Noob School - Unlocking Sales Success: Expert Lead Generation Tips with David Pence

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Today on Noob School, we're joined once again by David Pence. In this episode, David shares valuable insights and strategies to help you increase lead generation. Whether you're new to the field or looking to refine your approach, David's advice will guide you through effective techniques to attract and convert leads, ultimately boosting your sales performance. Tune in for practical tips and actionable steps to enhance your B2B lead generation efforts. Get your sales in rhythm with The Sterling Method: https://SterlingSales.co I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends

NewB School. All right, welcome back to Noob School. I've got a repeat customer. Always like repeat customers, David. David Pence, one of Greenville's most prolific entrepreneurs. He's got, did I know of, he's got Acumen IT, which is probably the strongest MSP IT company in the upstate. He's got Trace blockchain, where he's been mining bitcoins for how many years now?

How many years now? I started mining Ethereum in 2016 myself and I started that business mining bitcoins in 2018. Yeah. So you've almost been in the Bitcoin, Ethereum mining business for eight years. That's a long time in kind of Bitcoin. Like dog years. That's a long time.

And then another one we want to talk about more today called Team Cadre, where he's figured out a way to really help. people have more conversations with potential buyers, I'll call it, call it that way. Instead of calling it a lead, it's really a conversation. So really today is going to be a rambling conversation with David about what both of us think about, how do we find the right people to talk to these days with all this going on, you know, between, you know, traditional advertising, you know, all the social media advertising, the paper clicks and all that. with Facebook and Insta and X and everything else.

Traditional SEO, just trying to get your website to pull up when people put it in search terms and even trade shows. So we're going to talk about all that. And we're going to eventually talk about what David has learned as a way that's working for some of his companies that he's starting to offer to other people to make these appointments. Would that make sense? For sure. Okay. So in your past, What has traditionally worked, let's say going back 10, 15 years, what's worked okay for you in advertising?

You know, it's so funny. It makes me laugh. I'm going to go back even more than that. 20? Accumann will be 25 years old this September 1st. And 25, 20 to 25 years ago, I'm an IT computer engineer. I didn't know anything, right? So we're trying to anything.

And we would, there's some funny ones. We did the website. We used to do websites a long time ago, you know, back when it was basic. Yeah. And we did the website for an airplane company that pulled the banners behind it and flew around Death Valley. Yeah. And they said, well, would you do it in trade? We said, sure.

And so literally it would say, Acumen IT, because it would be like, Mary, will you marry me or whatever it is at the football game? This is before 9-11. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because now they don't do it at all. Right. But isn't that an interesting advertisement? It would be like Acumen IT is the best, you know, IT supplier or whatever. And that's all you could fit on that thing.

Yeah, yeah. And they'd pull it around. So we did that. We've done co-sponsorships where we wired Death Valley, Clemson Stadium. Okay. For Wi-Fi. Okay. Acumen IT did when I say we.

That company did. And we did it in partial trade with the athletic department. So we got the manufacturer to donate some of the Wi-Fi access points in the ceiling. And they made us and our manufacturer, you know, like gold partners or whatever, we had a box for a couple years. And on the big, on the big new LED screen, it would say acumen IT and stuff like that, right? So it was cool. Yeah. But it didn't get us a lot of business.

The airplane thing was eclectic, but it didn't get us a lot of business. So I've done almost everything that you can do wrong in advertising. But you don't know what you don't know, right? No, no. So I guess your question was what worked. I mean, always one of the things that Acumen did early on is I realized who is our customer. And this gets down to this principle of this fish bowl or this fish in the barrel or target market. Right.

And I read a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine and it talked about you have to narrow down the entire ocean of fish. down to your personal fish bowl for your business and figure it out. So that really hit me. So I'm like, okay, well, we got through the grace of God and referrals and everything else, 10 customers now,

how do I get to 100 customers? Recurring managed IT customers. And back then, we had to profile the people. Well, they're this size of business. They have this many employees. They're headquartered here, whatever it is.

