WINNERS FIND A WAY PODCAST
Trent Clark Interviews Cary Chessick
Trent: [00:00:05] Hello. Welcome to the Winners Find A Way show. Your weekly go to podcast for the 1% discussing winning strategies, how they built their winning teams and got winning results. If you’re ready to grow and execute, communicate better than ever, bring on that simplification and prioritization that make your dreams come true. Then get your headphones on and keep your notebook close and let’s go on a journey together. Hello. Welcome to the Winners Find A Way show. I’m your host, Trent Park. I’m a serial entrepreneur, long time EO member, and I speak all over the world, globally and always a bunch of fun. And I am the new author of Leading Winning Teams from Wiley Publishing. And probably most people do know me because I spent 13 years in professional baseball coaching in three World Series. And so today I welcome my good friend and guest, Cary. Cary, how are you, buddy? I’m doing really well. It’s great to be on the show with you and to talk to you and see you. Oh, man, I I’ve been looking so forward to this, Cary, because you and I have been friends for probably over a decade. When we met in the IPO mentoring program and you were, you know, giving your time, but you were also at a time in a really busy dude running, you know, a law, you were in law, you were in restaurant.com and setting the world on fire and really gracious with your time with me and one of my founders.
Trent: [00:01:34] Back in the day, as we were building a shipping company in the Chicago area, Chicago Marine Asset Management, that was one of our brands back in the day. Yeah. And man, we learned a lot of trials by fire on those on those days. But it’s so good to have you. I mean, you’re an Illinois guy. People really know the Restaurant.com brand, Cary. But probably a lot of people don’t know me and that, you know, you you’ve done all sorts of different things. And even I didn’t know back in the day, like, you’re a, you’re a lawyer, like, that’s where you really started. You got a degree from the University of Illinois. So you started there and then you got a law degree from DePaul. So were you at a big firm or what were you doing in law? I was well, I mean, for what it’s worth, back in the day, I studied psychology at University of Illinois and realized I in my own mind, I was entirely unemployable. And so I went to law school.
Cary: [00:02:32] Figuring I could get a job. Not not that I had some, you know, tremendous desire to change the world through law. It was kind of a security blanket. And so, no, I was a small firm. I was doing trial trial law and, and that’s where really I got my first I got handed to me my first lesson on sales. That’s where it all began, my journey into sales, not knowing I was going to be an entrepreneur.
Trent: [00:02:57] But yeah, well, I think, like, I want to hear the story of sales because, you know, one, I told a lot of people it’s a long time coach, and Cary is probably the most, you know, one of the most sought after coaches in sales that you’ll ever meet. We’re going to get into that. His book, which is incredible pitch before product and the reason he wrote it, as well as how you could get, which is on Amazon.com. And so but man, I had I don’t know how many times I thought Cary, as a coach, man, it’s great to have the I was a straight edition guy. Right? So understanding the physiology of the body and what’s about to happen to the body and to prepare, that was really important. But I told so many people, man, what I really needed was a psychology degree because people come in after playing and competing and, and even when you and I sit down, we talk business, right. Half the discussion, if not more, is the psychology of it. All right.
Cary: [00:03:50] Yeah. Knowing what people think matters. Yeah.
Trent: [00:03:53] And I mean, let’s talk about how that serves you, because one of the most admirable qualities I love about you, Kerry, is that you’re so product agnostic, right? Like, you really don’t care about the product so much as you care about what the consumer wants and meeting their demand. Like, you know, we always say, oh yeah, I’ll put the customer first. And I don’t know if that’s necessary from a customer service standpoint. That’s a desire standpoint. You’ve really met what the customer asks. You ask the right questions in order to get to, hey, this is the product we really need because this is what they’re asking for. I thought this is what they’d want. And then it turns out this is not what they want. This is what they’re requesting because you listen to what they say an accurate way. I’m not doing that very eloquently here, Cary.
Cary: [00:04:42] Let me. It’s pretty close. So maybe I can share the story. There’s two journeys I went through. First, I can share a story about while I was a trial lawyer and then the early stages of Restaurant.com. When I say early the first five years, which were a lot of pain, and both of those together helped form the foundation of why I put, you know, how my methodology. I get to at least that journey towards finding what the customer wants. So yeah, you want to hear, let’s hear.
Trent: [00:05:11] Let’s start there. Because before you tell the story of your first lesson of sales as a lawyer, which is great, by the way, people are not thinking sales and lawyers. Right, right.
