Jeff Bush: 06:01
Conan. I was a good customer. I, I didn’t know anything, so I just where am I going to learn this stuff? So buying the. Yeah, starting with tapes and then CDs and then downloads.
You know, it’s funny how much knowledge I got. And you know, I’ve got a couple hundred books in my library here that I’ve read, you know, and studied and, you know, just trying to learn from others. And, and then I’m fascinated by all the, the new, you know, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and just watching, you know, how they innovated and how they ran things and managed. It’s fascinating, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:32
Totally. I mean, people pour in their sometimes life’s work in a book, right? And so it’s like the, the most inexpensive, like 20, it’s like the best money. I spend 20 bucks for a book or you could buy them like $12 on audible. I was, I was saying, giving you a hard time about your book.
I’m waiting for it to come out on audible so that I can actually listen to it on two times speed. So you and your brother will have to get that going.
Jeff Bush: 07:00
Yes. Need to finish that project.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:02
Yeah. Before we get into the episode, just a quick word. You know about what we do. The number one thing in my life and business has always been relationships. So over the past 30 years, I’ve been obsessed with finding better ways to build relationships.
I mean, one of the ways you can do it is with, you know, Jeff’s software, actually BDR.ai. The way I’ve done it is, you know, through Rise25 and The Podcast Consultant, we help businesses launch run podcasts. We’re the easy button for people to do that. Second, through inspired insider. I help companies systematically get in front and stay in touch with their most valuable relationships.
So people give me a list of their 50 to 100, their best prospects, clients or partners, and we’ll actually nurture them with something called direct mail and more of like I would say it’s kind of content, Jeff, with a sweet treat in it, right? So it’s, you know, chocolate chip cookies or brownies or something with the, that physical content touch point. So we handle everything from the fulfillment, the follow up, the, you know, tasty treats and everything like that. So I found no better combination to profile the people that I admire on the podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail. So you can email [email protected] to learn more.
I also want to thank Stacy Lauren for introducing Jeff. She founded Do the Thing, which helps individuals and organizations turn ideas into action through interactive experiences and building meaningful connections. So you can check out DotheThingformula.com. I’m really excited, Jeff. I mean, it’s, there’s so much I can say, but he’s built five companies, sold for eight figure exit, kept 100% control, no debt.
He built revenue through hiring a thousand salespeople at the last five companies. We’re talking ad agency, AI company, mortgage, real estate, escrow, and even a wedding business. So Jeff, thanks for joining me. And maybe we’ll just start off with AI because there’s so many questions I have on really building a business, the scorecard, managing a sales team. But we’ll start with BDR.ai and what you do there.
And maybe we’ll work backwards.
Jeff Bush: 09:19
Sure, sure. So a quick description, BDR.ai business development rep. With some artificial intelligence, we basically go into LinkedIn and start connecting you to people through LinkedIn, through email marketing. It’s funny, you talk about a relationship. You know, LinkedIn connection is not a real strong relationship.
It’s a start, right? But, you know, it doesn’t mean a whole lot to people, you know, depending on the quality of the list and who you’re going after. But we work really hard to build the right list, send the right offer at the right time. And if we get those three things right, it’s a win. So, I mean, I started off two years ago.
I really didn’t like LinkedIn. I was never on it, didn’t really believe in it. But I had my ad agency. One of my sales reps reached out on LinkedIn to the CMO of Quicken Loans Rocket Mortgage, and got me a meeting in Vegas at a trade show that I was exhibiting at. And he happened to be going.
So I got to have coffee with him next door before he walked in the trade show. And we ended up selling $1 million deal to Rocket Mortgage as a as a test, quicken loans, the biggest mortgage company in the world. And I was like, wow, this LinkedIn thing can work. You know, certain people are really paying attention to it. So anyways, I started off with a thousand LinkedIn connections and now I have 10,000.
And they’re all quality, mainly CEOs, you know, people that might buy my product, so to speak. So yeah, we, we build LinkedIn, connecting, emailing, and then send messages and we’re taking it all the way through now. Booking meetings on your calendar with the right people, you know, verify who we’re going after that they’re your ICP. So we spend a lot of time up front getting the data right. That’s the hardest part.
