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foreign [Music] hey folks Derek Marin here your host for the MSP lead gen podcast uh and this is our fourth episode and we're Switching gears a little bit here uh we're bringing in an outside expert to talk about engineering uh the sales process for msps this is Robert Gillette uh he out he now has a company where he coaches msps on this and so I thought I thought it was a good interview I I hope you guys get value from it and of course uh if you have suggestions comments questions um feel free to reach out you can reach me at Derek at simpleselling.com I appreciate you thanks so much and until next time bye so uh Rob I appreciate so much your time coming into chat with me today or coming in coming into the office yeah this was the easy part podcast studio um well folks uh we have Rob Rob Gillette here um president of reclaiming sales and today we're going to talk about some that's near and dear to his heart especially but it's becoming more and more dear to mine um so Rob please first introduce yourself to the group on my huge audience here hey man any audience is a great audience for me um I uh so I'm the I guess owner of reclaiming sales uh I it's a consultancy where I work with businesses mostly I.T support companies to figure out their revenue problems because most of them uh you know obviously Revenue covers a multitude of sins so uh most businesses that are trying to get from A to B they have to solve the revenue problems it's typically for larger msps but I work with some smaller msps as well and I'm really just trying to help them figure out you know how do they either as an owner become the sales person they want to be or maybe don't want to be but need to be and then if for the right MSP I can help them scale up to an entire sales team so they can get out of sales altogether I also run something called the MSP Dojo where you know whoever has to go take that first time appointment with a prospect statistics tell us that it's the best sales person that wins not the best company so I help those sales people get together once a week and practice the sales process so they're never practicing on a prospect hmm that is awesome I'm a big Sports guy and like I just can't imagine having played you know playing in games like without practice so it's like it makes perfect sense that you have something like that to give these folks opportunity to to mess up screw up different scenarios that you might walk into that's awesome yeah um so I guess it it'd be great to hear just how you got into this in the first place like how did how did you get into working with you know msps and and getting to helping them with sales just that background first I think would be great yeah I'll go as quick as I can through my convoluted Journey but uh I'm a third generation sales guy Grandpa did it Dad did it I never wanted to do sales so I ran from it I started businesses and was a project manager and owned a retail store and it was a photographer and then uh in my 30s when I was staring down the barrel of my first uh my first child well I guess staring down the barrels were wrong he wasn't born yet uh but I was thinking about man I got a kid coming I need some consistent income and like you know I'm gonna start saving for college and these kinds of things I can't be as flippy floppy as I was beforehand I ended up taking a sales job in an MSP I tried to apply for an I.T job and I wasn't qualified although I thought I was and uh the owner convinced me to take a chance on sales and you know after six months I really realized this was this is my calling this is what I've been searching for my whole life it's just different than I thought it was because it hadn't been framed to me correctly and we all think of the car salesman when we think of sales and we know these bright narcissistic spots that we we want to avoid but they outshine the normal people we would be happy to be like that are successful in sales and so uh I sold MSP services for about seven years I you know sold a bunch it probably sold enough to spin up a couple msps and then I realized that uh you know I needed to move on because I was never going to be an owner where I was and so I started my consultancy teaching other people about the process I'd been through my own journey of making amends with that transition and that sales might be my highest and best calling that way I can give the most value to the most people through that function and I help people with that Journey now either as individuals or as a team and uh that's also why I started reclaiming sales my big hairy audacious goal is that you know before I die if I could create a world where my grandson can go to college and get a degree like a bachelor's in sales and that's just like super normal uh that would be an amazing contribution to the world because nine percent nine percent of the people in the United States are in a sales job but Daniel pink who wrote a book called to sell as human I believe his book says that ninety percent of us spend at least three hours of our day doing the same thing a sales guy would we just don't think of it as sales but we're trying to influence other people's behavior or opinions and that's kind of sales so uh it's this you know Mission critical core function of our of our world that we just seem to think is gross in hate and it causes a lot of what I call pollution just causes a lot of pollution in the environment it makes us unhappy to be where we live because we don't know how to address it um wow yeah no I'm totally resonating with that uh that last thing you mentioned about uh us always being in sales where they're 90 because I got three little boys and I feel like I'm constantly trying to persuade them to do one thing or they're trying to and they're doing a much better job at at getting me to do what they want so what we've been learning sales since the since day one I mean the crazy thing is the same stuff the same skill set I use to convince someone to sign a million dollar contract like is the same like that skill set I'm literally using with my four-year-old to get her to eat her broccoli it's just like the same same tools man deployed in a different context absolutely absolutely so we're all in sales I'm 100 with you 110 all right so let's dive in so these folks are here because they want to hear the five reasons or the five mistakes or the five things that msp's