Noob School - Jean-Michel Moreau on SaaS Growth, Sales Strategy & Scaling Smart

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

On this episode of Noob School, I sit down with Jean-Michel Moreau — entrepreneur, growth strategist, and host of the Rapid Product Growth podcast — to talk about what actually helps businesses scale sustainably. Jean-Michel’s background is anything but typical. Starting in device physics and the Bay Area startup world, he eventually led global tech commercialization efforts for billion-dollar companies before shifting his focus to helping mid-market businesses grow through smarter sales systems, technology, and marketing strategy. In this conversation, we break down why so many businesses fail with paid ads, the massive difference between marketing and advertising, and why understanding real customer pain points matters more than building “brand awareness.” Jean-Michel also explains: Why “foot in the door” offers dramatically shorten sales cycles How SaaS and consulting businesses can scale more predictably Why Meta ads can outperform LinkedIn for B2B growth The metrics he looks for before taking on a client Why founder mindset is often the biggest growth bottleneck How companies can identify the fastest path to sustainable growth This episode is packed with practical advice for entrepreneurs, founders, consultants, and business owners who want to grow intelligently instead of just spending more money on marketing. Subscribe to Noob School for conversations with entrepreneurs, operators, athletes, and leaders who’ve learned what works through real experience.

All right, well, welcome back to Noob School. This is episode 162. 162. We've got a special guest, Jean-Michel Moreau. Me, me, a nouveau amigo. Yeah, it's good to see you again, John. Kind of a new friend. I mean, we've been talking for, what, six months or so?

A couple months, yeah, at least six. A couple? Yeah. A couple? Yeah. Anyway, John Michelle and I met each other somewhere on the internet. And we liked each other, and we have a lot of common interest in technology and promoting software and selling and all that stuff. So I thought he'd be a great guest, even though he would not come down here from Toronto to join me in Greenville.

But hopefully we'll have a good conversation. And now he's got a great company called Rapid Product Growth, right? Rapid Product Growth, that's right, yeah. And you also have a podcast of the same name? Product Growth Stories is our podcast. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify. Yeah. And we talk to other founders, other entrepreneurs who are scaling SaaS businesses and consulting businesses.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting, to me anyway, I'm a big fan of names. I really like company names. And I mean, rapid product growth. Who doesn't read that and say, I think I want to talk to this. guy. I hope so. That was the home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, rapid product growth. I mean, it's just so much better than like, you know, XYZ systems or something. Or leads. Leads DEC or something, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because there's the company, Leads.com or something like that. It's like, well, I get it.

You know, you do leads, but I don't just want any old leads. I want, I want rapid product growth, right? That's what I'm looking for. It's not just leads. Leads can be a pain. If there's just too many of them, they're no good. Just give me the growth without the leads. What is that? I'm selling. Just the growth. Yeah. I love it when people say, we just want to get good referrals. They're easier to sell. I'm like, well, good luck. I mean, I don't know how, you know, you can just turn the referral lead meter up. But you probably, you probably have some tricks to that. That's not my special I've looked into that. It seems like just about everything

in the business can be looked at from a sales lens, and I'm sure you can engineer a customer experience that's aiming for the exact moment you ask for a referral. I'm sure there's companies that do that very well,

and I'm sure that's the most profitable thing to do. It's just really hard to do that, to get everything oiled down and nailed for your processes. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I do have a friend who's got a real nice business.

He operates warehouses for other people, for big companies like Michelin and Pirelli. You've got to be so good at that. And he does not believe in marketing or sales. He doesn't have a salesperson. He's like, we're just going to be so good at this that people are going to call us. And they do. Yeah. These are the people I want as customers.

This is exactly perfect. Well, I mean, that's Yeah. You could 10X this business, right? I don't know, but those are the easiest wins to get. People with this attitude, they, you know, it works. It definitely works. It's just that once you built that, okay, why don't we just get a little bit more attention?

Because not everyone is going to learn about you from within this close, tight network of people that are super interested in what you're doing. And even more interesting is there's people with, out there there's market demand in all these different areas and a lot of the world that works in like referrals and sales we are so focused on being experts and making great products and great businesses that we see the world through like the lens of delivery you know like I do this thing but there's people you can help to have no idea what it is the solution they have no idea at all like how to get there and they still want to spend money they are spending money maybe with a competitor that isn't even as good as you.