And then get the message right. The message has got to be good. It can’t be too salesy or, or junk mail looking. So creating the message, creating the data and then turning on all the software and the AI that makes this thing works and nurtures these leads from cold to booking a meeting on your calendar so you can talk to someone or meet with them in person if it’s a local strategy. So that’s kind of what BDR does.
We, you know, bought the company a couple years ago, onboarded 200 clients, learned a lot of what works, what doesn’t work, and just keep fine tuning it. So my brother and I are business partners in this, in this business. So we’re we’re growing another company right now.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:46
Talk about the Buy versus build thought process because, you know, obviously you could hire developers and created this. What were you looking at at the time and what did you assess when you decided to buy?
Jeff Bush: 12:01
It’s funny, I just read the book buy versus build great little book, talking about how hard it is to do a startup and 90% of them fail. But if you could buy something that already has 100 customers and a system, it’s a lot easier to go in and expand that than just starting from scratch, you know? So yeah, we, we bought the business. It had been in business for seven years, but just kind of a father son, small company. And when I turned it on for me, I was a customer first.
I’m doing business consulting. I hand BDR.ai 1500 bucks for three months. I go, this is never going to work. You know, this is a joke at LinkedIn’s a joke. It’s so funny.
But I booked like five meetings the first month and they were pretty qualified people. And I’m, I was shocked. I’m like, oh my gosh, this thing actually works. And then I went and tweaked the data, tweaked the message, and I booked 20 to 30 meetings every month on my calendar for $500 a month worth of software. It’s crazy that, you know, just if you get the right list, make the right offer at the right time.
If you can line up those three things, it works. If any of those things are off, you’re done. It doesn’t work at all. And anyways, so start off as a customer bought the company. So yeah, buy versus build, you know, buying it to, to where it already had kind of a name and a trademark.
And I didn’t have to go through all that. So that was, that was better, you know, because most of my businesses, well, the wedding venue was operational when I bought it, but I started in my garage, just me on the phone for the mortgage company, which included real estate and escrow company, the ad agency. I was just an employee and helped build that company and my the owner had a big exit and I got a little check out of that. And then, you know, obviously overflow, my direct mail marketing agency was a startup from scratch. Me and the barn next to the horse making 100 phone calls a day and just grinding it out for the first two, three years that, you know, was really, really tough.
So anyways, buy versus build, I’ve done it both ways, you know?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:07
Yeah. And so the BDR, you talked about some key elements of any of them are missing. It doesn’t work. Right. And so when someone comes on to use this, what’s like some the onboarding look like, you know, how are they?
What are the first things that they’re doing? Because you talk about, I know even when you look at your overflow company, you spend a lot of money on, in a lot of time honing on the right list, especially for that time.
Jeff Bush: 14:35
Right, right. Yeah. I mean, we would mail out 10,000 letters and you’re spending $0.60 a piece. So six grand to send direct mail. postage is $0.30 and then printing data is $0.30.
And we would get, well, the average response rate on like mortgage or car dealer direct mail would probably be a 0.2. So 10,000 letters goes out. You’re only getting 20 phone calls or 20 people in the door, and we tweak the data and tweak the offer to where we could get 50 calls on 10,000, a half a percent response. And that one me, you know, ten of the top 20 mortgage companies in America using my services, you know, Loan Depot, Quicken Loans, names you’ve heard of, you know, spending millions of dollars with me just because I found a way to get a higher response rate. And that all came back to data.
You know, who’s the homeowners with high rates that need to refinance, that have equity, that have solar panels on their roof with a lease that I could pay off or credit card debt. So we, we just found better data and made a better offer, you know, at the right time, you know, timing was an issue. So we learned that and then perfected it, and went out and sold it to a lot of. I had a thousand mortgage companies and a thousand car dealers buying advertising from me. Those were my two verticals.
So.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:56
And that’s because you were in those spaces. So you knew the mortgage industry. And then I know early on you were, you know, going to car dealerships for marketing too.
Jeff Bush: 16:07
Well, my first job, I had a 35 millimeter camera with film in it around my neck, right? I’m 20 years old and I’m out taking pictures of cars, putting them in AutoTrader magazine. So my first job, you know, making two grand a month as an AutoTrader sales rep where you’re just collecting payment, driving out to houses, putting cars in the magazine. That was the only experience I had in the automotive space. I mean, so I didn’t know the car dealer world very well, but I kind of figured it out.
