Sales-Driven Entrepreneurship

Today’s Serial Entrepreneur Secrets Revealed episode is a special feature from The Complete Entrepreneur, hosted by Michael Gilmour every Thursday at 5 p. m. Eastern on Clubhouse. This special crossover session brings together the insights and energy of both podcasts, offering a unique perspective on the entrepreneurial journey.

Startup club on clubhouse. And this show is the complete entrepreneur. This is a special episode because we’re, uh, we don’t normally air the complete entrepreneur on the podcast, start, scale, exit, repeat. Uh, but we’ve been doing that recently because there’s a lot of great content. It takes more common entrepreneur than just a code code that you need to follow.

And, um, the show really delves into cracking the code of the human side of being an entrepreneur. And today we’re talking about transforming your organization into a sales organization. And this is a mental process that needs to begin. With you, the entrepreneur, Michael Gilmour is our host. He’s here today.

He comes in from Australia. Thanks again, Michael, for, uh, for, uh, moderating today’s show and being our host, I will let you know that Michele Van Tilburg is out today. She’s got the flu or something. So it’s just you and I and the audience and those who want to participate and come on stage. Michael, can I just say, Colin, it’s so wonderful to be here once again on the Complete Entrepreneur, uh, where we really begin to pull apart, um, not just what it means to run the business of as an entrepreneur, but understand the life of an entrepreneur, all their stresses and strains and things like that.

And it’s going to be a, um, today’s topic is really looking at, um, great, you’ve been developing a product. And you’ve got a great product in your business, but what you then want to do is sell the product. Or is that the right way to go? Or should you do it the other way around? Sell it first and then, uh, then go ahead and, uh, build it.

Yeah, there’s, there’s different things you can do as an entrepreneur, but there’s one thing for sure. Is how do you move an organization to develop a mindset that the client, um, Is the reason why they do everything they do is how do you, how do you change the mindset of the team of the individual of the organization to view everything they do through the prism of clients.

And this is where it becomes incredibly exciting. And incredibly challenging all at the same time, because I don’t know about you, Colin, but one of the things I found in different organizations, different businesses I’ve led over the years, is that not everyone likes that. Um, they really don’t. And, uh, it’s a big challenge for a lot of people, um, of getting that mindset of how do you view everything from the perspective of a client?

I’ll give an example. I remember, uh, Uh, many, many years ago, 20, gee, I’m just getting on a bit 25 years ago or something like that. Uh, I had a real problem, the fact that a lot of the different, it was in a tech company, internet company. And the problem I had was that a lot of the, the bugs and things like that, which were just annoying things, not big things weren’t getting fixed and, uh, they weren’t getting fixed by the tech team.

And you sit down with the CTO and say, Hey, we need to get these things fixed. Everything seemed to be a hard part. And, uh, it was very frustrating and clients would be like harassing the sales people, say, Hey, this, this thing here, when I click on this, it didn’t work or, Oh, or whatever. And, um, and I scratched my head and thought, you know, what I need to do is I need to go along and expose the tech team to clients.

So for one day a month. all the tech team on a um, uh, sitting side by side with the help desk person. And they would listen and have to go along and deal with the issues that clients brought up. And you wouldn’t believe Colin, how fast everything got fixed because they suddenly got a glimpse into the.

End user of the service they were developing. It wasn’t some sort of theoretical use case. It was a real person trying to do real stuff and they didn’t want to go and sit there and have to deal with all these problems all the time. You know that. So you want the tech team did they fix them? They fix them really fast.

And it was the best decision I ever made of really moving the technical team into coming face to face interactions with clients. Now, the reason why I put them side by side with the help desk person or the salesperson side by side is because some technical people have trouble interacting on a client base and you actually don’t want them to do that.

It just, it just doesn’t work for the organization, if I can say that. Um, therefore the salesperson or help this person within guide the process, um, through, but anyway, it was, uh, one of the best things I’ve ever done, Colin, I feel like you’re jumping ahead a little here. Oh, yeah, I’m jumping way ahead, man.

Yeah, I think you’re going right in the weeds and like, I’m okay. Hold on. Hold on. Okay. So, like, and I can, you know, I can’t tell you how many, uh, entrepreneurs I incubator, people asking questions. For investments and what not and you know, especially a lot of the, um, you know, like the doctors and, uh, scientists who come and share me, share their idea and their products or patents and what not.

And they’re great, they’re really good, but yet they don’t have that ability to take it into sales. They might have a great technology. They might have a great patent, they might have a great whatever, but they, they can’t seem to break through on taking it into a sales. And making sales for it. Uh, they’re good at building it, but they’re not good at selling it.

If you build it, they will not come. We still have to sell it, right? So I’m going to give you my example of this was a bigger company, much bigger was publicly traded, but you know, back in two thousands, we had a company, Michael, that, uh, was, uh, it was a Hostopia and you know about the company and, and, uh, it was a web hosting and email company.

And we had hundreds of developers and we built the greatest fricking widgets you could possibly build, but we were losing four and 50, 000 a month. And it wasn’t until after about the third year, we realized that people aren’t just going to come and buy this stuff. You, we have to transform the business.

And I think the first thing that needs needed to occur was that mentally the owners, myself and my brother, we needed to make a shift in our mind. We needed to say, okay, we’ve built a good product. We know we have a good product. Now, how do we promote and sell that product? And there were a lot of things that we did at that organization to really move the dial.

Uh, and I’m telling you, like I literally put the CTO, the COO, myself, the CEO and the salespeople and the CMO, I put them on airplanes and we’d fly for two weeks a month, Michael. And we’d go now I’m getting into the weeds, but we’d go into the multiple countries and we’d sell and close million dollar contracts.

