Ep 18 - The Ultimate Sales Manager With Bill Zipp

0:02 Welcome back to another episode of the MRM Podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brandon. Join us as we discuss business, life, and legacy. It's business time. How you doing, brother? Good, man. You've got a guest for us today. Yeah, I am excited about this guest today. So I first met this guest maybe 15 years ago-ish. I was buying some radio advertising for one of the businesses that I've owned. And I met Bill through that because one of his sales reps, when he was a sales manager... Helped me with my account. That was the first time I interacted with Bill. And then later, hired him as a coach in my state farm business. And he helped me with employee development, certain kinds of leadership training and stuff like that.

0:45 Well, fast forward 15 years later, Bill has grown a massive... international sales consulting business. I mean, big Fortune 500 companies work with Bill. This is Bill. He's not part of a big consulting firm. Bill has developed this portfolio of clients and just been very, very successful teaching companies. how to sell and how to effectively manage salespeople. Yeah. So as we were putting together our podcast guest list, I'm like, man, I think this is so appropriate for our industry right now. And we're going to dive deep into all the reasons why, but let me tell you a little bit about Bill. Bill Zip. He's got such a cool last name. I know. I love the last name.

1:25 How would you like to be born with the last name? Oh, yeah. Right? Me rocking. I actually intended to ask him, okay, is that your real name? Do you have parents with the last name Zip? Or is this like a brand you built, Bill? But anyway. Bill is the president of Leadership Link. He helps heads of sales achieve double-digit growth through a proven people-first approach. That's his tagline. Clients that Bill's worked with, I mean it. Run Scam. Have you heard of 3M? One of the largest industrial manufacturers and product developers in the world. Cisco, SAP Concur, SAP Concur. Oh yeah. So all you people from Belfort that just love documenting your expenses...

2:06 And concur. Right? Well, Bill probably helped teach the person who sold that account to Bell for us. So you can thank Bill. ADP, one of the largest payroll processing companies in the world. He's also had deep experience teaching sales in the senior living space. And that comes up a little bit. It does. Yeah. In our podcast. He's also the author of the Ultimate Sales Manager Playbook. And that was another thing that brought Bill top of mind. When he was writing that book, he sent me an early review copy. And I've been in sales for the last 25 years. And there were so many best practices, actionable nuggets, stuff that even having been in sales and leading sales teams for as long as I have...

2:52 I found it really powerful. And it reminded me of some practices that maybe at one point I was disciplined in, but I kind of slept off with. And it certainly gave me some ideas of things that we can use with our own clients. So I highly recommend that book. And good news... Bill is giving away three copies of his book and we thought it'd be kind of fun to tie in a little, not a contest, but a little challenge. Yeah. So we have a question for you here and it's something to keep in the back of your mind as you're listening to the podcast. What are the four truths of a sale? Yeah. Yeah. There's four components that make up a sale, a sales process.

3:34 And so listen for those. And what we want you to do is just email Chris at floodlightgrp.com. That's my personal email address. Email me the answer to the four truths of a sale. And the first three people to respond with the right answer, we're going to drop ship a book. Yeah. Get a free book. That's kind of fun. And this is a legit book. I mean, you're going to hear from the show. This man... He brings it. There's so much information. Listen to this first run on the drive, but be prepared to circle back around with a notepad. This one's legit. And it's the kind of thing too, if you have a larger restoration company, you have say a sales manager or what you're calling a marketing manager.

4:22 This is potentially one of those episodes to share around your organization, your leadership team, because there are probably some behaviors, some principles that maybe at one point you were acting out of. But there's a good chance if you're like any of the other organizations that we've seen or been a part of that maybe we've sloughed off on some of these things. It's just so good for the beginner restorer that's trying to build a sales channel in their business. to the more advanced ones that have a full teams of salespeople. There is a lot to learn in this episode. It's awesome. Let's get into it. Well, welcome to the MRM podcast, Mr. Bill Zipp.

5:05 Hey, good to be with you guys. I've been looking forward to this. This is going to be a blast. I've been looking forward to this too. And Brandon and I have been talking back and forth about this. I mean, sales is one of those things that obviously every single service business needs. But it's amazing to me how few service companies have a real bona fide sales process. I think sometimes we can stumble into a measure of success. In fact, I've had clients that I've worked with very successful. They can reach millions of dollars in sales without any kind of real formal sales organization in place. They're just leading out of pure hustle and charisma. And so there are those unicorns out there. But our industry, I think, often really struggles when it comes to sales.

5:48 We tend to call it marketing. I'm sure you encounter that a lot, being a salesman. Yeah, because people want to run from sales. But let's call it what it is. And let's do it honestly. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. We're afraid to... A lot of people are nervous about what the sales title implies. Because I think many of us have this impression of the pushy, used car salesman kind of thing. Right? Or now we have the experience of the pushy spammer LinkedIn professional, right? Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. Sending us this four-page sales pitches, cold. Right. And so I talked to you a little bit about this beforehand, where we wanted to go with this episode.

6:30 I think right now we're literally on the cusp as disaster restoration industry of having to figure out a new approach to business development because for the last... 30 or so years, this coming of age period for disaster restoration and insurance claims and so forth, we've gotten into the habit of doing what I call candy and smiles. And we've couched it as marketing because we're basically going into insurance agent offices, property management offices, etc. and filling candy jars and handing out swag and smiling and being friendly. And And that, for a while, actually worked really well because we were building relationship with the people that were most likely to refer us.

7:14 A person calls their homeowner's agent when they have a broken pipe in their house. And it worked because they would say, oh, yeah, well, you need to call ServPro or you need to call XYZ Restoration. They're great. They'll really take care of you. Well, yeah. Now what the industry has experienced is that there's all these third party organizations that are now centralizing claims for companies. Claims are being directed to an 800 number. There's a lot of pressure on insurance agents as far as sales targets and cross selling. The service component oftentimes takes kind of a backseat because there's such a high pressure to produce in order to meet their compensation goals and so forth.

7:56 And so where we used to have this kind of army of referral partners out there, it's not as reliable of a system anymore. So our whole industry is having to rethink and really learn now how to sell, like how to go out, turn over rocks, hunt, find the business, like woo people, but take people through a process, close them. What is it like to close a new customer in the restoration business? And so I picked up your book, The Ultimate Sales Manager's Playbook. And when you were free... In fact, you sent me a copy. I didn't pick it up. You were nice enough to send me an early pre-release copy. And I started digging into this. And I thought, oh my gosh, I've been in some sort of sales management really for the last almost 20 years in some capacity.

