Episode 88: Make Your Sales Strategy Beautifully Effective with Raul Hernandez

Aug 26

Do you see areas where people like people commonly drop the ball in this process?

Like where, where's a common theme that you see people struggle with? And maybe you can give us some tips on how to overcome this? I think the major two we've discussed, but we should probably dive deeper into them. Not selling your services. Just don't sell your services. No one cares about your services.

No one cares how many backflips you do and how many coffees you drink. They just care about the thing you're getting me.

Raul Hernandez Ochoa is a husband, father, and growth strategist helping founders increase performance, serve more clients, and scale profitability without the overwhelmed. He helped companies two to five X with millions in revenue and profit, led a revenue team to produce 50 million in one year, and trained thousands of entrepreneurs.

He serves clients to reach their growth goals and scale their impact. He is also the host of the Do Good Work podcast, and I love his platform. It's direct and straight to the point. Do good work, which is what we're going to talk about today. Raul, welcome to prospecting on purpose. Thanks for having me, Sarah.

Yeah, I'm excited for our conversation today. I love talking about sales and I know that you're the same way. So before we dive into some specific sales tactics for our audience, would you mind sharing a little bit about your background and how you support your clients today? Absolutely. I started in entrepreneurship like everyone started wanting to start a software company that turned into a marketing agency and that turned into helping others get more leads and support in the online space.

And then from there helped grow other agencies from leadership positions to mergers acquisitions, the whole nine to one year we took a team from. Seven people to 24 in less than 11 or 12 months. So in less than a year, I've been able to build in-house teams. Like you mentioned, uh, to reach, we'll say the, the, the beginning story in the, for a different time during cocktail hour, but we hit 50 million in a year.

So that was, that was a very, very exciting year, but that was in the software space too, that wasn't the coaching and industry, but it essentially built the agency, uh, uh, an agency model within that organization. I've been helping clients primarily a lot from the growth operations aspect, from the leadership aspect, but now more and more always on quality leads, quality conversions, and increasing revenue and profit per client so that we can serve not 20 or 30 people a month, but five to 12 good accounts per year.

Well, that's very interesting, and I want to like, I want to double click on that. I just heard that phrase. Um, you mentioned, uh, and in some of my research before this call, we talked, you talked about getting more revenue per client and I think that that is such an interesting. I don't want to say the word easy way to increase your sales, but it's a strategic way if you focus on it intentionally.

So can you share a little bit about what that looks like and how you help your clients do that? Yeah, there's, it is simple. So, I mean, you could overnight just say, I'm just going to increase my prices by 50 percent and call it a day. You can do that. I like to do it more strategically, depending on the industry, the products that you're selling, the services that you're selling, the nuance of the founder, and who's doing the sale.

So there are essentially three parts. There's the before there's the during, and then there's the after. In the before it's all strategy. I think you mentioned this in one of your recent pods. You have to figure out what is the actual value prop, not just here's what I do, who I do it for, but like, what is the actual business case and the outcomes that the person that you're serving is going to get?

You have to have that dialed in because one product or service, and even if you're selling a B2B service, you're still selling, you should be selling a product. And I'll get to that in just a second. But when you're selling a product or service, It has to be in a solution-oriented way where you know who you're talking to, even if you're, um, I was talking to a lot of generalist agencies in the last couple of weeks, some people say like, oh, you shouldn't itch down, you should focus on one avatar, one ICP.

Well, yeah, but you can also have customer segments within your generalist agency is typically two to three different segments where your best customers, but identifying within your, your company, who are my best clients, or even if you're niche down, who is my one best client, but knowing when I serve them at this capacity, and we'll talk about the product in just a second, when I serve them here, what actually gets solved for them?

What problems are they facing? And this can be anywhere from five, to eight. Don't do more than 13 problems. Just focus on the core big five or the big eight problems. And then from there translate, what are the areas of transformation that I deliver? What are the actual things are going to get and how can we measure that?

And how can we anchor that towards either an outcome, a result, or a measurement? So that when you're working with me, you're not buying my services. You're not buying this thing. You're buying the dopamine, you're buying the outcome. And that also has to cross-pollinate to your product and your service, because when you're selling these services, no one cares that I did this LinkedIn search and I'll meet once a month.

