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okay so looks like a few more folks are trickling in hi everyone uh thank you again for uh taking the time out of your day to join us um my name is danny obaseki bp sales here at gms now a share web company for those of you that don't know very exciting things going on around here and very excited about today's presentation as we'll be discussing how to structure your sales team for rapid growth uh before i sort of delve into and introduce our speaker just a little bit of background story um met vernon at various channel events over the last number of years and late last year uh saw and caught up with him in orlando i believe uh at nasty event uh after a wonderful conversation uh he i grabbed his book for the plane ride back home to canada and uh it was very fascinating i've actually read it again uh vernon for those of you that don't know him has 20 plus years as a sales leader built and sold uh multiple technology companies and if you're poised for growth uh you're going to enjoy listening to vernon today discussing how to set up your your sales team large medium or small for success uh there are a ton of revenue generating opportunities for managed service providers it's solution providers managed security service providers and having the right team in place is critical in monetizing these opportunities whether it's it's its digital transformation and its acceleration over the last number of years cloud opportunities which share web can help services from i have services from a help desk and knox standpoint with gms can help or security which is top of mind uh these these days uh octa i think was just breached unfortunately uh today so uh things that are moving at breakneck speed so that being said uh allow me to introduce you to the channel veteran uh vernon harrison uh please please take it away sir thank you danny i will add you know yes it was orlando i think where we decided to do something together and um as part of that conversation we were sitting we were sitting out uh outside uh uh the sort of the activity in the perimeter and we started to talk and we we you know we were talking about um ways that that the i don't know what my slide deck is uh doing here it seemed to be jumping in my apologies but we started talking about things that that we could do to help bring value to and that's when dan invited me to participate in your webinar series so so let's get started this is a comment i like to make all the time and that is great sales professionals are made and they can sell in any economy and i hope you find that either controversial or challenging because the one those of you who are in the audience today who think that sales professionals are born or uh um i can assure you that is not the case and i'm in a i've carried a bag myself and there's a lot that goes into that but danny mentioned a little bit about myself but i i started cro leader a couple of years ago been a consultant for since about 2013 helping msps and really focusing on the msp business i have startup experience i really believe in in disk behaviorals and how important they are to what we're doing here and one of my clients experienced uh 300 growth in one year by adopting my methodologies an established company with a sales team and and actually i want to mention something before i go on any further that the the foundations and the precepts that i'm going to introduce you today are of course easier to implement in largely staffed companies or or companies that have sales teams but i can assure you if you are an msp and you're sitting there all by yourself these processes and and and they still matter and there is a way to get there and they will will affect your growth so we're if you have any questions go ahead and throw them in the chat we're going to have a q a section in the end also but if you have on any of these methodologies how to adapt them into your size team i do have answers for that that i may or may not cover in the presentation and so i've i focused on best practices for a few years but at the end of the day i want you to know that i have carried a bag i've owned a business i've been a channel manager i've managed sales teams and so you'll always find a lot of empathy in what i have to offer but i've been blessed with the gift of observation and discernment and so these best practices and the things that have worked i have not only been able to recognize i've been blessed enough to be able to adapt them into uh into my own methodologies and they have resulted in my own success as a matter of fact i wrote a book it's called the msp owner's manual and i wrote this book last year when i i or a couple years ago i started it but i published it last year when i found there were so many folks who really couldn't afford a consultant were doing a variety of different things and i started to write the book and i sat down and it ended up becoming something i didn't expect the title wasn't going to be the msp owner's manual but it has 50 separate chapters and the methodology from this book is i believe is that you read it through once sort of start to finish it's like the owner's manual in your glove box only unlike the owner's manual glove box which i don't recommend reading through it should be something you keep by for where it's needed and and reference it when rethinking maybe your linkedin strategy or your website strategy or what to do about this or what to do about that just take a look at that chapter guide and so from the from the book the book is is a great starting point for those of you who have are beginning to grow a sales process it's cro leader the company i started a couple of years ago we have but one goal and one objective and that's to help you achieve sustainable growth one level at a time one of the things i discovered about one size fits all solutions is one that they're good but that not you're not always in a position to leverage them so hopefully through what you garnish today if you're investing in lead generation or appointment setting you'll be in a better position to leverage that investment or when you look at one-size-fits-all marketing solutions you'll be able to better leverage what they offer you based on the type of company you have and where you are in your place in life the same holds true with vendor offerings vendor offerings are fantastic in that they give you lots of great material and pitch but it's got to fit what you're offering so