Jeremy Weisz 4:08
And I’m thinking okay, I have a seven and 10 year old. I’m like, how would I be feeling right now as a parent? If my seven year old, had not spoken yet?
Yeah.
So tell me the little bit of the background behind that.
Matt Sunshine 4:24
Yeah, I didn’t speak. I mean, I was Audible, but I didn’t mean I didn’t speak words. And I am.
Jeremy Weisz 4:33
Now you’re a public speaker. I mean, the other day I was watching you give a talk on inbound. Yeah. Okay. So it’s a big picture. So
Matt Sunshine 4:43
yeah, my family thinks it’s absolutely hilarious that I speak my they’ll jokingly say, you know, you didn’t speak until you’re seven and then you haven’t shut up ever since. Yeah. The, I don’t know. There was a lot of concern about the reason why I didn’t speak and obviously my parents took me to all the doctors that you could imagine taking your child to if they didn’t speak. And eventually a neurologist said, You know what? It’s actually not that uncommon, especially in boys on why don’t you get him involved in sports and let him ride his bike and climb trees and play in the parks. And, and probably by the time he’s seven, eight years old, it’ll all come together. And again, I was Audible, but I just didn’t make words I wasn’t able to speak. And by the time I was in speech class until fourth grade, um, and then it was around fourth grade when I was okay. And yeah, it’s just weird, right? They
Jeremy Weisz 5:44
ever figure that out? Why?
Matt Sunshine 5:46
Why it was, it was, um, my wife’s dad happened to be my father in law happened to be a neurologist, and when when I started dating my now wife, and I remember asking him about it. And he said, You know, it has to do with motor skills and development, and some people just takes a little bit longer. So yeah, so
Jeremy Weisz 6:08
how does that affect you with your like, now, if you think back, like you had to have a certain amount of grit or you have to just, you think back to that? Well, it wasn’t like that, or maybe not. I don’t know, how do you think it affects you? With the way you are now?
Matt Sunshine 6:25
Yeah, you know, I guess you don’t really know, because you don’t know any different, right? I mean, I do know that as a child, even when I was having a hard time speaking that my parents were very clear with me that Matt, no one can understand you. They didn’t make it seem like I was the center of the universe. And everyone else was going to have to figure out how to deal with Matt, it was Matt, you’re going to have to figure out how to deal with everyone else. And I think I think that’s really something that is a characteristic that the world doesn’t center around me. And it’s my job to, you know, be a participant in this in this thing.
Jeremy Weisz 7:09
Yeah, I love that. Um, another key part of your story, which I find interesting, I believe, if my facts are straight, is that your wife precedes you at The Center for Sales Strategy?
Matt Sunshine 7:23
Yes. Yes.
Jeremy Weisz 7:25
So how did that come? How did that come about? I mean, obviously, you did some work with them. But yeah, how is that dynamic play in the beginning? And then now?
Matt Sunshine 7:35
Yeah, it’s a great question. So the I was a client of the Center for Sales Strategy, I was the director of sales, recruitment and training and at the company at the radio company that I worked for. And we were working with we owned at the time, the company owned radio stations in seven cities across the country. And we hired the Center for Sales Strategy. And we were working closely with those guys. And I was probably the the main point person, and I really enjoy I thought, I thought what they were doing for us was really best in class. I mean, they they took us the they took us from being accidentally good to intentionally great. And I always love that, like it gave us a system and a process. So one day, my and my wife, who had been a recruiter for both the University of Missouri and then for SMU here in Dallas, she had thought about going back and becoming a teacher, and got her teaching certificate to do that. But then what happened is, we got pregnant and we had we had twins. And so she became a stay at home mom, very entrepreneurial, doing some created some small businesses, The Center for Sales Strategy, reached out to a bunch of the their clients and said, Hey, we’re looking to hire a talent analyst, someone that can help identify talent in potential sales people. Does anyone know anyone? And I, I remember, I called up Beth and I said, Hey, this sounds like you. Are you interested? And so when she did that, I did say when she was interviewing, because I knew the owners of the company at the time. I did say, Listen, if you hire my wife, does that mean that I can’t work there? And they said, they said, No, one day if you ever want to, we’ll see what happens. So but Yes, she is. She was here two years before I got here.
Jeremy Weisz 9:38
So then, tell me about the transition to going from radio to The Center for Sales Strategy.