So these are one of my favorite ways to grow businesses is to start finding motivated problem-aware people who don't understand the solution. Right. Yeah, like I wouldn't understand how to run, you know, a tire warehouse or something, you know. They don't understand how to do Facebook ads or Google ads or whatever.

Okay. So before we get into all that, we always want to do a little background. We want to understand kind of you have a great business now. You live in Toronto. You help people grow their businesses using technology. But how did you get here? Where are you from?

And how did you end up in the day area? What did you do out there? How did you get home? Sure. Oh, man. Yeah, the whole gamut. So, well, I'm a big nerd. So I studied device physics in school.

And I was really trying to find an exciting job where I could climb every weekend in Yosemite. So that was my number one goal. And I found a nice startup in the Bay Area and kind of cut my teeth there. And then I went on to do like tech commercialization for a billion dollar publicly traded company. So that means, you know, we had a skunk works in Switzerland. We had like a team of 30 different engineers. And we would try to find better ways to make new products and I got the pleasure to take something like from an idea to global rollout running all the P&Ls and all the entities to make sure it actually made money in all these different countries where we rolled it out. So that was a lot of fun and so much, so much stress.

And yeah, I had a chance to, after that I really wanted to kind of scale back because the problems that billion dollar companies are tiring. There's a lot of politics, managing, like, incentive mismatches between, you know, this, like this guy is going to fail if we succeed, and that's a lot to a lot of headache that isn't just getting the thing done. Right. So I started working for smaller businesses, like mid-market businesses, and really helping them grow. And that's really the sweet spot for me. Good, good.

Yeah, I never had the pleasure of working for like a really big company like that. I can only imagine, I guess I saw it because we sold a lot of them. Yeah. But a lot of meetings. A lot of meetings. And then like, and then you've got to fly to see each other too. And it's like, it's just a lot. Yeah.

Fly to Memphis for a meeting and then fly, whatever. Yeah. Did you, was, were they, I don't, I don't, I kept trying to think in my mind, time-wise, were people doing like a zillion online meetings at that time? Like, were you just back-to-back with all these Zoom calls? We were, which is kind of weird. It was kind, I mean, at that time, at least we were, it was, like pre-COVID and everything, but

we had those like Cisco meeting rooms with those little video phones and you would be funny because you'd fly to like maybe I'd fly from Switzerland to Canada or to Australia to meet someone in person and then the rest of the day would be on like video calls of people

in other countries so it's pretty funny how that would work out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is funny. It is nice and it's not nice that we're so used to these like just blocking our days with these calls. Yeah.

You know, I kind of liked going out and meeting people and like going to dinner with them and getting them a little bit instead of just an hour. And the other thing that's bugging me about the Zoom calls now is the people who don't turn the camera on. It's like, yeah. Yes. Yeah. How interested are you?

Because I know darn well what you're doing with your cameras off because I'm doing the same thing. I'm doing something else, right? That's right. Listen out of this ear. Yeah. Yeah, those are the worst. You just got to ask them to turn, especially in sales. I mean, I'm sure you teach people that in when you're helping them, but you could just tell them to turn it on. Like for this call, when you'd have the cameras on, it tends to work. Yeah. Yeah, we were talking about that very, the general subject, maybe similar to yesterday or the day before about Signs that you know it's not going well. Let's see, I once visited someone at Georgia Pacific headquarters.

That's in Atlanta. It's like a $7 billion largest paper or whatever they do, wood something. And, you know, I was kind of strong on my way into getting a meeting with like a VP in purchasing. It's like, I'm going to Atlanta, got my suit on, there early, ready to go. He meets me in the lobby. and we sit in just a lobby chair and talk for like 25 minutes and then I'm out. I'm like, this is going nowhere. That was a checkbox for him.

Oh, my God, yeah. Didn't get to get the elevator. Oh, yeah. That's not a good sign. I've had those realizations too where you're like, oh, wait a minute. Once a year you need a competitive quote. And it's about that time. That's why we're talking.

Well, you did. I want to back up for a second. You mentioned something about being a nervous. and what you studied in college. I'm not even sure what that is. Device, what? Device, what? Device mechanics?