And then we'd figure out, well, where do they go? What do they do? Where are more? of them. So we joined the various Greenville chambers and chambers and stuff like that. But we realized people do stuff. Like when they start making more money, they will maybe give back to the community. Maybe they'll donate something. So we went to every event coordinator in basically the upstate that was of any size and offered to do their IT for free. So if you name a sports team in the

upstate, we probably do their IT. If you name an event space that holds concerts or orchestra events or whatever it is, we probably do their IT. The Greenville Orchestra, we do, you know, we do their IT. So what happened was, is we did it either Grottis or Pro Bono or Partial Trade or whatever, and then they would put ads in their booklets and stuff, and it became so pervasive that if you were of somebody of means and you went to a rock kind of, a basketball game, a baseball game, whatever, there's an acumen sign somewhere. And it hit them so many times that when we would come in and see them, we could say, well, have you seen the copy of the big green monster in the baseball, you know?

And people are like, sure, we're like, what's to the right of that? They're like, oh, that's that big acumen. Oh, that's you. And we're like, that's us. And then all of a sudden, instant trust, instant credibility. We also wrapped cars 15 or 20. Oh, really? Yeah.

To wrap your own vehicles? We didn't do them ourselves, but we had them wrapped. Okay. So we bought like eight acumen company cars, and this is a long time ago before that was popular. Right. When we wrapped those cars and we had all those green monster signs and stuff like that, it was pretty much business owners were like, I've heard of you. They're like, we'd handle that business card and they're like, I've seen this. And we're like, what kind of sport do you like?

What kind of music do you like? Yeah. And they name something. Yep, we do their IT. What else? Yep, we do their IT. We do their IT. And it seemed like we did everybody's IT in town because of high-profile names.

Yeah, yeah. So that was really good. Yeah. That was what was successful for Accumen 20 years ago. Again, for entrepreneurs or want to be entrepreneurs out there, you know, it'd be easy to sit around and go, well, we'd be glad to do the advertising if we had the money. But you said, no, no, we'll figure out a way to do it. Right. You know, we'll do some trading.

We'll do some trading, horse trading. Yeah. If I was to go open up Charleston right now for Acumen, which I'm not. But if I was, I would look at venues where business owners take their customers. They're sitting in the stands watching a game or something like that. And what's that sign over there? Hockey, if you go look at the hockey, go look. Who's under the ice?

This guy gets pushed against the wall. Look behind the wall. There's pictures. We'll go to nonprofit organizations where they'll have a bunch of giveaways. And they'll have a picture of the hockey team and there'll be a hockey player getting ready to slam another guy. And their acumen signed behind it. Isn't that cool? That's cool.

So it doesn't surprise me that you've been clever with your advertising spin and your strategy in the past. Everything kind of changed over the last, I don't know, 10 years with social media. And it seems like everyone's going to pay-per-click. I've got to tell you, I haven't had much success with it. I mean, I have traditionally been selling business-to-business software. and, you know, I've hired a LinkedIn agency, like the smart young people out in Colorado that know what they're doing, they're going to place my ads for me and stuff. Didn't work.

Yeah. You know, I've tried it with Facebook, didn't work. Yeah, Google didn't work. Now, did I do it wrong? Maybe. Should I give it in a better time? Maybe. I don't know.

But, I mean, every month, the money's going out the door and there's no leads coming in. Yeah, I believe that most of social media is two things. One of us, it's B to C versus B to B. Yeah. I buy stuff from the ads. Right. Yeah. And then the other thing is, is that an ad that's a click or whatever is really like an impression on the highway.

If you're going down the highway at 70 miles an hour and it says got milk, you're like, okay. And if you see that, and if it says got milk 11,000 times, eventually maybe you're going to buy some more milk or whatever. But whatever the ads are is that it just takes so many impressions. to get you to do something. That it's almost unaffordable. Yeah. So I think if you think about Coca-Cola or something like that, they're constantly just branding.

It's brand trust, brand awareness. So when you place an ad in social media, you're not getting leads. You're getting brand trust and brand awareness. And if you have a $100 billion budget, well, you're going to get a lot of it. If you have a $10,000 budget, it's practically not there.

So leads don't come from that. Especially B2B. For B2B is not working for me. If there's somebody out there who knows how to do it, by all means call me or email me or whatever. And I'd love to hear from you because I would like to have our team have more conversations with our target market.

I mean, everyone wants that, right? So I have some gray things that your business could do. Okay, it's hero. I used to own Acumen. I bought a kind of. company in Spartanburg that is a Microsoft Dynamics GP practice. Okay. Dynamics Great Plains practice.

