Unlocking Sales Success with Doug C. Brown
Brent Peterson (00:01.982)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Doug C. Brown. He's a sales guy. sales coach, sales everything. Doug, go ahead, do an interaction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and give us one of your passions in life.
Doug C. Brown (00:12.942)
Thank you.
Doug C. Brown (00:16.952)
So Brent, thanks for having me on here. So I'm actually the founder and CEO of a company called CEO Sales Strategies. We have lots of clients that we work for, and we help them create predictable revenue or predictable sales revenue growth. I also own a SaaS company called Vibitno, which is a personalized, meaningful, relevant, and automated follow-up system that we had created.
And the question, what's my, motivates me? What was the?
Brent Peterson (00:50.112)
Passions, what do you have for passions in life? Yeah, what motivates you too? That's a good one.
Doug C. Brown (00:51.47)
.
Yeah, so passions and motivation. I love music. That was my first thing that I thought I might be, would be a professional musician. I did do that for a while and then realized I didn't want to be on the road in a bus for 300 days a year with five or six other people. And I love hockey. The Boston Bruins hockey team is my favorite hockey
Brent Peterson (01:19.528)
Alright, good, and you're in New Hampshire, so I guess that's appropriate, right? And what instrument do play?
Doug C. Brown (01:25.889)
I was a vocalist and then a keyboard player.
Brent Peterson (01:28.368)
wow, so I play keyboard and my daughter had a vocal scholarship. anyways. All right, so Doug, before we get started talking about some sales strategy, things like that, you have on told to be part of the free joke project. I'm going to tell you a joke. All you do is give me a rating one through five. So here we go. A polar bear walks into a bar and says to the bartender, I'll take a rum and a Coke. The bartender says,
Doug C. Brown (01:32.42)
wow, wonderful.
Doug C. Brown (01:46.861)
Okay.
Brent Peterson (01:57.716)
What's with the big pause? The polar bear says, I was born with them.
Doug C. Brown (02:03.338)
Mmm. That's a dad joke. So I got to give that a four and a half.
Brent Peterson (02:06.474)
Hahaha.
All right, that's fair. yeah, I probably saw it coming when I said the big pause, but anyways. So tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into what you're doing, and yeah, let's start there.
Doug C. Brown (02:23.884)
Well, I started pretty young. actually started working at the age of three, my dad. And my dad had a machinery repair, industrial, you know, motor company. And I started sweeping floors at the age of three and I was hanging out with the adults. And by the time we were five and a half or so, all my brothers and I, we were put out in front of clients and said, Hey, know, write orders and help these people. So.
You know, my little five or six year old, you know, brain was working at the time and my grandparents, it was a family, family owned business. And, you know, we had about 14 employees there and, it kind of started early because I noticed one day Brent, like I was making 25 cents an hour at the time. So, you you work 40 hours, you get $10, but I was selling parts and one.
day I was like, oh, I sold this part for $20, but we paid $10 for it. And it took me like seven or eight minutes. So I was like, okay, if I just made $10 in seven or eight minutes by selling something, why am I doing this 40 hour a week thing for, you know, $10, right? And that's what kind of started the whole process off. I never know if my dad did this purposely.
I never had a chance to ask him before he passed away, or if he just needed low cost labor or a combination of both or whatever. that's the leverage component of you don't have to necessarily just work for an hourly wage or a salary. You can leverage through selling. then so through my life, I had built one way or another, crashed, failed, burned, broke even, or actually widely succeeded.
at about 35 different ventures that I've been involved in. one of them I was fortunate enough to be part of that grew up to, you know, we sold it for $2 billion. And so I started focusing on what I was doing within that company, which was sales revenue growth. helping companies actually grow their revenues through the sales teams, through the sales process. And over time I dialed in
Doug C. Brown (04:43.975)
a methodology which is focused on a math-based formula and a metrics-based formula. So we can predictably and reliably show people if they want to grow by 142%, we can show them that. If they want to grow by 26%, we can show them that. And then we help them install that plan throughout their company.
Brent Peterson (05:02.644)
Yeah, I mean, that's such good experience. I had a company where it took me a while to hire my first salesperson, and then it took me even longer to kind of quantify what they had to do to meet those goals. And then when I sold the company, it was harder to explain to new management that, your goal of getting to 200 % growth with no output of spending or whatever that thing is,
Talk a little bit about those numbers because I equated directly with, I'm gonna get so many leads and so many of those leads are gonna convert and some of those leads are just gonna be bogus. There's a whole number portion of that that has to be involved. Talk a little bit about how you came about that.
