The latest episode of the Grow Fast Podcast featuring Corey Litwin primarily focused on the concept of revenue acceleration as a service, a method to rapidly increase company revenue through various strategies such as filling the sales funnel with qualified leads, optimizing sales processes, and leveraging partnerships. Corey emphasized the importance of in-person events and innovative outreach methods like video messaging on LinkedIn to differentiate in a competitive market. The conversation also touched on the challenges and tactics in selecting and managing effective partnerships, emphasizing the need for alignment, training, and continuous communication to ensure mutual success.

Another key topic was the idea of founder-led sales, particularly relevant to early-stage companies where founders often take on the sales role due to budget constraints. Corey discussed the struggles many founders face in this area, especially those without a sales background, and the importance of developing essential sales skills such as qualification and relationship building. The discussion also previewed a forthcoming book by Corey and his business partner, Shannon Plum, aimed at helping founders navigate these challenges by providing practical advice and strategies for effective sales management and growth.

You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Corey Litwin here:

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This is the transcript for this episode:

Mark Shriner [00:00]

Music. Welcome to The Grow Fast Podcast, where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses fast. Let's go. Hey, Corey, how are you?  

Corey Litwin [00:18]

I'm doing good, Mark! How are you?

Mark Shriner [00:19]

It’s been a pretty hectic morning actually. I just ran in the door here, so thank you for your patience. A couple minutes late, I forget. I mean, we just spoke a few weeks ago. But where are you located?

Corey Litwin [00:30]

Out here in Boulder, Colorado.  

Mark Shriner [00:34]

Oh! That’s right! Yeah, boulders, amazing city, our town, city, yeah, I used to go back there every summer. I had an aunt that lived there, and she had a swimming pool and lots, I mean, it's just beautiful there. Because what's it called? Flagstaff or where you can drive up and you see the view.

Corey Litwin [00:51]

Yeah, the Flagstaff. You can go Flagstaff. A lot of people here in Boulder refer to it as the boulder bubble, because you got everything you need here. Hiking, really great restaurants, great schools. So very rarely do I go to Denver except for a sports game or going to the airport. We've got everything here.

Mark Shriner [01:10]

Yeah, it's nice. You've got a university, and you've got the gateway of the Rocky Mountains. So very nice, cool. Well, hey, I am. I'm looking forward to talking to you about revenue acceleration as a service. Also want to talk to you about the work that you and your business partner are doing in terms of helping founders with founder led sales. And I think you're writing a book about founder-led sales. I want to talk to you about all of that, but first, maybe you could define what is revenue acceleration as a service.

Corey Litwin [01:45]

It's a great question mark, and yes to all the things that you just said, revenue acceleration is something that every company looks at, how fast can we grow our revenue? How fast can we scale that? And so the ability to come in and provide guidance and a service to help them accelerate their revenue, that's where my focus is with Litwin and plum. So, revenue acceleration takes on a lot of different forms. It's how fast can you fill the top of the funnel with qualified leads? How fast can you move deals through the middle of the funnel? How can you partner with other people that can go out and sell your product? That is a huge way to drive revenue acceleration. I always like to say, bring in partners. It's like putting fuel on the fire that you've already created. So, it comes in a lot of different forms, but at the end of the day, you're looking at that dollar at the bottom of the piece of paper, we want to see that dollar amount going up, and that's from our definition of what that revenue acceleration is.

Mark Shriner [02:51]

Okay, it makes a lot of sense. Let me ask some tactical kind of questions. You talk about filling up the funnel and lead generation and things like that. What are you seeing? Because, you know, the landscape has changed so much, and it continues to evolve. And, you know, used to be able to do cold calling, and then faxes, and then emails and then social outreach on LinkedIn and stuff. And it's just like it every time something heats up, the time until it that kind of venue gets flooded is decreasing, and so people have to find new things. But what are you seeing as effective methods for kind of cold outreach and lead generation?

Corey Litwin [03:36]

That's the million-dollar question. How do you get those top of funnel leads without a doubt?  

Mark Shriner [03:40]

You want to get that one in for free?  

Corey Litwin [03:42]

Yeah, no, you know, the thing I've seen really effective now and this took a hit during covid, were in person events. I still think that that is the way to go out and meet people. I believe in doing those guerrilla style where you don't have to get the pass and spend 1000s of dollars. You can just hang out in the foyer and lobby and have conversations with people, but getting that face-to-face interaction that, to me, is the differentiator and how you can start to create connections. Now, you know, companies can't afford to send all their SDRs and BDRs to conferences. What I'm seeing as a trend is video messaging via LinkedIn, being able to send something that's personalized about that person, about their company, a hypothesis on some of the problems that they're having with a business, and then at the end, talk a little bit about yourself. What you're really trying to sell is getting on the phone with the person. And people haven't really attached to that yet. I think there's a lot of fear that people have in creating videos, and they're not comfortable with it, so I see that as a channel right now, to be able to differentiate yourself, is using LinkedIn messaging and leveraging those video messages.

