Dan Sperring: Rethinking ICP to Drive Revenue

Really what we care about is less about whether or not the client's using, you know, all 35 features. What we care about is what three features have to be used in order to accomplish the goals associated with the use case. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now today's conversation is with Dan Sparing. He's the founder of Align ICP, which is focused on helping marketing and sales teams win together and hit their numbers by getting tight on the ICP. And this topic is near and dear to my heart because I've been preaching about it for so long and how I don't think most companies pay enough attention to their ICP and the nuances behind it.

Because most companies get their general list of industry size, number of employees, locations, and whatever, and they just go to work. And there is so much more to it. And that's what we unpacked during this conversation. So obviously we talked about his origin story and how he went from economics to marketing to procurement and then to sales. But I was really curious on what he's seeing out there with ICPs and how companies treat them as the way I perceive them to, or at least my experience has been, and see if it's accurate. Because again, when I do trainings, I always do a training prep doc and I ask them how they break out their tiers so that they can tear out their accounts so they know which ones to focus on.

And almost inevitably it comes back, well, you know, enterprise is tier one, mid-market is tier two, and S&P is tier three. And there's just so much more of it that we need to dig into to really get close to it. And right now more than ever, because what your ICP was last year probably isn't the same ICP this year. So we talked about what metrics and characteristics matter when looking for the ideal customer profile, and then really understanding the main two or three use cases for them. And he dropped a stat that I thought was really interesting. He had referenced a study about companies who sell vertically versus horizontally, right? So he found that the cost of sale in a company that sells anything to anybody, basically horizontally, they spend 41% of their cost of acquisition is on marketing.

Whereas the ones who are vertical only spend 22%, which gets to focus and how being hyper-specific with who you're going after matters so much. So a lot of good stuff in here. With this one, there's a lot of good tips, tactics, techniques, and thought processes. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Dan Spurring, welcome to Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, John. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. I'm looking forward to this conversation because this is a topic near and dear to my heart. I don't think enough people pay attention to it as far as the details of the ICP. But before we get into all that, man, I always like to ask people kind of origin story stuff here, right?

Like where are you coming from, parents growing up? Where'd you get the itch for sales, business, entrepreneurship, all that fun stuff? Because we can read your LinkedIn profile if we want to, but I want to figure out where you came from. So talk to us a little bit about that and then we'll get into the details here. Yeah, in terms of my origin story, I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and so both of my parents had small businesses. So from the time I was five, I was pumping gas. And back in those days, there was like self-service and full-service gas stations. So I used to, I would wash windows, I would pump gas, I would check the tires and hustle for tips. And as I graduated from college, I got my first job and realized that there was something financially different about me and the way I approach work than most of the folks I work with.

Knew I eventually wanted to start a business. I talked to a venture capitalist that said, hey, if you want to found a company, you have to learn how to sell. And at that time, I had my first job out of college and I was working in procurement and eventually made the transition and became a seller. Spent the last maybe 20 years carrying a bag and with a quota. Nice. So you were, because you went to the school for economics, right? Yeah. Where is it? And you got your MBA in marketing, right? Mm-hmm. So was that a conscious, like when you, I don't know about you, like when I got into college, I had no clue, right? I ended up with marketing because I was like, all right, I guess this is kind of the thing that puts all my stuff together.

It was relatively easy compared to the other ones, right? That type of thing. Did you consciously choose marketing, like, because that's the direction you wanted to go in? Or was that something more you just figured out, all right, this is what, this kind of feels right? Yeah. And so the story in terms of economics, I always had an interest in understanding how things worked and I knew I had like a very much like a business mind. And so I took economics because I thought that would help me understand how companies grow and are built. And what I learned was that it was very abstract and had very little to do with kind of the day-to-day operations of a company. And then when I ended up going back to school to do my MBA, I knew I wanted to become a seller.

And the closest thing to sales was really marketing. So I studied everything I could related to marketing so that I could be a seller. Nice. Yeah, I think that's... For me, yeah, it's like we always evolve, right? And then you kind of figure out, well, that's your point, like economics, like, okay, this is interesting, but now I'm out in the real world and now that shit actually matters, right? Exactly. It's the same thing, well, for me, it was kind of the same thing with marketing. It's like I went to school, I guess I learned marketing. I don't remember a single thing that I learned back then, but I remember coming into the real world being like, wait a minute, none of what they're talking about for these jobs is anything that I actually learned how to do.

So I don't know about this, right? And then I kind of got into sales. I was fortunate that I evolved into sales work because I have a DeWalt, which was, it was under a sales umbrella, but it was really event marketing. So it was a nice graduation from marketing to event marketing to then sales a little bit and then hardcore sales with Xerox. But yeah, it's an interesting, everybody's journey is always different. What made you, you know, throughout the career of all the different positions you've had, what made you passionate about this topic, about ideal customer profiles, right? Because it's, it's a niche, it's a niche component of what we do, but it's so critical in so many ways, but we're like talking about through your experience where you found why this was so important and why it was under service that you wanted to create a business around it.

Yeah, and so it really sends back to 2013 and I was incredibly fortunate to go to work for a rapidly scaling startup. They were first to market with a mobile messaging solution and raised a bunch of money and just had like exceptional, extraordinary growth. And so I went to work there as a strategic account manager and I was working with a lot of our largest customers. And at that moment in time, there wasn't really much segmentation. It was more of like, hey, if you have a counselor over a certain threshold in spend, those were yours. And then what happens over time was I ended up taking over a new territory that was very much based on the East Coast and primarily out of New York. And we had a large clustering of media companies.

And so imagine, you know, the largest, biggest and baddest media companies in the world, like NBC, CBS. As I traveled out there to meet with those clients on a regular basis, what became very clear was that the way in which they're using our technology was foundationally different than the way that everyone else was using our technology. And at one point I was in a meeting and we were kind of the de facto standard for across media for this type of technology. And during a conversation, by this time I'd been there maybe two and a half, three years, I was meeting with a customer who was using our technology and he was exceptionally frustrated with me. And he was explaining about their use case and what they're doing and talking about the deficiencies in our product.