You know, different departments that buy different things and car dealers spend a lot of money on advertising.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:40
So Jeff, did it take discipline at that point when you were building the company larger and larger with overflow to stick in those niches, right? Because you’re like, oh, we, you know, we’re doing so well in mortgage and car dealers. Did you ever consider going into different niches? You’re like, we have more than enough that we need to do in this particular niche.
Jeff Bush: 17:04
Yeah. I mean, there was 16,000 car dealers last time I checked, and we had a thousand of them. So there was a lot of room for expansion there. There’s 100,000 mortgage companies in America, and we had a thousand clients, but there’s only 2 or 3000 mortgage companies that ever spend a dime on advertising. Most of them are all by referral out, bringing donuts to the realtor, begging them to send their buyers to do their loan.
So the mortgage business was actually, you know, maybe 3000 and we had 33% market share, but there was room to grow. And we were so dialed in with the data and the copy that we decided to just stay in those niches. But, you know, I knew eventually mortgage rates will go up and that business slows way down. So we tried we tried a smaller niche marketing for solar. In fact, I had Elon Musk’s company, SolarCity, that was his cousin’s company.
They spent a million bucks with me. That was fun doing the biggest solar company in the world. And so we picked up ten clients, but it didn’t respond as well. So it was just harder to scale. They weren’t having the success we had selling cars or selling mortgages.
So yeah, we were testing 3 or 4 different markets at all times, trying to break in somewhere else. You know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:18
I know you and your brother Jeff talk about irresistible offers, right? So I’d love to hear to you the components of irresistible offer. But on the mortgage, I mean, you’ve sent billions of direct mail. What offers? We’re working for that market that you probably tested and maybe ones that you thought would work that didn’t.
What were some irresistible offers on that front?
Jeff Bush: 18:42
I mean, most of the letters said, listen, we know you’re paying 6% interest on your mortgage. You’re paying two grand a month, we can get you down to 3.5% and get your house payment down to $1,600. That’s $400 a month. Savings times 12 is 4800. Or pay off your 21% credit cards, or go do your home improvement, or pay off the solar panels on your roof that you’re paying 20% interest on, or you’re leasing them.
So the offer always had to do with saving money and, and all the information we had on them, you know, or take your mortgage from a 30 year term down to a 20 year pay your house off early and how much interest you’d save. So we were putting those offers together. It was really about savings, you know, monthly payments, savings and yeah, and however we structured that, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:28
I mean, that also goes into the data, right? Because you had a lot of really good data, so you can make it very specific to those people. So talk about some of the components of when you think of an irresistible offer what people should be thinking about for their own company.
Jeff Bush: 19:48
I brought Alan Rosen, span out for a seminar, and he handed 20 sales reps a pencil and he said, tell me all the features and benefits of this pencil. And I think we went around the room and counted five. Oh, you can draw with it, you know, you can erase stuff. But then he took us through this drill where by the time we were done, an hour or two later, there was a hundred different uses of this pencil. Like you can pencil fight with it, you know, you can put it behind your ear, you can hold your hair up.
You know, it was crazy. All the features and benefits. So just going through that drill of, you know, what is this product going to do for you, you know, and, and, and really workshopping, you know, all the features and benefits of your product and then trying to put that into copy, writing it out so that it, it hits with people, you know, some people want to lower their payment monthly outgo, but some want to trim time off the term of their mortgage. Some have want to buy a boat, you know, so it was like putting all those offers. So you’d have five things on there to cover all five reasons somebody might call and we’d rank them kind of top to bottom.
The way we laid out the copy, you know, it was, you know, features and benefits just going through, I, I’m blown away how many of my clients don’t know why people buy from them. They think they know. And then I start interviewing, I get, but this client of yours doesn’t fit that at all. Why are they buying from you? It was it’s really an interesting drill to, to interview your customers and find out what they like about you, what drew them to you, why they buy, why they continue to buy.
So that kind of comes into features and benefits and how to write an offer, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:25
And, and Jeff, you talk about this in your, the direct mail company where again, when you were charging whatever, 30% premium to everyone else. And when you talk to your customers, why they bought and then you basically took that and implemented it. Can you talk a little bit about some of the data you got? And then, you know, you basically highlighted that for, you know, and train the staff, etc..