And we ran it for 10 or 15 years and then I sold it to a guy who really wanted to buy it from me. He played golf with me four years in a row and said, please sell me this. I'm like, okay, fine. On the last time I'll let you, it's yours. But during the time that I ran that business, we used social media and click through advertising. I really got into click through advertising for that. business because that business was so poignant it was you're going to upgrade or

change your ERP accounting system right it was such a fishbowl that was so narrow and your warehousing software WMS is very narrow right so that's a cool thing yeah so here's a couple of maybe gray area things that I did that worked okay sometimes you know I mean got my pen out yeah so here's some stuff we would do as you translate when I say Microsoft Dynamics GP practice your your WMS practice right yeah so I found out who the largest Microsoft dynamics well first of all Microsoft came to us and said y'all don't sell enough software your ratio of software to bill blowers is not good and we don't get anything on your bill blowers so we're angry yeah we want you to sell more software so the

guys that they loved, we called them back in the day, disc or CD chunkers. Like they would just chunk CDs out the window and drive to the next building and chunk them out the window. And there was no install. There was no professional install or the CFO or whoever the controller would just get the, we called it Glapper. They would get the GL, the AP, and the AR running. But they bought the manufacturing modules, the warehouse modules, and they never installed it. never used it. Yeah. Because it was too hard and who was supposed to show how to do it.

Well, the CD chunkers were off selling something else. But Microsoft, they were always at the Microsoft platinum parties and stuff because they just sold software. But what did the client get? They wasted $20,000 or $30,000. They could have used QuickBooks. Yeah. So our angle became, wow, we're good at Bill Bowers.

We're good at going in and completing a complete install for a client, a small to medium manufacturer, warehouse company. and they love us for it. So one of the things Microsoft liked about us is we would take over failed installs and finish them, and then the number of seats would grow. And we didn't get front sales, but we got renewals for Microsoft. So there were four seats, now they're 30 seats. We don't know what you're doing, but good job.

You're one of the best in the country. Yeah. Oh, we're going into people. We're listening to them, right? But how did we go into them? Like, how did we get invited in to have that discussion? So what we would do is we would actually go find the largest partners that were all double diamond club, whatever the name of that partner was.

Let's just call them acme.com, okay? And we would do click-through advertising against their domain name. So if you typed in acme.com, it would come up on the SEO because you typed it into the Google address bar, right? Let's just say you typed in Acme, you know, the reseller of DynamicsGP. Most people go into the search bar and type in something, right? Yeah. And it shows a list of 10 people. Yeah.

Well, we would do click through advertising because you know the first three are actually ads now. Yeah. Yeah. And so they type in Acme and it would be Acumen IT would come up first. Yeah. Because we would put them in as a plus, a key phrase. Yeah. And our phrase would say something like, failed installation of Great Plains.

Would you like to get it done correctly? and stuff like that. There were so many failed installations that we became the failed installation superstars. We found our niche. And so if you had like failed, you know, think about Dynamics AX and stuff, I think SAP has a 65% rip and replace rate, by the way.

65%. So if you can go into failed SAP implementation, we'd love to help you with the best WMS in the world, blah, blah, blah, right? We plug right into SAP or something like that. like that. They may keep the Glapper version of SAP because their accountants have gotten used to it, even if it's SAP Business One or whatever. I don't know what you interface with, but the point is they're not going to use the other modules because they were just thrown some software and left

a rot. Okay. So you went with a keyword that they would type in if they had a failed installation. We went with the keyword of our competitors. Okay. Because people are typing in their competitors to get support. Okay. You know. But yours would pop up and it would say, if you have a failed installation, click here. You know, try us.

Okay. And then people would switch from them as the primary var to us. Yeah. Because they're like, I've called these people for four days and nobody calls me back. That's interesting. I like that. I think that leads us to what you've recently discovered with Team Cadres. So I'll throw out there just a quick summary.

because I think most people maybe who've heard our first podcast if they heard it. I don't even know how it started, but I mean, you have made arrangements with people mostly in Latin America to be either marketing people or to be accountants or to be assistants or I don't know what else you have. Dennis, I don't know what you got going on down there. No Dennis, yeah. But you've made arrangements with people who have great. educations and are willing to work in the same time zone, usually for significantly less money. I've got one, as I told you, I have one of my favorite people I've ever worked with in Ecuador.

Ecuador, yeah. And I work with him every day, and he does a great job. And over time, his pay has kept increasing him. He's making much better money now because he's just done such a good job. He's just getting paid for what he deserves. But anyway, you found a way not only to give people a less expensive way to do it, but very happy employees and also available. You have more available than we have in the U.S.

