156: Morgan J Ingram On Building A Sales Career

What's poppin' y'all? Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Make It Happen Mondays podcast with your host, John Barrows, brought to you by our partners, Sales Loft, Gong, Vanilla Soft, Vidyard, Proposify, and Owler. Today we have a special guest, JB Sales' own Morgan J. Ingram is going to be joining John to talk about his journey from SDR to SDR manager, all the way up to being a world-class sales trainer with JB himself. He's also going to talk a little bit about why John chose him, and I think this is a really important podcast for those of you thinking about where this career could take you. So we hope you enjoy all the insights that Morgan brings to the table. Let's get deep into how he became who he is today, and everyone get ready, strap in, and let's make it happen.

Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows. Make It Happen Mondays. Hope you had a good weekend and are staying sane out there in this batshit crazy world that we're all in. Today. Decided to actually go a little bit back to some of our roots here, and I'm more curious because I don't get to spend enough time with this gentleman, as weird as that's going to sound when I introduce him. He's a second guest on the show, and he works for Jay Barrow. So Morgan Ingram, what's up, brother? How you doing? Hey, what's up, man? Yeah, we did. The last time that we saw each other in person was in 2019. So it's just crazy. Well, and even with all the, like, even with all the, like, yeah, we see each other, right?

But not even as frequently as we should, just because of how crazy both you and I are going right now with all the trainings and everything else that happened. And that's kind of where, like, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to, first of all, just level set and see where your head's at, right? And see how you're doing these days. I mean, obviously, I want to tell everybody out there, we talk enough where I kind of, you know, I get a sense. I'm not just like, all right, Morgan, see you fucking later. Go do your job. So I do some coaching and stuff. But, you know, just going all the way back when I first noticed you, right? I remember you were doing your, you know, SDR Chronicles, and then you had done that, hey, what you learned, right?

One of the top 10 takeaways from being an SDR manager. And that's what got my perception to change of you, because a lot of what you had talked about was your value, like aligned with my values, right? And I always say that if you got the same values, you can, you know, you can do some cool stuff together. If you don't, it's going to be an argument the entire time. So with that, I thought it'd just be an interesting podcast, a discussion here to talk with you about your journey, right? And what you've learned, because what, you came up, what has it been? Two years, two and a half almost? Almost three years. So it's October 2017. Yeah, coming up on shit, coming up on three years. So, you know, and I plucked you from, you know, SDR, SDR manager doing kind of one thing, working at a company that, you know, pretty comfortable to, hey, now you got to fucking do everything and fly around the world and learn how to sell and do all this other stuff.

And, you know, there was growing pains along the way, like that first year was a holy shit. And then there, and then this year is a complete holy shit, right? So let's chat about kind of your journey because the one more piece that I want to put on this before we dive into it is I genuinely believe that what you are doing personally is where sales reps are going to need to evolve back to. And let me explain. I grew up full cycle sales. There was no SDR, BDR, AE model. It was, here's your territory, go. The good news about that was that I developed into a more well-rounded sales professional way faster. The bad news about that was that a lot of people who got into sales got out really fast too, because they realized they couldn't handle all that.

We then flipped 10 years ago, whatever, to the predictable revenue model, segmentation of roles, which I think is great for businesses, but it's not good for the customer experience, right? Because the customer gets, you know, four times before they get to talk to somebody they know who knows what they're talking about. And I also think that that models right now is being challenged with this down economy. My theory here is, is that we're going back to full cycle sales and SDRs and BDRs are going to move under marketing and operations. And, you know, with ABM being supporting inside sales, but sales reps are going to take them full cycle. And that's what you're right now, like you're in that position where you're doing full cycle sales and training, but you're still doing the prospecting, which so many AEs get away from, right?

Because now once they get into the AEs, like, oh, thank God, I don't have to do that shit anymore. Right? So, but you, first of all, you enjoy it. But I also think that it's going to be critical for the success of any sales rep moving forward here. So let's talk about some of the things like over the, over the course of the past couple of years here that you've learned about yourself, a lot about sales, kind of your takeaways here. And then let's talk about where we want to, where, where we think things are going or where you see things going. So yeah, there's a lot, lots on back there for sure. I want to, I want to start with what you talked about, John, which is AEs now have to prospect, which, which is going to go into one of the first things that I learned.

So right now, a lot of AEs, when I go train, they are paying a little bit more attention to prospecting. And I did a training this morning and the AEs was like, yeah, I have to prospect more because the inbounds and the outbounds I'm getting aren't as lucrative lucrative as they were before. Yeah. Well, yeah, no shit. Right. So, so now, right. You have the prospect because you could get let go because you were waiting for someone else to fulfill your destiny. And I feel like that just never has made any sense to me at all that you would be like, oh, cool. I'm done with this prospecting thing. Now I'm just going to wait and let someone else help me fulfill my destiny of getting to the next step, which normally is going to be a mid market enterprise and then all that stuff.

So if you're doing that, I cannot see you as a true sales rep. Now I want to say this podcast, someone wants to challenge me. That's fine. I just can't see you as a true sales rep. If you can't prospect and close, and that's not saying prospecting like five hours a day, no, no, it's like 45, 45 minutes to an hour. And I know that you could put that in your schedule because you're probably doing other things that you probably don't need to be doing to get that success. So that's first and foremost. I I'm going to jump on that real quick. Cause I I'll say the same thing and people can jump in as well. But you know, I've always said like, I, I don't, I don't have fundamentally have never understood it either.

