Creating Highly Accurate Sales Forecasts with Caleb Pierce from AFTI Watchdog

Hamish Knox: This is the full funnel freedom podcast, supporting sales leaders, and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results. Lead a great team and hit more targets with full funnel freedom. Welcome to the full funnels freedom podcast.

I'm your host. Hamish Knox today, we are going to get ideas and insights around accurate sales forecasting from Caleb Pierce, vice president of revenue optimization for AFTI watchdog, Caleb, welcome to the full funnel freedom podcast. So Caleb, I gave the ten second version of who you are and what AFTI is expand for our audience.

Who are you? And what is AFTI?

Caleb Pierce: Yes. So like you mentioned revenue, um, vice-president revenue, operations. Uh, um, what we do is we support oil and gas producers who are looking to maximize production while lowering the thing called through a process that we come up with called the virtual wealth side visit.

So we were a. Driving around downtown Calgary oil and gas producers, you know, several years ago and discovered that they used to visit every single oil, well every day in a truck drought. And that was their typical way of essentially making sure that the Wells were producing fluid and not leaking. And, uh, we figured that was a very archaic way to do business, but nobody had actually created a solution that targeted, uh, the lower production.

Okay. So we thought, oh, to, uh, answer those questions in a manner that was simple, low cost and easy to use. And at this point, uh, been adopted widely by most of the major Canadian producers are closing in on 25% of all the Wells in Canada. And in the last year and a half, we started spreading down into the United States as well.

Penetration and expansion. So I believe

Hamish Knox: it. So as you really were with AFTI, as it became much more of a sales focused organization, and now you're in the leadership role, how do you define full funnel freedom? What does full funnel freedom mean to you?

Caleb Pierce: That's interesting. I, uh, I moved from the seven people in the company to one business day.

So I was able to kind of go through all the stages from a very young professional to now. And, uh, back when I first joined the company of seven people, we had a very shotgun approach to the way that we were doing sales and the way that we were essentially managing the. And I wouldn't say we had full funnel freedom, but nowadays freedom gives you kind of clarity, peace of mind.

And it really helps you answer the tough questions for the C-suite and the board of directors very quickly and easily with a very structured response. So it's accurate, it's reliable. And, and what it means to me is that the. A lot less pressure. These are to answer

Hamish Knox: questions. Fair enough. And especially when you're getting, uh, uh, questions from on high, so to speak that, and they're looking for very specific answers, I would imagine.

Caleb Pierce: Yes. And you know, forecasting is always a, it's a best estimate at the time. It gets more accurate as time goes by. And, you know, everybody says, they're okay with a forecast, that's an estimate. But at the end of the day, they, they want accurate. Of

Hamish Knox: course, of course. And for some reason they tend to remember what you put in front of them.

Initially, even though that initial forecast may have been more or less a guest based on a little bit of data, but also a bit of a guest fair.

Caleb Pierce: Yeah. A lot of the stuff that we've worked on over the years, team members it's really helped to solidify. The forecast is a lot more accurate. So we're, we're now able to very accurately plan, which also leads to our material planning.

And as everybody knows, uh, with various, uh, parts, especially circuit boards and stuff, which we procure from around the world, the supply chain has gotten quite difficult to manage. So the more accuracy the future, you can get the better you can to manage it. Doesn't

Hamish Knox: dive into that a bit more because that's a really key thing that a lot of.

People forget is that yeah, you can sell something, but if you've got to wait six months for your circuit board to show up, like there's a different level of conversation. So how does the forecasting and things like that actually support the whole business, uh, in addition to of course you and yourself.

Caleb Pierce: Yeah, exactly. So, um, essentially the way we'll kind of go through this and a little more detail with the way that we forecast, we have a very high probability of close hits, various stages of our forecast. Um, so once it gets to a certain level, uh, we know the typical time it takes for the deal to close.