And as I was listening, it became very clear to me that his expectation in terms of how the world thinks of our technology wasn't actually shared in terms of how we thought of our technology. And what I saw was that all media customers, they had the same collection of expectations and use cases from our tech. And so, think about this idea of, like, well, they just use APIs where all of our other customers are using a UI. And so, there's a lot of things related to, like, segmentation and targeting. There was just a ton of unique aspects to that use case related to media companies that we didn't even understand as a business. And as I brought those insights back to kind of the mothership and shared that with our product organization, what became really clear was that the use case, the value realization for that one segment was foundationally different from all the other ones.

And we as a business didn't even really have a deep understanding of that. And so, as a really more of an account manager who owned a net revenue retention number and, you know, was on the hook for renewals and bookings, what became really clear was our ability to have success with accounts was largely driven by the use cases for each one of these verticals. And we had been very fortunate to grow without even having a deep understanding of that. What eventually happened within that space or category was there was two major, major companies that had a lot of success kind of niching down, in particular use cases and personas. And both of those companies have gone public. And so, one of them is Twilio that was really focused on providing more like text messaging based solutions to developers.

And then there's another company by the name of Brace who also went public that's focusing on solving this problem for marketers. And so, without that clear focus, what happens is companies often struggle to grow because they're really optimized for no one. And so, that was one of the big learnings that I had on that journey. And for me, in some respects, it was kind of a missed opportunity in the sense that, you know, I could have been one of those people potentially ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. And that wasn't me and that wasn't our collective team who I spent seven years kind of going the battle with to try to win a market. So, it was a pretty major missed opportunity.

Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to JBarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code PODCAST at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now, let's get back to the conversation. And because I always thought, you know, most come, and I'm curious from you, you have more insight than I do on this because it's always amazing. He's still to this day. It's amazing to me when I do a training for a client. I'll ask, hey, you know, I do a training prep thing and I intake form and I say, okay, how do you cheer out your accounts? Like, what are the nuances between your tier ones, tier twos, and tier thirties?

And I want to say 80 to 90, 95% of the time, quite frankly, it's based on revenue potential or size. That's literally, like, it's almost like, well, enterprise is tier one, mid-market's tier two, and SMB is tier three. It's like, okay, and I bring them through a very basic framework, but I think a pretty good one of, okay, yeah, we can all do the Zoom info stuff of, like, okay, how many, you know, what employees, what's a revenue, but that tells such a fraction of the story. That gets us down to, okay, you kind of look like a duck, smell like a duck, but then there's so many nuances underneath that. Like, I talk them through, like, what kind of tech staff do you have? Like, who's the competition in there?

Where are they on the growth stage of their business? You know, who are their customers? I even get into the details of, like, okay, let's look at their ICP. Like, who did they sell to? And I use this as a great example of, like, when the shit hit the fan, I remember back, it was, like, this, or, yeah, I forget what it was. It was a couple of times I shit hit the fan in my career. And everybody was telling me that, hey, John, you got to get out of sass. You got to get out of tech, right? Because it's just too volatile. And I was like, I have nab, but, you know, my grand. And it's, like, I've spent all my life in tech and sass, and I don't have a brain outside, and I don't know how to do it. So, like, how can I stay in tech?

Oh, this was, yeah, 2023. It was one that was getting totally better. Yeah, the sass occur, it was called. Yeah. And I was like, how do I stay in sass and tech without getting slaughtered by sass and tech? And I revisited my ICP, and I said, well, let me look at their ICP. And what I realized was, if you were a tech company selling to tech companies, right? If you were sass selling with sass, fuck it. Like, it wasn't even worth making a phone call to you, right? But if you were sass selling outside of sass, so if your website, you have financial services or retail or something like that, you were actually doing okay. Because those industries marketing is beat up. So, with a slight shift in my ICP to think about their ICP, I started getting traction again.

So, why? First, let's start with, how am I wrong that most companies take a very generic approach to ICPs? Like, what's your general sense of how most people say, okay, let me look at this addressable market and do this stupid, what is it, Shark Tank thing? Well, you know, if I just get 1% of this massive trillion dollar market, you know, and then they kick them out immediately. So, first, let's start with what's your experience and how people start and why they start with such limited data. So, there's three ways in which companies can approach this problem. So, one of the ways is they do an in-house analysis where they're like, okay, we're going to, you know, take a bunch of Zoom info data.

We'll take some CRM data. We'll sit down with our finance team. And what happens when the clients end up doing that work is they don't have the right taxonomy to think properly about how to identify the ICP. And so, what they end up doing is they look at three variables when they do this work in-house. And I'll describe these as anchor variables. And so, the first one they'll look at is, like, what are our win rates? Number two is what is the average deal size? And then number three is what are the days to close? And so, if you really kind of distill what those metrics are, that's telling you more around, like, market message fit. And, but what it's not really even attempting to quantify is, are these customers ones in which, once you sell to, will derive value from their investment in your technology and continue to not only renew but expand over time?

And then, ideally, drive inbound is really what we're trying to do in terms of building the flywheel. So, that's one approach. The second approach is companies will hire a third-party, like, management consulting firm, like, a boss consulting or McKinsey, who will do the work. But they'll often use the very same kind of framework that I just talked about related to those more market message fit. And then, the third way that companies do this is with their MarTech tools. And so, they'll expect that, hey, our, for example, in Marketo, we have our segments defined. And so, that's what's really driving this. But none of those approaches are creating the right taxonomy. And then, the second piece is even once you have the right taxonomy applied, you identify your target account list, there's not an easy way to operationalize it.

And so, what we see time and time again is that the marketing team will actually be marketing to one audience. And then, the sales team is selling, you know, they're, like, doing their cold outreach to a different audience. And under that situation, what it does is it drives up your customer acquisition cost. And then, it just slows everything down because the sellers aren't getting marketing air cover. And marketing potentially is generating leads that the sales team knows aren't good quality. And so, according to HubSpot, 93% of sellers feel that marketing does not consistently generate high-quality leads. Yeah, I mean, that just reinforces the sales and marketing divide, as it always has been.

So, in lieu of any great, I mean, what is the right taxonomy? Like, what should we be looking for? Like, if win rates, ACD, and field time to close are not really the lead. I mean, they might be some indicator. Yeah. But what are the ones that you, if you were to say, these are the top five, top 10 things that we look at to really define what a real ICP looks like, right? Yeah. Yeah, great question. And so, we have a segmentation taxonomy that kind of breaks this down. And what I would say is that the win rates, average yield size, and days to close, like, those are critically important because, you know, if we're not hitting our number, at some point, you know, management team will find someone who will.