Mark Shriner [04:58]

Yeah, no, I'm seeing, definitely seeing more of that. I mean, I think it was about a year ago where somebody forwarded me a video and said, Hey, have you seen this? This is a kind of a unique way to do some outreach, right? And these days, I'm seeing a bit more. I wouldn't say that we're at the saturation point yet, but it's definitely becoming a bit more common. Another tactical question, because you brought it up is partners, and selling through \ partners, maybe walk us through the process of selecting an appropriate partner, because you can partner with everybody, and then what are, you know, a partnership. A successful partnership takes a fair amount of planning and nurturing and kind of up, you know, maintenance. So what are in terms after you select the partner, what are some of the key things in terms of getting it launched successfully, that partnership and then and to keep it going?  

Corey Litwin [05:54]

Yep, so the second part of your question is spot on, and what people forget about that enablement piece, and I'll get to that in a second. Okay, so when you're essentially prospecting, I mean, it's just like sales, you prospect partners. Who is your ideal partner profile? Typically, it's someone that's in your space, that's selling to the same customer, or has a service that complements your product and makes your product better. So that is the first requirement is to find partners that are already in your space. And partnerships are two-way streets where you're making introductions on both sides. That's not how to recruit a partner. How to recruit a partner is how to bring more value to their solution or their service so they can sell more, so they could be stickier for their clients. And it's really, it's a relationship fit, too. When you're looking out and recruiting for partners, is this someone you're going to want to collaborate, that you're going to be in the trenches, co selling with? So, you've got to think about it as an interview almost. You know. You want to get the right partner. You want to have a scorecard and be able to assess who are the right partners to work with, because you can't go all work all of them, and my recommendations to find one good one and then enable them, which was your second question. You know, it's great to get them signed on as a partner.  

Mark Shriner [07:18]

Yay. We have this partnership look. We can create a little press release and put it out there, and then what?  

Corey Litwin [07:23]

Exactly, exactly, and that's where a lot of those relationships stop. It takes nurturing on both sides. You know, there's got to be skin on the game from both sides. So there needs to be regular communication, whether it's a weekly one on one, or a monthly one on one, there needs to be that regular cadence, so both partners are staying top of mind, but you also want the partner to represent your brand right in the way that your brand needs to be represented. So that's training, giving them the tools and resources to be able to understand your solution, the value you're offering, I always say, Make co-branded slides for a presentation. It allows you to control that messaging a little bit more when your component comes into it. But those are sometimes disastrous where you bring in a partner, they know nothing about your software solution. They're supposed to come in and implement it, and there's a total disconnect. And then the client that bought your software, you know, isn't happy with the solution, chances are they're going to churn. And this person keeps implementing your customers, and they're all set up for failure. They're all set up to churn. So, it's a really important decision to make of getting that right partner. Ask for references, and I'm telling you, it's just like a job interview when you're recruiting a partner.

Mark Shriner [08:51]

Yeah, I've worked with some really good quote, unquote, partner managers, and they would come in and kind of help jointly create some milestones. Like, okay, we're going to do this event together, that event, before that event, we need to create these materials. And sometimes they would even go so far to say, like, Hey, can we mutually identify some prospects, both from your, you know, database and from our database. And then let's, you know, put some time limits in terms of how long it's going to be until we reach out to them and sometimes people bristle a little bit because they feel it's a little bit too much structure. But when you're first getting started, I kind of feel like it's probably better than just saying, Hey, we signed the partnership, and then kind of being a little bit too lax. I don't know if you have any experience with that.

Corey Litwin [09:44]

Yeah, I think the sharing of prospects and client lists to see where there's some cross pollination is the best exercise, because both parties need to put skin in the game, like I had mentioned before, and I think that that is. An opportunity to see how well this is going to work. It also allows you to enable that partner, kind of, let's call it the honeymoon period, but looking back at my career, I haven't seen a lot of success in that approach because it requires nurturing. It requires a lot of communication, and some people just aren't wired that way, wired to understand that that partner is helping them. They're co selling with them. They're a resource. And I think that there's that disconnect between the salesperson more than the partner in those situations.

Mark Shriner [10:38]

That makes sense. So, let's, let's go on to founder led sales. Now, I mean, you and your business partner are writing a book on founder led sales. So first off, tell us a little bit what you know. What is founder led sales? What does that mean? And then why? Why do you want to write a book about it?

