Episode #48: The Transformation of Sales and Storytelling With Doug C. Brown

It all starts with a story and believe it or not, Doug Brown has a lot of them. Starting with his first job at the young age of 3 when he was sweeping floors. Many years down the road, Doug is now helping companies achieve their top 1% of sales.

Join us as Betsy and Tony get Doug’s unique perspective on the state of sales today. Sure, sales people used to push back on marketing and how they didn’t need it to sell. Now, they’re pushing back on really getting to know their customers. Some of them have told Doug there’s not enough information out there to learn about their customers. Listen in to hear Doug’s response to this objection with an incredible story involving his grandfather.

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the Podcast here:

About Doug C. Brown

Doug C. Brown is a highly acclaimed Sales Revenue Growth Expert and international bestselling author. He has coached, consulted, and advised thousands of people in business as well as companies including Enterprise-Rent Car, Nationwide, Intuit, Proctor and Gamble, CBS television, and others.

He has collected an impressive amount of experience throughout his life in different fields, especially sales. During this period, he created over 35 companies.

Doug served as an independent President of Sales and Training for Tony Robbins, Chet Holmes, Russ Whitney, and others.

He has generated over $500 million in sales; his last client made $3 million in 5 weeks. His most outstanding professional achievement is increasing the company’s close rate by 862% and their revenue growth by 116% in four months.

Doug is a 12-year veteran of the US Army and a proud father of two wonderful daughters.
His mission is to help companies grow their sales revenue and to have better performing sales teams. Additionally, he instructs B2B coaches and consultants on how to build a more profitable business.

The Transformation Of Sales And Storytelling With Doug C. Brown

The Shift To B2E (Business to Entrepreneur)

We’re excited that you are here. We have another great interview for you.

Betsy, I’m excited about having Doug Brown with us because we get into a conversation that over the last several episodes, if the audience have been reading carefully, they’ve known this shift that has been happening in some of our interviews. That shift specifically is one, we’re talking about the experience the consumer has or the customer, whether it’s B2B, B2C, the experience in the sales process, and how important that has become over the last few years. Two, we’re going to be talking about this idea, and I don’t have the attribution for this, I heard someone use this term and I actually loved it, “The consumerization of the B2B sales cycle.” In other words, in business, people want to be treated like people.

You and I, in the ProphetAbility book that we wrote in 2018, we talked about that. Business-to-business is really person-to-person. It’s just becoming more and more evident for people out there. As you read through the conversation, read from two perspectives. One, read from a perspective of what can you learn about B2B sales and how it shifted, especially in the recent past. Two, read about how Doug delivers story after story. He always finds a story that’s relevant to the question that we asked him. He’s actually preaching, if you will, his methodology of helping people grow their businesses or sales organization by doing it with us on this show.

I love some of the stories he told, specifically about getting started, pushing the broom at three for his dad’s business. Then the story about tracking down his grandfather, which you’ll read on this episode. It’s a very cool story that makes the point. We all hear about storytelling, and to your point, Tony, read this episode with a keen eye on storytelling. With that, we’ll go ahead and dive right in with our interview with Doug Brown, CEO of CEO Sales Strategies (formerly Business Success Factors).

—

Doug, welcome to the show. We’re so happy you’re here.

Betsy, thanks for having me on. I appreciate being here.

We’re looking so forward to this conversation. We’re going to dive right in. Can you bring us up to speed on who you are, what you do, what led you down this path, and what’s top of mind for you right now?

Who I am is Doug Brown, and I was brought down this path, I think probably by accident really when it came down to it, or maybe by design by my father. I’m really not sure. I started working for his company at the age of three, sweeping floors. I got paid $0.25 a week, and I loved it. It was great. I had my quarter at the end of the week, and I could buy candy, which was really cool. All my brothers and I worked for him at a very early age.