Device physics. It's like the, yeah, it's like the physical, the physics around the, like, physical processes to manufacture semiconductors. So, like, a computer, you know, like, how do you treat the wafers and, you know, how does that affect the performance of the chips and manufacture a chip? Okay. And so what's going on with Invidia is that guy, this guy was working on like high graphics gaming chips for what decades. And then all of a sudden that very thing he's working on is what we need for AI.

Is that kind of what happened? Jackpot. I mean, yes. Yeah, I'm not an expert in all of this. But boy, it is like an interesting circle that they've got deals amongst each other about buying chips and getting funding. So I don't know. So a lot of the U.S. economy is tied right now to AI. Hope it works.

Yeah. I know I'm doing a lot with it. I'm doing open claw. I've got someone helping me. And I'm seeing little nuggets that actually work where it's actually helping my business. But it's certainly not everything. And it's hard. It's like a car that you like that you have to fix.

all the time, you know, there's always something wrong with it because it's not easy yet. Yeah, it's like a bad classic car that's fast. Right. I hope it's not a DeSoto. Yeah. I mean, that is a lot of people's experience. And actually, we are using that exact sentiment that you have right now. I'm using to sell software.

So that's a really common, I mean, a really common. like mass market feeling that's happening right now. There's two, I would say, that are happening. One that's kind of now going down and the next is coming up. And that is people have started to use some of these tools like ChatGBT and Cloud or co-pilot and like nothing massive happened for them. Their business is not more valuable. Their margins didn't change.

They just have more stuff. That's a really common experience. That's currently that's a really big emotional demand trigger. You mentioned this, people like, yeah, I hate that. I will do something about this. They don't like that. And I think the next thing that's happening around AI that we're seeing is a lot of companies been pushed, sometimes with board pressure, to implement AI, and it didn't make money.

It lost money. It didn't work. And so now there's another trigger going on right now, which is I would really like proven ROI on something around it. Yeah, yeah. Can somebody promise me this will work this time or back it up or, you know. Yeah. I think the market. So in your case, you could talk to somebody who has been spending X amount of money per month investing in AI and getting no return or very little return and say, listen, why don't we take that money and put it in my program, which is investing in mostly paid advertisement, right?

Oh, yeah. Like what do I do? Yeah, well, it depends because, you know, not every business needs paid ads. Like, you have to have a lot of things set up. And, you know, 70% of business, small business owners, like people between that $2 and $10 million a year revenue range, 70% of them who start with paid ads fail in one quarter and never come back. So that's like just what happened. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, that's very common. And so it's not, there's a lot of things. need to line up first before you get started. And it's also not appropriate for everyone. But I think the main thing that gets people is that there's a huge difference between like marketing and advertising. And when people jump into paid ads, they're advertising.

They're like, I want to push my message out there. I'm willing to pay money to do that. And the problem is they're not marketing, which is they're not like connecting the right offer that's going to have like an immediate response that they can connect to revenue in the short term. It's more like, well, now more people know about this. And, you know, like next year, that's going to be really good. You know, and a lot of people can't wait it out for the standard like, let's just advertise approach. Because that's like a long time to see that money come back.

Well, since I'm one of those people who tried it, I mean, literally called Google ad people and it started a conversation. it's like, you know, like the lamb going to the wolves, but it did not work. And plus, you know, plus I have a short attention span. So I'm like I didn't have the time to figure it out. So what's the difference? Give us the general difference with how you approach it and make it easy for an entrepreneur to take that money and quickly turn it into more money. Yes.

Okay. So I'm so glad you asked my favorite topic of all time. So, well, first of all, we have to look at who you're trying to sell to. And if there aren't in the tens of thousands, if the number of potential prospects and companies aren't in the tens of thousands at least, then it's very hard to make it work. There are specific techniques for that. You know, that usually means that, well, these are super niche or it's enterprise. And there's very specific specialty techniques you can use there.

them are super easy. They do work. I'm not going to talk about those because those are so specific. Hopefully you have more than 10,000 possible customers and whatever you're doing. And then the next thing is you have to have the cash flow to see the operation through. So if you're going to advertise, if you do the estimations and, you know, run the numbers for a standard funnel that is a direct response, get a interested buyer on the phone kind of funnel, let's say you're spending 5,000 a month. You need to be able to do that for three or four months before you really know what's going on. Because the average B2B deals like three months and you want to know, did it actually like who is buying what? You have to give yourself a chance to see that.