8:41 And I realized just how much of the fundamentals I'd either let slide or that I just really never had a great grip on. And as I was going through the chapters and I'm going through these kind of steps or attributes of sales management, you're outlining your chapters. I'm like, God, this is... Basically, our industry needs a primer or a primer on sales management because a lot of the owners and general managers in our business have never had to be sales managers. No, but you're exactly right. The kind of owners I bump into are one of two things. Either you have the owner that came up on the operations side of the business and sales is an absolute mystery to them.

9:24 You rub a magic wand and it happens. And we, of course, know that doesn't happen. And conversely, you have the owner that sells really intuitively and really instinctually and can't scale it, can't duplicate it. It'd be like asking Steph Curry, how do you shoot a three-point shot? And he goes, well, I just shoot a three-point, right? And so when you do something intuitively and instinctively, you can't duplicate it, you can't scale it. And so the people I work with, the entrepreneurs I work with fall in either one of those camps and both need. the kind of help of learning how to manage salespeople, manage the sales process, and build their business in a scalable, reliable sense rather than the magic wand of sales.

10:10 Well, you know what's so... Hard-hitting about what you just said, as you just described, I think it's fair to say Brandon and I. On the instinctual... Two different types of senior leaders, right? Brandon, military leadership background, construction, lots of deep operational experience. And me, I am that instinctual, charismatic sales figure that you could ask me how I sell and I've got a lot of answers for it. But it's all based on survivor bias. It's like me trying to describe what I did or how I did it. And I've struggled with that. I've struggled. Yeah, you just sell. Yeah. My first sales manager job was over all these salespeople.

10:53 And I'd been the most successful salesperson on the team. So of course, I got the job. And then like, well, why aren't you people just selling? And it just shook the three-point shot. And I really, it was a wake-up call to learn how to get an executable process that has certain milestones along the way that can be managed, that can be compensated to, that could be coached to, that could be hired to. And that's kind of the backbone of the book with a whole lot of other things to it. Yeah. So let's just step into this conversation then about... And we're speaking to an audience from what the feedback we've gotten. A lot of general managers, a lot of communication managers, a lot of people that are leading teams for the first time.

11:39 And they've never even had to think about a salesperson. Maybe they have a salesperson right now, but they're not actively managing them. Maybe at most right now, they have a salesperson that they're seeing in the hallway a couple times a week. Hey, how are things going? Oh, things are going great. I just got a job from this one customer. And that's the extent of their sales management. Can you start to unpack a framework? Yeah, I will. I'm going to do it in two ways. I'll go into a little bit of history because you brought up how this industry is seeing a real change in the way they do sales, where you can't go in with the swag and the smiles. But that's how I was trained to sell 20 years ago. And relational selling was the thing.

12:21 You go in. And with the swag and the smiles and you do talk to them and you'd mention the picture on the wall and you do all this stuff. I was trained. This is what I was trained. The more they talk to you, the more they'll buy from you. That is not true anymore. It just simply isn't true. And there are three reasons why it's not true. First, no one has time to talk to you anymore. No one has time to talk. It's 20 years ago. Yeah. A manager would. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk. Sit down an hour later. You're still talking about the fishing trip in Idaho or something. It doesn't happen anymore.

13:02 managers are crazy busy. And if you spend five minutes there, they want you out of the office. So people are crazy busy. So the whole relational approach to sales is not going to work because they're crazy busy. The second reason why it doesn't work is because of budget demands. And you're seeing this, right? Outsourcing of claims and the intention, budget constraints, and just the good old boy friendship or the good old girl friendship, go with Mary, go with Bob. It doesn't work because it's everyone's price conscious. Everyone's talking about money and have budgets and they're under constraint for budgets and they're being pressured.

13:43 The third reason is in the average business to business buy, there are four to six decision makers. Four to six decision makers in the average business to business buy. That means you have to schmooze five people for every reason. How are you going to do that? You just can't do that. And have those people you don't know who they are or you don't have access to to schmooze anyway. Consensus buying has become the norm now. Even in the non-business-to-business buy where a consumer purchased, two or three people are weighing in on that decision. I mentioned you have deep experience in the senior living market.

14:23 Well, you know what? Two to three people, maybe four to five people are even weighing in on that decision. There's not enough schmooze in the world to go around. So relational selling is dead. You can't just talk people and have them buy from you. Not that you shouldn't be relational. You, of course, need to build rapport and have respect and have a relationship. But the whole idea of just keep them talking and they'll spend done, gone, over, dead. I'm like, well, that's going to... I know. I just want to let that hang there for a minute. Yeah, but you are 100% true to my experience. 100%. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So what you need now, like you said, is a framework.

15:04 Yeah. And this is something I help companies do, create a framework for what I call the four truths of a deal. The four truths of a deal. And the four truths of a deal, quite simply, is this. Who, why, when, and how? Who, why, when, and how? And first is the who. Who is your buyer? And again, who are the four to six people weighing in on a deal that's And what are their priorities? What do they want? Who are they? And who are your resistors? Who are your challengers? Who do not want to buy from you?

15:45 Because you need to know who's going to put their hand up and put your hat on and be your champion and who's going to say absolutely no way, never from them and challenge it. And so really managing the buying matrix is understanding who is the decision maker, who's the check writer, who's the challenger, who's the champion, and understanding this relational network. in your companies. And it requires a salesperson that is not just a back slapper and a glad hander, but a salesperson who's emotionally intelligent and relationally savvy and is really able to build positive, productive, professional relationships in target companies.

16:29 There was a lot that just happened. Yeah. There's a lot there. And I want to camp out on this profile before you move on to other aspects of this. Because I think what we see the most often is people are not hiring the correct profile because we don't understand what our job is in terms of conducting sales. So dive into that a little bit. Talk about the profile for who can be successful now. Yeah, well, let me tell you the bad news. And then let me tell you the good news. The bad news is out of the general population, only about 10% of the general population have the DNA for any kind of sales.

17:10 So that's the bad news. The war for sales talent is real. And some of what I do is I help my clients find top sales talent. And it's tough. It's hard. And I'm a professional consultant. All right. So if you're just throwing an ad on Craigslist, forget it. It's not going to happen. Or even Indeed. So it's hard because such a small set of the population. The good news is the classic polyester suit, used car salesperson, that's not what we're looking for. We're looking for someone with relational acumen. I'll get into it later because the why is the same thing. They need to have business acumen.

