S3 E22 - If You Want Something, Persist | Anthony Iannarino

Welcome back everybody to the latest episode of second growth. This is your co-host Cassidy. Carl, how you doing? All I'm doing, Cassidy.

Good to be here. You want to introduce our special guest today? What's up? I absolutely do.

Anthony Enorino joins us today. Everyone knows that like I just like gush over Anthony, like at least once a quarter. So everybody's like, oh my god, finally Carl got to do this. But Anthony is super excited to have you here.

I've not read every single word you've written because that is like we take a lifetime. But I wish we could measure this. But I feel like of all the people out there, I would be like if there was a leaderboard. I've been here the top, maybe top five, for like the amount of words consumed.

So thank you my friend for changing my career trajectory. And it's good to have you. I still talk about you all the time, just because of the HubSpot thing. And it was so funny.

It was just such a funny thing. A lot of people don't know that story. I got the job at HubSpot because of doing what you told me to do. And then I went to President's Club twice a while.

I was like, you got me the job. And you made me successful there. And so I just owe you, like just a lot of commission checks. It was just funny because it was like, they're not going to hire me.

They gave me a rejection. I'm like, call a VP. Just call directly and tell them, just like I'm calling you right now, when you give me a CRM full of names, I'm going to call all of them. And he said something to you that like, I want you to talk to my assistant and get on my calendar.

Because how's the sales manager going to say, no to the only person that called him? Like it's impossible. They have to hire you. Like it's, you are amazing for doing that.

A lot of people would be afraid of doing it, but it worked perfect for you. And then you end up, the guy that they didn't want to hire is President's Club. I know, I was like, I don't want to say black sheep, but like I think I told you the story when I got there, I was, you know, it was like a hired a bunch of like X, like sales force reps and like, Marcheto reps and Adobe reps and Oracle people, like they like to hire logos. And then there was me in like this new hire training class.

And it was like, who did you sell for? Sold software platforms to churches, you know, before this. It was, I was like, I stood out like a sore thumb. And I had a chip on my shoulder because of that, you know, and I just again, did what you said over and over.

And yeah, I won Rookie of the Year, which I think is probably, I don't want to do my own horn, but it's probably the hardest of words to win there. You only get one shot at that, right? It's not like President's Club where you could miss it and then try to get it the next year, right? It's like, you get one shot at Rookie of the Year.

And there are, that was like during COVID. So right before COVID, so like they were hiring aggressively. So it was up against like a lot of good salespeople from all these cool, sexy logos, but it wasn't enough. I've never heard that beginning of that story.

I didn't realize that's how you prospected in on. Yeah, they rejected me at the very beginning. I remember the emails. So I would say, and it was like a canned email, right?

It was like one from recruiting that's like, hey, we don't like your grade, but we went another direction and everything got a first interview. It didn't matter. I called like everyone with a sales leadership title at HubSpot and I waited a few weeks and I linked in message and I left, I was even voicemails at their office phones and calling through the front desk. And finally, one of the Matt Hanber, I'll never forget him, he called me back, commuting while he was commuting into the Boston office.

And he was like, what's up dude? Blowing up like all our phones. And I was like, yeah, I got rejected. And I don't wanna be rejected.

And he was like, all right, shoot your shot. I'm commuting in, talk to me. And he started like doing like a kind of on the fly interview and that was it, the rest was history. I mean, I closed him at the end of that call.

I was like, dude, I got rejected from recruiting. So you're gonna have to go into the ATS and like flag me back as active and get me into the process. Is that something that you feel like based on this call that you are comfortable moving forward with? And he was like, yes, I was like, I'm gonna hold you to that.

And he did it. And I went straight through the interview process. And one of the things, man, this was the last thing, it's supposed to be about me, it's supposed to be about Anthony. But this is a plug for sales accelerator for individuals.

At the very end of the process, they were also so impressed that they do a final panel interview at the very end, it's like four sales leaders versus you. It's two hours, it's pretty intense. They give you like a five minute water break at the top of the first hour. But they were really impressed with that.

I paid out of pocket for Anthony's accelerator. They had never had a rep that would like paid out of pocket for their own development. I was just like, who else is gonna develop me? I've got him to train him anywhere else, right?

I have to pay for this. So anyways, they asked all about it and et cetera. So anyways, all right, Anthony, anyways, that is, I'll never forget any of that, man. That's awesome.

And I still tell tons of reps, just do this. I know that this script sounds boring. It works, just say these words. Don't think like Maverick and Top Gun, right?

Don't think, just do, just do this. But anyways, Anthony, so happy to have you here, man. We'll blaze through here some of these topics. I wanna open up.

Take me back to the beginning. We'll just jump in the deep end here. You talk a lot about being one of business acumen, like really elevating the sales conversation itself, presenting a non-obvious or new insights and not necessarily talking about your company and leading with company and product and even pain, right? A lot of other sales trainers like Sandler, et cetera, their processes oriented around, no free consulting and pain funnels and this and that, right?