So if you don't have the cash flow or if that feels like a stressful thing to do, you're not ready to do it. You need to have the cash flow. So that would be just like starting preconditions. And then usually like whatever you did to grow, with relationship-based sales, that's not the right move. Of course, you should keep doing that, that operation, that business function should not ever stop. It's important to got you here.

You shouldn't stop doing it. It's like maintaining this floor, but it has a growth rate ceiling. You can only make so many relationships, and there's only so many, like, big dogs that are ready to play at any given time, right? So it's a slow game, and it's, you know, big rewards, but slow. So if you want to speed up, the trick is to do something different, do something different, do something totally different that is easy. That's the move is to skip the hard problem. So yeah, there's just market size limits. So there's a bunch of things you would try to do to shorten the

sales cycle and to find more buyers and to solve cash flow. So if you solve market size, cash flow, if you solve these problems, then you can scale really quickly. And so the way you do that is kind of straightforward. The first thing is you put, you make a foot in the door offer instead of your main thing. So a lot of companies, maybe they sell something. It's $150K to like $2 million. Sold through relationships. Like hopefully you find an enterprise and they want the one year solution, right? And that's going to be a few million. Or there's like a little quarter project or something. Those take a long time. And an easy way to shorten the sales cycles just require less approvals. Like make it easy so that whoever it is you're dealing with can just sign off and like let's see if it

works. And then now you're a customer and not a non-approved vendor or whatever. So that's like the first thing is make it cheaper. Do something, a tiny bite-sized thing. We can knock their socks off. And your whole goal is to not lose money. If you change your perspective, like the first sale is acquiring the customer at a tiny profit. If that's your goal, then you can make money in the upsell. It's a lot easier.

They're trying to go right for the jugular. So that would be like the very first thing, foot in the door. Right. The second thing is it's like switching your point of view and your length. So if your point of view is internal, like, you're just like, here's what we sell. I would like to sell this service to you. That is, and then you use your own language. Like, I'm the expert.

This is what we call it. That is so much harder than I'm going to go look at what these people want to buy today and what do they call that thing. And if you just sell them the thing that, this is like sounds like I'm joking. But if you sell people the thing they want to buy or they are buying, the risk goes way down. because they're actively buying that there's active market demand. So instead of saying like, you know, we are going to sell you, let's start advertising this one custom product feature and get some people on the phone who want this specific module. It's going to save them a lot of money and we'll do this intro package for this module.

You find this really core business thing they're looking for. Like they're looking to improve their margins. And we know that when customers install this, typically they can actually improve that that business units margins by like 10%. it's so easy to sell people 10% margin lift. That's way easier than this specific complex module will improve your warehouse. Right, right. And so these are the kind of basic things that you can do. Because in marketing, I know a lot of people want like this idea of blue oceans,

but marketers love red oceans because in a blue ocean, you don't see all the dead people. You don't see all the people who lost money went in a business spent hundreds of thousands and couldn't keep going with those ideas that look like they're fresh. No one's doing it. But we like to look at like, look, someone has been running this ad for a year. Pretty sure this is a good idea. And that's kind of where we want to start is proven demand so that you don't have to waste your ad spend testing and learning. So give me an example of that. Okay.

How about you? Start me off. Give me a, you want to, let's think of a product or something. We can go from from there. Okay, I'll give you one. I've got a company called Sequence Software. We just bought them like five months ago, and they make a product that people use to create specific lists

that people use as they manufacture products. And the list is you can put videos in there, you can put photos, You can have them checkmark as they do it. But it's really for highly regulated. Yeah, highly regulated industries that have to have proof that they're following a specific sequence. Yeah. So, yeah, exactly.

