Why do reclines call Dr. Jean the results queen? The name speaks for itself. Dr. Jean has been helping business owners achieve and exceed their goals for over 20 years. And now, she wants to help you get more results to your business and in your life. In fact, her mission is to leave you better than she found you. Join her as she dives deep into the world of business and entrepreneurship to provide you with actionable strategies and valuable insights and compelling stories that will propel you to greater success and ultimate results. Get ready to take notes because it's time for getting results with Dr. Jean the results queen. Hi everyone, it's Dr. Jean the results queen. Welcome to getting results with Dr. Jean. And I'm super excited today because I have a really fascinating guess that I know you're all going to learn a lot from. And I'm really excited to hear about his journey and how he's gotten to where he is today. So I'm going to welcome Paulo Santos today. Paulo, how are you today? Welcome to the show doing doing great. Thank you for having me looking forward to this. Oh my gosh, I am looking forward to it as well. So as we do, oh, we always start with the same question. How did you get to where you are today? So that's an easy but complicated journey, I guess, to want to go down path. My background has always been mathematics and computers. And from a career standpoint, it just naturally fit that we go with some sort of computer programming, some sort of analytical thing. That didn't really happen the way I thought it was going to be. I ended up working for a small startup commercial real estate firm very early in my career. And what I did realize was one of the skills that I genuinely lacked was communications. Really? Right. I absolutely lacked communications. Typical computer guy. I could sit in my basement all day in code, design websites, look at data, non-stop, but communications is always kind of lacking thing. So when I started working at this company, I'm working for a commercial real estate broker, which is basically as corny and typical a sales person, as you can imagine. They're round, they're in your face. They sound nice enough, but you always know something is kind of lurking in the background that they're always kind of planning, trying to go for the jugular at some point, trying to get your money. But there were skills there that were definitely applicable that I did not have. And I was there for the first six months, and I was like, holy crap. I could do anything on a computer, give me a computer, I'll bring it to life. That was never an issue. I'd already had my own company running at that point, but I didn't really, I was only 21 years old. I didn't really know how to run a company properly. Getting involved in a small startup like that was really interesting because you realize everybody is there as an executive and everybody there's also water in the plants right afterwards, like everyone took on every single role. Yeah, that was to me, that was a crash course in just how to work in a company. And then we had very large clients at the time, and we would be part of these pitches or visiting client sites as a commercial real estate company does. And then you watch how they operate on a larger scale, right? You're not even allowed to plug in your own printer without getting a union guy in and all those kinds of things. And I thought, wow, this is just so crazy, two different worlds. But yeah, but as that role of all, we got really heavy into looking at new ways to develop business. And as a non sales guy, my only thought to that was, okay, how do we make this more data driven, more technologically driven, and in my eyes, much more effective and efficient. And we were able to come up with some pretty cool, unique ways to do it. Fast forward, god, 18 years later. Okay. And this is where the story gets really wild. And now it's 2020 COVID happens. I was one of the first March 2020, March 17th, I was hospitalized with COVID. March 20th, I stopped breathing completely on intubated. I'm in a hospital and I go into a coma. Yes, and this part is a little bit more sci-fi, you know, depending how you want to look at this ton of the story, but I won't go into too much detail. But in my head, I end up writing this ridiculous artificial intelligence system that could basically do everything I've always wanted to do in the world of BD and in the world of lead generation. When I woke up, you know, in April, I just put pen to paper, two days straight coding it. And that's where my whole new company, Sona, is founded on today. Okay, wait a minute now. You're in a coma and you are writing in your head this whole artificial intelligence new business? In my head, in my head took me about two years to write, three years to write, in my head. Now, I'm only a coma for a few weeks. But for some reason, I wrote this entire thing out, spelled it all out, tops the bottom, tens of thousands of lines of code. But beyond the lines of code, which I thought was minimal, it was all about, okay, what's it going to do differently than anybody else? And even after I wrote all of this stuff in my head, I had to get it out and it was still lacking one major thing. So, thankfully, I have a business partner who is unbelievable. He is hardcore Wolf of Wall Street, you know, suddenly this pen kind of sales. And I spent a good amount of time with him. He probably hates me for it. But I needed to get his thought process and trade my AI system. Because there are just skill sets that salespeople have, which I find so amazing. Really? The other brain works so much differently than I work linearly, right? I know how to get from A to C, A to Z, and there's B, C, D, E, F, G all the way down, and there's a step-by-step process in how my brain works. I like computers and math. Everything has logic, everything has an answer. Salespeople, at least the ones that I haven't gathered, definitely my partner, is the most scatterbrained person ever. And I think all salespeople are scatterbrained because they can easily dodge a conversation or control a conversation and just jump from one point to the other because that's how sales really works. You have to feel how the conversation is going. You have to match the other person's mood, emotions, techniques, and