let's focus now on the four precepts to making great sales professionals and i will go in in depth into each of these the foundation is the sales rep themselves uh there's a few key things here that that must be accomplished listen smart the right disc and an industry experience although it's on the list i want to emphasize that that's something that you can provide and why you would choose to provide it versus hire it typically depends upon how much you want to pay for a sales professional and or somebody you can meet early in their career or has a gift and would might like to make an industry change sometimes that can save you money but you're the one that's going to invest in the experience a methodology and here i say company wide we'll talk a little bit we'll delve into good sales methodologies but they must be company-wide uh environment sales don't live on an island but deals die on them company has to understand that yes you are as a technology company you're very good at offering technical solutions keeping people's environments up and running but you should also recognize that you exist because you have clients and it's a better existence with more clients everyone in your environment should understand that you expect to and want to grow not just you as the owner or not just you as the sales guy and so when you have that sort of environment then everything is conducive to treating a prospect and growing the business it all falls back on leadership these are uh the the four key attributes to a world-class leader and again i will get into each of these a little bit more so let's start with foundation again above average intelligence listen we're all a good judge of uh you know we know smart people when we see them but i would look for people who are are quick potentially quick-witted not necessarily sarcastic but probably more important than their sarcasm or quick wick is their disc for those of you who are not familiar with disc this is a behavioral it is a behavioral assessment it is not intelligence and it's not experience and they must be a di which stands for dominance and i is for influence the other disc acronym stands for steadiness and compliance your best technicians are typically high cs and high s's your best sales professionals are always di the dominance will give them the ability to not only swallow no or accept it when it happens it also gives them the ability to drive when being pushed back too easily if a sales professional doesn't have a high d and they're told yeah not at this time they move on or if they lose a deal someone loses a deal that they really feel like they should have won it's it's the d that allows them to you know brush them off rub a little dirt on it and stand up and go out and attack it again eyes influence i is large talkers loves people makes friends everywhere uh it's it's a an attribute a people loving attribute that really allows you to get wide and to network and get into places you need to be now again i mentioned they must know your industry and your product however here's something that i think is different about what how i approach that yes i understand the value an msp has to offer and i do not just go out and talk about it what makes a really great sales professional here is not the ability to talk about it but to be able to discern what the prospect really needs that you have to offer and only talk about that what is important to your prospect even your own client base when it comes to account manager you should be able to articulate that value which you can bring to that problem otherwise you're nothing more than a commercial for your your company which will make you sound like everybody else so not only is it a great differentiator it allows you to teach and empathize with your clients so there's the foundation of sales professional okay next is a methodology you must have a methodology that is embraced company-wide i highly recommend question-based selling it is exactly how it sounds i define question based selling is you never have to ask for a po because you've already asked enough of the right questions for someone to have already made up their mind that they have a need that you can fulfill now the challenger sale is the next level uh what the the difference between question based selling in the challenger sale is the challenger sales where your great closers are bringing value to their clients through what i refer to as and they refer to as teach the challenger sales professionals are considered assets to their clients i had a very successful career in the 90s selling storage all levels of storage because i came from a technical background you combined that with the fact that i had been a business owner the ability to emphasize i mean sorry have empathy and relate to my clients but i didn't talk about the technology i didn't talk about the speeds and feeds i talked about what that technology could do for that company a great example of this for an msp is if you if you focus on the healthcare have you ever asked any of your clients if we could sit down together and maybe look at how technology might be able to get them to see more patients per hour it's a question i've po i've posed to prospects while working for msps and been out with their sales professionals and i can tell you every time the question is asked the results are amazing by the way the first time i asked the question i was sitting with an owner in front of a client and the doctor looked at me goes can you do that and the the owner i was sitting with was a little had a look a horror in his eyes in shock but i looked back at the client said no i don't know if i can but i know that i looked at some of your technology out there and i think we could address some of it and maybe we could improve that um and and so what was different from me and anybody else was me being out there telling them how i'm just gonna make sure they never go down and their phones are always working and their data is secure instead i looked at something that matters to the doctor and let's face it technology can help any business see more clients per hour now let's talk about the environment the environment is something that i mentioned earlier if you don't have a sales team that you can start on the environment is you know no great sales professional when interviewing is going to come to work for a company that they don't think they can succeed in so let's talk about it there must be a process uh we must track far