You look into sales now, you type in, if let's say you're looking for a marketing agency, or you're looking for whatever your industry is. And I kid you not, you scroll through 20, 30 of these profiles. They're all the same. They're all saying me too, me too, me too. We'll do all these things for you. So it's pretty much it's commodity positioning.

So how do you deposition yourself from a commodity-based and look at yourself as a partner or a strategic partner? You anchor it towards the key solutions that we just talked about but also don't sell the services. And this is the hardest thing. Even if I, when I work with a client, like a kid, you're not one of our clients right now.

We went through this whole strategy phase. We went through this entire process. We're building out their new sale sales page and their outreach, et cetera. And when the first three drafts or two drafts of the sales page were selling the service. I'm like, you don't sell a service. You sell the problem and the solution and you want to package it into a unique mechanism.

What's the widget? What's the thing? What's the, the essence of what you're selling that communicates value, but isn't just like this made up, uh, made up hype word it's in alignment to the problems they want to solve. And when they're buying from you, they're buying the end outcome. And the more you can get to the end outcome, the more you can quote-unquote productize the delivery of those services.

And we can get to that in just a second, even deeper, the easier it becomes for To not oversell or fulfillment to know exactly how to fulfill it. And also for them there to be a really good match between the customer segments or your ICP. So all these three things have to happen in tandem before you can actually raise your prices, talk to people, and then we can talk about how you actually do that in the sales process.

Cause that's part one. That's the thinking before the action, the action is simple. Like if I can do the action, like anyone listening here can totally do the action been kicked in the, in the teeth long enough to know. I'm nothing special. So the thinking though, that's the most important piece. The thinking is the most important piece.

I appreciate what you talked about. And there were a couple of things that I want to pull from that. Like I liked the, um, your example of searching LinkedIn and just seeing everyone talking about. Their services or how they help and, and, you know, a whole wide variety of solutions. I think that 1 of the biggest ways that you stand out is exactly what you're saying figure this stuff out before you present any product or service.

Because really the product or service, I don't want to say it doesn't matter because it matters, but it matters. Third, you can't even get to that point until you solve the outcome. So I also liked Raul, what you said about, you know, as you're structuring their problems, structuring your, your widget and how you solve that problem, it was, you want to highlight the outcome, the result, or the metric is, were those the three, you said something really great right there that I want to, want to repeat.

Yeah, absolutely. Think of it as a table. So the first column is the problem and all you're doing is selling problems and solutions to problems. The second is the area of transformation. What happens to them when this problem is solved? But then the third is how do you measure success per you can measure it through, uh, what they're able to do enablement.

You can measure it through actual ROI and people always think, well, what's the return on investment on this? It's not always that one of our clients works with institutions that get a lot of donations. And for them, it isn't about, oh, you know, let's make an ROI on what the donations, the more it's like, how do we prudently deploy donor dollars?

See that thinking there's a little different than the traditional, Hey, you're going to get 126 ROI. If you work with us, like, who cares? Are you making an impact? How do we report this back to the people who are giving us millions of dollars? So it's, you need to dial this into the customer segment, but those were the those would be the big three columns.

And then if you have a case study. Like, how do you prove success there? Show them, don't tell them. That's great, because I think 1, so I'm just past the 2nd year in my business and 1 of my services offered in sales training and sales workshops. And it's so funny because with sales training. 1 of the things I'm learning is I almost have to demonstrate that they have a problem 1st and then how can I solve it?

But the ROI piece is really tricky because I support B2B long complex sales cycles. And you have to depend on people to self-report. So I'm doing a year-long case study to help with that social proof, but that's been a metric that's been hard for me to quantify because it depends on the teams taking the action to get the result.

So it's, it's interesting, but I like how you broke it down that way. Let's lean into that too, just to kind of bring that to the surface. This is another sticking point when I work with clients and just like the belief of overcoming, okay, is it just ROI that we measure? So we really want to, when you dive into your ICP and your customer segments, obviously, you know, like the industry team size, right?

Okay, that's simple, easy. Who are you actually selling to? What is their personality like? And you can use this, you can use whatever the big file, it doesn't matter. The key thing is, are they going to want to be correct? Are they super analytical and want to make sure that they're safe? Do they want to promote and support others or are they more interested in others, their well-being, and our supporter role?

And that's incredible because the language that you use during the sales process, which we can get to in the next part of the convo, the language, the presentation, the vernacular, the tonality, it all plays a role. And it also plays a role in, how you stack the problems and the solutions. You have to know who you're selling into, like, what is their personality type?