Cary: [00:05:21] Exactly.
Trent: [00:05:22] I mean, do you you you’re a trial attorney, right? So, you know, are you a guy who’s thinking about, you know, hey, man, like a few good men, I want to be this great trial attorney. I’m going to be setting the world on fire because you watch movies of great trial attorneys. Is this what you really want to do? Be in the courtroom or what was driving you there?
Cary: [00:05:39] You know, I got into it because I figured that if I could, you know, pay my bills. I didn’t know much about what it was. Law school teaches how to think like a lawyer and not how to practice. But I did dedicate I set down this gauntlet, and I said, for the first five years, I’m gonna be the first one and the last one out, and I’m going to learn as much as I can, you know, in, this period of time. And I learned a lot. But one thing I learned is, you know, I don’t love fighting with people. And, you know, in my core, I want to get along with people and collaborate with people. And that’s how eventually I ended up realizing my journey was in business, not in law. So it really wasn’t that. It was just about being putting in the hours. To be an expert in my craft is as best as I could as a, you know, a new graduate out of law school and getting into a new profession. So that was my desire to to be excellent and to learn. Cool.
Trent: [00:06:39] All right. Well, tell us as you go on this learning journey, how all of a sudden this sales lesson became so valuable?
Cary: [00:06:45] Well, this is so okay. We have this case. It’s the court system is not necessarily speedy in most situations. So we have this case. It’s five years we’re working on it. Five years we think we got this thing locked up. We’re going to win. We get to the trial. The trial is 5 or 6 weeks long, 18 hours days, boxes to the ceiling of data and information. We give the closing. We are super, you know, excited. We think we’re going to win. And opposing counsel stands up within 20 minutes of the closing statement from opposing counsel. I literally like slumped back in my chair. I’m like, we just lost. I even believed that guy. That guy is way more persuasive, way more convincing, way more compelling. And what was fascinating, I had no idea I’d be, you know, in business and an entrepreneur. What was fascinating and how I compare and contrast this is in business. We all have competitors. We have differentiation. We have different products and services and price and different people in the business. In the courtroom, you literally have the exact same set of facts like exact. And what I realized, not at the time, but down the road when I got in business, is how hard that is to compete on exactly the same set of facts.
Cary: [00:08:02] And so the the skill with this guy was doing just moving the words around and changing the order and changing change, creating a different story. And wow, how valuable is that? Even when you have the exact same set of facts, you can still, by leaning on the words or the order of the words, the emphasis on certain words, you know, the pregnant pause and all those other things, you can change the outcome. And so of course, you can do it in business because your companies are different from your competitors. So now that leads right into the early years of Restaurant.com and where again, I didn’t know I would apply this lesson, but we raised a bunch of money. We had an idea. This is how most entrepreneurs, you know, have an idea that you want to start a company, you want to solve a problem. You see an opportunity. We raise money. We hired a bunch of engineers, we built product, we went to market and nobody would buy it. That was our idea. We it didn’t work. We raised more money a few years later and a very painful lesson learned.
Cary: [00:09:07] We raised some more money and built an entirely different product and go to market. So this time, you know, it’s we’re it’s effectively no longer fundable. We can’t change the product. So for about six months, vowing never to be a lawyer again, it was just about finding a way to how can we get customers. And so what we did is we changed the pitch, not the product, and bam, it worked. Shockingly, it worked. And that’s what helped us scale up to 18,000 clients. And, so it took us five years of pain of doing the traditional thing, building product, you know, start having idea building a product or service, going to market, testing it with customers. And, you know, Lean Startup came along, we did the same thing, but did it faster. And the lesson learned. My takeaway from both of these things was pitch before product at its core is start is to reverse engineer this thing, start at the end. What is the sales script? That is the most persuasive sales script that will get your customer to buy today and then walk it on backwards, and hopefully your product or your service resembles something related to what you just said.