I pulled him out of operations. We began to design our, um, product around the customer’s needs, uh, instead of, you know, what we thought the customer needed. Uh, we, we, we developed a BHAG, not a BHAG, a, um, unbearable brand promise, we called it, which was 100 percent migration guarantee. Because we needed to understand the customer.

The customer was a buyer. At a telecom and we needed to, uh, we needed to take care of their number one concern, which was getting fired. So that’s the key. It’s it’s like understanding all those elements and if you’re still even a one person show mentally you have to make that shift How do you go from you’ve got a piece of technology?

You’ve got an idea. You’ve got a patent You know, it’s good. And how do you go from there to selling? What are your thoughts, Michael? Yeah, it’s, um, it’s a really interesting one, but just before I continue on, if you’re in the audience right there and you’re saying, yeah, I’ve got some thoughts on this topic or some stories or disasters or whatever it is, we’d love to hear from you, so stick your hand up and let’s come up on stage.

And we’d love to hear, um, I’d much rather be, um, hearing from everyone in the community than just the Colin and Michael show, that’s for sure. But yeah, I think the. The first thing, Colin, is this, I found that many entrepreneurs, you’re right, they’re like, they’re scientists or they’re developers or they’ve come up with an idea or whatever.

And the reason why they like sticking at that sort of thing is because it’s in their control. For instance, I can go along and spend a week, and at the end of that week, I’ve developed X, Y, and Z, these great new features. Let’s imagine that in a technical, technical company. So I’ve got these great new features just because no one’s asked for them, or the fact that, um, uh, I’d have no idea how to price them, or the fact that, um, no one’s actually selling the features.

Doesn’t mean anything, but it’s in my control. The problem with clients is they’re out of your control. I just want to say that again, when you’re doing development and things like that in your company, you’ll have this natural affinity to be, to move towards doing and achieving versus thinking and working with clients because clients can go along and say, you know, great what you’re doing, not for us.

How much control that you actually have over that is, it is much less compared to I’ve never developed a new feature yet. So many entrepreneurs, they gravitate to the development side. Um, and the reason why they do so is because it’s in their control column. It’s in their control. It’s all about control.

So it’s both their personality, Michael. Like for instance, I’ve met a lot of, no, no, no. Listen, I’ve met a lot of Oscars are really good at sales, but the operations are shit. It’s just that they can’t make, they can’t. They can’t cobble together any, they got the deals, but they can’t seem to execute on them.

So it’s really about the good opport program. John Entrepreneurs can do both. I think the good entrepreneurs can do both. I’m not, I can’t do both. Yeah, they can do, they can do both. Or they’ve got the wherewithal to be all to, um, partner with people or to get the right team together around them that can do the different skills that they don’t have.

And they’re rare individuals to be quite blunt with your Colin, the individual who can look at themselves and say, you know what? I’m not good at this. I need to get someone else’s better than me. And that requires a level of humility that many entrepreneurs plain, plainly just don’t have. Um, and, uh, so it’s a, it’s a bit of a challenge, uh, for them to do that.

But I think a lot of it is about control. So you get one sort of entrepreneur who’s the developer, the, the engineer, the, uh, tinkerer, the inventor. So they develop in the product and they, they’re terrified of customers. And you’re right. The other entrepreneurs out there, uh, are the ones that, um, they’ll sell snow to ice Eskimos, right.

Um, but they forgot that they’ve actually got to have a, a, um, a snow making machine. They’ve got to have a process. They’ve got to have people actually building the product or the service for the eskimos, you know what I mean? And, um, it, you quite often get the two extremes. Um, and the, the, the second extreme entrepreneur is the one which quite often gets touted as the scam artist, because they’re selling things that don’t exist.

And, uh, well the first one, um, is a person who builds wonderful stuff and no one ever wants it, or they just have no idea how to sell it. So they, either, either camp never, never has a real business. Um, Steve Jobs said never go and buy a product from a CEO that can’t do the demonstration for you. And I think that’s actually a critical statement, which is what he was saying really is you need to bridge both those gaps, even to some sort of level.

I’m a firm believer that a, the, the leader or the entrepreneur of an organization should be able to sell. If you don’t have the skills, then go and learn the skills. Like read books, go to courses. There’s so many things on how you can sell and all that sort of stuff. You won’t be the best sales person in the world, but at least begin to, to shore up that weakness you have.

And on the other side, bridging that gap is on the other side, which is sort of the developmental side and things like that is if you’re a person who says, well, I don’t know how to program, then learn the rudimentary side of programming. I’m not saying become an expert programmer, just learn it, spend a few days.

Thank you. Actually understanding how things go together, and I’m a firm believer that you, you, you, your organization will go as far as you can go. I’m not saying you become the expert, but you need to share or shore up those weaknesses. But anyway, so transforming into a sales organization, Colin. So what’s some things that you can actually do?

Um, to be able to do that,

to transform. If you’ve got a, if you go to a business and you’re saying products, services, how do we do that? Got it. Okay. So, and this is in the book, by the way, start, scale, exit. Oh, I know. I was just taking a look at it this morning. Yeah, exactly. It’s like, yeah, it’s a reference guide, right? Yeah, exactly.

So, so in the book, we have four sections. We have start, we have scale, we have exit, repeat. And. Scale. Uh, we talk a lot about transforming your organization into a sales driven company, and it starts first with the mental shift in your mind. Okay, I want to do this. Okay, I want to do this. Then what we do, we need to do is we need to identify the positions that we need to hire.

Or partner with in order to become a sales driven organization. And what is the personality profile of those individuals? Okay. And then once we’ve got the personality profile, we, uh, and we’ve got the people in place, we need to create a sales playbook. Now, let me tell you this in the book, we interview a guy named Jim Bennett.

