16 | Angels, Agnostics, & Atheists in Change Management w/Hamish Knox

Listen to find out more about your angels (evangelists), agnostics, and atheists when it comes to a CRM implementation!
A member of the global Sandler network, Hamish and his team support entrepreneurs create and maintain scalable, repeatable, consistent sales functions and build a business that they can sell eventually for *their* number, not the number they’re told to take. Hamish is the host of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast, which supports sales leaders with tips and insights on creating a consistently, reliably full funnel.

Connect with our guest, Hamish Knox, on LinkedIn

Transcript

[00:00:20] Islin Munisteri: Hi, this is Islin Munisteri. I am host of the rev ops careers podcast, and part of Theia Strategies. I'm really excited to have Hamish Knox on the podcast today.

[00:00:33] Hamish Knox: Hey, Islin thanks for having me on.

[00:00:36] Islin Munisteri: That's awesome. So Hamish is a member of the global Sandler network. He and his team supports entrepreneurs to create and maintain scalable, repeatable and consistent sales functions and build a business they can sell eventually for their number.

[00:00:51] Not the number they're told to take Hamish is the host of the full funnel freedom podcast, which supports sales leaders with tips and insights on creating a consistently reliably full funnel. He's also. The David H Sandler award and he's the first Canadian winner to do so I'm really excited to have him on the podcast today.

[00:01:13] Hamish Knox: Awesome. I'm excited to have a chat with you about the side that we don't hear a lot about, which is the Rev Ops side, which is critical to the success of any sales organization.

[00:01:22] Islin Munisteri: Exactly. exactly. I guess the first question I have for you is really. We don't hear we know Sandler really well as a sales training organization, but why would you wanna have Sandler help with sales ops.

[00:01:34] Hamish Knox: Great. Great question. And most people knew Sandler for training and for sales training specifically, we were the Sandler sales Institute for many years. Actually as of June one globally, we have rebranded simply to Sandler because we are supporting our clients at evolving elevating, and then accelerating their.

[00:01:52] Success in all areas in particular leadership is our biggest growing opportunity. But in terms of sales ops, one of the core parts of Sandler is creating common language across all client facing functions in an organization. And this could be everything from, what does a hot lead look like?

[00:02:12] Or what does. What does it mean that we have a an opportunity at this stage in our sales process. So from the op side, they're. Creating a they're smoothing out the bumps in creating full funnel freedom because they're the drivers and the keepers of the grease that moves the wheels of a sales function in an organization.

[00:02:38] So bringing Sandler into create that common language and also Sandler is about creating more effective human to human interactions. Whether it's internal, external professional or personal. So for a rev ops person, and my experience working with rev ops is sometimes the sales people are not overly enthusiastic about what they're doing.

[00:02:57] And it's what the rev ops team is doing is meant to support the sales people and make it easier for them to go out and prospect qualify, close and expand relationships. But without those. Human to human interaction skills to, and a process for going from here's why I'm doing this. And here's why it benefits you to the salesperson going, oh, I get it.

[00:03:22] Sometimes we can cause internal friction and that reduces the efficacy of the programs implemented by rev ops.

[00:03:31] Islin Munisteri: That makes a lot of sense. And I know that before you were joined before you were head of Sandler in Calgary, you actually had led one of the CRM implementations at Canada news wire.

[00:03:43] You tell us more about that?

[00:03:46] Hamish Knox: Sure. I was I had a dual role and it was actually probably a triple role. So I was at Canada news wire, I was their product specialist for a SAS platform for media monitoring crisis management. I was also there. Basically they're big buck hunter in Western Canada.

[00:04:00] So fortune 100 companies who are not currently working with us from British Columbia through Manitoba, they were my prospects. So multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies. And then my leader came to me and said, Hey, we're gonna implement a new CRM. Would you be on the team that chose between.

[00:04:17] CRM a and CRM B, and I will leave out the names to to protect the innocent and the guilty and ended up choosing CRM which is a great force for sales in the in the CRM space. And then I was told, oh, now that you've chosen, we want you to actually be on the implementation.

