Paul M. Caffrey (00:02.454)
What's up everybody. Welcome to another episode of the surf and sales podcast. I am Scott Lies, co-founder of the surf and sales summit and cohost of this podcast with my good friend, Richard Harris. What's up buddy? How are you? I am so much better because just a minute ago you made a comment about something being almost 30 years ago. And it's rare that I get to pick on Scott for his age because generally speaking, I'm older than him. So I feel much better.
hearing you having to utter that phrase. Yeah, you're really tickled by that. Dude, it's almost 30 years ago, and for once in our life, it's not like, and I was in middle school. It was an absolutely horrible phrase to utter, by the way. Yes. Almost 30 years ago. We're gonna spend today talking with Paul Caffrey, who is splitting his time actually between Brazil, where he is right now.
and Ireland where he's from. He's the author of the work before the work. He also happens to be a supporter of what I would consider the worst Irish football club out there. What's up, Paul? Welcome to the show. There you go. It is great to be here. And I had a lovely compliment lined up for you, but I have to pull that back in after that. I actually I actually don't even I actually don't even think that they're the worst of the worst. I just wanted to give you a hell for that. Yeah.
We had a fun chat before because, um, those of you who don't know, uh, I spent some time in Ireland almost 30 years ago, which is why Richard is laughing it up. And Paul was like, what the hell? How do you know about this town or whatever? So anyways, we had a good laugh. We're going to spend the next 30, 45 minutes or so getting to know Paul and talking shop, tell everybody Paul, you know, what you're up to, man, and, uh, what you're working on right now.
Yeah, certainly will do. But before we jump into that, you left out the cool part here, Scott. Oh, you're actually playing football for an elite football team in the top division of the Irish League. I mean, that is quite incredible. So let's be fair. Nobody would like to add to that, you know, 30 years ago piece. Let's be clear, though. Nobody who understands football would call the Irish League elite. Just to be clear.
Paul M. Caffrey (02:25.938)
It's the best league in the world. Jeez, I've insulted some guests before, but not quite like that. I'm insulting myself more than anybody. Yeah, just to be clear, just to be clear. All right, Paul, tell us about the book and tell everybody, you know, what you're working on now. Yeah, I'm delighted to be here. The book is called The Work Before the Work. It's it shares the hidden habits elite sales professionals use to outperform the competition.
And I'm working with sales teams and helping them understand how the power of professional preparation can help them achieve higher level, more elite results when it comes to sales. And it is something which is becoming more and more important as we go on, because we're seeing a lot of changes in the world of sales. Obviously AI has burst onto the scene. It's getting harder and harder to get meetings, probably getting more competitive to get deals over the line the last number of years.
And ultimately this is something which some people really like. And others are like, it's not for me. Get it away from me because essentially you're talking about doing the work to get results, but this is actually doing even more work. So it's not silver bullet. It's not a hack. It's a case of if you can be prepared, if you can be ready for your sales conversations, for your prospecting, and you just have to be a little bit better than a couple of other salespeople.
and you can tend to get better results and win more often. And some people like that and they're like, okay, this is good. It's something I can control. I can fit into my sales process. So I'm not saying you don't change your sales process. It's actually going from step to step to step, being better, challenging yourself of how you can actually get from step to step to step, but more importantly, looking to put the other person first. So if you're meeting, you know, if you're prospect or you're meeting your customers, thinking...
What are they looking to achieve? What's the best possible outcome for them? Also, if there's people not involved, maybe stakeholders are a little bit invisible or hard to reach considering them. I'm bringing that level of preparation to your sales game. I would assume this is the way you operated while you were an account executive at Salesforce. You were at Salesforce for not quite four years or so through kind of the first year or so of the pandemic.
Paul M. Caffrey (04:49.41)
How did you make the decision to kind of pivot from being this individual contributor or working for one of the biggest companies in the world? I know you tried one more stint at a different startup, but then you really, you went out on your own after that. Yeah. Talk about why you decided to do that and pull that trigger. So many people have done that in the last few years. What was the reason for you to go do that? Yeah. The reason for me, and it actually.
It stems back to 10 years before I went into Salesforce. So I had the opportunity to work in the UK, selling Microsoft technology and helping them launch their cloud technology at that time. And as you can imagine, back in 2008, 2009, 2010, everybody was afraid of cloud computing. Only 1% of companies were actually using it. And it was something that was just not secure, not safe. We saw things change there.