He sold his company for many, many zeros, uh, you know, a hundred million, 200 million, whatever it was. And I don’t have the exact number, but it was way up there and he’s doing it all over again with his kids. It’s incredible and it’s such a simple product that he’s selling and when he does it He simply created a playbook a for the sales team But you know, these are the scripts and whatnot.

He talks not talks a lot about not being totally scripted But it’s a it’s a playbook and uh And then he launched it and he it repeats the processes over and over again and they get better and better At each process i’m telling you the training in his company is like about six months long But the people who work there make a lot of money and they drive the business forward.

We did a couple things, Michael, at our company. One thing that we did is we implemented a daily sales huddle. And this was 8 minutes, 8 minutes, uh, every morning, before 9 o’clock, standing meeting only. We had all the salespeople around the table and, uh, we had the executives come as well, the CTO, the COO and myself, uh, came as well and the CMO.

And we, so we all three would all come into the room and we had, but we were, executives were only allowed to listen, but we’d go around with the salespeople every morning and would ask you, okay, what’s your top victory yesterday? What is your focus today? And are you stuck? And believe it or not, the number one thing, the number one question Was what was your top victory yesterday?

And how do I know that Michael? Because man, did it motivate me? Cause I actually did participate in this con this call. I mean, the other executives did, but I would participate and I knew I had to come to the table with a victory, like, Oh, I just called up the CEO of Verizon. And. And he, you know, I didn’t get to him, but they pushed me down through the system, pushed me down to the CTO, and we’ve got a meeting in, in New York tomorrow, or I just contacted the guy from Yahoo, and these are some of these customers we actually had, by the way, Yahoo, you know, Verizon, Vodafone, Reselco, those type of customers we had, but I knew it had motivated me, and when I knew it motivated me, I knew it would motivate anyone, and by the way, when we first implemented it within a week, We dropped the week, maybe two weeks.

We dropped half the staff because you either perform or you don’t perform. That’s it. So I can’t tell you how much having a daily sales huddle can impact your business. When we went IPO, we used RBC as our underwriter every day, twice a day. They were twice a day, by the way, but they’re probably the most intensive in the world, right?

But they were twice a day. They had meetings with their team. Right. Uh, when I say sales people, the people that helped us go IPO. Um, it is something you need to think about. It’s actions you need to take. It’s not going to happen by accident. There are methods and systems out there. We did, the other thing we did, we hired a sales consultant.

All right, somebody who helped us draft that what you need to get to the customer or the documents or that we do at the time is fax now email, it’s this, that and the other, whatever it is, um, hiring a sales consultant to help you with that again, the sales playbook, right? There’s a gentleman by the name of Jack Daly in the book, and he talks a lot about a sales process and sales management.

Oh, that’s the other thing. We hired a great sales manager, not, we didn’t promote the best sales person. We hired a great sales manager. We go on and on in the book and we talk about how many things you need to do to transform into a sales driven organization. And this is something you can do. Don’t, you know, the vast majority of companies fail to scale.

And a lot of the reasons are that they don’t scale their sales and you have two personality profiles. I mean, there’s more, but we’ll just run this for now. You’ve got the dominant personality. And the sales personality. So they call those DIs under the disk profile method methodology. Then you’ve got the DSs and DCs.

Basically, DSs and DCs hate sales. That’s what I said, Michael. I don’t like sales. I don’t like to do sales. So if you don’t like to do sales, you gotta hire the right people who can do sales. So the DCs tend to be more successful at creating much larger companies. I think Bill Gates would be a hundred percent a DC.

Steve Jobs would be 100 percent of D. C. Elon Musk would be 100 percent of D. C. So some of the larger entrepreneurial minds out there have the personality profile to identify, analyze, And figure out that they need to hire the right sales leadership and create a sales team create the sales playbook Put all the systems in place.

Then you have the di’s now di’s are the vast majority of entrepreneurs They’re the ones who are right there. You know, you could be a solopreneur you can sell you can get lots of contracts And and their biggest weakness on scaling is is they don’t necessarily have the operators underneath them or behind them And they can often fumble the ball because of that.

But here’s where it makes a difference. When you’re a DI, when you’re dominant and influential. You are the one who does all the sales and it’s very hard for you to hire somebody or to let very hard for you to let that piece go. Right, Michael? So it’s very hard for them. I beat through this, Colin, I beat through this.

I’m a DI, right? And I had to go through the process of letting go to a person who became head of sales. That was a really tough thing to actually do because you keep on saying you can do it so much better Um, sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt. I just interrupted you said go for it And then the final thing I was going to say michael is that the uh, that particular entrepreneur profile Because they’re the one man show It’s hard for them to hire another person Scale sales through other people and that holds them back and it’s actually in the book I talk about being one of the number one reasons why entrepreneurs fail to scale is that they’re in the way So in any case if you’re in the audience, we’re having a conversation about sales Transforming your company into sales if you hate sales come on stage if you love sales come on stage We’d love to hear from you and really just talk about this issue Because it’s it’s it’s what we do.

We talk about this. We help each other out. We help figure these things out Uh, you don’t have you do not have had to written a book to get on stage We really it’s real and if you do come on stage, we love following you and love connecting with you as well So, please feel free to raise your hand and come on stage Michael any other thoughts see some people up here?

Yeah. No, it’s an it’s an interesting one colin. Um, the whole the whole challenge Of entrepreneurs be able to do that. They do so much. They’ve got to go and build the product of the service. They’ve got to be able to build an organization. They have to be able to sell the product and service. They’re going to make sure they keep, um, uh, keep clean in terms of statutory requirements and things like that.

There’s a lot of different things. And quite, quite often I’ve seen entrepreneurs, they end up gravitating to either end of the spectrum, like development or, or, or say, or sales, and really you’re a person that needs to be a fabulous generalist met, but maybe have a leaning inner direction. And, uh, I, I must admit one of the biggest challenges I had was, uh, getting a sales guy on board and then train them up.