And so, we can't disregard those. But what we've done is we've created, think of it as almost like a rubric that prioritizes use case. And so, what we've seen time and time again is within SaaS, unless you're Oracle or Microsoft, your SaaS product is probably really good at solving problems related to maybe two to three use cases. And outside of that third use case, like fourth, fifth, and sixth, your product probably falls down and doesn't do a very good job. So, especially as a seller, what you want to do is have a deep understanding of what those use cases are up front during that qualification process. But we believe the use case is really kind of the North Star kind of variable to focus on.

And then, kind of, as you start to think about the next priorities, what it's going to be is actually retention. So, like, logo retention and then net revenue retention and then, finally, customer lifetime value. And so, what you'll see, John, is that, and this is consistent across every single client we've worked with, as well as, you know, my 20 years as a seller. What we'll see is, like, lifetime value for a particular use case will be, like, three or four X that other use cases. And so, if you know a certain customer is worth, like, $2 million versus $500,000, but their win rate is slightly lower, the answer isn't that, hey, we shouldn't be selling to them because the win rate's lower. The answer is, how do we improve our market message fit so we can increase our win rates and so we can be acquiring the customers that are going to help us create that compound annual growth rates.

And so, part of the reason why I care so much about this topic is because, as someone who's owned revenue and has been expected to create consistent, predictable revenue growth, you can't do it if you're churning customers. It's just not possible. And so, if you close the deal this year, the expectation is you're going to grow the business 20%, which means that if you lose that customer, you have to grow at 20 plus what you lost. And that right there will kill you as a revenue later. How much does this change now compared to when you started this, right? Because I feel like things are moving so fast right now that you could get caught in a pretty dangerous game here of looking at a previous company's lifetime value of, hey, they'd been with us for three or four years based on where we were and what our product was.

But now we got to add AI to this, we got to do this, and hey, that client might churn pretty soon because you're now not exactly doing right or there may be a laggard or something like that. Yeah. So, I feel like there might be, because the future is so unknown, if we look at some of these indicators right now, they might not be the right indicators to look at. So, how do you plan for those variables, if you will, when you're looking at the ICP? Yeah. I mean, so, you're absolutely right. Markets are dynamic and they're forever changing. And so, that's one of the big problems that we're focused on solving, which is ultimately really what we're quantifying is the concept of product market fit.

And that's something that we need to be measuring on ongoing ways. And so, other KPIs that we haven't talked about that I would argue are just foundationally important, especially going to your point around what I'll call leading indicators, would be things like product adoption. Like, hey, is the client still using the product? Or have they ever even really adopted the product in the first place? Other things I care about are things like NPS, like, hey, is it the NPS in the tank? So, the average for enterprise SaaS is 47 right now. And so, is it going down? And so, as you start to piece these variables together, you can get a pretty good understanding of kind of the health of a particular segment.

I don't know if that helps. So, let's look at product adoption, right? And let's marry that to the two to three use cases. I have this whole thing of sell to the 20%, which is my theory or hypothesis that most people only pick any product or service you own. Most people only use 10 to 20% of the functionality of whatever that product or service is. And so, because of that, that's how they buy. They buy on the 10 to 20% of stuff that's most relevant to them. And then it's customer success's job to then get them to adopt the rest of it. But really, it's that use case of why I'm using this. So, I guess, like, is it adopt? I mean, obviously, if they adopt the full suite, that's a gem, right? But there could be some clients that only adopt that 20%, but are still fantastic clients.

So, how do you balance, like, hey, our main use case, they're crushing it with, but they haven't adopted anything else. So, is that a quarter of a bad thing? And should I look for more companies like that? Or should I really be focusing on the ones that we can add the full suite of services to? Yeah, and so, man, you're spot on. So, every software company runs into a situation where they have basically feature bloat. And to kind of double-click into that idea, as we build products, we tend to do more of, like, an MVP thing. We get the basic out, and then we continue to iterate and improve on it. And over time, what the customer initially purchased to what they have three years later is foundationally different.

And you're absolutely right. Like, 99% of the customers are not actually keeping up with the pace of innovation of your software company. And so, going back to this idea of product adoption and use cases, really what we care about is less about whether or not the client's using, you know, all 35 features. What we care about is what, like, three features have to be used in order to accomplish the goals associated with the use case. And so, for example, a particular type of customer may need to, and this is something from Mark Roberts that, you know, I think is beautiful about the work he's done in science of scaling, is doing an analysis to understand, like, with Slack, I think it's when a customer has sent 2,000 Slack messages, there's a 90% chance that that account will be retained.

And so, for every business, the combination of features that align with the adoption of the use case is really what matters. And then being able to actually monitor that over time. And to be really frank, John, I don't think there's many companies that are effectively measuring that today. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But ultimately, that's where we want to get to in terms of a business and creating, you know, successful customers and ones that are raving fans that are helping us build those flywheels. So, adoption. So, where does this fit? So, say we get a tight one, right? And we're pretty clear on that and we are assigning territories. How do we align kind of that with the sales reps' actions and reinforce them focusing on this?

Because, you know, it'd be great if we could all have a subset list of 10 perfect ICPs and I spent all my time doing research and being value-add and ABM to that whole group. And that's just not reality. Most companies have got to grow a little bit faster so they have a bigger TAM and they can go for it. So, what's the balance of the hyper-focus on the exact ICP versus the peripheral, like, hey, they're kind of ICP. And how do you manage that with the quality and quantity, right? Assuming that we have segmentation of SMB mid-market enterprise and, you know, each one of them has their own flair, there's always going to be that balance of quality and quantity. So, how do you operationalize a guest so that they're focusing on the right accounts but they're not limiting themselves because the revenue potential is just not there for that small subset?

Sure. And just one clarifying question for you. Is this more in the eyes of the seller in terms of their territory? Well, I think how does management implement it? Like, and is technology the answer, basically, where we're just going to serve up the, you know, the reps have no autonomy on it. It's just, we're going to give you the accounts and this is the ones you got to focus on. Or is there kind of a partnership with leadership and sales to help curate that, those, and understand different approaches? Okay. No, thank you for the additional context. So, I am a big believer in, we want sellers to have as much autonomy as possible because we want them to really kind of buy into who it is they're targeting and have some skin in the game.

