We Are 10 Accounts Away from Our Lives Changing

[0:00] I mean, like, do you want to succeed in life or not? But actually, look, we had a lot of fun. We talked about some things that will help you grow your business and help you cultivate new unfair advantages for your business. You need, everybody needs these or you won't stay in business. We talked about weeds and how to grow like a weed. And we talked about meetings, how to get meetings with anyone. And the ability to get a meeting with anyone is a totally unfair advantage. So, you know, unless you don't want those unfair advantages, you could just skip it otherwise. But I would say join us because we had a lot of fun. And just talking about those things, they are just sort of the essence of growing a business and growing a book of business. So join us. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. If you are listening to this, you are likely leading a team responsible for generating revenue. Purpose of Full Funnel Freedom is to support people like yourself and keep your.

[0:59] Music. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, I'm really excited to have Stu Hynek as my guest today. day. Stu and I really vibed when we connected offline after we were introduced by a previous guest. Stu is a best-selling business author, marketer, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist. His first book, which he is in the process of updating, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, introduced the concept of contact marketing and was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. His latest release, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, lays out complete model for explosive business growth based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds use to grow, expand, dominate, and defend their turf. He is a twice-nominated Hall of Fame marketer, NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center author in residence, and was named the Father of Contact Marketing by the American Marketing Association.

[0:59] Funnels consistently, reliably full.

[2:03] Stu, welcome to Full Funnel Freedom. Thank you, Ben. What a great intro. I forgot about most of that stuff. of. It says that you've done many, many wonderful things. And I'm grateful that you are here today. That was the 30,000 foot view of who you are and what we've done. Tell the audience of sales leaders around the world a bit of your story. Where did you start out? How do you get to where you are today? Well, I started out creating direct mail campaigns for magazine publishers. And there's a really cool story. I don't know if we have time for it, but there's a really cool story of how all that started because it started with a contact campaign or a contact marketing campaign and it's, It might be the most successful campaign I've ever had. Actually, the very first one. Well, yeah, because, you know, I... Tell us. Yeah, I mean, so I wanted to create these direct mail campaigns for magazine publishers. I was also, I'm a marketer, but I'm also a cartoonist. I wanted to mix the two. I knew that cartoons, according to readership surveys, were almost always the best read and remembered parts of magazines and newspapers. So why wouldn't they just be magical through the mail? And it turned out they were. I got my first two assignments for Rolling Stone and Bon Appetit to create new test campaigns. And both of those beat their controls, meaning both of those set new all-time records for response.

[3:23] And I realized, well, that's my opportunity to break through to the rest of the marketing, I mean, to the rest of the magazine industry. So I reached out with a campaign that just consisted of an 8x10 print of a cartoon, each one personalized to each recipient. Recipient, and then a note that said, this is a device I just used to beat the controls for Rolling Stone and Bon Appetit. And I think we should put these to the test for your titles. If we had your audience in front of us live, I would ask them, so what do you think I got for a response rate? You know, given the fact that in the direct marketing industry, they used to say that 1% response rates were, you know, that's like, that's, that's about, that's doing good. That's about what you should expect. And well, but the long and the short of it is, I got all All of them to respond. Mind you, I only had to reach out to about 24 people, something like that. I mean, the magazine business wasn't a broad business. It was just Time Life and Condé Nast and the Wall Street Journal, Forbes. There's not a lot of them. So it's about 24 people I needed to reach out to. And all of them responded. All of them agreed to meet. All of them became clients. So that's 100% response rate, 100% meeting rate, 100% conversion rate. All from a campaign that cost me about a hundred bucks.