Matt Sunshine 9:45
Yeah, so like I was saying, I when I was in radio, you know, the the company I worked for we had about 100 salespeople across the enterprise. I thought that we were good but I don’t Do you think that we had a system or a process or a structure, everyone kind of just did it their own way. And by the way, we had really good people. So doing it your own way, produce lots of good results. But I wanted something a little bit more predictable. So I hired The Center for Sales Strategy, the company I worked, and I got to know them really well. And I really enjoyed what they did for us, and really started implementing at a high level what they were showing us to do. The company I worked for the radio broadcaster that I worked for sold on the it was privately owned company, and it sold in tooth out in May of 2006. When that happened, I had a choice I had to make, do I want to stay with the new company? Do I want to go to a different company or start my own business? And I and I considered all of those things when when The Center for Sale Strategy reached out and said, Hey, we’d like you to come on board with us. I was like this was meant to be I knew that I knew what they could do. And I have used the product for 10 years made sense.
Jeremy Weisz 11:04
I want to hear about the thing. No, you have grown the service line. Since then. What were the services then? And now what are the services?
Matt Sunshine 11:15
Yeah, so back in 2006. People knew us for really two things. One was customer focus selling. And the other was something called talent focused management and customer focus selling was a sales process. And that, that we taught sales, training, and customer and talent focus management was the idea that each person is an individual, and that you should, you should do all you can to uncover what their talents are. And then help them to soar with their strengths by giving them an inbuilt individual focused. Coaching strategy, rather than coaching everyone in holding everyone to the exact same thing, work individually so that you can get Jeremy to be the best Jeremy and Matt to be the best, Matt. Um, and that was what were the two significant products that we were known for and loved.
Jeremy Weisz 12:17
So, Matt, someone’s like, Okay, this sounds amazing. I want to do the customer focus selling, how does it work with you,
Matt Sunshine 12:25
so what you need to know about what was going on in 2006. And then I can transition to what we’re doing now and how it’s different. And how it’s the same. Um, back in 2006, there was really two ways that that in the broad, and for the most part, our clientele at CSS, the Center for sales strategy was the was the media industry, radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, cable operators. That was our world. And so there were two ways that people sold either a was product focused, or B was customer focused. And product focus just basically meant you walked in and you lead with, hey, I work for this radio station, we have this person doing morning drive, you need to buy these commercials, because we’re great. And we’re ranked number one. And people love us, you know,
Jeremy Weisz 13:22
product. Like we’re Howard Stern, you want to buy an ad and you want to Howard to read it. Right? Well,
Matt Sunshine 13:27
let me tell you. Yeah, let me tell you how great Howard is. And how many other people think he’s great, too. we flip the script and said, You know what, we’re going to focus on your business, what is it that you’re trying to accomplish? What is it that you need to have happen in your business to get results, allow me to look at all of my resources and assets and come back to you with a solution that will help you to get the results you need. That’s customer focus. And while that seems like well, why wouldn’t everyone do that? That’s not the way it’s traditionally done. And we were changing that.
Jeremy Weisz 14:06
So do you typically then what does an engagement look like? You tryna you training them? Or you you have someone uh, how does that work when you input help the company implement it?
Matt Sunshine 14:16
Yeah, so a significant change happened probably around 2008 2009 in our business. And one of the reasons why this happened is that because of the recession, business was down the broadcast sales industry was down year after four years in a row. And I believe in 2008 or 2009, it was down like 18%. And we knew that we needed to change and so instead of our thinking ourselves as a training company that provided sales training, we said we’re going to think of ourselves as a revenue company. Right? We are going to help businesses grow revenue. And so when you help businesses grow revenue, you Stop thinking about sales training as your product and you start thinking about growing revenue as the solution that you sell, and in training is a portion of it. Well, okay, great, but maybe hiring and selecting really good salespeople is a portion of that. And to that we built out talent assessments that our clients could use that were, that were validated in science instruments, that that really could predict whether or not someone had success. Or maybe they needed individual coaching. Or maybe they needed help with their compensation design, or organizational structure, or anything having to do with growing revenue for a business very different than just providing sales training, we still provide the sales training, but that’s not at the core, the core is generate revenue.
Jeremy Weisz 15:52
So now today, fast forward to today, um, you have talk about some of the services you offer, one of them being Li g two.