And I've always said, if I was a VP of sales and you as an AE came into my office and you missed your quarter, you, you missed your quota last quarter. Right. And your excuse to me was, well, I didn't get enough leads from marketing. I didn't get enough meetings scheduled by my SDR before those even, before those words even came out of your fucking mouth, I would have fired you. I would have just been like, all right, get the hell out then. Why do I need you? If the only thing you can do is that, then why do I need you? And I, and I actually think the old school sales, like senior enterprise sales, and this is where we're going right now, which is I'm watching a whole bunch of senior enterprise sales reps who used to like live and die off of relationships and going out and milking their accounts and, you know, and networking.

Right. I mean, that's where most senior reps get some of their businesses, networking with partners and events and trade like that type of stuff. All that stuff's dried up. And now you're sitting there a 30 year vet sitting behind a computer screen who barely even knows how to turn the thing on at this point and going, uh, what am I supposed to do? And thinking about prospecting, like you alluded to, which is like, Oh, now what do I have to go sit, you know, make up 50 dials. Now I have to go send out a thousand emails like that. I don't want to do that. But it's that mentality of why would you want to have somebody else be, be dictate your success? And I just, I just never understood that. And, and it leads to my point, which is one of the first things I learned from you is actually caring or in John's words, you know, you know what you said, but like PG, PG, PG, Disney, Disney Morgan.

But the thing is like actually caring. That's one thing I realized that I was not doing. I was good at prospecting because we had structures, we had things in place. I just knew exactly what to say. However, my acumen was off when I first started and I didn't really understand how to articulate value based on what I was seeing in websites because I was doing the ADA, right? I was following it to a T and I was like, John, what's going on? He's like, dude, you don't, you don't really care. And I was like, I was like, wait, what? So first of all, why did you hire me? But he was like, no, let's look, let's talk about this. And then that was the very first thing I learned. And then that's when a lot of things changed for me, not only as a prospector, but a seller.

When I stopped thinking about the doctor checkup questions or the calls that I'm supposed to make or the emails I'm supposed to send and really look at it and be like, would this person respond to this? Is the question I'm asking on this discovery call, does that really matter? Or I'm just asking because John told me to. That was the first thing that I learned and that hit home with me. Yeah. And that, and you know, it's funny because I'm going back to school because Hoffman, the essence of the why you, why you now email, like that he came up with, right? I always was like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Okay. You'd like, yeah, great. You do research, you make a connection, you send an email. And I used to get really good results.

But, but again, once I started get truly giving a shit and looking at accounts, like, wait a minute, they're going through something that I've seen before, right? They're going through something where I know I can help or I have an example of, and I have, I have like, I don't want to say true empathy because I don't necessarily know their situation, but I can empathize to a certain degree because I've never seen it or I've been through it before. And Jeff, he, you know, he still fundamentally believes in the, the power of the genuine connection. Now the challenge, and this is what I'm going to talk to him about is how do you adopt that to today's world, right? How do you adopt that to, look, if I had 30 minutes to do research on every account that I could go after, then great, you know, but I just, that's just not realistic.

So that's what we're going to be chopping it up on. But, but I wholeheartedly agree. And you had said something to me earlier when this whole thing hit COVID was, you know, that your generation has grown up in that point and click world, right? You want, you want to catch up on a series, Netflix, binge it all weekend. You're good, right? You know, you want to get the hottest movie, you order it immediately. You want to get your favorite restaurant delivered to your door, DoorDash. You know what I mean? Like, like what you want to hit your numbers, here's a cadence tool. You send a thousand emails out and you get a few responses, but the, but the, the lack of like looking at that number and that email address as an actual person, uh, you know, I think we've, a lot of us have lost that.

You know what I mean? It was like, this isn't just a number or an email that I need to send you. This is actual person on the other end of the line that has challenges. It has priorities. And if I can just give a shit a little bit, my chances of getting a response go up exponentially. Yeah. I mean, it goes back to what that video that you made, I think it was like a week after everything was going off is the difference between fake empathy and real empathy. And it goes back to that. You know, a lot of people are saying, hope you're staying safe. Like, yo, you've never talked to me in my life. And, and the, you know, I got, we got asked to be on a lot of podcasts and webinars at that time. And I was like, Hey guys, look like you have to truly understand what your prospect is going through.

I remember the week after I contacted the people that I had done training with that I'm close with. And I was like, Hey, let's do a client round table. I want to know what's going on. I can make guesses, but it's probably better just to talk to my clients. So we got five of them in a call. I had questions already set and I asked them the questions I got answers. And then I was like, cool. I know how to sell. I also know how to prospect in this environment because these are the people that I'm talking to. And I think sometimes as sellers, we overcomplicate it and try to think about like, what do I need to get done? Instead of thinking about what does the prospect want for me or would like to see for me so that I could provide those needs?

I mean, it's the reason why we've, we're going all in on video right now because everybody wants to talk about video. So it's not saying, Oh guys, let's talk about cold calling. What does it make sense? Cause people really aren't talking about that right now. We're talking about video and that's, what's really going to matter to our clients. Yeah. Like it. Cool. All right. So what else? So I think number, number two for, for me that I've learned a lot through this is setting up the proper expectations. This like, and John's like, cause we've dealt with this a lot where I've had some really bad experiences when it comes to training and really bad experiences when it comes to client calls. And you know, I've been obliterated before and that's completely fine.

However, I realized the reason that that happened is cause I didn't set up the right expectations or I missed the expectations that someone thought that they told me and they, and they, maybe we didn't communicate it the right way. And so what I learned in this job is when you're working on the service end, and even as a seller, set up the expectations, send the agenda, do the summary email, re-clarify. I know what John has a terrible memory. All right, guys, like his memory is really bad. So when we used to go to events, he was always like, Hey Morgan, like, wait, like what's going on here? Like, where am I supposed to be? Like, what? So I was, I was the, the memory bank there. But the thing is, is that like, the reason I'm talking about that is because you have to set up the right expectations with people.