17:50 be able to uncover pressing business challenges and monetize them. And so being able to read a balance sheet, being able to read a profit and loss statement and know how to impact that with the investment in your products and services, that's business acumen. And there's relational acumen. So we're not looking at the back slapper. Yeah, someone that can build a relationship, but someone who in a respectful, trustful, credible way connects with you, understands your business needs, and is able to monetize the investment in your services in a way that makes sense. Dude, that's huge. For anybody listening right now, this is a notebook session. And there should have been a whole lot of notes that just went down on paper.

18:34 And of course, we're going to talk about how people get their hands on your book, of course, too. Oh, sure. But this is huge. I mean, just that in and of itself, there's a lot of gold that was just mine. So anyways. Yeah. One of the things that we talk a lot about with all our clients relative to the sales approach is humility and curiosity. So back when I had some corporate sales training earlier in my career with Cintas, a uniform and laundry company, their sales system was called requirements-based selling. And it was kind of my first introduction to pain solution selling, essentially. Going through their prior service invoices, finding discrepancies and other service failures and and getting an agreement that solving those problems was important to them.

19:19 But what we found in our industry, what's difficult, I think, for some salespeople to understand, especially those coming from the smiles and candy legacy, is no longer good enough to just hang your banner and wave your flag about, we're awesome because of all our features and benefits. We got a big fleet. We have a more sophisticated app for tracking your claim. Instead, where we found the most traction is by approaching with this humility and seeking pain. Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Property Manager, Facility Manager, COO, VPO, tell me about your experience with our industry.

20:00 Tell me about the experience you've had with our industry. You've had damage events at your different properties. How has that gone? Oh, you work with this company. Well, what about their people or their process? Did you like? And what parts did you not like? What's your experience with our industry? And then speaking to those pain points... Yeah. And that's a very different approach than what most of the industry has. But it's successful, though. See, that's what's succeeding today. And I'm seeing it. So I work around the world in consulting with sales companies, large and small. That's what's succeeding today. The chest-thumping bravado, people turn off. They don't want it.

20:40 They don't like it. And you may get one buy, but you won't get two, three, four, five, and six. And the salespeople that are really succeeding today become the trusted advisors of the companies they serve. And that's what's working. And it's that empathy and humility that you spoke about. Yes, that's what gets the conversation started. And then how can I help you grow your business? How can I meet a pressing business needs in a way that makes the investment make sense? That's what's working today from the perspective of worldwide sales and consulting.

21:22 Yeah, love it. Yeah. Yeah, I find it interesting. I'm sure you see this too on your end. I mean, you work with technology companies and service companies and all kinds of different categories. The trend I'm seeing is that the salespeople I know personally in all these different industries, there's a much more professional quality to salespeople that I'm encountering now. And in many ways, many, many of them have college degrees, degrees in like professional degrees in finance or engineering. You're seeing a lot of... I've seen more and more engineers coming to the space of sales. And I think it's because the skill set is different. It used to just be a charisma game. Yes, exactly. It used to just be, are you good at golf?

22:03 Exactly. Do you like to drink? Do you know how to talk and make friends? Right. And I think people are tired. Like you said earlier, they don't have time for those kind of business relationships anymore. And frankly, I don't want those kind of business relationships either. I don't want to hang out with a bunch of guys that get drunk after work. They'll get fired and they'll tarnish my brand and my reputation. So I actually steered away from that stuff over a decade ago with my consulting practice. And I'm really glad I did. But let me come back to it. There's still, though... there are some core sales characteristics that are still really important.

22:44 You still have to build rapport. You still have to be able to connect with people in a genuine, authentic way, but you still have to build rapport. You still have to have a competitive drive. Not the kind that we see on Mad Men or that type of thing that destroys everyone. But you still want to win. You still want to be on top of the leaderboard. You still want to make it the President's Club. I mean, so there are still some core features. Maybe they've matured over the years, but they're still there. And that's what makes that DNA, finding that DNA, super important. It's huge. It also makes sense why it's 10% and not a larger number.

23:29 No, exactly. They're driven, they're competitive in a good way, not in a destructive way. And then they still have that, but that ability to connect with others. And so, but you're right, Chris, I'm seeing more and more sophisticated, more professional salespeople rather than scoundrels. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that there's a piece there associated with the number expectation too. And I don't want to keep us off that framework. We got to get back there. But I think it's important. There's this mindset switch that has to happen with business owners that we're... In order to get the 10%, to get these sophisticated sales professionals, we're not talking small pay rates.

24:13 And so how do we figure that into our financial planning? Yeah, that's really good. I just actually cut a video. I haven't released it yet, but I cut a video on sales compensation. It's not well understood. I'll give you the shorthanded version of it. You basically want half of your sales compensation guaranteed and half of it in bonuses and commissions. If you're out of that matrix, you'll simply pay people not to sell. You want to give them enough base so that they can make the house payment, make the car payment, put food on the table without freaking out and worrying. But you also want to have enough bonus, commission and bonus, so that they get paid when you get paid.

24:55 And that's fair. They got skin in the game. So right now you see professional sales, people earning around $125,000, $150,000, $200,000, but it's only a half of it's guaranteed. On-target earnings, big chunk of it is legitimate bonuses and commissions based on sales. Again, we're back to that 10%. Not very many people want to gamble half of their livelihood. on commission bonuses and commissions. But there are people out there that wouldn't have it any other way. Well, and doesn't it kind of speak to that character grouping that you were talking about? It's like, they're not afraid to bet on themselves.

25:36 Right? And that's when you know you got a winner. Exactly right. Exactly right. Now, conversely, these people at times are hard to live with. So I'm going to say, conversely, these people at times can be difficult. A good salesperson is going to make you feel uncomfortable at times. They're going to get all fired up and everything, but they won't go rogue on you. So just to understand, your salesperson probably is not going to be your best friend in the company. Probably shouldn't be. Go get a dog if you need a friend. A good salesperson should push you, should be driven, and also know when to say, all right, you're the boss and I'll follow you.