got to do a little better to get what they want and some more myrrh mrr so where do we begin with Bob Where Do We Begin yeah we need the way here so the first yeah there's there's five of them and it was probably more than five but the five I've chosen to talk about today uh are it's kind of part of the the lean lean Six Sigma management methodology plan do check act that's the first four steps and Americans were really bad at this generally speaking like we love making plans we love doing plans we skip the check in the act so just from a very high level the first thing we have to do is we gotta make an actual plan don't just like go I need more sales than just throw yourself at whatever you've done in the past come up with a plan sit down for a little bit and and actually write it out uh not just your prospecting plan but your whole sales methodology like write it out so you could explain it to a stranger so that if you called me up and said hey Robert I need help with my sales and I said okay what's your strategy you could explain to me in 30 seconds or so like what is your sales methodology what tools do you use what are the steps what are your beliefs are you a Sandler guy are you a challenger sale guy spin like what's understand the plan and then write it out so that you don't get confused when you're tired because when we're tired and we're busy and stuff comes up it's really hard to do the plan if it's more of like a guideline you know if it's more like ah I'm gonna work on sales this week you have to have a plan what are you going to do when and how I guess that'd be the first step the next part is go do the plan again Americans great at this activators push let's go um this is one of my core strengths is the activator I'm the kind of guy that like if I know what restaurant I'm going to I'm going to get in the car start driving and then look up directions I want to just go and that's very normal and you should leverage that when you have the strength and the power and the motivation to do that but you have to make sure you're actually doing the plan don't just do stuff do the plan be disciplined about it try and actually do what you say you're going to do which sounds like I'm an easy thing but it's really not shiny object syndrome is normal when you start doing the plan you realize how hard this is and um you don't pick up as much speed as you want and whatever so like doing the plan is more about discipline than anything else saying like I'm gonna be disciplined to do what I said I'm going to do the way I'm you know the way I was going to do it so that I could see if the plan works because that's what's most Mission critical people start pushing and then they go oh this isn't working and they change the plan and that's a bad idea come up with a plan then do the plan not just stuff but the plan and then once you've done the plan the way you said you were gonna do it then you need to check the plan you need to like a little scientist go okay I said this was my hypothesis this was the experiment I was going to run I ran that experiment what data did I collect I see this all the time with like outbound sequences people got me I created this nine step outbound sequence I plugged a thousand people into it and somewhere around step three you know people are uh I'm not getting the results I want and so they stopped the sequence they abandoned it they change it they try again do the plan then check the plan did it go as we planned did you get the results you were looking for and spend the time to review the outcome to see if like maybe it didn't get what you wanted but maybe it was good enough maybe 80 of the way sometimes a hundred percent of what you needed you know so not not 100 of what you wanted but 100 what you needed so sit down and go like just make sure did I even do the plan let's check it check the plan against the activity to see it works and then what I call recommit or regroup so if the plan worked do it harder better faster stronger if the plan did not work then change something the the regroup part of it the change something most people again screw up because they change everything hmm and we go well that didn't work so let's come up with something else and while sometimes that's the case oftentimes and more often it's that if you lost like the plan broke down at a certain point being able to identify what that point was and being able to change that five or ten percent to adjust the outcome and run it again is where most people lose the iterative process because we don't want to reinvent the wheel we want to have a better wheel and then a slightly better wheel a slightly better wheel and a slightly better wheel instead of going well wheels don't work let's make squares stress scores for a bit maybe octagons you know like make a small adjustment to the plan and try it again so by its very nature these plans the plan to check act cycle needs to be small it means it can't be a big sweeping quarter long process it should be like a couple weeks or a week you know come up with a plan try the plan how did it go can we iterate on this and make it a little bit better this is not a New Concept but for some reason we don't like applying it to Sales we want to run Full Speed Ahead towards prospects and then like something works once and we built an entire strategy off of it and then realized that was a one-off and now we've wasted a bunch of time and money so plan to check act super important and then the fifth one which obviously I think is important is that practice is like the fairy dust of sales you can take anything you're doing and sprinkle a little practice over it and it gets better it's just that's I can maybe culinarily it's the bacon of the of of sale like you just put bacon on it I think it's better that's just how it's just generally if you're vegan I'm sorry I apologize but it is so um well basically there's a there's a great book by Angela Duckworth it's called great and it's about like how do you identify the one characteristic that every successful salesperson seems to have and it's great she's it's a scientific thing she's figured out I'm not a scientist but she figured that's great and uh one of the key tenets is that Talent counts but hard work counts twice and so there's something about just putting in practice to whatever it is you're doing especially in sales that it just levers it up so much nothing can beat just putting in the