What I attract. businesses and I work with them, it's almost like the same personality type. And it's like, okay, that's what I'm putting out there. That's who I'm attracting. Great. Let me lean in on that. Let me serve them at a higher level. You have to find that for your business. And this could be like, well, what does it matter?

I just want to make a sale today. Well, let me tell you, this is the difference between making a sale at one X, and the potential to like 10 to 17 acts of the current pricing that you have. Right. And I think one thing I'm starting to get now that I'm past the two-year mark is that you know, services ecosystem.

I'm able to sell different services to my clients, which has been wonderful. And that's a long-term vision, but now it's starting to happen. It's like, Hey, we need a quote for you to help us over here. Hey, why don't we train our sales team? So it's been, it's starting to happen, but it is interesting, especially Raul, let me ask you a question in B2B.

We have a lot of different Decision makers in the process. So in this, in the example of what does your client care about? Like I'm talking to HR professionals to hire me for their sales team, but the sales team disc profile is much different than the HR professionals disc profile. So it's interesting because you have to kind of flex to who you're talking to.

Also, and that's like a, you know, Just another layer of town that we got to focus on is the beauty of human behavior and there's no escape. So I feel like that's why I'm a new astrologer. Sometimes people are like, I don't get it. I'm like, well, it's just another way of describing human behavior. It's just fun.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, Yeah, when there are multiple things. So let's talk about the actual presentation and the actual process for the sales, because there's a, there's a certain level of certainty that you have to deliver, regardless of who you're talking to. Like, if you don't believe in what you're selling, then that's like, you're not going to sell, but to, to, to close the loop on the product piece.

Uh, when I say product high services, some people think that it's just like courses or you create like done with you servicings apart from the done for you, but it's, I like to think of it as Lego blocks, like knowing that for these core problems that you're solving, you know, which service or which tangent or aspect or bullet point of the service solves that and you have a backend system.

Either human yourself or technology to execute it for you. So that it's on repeat on the dial. So regardless of what you sell, even if you make a bespoke offering. You can just collect the Lego pieces together and execute on that. And I'm not oversimplifying this, but this is critical, especially for sales teams that tend to either oversell over promise and then fulfillment gets backlogged, you go negative with pricing with clients, meaning your profitability goes negative and like even your pricing was good, your profit is tanked and there's friction between sales and fulfillment.

So the key thing is to marry fulfillment in alignment to the services that you're selling and then having those things dialed in so that, okay, the client wants number one, three, and five. We're going to go and execute that. We can do that. These timeframes, these deliverables, and we were to have it backlogged.

That's, that's the one critical piece. That's not really always spoken. It's critical for sales to be able to have that alignment with the operations and fulfillment team. Okay. That's cool. Because I, I think it also speaks to if you're talking to someone who cares about this and you're talking to somebody else who cares about this, but they both have influence.

You already have yours, it's like the Lego blocks are a cool analogy. It's almost like a menu item of what you pull for which person and when I like that visual and it feels custom. So you can create custom quotes and custom orders, even though you're selling the same stamp over and over and over again.

Those are the best businesses, by the way, where you're doing the same thing repeatedly. The thing is, if you want to focus on value, this code, goes now into like the sales conversation. As you already know the typical discovery, the gap selling, I mean, we can dive into that. The key thing that I think is the most important is to hear the words that they're saying and just use the inflections and understanding and making sure that they know that you've heard them.

And this is where you start taking notes and then you start creating a quote-unquote custom scope. Some scopes are custom regarding like, here's what needs to be true for you to get this outcome. But the key I think is in the actual presentation. And I don't usually share slides until either a request for it or midway through the conversation.

Cause the key is always to like, once you do your discovery, it depends if it's one call, two calls, three call discoveries, depending on the level of stakeholders and the size of the project that you're selling, I mean, that's. I'm not a proponent of a two-call close. I think it's like building a relationship, building trust, make sure you can solve the problem.

When you go to the presentation though. I always hone in on here's what you told me. Make sure this is true. And when you do this, I've had this where I, where I, um, gone on the second call with a team or was the second or third call And I mentioned, here's what I heard. Is this right? And I just started talking.

You mentioned that you were struggling with X, Y, and Z, or, you can't predictably create success over and over again. And as I said, those, it was almost like, yeah, you're right. And like their shoulders drop down and it isn't to hurt them. It isn't, it's just a way for them to know that you understand their problems more than they do.