And I said to him this way, I said, um, you are a resource to me. And this is at the beginning of the relationship. And as he learned more and more about the sales process and we have all sorts of sales documents and everything like that. Um, uh, I said, you’re a resource to me. And recently, about six months ago, I said to him, I’m now a resource to you.

So you pull me into the meeting. If you think I can add value, you then have to go along and arm me on how I can add value or how you want me to add value. And it was a transformation that we went through in the relationship, but it was a really important transformation. Otherwise I, as the entrepreneur would become the cork in the bottle.

The company would then be limited by my capabilities to do all the things I need to do because, um, uh, I wasn’t prepared to relinquish the sales, uh, part of the business to this individual. And it was, um, it. It was really something I thought about a lot, Colin. And, um, so one of the things I’d recommend is this find someone who you believe can do sales, has a proven track record.

In sales and begin to have that almost, um, uh, apprenticeship mindset, like really train them, um, really train them up, take them with you everywhere, invest into them as an individual. And they’ll be a great resource to you, but at some point in time, you’re going to have to go a lot. It’s going to, the relationship needs to change and that can be quite wrenching for a, an entrepreneur.

Now, I have said to this, uh, the head of sales, I’ve said to him, look, there’s some people I’ve had a relationship with for 20 years. This person, this person, this person, these three people, I want to know exactly what’s happening with them and I will probably maintain that, um, that sort of first protocol with them, uh, simply because of relationship level.

Um, but everyone else, fair games all across to you. Yeah. And it’s, it’s interesting. Even those three people is now whittled down to one. There’s only one person in, in my business where like in terms of clients and things like that, which I have the number one relationship with, um, versus my head of sales now.

And, uh, it’s been, it’s been really quite an interesting journey. The other thing, Colin, uh, one of the things I did, in fact, this week, I took the entire team way. Um, in terms of changing the organization and changing the mindset, I took the entire team away. We went away down to this really nice place, um, on the beach here in Australia and beautiful golf course and all that sort of stuff.

And we had a two day retreat. Um, and we tackled a whole lot of things from highly technical to, um, right through to what are we doing on sales and what sort of thing. And one of the things we tackled was this whole issue of viewing everything through the prism of a client. And, uh, So we, we also talked about innovation, things like what does innovation look like, and, uh, we wrote down all the list of things we’re planning on doing, uh, as a company, and I said, I want you to read each of those items on why we do it and the impact it has for customers.

And so that the techies sort of like scratch their head for a minute, but that’s just like putting a new server in. I said, well, describe it to me and how it’s going to add benefit for the customer as well. It’s going to add benefit because it’ll make it faster for the customer. I said, okay, well then articulate it.

The reason why we’re adding a new server is so it’s faster for customers. And they began to get the swing of it, and each one of the items, uh, that we’ve written down of innovations we’re kind of working on, that each one of them began to articulate in terms of the benefit it would give customers. The reason why we’re building this internal dashboard is so we can provide better customer service.

The reason why we’re doing this incredibly complex technology, um, is because it’s going to give this benefit for, uh, for customers. Yeah. And Colin, it would, it’s became a complete reset, um, for the team. It wasn’t a lost in the ivory tower and we’re building this technology. It was the reason why we’re doing it is for customers.

So if you’re struggling in your company right now, and you’re sort of saying. How do, how do I change the organizational mindset, um, from one of say technology or development products into one of sales? One of the things I’d recommend take the entire team away and create a point in time where it is going to be the reset.

And I know that that’s, like I said, that we made a decision and I did that this week, really planned it, planned it out. Um, did all sorts of fun activities and things like that as well. Um, and, uh, some crazy activities, but, but the mindset from my, my end goal as the entrepreneur, the CEO of the company was to migrate the thinking more and to be client focused.

Client focus. That was absolutely critical. So, yeah, Michael, I want to follow up on that. I want to, yes, I want to follow up on that because, you know, in the, in the book, I keep coming back to the book. I do that if you have, if you have a copy of the book, it’s chapter 32, scale your culture, but, uh, the, um, The culture statements that we can create if we can mold our culture for our organization and change it so it doesn’t become a tech driven organization it becomes a sales driven organization we can do that by working with the executive team and changing that culture.

And by the way, I know you might not be a one man operation, but you can still have, you can still have values, personal values, cultural values. And I think those values should include being a customer centric company. So I just wanted to share with you, like, the company I’ve been talking about is Hostopia.

It was publicly traded. And here were the values in our company. First and foremost is respect. Yeah, we had a lot of fighting going on in the company. Okay. So we had to put that one in there. There’s only four, by the way, only four pillars and their phrases and statements that you can repeat over and over again, recognize greatness.

We spend it like our own. And when our customers succeed, we succeed. That’s it. 20 words. And they became the lexicon in our office. And. A lot of our sales staff would put that in their tagline when our customers succeed. Indeed, this idea that you can become a sales driven organization isn’t just related to getting good sales people, although that’s important.

It’s about changing every part of your business and mindset to focus on the customer and the needs of the customer and to make that part of the culture of your organization. Yes, we do need great sales people. We talked about how do we get great sales people through profiling. Creating a sales playbook, doing daily sales huddles.

We need all that in place. But it starts with a mental shift in the entrepreneur’s mind, and then a culture shift. Michael, we had in the chat, someone asking, What do you think about the influence of AI in sales? Like, how, how, and I do know that, um, A lot of people have been using AI for marketing. I’m just curious what you’re thinking about for sales with AI.

Michael, I know I’m putting you on the spot here. Yeah. Yeah. That’s an interesting question. I, um, it really depends upon the, the sort of sales you’re doing. For instance, in, in my particular business, there’s a hundred people in the world that we need to do business with. I don’t think AI, this, this just. Me off top of my head.