I ended up in being in a very fortunate position where I was getting to work a lot of mid-market, getting to work a lot of enterprise-sized deals, and then also being training the SOHO and some of the smaller SMB teams to actually sell over the phone. So I was in a sort of dual role. And I reached a point where I remember I was on an airplane every single week, I was five o'clock in the morning on
you know, landing, I'm jumping in a rental car, I'm going to this city, I'm going to that city, I was covering the whole of the UK and Ireland. And I remember just sitting in the bar 12 o'clock at night, typical Irish guy, and I'm working on quotes and I'm trying to send out my quotes and stay on top of everything. And business is really good. I was like, there has to be a better way here. And that's when I was fortunate enough to come across Todd Herman, who is an elite performance coach. And.
He'd coached the likes of Real Madrid, the US Olympic team, lots of Fortune 500 companies. I just happened to be lucky enough to find his first foray into the online world of coaching. So the small group, we got to go on. And it's at that point where it dawned on me that preparation is really the key thing that can help you achieve a lot better results. And again, it means you can work less deals. We can walk away from maybe trying to work all the business and then understand, well, actually hang on, which...
Paul M. Caffrey (07:07.618)
which deals are gonna have the highest chance of closing, which ones aren't. And a very long way, if I zip through it and you jumped into Salesforce, I'd met a leadership team there years before and I've studied and doing a master, so I was forced to have those connections. They're always saying, come over here, you should do Salesforce for a while. Went and did that. And it's at that point where I realized that I was constantly.
coaching other sales reps, I was constantly helping out reps. I was jumping in, getting involved on deals. And I realized that the biggest thing that was holding people back was they just weren't prepared, they just weren't ready for those deals. And then conversely, I realized that the best salespeople, they always prepared. And I'm talking, you know, there'll be some of the top performers would be.
knocking it out of the park in Salesforce and they'd have their solution engineer driven demented because there'd be driver one three, driver one four, driver one five, because they knew they wanted to get that demo, that solution thing just right. And I decided to take a step out so I could actually help more people as such, because I felt I'm helping a very small amount here. I was looking at the space and I just didn't see a cover. So I decided, right, treated it very much like a football career. I was like, okay, I'm gonna
do my stint here, do one more year, and then I'm out on my own. And at that point, it's just to go out and get this message out there. Cause I think it's something which people are, they're maybe ignoring it because it's more work, but if you just prepare a little bit more than somebody else, the returns can be 10 or 20 X. Because if you're winning deal after deal after deal, and you're only doing that much more work, that will really compound. So what does that mean?
you know, that little bit more. Cause you know, this is something I have to coach Scott on all the time. He's got to put a little bit more effort in. He's just not, he's just not putting in enough effort, but you know, so does that mean I need to do it 10% more? Because I think, and the seriousness of the question is we hear that and we think it means we need to work longer hours, which in some cases it might be, which is totally fair. Like you do have to put in some work.
Paul M. Caffrey (09:26.442)
What are the other things though that it could be that says, if you do this better, you're gonna do it better than the competitor over at Oracle or something like that if you're at Salesforce or something. And like what I find particularly, if you're working for a big tech company or if you're a founder, maybe you're leading the sales charge yourself, your days are full of meetings. And it's so easy to just be hit by the week and it's a whirlwind, it's meeting after meeting after meeting. And actually,
keeping yourself really busy is a bit of the, is a little bit of the lazy approach. So what this means is doing a little bit less in the sense of every single meeting that you go into. And I've seen this with elite sales professionals again and again, they're considering what are they looking to achieve? What's the current situation? And they're also considering that for the other person. So it's, whether it's a 10 minute, you know, stand up 10 minute huddle,
or whether it's going in for an hour long meetings, maybe you're delivering a demo to a customer or it's something else, it is asking yourself a series of questions so that you can get the most out of that moment for the other person and also for yourself. So let's pause there for a second. Let's say I do have a demo. What are some of those questions I should be asking myself in preparation for that demo? Or what should I be doing? What you wanna... What?
What you want to think about is, firstly, how important is that demo to you? And what I mean by that is if you're an enterprise sales rep, you might have three of these a year, right? So then you want to give yourself days of preparation. If you're working in SMB and you've got that process down, I suppose, Scott, as you're a big fan of them, there's lots of transactions. You look to give yourself a lot less time accordingly, maybe five minutes, maybe 30 minutes.
Okay. And what we're looking at is thinking about what am I looking, what am I looking to achieve? What do I want? What point do I want to get across to them? What pain do I want to try solve? What's the current situation? And you're then looking at going, well, they have this problem, which means it's causing, they don't address it by a certain time that this issue is going to happen. But we want to, if it's a bigger deal, you know, the current situation goes a bit beyond that. You're then asking, well, what's, what is the competition here?