But you take such a different approach and just focus again on the value of the sales conversation and really knowing something that your buyer doesn't of value and that being the major reason why somebody chooses you as a preferred vendor or provider. Long way to say, where did that start? When did that idea, like the inception of this paradigm kind of shift for you, really, really early in your sales career? It was 2021.

No, no, no, no, 2001, sorry, 2001. I had a client. I won this client. I beat every major staffing company on Earth, like the big ones, a Deco, manpower, Cali, all of them.

And I had about, I don't know, $10 million company at that time. And I won the client. I went and met everybody where they lived. I took careful notes about what they wanted from me.

I presented it to them. They bought for me. And then they became a horrible client. They were under market.

They had one union shop that was just brutal to all of our people. And at some point we started having quarterly briefings. So we would have like a QBR. And I started to notice that they had a lot of things that they believed that just wasn't true.

And so I started to notice like, they think that $9 is okay, even though the average was $12 at that time for unskilled labor. And I tried to convince them to give me money so that I could raise the rate and they could get better results. And they refused to do it. And they continued to refuse to do it.

And at our next quarterly business review, I came in with 100 slides, literally 100 slides. Every single piece of data that I could find, all of it repeating the same thing over and over again. I'm showing them the wages. I'm showing them how low unemployment is.

I'm showing them how few people there are in Columbus, Ohio, and how far they are from being able to work in these places and how uncompetitive their rate was and their shifts were and how they treated people. And I gave them a full 100 slides. And what I was thinking that I was going is, I'm going to bludgeon these people until they give me the money to pay their people what they need so that they can be successful. At the end of that, the senior leader of HR was a full bird colonel in Vietnam.

So he's one of these guys that's rather direct. And he said, that was one of the best briefings I've ever seen. And I said, great. And he said, can I have a copy of your slide deck?

And I said, why do you want my slide deck? But nobody ever asked me for my slide deck because it was all why us, right? Nobody cares about that. He said, I'm going to brief the senior leaders at three o'clock today and it'd be really helpful for me to have this.

And I said, okay, I'll give it to you. He said, take your logo off first. And now I'm like, I just did his homework for him. I did his homework.

Now he's stealing it from me, like Paul Grady in second grade who stole my homework and gave it to the teacher, but his name on it, fortunately you can see mine underneath that. But two hours after his meeting, he called me and he said, I'm giving you $2 million to raise the pay rate. Yes, so I've got it. I got the money.

Now things are going to get better because I'm going to be able to pay people what they need to be paid. At the end of that year, now I'd love to tell you that that briefing gave me the idea to start selling this particular way, but it didn't. I went right back to doing what I was going because I got my money. I got everything I needed from him, but it was fine.

At the end of the year, he called me and he said, are you going to brief us on what changes we need to make going into next year? And I said, yeah, absolutely. I had no interest in delivering that again. And he said, we'd love it if you'd come in and just go to each of our locations and talk to all of our managers and share with them what you see and what we should be thinking about.

So I did that four times. I had to do it four times to four different locations. When I left everybody was like, can we have a copy of that? Can you share that with us?

And I thought, wow, that's amazing that they actually want this piece of content that I created just to try to get a pay raise for one group of people. And then it dawned on me. I thought, I wonder what would happen if I just did this cold? Like what if it was my first meeting?

I just come in and I describe the environment and the challenges, the headwinds, all the things that they're going to be struggling with over the next 12 months for sure. And everybody loved it. Everybody sat in their chair and then leaned forward and they started asking questions and they started talking about their business. And they're like, well, what do you guys seeing other people do?

And they started asking all kinds of questions. And that's when I realized they want to learn more than they want to pitch. And they want information that will let them make a decision. Now, I knew that that time I knew way more than they did because their heads down doing work, right?

And I'm looking at lots of companies. I'm looking at all the things that are going on and I'm trying to make sense of it for them. And that ended up being where I started that. So I've been doing this since 2001.

And that's the only way any of the companies that I have, we always start with the executive briefing in the first meeting, including the person that works for me in sales and training. She knows, I won't talk to anybody if they haven't gone through the executive briefing. I just won't do it. They don't know the context.

They want to have a conversation. But they're outside of the context because they don't know what they don't know. Anthony, that's awesome super insightful to hear a little bit more about how the executive briefing came to be. I want to talk about assumptions for a second because I think a lot of salespeople and any leaders that are listening to this, they want their salespeople to do this, right?

I mean, it sounds awesome. You do not want to do this. And the struggle I've found, and I'm sure you're helping all of your customers to kind of overcome this, is how do you really identify, first of all, you bring a level of confidence to this. You said it, right?

You said, I know more than they do about XYZ topic, right? Recruiting and wages and talent management, et cetera. At least where your industry intersects kind of with their industry, right? Sippic crossroad there.

You just become a master of it. How do you gain that knowledge? What is the process? Let me have a thought experiment.