[00:04:37] You still have all of your other jobs to do, but we also want you to implement this off the side of your desk nationally. And one of the things that we ran into was. Salespeople don't necessarily wanna have tech the, in the book, text powered sales, there's this buzzword that I discovered called AFL the, a stands for another, the L stands for login.

[00:04:59] I'm sure your audience can guess what the F stands for. and one of the things that we ended up having to do was actually tie compensation to using the CRM. So basically it was, if it doesn't live in the CRM, It doesn't exist and you don't get compensated for it. And even at that point, we were still under 80% compliance with the sales team nationally.

[00:05:25] Islin Munisteri: Oh, wow. That's crazy. And I guess we were talking about this term. As you're implementing this called malicious compliance. Yeah. So let's talk about that a bit.

[00:05:37] Hamish Knox: So I hope that none of your audience has ever run into malicious compliance. Malicious compliance is it's like the phrase letter of the law versus spirit of the law.

[00:05:47] So malicious compliance is I'm going to do exactly what you tell me to do exactly as you tell me to do it, even though. Exactly as you tell me to do it may not fit in every situation. So when we were the previous CRM that, that we were using before we chose the CRM when I was on the selection team we had a sales rep who would literally put interactions in went to the bathroom.

[00:06:11] Heated up my lunch called my mom. And these were literally entries in the CRM because, but when the senior leadership is saying, we want to see stuff in the CRM it was stuff. He was legitimately putting stuff in the CRM. It just wasn't stuff that was actually advancing the business in any form or fashion.

[00:06:32] Islin Munisteri: Oh, that's funny. Oh, my gosh. So what eventually, like what, what happened to him? Did he eventually start following the spirit of the law or?

[00:06:40] Hamish Knox: So he my favorite HR cliche is self-selected. So he self-selected and moved on to a new opportunity with an organization that, maybe was.

[00:06:49] Less strict or less enthusiastic about CRMs or maybe the tolerated mediocrity. I'm not really sure cuz they didn't, they weren't directly in one of the offices that I worked in, but they self-selected and it was it was a good thing for the organization.

[00:07:04] Islin Munisteri: Wow. And I guess what did you learn from that CRM implementation?

[00:07:08] Get getting. I don't know, in one of our earlier conversations, it was somewhere between 60 to 80% adoption. Yeah. But like, how did. What did you learn from that?

[00:07:15] Hamish Knox: I wrote a book on change. My first book was accountability. My second book was change. I write books on topics. no one likes to talk about and in change what our data says globally is there's about 20, 60, 20.

[00:07:25] 20% of an organization are the I call them angels, right? So angels, agnostics and atheists. So angels are the change champions. They're the ones who are like boss. Great idea. Let's put this CRM in. This is gonna be so awesome. And they're great. The bottom 20%, the atheists it doesn't even matter.

[00:07:46] Change you're making, you could be saying, we're gonna change the coffee in the break room, or we're moving from this video platform to this video platform. And it's that's the worst idea ever. And by the way, I call the angels agnostics and atheist because I like alliteration, not for any sort of religious connotation.

[00:08:01] I got a little bit of feedback about that. Once I was like no, I'm an author. And I like alliteration. So it worked very nicely that way. Now the agnostics are that 60% in the middle. And they're the ones who have been through a bunch of flavor of the month changes in their career. So they've often been in organizations for a while or maybe not our organization, but they've been in, in the business world for a while.

[00:08:24] And they've had way too many experiences where a leader has stood up and said, we're gonna do this. And then 30 days later, it's Hey, weren't we doing that thing? You were so excited about 30 days ago. And the leader's. Yeah, I've actually moved on to this other thing, cuz I I saw another speaker or read a book or whatever it might be.

[00:08:40] So they're the ones who are like, okay, I get it. It sounds good. But I'm just waiting around to see, is this actually gonna be a real thing or is this just another one of those flavor of the month? So what we coach the leaders we work with on, in rev ops as well is get the champions, the angels to coach the agnostics.