If John didn't tell me, Hey, I don't have good memory. And he kept asking me about these things. I thought that John might've been going crazy. Like, what's going on? But the thing is that like, I've realized it's something I didn't do because I was so used to getting on calls and doing things based on just pure talent alone, or also just based on, Hey, I've done this well before. And that's my own thing that I'm continuously correcting and getting better at. I was like, Oh, I don't need expectations. I can just show up. Like, it'll be fine. Like, I know what I'm talking about. Terrible way to go about it. Like every training. Now I say, what's the outcomes? What are the expectations? What should I be looking out for?

I send a recap email after the calls at the, do our prep calls and make sure we're on the same page. I don't want to make sure that I'm going into a situation where I thought it was something different so that if it was something that was off, I can always point back to, Hey, we talked about this in the summary email. Hey, we talked about this in the recap call. And so that's one thing I learned a lot here is that if your expectations are off, then everything is going to cause tension and there's going to be some type of fight that you don't need. Yeah. I mean, life is about expectation setting, man. I, you know, and I say this a lot, which is, you know, think of the last time you were pissed off about anything, right?

I almost guarantee it's because your expectations were misset. You know what I mean? In some way, shape or form it, you walked in thinking one thing and then something happened that you weren't expecting and it threw you off. And that's with clients. That's with prospects. That's with training. That's with relationships, you know, like ours, you know what I mean? Like internal, because now, you know, and it's almost, we have to manage up too, uh, in a lot of ways we have to be the, this is one, this is another thing I'm going to kind of talk about with, uh, with Hoffman. He has this whole social, um, I forget what he calls it, but it's like his social worth, if you will. And he always is like, Hey, you know what?

Uh, I, I'm just as important. I'm just as important as you. So I'm not going to do anything extra. I'm going to make you want to come to me because I'm important. You know what I mean? I've always felt a little differently about that. I've always felt like he doesn't believe, for instance, he doesn't believe in the summary emails because he's like, no, that's you doing work to like that. They didn't even ask. And so you're putting yourself below that, uh, emailing on weekends. He's like, that's like no executives email. So you're, you're putting yourself below that. And I'm like, yeah, but a certain point you got to earn it. Right. And, and you have to be the bigger person in a lot of ways to manage it the way that it needs to be managed.

So for customers, like guiding them through the sales process and walking them through the steps, if they don't know how to make this decision, uh, setting expectations of what the call is even going to be about. I know for a fact, and I'll tell everybody out there, listening to this, the reason that your meetings are getting canceled, like if you set up a demo call, right? So say you cold call real quick or whatever. And somebody says, yeah, Morgan, sure. You know what? Why don't we schedule, why don't we touch base here? Let's schedule a meeting next week. Right. And next Friday, I'll see us Thursday, Friday, three o'clock, send a meeting on my invite. By the time that day comes, if I don't remember the likelihood of me remembering our, our convert, that quick 30 second call last week of the 8 million other things that I've done between now and then is not high.

So now I'm looking at my calendar on Friday. It's Friday afternoon. Uh, you know what I mean? I just want to go hot tub, right? Try to go hot tub, smoke a joint. Like, come on, man. Like, and if I don't, and if I'm looking at it, I'm like, what the fuck is, like, I'll change, I'll cancel that without even thinking about it. You know what I mean? But if a rep sends me a quick email beforehand, the day before, Hey, John, I'm looking forward to the call. Here's a few things I want to make sure that we talk about. What else do you want to talk about? Here's some resources, by the way, that you can take a look at beforehand. Okay. Now, A, I know what the call is about, right? B, I, I, my expectation is set for what this meeting is really about.

Same thing with, you know, the, the next steps of any aspect. So I think expectations, I think a huge takeaway of, of, of being crystal clear on that and not just being crystal clear, but documenting it, documenting, to, to, to your point is having something to lean back on when somebody flakes on you and you're like, look, I appreciate that, but look what you committed to. Like you said this in an email, I'm not trying to be an asshole here, but this is what you said. Then, then you don't, then you're not the asshole because if you and I, if you try to remind me what you and I talked about last week and, and I don't remember it, but you're trying to hold me accountable for something that I may or may not have said in my opinion, you're the jerk.

You know what I mean? Even though I forgot it, you're the jerk, especially from a client vendor relationship. So I love that one. Cool. I think, you know, it's a funny part and it comes to mind is that I think every single rep, when you're getting onboarded, you should have to see your, an executive's calendar just so that you, just so you understand like how crazy it is and why it's like, oh, okay, well, I shouldn't send the, the agenda. Like that matters. Like if y'all looked at John's calendar and y'all would probably be like, uh, yeah, I understand why he hops on a call and be like, what is this about? So I think, I think it should be a requirement that every rep, when they get on board, it's like, Hey, here's our executive's calendars.

It's crazy. This is the same thing that you're going to face as a sales rep. Make sure you send an agenda. Yeah. Yeah. Again, that goes to empathy, right? Putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and understanding what their day looks like even so that you can understand how best to communicate with them, how best to get on that schedule, what's a priority for them and what isn't right. So all that stuff is, is huge. And I agree. I think, I think it's, it's, you know, I wish more companies did that from an onboarding standpoint where they actually had the reps like sit down and, and interview the CEO, interview the CFO or whatever persona they're going to be tasked with, with going after. Right.

It's just pop in. By the way, if you're listening to this right now and you're having a, you're having a hard time getting through to see CFO. Say if you're a sales rep, right, right. Say, say you're a BDR or an SDR and your VP of sales is telling you that you got to call into CFOs. Okay. And you're struggling calling into CFOs, having a conversation. I will give you a tip right now that will put you on the top of the list as far as people who your company is going to pay attention to. Go knock on your CFOs door. No shit. Go knock on your CFOs door. Do a little bit of homework beforehand. Don't go in cold, but go in and say, Hey, um, would there be an opportunity where I could just pick your brain for about an hour or so?