Jeff Bush: 21:53
Yeah, a couple of things that just ring a bell, like add on products. So we were a 60% margin company, which is pretty profitable, where the average direct mail company was margins were like 30%. So we were double. So how are we going to get this premium for direct mail when it’s just a printer and junk mail? I mean, people just take the cheapest bid.
But we started doing things like we put a toll free phone number on your mail piece. We’d record all the calls and send it to the sales manager to let them listen to the calls for training. And it was amazing how many calls they would listen to and end up letting people go because they weren’t converting. So we got into helping them convert more of the calls to sales. I don’t want to call it sales training, but recording phone calls.
We had a system where you’d put in a pin number off each letter that was unique, and it would pull up a picture of their house square footage value. Who’s on title? That was like a CRM system that we developed that our customers loved. You know, so I’m, I’m adding on toll free numbers and CRM and, and it just got to the point where it was hard for them to leave, even though they would tell me, I can buy this, I could save 20 grand a month off my bill. Jeff.
If I go to your competitor, but all these extra things that we added. So that was more in my mind product development. You know, what can we add on to this product to differentiate from everyone else? Right? I mean, we had a higher response rate.
So that was good. That was the most important thing. But all these other tools that we added on were, were very valuable, you know, to hold our margin and not have to give it away. And, you know, we’re in business to make money, right? We don’t want to, you know, just cut our price and break even and then pumping up the sales team with all these values to where they were able to hold a good margin instead of giving away the farm, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:40
And people.
Jeff Bush: 23:41
Tend to do.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:42
Jeff, for those add ons. I mean, people are paying additional for those things, right?
Jeff Bush: 23:46
Yeah. We got to the point where we just had a high price and it includes all this. It was not really an add on. It was just we we added it on to our product, took our price up and said, this is what you get when you buy from us, you know?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:57
Yep, yep. Because it just makes it stickier. Like, hey, you got the toll free number, you get the recorded calls, you get the CRM. You know, it just becomes very sticky at that point.
Jeff Bush: 24:09
And instead of going out and buying data, we brought, I think it was 80 million records in-house. There’s 40 million mortgages in America and 40 million people have their homes paid for 80 million homeowners. We brought the data in-house and started studying it, modeling it, you know, who’s responding and who’s converting and kind of working. So we were spending a lot of money, you know, quarter million dollars a year to have all that data in-house. And that allowed us to manipulate and look at who’s responding and cut the section of people that are never going to respond off the list.
And don’t don’t market to them, if that makes sense.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:45
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I think it comes down to, you know, you just want your clients to be as successful as possible, you know, with what you do. And that kind of goes with the BDR and where, where you’ve seen people drop the ball with the BDR.ai. Do you want to talk a little about that? And you’re like, okay, it’s almost I feel like it’s like the reluctant, fine, we’ll do this too, because it’s going to make you more successful even though it’s more work.
Where are people dropping the ball on the BDR.ai side?
Jeff Bush: 25:15
Yeah, we tell our clients, listen, you kind of have to log into LinkedIn like 15 minutes every day, but you don’t have to do it every day. You could do one hour a week and, and just go in and respond to these leads that were warming up. They’ve got questions. Maybe our AI can’t answer specific questions, and it’d be good to just manually respond, this is a big one. And you just say something intelligent to move this to work toward a to call.
Some of our clients wouldn’t log in for weeks. And we’re like, they’re not really using the software. They get busy, they don’t want to do it. So we started having to take that over and go, okay, we’re going to respond to everything on LinkedIn till we get it all the way through booking a meeting on your calendar. So it was interesting to see how many people would sign up agree to do this.
But then when it became work discipline, a lot of them wouldn’t do the work. And we’re like, why did you sign up? You know, like this is we told you what you have to do. So it was it’s interesting, you know, different clients that are, you know, love LinkedIn. And they were already logging in every day versus new people that, you know, they had a thousand followers on LinkedIn and now we get them to 10,000 and, you know, different people willing to do different things.
You know, not everybody’s a social seller and wants to do social media. So we had a lot of clients that we’ve taken all of it over, you know, because they weren’t willing to do charge a little more money and do it all so well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:36
It’s funny. It’s like, hey, it’s working. People are responding, but then no one’s responding back to them. So so it’s got to be kind of go all the way to. So do you find who are the best companies to be using BDR.ai?