And everyone says that but how do you actually deliver that? And the way that I deliver it is here's what I heard. Can you help me make sure that this is correct? You're not saying, uh, like reading from a checklist. Okay, you're suffering from X, Y, and Z, and A, B's like, don't, don't do that. Like that's just scripted.

But then when you move into the transition phase, okay, cool. That makes a lot of sense. Our goal is to achieve this outcome. So here's what needs to be true for that to happen. And instead of saying, here's what I'm going to sell you. It's like, here's what you need to do. Here are the items. You can run with it.

You can have someone else do it for me, or we can collaborate to do it together. And when you list out, here's what he said, that's your scope. And you tell him, here's, what's going to happen. But then I always love to give options, giving them options of how to engage with you. And this goes back to the product type service.

This goes back to the Lego pieces of here's how we can engage together. If you want to do the high-end. The mid and low end and for our financial CEOs or CEOs out there making a profit, you want to make sure that whatever your lowest pricing is, is your ideal profit number. So whatever you sell, you're always going to be profitable.

But when you do it this way, you anchor it towards value. Unless it's a straight-up product type service and you just focus on the back and increase profitability and LTV, but you focus on value and you swing for the fences, not absurd balloon pricing. I've tried that, done that. It works. But just realistic non delusional pricing that can help people and serve them.

But, uh, you can swing for the fences. Here's all I'm saying. Have you noticed? I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, I was just going to finish by saying the key thing is to always empower their next move. You're not there to push. You're not there to sell. You're like, here's what needs to happen. Here's how we can do it.

How do you want to proceed? And they self-select and close themselves. You do not have to push. Okay, let's say that again. So you present the three different options, like a good, better, and best solution based on what they told you. So it appears customized. You know that it's a win, no matter which path they take.

And then say your script again, Raul, or you know, what you just said. Well, when you, when you do this, it is from, it has to come from a place of service. You're empowering their next step and when you do that, they literally self-select and close themselves because you don't have to push. You don't have to say, this is what we need to do.

You just empower them and just move forward in the conversation. Okay, great. One would be a good day to either touch base to finish this up with the team or select the date to press play. Love it. And have you noticed this? This is more of just like a curious, uh, you know, curious feedback, but when you present your three packages or your three pricing tiers, have you noticed a theme?

Do most people select the middle one? Do they, it's not a race to the bottom. Have you seen any type of, um, like synergies there? So I, sometimes just present one. Sometimes I present two or three, depending on again, what they need and the level of engagement. And This is going to sound weird and like, Oh, you're underpricing your clients.

Like usually people want to select the big one, the first one. And it's not because, um, we're, it's not manipulative in any way. It's just like, if you want to go fast if you want the highest value, I think the value conversation that we know the problems we build the rapport and even some of my clients and I'm not, it's not because I'm special or this process is amazing.

My clients are like just phenomenal people, but they close the biggest deals in their business. Just following this process. And it's, it's a lot of that is the relationship building and the key thing is just presenting it in a way. And usually, the right stakeholder is always going to choose. And I had a founder tell me, like, I care about my business so much.

I'm going to choose the best. I didn't even look at the other two because decisions, decisions are a mirror of who they are, not of what you do. Like, there's a reason why there's Honda, Toyota, Lexus, and then like whatever the other luxury cars. There's a reason why the same cars with four wheels get you from point A to point B have different classes and different vehicle sizes.

Like it's a reflection of the person driving it, not about the car. Oh, the car analogy is great. I like that. Cause it's very, that's interesting too because I'm thinking about, you know, like a luxury travel agent, for example, if you're presenting options, that person's going on a once in a lifetime trip, they're already investing and spending the money, like.

Yeah, I don't want to sacrifice that snorkeling tour. Like I want to go snorkeling. So I know it's a little bit of a simplified analogy there, but I really like how you laid that out. And I've noticed the same thing too, in my sales training, the closing part, isn't that beefy because. If you do all the first things right, the clothes become very organic and simple.

Like, why wouldn't they work with you? You understand their problem. You speak the same language they do. You gave them a customized solution. So I really like that, that, you know, you mentioned they're kind of selling themselves and they closed it themselves because that is a sign that you did the first part correctly.