Talk to you about what, what a day in the life of a CFO looks like? What do you care about? You know, you know, if a sales rep would have reached out to you, like what would, I will guarantee you that if, that if you take the right approach there, your CFO is going to look at you in a completely different light, they're going to want to help you. And they're going to tell your VP of sales, holy shit. Did you realize that one of your little 22 year old little pissant SDRs came up to me and actually asked me about my job, which nobody has ever done before because this kid is being asked, like you'll go, you'll skyrocket through as far as the person that they're paying attention to. Yeah. That's really key.

I it's probably less than 1% of CFOs that ever get asked by any sales rep on like what to do on how the legal process works. Cause I, I, we always see it as like the enemy. I gotta go to legal. Well, it's the same thing with gatekeepers. Like when I was, when I was at thrive, right, what I would do is like my reps would come up to me and be like, Hey John, you know, I'm having a hard time getting through gatekeepers, man. Like you have any tips and I'd be like, yeah, I got some tips here, but hold on a second. And I'd open the door and I'd be like, Hey Shelly. Yes, John. Shelly, are you a gatekeeper? Yes, John. Okay. Shelly, do you take calls from sales reps on a daily basis? Yep. Do you let some of them through?

Do you not let others through? Yeah. Would you mind sitting down with my reps and telling them how to get through gatekeepers? Sure. John, no problem. Right. Go ask the talking source. Right. Same thing, John. I'm having a hard time getting through to CFOs. Hey Calvin, are you a CFO? Yes. Okay. Like that type of thing. Just go use your resources. Yep. And people are scared too, because it's an executive. Ooh, right. Fuck that. People, everybody puts on their pants the same way. Anybody who's chicken shit going after executives. Next time you're in line at a store, look behind you. If there's like five or six people in line and like, there's one dude sitting there, like all disheveled with his kids, like pulling from his shirt and everything.

I almost guarantee you that's a CFO of some like massive organization. That's like a multimillionaire. All you got to do is be like, Oh, okay. That guy, I'm worried about talking to that guy. Are you out of your mind? Come on. Yeah. And also John adds to that. It's number two, which is ego, which is what we all have to carve out as well, because we don't want to ask for help. Cause we'd rather figure it out ourselves and be like, Hey, well, yeah, I did some research and I have the new formula on how to reach out to CFOs. What instead of just being like, Hey, yeah. Can you just tell me how to reach out to CFOs? It's a lot easier. Easy shortcut. Just a little bit. Well, it goes back to what we've been talking about, which is, I think we do, I think in sales, we guess too much, right?

We guess, we make educated guesses. I mean, the, the, the average sales rep or the piece of shit sales rep doesn't do any research and they just kind of, you know, throw out stupid emails and generic shit about them. You know, the above average one will do some homework. We'll look at personas and maybe read a few job descriptions and, you know, case studies and stuff like that. But, you know, those are all guesses. You know what I mean? Like, why not go talk to the people who know and, and, and have real, I mean, every executive I talk to, one of the number one things that they always say when, when asked, like, how do people, what's the best way to connect with you? And it, it always comes down to just be human.

You know what I mean? Be like normal. Like, don't treat me like I'm on this ivory tower thing and try to use big words to impress me. Like, just talk to me like a normal fucking human being and, and, you know, and bring some value. Like that's really it. Yeah. Cool, man. What else? Let's go. Another, let's get another one that has really helped me out a lot is the difference between being direct and rude. This is one I struggled with a lot because there's a lot of reasons. One, I'm from the South. So Southern hospitality. Also I grew up in a Christian home. I am one myself. And so I always felt like I had to be nice with everybody. So I never wanted to be direct or rude. I just felt like it just made me feel uncomfortable because I was uncomfortable.

I felt like I make other people uncomfortable. And I realized that in the beginning, when I was first started, when I just wouldn't ask questions that I knew I should have been asking. Cause I felt like it was just rude. And I told John, I was like, Hey, I feel like I could be more direct. I don't know how to go about that. And he was like, well, let me explain it to you. Like, there's a difference between being rude and being direct. Like rude is just, just being aggressive and saying things that are a little obscene. However, being direct is like, Hey, you know, the facts, you've done your discovery and you're just being direct with someone so you can get to the truth. So what I would, from a tactical standpoint, everybody listening, leaders, reps, whatever it is, like write down questions that you are afraid to ask and ask them and see how the response goes.

And if you feel like it's uncomfortable, if you go back to listening to John, the tier threes, like do them on practice accounts, right? Do it on people that aren't at maybe aren't on that tier one. Right. But that's what I started doing. I started asking really hard questions questions and on discovery calls when someone was like, yeah, I'll talk to my team internally or yeah, I'll follow up with you next week. I would normally in the beginning, I'd be like, yeah, sure. I'll follow up with you next week. Ghost, Casper, right? See you later. So then I was like, that's not happening anymore. So now what I do is I'm just very direct with people. If they say, Hey, let me follow up next week, I say, cool.

Normally what happens, I just, that's fine. Normally what happens next is with clients we talk to, we just schedule a follow up call to make sure that we're on the same page. And so when you have that follow up conversation, we can reconnect. Does that sound fair? Most of the time they're going to be like, yeah. And they'll reconnect. If they say no, then I take a step back and say, Hey, look, I'm a, I'm a little confused here. You know, we've had a really great conversation here so far. You asked if you liked it and your feedback, you said that this is something you want to do yet. You don't want to schedule a fall up here. So is this something that's not interesting anymore? Like it's completely fine.