And that gives us about a three to six month old look on what materials we're going to need out of an 80 to 85%. So we're able to order it all well in advance. And some parts will actually gotten to the point where there'll be times have gone up to 90 weeks, but, uh, there are specific small parts that are used on the circuit board.

So we order them well in advance and we pull and draw down that inventory as we need them. We've had our eye on the ball for that one for a couple of years now through. But, I mean, the whole company essentially relies on it to make it spin because the six month thing is a killer. So if you're trying to maintain a forecast and build future expansion sales, and you have to delay the satisfaction at the point of sale, you lose a lot of momentum, which means you can't get to the payback analysis, cost, justification and expansion as quick as you'd hope to.

And that's really how you, how you secure the future of your business. Right?

Hamish Knox: Absolutely. Absolutely. Tell us about the journey of that, because I've yet to meet a sales organization where they started on day one being able to forecast as accurately as, as you are now. So, uh, it sounds like you went on a similar journey.

What did that journey look like? And what were some of the key metrics or key learnings that you had that are now putting you in a position where you can put a forecast on the table that allows you to say order well in advance without having a whole bunch of excess inventory and things that could be detrimental to the business.

Caleb Pierce: Uh, so the biggest thing was when we first started doing sales, we would go and you'd talk to everybody. And in one meeting, you'd have a discussion pain, discovery, budget decision, product demonstration, and then pretty much quoted in a meeting and then request the sale. And it was all just kind of a very quick approach.

And every, every person we talked about the same rating, it was like, here's an opportunity. Here's an opportunity. Here's an opportunity. So we had occurred. And what became difficult is actually training the success. So it was very difficult to take the success I was having personally, and actually push it to the sales people, because we hadn't really mapped out the journey of, of how somebody goes through our pipeline.

Right. So what we did, and this is something I highly support and a new universe for all of us at the time too, is we broke it into sales. Right. So that way, what you do is, is you have your first discussion with decision makers and then you have a series of meetings and call reviews and final closes along the way.

But what you do is you're not actually trying to sell the product. All you're trying to do is sell the person on the next stage and process. And that gives them clarity and it breaks into smaller chunks. So like it allows you to start kind of checking off the boxes and making sure that they're going to get the best solution possible that fits their business plan, um, all along the way.

But what it does for us is that the, what, at the point where they finally said, you know, this is something we're interested in. This is something that all the parties and stakeholders agreed to and that's something we've we might consider. Moving forward on a that's when we'll build them a proposal. And in order to build a proposal, uh, it's a requirement for them to give us, uh, the material planning required, the different sensors, boxes, configurations, modems, things like that.

So at that point in time, that is when we use that, that step of the stages that you have to have the materials when they're in the forecast. And at that point in time, we're able to use that. But what's nice about it is upfront contract make stepping yourself through those stages is very easy. So I don't know if you want to give a plug up for a contract, what they mean like, well, what would your definition of an upfront contract?

Well, not

Hamish Knox: for contracts really. Just about creating clarity between two people, right? Whether we're talking about planning a backyard, barbecue, or whether we're talking about, like you said, you know, we need to order certain materials. So. We need to agree that we're actually doing this so we can actually go and order those materials.

And we're not going to get a, you know, so on the backend someone's like, Hey, I know I said I was going to move forward, but I haven't actually not going to. So it's really a system for creating clarity amongst two people that be aligned with.

Caleb Pierce: Yeah, totally. I think the thing I loved the most were when I first heard about them was everybody goes into a, a sales discussion or a potential prospect and client, and you save the close to the very end of the discussion.

And then you kind of sneak it into the end. It's like, oh, by the way, do you want to do this thing? You know, it's like, you wait for the very end. And so you have this like 30 to 60 minute discussion with the person. Then you surprise them with something, with what you want. And I was, I thought off my contracts are brilliant because.

Minute of the discussion. You say, you know, I'm here to talk about this. This is my goal. What would you like to get out of it? Do I have permission to ask questions about your business and then right before you even start presenting what you do say at the end of this meeting, if you're interested in the product, my only goal is to get a second meeting with your additional stakeholders in the field.