all that kind of stuff, none of which I am a natural at all. But if I could take what I know on the data-driven analytics, things like how will a person respond to specific names, specific nuances based on my data, and then take somebody who's a hardcore salesperson, how would you respond based on what they say? That is something I just will never be able to do. We took the better part of six months and we combined the two expertises, and that's really how we were able to come up with this new system that we do today. Wow. That's okay. We're in a coma. We come up with at least two years for lines and lines and lines of code, which you could say I'm like code lines? What? Yeah, I've all in that scatterbrained salesperson situation. And then you meet this amazing sales guy who becomes your partner, and the two of you marry this together to this new business. Well, I've known previously, we've worked together in the past, but I just knew that this guy is just good. There is something about his ability to convince executives to talk to people and to have a conversation. Now, in our roles previously and in this company, we only go after companies who want to meet high level executives, C-suites of companies, usually over 25, closer to the billion dollar range is better for us. We play really well on the north end of that spectrum. And if you've spoken with C levels at various levels, you know how much they don't want to talk to salespeople. No, they hate talking to salespeople. They hate talking to salespeople. And they're so smart and so savvy that you could be the best salesperson. And they know immediately what to interrupt to. They know immediately what you're up to. And for some reason, this guy still gets through every single time and was able to get these conversations at high levels that I could never imagine getting on my own or anybody else getting to be honest. And I've worked very closely with a lot of salespeople. And he just has a different brain about him. And if we were able to marry the two, I thought we had a brand new product and service that nobody else could really compete with. And it sounds like that's what you've got. I hope so. I mean, it's been a lot of fun at the very least. We meet a lot of great people. And quite frankly, you know, and I'm sure he'll hate me for this statement, I like a lot of this is for the art of what we're doing. To me, there's an art form to, oh man, you know, that meeting you couldn't get for six years, we got it in three hours, right? To me, there's some sort of fun aspect to it because we're doing some, we're doing things that are just so out there and so out of the box. I think with everything that's happened in the past four years, especially with the whole post COVID situation, traditional sales, if you're just following the same sales methodology, you're going to be left behind very quickly if you already haven't been left behind. I related to this, you know, we talked about major shifts in our world, 9/11 being one of those things that I was, you know, I was 20 years old, 20 years old for. And I remember that day specifically, but the days and weeks and months afterwards, it created something that was a side effect of that event. Anybody, you can be, you can make a cold call to anybody at that moment. And you could, you have a conversation starter, and you have meat on the bones for a real conversation. COVID created that same window of opportunity because you could talk to anybody, whether they hated it, thought it was fake, thought it was great, thought it was terrible. I watched somebody die, had somebody with an experience like myself. You had a conversation starter, that wasn't just, hey, how's the weather outside? Oh, can you believe, you know, can you believe the Giants lost yesterday, right? You had a real conversation with meat on the bones. And I always said, not since 9/11, were we able to have that same kind of crazy, singular conversation with anybody we picked up the phone with? Yeah. And we use that to our advantage. I think that's amazing. So now, okay, well, now we're in post COVID. So what's your thoughts around this where sales and data meet together? Because we haven't actually ever, most sales people don't want to talk about data. They hate data. And most, most sales people hate data. And if you ask sales people to enter their conversation, it's any kind of CRM or system, forget it, worst at it. So you know, one of the things we do is we create these really kind of unique systems to track your data for you. And I'm not going to go into it, but things like, you know, can we track how you were on a conversation with somebody for, right? So you got a hold of a CEO, a Fortune 500 company, were you on the call for 30 seconds or three hours, right? Two very big differences, right? Did you go through their secretary to get to that person? How many calls did it take to get to that individual, right? And what's the timeframe in between? And let me be a dozen other data points. As the shifts change, we have to create more and more conversation starters that they will basically hook on. But it's so interesting that everybody has a different conversation starter. So if I called and just great example here, so one of the things I keep really great, really great data on are basically events happening, not just in the news per se, but just in the around current events in the area. So things like the New York Knicks one, for the first time getting out of the first round in the playoffs, it sounds like a stupid point. But if you talk to somebody, and I know for a fact that they've lived in the New York metropolitan area for 30 years of their life, or maybe they played high school basketball or something, there's a 75% chance that this guy would be a Knicks fan in this region, right? So we're gonna call them with that as kind of our opening conversation in many ways. Oh, did you catch an extreme last night, right? So there are other ways to skew the data if you have access to it. But that's your point where salespeople hate data, right? We give them a reason to have a real conversation. So you make that same call and most people open up with the exact same ridiculous pitch, "Alright, this is Bob, I'm calling you from this, let me tell you how we can save