By the age of six, they thrust us out in front of clients and started saying, “Write orders, take orders for people coming in.” I still don’t know if my dad did this because he needed low cost labor or he was trying to teach us something. I’m not sure. I never asked him before he passed away, but that’s how I started this. As time went on, I got more and more responsibility in his business. What happened was my father actually had a heart attack. At the age of seventeen, I ended up running his company.

What was the business?

My dad had an electric motor machinery repair company, and we would go in and service all types of industrial equipment. Here I am seventeen years old, talking to the CEO of $150 million manufacturing company. I have to learn all this live fire for a while. It was a great experience for me because I got to see a couple of things. I got to see how leverage is created in companies. My father had maybe nine employees, and I’m walking into companies that have 150 employees. I’m beginning to talk with these upper-level owners, and they’re talking to me because I’m seventeen and sharing some secrets with me. I’m like, “This is pretty cool.” That’s how I got the bug.

As I was going through that, I always had businesses on the side of my dad’s business as well. What I do is I actually help people and companies achieve the top 1% of sales. I did this for my dad’s company. I did this for other companies, and I did this for my own companies. To me, it’s all about selling. Business is very simple. I always say this to people. It’s very simple until you add people because it’s money out, money in, equals something. That’s really business. I focus a lot on the money coming in, and we try to minimize the money going out and that creates higher profitability, and optimize those processes for people who are selling or companies who want to have more in sales.

Business is very simple, until you add people.CLICK TO TWEET

Tell us more about your clients. Let’s get into the weeds a little bit about who you work with, the things they’re trying to achieve, what you’re trying to help them achieve, and so on.

That has morphed over the years too. Now, I will say that it’s really those people who are looking to sell in the new economy. Many years ago, I started telling people, “This thing called Dial-up, the internet, will change the way we sell.” When DSL came in, I’m like, “This is happening.” People were like, “You’re crazy. We should be locking you up. This is never going to change how we sell.” I go, “Think about it, with a click of a mouse, people can go find all this information about stuff that they don’t know about,” and that means if you’re selling to them, then they’re going to know as much about what you’re trying to say to them, or maybe even more than you know.

They don’t need your knowledge base like they used to. It’s going to change the way we communicate in sales. For those of you who scoffed at me, ha ha, we’re here. What I teach people is in the new reality, this virtual thing we’ve been teaching now for well over 20 years, it’s not changing. It might morph back a little more in person as things get a little more less stringent on the regulatory issues with the pandemic.

The reality is what has happened is now companies realize, “We can be as productive or more productive running virtually. We don’t have to pay all these square meters or square footage for office space for our people. They’re actually happier, and we get as much done or more done.” It’s the new normal, which has created a real big deal for people trying to sell, especially to people trying to sell into higher-level accounts.

I teach people how to do that and how to get in and actually take their own products or the services they’re selling today, be able to accomplish that, but also be able to actually sell those sometimes for 3X to 5X what they’re selling for today. A lot of companies are not realizing the value that they actually provide. That has morphed to today, and that’s part of helping people get into the top 1%, selling a better quality deal, and to a higher value client, as well as putting some other processes around doing that.

Can I take you a step back because you addressed something that I want to hit on really quickly because it’s going to lead to some other questions I have in the interview here? You were talking about, I think the term I’ve heard is information democratization. The internet gave information to everyone. I was in the hotel industry, running customer experience for the Gaylord Hotels brand back in 2007, 2008 and 2009, that era when Tripadvisor was just becoming a thing.

We just got our iPhones in 2007 and 2008. People could literally be driving down the highway and saying, “Do I want to go to that hotel?” They go to Tripadvisor and see what the reviews are. In that case, people had more information than the companies did because almost no company was watching Tripadvisor and looking at the reviews.

I was at that era where we were just starting to look at reviews because it was hitting us with questions or concerns or fake reviews or whatever else. That era went on for a while, I would say, but if a company is not out there really mining what’s online, the social platforms, the other information that’s out there, they’re behind. How would you respond to someone who’s saying, “I’m not even in that ballpark yet. My salespeople know what I teach them in class. They haven’t even gone online to figure out who we are and what we do, what our customers think.”