[4:38] And so yes, that had a big impact on the rest of my life. Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine. And the sales leaders who are listening around the world, I imagine, are also experiencing a range of emotions right now hearing that story. Some excitement, some maybe less excited, thinking about some of their own campaigns that they have launched and that their sellers are active in right now. Now, that is a really cool way to kick us off because one of the things that we really connected on when we first visited Stu was this idea of being human and putting the human back into outreach. And last year, Google and Yahoo really clamped down on spray and pray email campaigns, these long sequences, things like that. So from your perspective, what have you observed over the course of your career from when you were doing these direct mail campaigns to the sequences? And where did we lose the humanity in that? Well, I think we lose it just because things become more and more automated. It just becomes easier to, well, not really going to piss people off, but to get lazy and just send sequences. It's going to piss somebody off. But I think it's kind of lazy, and here's why. Usually, the content is not very disciplined. There's a great quote by Mark Twain who said, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time.

[6:07] And that is really true of the content that we see. It is pumped out through these systems that just have these long, long letters. No one's going to read. It shows no respect for the recipient's time. It's just not engaging. And so.

[6:24] I don't know why they're doing it, but I mean, they must be getting results somehow, but it's not good stuff. It's not effective. It's wasteful. It's just causing people to just roll their eyes and say, wow, I'm not going to read this. And, you know, you have that slug at the bottom of every email that's sent out that way so that you can see here's the unsubscribed thing and it was sent because of this. And you can manage your subscriptions preferences. I didn't subscribe to this in the first place. But, you know, I have no preference for this email. Impersonal. And nobody gives a crap. Yeah. Right. And so so I think that is probably a big part of it. And, you know, I've been sending cartoons around. Well, I mentioned that first campaign. I just thought, wow, that was amazing. What would happen if I send one of these to a president or like the president or a prime minister somewhere or, you know, or, you know, presidents and C-suite people? What happens if we do this? And I just kept reaching people I should never be able to reach. And why is that? It's because I reached out with something from me, something that I did for them, something that is about them, too, something that is, you know, it's fun.

[7:34] It's very carefully crafted, so it says something really great about them, sort of in a backhanded way, but through the humor. And it's funny, too. All of that stuff together is very human and very humanizing. And I think that's one of our big challenges in outreach anyway is how do we humanize ourselves because they don't know us. So how do we go from – I think this is going to be my next book. I'm going to call it Flip Moments. And so how do we create this flip moment where we go from sending something out, someone receives something from us, and they're saying, who is this, to flipping the switch then to, oh, my God, who is this? I need to meet this person. So how do we do that? And I think we do that with very, very personal touches. I just don't see automation helping that much. And now here comes AI.

[8:24] Yeah. Well, let's dive into AI really quickly because then we'll unpack some of the other insights you've brought to us already. So as you, because you are on the contact marketing side and AI gives us all these insights. Theoretically amazing ways of personalization and whatnot. What are you seeing from AI that is maybe beneficial to this idea of humanizing, even though we're doing it through AI? And maybe also the dark side where it becomes more of this mass campaign sequence nonsense that we're trying to get away from. Well, I love the way you pose the question because AI is miraculous. I mean, for sellers, good God, the stuff that it's allowing us to see. I tell people in my book, you need to build a top 100 list. So these are the top 100 people that if you connected with them and they became your clients, they'd be dream clients. And they would change your scale. And they do it pretty quickly. So with AI, we can now produce top 100 lists that are just completely different, way beyond what we used to be able to do before, by including not only just, or let's say not basing it just on our ICP or our ideal customer profile, but also on trigger events and buyer intent signals and so forth. I mean, we can really, really drill down.

[9:42] That's incredible. incredible and and ai is doing many many more things but and i think i would actually call ai miraculous it's it's incredible so but at the same time i believe there will be an equal and opposite reaction to ai and to automation and to just things that are artificial i suppose but just there i think that that that people will clamor for things that are very very human that are done by let's maybe things that are produced by very talented humans and with practiced hands I'm kind of describing cartoons you know but really anything I mean maybe you knit something for someone and they and then we're going that didn't come out of an AI at all that's pretty cool thank you that's really really thoughtful but but certainly these things that that are very human I think we're going to become more and more dear to all of us.

[10:32] We want to hear your burning questions about sales and sales management. Whether you're curious about strategies, challenges, or career advice, send us your questions. We'll be addressing them in one of our upcoming episodes, providing ideas and insights to help you excel in your sales career. You can submit your questions in the link in the show notes. So don't hesitate, shoot your questions our way, and help shape a future discussion. Thanks for listening to Full Funnel Freedom.