Paul M. Caffrey (11:51.958)
And is this a competitor? Is it the status quo? And what's the catalyst for this demo? Have they come into our inbound system and put their hand up and said, we really want this? Have they used our service before? Or have we went out and prospected them and found this opportunity? Or maybe they're gonna be playing it a little bit more cool. And on top of that then, it's relationship. What's the relationship like with their existing incumbent? Or do they have a better relationship or a worse relationship with competitors or maybe with your exec team?
And then there's the other thing to consider is the decision-making process. So what do we think that they need to see in this demo to actually decide to go to the next step? What do we think they need to see to decide to actually go with us? And of course, then you look at that from the demo perspective, but then from the deal perspective. So from the deal perspective, you go into more detail. From the demo perspective, it's maybe a little bit lighter.
Well, now nobody needs to buy your book, do they? Or should they still buy the book? This is it. Just listen to this and use it. It's a simple as he's just he's just saying that because he wants everybody to buy his book. You guys are having like a book battle. Yes. All the books are in the in the background over there. That's it. Yeah. The seller's journey. I can't wait to get a copy. So as I was saying beforehand, mine arrives in March 13th because it's coming to Ireland. So looking forward to getting it. Richard, you can rest.
knowing one person bought your book. I won't ask for a refund. But I give away it's a, it comes with the money back guarantee. Like I'm the only sales book ever. So, uh, but let me ask, let me ask you a question, Paul, that, um, it's kind of geared maybe for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs out there, people like yourself who have gone their own way. You've got, uh, a number of kind of posts and things you've shared where you're delivering.
uh, speeches, talking to conferences, doing SKOs and stuff like that. What's your number one tip for somebody who's looking to secure. SKOs it's kind of in the middle of towards the end, maybe of SKO season. So might not help people this year, but for next year, as they, as they think about it and they're like, I want to do some of those, what's your number one tip for securing them and just know Scott's asking for a friend. He's not asking for himself. He's asking for a friend.
Paul M. Caffrey (14:15.43)
Nobody. Yeah. Nobody loves me. I'm sure. I'm sure there's lots of SKOs in Costa Rica. I'm sure you can you can dot them in, you know. There's only two that matter. Hey, and we run them both. Yeah, it's I mean, they look they look to great events as well. I have to say the advice I'd give. And it's something which you can do right now is start looking at.
It's straightforward identifying the companies that you would love to actually talk at their SKOs and look into the social media coverage. Because, you know, typically people are posting stuff on LinkedIn. You'll have the ones that you want to go after and then connect with the people who have organized this year's one. And really looking to do it six or 12 months in advance, essentially. And then the other side of that as well is connecting with RVPs or connecting with sales leaders and trying to tap into something that they want to get their
sales teams or if there's a message or initiative or a North Star, and that can be super helpful. And I guess the other side of it is maybe don't necessarily pigeonhole yourself to that one talk because everyone's going to have that one idea, that one big thing that they want to actually deliver. But if you can have three, so the one is that your core piece, but then something which is you're working on.
for the future and it's an idea, but you can throw it in the mix. And then something that you've maybe spoken on a couple of years ago that, you know, you could dust that off and present that. So you're giving people a couple of different options, because if you just go in with the one idea and they're going a different way, it's just not going to happen. Then you're out, right? Yeah. Does the math break down the same in terms of, okay, I need to...
reach out to this many companies to get this many conversations, to close this many deals. Is it standard kind of sales math? Do you have the same conversion percentages from top to bottom of the funnel that you did at Salesforce or is it higher? The say it's you're reaching out to less and you're, but you're doing more. You're having more conversations. So
Paul M. Caffrey (16:27.05)
It's a case of there's a sales leader or there's someone in there who's advocating for it. And then there's the event coordinator who you're looking at chatting with. And then typically there's another person who's actually organizing the event on the day itself. And a lot of people wanna have meetings, wanna vet, wanna see slides, wanna know what you're gonna say beforehand. So it ends up being something where you're better off being quite specific on the ones that you're going after, because...
So I was like, the more generic approach is probably not gonna pay off.
So I want to shift a little bit. What was the catalyst for you to go do it on your own? Like you talked about, oh, there's the one part of like, hey, I think there's this niche that people could go learn this skill. But what was the thing that sort of got Paul to go, I'm going to do it? And were you nervous to do it? Or were you one of those people who's like, nah, I know how to go tackle this stuff. I'm just going to go for it?