Corey Litwin [10:56]

Founder led sales? That's, that's definitely near and dear to my heart, and so companies, when they first start out, typically can't afford a salesperson, and the person responsible for going and selling is the founder. What I've found in a lot of conversations, especially in the tech space, is those founders are not comfortable being salespeople. Maybe it was a traumatic episode as a kid going to the rental car lot, right, seeing that used car salesman, and that's the image that comes to mind, but it's such a critical part, and it never stops. Founder led sales. Even you know, the biggest founders of the largest companies are still involved in the sales process, just not as involved as they were early on. But it's a struggle for most founders that don't have a sales background to understand, like, how do you qualify someone? How do you discover their pain point? How do you prove that you can, you know, solve their pain point. Those are things that founders miss out and there's founder led sales of generational companies, you know, manufacturing companies where the first generation was a founder led sales mentality. They were out hustling grit. The second generation of owners don't have that same hustle. They don't understand that component of founder led sales. And it's a skill, it's a profession. You need to work on it, and that's something that I see a lot of people lacking, which is why we're writing a book about founder led sales. My business partner, Shannon plum and I, we want it to be the book that founders go to read. What do I do in this inflection point or situation? Because Shannon and I, we've seen that movie 1000s of times, and we know typically, how that movie plays out at the end. So, we're taking our experience. We're saying, here's what you need to do right now, and here's what good looks like. We really want to make it the handbook that founders keep in their back pocket. And lots of companies are founder led sales throughout the life. Great example is CPAs, accountants. You know? They are very number driven. They don't understand sales. They understand how to deliver the value, but not how to present it. And that's another example where people struggle in those professions, but they are responsible for selling, and it's the founder. You're not going to see an accounting agency unless it's a really big one. Hire a salesperson. It's on the founder of the company to sell.

Mark Shriner [13:40]

No, my experience is totally in alignment with what you described. I've seen a lot of technical founders, one either just think that the product or the service the platform is going to sell itself. They're like, this is amazing. And they're just, you know, so geeked out about it. And they do make these, you know, really cool tools, platforms, et cetera, but they're missing the piece that you can build. It doesn't mean they're going to come to and buy it. So, you need to figure out how, what's your go to market strategy? The other kind of scenario I've seen oftentimes is like, oh, we'll just hire a sales guy or person, and it almost like treating salespeople as like a commodity, where you can just order one off the shelf, and they'll show up, and then they'll sell your product. And it's, you know, you got to find the right person, and you got to make sure they have the right experience, and then you got to make sure you have the right strategy. Blah, blah. But why don't you kind of go back and let's say, you know, some of those areas that you talked about, if you're trying to convince a founder or trying to help them sell, what would be, you know, let's look at it this way, what would be some of the chapters in the book that you're going to write, you know?  

Corey Litwin [14:55]

The first chapter is definitely around. You know, your approach, you. To work every day, because most people are transitioning from being in another role to being a founder, and that's a struggle for a lot of people, especially folks with a technical background. So how do you transition the way that you approach your job every day, with a large part of that being on how you're selling your products, how you're generating revenue, how you're generating clients, because it's a different way to think. So giving them some practical tips. Of you know, having early interviews with people with the idea of not selling them, but simply getting feedback from them, like that is a practical tip to give someone that's early on, giving them confidence, starting to get their voice and who knows, one of those might turn into a lead. And so that's an example of, you know, you're changing the way you're doing things. You're just talking to people and having conversations. I think a lot of people don't have that ability just to have a conversation with someone, and that's also a big change. And so how do you do that? As you practice?

Mark Shriner [16:11]

Well, I totally agree with you. It's funny, because as a founder, you're selling to a couple different audiences. One, you have your customer base or prospects, right? But you also have potentially investors that you have to, quote, unquote, sell to, right? And it's a different conversation. And I recently went to tech week Seattle to talk to potential investors. We're not We're not actively seeking funding but seeking funding. But I wanted to prepare myself to have those conversations, and it was exactly what you were talking about, where I was talking to investors or potential investors, and the first couple of conversations were a little bit awkward because I hadn't had them live before, even though I kind of practice on my own. But then by the end of the week, you know, I'd had the same conversation many, many times, and it just became much more natural. But I also learned a lot. I got so much feedback from the people I was talking to in terms of the questions that they were asking. But also, I would ask them questions, and they, you know, oftentimes give advice or give feedback in terms of our platform, etc. So, it's really, really important, I agree with you, to have the conversations, whoever you're selling to have the conversations, ask a lot of questions, get that feedback, get that confidence built up a little bit. What would be some other chapters?