People say you can't find people in the U.S. So anyway, that's led you to what you've learned for your companies, which is you can have them do a series of things with LinkedIn and otherwise to create conversations for you. and your people to have in your target market. Right. And that's the best thing you're doing in marketing. That's the best thing we're doing.

Okay. So how did I do on the explanation? Great. Is it okay? Wonderful. All right. Well, please tell us, first of all, how did you come up with the idea to do this Team Contra in the first place?

Oh, gosh. So Team Cadre itself. So a couple other IT companies that we are partnered with in a peer group, they started, and one of them was in California and one of them was in Florida. And so those two states happen to be ones that are more connected to the Latin world, I think I would say, right? Like if you go to Miami, wow, it's Latin. Right. Spanish.

If you go to Southern California, it's Spanish. And so I had a couple of business owners that were like, yeah, we have 20 employees out of XYZ Latin American country. I was like, really? So anyway, I flew down there and did the same thing. So Acumen now has like eight people of its staff that are Latin American. And Acumen finds its people through my other company, Team Cadre. So Team Cadre is a talent sourcing company that specializes in only Latin America. And frankly, we do do IT placements because that's what I knew and where I started.

But the exciting thing for us right now is we've retooled our website and our marketing and our lead generation program to go after one of the, most, an industry that has one of the biggest shortages in the United States, and that's the accounting industry. Okay. So if you look at Team Cadre's website, it's like accounting, accounting, accounting, accounting. It doesn't talk about dentist or IT people. Yeah. Right. Much.

They may have a word on there, but not much. Yeah. And then we lead you in it, and I'll say how we do that in a second. But to answer your question, what does Team Cadre do? We are in Panama, Colombia, Argentina, and Uruguay, right? now and I have talent managers in those that work for me full time that are in those countries and they're constantly finding English speakers. Yeah.

Which is like, that's the fishing expedition for us. They're probably speaking English, yeah. There's probably some scenarios that don't have to be, but our target market is I want somebody just like Joe or Mary in my office. I want somebody else. Right. And an additional one, not replacing them. They're growing, right?

And so there's 660 million people in Latin America. and there's probably 2 to 4% of them qualify. This is a side, but were able to meet my friend Carlos when you were down there in Argentina? We texted a few times, but we did not meet physically. I think there was some scheduling. Let me next time. Yeah. His wife, I recall, his wife runs a large IT outsourcing group out of Argentina.

So she might be fun to talk to us. Yeah, I would love to speak with her and him. It would be great. That's cool. So you heard about this through a networking group of yours, a mastermind group or something. That's right. A mastermind group, there was two companies that were finding IT people in Latin America. Yeah.

And so that by itself is worth mentioning with the viewers is, you know, hanging out with other like-minded people, people that are trying to build businesses make a difference in the world. you're involved in multiple groups like that. I'm in one group with you. Yeah. And that is where a lot of your good ideas will come from because I have a lot of good ideas. David has a lot of good ideas. So just double that, right?

If we share everything with each other and that's double. Yeah. And if there's 10 of us in the room, that's times 10. Yeah. It's funny that you say that because when we started this session today, what we're doing right now, I was in here thinking, boy, if business owners would get together. and focus on sales or lead generation or marketing specifically. Yeah.

Because a lot of us talk about our business, you know, like how we can, you know, whatever. Yeah. Make more tidly wings in the factory. But that's manufacturing or operations. What about sales and lead generation and marketing? It's just like a hospital. You know, you say you got Doc Holiday. I just do everything in sales and marketing.

Or you have a full-on hospital that says, we specialize. And you really need, if you want your sales to crush it, you need to have specialists. You can't just have your one salesperson or your three salesperson and their Doc Holiday with the black bag with the tourniquet and the saw in a bottle of aspirin. Well, when you describe, because again, the premise here is all of us are looking for ways to have more conversations with our target market where we can have a voluntary conversation where we're going to explore how their business is going, what's lacking. is there something they need that we might be able to help with? I mean, that's what sales is. Right. And again, I'll try to describe how you do it,

and then you tell me how I do. But David will give, I think for one of your businesses, you've got two or three full-time people that are just going through the list of your targets, the people that you want to have conversations with about this market, and they're sending them LinkedIn, messages and emails and maybe even text saying voice mails. Voice mails.