[11:30] To have. have because it means something to them so like a gift is very almost more superficial whereas that a present is something that's like Stu this is for you because I know you as a human and I believe that you would appreciate this because I know who you are and it really resonates with me that idea of like how can we give presence to our buyers and not literal presence because by the way sometimes Sometimes that's illegal, but also to stand out and say, I see you as a human. So let's go back to what you were sharing about getting in front of people in contact marketing. So what I heard you say earlier is, number one is you identified that human, that ideal person who's going to be a great client. You then personalized something for them, and then you also, you created something for them, and then you personalized it. You said something about the recipient.

[12:26] That's great. How do we do that when we are trying to hit the hockey stick that our investors have set out for us and we're trying to get our sellers to do this on an ongoing daily basis? Well, I think we were just talking about AI. AI can also help us discover a lot about each person that we're reaching out to. I think Clay does that and I think Apollo does that as well. There are tools out there that do it. And so it allows us to discover personal just elements of the story that maybe no one else might know that would help.

[13:05] I don't know. I mean, I go hiking a lot of Mondays. So if you knew that, sending me something for hiking would probably be a pretty cool thing. Hey, I know you go hiking. I've seen some of your posts. Wow. Or, you know, I love to, I don't play tennis, but maybe the person that you're targeting loves to play tennis. Man, get them something that's really cool about tennis. I don't know. Maybe they love the Tour de France race, but they couldn't make it one year. Get them, like, I'm actually telling a story, recounting a story of someone that, one of my students who went out and found tickets from Tour de France from that year on eBay and packaged them up beautifully. And Thomas Ballard is the person's name, and he's incredible at this. But he just packaged them up beautifully and sent it off, and of course he got through. So I guess it's about paying attention, but AI can help us pay attention. But even at that, one of my favorite campaigns, I've heard about so many campaigns and written about them in my books. But one of my favorite ones is by Dan Waldschmidt, who is a – he runs or writes the blog Edgy Conversations. He's a really interesting guy. He runs 100-mile races and wins these things. That's crazy. But his profession is he's a turnaround specialist.

[14:30] And he described his process for breaking through to CEOs of companies that are in trouble. By the way, you know, you can't buy a list of companies. Well, actually, with AI, perhaps you can now.

[14:41] Maybe. But his process pre-AI was to comb the business news every morning and look for stories of missed earnings estimates. And when he saw one, he would have this sword made up by the prop maker who made all the swords for the movie Gladiator. Beautiful swords. They're not strong. That's great. Very smart. Yeah. The CEO's name is engraved on the blade, along with a description. If you're not all in, you're not in at all. And that goes to this beautiful wooden box, felt-lined wooden box with a handwritten note. There are so many elements to this that are so...

[15:16] So right on the money, actually. Like handwritten notes. Great, great detail. No branding. There's no logo on anything. Great detail. Because he's humanizing himself. He's the brand. And so that gets sent with this note, handwritten note. It says, dear Hamish, I, you know, businesses were, and I noticed you lost a battle recently. I just wanted to let you know, if you ever need a few extra hands in battle, we've got your back. It's a sword for crying out loud. He's willing to go, he's willing to die in a sword with you. He's willing to go into battle at your side to help you beat back the, I don't know, the barbarians and whoever they are, whatever they are, but beat back the forces that are causing your company to fail and fight to save it. And so it's a visual metaphor. It says so much without having to say almost anything. And when he sends these swords, he's getting 100% response rate so far.