Corey Litwin [17:29]

Qualification, without a doubt. I mean, this is a struggle with any company in sales having happy years selling to someone that you have no chance of closing they deal with, I always say, get to the no as fast as you possibly can. I like that. So, there's, I use BANT as a methodology for qualification. You know, they either need to have budget authority need or the timing. And trying to keep it simple for the founder, like, if you can find one of those. And really the need is the most important thing that you need to get to qualify this person. That's the type of advice we're going to give. Like, here's an example of the sign that you just heard me or that you're talking to the right person. So being able to guide them through that qualification. And the qualification goes through the whole process. If you're at contracting and they're just, you know, digging their heels in, and you're realizing this isn't the client we want to have, like you're still qualifying them at that point. And so that's just a really important thing that I think a lot of founder’s miss is because if someone's you know, they say, Wow, that's cool. During a demo, a founder is going to take that as a buying sign. Is going to think, Wow, this is a deal like, when can we schedule the next follow up call where they need to spend more time qualifying them and not just taking a wow, that's cool comment and hearing that that's a potential deal.

Mark Shriner [19:01]

Yeah, it's a tough, I guess, road to navigate, because as a founder, you have to be optimistic, right? I mean, otherwise, why would you be running a company that's that? You know, nine out of 10 of them don't make it, but you you're optimistic, and you kind of hear sometimes, sometimes you hear what you want to hear, and then that you could be I, you know, I've done a lot of work in Japan, for example, and it's so easy to hear that they say, Oh, this is very interesting, which doesn't mean really anything other than the fact that they're trying to be polite and say that, hey, you know, this is interesting. But it doesn't mean that they are going to buy for sure. But I've been in so many meetings were, like, Oh, there. Like, oh, they're into this. This is like, we'll see. So, it is really important to qualify. Can you give some examples? Because sometimes people feel it's awkward to ask quote, unquote qualification questions. So, can you give some examples of questions that you might ask related? To, let's go and just go down the band, you know, the budget authority needs, and what time, timing, something like timing, yeah. So maybe can give a couple examples of either questions or strategies you could use to kind of work your way through that.  

Corey Litwin [20:16]

Sure, the budget one's hard. They might tell you something. Can you really afford this? You know, it's a hard one, and I do have a theory that buyers are liars. So that's a hard one to get and have validated. I really like the authority one, especially in today's day where every dollar is being, you know, evaluated. What's the ROI on that dollar? A lot of purchases under $100,000 are going to the CFO. So, a question I like to ask about authority is, like, talk to me about your approval and decision-making process. Like, how does that look? Who's involved? And you start to map that out, and just having that early conversation, because typically, you're going to need to get two levels above the person you're talking to in an enterprise, B2B, you know, complex sale, and that's a great way to do is just start mapping out the approval process on the first call. I'm a huge fan of mutual action plans, of where you and the client are collaborating on that document, and within it, you're mapping out the org, and you're just asking questions of, well, who does that person report to do they own budget? Who's able to sign the order? Those are the type of questions that you want to know, who's got that authority?

Mark Shriner [21:35]

Yeah, I totally agree with you, and it's always been helpful for me to have a couple kind of whatsoever, canned questions like that, you know, talk to me about who else is involved with, you know, in the decision-making process on this. Because if you go in and try to shoot from the hip and make something up, and especially if you're a little bit reserved, it's going to sound you might feel that it sounds awkward. You might be reluctant to do it. I've been in situations where a non-experience, it was actually a technical person trying to do the sales qualification process, and then they just blurted out, are you the decision maker? And I was like, there's probably a better way. We can ask that, you know, like, who else is involved in the decision-making process? You know, can you tell us what the what the process is? Something like that, but he was his intents were all right, but it was just his intentions were all right. I should say it just came out kind of awkward. So, it's good, it's important to practice that before and then, like, need. Like, how do you navigate that? Is it just asking questions, or is it like, are they really describing their situation in a way that makes sense to you.

Corey Litwin [22:47]

To find the need, you need to be a therapist and get them talking. And you're going to have multi decision makers too. This is maybe just your first conversation of many, I believe in just saying, How does this affect revenue? I mean, you always want to go back to revenue, and that's kind of one of my canned questions. That's, what's going to drive a purchase, if this helps our revenue. And so that's a common question I'll go to, so you know, how does this problem affect revenue? Does it affect other departments? And just starting to understand that need, if that need is just for that one person in the organization to make their job easier, like, that's not a need for the solution. And so one question, I also will say, is, you know, if you guys don't do anything, and you remain with the status quo, like, what's going to happen? Like, what effect is that going to have on your revenue? And bottom line, if you don't do anything, because most companies don't do anything, they stay with the status quo.  