If I was to drop you into an industry that you just didn't know or didn't understand, and as Anthony Innerino today in 2023, in order for you not to be able, so that we don't have to wait five, 10 years to run a good executive briefing, like what would you do in a new sales role hitting the ground running, trying to build up this business acting and understand the assumptions, building executive briefing? The thing that I worry about most about sales right now, Carl, there's a couple of things. I think that a lot of people are trying to set up their sales force like a tech company when they're not a tech company. So I think that's one thing.

And they're not making a lot of full cycle salespeople. So I'm worried about that, because we need them to grow faster and when they're stuck in an S.E.R. role for a long time, without getting any development, it's gonna be very hard for them later on when they do get another job. So I think that's one thing that I'm concerned about.

The second thing that I'm concerned about is that we don't do our homework. So I read more than most. I don't think that people go do the research with a simple query that would say something like top 10 headwinds, oil and gas industry 2023. You'll find a half a dozen or a dozen listicles with all the data around all those things.

All you have to do is go do a query. I mean, that's it. And then you can say, these five show up on everybody's list. Now I have a good sense of that.

I can go pull the data and then I can start understanding what the headwinds are. So I just want the headwinds right at the beginning. And I worry about us not reading, not studying. And you only get one chance at a first meeting.

And what happens is when you come in and you say, I wanna tell you about my company, I wanna tell you about our clients, I wanna tell you about our solutions. You've already lost them because they've done that for so many years. All that stuff's on your website. Like you don't need to say it out loud.

You're not a walking brochure. So you just have to say, we have to remove that. So here's what I do whenever I have a transformation with a client where it's a big client and we're gonna do something like one, we add 1,500 reps and 200 meters. And the first thing I did when I walked into the first training is I gave them the executive briefing that I would want them to give their clients.

So I start talking about what's the number one concern of a chief marketing officer? Cost of acquisition of a customer. That's it. That's what you're gonna get fired for is not being able to acquire enough clients with the money that you have to do that.

So that's, I started going through all kinds of data for them. I'm showing them the data and people are going, where are you getting that data? I said, well, a full half of it came from your website. And they're like, we have a website?

Yeah, you do. You're a $5 billion company. You have a big website with lots of insights on it. They've never seen it.

And then the hands start coming up. Are we getting this? Are we getting this? Are we gonna be allowed to have a copy of this?

And I said, yeah, not only that, you're your marketing team put 32 of them together. You for different verticals. So, and then they were like, what? Yeah.

So I do that every time. I'm gonna brief you right at the beginning because I went to context set and the context for that conversation was, I know something that you don't know that you should know and you should know it better than me. And it, well, I'll just tell you the end of the story. After we were done with the transformation, the following year they went from $5 billion to $5,900 million.

So that's what happened when we changed their approach. It's hard to do this, but once somebody actually experiences you doing it, especially if it's a salesperson, they recognize immediately like, that's so different than what everybody else does. And here's what I would tell you about this approach. It does four things.

Number one, you're creating value immediately. Like there's no gap between you sitting down in the value of being created for the client. The second thing it does is it positions you as an expert in authority. So that's really a great thing to have in the first few minutes of a call.

The third thing it does is it answers why change. So I've got that established in 10 minutes. That's already done. And then it makes it really easy to get a second meeting because you already proved that you can create value.

And what happens is when you start talking about your company, it's not creating any value for them. And the reason salespeople were taught to do this is so they can look credible in front of their client. But as soon as you know this, like as soon as they start talking, you're gonna determine whether or not they're credible or not. You'll know that in a few minutes.

And the questions they ask and the way that they go about pursuing that, that will immediately identify somebody who's one up or one down. One up means I know something that you don't know. And if I transfer it to you, you will be able to make a better decision because I can give you what you need to know to be able to make that decision well. If you're one down, you're gonna talk about your company and you're gonna try to position your solution.

And I want you to love your company and I want you to love your solution. But you have to understand that isn't what they're buying. They're buying trust, they're buying credibility. They're buying certainty of outcome.

They're looking for somebody that knows more than they do. And if you don't know more than they do about the decision that they're making, they don't need you at all. I mean, and that's the problem right now. So I've had five companies that are in measure revenue and billions that have reached out to me to tell me we can get a first meeting, we can't get a second meeting.

Why can't you get the second meeting? You blew the audition. That's why. Hey, Anthony, have a follow up to that.

That is, I love this approach. As a somebody sells the marketers as a former marketer, it's pretty easy for me to buy into this and do it because I have the experience. I assume you get a lot of feedback from sales leaders and sales reps who are like, listen, I believe in this, I love what you're saying, but how do I, as somebody who's never been in the shoes of a CMO or a CFO or a head of HR, how do I come across as the expert when I'm a 30 year old AE? And I assume you have an answer for that, but I'm just curious how you go through that process of getting people who may not have sat in that seat be viewed as an expert to people who are arguably the experts.