26:23 And mature professional salespeople also know. when to drop it and move on. I like it. My gut says people are hearing a different version rather than what's in their head. There's no doubt in my mind what people are hearing right now is not what they've been thinking. So let's get back to that framework, right? Okay. Yeah, so who, once you understand your who and that buyer matrix, the handful of people, not just the one person, then you need to know why. You need to know what are the pressing business problems you're solving. What is the pain and what is the gain? In that order, adults and humans on the whole make decisions to relieve themselves of pain and then to achieve gain.

27:06 And so we need to know what the internal drivers of change are that are causing pain. and how we're going to solve them, and then how that long-term gain will result as a benefit. You need both, and creating the business case for investing in your products and services, monetized by losses kept and gains gained, and that requires business acumen. Understanding how all the dots connect. One of the things I think has contributed to my success in sales is curiosity. And being curious about your customer's business and how it works.

27:47 Yes. That matching their language, like learning to match the terminology that they use in their business for certain things, I found to be really key as well. Absolutely. But I think what you have, Chris, is informed curiosity. Not just random curiosity. Your curiosity is informed by asking about certain things. And that's where vertical industry knowledge, whether it be scene of living or the other verticals that your industry serves, you have this informed curiosity. And that leads you to ask the kind of questions that unlock pressing business problems. Yeah, that's good.

28:27 Yeah, yeah. And then the next two in the framework is when and how. And what I mean by when is creating a sequence of events. Most buyers don't buy from an industry every day. They don't buy software every day. They don't buy disaster restoration services every day. Almost by definition, you don't buy disaster, right? We have a problem or we live in New Orleans. Exactly. You don't buy it every day. So you don't know the sequence of events. This should happen. This should happen. This should happen. This should happen. And so it's really important that we lay out the sequence of events from start to finish.

29:11 So there are no surprises. And this is what you should expect here and expect here and expect here. Not every natty little detail, but simply the sequence of events that they should expect from what this is what you're investing in. And this is what you're getting, be it from the implementation of a software or an intervention after an event. I hear you describing leading the customer through the process, leading the sale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they don't buy from you every day. Most of them, they just never done this before, or I do it rarely, maybe once a year. So it's really important for them to know the sequence of events and what gate is going into which.

29:58 It's funny. I used to be really intimidated earlier in my career. And even now, I find myself intimidated when I meet with a CEO or a COO or somebody in a big, highfalutin position, right? Yeah. But what's really interesting to me is every time I find myself at that table with those people, what I discover 90% of the time is... is they are much less confident about that buying process and what their criteria is and how they're purchasing that service or evaluating it than I would have thought. They're really dependent on me helping them navigate the process. And I think that's a big mistake that salespeople make is they're waiting for the other person to tell them how the process...

30:40 They want the process to go. And even sophisticated... business people, they aren't necessarily sophisticated at buying things. Well, because they know their industry. Their stuff. Like in senior living, they know senior living, but they don't know X, Y, Z. Right. And it's where we need to pivot from informed curiosity to becoming that trusted advisor and guiding them down the path. Right. But I think you hit a point, those of us that sell for a living, we tend to have this imposter syndrome. And so we get into those situations. We overcompensate by talking and talking and talking rather than saying, no, here's step one, here's step two, here's step three, here's step four.

31:23 And making it really, really clear. And again, professional salespeople, not with arrogance, but they come in with a confidence and they're able to present the solution in sequential steps. To me, I'm just picturing some of the rooms that we've been in in the past. And when you've got this leader that probably already feels the natural pressure of got to have it all figured out anyways... So then when someone comes in to sell them something and is not helping that process have a smooth transition of events, I can see how it's setting your buyer off. They start to probably retreat into this whole, oh gosh, now I got to act like I know what's going on.

32:06 And inevitably, they probably almost step in the way of their own purchase process. Right. Right. Oh, yeah. Because they're filling that void of leadership and it's their natural thing to do, but they don't know what they don't know. And so in filling that void, you know you're doing well when they're asking questions, real substantial questions, maybe even offensive questions to you, kind of objections, you know, like, well, how the hell you guys do that? You know, it's like, that's a good question. What you know that a CEO is not engaged in, Wrap this meeting up and get on to the next meeting.

32:49 And so it's measured by the quality of questions. They're interrupting you. And they're asking questions and they're really involved. Again, as salespeople, we tend to want to shrink from objections. They're buying signals. Yeah. They would not be bringing this up. They would be nodding their head and wrapping things up to get on to the next meeting. If they weren't bringing up these uncomfortable questions that allows you to prove the fact that you're a trusted advisor. Gosh, I love that. That's huge. That's a get comfortable being uncomfortable right there. Yes, exactly right. Exactly right. And here's what I have to do because I face this.

33:30 I'm a one man show. I decided... A few years ago, I was going to do this as an independent consultant. So a lot of people will put, how in the world can you do that with one person? Now, my temptation is to react and to snap back and become defensive and tell everyone how smart I am. You get what I'm saying? I'm glad I'm not alone, Bill. I'm glad I'm not alone. That doesn't work. Is this, oh, I'm glad you asked that question. That would be, if I were you, I would really concern about it. How can one guy know that? So let me explain to you what I do to stay sharp and how I think that brings an advantage to you.

34:12 Not everyone wants to work with me and that's fine, but this is what I bring. And I think this is an advantage to you because I'm beholden to no one. So just letting that, yeah, being in that space and letting that discomfort happen and not reacting to it, not being defensive and in flushing it out. It's really counterintuitive, but it's when sales becomes rich and rewarding. I would say, too, I think for a lot of the companies, I guess, that are represented in listening today, I think there's this piece then that we need to remember that, we have to prepare our salespeople for the industry.

34:53 So if they're going to be an advisor, if it's not slaps on the backs and smiles, and they're going to be an advisor, then we have a responsibility as leaders then to help introduce the technical aspects of what we do. They should be participating in production meetings. They should be spending time in the field with our technical staff, learning their jobs, seeing what they do. They don't have to be a certified specialist. But having a good grip so that they're comfortable enough that when a question like that comes, they can say, Hey, here's what I understand about our process. Here's how we do it. And I have a ton of confidence in the team that will deliver when the call comes in. Exactly right. Exactly right.

35:34 Enough, but not too much. They need to know enough about it, but we don't want to make them a technician because then they'll go down the rabbit hole. And your buyer doesn't need to know that much. But you're right, Brandon. They do really need to have a sense of professional confidence about the work that you're doing. And again, how we're going to meet pressing business needs with the investment that makes sense. And a certain amount of content is required when I'm going to make an investment. Right, right. Okay, how? Yeah, so the secret sauce here on how is buying goes in steps. Rarely are you going to go on one call and close a deal.