Now, there's definitely a little bit, there's a lot of gray and there's some wrinkles here. And so, in terms of how we go about operationalizing these ideas, you're absolutely right. We have what we refer to as ICP segments are clearly like in the target. And then what every company is going to have is emerging segments and ICP segments. And so, what happens over time, like as companies get to like, you know, call it 50 million, 100 million, what happens is there ends up being this organic segments that show up within the customer base that arrive not because we're marketing to them, but because they're hand raisers. And they're like, you know, hey, we need your technology, it's helpful. But most companies aren't really aware that that segment exists.

And so, what we do is we identify those as emerging ICP segments and where you have like a really strong track record of performance. Now, getting into, so that's maybe thinking about it more from like, I'll call it a rev-offs perspective. Now, if we were to double-click into, from a seller's perspective, in terms of, you know, where are they investing in their time and energy? So, within your territory, you're, like, we all know that territories are not built equally. And there's massive variations in the quality of the accounts within a particular territory. And with that in mind, what I have done as a seller is paid a huge amount of attention to the deals that are closing, the size of them, and then trying to understand, you know, of those, you know, those marquee accounts that we've closed, which one of them, of those do I have within my patch?

And then think about, how do I get really strategic about investing my time and energy so that I'm going to have the most success possible, you know, with that book of business? And so, in terms of this idea of the sellers going out and picking their accounts, if I were to think about it from more of an organizational perspective, I've seen very specific examples with clients that we've worked with where that actually ends up creating a lot of churn problems. And so, I think the best case scenario would be one in which the territories are constructed where they're large enough, where the sellers can pick and choose which accounts they really want to invest their time in, and then leveraging those insights to double down on the ones, and ideally get marketing air cover, too.

Like, it shouldn't be a simple sport. I used to have my team, so we would go through the ICP exercise to get tight, and then I'd say, okay, here's the details. Now, set up your list and sales to have and all that fun stuff, and they would have to come to me with their top 25, right? But before they could even engage with their top 25 or start going after them, I said, okay, one more layer here before you go after these accounts. I need you to go and look at these accounts and come back to me and tell me a reason why you personally want to work with that company. Amen. Yeah. I need you to have a connection to it, and I don't care what it is. Their product is awesome. Their values are really strong on their website.

Their mission is fantastic. Their leadership is really good. Whatever it is, so that you can make that actual connection, because when you can make the connection to why you want to work with them, not just because they fit your ICP, well, then your messaging becomes a lot more gin, right? And that comes through when you're reaching out to them and creating your campaigns and your approaches and your strategies. And so that layer of like, okay, there's some autonomy here, right? Because I'm going to give you the framework and you're going to get the details here, but you get to go choose who they are. And then when you choose who they are, you need to come back and tell me why you want to personally work with them.

And that became a really good, you know, just way for them to start to give a shit about the client as opposed to just treating them as another, okay, here's my top 25, and I have to go after the first one, the second one, the third one, the fourth one. So many people are stuck in this, oh, I got to hit my cadences. Oh, I got to do my 50 dials. Oh, I got to call these clients. And I always talk about the give a shit factor, right? It's like your results aren't going to change until, and I told this to Morgan, I've said this a bunch of times on the podcast. Like I said, and look, your results aren't going to change until something does, one thing does. It's like, what? So you start giving a shit.

Yeah. And then once you start giving a shit, and I mean that, like care about them as a person, care about them as, you know, have some empathy. Think about them as like waking up in the morning and the kids and the boss yelling at them and those type of things. Now all of a sudden it becomes real. And so how, I guess, how do you layer on that with the work that you do, right? So we can all get the demographics and firmographics and all this different stuff and we can produce these perfect, yeah, this is the case. But how do you coach the organization, whether it's leadership or the reps, to make that extra connection to give a shit about it? Yeah. And so, man, I have some great kind of personal learnings on my journey and that very much tie into exactly what you're talking about.

So two examples I can provide. The first one was me as a new logo hunter. Man, this is probably like 2005. And so my book of business was in the state of Oregon where I live. And one of the larger accounts, prospect accounts we had was the company called Schnitzer Steel. And they're probably, back in the day, they were like a $2, $3 billion company. And so I, in terms of my book of business, what I did was I'd use Google News and I'd set up these alerts for all my accounts. And so every day, you know, get in the office, you know, this is obviously before COVID. The first thing I would do is I'd go through my news list to see what was going on with my accounts. And coincidentally, there was one day where I had this account for like eight months and I tried all these different things and got nowhere.

One day I get home from work and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal is an article about Schnitzer Steel and how their company is like blowing up and doing really well. And anyways, and so I read the article in the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal was just like full of all of these areas in which we could help them grow faster. And so like one of the stories is one of the, so with Schnitzer Steel, they have several lines of business and one of them is called Pick and Pull. So like if your car gets totaled, your insurance company will sell it to Pick and Pull. And then they call them like shade tree mechanics will go out and like get parts for their cars. And so anyways, so I get this article and like on the front page of Wall Street Journal, there's a guy that goes out and buys these salvaged cars.

And so anyways, there's a clear way that we could help them by like allowing him to connect his laptop to the cellular web, you know, the cellular network. Like I worked for Verizon Business and how he could basically find more cars faster. And so anyways, I put together this, this big, it was like a binder that kind of took quotes out of the Wall Street Journal article and then tied it back to our business and how we could help. You know, and one of the, in the article, this guy that ends up buying these salvaged cars, his favorite car to buy was a 67 or 63 Impala. So I went down to Target and I bought a big ass 63 Impala and it was like the doors would open. And so myself and some colleagues, we like, we put my business card in the trunk and then we like taped it and then we put our logo on the side.

So then I walked this big ass package down to their headquarters and we went down to their admin and said, hey, this is for your CIO. And so, so she took it. And then about a week later, I get a call from, he's like the director of like information security. I get a call, hey, can you come down? I'm interested in meeting with you guys. So I go down and meet with the guy and didn't really have, it was kind of a strange, like it was one of those, like there wasn't a clear, you know, like as you go through Bant, it wasn't a clear, like, you know, this guy clearly had budget. He had authority. There wasn't a clear need. It was like, you're meeting with me. Well, then I started getting, as they would spin up location, I'd start to get emails saying, hey, do you want to bid on this?