Right, okay, so they are, so they're also one out, by the way. They know way more about their business. They know way more about their goals. They know way more about what that buyer's journey is gonna need to look like for them.

They have a whole lot of things that we have to ask them about. What I'm describing is not a contest as to do I know more than the CEO. I do in some areas and they do in some areas. Now that's when we do our best work is when we go back and forth like this, right?

So Cassidy, the way that I would do this is I would say something like, Cassidy, I realized that you're not very smart and I probably have to teach you a whole bunch of things or you'll probably ruin this thing and it will never work for you. That would be one way not to do it, but the better way to do it is to say Cassidy, what I'd love to do is share with you the trends that we see that are already harming companies like yours and I'd love for you to give me your perspective on how these things are showing up and I'd love to understand what's important about this to you right now. And so you're smart, I'm smart. If we start talking to each other and we start sharing, now we're having a good conversation about change and that's what causes this to work.

So that's we call that the approach because you wanna make that other person. Like I wanna know what you know that I don't know because if you have some other perspective, I get to add it to the perspectives I already have and now I know more about why some people do it this way and other people do it that way because I'm just trying to get smarter in every conversation that I have. That's so good. It's such a beautiful way to invite the other person into the conversation without trying to like your point come across as one-upping.

Cause I am the other end of the day, but of course I wanna hear what you have to say. And of course I'm gonna open up and share if I disagree or I have another point of view or I also see things that you may not have called out which only helps your story before. Yeah, I've been doing this for a long time that way. I've asked every client I had since I was 25, like what's the strategic outcome that you're looking for and what's the value that I have to create for you to make this successful?

And they will tell me like this is what we need you to do. And I learned and then I could go and take what I got from one client and I'd walk in like a structure was part of the limited. I had a great mentor there named Dallas Mulder and Dallas would answer all my questions. And I asked him like, you guys talk about throughput all the time.

And I understand what the concept is, but you're like doing it in math. Like what's the math? And he said, do you wanna walk through a spreadsheet? And I said, yeah, I'd love to walk through a spreadsheet.

So I got the spreadsheet. We walked through it. Two days later I walk into another distribution center and I'm like, tell me about your throughput numbers. And they're like, you know what throughput is?

You're the first salesperson who said throughput. And I only know like this much about it, right? But I've been helping them for that period of time. This is what I think we're missing right now in sales is like you need to be really curious.

You wanna understand other people and why they do the things that they do and why it's important to them. And I just don't think we have that curiosity. I think it's let me tell you about how our solutions helping other people like you. Not the same thing.

I also feel bad if I have to ask what your problem is. I just don't, I don't wanna ask that question. I want it to come up in another way because it's like Anthony is at your second day on the job. Like you don't know what kind of problems your clients have.

And I always think that that sort of, if you were trying to be an expert in authority and then you have to start asking questions like, well, how's that impacting your business? You have no business acumen. So if you would look at the research on why buyers don't wanna talk to us, it's because they say you're not very helpful. They don't know anything about our business.

They don't know, they don't have any business acumen. And it's just very hard to give them the education that they need when they come in like that. So I'm trying to push back against that and four books so far. Well, and you're having to like it puts a burden on the buyer or the prospect and now I have to spend time educating the salesperson, right?

And you can get very cringe worthy very quickly when you're like, well, tell me about your role, like what do you do? And it's just like, yeah, it's man, like that's the basic stuff on the website. What do you do as a company? But it gets even worse to your point.

And again, we've just been to defend all salespeople here. We've just been indoctrinated for so long, right? Pain funnels, pain funnels, daps, like just probe into like, you know, finding pain. And that's the mode that we get in.

It's like if you do a good job finding pain, you'll win the deal, but you have a completely different paradigm. And this, I love this idea of like being one up in different things as your buyers. I think in elite sales strategies, you call it something. It's like a virtuous, you call it like a virtuous circle.

You have like a concept that you name it. I forget, I'll have to go back and look. But I think that's awesome because it also speaks to this trust and rapport and this mentorship type of relationship, like there's an equal value of exchange here that happens. And I think you said it earlier where you were worried about SDRs and I'm gonna connect these threads here where you said SDRs are in a sense silo.

They're overly specialized so they don't get exposed to anything else in the business. I think that happens to AEs too, right? They don't get exposed to the businesses that they sold. And so they don't learn any of the good stuff that happens once we actually are delivering on the service or implementing the product or helping whatever it is that they actually bought.

AEs are no longer a part of that. So they don't actually get to learn, hey, how did my customers actually use, you know, what I saw, right? In our Refine Labs context, like what other challenges did they run into when we started to help them with their demand gen and their marketing, et cetera? We're siloed off from like that success part of the organization and it doesn't, nobody actually develops any business acumen, right?

So in, whenever you're doing training Anthony, here's the question, how do you, like, how would you suggest structuring, I guess, would you just restructure roles entirely? What is like the ideal sales team structure and scope of responsibilities look like for a team that is hungry to be subject matter experts and to be one up in all the right ways and to always be, you know, providing value for their customers? I think one of the things that people should consider is making sure the SDR is part of the rest of the sales process. So that makes people unhappy when I say that.