I just don't want to be an annoying sales up with a followup. And most people that give you like another reason they might be like, Oh, you know what? I don't know if we have budget, so I don't want to waste your time or Hey, you know what? I really wasn't interested because we're already talking to another vendor and you were just part of the checkbox. So I want to know. So I don't follow up with the summary email. I don't follow up with have a follow up call with you. And then it's a waste of both our times. So that's just one example of me being direct and not rude. And I've felt way more comfortable being direct because I realized from John's perspective that it wasn't about being rude. It was about respecting both of our times.

Exactly. And, and I think there's a, I've been thinking about that a lot too, which is, I think the, the difference between direct and rude is them versus you. I think it's rude. If it's about you, I think it's direct if it's about them. Right. So the, or, or both of you, not just you give, because if, Hey, I didn't get mine, like you didn't give me that type of stuff when it, that comes across as rude. But if it's, but from a direct standpoint, and this is also when we talk about negotiations, right? The difference between quid pro quo and rule of reciprocity, like quid pro quo is I'll do this for you if you do that for me. And that's most negotiations. But the problem there is it's contentious.

It's, we are fighting at that point. Whereas reciprocity is, Hey, you know, it's a human condition and all this other stuff. When somebody asks for something, they feel obligated to give you something in return. And if you can make it, the key there is when somebody asks for something, you can say to them, look, I'm thrilled to give you what you're asking for. In order for me to give you exactly what you need, this is what I need in return from you. So now it's putting it in your best interest to give me what I need. So I can give you what you need. Right. And that to me is being direct versus rude is I'm not going to give you that discount unless you're going to sign the contract. You know what I mean?

Like, yeah. And now don't get me wrong. That's necessary. In some cases you do, you like at a certain point, you do have to just say, look, at the end of the day, this has gone too far. I'm going to have to put my foot down. Okay. Usually by then you've lost the deal anyways. Um, but that has, has that, let me ask you, has that translated? It was the main way that you made that transition. Cause I remember that was something we talked about early. Right. And I remember I even gave you the authority and I don't know if you remember, but I was like, dude, I will welcome the day when I get an email from one of your prospects saying like Morgan Ingram is the rudest person I've ever met in my life, blah, blah, blah.

Cause I knew you would never, I knew you would never cross that line, but was it, was it practice? Was it a mentality shift? Was it writing down things? Like what were some of the key things that really got you to, to get comfortable being direct? Yeah. So I cleaned up my desk over the weekend or I would show it and I had a sticky note and I laughed cause I remember doing this and it said, next steps be direct. And I put it, I put it on my monitor because I was like, I'm not going to have another conversation where someone either just flakes and I don't have a next step or I wasn't being direct when I could have asked the question that was like, that needed to be asked. And I was afraid of doing it.

So that led into two, which was a mindset. I went into every call instead of worrying about the outcome. I was way more concerned about the process of the call. So as I was in the call, I would, I knew if there was a question that I needed to ask, I was going to ask it. And if someone thought it was off, then I just need to get better at my tone and I need to go and go and listen to it again. However, I realized when I was just direct and I was like, wait, hold on, but let's take a step back here. Like, what do you mean by that? You know? And someone was like, for example, when we sell sales training, some people may be like, yeah, we're at 150% of quota. I was like, hold on. So what makes you want to invest in sales training?

Like before I may have never asked that. I was like, oh, cool. Sounds usually doing good. But I was like, no, hold on. Like what makes you want to do sales training? If you're 150% of quota, like what's going on here? And then I can uncover maybe other things that they're like, well, we're 150% of our quota for meetings completed, but our stage one to stage two conversion is 70%. So it's like, oh, okay. Like that's why you want to do training. So let's talk about the stage one to stage two conversion. Right? So by asking those direct questions, I was out, I was able to uncover what was really going on. So it was a mentality shift. And three, it was practice. Like I said, like I listened to a lot of your calls.

I did mock cold calling with Kevin Dorsey and Frank now at sales off Costello. You know, I did these practice mock cold calls to make sure that I was comfortable in doing it. So I would encourage you all that are sellers that are out there to get a rep. That's a colleague, get your leader and do some mock cold calls. It's very intimidating, especially with some people that are really good at it. Cause they're like, I don't like this. Right. Kevin specifically. Oh my gosh, I got torn apart. But the thing is I got better. Like now I can go on a mock cold call with Kevin and feel completely comfortable for no, not so much. Yeah. And I, so I want to tie into that because, uh, I think it relates to, first of all, I think that's huge out there, like taking your own, um, uh, success into your own hands, right.

Going out there, not waiting for your manager to say, Morgan, we have to do a cold call thing here. Cause I want to, right. But going out there and people you respect and saying, Hey, I'm having a hard time with this. Could you, and people want to help as long as you take the right approach. Uh, let's talk about pricing because I think this leads to pricing, the confidence asking direct and also delivering pricing, right? Cause I think so many reps are so chicken shit when they talk about pricing, they, they come across super passive and immediately show the client that there's room for a discount. So even if the client isn't asking for the discount, when somebody says, you know, how much is this?

John say it's $20,000. The answer should be $20,000 and I should shut the fuck up and wait for you to go, Oh my God, that that's wicked expensive. Right. But most reps go when it wins. Oh, well, what's the price? Well, you know, it's 20 grand and, and maybe, and dah, dah, dah, dah. And, and look, I might've heard 30 grand, 40 grand, 50 grand from your competitors. I heard 20 from you and I was like, Oh my God. But then as soon as I heard, but I ain't paying 20 G's anymore. So has that translated for you into, into how you deliver price? And, and also how have you gotten more confident in delivering price based on the understanding of the value that we bring? Cause that's another piece of this.