Is it good if they have like a sales team? Because those people will be motivated, like who’s who are good, I guess customers, clients.
Jeff Bush: 26:57
You know, the solopreneurs who are out there joining like B and I and they’re speaking and they’re meeting people in person are have not been as good as somebody that has 3 or 4 salespeople that are used to using a little bit of LinkedIn, at least for research to reach out. So yeah, you know, companies with salespeople have seen and they have some sales ability, some sales training, they know what to say to book a meeting or they’ve worked leads before. Some people are like, I don’t want to work leads. They’re hard and they’re, you know, that’s not maybe that’s not our correct customer. If you’ve never.
I had a guy call me the other day and go, Jeff, I’ve got like five leads and, and, and I have to respond to them. What do I say? And I’m like, what do you say? You don’t know how to sell your product. Like, not even to the point of like taking someone with some interest and moving them towards a phone call.
That was shocking to me. And, and so yeah, people with sales ability that have responded to leads or a CEO that has a sales team that’s used to working leads and turning them into sales, you know, I guess that’s, that’s not everybody. If you’re used to working off referral and people tell me that, oh, I don’t want to work LinkedIn, I want to work off referral. I’m like, well, how many referrals are you going to get this year? Five.
And you want to get 50 new customers and you only have five referrals. You gotta do something different. You’re going to have to learn how to take a lead and turn it into. And then that person, if you do a good job, we’ll refer you. You’ll build your referral base.
Yeah. In fact, when I was doing 100 loans a month in my mortgage business, I always used to say, I’m spending $200,000 a month on direct mail and I’m funding 100 loan, so it’s costing me two grand a loan to be in this mortgage business. And and we’re, we’re making 8 or $10,000 a loan. So the math, math, which was good, but. I, I, I found out later that there was only about 60 loans a month coming from the marketing.
The other 40 were referrals from the marketing. So you build more referrals by getting more clients. And but it was more expensive than I thought. But if I wouldn’t have spent. You know, I sat down with my CPA one year, I think I, I spent 2.4 million on marketing and I made $2.4 million that year.
And my CPA goes, you’re crazy to spend 2.4 million on marketing. The average mortgage client of mine that I do taxes for spends 20 grand a year. I’m like, well, how much do they make? Look at the bottom number. I made 2.4 and I spent 2.4.
I made ten times the money that these guys did. So why would I take your advice, Mr. CPA go back and do my taxes and stop giving me business advice, you know? Friend of mine. But anyways, that, that rang true. I, I found another guy that was doing a thousand loans a month and made $10 million.
I go, what did you spend on advertising? 10 million? It was shocking. We were making exactly what we spent. And some people are just afraid to spend money and hire salespeople to convert and manage that.
That whole thing, you know, it’s not for everyone.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:57
And if you’ve always done a good job, kind of reverse engineering the numbers. I remember hearing you talk about when you wanted to duplicate yourself and you were kind of figuring out, okay, hiring salespeople, right? Can you talk about what were the numbers you were going over in your head? And obviously, you’ve hired thousands of salespeople at this point. What were you thinking as far as the math goes?
And, okay, I need to hire this number of salespeople, etc..
Jeff Bush: 30:28
So when I started the most recent company, the eight figure exit, the one that I sold. I told myself, I want to get this company to $10 million and sell it for 10 million. That was my goal from the day I started. So it took me, I think, the first year I sold $1 million worth of business, but I was working hard and I’m above average sales person, not not great top producer, but above average. So I kind of reverse engineered and said, okay, if I sold a million, I bet I could get 20 salespeople to sell 500,000.
So I kind of went into knowing that here’s how many salespeople I need and to hit this revenue goal and just work backwards. And yeah, it’s funny, you know, eight years later, I had 20 salespeople and we did $40 million in sales, and one of my sales reps sold $20 million worth of mail, and I paid him 15% commission. I w him for $3 million. My top sales rep. So these salespeople, I found ended up doing way more than I ever did.
So I duplicated myself. And then they got better, you know? But anyways, that was that was a fun year. So. And then whatever.