Doug C. Brown (05:38.318)
Thank
Doug C. Brown (05:49.486)
Yeah, so lead quality is definitely one of those things, right? So the first step out of the gate, like if we run the metrics, is, as you said, you're going to get so many leads. So you're going to have so many outbound reaches, right? So even if we have an inbound lead, we count that as an outbound because you still have to talk to the person or you still have to communicate with the person. So you're going to reach out somehow. That reach out rate will equal some connection rate.
They see your message. For example, if we sent a postcard or overnight mail or something, people look at it and they go, that's a connection. If it's an email, they may not see it. Usually a text message or something, phone call, they usually hear it. So there's a connection rate. So we measure the ratios within these different metrics. And so out of that connection rate, you're going to get a response rate. So you said some are good, some are bad.
So some of the responses could be good, some of them could be bad, some of them could be neutral, some of them could be no response, right? So if you got a bunch of leads and you're reaching out, for example, and there's no response, well, the messaging that you're probably, one's probably sending out is not resonating with the end buyer. So these metrics and the ratios of these metrics start to tell a story. From there, we're looking at how many appointments do we set? And from there, we're looking at how many closes do we get?
on that call. Now there could be submetrics like how many appointments actually stayed and kept their appointments. And we look at these metrics and that will tell us a story. So for example, if somebody had 100 appointments and four people showed up for the appointments, that's telling us a story. The messaging's wrong, the right fit buyer is off, whatever it might be in that case and we can investigate this.
We go from closes to follow up closes to increase transactional value, to increase buying frequency, increasing new clients from referrals and all kinds of things. But lead quality is one of those things that you can also improve, which will improve a lot of those ratios. So when we're looking at these ratios, we're looking at on daily, weekly, monthly, and we're measuring these ratios as we go along. And then we're putting behind these ratios tactics. So referrals, for example.
Doug C. Brown (08:13.254)
That's a way of getting new clients. So how do we get new clients? Anything that's getting new clients is going to usually require some additional output. And depending on how we manage those ratios, that will allow us to dial in the predictability into that process. So if you have a new salesperson like you were talking about, you had that person, had to figure it out for a while, that's not uncommon with sales teams.
clearer on what we want those metrics to be, we now know what we're going after for that sales team member. And so now we can qualify and disqualify the sales team member in just like we or out, just like we would qualify a potential lead in or out. And so the more you start dialing in these metrics and then put behind that action, the tactics, massive prospecting, dialing in the right fit buyer to get better lead quality, conversational sales conversion.
a follow-up, example, wrapping follow-up around the process. All of these are supportive mechanisms for the metrics-based plan. And the more you dial this in, the more predictable it gets, and quite frankly, the easier you work.
Brent Peterson (09:26.208)
When it comes to the BDRs, the cold calling, I've heard it over the last five years that it's dead or it's back, it's dead or it's back. How important is that sort of the business development process in that cold calling that's happening still?
Doug C. Brown (09:29.934)
you
Doug C. Brown (09:38.574)
Thank
Doug C. Brown (09:44.472)
Well, cold calling is extremely important. People don't like to do it because they view it as hard, right? Or you're getting rejection, but it's not like you're sending an email and somebody doesn't respond to you or somebody deletes your email. They respond back, take me off the list, even though when they're not on a list, right? This is a direct connection amongst human beings. And a lot of people don't like that. So people will say, well, cold calling doesn't work. It works when you have the right fit buyer dialed in and you have the right messaging.
and you're able to reach that person. And a lot of times reaching that person isn't during certain conventional hours. Like, you if you want to get to a CEO, for example, many of them will be in the office at 6.30 in the morning. So if you're trying to reach a high level CEO, call early in the morning, call Saturday morning, call after hours. They're usually there, right? But a lot of times, you know, people are trying to get in while the masses of other activity that is going on.
And you know, you're hitting gatekeepers and hitting all kinds of things. Of course, when you hit the gatekeeper, you got to have a great message to for the gatekeeper and get, you know, allowing yourself to get passed through to the person you want to talk. So cold calling is not dead. People talk about that all the time. Cold calling is an essential feature. Interesting statistics, Brent. The average person who's being pursued expects three to five phone calls before you actually will give up.
And this is statistics that are measured across the board. so they're not just looking for email. They're not just looking for LinkedIn. They're not just looking for Facebook, or Meta, me, or Twitter or whatever. We want to use different methodologies to try to figure out what the people want. But if we're clear about who the right fit buyer is and where they hang out and what they do, we can narrow that down to their top two, three desired.
ways of contact. And one of them, frankly, is cold calling in some cases. They want to hear from somebody. And they certainly, if it's a complex sale or some type of involved sale, they're going to want to talk to somebody. So at one point or another, we have to talk.
