Omer (00:11.360)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This interview is a story about a sales guy who spent 10 years helping to lead two companies to over $10 million in annual revenue.
Then, as a founder, he took another company from a million dollars in funding to zero.
Yep, you heard that right.
He shares with me some important but tough lessons he learned from that experience.
And we talk about how losing other people's money was one of the hardest challenges that he's faced in his career.
There are a lot of stories about how a founder went from zero to a multimillion dollar business.
And those stories are great because we can learn from those entrepreneurs and their successes, but it's equally important to learn from business failures.
And I'm fortunate enough to have a guest today who's willing to share it all.
My guest also shares his extensive sales expertise and takes me through a simple but powerful four step process to help you achieve the sales goal for your SaaS business.
This year, we do a deep dive into that process, so you might want to be ready to take some notes.
I hope you enjoy the interview.
Today's guest is a sales coach, founder of Sales tuners, and the host of the Sales Tuners podcast.
He spent the last 10 years helping lead two companies from a million dollars to more than $10 million in annual revenue.
And as a founder, he took another company from a million dollars to to zero.
Today he coaches tech companies and salespeople through his skeptical selling method.
And on his weekly podcast, he talks with great sales leaders and high performing individual salespeople about the behaviors, attitudes and techniques that have led to their success.
So today I'd like to welcome Jim Brown.
Jim, welcome to the show.
Jim Brown (02:11.330)
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Omer (02:14.290)
Now, let's start by getting into your head, wanting to figure out what makes you tick.
So is there a favorite quote that you can share with us?
Jim Brown (02:20.630)
Yeah, absolutely.
This has actually been my email signature for almost 16 years now from when I had my first professional job.
And it's from Eric Hoffer.
And he says, in times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Omer (02:36.950)
Wow, that's pretty deep.
Jim Brown (02:38.870)
Yeah, like I said, it's been there for almost 16 years because it's just true.
I mean, you have to constantly be Progressing and learning and exploring new things.
And I mean that across not just professional disciplines, but just life in general.
One of the biggest things I think is we have a challenge here in our country right now is that it seems like we're anti idea right now.
If you don't share the exact same philosophies as someone else, they're wrong.
And I've just experienced so much by my travel and some of the personal pleasures that I have that when I explore and I'm vulnerable to other people and other ideas, I just learn and grow so much and I kind of leave the past behind me and just explore this new world.
And it's just amazing.
So it is deep, but it means a lot to me.
Omer (03:22.710)
Yeah, that's great.
Quote.
Okay, so I want to start by talking about probably the piece that people might be wondering about in the intro where as a founder, you took a company from a million dollars in funding to zero and to kind of set the context for this.
I watched a talk that you did where you Talked for about 15 minutes on this topic as we were discussing earlier.
It was very raw.
It was very close to after this experience of, of having this failure.
And I think it took a lot of courage to go out in front of people and talk about this.
And I know that you were talking in front of a group of entrepreneurs and there were also people who had invested in this business who were also in the audience there.
So it was a pretty moving talk that certainly, you know, I experience.
So tell us a little bit about that before we talk about the good stuff that you've done.
Tell us a little bit about what happened here.
Jim Brown (04:22.850)
Yeah, we're, we're going to rip the scab off this right away.
I like it.
So, yeah, you know, so I want to just be very clear.
I think I started that company from the wrong position.
And what I mean by that is it was ego.
I had just had two very successful stints with other companies, lots of growth, as you mentioned, and I had this ego.
To me, I saw everyone else raising venture capital and I wanted to do it too.
I want to be part of the club.
And so, so that was the positioning over that I decided I wanted to raise a million dollars in venture capital because here in Indiana that seven figure number was kind of like it was out there as a thing that no one really got to do, especially not at the seed stage and especially not for a B2C company in a very heavy B2B town.
So that was it.
My goal was to raise a million Dollars of venture capital.
And I did it.
And my challenge, or my problem was I thought that the investors writing that check to me was market validation in and of itself.
And I could not have been more wrong.
Next two years of my life prove that.
Omer (05:20.730)
Well, let's start by talking about the business.
So tell us what the business was and what was the problem that you're trying to solve.
Jim Brown (05:27.450)
The company was called Haven.
It was originally started as Porch Light.
And I'm telling that part of it just because having to change names partway through was another challenge we had to overcome.
But I was sitting in London, England, in it would have been, gosh, I don't even know, November, I guess November or December of 2013.
So two months after we had kind of started the business.
And again, our name was Porchlight at the time, and we had done a ton of research to get that name.
And all of a sudden, I'm sitting there in London, England, I'm doing some work, and out comes this, like, article about this company called Porch, who seemingly is doing the exact same thing that we're doing.
And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.
They're backed with $6 million in venture funding.
They'd already signed on, like, all these different people.
And evidently, they had been working in stealth mode for almost a year, year and a half.
And I thought to myself, wow, we can't call ourselves Porch Light.
There's going to be, you know, they have more money than us.
They're going to drive us out of business and all that kind of stuff.
So that was another hurdle.
But what we were trying to do is use this concept of the Internet of things combined with big data, combined with what was coming up, the convenience economy, if you will.
And we thought that by molding all three of those things together, there was no reason that your house or your home should not be able to talk to you and tell you the things that it needed, right?
And so, hey, because we know your house was built in 1992, and it was built by this builder and all the other people in your neighborhood, they're starting to replace their H Vac system.
That must mean that yours is about to go out as well.
Here are some things that you need to be thinking about, right?
So kind of think about it like a check engine light for your car, if you will.
But not only could it alert you omer of what your house needed, but it would also take out all the friction of buying that home service.