Trent: [00:10:19] Yeah, well, I love that. First of all, I love the reverse engineering, right? I’m a huge goal guy and I always look at this, hey, how I’m going to do it right? So I’m always like, hey, here’s the current reality. Here’s our future reality. You know, let’s work from the future reality back. On the gap, right? Because I know where we want to go, but we got to come all the way back to where we’re at on how we’re going to get there. And that defines our KPIs and what we’re going to have to do. Then building that process behind that is such a big deal. I love the fact, like, as you know, winners find a way. I love the quote winners when shown data that they’re losing. Find a way to win in this story. Gary, you’ve got this product right. And you’re like, oh man, we all think it’s a good product. Like it’s it’s valuable to people. And this is there’s a lot of winners in this. There’s a consumer winner. There’s a business winner. You know, there’s a cost savings and there’s a database winner. I mean, there’s all sorts of different winners in it, yet all the data is pointing that you’re losing. Right. We’ve raised this money and we’re not creating revenue. We’re not getting the subscribers that we want. And so when you what was the huge thing? Do you remember a moment that, like, you decided to go back to the pitch when you just figured out, we gotta we know we’ve got something, but we’re not selling it the right way? Did you start asking questions of your clients? Did you start surveying? What did you do to get the right pitch?
Cary: [00:11:43] Well, we went out in the field and talked to prospects. And so in its simplest form, I mean, it was five plus years. But I can boil it down to this for Restaurant.com this this was the fundamental change. There was so much behind the scenes, way too much to, you know, like go through it all here.
Trent: [00:12:02] Not going to do the Joe Rogan for our show.
Cary: [00:12:04] No, no, we’re not doing that for our show. So our initial premise was that we thought restaurant owners wanted websites and we’re going to sell them websites. We, we it was we were so fixated. That’s the era where, you know, a lot of times those of us that are, you know, starting companies, we fall in love with our product and which is natural because it’s so hard. You almost have to fall in love with your product if you’re going to keep pushing the boulder up the hill. But here’s in its simplest form, this was the change. Instead of selling websites, we decided that we were going to fill empty tables. Oh, by the way, we have to build you this website because that’s a vehicle that will get the customers to come on into your store to fill the empty table. So it was such a simple thing. It was right before our nose, like, how did we not figure it out? How did it take five years? Yeah, we’re we were immersed in ourselves in our original premise, not the paying interest in need that the customer wanted.
Trent: [00:13:01] Yeah. So this is your, like, secret sauce, man. I mean, I don’t know, it’s not a secret, right? Your superpower is that you find the pain of a client very quickly, and you lean into the product that will alleviate that pain.
Cary: [00:13:15] You know, with every client I’m coaching, we start with three things. What I love when you said, like, you know, what’s the goal? And then how do we back into it and get there? I started with three things a project that most companies don’t have in motion. What is your sales script? Word for word. Write it out. Show it to me. What are your top three objections? What are the answers? What are the top three frequently asked questions? What are the answers? Now make that a project with an owner, and the goal is to optimize the words, the order of the words to make it more compelling and convincing and captivating. Designed to close deals today. And like I said, hopefully it has some resemblance to what you actually sell and what you do. And the reason that is often not a project, and the reason I’m typically implementing it is think of that’s not a job title, increasing the persuasiveness of the sales script. Like, you know, sometimes sales owns it, sometimes the founder co owns it, but it’s really not. You know, that’s not a job title where somebody comes in like, I own this. And so generally speaking, sales owns it. But you know, I was gonna.
Trent: [00:14:23] Say like full.
Cary: [00:14:24] Time project.
Trent: [00:14:25] It feels like sales shit on it. Right. Or marketing or marketing potentially. Right. Yeah. Or both. Yeah.
Cary: [00:14:30] But remember, sales has a lot on their plate, you know, sales and a sales leader and a sales team, like, okay, interviewing, hiring, you know, compensation, the CRM, the database, you know, the deal stages, the how many touches the coaching. Oh my gosh. You know, on and on and on. There’s a million things on their plate. So how do how do you carve out the creative time to mine data and a B test a pitch?
Trent: [00:14:56] When I think about, you know, us as coaches, I have a few questions that I go into that I really want to know. And things that I think are relatively basic. Right? Yeah. Very few companies have this information. You know, one of the things I wrote: Leading Winning Teams. Right. And everyone tells me, oh, we got a great team. And I’m like, oh, show me. You show me your script of how you get the team. Show me how you’re recruiting. Because I come from professional baseball, right? Where we do tons of scouting, it goes worldwide, it goes global and scouting layers or, you know, and it’s like, oh, well, you know, someone’s got a pulse. They got a job. And I’m like, and you’re telling me you got the best team? Like, how’s that possible? You just randomly got lucky that everybody wants to be in your field. And the best players out there just showed up and signed on with Trent Clark’s team, right? Like, come on man. Like not really. So you find out that when you really compare it to like, there’s a bunch of teams that are beating you up and you just don’t want to admit we’re not very good yet. Right. And how many? My question to you on this, on this structure and give me these questions again after I ask you this question, is when you ask those three things of a company and you go in for the first time, what do you think? Just tell me the percentage of how many of those companies have that in place?