36:17 I know it happens, but it's rare. And so there needs to be specific steps of action that the buyer takes along the way. And the reason why the buyer takes it is that the buyer needs to be engaged and you ask them to do meaningful steps along the way. That's the how, that's the secret sauce. For example, For myself, I'll have a first call with someone. And if it goes really well, I'll ask them to complete an assessment. I'll ask them to do something. And assessment costs me a little bit of money. But by asking them to do something, they start becoming engaged with me before they give me any money.

37:01 And then the next meeting, I meet with them. And then I may ask them to, let's have one of your employees take this assessment or so forth. Find reasonable steps of action that the buyer can take because closing a sale is the seller takes an action, the buyer takes an action, the seller takes an action, the buyer takes an action, the seller takes an action, the buyer takes an action, and we close. Typically, the seller takes an action, the seller takes an action, the seller takes an action. Would you like to buy my stuff? No. And so the how is every step along the way, maintaining some kind of engagement as defined by a reasonable step of action that the buyer takes along the path.

37:52 All right, let's take a minute to recognize and thank our MitResto Mastery sponsor, Accelerate Restoration Software. And I'm fully aware, by the way, that when I say those last two words, restoration software, that that instantly creates heartburn for some of you out there, right? Because we probably all fall into one of two camps when it comes to software. We've either cobbled together kind of a version of free website tools and spreadsheets just to make our business work Or we're in the camp where we've adopted one of these existing restoration platforms, you know, one that has all the bells and whistles and supposedly does it all. But we can't get our team to consistently adopt it and input information to it.

38:37 Yeah, and that's really where Accelerate has honed their focus. They've created a system that's simple, right? It's intuitive, and it focuses on the most mission-critical information, i.e., guys, your team will actually use it. Let's talk about sales, right? After years of leading sales and marketing teams, the biggest trick is getting them to consistently update notes about their interactions with referral partners and clients. And the essential piece there is there's got to be a mobile app experience. And in our experience... the solutions that were previously out there were just too cumbersome and tricky to use. Yeah. Imagine guys, how your business would change if your entire team was actually consistently using the system.

39:23 Do yourself a favor, go check these guys out at xlrestorationsoftware.com forward slash MRM and check out the special offers they're providing to MRM listeners. All right, let's talk about actionable insights. Owners, GMs, you can't be your business's expert on all things estimating. You might've been three years ago when you're writing sheets in the field, but the industry's always changing and so are the tools. If you're the smartest person in the room when it comes to Xactimate Matterport, how does that scale? You're the bottleneck. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but this is where Actual Insights comes in. They're a technical partner that can equip your team with the latest bleeding edge information and best practices, and then update them with webinars and training resources when the game inevitably changes again.

40:12 For this reason, we recommend actual insights to all of our clients. Yeah, three of the kind of big things that stuck out to me when being introduced to AI and their team. First off is this consistently updated training. I mean, at the end of the day, these guys are the experts. They're out front all the time. They're constantly learning new trade secrets and ensuring that your team's got access to those things. A 3,700 plus page database of Xactimate templates. I don't know what else to say here other than Don't reinvent the wheel. It's already available. Download it, copy it, use it, bam. Database of commonly missed items. I think this is huge. So many of us can change the numbers by just moving the needle a couple points and those commonly missed items can make all the difference in the world.

40:59 So go check them out at value.getinsights.org backslash FCG. How many back and forths do you see? Is it a variable of the product or what do we see? Yeah, it's a variable of the product. So in senior living, it might be a tour. It might be a visit. It might coming to a concert or an event. It might having the family, right? So a senior living buy may be an 18 to 24 month buy. But if it's the tour and then you never hear from them again, you'll never hear from them again. So you hook them in with actions. Now for me, my average buy takes three to six months. And so every month or so as we're moving down the process, we're in a few actions.

41:44 You're by maybe 30 days. It may be a week. But you still need to ask buyers to do a reasonable step of action with you. And if they don't do it, they're telling you something. They're not into you. Yeah, that's what I was... It sounds like what we're describing. It sounds a lot like what salespeople would call a trial close. You're taking the polls kind of like what you referred to earlier with the questions, right? You know a CEO or a buyer is engaged when they're asking tough questions. It's almost like a trial close. They're in it. Yeah, it's a trial close on steroids because you're really asking them to do something. It tests the degree of their interest in you.

42:28 It also will insulate you from the competition. I've had people say to my competitors, I'm working with Bill. When no money has exchanged hands, we're just working through an assessment process. And they say, oh, no, I'm working with Bill Zip. So these actions not only engage buyers and then tell you how hot they are, for lack of a better word, but it also insulates you from the competition because they become engaged with you and close off others. And so that's the how. What are the reasonable, meaningful steps of action? And what I tend to do is what can we front load that we would normally include in a service package?

43:11 What's really something affordable? Like for me, it's an assessment. Typically, we get started engagement and have you do an assessment. Well, assessments don't cost me that much because I'm buying them at cost. I'll front load it and provide it as an upfront assessment that leads to sales rather than. So what is in your industry that is affordable enough to front load and give away? One of the things that we do, we won't get too into the nitty gritty just because it's very specific, but I think an example that might fall in line here, and I just want your feedback on it. One of the things that we work with a lot of companies on, and this is not, we didn't come up with it. This is pretty industry standard, is this idea of an emergency response plan or a priority response plan.

43:56 And obviously, we've got a little bit of labor hours associated with delivering that and collecting data. And then you might have some print or some cost to produce that piece of content. But it is an opportunity where we're getting the prospect, the buyer to engage with us. They're having to provide information. They're having to interact with us. Is that an example that falls in line? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So instead of getting started working with them and saying, hey, let's put this emergency response plan in, let's front load it. You get to know them. They get to know you. You build relationships. You get this in-depth knowledge. You give it to them. It doesn't cost you a lot. And I've even seen people even maybe charge a little bit for it. But on the whole, it doesn't cost you a lot.