And so, so then we started, you know, I'd send in bids on certain projects. And then the strangest thing happened, which is we didn't win any business, but the strangest thing happened, which was I ended up getting a call from our competitor. And what I didn't know at the time was that they were struggling in that account and that they just had like a major, a major like data center outage and the account, they're about to lose it. And then that same week, they're about to lose the account. I delivered that package. So what happened was I got my next job because of, I was just doing my job. I was trying to sell stuff, but I was creating these major challenges for our competitor and I ended up increasing my OTE 100%.

Like I went from 75 to 150, you know, this was back in the day, but it boiled down to the fact that this competitor was seeing me in that account and other accounts doing similar types of things. But to your point, I gave a shit, like it wasn't like, I wasn't just like, uh, trying to sell ice to Eskimos. I was like trying to help a customer be more successful. Um, and so because of that, that story that ended up being a story that I would tell my account management teams and we ended up, um, really cool story with, um, EA sports, um, down in, uh, San Mateo. Um, they have some pretty amazing, um, you know, obviously video games and one of them was FIFA and one of our AMs had like a small foot hold in that account.

And she ended up doing a very similar thing or talking about as they moved to like mobile apps, how there was an opportunity to use our technology to really, um, drive much more usage and engagement from those people who download the app and just don't use it very often. And so, and she had, luckily she wasn't poached, but she had a very similar situation where she built, she built out these individual playing cards of like the FIFA, uh, athletes and, um, kind of link that to them kind of generating more revenue. And she got tons of meetings from that campaign. So, yeah, I'm, I'm all in on kind of these ideas that you're talking about and I've seen the work firsthand. Yeah. And I, you know, the thing that it's always the balance, right.

Is, is the need for growth and high, you know, go, go, go, go, go with, with the balance of quality. Yeah. And I just, I hope if there is anything that came out of, you know, the slaughter of 2023, it was to realize quality matters over quantity. Right. And we need to slow down to speed up in some ways, but I still must seen it out there. Quite frankly, I'm still seeing the volume play and everybody trying to do personalization at scale. And, you know, AI is the answer, but it's just not, it's just the real shit is the real shit. And it doesn't, like, I was actually quite frustrated, um, the other night with, uh, you know, with my wife, she was, she's trying to prospect into her target. Helen, she's like, I just come do, cause she's a CEO.

She's like, I got to start selling these dashboards. So I just need to, you know, I go, I can give you some template thing that you can send out to a hundred, but that's not going to make a difference. It's like, you need to sit down, you know, half hour to an hour of every single account, go in, do some research, figure out where your strategy is, all this other stuff, create a hypothesis, do this. She's like, I just don't have time for that. I'm like, then I don't know what to tell you. You know what I mean? And then what we did was we sat down and, you know, again, my approach could be a lot better. Um, but then we sat down and said, all right, let's just pick one account. Let's go, let's take a look at the website.

Right. Let's all right. Let's look at this. Let's say, okay, cool. That's something neat. All right. We have a value statement there. What about this? What about that? So, okay, cool. Now let's craft these messages in this way. And then let's figure out ways to add value. And what's interesting to me right now is I've always struggled with this. You know, I tell people all the time, like, you got to add value, you got to add value, right? Like in every touch and everything, you got to add value. But that's, that's kind of hard to do, quite frankly, is, is, is what kind of value is like for me. And I, I joke really, I'm a sales guy selling sales training to sales guys. You know what I mean? Like I'm a crackhead selling crack to crackheads.

It's not that hard for me to, you know, and I have a backpack of tips and techniques and tools and resources. So I could reach out to a VP of sales and be like, yo, have you seen this? It's like, holy shit, I've never seen that before. But when you talk to like a 22-year-old kid who's selling at cybersecurity CISOs, like value is that person going to bring to that CISO? But now it's actually easier than ever because what I don't think a lot of people are doing right now or understand is CHEPT, the deep research shit, dude, like the other day, like I can go in and say, I'm trying to add value to a CISO in the cybersecurity space. I'm a 22-year-old kid. I have no idea what I'm doing. What are five ideas of content that you, CHEPT, can go do deep research for me on that would add value to that CISO's life?

And it'll say, oh, well, we could do this, this, this, and this. It's like, okay, cool. Go do deep research on that and create a five-page white paper that extracts explicit data on this very specific topic on these type of things. And it'll do it for you. Yeah. And then you fire that off to the CISO and be like, hey, not sure if you were. I did this data analysis on this, that, and the other thing. You might be right. So there's actually so many more ways now to be thoughtful, to give a shit. You just got to kind of break through that barrier. When do you see reps? Is there for you in your career, you know, who you've worked with and the clients that you've worked with, do you see it? There's almost like a light bulb moment in some, or is it just kind of, it is what it is.

It's all over the place. Some people get it. Some people don't. But is there a point in somebody's career where they say, hmm, I got to get out of this machine, right? To just keep cranking this shit out and actually start to give a shit. Is it a forcing function? Is it a realization? Is it a leadership thing? What do you think? Yeah. That's a, that's a really tough question. And so, man, there's a lot that you said there, John. And there's, there's so many things I kind of want to almost go back and touch on. Cause I think they're really important to your point, this idea of quantity versus quality. I do think there is a way to use AI to improve quality and do it in a much more efficient way.

At the same time, kind of going back to this idea of, of like giving a shit, like when I think about kind of, and some of this gets more into just value. And they're really tough things to kind of coach, but going back into values, what I've seen consistently is the most successful people in the world are ones that they're probably helping a lot more people than I am. And what we end up doing is we end up focusing on ourselves and like, how do we, you know, how does Dan Sparing become more successful? And so what we end up doing is saying, okay, well, I need to close more deals. And so I need to, you know, triple down on, you know, the volume. But the reality is that, um, as you take a step back and you start to think about, um, how do I, how do I hit my number?

And chances are, if you can close, we'll call them five deals that are meaty, you're going to have an amazing quarter or amazing year. That kind of like when you factor in all the other things that potentially work will just organically show up. So under that construct of, wow, within those five accounts, if I can help 10 or 15 or 20 people be more successful and I'm the, the only really way to help them be more successful starts with understanding how they define success. And what I've found, and it's like the level of effort's really not that hard. Like if you set up, like literally you can set up a Google newsfeed in like 20 minutes and you can have your, you know, I'll call them your top 15 or 20 accounts.