It's something which I've always wanted to do. And call that out. It's like at the start of my career. I don't know if you guys play this game. It's called Fantasy Premier League. It's a it's a game where you pick some English soccer players, never gets the most points, you know, gets the slag off their friends because they beat them. So in 2010, 2011, I'd set up a side hustle. So I had my career started going well on traveling. I set this up and that was something which was only ever a hobby.
But then income started coming along, had a podcast, podcast ends up on national radio, end up writing for national newspaper. So every week had this business going. And I reached a point in 2014 where I had to pick which one I was going to go for. And I was like, sales is way more lucrative. The football is fun. And I decided to go that way, but it was always in me to go.
Paul M. Caffrey (18:29.694)
I'm going to go out and do something else. And I remember I was at a conference in 2019, a weekend sales conference in London. I just saw person after person on stage sharing messages, most of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't. And I just had that moment where I'm like, right, that's it. I'm going out on my own. I'm going to do this thing. And then COVID struck and it put me in a little bit of a, oh, I better not do it now. I mean, like.
can't leave my house. I mean, a very, very severe lockdown in Ireland. It was a very long time. We weren't allowed out pretty much a year. Now the upside of that was it gave me time to start writing. I also have co-authored my co-author, Phil M. Jones, is an extremely accomplished keynote speaker and trainer. He's been doing it for many, many years. So, you know, thankfully I'd involved him in some events that I'd ran. And then through those side conversations, he asked to get involved.
And that just further stoked a fire for me to go, yeah, I'm gonna go and do this. Now, look, is it a gamble? Of course, you know, you've got mortgage, I've got two young kids, all of that. But I just thought I'll always have a reason not to do it. So if I don't go now, you know, I probably never will. And then the other side of it is, you can always take a step back into what you were doing before. Maybe different company, maybe different situation, but from that perspective.
There's a fairly good safety net when you've got a 15 year track record behind you.
Paul M. Caffrey (20:03.318)
Yeah, that track record that you're talking about is super important. Right. And I think that that's what gets some new entrepreneurs into trouble. You know, they go all in, they don't have a big body of work. Maybe they have some early success and then it fades a little bit and then they don't really know what to do. But I like your answer because it was the same thing that I eventually, after I got brave enough.
I eventually said to myself, which is sort of like, what's the worst thing that can happen? I have to go back and get a job. Oh, well. Right. And I think that that's the right attitude and the right approach. And if you've done it often enough, you should be able to command a good, the good gig that pays well, and you should have, you know, pretty high level of confidence that you can be successful in that gig and kind of reset the, the clock, if you will, a little bit. Right.
Yeah, absolutely. And then you have to be open to where, you know, where the market and the opportunity takes you because my vision was always to train account executives, help them prospect better, help them sell more, help them get promoted faster. And there's still some stuff coming out on that later in the year. I was always like, that is what I'm going after. However, I found there's a lot of founders, you know, newly formed companies and they've got great ideas but they've never actually done sales before and they've been putting their hands up. And...
they've fallen my way where I've ended up going, okay, well, building out those initial, helping the coaching founders to sell and teaching them how to build out their initial sales teams and coaching them how to take on their initial sales hires. That was something which I never actually anticipated going into at the beginning, but then it is something which I've ended up pivoting to and looking at. And again, you gotta go super niche. So for me, it's a...
you know, founder who's just starting out and looking to get their first 50 customers, their first 250 K and ARR. And then at that point it's right. You go move, you know, get someone's that level. Then they move on and they go for, you know, somewhere, somewhere more established, but it's been open to that. And probably surprise, surprise where founders are seen to read books than salespeople. So there you go. It's probably makes sense that that's starting to come my way. How do you marry the two?
Paul M. Caffrey (22:28.77)
passions, because you started with this football thing, this side hustle. You kind of let go of it. Let's just say to go with the sales passion, which was more lucrative and whatnot. But now you're in a position where there's no reason you can't do both. And you know, if you, if you think about the show you're on, it's titled surf and sales, how do you combine the things that you love, be it football or some other hobby or whatever with.
your profession and do you think about that as like something that you're going to explore doing next? It's a great question. And I, you know, I'll be, I'll be on to, you know, the guys, Andrew Phil, get the pan back together. I want to do it in like 10 years, man. Yeah. Let's, let's go. Um, for, I guess for me, what it comes down to is this is, it sounds funny to say this is a passion, but this, you know, this is a enough.
of a passion. Would I like to get back involved in that world of, you know, fantasy football and sport and all of that? Absolutely. But at the moment, I'm very much focused on getting this to work. And the other side is I have a two year old and a three year old, and they have become my new hobby and my new passion. So my weekends and free time is spent a little bit more with them. And unfortunately, it's.
football updates on the phone or every so often getting to go to a game. And I actually I got to go to a derby here in Brazil a couple of nights ago. And football here is on a whole other level. People hanging out of fences two hours before, two hours after, singing, chanting the whole works. So, yeah, if you ever get a chance to go to a football game in Brazil, guys, I got to check it out.