rep the repetitions [Music] hey everyone so before we continue with the episode I did want to take a quick break just to introduce us better um so if it wasn't clear already simple selling specializes in managed Business Development and marketing for msps and one of the main reasons that msps choose us is because we bring two processes together better than anyone else and here's what I mean the business development part the outbound that's the first impression right that we make uh on prospects about your MSP and we call it the lead capture moment in the second process the marketing process that's to make a long-term good and Unforgettable impression on your prospects we call that the demand generation process because we do both the outbound lead capture and the demand generation and we integrate them in one system your CRM msps are really differentiating they're really getting the results and the other benefit is that msps can spend less time having to work with multiple uh vendors and sales and marketing and they can focus more on running their MSP in taking care of customers and cyber security and all the other things that you guys have going on so if you're looking for help with this definitely reach out to me and we can schedule some time to get to know each other anyway thanks so much for listening to the podcast and I'll let you get back to the show it makes people more comfortable it breeds confidence it creates activity and then I say it like hijacks the hypothalamus which the hypothalamus for anyone that doesn't know is the part of your brain that controls fight or flight and this is a big deal because like what's the most dangerous thing you do Derek like in real life I mean the most danger probably I guess I drive statistically attack you drive a car and you go down specifically I guess yeah you go downstairs that's probably like statistically that but like your brain doesn't think any of those things are dangerous because you do them all the time and it's hard to sense the danger like our lizard brain did not develop with the ability to judge g-forces and speed and apply it to a hypothalamus it just doesn't so oddly enough for most people sitting in a sales meeting is the most life-threatening thing you experience at least as far as your brain is concerned because that same uh you know biological system that would allow you to respond to a bear attacking your house or the next Village over coming to burn down your village like that still exists in you you just don't use it and because it's there it's not trained very well and so you'll be in a meeting and it represents maybe your livelihood or your next your ability to make payroll or your ability to retire someday and people say no to you or they ask tough questions or give objections if you're noticing you're getting a little warm get a little antsy you can't focus your thoughts that is the system that protects you from the village Raiders kicking in in a life-threatening scenario because you don't train it to do anything else and that can be really hard to hijack and get any kind of control of because it's completely involuntary but practice seems to shut it down it makes it normal just like driving the first time you drove a car you were terrified but now you drive you don't even think you zone out while you're driving you drive like three or four miles and then remember you're driving right hopefully not very often but that happens to all of us so if you can practice your sales enough that it becomes normal you're not going to have those same things the challenge is most msps I think 85 percent of them have fewer than 10 meetings a year like how can you do that if you're just like once a month popping into a prospect there's nothing normal about that it's a big deal so practice allows you to rob the fear and the power from that that FTA or that meeting uh because you've made it normal so man I'm sorry I just like talked for 15 minutes and I'm not sure if I even breathed so I'll let you yeah no man this is great so let me try to squeeze in a few questions I know right we might get one question out for I'll get another episode uh the plan part right that's where you started like can can you kind of you know walk me through as you've met and worked with msps kind of what what is a part of the plan that you know that gets the most you know kind of like aha moments or and and also second part of that like what what is like the high level like you know table of contents would you say for for the plan you know if you will like what are the sections that that you guys kind of look at or that you suggest they plan out that's a really complex question and it's tough because I don't know who's gonna see this but what I would encourage people to do is you have to start with what works so if your company that has built your entire process off of referrals you know uh you probably can't grow your business to what you want just on referrals but you need to find a way to maximize the amount of referrals you're getting and the close ratio so that's first step one a lot of people that call me they're like God I need I need I need I just lost a client that's 20 of my Revenue like okay well now's not the time to hire a marketing company I'm sorry you got like a lean in fast to what has worked but when you're thinking about how you're going to grow your MSP by five-fold in the next five years you can't do what you've been doing you need to add something to it so the first part of the plan is if something works do it more but then you have to add a whole new thing to it and that's where a lot of the time marketing or outbound appointment setting you know SEO whatever the strategy is that you're comfortable investing in you know you have to pick one and vet it and come up with a plan and run it for as long as that person says you need to run it and give them money to do it but you have to make sure you adjust to accommodate that new thing so all the time I talk to people that have built their referral their entire business off of referrals and then they hire a marketer and then they fire that marketer six months later because they're not getting any business and I'm like oh man I'm like okay congratulations what's your what's your your close ratio on referrals I'm like 90 what was your close ratio on your marketing they're like well we didn't sell a single one and I go cool congratulations you can eat a fully cooked