[00:09:02] And get them to see that this is gonna be a good change. This is gonna be a long term thing because sometimes mom and dad. I tell my prospect, sometimes uncle Hamish has to come in and say the same thing that you've been saying to your sales team for years. And I've actually seen leaders will be in a session and I'll say something and one of their sales people goes, oh, that's brilliant.

[00:09:22] And I can see the leader go. I've been telling you that for years and you didn't listen to me. And so same thing with rev ops is they're going like, Hey guys, here's how, the CRMs gonna work and here's how it's gonna function. And this is why it's good, etcetera, et cetera. And. The sales teams could be like, yeah, but you're rev ops you're paid to say that that's your job.

[00:09:40] And so we need to find those angels in the sales team who get it and go to those agnostic and be like, okay, listen, I know rev ops is saying it this way, but here's how I'm doing it. Here's why it's working for me. Here's how I see it could work for you. You're different than me, but we're in the same role.

[00:09:56] And so we have to. Encourage the angels to bring the agnostics up too much in change management. We're taught to focus on the atheists. And so the rev ops team goes down and tries to beg and cajole and incentivize the atheists to get on board. The fact of the matter is they're not going to so ignore them. so ignore them and go leverage the change champions who are actually going to make the implementation successful.

[00:10:28] Islin Munisteri: that's. That's great. And that's what we do too. In our onboarding, this that we try to onboard the angels and the angels start like seeing amazing results and like a certain percentage and creates in productivity. And then the rest of the team was like, wow that actually is working.

[00:10:43] Can we get on board too? And then they absolutely eventually the whole team comes, absolutely comes on board and, and we were talking about this earlier, like how do you create an upfront contract in revenue operations? I know the upfront contract is one of the key pillars of Sandler.

[00:11:00] Hamish Knox: Yeah. Yeah. And it could be really used in any human to human interaction. Really what an upfront contract is an agreement in advance as to what are we doing? Why like, why are we here? What do each party or parties in the conversation want to accomplish? So it's a good. Use of time for them, and then what's gonna happen at the end of it, and we're doing this in advance because as I tell my clients I wanna have emotional conversations about the emotion.

[00:11:26] If I have an outcome that I want at the end of the meeting and I wait till the end to bring it up it's gonna cause anxiety in a portion of my of my audience. And I'm probably gonna walk away upset because I didn't get the outcome. I. . And so with a, and I actually used to set up front contracts with my wife on shopping trips.

[00:11:44] And my team loves me to tell that story in, in our training. And it really actually made our shopping trips way better, cuz both of us knew what was gonna happen. And we both had clarity of expectations. So with rev ops, An upfront contract has four components. And I've talked about them briefly already, but just to really define them for the audience it's purpose, which is why are we here?

[00:12:06] It's agendas yours and mine and always, we want the other person to go first. So if you're in rev ops and you're going to be talking to me about the we'll just keep using CRM implementation cause it's easy CRM implementation. You're gonna say to me, Hamish, what do you want to cover in the next 25 minutes?

[00:12:27] So this is a good use of your time. And I'll say Islin wanna talk about this and this and this and this. And at that point, we're allowed to say from the rev ops side, Hamish, that's beyond the scope. We'll cover the first two, but three and four beyond the scope of our time together today.

[00:12:43] But I'm happy to set up another conversation with you. We're doing that in advance, right? So it's an emotional conversation, cuz I want to get my emotional needs met with those four items, but without the emotion, because if we get to the end of the meeting and we haven't covered items three and four, but there was no upfront agreement that we're not gonna cover items three and four.

[00:13:06] I'm gonna be upset. So we want to address that front and then because of reciprocity, that's why we always let the other person go first. You'd say, Hey, Hamish I've got some things I wanna cover in the meeting. May I share them with you? And of course, because you, let me go first, I'll say, absolutely.

[00:13:21] What do you wanna talk about? And you'll say this and this and this and this, are you okay with that? Cuz you have to get agreement and I'll say sure. And they say, so Hamish at the end of. Here's the outcomes that, that I'm hoping to achieve. I'm hoping that you'll be able to, clearly understand what our naming scheme is in the CRM for tasks and opportunities.