Cary: [00:16:08] Well, they have some form of it meaning like maybe.
Trent: [00:16:11] Half of it. Well people are selling. Yeah, people are selling.
Cary: [00:16:15] So they’re saying something. Whatever they’re saying and whether it’s written down or not, whether they have a presentation deck that goes along with it or not, there’s always something meaning there might be a call recording and hey, what are your top objections? They can tell me what they are. That’s not, you know, what are your frequently asked questions? Oftentimes they’re on the website. That’s not the point of it. That’s the current state. That’s not the desired future state. The gap there is there isn’t a process to continually ab test and improve it day after day, week after week, month after month. By mining the data from the mouth of the prospect, the things that resonate most deeply, that they say that leads to closed deals. You know there isn’t a process of improvement. Continuous improvement. Yeah. That’s. Do you have software?
Trent: [00:17:04] I assume that you’re getting client surveys of asking those questions. Right. Do you have a software that’s backing up to collect that data and mining it? Some of the.
Cary: [00:17:12] Clients have it and some don’t. There are a lot of platforms. I have been using an AI platform called chorus AI for five years now. Okay, but there are a lot of players in the space now as AI is exploding, so even zoom records and transcribes. There’s a ton of platforms. It’s not hard to get the data. It really isn’t. It’s a matter of because the data is there. If the call is recorded. The question is that’s where I see in many cases people stop and they’re not mining the data looking for the common threads. What are the top 5% things that resonate most deeply? What are the top bottom 5% that get people to say, nope, not working for me. And most often, let me say it this way. What is the number one objection for your company? What’s the number one reason you don’t close business today? And just it might be price. I mean, I hear all kinds of things. It might be price, but but this is a take home assignment for anyone that wants to do it. What’s the number one reason you don’t close business today? That number one objection. And what is your response? Why don’t you meet with the team and try to make it better right now? Like call a meeting, say let’s role play this and let’s just let’s take the number one reason we’re not closing business and turn it into a project and see if we can make it better and increase our close rate by 10% automatically.
Trent: [00:18:36] Yeah.
Cary: [00:18:37] So rarely is that project in motion.
Trent: [00:18:41] Yeah. And that’s really kind of the art of continuous improvement as well as utilizing your team members. I mean they’re the ones on the front line. They know what the number one objection is. And everyone’s got their idea, right, of like what we should be saying to this when this happens. And my guess is that if I was looking at, oh, I’ve got like eight, eight salespeople and Sally has the highest closing rate, she’s probably I identify this objection and goes, oh, when they tell me this, I say this because I keep moving and like, oh, that’s why her average is higher than everybody else. Here’s why I.
Cary: [00:19:14] See a lot. Uh, Sally doesn’t get the objection because she has a different script.
Trent: [00:19:20] So she’s already built a proactive script that’s addressed pain.
Cary: [00:19:24] So a lot of times the objections are being introduced and raised, by the way, the script and the order of the script and the words in the script, you’re basically asking for the objection. And so that’s how when you see, let’s say you see a team of ten people, how does this person never get that objection. And then these three people always get the objection because they say different things in a different order. And so Sally, for example, and that in that scenario, if look in the order of the script, here are the three objections that come up most frequently. Where in the sales presentation do they come up. So a lot of times what we’ll do is say, oh, this comes up at minute 13. Let’s if it’s price, let’s figure out how to in slide two not slide ten. Talk about all the value. So we overcome the objection of price before it even comes up.
Trent: [00:20:15] Yeah we’ve just eliminated it after the 13th minute because it won’t happen anymore.
Cary: [00:20:19] Right now they’re like wow, there’s a lot of value here. They’re going to give me more time to talk. Of course, eventually you’re going to talk about price, but you can talk about it in the context of value.