So let's say it was an H VAC install, it would automatically tell you exactly how much it was going to cost to have that fixed, who the service providers were that were going to provide that, and you could simply just tap a button right there in your mobile app and just get that done.
One of the biggest inconveniences of this is every home service contractor wants to come out your house, they want to do this, you got to be home.
The prices are all over the board.
And so we just wanted to fix those problems.
So that's the problem that we were out attempting to solve.
Omer (07:31.710)
So it was kind of like proactive maintenance for your home and a hassle free way of getting things repaired or replaced when the time came.
Jim Brown (07:44.870)
That's right.
And so I wanted this product to exist in the world because of my own selfish interest.
Again, I hope you're seeing that theme, that self interest and that ego drove a lot of these things.
So.
But what I'm saying that is I spend about $8,000 a year to maintain my home.
And then to some of your listeners, that may seem like an enormous amount of money to spend on your home.
But I can tell you that when I was out there talking to investors, they spend a lot more than that.
And I've seen so many different homeowners that spend different levels of money on their home.
But I am not a handy person.
Ome I don't know what to do to my home.
I don't know when to do it, I don't know why to do it, and frankly, I just don't have the desire to do it.
So when I'm talking about that, I'm talking about 30 lawn mowings a year, I'm talking about 26 house cleanings, I'm talking about carpet cleanings, I'm talking about H vac maintenance, I'm talking about mulch installation, all of the types of things that could be done to your home.
I'm having someone else do that for me and that just starts to add up.
But I'm now got 14 different vendors that I have to move, manage.
Everybody wants to upsell me on the next thing.
So they're always calling me.
I've got to be home to let them in.
It's just a big hassle.
Some of them want cash, some of them want check, some of them want credit card.
It's just a pain.
And that's again what we were trying to solve.
But I was solving it from a self interest standpoint that there's definitely other people out there who have that problem.
But it wasn't at the volume for us to build a sustainable business off of.
Omer (09:03.780)
You were able to raise a million dollars and how easy or hard was it to raise money for that business?
Jim Brown (09:11.990)
Unfortunately, it was way too easy for me to do that.
So we raised the million dollars, actually $1,025,000.
We raised it in 57 days and we raised it with a PowerPoint deck.
I wish it was not as easy.
I wish it would have been harder for us.
And honestly, I wish we would have raised less money.
There were three of us as co founders and I think that by having the three of us and the successes that we'd had previously, that's why we got the million dollars so fast.
But by having $1 million in the bank and three smart guys, we're like, we have plenty of time.
We will figure this out.
We can pivot our way into whatever success we want to have.
And 11 short months later, after the fundraise, we were out of money and it was not a pretty sight.
Omer (09:54.200)
What were the main lessons that you learned from that experience?
Why do you think it ended up the way that it did?
Jim Brown (10:00.440)
Several things.
I wish I could do a lot of things different.
One, obviously, like I said, we thought the investors giving us the check acceptance, that wasn't not accurate at all.
I think we waited way too long to put a product in front of customers.
We thought that we could build the perfect thing that as soon as we throw it out there, it's going to be, you know, like Facebook and it's just going to be ubiquitous.
Everyone's going to use it.
And when we did start to actually put some stuff into market as some test, no one was using it.
And I thought, well, it's just because the features aren't fully baked yet.
As soon as all the features are baked, they'll definitely start using it.
That wasn't the case.
We tried to boil the ocean.
We tried to do everything for everyone who owned a home.
That was a problem, literally.
There's just everything that we did, I wish I would have done differently, as crazy as that sounds.
Omer (10:45.440)
So to kind of summarize, one was the lessons was around the product and in terms of the complexity of what you were trying to build.
The second one was around not doing enough testing or validating your hypothesis beyond the getting the million dollars.
Did you do any sort of customer development?
Did you do interviews with people?
Did you try to validate the idea in the market in any way?
Jim Brown (11:17.290)
We did so, and I wish we could have done more.
So here's the Thing we had a customer list or not customers, I guess I have a pre invite list of almost a thousand homeowners.
One.
That number may sound like a lot, but I think we could have had a lot more.
We should have been doing things prior to actually launching the app to get more people on that list and be surveying them on an ongoing basis.
But here's the problem.
Those that we were surveying, those that we were putting mockups in front of, those that we were having do certain tests for us, we were blinded by our own biases.
And so we looked only for the things that they said that confirmed those biases.
We didn't actually care what they said so long as they ultimately said what we wanted them to say.
And then we used that in aggregate to say, yep, we're building the right thing.
It's crazy.
Like when I fast forward to June of 15, when we were starting to shut down the business, I felt like omer, we were on the precipice of actually a breakthrough, but we were just out of cash.
We didn't have the time to figure it out.
But it was at that point that we finally found the thing that people were willing to pay for again, this whole concept of like proactive, preventative maintenance for your home, no one cared about that.
No one is thinking about their home like that at any kind of scale.
That allows you to build a sustainable business on its own revenue.
But what they did start to tell us, right?
So in Indiana at least, because it was very much a geographical launch.
So in, in Indiana, most people have spent way too much on their home.
They spent more than they could afford on their home, which means their disposable income is now gone.
Even if they wanted to have a home service provider come out and do the work for them, they can't afford it.
So now you gotta go up a level.
Now you're up to like, you know, the three $400,000 homes, maybe 500,000 at that level.
Here's what I was hearing, and I'm not meaning this in a sexist way when I'm about to say this.
This is what my customers were telling me.
So those that were living in the three to $500,000 homes, and to be clear, in Indiana, that's a very, very nice home.
Those who had those homes, they said one of two things.