[16:19] So I'm not saying everyone should now say, oh, wait a minute, let me write that down. Swords, I've got to send some swords. The prop maker for the movie Gladiator. I'm not saying that at all because this really fits Dan, his personal brand of being ultra competitive and competitiveness as well. But it just fits him. And and so as a result, these people get these I mean, the CEOs get these swords and they're at least willing to take a call with them. And that's fantastic. They weren't waiting for a sword and they're not into swords, probably most of them. But the sword is something so valuable to them and they can't help it. I mean, that's that's that flip moment again. Box, the package shows up, and it's like, I don't know, who is Dan Walsh now? I don't know who this is. And by the time they've opened it and gone through the note and seen what's inside, they're going, I love this guy. Who is this guy? I got to meet this guy. And they do, they meet up with him.

[17:18] So, and by the way, it's not even, it's not always about sending things, but often it is. I mean, like the best stories, most of the best stories are sending things that just, the stories will just, they'll knock your socks off. They're, they're just incredible. But, but when, when you send something that, that humanizes you, that's the effect. It really is the effect of flipping a switch of being a flip moment. Yeah. That's brilliant because it is really that it is humanizing on both ends, right? It's humanizing to the buyer and it's humanizing the person who's sending it. And I, I, sales leaders, I want to reiterate Stu's comment here is don't write Write that down. Like don't just be like, oh yeah, swords. It reminds me, several years ago, I heard about a guy who discovered that it, at the time, I have to say at the time, I don't know if it's still allowed, it was legal to send a piece of two by four that was like less than 18 inches through the US mail. And as long as it was stamped and addressed and all that. And so this one entrepreneur discovered this and that was what they did, is they sent out these links of two by four to their buyers. And then of course they told a story at a conference.

[18:19] And magically, two by four sales went up. And then the response went right down because all these buyers are like, I got 17 pieces of two by four this month. Like, what do I need this for? So make sure you're humanizing it. Make sure you're not just going copy, paste, repeat, because that's not going to make you be human. That's going to be like, hey, I heard something on a podcast or hey, I went to a conference. Make it your own before you put it out there. Stu, you said something a second ago that I really resonate with, and I've believed this for a very long time. No logos.

[18:53] Tell us more about no logos. Because by the way, the marketing people who are listening just started grinding their teeth when you started saying that, because they love their logos on stuff. Why no logos? You know, when I first started creating direct mail campaigns for the big magazine publishers, the point was to put these people in cartoons, Let's just have them appear in the cartoon. They don't actually appear in the drawing, but appear in the cartoon. The cartoon's about them. And, you know, all of these clients that I had at first, they were all saying, now we've got to get the logo in there somewhere. Like, let's put our logo on one of the buildings that's showing through the window on one of the skyscrapers or put a tchotchke on the guy's desk with my logo on it. And I didn't know enough yet. It didn't seem right, but I didn't know enough to say, no, no, we've tried that. We've tested it. It kills it.

[19:44] But what we discovered was if you stick a logo in anything, in any of the cartoons, it kills it. Think about Geico commercials. Are Geico commercials funny? No. They try to be funny. They're not. It's always about their brand. It's always self-focused. It's boring.

[20:01] So putting a logo on a lot of these things, we've got to know where to put it. Sometimes it fits, and other times, many times, it doesn't. And if you're trying

[20:09] to make a human-to-human connection, you're not making a human-to-logo connection. You're making a human-to-human connection. And the logo only serves to... I was going to say, really, it defeats the whole purpose. So the fact that Dan didn't have a logo involved or a business card involved, it was just a handwritten note from one person to another, is a lot of why that approach works well. It's just because of that. Just that someone sat down. Dan sat down. Not only he got this sword for me, but he sat down and wrote me this note. This is not something that has come from any sort of automation. And and this is absolutely human this is actually human to absolutely human to human beautiful yeah that that's a great way of of framing it and and uh from my experience yeah a logo immediately makes it corporate instead of human and you know few people you know i'm going to say no people there's i'm sure there's one uh you know love logos or love brands right there is we all have our favorite coffees and muffins and all that at the end of the day we're buying that from a person because we're having an emotional connection with that person. So, Dan, I grew up on a farm.

[21:20] Weeds, not my favorite thing in the world, mostly because I have plenty of painful

[21:23] memories of spending all day out in the field pulling them when I was on break from school. So why weeds? Why that analogy for growing your business? So we're going 180 from what we've just been talking about, which is, Great. I wrote a book called How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed. It's actually my favorite of all the books I've written.