Brent Peterson (11:53.856)
You talked a little bit about the human part of it and the numbers part of it. So, you know, this is geared towards people that are in EO and any person in EO has got to, you have to qualify with at least a million dollars of revenue. So they're probably at that point, either they have some sales team, people, or they're hiring a sales team. Where do you think that if that person like me,
whatever 10 years ago where I was just taking that leap and I'm going to hire somebody. What are some of the main aspects they should do when they're building a sales team?
Doug C. Brown (12:31.256)
So the first thing is write a description, detailed description of what the actual job is. And when I say detailed description, I'm not talking about just a half a paragraph or a paragraph. I want people to sell. I want this. I want that. So again, if we take the concept of the right fit buyer, which we call CPM, which is something that we teach.
What do you actually want? And what does one actually want them to do? The clearer you are, the folks on the front end about that, the more you now can look for that particular individual. So it's no different than Brent if they were dating, right? So let's say that they wanted, I don't know, I'll make this up. A girl who's five foot seven, dark hair, blue eyes.
you know, has a master's degree, and, know, wants to be autonomous in life, wants to have children, loves music, loves dance, particularly loves folk music. you know, you know, likes, Lamborghini's or whatever, right? You're going to, you're going to put down all these criteria wants to live in a lot, a warmer climate. Let's say, you know, I live in New Hampshire where it's going to be minus four tonight, so I'm not real happy about that. so you want to create that.
but you want to create the description of what that person is going to do. And that has to be very detailed out. This is a big mistake that people make. They don't look at this. Now the question is who fits that profile, right? That's how you write the ad. You write the ad to attract that and repel the people that you don't want. And so once you kind of get that down and you understand there's two factors, main factors in a, well, there's more than two, but two main ones you want to look at is
What are they gonna do and what's the ego strength that's needed for that? Do you need somebody that's gonna try to, for example, well, callers are calling in on the highway, driving down the highway, you need them to pull their credit card out and give you a credit card, you're gonna want somebody who has a lot more confidence or what we call higher ego strength. And then if you want somebody that's gonna do four coaching sessions with somebody before they try to close. So there's a different profile for the person. So what do we absolutely want?
Doug C. Brown (14:51.96)
How are you writing the ad? And there's a specific way to write the ad. And when we write the ad specifically, what are we attracting and what process are we using to put these people through? Folks, if you're not using the same process for every single salesperson, you're making a big mistake. Because how can we measure, like we talk about KPIs in business or other metrics in business, we have the same measurement that we should be measuring a sales team member off of based on that description.
so that we can qualify them in or disqualify them out. So that's kind of the short answer, Brent. There's a lot more that goes to it. But those three factors are kind of the first step.
Brent Peterson (15:33.888)
I mentioned my friend Jack Daly spoke to us recently about never make a salesperson do a sales manager or never expect a sales manager to do a lot of work or do a lot of sales because their job is to manage a sales team. Tell us a little bit about that how people think, I'm going to get this great salesperson and I'm going to make him into our sales manager and then it seems like they're disappointed.
Doug C. Brown (15:43.854)
Thank
Doug C. Brown (16:01.464)
Well, now I disagree with Jack, never do it because I'm a guy that had it done, right? I was the top producer. They made me a manager and ended up crushing it within the company. So there are those people who can do both. However, to Jack's point, the majority of the time you're ruining two good positions. You're taking somebody who has, especially a top performing sales rep,
They have a different characteristic or profile than a manager would have who's a top producing manager. So let me just give people something that they would understand. A manager is going to want to look at numbers, spreadsheets, pivot tables, all of that type of stuff. A top producing sales rep will never, unless they're highly analytical, will never want to look at a spreadsheet and create it and do that type of thing.
they would rather plunge themselves into icy cold water. It would be more enjoyable. So if you take just something like that and you say, okay, what are the characteristics of a top producing sales rep? They love freedom. They love being out. They don't want to have anybody managing them. Even if they have a manager, they, they, they, they want to close sales like, and be a lot of times at the center and the forefront of, of.
the activity as well as the recognition. There's a lot of things that go along. Now I'm not saying all top sales reps are egotistical. There's different types of breeds of dogs. And I, you know, there was a great book written called sales dogs by Blair Singer. And, you know, I can relate to it because some people are golden retrievers, some people are pit bulls, right? Doesn't mean the golden retrievers not the highest producing person in the company, but a manager on the other hand, doesn't dislike those things.