44:39 You give it to them. And that relationship is started out. And I refer to this as selling by serving. Selling by serving. Just start serving. Serving and not giving away. I'm not talking about giving away for me free coaching. I'm not giving away six months of free coaching. I'm debriefing an assessment with you, right? So it's selling by serving. And it feels good. It feels to me like it has some integrity. I'm going to offer something to you, a true, honest gift. Not some made up thing, right? So a true, honest, helpful gift. And then if it makes sense for us to continue working together, let's do it.

45:19 I like it. I love that. Yeah. And in the process, you're building relationship. Like Brandon's example with the priority response plan, it involves the customer scheduling time to do a sidewalk of their properties with the restoration company. And that time and grade. I think that's part of what you're talking about is you're establishing some time and grade. with that person in the process. And I love how you said that where you have some clients are like, yeah, I'm already working with Bill where you haven't even sent him the first invoice. Exactly right. We've experienced that too. Yeah. Because like when people invest their time with you, it's almost like it would be cognitive dissonance for them to do that if there wasn't some business objective to it.

46:03 Mm-hmm. Exactly right. This is the reframing of relational sales. It's not the smiles and swag and talk about the fish on the wall. It's actually being a trusted business advisor who is credible and is honestly helping their business. That's what a professional salesperson does. That's so good. Man, I want to take a turn because I know there's a lot of people listening that are, like you talked about operational leaders. Yeah. They just feel like a fish out of water. Now they're probably taking notes like Brandon and they're like, okay, this is great. I know what I'm looking for now in a salesperson. I have a sense of what their activity is going to look like. Yeah. Can you lead us through a framework of sales management now?

46:46 Sure. Let's pull from some of your book. How should an operational leader... think about their salespeople. Because many of the people listening to this, by the way, they have maybe one salesperson that they're currently probably calling a marketer. They probably have one salesperson on their team. Some may have two or three. And like we described, they probably have a very informal accountability process, goals, expectations, kind of thing. So walk us through, what is it like to develop a professional sales operation? Well, you need a professional sales process. So we really need to start is creating metrics and milestones for who, why, when, and how. All right. And so you need a professional sales process.

47:29 It's not magic. We don't wave a magic wand and sales appear. It's a professional sales process with sequential steps with milestones along the way that trigger one to another. And so really, it's setting up the professional sales process. And then with milestones and metrics along the way, you're able to have objective conversations with your sales personnel about how many first appointments are scheduled. How many emergency response plans have been put in the door? How many proposals have been presented? And what percentage of those proposals have gone on to close and at what dollar amount?

48:09 It's really thinking through milestones and metrics at every stage of the sales process and defining those objectively and managing to them objectively, the greatest gift that you can give to a salesperson is clarity. And this is what clarity looks like in the beginning of our sales process, in the middle of our sales process, in the end of that sales process, and having positive, productive conversations with them all along the way. Mm-hmm. Can you start to unpack that a little bit? So I love that.

48:51 Let's dive into what that accountability... Because when I think of accountability, I think of there's certain things that somebody's going to be routinely accountable for. Right. And then there's a rhythm or a frequency of when am I going to be accountable for that? Yeah. So I'm a big advocate of weekly cadence for sales. Sales is a weekly game and you have weekly cadence. The best sales organizations in the world, the ones I work with, they have a weekly cadence. And about the only time when they get out of that weekly cadence is maybe end of quarter, end of year. when we're frantically trying to push to our number, end a quarter, end a year.

49:36 But you have that weekly cadence of 30 to 45 minutes. And what's the agenda on the cadence? It's a sales process, right? And above the pipeline, where there are clients we're building relationships with, within the pipeline, and you just talk through that weekly cadence. And then you begin to build forecasts for a business that's out 30, 60, 90 days based on what's moving through the pipeline. And really using the science of the sales process to manage the weekly one-on-ones, or if you have more than one salesperson, weekly team meetings where you work through this pipeline and the pipeline and the projections for 30, 60, 90.

50:19 And really running your sales department like a business person, not a magician. One of the things I just heard you say, Bill, was this. I didn't hear you asking questions on, so how's it going with so-and-so? So how's it looking with so-and-so retirement? No, it's very measurable data. It's this many types of leading activities. And then here's the lagging indicator or the result of that previous week's activity. Is that where you're... Yes, of course. And we also may talk about, for instance, Pacific Retirement Services. And we may talk about all their properties in the Northwest.

51:00 And we may strategize for it, but it's in a framework of a sequential process with metrics and milestones. And yeah, for example, Pacific Retirement Services is a big player in the Northwest and in senior living. So yeah, we may strategize with those accounts, but it's, yeah, it's not, It's with deep insight and the business acumen. The business acumen, frankly, you're asking your salespeople to take with your customers and prospects. You want to take with your salesperson. I dig that. We kind of touched on this a couple of times because Chris keeps using the term a lot of our people in our industry call their staff marketing teams.

51:42 Yeah. Please dive into that. Give us this crystal clear difference between marketing and sales. What are we talking about? So the purpose of marketing is lead generation. I think marketing has been oversold. I think it's been oversold with social media. It's been oversold with Google AdWords and all this stuff. Marketing generates qualified leads. Marketing qualified leads, MQL. That's the output of marketing. It will not sell a complex deal with multiple decision makers. It simply won't. And so marketing messaging is y'all come.

52:23 And it's fine. It's good. But that's marketing. Sales is a professional business man or woman, a trusted advisor that gets to know the business needs of specific clients and prospects and monetizes and meets those needs. I love that. And the thing is, there's nothing dirty about sales. And our senior living goes through this a little bit, right? So you go in and you meet with a marketing advisor. And it's that, No, you're going to sell me a property. And the best ones say, it's sales. We're going to do it as sales. But then our salespeople are going to act with integrity. And I think that's the key.

53:03 It's not what you call it. It's how you behave. There is so much of this reshaping of just little... It's thoughts, perspectives that got lodged in our brains at some point in our history to merge those two because sales is too hard of a word or too harsh of a word. No, yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to understand what marketing does for you. Marketing should get you qualified leads, but that's all it's going to do for you. The companies I work with, actually, at least half or two-thirds are self-generated leads by salespeople anyway. The marketing, all the marketing world can only get enough leads for about a third of the business.

53:47 Really good salespeople are sourcing their own leads as well through the relationship network that they're working. Marketing has been oversold and people pour a ton of money into it and they don't get anything out of it. Can you dive into that? Said the salesperson. Right. Well, yeah, that's tradecraft right there. So dive into that a little bit, the creating your own marketing or that lead development that's being generated by a salesperson. What does that look like? Give me some examples. Yeah, so it looks like asking for referrals from businesses. It looks like going to the other departments of larger corporations.