your company a billion dollars," and increase revenue by 5,000% in four hours, right? And I think it's hilarious, right? I think it's hilarious, because people give me all the time, when I take on a client, the first thing they give me is here's a list of companies I want you to go after, and here's the reason we can help them. And I'm like, okay, I just, I throw it out the window, it's pure garbage to me, because, you know, I have to convince this company that they need your help, right? Companies know when they need help. Executives are smart enough to know that, okay, I need help in this, right? And that's really, to me, is a virtue of you get the right person at the right time of their pain. True. Right, right? Everybody sells the right time of the struggle, right? Right. And every salesperson that I interact with in these companies who have tried doing their sales before, say the same thing, you get me in front of the right person, I have an 80% person. Yeah, absolutely. Every salesperson says that. That is fantastic. I can guarantee you, your bosses would not be talking to me if you had an 80% close rate, every time we got on the right person. Yeah, because there's numbers, guess what? He does have an 80% close rate, but what is percentage, what is the percentage of him getting to a meeting? Exactly. So if you had one meeting out of every 1000 calls, right? And out of that meeting, you have an 80% close rate, you're going to have to make tens of thousands of calls, even be close to being able to feed your family. Yeah, simple math equation, right? Just as simple mathematics. So what do you do? You get the guy and the companies get cheap. So they start hiring a bunch of kids at a college who was crazy enough to make a 1000 calls a day. Now, like I said, let me go back to my partner, who was from the Wall Street 90s era, 80s, 90s era is doing all the terrible things you probably see in the movies. And he was making a 1000 calls a day. I guarantee you, you know, he didn't want to do that for the next 25 years of his life. Notice this college kid who's being sold the world from some guy who's making, you know, six figures of maybe, maybe more, right? And saying if you just make your calls, you're going to be able to buy a BMW tomorrow. And they all are sold on this concept. But in the first week, they're burned out. They've done, they've done 18, 19 hours a day. They made a 1000 calls that they've gotten four meetings, right? Right. Of which they're only going to close 80%. So let's just go with that for a moment. And the manager thing, 50% of it, if not more, because the junior guy, and you got to pay up, right? Yep. Absolutely. All of you probably did. When I when we started this whole process, I was like, God, this is just, that's a stupid, ineffective way to do business development. You have sales guys that are getting paid a base plus a salary. But you're getting a base, maybe your base of 100,000, 50,000, 100,000 doesn't really matter. Then you get a commission, and maybe you're getting another $50,000 and $100,000 plus in commissions. You're earning a good amount of money if you accomplish all these things. Meanwhile, the company that hired you has to start paying your base immediately, possibly benefits, right? And on top of that, they're going to wait, they have to train you, and they're going to wait for you three to six months to kind of get your act together, learn their business, learn the model, learn their system, and then get to your first few meetings, which is going to be 80% the first time, maybe 20%. But in like six months a year, you're finally getting some sort of consistency. That only cost the company $100,000 before you've made your first close, right? We are my personal view on sales is that the same person that is the killer at the end of the deal that can go ahead and close, close, close at age percent is not the same person with open doors. I agree. They're usually not the same individual. And by the way, sometimes, they're also not the same individual that can maintain a relationship, especially for these things like selling a car is one thing. A guy comes in, you need a car tomorrow, he's going into your shop when they're buying a Honda or Mercedes, he already knows he has to buy a car. So there's a good chance you're going to close the deal, right? When you're trying to talk about selling professional services or these much larger scale, you know, six figure seven dollar seven figure investments for these companies. They're not buying tomorrow at one shot. You have a long term sales process. Yes. Or advanced, not just to get the meeting is one thing, but you have to dance, right? There's that whole mutual, do I trust you? Oh, you're 20 years old. You would have trust you with a seven figure deal and get out here, right? Do you have enough great hair on you? Okay, who is the T behind you? Let me do all the research. What kind of other work you've done? And then, by the way, let me also talk to 20 of your competitors to get better offers. Oh, yeah, right. And they have to. That's their job. They're supposed to compete, right? But you still have to dance the entire way. Hails people back here, and they usually are also not good with this long term dance because they're trying to close so fast. Yes. They're not eating tomorrow. So they're always killing it. You know what happened? You're close too much. When you try to close too much, you lose a relationship because nobody wants to talk to a salesperson that long. Nope. Right. And that salesperson is probably really good right here. Like, all right, you know what we do? You have our car tracks in place. What do I got to do to close this deal? Perfect. You're 80%. So what I said is just leave the guy right there. Let's stop everything else. Why are we forcing people whose personalities won't match everything else to do everything else? Because a company who hired a sales guy thinks, I have a sales guy, right? You're supposed to find targets, get data for them, whether you have Zoom info or Apollo or just go knocking door to door or going to business cards, get data for them, make sure it's my person. Right. Get the first meeting, get the relationship started in somewhere in that relationship that you're supposed to maintain. You know, wine, dine, pitch, pitch, pitch, wine, dine, keep trying to close. Eventually they have a need and then you go for a kill. Like, it's a lot to put on a salesperson who just wants to go for the kill for their 80%. 