I don’t think AI is going to help me in that process because it’s very relational and the reason why I, we get business because we’ve sowed into those relationships and on an ongoing basis and it’s been enumerable lunches, it’s been dinners, it’s been whatever. For instance, we’re based in Melbourne, Australia, and as Colin knows, I travel quite a lot and I’m one of those very.

We’re one of the very unusual companies which goes and actually visits customers in our industry. We don’t know anyone else who really does this. And so we actually sit down with them and, and we talk with them face to face. And we’ve got so much business from doing that, Colin. And that’s been really good.

So I’m not sure how AI would help in that regard, but AI in terms of, um, like if you have like a B2C or something like that, or if you have a larger constituency, so you do analysis and everything else, they have the data coming through and everything. I think AI would be invaluable. Yeah, I agree. And I liked, you’re making me think about, you know, people like to do business with people they like.

I like to do business with an AI. They like, um, let me, let me throw this out. Cause we, we did a show last Friday on, um, and it’s in podcasts, uh, or will be in podcast soon under the title serial entrepreneur secrets revealed. And. We had a guy come on who was, um, coming out with a technology that did cold calling based on AI.

And he was saying that he was getting, his initial tests were getting better results. Now it could be a novel thing here too. So maybe he’s getting better results than humans because it’s novel. I have not had a phone call yet from an AI. I know Michele said she’d had a phone call from an AI. So, uh, this concept that he’s come out with, Michael, is that it does the cold calling and it starts to talk to you.

But the good thing he does right away, he says, OK, I’m an AI. Don’t don’t shoot me. I’m an AI, and I want to talk to you about this opportunity that we can do with blah, blah, blah, whatever. You know what I mean? And you can try to see humanize the AI, and if you’ve used pi. ai, pi. ai, um, she, she, she, or, I mean, I have a, a, a, a female voice, so I call her she, but she is, uh, has got quite a personality.

Oh my gosh. And, uh, and she’s interviewed me on Clubhouse, uh, once. I’ll probably bring her in tomorrow, to our show tomorrow, Michael, but she’s, she’s hilarious. And I could see AI playing a role. So in sales, if you have a large customer base or prospect base, AI has to play a role, even if it’s just, you know, helping to, um, personalize the emails or personalize the messaging that goes out.

Because I’ll tell you right now, it doesn’t work. The way it works right now, it’s just, it’s too, you gotta, people catch it right away. But I’m wondering if AI can help with that. And that’s gonna be, that’s, I guess that’s more marketing and prospecting. But I guess that’s all, that’s all connected to becoming a sales driven organization, but nothing changes.

Nothing changes between the fact or that concept that people like to buy from people they like. That’s correct. And it’s, it’s a really interesting thing. So I think AI will continue to develop things like that moving ahead and people use it in different new and innovative ways. It’s another tool. Thank you.

Uh, in my personal opinion, I could, I’m just reflecting on our retreat this week, one of the other things we had was there was a great big goal we’re trying to achieve as a company. Uh, and I said, um, the day we achieve this goal and it doesn’t have like a timeframe, you know, Um, for this goal, you may say, well, that’s a strange goal.

I said, well, if we achieve this goal, then we’re going to take everyone down to this resort and we’re going to celebrate and we’re going to spend a few days just enjoying each other’s company and all that sort of stuff. And you can bring, bring your, your wife, partners and so forth like that as well with you.

And we’re gonna have a great time together. And everyone was like, really excited. Like, wow. And I said, as soon as we can get this done, that’s, that’s great. And, uh, it, it, it gave a focus of there is gonna be a reward. I think it’s actually important to reward people part and lemme guess by be a sales focus.

Lemme guess the reward wasn’t, um, we’re gonna have this code delivered. It’s gonna be this sales target. Yeah. So, so, uh, uh, exactly. It, it was directly tied to, to, to, to revenue for a particular reason, which I, I can’t go into. But then I said, then I had a slide that said, however. Audacious goals deserve audacious rewards.

And it was like, what’s this? And I played this video and, um, and the first, the first thing was, if we go along and able to achieve this, then there’s a place called the Phillip Island, just down here, we’re going to go there and it’d be really nice. It was great. But the video I played was of a resort on the great barrier reef.

And I said, if we achieve this goal. By the 31st of October this year. And it’s a bit of a stretch. If we achieve it, I’m going to fly you all to this resort. It’s like a six star resort. You’re going to be pampered. Like you wouldn’t believe you’d have an awesome time. Um, and we’re just going to celebrate achieving this goal by the 31st of October.

The thing I found that hit that everyone, there was stunt silence and then the tech guys began to say. You know, if we do this, it’ll help us get towards this goal. And then the guy goes, Oh, I’ve got this idea. You know, one of the things we could do is this. And suddenly you had these tech guys getting excited about like achieving the goal by the 31st of October.

It was, it was actually really interesting to sit back and watch. Um, just the reaction. I said, you’re going to get a reward if we achieve this goal, no matter what, we’re going to go to this other place. So I kept on saying that my, uh, during the rest of the day, I said, the thing we need to decide is do we have a Phillip Island, is this a Phillip Island decision, or is this a Haman Island decision?

So is this a. The local plays, which will be wonderful by the way, or is this going to be spit up on the great barrier reef? So every time during, during the conversation across the two days, cause I did that towards the beginning, um, uh, the, the tech guys would say, hang on a second, that’s a Phillip parlor decision.

We want to go to the Hayman, Hayman Island. We need to do this. And you wouldn’t believe the change it actually made. That there was this reward there. And I think it’s important, Colin, if you want to change your organization, then throw the doors right up and be outrageous with how you reward people. No, I love it, Michael.