Are you okay with that? And then when it comes to the very end of the very end of the whole discussion, it's so simple to go. Okay. So we're 35 minutes ago. And I said, my only question would be. Yeah, Laurie, are you interested? I am great. Can you help us facilitate a second meeting with the field? It really solidifies that step by step by step sales process, which then makes your forecasting very repeatable.

So that was a. Kind of a lifesaver, especially in the times of room for making sure things go all right. Fair

Hamish Knox: enough. Well, and also what I heard in there is would you facilitate that conversation with the field? Whereas I know from my experience before, uh, you know, selling software as service, it would be, well, you need to go talk to this other department and I would say, oh, okay, I'll go call them.

And then I called them and now I'm just another salesperson. And I might even say, well, Caleb said to call you. And they're like, yeah, he says that to her. Right. Cause he didn't want to talk to a sales guy. Whereas you facilitating, asking for that introduction, even though it's an internal introduction, I got to believe that that actually reduced a lot of friction to getting sales to the finish line.

Would that be accurate 100%.

Caleb Pierce: And it also creates ownership from the field levels. Especially a lot of times technology gets pushed down onto the people in the field, in the oil patch and with the new system. Uh, but when they feel like they're, they've been brought in on the process and they're part of the creating a solution that works best for them, and they're more likely to actually support it in the long run.

Fair enough. Fair enough. And then they get the results they want, then everybody benefits. Then they get the benefit of using a better technology to manage your day and the oil company, you know, more efficiencies, more, more revenue. Right. But yeah, it's interesting. So when you do the introduction idea for facilitating the discussion, like we always try to take the work out of it for them though.

So wherever possible, this process, we always try. Do the work for the end user. So oftentimes they'll say, oh, I need to talk to my team and go, well, you know what appreciate that. But you know, you're busy and I'm sure a lot of questions. Would you just CC us on an email, introduce us, show us that you've talked with him that you're interested and we'll take the ball on sending up the time.

Like you don't need to do that. And that way, that way you still get your name beside theirs on a CCD email. And then you don't have to rely on somebody else to do it because it's almost a. The given on, uh, almost the politely telling you that there's not wanting to do the business. I'll talk to the team and get back to you or all facilitate the meeting and then you just never, then, then you chase them for two months old.

You talk to them all. And I haven't a chance yet. Right. Things like that. Right.

Hamish Knox: Well, you and I are very direct communicators anyways. And so we, we, we also like to be a control, but it also speaks to that human to human element of showing respect for our prospect. And, and when you're talking to and where you start, you started at a decision-making level, they got a lot of stuff on their plate and where, and even if they're not being polite and saying, yeah, I'll talk to my team as a way to say PFO, they still have.

Caleb Pierce: Well, let

Hamish Knox: little light, little light it's PG 13 program, right? So the, so they still have a thousand things on their plate. And even if they have the best intentions to talk to their team, they may not have cycles to do it for three weeks. So by you stepping in and saying, listen, all you got to do is send one email.

Which in brackets, I'm sure you have time to send an email, then we're going to manage that for them. I've seen the eyes of a decision maker go, oh really? I don't have to burn calories on this. Absolutely. I'm going to take care of this for you. And again, reduces friction to get a deal across the finish line.

Yeah.

Caleb Pierce: And then go do the work. I'll meet the guys and always check back in with the initial sponsor and be like, I met with the guys with their feedback. You know, this starts at the next. Um, make them feel normal, always use the typical best practice stuff, because people want, like, if you have a best practices, it's worked for other people and created benefit results.

So why would somebody else want to reinvent the wheel? Right. Right. So those are, those are key parts of the whole idea around getting that forecast. Both though. I mean, it goes further than that. Like, so our forecast originally when we first started working. Um, this idea of deal stages. It started at the first discussion up to the point of sale.