Got to sell it for more than what I expected. I, I sold it at 20 million. And then the next year after I sold it, it doubled to 40 million. And I was still there doing everything that was a little bit not perfect timing. When you sell a business, it’s hard to know when is at the top and you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:51
So it was it’s a good outcome for everyone. I’m sure, you know, talk about hiring sales people and what attributes you look for. I, I, I kind of think of it as like a Hall of fame baseball player. You know, you can bat 300 and still be a Hall of Famer type of situation. Yeah.
What, what kind of attributes do you look for in a sales people in a sales person?
Jeff Bush: 32:18
You know, it’s funny, I when we sold a business in the late 90s that I was running, I had 40 salespeople and the guys who bought it came out from Chicago and they said on an interview to me and said, how’d you find all these top producers? And I’m like, top producers. These are not top producers. These are average, but I do a lot of marketing to make it easier to sell, you know? So I took average people and made them above average.
It wasn’t like I went out and found all these top producers. You still have the, you know, the 80/20 rule that’s you’re not going to change, right? You fire the 80% and you’re left back to 80/20 again. So I mean, I learned that principle. So yeah, hiring sales people, gosh, I found a system that worked for me, you know, and one of the things I did, I’m big on the disc profile, the DISC, right?
So it got to the point where if you didn’t have a sales personality like some D and some I, you wouldn’t even get an interview. So I would screen through people. If you don’t have a sales personality, I, I can teach you sales in our product, but I can’t teach you personality and I just found the high DI sales reps were killers, you know. You know, 77DI would chase those people to get them in the door.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:36
So part of the interview process, they’d have to fill out like a disc assessment.
Jeff Bush: 33:40
Yeah. Disc assessment. And I’m looking for high D or high I. One of the two if they had both. That’s a superstar.
I learned that after hiring a thousand salespeople and I proved it. And so I was big on personality profile disc, you know, and, and if we were working trade show booths and people were coming to us, you could get away with salespeople that weren’t so aggressive because you have all this warm traffic coming in and they could build rapport and, and still get business. But we were out chasing the business. We were cold calling email, LinkedIn, you know, outbound dialing. And that that takes a real driven person with some influence, you know, drive for D and I for influence.
So we would look for that, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:25
What, where do your I don’t know if you know the answer to this, but where do you and your brother fall each on the disc profile?
Jeff Bush: 34:32
You know what? I don’t know my brother. I know he’s got some high eye because he loves the public speak and he can get on stage and just kill it. And I don’t really like that too much. I’m not really the speaker.
I’m a lot more introverted. He’s more extroverted, but I’m a DC, I’m a I’m a driven analytical, you know, so I drive for the result, but I’m not very nice. I’m not super friendly. I don’t have the high eye. I’m not the life of the party.
My wife’s a high DI and everybody loves her. They don’t really love me too much. It’s not like I’m. And and so anyways, I, I don’t know, I haven’t really looked at the Davids, but I know he’s got a lot of high eye and he’s pretty analytical. He might be an IC.
That’s my guess.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:11
So it’s like hiring the sales people and then talk about managing. You know, you have a lot you had a lot of things baked into from like an accountability perspective. What were some things that you did there?
Jeff Bush: 35:26
Yeah. I mean, I was big on just managing activity, you know, but I would give them things to do that they would get results out of. So. Okay. If you call this person and say this, you’re going to get an appointment and you’re going to go pick up a client that you might make five, ten grand a month off of an income.
So I was big on just managing activity. You know, we had the right people to call. We had the right script. So do this. But if you’re not willing to do the work, I mean, I hired a thousand salespeople, I don’t know, 500 didn’t make it.
You know, it was just I used to talk about I had churn, I had, I’d probably lose 50% of the sales team every year. And people would. Well, that’s terrible. And I’m like, well, McDonald’s is worse. And they’re pretty successful.
You know, it’s like it was just get them in. And if they’re willing to do the work, we’ll train them and invest time in them. We cared about them. We pumped a lot of money into training and motivation to keep them. And they really appreciated that the the good ones would stick around and work, because not everybody was investing in the sales team and really cared about them.
I felt like we did, and they knew that and they could feel it. And so they worked a little harder. And then they ended up making more money than they ever made before. So that was fun. That was probably the the funnest thing about sales management.
I was a sales manager for ten years before I was a CEO business owner. So I knew that part of it. And just watching people come in making 60 grand a year, and then three years later, they’re making 180,000 a year. And it was fun. That was really rewarding.