So from my perspective, it's going to be different than people that sell solution. So I'll give answers for both. So from my perspective, like I go out and deliver the training, you go out and deliver the training. So we're seeing direct results and responses from clients being like, Hey, I did this. And I two X my response rate. It's like, Hey, I did this. And now I'm my conversion rate on LinkedIn is 40% now. So I'm, I'm seeing, and you're seeing direct results. So I'm going to be confident to be like, yeah, it's 15 grand. Like should be charging more. Way more, way more. Put it this way. If we charge, if we charge a percentage of revenue, like, you know what I mean? If revenue that was driven by our trainings, we all can be millionaires right now.

You know, like, so like, that's how I feel now because I've seen the results before. It was a little bit different because I hadn't seen them directly for me. Right. I knew what they were for the organization, but for me as a seller, I didn't. So what I would recommend you to do. So service, Hey, you're delivering the service. You're going to see direct results. That's how I got more confident to you though, is if you're a solution, go listen to the case studies and use cases on your website, or go ask for customer success, just for some videos of clients saying how successful this product is. Cause then you're going to be confident to be like, Oh wow. We have a lot of people that say this works.

Then you'll be confident in delivering the price. And also as well, when I say price, I, I don't say like, Hey, this is going to cost you, et cetera. I say the investment is 15 grand. The investment is 10 grand. So I'm letting them know that key wording there, that this is an investment that they're making. And then I pause. And then I just see what they say. And if they're like, Oh, sometimes people say, Oh yeah, that's not that much. I'm like, all right, cool. So this is like, all right. So how does legal process work? Yeah. I'm going to go right to it. Right. But some people may be like, I don't know. And then I say, okay, so what budget is within your range? Right. So that question is important because when is happening for most sellers is when they say, Oh, here's the price, the investment.

And then they say, Oh, uh, that's not, that's not what we're looking for. Or maybe they're like, Oh, that sounds like a lot. You're like, Oh, well we can make it five grand. And it's like, Whoa, you don't know what the range is. Like the range could be 12 to 14 grand and you're at 15. And all you got to do is do a little bit of negotiation. And you could probably still get 15 grand if you just added a couple of things. So I think a lot of reps have missed out on that as they don't, they don't ask, okay, sounds like you're uncomfortable with that. What range are you looking for? What out do you have allocated? And sometimes half the time they don't even know what the budget even is yet because you may not even be at power.

So they're like, Oh yeah, I don't even know what the budget is. And it's like, we don't know if it's expensive. Exactly. And that's, and that's where I think, so I've shifted a little bit, right? Cause I used to, pricing has always been an interesting one for me as far as how to deliver it. Right. I've always been pretty confident cause I've always really believed in what I sold no matter what it was. Um, but it was always awkward. Right. Um, because what do you do? And I was taught early in my career to do something similar to what you said, which is you, you say the price and then shut the fuck up. Right. You just, right. And then, and then there's the old adage in sales, whoever speaks first loses, you know what I mean?

So it's like this standoff, but I gotten unfortunately in too many opportunities where I would like drop the price and, you know, shut up. And the other person on the other end of the line knew exactly what I was doing. And so they just shut up too. And you know, three minutes later of dead silence, I'm like, all right, fine. I got to talk. Um, so what I've been doing is, uh, you know, what I'll say is I'll combine what you just said there. I'll say, Hey, it's $15,000. So does that fall in range of what you'd expect to pay for something like this? Right. So, cause I do want to get your reaction to it. You know what I mean? I want to get you to, I want to get that either. Whoa. Or okay. It's in the range.

It's not, it's probably, I'd like to pay less, obviously, whatever, but at least it's in the range and we can keep talking. Cause the last thing, I mean, there's two theories of pricing, right? You don't talk pricing at all. And so you can build value, value, value, then you justify the price or you talk price early. So you don't waste your time. I think in the middle is like a range option, but getting their feedback on that, I think it's huge. And, and you mentioned something. I think we did this. Remember when you came on board, I had you interview customers, right? Yep. And did that give you a different perspective on the value that we brought? Absolutely. Yeah. I think you're bringing up a great point there.

Cause when you talk directly to the customers and you sense and hear that energy, it's like, okay, I understand now why people are investing. Cause that's important too, because you should be, you should be telling customer stories while you're delivering that demo. You shouldn't be like, Hey, here's our product. You should be like, Hey, this future here works really well with X client. And this is what they saw. So you should already be building that validation throughout the entire conversation. Yeah. And those stories, again, storytelling, right? And under the case studies and that type of stuff, that's the fastest way for a sales rep to get ramped. Cause look, features, function, shit, whatever, who cares about that stuff?

If you're getting caught in feature function conversations, you're already losing. Yeah. So, but if you have stories, it's from an objection handling standpoint, from a, just an engagement standpoint, I mean, the best of, you know, the best objection handling or one of the best objection handling techniques is feel felt found, right? I totally understand how you feel about that. Other people felt, you don't have to be cheesy with it, but feel felt a case study is feel felt found. Yeah. Actually, I appreciate, you know, another client actually had that exact situation and this is what they did about it using our solution. And this was the results. Feel felt found. Is that worth a conversation?

Right. And, and those stories are just gold when it comes to ramp, when it comes to execution, everything else. Absolutely. All right. We got, we got time for one more. What's one more big learning lesson that you've had over the past two or three years here? This is, this is the biggest one is leading with integrity. All right. This is the most, this is the most important one because if, you know, everything we've talked about here so far from a tactical standpoint and all the stuff that I've learned up to this, do these points are have to do with sales, right? This is just important as a human. And I've gotten really close with John, even though we don't see each other as much as we probably both would like to.