So if I wanted to, okay, assuming there's at least 10K buyers and so forth, I would try to look at what is the ultimate consequence, the ultimate outcome, negative outcome of not having this solution. that you know they know about. So it's not a feature. It's like recalls. It's really, you're really, you're hitting it right on the head. They're, the reason they buy, the ones I've talked to,

they'll say it's because the compliance guy told us to. Or because the regulator came by and said, you've got one year to fix this. You have to have this thing tracked. Otherwise, they would never do it because they don't really care that much. you know, about being perfect about that. So, you're on it already. Great.

Yeah, that's where I would go. And so maybe there's some angles around that, like, I don't know what this type of regulator is, but like, you know, did you get called? Did this guy give you a call or did you lose, did you get written up about this thing? That might be an actual thing to run. Like, if you got written up about this, we can get you compliant in 30 days or you don't bet or something like that. or something where you also at least minimize the risk of taking action on getting on the phone with a total stranger, something where it's like we are so confident that this works that if it doesn't work, I don't want your money. Right, right.

This is what we do. That's what I do in the marketing space as well. Like if we biff it, if we whiff for a client, we give them all the money back. Okay. Well, that's good. I like a, most people like that. I mean, most people who are talking about earlier, most people, Like, I want to do something.

I think it makes sense, but I just don't want to make a mistake. So how could we take the mistake away? How can we make it an easy bet? Yes. Is it the same thing you're talking about? Same thing I'm talking about. And then when you look at the different ways that customers come in to a company, those referrals, networks, events, those are usually the starting points, conferences, golf, all that stuff.

But then a lot of people focus. on like search marketing, which is fine, in your website, all those things. But the people that come in through those funnels, through search marketing or through your website, they're this interesting, tiny subset of the world's most motivated prospects. Like, not everyone is like that. Not everyone is saying like, gosh, it better compare you versus XYZ corp and PDQ at this feature. I had an uncle like that. I'm thinking of him right now. He would do that. But not everyone does that. And so the interesting thing is you don't have to solve all those problems when you're running a specific marketing campaign. You can just ignore all that other stuff, ignore the competitors, ignore your own brand,

ignore the name of your product, and just say, do you have this giant pain? Do you want this outcome? People will book a call for that with like B2B businesses will get on the phone for those kinds of ads with no brand, no context. Yeah, just like get compliant or we'll get you compliant or we'll do a compliance audit or something. But it's funny, I called a couple of customers right after we bought the company and asked them why they did it. And, of course, I've been told people do it because they want to get organized and it's good for the workers.

And, yeah, no. Well, they, the regulators made us doing it. Well, that's a good point. Now, let me ask you this. I know kind of how you do it, but our viewers don't. Once you figure all that out for a client, you know, then what? What do you do with, how? much money do you need and what do you do with it to get them the money back?

Yes. Okay. This is a good question. There's a few things that we do in order. And I think I forget who gave me this advice. Someone told me in business like you better solve their whole problem and I'm starting to learn what that means, which is like if you get a, if you take a company, you help them get new leads and you don't and you stop there, they almost always fail because you need a different sales motion for colder, colder audiences. So typically what we do after we set up these systems, optimize and improve them, is, okay, now we're going to work on your discovery call process for colder audiences. And now we're going to work on sales process for colder audiences.

And then once all that works, the next thing we work on, and we do this, like, you know, once we have enough trust from the owners, we work on the pricing and the cash. Because a lot of these things, you're looking at the payback period. And if your payback period is over 30 days, if you want to scale your growth, you're going underwater, you're losing money. And you're going to hit a point where you can't do it anymore. And so the trick, the trick, I don't know if it's a trick, but you would really love it if each customer bought you a new customer right away.

And that's what we try to do. We try to organize the offer itself to have the right unit economics that once that person buys that easy fronting offer, they've paid for themselves. plus one customer. And now we don't need to go get funding anymore. We can just scale. I have some customers. We're at that stage,

and I'm like really working on the owners like, hey, we could like, let's just consider charging them on day one instead of day 60. Like I'm pretty sure we could grow faster if we had to money. Yeah. Interesting. So that, so in a perfect world, we're spending, we'll say $1,000 a month on,

whatever ads and approach you tell us to, and that's bringing in $2,000 a month in sales or cash receipts. And so now we kind of have the funding for month two and beyond as that repeats itself. Yeah, just like that, but just multiply everything by five. So usually for B2B, you're starting at least 5K a month to get enough meetings that you could expect one sale a month at least. So I'm just assuming, like, a lot of these funnels, depending on how rare of a customer are going after. The cost of a customer is almost always somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000,

unless you're going to really hard-to-reach people that are, it's fancier, for lack of a better word. So that means it also fixes your pricing. You sell something for 10 or 15 at the entry level. They're easy to say yes at that business level, and then we just bought two customers. Yeah, okay. Or they cover delivery and buy one more customer. And then all the real money for the business, the major profit comes on upsell one. And then that's the other thing that we get help a lot of people with. People will buy upsells at the point of maximum deprivation.