I got a lot out of that. See people grow.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:00
What about from the training perspective? What kind of things did you did you do? And, and there are certain resources that you recommended that people look at from a sales training perspective.
Jeff Bush: 37:10
I did a five day training when people started. It was Monday through Friday. It was exhausting. We would teach them everything. We built a playbook and open it up and take them through an outline and give them the book objections, products, pricing.
And I remember when I did that, how appreciative the sales people were because a lot of companies hire sales people and go, here’s your business cards. Go get em, Tiger. And they do nothing. And it was it was like they knew these companies that they went to work for with zero training, really didn’t care about them, didn’t care about their success. They saw how much time we put into our training, and they knew they were at a good company with with good people who cared.
That training was so important, and I got to the point where I’d bring in outside vendors, and so they’d probably see four different people throughout the day. So it wasn’t all me. I would do two hours a day for five days training, and then my sales managers and our vendors, and they would learn a little bit, and then we’d take them over to our warehouse and show them how production ran. And so it was a pretty elaborate training and five days. I remember at the end, it was like eight hours a day or six hours a day of training.
Their head was spinning at the end of five days. So we, I think we changed it to like four hours a day for two weeks because it was just too much to take in. They’re only going to remember 10 or 20% of it, but at least if they got the the important parts, you know what?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:28
How did they utilize scripts there at your company? Did they. Was there something they can reference or were they just from the training? They just kind of developed their own methodology. How did that work?
Jeff Bush: 38:45
Scripts are funny. I know one script could book ten meetings and another script might book two. So they’re kind of important, but it was always kind of a pet peeve of mine, like make it up as you go, like depending, you know, I just, I gave them some basic scripts to use, but I would encourage them to try to put your personality into this because this doesn’t work for everyone, you know. So yeah, we had some basic scripts, but I would let them sit down with salespeople and shadow and listen to what they were saying, and they’d go listen to five salespeople and go, I like that guy or like that gal. What she said is, that’ll work for me.
That’s more my personality. So it’s hard to give someone a script because people are like, Jeff, you just have a bunch of telemarketers. We’re making a lot of outbound calls and I go, how many telemarketers do you know that make 3 million a year? I mean, that’s a pretty highly paid telemarketer, right? But seriously, it was mainly over the phone.
It was interesting, you know, how to how to get through. And a lot of the marketing we did that, we would mail stuff to him before we call.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:47
So it’s a little bit of a warmer of a touch point as opposed to.
Jeff Bush: 39:51
We would mail a shoe and with a note, we’re trying to get our foot in the door. And that one worked phenomenal. We’d call and they’d be laughing. I got the shoe in my desk, you know, when do I get the other shoe? And, you know, it was converse.
It was vans, it was Walmart, cheap shoes, slip ons. But California, you know, black and white checkerboard vans. You know, it was it was fun to just door open in some of the big prospects that would get us phone calls, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:16
Are there any I love hearing people’s favorite lumpy mail stories. So shoe any other like, like.
Jeff Bush: 40:23
One of my one of my best I stole from Dan Kennedy and it was called Lumpy Mail. And I would mail a letter to somebody that had 20,000 in credit card debt, and I put in a razor in the envelope. And I’d say, we’re trying we want to erase your debt. And they get that lumpy mail. And it would be sometimes I think we’d even hand address it and put a stamp on it.
Huge response rate. That was fun. That was a big winner. Erase your dad. Just the eraser that goes on top of a pencil.
You can buy them for like $0.02 a piece. And we’re hand inserting them about that lumpy mail post office hated us because it wouldn’t go through their automation equipment. So we had to start taping the eraser to the piece of paper down low so it wouldn’t jam the post office machines, but that was a good one. Erase your debt. The shoes.
We had a bank bag program where I went and bought all these bank bags with the zipper, and put something in there and put a label on it that was phenomenal. That was some of my own direct mail.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:18
Those are one of my favorites. I’ve sent those to you. Oh, yeah. That’s. Yeah, they’re gonna open that regardless.
You know, I feel like those green bank bags and people visualizing that cash in it, that’s like, actually it’s a, it’s like stamped on the outside, right? So it’s basically yeah, yeah.