Sales Transformation: Selling a business is very simple until you add people because it’s money out money in equals something that’s really business.

I would say that I’m sure that some son or daughter was told by their father, “Understand how to repair this carburetor, you’ll have a job for life.” Now, most cars don’t have carburetors or a steam engine. This is a technology that has changed. I fully agree with you, Tony, on the ability for the information. Sometimes, or many times, a consumer now, whether it’s B2B or B2C, can actually get insider information on the company. For example, Glassdoor, if you want to know how a company rates on their employee, satisfaction, let’s go to Glassdoor. I’m not saying that every single thing put out on Glassdoor is accurate, or I’m not saying it’s inaccurate, but I’m saying it’s out there.

You’ve got 30 people saying this company did X, Y, Z, it’s probably going to be an issue. I think this will answer the question probably better, Tony. Right now, statistics, and you know that statistics can be rigged, but statistics show about 80% of the sales decision today is first generated by the marketing department. You’re not, as a salesperson, getting to the higher companies, especially without marketing having an influence, without the internet information having the influence now.

Usually, a lot of the decisions to talk to a salesperson are generated now by marketing research first. I’ll give you an example. I was talking to a CEO of a $35 million fast-growing company. I asked him, “How are people actually getting to you?” He said, “They only get to me when my marketing people tell me that we need this. Then we go out for peer-to-peer referrals.” That’s how a lot of business is done now.

The internet has not only changed the information exchange, but it’s more important for us to be out, and what a good friend of mine and mentor, Alan Weiss, says, “Get into the public square.” We have to be out there because now what’s happening is people are actually going and Googling or LinkedIn or whatever search they’re doing. They’re doing this on the people they’re actually involved with. If the person that was saying that to you is like, “My sales team is selling the way we did in 1987.” It’s time to change.

I can’t mention the actual name of the television station. It has three famous letters. They called me. They had like a division of PBS-type things like public broadcasting, and their advertising sales were just down. I did an assessment on the company. I looked at the sales team and I’m like, “They’re trying to sell like the Tin Men were selling back in the ‘40s.” They had people that were there for 30-something years, and they’ve never changed their sales style. The company hasn’t morphed to adopt that. They were just really having a hard time.

People who are not going to embrace, whether you like social selling or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s here. Whether we like having humanized, relevant conversations or not, it doesn’t matter. That’s what’s here now. We have to have meaningful, humanized, relevant conversations with people because it’s not the game of sales that it used to be. It’s the game of now embracing what is and taking that and adapting.

Make no mistake, cold calls still work, but you’ve got to call when the CEOs are there. Many people are trying to make cold calls in the middle of the afternoon, and they’re not there. Get up early. A lot of CEOs are there at 6:30 in the morning. They’re at the office, so you can get them at that point. Call them on Saturday mornings. You’ll be surprised how many people are actually there in the office or will pick up the phone. It still works. It’s just that we’ve got to morph and change.

When we talk about the changes here, let’s move toward the pandemic and look at the significant changes because there were things that were happening, you and I both agree. I know Betsy and I talked about this quite a bit. There were things that were in process, but in March 2020, we had to lockdown. The acceleration was instantaneous. Whatever vector we were headed on, we just took off like a rocket ship. In your mind, what has really changed with the pandemic from a selling perspective, and really from a perspective of getting to know your customer. If 80% of the decisions are made already, they know you before they talk to you, how do you get to know them?

Statistics show about 80% of the sales decision is first generated by the marketing department.CLICK TO TWEET

It’s the REALLY Know Your Customer show that we’re on. The reality is that’s the first step, and this is the part that most sales channels push back on. It used to be marketing. I remember in the old days, marketing would always fight with sales. Sales would always fight with marketing. Marketers go, “Salespeople are lazy and they make too much money.” Salespeople go, “We can knock on doors. We can make phone calls. We don’t need marketing.” That would be the kind of the thing. For many years, I tried to blend those two together, push them together in one room, shut the door and say, “You slug it out and I’ll come back when it’s done.” Then they would work ubiquitously along a path called a customer journey. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Part of that customer journey is really knowing the client. Who are we actually selling to? What are their motivations? What are their pains? Don’t just stick with pains. Sandler Sales, I embraced that early on in my life, but I can tell you now that people are looking for improvement, innovation. They’re looking for strategic growth. It’s not just about pain any longer. They’re looking for opportunities as much as they’re looking to avoid pain, back to Tony Robbins. It’s really understanding who the person is that we’re actually selling to. I said, “Person,” not just company.