[00:13:41] I'm hoping that we'll have another meeting set up. So you have items three and four covered. How's that sound. And I'll say Islin that sounds great. Let's get going. And then we actually have a super productive 25 minute conversation, more like 22 and a half minutes, cuz the upfront contract took a few minutes.

[00:13:57] And then at the end of that conversation, both of us walk away going, that was a great use of my time because for salespeople, especially high performers, they do not want to sit in meetings that they consider non revenue producing. And with that upfront contract, we take that anxiety.

[00:14:17] Islin Munisteri: That's great. So the upfront contract has the purpose, the mutual agendas and agreement?

[00:14:22] Hamish Knox: Yes. Oh, and time I glossed over it, but also time I, I said it, but I didn't define it. We have to agree to how much time, because again, I'll use the example about the high performer without an upfront contract is gonna give you.

[00:14:35] Seven and a half minutes of attention, and then they're gonna be on their phone or they're gonna be like twirling their pan, or they're gonna be answering emails while you're talking or whatever. So we have to agree to advance how much time we're we're setting aside for this conversation. And we can even layer in.

[00:14:52] Especially if we have an experience with a salesperson who maybe is not giving us their full attention, that we will be completely focused on this conversation and not emails or anything else for the next 25 minutes, 40 minutes, whatever that might be

[00:15:10] Islin Munisteri: awesome. Yeah. I feel, I feel like setting up like upfront contracts is really helpful in sales and even in, in standups at times as.

[00:15:20] Hamish Knox: yeah, very much

[00:15:20] Islin Munisteri: and so we also talked about in the CRM implementation, Like there, there was an interesting phrase you said, but there, but you basically said sales people use a tech stack for their own purposes.

[00:15:34] Yeah. And there was also another phrase that you, you said with that was, that really resonated with me. But, do you wanna talk about that as a salesperson?

[00:15:44] Hamish Knox: Sure. So it's a modification. So there's a Sam, one of David Sandler's rules was people buy for their reasons, not the salesperson's reasons.

[00:15:51] And everyone who's listening can think about a time where they went to buy something, whether it was in their professional life or in their personal life, and they were gonna buy it. They did the research, they knew they were gonna work with this particular company or buy from that particular store. And they encountered a salesperson who spent all the time talking about how awesome the salesperson or the salesperson's product was, and didn't pay at all attention to.

[00:16:19] The buyer, but the buyer bought anyways. And they've also probably had an experience where they weren't going to buy anything. And they encountered a salesperson who spent all the time focused on the buyer and them and their reasons and their challenges and their opportunities. And they walked out.

[00:16:37] And had bought something that they hadn't even planned on buying, but they still felt really good about it because it solved a challenge or helped them realize an opportunity that was floating around in the back of their mind, but they didn't even realize it. So if we modify that for rev ops and going back to that AFL acronym that I brought up earlier, sales people love magic bullets.

[00:17:02] I am one of them, right? You tell me that you can bring me hundreds or thousands of leads a month that I can connect quickly with decision makers at my largest prospects, that you can fill my funnel with highly qualified prospects with me, really doing nothing, but putting my seat feet up on the desk. I am going to want to use that all day.

[00:17:25] You. And I both know the reality of it is sales is work and no matter what kind of tech you've got, it still has to be used to, to and used properly to actually realize the benefits. So from a rev ops perspective, when we're looking at adding to our tech stack and our CEO, Dave Matson has talked about how Sandler.

[00:17:48] Slots in at every part of the tech stack, whether you're talking about first contact with a prospect all the way down to expanding a relationship that you've had with a client for decades. There's a portion of the Sandler methodology and system that, that slots into there. So for rev ops and the audience it's, I'm gonna put in this piece of tech.

[00:18:10] Okay. If I put myself in my sales colleague's shoes, Why are they going to use. How are they going to use it? And how does it fit in with their way of working? I know when I implemented that CRM back at Canada, Newswire I loved it because I'd open up my CR every day and it would go, here's all your tasks to do today.