Trent: [00:20:28] Love it I love that. That’s great. The book currently on sale on Amazon.com. Three. If you’re a Kindle subscriber right now, you can get a page before product for free if you’re a Kindle subscriber. But oh, check it out. There’s a book and you can go on order on Amazon. It is five bucks people like. And what I love about this Cary and I want to talk to you is, you know, you’ve built this out this walkthrough in true you know young presidents organization fashion. Right. Like, hey, here’s the kind of critical three things that you need to get from this. The takeaways. And I’m going to address them in 52 minute read or less. And so this is a book that within an hour, you are taking active principles and looking to execute that into your brand. And I love that man. I mean I think that’s big takeaways. Thanks.
Cary: [00:21:19] That was the design. It’s not to tell you my life story or what I had for breakfast when I was five years old. Nobody cares, I don’t care. It’s really just there are three pillars of what I coach is a story about the three pillars that I coach and hopefully, you know, people read it at lunch, implement it at work that afternoon, you know, introduce some of the concepts. Very hard to implement all but simultaneously at least. But there are definitely things like I just said, why don’t you make it a project to overcome the number one objection in your company? Yeah, as a simple that’s one of the pillars that is pitch before.
Trent: [00:21:54] You know. And by the way, people like it’s Friday or, you know, whatever day it is for you, you’re listening to this and you could start this after lunch and have a very good idea by close of business today, exactly how to address that and build process. And what I hear Cary saying is, is there’s a process now around managing that objective, whether proactive and answering the question, changing your script. There’s there’s 100 different ways we could talk about how you change that. But you’ve addressed the number one issue. You brought your team in them, made part of the solution with your team who are actually doing the sales. Right. And by 5:00 today, you can have already an executable strategy. And this is and I’m a great goal guy, I told you that from the beginning. And as much as I love goals, you know I set them. But man, when you figure out the process, goals are achieved once and they’re done right. But when you see the process, you just do it over and over and over again. Like you just keep getting it because the processes just keeps achieving and you keep raising the level of goals you can set behind that process. And that’s what’s changed. And Cary’s teaching that in a very, very short, direct way for you to get insight and value. And I really love that approach, Cary, because, you know, it’s hard it’s hard to read a book and take in executable strategies. And I also think it’s okay that, you know, though it may take you an hour to read, it’s not going to be fixed in an hour. Like, you know, it takes some time to get to the work and execute it and build your strategy and answer the hard questions and develop your process. And it’s okay that continuous improvement means they are our first iteration of this isn’t the final iteration. Is that fair?
Cary: [00:23:30] What I say is the best sales presentation is the one that hasn’t been invented yet, until you’re closing 100% of your deals. Yeah. So why would you stop? Why would you ever stop improving it? Yeah. Why is there not a process for that? And let me share. You know, there’s a very good reason. It’s the companies are have maybe a presentation or a script or a sales process that’s maybe six months or a year old, because now in marketing we’re like data geeks. We’re a B testers green, blue, this word, that word. Let’s get 100 clicks and then we know which one’s the winner. That’s the mindset and sales. But as entrepreneurs and people, you know, what do we do? We come up with an idea. We started a company. We’re the first people that sell it. We create the first sales presentation, the sales script. And we can overcome the objections where entrepreneurs and also we also say we’re the CEOs. And so we have a different level of credibility that our future salespeople don’t have because we’re the CEO. And so what happens is we get too busy as founders and as CEOs and we say, oh, we have to hire sales team leaders and everything.
Cary: [00:24:43] And they’re we’re handing off our personalized sales presentation. That’s all about us being delivered by the CEO to other people. They have to memorize it and learn it, even though it’s not built for them. And now there’s all the other admin of running a sales organization. And that’s why, you know, if the founder was selling it, there’s a presumption that everyone else can sell it and that it will work. And the mentality of the sales team is, I got to hit my numbers. I need to get my bonus. It isn’t, oh, let me go and ab test this word against that word. That’s just usually not part of the conversation. And that’s because the natural flow of how companies are started and how they grow. And that’s how a year old presentation gets handed to somebody that’s hired today. And they’re just repeating the. Things that were presented a long time ago and continuing the path. And that’s why the process of improving it generally isn’t installed into the company. I love it.
Trent: [00:25:44] And, you know, for folks out there who haven’t heard Cary’s coaching before. You know, Cary has a track record of being so successful that you have to turn off the sales process because, you know, a lot of programs aren’t ready for fulfillment of new sales, like, you know, a lot of organizations that have $100,000 a month in sales all of a sudden go, hey, what if you had 150? Like, ah, it’s not a problem. We’ve never grown like that before. Well, it could be. And if it does, we got a production issue. Right. And you’ve seen that. You’ve seen that where your sales organizations have moved so quickly and so productively that the, the operations all of a sudden becomes a cog to moving forward and continuing to, to deliver on your systems.