54:29 It looks like checking in with past contacts that maybe didn't close and reigniting those. It looks like going to LinkedIn and doing some consulting. research and seeing who knows people that you want to know and on asking for an introduction. It looks like some of the old school stuff, like when we get to go to an event or a conference, you know, it looks like some of that as well. And It's the heavy lifting. I know you guys work out and I detest core work. Absolutely detest it. I hate it. But you got to do it to be strong. Prospecting is the same way. You have to do, you got to make your calls.

55:09 You got to send out your emails. You got to ask for your referrals. You got to keep good live prospecting. And that 10% DNA, they don't mind it. They're willing to do it. And for some of them, it's even fun, bit of a game. Yeah, yeah. I think what's so perfect about this is that I think it is creating all sorts of clarity around who's doing what. Some of the questions that Chris and I are asking around this is because we just get all this language mixed up. The expectations that we place on our personnel is goofy. It's getting split up between multiple people. And really, what I'm hearing you say is...

55:50 Our most powerful asset that we can spend money on is going to be a professional that knows how to build a pipeline with lead generation and then follows a key process to close a sale. Yeah, exactly right, Brandon. Exactly right. And that's what I find is working so well today. I think it's cool. I think we feel pressure to try all these other things for a lot of reasons. I think the crunch on personnel and trying to find good team players is a real struggle. And I think people are fearful of it. I think any of us that are running businesses, if we think that really the most critical tool here is to have a person, the right person in that seat doing that job function...

56:36 There's a lot of us, whether we're doing it consciously or subconsciously, are wanting to draw back from that and say, Well, can I throw my money at a PPC campaign? Can I throw it into this membership or whatever? In my experience, no, you can't. There's nothing that can take the place of a professional sales representative. Yeah. One thing I wanted to pick your brain on was reporting. I heard you describe this weekly sales meeting and that makes sense to me. But do you advocate for any kind of like standardized reporting? Yes. No, absolutely. I think the gold standard is Salesforce.

57:16 I think there's a new version of Salesforce called Salesforce... Lightning or something. I don't have the right word. Salesforce has become bloated with chat and all this stuff. But it's really important for sales professionals to know these are not your leads. It's your company's leads. These are not your customers. It's your company's customers. And so that information belongs to the company. It needs to be captured and it needs to be collated. That being said, salespeople hate doing that. It's tough for them. There's a couple solutions for that. One is that only capture what you're going to act on.

57:57 You can capture 22 different things in Salesforce and you only act on two or three. So don't capture what they act on. But my daughter sells for Medtronic and Medtronic realizes this. And so there's an admin available to her at the end of the week where she does a brain dump for an hour or two. And the admin puts it all in Salesforce for her. Wow. And yeah, but it's an hour or two, right? Sure. And it, what is it? It doesn't cost anything. So, well, an hour or two. And Becky would rather die than have to do that stuff. I can see Chris twitching right now.

58:38 Now, if you can't get that recognized, all right, it's, it's part of your job, keeping track of everything. They're not your leads. They're your company's leads. They're not your customer, your company's layer. As a matter of integrity, that data needs to be captured. You can get hit by a bus and, But recognize the company also needs to recognize that many salespeople are detail averse. So give them the help they need, have them empty it out of their brain, get into Salesforce, but it must be captured and it must be kept. I love that. That's great. Can we hit the onboarding? How do I set the foundation?

59:19 I do some rad hunting. I pull a miracle out and get the top 10% person. What now? How do I get them set straight? Yeah. So you have 90 days, basically, to do it. The average onboarding in the United States takes 11 and a half months. Can you imagine 11 and a half months before they're on their own quota? It's like, seriously, that's the average. And so, Really, don't do that. You're not helping all the money lost by the salesperson. Put a plan together. Put a checklist together like it were a flight plan and go through every last thing. That first 90 days, they should feel like they're drinking from a fire hose, shadowing everyone in the business, learning the business, being introduced to people.

1:00:06 There's a couple of reasons for this. One is you want them to be successful as fast as they possibly can. Don't go out to 11 and a half months. And secondly, God forbid, but this happens, you want them to fail faster. In other words, if by chance you made a bad decision, and statistics tell us that one out of four times you are, you need to be able to quickly understand it and move on. It's not good for the salesperson, the twist in the wind, and a job they're not gifted for, and it's not good for you. And so another reason why this drinking from a firehose 90-day onboarding thing is to be successful as fast as you can or fail fast so everyone knows this isn't a good fit.

1:00:52 One of the things that we hear all the time is like, what should our salesperson be producing in that first 90 days or six months or whatever? What's your perspective on that? I know it's a broad question, right? No, within 60 days, there should be sales. Okay. And you're saying, hey, that's the answer. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. We should see results. I work with very sophisticated technology companies. And yeah, they're learning sophisticated software, but they're saying, no, you should be selling something in 60 days. You're not on full quota till 120 days. But that's four months, guys. So yeah, you get a ramp quota your first 90 days, but sales is very clarifying.

1:01:37 And yeah, don't wait for three months before they sell something. Yeah, first 30 days, they're learning, they're growing. They may not have the most complex contracts coming in, but yeah, they should be selling stuff. as soon as they possibly can. So in a scenario, and this is some of the nuances I can just hear as an operator, like I'm having the same thought. But so a lot of what we sell, right, is a promise. we don't know when someone's going to have a fire in the B wing or whatever. Right. Yeah. So I'm a new salesperson. You're telling me I should close a deal in 60 days. Is that the same as like, I need to be having a contract that's worth dollar amounts?

1:02:22 Or are we saying I need to be producing signed priority response agreements? I need to have like, what would that difference? Do people pay you for priority response agreements? They don't typically. That's a pre-sales. That's a pre-sales thing. And forgive me, because I don't know your industry as in-depth as I might. But I would suggest to you that we want actual real money within 60 days. Sales people sell. It's what they do. So if you're not charging for a priority response agreement, that's a pre-sell. That is what we were talking about earlier under the how of the framework.

1:03:03 There should be some money exchanging hands soon. 60, 90 days. And I'll qualify that because I don't know your industry like you do. But on the whole, that's what I'm seeing. Yeah. And I think the reality of it is that just like we as the operators have to be doing our own due diligence to establish the appropriate leading activities that could net that. a closed sale in that 60 days. The expectation remains the same. I just think that there's some expectation now as a leader that we have to take a hold of and say, we know how our industry works. If we have the right person doing the right things, what's the number?