Mark Shriner [23:52]

Yeah, I totally agree with you, and I do like that question. How do you balance? Let's say it's an initial discussion. Maybe it's a one-hour meeting. How do you balance your need to qualify across those different areas, you know, versus just building rapport and also talking a little bit about your product and service.

Corey Litwin [24:17]

No one's going to buy from someone they don't like. Okay, I you know, there's a lot of sales methodologies that say relationships don't matter anymore. I disagree. Maybe I'm a little old school, but I believe in that first conversation, you need to have a connection outside of work, and that's the job of the seller. It's kind of like dating, if you think about it, you know, you go on a blind date with someone, and you've never met them before, and you're trying to get the know them. And you know what common interests that you have that's really the approach you've got to take, is you got to get to know that person. I sometimes, if it's a. Half hour call, get to the 20-minute mark, and I'm like, Oh, I didn't get to the meat of it and the qualification. But it doesn't matter. At that point, there's already a trusted relationship. And if I'm like, let's just jump on another call, I'm confident that the person's going to be like, Yeah, let's just jump on another call. So, I'm a huge fan of that. I'm not a huge fan of talking about myself and the company after I've qualified them, because if I don't know what their problem is, what their need is, I don't know what to say to them, like I don't I don't know how I'm going to help solve your problem. So, I don't know how to position the company or solution yet. So that might even, you know, be a second conversation. And it's like dating. You want to leave something behind. You want to get that next conversation. And so that's something I believe in doing, and that's something, you know, let's spend the next call learning more about my company. You know, this is a potential big opportunity. Let's bring in a technical expert. They can give you a quick fly by so you can understand the solution or service. But there's to me, I have no problem waiting to the second call to talk about my company, unless I'm you know, you're just looking for anything to grab to get that next call, but that's why you develop that relationship up front.

Mark Shriner [26:23]

I agree. I'm going to talk to you about a kind of a different scenario in a second. But first off, yeah, I think it goes back a little bit to what you said a little earlier, about be a therapist, find out what's troubling them, what their challenges are, people who really do like to talk, especially if you can ask smart questions about that, or say, Oh, that's interesting. We're seeing this over here, and you share information that's relevant and maybe helpful, but you definitely want to demonstrate empathy and some subject matter expertise, so by asking those smart, kind of relevant questions, a different scenario might be, though, where somebody has signed up for a demo, okay? And now I'm the founder, or I'm it's my co-founder, and we've got to give the demo. And now you've told me I got to qualify, but you also told me I got to be a therapist, and don't talk about my company, but I got to talk about the coming second we give you the demo. Talk to me about because these days, people sign up for a demo, and it's literally the first call. Sometimes it's 30 minutes. I like to do a little bit longer call because try to make it conversational, things like that. But tell me, tell me, how do you navigate that scenario?

Corey Litwin [27:31]

Been there a lot of times, for sure, don't ever promote a demo on your website. I guess that's my first piece of advice. It's hard with some solutions to do that. You've got to be able to be a storyteller in those situations. You've got to be able to let them visually see what they signed up for. Be able to see if any of that's resonating by peeling the onion. If they say, Oh, that's really interesting. You know, pause, like, stop what you're doing. Have a conversation. You don't have to go click to click, to click. If there's a moment, I like to call them bind signs, stop, start, to peel the onion. Like, you know, is this something that keeps you up at night, like, Gage? Like, how important is this to them? And so the ability to do that in 30 minutes, you need to have a tight demo that needs to be predictable and the clicks need to be exact. You can't have a founder going off and clicking throughout the platform. It's got to be very efficient and tight. But it's an art form, like we were talking about before. You've got to practice that. But as you're going through the demo, you do the discovery, being able to pause and ask questions. You know, this approach to solving the problem is this unique for you. Do you think there would be value in having this approach within your company? Those type of questions get people talking, and then they forget about the demo. A lot of times it becomes a conversation, but you can't go in there just thinking, I'm going to show a deck. I'm going to just, you know, show them solution and say, Hey, do you want another call? Like, that's show up and throw up.

Mark Shriner [29:11]

Yeah, not totally agree with you. And I think one thing that I see a lot, because I take a lot of demos, I'm always looking at different sales enablement tools and anything that can help kind of optimize our business. And it's also I just like to understand where the market's going. So I'll, you know, watch a demo one or two a week sometimes, and more often than not, they'll spend the first 20 minutes of a half hour call qualifying me, which I find irritating, because I signed up for a demo, I didn't qualify, sign up for a qualification process, and I'm okay to answer a few questions. You know, that's, that's fine. I mean, that's just, you know, normal business, I give you something, you give me something back. But the I had actually to just to the. Little bit. I had a situation last week where somebody said their website said, sign up for a free trial. So I signed up for free trial, and then I had a call with somebody who spent, you know, 15 minutes qualifying me, and she said, I got to tell you, we don't actually do free trials. What we do is we do an extended demo. And I said, well, that's fine too, but we, but we need to qualify you to see if you, I was like, that's kind of a bait and switch. And, you know, we've already started off on the kind of a wrong foot, the wrong foot right now. So, I and I don't know, like, when that happened, but the whole, like, show up, qualify for 20 minutes, and then show you a quick demo, and then talk about next steps. You steps. It just becomes, it seems like that is the kind of standard these days.