And then now our whole after sale support team actually uses their own kind of forecasting funnel stages that the moves through various departments infiltrating and then setups and then production adoption, and like it's the whole thing. But then when that process is done, the sales stage actually starts back up again.

So we have a pretty, the whole idea of making the repeatable process comes in again. You talked about, uh, you know, you do the work for them again, but you create a system where the salesperson goes back. I would check in with them and then you start gathering alarms, examples, other things. So we don't sit back and wait for them to actually go through and justify the system.

And if they made money or if they found a benefit, we start doing that for them. And we got all the data with the, with the field personnel, with the superintendents and we get them to come on board and say, You know, you're part of this project and what was the impact? You know, here's your list of alarms, which ones paid back.

Here's all your events. You call it leaks, here's your . And then we get, we get them to really come right from the horse's mouth. Tell us how, how they experienced it. And part of the process is when you go take them all and take that all the way. So the decision-maker full circle and say, okay, cool. So I did it all and they go with me, you, you already did my payback analysis, but I'm probably gonna have to do to justify this project here.

Then like, I'll take it through, then you can change it however you want, make it work in your world, which makes it further solidified as the, uh, kind of the funnel funnel is much freer and also really kind of put them stolen the different sales stages in the

Hamish Knox: forecast. Right? Absolutely. Well, If I heard you correctly, you're also empowering your after sales support.

People who are still in sales, whether they want to think of themselves or not. But instead of creating this linear funnel, you've actually created an entire circuit. Of of success with your clients, which I'm going to guess is going to keep them sticky for a really long time. Because even if you got a competitor come in and they'll be like, well, here's all the stuff that AFCI does.

And of course the competitors can say, well, we could do that too. Uh, like everybody does, but I'm also going to guess that expansion opportunities where if maybe you started with us, uh, 25 Wells or a hundred Wells by circling back to the decision makers, they're going to give you more business because you're doing the work for them.

Am I

Caleb Pierce: off side? Uh, well, I mean, I think that's what all, all like in all and everything that you do, if you can take the work out of it, like I said, if somebody is, uh, making my life easy with gutter, cleaning your furnace maintenance, and there they come and bring me the report and the typical best practices and how much it can improve my efficiencies.

And they do it all for me, they'll be having to research it. I'm probably going to be like, oh yeah, excellent. That's the person that I work with. This person just took a huge weight on my hand. Um, so yeah, no, I agree. And then there's a bunch of other things that we all can do to like the other thing that really, I kind of touched on it earlier, but when you talk about like the one stage where we do quote reviews, it's also a good time to weed out your funnel.

So one of the things you require in order to give somebody a quote is they need to give you accurate. Okay. So tell me, like, tell me, tell me the information that I required to build the quote. And at that point in time, if they, if they choose not to get back to you on that and start chasing that's where you immediately realized that you're maybe chasing an amiable prospect, that it didn't actually have intentions of purchasing.

So the, give the homework. Uh, I think you'd like to give homework a lot earlier in the process when you're doing it, but, uh, we, we save it for awhile and, you know, go through a few stages for us, but then eventually that's kind of the come to Jesus moment where you're like, okay, wait, this person has got the info.

They're giving some stuff. It was quick back to us. Like this is probably a hot prospect. Absolutely.

Hamish Knox: Well, that kind of sounds like an awkward conversation to have with a salesperson, because I know from my sales background, if my boss came to me and said, Hey, listen, you got to pump this opportunity out of your funnel.

I was probably not going to take it that well. So, you know, as you shared earlier, you were. Started with Efti when it was seven people. It's now significantly more than that now. And you've brought on salespeople into the organization. How has the sales team resisted or gone along with these, these developments, which I believe are going to net payoff to them, but in the moment probably feels a little awkward.

Caleb Pierce: Good because, well, we typically hired a trans people that are fairly not your typical seasoned sales person. So we've got to come in with kind of more of the right characteristics and personality and attitude. We're driven self-motivated and then we train them on, on the industry essentially. So they've always like, this is kind of what they learned from the very get-go.