And I, and I really like this thesis or this idea that everyone is involved in sales. Yeah, everyone, everyone’s involved in every single person in the company’s involved in sales. And I remember going back before we made our sales transformation, In the in the 2000s with that publicly traded company I remember the only people responsible for sales were sales.

It was totally siloed It was the sales people and marketing they go have they have to go make their money. It was so bad michael They even locked the doors the technology people, uh had special access to the technology area of the company They didn’t want sales or or or um, yeah, they didn’t want sales people coming in My client needs this or my client needs that or you know, they said you have to open a ticket You can’t come through this door.

You got to open a ticket, you know, that’s just funny. Cause it’s like, what you said there was absolutely amazing. You talked about how every single person. In the organization is involved in sales. And that is probably one of the keys to transforming into a sales driven organization. Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. And it was really thought of, uh, what, what was happening previous to that was that a salesperson would have a problem and they toss it over the fence, um, and to the tech people and say, demand that they fix this. And the tech people will hit a problem and toss over the fence their sales people and sort of say demand that they, they talk to the client about this and that they should stop doing this particular thing.

And it was like a, there’s a great big wall and neither party was talking to each other and this, this, this, this whole goal and the whole, the whole retreat was essentially from my perspective was all about destroying that wall. Get rid of the wall and let’s all work together And if you’re gonna do that, you need to reward people I keep on coming back to you’ve got to reward people and you got to be prepared to put your hand in your pocket and make it make it a like if there’s an audacious goal, there should be an audacious reward and I said to them no matter what you’re gonna get rewarded if we achieve this particular goal Um, but if you do it in this timeframe, let me tell you, we’re going to have just the most incredible time.

And I had a whole video and everything like that of them, people snorkeling the great barrier reef and swimming with turtles and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. All those sort of things. You put them in the dream machine. And it really, it became quite an interesting. The other thing I did as an activity, Colin, on this retreat is that it’s actually my wife and I became this idea.

We bought every single person as an activity, a team activity, a little box of Legos. What they didn’t know is we’d opened up the Legos and we removed some of the pieces from each box and swapped them with other boxes and then we resealed them. So what then happened was that these boxes and this team sort of activity, it only took like 15 minutes or something, each person had to build their Lego and they found their missing pieces.

I’m missing pieces and no, I ignored it and just watch what happened. Another person said, hang on, I’m missing pieces too. And then you get one of the team members would then sort of say, well, hang on. Uh, I think you’ve got my piece that that’ll work here. And the other person said, Oh, you, you, you got mine and so forth.

And so they began to, to, to communicate and interact. And you realize that, you know, what? The other people have the pieces to their little Lego and I said, and I wrapped up the end. I said, you may have a great solution that you’re working on and you make it a brick wall, but you know, the other person’s got the missing part that you actually.

So talk. What are the great things you can do to your organization? It’s a transformational sales organization is foster communication. Because that’s, you’ll do things faster, faster and faster and faster if you can foster the communication between the different people, whether they’re salespeople, whether they’re technical people, and everyone’s working now together to build, in this case, the little Lego thing, or the client relationship, or this deal, or whatever it is.

We’re all working together on this. So just today, for instance, there’s a meeting at 10 o’clock with a major client. My head of sales is there and he’s got, uh, two of the, uh, the, the senior tech guys are in the, in the discussion. And I’m not, and I’m not, and they’ve got everything under control and they’re working together.

It’s a really interesting thing to see. And I hope you’ve got the example I was giving with the Lego kits there. They’re Colin. Yeah, I do. And I was just reading the comments, Joe Slaughter. If you want to come on stage, I can’t understand a comment. I’d really just, you know, what some knee was steak. So we’d love to hear from you, Joe there.

We’ve been on here many times. Uh, and if you’re in the audience, you want to just jump on stage. We got 14 minutes left. Uh, this is a, just to sort of set the room. This is also going to be syndicated and podcast on our main channel, which is, um, start scale, exit, repeat serial entrepreneur secrets revealed.

We’d love to feature this show on that podcast channel as well, because, uh, it, you know, if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s more than just figuring out what you need to do. On your business, but it’s also what do you need to do yourself? And when we started this conversation, we started talking about how do we need to mentally make a shift in our own brain?

To become a sales driven organization and then once we make that shift once we say to ourselves Okay, I want to be a sales driven organization We’ve got about 30 or 40 different points here that we talked about on today’s show You can go back and listen to or if you want to get the book start scale legs and repeat You It’s extensively talks about how to do this.

Uh, and it’s one of the key, uh, key ways that you can scale your organization or scale your company. Look, business doesn’t happen by accident. It’s also a fricking rollercoaster and we need to understand how to emotionally deal with start. How do we emotionally deal with scale and transforming into a sales driven organization?

And the mental challenges that go along with that, you know, going from delegating tasks to delegating responsibilities, uh, even in the case of sales, delegating responsibilities to exiting the company, you know, to, uh, repeating that over and over again. And, uh, we really do tackle all of this in the book, start scale, exit, repeat.

It’s been, and I’m doing a commercial here, Michael, but it’s, it’s been the number one bestseller for in 13 categories on Amazon since we launched our October 3rd. Of 2023. Uh, and tomorrow we’re talking about at two o’clock. Eastern would love to have you join us. We’re talking about catching the AI wave.

And you can you can catch waves. And this is one of the things that we talk about more in the book than almost anything else is how you can catch a paradigm shift. A technical shift. And we have been blessed. Every single person in this room have been blessed to be in a period of time in history where we have the greatest wave of all, which has been AI, and it will meant more millionaires than any other, uh, technological shift in history.

But again, if you’re in this wave, you need to learn how to sell. You need to become a sales driven organization or to capture the value that comes from that wave. And that’s what we’re talking about today, Michael. I know I just sort of digressed there a little bit. And, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an interesting, Joe in the chat says sold me.