beyond and we'll get into greater detail on kpis but kpi is a term used all over the place now and we must be tracking the right kpis and we should be giving kpi as well as revenue quotas just just don't hire a sales guy and tell them if you don't sell a million dollars this year you're fired you should hire a sales professional and say these are the things that have to be accomplished and they're they're different for each company depending upon your market and where you are and how good at different aspects you are at it and again i'll review in a little later slide implementing some of the kpis and why some of your numbers it's not bad that some of yours have to be higher or lower what's important to note is where your kpi numbers need to be to achieve success and if you don't have a lot of quotes out there and if you're not meeting with a lot of clients your kpis are key because they're the path to that we must have rules of engagement internally when to bring in the technical team when not to when to take the owner out in many cases the owner is the sales professional i highly recommend that if you're thinking of hiring your first sales professional that you have done it first and of course accountability through responsibility charts and you must always continue to train and role play and by the way role playing is something that i do with my sdrs my sales development reps every single day every morning we spend anywhere from five to twenty minutes role playing what will happen on calls and i can tell you that the amount of productivity and improvement my sdrs have had and by the way for me sdrs live for one thing and that is getting appointments setting up first meetings ever and we i role play with the same str's every day different challenges and different answers sometimes it goes 25 minutes sometimes it goes 20 minutes and sometimes to just blow off a little steam we pretend we're crazy inappropriate clients but either way there's a chapter in the book on role playing an essential thing to do again if you're if you're one owner right now looking to grow your company role play in front of your wife ask your wife to be a client ask her to be difficult in an unwilling to purchase your service way not not in a jerky way so that you can practice and be prepared to meet those challenges and the first one you should overcome is i'm busy now or maybe at a later time or send me some information those are role-playing uh challenge or challenges that sales professionals reach every day and if they can't overcome them you should stop you should you should either train that sales professional or move on from by the way when i interview sales professionals i role play in the interview it is a great opportunity to see how people potential candidates react my favorite one is when they say let's do it i already know i probably got the right guy now let's talk about marketing first off your list are you talking to the right client we've developed an ideal client profile score here where i will tell you that talking to the right people quality over quantity is significant i recently had a new member of my team that was doing some icp scoring on on in our own process and in our own marketing and she was blown away she was actually endorsing what's happening uh with the results of our marketing to a very small number of people we were achieving results over the last company she came from with a list of i think we we did some particular thing we had a list of about a thousand people we were focusing on and she came from a company that was marketing to 50 000 people and we were getting not a better percentage we were getting better numbers we were getting better responses and the point is that because we had the ideal client profile we were talking to the right people just because your sales guy can get a lot of meetings doesn't mean they're good meetings very very important and again i'll drill into it uh you do need a database of of icps you have to have that and then you need a tiered marketing sequence and a tiered marketing sequence is i have a 20 to 25 step process i take every qualified contact through until i've exhausted myself and say okay i'm done i'm done with you and in particular i will tell you that i typically never get to the bottom of that before i either bail on them or they bail on us for the right reasons and your content that you're marketing with should always have teaching in mind even if you tell something to somebody that they know okay at least they'll say yes you get it your content shouldn't be about i mean obviously you have to uh boast and brag about your guarantees the importance of what you do but teaching about how many breaches are you know broadcasting how many breaches occur in a second or how many times you've been that is teach content or the consequences that most small businesses go out of business you can get teach content from sheerweb and gms is they've got some great content on on things that will happen if you don't use their services and that or if if if your clients aren't embracing those services and that's the messaging the messaging is this is what's going to happen uh in real estate you know they always say in real estate it's location location location i think for msps it's teach content teach content and teach content very important so that's the environment world-class uh sales leadership no disrespect but most msps like myself when i started my own i was i was getting an engineering degree i was making good money on the side fixing stuff and fixing computers i don't want to tell you how old i am but i used to solder chips on motherboards and so other companies were bringing the stuffing you know that's how we started we're really good at keeping systems up building computers changing hard drives keeping networks up setting up networks so our leadership comes quite frankly from technical sales leadership is something that you must have in your environment or at a minimum understand it so in the challenger sale they surveyed 12 000 sales professionals and 2500 sales managers as to the importance of the skill set of a good sales manager and at the bottom of the list was the ability to manage now when i say the ability to manage that's about telling them what time they're supposed to come to work and managing the pipeline and presenting it to this group or that group or dealing with hr issues when they come up you know right how many we need how many we don't need of one each