Cary: [00:26:26] It’s a luxury when it happens because those are good problems to have. But yeah.
Trent: [00:26:30] They are good problem to have. Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. They are good problems to have. I mean, listen, let’s talk about another problem that you just kind of identified there, which is a challenge. I’ll just say this of companies that want to scale, a lot of companies come to leadership because they want to sell their business. And I run into this all the time, Cary, where there’s a couple people, maybe even one person who’s the captain and ownership of sales, uh, often a founder and owner. And they’ve got a system built up behind them, and now they’re like, hey, I’m ready to sell my company. And there’s zero transferability, because when you walk out the door, the entire sales team just walked out the door. . So there’s an issue with that in the value of the very thing you’ve built, because there is no process and system and or it all lies within you as a founder and sales expert. And it’s going to leave upon sales. And man, I see a lot of organizations. I see a lot of baby boomer businesses on the daily who have built that structure, and it’s flawed.
Cary: [00:27:27] You remind me when the founders sell, and they don’t understand why the next in line isn’t producing the results. Well, that that happened to me. And so I recognized it and I was scratching my head like, what can I do about this? How can I step into the shoes of an entry level salesperson or somebody who’s, you know, path in life and sales? They love sales. They’re not starting companies. We have different career paths. And so, okay, I had that career, I have a different career path. But and I alluded to this before, it’s a different sales script. So I was doing trade shows at the time and I decided to change my title for the trade show, and it said instead of CEO, it said sales associate. And I went to the trade show, and all of a sudden I’m getting all these objections that I never got when I was a CEO. And so I’m living the life of an entry level salesperson that’s a different life than the CEO. And that’s why I say you need a script not for the founder or the CEO. You need a script for the people on the team, their education, their level of experience, the entry level sales rep with a 60,000 base. What is the sales script that that person can own and leverage to be persuasive? It is not the founders sales script.
Trent: [00:28:47] That’s so good. Because, Carrie, you know, a lot of people complain about that, right? Like, oh yeah, this guy’s, I could fall out of a boat and hit water selling, you know, like, what’s the problem down there at the beginning? And, you know, coming from professional athletics, I tried to get my first company I own. I think I owned like in a home gym installation company. Right. Like I was doing gyms for professional athletes, showing them how to write off their investment in themselves. Right. And man, like nobody answered my phone as Trent with this company sales associate. But if I said Trent Clark Cleveland Indians, everybody answered the phone. They were like, oh, I’ll take this guy’s call. And all of a sudden it’s like, wait a minute. You’re like, huh? This is a lot tougher to get through the entry door, right? Like, this is a whole new I, I can’t objections. I hadn’t even heard the objections because I can’t even get to the people I need to have the discussion with. And I think this is where this challenge of knowing what people are going through aren’t aren’t, isn’t realistic. As a founder CEO of of what? A sales association on the front lines actually living. Is that fair?
Cary: [00:29:53] Yeah. Oh for.
Trent: [00:29:54] Sure, for.
Cary: [00:29:55] Sure. And so that’s, that’s another just traditional reason why you don’t see this process in work and why, you know, there’s a gap and a disconnect. And you see, you know what? Why is my team hitting the numbers or their you know, the sales are declining, whatever it may be. There’s just a gap. We need to invent the sales process and the sales pitch, the responses to the objections or the responses to the fact that we need them created for the people that we have on the team and we’ve had. Yeah, I was going to say one and and within that I do I do want to touch on the. The second pillar of what I teach that really makes this thing hum. And it’s kind of tied to the hip of it. It’s called stack ranking revenue. If I if I may, can I, can I talk about that one?
Trent: [00:30:48] Sure. Come on.