Okay. We love you, Joe. We love it when you come on, but, uh, it’s a, it’s a tough topic for me personally. Be, and it was tough one to write, uh, because although every entrepreneur is in sales, you know, I did IPOs and stuff like that. It’s it’s it’s just not my natural instinct. I know you’re more affable you i’ve seen you at conferences michael You you sit around you chat.

You’re like hanging out with people. You love to talk I hate to talk. I hate to talk because it’s like a waste of time for me. Um, but then i’ve got jeff remember jeff sass Uh, yeah company and you got Michele van tilburg I got others around me who can do the chatting and talking and stuff like that But for some entrepreneurs like myself, it it just it’s like I don’t have the patience for it How do you have the patience to To build those solid relationships.

And by the way, you need to build them to make a sale. Yeah. It’s, it’s really interesting. It obviously depends on the product and service, um, that you have and that sort of thing, um, that you’re, you’re selling. Um, but I think the, uh, it came comes down from me anyway, is I remember I took my daughter to one of the conferences, um, and, uh, and I talked to all, all my meetings and, uh, she said, so who are we selling to today?

So we’re not. And she goes, sorry, dad, who are we selling to? I said, we’re not, we’re not selling anything. And she goes, well, I don’t understand what do you mean? Like, why are you here? You’ve got to, got to get in return on investment, you know, sort of stuff. And, and I said, no, what we’re going to do is we’re going to listen and we’re going to work out if we can help people.

And if we can help people, that’s great. And there’s a benefit for us, fabulous. And so it’s a matter of, of listening first. I said to her, don’t leap into your solution before you’ve listened. You have two ears, one mouth, use them in those proportions. And, uh, it was quite amazing. Like, um, just to sit there and to listen to you.

It’s interesting. You said, Colin, I see you at conferences and you’re always in different meetings and all that sort of stuff. I could talk, we could spend a whole session on conferences in terms of sales and things like that. I like to expose my tech team. To conferences, because they get to actually interact with real people and they get to interact with, um, clients and opportunities and things like that as well.

So I teamed them up with a salesperson and I found that works well. And the thing I find quite amazing, um, for people in the, in the U S. Is that for you, the cost for you to fly from one CD to another is like a couple hundred bucks. It’s not very much at all. And, um, yet many businesses don’t do that. They don’t establish the relationships.

For me to fly a team member from Melbourne, Australia, say to a typical conference I go to in the U. S., that’ll cost me, um, about 10, 000 Australian dollars plus. I’ll put in U. S. dollars, it’d be about 7, 000 U. S. That’s minimum just to fly them, let alone hotel and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. So it’s a real investment, but it’s one that I found really works, Colin, is that developing those relationships is key.

And particularly in the type of industry that I’m in is this all about the relationships and, and sewing into those relationships. So there’ve been some companies, um, we’ve, we’ve been to like, we’ve traveled from one side of the world to the other and, um, yeah, I’ve visited them three times, got no business whatsoever.

But now we’ve got to just have, this is an example, got a call from one from that, that, that company and person there. And they said, look, Michael, we just need to go along. We got, we got so much business. We need to actually move to you now. And I said, that’s great. We’re traveling to the U S love to come visit you again for the fourth time.

Let’s have dinner. Let’s talk about how we’re going to do that. And it’s because there’s a level of trust that gets developed over time. As I also, I was at a conference call and, and a guy came up to me and said, why should I do business with you? And I said to him, because we’re still here. And he goes, that’s a really good answer.

There’s an issue of longevity as well. Um, in terms of transforming into a sales organization, I think that you could be the hardcore sales, like, um, and just out there and kind of And all that sort of stuff and everything. And there’s some businesses really require that, but if you’re selling Gulfstream jets, my guess, high pressure sales is not going to work for you.

So it depends what you’re selling. It really does depend on that and the approach and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. So, um, I think that you’re touching on something here. Like, I really believe that, um, see. When I was doing sales at Dot Club and Hostopia and these other companies I talk about, it’s really B2B.

So we’re talking a lot about B2B here, but I think this could apply to B2C as well, is a one word. Authenticity. Oh, absolutely. Really being authentic with your customers. And by the way, that also means sometimes acknowledging when you made a mistake and doing that and then, and that may shock people too when you do that, by the way.

Acknowledging, look, we made a mistake in this proposal. We should have come here. We, we know that you want the lowest price. And so we are, you know, and just acknowledge it. And some, you know, sometimes that has happened with me in the meetings before and other CEOs were like, what? And it was a particular meeting with the Columbian company.

I’m thinking about where they, they, our team, our sales team promoted, like first trying to sell them something that, and I could see they were not buying it. And I just, I saved the day by saying, look, guys, we apologize about this presentation. We know that your needs, you know, are different and that you have A lower paying customer base.

So we’ve got a package we can deliver you. We can do all of this with, and they loved it. They loved the fact that it was so authentic. It’s like those who come on clubhouse like shadow, right. And Joe, you know, those who come on clubhouse, they’re authentic. They’re real. We’d love to hear from real people and talk with real people.

And and it’s no difference in sales authenticity. What do you what are your thoughts michael? Yeah, I I think you’re right like, um, I remember uh many years ago. I had a sales guy um He he said to me, um He said, look, I’ve discovered we made this mistake with a particular client and it’s cost them money, but it’s okay.

They won’t find out that they won’t find out. I can spin it this way. And I said, don’t do that. And he said, well, what do you mean? We’ll save the company money. I said, no, be up, be authentic with the client, tell them we made a mistake and then we’ll, we’ll make good. And so it had two impacts. The first impact was obviously the client, the client was pleasantly surprised.

Uh, that we’re being authentic with them, but had another impact. It was on the sales guy that he knew the company had his back. He knew the company had his back and we’re prepared to put a money where our mouth was and, and it began to transform him as an individual. And he became a tremendous sales guy.