that was just it's important skill to have but at the end of the day it's typically the skill that when those who are interviewing for sales managers emphasize on well how good have you done how many of you how many people have you managed you know what was the size of the environment you were managing okay and i can assure you that world-class sales leaders and i've worked for i've been blessed to work with some great ones so the first one i want to emphasize here today is is innovation innovation is about being able to coach or drive your sales professional in an actual opportunity when it's starting to slip away or differentiating yourself from the others that are out there like i say when i'm leading your sales guys or the sales professionals that i lead they're not talking about how great you are out of the gate instead they're investigating what the client needs where the pain is at where they're spending too much money and they're making sure that they understand the client's slash their their potential prospects competitiveness and growth within their own industry some of their own company objectives to interweave into the conversations that they're having with them to emphasize how we as an ms mskp can support those objectives and it's that kind of innovation that will keep you into the sales job into accounts coaching it's about coaching not a sales team not telling them you need to embrace this methodology or that methodology or but it really is about taking that particular individual strengths and weaknesses and making sure that you help them where they're weak and encourage them where they're strong and know the difference so that whoever is working from you a on a level that they can achieve the best that they can achieve they appreciate being coach i have a sales rep that i haven't represented this company for over a year who still calls me once a week with questions and to vent and to how i would respond to that and and i really appreciate that because it helps me stay on top of my game and last year he became uh he won salesman of the year for his company in fact uh i no longer with the account so i i asked him to include me in his acceptance speech but i don't think he did they also have the ability to sell if your sales manager can't sell your product how can you ask others to do it that's all i'm really going to say about that in fact you know if you're smaller i i believe the sales manager depending upon how many folks they should manage should always be managing a small percentage of accounts themselves all right now so let's talk about now we talked about those four precepts let's talk about implementing them and this is again where the smaller companies have a tendency to get thrown for a loop again you need to have sales leadership no you can't go hire sales manager you can buy my book another shameless plug okay and you can buy the challenge or sale and things like that but at the end of the day you're just recognizing that the fact there is sales leadership there is a void there's a gap there and it's got to improve that it is different than other leadership uh because remember as the owner of the company is somebody leading a sales team success and failure begins and ends with you both from an action standpoint and a responsibility standpoint this is the ideal sales team strs live for setting up first meeting evers that's all they do i found through best practices and years of experience that those who were closing deals weren't always good at getting meetings and those those who were good at getting meetings weren't always good at closing deals and by separating those roles when feasible okay resulted in a much higher output from that division i no longer ask my closers to set up their own meetings by the way great closers do they do set up their own meetings they're capable of setting up their own meetings the hungry ones never stop but i do hire strs and insist that sdrs live for that and again by the way sdrs is sometime a great playground for people who want to grow up to be closers but i also know a lot of strs who love being there they love that first contact they love those first engagements they're tenacious and they're good at meeting people and and what so let me define now what a closer is a closer is not a fast talking high pressure person a closure is someone who recognizes what the prospect needs and is able to align a message to your offerings and also coming within to your company and saying this is what we need to win this client to bring it over yes we do everything but this is where we need to emphasize aligning your structure with what they need is what a closer does best the most successful ones i've always been doing that under my uh the sps and sdrs that i manage we close 80 percent of our deals 80 of our deals that go to proposal by the way part of that is we don't propose if we don't believe we can win we don't propose when we think someone is just price shopping but we know that through asking all the right questions and really understanding the client we won't quote a deal where we don't believe we're bringing value account managers those are after the deal is closed those are the folks that are focused on making sure your clients stay compliant into what they're supposed to do for you to protect them and give them a good offering especially today with security and and also make sure that they're satisfied by the way that's just not kissing and hugging all the time that's about bringing to you the company uh grumblings within your client base and also making sure that they get addressed even though they're not your problem we've got to make sure we articulate the right message to the client that they're having this problem because of their own actions it has to be done in a right way it takes a certain personality and account manager i think these are good bartenders you know and of course because they're good bartenders they're always asking if you want another drink which would be a euphemism for asking to making sure that what's on your line card is being served to all your clients so that's sort of the first step is understanding those roles and again these rules if you're a single owner of the company right now all of these roles are embraced by you and for those of you have smaller companies one or two sales professionals one sales professional one str i have great strategies you can reach out to me more than happy to talk to you about how you can get