Corey Litwin [30:48]

Yeah, it's definitely evolved and changed. I always try, at least once a month to do a sales call with another company and just see it. You know, everyone does things differently, and when I've been doing it lately, I just shake my head when I get off and yeah, just so disappointed. There's, there's no next step, there's, there's really no understanding of what my true problem is. It's just like, here's the cost. You know which one fits best for you. You can't sell like that you're not going to be effective.  

Mark Shriner [31:23]

Yeah, totally agree. And I like what you were saying about when you're doing the demo. Pause it once in a while. Ask questions, are you? Are you? Do you use something like this? Or how do you solve this problem where I'm going to show you how we solve this particular problem on our platform? How are you currently doing it? You know, and that's just also it keeps people engaged. It's not just the empathy thing. It's like because everybody gets so easy to get distracted. If the demo is remote, which I guess probably 99% of them are, these days, you want to make sure the audience is engaged. And you know, there's a kind of resetting from time to time. So let me ask you, gosh, what you said you're interviewing founders to help you write your book about founder led sales. Take me a little bit through the interview process.

Corey Litwin [32:09]

Yeah, love to! So, from your perspective, how would you describe founder led sales? I know you asked me that question earlier. But how would you describe founder led sales?

Mark Shriner [32:24]

Yeah, I would very similarly to what you said, where you have a founder of a company who is out there doing the initial sales. In fact, I just met with a lady who's running a company. It's a two-person firm, and they're outsourcing a bunch of their dev. And I said, who does the sales? And she says, I do. Said, but I thought you were with the platform development. I am. So that's kind of a typical scenario. She doesn't have a lot of sales experience. I think she's a very effective salesperson, probably, but doesn't have a lot of experience, and so I guess it would be kind of what you said. You somebody who's trying to do it all. She definitely seemed to appreciate the importance of sales, but maybe, and but I feel a little bit naively, felt that she could just do it all herself. Maybe it's not naivete. Maybe it's just lack of budget at this point, but yeah, kind of what you said.

Corey Litwin [33:28]

I know you talk to a lot of founders like I do you know, just as an assessment of those founders, on a scale of one to 10, one being lowest and being highest, where do you think those founders land on how they sell.

Mark Shriner [33:46]

You know, I would say most of them are relatively low down on the scorecard, and because something that we touched on before one, I don't think they appreciate the importance of sales. When I say sales, I'm talking about, obviously, they want the numbers, but I'm talking about the process of selling. They think that, they either the platform is going to sell itself somehow magically. And the big thing is, is they lack a defined process. They haven't done it, and they don't understand, like you were talking about, is, you know, there's the qualification, there's the relationship building. There's also, what is the next step? What's the follow up? Because you can't just have a meeting, walk out, go, Oh, it's a great meeting. What's next? I always ask, like, when I'm coaching teams, after, I said, before we go into a meeting, I said, What are we going to get out of this meeting? What are do we want to be the next step? So, we can kind of guide things in that direction, and then when we walked out of there, or when we walk out of there, what lessons learned and what's the next step? And it doesn't have to we don't have to get exactly what we wanted, but we have to get something out of there. We have to know what the next step is, right? And I think that a lot of founders get super excited but lack. That kind of follow through and process. Now that's just a blanket statement. Obviously, some, there's some amazing founders who or amazing salespeople among the founder community. It's just you asked in general.

Corey Litwin [35:14]

Yeah, definitely see the desire not to not to lean in, of being a weakness as well of being curious. And that should be the personality of a founder. You know, if you're not curious about the sales side, are you curious about the finances? And so, I think it's across the board, and I agree there's a lot of amazing founders out there that understand they don't know everything. Like bring an advisor in. You know, I advise some companies like that is a very helpful tool for an early-stage founder, good stuff. So, we're going to publish this book. Like I said, it's going to be the handbook for founder led sales. You know, they're at an inflection point, like, is this the right time to hire my first salesperson? That is a common question we get asked, What is something that you think would be really valuable for a founder to read in our book,