But I want them to understand, so let me say this in the way that I like to say it. They need to learn to speak client. So that's a language. There's a language that clients use.

And a lot of it is around business acumen and goals and priorities and those sort of things. And I worry that if they don't get that and then they're like, you know what, I've been here long enough, I'm gonna go, I'll get a job as an AE. And then they're not prepared to do the work of a full cycle salesperson because they've not had access to that whole conversation. So I think what you, if you're gonna do that, you should say they've got to sit on X number of sales meetings every single week.

And then I would never let anybody be a passenger. If you go on a call with me, you are not gonna be a passenger just because I'm driving and you're not gonna be the navigator because I already know the way. But what I'm gonna ask you to do is you're gonna write down every question I ask and what the client answers. And then I'm gonna tell you to, when they ask a question, I want you to write down their question and my answer.

And then we're gonna sit down and we're gonna talk about what those things meant and why I ask them and why they ask this. And this is what they're looking for. And you might not have heard the question, the same way that I heard the question. I hear something as a full cycle salesperson that means I'm not certain.

They might not pick that up until somebody tells them they were asking this cause they're not certain about what we were saying. And I believe they're still not certain. And we still have to have another conversation with them to help them see how we do this and how it works. But I think that they should not be allowed to be passive in any way.

You have to develop yourself like you've done. Like you went to accelerator because you like, I'm gonna develop myself. I'm gonna get help doing this. But if they're not responsible for doing that, they can stay, I have people that say to me, like I've been selling for 20 years.

But they've had the same year, 20 times. Like you didn't just continue to grow up the whole time. It's like I'm comfortable now. And then they stay there.

And I think that that's what could happen to an SDR or does happen to SDRs. Those are the people that generally, Carl that send me an email saying, how do I become an AE? And nobody wants to talk to me cause I'm an SDR. It's like, well, they will talk to you, but you're gonna have to pick up the phone and call them like you called everybody else and pull yourself out of the box.

Cause there's a whole bunch of people that are gonna go to Indeed or whatever, instead of reaching out. And look, the thing about this, if you're an SDR and you wanted to move, making a call to somebody that you really wanna work for, will be the only call they get. That will be the only call they get from a person who's being hired to make calls to decision makers. So it just doesn't make sense to do some of the things that technology allows us to do.

So now they think that they've applied because they put their resume in Indeed. That you did not apply. You gave the company a lead on somebody that they might hire. It's just a lead.

In fact, it feels like that is the way you need to get the job. The way Carl, we kind of bring this back to Carl's initial example. If I'm hiring AE's, I kind of would expect that they prospect me. Like that is a great way to show that you're different.

I mean, cause that is the job in many cases, you know? If you believe that's true, you should get open up Google and get a grief counselor right now. Like you're gonna be really, really unhappy with what happened. Yeah, it's always amazing how that doesn't happen.

And I think it just goes back to, I don't know, as any SDRs that I, you know, I guess coach through becoming an AE. First of all, I always discourage people from becoming SDRs only, right? I'm like, look, the jobs are different. Like starting in one doesn't mean you have the skills to do the other.

Like there are plenty of companies out there that will hire you as an AE with no experience and give you some training. My first job as an AE was, like I've never been an SDR only, right? My first job was an AE and I got like a two week training. Like I got a script.

I got all these things. And I remember my sales manager was like, look, you're gonna want to be creative but just say exactly what this says. But for now, just follow this. I got two weeks of that, a spreadsheet and I got a phone.

And that was it. It was outside sales selling print digital advertising and magazines. And so that was always, but when I got into tech, it was so different. It was like, oh, you have to be an SDR first.

And I never understood it. I was like, the best AE's are gonna prospect anyway. So what's the value of that being the only thing that I do? Why can't I just learn both of those skills concurrently?

And the tech space is just fascinating because it's just a lot different than else, right? What do you see, do you primarily sell to tech or how do you see team structures differently in your world? We get some tech, but we also get a whole bunch of other things. We get a lot of industrial things and like marketing companies.

We get all kinds of things. So I'm big on big marketing companies. We do stuff with like SAP and people like that. So we do training for big groups like that.

I think that it's okay if you wanted to say we need to put an emphasis on prospecting, but I would say that the AE has to be part of that. And when they let them just sit there and wait and think that somebody else has to do their work for them, that's not a very good thing to do with a rep. I do think that all of them should be working towards being full cycle. Because that's the truth is what you really have to be able to do to be successful.

You're going to make money in sales. You might make decent money as an SDR or BDR, but if you want to make money money, you've got to do the whole thing from beginning to end. You've got to start the wide change. And I came out of staffing.

So everybody I ever called on already had somebody. And when I started becoming a sales manager, the people that I hired would say, everybody's already got a provider. Right. Why don't we call them people that don't have a provider?