And if every day you have like part of your rhythm and your motion is to say, okay, I'm just going to read this and see like, okay, what's new within this, uh, target account list. What you'll end up finding, like within three months of doing that, you're going to know as much, if not more than the people who actually work there. Hey, real quick here, this is another reminder. What he just described there is pretty much my exact morning routine where I follow my top 25 accounts. I follow topics to learn stuff from, and I build rapport and relationships in literally 30 minutes a day. So if you want to see my exact routine, the tools and approach that I use to do this, sign up for the JV sales membership today by going to www.jbarrows.com.

Go to training, click individual, choose either the pro or core package and use coupon code podcast 20 to get 20% off. I'll see you there. Let's make it Apple. And so, um, I have another example where, um, Adobe, actually, no, it wasn't Adobe. Um, Adobe bought a customer of mine called, um, gosh, it's a CAD software. I'm struggling to remember the name of it, but, um, to solve PTC. Yeah, it's one of the, like the biggest AutoCAD, uh, software out there. But, um, anyways, I, yeah, I'm struggling, man. And so every, every day I would read the, you know, kind of the latest and greatest, um, about this company. And then eventually there was an inbound that came in and I jumped on the phone with this gal and the amount of like having like studied their company for six months.

Like, man, we had like the greatest discussion and, you know, she told me like the piece of the business that she was working on and their business was blowing up because of all these 3d printers. And, you know, we could kind of nerd out on that. I knew like what websites that they owned where people could upload like designs to, to, you know, build these things. And so point being is, um, I think some of it's just about them is having like a really good rhythm. And every day I'm going to show up and learn, you know, just a touch more about a handful of accounts. And it's actually, I don't really think it's that hard to be honest with you. Yeah. And that's the sad thing. It's, it's, it's really not, especially now, but especially now with the AI stuff, like it is, it's a joke.

How easy shit is to find out. And, and that's why I, I'm ruthless these days with sales reps, trying to sell me shit. I mean, ruthless because there is zero excuse not to come prepared to a conversation and to skip all the bullshit of, Oh, tell me about your business and your priorities. And what keeps you up at night and all those top three initiatives. Yeah. Right. Like, I, I mean, this is what I do. And I encourage, by the way, I encourage every sales, I encourage every, everybody who takes sales calls, who's listening to this. I encourage to ask this question on the first call when the kid picks up the phone and gets on a zoom call. I do this every time. And I'll say, Hey, uh, Dan, before we get started here, um, before you tell me a little bit about what you know about me in the business and that type of stuff, just so I can get a temperature.

Check here. Ask that question. Yeah. And you will be amazed at how few sales professionals can give you any substance to that answer. It, and it is, I did this, I did, you know, I did 20 of these a while back, 20 calls. I took 20 sales calls. And that question I asked 14 out of 20 couldn't even tell me I did sales training. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. And I get off and I, by the way, I'm like, okay, so you wasted my time. I'm going to take it back. And I just hang up the phone. No matter how much I need the, the, the product service, whatever it is, I, I will not deal with that sales route and I'll go find somebody else to do it. And I, by the way, I encourage every buyer to do that because shame on you as a sales professional for not showing up prepared to a conversation at this point.

Shame on you. I mean, it literally, it takes less than a second. You go, go on chat GPT. Tell me about this business as quickly as possible. Give me five questions that I could ask that make it sound like I know what I'm talking about. Like, it's ridiculous. So, um, awesome. And well, where do you see this going? I mean, I mean, with, with things moving, I mean, with what you're working on, like from a technology standpoint, uh, is this, are we headed towards a world where this is all going to be kind of automated for us? Where like AI is going to be able to scrape our database, find out all that information for us, and then go look at the addressable market and suck that, you know, and then feed us the information that we need when we need it.

Is that where we're headed right now? Or do you think there's still going to be a, a significant amount of annual labor involved in this from near future? When you take a few step steps back and you look about, you look at how we, as, um, B2B SaaS professionals go to market. We all know there's massive, massive amounts of, uh, waste and inefficiencies in the process. And so, um, where I think this is headed is, um, there's an opportunity and, and it's pretty fascinating. So others have done some, some work, um, in the space that I'm just massive fans of. So one of them, um, his name is David Spitz. And, um, he did a study where, um, he looked at public SaaS companies and he broke them down into two populations, um, horizontal SaaS companies, you know, ones that sell across many different industries.

He compared them to vertical SaaS companies that are just focused on, for example, healthcare or just focused on retail. And what he was able to demonstrate was that the vertical SaaS companies spend about 50% less on sales and marketing and grow at the same rate. Really? Yeah. And so he compared identical, uh, companies identical size in terms of ARR and then almost identical growth rates. And so, um, if you were to step back and you were to ask yourself, well, what's different about vertical SaaS versus horizontal SaaS, what's different is the entire company is focused on building and selling to the same identical, uh, buyers industries, as well as against the same use cases. And so where, if you were to step back and say, okay, for the majority of the market, you know, like 95% of the market, we're, we're selling, uh, horizontal solutions to many different types of buyers and personas where this is going.

I mean, it's a place in which every company knows exactly who their ICP is down to X number of accounts. So there's 10,530 accounts in our ICP. We're doing business with a thousand of them. Um, where this is going is that the ad spend. And so like the days of, um, there's this old kind of adage that as a marketer, I know I'm wasting 50% of my budget. I just don't know where I'm wasting it. Those days are going away. And what will happen is that, um, we through, through that, that deep understanding of who our ICP is, ad networks are sophisticated enough today where we can just market to those accounts and actually down to those individual people. So what's fascinating about this is, um, where I believe this is going is that the go to market, um, process that spans marketing sales and customer success is one that's going to be automated.

It's your workflows. And those workflows are going to be very specific to take out a lot of the kind of the manual intervention and kind of broken pieces of, of these siloed functional teams. And what will happen is every company at any moment in time will know not only who those accounts are, but also which ones are in market. And today we can say that, um, you know, uh, uh, a percentage and according to six cents, um, but it's usually around 2.5% of the, of your target account list is actually looking for a solution. Why is this important for sellers? Well, if I'm a seller and a company is just more in the awareness stage and they're not going to be buying for six months or eight months, maybe I shouldn't spend a lot of time reaching out to them.