Either, hey, we already got a guy who does all this stuff for us.
You know, we've got all the service providers that we could want.
We're already doing it.
Or again, their words.
My old lady takes care of that.
So.
Meaning their wife was taking care of that.
And so now that became the new competition.
Their wife or all the 14 service providers that were already working on their home.
And so we honed in on that and we even went up one more level to maybe even had like a home manager for themselves already.
And what I learned at that point is they were willing to remove the pain of having to coordinate schedules with 14 different service providers and pay fees in a different monetary unit to those 14 service providers.
So if you just take me for an example, I spent $8,000 a year.
And there's definitely peaks and valleys throughout the year when I spend that money.
The majority of it is right before summer.
The least amount is right around the holidays, Right?
So if you could take my $8,000 a year that I'm going to spend and balance those payments out over the course of 12 months, we were having people tell us, not only will we basically just give you the lump sum money on a monthly basis, we'll pay you 10% on top of that just for you to manage all the service providers that we already use and just take care of us, don't give us the hassle.
And so not only were they willing to pay us 10%, they were also willing to pay us a monthly retainer fee to do that.
It was crazy.
We'd started to unlock this model, but again, we couldn't ramp up fast enough for that to be worthwhile for us.
Omer (14:37.930)
And it's interesting because.
Because that is a much simpler idea, a much simpler problem, and probably something as a product you could certainly, in terms of a basic version, you could probably get out there in a matter of a week or two.
Jim Brown (14:52.070)
Yes, absolutely.
And thanks for pointing that out, Omer.
Thanks for making me feel really good.
Omer (14:57.270)
Hey, everyone's a genius in hindsight, right?
Jim Brown (14:59.510)
That's right.
No, you're absolutely right.
But that's not what we wanted to do.
We wanted to build a mobile app.
We wanted to be a B2C mobile app genius company.
And we didn't want to think about the easiest path to.
And it's funny, one of the books that I've read, and I'm sure many of your listeners have read this book, but the Lean Startup, right.
When I read the Lean Startup, and this was probably back in, I don't know, 2012, probably when I read this book, I dismissed it.
I read the book and I'm thinking to myself, if this guy was smart at all, he would just go build the right product.
This whole Lean Startup Movement is ridiculous.
He just needs to better educate himself on the right product to build.
And so completely dismissed it.
I reread that book right in the midst of when we were making this decision to shut down the company.
And Omer, I'm telling you, as I flipped page to page and I highlighted, I was kicking myself yelling explicitives out loud because now all of it made sense.
I now understood what was actually being said.
So I've had this notion for a while now.
It's content versus context.
So the content of that book, the Lean startup, had not changed from 2013 when I first read it, to 2015 when I was rereading it.
But my context and my worldview had completely shifted.
And so now I'm like, I get it.
And today I believe wholeheartedly I could go out and start the business that we just talked about today with next to no fundraising at all, and build a profitable business without any investor money.
But again, that's just not what I wanted to do.
That wasn't the goal.
Omer (16:27.500)
Now, you've also had a lot of successes, and I mentioned them briefly in the intro.
And you've taken two companies that were doing $1 million in revenue and basically 10x the revenue to over $10 million in both cases.
And I want to kind of use your kind of experience from that to talk about how people listening to this can apply that in their own business and what that means for a SaaS business.
Before we do that, I mean, I mentioned in the, the intro about your skeptical selling method.
Can you explain what that is?
Jim Brown (17:06.580)
The skeptical selling method is simply this.
Most salespeople that are out there, if they cold call you, if they email you, all they talk about is how great they are, how great their product is, all the amazing features, all that kind of stuff, and buyers are so sick and tired of hearing all of that.
They do not care about the features and functionality of your product.
The only thing they care about is whether or not whatever it is that you do could solve a problem, a legitimate business problem that they have.
Assuming we're talking about B2B sales here, right?
And so I explained this of, you know, let's say that you were going to Lowe's or Home Depot, right?
Something like that.
And you were buying a drill.
Are you going to look at the spec sheet?
Yeah, sure, you might.
But what you're doing, you're not even going in to buy a drill.
What you're doing is you're going in because you need to put a hole in your wall.
And that's all you care about.
So the features and functionality of the drill and even the cost and all that kind of stuff.
Because I can tell you there are $30 drills that are have a plug on them, and there are $400 drills that are completely battery packed and they could do your hole in like a millisecond Instead of the 30 seconds it might take.
Right?
So there's just so many different types of.
But all you care about is the hole in the wall.
And so when I talk about the skeptical selling method, I want to go in if I'm trying to sell you home or what I'm doing.
And so today I do sales training and sales coaching.
So one of the things I might reach out to you and say is not how great I am at sales and how much you need to work with me, but I might say to you, hey, Omer, typically when I call on SaaS founders who, you know, have some sales challenges, here's what I hear them say.
A lot of them say they are really good when their people get in front of prospects on the phone.
The challenge is they just aren't getting in front of enough people.
Now, I don't know you, Omer, but is that something that you guys are experiencing and all of a sudden you could say to me, no, Jim, we don't experience that at all.
And I'm okay if you say no, because I can, hey, no problem.
I understand the business you're building.
You're doing a great job.
I wouldn't have expected you to have that problem.
But if you say yes, we experienced that, I get to say, what do you mean?
And all of a sudden, we're in a conversation now, and you don't even know what I do.
But let's say you told me no.
Okay, great.
I'll dismiss that.
Again, Omer, you're clearly building a great business.
I would not have expected you to have that problem.
But, you know, some of the other things they tell me is, yes, again, they're good when they get in front of people, but all of a sudden their deals are starting to slip month to month when they thought it was going to close in this calendar month, all of a sudden it slips, and then it slips again.