Matt Sunshine 16:02
Yeah, so what happened is this, so the services, first, I’ll tell you the services, then we can talk about how it happened. So the services would be everything from helping them to select better people with a talent assessment. Implementing a repeatable, predictable sales process that they can use, coaching and developing people to their strengths on lead generation, because that’s probably one of the biggest, most significant hurdles right now is the junk generation, organizational structure, sales enablement, tools, employee engagement, because you can have the greatest, we actually just started up a division called up your culture because you can have the greatest people in the most talented sales, most talented sales department in the world, you can have a perfect structure, all the sales enablement, resources you could ever imagine all the leads flowing in, but if nobody likes where they work, and no one is engaged, well, then you’re never gonna have the revenue success that you want. So our product offerings have changed. So now we offer all of those sales enablement sales structure, individual coaching, online training, online resources, workshop, virtual workshops, in person workshops, everything centered around grow helping a business grow their revenue.
Jeremy Weisz 17:33
Matt, you know, it’s funny, because I was listening to you, you were chatting with Beth about this topic. And I thought was interesting the example she gave, which was, you know, I like the distinction between happy and engaged because you gave an example of going in a store. And the The staff was chit chatting amongst themselves and totally happy that they’re, they’re happy with their peers. But they were totally neglecting customers who are coming through the door. I’m like, Ah, that makes perfect sense. You want happy? and engaged? Right? So I like that you kind of make that distinction.
Matt Sunshine 18:08
It’s a big deal, because I think so many businesses right now are, especially as as businesses are coming up with their return to office or not returned to Office strategy, whatever that is, and there’s no right way to do it. There’s lots of ways. But I think one of the things that everyone talks about is the happiness quotient. And happy is important. But happy without engaged is a big problem. It’s a and it’ll become a revenue problem really fast.
Jeremy Weisz 18:38
So LeadG2 because it’s not easy to I mean, this has been an evolution where you release these services, but it’s not easy. You need processes, you need people, you need a lot of stuff to release this. And, you know, so talk about a little bit the evolution of LeadG2
Matt Sunshine 19:00
Yeah, so LeadG2 started because, well, there was no intention to start an inbound marketing agency or sale, an agency like that. The intention was, how do we grow the Center for Sales Strategy. And we’re very proud of the fact that we retain 90% of our customers year in and year out, and our average client has been with us for seven years. But when we looked at how we were going to grow, the growth strategy for the Center for Sales Strategy for many years, was a sales leader or a business owner left, who was a client of ours left the job that they were currently working at, to go to another company. And when they went to that new company, they called us up and they said, Hey, I’m over here now. Can we work together? And we said, Sure, yeah, let’s work together. And that works. By the way that still works today. Except For the fact that that’s not a predictable growth strategy, you don’t want to like tie the success of your business to the fact that you’re hoping people leave their current job to go somewhere else. So we decided we need to get intentional about growing our business. And what we learned. What we knew is that when we shared our expertise, when we were helpful when we help people when we stood up on a stage or when we, when we talked to people and said, Hey, let me help you with your business. They would come back for more and say, hey, how can I? How can we work together permanently. And so we started to do inbound marketing and we started to work with HubSpot. I chose HubSpot, because I found it to be the I looked at all the software out there, it was the one I enjoyed using the most. And so we went with HubSpot. And for the first, you know, six months, it was difficult for me, this wasn’t my full time job. I was doing this stuff at 10 o’clock at night to two o’clock in the morning when I was when I was working and doing my other job during the day. And we started to see good results, we started to see really good results. So much so that I said to the guys that I work with, you know, we should start an agency to help businesses do what we’re doing. Like if we’re really this revenue performance company, why wouldn’t we help our clients with lead generation and thought leadership and sales enablement, tools? That’s a natural evolution of our business, we should do that. And about a year after we did it for ourselves, we stood up this agency and said, let’s give it a shot. And today we’re one of the larger HubSpot agencies out there. That’s amazing. Yeah, it’s and and we still use it, we’re still our big, we’re still a client of ourselves.
Jeremy Weisz 21:54
You know, with, I’m interested here also, you know, because I listen, you’re one of your talks to inbound. And I like, how you talk about talent, and how you talk about Michael Phelps. And like, even if I swam for like, every day, for the next 10 years, there’s I, I’m not gonna win a gold medal, I probably won’t even make the Olympic team and probably won’t beat the junior high kid or whatever. But I love to hear about the leadership internally with the The Center for Sales Strategy, because you kind of rose up the ranks, and then how that transition of leadership was for for you, as you started to, you know, go up the ranks.