And, um, where this is going is that every day or week sellers will have a really good understanding of, Hey, these are the accounts in my patch that are ready to buy. I mean, these ones are, um, more in the awareness phase and therefore you want to make sure that I'm partnered up with marketing and that they're getting more like brand messages so that when they go in to market, we're the first company that gets considered. Yeah. I think that's the key, right? It's, that's why I continue to push on this that I think, you know, a lot, at least the SDR, BDR function almost at this point needs to be seen as a marketing function. And it's about awareness. It's about, uh, impression points. It's about adding value without always saying, Hey, what's the best way to get 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 15 minutes on a calendar type of bullshit.

And if we treat it that way, we actually release a lot of the pressure from the SDR org to produce, you know, these arbitrary metric results of activities and bullshit meetings that just get flipped over. And, and we can focus on quality. I mean, I said it before, I'll say it again, the number one thing that we can do to sell to, to align sales and marketing was just take away attribution. Amen. Now the problem with that is commission. So I'm actually pushing on this, I'm putting together, go back to the deep research and cause I've, I've been, I've been always struggling with the SDR role in general. Like I built my career off of it and I, and I think SDR and if it's the hardest job in sales by far, um, but it, it, it made sense back when predictable revenue grow at all costs, you know, you know, money was free effectively.

Uh, and when sales rep stayed at the organization for more than a year, right. But now sales rep say, I mean, SDR stay less than 1.6 years. Now that I've done this research, it's lessons at that company. Forget about the position. Yeah. Position is 1.4. The company is 1.6. So they don't even become your AEs. And the ones who stay less than 50% of them actually become AEs. So the model of cheap labor early that you can use to develop your, that, that model's over like that, that value of that is done. So therefore let's look, let's reshape the entire SDR org here. And, and I almost want to create like, like an apprenticeship program here. Whereas I don't know about you, but like I got into, so Xerox, right.

What I like back in the day, you went, you went to an, a cat, like before you got territory, before you got any of that, you literally went to like an eight week sale. Or a one year apprenticeship where you learned the business, you learned how to do it and that type of thing. I think we need to get back to that. I think we need to get back to treating it as almost like a go-to-market function. And you come in, you get salary roll. You then get to do a bunch of stuff. Yeah. You can send some emails. You could do some data research. You understand how the tools work, but you also understand business and you need to work with some clients, understand use cases. Then maybe after the first year, if you got the itch to get a little bit more higher comp and like, you know, okay, well put me in the bullpen.

That's where the cold calling side of the house. So I can actually make cold calls now. But then after the second year, you pick a lane. It's almost like when you go to college, I went to University of Maryland. And the main reason was because they didn't force me to declare my major in the first two years. Oh, cool. Because I didn't know what the fuck I wanted to do. So this is my idea here is like, make the first year a pure salaried roll cost of sale. But then after that first year, the rep can pick a lane. Hey, I think I want to go into direct sales. Hey, I think I want to go into marketing. Hey, I think I want to go into customer success. Hey, I think I want to go into operations or even enablement.

Yeah. And then they start to work in that. And that construct to me makes a hell of a lot more sense than what we got right now. Because this is a fucking mess what we're in right now. So first of all, Xerox for a long period of time was viewed as having the best sales organization in the world. And many of our leading CEOs today come from that environment. So examples being McDermott at ServiceNow, as well as Howard Schultz. You know, he graduated through that program. And so what I've witnessed on my journey is most of the SaaS companies I've worked with have been very inadequately prepared or have invested in the training of what I'd argue is one of our most important functions. And in the absence of that training, I'd love your thoughts on it.

But I was always under the impression that the journey to an AE, from my perspective, absence of the training, should really be more of an account management function. As you actually learn how the client's using the product, what the product can and can't do. And having been, you know, in kind of, you know, knee deep, kind of fighting the, you know, the battles with the customer and trying to help them be successful and working with the product team, that really sets you up to be an amazing seller. Oh, without question. I forget, terrible memory, but there was somebody out on the podcast a long time ago. And that model was my first, this was actually before the AI and all this stuff kind of threw a loop into everything.

But he had said he's, he actually takes, he lets the, you know, SDRs, SDRs, right? You're going to come in, junior rep, you're going to beat the shit out of you, you're going to make some calls, whatever it is. But then instead of going to an AE, because the challenge with that is, if you're a company like Salesforce, it makes sense because you have enterprise, mid-market, SMB, and then VSB. You have very small businesses. So you go from an SDR doing the kind of the front end of the sales process, making calls. And when you get promoted, you get promoted down to a VSB AE, right? So a very small business. So you learn how to close, but there's not a lot of stress to it. You know what I mean? It's transactional kind of, so you kind of get in.

And if you lose a deal, you lose a deal who gives a shit. Then you get promoted to the mid-market and move forward, right? Most companies don't have that size and breadth to be able to create that learning path. So they take a SDR after a year, then throw them into mid-market or enterprise full cycle sales. And these kids are freaking slaughtered. That's the drop-off that you see. Like the amount of people that fail between SDRs and AEs is drastic. So if what he did was he took the SDRs and he became account manager's customer success. And they sat and they listened, use cases, understood what happened when a dipshit sales rep sold the wrong thing and the pain that that caused. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And so now when they grab, then they could stay in CS or AM if they wanted to. But then, okay, a year later, now they're in a, now they have empathy. They have use case conversations. They have, you know, true understanding of the value of the product. And I thought that was genius. I'm like, you know what? That's the transition out of this horrible, predictable revenue model that we're in right now. That would be a shift. But now I think it's, we got to shape, we got to reshape this all together. That first two years is we have to basically now create it, I think, as a, as an expectation that it's effectively your MBA. Like you go to school for four years, you're going to come here for two and we're going to give you an MBA and go to market.

Like, and if we accept that as a cost, if you churn after that, if you, okay, whatever it is. But if you make that fucking program off the charts and you add so much value to that kid's life, they're probably going to stay up. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more with you, John. Like in terms of when I think about the teams that I've been a part of and the leaders I like to follow, they're ones that actually, in many respects, they invest a tremendous amount. And me and my development and there's situations where I've, I've stayed in jobs, not because it was the right company or even, you know, I wasn't making the money I wanted, but I had amazing fucking leader. And I knew that my time with that leader was one in which there was this intangible value that would help me for the next 20.