Mark Shriner [36:12]

aside from the things that we already touched on. Yeah, I think you know knowing when to hire your first salesperson, whether it's an SDR, or some people say, oh, when do you hire your first CRO? And I think that really comes back to your skill set. So, if you have some sales and marketing experience, maybe you don't need to go with the CRO. Maybe you need somebody who's going to do lead generation and demos for you. Or maybe you need a CRO that can do all of that in one, you know. So, it kind of but you need to identify when is the right time and what's the profile of the person that you want to bring on. And you need to understand how you know, depending on what your market is in your, you know, your ICP, what type of salesperson are you going to hire and bring onto your organization? So, and I think a lot of people don't know that, because they they're just like, Well, as I said earlier, these, these salespeople are all interchangeable, and we'll just hire one, you know, just, just a commoditized person that goes into a chair and which maybe you could say something like for salespeople. Maybe we think that's how we look at developers or coders. It's like, well, that guy can do code. Why can't this person do code? I would argue that those roles are probably more interchangeable than a salesperson, because you for sales, man, I mean, you're talking about the human brain, it's the most complex thing in the known universe, right? And that human brain has to go out and interact with other human brains, right? So, you want to get and so what I guess my point is, there's a huge amount of variation in terms of personalities and skill sets, aptitudes, and you want to get the right person for your specific situation. So, if you could write a chapter on that and kind of distill all that, you know, know, how down into one chapter, I think would be incredibly helpful. I don't know. Does that make sense?  

Corey Litwin [38:10]

No, it does. I like the comparison of the developers, because I think that resonates. And a lot of times Shannon and I find ourselves trying to talk in that language of project managers, developers, we've, we've even created a go to market strategy that's designed for them involving AB testing. So, I think it's really, you know, important for them just to know when to ask for help. And I think that that is, that is kind of a theme of what you just said and trust, and that's part of being, you know, a founder, bringing in good people around you, and knowing when you don't know something.

Mark Shriner [38:51]

Absolutely, talk to me a little bit about this AB test that you're putting together or that you've used how, yeah, walk me through that process.  

Corey Litwin [39:01]

Yeah, I mean, go to market strategy. So, for example, you know, your ideal customer profile, it's a foundation for everything you're doing. You've got to nail down your ICP. If you mark, if you do marketing without ICP, you're just wasting money. So, the approach of, of testing, that, of having, you know, an ICP to ICPs, testing them against each other. Obviously, revenue generated is going to be one of those big measurements. But, like, what type of tracking and conversations?

Mark Shriner [39:34]

Okay, so you would, you would track, you do AB testing, okay, I'm talking to this type of customer profile, this type of, and then just, just kind of analyzing the feedback from the conversation. What about in terms of any kind of outbound marketing, you know, would you look at, like, you know, AdWords responses, or anything like that, or.

Corey Litwin [39:56]

A lot of the company marketing with, yeah, are. As mature for that piece. I mean, another one, I think, is just branding and leveraging. You know, what is our catchphrase? Like, what's our elevator pitch? Having two different elevator pitch and testing those I'm always encouraging, like, get a group of friends together and press practice your demo pitch or your investor pitch with them, and so I think that that's just a key component of it as well.  

Mark Shriner [40:31]

Totally agree. Talk a little bit about how women and plum, how you guys engage with your prospective customers and customers.

Corey Litwin [40:42]

Yeah, so we work with B2B specifically Shannon, and I have a background in SaaS, but we've got clients in a variety of industries, and what we're finding is that SaaS best practices apply to every other B to B industry. They just haven't adopted them. So, we take the approach of all of those best practices that we have from our 50 years’ experience in tech and SAS, and we deliver in a variety of ways. Traditionally, we like to come in and do an assessment of their revenue machine, all the different things touching their revenue and just getting a baseline of where they are and where places we can help them with. Sometimes we'll identify specifically. You guys need to have an ICP like before, anything else before, anything you do with anything else, whether you do it with us or not, you've got to do the ICP so we'll come in work with them, do customer interviews, do competitive analysis, and deliver that as a project. So, we can come in and solve specific problems that founders have. We also serve as a fractional CRO, and we do that on number of days per week. And so we serve as the chief revenue officer, and we'll run forecasting calls for people will help them hire their first salesperson with their first VP of sales, put in their sales strategy. So, there's a variety of ways that we engage with our clients. And you know, their startup scale up size, post revenue, or they've got to have done some impressive fundraising for them to get value from us. But we see the same problem over and over. I've said we've seen the movie 1000s of times. We typically know how it ends, so let's not get to the ending that we know how it is, and just take this approach of really coaching them, helping them, giving them practical advice and tactical tips. One customer and a lot of salespeople out there do this, so I think this is a good tip to everyone. Don't ever send a proposal over email, get on a call, walk the person through the proposal, so you can see their eyes when you show them the number.