I stole this line, but I love it. It's so true. So like if you knock it out of the park and get someone the result they're looking for, and then the next day, ask them for the upsell, that's the worst time. They don't have the problem anymore. That's a good point. The key is to get their trust before you've completed solving the entirety of the problem and get them into up-self. Okay.

Okay. So how would that look? If we're talking back about the, let's say, the sequence of compliance people. Yeah. And we sold them a $10,000 project to get them compliant. And then after that, it's going to be a subscription. That's kind of how I would see that working. Yeah.

But we're not quite finished the project. And is that when you say you would go in there and try to talk about phase two? I don't know what other, like I'm not an expert in compliance solutions. I don't know what other things you might sell. But, you know, if you have an audit and then the software is sort of the continuity piece, maybe there is another project to get something applied. I don't know what else they need. But it's, it's.

It's sort of like, you know this. I'm sure you know this already, but business is like problem solution, problem solution, over and over forever. Right. So whatever you solve must have created a new problem. Now we're compliant. Oh, crap. There's a new problem now.

So what happens then? Yeah. Well, that's a good point. That's a good point. That's a good point. Do you want to have that discussion before everything's done and everything's rosy because they don't have the problem? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. A lot of people, it's actually funny, a lot of people hire me, a lot of my, our agency clients come through like fractional work. So someone will hire me to like oversee all their, they're like, oh, I have four teams doing, you know, I have an outbound team, I have a search team, a meta team, a LinkedIn's ads team. And I don't know what they're doing.

Can you please sort it out? So I come in a lot of companies like this. And very often we come up with a more. involved engagement within like the first two weeks. Because at that point, they're like, oh, this person is serious. I believe what they're saying. I would like them to help me with all these problems I now better understand. We haven't solved anything yet, you know.

And that's why it's the easiest time to do an upsell. Right. Okay. I got it. And when you take on a client, I mean, I love the idea of minimal risk up front and all of a sudden it's paying for itself. in my case, or most people's cases, it would lead to a long-term subscription. So it's wonderful. You're kind of like getting paid for creating these long-term annuities.

How often does it work, you know, where you really start to pay for itself because it can't work all the time. But what's the percentage of win on that? Yeah. Yes. Well, that's part of my game, too. I figured this out a while ago that. It's just better to have the best customers possible.

so we do turn people away. And I like this idea about sharing the risk. I'm not going to take crazy bets. I just don't have time for that. So if it's really odd or unproven market or there's a lot of risk or it's a startup, usually it's not a good fit for these kind of super shared risk deals because, you know, who knows?

I don't want to be the person. I'm not there. That's the entrepreneur's risk, not mine. But so, yeah, we have a really, high success rate with the specific conditions. So, you know, there's like my, I have this perfect fit customer conditions that I'm always looking for. And it's something like, you know, we want to have a reasonable number of people that can buy mid-market two enterprise, not enterprise only. That gives you so many more chances to win, especially with pay because

just more people. So that lowers the risk. And then the other thing is we want them to have a good healthy one-year average contract value. So at least 30K would be nice for the typical contract at the minimum. And these are all just conditions that make it easy to win, right? And then we want to have at least 10,000 target customers that exist in the world, but the more the better. So if there's 50 or 100,000, it's starting to become way easier. And so those are the areas that we look for.

and then the rest of it is like, you know, really diving into, okay, do I see a way we could, we could do this? Like, do I see a kind of pattern matching to, okay, it's very similar to another campaign or another company, just a little different? Yeah. And so that cuts the risk. Okay. So, well, if someone passed muster, like if it was all of those things and they had a

first year contract at let's say, well, let's say 30,000, minimum 30,000. which would mean at $5,000 a month, that'd be $60,000, they have to sell two to not lose money. Is that the idea? Yeah. Yeah. And that's what we, I mean, that's also why I have to jump in with sales too and make sure the sales is on point because otherwise, you know, no one's happy.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think the other thing is sort of an attitude thing, which is, and you learn this from, how do I put this? There's also like an attitude that I'm looking for from a founder. It was like an ideal and like okay and then like not acceptable in terms of a certain kind of mindset. And out there in the world there's people who are like, everything doesn't work for me, prove it. And those people, they are more work to get them to win.