Yeah. And it's, it's all about, I'm a huge proponent of just relationship and it sounds lame and old school and simple, but with the rise of AI and like, relationship selling, just actually caring. is significant. You'll be in the top 1 percent of the 1 percent of people who are selling your clients.

And that's not just me, it's the feedback that I'm getting, even in my own prospecting. So yeah, it's just, it's just around collaborating and finding ways to make that match. Because sometimes the question isn't, how are we going to work together? It's like, we're going to work together. It's just a medium of like, which path we take.

Yeah, I like that mindset shift to like, yeah, of course, we're going to work together. It's just finding the right fit for what you need. That's very cool. And, I would be curious about your experience too, with the different types of people that you worked with, do you see areas where people like people commonly drop the ball in this process?

Like where, where's a common theme that you see people struggle with? And maybe you can give us some tips on how to overcome this? I think the major two we've discussed that, but we should probably dive in deeper into them are. Not selling your services. Just don't sell your services. No one cares about your services.

No one cares how many backflips you do and how many coffees you drink. They just care about the thing you're getting me. Um, so that's the number one thing that takes some time to overcome. It's just sell the outcome or sell the problem. And your marketing is just selling problems. The second one is just the normal human fear of putting a normal aggressive price.

I was talking to, so this prospecting and with clients, like people that I'm looking to support and current clients, uh, looking to support, like some people are raising their pricing because they want to scale up and they're a little nervous about the new pricing. I think that's normal. Uh, even when, uh, our clients, when we're pitching and we're presenting services that they've usually charged three X less, but because the value is there.

It would be a disservice to charge so little amount they're afraid, like, Oh crap. I've like, am I going to get laughed out of the room? That's literally what I, what I hear is like, I feel like I'm going to get laughed out of the room and I don't know how to like, just overcome that by saying, just overcome it.

It's just, it's just normal. It's just a normal piece. It's like when I, I've said this enough, so I have to do it. Like I'm training for an Ironman and I've only done like, like the half distance of an Ironman, which is like an Olympic. And anytime I line up to go swim for a triathlon like I'm freaking nervous like that's normal.

It's the same thing. Like once you get the first yes, I'm like, Oh, this is normal. And then once you get that consistency, like, okay, this is normal. There are some ways that you can like, um, uh, condition yourself in terms of. The beliefs you have around your services, the beliefs you have around the deliverables, tracking your client wins and just saying, look how friggin awesome this can actually be.

I know this is worth it. So you can condition yourself over time with that. Um, but I think in the beginning when you're doing this, it is going to take some time and you're going to be like, okay, wow, that's different. I'm not used to this. But once you get that first, yes, you're like, oh. That was too easy.

Like maybe I'm underpricing. Yeah. Interesting. Cause I, I think that when I first started my business, that was my big struggle. I would either price too high and they were sticker shocked and, and, and, or I take that back. I actually think I priced appropriately, but I didn't do a good enough job communicating the value and the transformation.

Like that's what I learned at the beginning. But, um, I also think people thought since I was new in my business, It was a lower dollar amount that I was worth. It's like, no, I'm, this is starting from experience. And I think that's a big hurdle that I've had to get over. Um, but you're exactly right. Like, once you start getting the, yes, it's like, okay, this isn't out of line.

There are other forms of currency when you're building too. And so it's been, um, it's been interesting, but it's been probably one of the hardest things that I've had to do is figure out pricing models and being confident in presenting pricing. There are so many cool pricing models too, on that point, like you, it's not just value-based pricing.

You can value-based price. You can, one of my buddies is doing subscription-based. So it is a value, but it's subscription-based pricing. So they're a design firm. And I think their prices, they raise their prices to the range is nine to 15 K a month for the design services. And, uh, they've, they raised it because of the demand.

So you can do that. You can do a rev share deal. You can do equity. Maybe not. I wouldn't always propose that, but there are ways to do like retainers plus, you know, performance fees. Uh, which is like what a rev share would look like. So there's a lot of different ways to work with pricing to like, to your point, where's the client at?

Go for like a 40-minute sprint run, like intervals. Once you do that. And you figure out like, wow, I'm capable of things because everyone has a body. And if you're healthy and thankfully like have mobility, everyone has a body. The people you're selling to do the same thing. What's the difference? It's just how you think in the words that you use and identifying what words are used to describe yourself, your circumstance, your opportunity in the future, and also knowing you're thinking, am I stuck in the past?