From me. Yeah, from you. Like, I know you because I got your name from John Sterling. I like to talk to you about whether or not Codra can help you or whatever. Right. Something like that, short and simple, coming from you. That's right. And they cover them up on every medium nicely.

And they're just, you only give them, what, two slots a day and they're covering you up. You give them two slots a day to fill? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You're just completely booked. I have had to limit it to do. I used to let it just no governor whatsoever. And I was doing, locally I would do like five coffees a day.

Yeah. Monday through Friday. I said, okay, I can't do Monday and Friday. You can't even do the follow-up. Yeah, I can't do Monday and Friday. I need office time to do follow-up email. I said, let's just do Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And then, you know, that's still a lot.

And I told them, I said, my hands are shaking at the end of the day doing five coffees a day. Five coffees a day. at a coffee shop with a business owner. So I can't do that. So, and you also have to know that the quality when you're totally unzipped was just whatever. Just get me people because I want their confidence built. Yeah. So then we narrowed it down and we said, okay, this higher level of person, this level of thinker.

And, you know, let's try to do a coffee or a video call one or two a day, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So basically I have six slots a week that I let them fill me up. And I think that's good. You know, I have also tried what we'll call an appointment setting service where you pay someone something a month and they're like, okay, we'll try to set you up these appointments and never worked. The problem, I have to. Yeah. You try to. The problem is, is that they're dealing with 100 clients.

Yeah. They're trying to use their generic success model that worked for selling real estate, selling IT. Yeah. And there's nuances that don't work. So for the, and I've talked to people, for the money that people are spending, there are people that spend five, ten thousand dollars a month doing these appointment setting services, not one thousand a month. I mean, one thousand, I don't even know what happens. I've never seen a $1,000 appointment settings. But if you're spending five or ten grand a month and you're getting one appointment with, you know, something.

It's because they're using their generic model and whatever was successful for that. So instead of doing that, what we decided to do is let's take that same five or ten. thousand dollars and let's apply it to a couple of full-time staff and you know you can get lead generators for let's speak english yeah through team godre for a couple thousand dollars a month 2,500 bucks a month so you have two of them for five grand and what I would say is you train them I'd do things in pairs if I hire American outside sales reps I bring in two and train them both one usually leaves or doesn't make it but I've wasted all this time not totally wasted because I got a good one right right right if you just do one it doesn't work out well six months go going by so you try to do

that so the same thing you know hire people in pairs and train them and also you can kind of in a nice way pit them together pin them against each other a little bit yeah and it's not just against like negative it's also positive like if one of them gets an appointment and they said this and they did that then the other one can try it and see if they're successful so you get to you know try a lot of trial error and you need their full attention versus that service that's given you four hours a week or whatever it is for $10,000 a month you need to get their full attention. So when we do this, we actually have scrum meetings. I have a scrum meeting with my lead gen team every morning for 15 minutes. And what happened yesterday? And they're like, oh, this and this and this and this. And

what are you doing today? This and this. So they know I'm on it because what gets measured gets done. Right. If I don't see them and say, just send me an email, I'm going to be on the beach drinking mitis. I want to see what you did at the end of each month. How many days a week are they actually working? And how encouraged are they, right? And what little dials were you able to change?

That little 15 minutes a day allows you to go, well, let's try doing it, you know, whatever. So we get better every single day. So I would say if someone's considering it, it would be something like, I've got an assistant, that I've had for a long time and she's just remarkable. And I only have her part-time because she has other things she does their life. But if I asked her to get me an appointment with somebody or for five people or whatever, it would just be done. I wouldn't have to go back and check.

She would just get them made over the next couple of weeks. And I think that's kind of what you're selling. It's like you have your trained personal assistant that you know. That's right. Over time, you know them. You've been working with it for a while. and here's the list of people I want to meet with, and then they just put it on your calendar.

Right, and my lead generators, their title on their signature, it doesn't say Acumen IT lead generator or Team Chydra lead generator, because nobody likes that, right? It says David Pence's assistant, and they're like, oh, so now the business owner's like, oh, this, you know,

Louisa lady or Melissa lady is contacting me, and it's the assistant to the CEO of the business. I'm taking this appointment. Yes. So, you know, it depends. on here, if you're selling 787s and you're trying to get in touch with the president of XYZ country, maybe a little harder, because that's a big sale. But if you're selling stuff to people that make less than $100 million a year in revenue, which is almost everybody,

that's like 98% of the population, you can get appointments with a $100 million business owner. Right. That way. Yeah. Because they're not that big. They're not that big of a thinker or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. One of the best emails I've ever gotten. Now, this is, This guy was the holding company of one of my customers. So I kind of knew who they were, but I'd never talked to anyone at the holding company. His assistant sent me an email. He said, Mr. Sterling, I'm so-and-so's personal assistant. He'd like to talk to you any time in the next week or two.