[00:18:33] You're gonna call Islin you're gonna call Lucas. You're gonna call Nisha. You're gonna And when I would, click and I'd call Islin and i'd have a conversation. And as I'm talking to Islin I'm punching my notes. Da. And then I hit save and either book, a meeting or save, and it's another task, cause let's say we agreed.

[00:18:49] We would have another call in a couple of weeks and I could, I just made it flow that way. Some of my colleagues were like, I'll do that at the end of the day. I just want to call, call, call. I'll keep the notes in my head or I'll write 'em on a sticky note and I'll input them later. So we have to make our tech stack fit with our salesperson's way of doing business.

[00:19:10] and if we can't do that, it doesn't matter how awesome the tech is. They ain't gonna use it.

[00:19:18] Islin Munisteri: oh, that is so true. Yeah. You just, you gotta make sure it fits their purposes, right? Totally. Or else. Yeah. Or else it won't work for

[00:19:27] Hamish Knox: them. And again, 20, 60, 20 you're we're gonna get 60 to 80. We're gonna get 60% adoption on any sort of implementation that we have, whether it's a new tech whether and now there's certain things like naming scheme.

[00:19:43] You and I talked about naming scheme. I'm a very big believer in common language. And that's one of Sandler's core outcomes for our clients. We have three core outcomes and the first one is creating a common language for all client facing. Like opportunities if I'm a sales leader or if I'm in rev ops and I've gotta do reporting, I gotta report up to the executive. I don't wanna have to spend hours and hours and hours compiling a funnel report. I want to be able to just go in and go, okay, here's, it's gonna be called opportunity company name or product name, company, name. That's how we name all of our opportunities.

[00:20:18] And if it's a first contact it's gonna say first contact. Company name. Cause I'm also a big believer in everything goes to the, the company, not to the person, because I might have a great relationship with Lucas. And I go from a prospect all the way in Lucas has been a client mine for 10 years.

[00:20:37] The way the business world works, Lucas is probably moving on to a different company at some point. And even if he's the CEO, he's probably moving on to a company, a new company at some point. So I would rather have all of my notes under the company, as opposed to the contact, because once the contact leaves or if a new salesperson comes in the chair and we need to support them in getting up to speed, everything's under that one profile.

[00:21:03] So having those, that common naming scheme, and that's where rev ops I found provided a great benefit to sales organizations is they are the keepers of the common naming scheme. It's like the AP style guide, I used to be a journalist many years ago, and we would follow the AP or the associated press style guide.

[00:21:20] So having what's your style guide or what's your sales language internally? That's where rev ops could be really beneficial also in terms of moving from stages. So moving from first contact to discovery stage, whatever the stages are in the sales process. I don't believe in sales in percentages. I in fact, would like to rid the world of percentages and funnels because I don't know what the heck 50% means for an opportunity.

[00:21:49] I literally don't. And from rev ops perspective for forecasting, I could have $3 million in my 50%. I may only close two, two 20 $250,000 of a 3 million pipeline at 50%. If it's legitimately 50%, one and a half million dollars should go in my bank. I would rather have stages and where I've also seen some really effective rev ops implementations is they actually put in the CRM, what are all the boxes that need to be checked by the sales team at every stage?

[00:22:21] So what is the information that needs to be gathered by the salesperson at every stage to move from first contact, to discovery, to proposal presentation, to implementation, and in one organization, it was a large oil field service company. the sales people actually couldn't advance an opportunity until they checked all the boxes at every stage.

[00:22:43] Oh wow. And some people have said to me, Hamish, couldn't they lie? And I've said, absolutely. I've been in sales since I was 19. I have lied to my sales managers. I have no problem admitting it. I have totally lied to my sales managers in my sales career. However, If we have this common language, and if we have this common, this is the information you need to gather, this is how rev ops has set it up.

[00:23:06] At some point, if I've got 3 million in my, in the middle of my funnel and none of it's moving, that's when my leader can start to say, Hamish, help me understand how you've got 3 million in the middle of your funnel. When, if you had $3 million, it shouldn't actually be $3 million in your funnel. A million of that should be moving down.