Am I too anxious about the future? Or am I sitting in the present? And there are ways to get not just present now, but like being like gratitude always brings you back to the present. So there's a little bit different than like maybe what traditional people would say. I love that answer. But once you, I mean, I think this is why I love it, even though it's really hard training for this thing.

It's like, wow, crap, I can do this. Or like, wow, my heart rate is now like incredibly healthy and you're capable of so much. And if you see that, like, okay, well, how do I carry this onto other areas of my life? And I, my greatest, uh, my best mentor says this and it took me, I don't know how many hours, like hundreds of hours to figure, like sometimes the message takes, you know, goes around the world and it just takes a little bit more time to go through those two inches across the, between the years.

But if you're the right kind of person, you have the right habits, you have the right, you know, mentality, you have the right focus, you have the right aspirations and determination. You just have to be the right kind of person and you can do it. I love that, Raul. Thank you for that. I think it's a mindset shift in how you show up too.

And I think that that's very cool. I like to just wake up early and do something difficult. I'm like, all right, I can do that. I think the first, the first big negotiation I had to do, I, Called the guy, you know, I've had everything ready to go and he said, Oh, can you call me back in 10 minutes? I'm like, Ooh, okay.

And so I had an appointment I had to be at. So I was driving. I was like, okay, I'll just drive to the appointment and take the call from the parking lot. So I'm driving to my appointment and in my head, I'm like, you're a shark, Sarah, you're a shark. And a little voice popped into my head. I was like, well, you're kind of a baby shark.

So I just started the business. And so I listened to that song, Baby Shark on the way to the appointment. And I was like so much lighter than by the time I had the phone call. I was asking for big dollars and I just kind of loosened myself up that way. And then later I called my parents to tell them how it went.

I said, Man, in my first, job in LA, I was getting paid X dollars. And I just asked this guy for the same thing for a month. You know, it was just such, it's almost as if you can make it light and comical. I think that helps too. It just removes some of the, I don't want to say desperation, but it removes some of the pressure we put on ourselves.

And I loved your mindset of just, if you're in your body in a, in a powerful way, whatever that looks like to you, that's what's going to help how you show up. No, I love that. And, Josh Braun is one of my favorite, like, uh, like his, his one-liners, his one punches, it's always the touch. Like, If it doesn't work, okay.

If it does work, okay. But the key thing is, and I, and I like this, this is the Norwegian translation of the word sales. I think it's selja with a J, selja. It means to serve. And if you really cut, and I, and I, it's like a cliche, stupid, whatever. Like, okay. Like, If you really do come from a place like that, other people can feel the contagion that you're different and you're actually there to help the other human.

And when you do that, like you'll never run out of work. It's, almost like once you dial in the acquisition, once you dial in how to get them consistently and you seek to serve, the question is how big, when I, when I worked in the house and, or I worked in helping agencies scale up or marketing firms scale up, it's Once you crack that code, it really was a question of how large do we want to build this thing?

And then the operation sustainability to fulfill that demand. And I think that's the key thing to look at here. And the only thing that can happen to do that is you're solving a unique problem or an important problem. You're you're owning that and you're just not stopping. Sometimes the key thing to business is endurance.

I talked to people who have been in business for 20 years, like, dang, that's goals. And some people who are promoting yourself, promoting themselves, hype you're like, I've been doing this for a long time. Okay. I've been doing this for five years. Bro. Like that's barely getting started. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it is a, it is an interesting thing too.

I was talking to someone who's been in their business for seven years and they used to, you know, be working a very well-known brand and a very high-level role. And somebody put us in touch and I was telling her, I said, well, I feel like I should be farther. And she goes, you've been, you've gotten far in two years.

Like it's okay. And I think you're exactly right. Like I liked the point that you made Raul about looking at. The clients that you have closed or the work that you have won and counting it as wins. And it doesn't always have to be monetary wins either. It could be that person told me I helped them, that person, you know, sent a LinkedIn message and said the podcast helps them.

You just have to measure success a little bit differently, but I really liked your point of if you show up energetically with kind of wanting to serve. You're never going to run out of work. And I think that's, that's very cool. Cause I think sales is a noble cause. I think it's something that we all need and it gets like a dirty word.

So I like that energy shift and I like the Norwegian definition too. Yeah. Translation. Yeah. The, the, the pushy idiots are the ones no one likes, but, um, and I'll call them out any day, but, um, one thing too, and maybe this can help, cause I was on a pod at the solar printer pod and. Well, amazing podcast. If you want an intro, he mentioned, it cause he was going solo.