Do you have any time available? Right. Well, yeah. It was just very clean and easy. We do that all the time. Yeah. All the time. in your case you'd say maybe say I want to meet other business leaders in the community like you

maybe there's a way we can help each other right that's all you got to say I have done we've done many of those too who can say no to that many people say no but the point is is that a percentage say yes I wouldn't say no yeah but let's say two percent say yes that's a great return yeah that's a great return to say I'm the admin assistant or the assistant for so and so yeah well I had a question earlier today about this subject and the question was, you know, how do we get through to people these days? Because, you know, we send the emails, the multiple emails, the follow-up emails. Here's an email that just, I want to bump this up in your email, that email, you know. And I said, well, you don't, first of all, don't send those emails.

I mean, don't send anything generic to anybody. No generic LinkedIn, no generic email, no generic, nothing generic. Get your market, the people you actually want to talk to, and get personal with them. Right. You have to get personal. and cover up all the bases, cover up, you know, email, LinkedIn, phone call, cell phone, text, Facebook, DM, whatever the hell you want to do, but be personal. I'm calling you because David Pence told me if I didn't know it's going to be in big trouble.

So we do too. We do the admin assistant calls them or emails them and said, I'm emailing you based on David Pence, the CEO of XYZ. He would really like to meet with you because you just want to get together because he's watching your LinkedIn and you guys are incredible. and you just invented this thing and congratulations or whatever, right, personal, right? Or they will impersonate me

and it's actually my email, a slight variation of my email. Like I'll have David.pins at TeamCadre. Well, they'll take David Pence at TeamCadre at No Dot. And it's a completely different email. Yeah. But they will send an email and say, hey, and they are me.

Saw what you did on LinkedIn. Congratulations. We'd love to get together and have a virtual coffee or something and chat about it. And they're in college. Colorado and I'm here in South Carolina, and boom, 2% are like, yeah. And then they get on the Zoom call with me or whatever.

We just start chatting it up. It doesn't matter that it's David Pence, no dot. It's over, right? And they're like, wow, you really reached out to me and did. I'm like, yeah. And I mean, in a way, I did. I paid people to reach out to you. So, but it is funny because sometimes we'll get into conversations like with these business owners.

And what's one of the number one things the business owners say? I got to find a way to grow my sales. And I'll say, you know, you know? And I'll be, you remember when we had that first video call two years ago? Yeah. You remember when I was emailing you and asked you to meet with me in the city? Yeah, I said, yeah, I said, that wasn't me. And they're like, really, you're kidding me.

You don't say the day, the first five minutes of the first call. But it's very valuable to tell them, I got people setting appointments for me. It's like Oprah buying houses or Kim Kardashian telling you her feelings. That's not Kim Kardashian. Yeah. Right? Yeah. On Twitter.

Yeah. So most of the people you're talking to on Twitter or LinkedIn or YouTube or whatever that's responding to your comments is not the people on those videos. Right. Right. Not the popular people. Yeah. And so it's a way in the military we talk about if you can find a great weapon and it's a force multiplier, it makes you much more combat effective. Great.

Well, having lead generation staff that can either be your admin assistant or be your. Kim Kardashian poster and post for you is a force multiplier for a CEO. Yeah. Well, yeah, and I think also the attitude of the salespeople, particularly if they have targeted their market, like you talked about earlier, the spear fishing versus the whole ocean. Right. If you've targeted the market, you need to feel like my job is to have the conversation with all of you.

Right. That's my job because I might be able to help you. Right. And that's why I'm going to be aggressive, politely aggressive, and, you need to be. getting through somehow. And I've got two quick stories on that. First is my good friend, Rebecca Heiss. So Rebecca, you know, she wanted to meet with me, and we didn't know each other. And she wanted me to look at some app she had written about, I can't remember what it was about, but it was interesting little app. But I was busy. I mean, I didn't know her. I was busy. I didn't want to

look at anybody's app. I didn't want to help raise money. I didn't want to do anything. I had my own list. And so I just delete, delete, delete. delete the email, delete the voicemail, didn't take the call. So she didn't give up. She kept trying. And then finally my brother calls me. My brother Dan, and he goes, hey. I'm like, hey, because, hey, well, you told this Rebecca girl?