Have you done Brazil yet? I've been to Brazil. I've never gone to a soccer game there, but I've been to Brazil. Yeah. There's a huge surf culture over here. Like the news over lunch was 15 minutes of surfing news about the competition in France, this, that, the other. So I think in my head, guys, this is, you know, this. You're on the list. It's on the list. We can't go till you show up, though. Like we need you to come and.
Paul M. Caffrey (24:47.238)
experience it so that then after you've experienced our version, you can tell us where to go in Brazil. So that's the key piece. So I have a question. And Scott, I don't think I've ever asked you this question, although I think I know it. As you made the leap into doing your own thing, every single person I know who does that, we start out really successful, it goes well because we're working our friends and family network. And then we get punched in the face of like, oh, now I got to go get business.
And two things happen. People either grid it out and figure it out, or they actually go back to get a real job, which is okay. It's not a failure. It just means that maybe they're realizing like, you know what, I don't wanna do that. I'd rather just have a little bit more security. A, did you ever have that challenge? And B, what do you coach those people? How do you coach them ahead of time? That, hey, you're gonna get punched in the face pretty soon. What's your plan ahead of time?
going back to your sort of you better plan and prepare ahead. So there's a couple of questions inside of there, but we've never really talked about it.
Do you want me to go first, Scott? Or do you want to do? No, no, you, you go. OK, so for me, I mean, yeah, those first few contracts and all that first business. I'm not going to say it's easy, right? But yeah, it's you know, it's a few meetings. It's, you know, a couple of coffees and all of a sudden you're off to the races. This is great. So I know exactly what you're talking about. For me, what was the big piece? I remember a mentor told gave me this piece of advice and it scared the life out of me.
You know, it was basically going, look at all of your customers that you have at the moment. And you need to make peace with the fact that when you do a good job for them, they will no longer be your customers. So the second you sign a customer, they are going to not be one of your customers someday. And I remember just going, what? Oh, actually, that makes sense. And
Paul M. Caffrey (26:48.546)
That scared me into looking to always try to build a pipeline ahead of time. Now, I guess the way of doing that, that I found was pretty useful was networking. It is networking. It's getting to events and just spreading the word and letting people know what you do.
And then for me, it was a little bit of listening to the market and pivoting and actually reacting to some of the, you know, the leads that came across my way or what people were looking for and, you know, working in that, in that startup ecosystem. I guess the first, you know, first 12 months or so is, is what you want to, you get through and then it's the second 12 is where you want to double down and that's where I'm at and it's a case of right going full tilt now and, and just seeing where it goes.
Yeah, I feel that with regards to, uh, people moving on, you know, sometimes somebody will say to me, are you still working with so-and-so? And I'm like, no, you know, that, that contract ended or whatever. And, and they, their immediate reaction is usually like, Oh, I'm sorry to hear that it's like, no, actually it's because they don't need to pay me anymore because they're rocking and rolling. They're set up. Like I did what I went there to do. I did a good job. So.
They're set up for success. And it's a, it's, you can play yourself out of a job in some ways. Yeah. And so it is a, it is a weird feeling and. You know, your answer is the same as mine, which is like the only solution is more pipeline. Yeah. That is the only solution and how you drum up that pipeline is your own preference. And I suppose what you're good at with combined with what works. Um,
And, but even that is an ever evolving kind of thing for all of us. You know, when you've done this long enough, if you've done it as long as Richard has, I bet the way that you get business now, Richard is somewhat different today than it was 10 years ago when you first started. You know, I know, I know right now it is for me and I've only been, this is only year five for me. Has it really only been five years? It's, I mean, it's been four years and like four months for me. Yeah.
Paul M. Caffrey (29:09.706)
Wow, I feel like it was just yesterday for you. You're so young. You don't carry the stress that I do 11 years in. Paul, this has been great. That was a fun one. Scott, we should ask that question more often because I think that's something that we know so many people do in the side hustle stuff, right? So I have one more question along with that, but then we'll flip it to you to let you ask us a question.