Matt Sunshine 22:38
Yeah, absolutely. So The Center for Sales Strategy was started by a gentleman by the name is Steve Marx, almost 38 years ago, actually, almost 39 years ago. And it was his desire that the company would survive him right when we live on beyond him. And so it becomes incumbent on the leadership of the company to always be looking to grow and groom, the successors. So Steve had a person that worked for him named Jim and another guy named John and Jim and John bought the company from Steve. And then when I came on board, I had expressed interest from day one that hey, one day, I would like to be an owner here. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. But I would like to do that. And Jim hopes wanted to move it towards retirement. And so he came to john and to me and said, I’d like to sell my shares to you. One of the things that we did after I purchased Jim share, so john, and I own the company, one of the things that we did is we created a partner group of people inside of our company, there’s six people that are on this partner group, and we make the decisions for how we run the company. You might think of it as a law firm, they have a management committee that kind of runs the law firm. Well, that’s kind of the way The Center for Sales Strategy operates in the fact that there’s this partner group of six people that make a lot of important strategic decisions on what the company does and what it won’t do and what it stands for. And then we’re extremely transparent with everybody and we share We are proud of the fact that for a company our size, we’ve had a lot of people come up in the ranks, which is kind of nice, like doing that.
Jeremy Weisz 24:37
One thing I wrote down too is you know, from five years ago at 25 people to today, around 45 people talk about the best I mean, that’s kind of what you do as a company, you help other people do this to see you do it for yourself, but I’d love to hear some of the top tips for growing them and also some of the challenges of growing
Matt Sunshine 25:01
Yeah, well, I’ll tell you that the hard part for us is focusing on ourselves, where we are really good at helping other people grow their business, and sometimes neglect ourselves. And I think that’s probably fairly common. Right? take too much time working in your business on a time working on your business,
Jeremy Weisz 25:21
I think I had so I had someone the, the President CEO of SiteTuners on and he does conversion optimization and, and I asked him, I go, listen, I know sometimes I don’t know the same wherever the cobbler shoes don’t have cobblers kids don’t have shoes or whatever. And I go, um, you know, he goes, it’s funny, Jeremy and he said this on an interview. A couple years ago, I, we revamped our site, we neglected her say, for so long. So a couple years ago, we’re like, we need to focus on us. And we actually did for us what we do for our clients. But it was a long time, he’s like before we actually just zeroed in focused on ourselves. So totally,
Matt Sunshine 26:05
one of the things that we did is we looked at, we made a list of all the important jobs to be done inside the company. Like, okay, who’s in charge of sales, who’s in charge of marketing, who’s in charge of customer experience, who’s in charge of talent, who’s in charge have made a long list of 15, you know, 20 things, whatever it was, all the things, regardless if there was a title or not just who is in charge of this, and then we went through and we said, okay, let’s write down the name, or the names of the people that are in charge of it. You know, content creation, customer content, right? So we write down the name. And so what we look for two things, does someone’s name appear? Too many times? That’s a problem. And are there some things that there are too many names next to so when it came to sales, for example, who’s in charge of sales, we have like four people’s names next to sales? Well, four people can’t be in charge of something, one person should be in charge of something. So by doing that, by looking at the jobs to be done, and then identifying who’s appearing too many times, and what jobs have too many names next to it, we were able to share that up. So now we have a head of marketing, we have a head of sales, right? We have a head of customer experience, we have a head of talent. And it’s a when we started doing that we saw growth happen. What are some of it? Now? It’s not all one person’s job. Yeah, I
Jeremy Weisz 27:49
love that. What are some of the challenges? You know, I’ve you I’m sure you’ve heard this many times, and people come to you go, it’s really hard to hire salespeople, it’s really hard to keep sales people. What do you say to them? What are some of the strategies that they should think about? Or what do you say to those those people in companies?
Matt Sunshine 28:10
What I say is you’re doing it wrong. It’s it’s not it. So it’s simple. It’s not easy, right? It’s simple. It’s not easy. So here’s why I say that, I can tell you exactly what you need to do. And if you’ll commit to doing it, it’ll work. It’s kind of like losing weight. Right? I mean, it just, there’s
Jeremy Weisz 28:37
only a few ways to do this just burn calories, right? Or you don’t eat as many calories.