Cary: [00:30:49] So the objections, the script, the frequently asked questions, and then all the things that come out of that to create a super well-oiled sales and marketing requires execution. And so pillar number two, I call it stack ranking revenue. We list all gold, all tasks. I use project management software for this. Uh, we list them in smart format, making them time bound specific and measurable. So time bound creates an organization with, uh, a deadline driven organization. We all have accountability. These are the things we’re going to work on. This is the order. We’re going to work on them. This is one that’s going to be the uh. Specific is really easy. Like just stop using acronyms and list the task so that anyone reading it would know what it is, even if they’re outside the company. The hardest part for teams is to give it a revenue rank to it. High revenue, medium revenue, low revenue. But the spirit of stack ranking revenue is to get teams collectively working on the things that will generate the most revenue in the shortest period of time, first before working on other things. And so that kind of sounds like common sense. Why would we not do that? Right. Well, of course you would. But that’s just not how real life works. The way real life works is some people are. I hear this a lot. I’m so busy. I spend the first two hours of my day burying out of my inbox so I can get to my work, and then this is this happens all the time. People work on things they are really good at and that they love to do first, and generally procrastinate on things that are really hard for them that they don’t like, which usually are the same. Having no relationship.
Speaker3: [00:32:39] To revenue.
Cary: [00:32:42] And I just say, I call that hijacking the payroll. And when the employees decide what they’re going to do and what order they’re going to do it, having no relationship to revenue, the team is less efficient. And so when you take it back to, you know, I have to dig into a company to see, you know, how mature is your sales script and your sales presentation, your objection, your frequently asked questions. I create a value board like give me all your value props. And are they woven into your website, into your sales pitch? Now all these things have different implications and different priorities. And so we are teaching teams to not have a meeting, say, oh, I’ll do that, I’ll do that, I’ll do that, I’ll do that and walk out like it’s going to be documented. And and we’re going to stack rank the revenue of each task. So we know what order to do things in and that that helps them. When you talked about growth, that helps them really accelerate the things that will move the needle on the sales side by focusing by by ranking them. And they have aligning the team and saying, we’re going to collaborate and get after it.
Trent: [00:33:51] And then that clues even awareness around highest margin product we’re selling, right? I mean, that’s certainly something I run into a lot of salespeople who don’t know where their highest margin. And I’m like, hey, you should know that, right? Like we should know where we get our best bang for our buck here.
Cary: [00:34:07] A great example. So if a lot of attention is on a low revenue, low margin product. For whatever he’s maybe because it’s easier to sell. Yeah. And so you have a whole team aligned and focused on improving whatever they’re working on related to a low margin product, instead of instead of the thing that will move the needle the most. And so that absolutely is part of the process of, you know, how do you generate the most revenue in the shortest period of time? You have to know what to sell in what order?
Trent: [00:34:47] Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay. Let’s talk about the third and final tier.
Cary: [00:34:53] This is called the sales and marketing pendulum. So this is a process where data. Meaning the words that come out of the prospect’s mouth. Data in the form of words that come out of the prospects mouth that is shared with marketing. And data in the form of high performing, top of funnel marketing campaigns, taking the words regardless of channel SEO, PPC, social thought, leadership, blogs, content, what have you. Taking the words that drive the leads and bringing them into an agile sales process where they can they can be used to help close deals. And so that’s why I start with sales. And I say the best presentation is the one we haven’t invented yet. So we can implement an agile sales process instead of a static one where we’re using, you know, the same presentation from a year ago. Before we can leverage marketing data, we need an agile sales presentation. And so here’s a here’s an example. We’re going after a consumer electronics company and industry. And maybe think of it as a competitor to a ring doorbell. And so we’re on the call and our prospect says the thing I need the most, I need a compelling and persuasive way for my team to convince, uh, the customer to troubleshoot and solve the problem while we have them on the phone. And because if we don’t, we have to roll the trucks. And usually it’s about changing the battery. And so we’re like, wait, what? Rolled the trucks? What are you talking about? And and this person says literally, I mean, like, we have to put a person or two people in a truck go out to the home. Most often to change the battery, in which case we’re completely upside down on our ROI on this customer for life.
Cary: [00:36:59] It’s over. Game over. So that’s like a real wow moment. You got to be listening for those kind of of words and phrases that come out of the prospect’s mouth. We swing the pendulum over to marketing and say, I want you to run top of funnel campaigns that say, don’t roll the trucks. Now that means absolutely nothing to you and me, but it means everything to every buyer in that sector. Yeah. Why? Why? Because it’s their words, their language. So you know the phrase like, oh, now you’re speaking my language. Yeah. Not figuratively. Literally. We’re speaking their language by taking their words and turning them into a top of funnel campaign. And the other way, the other the way the pendulum swings the other way. Let’s say you have ads. They have different copy in them. Let’s say it’s three words, maybe an SEO and that drives the lead. They fill out a lead form. So I want to talk to a salesperson. The salespeople can regurgitate this, the static and templated form to say, sure, let’s set up a zoom meeting and then give the exact same presentation that they give to everyone else. Or they can take those three words. Integrate them into their follow up email. Maybe now they you know, that means something for that company. And maybe in slide two instead of slide ten on their presentation, that’s that’s what they do. They incorporate slide two that addresses those words. And what you’re going for here is you’re you want that person that that filled out the lead form to say, wow, like these people really get me. I love it. That makes sense.