steak nice I'm very proud of you um and then someone handed you a cow and you didn't know what to do with it and like that I I understand that that's not abnormal but it's not their fault they simply you're used to someone doing the hard work of building trust running a great process somebody walked you in the door and said you should buy and then they said okay and that's great you should close 90 of those and it should help you make lots of money but if like there's a certain point where that's not enough and it's time to engage a marketer or an appointment setter you have to adjust your sales plan to accommodate that new perspective of the buyer and it's not the marketer's fault you're not closing those appointments it's that your sales process is accommodated to eating fully cooked steaks not preparing the meat for cooking does that make sense that's a great analogy yeah um or the metaphor yeah I'm gonna use that one because yeah it makes a lot it makes a lot of sense um I said I'll share a story like I was speaking recently to um an MSP president a roughly 25 person um based in doesn't matter where they're based in the United States and he had they had just parted ways with like a competitor of ours who does like lead generation it doesn't matter who they were but they had done 18 months with this firm The Firm had generated around 45-ish appointments 45 years I just met with them like last week and they told me that they had only um actually met with around half of those so there was a huge problem with like ghosting which is a separate issue definitely interesting uh not a good thing of course and that firm uh is is at fault but but for the other 20-something appointments what happened and nothing you know no no customers and so you know I think you know it just it you know what you're talking about I think you know they're coming from referral based um great MSP but now they suddenly get all these leads and you know and they share the questions that they were using in the FTA in the first appointment and boy it's just like you can you can you can see the inexperience there in in that so it hits home absolutely and this is where the the plan makes like this is incredibly like you could like oh plan do check act now that makes sense totally awesome no problem um but this is a real invest of time and energy I tell people all the time what what people really want you know what msps really want is more leads I just need more better leads like yeah that's probably true that's the ice cream cone you want to buy I get that okay but the vegetables you also need to eat you know your strong food is that you probably suck at sales just a little bit not a lot just a little bit especially when it comes to those those cold lights and so you know Mark sales and marketing getting more leads but knowing how to close them that's like two sides of the same coin that you're hoping to spend or gather or whatever metaphor you want to use here and so you have to absolutely have a good plan not only on how you're going to generate those leads how you're going to get those opportunities but how are you going to treat them differently than someone who is referred by their accountant who they Trust you know who's done all the hard work of building you know building that credibility because that's essentially what you're as an MSP that's what you're asking to do you're saying hey you know that guy who made all these promises and then apparently lied to you because you're firing him I can make all those same promises not very helpful you know you have to have some thing more than that right if you're gonna do if you're gonna be closing a cold lead or a marketing generated lead it's not just good enough to be hey look at me look at my tie look at my company I have great branding money please it just doesn't work that way yep yep yep no absolutely no it's it's uh it takes a little bit more than that so um well Rob I mean I think we're getting closer to to the to the time um is there anything else that you wanted to add in either any one of these sections or tips that you have to talk about I mean it went on my own dissertation long enough um but I would just say that most people uh wait too long you know to say to spend up a good to spin up a good sales engine it's a little bit um like going to the doctor if you will or maybe losing weights probably a better one I'm trying to lose some weight right now uh by the time you realize you're very overweight you are very overweight and you have lots of bad habits and you have to like pick up a lot of ground and at the beginning it's not very like rapid like you it's it's it's a long journey back to healthy if you are unhealthy and so I cannot tell you how many people call me and it's so expensive to fix their revenue problem because they didn't start early they waited until it was a big problem and now it's a big problem if you're hiring a marketing company if you're trying to figure out your Revenue problem I don't I hate the word problem but like if you're not happy with your Revenue you have to start somewhere and you should start long before you should so if you're anywhere within the sound of my voice I know this is a self-serving comment but you gotta hire someone to fix this for you or at least advise you in this direction whether it's Derek or me or somebody but you just can't build a business unless you're focusing on revenue and it has to be new client Revenue you cannot achieve your multiple exit or your lifestyle profitable business that doesn't worry about Revenue off of just growing current clients you have to find a way to reliably bring new clients take strangers that don't give you money and convince them to give you money you have to have a reliable process for that or you are like a ship at Sea and one Wayward wave can knock the whole thing down and cause a lot of problems if you haven't figured out this part of your business and you need to start before the economy gets bad you need to start before that big client leaves you need to start before that sales person you know quits or you hire that sales person this is a process that takes time to do correctly start before you need it absolutely no it's a great great advice well Rob this has been awesome thanks so much man for so happy thank you you're a good man maybe we'll have you back to yeah yeah no this is great Rob thanks so much we'll talk to you next time [Music]