Because they don't buy what we sell. That's why. So there's no reason calling people that aren't going to buy from you. So you just have to work hard enough to be able to displace somebody.

And of course in staffing, what you're promising people is unreliable people. That will be there for some period of time for you. And that means it's very easy to displace people who aren't doing really good work. And that's what my whole career was, was just taking companies away from other companies.

I would take my competitors, companies away from them. If they had any kind of problems, just we would come in and take them out. What I know like either lunch is like, that was just one majorly, it's primarily correct me from wrong devoted to creating value, but in the context of competitor displacement. What about Anthony O'Challengie here for tech?

When you have so many of these disruptive companies and we do something different and ripping out tech, I don't want to say it's harder or easier because I don't know what it really takes to change from one staffing agency to another. I don't know if this is a simple paperwork thing or if this is a big process. But I think a lot of the pushback that I get from companies that I work with or in the context of refine labs is that, well, to rip something out is a really, really painful process and a big process. And it's too hard.

We should just find people that don't have HubSpot yet. What do you say to a team like that that is always just looking for kind of net new and fishing in that pond? When you look at how business works, that person who's the incumbent is probably going to become apathetic. They're not going to give them the same attention.

They're going to think that because we're in, we're safe. And I think that that exposes them to somebody else who can come in and create value. Now, this is another truth that's really hard for sales people to understand. We create value in the sales conversation.

We build the value of the solution. So those are things that we do. We add value when we don't want to give somebody a concession, we deliver the value. And then this is the one that people don't get.

New value. So great, you did this for me. And you're going to tell me it's working great. You got this great outcome.

OK, great. Now what are you got? Nothing. Everything's working for you.

Nope. Now you're in trouble. As long as you leave that door open for somebody to create new value, some people are going to engage with you. And there is always some cohort inside the company that's not happy with everything.

Like there's people who don't like the software, and they would love to rip it out. And if you can find your way to those people, you can start the wide change with a group of people who are motivated. And I only know this because it's what I've done for all my life. Yeah, it's what I did at HubSpot, right?

There was like two cohorts of sales people. It was the people who avoided people with sales force. And it was the people who were just uniquely focused on anybody who had Adobe's Market or Salesforce. And that's all that we focused on.

And I found, to your point, that it was a little bit more painful in the sense that there was more complexity in a rip out. But I didn't have to do any convincing of value of doing in-bound marketing or value of having a CRM or value of finding budget for this type of technology to your point. So I think there's pros and cons of both side. And I think to become a company like HubSpot, you're going to have to get good at both motions.

But to your point, again, I think that it's just like you get shied away from it, right? You just think that you're competitors are so awesome. They're good enough at Salesforce, right? But to your point, there's always a niche.

There's always a pocket. There's always a pain in there somewhere that nags at that team. And if you can position that properly, you win. It's also like, I want to, you said something on LinkedIn, let's change gears.

He says something I linked in about just the transactional nature of sales. And I think that applies to you, right? It's like, I'm not playing the long game anymore. I'm not going to nurture that big Salesforce customer and eventually rip them out, even though that may be a really big deal.

It may take me 18 months, 24 months, because I'm uniquely focused on just like, where's this a low hanging fruit? Let me just email everybody in my install base and see if I can just add another hub, right, to hit my quota this month. And then I'll worry about my quota next month when it gets here, right? And I see this.

It plagues, especially the tech industry, just the short-sightedness. How do you, I guess, train that? Because a lot of times it starts with the leaders, right? It starts with the CEOs.

Like, they just want to hit numbers month to month. Like, just drag customers forward into this month with a discount. It's like this infection or this cancer that plagues Salesforce, right? Short-sightedness.

How do you navigate that? You have to have two pipelines. So you have to have a pipeline of the things that are moving like they are right now. But then you also have to have a pipeline for the things that you actually want.

When I pursued PetSmart, it took me seven years to win that account. It literally took me seven years. There was a woman there named Vicki. And Vicki was the hardest gatekeeper I've ever run into in my life.

Like, she was brutal, like never letting me in. And I called every month I called, every single month I made calls. And one month I called and I said, is Vicki in? And they said, no, she's gone.

And I said, what happened? And they said, she got a new job. And two days later, I was sitting in PetSmart with a senior leader. And I had a great brief for him.

He had no interest in it. I started talking to them about other priorities. And he said, where'd you get that? And I said, I read your last three annual reports.

He said, nobody in this building cares anything about that. If you could get those boxes moved from over here to over there, that'd be just great. And I said, I'll bring you back to the contract. And seven years to get it in seven years of $2 million a year for taking care of PetSmart.

And people on my team would say, why do you keep doing this? Like, they're never going to say yes. I'm prospecting anyway. What difference does, I mean, one calls, one calls, and the next calls, the next call.

Why wouldn't I keep calling them? Like, eventually something's going to happen and I'm going to get a shot. Yeah. You just, you need two pipelines, though.