I can't imagine that you've ever had deals slip month to month, have you, Omer?
Omer (19:29.310)
Right.
Jim Brown (19:29.790)
And again, as soon as we start to do this, I'm creating a conversation and I'm giving you intrigue.
I'm almost giving you a presentation without giving you the presentation, but I'm revealing To you what other people who are similar to you have wanted to talk to me about.
And I'm showing you some of the problems that we solve.
It doesn't matter how I solve them.
Whether or not my training is online or in person.
It doesn't matter if it's a book or if it's a webinar.
Right.
Those things don't matter.
But that's typically what your average salesperson leads with.
Omer (19:58.940)
So you teach this four step process for helping salespeople or companies to achieve their sales goals.
Can you kind of give us a quick overview of what those four steps are?
And then I'd love to sort of dive into each one of those and pick your brain.
Jim Brown (20:14.780)
Yeah, we definitely got to dive into it because it's going to seem very simplistic when I just lay it out.
But it is the details and the nuance inside the steps that really make this come to life.
So the first thing that this isn't even a step yet, but the first thing is you have to have a goal.
So just for round numbers and being able to explain this via the voice or audio format, I'm going to set my goal at $100,000.
So here we are.
Today I have zero revenue and my goal is to get to $100,000 in revenue over the next year.
So the first thing that I have to do is look at what my average contract value is.
Again, just for round number purposes, I'm going to say my average contract value, ACV is $5,000.
So now I'm just going to work backwards and do some math and lay out the four steps.
So the four steps are prospecting for new clients, running discovery calls on those prospects, creating proposals for them, and closing and winning the deals.
Right.
So I'm going to work backwards though.
If I have this goal of $100,000 and my ACV, my average contract value is 5,000.
That means I need to have 20 closed one deals over the course of the year at that average $5,000.
And that hits my $100,000 goal.
Okay.
But too many people, again, they look at that zero to $100,000 and they have no clue what the incremental steps are.
And so they just kind of become intimidated by it.
But now we've decided we only need 20 people to buy from us.
We can find 20 people to buy from us.
Right.
So how do we get 20 people to buy from us?
Well, we have to give some amount of people proposals.
Well, how many proposals does it take for us to give to somebody before they buy.
And so I'm going to assume that we have a 50% conversion rate.
So for every two proposals we put out there, one of them is going to close, assuming we've done the previous steps.
Right.
So if I have to do 20 closed one deals at a 50% conversion rate, that means I have to put 40 proposals out again over the course of a calendar year.
Well, how do I get to the proposals?
I have to run discovery calls.
I have to understand what the pains are or what the goals are of the companies that want to work with me and what they want to achieve.
So I'm going to say I have a 33% conversion rate at that point.
So for me to get 40 proposals, I'm going to need to run 120 discovery calls.
Okay, so now we're at 120.
Well, how do I on earth do I get 120 discovery calls?
I have to prospect and I'm going to use a 10% conversion rate.
Again, these are just baseline numbers.
We have to get into your data to figure figured them out for you specifically.
But at a 10% conversion rate, to do 120 discovery calls, I would need 1200 prospects to talk to over the course of the year.
Now we're right back at a pretty daunting number.
How on earth do we talk to 1200 prospects?
That's a big number.
Well, fortunately, omer, we have 12 months in the year.
So 1200 divided by 12 is 100.
So now we're back down to 100 prospects per month that we need to talk to.
We have four weeks in each of those months.
So 100 divided by four is 25.
Now we're at 25 prospects a week that we need to talk to.
Well, fortunately, we have five days inside of those weeks.
So 25 divided by five is five.
I have to do five prospecting activities, five prospecting outreaches per day.
And if my math works out correctly and I see those conversions from each step, that's the reality.
All I need is to talk to five prospects or do five prospect outreaches every single day, and I'm going to hit that $100,000 revenue number that seemed daunting, you know, just a few minutes ago.
Omer (23:35.090)
Yeah, no, that's awesome.
And thanks for laying out the process.
So let's start with, I guess, your step zero, which is around the setting the goal and getting clarity on what you're trying to do or what you have to do.
Where do people start with that?
Jim Brown (23:51.420)
It's crazy to me that most people don't actually have a goal around this.
So whether you're an actual salesperson and you get paid on commission or you are the business owner, you're the entrepreneur trying to create a SaaS product, you have to have a goal.
Because if, you know, if you just tell me, hey, you like to travel, you know, I'm in Indiana.
If I want to go to Boston, that's great.
At least now I have a destination.
But if I just say I want to travel somewhere, well, I can't even give you any guidance around whether or not you should take a car, a boat, a bicycle, if you should walk, I just don't know.
So you have to just come up with a goal.
So I don't know what it is and I can't tell you what yours should be.
But it needs to be rooted in something so that we can lay out the rest of these steps.
Omer (24:29.330)
Right, right.
And I think that's really important because it's too easy just to go out and just say, let's just hustle and get lots of customers.
If you don't have a clear goal, you're going to end up somewhere else.
Jim Brown (24:41.730)
I guess it's totally right because look, if we don't have a path that we're going and if we're just doing that hustle method, which you told, which by the way is great, I do want you to hust.
But if we're working towards something now, we can start to run a cohort analysis.
Now we can start to say, okay, week one, we're going to try these three tactics and we're going to look at the conversion rate specifically inside that week to understand what happened.
How many, if we were just doing cold calls, how many of those cold calls actually resulted in discovery calls?
The next week we're only going to do email.
Well, how many of those email outreaches turn into discovery calls?