the best out of each role as you expand the second again is the kpis as i mentioned earlier about the kpis this may look a little bit about micromanagement but i believe that the silver bullet is first meetings ever you're not going to be bringing in new clients if you're not talking to new people as i emphasized earlier they have to be the right people okay so so we look at marketing qualified contacts with a high icp score my icp score chart from my own company cro leader goes to 40. i market differently to somebody who's between 30 and 40 than i do 20 to 30. and those under 20 i market completely different and spend little time chasing them down or driving it or setting up meetings driving because they're not an ideal fit for me i can't bring the value to them um all of them should buy my book another shameless plug okay linkedin is a such an important tool and you need to track these activities now here in this particular chart these are some pretty good averages okay if you want to close a deal a month okay or at least a deal or a minimum a deal a quarter you need to have an fme every week okay you need to you need to have that and and you need to be you know have making 250 calls a week you know within your system or or a thousand emails sent a week and and so all these formulas that you see here are typically around the success criteria for closing a new deal every month or quarter and by the way marketing qualified leads the difference between a marketing qualified contact marketing qualified content something that you identified that you can bring value to a lead simply means they know you exist in one form or fashion attended one of your webinars opened one of your emails came to one of your events gave you their card you know the difference between a contact and a lead is they have some inkling of your existence i don't measure that and at the end of the day you should to always track how many proposals you have out there okay and how many of those proposals have actually been presented and for those of you who send over proposals versus presenting them i'll be nice on this call don't do it always present your proposal in fact i i've been so adamant in cases i've literally had to tell clients i am so sorry i cannot just send you my proposal it is company policy i don't want to lose my job i don't want to disrespect you you must always present your proposal particularly if you'd like to get up to where you're closing eighty percent of them here's an icp score uh again i'll uh send you a copy of this the for those who are attending the call this is where we take certain criteria depending upon your vertical and we give them a score around verticals distance from your office whether they're using an msp today and by the way if they're using an msp today okay a lot of a lot of sales folks say well they already got one seriously they're already buying what you're selling that should be that should make it your number one reason to go see them you're better than they are you don't have to be unique you just need to be better than who they're they're uh using so clean up your list using an icp scorecard the results will be amazing i just want to do a a plug on four books that i highly recommend and you read question based selling is a simple read challenger sale also owners traction by gino wickman if you haven't heard about it it's absolutely amazing uh we we teach and train on traction i do traction implementation for msps i don't do traction implementation for other companies i only do it for msps and if you do nothing else take a look at their vto their vision traction organizer that's a sort of a short and long term plan on how you get there i promise you i promise you if you read these four books and start to embrace these methodologies your business will grow without any outside support you'll become a better growth oriented entrepreneur sales leader if you just just by starting to read and implement these four books i have so many more that i can suggest anything around uh john maxwell you know who is uh the world world-renowned uh leadership guru but at the end of the day this is where you should spend some time and money all right now we'll open it up for any questions if anybody has any i don't know how that works i don't know danny if you can let them in give them the ability to speak or if somebody typed any in but do we have any none have been typed in uh but awesome content so far and uh i was actually taking notes here so and i'm guilty of one of the things always my my key takeaway vernon always present your proposal i i'm guilt i've been doing this for 17 years and sometimes i i email proposals so i'll try not to do that uh that's that's great well it it can be crazy and i really over emphasize sometimes you know back in there there were times in the 90s where we used to send unsolicited proposals to get attention but that wasn't an official proposal right and so by presenting your proposal you put yourself in a position to meet the objection to your proposal as it's happening in real time okay and remember your proposal when i introduce a proposal i tell the client too before i even start it and the reason i need to present it is i need to make sure that i am meeting what you have asked me to accomplish that i am meeting your needs so presenting it is the only way i can do that i completely would echo that statement and it resonated with me just because number one i have no control over what they feel but when when they receive the proposal instant objections can be uh definitely uh talked about and have the ability to turn that around so i will not be doing that anymore so so you know and quite frankly too it's deeper than that when i'm presenting to the ceo when the owner of the company when the when the head doctor is looking at the practice okay um a lot of times he just wants to know the cost okay so sometimes believe it or not i actually start there so how and who you're presenting to has a lot to do with whose pain points you're addressing who are you satisfying and so a lot of times with the owners you know we're finding a lot of different verticals like legal and healthcare really care about data integrity and security right now so i address those out of the gate but i quickly get to the price with what a ceo is looking for is one confidence you can do it and they're not looking for how they're looking for confidence you can do it if you're dealing with technical folks they may be you