You need that one where you're like, you're playing this most, the strategic long game, because it's a big money on the other side of that. So you can't just try to do the transactional stuff because it's not big enough for a lot of people to reach their goals, but they need big ones too. So I try to convince them to do two pipelines. I love that.

I love this idea of like the second pipeline being the accounts that you want. I mean, I'm looking for the word, the terminology you use. Frankly, we don't see this enough. And when we see that, and when we may call that a tier, it's like, oh, but, but, but, but, but if I can't sell them right now, so they're treating these strategic accounts still transactionally.

Yeah. Versus the long game is what you've articulated, which I completely agree with. That's awesome. I went back into one of my staffing companies to help with a deal.

It was a deal that we weren't able to get. We were working on it. And I went out and had two meetings with six stakeholders, leaders. And then I had another meeting with them.

And then I had two meetings on Zoom. And it's a $42 million deal. Two face to face. Two on virtual, $42 million over three years.

Decent contract. Why would you ever give up? Like, why would you ever give up? You just never give up.

Something will change. Give me a long enough timeline and I guarantee you every client that you have will be gone and replaced by other ones. That's the nature of what we do. So you, if you want it, you focus on it, you keep focusing on it.

And I, I, there's just no reason to ever give up. Like, if you want something, you're just going to have to persist. It's just intestinal fordeneude. Can you, can you do something that's uncomfortable long enough until you get what you want?

They want somebody that really wants to help them anyway. They're looking for people who are serious about helping them. Yeah. I think there's a side conversation here that Carl and I need to have with you on how do you close 42 million three-year deals?

That's amazing. First you have to find somebody who buys a whole lot of what you sell. Clearly. I love that.

Displace all of their competitors. I mean, for a dealer, we'd have to displace like 40 different color-rich agencies inside of a very large account. Anthony, I want to wrap with two topics. One, I want to hear more about the negativity faster new book and give you a hard time about me not getting a pre-read yet.

Before we do that, I want to wrap up on this topic of a lot of marketing leaders listen to our podcast. I want to wrap on just your experience with the marketing sales interaction. You said something really interesting when we were just chatting before we get record that you very rarely have marketers that join your workshops and your conversations with sellers. Can you just talk a little bit more about why you feel like it's valuable for marketing to be involved in that these aren't like your message isn't just for salespeople.

I mean, why change is relevant for the entire organization? Can you kind of unpack how you've seen these two teams interact and what your vision is for them moving forward? Yeah, it's really interesting because I just did this last Thursday and I was walking around the tables while they were doing their work and I knew that people at the back were non-sales people for the most part. And I said, I guess you're probably marketing.

And I was going to get, and she said, I took so many notes on level four because we can do this. And I said, what are you going to do? And she said, all those things that you had up there on the wide change, we're way better placed to do this than they are. And we think we could do this wider.

And I'm like, great, because you're one to many and we're one to one. And so you can have a big impact on what they see before that call comes in or you can give them something so that it shows up on LinkedIn before. And they said, we can do all of this. And so they had a conversation with a couple of the sales leaders there about we want to talk about how we can do this now.

And it's just because they weren't aware of the concept. So once they're aware of the concept, now I've had two companies, I-DEX is a veterinary group. They were, when I've met them, they were concerned about the strategic outcomes for their veterinarian clients. I'd never seen that before.

And then I had one other client that had a level four approach right out of the gate. But that's two. That's all I've seen. Sometimes the marketing people come in and they don't recognize the value of what I'm explaining to them.

And I'll do this in the way that Theodore Levitt. He was a marketing professor at Harvard Business School. And he said, people don't buy drills. They buy quarter-inch holes.

And I'm only concerned about the quarter-inch hole. And that's the difference between my approach. I'm going to talk about the strategic outcome and I'm not going to talk about the drill because nobody cares about the drill. And certainly a senior leader doesn't care about the drill.

They're like, I need the outcomes. I don't worry about that. And that's why when SAS companies are like, why can't I get the CEO to go through a demo because you're showing them a drill. They don't care about the drill.

They're like, if I have to look at this drill, I can't buy anything from you. You have to give me something that I can buy. You tell me you're going to get these better results. We can have a conversation.

But they're not interested in a conversation about solutions. They want the outcomes and they charge their people to go find those outcomes. Right. Yeah, they hire other people to evaluate drills and drill bits.

There's no value for them in those conversations. Awesome. Anthony, I don't know if I've heard you talk too much about that relationship between marketing and sales. I think we've inspired maybe just for our audience some blogs.

How many years, by the way, have you missed a day of blogging? I missed 13 days in 2010 because I went to Lassa Tibet. And that's where I ended up learning about what one up meant was on Mount Everest. Those are the only 13 days.

Had I known that China Mobile is better than being in Columbus, Ohio, I would have brought a laptop with me. And I just thought, there's no way I'm going to be able to get an internet. I had internet that was clearer than Westerville, Ohio at 17,000 feet on Mount Everest. That's wild.