80% is a fantastic close rate. Their relationship rate is probably terrible. Their opening rate is definitely horrible. Just leave them at where they are. Yeah. I think that's where that's where the where our company jumped in. Like, listen, we're only going to do that. We're really good at opening doors, period. Like, I'm not going to pretend to be good enough to close your deals. And by the way, it's not me. It's somebody else's. It's definitely not, I'm not the 80% closer. Right. But I am definitely not going to be able to close your deals. You could trade my team all day long. We will never be experts in your service, in your product, to be able to actually tell you to close it. Well, we are really good. It's just this one piece. And to me, that whole process, the idea of changing that whole process to, okay, let's just be experts in one part of it. Because really, there is no expert in everything. And by the way, if there was, I would love it. But I just don't think that in large enterprise sales, large high level executive COCFOCIOCO, that the same individual can maintain it and at scale. Now, you may click with somebody and you have a relationship with one or two guys and you maintain a relationship. That's different. But if you're actually got to make 50 meetings, you're not maintaining 50 relationships, new relationships a year. Right. And then I'll make ultimate enclosing. It's just too much work. You end up burning out. Truth on that. And also, I think there's a lot of salespeople who are really good at closing and not really good at opening. Right. It's very, if you look at 10 people, there's maybe two people who are good at opening and eight people who are good at the other stuff. So I really like this concept of it's three parts. It's open, it's nurture, and it's close. And you as the sales manager have to decide who your openers are, who your nurturers are, who your closers. Right. And you're doing it through data, which is even more fascinating. Yeah. Well, I love the data, right? Data to me makes a crap ton of sense. I don't understand people very well. I understand the data around people. I'm so sure they're my friend on not understanding people. I think you don't understand them more than you think. But go ahead. Because I analyze their data. I think I believe there's people who could just walk into a room and like, I feel something about you. We have five seconds of conversation and they just know how to relate. Not me. Definitely not me. In computer science, especially in programming and like information systems, there's a process called data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. And you take raw data, seven, nine, four, three, six, two, eight, right? It's just raw numbers. That's called data, right? You take that same number set and you organize it to seven, three, two, nine, four, six, eight, three, two. By the way, I hope that's not a real phone number, but you don't know that that raw 10 digits I gave you organize correctly turns from data to information, data information. Now that information is still only partially useful. You knew that the raw numbers is actually a scrambled phone number. So the data organized correctly becomes information. The real information is then moved into the next challenge, which is knowledge. Okay. That phone number is Vinny's pizzeria, right? Okay. Perfect. Perfect. So now you know that nine, seven, three, six, four, two, eight, whatever, it becomes seven, three, two, whatever, and now becomes Vinny's pizzeria phone number. You now have knowledge of Vinny's phone number. And the first three steps, by the way, is where AI, not AI, machine learning and data analytics has been very good at for decades. AI is trying to convert the last step. So to me, the last step is wisdom, right, D-I-K-W data, information, knowledge, wisdom. The last step is wisdom. That means I can predict if I see nine, four, two, eight, three, seven, six, five at the very beginning, my wisdom will say that's a pizzeria phone number. Before even looking at anything else, it just predicts that that would probably most likely be a pizzeria phone number. Now, how it predicts it is a billion different ways, right? But let's say that it's targeted, so it removed this part. Okay, now it takes seven, three, two as a first part of the information tree. Okay, we know it's an area code, so we have some idea of geography of where that location is, right? If you look at the next seven, the next three digits, you could probably predict when and a little closer in geography. So when the phone number was given and when it was, you also know if it was mobile or a landline, right? So let's say it's a landline, okay, soon, now you probably know it's a brick and mortar place. If it's a landline, most land, most new people, people with houses today often don't have landlines anymore. Most offices are using virtual grasshopper lines or whatever kind of lines like that or teams, meetings or whatever else. So you could predict maybe it's a location, okay? So what has landlines today? So maybe it's it's a medical office, a retail shop, or some sort of restaurant, okay? Okay, you look at demographic, okay, it's in the seven, three, two area, four, six, nine, whatever, and okay, there's a high ethnicity of Italians within that, perfect, it's a pizzeria, just by predictive analytics, pure guessing, right? That's what it is today, right? And when I look at how we go from data, information, knowledge wisdom, we walk around all day long and people are giving us data nonstop. And I love every single thing about it. I can't turn my brain off. When I walk around into a room and I'm looking at a person and I just start, I don't judge him. Maybe I do, who knows? In my brain, I start analyzing what he's doing. Okay, so you're you're it's a Saturday morning, it's a Saturday morning, okay? And I walk into and I walk into to the mall and I see a guy and he's wearing a gray suit with shiny brown loafers on, and he has a shirt on, a white crisp white shirt on, and he has a fancy watch on. So immediately, my