[00:23:31] Maybe a million of it should be a little bit higher up, like, how are you gathering all this information? And at that point, the house of cards crumbles. And I go you know what? I just, I wanted to get, show you that I had a good pipeline. So I. Check the boxes and move them down. And that's a coaching opportunity.

[00:23:49] That's not a gotcha moment, but it's all set up by the backbone of rev ops because rev ops is that backbone that supports full funnel freedom because they're the keepers of the language. They're the keepers of the tech stack and how to implement it effectively.

[00:24:04] Islin Munisteri: I like how you say that it's the keepers of the language and the tech stack.

[00:24:08] That's really true. And I was just thinking more. So I, as you've gone on in your career, like going to some of the more traditional questions that we have is there any career advice you would tell your, younger

[00:24:21] Hamish Knox: self? Yeah. And if I projected myself on the rev ops side I've gotten to know some very successful rev ops leaders is really.

[00:24:33] Is really focused on, it's not about me, it's about them. So I might be super passionate about this new piece of tech or super passionate about, this new report or this new this data that I've got out. But unless I can directly tie one of the, that thing to a personal payoff for my sales colleagues or my sales leadership colleagues.

[00:24:58] It doesn't matter and I'm gonna end up getting frustrated. So having that mindset of it's not about me, it's about them really would drive my focus on building out tech stacks, building out data sets that are going to pay off for my colleagues as opposed to paying off for me. But if they pay off for my colleagues they will pay off for me as well.

[00:25:20] Islin Munisteri: That is true. And. What do you think of when I say the term rev ops roadmap?

[00:25:26] Hamish Knox: Ooh there's a lot of talk about, 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0. It's starting to become a bit of a cliche. But that's what I think of. I think of being strategic instead of tactical. My experience with rev ops is sometimes it gets to be very tactical.

[00:25:43] We need a CRM. That's a tactic. Why do we need a CRM as a strategy? Or why do we need an auto dialer? Or why do we need a call analytics engine? That's a strategic thing. So rev ops roadmap to me is the rev ops leader, pulling their head up and saying, okay, if I implement a call analytics tool today, What is the payoff gonna be to the organization as a whole, or the revenue side, at least 6, 12, 18, 24 months from now.

[00:26:21] And what am I gonna be needing to enhance or elevate or evolve? 6 12, 18 months from now, if I do implement this because the tech is great, but the tech is also gonna change and the needs of the organization are gonna change. And I would rather be proactive as much as I can to get ahead of those things so that when the.

[00:26:50] Leader the executive goes, Hey, we need to elevate our our prospecting calls with this, we could be like, I'm glad you brought that up. I've been working on this idea and they go, rev ops is genius. They're already, they're anticipating what we need even before we think we need it. So that's what I see from a rev ops roadmap.

[00:27:12] Islin Munisteri: That's awesome. Okay. It's good. It's good that you. You put succinctly what's the difference between strategy and tactics really simply it's the why we're doing it is the strategy yeah. Like we don't we just don't wanna pull a CRM off in there and implement it.

[00:27:25] We wanna really think deeply about why we wanna do that.

[00:27:29] Hamish Knox: Yeah. And what does it mean going forward? That's the other, that's the other real key part is, why are we doing it? And there's lots of really good reasons. , but my experience is that's where we tend to stop and we go, we need this because it's okay, but after it's implemented what's the next layer?

[00:27:47] And what's the next layer after that. And what's the next layer after that. And sometimes we get so narrowly focused on. We're doing this because of this, that we forget that our business is probably gonna exist past implementation. It's like I say, to sales leaders our sales people sometimes forget that the world doesn't end on December 31st.

[00:28:06] Come January one. They're gonna have to be selling again. So I'm not sure why they're taking the last, like six weeks of the year off in terms of funnel filling activities. Because come January, they're gonna be in your office going boss. I gotta have more accounts. My funnel looks skinny. It's yeah, your funnel looks skinny.

[00:28:22] Cuz you took your foot off the gas in the middle of November. So that's the same thing with strategy and taxes. Strategy is okay where are we going? What's the next layer? Or what's the next mountaintop after we've done whatever the project is that we're implementing.