Those are the only 13 days I've missed. Your volume of content is absolutely unreal. Do you have a backlog or do you just write them? Do you just write them on the spot?

Do you have a long backlog? I'm always curious to hear behind the curtain on this. You just wake up, you write it, you publish it. How deep is your backlog typically?

I have things that I want to write. So I have a list of things that I want to write. But then I write what I feel like writing. So at four o'clock in the morning, I get a cup of coffee and I write a thousand words every day.

You're a machine. Let's talk about really quickly before we wrap negativity fast. So your most recent book, I guess, give us like the 30 second commercial of why did you decide to write this book? I don't want to say it to departure, but it is to a degree, a departure from core sales topics and contents.

Why did you decide that your first book kind of away from sales, like maybe self help-ish was going to be on the topic of negativity. I guess kind of talk us through why this book? Why now? What you're most excited about when it's coming out?

I think this book is going to be really helpful for people. I mean, post-COVID people are groutier than they've ever been. They're more negative. They're pessimistic.

It's terrible for salespeople to have that sort of mindset. So I've been wanting to write this for a long time and Wiley has allowed me to write outside of sales. They still call that book sales and leadership, but they also put self help on there. One of the things that shows up and probably the first page of the book I haven't got it yet, but when I get it, you'll get it.

Alvin Toffler in future shock, 1970, said that the biggest problem that we're going to have is that the rate of change is accelerating so fast that it's going to make it very difficult for people to exist in this environment because it's changing so fast. Everything is changing. Ray Kurzweil said when we get to the singularity, guess what? We're here.

When we get to the knee and it starts going straight up, it's going to tear the fabric of human civilization. I mean, that's what he says. Yevall Harari says that we have more information than we've ever had and all it's doing is confusing us and making us miserable. So that's where we are.

And I decided I was going to write a book about what I do, practical, tactical strategies that you can use to be less negative and more positive, more of the time. And that's what this book is. What's your one? Give us your one if you're open to it from the book that is you think has the highest amount of leverage of all the tactics I'm sure that you go through.

What's the fun only? Which one is it? I read hundreds of papers. So I read all kinds of books.

I read papers. Things I'd already studied. I was stunned at what gratitude does. I was stunned.

It will lower your blood pressure. It will reduce your inflammation. It is that's physical. I'm mental.

It reduces anxiety and stress and depression. And there's a thing called three blessings from Marty Seligman who created positive psychology. And what he asked people to do, like millions of people because this was on Time Magazine. So write down three things good that happened today and why it was good.

So if you do that for two weeks, you will no longer be depressed. And Seligman's research says it's more powerful than psychotherapy or pharmaceuticals. So when I started reading gratitude, I thought, man, people should know this. They should know it in like sixth grade or seventh grade or something way earlier than now.

All of the scientific research on gratitude, all I could tell you is that if you want to feel better, if you want to have a better life, if you want better health, like literally your physical health, just start a gratitude journal and do the three blessings and it will help you out. I mean, we've tried this with a number of people. And I did it with one of my clients or not my clients, my company. One company, we did it on a chat.

And I thought, well, they'll do that for like two days. They're still doing it. They're still and everybody's supporting each other. And that's less negative, more positive, better workforce.

Yeah, I believe that I'm that's me. I'm grouchy and pessimistic. And so Cassidy knows this to be true. So I feel like to a degree like you have to be, I mean, you're obviously, I'm probably wrong here, but I feel like to be a good sales person.

Like you have to, there's a level of skepticism and pessimism that I think kind of comes to the territory, right? But I think you kind of, I'm excited to hear, you know, read the negativity fast whenever it comes out. But I'm on the opposite side. I have no research to back up any of my assumptions, of course.

But I'm always of, you know, of the mind that because sales is difficult and it's largely an exercise in managing failure. And you get so many nos and so much rejection, you've got to be a little bit pessimistic, right? Until you have ink on a contract, you don't have a deal. Why am I going to lose this deal versus why am I going to win it, et cetera?

So I guess I'm wrong. It's probably why I can't deal. Yeah, I can't think of a better way to wrap that up. I haven't even gratitude, especially for Carl.

You know, Carl, you need to start a gratitude journal seriously. I know, I'm not doing that mindset around. I'm grumpy and angry, you know, and I should actually practice that and I haven't closed the deal in years. So, I'm pretty proud of my results.

So, Anthony, I need a better executive summary, man. That's what you need. That's exactly what you're doing. Get busy.

I know. I got a lot of work to do. Anthony, thank you, my friend. I can't read your new book, November 1st.

October 31st, I think. October 31st. Awesome. Can't wait to read it.

Thank you, man, for coming. Always appreciate your insights and have an awesome day. Thanks for joining Sacking Road. It's standby for the seventh and I'll send you the groups.

I will harass you and follow up every other day via phone. That's a good wrap. Thanks, Anthony. All right.

That's a wrap for Sacking Road. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Thank you.