analytics say this guy is one of three people, right? First of all, who wears a suit on a Saturday morning that crisp with a white shirt, right? So either a sales guy going to one of these stores of the mall, he's picking up something and he's probably a car salesman, by the way, right? Because if you're wearing, if you're wearing a shoe, you're putting up a Rolex on, you're selling a BMW or else you're putting a suit on, and you're selling a high-end car, right? You go to these you go to a Honda or a Toyota place, they're wearing a Toyota Polo shirt. Yes, they are. These guys are wearing a suit, right? Sure, and I suit, or the guy's going up our mitzvah, right? That's somewhere he's working. But to me, those are all analytics. And people are giving you that stuff non-stop. People are feeding you non-stop. The thing is there's just so much of it. How could we get that data at scale and turn it into useful wisdom? And that's what I love to do, right? Take all of this random data that people are throwing at you and I turn it back around on them. And basically, you know, use it to our advantage to get meetings for my clients. I'm fascinated. I really am fascinated. All right, so I can't believe I'm going to say this because I could talk to you so much longer. However, I have to ask now the second question, which is, you know, we're all about getting results here. So what can the listeners do immediately after listening to you that they can get results given all of this interesting knowledge that you gave us? So I would take a step back. So if you know, let's talk about their sales teams first. To me, that's kind of the first place I would look at. Look at what they're good at. Ask them. What do you like to do? What do you hate to do? If I'm correct, if I remember this correctly, I think the number was some stupid thing, like 89 or 95, some high number, percent of salespeople say the hardest thing to do in sales is to get the first meeting. The second hardest thing to do in sales was to differentiate yourself after you get that meeting. And the third hardest part was actually to close, right? So talk to your team. Like, okay, you know, Bob, what are you really good at? What do you like? What don't you like? And then look back at their numbers. Man, Bob got 55 meetings. He just didn't close any of them. Meanwhile, you know, Lisa got two meetings, but she closed both of them, right? Okay, there's there are metrics you should be looking at as your team and say, okay, so maybe you're just really good at getting the meetings. And maybe you're just really good at closing. Meanwhile, you know, Michelle's pipeline has 500 people in it. And she's hanging out and every day she's drinking and she's and she's going to dinner and she's meeting up and her all history is massive. She's touching base with everybody via email. She has campaigns going, oh, you're really good and nurturing. All right, let's just fix it. Okay, you become this, you become that and you become this. And I can almost say that if somebody just looks at their sales team, there are such amazing expertises that people have, instead of trying to fit, you know, square pegs into round holes. All the launches, you really, you really will succeed in. You know, some people are just always going to be great at things. They have a natural ability at certain things. I get it. I don't want to force them, but you could train somebody all day long. But sometimes their natural instincts will just override all of that. And you got to let them shine with who they are. I totally agree with that. I think there's I think it's a great way of looking at it because most sales managers want everyone to do beginning, middle, and end. And I can't tell you how many people come to me. They're like, if I just could get the meeting, if I could just get the lead, right? Which is where I know you do a lot of EOS traction stuff, right? Yeah, we do a lot of EOS tracking stuff. I love EOS. I love that. I love any company that has some sort of system. Yep, please. Me too. I'm a sister's girl. Right. And I was working for a client a couple years ago. And we got so nitty gritty with the tracking. Like it was stupid. It was almost over the top. It was borderline over the top, but I loved everything about it. Of course you did. And we had call centers overseas. And we're literally tracking how many phone calls and how many dials each person is making, how many seconds before each pickup that other and takes, et cetera, all the way down. And we're talking about about a million calls. We're going to take a month. Oh, but literally one million calls. And we look at this data. I'm like, holy crap. This person can keep a person on the phone 200% longer than this person. Like there's something to be said about that. But just to be able to keep a conversation going is a skill by itself. Oh, yeah. But certainly this person can't close a deal. Right. But they're really good at this part. Okay, fine. Just leave them there. And we spent so much time with these things. Because if you have a real good system in place that could track the data and could track real analytics, I think it's endless the things you could do with that information. Now you may need an expert to really kind of break it down for you and tell you why it's important. But the first step is to actually be able to capture it. So if you can start with capturing, somebody can somebody could really look back at it and say, oh my gosh, all right, let's fix this right here. This is your first problem. And to me, these like business systems really do help in organizing a lot of that information. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'll just tell you right from me. Oh, I see you need to have a scorecard, right? Everyone should have a scorecard, a weekly scorecard that you're talking about with the data that you actually need. But most people aren't tracking the right data. Right. And that's what you're telling us that we're not tracking the right data. What's a scorecard in the information process except it's data, information, and now you have knowledge. Yes. And we're talking about what we're doing with it. The wisdom is what you predict the next step. So to me, it's right down the list. You have all this raw data, you're either organizing correctly or you're not. Okay, now you're doing some sort of tracking setup where I know for a fact, this now, wisdom, what are you going to do with it? So you have all this great stuff. What do you do with it? And that's when you really need a real deep dive into the company. And a lot of I'm sure you face this in your business, right? You have upper management that will often fight you on the tracking and fight you on the wisdom part, because it makes them look bad. Oh, yeah. Right. We have it all aside. We face it all the time. It makes me look bad. Like, you're now his boss is going to say, how come you haven't been doing this before? Why weren't you looking at these numbers? We've given you everything to track it properly, but you've never dug into it aside from this guy being 100 calls today. He should be making 200. That's that's so top level. It's so terrible. Yeah. And more is not better. It more is more is never better. And yet we all think more is better. More is never better. Nope. And I looked at these. I love the score cards, and he does those top light reports that EOS does. And it's green or red or whatever else. And people say, Oh my God, it's all red. Okay, but let's understand why. Yeah, it was wisdom around that. This guy made a crap ton. Let's call. He's just fired him tomorrow. No, but you know what? He closed at a higher rate than anybody else. Yeah, let's just take advantage of that skill set. And I think people companies jump to conclusions too fast, and they lack the ability to really dig into it. Everybody is so results driven. And results are great. But getting better results does not mean, you know, looking at raw data and just saying, okay, we need more sales. We need more sales people. We need more phone calls. We need more stuff. It's just so basic of a thought process. And at the end of the day, it's a waste of money. It's a massive, inefficient, ineffective, costly process that if you're just thinking, we make if we do the math, 1000 calls, I think was $1 million. Perfect. Let's make 2000 calls instead. Yeah, that's not worth that way. It never worked that way. And most executives at businesses who aren't data driven and are only results driven, are only results driven. We'll only look at it that way. And it's a shame because I think if you do a data driven, much more deep dive into things, the results will come at an exponential factor. And it'll also just be efficient. People will be happier because they're doing their natural roles. And all around, it'll just be a better, a better system from top to bottom. I cannot agree more with that. And I'm going to just tell you this story. We were working with a company and they wanted to fire this salesperson because he was only selling one line of the 12 lines that they sold. When they start, and I said, "Well, can we look at the data around this?" Well, it turns out that he was one of the top salespeople because he was selling the quote out of this one line. And I'm like, "Yes, you're going to let go of this guy who's making you $4 million and there's one line because you think he should sell other lines, really?" And then they're like, "Oh, I guess we should just keep him." Yeah, hello. Well, otherwise, you're losing $4 million. Why do we want to sell the other lines? And to your point, Pablo, it's so important that it's what's people good at, right? And the data, data, data information, knowledge and wisdom. I think most people don't use the wisdom of their data, right? People don't know how to look at it that way. But to me, it's so stupid in many ways because I think what we do personally is so basic and it's so simple. I hate to say about my own company, but no, I don't think we're doing anything revolutionary. Oh, I think you are. Well, I think we're maybe, but I think we're taking what people are doing and just taking advantage of the things they're already doing better. But you have great salespeople. Companies have been, I have a client that's a very large firm that's been around for 100 years. They've done all this kind of stuff. They've tracked, they've done all this stuff. So they know what they're doing. They're not a successful company for 100 years because they don't know what they're doing. But the world is changing and people are forfeiting data, their own information, their own data. You're giving it away. You have a Facebook account, you have a LinkedIn account, you have posts, you have Instagrams, you have Snapchat, you have websites with your about us. You have stories, you're posting articles that you wrote or chat GPT wrote for. You're doing all of that stuff, right? Which basically allows people like me to take all of that raw data and create a profile about you as an individual that will allow me to communicate to you better, right? That is that part is newer than before. The amount of data that is public, the amount of data we are purposefully giving companies, apps, our phones, executives, individuals, anybody is out there. I can search anybody right now and if they've done podcasts in the past, if they've done speaking engagements, I could listen to all of them, break it all down. I said, okay, I know what this guy likes. I know what this guy's interested in. I know what to call him about, right? One of the things I always joke around about my process is I would hate to be single in this day and age. I would hate to struggle with, oh my god, the first person who I'm going to have a date with is going to know everything about me. And I wouldn't know everything about me. It makes it so much more difficult because then you're like, okay, how false is this conversation? How artificial or how manufactured is this interaction versus how much of it is genuine? Oh, well, we do have a lot in common. Or do you just know exactly what to say to me, right? It's hard to break that death. Yes, but think about that from a sales process. Just go with that for a couple of minutes, right? So fascinating. I just so fascinating. Well, okay. So with that said, tell us what your favorite quote is and why. Sure. What's the skill? I have always observed that to succeed in this world, one should appear like a fool and be wise. Ooh, I like that. And the reason behind it is back to my nerdy data things. And if you ever see me at events or