However, I've realized that John has allowed me to be more open where as a person, I'm not open. I don't, to be honest with y'all, I don't really trust a lot of people. That's just how I am. And also as well, I sometimes have to know when to be open to people when I know I should, because that person's looking out for me as John, as John does. And it's just, again, you're trying to figure that out because most people are shady. It's just facts, right? Unfortunately. So the thing is, is that like, I'm not saying that I thought John was, it's just, we had to build that trust. So I've been able to see him lead with integrity and, and do the right things as much as he can throughout the organization and be willing to hear out me when I have certain things that I'm like, yo, dude, I don't know what the heck is going on here.

Cause when I got hired, dude, I was, I'm still am, but I was a baby, baby. Yeah. You're still a baby. You're a toddler now. And so, and so my thing is that, you know, I see John as really my uncle, you know, and it was the cool, the cool uncle that gives you that advice on your, you're able to kick it with. And I feel like, cause you'd probably fire me. So the thing is that like, I, that's the relationship that I have with John. I don't know how he feels about it, but that's the way that I feel in terms of like, he's really been my uncle and guided me in a certain way. And he leads with integrity. So I know moving forward, whatever I do, I always know that that's going to be the most important thing is to lead with integrity, keep people the right way, understand where they're coming from.

Yeah. They're going to be disagreements and we've had that. Yeah. They're going to be misunderstandings. Yeah. You're going to make mistakes, which I have, but at the end of the day, it comes back to what we started this conversation with, which is why this is why we're ending with it is that you have to have the same morals and ethical background values and values. And also as well, like we're completely different people. However, we have that background of values that matter. And so leading with integrity is super important. And again, I just been able to trust John with a lot of things that are in my head and we're able to have really genuine and valuable conversations. And I, and I see John as a, as a lifelong friend, not just working together, but someone that I see as a true friend.

Appreciate that, man. Likewise. And I think that's, and you said that you bring it circle back. I mean, that was what got me to pay attention to you in the first place. And it's interesting. I actually, I remember how I learned this was, um, think and grow rich by that, you know, Napoleon Hill in that book is where I read about defining your values, because once you define your values, then what you can, then it makes your decisions a lot easier because then all you have to do is find people and companies and, you know, whatever that share those values. And then once you share those values, the world's, you're always, I mean, you can go and do whatever you want to do. Right. And again, we can argue, but as long as those core values are the same, we're, we're, we're coming from the right place.

And I think that's what, you know, what really stood out with you when I first saw that, that video of yours, I was like, all right, cool. And then it was funny because I remember, remember when you came over for your onboarding, we had the whiteboard. Can you say like, we're, we're, we're pretty opposite. I don't know. I think I might have a picture of it, but it was like, all right, what are all the, you know, what are all the core values? We like, yep, we are aligned on those. Now we like, all right, what's different. Right. We started with the easy stuff. Like you're black, I'm white. Right. Like I curse like a fucking sailor. You barely swear. I drink and smoke like a, I drink like a fish and smoke weed, a shitload of weed.

And you barely fucking touch alcohol and you don't smoke weed. You know what I mean? So it was like, we went through all this shit. We like, look at how fucking different we are, but ultimately we can have that commonality that makes it. So that, that lifelong friendship will be there. I mean, you've seen me fire customers. You've seen me fucking tear up partners because they're fucking pieces of shit. You know what I mean? Because we thought they had good values or we thought they had, and then all of a sudden we don't cover it and be like, nope. All right. I mean, how quickly have you seen me cut, like slit somebody's throat as soon as I find out that they don't, they, they, they are shady or they are, they are, they don't share our values.

Quick. I mean, I don't even give you a chance anymore because as soon as you cross that, wait a minute, like you broke my trust, that type of stuff is this conversation's over because now you don't, you, you obviously do not share our values anymore. And therefore I'm sorry, I cannot associate with you. And I, and, and that's what I told Chris when he came on board. I mean, Chris and I have known each other since we were five years old, so it's pretty easy to share our own values, but partners, everybody like that, if they, the first and foremost and customers, the first thing is if they're not good people, I don't give a fuck how much money they have. Right. And I'll be, I'd rather be dead broke with my integrity than a rich asshole.

Right. So cool, man. Well, I appreciate that. I think there's a good conversation. I'm glad we were caught up and, and, and, um, and your growth has been impressive over the past couple of years. I will say that it's, it's, it's been cool to see you evolve. Uh, I'm looking forward to seeing how further, how much further you can evolve. But, uh, but I, but I love the mentality, the attitude, the drive, especially with dealing all this shit that you're dealing with. You know what I mean? Like this is not an easy job in general to do prospecting, selling, training, man, you know, all that other stuff all at the same time. But we're also not in a, we're not really in a cool environment here either.

Like from an, from a, just a global standpoint, right. With the virus going on with the black lives matter and all this other shit happening right now. So the weight of what's happening right now is, is heavy. Uh, and, and, and I, I just appreciate, you know, how you've been approaching it. Right. So I appreciate that. I want to, I want to talk on that because I don't know what everyone's roles is or how much stress that you're involved with. For me, this has been, I mean, I've talked to John like almost every single day. And if you are feeling any type of stress. And again, from my perspective, I don't like really sharing emotions or where I'm at. I always want to keep like, Hey, I'm super positive.

I've changed my complete mindset over this quarantine. Like if I'm feeling off, I text John and say, Hey man, I'm off this week. I'm just letting you know, like, if you see me on a call and I seem off, or maybe you get feedback from a client saying Morgan was off, I'm just letting you know, I am, I'm still going to do what I need to do. I'm just letting you know, like this week I'm not feeling it. And this was in the middle of like a lot of different stuff. And so my suggestion for you all is if you're feeling off or even if you're getting on a client call, like letting them know, like, Hey, like I'm a little bit off today. Like I'm still here. I'm just a little bit off. And that has gone a really long way for me.