know like you're sort of co-managing it you know they may want to see a little more of that technical what what technologies are you using you know who's who's backup software who's security software they may be more interested in that but the higher you go up the stack they're more interested in confidence and cost so it also you know when delivering it it's important to know who you're talking to including monitoring their disk absolutely what are your suggestions for msps uh and does it matter about their size do you think msps generally should uh focus on a specific vertical once they know their core strengths or have a sort of machine gun approach and target any and everyone so great question um because it really has a lot to do with geography okay um somewhere in iowa i had a uh an msp who also owned a restaurant by the way and a um a payroll service you know and they weren't mega rich these were not you know just was a small community and they looked at things that their clients needed so they were very horizontal they were serving in geography and they were coming up with solutions that geography needed however the more you verticalize the better you can invest in your marketing and the more valued of an asset that you can be to a particular community that doesn't mean you have to choose one vertical and so if you're trying to choose a vertical i always suggest you take a look at who your clients are what vertical do they fit in and you'll be surprised uh what percentage of them will tell you what is your best vertical and then you'll start to realize well yeah i'm managing six doctors offices because i'm really good at you know helping them you know do their billing or their transferring or you know you know i i get my wife's a nurse you know i mean whatever it is right that you know i was pre-med before i failed out um you know you'll find that there's some underlying reason why you're focusing on that verdict and it's bring value then once you choose a vertical then you can start to go to the same meetings and and clubs that they go to you can participate in hymns if you're doing a certain vertical you can you know join the local uh uh law organizations where if you invest in trade shows and marketing again you can you can have much more a much preferred list a smaller list so you can talk to those folks so that that's what the value that comes from our vertical quite frankly is it also reduces your investment in marketing to them cool verticals are key um but if i were to if i want you to leave with one key goal to grow your business today whether you picked up anything on foundation or sales leadership it's fmes talking to the new and right people such a short and easy sentence but by far one of the hardest things to do but it should be the number one goal and i like to i like to uh use uh dating analogies for this you know because remember i do the icp score you could find the person of your dreams but how do you get them to talk to you right and so and sometimes you do silly and extraordinary things and the same should hold true in marketing okay but at some point showing them you can bring value to them but the fme is definitely the silver bullet and i encourage you to to really think about that and what you're doing around that and if you're using an appointment setting company or a lead generation company i would also make sure that you're driving them yes you driving them to only provide you with leads or meetings that really align with places you can bring value and not just providing you with meetings and leads so they can check that box and that's on you um there's a lot of great lead generation companies out there that will help you get to that fme a lot of appointment setting companies but remember their job is to get you a lead and get you an appointment it's your job to drive them to the ones that the right ones you want thank you and that was actually one of my other takeaways from your reading your book uh a number of times is uh fme's and a huge opportunity to have a good first impression with that prospect of customer and make it as impactful as is yeah i mean you want to make first impressions right now and i'm with you too you only get one chance to make a first impression but i would also add another saying i like to add after that is you can never say the wrong thing to the right person and and that is true and untrue but at the end of the day when you've met the right person even if you say the wrong thing you know in your heart you can bring that prospect value and you're more apt to even plead if not suggest a second chance you know when you really understand that the person you're talking to could benefit from working with your company you will find that you don't have to put your sales guy hat on you're almost you just turn on your servant's heart i want to help you sure i'm charging you for it but uh but that all comes from you know embracing the methodologies that allow you to understand that remember the more questions you ask it's not like they're going to slip through your hands the more idea that you can have that you want to help them out that's it and in terms of in terms of uh one of the things you mentioned was and i like the analogy with when you said real estate was location location location marketing msps it's content teach content teach content teach content what would you suggest as a as one of the best vehicles for doing that vlog yeah that's a great question boy that's a tough one because i don't know if there is a best vehicle you know people say email campaigns don't work but i'll quote yogi berra you know no one goes to that restaurant anymore because the line's too big well then why are we getting you know why are we getting a thousand emails a day it's a numbers game i think it the method of delivery this goes back to verticalizing too okay imagine if you could um actually i remember i was doing a dark web campaign we all know about the dark web we know what's out there and you know they had this campaign to go out we were just about to send and i said i said to the folks in marketing before we send it i said who invented the dark web and they were like how would we know i said did you know it was invented by the military and they were like why and they said so people could spy without getting caught or killed behind enemy lines and the next campaign went out and said you know did you literally had a question they put right did you know the military