interact with me, I have different hats and personalities that I put on very purposefully. And a lot of times I'll act extremely lost in a conversation or I'll act like I have no idea about this topic or anything else. I think people will talk to you very different when they think you're stupid. How people interact with you when they feel like they're at a higher position than you and you give them that ability. Because more about them than any other interaction I could have had. Not only that, some people will step up to the plate and it's pretty impressive where they're like, you know what? You don't understand. Let me stay with you and I will explain to you every single thing. And probably explain to me too much about their own processes, too much about them, too much about what they don't want to divulge. But you know what? I'm too foolish to understand it anyway. So what's the harm in telling this guy who never understands it? Right? So I do, I purposefully do a lot of that. I think it's hilarious. People give me so much information and divulge so much stuff when I act a certain way and act like I'm lost and act like I'm a little bit foolish. But if you could take all the stuff people give you willingly and turn it around on them, I think that's one of the wisest things anyone can do. I totally agree with that. And that, you know, smart person syndrome, if you haven't listened to that podcast, go listen to it because smart person syndrome is what gets at you in the way of, of acting curious, right? And acting like a little kid and learning new stuff. Absolutely. I love that. Tell us, Pablo, I know like, in one of the things I love when we talked in the green room last week, I know it was last week because we just jumped in. You don't work with everyone. You work with very specific people. So don't think that, Oh, wow, I need him and call him up. But if you people wanted to learn more about you or your process, because you only had two spots open the last time we spoke. Yep. For very high level companies. How do you find you? So Sonah Connect S O N A dash connect C O N and E C T dot com. Um, add me a link then we'll have a ball. Um, I'm always open to a conversation. Now, because we are only the door openers of that process, we're not the no church, we're not the closures. You know, a lot of our success is based on your ability to do everything else. Truth. Right? Yeah, we can get you to. So just just a quick idea when in the start of engagement, I'll tell you, I talked to a client and say, okay, perfect. Who do you want to meet? When I say who, give me exact profile of a company revenue, employee size, demographic, geography, everything, right? Who do you want to meet at those companies? That's it. That's it. Exactly the titles or roles at that individual house, what they do at that company. And I'm going to start filling your calendar of meetings. So if I get you 25 meetings with your exact demographic of company and your exact person that you want to meet at that company, two months roll by, three months roll by, hollow, I want to talk to you, we got to let you go with, we can, we can, we can, we got to terminate our agreement, like, wow, what happened? I'm like, we've made a penny off you. And then my brain, I'm like, girl, tell me, tell me, tell me what happened to these meetings that I got. They didn't want our business. They didn't hire us. Like, all right. So we give you 100 meetings of the exact companies you wanted to meet, of the exact person you want to meet at those companies. None of them wanted your services. But we did our job, right? Just what I was going to play about. We did our job. You did your job. But you don't want to continue on. I was like, yeah, no, because none of them want to, none of them want to buy your services. I'm like, okay. So where did, where did, where did the process fail? Where's the disconnect? Where's the failure here, right? And usually it's the failure in, in what I always think is surprisingly, it's not the closing. Most of the failure isn't that this process of nurturing. Yes. You know, do you have a system in place? And actually, so now, you know, when we first started the company, we made a bunch of mistakes, like every person done. And we were like, you know what? You want to hire us? We're starting up. Yeah, let's go. Let's come to work. Let's do it. And we got leads. I had one client. We did 385 leads in two hours. See? And straight up 85 leads in two or eight of all these, we had to turn off the system because they were like, what did you do? They didn't close a single deal, not one deal. Okay, so the first problem wasn't actually the closing process. The product sucked. And that was our fault for not inventing it out. We just wanted the money, like I were starting up, let's get more clients. And who says no to a company who's going to get you that many leads? Yes, but I want to tell you something. Nothing kills a terrible product like great marketing. And you got killed off by great marketing killed your terrible product. That's exactly it. And not only was it too many leads, they didn't have enough time to get back to them in the right time frame. There's a respond back. And if you don't catch them at the right moment, you've lost it again. So we gave them too many leads too fast. And they had a terrible product. So all around was just a bad concept. So now I look at companies that one, have a great person at the end. Usually, it's somebody that's been there or an entrepreneur that's been there for a long period of time, that I know for a fact that I almost put them through the ringer. I make them say, I'll do a trial. Listen, I'll give you guys some of these. If you can't close any, I'm not going to work with you. Right. And I actually, and I spend the whole concept around the trial is about them, not me. I know what I can do. I'm not, I'm a little arrogant in that sense that listen, I know my sister. You're not arrogant. You're just, you're good. Right. But can you close? Can you close? Right. And the second part is that nurture system. Now, that's different for every product and every kind of sales person, every company. So what I do ask them is, do you have a CRM or a process or a system in place? If you're working off excels, this is going to be a very hard