Week three, a new cohort.
Now we're going to do a call and email.
How many of those turn into discovery calls?
But again, unless you have a target path of where you're going, like you, it's just hard to do the math.
And for everyone out there trying to create a SaaS based product, all engineering is math.
But to me, so is sales.
Sales is just math and it's just process.
And if you run the process correctly, you're going to have an outcome that's predictable.
Omer (25:35.770)
Yeah, and the other thing I was thinking was that let's say we extrapolate this out and say maybe your goal is to hit a million Dollars and I'm going to reach out to 10 prospects every day.
And if I keep doing that for the next year, I'm going to get the breakthrough I need.
But if you kind of go through the process you describe, you might realize actually you need to be talking to 20 prospects every year.
And if you just work on the 10 number, you're going to be halfway towards your goal by the end of the year.
So I think it's just really great in terms of the way you laid it out.
Obviously, I think there is some validation along the way in terms of making sure that the conversion rates that you start out thinking about are actually playing out.
And presumably you need to the course correct as you're going and you start to get numbers through and you're seeing how many prospects actually are converting into discovery calls, et cetera, et cetera.
Jim Brown (26:25.110)
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
But again, once we, once we start to lay these out and we find what our actual numbers are, we may find that we are actually converting 67% of our proposals to closed one deals.
Well, if we do that, we don't need nearly as many prospects.
Right.
And so I definitely have to be able to do that because then I can identify each step.
Where am I falling short?
So in my prospecting outreach, am I reaching out to the right prospects?
So I would look at an ideal customer profile and say, I kind of look at three things, Omer.
One is, what is my acceptable client, what is my typical client, and what is my ideal client?
And I'm going to reach out to those people very differently.
Again, I do all this stuff for myself, so it's not just like I talk into a microphone and tell other people to do it.
But for my ideal clients this year, the tactic that I did, I had 50 of them on my list.
That's it.
I only had 50.
Now, I could have very easily called all 50 of these in the course of one day, let alone a month.
But in the course of one day, I sent them.
It was right at the beginning of baseball season.
I sent them an autographed baseball that I autographed with a handwritten letter to each of these 50 that talked about the dreams that I had as a boy to grow up and be a major league baseball player.
And unfortunately, while those dreams didn't come true, I've actually become a pretty good salesperson, had some success, and now work with other teams to do that.
So.
So again, autograph baseball by me in a padded envelope with a handwritten letter.
Those 50 baseballs resulted in 17 discovery calls and three closed one deals, they way more than paid for themselves.
I mean, they paid for themselves many, many, many thousands of dollars over.
But that's it.
That's literally all I had to do at that point.
Now I did do cold calls right after them into the people I mailed those baseballs to.
But I couldn't have done that with the 1200 prospects that, you know, I'm talking about at a high level number.
It just wouldn' have been possible, wouldn't have been feasible.
But I'm just doing that again for my ideal prospects, not for my acceptable prospects or even typical for somebody who's
Omer (28:18.810)
not maybe familiar with the sales process.
What does prospecting mean?
Jim Brown (28:22.810)
Well, I will tell you what it doesn't mean.
I wish that everyone could just set up a website and all of a sudden everyone would just come to their website and ask them to do business.
It just doesn't work that way.
So before you can build a marketing machine that creates the amount of inbound leads that you would like to have, or self procurement if you, you will, somebody has to reach out to someone else.
Right?
One of my mentors has always told me nothing happens in business until somebody sells something to someone else.
And that could not be more true.
So when I talk about prospecting, I'm talking about reaching out to people.
And they don't have to be cold, they could be warm, they could be part of your network, but it's the activity that you do on some kind of basis.
I prefer daily that you're reaching out to someone to see if you can have a conversation about what problems and pains they have in their life that your tool, your SaaS product might be able to solve.
And again, if you use my skeptical selling method, if you just assess the approach that you use, and you don't have to be trained by me to do it by any stretch of the imagination, but you reach out and you say, hey, I don't know if you have any problems at all, but I'd love to hear how you're handling certain things.
And it just, lo and behold, I have a tool that could address those if it made sense.
Omer (29:27.850)
And then in terms of the actual mechanics of prospecting, that could be making phone calls, it could be sending emails, it could be sending direct mail or baseballs to people.
Jim Brown (29:41.220)
Absolutely.
It could be LinkedIn, it could be tweets.
There's a big push towards social selling right now, which I absolutely love.
I will follow people on Twitter, I will engage in the conversations they're having.
Not about me, not about my services, by interest of the imagination and just try to build an online relationship.
And if you do that and you have real empathy for that person, you're trying to get to know them, all of a sudden it's going to be very easy to say, hey, I've noticed you've been talking about X, Y and Z recently.
You know, I have a product that I don't know if it makes any sense, but I'd love to talk to you about it.
Would you be open to just having like a 30 minute Skype call with me?
Yeah, you know, it's, you've, you've been adding value to our conversation.
You've been.
Yeah, I'd be happy to do that.
Right, so that's a level of prospecting.
It doesn't have to be this intimidating cold call where you sit in like a boiler room esque space and just pound the phone for hours and hours.
Omer (30:30.710)
And ultimately the goal is whether you're working from your own contacts list, whether you're getting a list of prospects by searching on LinkedIn or an email list or a phone numbers that you've acquired from somewhere, the goal is to daily, regularly, consistently is to reach out to the number of people that you've identified that you need to be doing on a daily basis and get them on some kind of discovery call.
Jim Brown (30:57.960)
That's it.
And I'm glad you said that.
Yes.
The goal is not to sell them anything.
The goal is to get them on a discovery call.