I'm like, well, what for her? And he goes, well, she just keeps calling me. She wants me to get you to, I'm like, okay, all right, send her on over here. You know, so anyway, she came over and brought me some coffee. And sure enough, we ended up being friends. She's been on the podcast. She's great. But she thought that we should know each other because we're both entrepreneurs in Greenville, and sure know if she was right.

Isn't that cool? Yeah. And she was tenacious. She was tenacious. How many, you know, you've got your program here. Yeah. How many people, how many salespeople, I don't know what the number is, but I'm guessing it's 99%. Yeah.

How many salespeople are three strikes and it's out? I mean, almost all of them. It's like 99%. Yeah. I'm so interested in sales like you are that when I have somebody who's creative like that, And let's say they're not local. They can't bring me coffee. But they're in Connecticut or Utah or something, and they're hitting me, hitting me, hit me.

And it goes on for more than 30 days. That's impressive. Yeah. If it's not just an email, I'm like, how many coordinated email, LinkedIn, voicemails do I get these days? It's just lazy emails. Lazy. Lazy. My bot's talking to your bot. Lazy.

Salespeople are so, it's so lazy. But all of a sudden I see an email that's coming at me for three or four months. with LinkedIn invitations, with voicemails and mail box politely every so often, maybe a Federal Express, you know, certified letter comes in, you know, and I'm like, so on touch 18, that person calls me, I answer, and they're shocked. And I'm like, hey. And they're like, oh, my gosh, I'm so happy to talk to you, David. You know, you're the CEO of so-and-so, and we sell whatever we sell.

But you know what I want to talk about with them? you are fantastic at your job. I know you're probably happy where you are, but if you ever want to come down to South Carolina, we'd love to have somebody like you. And I even tell them, I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to buy your product or not, but I just want to let you know,

congratulations to you, you're amazing. And they're just blown away. I've had them cry on the phone and go, you know what? Just unbelievable. But some of them are so good that they're like, thanks. You're right, I am good. I'm the best in this building. You know, there's 34 of us.

I'm the number one. I sell more than the other 33 combined. Well, it is a great, I'm so glad we got into it today because it's a great subject. How do we have the conversations with the people in our sweet spot? And the first answer that we agree on is we have to take time to narrow that group down. Who are they really that we want to talk to? Not just anybody. And the second is how do we reach them?

And it's either going to be a lot of work on your own, or your assistant or someone like David's team cadre group that's going to surround people with personalized messaging trying to get a discovery meeting basically. And tell you one more? Sure. Think about buying a car. Let's say somebody was emailing you and voicemailing you and linking in with you and sending you FedEx signed documents to buy a car.

You could look at them and go, listen, man, I appreciate you. Great. You're tenacious. But I'm not buying a car. right now. Your mind is not opened to buying a car. So maybe they need to do a better job of people who need to buy a car, right, and get a better list. But, but, you know, my lease just came, comes to do three months from now. Yeah. Okay. That'd be pretty smart, right? So to your point about the fishbowl. But another thing about the fishbowl that we have found is, believe it or not,

these trade shows are, trade shows, yeah, forgot. are pretty interesting where if somebody goes to a trade show, a trade show is I'm going to a show. I expect to go in. I'm going to take some continuing ed classes, but they're going to tell me to walk through the area with the 200 vendors and thank the vendors. Let's all thank the vendors and give around, at least the good trade shows, right? Give them a round of applause because your fees would have been triple to come to this thing if it wasn't for them. Those are the really good shows, right, where they go thank the vendors and walk through. they put the dinner, you know, the snacks or whatever are in the trade show.

You want dinner tonight? It's on a chair. It's on a table in the trade show. Kind of walk down the hall. Yeah. So trade shows have some value. And the biggest value is that when people go there, their minds are opened for new products, new things, new stuff. Yeah.

And when you're in a buying mood, that's the best. So I'm not saying just go back to trade shows. What I'm saying is we've used our lead generators to amplify the success of our trade shows dramatically. And I've been in business for 25 years and we'd only started doing this like two or three or four years ago. Yeah. And it's made a big difference.