[21:47] And this came about because, first of all, I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway a long time ago. I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles.

[21:55] And there's six lanes of traffic going one way and six coming the other way. And we're moving pretty fast. And there's, I don't know, 40-foot wide, 20-foot wide concrete median in the middle of between the two sides of the freeway and going from a crack in the concrete was a dandelion and i thought well first of all i mean we see that a million times we've seen everybody's seen that that's what they do um but i thought when i spotted that one just kind of bouncing around in the turbulence of the of the traffic and in the middle of a darn freeway i mean in all this concrete it's just there it was and i thought isn't that just impressive in this sea of concrete it found a way to make it work. And it looked like, well, we don't know what it was feeling, probably not feeling anything, but it looked pretty happy, just kind of, you know, with those happy yellow flowers and those geodesic beautiful little seed pods, just out there in the middle of a crappy place running its process. And I just thought, that's just incredible that it would do that. And so it got me thinking as I was driving, I thought, what is it about weeds? Why? We all know what it means to grow like a weed, but why do they grow like that? What are they? Do they have a model that they all follow? Is it one species? Like is weed just a species?

[23:15] And if they're not, they're not . All it is, weed is just a derogatory term we use to describe a plant that we find bothersome.

[23:25] I just wondered, is there a model that they all follow? And there is, there is. In that quick moment, I realized I've got to study weeds. First of all, I want to follow that. I want to emulate that example. I want to be a weed. I want to grow my business like a weed. I want to be really tough to stamp out all those things. I want to be resilient, et cetera. All kinds of really wonderful things actually describe weeds. needs. And so if we look at what they do, what I discovered is we can learn a lot from them. So here's the model sort of in the nutshell. Weeds deal with what is. They have this incredible mindset. Even though they don't have brains, they have this incredibly resilient and aggressive and I would say even optimistic. The weed that was sitting in the middle of the freeway wasn't saying, well, this sucks. I really saw myself as being at the beach. It wasn't doing that. We would do that.

[24:19] So they just deal with what is. And then they never do anything without an unfair advantage. We can come back to all these, but nothing without an unfair advantage. Shouldn't we be like that? We should. In business, we definitely should. They never do anything alone. It's always at scale.

[24:35] They always operate at scale. We should do that. They always focus on what makes them win. And I think that is a great description of process. Their process is a living process. It's a miracle. The way it works is incredible. And then finally, they thrive best in disrupted ground. We're the ones who disrupt the ground, actually. That's what our lawns are. And they thrive best in whatever it is that we've disrupted. And that's also a great way, or should be a great way to describe any entrepreneur and any of us. So if we were dealing with what is, if we were operating with unfair advantages and always cultivating new ones, if we were operating at scale, really collaborating with sort of at an extreme level, and if we were actually paying attention to process, you mentioned earlier, I think before we started, that you're a stickler or that you're a fan of process. Process can be amazing. It's one of those things that a lot of times people think of as a speed bump. It's like, oh, I don't want to talk about that. There's rules and regulations and training and blah, blah, blah. No, no, no. I want to get out there and do it. I want to get out there and make things happen. But process is what makes those things happen in an expert way. It's miraculous stuff.

[25:55] So all of those things, that's what weeds are doing. And we should follow their example. By the way, I think if you would stop and look at those weeds in your yard and just watch them. I mean, if you mow them down with your mower or something, they come right back. If you cut them out, if you pull them out, they're going to come right back. That's what they do. And if that described us as entrepreneurs, that's incredible. So you might end up looking at weeds very differently after this conversation.