Because for most people you're not going to sell them in one call.
If you can, great.
By all means.
That's amazing.
But the first, the only thing that I want to do is I want to schedule a meeting with them to explore whether or not they have the pains that your product is uniquely qualified to address.
Omer (31:19.560)
Okay, so let's talk about the discovery call.
Let's say you've been reaching out to people.
Some of them have agreed to get on the call.
You schedule that.
What are you trying to do with them on that call?
Jim Brown (31:34.140)
What I want to do is I want to try to discover the gap between where they are today and where they would ultimately love to be.
To me, that's the best possible thing you could do.
This may be pain, this may be the things they want to gain, so their goals.
But there's just got to be a gap between where they are today and where they want to go.
Because one of the things, and I just had a training class today, the three things you have to be able to Answer is why change?
Why us and why now?
And so those are the high level questions.
Now you can't just go in and ask those three questions, right?
But you have to ask questions that are ultimately going to get you to the answer of those types of things.
So when I'm running my discovery call, I'm setting it up to say, hey, I'm going to have to ask you a whole bunch of questions today, right?
And I'm going to get permission to ask those questions and hopefully you're going to answer them honestly.
Although we could take a whole rabbit trail down that path.
But anyway, I hope that you answer those questions honestly.
Obviously you're going to have some questions for me.
But typically, Omer, when we get to the end of today's call, what has happened in the past is we've done insert thing here.
So you do need to define the steps.
What is the next step you want them to take?
Do they need to see a demo?
Do they need to do a trial or a sandbox to or what is it that you want them to do?
And I lay it out from the very beginning.
So typically at the end of this discovery call here is what that next step is.
Hey, would you be willing to say yes to that today?
Again, not asking you to buy anything, I'm just saying, will you take that next step with me?
And it's up to them, they get to decide.
And then eventually you're gonna move into the proposal stage, wherever that makes sense.
Omer (33:02.660)
Okay, so you're doing the discovery call, you're kind of going through the process in terms of, of asking them questions.
You're not talking about the product as you are in terms of talking about them and trying to, as you sort of explained earlier, you're almost like revealing the parts of the presentation in a question driven way.
Are you also trying to qualify prospects at this time?
Are you also using those questions to figure out who's the wrong person that you shouldn't be spending too much more time with?
Jim Brown (33:36.850)
Absolutely, that's definitely part of it.
And there's so many different qualification methods we could talk about.
We could talk about bant, which stands for budget, authority, need and timeline.
We could talk about gpct, which is goals, problems, challenges and timeline.
There's so many different frameworks that we could use for that.
But yes, absolutely, I am trying to qualify that person to know one.
Hey, do you have these certain problems?
Because that's what we sell to and if you don't, okay, I'm gonna get rid of you.
Do you have the ability to change?
Do you want to change?
And if you do want to change, do you have the capability of doing in a reasonable amount of time from today?
So yes, we could spend hours just talking about that.
But that's the idea is I want to ask enough questions to qualify them both for the opportunity of the product that we have and then qualify them as well for, you know, can you even buy something like this?
Right.
And the scenario that we use, talking about the average contract value of $5,000.
This may seem, seem completely crazy to some listeners, but I will tell you, most people inside of a business can put $5,000 on their credit card.
So we don't even have to talk about proposal, we don't have to talk about anything like that.
And it's hard for people because a lot of people have a money bias or a money weakness.
They're not willing to talk about it.
But $5,000 to you as a person may seem like a lot of money, but to a business, $5,000 is literally nothing.
The largest deal Omer that I've ever sold was $1.2 million deal.
I sold it to Sears back, I think like 2012 or 2011 maybe.
And you would think, I would think 1.2 million.
That's a lot of money.
I want to be very clear, when I sold this deal to Sears, they were fine with paying that amount of money, but the deal that we sold gave us such little access to the executive team because $1.2 million to Sears was a rounding error.
Omer (35:21.660)
Right.
Jim Brown (35:22.460)
And so when we came in and said, hey, here are our ideas and here's what we need you to do, and then this, and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, go take a seat over there with the other little kids.
Right?
It was just crazy.
But again, it's all about perspective of where we are.
So that scenario, we used a $5,000.
That's something that most companies will put on a credit card without even thinking about.
Omer (35:40.490)
Okay, so you've done the discovery call, you've qualified the people that make the most sense to go to the next step with.
And you describe the next step as the proposal stage.
But from what I'm hearing, that doesn't necessarily mean a 10 page document laying out how you can help them, etc, etc.
It could be a proposal in terms of let's get you onto a demo or let's get you started on a trial.
Would those also count as proposals in this model?
Jim Brown (36:15.470)
100%.
That's exactly what it is.
It is a proposed solution.
It does not have to be, as you said, a 10 page document.
It doesn't have to be a one page document.
It truly could just be trial, sandbox, demo.
It could be any of those types of things.
Whatever you define as how you want to propose your solution to them, that's what that next step is for sure.
Omer (36:34.510)
And from a sales perspective, what are you trying to do at this point?
So let's say at the proposed solution stage it's to give somebody a demo.
Are you saying on the discovery call, would you try and then, then once you get their agreement, would you also then move on to giving a demo right away or would you do that as a separate call?
Does it make any difference?
Jim Brown (36:59.020)
These are great questions.
I think there's nuance in all of these.
I think it depends on the complexity of the product that you're trying to sell.
I think it depends on the average contract value that you have.
I think it depends on the type of buyer and company that you're selling to.
Because all of the answers that you said could be accurate.
I've got a client right now, they call it the disco demo, meaning they do discovery and demo all in the same call and it only lasts one hour.