Jeff Bush: 41:35
Label outside and, and postage on the outside. That was a fun one. Yes. Those were, were some of the best ones, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:44
No, thanks for sharing that. I love the shoe one. That’s, that’s, that’s a fun one. The I’d love to talk through a specific example, you know, from the BDR.ai side. And there was someone in Saint Louis that that use it.
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Jeff Bush: 42:01
Yeah. So we have these Vistage chairs that their job is to put 15 people in a room every month for eight hours, CEOs that are all going to share ideas and financials and give each other advice and bring up issues that are happening and get people’s advice on how to solve issues, but I think Vistage is like 1800 a month and it’s eight hours of your day, once a month, which is hard. It’s a CEO’s to try to get them time and the money. But we had a guy in, in Saint Louis that had, I don’t know, 7 or 8 people in his Vistage group. And he signed up with BDR.
And after six months of paying, I don’t know, like $500 a month because I put six people in my group. So LinkedIn is connecting him to CEOs, and then he’s going out and meeting at Starbucks, having coffee. And, you know, he probably got 40 leads and got six converted into the group. So that was a big success story, a, a vistage chair. We’ve got about 20 or 30 of those guys around the country using us, and then some of our EOS traction clients, you know, going out and connecting them to CEOs, trying to find people that maybe recently read the book Traction.
So we know they have an interest that’s been successful, or we have some CEOs that are onboarding in their package, I think is like 20 grand a year. That’s not cheap. And it’s a big commitment of time building those scorecards five grand a quarter. So generating, you know, leads. And these are tough people to get a hold of because it’s kind of minimum $3 million company with 15, 20 employees all the way up to 5100 million.
These are CEOs of big companies that are not easy to get through to. They’re getting a lot of messages on LinkedIn, a ton of emails. They’re screening everything. So trying to get in there with a message that will resonate to where we get some hand raisers. Hey, you got my attention.
Let’s talk. You know, that’s what we’re looking for.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:57
Jeff, I have one last question. First of all, I want to thanks for sharing your your lessons. There’s so, so much we could get into. People can check out BDR.ai. My last question is just, you know, you and your brother have a lot of great content on the site, so I encourage people to check out the resources.
You know, they have some videos, they have a podcast also that people can check out in a Scale University. I know you talk a lot about you and your brother. Talk about the playbook, right? And so maybe something you can highlight from, you know, some of the information about the playbook. I mean, there’s a business builders playbook.
People can can check that out and there’s a video there. But maybe one important piece to highlight from, you know, the playbook that you’ve, you’ve been in the trenches with this over the past couple of decades.
Jeff Bush: 44:49
So yeah, one of the big things is if we’re generating leads for your sales team and they’re not converting the leads is building a scorecard to track conversion. I mean, I used to send 100 calls to Ron and he would close 20 loans and I’d send 100 calls, the same exact calls to Bob sitting next to him, and he would close two. So if they can’t convert leads you, you try to train them and see if you can fix it. If you can’t fix it, you got to get them out. So it’s part of the business builder playbook is if you have a sales team generating leads and you’re spending all this money, it’s got a pencil.
So a scorecard to track conversion ratios is big, big, big. And then, you know, remarketing department, some of these people go cold and you have to call them back a month later. Just everything I’ve built in for companies B2B, B2C, the wedding business, the mortgage company, all of that is part of what we help them build just so that they have a plan that’s going to, you know, execute into growth in their revenue goals. Where do you want to be in five years? Let’s start this.
You know, how many leads do you need? How many salespeople do we need? Let’s do the math backwards and build this thing, kind of engineer it and then follow this plan, you know, helping them with a plan because a lot of people don’t really, really have that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:07
So I’ll point people anywhere specifically. We should have people point people to on the BDR.ai website.
Jeff Bush: 46:15
I mean, just home page and fill out the contact form. My calendar is pretty open. You know, I mean, it’s full, but next week it’s open. So I’m a week out, booked out. But I love talking to people and just walking through.
What do you sell and who do you sell to? If you can correctly answer those two things, I think we can help you generate leads and sales and get an ROI on a, on a spend and start growing it, you know? So what do you sell? What do you who do you sell to? You know, and understanding that once we have an idea that we can build the right list, build the right offer, you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:47
I want to be the first one to thank you. Check out BDR.ai. More episodes of the podcast. We’ll see you next time. And Jeff, thanks so much.
Jeff Bush: 46:55
Thanks, Jeremy.