There are two things that have shifted massively. One, people used to sell the companies and they used to think that was good, company profile, “I’ll be in the game.” No. Now, things have also shifted to the person. It always was like that, but now it has been hyper-accelerated. The reality is that we, as people selling, better embrace different generations now because the generations now are not the same generations that I was selling to 25 years ago. They have different outlooks on life. They have different ways they want to communicate. It’s nice to know the DISC style and all that type of thing, but the reality is we have to know our customers before they are our customers, or at least understand what motivates them, and what things we shouldn’t be saying as much as we should be saying to them.

It sounds like there’s a bit of this idea, and we’ve heard this on other episodes of our show within the B2B space, where B2B is becoming much more like B2C, where you had to know the individual, you have to talk to them as a person. The term I’ve heard is the consumerization of business-to-business. Is that what you see happening as well?

Yeah. I termed it B2E, business-to-entrepreneur. I agree with you, it’s the morphing of what is happening. It’s now about communication. It always was, but before it was about, “My product or service will solve this.” That is a professional return on investment. What people are forgetting about now in the new economy is people are also looking for a personal return on their investment. If you look at what’s going on in the shift in the workplace, quality of life has become far more important now than actually money to a lot of people.

Back when I was growing up, we never talked about quality of life. It was all about the money, especially in sales. Don’t underestimate what I’m saying to the point where you don’t think salespeople are driven by monetary gain. They are, but a lot of them are driven more by significance or recognition than they are by monetary gain. Clients are too. I used to build these very large agency networks for my clients and myself, and utilize them for selling purposes.

One time, I won all these prizes at a company, and I took all the prizes, big TVs, all that stuff. I didn’t need it, so I took it and I brought it over to my best referral partners. I walked in and I go, “Merry Christmas in July.” They went like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “Here you go. Here’s the TV.” They’re like, “What the heck is this for?” I said, “I just want to recognize the fact that you guys work really hard and you might want a TV in your office and to kick back and relax at the end of the day. I thought I’d go out and get one to say I’m really appreciative of what you do with me. Thanks so much. Have a great day.” That turned into millions of dollars’ worth of business – a TV.

It’s because I recognize them, I gave them a gift, and I treated them like human beings. I know they were tired at the end of each day. I’m recognizing who they are, what they stand for, and what they’re looking for. One company, I used to go up every two months, I did this for over two years. I would go have Chinese food with this company. They value Chinese food. I’d go up and find the best, greasiest food they like, and we’d go up and we’d have Chinese food. I sat down for two years.

Sales Transformation: We have to have meaningful humanized, relevant conversations with people because it’s not the game of sales that it used to be. It’s the game of now embracing what is and taking that and adapting,

I make a phone call month one, Chinese food month two, three. I did this for two years straight. They go, “Why would you do that?” Because I was communicating with everybody in the company. I’m bringing them all together. It’s a consensus sale at that point. It took me two years to close that company. The first thing they introduced me to was NASCAR, and I closed it. Was it worth two years to get NASCAR? Absolutely. The reality is that it’s more so about that now as equal to than it is the professional ROI.

How has that been? I’m sure that has been very challenging with the fact that people are distributed now. It’s not like you can go to a home office and see five people at same time, in a lot of cases, but what are you seeing like at a 30,000-foot view of what your perspective is on how much of that we’re going to continue to see, versus people shifting back to, “I want to be with people?” I’ve seen a lot of conferences starting back up and trade shows and all of that. What’s your feel on where that’s heading long-term?