invented the dark web we know why and they had more clicks and more reads on that than do you know if your password's out on the dark web that's teach content being creative around how you deliver it is important too question based selling is about curiosity so you teach content if you go into a vertical spontaneous question i've asked that i'm that i'm writing and i want you to plagiarize if you're if you're working in healthcare if you're saying if you're sitting with a dentist and you say hey if i could help you see you know more patients and fill more teeth in an hour you know how would that change your life not you know would that help how would that change your life how would that affect this practice right and because it starts a great conversation okay well how much time are you doing this this or this you know my dentist has a tremendous amount of technology at the chair you know um when they take my x-rays they show up right in the screen right there you know right i get to look at them you know so um and you know so just take you know how is technology helping that company you know if it's a law firm you know how are they leveraging that database if it's important data how are they affecting the integrity if they're a company that has a large turnover you know how are they protecting that environment from past and present employees and things like that those are the things that people want you know so if you went to you know uh uh a company i don't know say a restaurant that has hundreds of employees you know and you say you know we can help you stop sending a paycheck to somebody who doesn't work here anymore right or how do you know i mean it's that's teach content so really looks at the vertical how you deliver it uh or or the methodology you deliver it with it to i think it's the same it's about emails it's about postcards snail mail is coming back you know it's about dropping by and knocking on the door if you look at my kpi document you know stopping in i've literally walked into a client and said hey is danny there and they like do you have an appointment and i say no and i say but you know i sent dan about 10 emails and i really all i want to know is what does it take to get about 10 minutes of dan's time because i know he's an important guy i know he owns this company probably hates sales guys but i'm just looking for 10 minutes and in fact you know nine out of 10 times they'll go get danny and i'll tell danny right there i'll say danny if you give me 10 minutes i promise you you can get me out of your life you know more importantly maybe we'll find common ground and reasons why i shouldn't and so again creating curiosity and and bringing that in that 10 minutes i've got to ask enough questions to make sure i can bring value to them and when you do you're in and by the way i i do count that as an fme just so you know if you can talk somebody out of a back room that's an fma i don't shaking hands and trading cards at a trade show doesn't count so you got to be like danny and i we got to sit in the corner and talk to each other till we find out we can have value and help each other out and you guys have that you know i want to say something about msps a lot of clients i engage you know when we start talking about marketing they say they want to sound different and you know i i i don't disagree with that but at the end of the day if i'm looking for a restaurant i'm looking for a restaurant okay yeah am i looking for a uh you know a fine meal mexican you know a pub burger right you know there are differences but when it comes to to manage service providers i think what you really need to strive for is to be the best and to be able to claim you're the best okay because unlike food nobody wants to mess around with their technology and so whatever they're consuming there to stay within my pun okay they want to know it's going to be the best it's going to be the safest they're not going to die from eating it you know and so strive to be the best and emphasize that in your advertising too although it's not teach methodology some teach methodology can be um you know it's like zero days since last breach um you know zero days since one of our clients has been uh breached okay and now that's not necessarily your responsibility to have so you might want to put an asterisk that because of us [Laughter] i think uh jordan's gonna step in here and ask some questions apparently there were a ton of questions that i can't see but he has access to them let's go jordan yeah yeah thanks danny so this is jordan um we're probably gonna run out of time before we answer all of them so we'll try to get these answered afterwards yeah we can email we can email some of the questions after okay i'll i'll try to do short quick answers then i love to talk aye aye sure so i'll start with a couple so one was how to get in touch with you and where to buy your book so maybe we can just share that after the webinar okay actually let me just take a quick thing about this it is available on amazon and for everybody that's on this call um there is a discount code msp50 that will give them half off and we're having trouble with the code on amazon so for the next 48 hours we're gonna knock it from 49.95 which is what i charge danny to 24.95 sorry danny no refund that's all right next question so one of the questions was about base versus commission recommendations oh i was going to ask that one so what was it what was the first part about versus commission base so base versus commission oh base versus commission or compensation in general um you know the that is a great question and there's a lot of different ways to pay sales professionals okay so for sdrs i bonus them on fmes okay and particularly fmes within a time period and we can talk more about that but you know this whole 60 40 split thing look um i want my sales professionals to be making six figures how we get there is really determined upon the market and i know this is a vague answer but i will say this that basic you got to have enough base pay so they can pay their bills you don't want to have enough base pay so they're living on it so anybody that's on this call they can get my phone number from the website we can talk more about it but the best comp plans i have seen okay do a commission and they only do it for two years okay not forever they do it for two years and what's good about this is so you close a deal i pay you a bonus on the um on the deal for the year and on the