So it's not, we're not trying to kind of teach an old dog new tricks and we're, we're ruthless with. Like we, because we're using it for material planet, we will cut and stuff so quick. So typically the best practices, if you don't have a meeting in the calendar with the next step, the person has been removed from the material, essentially, you want to make sure that you have.

Clear next steps in the calendar. If not, it gets the red icon for awhile. And then, and then if it's red for yellow, like a couple of weeks to get it back on the radar, and that doesn't happen, then you're toast because we can't have, when we're making decisions on purchasing large volumes of inventory, we can't have hope in there.

They'll hopium right.

Hamish Knox: Amen. So what are some of the early warning signs though that a salesperson's pipeline is maybe going to start to get a little skinnier than we want it to be that you've seen from your experience?

Caleb Pierce: Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the big things is the great book. What was it?

The predictable revenue book back in the day kind of talk. So, one thing that I think is a warning sign is when everybody gets busy on chasing the later stages of the sales funnel. So like, ideally, like, can you think of what. Your existing clients as your first place to focus your attention, because it's probably the easiest place to get repeated business.

When you're in your existing clients, you work through your fit phase from the guys that you close negotiation, quote, review. Those are the first things you make sure you always done all the work there that needs to be done. And then you move backwards through the stages all the way down to like kind of your first discussions with new prospects.

And what happens sometimes there's points in the years, you'll see a sales person get really tied up in the later stages of the funnel where they're just so busy doing close quote negotiations, like they're there in a barrel high value activity, but they'll take their foot off the gas for some of those three, six weeks on the prospecting.

And you see all of a sudden that discussions with decision makers just minimize completely. And you know, that's going to hurt later because when they clean up all that stuff, they won't have anything coming in behind it. Right. So, you know, it's just that when you see that happening, you kind of got to, you know, most people like creating self pretty good, but they see it coming.

Right. But I mean, you, it, my advice would be, if, when you see that haven't you asked to him, like, I know you're busy, but you've got a time block off like a couple of hours in the week and just make a committed effort to just, you know, making however many reach outs you need to just to make sure you still got stuff coming in the front of the fall.

Hamish Knox: Right? Absolutely. Yeah. Otherwise that funnel is going to start to look upside down and not in a good way, because it's going to end up looking like a pencil.

Caleb Pierce: Yeah. And then the way that our cycles work in our industry is there's a very specific kind of budgeting cycle in the oil and gas industry, where all the companies do their budget breakups.

And at the same time every year when they have the spring break. So if you don't have those discussions happening at the right point in the year and you don't get three implementations and then the right point in the year, then you don't get put in the budget for the following year. And which case you're limited on your total scope.

Cause

Hamish Knox: true, true. So you, you just gave us a really good example of, of a mindset, right? Which is always with you and a little bit of prospecting. What are some of the other mindsets or, uh, and proactive activities that you're coaching your people to do on a regular basis in order to keep their funnels consistently full.

Caleb Pierce: Uh, lot is what comes to mind.

I spent a lot of time I'm talking too much. So, um, I dunno, I, I always believe clearly in an attitude of abundance. Okay. So I truly believe that you manifest what you believe in. So if you're thinking with a positive mindset and you're thinking that there's opportunity out there, and then you find the opportunity, if you, if you're thinking that if the adults, so I often always practice gratitude and.

And good things with the half cup, a half cup full mentality, because then you'll see the world through those lenses. And then you start to see the opportunity where there isn't. So even when something negative happens or something bad happens, or you lose a deal, like I remember. When I was, I was talking to this when I was really early on in my career, we could do a close ratio with one in five.

So one in five of every meet, every company I met with would end up buying. So every time somebody told me, no, I got excited. I was like, sweet. Three more, three more, two more, one more. Yes. Got it. Right. Like. Chasing knows. So don't be afraid to go for no, and just like figure out what works and you gotta keep in mind when people tell you to know this other thing we all should preach.