And people will really appreciate that. And also like write down like what you're going through. Like I've journaled this entire time during the quarantine. And a lot of people see that as like soft and weak, whatever that is. I'm going to completely disagree with you because that has helped me stay sane. I can't tell you, I wrote a book. So I mean, talk about cathartic. When I got fired from Staples, right? I had never been fired and ever, I've been a, I was a top performer at every fucking job I had. I started my company. They got bought by Staples. I bled blue. Like who fires me, right? I got fired. And it was one of the hardest things I ever had to deal with. And one of the things I did decide to do was I wrote it.

I wrote down the story. I started and I said, all right, let's, let's go back to when we started thinking about the acquisition and when, you know, then moving forward. And let me, let me document how that whole thing went and what my perspective was and all that other stuff. And no joke, when I was done writing that book, like when I was, and it was like, I think it was like 75 pages, single spaced, eight and a half by 11, just full blown story of the whole thing. As soon as I hit send, as soon as I hit done and save, it was like, that's behind me now. You know what I mean? Like I have, I've closed that chapter literally and physically closed that chapter of my life. I've learned a lot from it, but it was just such a really healthy thing for me to do.

And I think to your point, journal down, like write down what you're frustrated about. Write down because just getting it out there, you know what I did yesterday, this weekend was this weekend. I was pretty, I mean, I fucked up my ankles that, that fucked me up too, but there was a lot of others like mental, like small shit that was really annoying me. Like friends who had done dumb shit, a couple of customers that were, you know, really acting in a way that I didn't appreciate and a few other things. And I mean, this sounds weird, but I wrote each one of those problems down on a piece of paper, had them all out of my desk and one by one picked them up, crumpled them up, threw them in the trash, crumpled the next one up, threw it in the trash.

And after I did that, I felt better. You know what I mean? I was like, I'm getting that fucking bad energy out of here, man. And I, but I'm writing it down so I can get it out of here. Not, I'm just thinking about getting out of it. I'm physically writing it down to get it out because if you don't get it out, man, it's going to come out one way or the other. You know what I mean? It'll come out in a reaction to a client. It'll come out in a, in a comment that you probably shouldn't have made to somebody or whatever it is. Write it down, get it out and just keep trying to get better. Right? Absolutely. So yeah, throw it away. You know, some people, they burn it. I know some people, they burn it.

Talk to people out loud. Roll it up and smoke it, man. And that's how we're going to end it, right? Right. There we go. I keep, I keep threatening I'm going to do the stoner podcast. It's happening. One of these days. They want it. The people want it. Yes, they do. All right, brother. Any, any final words before we get this thing up? We tie this one up. I mean, I would just say, you know, we, this might be a, another episode. Cause then one of the questions you asked was about things to improve upon. I would definitely encourage you all to, to write out things that you feel like you need to improve upon and then find people who are really great at it and ask questions. And that's one thing that's helped me.

I'm not good at receiving feedback better, better, but I'm not, I really was not great at it at all. Um, however, I tell people that I'm not good at it and I make certain faces cause I'm uncomfortable with it. However, I do take the feedback that people give me and I do it. I just have a very weird reaction when I get it. I'm not, I'm yeah, I'm just not comfortable with it, but it's not like your physical reactions. Right. You're like, it's like, it's almost like somebody who's legitimately punching you slow motion. You're like, it's the worst. I don't like it, but I know that. And I'm getting better, which is part of it. So like write those things down, um, from a leadership perspective, John does a great job of, he breaks down certain skills and he puts my grades.

He'll put like C B or A. And then he'll tell me like, Hey, you're a C here. I'm like, all right, well, like, let's talk about it. And so I would do that for yourself. Like ABC rank yourself, figure out what you can get better at. I know there's things I need to get better at. Like writing is one. Um, I still, I'm getting better. Um, but that's one that I know I have to get better at. I think setting expectations. I'm still getting better at that. Um, blogging task and Salesforce with John always yells me out. I'm getting better at those things. Right. So like, do you know what you need to get better at, but write those down. That's that's my last thing. Cause that's important. Like it's growing 1% every single day.

Cause if you're not doing that, especially in this environment, you're going to get lapped. You're going to get smoked fast, man. Like if you're not getting better, you're getting worse in my opinion. Right. So, all right, brother, I appreciate it. Look, uh, let's tie this one up. I got another call with a client. Um, but, uh, look, everybody, hopefully, uh, hopefully you're enjoying this journey of ours. Uh, both Morgan and I are on right now that all of us are on, uh, cause it's, it's pretty fucked up out there, but there is a, there is a silver lining if you look at it the right way. And, uh, and there's always room for improvement, right? There's always ways to get better. There's always better ways to help other people out.

So keep searching for those things and keep talking about your story. I mean, Morgan and I are both huge proponents of telling your story. You know, if you're into social selling, if you're trying to figure out how to get into that, don't worry about sharing your tips or anything like that. Just share your journey. Right. People are more interested in that. And that's why I think, you know, people are, you know, that's why I think so many people follow you, Morgan is because you talk about your journey. You, you share that stuff with people and you're open about it. And I think the more people are, the better we're all going to get. Absolutely. So, hi, everybody. Well, like I always say, uh, if you're having a bad day, go make somebody smile.

Cause no matter how bad your day is, you made somebody else's better. You had a great day. So, uh, we need a little bit more of that in this world these days. So thank you all from so much for listening and, uh, be on the lookout for some cool shit coming up here. Cause we're going to be trying to get better every day ourselves. All right. Make it happen. Everybody have a great day. See you guys. Bye. Bye.