There's also just a knowledge of making sure that if you're going to do that and do a platform roll-up, that you put those companies together, but that you make sure that there's some like an MBO almost, if you're familiar with the management by objective component to the comp plan or the buyout, where they have to do things that are not revenue related. Because when they leave in three years, and they will, you want to be closer to integrated than not. And so some of those things could be the things along the integration of the sales team, the delivery team. So, yeah, I think that it's it's interesting because there's not a lot of discussion about that. About, hey, how do we do this in a way that think about how powerful you'd be if you started to roll up? You had your sales infrastructure in place. It was easy to pull everybody in. You had an onboarding and enablement program that got all the salespeople up to speed in half the time that you normally did, which by the way is statistically what we do when we add enablement programs. And now all of a sudden you're growing organically, not just because you bought a company. What do you think that does to your multiple?

SPEAKER_01

I think you your point is it's a good point, but that's the first thing you want to do even before you take it on a company. I mean, you know, I was working with the one company, we were looking to acquire six salespeople, and they've been with the company for the last 16, 17 years, they have their way of selling it. You know, they have their way of selling it, but nothing documented, right? So I was simply saying, How do I take on this and and grow what I want to grow? And you know, and I simply put that on LSC, simply said, listen, I need this people before I want to take on a company. You know, company will be in a three months for now, but the before the three months, I need to work with these people. We gotta figure out how to do that. And we simply just couldn't come to the terms, or simply we just walked away. It's simply because they have asset their own ways of doing things for so many years, they're so resistant to change, they're so resistant to document because they think that's their job security, because all of that stuff, and you can't rip and replace that's you know, to your point, you you gotta figure that piece out. If you don't figure the sales piece out, the rest of the stuff is is it doesn't really make sense.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and I'll give you a free bit of consulting advice on a deal just like that. Okay, and that is this most of the time, those people say it was an MSP as an example or something, most of the time, those people are really just account managers. They call themselves salespeople, but they're overpaid account managers because they went and got some business 15 years ago and they've been getting paid on it ever since. So, really, one of those things, those those types of acquisitions are interesting because sometimes you can say to yourself, huh. What if I was just buying their customers? And I know that it's not the thing, people don't want to talk about it. But maybe it's time they go find something else and that you're able to buy a company because you can put better servicing on it. Because in those net in those arenas, as an example, a lot of times it's they take incoming calls, they don't make a lot of outgoing. You know, it's a little it's a lower margin business than we all want. So it's just interesting. I think when you remove the blinders, there's a lot of opportunities to look at different ways to structure deals, which work out better for the acquirer and the acquired.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but I think that's where you know business need of people like you. You know, we work in a business on a daily basis, uh, Ken, and uh, we're not gonna sneak out the blind spot, right? So we are so focused. Sometimes we are so focused technical, say, hey, how are this gonna integrate with this piece? How this is gonna work with how this customer is gonna be reacting, all that stuff. There's so many pieces, moving pieces. So we are so in, but somebody gonna see those blind spots. I think that's where experts like you come in, simply say, listen, you know, let me take a look at blind spot. Maybe we can solve this problem different ways instead of the way you're trying to solve it.

Accelerating Growth: Strategies for Business Owners

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I think so. I think there's uh there's one of the things that I would say too that happens is if you're serious about it, then speed the market matters. You know, and I had a prospect that's just told me last week that they're gonna work with us. And when I was talking to her, and she has all the expertise in-house, they're a go-to-market agency. You want to know, you want to hear a funny thing is we're actually becoming the go-to for go-to-market agencies. So you tell me how good we are, right? So she has all the expertise inside, you know, but it's like the, you know, the cobbler whose kids don't have shoes. And what we talked about was this. Yeah, you probably got it, but they're billable, they're working with clients, and they don't have the specialized knowledge on the order to implement the things to solve the thing internally. And that's what it comes down to a lot. It's just like, you know, we're gonna get you places a lot faster than you can on your own because it's you're basically asking somebody to do a second job when you ask them to do some of the stuff we do. And then because of our adoption of AI and our best practices, we have the ability to move things that used to take us six weeks, take us two weeks. Because we adopt it and we make it bespoke based upon your environment. And it's really, really cool. And we just try to put you in a position where all we have to do is support your implementation because we've done all the back end stuff, all the boring stuff. We're not gonna tell you, hey, go become a sales expert in onboarding and hiring. And I want you to write a playbook. And then when you do that, I'll come back to you. No, we'll have that produced for you in a week. We'll show you the hiring plan. You'll, you'll, you'll bless it. We'll put it together with your team, you'll be out hiring and hiring better people in the space of two weeks.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You know, so yeah, that's a lot. A lot of it when it comes down to that, it's it's that. It's that we the difference between me and you when it comes to sales growth is I talk to 15 different CEOs every single week. So I get an entirely different perspective about what the real problems are in the world and how other people are thinking about them. Yeah, so it's not even Ken's brain. Yeah, it's exposure. Yeah. So it's because I only yeah, let's look at it this way, just like you, I have a core set of problems that we solve. Yeah. Yeah. If you have those problems and we're uniquely qualified, yep. If you don't, cool. But yeah, we talked this on.