Matt Sunshine 28:45
Right? It’s just a science experiment. I mean, that’s all it is burn more than you take in and you’re going to lose weight. Same with, like hiring. So you have to have a big talent bank, which means you have to constantly be looking and constantly be interviewing. I’ve, I’ve shared this story with lots of people when I was a sales manager, I interviewed regularly, two to three people a week, every week. So I interviewed between 100 and 150 salespeople every single year. And when you only have to hire three or four people a year, but you’re interviewing 100 250, you got a lot of choices, and then use a validated talent instrument to help you to determine Do they have the right talents, learn how to read a resume or looked on LinkedIn to see if they have the right experience. And then roleplay with them or give them a pass to see if they have the skills that they need to have the develop skills that they need to have in order to have success, but they have the talent, the experience and the skills. They’re going to be successful. Interview enough people so you have a large talent bank And then commit to growing and developing them once they join your team. If you do that, they’ll stay forever.
Jeremy Weisz 30:10
I feel very easily caught up in Matt, like the reactive mode as opposed to proactive. Like you’re, you’re probably super busy. I imagine when you were interviewing two to three a week is like, Oh my god, like, I don’t really need someone right now, it’s probably very easy just to not do that. What What gave you the discipline or, or put that in your mind that, Okay, I need to just do this no matter what,
Matt Sunshine 30:34
two things, you’re right, it becomes a habit. And once it becomes a habit, you won’t not do it either. Right. So just as it’s hard to do it, it’s hard to stop doing it once it’s your thing. So, um, I’ve done a lot of endurance sports over the years, one of the things that you learn when you do an endurance sport, especially let’s let’s just say a marathon. First thing to do when you can do a marathon is tell everybody, you’re doing a marathon, right? Because then everyone holds you accountable. Everyone’s gonna ask, So Jeremy, how’s the training going for the marathon? You don’t want to say, oh, not doing that anymore, right? When it came to recruitment, I told everyone what I was going to do, I told everybody, I’m gonna start interviewing two to three people a week. The other thing is the state where I worked, we had ridiculous really large turnover, we had about 40% turnover. And that’s because we were not selecting the very best people. And we were not growing and developing them the best that we could. And I said, we need to put a stop to this. And I knew that it started with recruiting and selecting the very best people and then growing and we reduced it to 17% in one year, with 40% to 17% in one year. That’s a really, really big deal. I mean, that saves the company. Lots and lots of money. Um, the the Yes, I was busy. Everyone is busy. You learn to make it a priority, and you do it. But I committed to it. I absolutely committed to doing it.
Jeremy Weisz 32:07
Yeah. So someone listening right now, you would recommend, just do it on a regular basis, whatever that works for that person, just put it put make it a habit to do it on a regular basis. Maybe it’s not two a week, maybe it’s maybe one or two a month.
Matt Sunshine 32:24
Right? The Matt I needed I needed to do based on my needs based on our structure. Two to three a week was what was required. But you could easily say, Well, I only have to do two a month, and I’m going to be in a good I’m in a good spot. I only hire one person a year by 24 people, I’d be good.
Jeremy Weisz 32:44
How does that conversation go? Like so you’re not hiring, you just tell them upfront? Hey, like, if not now, later? Or what? How do you? You know, talk to the person about that?
Matt Sunshine 32:57
Yeah, so that’s great. That’s a great question. So there’s a big difference between interviewing for talent bank versus interviewing for a job that you have open. See in from my frame of mind, when you have a job open, you look in your talent bank, to select somebody, all year long, you’re making deposits into your talent bank. And it’s just like a real bank. I mean, the more you have in it, the more options that you have. So when I’m interviewing, if I was interviewing you, Jeremy, I’d say you know, Jeremy, we really don’t have a position open right now. But I’m always looking for really good people to put in my talent bank, I want to get to know you get to know what your strengths are, what your likes and dislikes are, what kind of what you’re looking for, so that when I have something open, I can look at my notes and go, you know, who would be perfect for this, Jeremy, and I’ll give you a call when that happens. The other thing is people that are when you’re interviewing for talent bank, you’re not necessarily interviewing people that are looking right now gives you the freedom to talk to people, but I can call you up and I can say, hey, Jeremy, your name has come up two or three times I’d love to talk to you about takes the pressure off. Hey, Jeremy, your first thing we do, I’m not looking for a job say great. I’m not hiring. I don’t have any openings. I’m just trying to get to know you. So that may be one day. Yeah. I love that.