1:03:43 Yeah, exactly. And then we own that. Yeah, and then you own that. Like in senior living, you have a sales cycle of a year to 18 months. So you're going to adjust some of that based on that. But even in senior living, someone will stumble across something and have a one call close. Even in senior living, that happens. And so we're not looking to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars, but something's going to cross the finish line. Hey, Bill, I know we've got a limited amount of time left. One of the things that I think you probably encountered in the service industry, or maybe it's just true across all different industry segments, but one of the dynamics that I've seen over and over again, well, frankly, both in my experience at State Farm and also in the restoration industry, is just this conversation.

1:04:35 Synergy or lack thereof between sales and the actual production or service department delivering the service. And what I've observed is when a company is struggling on the service delivery side with quality, maybe they get a bad customer review or they're short-staffed or there's something that's causing... challenges on the service delivery side, it can have a real profound impact on the salesperson's ability or confidence to go out and sell. And so one of the things we talk with our leadership clients about a lot is how critical it is for them to be, when they're making an investment in their front-end sales department, hiring their first salesperson or expanding or whatever, making sure there's an equivalent investment in shoring up their service delivery so that the promise that the salesperson is selling, they're confident that service can deliver on that promise.

1:05:39 I just love if you would speak to that a little bit and if you have any advice for operational leaders about how to navigate that tension. Yeah, I think you're right. Professional salespeople, the ones that are worth their weight in gold, are really, it's their reputations. that they're selling. And they put their integrity on the line every single day for your business. And so it's really important to be able to match that integrity in sales with integrity in service. And so you do. And both you and Brandon have used the word promise. And we need to fulfill our promises to our customers and clients.

1:06:21 And then your sales will do well. We also need to recognize integrity is not perfection. We also understand that. So some salespeople expect perfection, and I think that's not what we're looking for either. There's nothing perfect this side of eternity, and so that's not going to happen either. And many times when you make a mistake and then go back and deal with it and own, cements a lifetime relationship of sales. And so we're not talking about being perfect, but we act with integrity. We fulfill our promises. And when we don't, we say sorry, and we make sure we do.

1:07:01 I think that's the kind of synergy that'll work. And you'll keep professional salespeople working for you. The other, they'll be gone very quickly. I've seen our teams, including me, get really defensive when a salesperson comes and says, here's the feedback I'm getting from my client or my prospect. Or they want to be engaged and they're asking questions about this first job. that they've finally gotten a yes on. And so I think part of the mindset shift too for folks is like, our salespeople are our production team as well. This is a united front.

1:07:42 We're all on the same team. If they're asking us questions, we need to like those questions. The same hard questions we're getting from a prospect that actually wants to buy. If my salesperson cares... Yeah. Now, so here's the twist. So salespeople, they tend to be wired to be super frank and more assertive. And if a salesperson goes directly to a frontline worker or manager, they may be too frank, they may be too strident. So salespeople often have difficulty in cross-functional communication because they're on the competitive line every day, being told no 10 times, and then they go internally.

1:08:24 I often suggest that an owner facilitate that communication. They become the dumping ground for the salesperson's angst. And then the owner, who most of them aren't wired as aggressively as salespeople, then the owner deals with that. But when a salesperson goes directly, many times that can go sideways just because they're just wired so differently. So that's just some of the dynamic, the interpersonal dynamics. One of the things that's super refreshing about this conversation, Bill, first off, obviously, there's a technical expertise that's spilling over. Because I think in half the time, you've said more than I constantly do in a two or three hour session.

1:09:11 So kudos to you. But here's the thing that is just smacking me in the face is this unapologetic understanding of how the game works. So therefore, expecting people to change what they're doing to meet the demands of the game. Everything that you're saying, like, maybe we can't have a warm and fuzzy conversation with the right kind of salesperson. So therefore, we need to create a strategy that still lets us win. It's going to be hard to lead... the right kind of salesperson. So our culture piece can't be limping because we don't want to hire the right person. Everything that you're saying is so unapologetic.

1:09:52 Here's the standard. You measure it, you meet it, or you don't, period. It's not a great conversation. Everything that you're teaching, this is the game. And so I think our listeners, what we need to be very careful of is not trying to filter out with some form of excuse or preconceived bias that we can't do the things that you're talking about in our own businesses. This is the game. We do not have a choice other than to change the way that we're playing so that we can succeed in the game. Yes. And this is a game. And then here's some grace. All right. So if we work together, you would discover I'm very intense. I'm very driven. I'm going to get it done.

1:10:33 I want to win. And then we go out after work and have some beers and hang out and laugh. and play with each other's kids and cry with each other when our parents pass on. So here's the game, and then here's grace. And I don't think one should undermine the other. We should be gracious and then play the game to win. And we should play the game to win and be gracious. And in my career, that's who I've wanted to be. And I think that that's inspiring, it's challenging, and then it's also comfort. Yeah, it's worthwhile. Boy, I think you just created a really natural wrap-up moment there.

1:11:14 Bill, it was really good. Can you talk a little bit about how our audience... I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of people who are like, wow, there's a lot I can learn from Bill. Sure. We definitely... I definitely recommend... that everybody get a copy of your book. And you've been so kind as to give away a few books. So we've got a giveaway that we're going to do. But apart from buying the Ultimate Sales Manager's Playbook, what are the different ways that people can work with you? Yeah, just reach out to me. BillZip.com, my website. And you can read my blog. You can watch videos. There is a form. Just reach out to me. I think even on my website, you can schedule an appointment.

1:11:55 Yeah, I saw that. And we'll talk. So just let's talk. And I think if the kind of thing I'm talking about is the kind of thing that stirs something up in you, reach out, let's talk, let's have a meeting. I've helped lots and lots of owners like yourself. I eat, breathe and sleep sales and I love it and I think I can help you. Let's hang out. Right on. That's awesome, man. Hey, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks, Bill. It was a pleasure. Bye, gentlemen. Great to meet you. What a fun afternoon. Yeah. Awesome, man. Have a great day. All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

1:12:37 All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of the MRM Podcast. And if you got something out of it, share it with a friend. Hit subscribe. Hit follow. Leave us a five-star review. Thanks a lot.