It's not, no, never, no, not now. Totally. Um, so you just keep that door open and sometimes you plant these seeds and you don't even know it. And several months later it will flourish into a thriving plant.

Hamish Knox: So one thing I want to want to highlight for the listeners is, you know, Caleb's already described that his sales cycles are really long and, and they're very specific around certain times of year, given the industry sells into. So you know, him, him and his team are not getting yeses every day or every week and they really have to be specific.

And so having that attitude of abundance and that mindset, that what a no is just one step closer to, yes. Especially if you're in that long sales cycle, great mindset to instill into your team to keep them motivated during the down times. Cause there are going to be down times throughout the year, and then eventually you're going to get into harvest mode and be closing a lot of sales.

So Caleb, I want to say thank you for reinforcing that mindset because especially for. Enterprise type sales. You're not going to get a win all the time. And if you end up starting to look for the negative, you're going to end up really killing your funnel.

Caleb Pierce: Yeah. And you also, like sales is hard. Like it's hard on the flaky, like, like, um, Rejection and sales and you have to be okay with it because essentially it's not personal.

People are having a bad day. There's no reason to take a note on people and be rude to them, but it happens sometimes, but you just have to be okay with it. Cause you can't, you can't internalize that. The other thing I often talked with built-in a lot too is I, I often tell them that we're not selling and this is maybe specific to arcade, but we talked a lot about how we're not salespeople.

We're business. We're problem. Cool. So we don't actually in these steps in the various stages that we're going through. We're not actually trying to sell people on anything, but what we're trying to do is uncover their business problem and then work through with them, how they'd like to solve it and how, if our technology can support them in that process.

So I often tell everybody for the first several stages of our sales process, you're actually not selling watchdog. You're selling digital oil field. So at the end of the day, they can, they can go buy whatever digital oil field solution they want and they can go to market. We'd encourage that, go check out our competitors, go look around, we'll see what they're like.

We have the processes in place. We have the tracker community equipment, but when you really try to do the job and just try to get people to come over the hump on this whole business problem of how do I digitize a previously manual? So, like I was thinking into advice for any sales people would be not to think of yourself as I'm here to sell you a pencil, but more so, like, what are your goals?

What do you need? Like, what do you want to solve? Maybe they need a pen. Like, like I'm always the first to say, if we can't solve a problem, Follow the competitor or I'll suggest the competitor and send them to somebody, a website to check up this person. This person has to be useful for you. And those things come full circle because if you, if you, if they reject you and you, you're not, the technology is we can find a different supporting device or something, you know, about the next time they're having a problem.

Like, oh my, I remember last time I talked to this guy, he led me off on the right thing. Maybe they can help again, like you get, you get sticky in their minds. Cause you're a, you're a problem solver for them.

Hamish Knox: Totally. And your credibility is going to go up way, way up. Would you suggest, like you said, here's a competitor, here's an alternative, et cetera, et cetera.

Um, and so really going macro at the beginning and in your world, it's digital oil field, right. And other people's worlds, it's going to be, you know, cloud-based accounting or it's going to be whatever that might be. And eventually if we get to that point, we're going to narrow it down to our specific thing.

But you've already bought in that we have the credibility because of the way we've been interacting with you all the way along.

Caleb Pierce: And if they choose that it's not, you, it's not the end of the world. It means you weren't the best fit for their business problem. Attitude of abundance, move on to the next thing.

And if you, and leave it with a good relation. I mean nothing like nothing is about a sales loop where you just keep calling people up saying, oh, like, like, you know, when you got kid of put on the loop where it's like, oh, how about now? How about now, now, now you find yourself making the same phone call every time I remember when I used to get stuck in those ones back in the day, very rarely because it's always a very clear.

Like the next thing you're going to do is like, oh, we have this meeting to do this. And then tell me, no, you talking about no harm feeling no hurt. Like I'm not offended if we can, we, I would love to do business in the future. So it's kind of getting the, getting to those notes as quickly as possible.

Right. Totally.