But the manager's job is to grow the revenue, just as Jack said, grow the revenue of those that that person is managing. So it's to grow the department revenue that the typical manager loves coaching other people. The high producing rep might like it, but not really wanting to do it. They want to get out, make more sales and more sales and more sales. So there's two different profiles. And Jack is right that in most cases,
Doug C. Brown (18:27.564)
You don't want to, you don't want to promote that top person in. and the reason behind that is because they don't have that personality profile or let's say that part of they are a pit bull, for example, right? Well, now they got to manage a bunch of, you know, Labrador retrievers and, know, you know, pick a breed, right? A poodle, you know, in different types of breeds of dogs who have different types of personalities, but they only can manage as a pit bull.
And so what's going to happen is they're actually going to separate out some of the sales team, even if they're good producers, there's going to be conflict in there because there's only one management style. And a good manager will be able to manage individually on different personality styles under an umbrella of the, you know, this is the mission and what we got to get done. So I do agree with Jack in that, in that case.
Brent Peterson (19:22.24)
Do you think there's a time and a place for a sales manager like Alec Baldwin in Glen Gary Glen Ross where you just have to give everybody the One chance to do it and the last one is you're you know what you're fired
Doug C. Brown (19:36.076)
Yeah, yeah. Well, do I appreciate the management style of Alec Baldwin in that movie? Absolutely not. Is there a time for that? Yeah, if you're in combat in a military mission, yeah, there's probably a time for that, right? I spent 12 years in the military, so I could see the value in having that. Here's the thing. Most people don't respond well
to that type of character criticism. know, coffee isn't just for closers, right? So what is for closers are the rewards that come from it. I'm not, you know, I mean, I've managed, geez, I don't know how many people I never, you never actually looked at, but I'm going to say I've managed well over 800 to a thousand plus people in sales, right? And
There's never been one time I've had to come top down like that. And we've had hugely produce, like strong producing sales teams. mean, you know, when I, for example, when I did, I was president of training and sales for Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes and some of their companies. And I had 166 people reporting to me just in that alone. We hired hundreds of salespeople.
And not once that I ever have to come talk down and we broke sales records all throughout the company. you know, and close rates went up. mean, we took the close rate up from 17.8 % to 43.2 % in the first four months, and it never came down for seven years. You know, which added tens of millions of dollars quickly, you know, sometimes monthly to the company. So I don't, I don't subscribe to that theory. I'm sure there's some applicable places, but I.
Especially now where people, you know, there's too much information out there, Brent, that that type of management style quickly can end up on glass door. It can end up on the, on the internet. people could take, you know, videos of people today and post them out on social media. You know, that, that is, that is a certain kick in the reputation of the company's face.
Doug C. Brown (21:58.959)
so it's, it's just not needed. And, know, I've never needed it.
Brent Peterson (22:04.852)
Yeah, my experience has been with the younger generation now moving into sales that there is a different expectation and even a different idea of what they would like for compensation. Some of that compensation may come in in more time off and or it's not always monetary based and it's also not based on like that character. I think that that's from the 90s or late 80s that that type of style.
Doug C. Brown (22:31.362)
Yeah, that's, know, times have changed, right? And they do change, right? So, I mean, the Tin Man, for those of you don't know what I'm talking about, selling aluminum siding, you know, those type of tactics and those types of things, frankly, don't work well, right, any longer. And the reason behind that is the internet has leveled the playing field on information. Usually now, marketing and research are far more involved in a, especially a complex sale.
long before they even talked to a salesperson. So they know a lot of information before they used to, you sales used to be that salesperson was the expertise that was being conveyed of information. Now, I mean, you don't even need like, you know, not to beat up on car dealers. I personally like car dealers, but I don't even need to talk to a car dealer. I can go buy a brand new car without even talking to somebody, right? Just go up online and click, click, click, and I'm done. So.
You know, human to human connection will never ever, ever go away. Uh, and, uh, I have found that the people who create those relevant, meaningful relationships, uh, sell a heck of a lot more than people who don't. So, um, yeah, I, I, I agree with you.
Brent Peterson (23:46.496)
So if you, we have a few minutes left here, what sort of advice do you give to an entrepreneur who is now moving into the next stage? What can you tell them that they should be looking at?
Doug C. Brown (23:59.954)
on regarding building a sales team or regarding. So a do not have patience. Do not be in a hurry. Right. Because hiring a salesperson can be the great leverage for you. Turning a salesperson over averages about 150 percent of base salary. That's what it costs you. So if you're not doing this the right way and if you don't know how to do this the right way.
Brent Peterson (24:02.28)
Yeah, building a sales team.