You said it accurately, it is shifting. I think in the beginning when I said it’s not going to go back to what it was, I also believe that as well. Too many people like the fact that they can roll out of bed, take a twenty-step walk to their office, and sit down and work. They don’t have to drive through New York City traffic, Dallas traffic, San Francisco traffic, Florida traffic, wherever they are in the country. They are finding this to be far more productive. I have a client, Betsy, to answer that question, like what do you do now? They have seven major people in the company. We meet on Zoom just like we do here. However, you can send coffee and donuts to seven people in different locations.

If we’re smart enough, that means we, as the sales channel, also have to invest in our clients. Before, it was like, “We’d get together. Then we’d go, sit down and we’d have lunch at a certain place.” Some of that is coming back. Live events are starting to come back because people are tired of not having human-to-human contact. I believe at least half are perfectly fine the way they are now. It’s okay to see each other at a conference once in a while. It’s okay to have Zoom conversations as well. It’s one of those things I don’t think is coming back in full.

I see a lot of companies that I work with in the training industry saying, “We’re not even going back. Maybe once a year. We used to do 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 events a year. We’re not doing that anymore. Here’s the reason why. It doesn’t cost $100,000 to get a hotel.” That’s the reason why. If they do ten events a year and they go, “We’ll do one,” they just saved themselves $900,000 on the bottom line profit, especially when the conversion rate at the event is the same as it was live.

Have you seen anything just particularly creative on the way that salespeople are addressing people? I know there’s a lot of talk about Zoom fatigue and those kinds of things. Are you seeing anything that is really notable with how salespeople are getting to know their customers better or engaging with them more, displaying what those opportunities are, not just pain points?

The thing is, there’s information on people everywhere. I had a five-year drive at finding out who my real grandfather was. I found him finally. He’s no longer here, but I now know who he is, and I know where I come from because I never knew. I liken that to what salespeople have to do. It’s not easy. You’re going through newspapers, associations, ancestry, DNA. You’re doing all of the ancestry type programs. It takes a little bit, but I’ve learned so much about my grandfather.

I did not know, for example, for the Boston Bruins, Boston Celtics and Boston Red Sox, in his early days, he worked for Western Union as a telegraph operator. He was transmitting the news. Later on, he became a reporter. I never knew this. I used to go to the games. He might even have been at the games when I was there, and I never knew the man.

Whether you like social selling or no, it doesn’t matter, it’s here.CLICK TO TWEET

I’ve come very close to understanding who he is, where he grew up, what schools he went to, what he studied, what sports he went and played, all of this stuff. If I can do this on a person who has been deceased since 1980, I do not want to hear from a sales channel, “We cannot find relevant information on our clientele now,” where it’s all over the place.

That brings me to another point. In our prep session, you talked about this ideal customer profile versus the ideal customer buyer. I think it ties into everything we’ve been talking about. Give us some framework there for our audience, so they can put their mind around that and wrap it up.

The old days was, “Cold call until you turn blue.” The ideal customer profile was, “Here are the parameters of our particular client that we look for.” Any company that even remotely reminds you of that, they’re an ideal customer, “Let’s go for it.” You make 100 calls, 150 calls a day. That was the deal. Who’s going to be the decision maker? It’s got to be the owner or the CEO. Unless maybe you’re in a technical business, then it could be the technical officer or something like that. You’d go, “That’s my ideal client profile.” Those were the old days.

Today, also there’s far more consensus sales going on than there were in the past. Whether people admit it or not, they get off Zoom calls and they talk. You, as a salesperson, aren’t there. They’re going to talk to one another. Before, you could be in the room and they would talk to one another and then you could handle those things. Now, we have to look at who our ideal buyers are. The buyer is the person that goes, “Pay that check or transfer that money.” That’s the buyer, but they may be more than one now. They always were before, but you would be able to identify them a lot easier. We have to identify the buyers, as well as the influencers of that buyer.