Trent: [00:38:45] Oh, it makes perfect sense. I mean, for everyone out there, I think if they’re not understanding this, of course you can easily pick up the book, right? Amazon.com Pitch Before Product by Cary Chessick, founder of Restaurant.com longtime coach lawyer Cary. Tell them how they can find you before you gotta go. I know you’re a man in demand because of the book and interviewing, so I know you got to run here, but I wanted to make sure. How do they find you?
Cary: [00:39:11] Well, I’m very easy to find on LinkedIn and you can reach me there and my email is Carrie at carrie@prophetology.com.
Trent: [00:39:27] Carrie, like, I know you’re gonna have a ton of impact on a lot of organizations and a lot of sales teams by this book. Well, what would be your recommendation for someone once they grab the book? Read it. What’s the next steps? What do they got to do right now?
Cary: [00:39:44] It depends on the capacity of the organization. I often say that, you know, what’s what’s your capacity for output, how fast can you move. And oftentimes this is something I measure. I look at how many tasks, how many to dos can the team churn out over what period of time. And that’s part of documenting all the tasks and putting them in order and seeing what the output is. And oftentimes the CEO thinks we’re holding a fire hose when it’s actually a garden hose, and it starts to like reality starts to set in like, wait, we’re working with the garden hose. So what are the things we need if we if we want growth like a fire hose, what are the systems we have to implement in what order? And so when before I answer that, I really have to dig under the hood. But. Like I said, the easiest thing to do is take your number one objection. And look at the response. See if you can make it better. Any organization should be able to call a meeting and make that happen. So yeah. And it if you can’t, uh, it’s gonna be hard to implement everything simultaneously. It takes, it takes it’s a lot of moving parts in the company and especially in sales, sales and marketing and all the people involved. But but most, most teams should be able to execute that one thing. And, and and I think I think success builds on success. I know you know this from your, you know, career. You know, if you can execute one thing, I’m not going to have you execute ten things if you can’t execute one. So let’s see if we can execute one.
Trent: [00:41:24] Yeah. And I love that. Like spending a quarter really. You know diving into that number one getting it right. You know really really complete that process on it. Look at the numbers come up and then come back to, you know, task number two. What’s your next subject. You know, you’re going to tackle on your sales or marketing strategy because, you know, get this one thing dialed in. And I mean, this is the number one objection right. You’re facing right now. So you’re getting it all the time. So it’s clearly prevalent in your business. And resolving that will have massive impact. I think it’s a great suggestion for everybody out there. So thrilled Cary Chessick could join us today. His new book Pitch Before Product. Super excited about it. You can pick it up on Amazon.com, on the leader, on For Winners Find A Way. We are live every Friday 12:30 p.m. eastern, 9:30 a.m. Pacific. You can check us out on LinkedIn live, Facebook Live, and YouTube live and on the leadership of YouTube channel. And then of course, we welcome you. We are having up the retreats in Italy this summer, which is going to be incredible.
Trent: [00:42:29] Big Italy with myself, Ethan King, Rachel Weaver, three authors coming together talking all about growth, AI and branding, which I’m super excited about that. I mean, you can’t beat Italy in the summer. Come on, man, let’s just go. Yeah, this is your time to get away and develop a little bit about your business. Give me a fun little walkthrough for six days in Italy. And of course, everyone can buy my new book Leading Winning Teams on all the major networks Pre-selling today on Amazon and Barnes and Noble for everybody. Thank you so much for joining the show. We’ll see you next time on Where to Find Away. Organizations come to me all the time with challenges of execution and communication with their teams. We help build a system through bloom growth and software that gives them simplification and prioritization. I teach, facilitate, and coach these organizations to literally double their value. If you’re interested in training your individual and organizational growth, please email me at Trent at Leadership at com, or click the link below and book a 15 minute call on my Calendly.