Paul, what advice do you give to people to tell them?
it's time to make the side hustle the main hustle, right? Do you, do people come to you and say, well, I kind of got this thing I've been doing, I've been thinking about, you know, maybe making it my full-time thing, but I'm not sure, you know, what advice do you give to people? My advice is probably just based on my own situation. It's when your lifestyle doesn't have to change and you can go all in. So can, you know,
Is the mortgage bills all that covered? Is the family going to be able to still have the same level that it has at the moment? And if it's your side is at that point, then I say, yeah, go for it and give it a blast. And you'll be amazed at the amount of people out there. And I had so many of these conversations that you would never expect are thinking about doing this. That are so, you know, if you're thinking this, you're not alone. There's lots of people who are.
Most people tend not to do it. If you've got some sort of market signals, you've got some sort of validation, and if there's a bit of revenue that you can close, I mean, you can close your initial contracts while maybe you shouldn't, but you can close them when you're in your existing role. And then if you opt to fulfill, you can step away. There's lots of different ways of doing it depending on your business model. But that will be the case. I would say don't just quit and put yourself under pressure.
Paul M. Caffrey (31:09.862)
I mean, you can and you probably have six months, 12 months or however long before you start dipping into savings. But I think you want to get market signals and a little bit of validation before you take that make that plunge.
Scott, it's like you're more handsome, smarter, younger brother. Yeah, it shares my.
safe philosophy of going out on your, on your own, rather than just saying, fuck it, caution to the wind, zero money in my bank account. I'm going to work for myself now. Yeah. It's a, yeah. What happens when you do that? When you happens when you do that, if you're lucky enough to even get some businesses, you end up taking on bad business often because you need the money. Right. True. He worked with the wrong clients. Maybe they don't have the right experience and that kind of can set you back.
or frustrated and demoralize you, you end up making certain choices for the wrong reasons. You know, and that's dangerous. And then if you're fortunate enough, you can also run into that same problem when things are going amazing for you. You know, you start to think you can do no wrong maybe, and you say yes to everything, because you can sort it out, and some of those things you say yes to, you're like, oh shit.
shouldn't have said yes to that. This person's a pain in the neck or they don't actually need very much help in the area that I'm good at. You know, whatever, whatever the reasons are, you know, you got to be careful with bad money, right? It's a real, it's a real thing out there. Well, we appreciate you spending some time with us, man, on your, uh, winter sabbatical, if you will, even though you're working full time. I'm just going to give you grief, staying away from the Irish winter.
Paul M. Caffrey (32:59.694)
How can we be helpful to you? What kind of questions do you maybe have for us? Yeah, so there's so, so many, but I'm mindful of time. I guess maybe Richard, I'll start with yourself. I obviously heard you were on John Barrow's show recently. I suppose you were talking about prospecting, you're talking about getting new business.
I'm intrigued to, I suppose, get your view on, I guess, how maybe neat selling is changing a little bit with the introduction of AI. So what impact or what change do you think that's going to have for, let's say, an SEO or a sales rep?
So the key piece, I mean, I've been doing it this way for a long time is that it's all about the humanity in sales, right? And we've talked about personization and personalization and all those things. And we're still chasing this dragon that we think we can scale personalization. And now, first it was through the tools, now it's through the AI chatbots and all those things. And...
it's going to get there and it's getting better. The problem is, so is everybody else. How are you going to break that noise? Because now all of a sudden, everybody's going to have a really human piece. At the prospecting level, it's going to be that much harder. At the sales rep level, it's all about the experience. It's never about a journey for the buyer. There's no buyer's journey. There's only a buyer's experience. That's how my whole concept is. I think you
the elite performers are gonna recognize that what happens in those meetings and how that meeting goes needs to last and have a halo effect for the meeting after the meeting when you're not there. Right? You know, sort of the in-between moment that Scott and I like to call things. And that's where I think, you know, and I don't care if it's need or medic or like whatever, like whatever you study, you still just gotta be a human because humans are buying from humans.
Paul M. Caffrey (35:17.612)
For now. And Scott will jump on this in a second, but we are being conditioned to purchase more and more without the involvement of the human.
Until a single person can make a decision and is willing to make a decision by themselves without the group of a committee, I don't think the sales rep is going to be eliminated. Now, when it's me buying a TV, I don't have to go to the committee. The committee might be my wife and my family, but that's very different. That's a B to C play. It's coming into the B to B market, but as long as marketing has to have an opinion and IT has to have an opinion and so-and-so has
No champion is going to have the answers for everybody. And so coming back to your point about this elite performance, those are the people who are going to survive. And I've been saying it for a while, too, is that if I'm in sales, I am trying to move my sales skill and my sales job up market as fast as possible. I want to get to the high level mid-market. I want to get to the enterprise deal where there's eight or 10 salespeople or 10 people who have to be involved in that decision, because they're going to need a human.