Mark Shriner [43:06]

Great, great advice. I love that because I so it's so funny, because I've had that conversation before of just, no, we're not going to send it to them. We're going to take it to them and back in the day, pre covid, we're going to meet with them and walk them through this. They're like, I will just send it over. No, no, no, no. Like, I'm sorry I cut you off. Go ahead.  

Corey Litwin [43:26]

Yeah, no. I mean, even to the extent of like, they just send me a DocuSign. And, you know, that's like, the ultimate like, Are you kidding me? You know, you think I'm going to click Sign on this thing and so, you know, it's, it's just these things that we don't think about. They're reflexes for Shannon and I, and just a lot of people don't know them. And that's really what we want to be able to do with our practice, with our book. That's our mission statement in general. We want to be able to help as many people as possible. And when Shannon and I were in corporate America, like we were helping our company, we were helping a few clients, but there's so much knowledge that we have to share. And for us, you know, we don't really think about it. And you know, these are little, little gems we like to throw out, and that's how we engage with people, like in the moment, like, here's something you can do, here's something you can try.

Mark Shriner [44:23]

I like it. What? How do you guys scale your business, though?

Corey Litwin [44:28]

So first off, we're taking a different approach than a lot of other fractional CROs or fractional CMOS or CFOs, where there's two of us, what you traditionally see is one practice or one practitioner. So, we have already scaled compared to other firms in our competition. You know we want to work with clients that we know give value in the ones that we want to work with. We want to make this thing big and grow it and potentially bring in other partners in the future, but for right now, we're just focused on delivering quality work, getting most of our clients through word of mouth, and that's what's going to breed that growth that we want to have. So, it comes down to just strong delivery and being able to leverage relationships with our clients and their network.

Mark Shriner [45:26]

Do you set some type of success criteria? Do you establish that at the beginning of an engagement and then, and then, say, make it some kind of time bound deliverable, like between now and this next quarter, we'll do this and then six months from now, we'll do this, and if we achieve these, we'll consider that a success. Or how do you do that?

Corey Litwin [45:51]

Yeah, just being on the same page with those priorities when the engagement kicks off. You know, our typical engagement is probably six to nine months. We're not there forever with our clients. A large part of what we do is succession planning and bringing in people to take over the processes that we've built.

Mark Shriner [46:12]

You know, I definitely see a need for revenue acceleration as a service in the founder led community, because, I mean, founders are so busy and they're my experience as a founder is I get pulled in so many different directions, and it's hard because I just I think that for anybody to be effective in their role, they need to focus on one or two key things. And if you're trying to do everything, it's like Jack of all trades, master of none. But if you can find some smart subject matter experts to help guide you through some areas, especially areas that you're not really familiar with or haven't developed those skills with, you know that's the way to go, just find somebody that you can trust who's like you said. You've seen that movie a million times or 1000 times, I think you said so somebody like yourself that you know this, you've been through the drill and you know you can immediately bring a lot of value, versus a founder who hasn't done that and then is just learning by trial and error, and that because what if founders don't have, they don't have time, you know, we don't have time to make all these mistakes and learn from it. We got to move now. And so, I definitely see value there. Tell me about the book. When's it going to be out? How can I get a copy? Will you sign it for me? Yeah, talk a little bit about that.

Corey Litwin [47:39]

Absolutely. We'll send you a free autograph copy. It's going to publish in 2025, we're just finishing up right now doing some crowdsource ideation. We actually just released last week an eBook helping founders be comfortable with the uncomfortable, because I think that's a big part of the issue with founder led sales and so, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn. We can send you a copy of the eBook, but it's a micro version of the book. We're trying to get some feedback, making sure we're heading down the right path. But excited. You know, one of my goals turning 50 last year was to publish a book. So, partnering, partnering with Shannon has been a great experience, and can't wait to have that in my hands.

Mark Shriner [48:28]

No, you get a sense of accomplishment. I published a book on sales, and people said, why'd you do that? You don't make any money from books. I said, well, it helped me. The process of putting the book together helped me to kind of crystallize all my experience and thoughts on sales. Otherwise, it's just kind of this all. It's in the ether and but there's no real structure, you know, and I it helped me put together a structure to around my thoughts and kind of rethink some really important areas as well. So, I'm sure for you, it's a similar process, and you might under you might discover there's some gaps in your knowledge. And so you go out and do some research, and then you talk about it. So, it's a great process. Well, Corey, I appreciate you coming on the grow fast podcast. I totally see that you have a massively Bright Future providing assistance to founders, because we, we founders need all the help we can get, and I wish you the greatest of luck with your book.

Corey Litwin [49:24]

Thanks. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed our time together.  

Mark Shriner [49:40]

Cheers.  

Corey Litwin [49:40]

Thanks.

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