Jeremy Weisz 34:23
There is also I’d love to talk about example, right for the Center for Sales Strategy. And there’s an example in the broadcast industry that relates to a large figure I’d love to walk through kind of, in that specific example what you did.
Matt Sunshine 34:40
Yeah, so one of the things at The Center for Sales Strategy, one of the one of the so fundamentally, we believe that the formula for sales performance would be talent plus training plus tactics, equal sales performance, so you get the right people, you train them up the right way. Give them All right tactics to use, and they’re going to be successful. And you you know from earlier, when we were talking that we don’t really believe in product focus. And so many times the tactic that business owners have is go and push this product. So we came up with a tactic that is about focusing on process, and we call it a target drive, target drives are eight to 12 weeks in length. And the idea is that each salesperson identifies a handful of targets, maybe 10, target prospects, that they’re going to go after a target prospect being one that could eventually become a great client, not just make a sale, but a great client. And that over that eight to 12 week period of time that you would focus on identifying who the prospect is getting an appointment with them connecting to get an appointment them doing a discovery meeting so that you could uncover desired business results and how they might measure success, advise them on the right solution, present them a solution, and close the business. So we would focus on that end, because we’re going to measure how many appointments did you get? How many proposals Did you present? How many closes Did you get, not only are we going to see the results that the revenue that it would produce, but we’re also going to be able to identify where the bottlenecks in your sales process might be, and be able to help you to cure your bottlenecks, which will ultimately grow your overall revenue. It’s a tactic, yes, but it’s a tactic that supports your process versus a tactic that supports your product, which is the big disconnect that a lot of people do this and do this wrong? Well, we’ve done this over the last 18 months, we’ve done this with 550 business units. And it’s generated $127 million in brand new business, for the companies that we work with. And what’s even better than the revenue that it’s produced is the data that we have from this. So let me give you some of that data because it’s fascinating. First of all, of the at these 550 business units, the goal was that every single salesperson would sell something would sell a target, at least 190 1% of the sellers did. So it didn’t come from just you know, 20% 91% actually sold something, we also learn something along the way.
Jeremy Weisz 37:41
And by the way, we were talking about this, we’re talking about a b2b. So it’s not like they sold like a box of cookies for $10. Right. So I just want to put that in, in the frame of reference. Yeah,
Matt Sunshine 37:52
great caveat. We are talking b2b, we’re also talking that it is identified as a target targeted piece of business, which means it’s large enough to, to to be in the top 25% of all the business, all the all the customers that the business has. Yeah. And we learned some things, we learned that, you know, the difference between the top performers and the bottom performers, we went and did some, some benchmarking. And top performers have two plus discovery meetings in a week and bottom performers have less than one. That’s a big difference. And so top performers move 90% of their their meetings, move to a proposal, bottom performers, 67% move to proposal. So this sort of data, when you have this sort of data for your organization, you can really make significant coaching improvements.
Jeremy Weisz 38:55
Why do you think that is the 90%? The 67? And let’s make the assumption that, like you said, it’s still the target client. So it’s not like they’re less qualified or more qualified. Let’s assume they’re the same qualified. What’s separate? What are they doing? Like? What are some of the things that you found are lacking?
Matt Sunshine 39:11
Yeah, so it probably a better thing is what are they not doing? versus what they are doing? So I bet it’s two things. Number one, they might not be that talented to begin with, right? They might not have the natural talent. They might be like me trying to swim like Michael Phelps. I can practice all day, I’ll get marginally better, but I’ll never be I’ll never be an Olympian. Yeah,
Jeremy Weisz 39:39
I know, you give the example when you were in a car with a client with one of your team members that they just naturally picked up on, you know, something on the window with the kids and the names and we’re bonding and that maybe just wasn’t the same skill set. Right.
Matt Sunshine 39:55
Right. I mean, some people are just more natural at that. And I think so one of the things you easily say as well, I have to make sure that my sales people do a better job of converting their appointments into a opportunity. But if they’re really struggling in that area, it’s either because they’re not capable of doing it, they don’t have the talent, or they’re refusing or they don’t know how to do it. And if that’s the case, then we have to train them. And that’s your job as the sales leader to give them that specific coaching. But wouldn’t it be great and this is what our clients have benefited from? This is a real value, I think that we’ve written that that that the target drive brings is that you can isolate where the bottleneck is. It’s not just Oh, sales aren’t where they need to be. Sales aren’t where they need to be. And the reason why is because we have, you know, three, three people on our sales team that are not very successful. They’re good at getting appointments, but their appointments never leave the proposal. Okay, great. Let’s zero in on just that and fix that problem.