Right? And there will be a very small niche. There will be this very small niche of SMB mom and pop business owners who only want to talk to a human. That might be the other person I would try to be. If I like that transactional high volume kind of thing, I would try to find those things. But Scott's more involved. Scott knows more about the transactional SMB market than I do. But I think there will always be a niche of people in that, even in that world.
who don't want to do everything talking to a computer, but I could be wrong. Well, there's your answer. What kind of questions do you have for me? Do you have a different question for me? Because I answered it so brilliantly. Scott's got no question. No, it's a yeah. There you go. Thank you very much for that. I think there'll be a lot of people thinking, oh great, yeah, human peace is still needed, absolutely.
Paul M. Caffrey (37:23.21)
But the key point I take away there is being intentional about where you're going with your career and also, you know, getting the skills to allow you to go wherever that is. Because I think there's a lot of people that just ride the wave and you kind of coast, you could end up in a bit of trouble in a few years if you're if you're between the two. So I think that's super interesting. And I guess the question I have for yourself, Scott, and it's a bit of a selfish question.
So I'm just going to ask, I know you're one for process and you say don't change the process. And if you're following a certain sales process, stick to it. How do you get people or convince people to stick to their sales process without tweaking or changing anything? How long should they stick at something? You know, when should they pivot?
Yeah, there's, so there's nuance to some of those things that you said. So if you're sticking to your process and that process sucks and doesn't work and nobody is succeeding with it, then that's not a good thing to stick with. What I, what my intention of is when I say stick to the process, it's one that's proven. So if you, Paul have, you know, for five years in a row been the number one seller and like,
This is the process that we follow. This is how we qualify. This is how we demo, et cetera. And I'm doing that thing. I should stick with that provided it's still working. But always, all of us, if you're at a place long enough, little things have to evolve and get tweaked. And it's a little bit of a living breathing entity. Maybe you have a new product or a new feature, maybe the price point changed a little bit.
Right. You got one more thing you have to show off or this new thing replaces the old thing that you used to demo. So you have to be aware of some changes, but as long as you can still point to examples in yourself or other people and data that this thing works, then there's really no reason to change, but in the absence of these examples or real life, you know,
Paul M. Caffrey (39:50.014)
stories or use cases or whatever is very difficult for people to believe you. So I think some sales leaders or coaches get into trouble with this because they'll say, you just have to follow this process and this sales rep is in their mind following it and not getting results. And if that coach or sales manager or whoever doesn't say, okay, well give me the fucking phone. Like, let me show you and demonstrate
Right. Then why should they believe you? And if, if that new hire comes in and is saying, what's the start with this process that everybody's supposed to follow, there's not a single person on your team hitting quota, that's a bit of a red flag, right? So to me, it's just all about the proof. It's all about the proof, you know? Yep. Which is why when I started someplace, I always said
I gotta, I gotta be the best salesperson in the company. I gotta figure out how to sell this thing. I gotta show everybody. This is how you sell it. This works. This is why it works. This is the numbers. Everybody should do, do this kind of thing. But the moment that stops working, we actually have to make an adjustment or a tweak. Okay. That's, um, yeah, again, yeah. Look at, look at the data or have a reason to change. I really like that.
One more super fast question. Founder has just started their business. Maybe they've got a minimal viable product. They're doing, they've got to carry a sales target. What sales advice would you give them?
sales advice would I give them? What was the question? Say that again. You got it. You found her has just started. Maybe they've got a minimal viable product or maybe three, four, five months in another. They're going to market for the first time and they're carrying a sales target because they want to get investment and they're right at the start. But what sales advice would you give them? And they may be people who haven't had experience selling. Typically are. Yeah.
Paul M. Caffrey (41:56.418)
There's a lot of different directions they could take this. I'll jump in unless you want to go for collection. Figure yours out, Scott. Yeah. I'll just rapid fire. Like, um, get the process out of your head and onto paper. Get number one, like what am I supposed to say? Don't try to remember it. Just get it down on paper. So you have something to kind of follow. Right. And then it makes it easier for other people to follow if it works. Number two, uh, you should probably work with.
a coach of some sort, if you can. So you're getting feedback and guidance from somebody who knows how to do this. If this is not your domain or area of expertise, uh, this is an obvious one, but, um, actually focus on selling. You know how many founders I've talked to in my life for like, yeah, I'm, I'm the GTM person or whatever. I'm like, sweet. How many calls did you make this week? I made six. Yeah. Then you're shocked. You don't have results.