Well, it doesn't give you a lot of time to ask a lot of questions, but it gives you enough and they pull it off with quite a bit of success.
But for me, a proposal or a proposed solution, whether it's a demo, whether it's a trial, whether it's a sandbox, whether it's an actual written contract, all you're doing is you are fulfilling that gap that we talked about.
Again, they are where they are today.
There is a destination, what they want to get to and go to.
Your demo, your proposal, your whatever you call it, should simply lay out what are the steps for you to go from where you are today to where you want to go.
Too many people, especially in the SaaS space, when they do a quote unquote demo, they want to show you how to click buttons and teach you how to read.
No one needs to do that.
There is a business driver or a reason why they're looking at that.
Let me ask you this, Omer.
When's the last time that you got a demo of Amazon.com?
Omer (38:14.470)
not that I can remember.
Jim Brown (38:16.100)
You've never had it.
It doesn't matter if the button's blue or yellow or red or if you have to click this dropdown or that dropdown, because that's not the point.
The point of going to Amazon.com is I want a package to arrive on my doorstep in two days.
I don't care about the things I have to do to get there.
And I think this is another part of the problem that a lot of SaaS salespeople have or SaaS founders have is your product.
It's the features and the user experience.
The only person that matters to is the end user, but the end user typically is not the person who can stroke the check or swipe the credit car.
So the business challenges are higher than the person who cares about how you click buttons inside of an application.
Omer (38:55.120)
Yeah, no, that's a really good point.
Okay, so proposed solution stage, whatever that is, we get them onto that next stage, they're qualified, they're moving ahead in the process.
And then the final step we want to do is to close that deal and win that deal.
How do we make sure we do the right kind of follow up to close this deal?
Jim Brown (39:16.270)
Yep.
So if you do your job correctly here and your proposal stage is simply the proposed solution to fill in that gap that they have of again, where they are, where they want to go, you should just kick it out pretty easily.
Right?
It says, hey, you know, does this align?
Is this what you're looking for?
You know, are we solving the actual problem here again, as opposed to just a demo?
And if that's the case, you should win at a high margin.
Now, Omer, we could keep talking for literally hours.
I take, there's a 15 hour training session that I do with a lot of my clients to go through this.
So we definitely can't cover all that today.
But, you know, I want to understand, hey, the last time that you bought software, what that decision making process look like, who was involved, what the budget process look like, how'd you get to that number?
What do you typically look for in an ROI when you spend that?
So these are the things that I want to try to get to, and if I can get that, I can probably actually sell for more value than just having baseline pricing of an application.
Omer (40:08.250)
Yeah, yeah, no, those are really good points.
And I think that we can only skim the surface today when we talk about the process, because as you said, there are just so many nuances and so many different approaches you might take depending on the type of product, how much you sell it for, the type of business and so on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
When you sort of look at this process and having worked with SAS founders, what do you find are the areas where most people tend to get stuck?
Jim Brown (40:40.230)
Well, Every single day because I keep repeating it.
Everybody wants to demo.
Like they think that's what they have to do.
I just have to get to a demo.
If they just see it, it's going to be great.
When I sold services, it was the same thing.
Well, the service just sells itself.
If you just show them how we do it, it's going to sell itself and it's never the case, Right.
Unless you're selling something completely transactional like Slack.
Right?
Slack is something that you can go on and you can self procure.
And for a lot of SaaS founders, that's what you're trying to do.
However, I will tell you, I just had Simon Mutloo on my podcast a few weeks ago who does enterprise sales for Slack.
And I was like, well, hold on, help me understand.
I thought that everybody did what I did and they go onto slack.com and self procure.
He's like, jim, come on.
When I'm selling to the IBMs of the world or the Oracles of the world, or, you know, insert big company, Wells Fargo, you know, Chase bank, when I'm selling Slack to them, dude, we're talking about change management.
We're talking about so many different things.
So there's just a huge range of what's possible out there.
Omer.
Omer (41:38.560)
Yeah, totally.
And you know, I interviewed somebody on my podcast last week who is a SaaS founder, but previously used to do enterprise sales at Google for Google Maps.
And so again, you kind of think, well, Google Maps, right?
What's there to sell?
You just use it, right?
It's free.
Jim Brown (41:57.040)
That's right.
Omer (41:57.760)
But when you're talking about an enterprise and you're talking about, you know, licensing the mapping to integrate into some other product that maybe the enterprise has, and, you know, there's a whole bunch of complexity that comes behind that in terms of how you interact with potential customers and how you sell that product.
So let's get onto the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions and just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Jim Brown (42:23.640)
I'm ready.
Let's do it.
Omer (42:24.600)
All right, what's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
Jim Brown (42:28.760)
Well, the best piece of business advice that I've ever received is one that I've now taken as my own.
And I give it out to everyone else.
So I'm glad you asked.
Ask.
And it's that you will never get anything in life that you don't ask for.
So start asking.
And let me just break that out real quick.
One of the things, if you were to go buy a big screen TV, right?
60 inch, nice 4K might cost you, you know, 800 bucks at best Buy, right?
And I know probably everybody's gonna go to Amazon anyway, but if you walk into a Best Buy and you see the price tag for $800 and you're going to buy the TV anyway, what does it hurt to ask them if they would sell it to you for $600?
The worst thing they can say is no.
And you were already going to buy it anyway, so no loss, but they may say yes.
And now all of a sudden you save $200, so now you can buy a PS4 and some games or some movies or a DVD player.
So it's amazing.
But you will never get anything in life.
You don't ask for it.
Omer (43:18.560)
So start asking, what book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Jim Brown (43:23.120)
One of the best books that I've read in the last couple of years was a more beautiful Question by Warren Berger and the idea behind this book.