[00:28:39] Islin Munisteri: Gotcha. And that's what, yeah we sometimes forget about what's the next thing.

[00:28:43] And then the next thing and the the next thing. And I guess let's finish on like kind of a Sandler a, I would say a Sandler thing. You said that Sandler prioritizes the how not the, what? There's a lot of self-help books in courses telling you exactly what to do. Yeah.

[00:29:01] But they don't necessarily tell you like how to do it. So I guess let's go deeper

[00:29:05] Hamish Knox: into that. So there are a lot of. Organizations out there. And they will tell you the what to do. I say to our clients, the worst thing you can do is give a human, being a blank piece of paper and say, fill it in.

[00:29:18] It's write me a testimonial. It's Islin exists? What do you want me to say? And, so the, the, the, what is critical Sandler has lots of great whats It's the, how do you implement it, but how do you implement it a in a way that feels genuine to you because, and we've seen people in our lives, or it's a bit of a cliche in a movie where a character tries to, to speak or act like a different group.

[00:29:44] It's usually the nerdy character. Who's trying to act like the cool kids and it all falls apart because it's not genuine to them, but also. In a way that doesn't make them sound like they just went to training and they've got a shiny new toy to try out because our prospects and our clients are smart and they can see the shiny toys learned in training a mile away.

[00:30:03] And so where we support our clients is where are you now? Where do you want to be? You're gonna get part of the way there, cuz you're already awesome, but what's the gap that you're trying to fill. And then when we get to the what's the gap, a lot of times it revolves around sales process, which is the information we need to gather from prospect to qualify or a client to expand.

[00:30:26] And then the system is how we actually go about doing that. And that's where the, where we find that. Our clients end up with a common language or a methodology because they have a process in a system. Oftentimes they're just getting process, which is the what, but they're not getting that how, and they're not getting the, and if they are getting a little bit of the, how they're getting it in scripts And I don't know about you Islin but I don't give my script to a prospect.

[00:30:53] Be like, no, your, your, line is this right. You should be here for now. At least we're still selling to human beings who have their own hopes and fears and dreams and worldviews and things like that. So we can script out an amazing interaction between us and a client to expand that relationship.

[00:31:13] 15 seconds into that conversation. The client is off the plot as the bridges say and we need to have those skills to read and react in real time. The analogy I use is interchangeable plastic blocks. There's a company at a Denmark that makes interchangeable plastic blocks.

[00:31:26] I probably can't say their name but that's what we give our clients for the, how is instead of saying, okay, Islin here's a selection of hammers. Pick up the hammer that feels right to you and bash it into everything. And eventually by the way, you'll hit a nail and you'll be like, oh, the hammer works.

[00:31:42] Let's have a series of interchangeable plastic blocks. So for the first conversation I need these three blocks. Maybe it's an upfront contract. Maybe it's whatever that might be. And then we agree, Hey, we're gonna have another conversation. So for that next conversation I don't need this third block.

[00:31:58] But I need two more blocks from my chest. And that's where the, how comes in is building out this treasure chest of interchangeable plastic blocks. So our clients, whether they're in rev ops sales leadership or frontline sales customer care can. Interact with clients in a way that feels genuine, that doesn't make them sound like they just went to training, but gets to a mutually beneficial outcome for their for them and their client or their prospect.

[00:32:27] Islin Munisteri: That's great. And I think that's a great place where we can end like the. Getting to a mutually beneficial place. and it's funny, I didn't really set an upfront contract for the podcast today, but I think we covered all of the all of the main topics we, we wanted to go over.

[00:32:45] Yeah. It was great having you on the podcast, Hamish. Yeah. Thank you for joining.

[00:32:50] Hamish Knox: Yeah, thanks for inviting me. And just a quick plug for podcast is full funnel. Freedom comes out every Monday. Go check out full funnel, freedom.com. Or if you're curious about Sandler hamish.sandler.com is the website for our office in Calgary.

[00:33:02] Islin Munisteri: Awesome. Thank you, Hamish. Talk soon. Bye

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