Yeah. So instead of just showing up and seeing who comes by the booth, you're looking at the list of attendees beforehand and you're making appointments. So our lead generators are hammering them. That's the wrong word. We're contacting them politely and, you know, hey, you're going to the show. going to be there. We're booth 155. And okay, so is that good? Okay, thanks. 155. I'm not remembering that. But what we'll do is when we get our fishbowl of who is at the trade show, we'll say,

listen, we want to come pick you up in a private van and take you out to dinner at Maggiano's or something like that for Team Cadre, which is exactly, we're doing this next week in Las Vegas. And Maggiano's, private van. I'm paying for all this stuff, right? But my little 10 by 10 booth is nothing against these other 199 competitors. But when I take the key people and take them to dinner, and I'm not even going, but my sales reps and my marketing people are going,

and the lead generators are kind of meat cleavering them up a little bit, loosening them up. Once you get them sitting there eating your food, drinking your alcohol, and you're having conversations just about, you know, getting to know them, you create an O-W-E, an O.

Creating an O is one of my favorite things to do. It's kind of like you owe me. I gave you free dinner. Not much. Right. But, you know, and they feel like, oh, well, take your call. I'll take your call next week. Yeah.

Thank you. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then one other thing that we're doing, and I'll stop, is we're doing that. And then we're doing, we rented a room in the Aria that is a sky view of the, the aria is right beside Belagio with all the water fountain stuff. And so we have, you know, most people's hotel room is a two, three hundred square foot hotel room. We rented the best one they have.

It's like 2,000 square foot hotel room. It doesn't have a tiger in the bathroom. We didn't get that option. But you know what I mean? It looks like that movie, right? And it's overlooking and beautiful. But we only rented it for one night so that we could have people come up to it. Yeah.

Beers and wines and stuff like that. And so when we're in the show, in our 10 by 10, when we have a good conversation with somebody that we didn't hit up earlier. Yeah. Because the good ones we hit up early came to dinner for it with us. Right. the ones that we're meeting at the show, we're like, oh, you want to hire some people for accounting or whatever?

You should come by and have free drinks in our place before you go off and have your gambling night or whatever. People love that, right? And so we try to do creative things to make that box amplify. But who's the key to making it happen? The lead generators, we even, they've gotten emails or contacts or voicemails from us, and they're coming up to see us because of that. and then we're inviting them to something else. So it's like a one, two, three punch.

The punches before they got on the plane, while they're there, come see us and have some social activities, and then guess what? Lead generation at Post happens too. Because I've gone to events where, wow, we went and we saw 200 people and I collected seven business cards, but the other than 193 people, they couldn't get followed up at all.

Just the seven business cards got followed up with. That used to happen all the time, all the time. Lead generation cures all that. Well, it does. It does, but I like what you're doing with the trade show. I think, you know, we soured on trade shows a while back, probably because we were just showing up and like an idiotous, just waiting for people to come by.

And then when they came by, our people would just give them a demo and maybe get a business card or scan them or something. And then there's so many by the time we got back, no one followed up with them. I mean, it's just all these wrong things. But the right thing is, again, And if there's 500 people that are supposed to come, who are the 40 you'd like to talk to, reach out, make the appointments, get them up in the penthouse suite.

Right. And then follow up with them, even if you didn't get their card, follow up with all of them. And it's hard for an outside salesperson or the person who went to the trade show and is now exhausted to do that. So be a hospital, not a one-man doctor. When you get back from that plane and you go rest and get back with your family, there's another set of crew that's crazy. going to call and contact every one of those people for you. And they're called lead generators to me. My lead gen are the activity people. But they're not salespeople. They're not front facing.

Yeah. Well, I do think you're your way with the cadre. It answers the objection of my reps aren't calling the leads and they're not. I mean, there's just a lot going on in the rep's life. And let's face it, most of them aren't doing it. So that solves the problem. Well, how many great outside sales reps that have personality and can shake hands and look you in the eye are also great at making 60 phone calls a day? Yeah. It's just a rare, you can find them. Yeah, there's a kind of rep that's very good at keeping the CRM organized. Right.

And there's the one who can go out there and make some money. Right. And they can't do anything organized. I'll take the one who makes the money. Take the one that makes the money and back them up with. That's what we do. That's good. All right.

Well, if people want to hear more about team contracts, You go to TeamCadre.com? Yep. Team tadre.com and then you'll have some people. We'll have David Pence himself following up with you. No, you know. Not me person. David dot Pence, man.

Anyway, thanks for being here again. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you, man. Take care. Awesome. All right. Yeah.