We were supposed to do that in the old days too, but it was a lot easier. Now, we have to look at who touches that and ask ourselves some questions like, “If this was to happen, who else is influencing it? Could human resource actually influence this?” They’re part of the buying decision then. We better know what influences human resources.

A world-famous sales training organization was calling me to sell me sales training. My wife and I are on a call together. I’m sitting there going, “This guy is pretty good.” I’m throwing him little curve balls here and there just to see where he goes. He gets to the end and goes, “How’d you do?” I go, “Not bad actually.” He looked at my wife and he goes, “How about you?” She goes, “Not good.” He goes, “What do you mean?” She goes, “You directed every single question to Doug, not one to me.”

Here’s what I want people to understand. If you don’t pay attention to the influencer, there’s no way in heck that they’re buying at that point. It’s not happening. They could say, “We’ll send you on a world trip.” She’s upset. She’s the influencer. She’s the real buyer when it comes down to it. The reality is we have to pay attention to everybody now, not just that person. Like we did in the old days, we want to build in all of the objections for those people that might come up. All of the fears, all of the desires, all of the things that we think could come up, we’ve got to build into the upfront conversation in the form of stories, and quite frankly, humor, if you can use it because people love to laugh.

One of the things that Betsy and I have picked up on as we’ve talked to typically technology companies now, but this is spreading, we see the wave out there. It’s this idea of we need to know not just the executive who’s making the decision or the executive influencer in this case, but for technology companies, it’s the user. I say this is spreading because even if you look in the medical industry, and you’ve got the nurses that are using the products. One of the people we spoke to very early on their podcasts, they sell to the military. They knew that they had to talk to the people who were going to be using the tools that they created.

Sales Transformation: Most sales channels push back on because it used to be marketing. In the old days, marketing would always fight with sales.

They talked to the end-user because the end-users actually in today’s world seem to be much more influential than ever before. It’s that consensus you’re talking about. You get a group of end-users together, “Try this product out. What do you guys think?” The influencer above them reports back to the buyer. It’s multiple levels deep in the organization. How do you handle those situations? How do you really get to know what the users want if they’re not necessarily in the room?

You talk to them, you call them, you email them. You social media ping them.

That’s a novel idea.

I know this is like worldly information, but we communicate with these people on all levels just like what you’re speaking about, Tony. I remember I was working for a very large company. I was the top rep in the company at that point. I remember them saying, “We’re going to bring in SAP,” which is a fine product. I’m not pinging on SAP. “We want you now to put every little name in this system. We want you to track every little conversation. We want you to track every single interaction that’s happening. We want to know everything about that.” I’m calculating in my head how much money this is going to cost me.

After they were done with their company-wide presentation, I walked into the director of sales office. I shut the door, and he says, “You’ve got to do this.” That’s the first thing he said. He didn’t even say, “Hello.” I said to him, “There’s no way I’m doing this.” He goes, “You have to. It’s company mandated.” I said, “You have two choices here. This is going to cost me over $25,000 that I just calculated in my head. Either I get to hire an assistant, or you hire me an assistant to do all of this stuff, or I will leave and go to our competition and take the business with me.” I know that sounds kind of harsh, but top producers think this way. If we’re not talking to the end-user, the top producer in this case, or the other people, just as you said, Tony, what we’re going to do is we’re going to miss the motivation. By the way, they hired me an assistant.

I was out-selling teams 9 to 1. They don’t want to lose that, and I get it. I had two little kids. I wanted them to go to college. I wanted all kinds of motivational things to happen for my children. It’s one of those things that if they talk to the end-users, and especially now with the Millennials making more decisions and things of that nature, it’s more important to talk to them than ever, because what will happen is that groundswell will happen underneath. Even though executive management looks at that and goes, “This seems pretty good,” then they’re going to get the people marching in the streets, so to speak, and all of that groundswell will come up and they’ll say, “We didn’t realize this. We want to put the brakes on this situation at this moment until we figure it out.”