Hamish Knox: Totally. So speaking of. You know, you've grown up from salesperson selling sales manager. Now you're in a sales leadership position. If you could go back and advise your younger self and say, Hey, in the future, you're going to be in this type of a leadership role. I think you'd like to do this differently or this better.

What would you say to your younger self that might, uh, smooth out some of the bumps in the road or avoided some of the stumbles that you went through?

Caleb Pierce: Uh, what do you mean? Like the idea that like you could get so worked up or so excited or so whatever, but like really nothing actually time this too shall pass. Okay. Tie overtime once time progresses, like everything gets less. I like painful or less possibly even your very best times are very worst times as it gets further away, it kind of dampens it.

Like you don't, you don't feel it as much anymore. Like you, you know, I remember in the early days we you're all stressed out and you're, or you're really excited when you make sales or you're like, really, there's a, there's more of a roller coaster. And it took a few years to realize that, you know, just.

You don't need to go up. You don't need to go down, but you just need to keep an even keel to it. Like you don't, don't get worked up and things are bad and don't get really, really excited when things are good, because it's going to end. Like it's not. And that's the thing is you're only as good as your next sale when your salesperson, so it's kind of a daunting task.

Cause there's having to get a big celebration and make a big winner, a huge project. That's very, especially wasn't it. Yeah. So, so like at first, if you're going through the all I'm so excited about the sale and then all, no, I don't have anything to fall off, so I can just say over time, it just wears on your emotions a bit in the very end of it.

You just keep it cool. Keep it calm. Everything's going to play out to set your course and then pick your consistent activities day over day. And that'll get you the results over time. So by the do nothing, it's kind of a joke, but it's like, when I say do nothing more, don't overreact. Uh, don't get too emotional.

They'll do that. Just keep it cool. Do nothing and just keep, keep running the system. Right.

Hamish Knox: Love it. Love it. Well, Caleb you've recommended several books to me that I've really enjoyed. We're both voracious readers. So what are you reading, listening to watching right now to support your own professional and personal.

Caleb Pierce: Ooh. Okay. So, uh, I've been down the rabbit hole on the Lewis Howe school of greatness podcast. I love those. He's got the amazing guests every week that really, really kind of get you on attitudes of abundance, manifesting, you know, what you need to do in life and organization and stuff like that. Um, recent books I've read, uh, your favorites.

Uh, you'll never eat alone. Like

Uh, Simon Sinek, the infinite game as another one I read recently. And a book that is kind of Chicago rolled up a bit and maybe it's a future podcast discussion, but the high, uh, high tech sale. And that's one, that's a really struck a chord with how the whole world is changing. So we, we we've been joking internally.

We'd sell digital oil field to optimize ways where people used to do things manually. Um, well, high-tech sales is essentially doing that, that there's all these tools and techniques now, new. Technology owed and available in the sales industry, that's really, um, you know, creating more efficiencies and optimizations in Salesforce.

And so I think the future of how people sell and how people consume sales is going to be drastically different in 15 years. And I don't think, I don't think it's going to be, if you're selling commodities that are things that can be easily searched and figured out through computers. I don't think he made those for two.

Yeah.

Hamish Knox: Yeah. True. And, uh, yeah, I would certainly love to have a conversation about, uh, about tech and how it can, uh, increase your funnel velocity and the consistency in your funnel. Uh, Caleb, it was a lovely conversation. Thanks very much for being on the full funnel freedom podcast.

Caleb Pierce: That was wonderful.

Hamish Knox: You've been listening to the full funnel freedom podcast. I've been your host Haymitch Knox. Today. We have been getting ideas and insights from Caleb peers at a F T I watchdog on how to create a consistent, accurate forecast. Like, and share rate and review the podcast. If you'd like to follow us on Instagram, we are at Sandler and YYC, if you'd like to become a guest or get involved with the podcast as a sponsor or advertiser email podcast at full funnel, freedom.com until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

Thank you for listening to fall funnel freedom with Hamish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com.