SPEAKER_01

Especially when you're buying a business, can you know I the way I look at a business, you know, maybe, you know, maybe I'm I'm naive, I'm I'm new in this uh buying a business set of things. I buy for potential. Hey, this company is doing a six million. Can I take it to 15? Can I take it to 20? Yeah, that potential, that's what I'm buying it for, that's what I'm spending money, that's what I'm doing, all that stuff. So to get to the potential faster is very important to me. You know, I'm sure it's important to a lot of business owners who are listening to us, CEOs listening to us. So if you want to get to the potential faster, you're gonna need people like you. You know, yeah, definitely. I'm not looking to you know, uh trial and adder can approach. Listen, I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna try this. No, no. I bought it for 5 million. I want to get to 15 because that's the potential I bought it for. Yeah, how can I get there faster? And that's where I think uh, you know, we we we need experts like you or simple say, listen, take me to the potential. We'll figure out what happens next, but let's get to the potential where we saw the potential before we bought the business.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, it's interesting too, because like when you buy a business, a lot of times if you're doing PE particularly, you go through like this due diligence called quality of earnings. Has anyone ever said to you you need to go through a quality of sales? Right? We essentially do a QOS process where we're like, let's figure out what's he what's hidden, where it's broken, and where the potential is so we can see how fast it can go from six to fifteen. Because what do you know about that six million dollar business that you want to go to fifteen? Something's gonna have to change.

SPEAKER_01

Yep.

SPEAKER_02

It's not gonna look the same when it gets to 15. No, and to get there, you're gonna have to do some changes. And you know, as I say, break some, break some eggs, do some things, invest some money. But you want to do it in the right order, right? There's, you know, like when we look at those three bucket buckets, like, is it a new business problem? Is it an existing account problem, or is it an upsell problem? Like, think about if you just knew that when you bought a company. How that could change your entire focus. As an example, no, they've done a really good job with their existing accounts and they upsell 22% of them. Huh. Okay, seems like they've got that under control. Problem is they're only growing at 5% in net new organic business. Okay, so what does that tell me if I'm a buyer? That tells me it's gonna be heavier investments with a longer payoff. Right? Now all of a sudden, hey, we're getting inbound leads and we're actually growing the front end by 24% a year. But our existing accounts are churning at 15. So we're just above flat. Oh, you mean I just need to fix the way you handle your existing accounts, and I can instantly add revenue and earnings for less money and quicker. So if you take nothing away from this and you're a CEO or business owner who wants to buy stuff, very interesting.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, you gotta look at all the different angles, just not a one one area, simply look for new accounts. You're gonna look at it from every single corner. How do we preserve that? Yeah, very interesting. There's a lot to learn from you, Ken. You know, I definitely uh enjoy our discussion. Any word of advice you want to leave for business owners who try to uh you know get into uh you know growth, they're the planning about it, they're thinking about it, anything, where can they start?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, well, I mean, start the easy way. Like I won't even hit you with a hard solicitation, but you know, look look me up. I'm sure it'll be in the show notes, but look at my LinkedIn profile. Follow me. We're posting every single day about sales 365 days a year. So uh you can look there. I think that's it's kind of the first place because we are directly talking to the problems of CEOs and and C-suite executives have to deal with. So I'd say that's step one. I would say step two, decide how bad you want it. Everybody talks about growth. Your neighbors tell you how easy it is. You know about the guy I sold his SaaS business for 50 million. But anything worth doing ain't worth ain't that easy. Hell, you know, I'd rather have you if you've if you've avoided the hard things for long enough, go to the gym 20 out of the next 30 days. I don't care if you show up in the parking lot and it's not your jam and you leave five minutes later and you never go in. But show yourself that you'll stick to something that's around change management, and then you call me and we'll go to battle. Very trusting.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that great, great, great notes. So work so back to the LinkedIn. That's where people can connect with you, or they're well website.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, we can put it on the show notes. It's RevHeat, you know, as in Revenue, but Revheat.com. You can go there, you can go to LinkedIn. You know, we're we're we're pretty easy to link the other than put a link below this video.

SPEAKER_01

People can click a so uh click a button or they can connect with you. So, business leader listening, you know, whether you're trying to grow a company, whether you're trying to uh you know acquire a company, whatever you're trying to do. You know, I learned so much from you uh during our discussion. I would encourage and strongly hey, click a button, reach out to you for conversation. Who knows where the conversation is gonna go, but connect with you, learn from you, and uh have a discussion, see what opportunities opens up. You know, you know, there's so many blind spots that as we talk about, you know, we're not as a business owner, we're not looking, but uh, you know, people like you, you know what the blind spot and you can get there much faster.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I had a CEO once tell me that the reason she hired us and stayed with us is we can see around the corners that you don't know exist.

SPEAKER_01

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02

So good.

SPEAKER_01

Hey everyone, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. You're very generous with the time. Thank you so much for time, Ken. Enjoy it of our discussion. Thank you so much. Awesome, thank you. Thank you.