Got it. So actually put forth the effort and understand the, the math and the volume and everything kind of required. And then the last thing I'll say, and then I'll pass it over to you, Richard is nobody cares about every single little thing and feature that your product does. So you have to stop being so in love with your baby and brain bragging about every little thing. You really have to try to figure out like
What are the three or four most important things? And you gotta lead with those, not, hey, here's the 9 million things that we do. You just wanna overwhelm somebody at that point or they won't believe you. Richard. Yeah, so I'll piggyback on all those things and add that nobody cares what you do. They only care what pain you solve. Everybody in the world talks about what they do. I can go to almost any website and in the SaaS and startup world.
and most of them talk about what they do. Nobody gives a shit. They only care what pain you solve. So that's the first thing. And you can only do that by our, to Scott's point, by talking to a ton of people and figuring out, well, what pains do you have? What would better be like? And what could you do if you had better? That's what you need to be asking, particularly when you have an MVP. In addition to what Scott says, death by a thousand mouse clicks, I'm actually going to do something today and,
Paul M. Caffrey (44:21.898)
the two founders want to go in and we're going to show them how we do this and we show them how to do this and Richard, we want you to spend like 10 minutes talking about cold calling and cold call scripts. I'm like, fucking kidding me. No, that's not what they want. I said, who's the author? It's a bunch of SDRs. Great. Bunch of VPs of sales. Great. I'm like, they could give two shits how the information gets uploaded into your program. Do not spend 45 minutes doing that because that's what they wanted to do. They're like, what do you mean? I'm like, nobody cares, particularly a head of sales. They could care less. A VP of sales, a CRO, they're not going to do that.
They're going to have somebody else on the team do it. So you need to get to the pain. Let's solve the pain first. Talk about the pain you solve, not what you do. At an MVP level, I don't even think it's about a process at all. It's about a conversation. To Scott's point, well, what am I trying to articulate? It's not even at this point in the scenario you gave where they've got an MVP and they're trying to go get three or four clients or whatever.
Paul M. Caffrey (45:22.078)
It's not about a pitch. It's about the conversation and you got to have a couple of them to figure out, well, what does the pitch need to sound like? I could be splitting hairs over what Scott was describing. It's just how I interpreted the question. Then the last thing is, this idea if they're at the MVP stage, and their goal is to go raise money. They need users, not customers.
Scott may not agree with me. You might have to cut some deals at the MVP level to get users to get feedback to figure out, well, what pain are you really solving? And you may cut deals, you may do some freebies in exchange for case studies and use cases, because that's what matters. Yes, you do have to show revenue right now, it's 2024. And so people wanna see attraction of revenue, but you're not even gonna get to that if you don't have people using the product. So if you're so focused on closing someone,
and you don't have any customers yet, I would tell you to press pause on, I would encourage closing and selling and figuring those things out. But right now I just need users because I don't even know how to sell it. How can I sell something that doesn't have any users yet? How can I come up with a price point without knowing what that looks like, right? Why would I scare away those people if I come up with the wrong price point? So in the scenario you painted of an MVP, it's early stage, they're three to five months in, that's sort of how I see it.
Great, really, really helpful there. Thank you so much for sharing it. Yeah. Well, thanks again for joining us, Paul. Tell everybody real quick where they can find you and how to get in touch with you. Yeah, so probably the first thing is if you go to work forward slash assessment, you can fill out a scorecard and see how you compare to an at least sales professional. And you will then get custom guidance on how to up level.
where you're at this moment. So there's like 15,000 possible, you know, computations of that. So it's pretty, pretty good about what comes out of it. Second is books available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, everywhere, everywhere. Well, pretty much you can get books. So it's called the work before the work. And then finally, connect on LinkedIn, Paul Caffrey, I love to chat to you there, mention the podcast, and feel free to slag off the dog. And also,
Paul M. Caffrey (47:47.594)
It's like off Liverpool as well. I've just noticed the Liverpool flag there. And yeah, I'm a Man United fan. I moved to Manchester, my season ticket many, many years ago. And I'm like, oh no. We have dueling rivalries. We've crossed countries even. Yes. And unfortunately, both your teams are doing way better than both my teams. So, yeah. Let's talk more about that.
All right, everybody. I got to go. Sorry. I'll see you next time on the Surf and Sales podcast. Thanks for joining. Bye. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Gus.