So I've got a four year old son who obviously I want to try to raise the right way, but this book takes a look at our education system and how we're taught rote memorization.
And it's just, it's terrible.
Why should we remember things that Google could answer for us, right?
So the idea behind this is not only rote memorization is bad, but how do we actually, in our daily life start asking questions to other people that Google can't answer?
And when we do that, when we craft that more beautiful question, we get to have deeper relationships with humans and let Google and the machines do their things that humans or that they will never be able to do like humans can.
Omer (44:10.440)
I love that.
Okay, what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Jim Brown (44:16.280)
It's got to be grit.
For me, you know, I grew up very poor and so for me, when someone told me I couldn't do something, that was the fuel I needed.
It was the only fuel that I needed to get to where I wanted to go.
And if you don't have grit, it's going to be very hard.
Because, you know, whether you read about the Valley of Sorrow or the Trough of Sorrow, if you will, all those types of things, there's going to be hard days as an entrepreneur.
And if you don't have the grit to get through it, it's going to be pretty painful.
Omer (44:40.940)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Jim Brown (44:45.420)
It's definitely Evernote.
I have been a premier or whatever.
Pro user, a paid user of Evernote for, I want to say, almost eight, nine years now, I absolutely love it.
I still have all the notes going all the way back then.
And if I.
If I was using a moleskin or something like that, those books would have been lost or pages torn out and all that kind of stuff.
But the fact that I can take pictures of stuff on a whiteboard and it automatically OCR it and it's now become searchable and all that, I could not live without Evernote.
Omer (45:13.050)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Jim Brown (45:18.250)
I love to travel and I believe that the world that I live in now, and I know I'm blessed and I'm fortunate to be able to say this, but my wife and I both are in the the same space.
We can work anywhere in the world as long as we have Internet connection and a cell phone.
So this concept of location independence.
I would like to create a co selling location independent company.
And what I mean by that is I want to basically create an environment where I can bring multiple salespeople from multiple different companies into the same area and we move around from country to country or city to city, something along those lines, working with each other, but for separate companies and being able to grow together.
I think it would be a fascinating social experiment as well as business.
Omer (46:00.320)
Yeah, it's a pretty interesting idea.
What's an interesting old fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Jim Brown (46:08.160)
So if you've been on my Twitter feed in the last couple of weeks, you might have seen this because I dressed up as a Halloween gig.
But anyway, I used to be a pro wrestler almost.
I know it may sound crazy, but I did.
So I traveled all across the Midwest.
I got paid somewhere between $10 and $50 a night to go in and wrestle for five to 10 minutes.
It was absolutely fascinating.
I loved it.
But yeah, I was a pro wrestler.
Omer (46:30.720)
Yeah, I was gonna include that in the introduction, but it felt like a spoiler that I wanted to leave for this moment.
That's great.
Great story.
I don't think we've ever had a wrestler on this show.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Jim Brown (46:45.300)
You know, I don't know if this is cliche or not, but I have to say, my son, I have always wanted to be a dad.
And when I had my little boy four years ago, one of my biggest joys in life is getting to wake him up every morning and watch him grow.
And so everything that I do, I truly do do it for him.
And again, it's because I've always wanted to be a dad, but I knew it was going to be a certain time.
So again, just being able to pour myself into him and see him light up and learn and grow, it's just something special.
Special.
Omer (47:12.730)
That's awesome.
So, Jim, thank you for, for joining me today.
I've really enjoyed this, this opportunity to pick your brain.
I really appreciate you being candid and sharing your experience of going through a major failure and the lessons that you learned from that, which I think is the most important part of that and for kind of taking us through the sales process and in terms of people who are looking to, to figure out how to take their SaaS business to grow sales.
And I think that was really useful in getting people to think in a more structured way about how they tackle sales.
And I think what the beautiful thing, you already mentioned this, but I just want to kind of reiterate this is from a technical point of view, anybody who's listening, who's maybe a developer or a technical founder and not necessarily comfortable with sales, it can be a pretty daunting thing to think about sales.
It's like, oh, I gotta be, I gotta go out there and get into uncomfortable situations.
I'm not that comfortable going out there and selling and all of these things that you think about it.
But when you, the way you explained really was like a math problem.
And I think many people who are technically inclined can really relate to that in terms of, well, solving a math problem is a lot easier than selling to people.
Right?
So that was a great way to tackle that.
Now if people want to find out more about you and sales tuners, they can go to salestuners.com where they also get a link to your podcast and I'll include a link to the both of those in the show notes.
If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jim Brown (48:52.950)
Yeah, absolutely.
You mentioned the website and I'll add one more resource out there.
So that four step model that we talked about, Omer, I've actually put that together in, in a workbook and I want to emphasize the word work.
If you download this, it's completely free to you, but you're gonna have to put in the work behind it.
It's gonna break out all those steps for you.
You put in the numbers that you wanna hit and it will spit out all the data for you so you can get that@salestooners.com roadmap and that also includes all my contact info.
But I think the best way, honestly, is either LinkedIn just search for Jim Brown sales tuners.
You'll find me there.
If you want more of the personal daily Dr.
If you will get me on Twitter and it's JimBrown.
And again, that's where you're going to find the raw me.
So there's a few ways.
Omer (49:32.800)
Awesome.
And I'll include a link to all of those in the show notes as well.
Jim, it's been a pleasure, really enjoyed talking to you and I wish you all the best.
Jim Brown (49:43.760)
The pleasure is all mine, Omer.
Thank you so much for having me.
Omer (49:46.160)
Cheers.