Doug C. Brown (24:27.97)
you know, reach out to Brent or somebody like myself who's done this, because we can certainly shortcut that process for you and save you a whole lot of headaches. You know, because sometimes if they don't know what to do, Brent, sometimes they're even breaking the law with some of the questions that they're asking. Right. the which could come back and bite them. But don't be don't be in a big rush. Understand this is a very important position now.
I get it, like, my gosh, I got 300 leads a day coming in. I need somebody to field these leads. You're not going to be as patient. But what I'm talking about is if you can be patient, be patient. Start with the description of the job. Have a standardized process. There's a whole process to this thing, but my biggest advice would be, make sure that you're finding the right person for the right position.
to the best of your ability, but being patient, a little more patient than you would normally be, because you cannot hire a salesperson the same way that you hire an admin or you hire an executive. It is a very different position. Your administrative assistant might take a little bit of rejection throughout the day, but a salesperson is going to take a whole heck of a lot of rejection throughout the day. And the other thing is you want to use sales specific, not personality tests like
disk, and others, you want to use specific sales for better term assessments or profiling assessments, measuring things like do they have the will to sell? Can they sell consultatively? Whatever the position is that you're looking for, you want to measure those specifics.
Brent Peterson (26:14.464)
Yeah, that's great. I'm a key in on that 150%. I know that when I was involved in some organizations where the leadership would just see salespeople as a commodity and when things were down, they would let them go and then they'd hire a new person. it always took, not only is it the base salary, but it's that time to get ramped up and to learn some of the fundamentals of the company that takes time to know.
Doug C. Brown (26:36.46)
Yeah, yeah,
Doug C. Brown (26:42.498)
Well, and there's lost revenue there too, Brent, because these people have been working on clients and maybe they've been burning the client and now you have nobody to go after or even understanding that. Right. So it's, it's, it's one of those things that you want to dot the I's cross the T's take your time doing. and most entrepreneurs don't have the patience for it. and I got this advice to actually Jay Comer Levinson, who was a book series called guerrilla marketing. I asked Jay one day.
Jay, what's the most difficult thing for people in marketing? He said, patience. I said, well, that's the same in hiring salespeople. He goes, yep.
Brent Peterson (27:19.232)
Yeah, there's so many parallels with just counting. I think that people tend to, the first thing they overlook is just measuring your marketing. And then the next thing is measuring your sales and making sure that you have. And I think that's what you're all about is making sure that you have those measurements and that math in place to make it happen. Doug, we have a few minutes left as we close out the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they want. What would you like to plug today?
Doug C. Brown (27:38.925)
Yes.
Doug C. Brown (27:48.174)
Ooh, thank you. I appreciate this. So I developed a SaaS product called Vibitno.com. It is a personalized, meaningful, relevant, and automated follow-up system. And that's my plug because people drop the ball all the time on follow-up. And it's not only the 50 % of sales people selling don't follow up once.
87 % of them never fall up more than three times, but 90 % of the sales are usually on a cold lead, maybe between the fourth and the 21st contact, right? So if people aren't doing that, you're losing the sale, but worse yet, you're sending it to your competitor, because your competitor is coming in and that cycle, right? So people lose relationships, they lose sales, they gain relationships, or they gain sales. Follow-up is a key component in the glue, and it's a common courtesy that people expect. But there's really difficult...
to manage even 10 people on follow-up, never mind hundreds of them if they've got it. So we've solved that problem. We're rolling that out right now, Brent. It's not commercially available to the public. But if people are interested in joining our first 12 users, we're putting 12 users on the system, they can reach out to me at doug at CEOsalesstrategies.com. They want to check it out first. They can go to Vibit. No, V-I-B-I-T-N-O.
and they've got a page up there in Vibitno in a Slavic term means you matter.
Brent Peterson (29:23.306)
That's awesome and I just signed up. I was doing a little multitasking so you'll probably get an email from me. Doug Brown, Doug C. Brown, the CEO of Sales Strategies. It's been such a great pleasure to speak to you today.
Doug C. Brown (29:26.995)
thank you.
Doug C. Brown (29:39.682)
Brent, thanks for having me on and thanks for recognizing the sea because Doug Brown himself, he is a professional hockey player, was for the Detroit Red Wings and people sometimes ask me if I'm that guy and folks, I can't escape to save my soul. just so you know.
Brent Peterson (29:54.784)
There's a Brent Peterson who's a professional hockey player as well, so older. So anyways, I know the feeling. Doug, thank you so much and have a great day.
Doug C. Brown (30:06.67)
Thanks, Brent, you too.