If you do get them to win, they are great case studies. They're very vocal about it. That's amazing. But it's harder to make them, to get them success because of that attitude. The ideal is on the other extreme. There's people out there who say, you know what? There's no reason why this should be impossible. You know, like, I'm going to do this and I'd love your help.

Those people, they're going to win anyway. So I'm just helping them get there faster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's similar. in terms of ROI to when people ask me to help them improve their sales teams, is, you know, I say, you know, this is what's going to cost you for a year. And, you know, you've got to be making the bet that we're going to improve the team by a lot more than that. And if we don't, then, you know, it didn't work out.

And, but I can't, I mean, the only time it doesn't work out in my case is when there's the, I would call it the not good fit founder or owner. where they're not supporting what you're doing with the team. And so anyway, sometimes it doesn't work out because of that reason there's nothing you can do. But like you said, you can do something on the front end and not take them on as a client, which is pretty smart. And then in terms of ads, in terms of ads, are you primarily like picking, is it Facebook, Google? what do you what do you typically use yeah so for i mean when i'm coming in like as fractional

cRO we just look with whatever they're doing so we've done like everything under the sun but my my favorite for high-intent high-end b-to-be business uh book a call like get them on the phone for your sales team those kinds of of ads i like meta because if you know after like hundreds of thousands of ad spend, we find you can get the same people or most of the same people are there. It's like 8 billion people or I don't know what on meta. So there's

a good chunk of your audiences there. Maybe not all of them, but enough you're never going to saturate it unless you're a huge company. And I'm competing against people trying to sell you a watcher shoes when I'm going for business deals. Whereas LinkedIn, it's way harder.

So it's more expensive on LinkedIn. You can do all the same tactics. on LinkedIn. They just cost more. So that's why we like meta. Okay. Well, that's cool. That's cool.

They continue to build and I still use it all the time. It's a good way to stay in touch with people and I'm trying to think. And Instagram. Instagram.

Yeah, Instagram. Yeah. That's good. Okay. And so you're to be a fractional CRO, it's fractional chief revenue officer, what size team slash sales team are you looking for minimum to maximum? I'm trying to do that as little as possible.

Okay. So it's sort of like last resort. I try to do that as little as possible because of all the ways that the business generates revenue, that's probably the least profitable. It's the most unscalable, complicated thing. Like, okay, I'm going to dive in. I'll meet every vendor, every sales team, every sales manager. So I don't really want to do that, but some people, I want to work with them, and that's what they need.

So in some cases, we make it happen. So generally speaking, I took a crazy Ive in there. You mentioned it once or twice. I thought maybe you were doing that because I thought your primary business was just this helping people. It's just the agency. Scaling, okay. That's right, yeah. It's just a little thing that gives me more perspective into some of these companies

when I go in and dive through the whole org and see what's going on. And then in terms of, like if you say, okay, everything, they got $20,000, TAM, all these different things, how many sales reps would be a minimum you would need to process and sell these things? Yeah, okay, this is great, great question. So the way you do, it's all tied to cash flow. And if you solve that cash flow problem in the first place, like how many can you book? But the way it works is for almost across all industries, the cost for running ads to book a B2B high-end sales call is somewhere between $250 and $500.

Okay. So let's just take bad numbers to make the math easier. So let's say it's $500 and half the people don't show up. So that means it's like, okay, you want to do eight hours. If you want to fill eight hours of a guy's calendar or gal's calendar, that's $8,000. Yeah. So you just, there you go. And that's why you want the cash flow solved right there.