[26:22] What a great analogy. And, you know, sales leaders, that there's something that I say to one of my daughters who's

[26:29] very much like, well, what if this and what if that and what if that? And finally, I said, if you're always asking what if you miss what is. And to Stu's point, like weeds deal with reality. It's like, what is present? What is happening? And yes, we might wish that the product was better or that it came in a different version or that marketing had better content campaigns or whatever. That's not reality. reality is we need to sell stuff and not only we need to sell stuff our sellers need to sell stuff and we need to support them so if we can stay present as Stu just said and focus on what is, and follow the process and yes Stu's comment I am process oriented I like process unfortunately as Stu pointed out most people equate process with bureaucracy and handcuffs yeah and to my mind process is freedom because as you said Stu if we uh if it's just like I want to go do stuff It's like, well, yeah, we can go off in 17 different directions, but if I have someone like, say, yourself who has written a book on how to grow your business like a weed or how to get in front of anybody, and I go, oh, there's a process to follow if I do this and this and this, and it ain't going to work 100% of the time because I'm not Stu.

[27:34] And still, if I keep following the process, I will win more than I lose. And so that's what processes sales leaders is helping you and your sellers win more than you lose. Stu, I can't wait for everybody to check out your book. I'm curious if you could go back and coach younger Stu, right? Go back as far as you like and go, hey, younger Stu, in the future, best-selling author, cartoonist, sought-after speaker, Hall of Fame nominee.

[28:05] You're also going to have a bunch of scar tissue and bumps and bruises. What would you coach younger Stu to say or do different to get to the same place but have less scar tissue and fewer bumps and bruises? Well, you know, I want to answer that two ways. Because one is I did do some things absolutely right. And one of those is when I started my agency and we were working with cartoons and personalization and direct mail, I recruited a lot of my heroes from cartooning into my group. And they ended up mentoring me, actually. So these were people like some of the great cartoonists, really some of the great cartoonists from around the world, but Gahan Wilson and Eldon Nadini from Playboy, and then a bunch of them from The New Yorker. And so I would say one of the things is don't be afraid to reach out to your heroes and work with them. I hear the stupidest things about don't meet your heroes. You'll always be disappointed. That's stupid. You should work with them. And you'll learn from them. You know, I was bringing the business where we didn't know that that they were mentoring me. I didn't know that they didn't know that. But it just ended up by osmosis. I just learned so much from them by hanging out with my heroes, for God's sake. That's incredible. And so, yeah, that's that's one that you should do. It's one that I did do that you should do.

[29:23] And then let's say one that I wish I had done is I was considering going on to a graduate program for entrepreneurial studies. And I really wish I had done that because I end up, I'm learning things as I go along, but I would have known a lot of things very early on from that sort of a program. So I think that's what it would be. I'm about to turn 69 now, and I still feel like maybe Maybe I should go back to school and go to one of your programs. I think it would be amazing to do that. Beautiful sentiment. And it reminds me, Dear Abby, which I don't know if anybody listening remembers Dear Abby. There's a famous Dear Abby where someone wrote in and said, you know, I'm thinking of starting a university degree, but I'm 60 now. And I'll be 64 when you graduate. And her response was, well, how old will you be in four years? There's the answer, right? You're going to be 64 no matter what. Do you want the degree or do you not? It's a beautiful sentiment, Stu. You've also talked about several great books and things like that already. What are some of the other things that you've read, watched, or listened to that you would encourage the audience of sales leaders to check out for their own personal development?

[30:33] Well, I think there's one book. I mean, the thing is I'm not reading much right now because I'm in the process of producing the updated edition of How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. Yeah. But and so I'm actually I'm on YouTube a lot. That's a great source. It's not reading, but there's a lot of great information and news about AI, where that's going, what's happening. I'm sort of like the best place to go.

[30:57] But I am reading a book that I don't know, I think it's I think this came out in 1998, by John Nesbitt, the futurist, who's no longer with us, but he wrote a book called high tech high touch.