Even if they bring a product in, you get the initial sale, they may not get the renewals, to which a lot of products have gone to now.

Right, because it’s all about membership. Amazon or anybody were trying to make that very famous in the process of doing that. The reality is with SAP, had they talked to me initially and said, “I want to talk to your top five salespeople in the company,” we had 315 salespeople, so it wouldn’t have been that hard to get ahold of somebody. If they had talked to me and said, “What do you need?” and they built that into their presentation, “For those of you who are aspiring or at the top producing level in the company, this will help you be 25% more productive. Let me show you how,” I would have been like, “No problem,” but they didn’t, so that’s what happened.

“Business to Business” is really “Person to Person”.CLICK TO TWEET

This time has gone so fast. I just looked at the clock. I can’t believe how fast this conversation has gone. Before we let you go, as you are probably aware on our show, we always like to let our guests give out a shout-out to a charitable organization or just an organization that you think is doing good to give back to the community. Is there anybody that you’d like to shine a spotlight on?

Can I make it local?

Yes, of course.

I actually did some work for a company called The Battered Women Society in Manchester, New Hampshire. I’d like to give a shout-out to them because they do such a great job at handling domestic issues for women. It’s a near and dear cause to my heart, so that’s my shout-out.

Thank you very much. Doug, thank you so much for your time. Tony, any last questions?

There are always more questions, Betsy, you know that, but no. This is such a good conversation. It has been really powerful, and you’ve given us a lot of insight to things that we’ve hinted at in other shows, but I don’t think we’ve gotten as deep into the sales process. I love that.

Thank you so much, Doug. We appreciate your time, your energy, your stories. I love the story about your grandfather. That was really cool. Thank you so much. Keep us posted on what’s going on in your world.

Thanks, Betsy. Thanks, Tony. I appreciate being here.

—

Sales Transformation: We better embrace different generations today because the generations today are not the same generations that we were selling to 25 years ago. They have different outlooks on life. They have different ways they want to communicate.

I’ve got to tell you, one of the pieces that I really loved in this show, Betsy, is where he talks about getting to know your customer. Of course, REALLY Know Your Customer show, what else would I love? In particular, he’s talking about how salespeople used to push back on marketing and say, “I don’t need that marketing stuff.” Now, salespeople are pushing back on getting to know their customer as an individual, not just the company profile.

I love that we went into such depth in that particular area and got some ideas of how the audience can do that. If you’re a CEO or the leader in a large company, sales may not be your particular role and function, we get that. If your sales team is not doing what Doug has outlined here, you are behind the eight ball. Remember, about 80% of the sales decision is made before the customer ever picks up the phone or sends an email to contact your company.

One of the things that he said, Tony, that really struck me, he talked about a term he refers to as B2E. In my mind, I’m thinking business-to-everybody, business-to-enterprise, business-to-entire company. I was trying to think of all these words. He said it was the business-to-entrepreneur. Even people who are employed can have an entrepreneurial mindset. You don’t necessarily have to own your own company to have the mindset of an entrepreneur. I would go out on a limb and say that a lot of leadership teams have people that think like entrepreneurs.

I thought that was really an interesting perspective, piggybacking onto the people-to-people versus business-to-business, but really thinking on getting into their heads as somebody that’s trying to grow a company. All in all, I thought it was just such an interesting, fascinating interview. I am quite confident that our audience felt the same way.

I want to tap on something. I normally don’t jump in here after you. I have this idea that occurred to me. It’s an insight from the show. Instead of just talking about, “What’s in it for me?” that’s how we used to sell to people, the entrepreneur side of things, the B2E. He talked about how people care about the significance and quality of life, making improvements. It’s no longer just about resolving my pain, but it’s also, “How do I make the world a better place? How do I make my company a better place?” I think that’s the essence of the entrepreneur, “How do I make things better for other people not just myself?”

That’s a great way to conclude your thoughts on this. I’m glad you did jump in. That was a key point. I really embraced that point of the conversation. With that, we’re going to wrap up another episode, and we’ll see you next time.