It's like, Hey, what, what do you do? Like when, like, you're not confident or like when you have self-doubt, cause everyone has self-doubt, like I'm not as good as I think I am or whatever. Um, it's just keeping that wins journal, but also if you can't get the testimonials from the clients if you can figure out a case study or way of permission to do that, but always have that wins journal.

And it's like, okay, cool. I don't suck as much as I think I suck because sometimes we'll have that data or sometimes So the fruit of the work that we do is going to take 30 days or 60 days to mature. Uh, another thing that I would recommend is just to keep a daily log, like a daily win. And always focus on the main three things that matter the most.

Number one, did you make your three deposits in revenue-generating activities? Not just, I followed up. That's not a deposit. That's a continual. Did you make a deposit to make an offer? Did you make an offer to either get a referral, get a client, or make an introduction? Because everyone that you talk to is either going to be a prospect, going to introduce you to a prospect, or is going to be a JV marketing partner.

And if you're in, that's one key thing to keep in mind too. Yeah, I was going to say, let's say that all again. They are not, you don't have to say it all again, but I love the every day we're showing up doing three things that are revenue-generating activities. Revenue generating activities and this is legit sales.

Not marketing, not education, not posting, more talk to someone, introduce you to a prospect. Make an offer to a prospect or to a JV referral partner or co-marketing partner. Then you focus on what deposit I make for my clients. Depending on the level of clients that you have or your team for your clients.

And then what deposit did I make to grow the business? This could be, Oh, I redid the brand, or I posted this thing, or I did this podcast. Okay, cool. That's a long-term deposit. It's going to support the business. You made the sales stuff. And as you do that, because sometimes you can get unmotivated. Like, Oh man, Oh my gosh.

When is this going to turn out to, have? Or work or whatever, like just depending on where you're at in your stage. That's really helpful. Cause then you can see, okay, I did the right things. I did my workouts for the day. I do this, I eat right, I sleep well, and fitness and health are inevitable. And I, I really like that analogy too, because I did that in corporate too.

I had a list, an Excel document on my desktop and it was just called accomplishments. Whenever I closed a big deal, whenever I set up a big meeting, whenever I got feedback on training we did internally. I would put it in that document, but every time the performance review came around, I had everything there.

If I was feeling down, I had everything there. So it was just, um, it's just nice to reflect back because that gives us the motivation to keep going. I really liked that. I, um, that for the, for the listeners, the show is now on YouTube. Raul, you'll appreciate this. I have, oh, wow. What I call them is my impact board.

So whenever I get like, you know, that's so cool. A letter from someone or some, you know, somebody helps me, I just kind of like write their name on a post-it and put it on my wall. And it's just like, that's pretty cool. A visual reminder of like, oh, I'm not running this business alone. I have great clients, I have great referral partners.

I get to meet people like you and have these types of conversations. So it's been, um, it's been great. And I, I, I personally. Had a lot of takeaways in this conversation. I love the workouts for the day in terms of work activities. Any other things you want to share with us before we start to wrap up? I think that that is the, the core, core premise of how you increase profitability and revenue per client.

Is strategic thinking, how you translate that to the sales presentation? How do you provide options and make sure that your team can fulfill that? Or if you're fulfilling it on it, then you fulfill on those pieces, but you know exactly what those things have to be. And that's what is required, in my opinion, to go to market and build trust.

Because I think the big key term right now is like, there's a trust recession. Like, yeah, there is. But if you have these things in mind, building that trust, assuming you can do that really well is relatively simple because humans are humans. They're not really going to change much. Um, we're not going to change much.

And that's, that would be the key thing is just focus on the back end foundations. And then when you go to market, focus on building the trust. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Raul. Where can people find you if they want to connect with you, if they want to hire you, if they want to learn more, where can we find you?

The best place would be LinkedIn or right on the website to do good work. io. That's good work. io. It'll send you to LinkedIn as well. Just message me or email me. You'll find my contact there. Awesome. I will link everything in the show notes too. I am really grateful that you and I got to meet and have this conversation.

I feel, I feel excited to go through my, big 3 deposits today. I'm ready to go. We're recording this in the morning. So we got the day ahead of us. Raul, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate your insights and expertise. Thank you, Sarah.