And so, um, yeah, like some of the, you know, the most important mentors in my life have been bosses and, um, yeah, like going back to kind of like the transit transactional nature of go to market today. I think the real opportunity right now for leaders is actually leaning into investing in your people, helping them build a great career. And if you do so, they will return just massive amounts of, uh, kind of, uh, success in terms of not only just crushing the number, but helping you and your mission, uh, to build a great company. And I think that was one thing I learned, I know it's a little old school these days with Jack Welsh, uh, and GE, right. Cause they were pretty great, you know, everybody hates it now, but, but, um, you know, the whole good to great, uh, if you read good to great, I think it was either good to great or built to last, uh, you know, built to last to a degree, one of the two.

Um, um, but I think the good to great was when they had this process, this system for, for, um, development of a CEO. So that it wasn't just like, okay, when the new, when old CEOs are retiring, they, okay, well, let's pick one. They had, they literally had a whole, a program, like a multi-year, five-year, four-year program that produced leaders and CEOs. And what was funny is at the end, you know, you got down to like the two or three that were like, holy shit. And they were all incredible. Yeah. And then it was the choice of, okay, we chose Jack. Well, the other three people that went through that with Jack to get to the CEO level, CEO of a Home Depot, CEO of this, they became, and so that's the legacy.

And I, and I wish more companies would think of it that way. It's like the leg, you know, of, to a certain degree, legacy of what you're trying to bring to the table here. You're not just trying to, you know, hit your revenue numbers and get your IPOs and good for you. And you make your fucking cash good for you. Like, if you want to create something real and a legacy, well, you create a system that produces greatness. Yeah. And that loyalty comes back to you in referrals, in NPS scores, in customer stuff, you know what I mean? All of that shit. People say, you know, all the customers, fuck off. Like, yes, customers, but they're not always right. Fuck you that the customer's always right. And I've, there's been multiple times in my career where I'm like, bullshit, you are an asshole.

You know what I mean? Yeah. But if, and so people say, oh, you treat your customers and you'll leverage. No, no, no. You treat your employees. Because if you, if you focus on your employees being happy, your customers are going to be happy. Like, let's just, let's just, it's obvious. So I think that's where we get to shift this entire thing, in my opinion, to get back to fucking matters, going back to ICPs. Who's the ones that actually matter? Who gives a shit of how big the TAM is? What are the 50 companies that if we got them, would make us the most profitable and, you know, effective company in the world? Like, those are the ones that we should focus on. We should build our whole GTM around that, which I think I'm preaching the choir here, but I'm also trying to get way people up right now.

Cause I, I think this, this volume play, man, is a race to the bottom. It's just a race to the bottom. I couldn't agree more with you. Today, I got an email that was inviting me to speak on a podcast about what was fascinating about it. It was related to SAS, but it talked about skincare, you know, and it was clear to me is the AI wrote it. The person that sent it, didn't even bother to check it. And there was this random shit in there. Well, that's it. Well, I'm curious now. And there you're like, no, no, it was just a fuck up. Yeah. Yeah. I can surely, you know, if you want to see it, but it's almost like every day, it's almost comical. Cause these things are showing up in my inbox. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Like, yeah, like my version of that is a LinkedIn comments. Okay. Right. So like, I'll post something and obviously, you know, bing, bing, bing, LinkedIn, you know, there's all this stuff. And I look at, I'm like, did you read the posts or are you, cause that, that's a pretty obscure comments on that. I don't, okay. But it's, it's so obvious. That's why I just automation, augmentation, right? Everybody who's looking at automate, I think it's just automating themselves out of a job, but every augment, that's, I think, man, this is a superpower. So hopefully we can be there for the bridge, my friends, cause we're all living a legacy model right now and we're all moving into a new one. Just nobody knows what it is.

So I appreciate the conversation. Tell people where they can find out more information, more about what you're doing. Cause I do think this is, and also talk about your ICP, right? I mean, I know we were talking about doing some work together and I'm a little bit more of the PLG and getting some businesses to work it. Even though I work with Enterprise, who's, who's the best suited and where can they find out information about you? Yeah, no, I appreciate you giving me this opportunity, John. So in terms of the best place to learn more about what we're doing and ultimately how we can help revenue leaders be more successful, our website's a good place. There's, it's a line, icp.com. And there's a section in there that, where it says learn more.

And it's a, it's basically our blog post, but what's great about it is it gets deep into the frameworks and ideas and illustrates how we're trying to help revenue leaders be more successful. In terms of our ICP, we'll start on more of the company side. We're a hundred percent focused on B2B SaaS companies, ones that probably have over $10 million in ARR, probably all the way up to maybe 500 million. In terms of our personas that we care most about, it's a, it's, I'm being really intentional when I use this word. It's a revenue leader. And so it's, it's an individual that needs to contribute to building repeatable, scalable growth. The folks that we tend to naturally gravitate towards are, it's a combination.

It's not just one. It's a CMO. It's a VP of RevOps. It's trying to do this work, but struggling and potentially a CRO that owns not only a new logo bookings, but also a retention and expansion. Got it. Awesome. Well, I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate what you're doing. Cause it's, again, it's, it's a weird going back to vertical, right? About that. That was an interesting one. Could you remind me it's 40% of their vertical, they expend 40% less to get the client even though, and they're just as profitable. Is that the number? Yeah. And so just to run through those numbers one more time. And so the study was based on, on two populations of public SaaS companies. And so the populations were constrained such that David looked at accounts that had similar growth rates.

So it was right around 18% and then companies that were right around the same size. And so I think there was maybe 700 million ARR. And so from there, what was looked at was the percentage of revenue that is allocated towards sales and marketing. And so on average, the horizontal company is spending something like 41% of, of every dollar goes into sales and marketing. Whereas the vertical SaaS, it's right around 22%. Hold on. Yeah. That's impressive. That is impressive. 40, 41 versus 22. Good. Awesome, man. Well, again, thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate the conversation. It was a fun one. Yeah, man. I really enjoyed it. Thanks, Sean. Yeah. That'd be, uh, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did and got you to think a little bit about your own ACP and go and do a little bit of homework there to figure out if your spokes are all right ones.

Of not wasting your time on people that will never buy from you, but regardless, like I always say to all these, uh, all these podcasts here, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day went or how bad you think it's going, you make somebody smile today and you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side. Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough. Now, to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network.

Also, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day just like you. Go to jbarrows.com slash newsletter to sign up today. Let's all level up and make this happen together. you