anniversary of that deal when it renews i pay you again okay what will happen is when you start to have successful sales professionals at some point they're walking away from a year's worth of bonuses okay and so that was the best i do have an ideal compensation plan that i don't have up here but i think that um you could expect to pay if you're using in-house sdrs forty to fifty thousand dollars a year in base i know it seems high you can do lower but you uh or or maybe 40 to 50 for a compensation plan if you're allowing the will working remotely i think a good closer is going to be anywhere from 65 to 85 but i i'd like to think a good closer is making a buck and a half or north of that and i will tell you when i am managing an environment i demonstrate to that sales professional with a three-year investment in us and their time how i will get them up to that mark and beyond for the rest of their career with my company you expect good sales people good sales professionals will invest themselves in a market too in an environment that they can be successful in okay so so it's a growing skill has a lot to do about where they're coming from and where they've been so anybody who really wants to discuss that on a one-on-one basis within their environment i would love to take that call at no charge next question yeah there's a question about how to initiate conversations to understand the client's needs well you know i always start my meetings with a prospect and and so if any of you has ever sit down with me and want to talk about maybe how cro leader i can tell you what the first two questions i'm going to ask what do you do here even though you're an msp i'm going to ask you what you do here so i asked i think so what do you guys do here where's this practice you know you know what what does that mean to be a enough schleichnockenish you know what do you fix right and then my next question is that how did you come to work here how did you come to start this business you will find the answers from those two questions will really give you a great foundation i've had people say to me why do you want why do you care and i i've got one answer for everybody who asked me that question how can i help you if i don't know what you do as how you perceive it so that for me the greatest starting question it is a tell me about your tell me about this company how did you start it how did you get in here and if they worked there how did you get here how do you get that job great conversations fact danny next time you and i are sitting at a trade show i'm going to ask you that question i don't think i've ever asked you that so no but you get great answers from and find you'll get great motivations about that person and you learn about that company and what's important to them so next question so there's a question about what niche you would be looking at if you were starting an msp right now um wow uh i think if you're starting an msp right now you're smart there's over 50 000 of them in the usa and there's much more need as technology has evolved the need for your own internal i.t staff has really really diminished and becomes far and far necessary the question i would ask myself though is do i want to be an msp or an mssp and i don't want to open this can of worms this late in the game but i'm of the belief that over the next few years you're going to see evolving mssps that are not msps and that that you know they can be owned by the same company that truly security is within its own silo and that mssps are also the security for even fortune 100 companies um so if you're starting today and you really want to focus on security i would consider becoming an mssp and you know outsourcing help desk to another msp because again i think over the next few years they're going to evolve at the end of the day i would also say if you're starting an a good hard look at these products out there try to streamline your line card and take advantage shameless plug for danny of offerings like they have you know danny am i wrong in saying anybody who builds their own knock today is crazy sorry for those you guys have a knock i wouldn't say crazy but uh we can we can help um and i would echo your comments earlier that the market is pushing at traditional msps to offering security products and i'm not sure if every msp is built out to become an mssp but they're uh and this is not like i don't make any money off of this but there are tons of organizations out there that can help that you can partner with to to bridge that gap uh actually including chairweb who is like office protect which is a security m365 monitoring security solution uh that that plays a part in helping you build a from a security standpoint build a fence around your clients different networks so i absolutely would would echo that comment yes and even as you go down those road with the products i do believe they're they're administered and managed by an msp but the best analogy for i heard for an msp having full responsibility over your security is like asking a pitcher to call his own balls and strikes so right and i thought that was a great analogy that yeah how do i really know i'm getting a fast ball down the middle right and um you've got to have a referee and and i think like i say at some point that's truly what the mssp comes so the lines are a little foggy there but there's but i would also say leveraging products out there i met a guy a couple years ago i couldn't believe it was a multi-million dollar msp with only three employees he was outsourcing everything by the way that's a sales guy that's a sales guy um i think we're unfortunately almost out of time here we do have all your questions and we will get you all answers uh thank you all so much for taking the time to uh join us today hopefully you now know why i read vernon's book twice and i'm probably going to do it again on my next trade show keep it nearby keep it nearby at the end of the day danny and i are both here to help you guys grow your business okay and not everything i offer is transactionable so don't be afraid to call me cro leader.com is the website you can grab my phone number and email there love to chat with you i love talking to msp owners it you guys help me write the book it's your best practices that i've adopted and there's so much more we can learn together and to become better so i look forward to that and thank you again danny thank you this was fun thank you all have a good rest of your day you