Because if that all pays back right away, there's no limit. But if you have a two-month payback, then you're like, okay, how do I balance capacity? So depending on what the size of the spend was, that's going to lead to a certain number of leads. So it could be one sales rep, one good sales rep, two good sales rep, it doesn't have to be a tonne. That's right. Okay. Okay. Is there anything about marketing today that people believe that's not true?

Any wives' tale? Sure. So many things. So many things. You know, I think. One of those strange things about business is there's all these ways to succeed and all these things that are true at some other time. And they're not true for you at your business stage right now. And so they're really bad.

They're great, but like, you should never do them. And there's so much like that. Like a lot of what really successful, well-known mega big companies do is a terrible idea if you're below $100 million. You know? Right. For example, a lot of people talk about branding. It's a popular idea. It plays into people's ego.

They like, like, yeah, personal brand. And we know, I know how much it costs to get someone famous. It costs about $50,000 in advertising. So if you spent, or sorry, $50 million. If you spent about $50 million, you can make sure most people will at least have seen you and know about you. Right. You have to have such a huge engine where you know that's going to be worth the money.

You know, and so it's just not like branding is great, but it's not for most. companies, it's not, your brand is not the thing that you should be doing. Yeah. You can directly just go after pain. Pain's in the market without a brand and people want to talk about solving those. It doesn't depend on the brand. Right. Yeah, I tell people all the time that the whole game is, like you said, finding people that are in our market space, having the conversation, finding out, do they really have a problem? And then really working to get that problem out of them. Because they won't just come out and tell you, right? You've got to really work and you're really good at that.

And then once you figure that out, once you get them, they'll buy. They'll close themselves because they want the solution that you have found. And you don't have to be, you know, Gary V to do that. Yeah. Although I'm sure he could do it. He could do it. That's a good one. A couple times.

Yeah. What else? I think maybe, yeah, there's the brain. ending thing. I had one out of the top, but it's just evaporated. Well, I'll give you one while you think is we, sir. We want, you know, we hired local people, you know, from great schools around here,

nice, nice young men and women, trained to be salespeople. They all did great. And some of them have gone to crush it. But there was one time where I decided we have to get better. We have to do better than that. We're going to go get some really good salespeople. And so Dell had had a layoff out in Austin. And so I was like, we're going to go get those people.

And so we went out in Austin and we recruited and we got them and we moved them to Greenville. You know, these Dell people. And they were some of the worst excuses for salespeople I've ever seen in my life. Because what did they do at Dell? You sit there and the phone rings and you find out what configuration of computer they want and you pit the button. I mean, they weren't selling. So people who have the big logo, you know, Oracle. I worked at Oracle.

Of course you sold a bunch. You were, hell, have to cut the World Boss Oracle. Yeah. So I think the big logo is another big, a big thing people misunderstand. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Oh, I had that idea and it evaporated a second time. Like, doesn't want to come out with this idea. That's all right.

That's all right. Well, one thing I want to, let's see, I want to close with, unless you think of this magical idea, is tell people, tell people that want to explore this with you, that people that might want to, for example, have rapid product growth, you know, those kind of people. How would they contact you and what would that look like? Yeah, I mean, easiest way, just DM me on Instagram. or DME on LinkedIn, or go to rapid productgrowth.com and apply to work with us. And what we are looking for is companies in that $2 to $10 million a year range already established

at that range. And we're looking for people that are trying to double. So if you're trying to double your business this year in that size, we can do it as long as, you know, you meet all those criteria we talked about earlier. And what I like to do, because I always like to leave people and things better than I found them. So what we try to do is, you know, we'll go through with you and look really in depth at the business and whether or not we work together or not. We'll show you here's what we would do so you could do it on your own if you want to or we can help you get there faster.

Okay. Good. Well, I like what you do. Your pleasure to talk with and, you know, talk of all these fun subjects. So if anyone's interested, I highly recommend they talk to you about this. And I think that's that, you know, I teach sales, but our, our big thing in sales is always, we need the leads, you know? Yeah. We need the good leads. Yes. And so I think you could help, right, you can help people get the good leads.

So anyway, thank you very much for being with us. And maybe we'll come on in a year and kind of do an update on what's going on in the ad world. Let's do it. Let's do it. Thanks, John. Okay. Pleasure. All right.

Thank you. All right. Bye-bye.