Jeremy Weisz 41:03
Yeah. First of all, Matt, I have one last question. And I just want to thank you for sharing your knowledge in this. This is a big pain point for for any business, which is talking about sales and lead generation. So I want to point people to LeadG2 to point people to The Center for Sales Strategy.com To learn more, and check out more. And my last question is going to be I’m just interested on, you know, your mentors, your mentors in business, and it could be mentors in business that you personally interacted with, that could be distant mentors mean, like you just love their books or training? And before you answer it, I just want to I can’t unsee one of the things that you showed in your presentation, your presentations, which I thought was was really funny is the right word, but but you show a picture when this whole talent plus training plus tactics equals performance, you show this before this Tom Brady picture. Okay, and it looks like I didn’t even know who it was, at first, you know, this picture of Tom Brady, like when he first entered into the NFL looks like whatever, like a high school kid, and then you show the after of him with the rings. And it’s just you were showing how just talent spotting talent is, is so important. But then you also need all the the other things in place. But I just that visual, I can’t get out of it. Because I’m like, Who is that is that like someone I went to high school with? It just didn’t like the Tom Brady today
Matt Sunshine 42:34
exactly, was simply raw talent. He was involved potential, someone had to see someone had to see that and believe in it and coach it and develop it and modify it and groom it, to get him to be where he is today. And somebody did. I’ll tell you this, and then I’ll answer your question. Um, one of the things I think makes LeadG2 too special is most of many of the inbound marketing agencies that exist out there, our former marketing companies or ad agencies that have that have rebranded and now call themselves an inbound marketing agency, which is awesome, that’s great. We come from a revenue generation perspective, we come from a sales perspective. And so we created our inbound marketing agency to help businesses grow their business, help them grow their revenue. That’s what gets us excited, and we understand that process. But you asked a good question about my mentors. It’s so funny that you asked that because just the other day, I started to do a LinkedIn post that I didn’t do because it started off as it was just gonna be a quick LinkedIn post. And then before I knew it was like this big article, so I just said, I can do it. But nobody gets to where they are, I don’t believe nobody gets where they are by themselves. None of us, none of us get where we are by ourselves. All of us have had somebody help us out, believe in us, groom us, give us a chance, whatever. And I’ve had those people and I’m gonna share with you who that in a second. But I also think it’s my responsibility to do that for others to write as as as I’m growing. And as I’m becoming older, I it’s my responsibility to help others to grow and develop and just like I just like people believed in me. So I’ll tell you that starts with my dad. My dad was a was an entrepreneur, started his own his own business is he’s in his 80s. He still works. he instilled in me work ethic.
Jeremy Weisz 44:43
What was his business?
Matt Sunshine 44:44
Was he early in his early days, he was a rock and roll promoter and booking agent. And now he’s a headhunter today his executive recruiter and I’m sure he has some stories. He has great stories. Awesome stories, but he was a big inspiration for me and helping me to realize that I can do whatever I want, but it’s gonna be up to me to do it. And then I’ll have to ask questions, and I’m gonna have to put myself in the best place to do it. And that hard work can can really make a difference. So that’s one another person, though, along the way, was a guy that was the general manager of a radio station I worked for his name was Dan Halliburton. And he just believed in me, he did, he believed in me, he exposed me to opportunities outside of what I was directly responsible for, as the business was growing. And there would be opportunities to do other things. Dan would be the first one to say, Matt, why don’t you get involved with this also, and I just think the world of that. And then the third person would be Steve Marx, the founder, the guy, the guy that started the Center for sales strategy. Again, all of these people the same thing, they were not always easy on me. Right?
Jeremy Weisz 46:04
Because most of the time, they weren’t,
Matt Sunshine 46:05
but they That’s right. They held me accountable, but they believed in me and I knew that they cared about me and had my best interest in mind, and that means a lot and so those are the three but I’m probably like a lot of the people you talk to were influenced by a lot of people. Totally, a lot of you
Jeremy Weisz 46:24
totally. First of all, Matt Thank you everyone. Check out TheCenterforSalesStrategy.com check out LeadG2, and check out more episodes, everyone. Thanks, Matt.