[31:09] And, and there's a quote, I never get quotes, right. Right. So if I trip over it, sorry. But basically, he said, the more high tech we become, the more or the greater the need for high touch. And what he meant by that was the more technologically oriented our society and our lives become, the more we're going to clamor for things or the greater the need for things that are human and human to human contact. God, that sure fits. It sure fits the update to how to get a meeting with anyone. One, but surely it fits just the essence of contact marketing, probably any marketing and anything to do with sales. The more things become automated and artificial, the more we're going to clamor for things, the more people are going to value the things that are human, uniquely human and uniquely talented human, but maybe perhaps by uniquely talented humans with practiced hands. I have something like that. Something that causes people to say, wow, this did not come out of an and AI. That's really cool. Wow, I need to meet this person. Very cool. Well, we'll certainly link to that in the show notes. And sales leaders, I would certainly encourage you to check out that book as much as it was written, you know, almost 20 years ago, I certainly present for today's times. Stu, you've already shared a bunch of amazing ideas and insights with our audience of sales leaders today. What do you have as a final thought a closing bit of wisdom or even something to plug the floor is yours. You can get a meeting with anyone.

[32:35] That's kind of interesting, isn't it? That's kind of an amazing thing about life. And you know, if we can't get meetings, we can't sell, obviously. So meetings, getting meetings is just a fundamental of life. Because if we don't connect with people, nothing happens in life. But certainly, you can't sell if you can't get meetings. And I think we're all about 10 major accounts away, if we sell or if we're entrepreneurs, were probably 10 major accounts away from living a very different life. And so the two combined says, go for it.

[33:06] Go for it. There's nobody who's beyond your reach. We're helping a client right now reach the CEO of Ford, which will be fun and interesting, but probably life-changing. So you can reach anyone. And so that's kind of a wonderful thing in life. You can reach anyone, and that's amazing. So that's probably my parting thought. And if you'd like to, certainly feel free to stop by my, or I would love you to stop by my author site, which is StuHeineck.com. I'm sure that the spelling will be in your notes, but StuHeineck.com. If you come in, sign up for my list and you'll get the first two chapters of how to grow your business like a weed for free. So I'd love to have you do that. Maybe also connect on LinkedIn and mention that you heard me on this podcast. Very cool. And certainly we will put the link to your website in the show notes. And I would encourage all the listeners to go get the first couple of chapters on Stu and then, of course, support him and buy the book when it is released next year. Stu, great way to wrap this up. Thank you so much for being a guest on Full Funnel Freedom today. What a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.

[34:22] Sales leaders, I had a blast visiting with Stu. Love his energy. Love his passion. Love that idea of human. As you know, that's my big passion. And so many great takeaways from his session, his visit with me today. The first thing, just because I'm holding it, is this idea of no logo. This is a thank you card I use. It just says thank you at the bottom and it is blank inside so I can personalize and humanize my message. So as much as marketing departments might grind their teeth at not using logoed items, best is to take the logo off things that are going to prospects and thank you because there is research out there that says any sort of a logo on anything, especially like a thank you card actually reverses the goodwill that might be created by getting the thank you card. So humanize them, personalize them and also don't put the logo on something else that Stu said that really stood out to me and it would probably be the title of this episode is we are 10.

[35:27] Accounts away from a completely different life. So think about that for your from your sellers. If your sellers only focused on activating 10 accounts now not when I say only I meant that's their focus right that's their primary focus. Yes inbound leads and and expansion opportunities things like that we certainly want them to do those. However focus equals freedom. So if we We start with a top 100 or a top 50, and then we narrowed that down to, okay, who are the 10 that we are going to target, whether it's this month or this quarter, depending on how long your sales cycle is. And within that quarter, some of them will fall off. Some of them will engage and will start active sales cycles. Some of them will engage and then push things off in the future. Great. So then the following quarter, how do we balance up to 10? If we're always topping out each of our sellers at 10 focused accounts that we're trying to land, that is likely going to change our seller's life and it's probably going to change ours and our businesses as well. Those are a couple of my takeaways from today's episode. So curious to hear what yours are in the comments on our social media. Until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[36:54] Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. You can continue to support us by leaving us a review and a rating, sharing this episode with a couple of sales leaders in your network who you care about. I'd love to connect with you. I'm easy to find, Hamish Knox on LinkedIn. Also, if you'd like a free 15-minute call with me, go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler. Until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[37:26] Music.