move forward plan. It's just not going to work. And I've seen, I've seen some very large companies working off excels. But we do, we do have a service where we'll jump in and actually build out a CRM system for you or modify yours, if need be. But I cannot give you this much meat on the bones and have nowhere to put it. Right. It will get lost, it will die on the vine without some sort of organized system for all the data information and just the amount of leads coming in. And you'll never get to this point without it. You have to have this whole process in place. So that's really a vetting process. Like what, if you don't have some organization process, if you don't have a killer at the end to actually close the deal, we could do all this and guess what? We're still didn't look like we're jerks and that we failed because you're right, you didn't make a penny off us. But it doesn't mean we didn't do a job, but you're still going to fire us and you're right to. You're still not going to spend money here unless you spent the investment here. Right. So I, a lot of time, retail companies, unless I got to see your systems first, show me everything that you're doing. Unless you have that organized and structured or we're going to work on getting that built out first, I'm not giving you this service. There's just no chance. And part of the reason I have so few clients is because not every clients can handle it. So I work within a limit. I know what we can handle as a team. We have room for just a couple more clients, but that's it. And unless we design, we redesign our processes internally and put some different team members doing this and also redesign the system to work differently to the AI system itself. It's just not going to manage this many clients because everything requires structure for me. I know for a, I would love to be a $50 billion company of what I'm doing. The reality of it is, it's not going to happen the way it's structured. But what it will do is create such great opportunities for my clients that we become partners with them. I have clients today that we're taking equity ownership in as part of our process because we've generated that much revenue and it's proven. So a lot of my percentages, a lot of the way we structure some of our compensation is, if I believe in your product enough, if I believe in your system enough and I believe in your closing process enough, I don't even want to get paid monthly. I want ownership, I want equity in the company because I could tell you we're going to produce our size or give us, or give us all purely incentive based on what you close because I know for a fact that we're going to do it right. And if everything else works and your product is great and your closing rate is great and your nurture process is great, why would it fail? And that's why he doesn't work with everyone. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to take all of your rejects because people who can't do all the other stuff, like the lead gen, you do that, but we'll take care of the figure out how to nurture and how to close gave man praying, baby. I'm taking all your rejects. If you really want to work with him and he rejects you, come talk to us because we'll help you and then you go back to him. So yeah, right? It's a great relationship. We have to talk more about that. All right, with that said, come on now. Last final thoughts that you have for this fabulous podcast that you can leave our listeners with. Let people be themselves. All right, let people be themselves. I spent the better part of two decades in a role that was more of a support role for an executive. I did acknowledge that, you know, as, listen, I'm not on Zuckerberg. I'm not going to be these kinds of guys. I like being the guy behind the scenes. I always tell people, Sona is one of these companies that have probably all reached out to every company in this country at some point. And no one knows who the hell we are. And that's by design. Right? And that's my personality. I like being, I like making sure other people are successful in a weird way. And I do enjoy the art form of what I do. And there's going to be people in your company that are going to be very great support people. There's always going to be an employee number five who is an unbelievable employee number five and never wants to be the top dog. You need that, you need that crowd worker. You need him and he's always going to be super reliable every single second. And then you have these sales, these sales superstars who you know one day is going to be a CEO of a billion dollar company one day. And you're very good at stepping stone and you get it. So let them, let them be the best stepping stone you can be for that individual. Right? Why not build them for the moment that you have them? Right? And people are who they are. We train them and they evolve to certain extent, but there's certain instincts that are just built into individuals. Let them shine, just let them be who they are. And there you have it, folks, because that's the best advice that I can give. Pablo, thank you so much for being on our show today. You were tremendous. I hope that you'll come back and have another conversation with us because it was great. This is fantastic. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Oh, any time, any time we learned a lot today. So with that said, if you learned a lot today and want people to listen to Pablo, please send this on to your person. The youth bill needs to hear what he has to say because his words and words were amazing. And if you liked this podcast, please like us on your favorite podcast platform. And as I always say, when you're ready to get results, come listen to the queen. I'm Dr. Gene, the results queen. Go out and get results. Thank you for listening to getting results with Dr. Gene, the results queen. If you like the show, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We appreciate it. And it really helps your fellow business owners to find the show. Go to getting results with Dr. Gene.com for more information on how you can achieve better business results with caveman brain business growth system and the entrepreneurial operating system. Here's to you getting results. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