Um, amazing fast forward number of years after that. And, uh, we had another guy come in and, uh, we had a sales meeting and he tells me announces to everyone that we made this mistake, um, but I managed to say these things to the customers, uh, they’ll never know, and we’re gonna save ourselves like X number of thousands of dollars, and there was a bit of silence.

I said, So pardon me. And he repeated what I said. I said, so let me understand this. You told the customer a lie. And he goes, well, um, no, it’s going to save us a whole lot of money. I said, well, hang on a second here. Have you logged the lie in the CRM system? He said, well, no. I said, well, you better make sure you log the lie.

So we’re all aware of the lie because we’re going to have to be across this lie now. And so when we meet the person at the conference, we need to understand the context of the lie. And by the way, when you’re in a group of people at a conference, you’re going to remember all the lies you’ve told to each person.

And you got to really hope they don’t share any of those lies in amongst that group. They were gone within like, they were gone very shortly after this. I think you can’t have that. If you want to destroy your sales organization, allow them to lie. You’ll destroy, you know, we talked about culture earlier, Michael, how important that is, how important culture is.

We fired multiple sales people because even though they were good, because they violated those culture statements.

We’re going to close it out here, Joe. I mean, thank you for saving Joe. Great to see you. Love to hear from you there, Joe. Great to hear from both of you. Yeah. When you were describing the story about your daughter joining you, it reminded me of something today in one of the patent and innovation calls.

They were talking about, um, servant sales, in a way. That at some point you end up, uh, self actualizing the work that you’re doing, and then you realize how you add value to someone else. And so only by adding value to someone else’s work first, you must intake what they need servant sales So I thought that was kind of fascinating that there was another another circle that was almost talking about it in a fringe I think it’s a good way of putting it joe servant sales is First seek to understand before you seek to be understood Listen before you go along start doing your big sales pitch and all that sort of stuff really listen And this one of the things I, I tried to instill into my sales team and all that sort of stuff.

And the whole thing is listen first, listen to what the client is saying. And sometimes you have to listen between the lines. So I think Colin, you said it was the biggest issue for some of the people you’re, you’re ultimately selling to was the fact that if something went wrong, they would lose their job.

They would never articulate that. They would never say that. But you’ve got to listen. So it comes down to Joe, what you’re saying, be a servant to the person, really understand them. What are the stresses? What are the strains and all the things like that, um, that they’re going through and teaching your, your, your company to be a company of listeners is going to be one of the, one of the first things you need to do in terms of transforming to sales, teach them to listen, keep your mouth shut.

In fact, the company Chanel, um, When they have people, um, new people start there, you know, Chanel, the perfume company, um, the, all the people are allowed to attend meetings, but they’re not allowed to speak for three months. They’re not allowed to contribute to those meetings for three months. They need to listen.

It’s an interesting philosophy there, Colin. But anyway, you guys have been listening to the Complete Entrepreneur. Thank you for coming into the distance with us here. Joe, I’m going to follow you right now. It’s great to have you up here. Um, and, uh, It is wonderful that the complete entrepreneurs, we tackle some of these really interesting topics here about what it means to be an entrepreneur and some of the challenges, the real challenges, but Colin and I are avid entrepreneurs.

We have been all our lives and we’ve got a whole lot of experience, but we’d like you to hear from you guys as well. And Joe, thank you for coming up on stage. It’s just a wonderful time that we have. On the complete entrepreneur and Colin. So what’s going on with startup dot club? Okay Yeah, we’ve got a number of speakers coming on if you haven’t already done.

So go to startup dot club Www. startup. club and sign up that mailing list. We’ve got some really cool speakers coming on next month Uh, I think the newsletter comes out tomorrow at noon Uh, I will say to the bookstore scale x repeat forbes put it on sale for One more day and that’s it. It’s done You It’s going back up to full price tomorrow.

It, I think it’s today’s the last day of the month. Sleepier, right? Yeah, that’s right. So it’s going up full price tomorrow. So if you ever wanted to get a copy of the ebook, it’s 2. 99 right now. And, uh, that doesn’t matter. I mean, you know, we’ve spent 10 years on that book, Michael, and 200 interviews and 50, 50 of those went in the book and we have, you know, dozens of call outs and illustrations.

It’s color coded. It’s, it’s, uh, been number one. It’s a fabulous book. Yeah. Number one for 13 categories. So if you wanted it, I don’t think price matters. Cause I know a lot of people might be listening to this in podcast and say, yeah, do I spend the 10 versus the 3? But I do think they might put it back on sale in September.

There’s been some discussion about that, but otherwise, otherwise, uh, thank you very much and tomorrow at two o’clock Eastern on Friday, catching the, catching the wave, catching the AI wave. And it, and we’re talking about catching a wave. Which includes the AI wave. So there are many different technological and paradigm shifts that occur every day in our lives.

And you can benefit from those, whether it’s Airbnb or whether it is the sharing economy or, or even, uh, even AI. So tomorrow we’re going to talk about that two o’clock Eastern and you’re obviously Joe and shadow. Welcome to come on stage and, and shadow loves talking about AI. We know that. So you’re welcome to come tomorrow.

Thank you very much. We’ll see you all. Yes. And next week on the complete entrepreneur, we’ll be tackling, uh, the topic of the cost of raising money, the cost of raising money. Many entrepreneurs view raising money as one of their first objectives, but what is the cost? Is it more than giving away equity?

What is the emotional cost of raising funds and is it really worth it? You’ll be digging into that, the cost of raising money. And let me tell you, it’s going to be a fantastic topic. Great to see everyone next week at 5 PM Eastern time on the complete entrepreneur. God bless. May you have a wonderful time in your business this week.

See you later.