Do you have enough quality appointments with the right prospects? Ask any salesperson, good or bad; killing it or struggling. Most of them will tell you they need more leads, and more accounts.  While that is certainly not always true there are cases where leads are fine but what truly leads to more business, more deals won, and unprecedented results is increasing the number of quality appointments with the right prospects. Simple put Quality matters fare more than quantity.

Today we talk about how to narrow down who you are targeting, message to them, and win more new business with the right type of customers.

Much like the RedZone Sales Opportunity Management App, Chris Bremmer and Tim Cook of SalesPunch.Guru built their solution as salespeople focused on growing their own business.  It worked so well now they are helping others get in front of the right prospect with a high-quality appointment program. To learn more about them visit them on LinkedIn.

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If you’re not absolutely certain who the decisions makers are and what their buying criteria are in your top 3 opportunities I can help. I’m working with a few clients for the next 12 weeks to help win their deals and hit their goals  — without a crazy amount of new prospecting, social media BS, or magic. If you want to accelerate your income and book of business, have an existing set of customers and prospects email me at tim@timkubiak.com the word “Velocity”  and I’ll get you all the details.

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Quality Appointments with the Right Prospects

Tim Kubiak 0:01
One of the biggest things we’re hearing right now is people need more leads. today. We’re not just talking about leads, but we’re talking about getting quality appointments with Tim and Chris from sales punch guru. Hi, I’m Tim Kubiak. And I’m the host of bow ties in business. As always, you can find us on our socials at bow ties in business on Facebook and Instagram, bow ties in bi z on Twitter. And you can find me at Tim Kubiak just about everywhere. And be sure to check out our new Red Zone selling group on Facebook.

The sales punch methodology was created five years ago, almost by accident.

There was a national sales contest comprising over 800 bars and 4200 salespeople, Tim wanted to be in the top three.

From there, they built this methodology out and they’re now helping other people set better quality appointments. And that’s really what they do. Tim’s a multiple president’s club winner quota Buster award winner, and he’s got a Bachelors of Science in advertising and Business Management from Ohio University. Chris Bremmer, who don’t believe anything he says about me. I’ve known for over 25 years, and he’s had 25 years of success selling on the enterprise level and building out new markets and verticals. One of the things he does amazingly well in his own business is find and drive new leads and new verticals. And we’re gonna get into that a little bit here. So Tim, Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks, Jim. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. And for people listening. We’re doing an exceptional recording time here. We’re on a Sunday morning and well caffeinated. So I appreciate you guys making the time.

Chris Bremmer 1:41
It’s Sunday morning, got to get up and get it done.

Tim Kubiak 1:45
That means your weeks are so busy. That’s when we had to do it. Right. Yes.

So we talked a little bit in the intro about sales budget, how it got started, but do you mind sharing a little more of the story?

Tim Cook 1:57
Yeah, you know, what’s, what’s kind of funny is, there’s a little serendipity involved in the whole process. So several years ago, I think before you before you see it as analytics was involved in, you know, in our lives from a daily basis to when I was a traditional sales guy out there trying to figure out

a better way to skin the cat, you know, to try to figure out a better way to find or more efficient way to find opportunities, and then turn them into to revenue for the companies I’ve worked with. And so I started sending out a group of emails, and then measuring, changing a few things. So almost like a behavioral science aspect to it right. And so I started sending these out and

waited to this, it was a company actually in Boston, that had a technology that allowed this is I don’t think it’s long, no longer available, but allowed me to see when they opened up my emails that I’d sent. And so from there, then I started, I started crafting some things and going after customers in various different ways. And I found this methodology that just worked. And the gentleman who works with us, who is our technical adviser, he and I were having lunch one day, and I was kind of explaining to him my process. And he’s a tech guy, and I’m a sales guy. So

he was thinking about it in a completely different fashion. And he said, You’re not gonna believe this, he said, but I created a process to do exactly what you want to get accomplished. He said, and I actually pitched it to Microsoft, and they didn’t have an interest. And he said, I’ve got it sitting at home, I probably could

could reconfigure it and make it work for you. And so he did that. And lo and behold, you brought up this sales contest, and ended up number number one in two of the four categories that they had, nationally. So I my goal was to try to get the top three, win a few prizes, get a little money, ended up being number one in two of the four categories. So there’s some serendipity involved, but there’s obviously some good sales stick to itiveness for you, you figure out the best process that works.

Tim Kubiak 4:10
I love the fact that you started it to drive your own business, your own sales number, and you’ve turned it into helping other people drive theirs.

Tim Cook 4:18
You know, what’s amazing was the last year

before I launched, we just launched at the end of last year, but before we launched my previous year, I was 378% of plan with the company I was with and it just hit me um, I thought, you know, I can replicate this. This is this is an interesting concept. I can replicate this, we can add some nice technology in the background, to make sure we’re more efficient, but I can put this together

and and push this forward. And we’ve had we’ve actually we’ve been we’re in the process of maybe our second or third beta and we’re, it’s it’s going well, very well. Yeah, it’s it is going well well received and we’re really just

Chris Bremmer 5:00
Trying to help people again, make more appointments because I’m on the other side of it always trying to drive new business. And Jim and I put this together, we test it out. And it’s been it’s been pretty successful with the beta as we’ve been doing so far. So Chris, I want to talk about that a little bit. And you and I actually had, because we’ve known each other and you helped me out with the redzone launch stuff. Really, you were one of the guys that showed the tool too, right? Yeah. So full transparency. And Chris and I joked about in the opening, but we went to school together. And the marshals are because he’s a rocker now too, right. So he’s always on me to play guitar. But away from that. One of the things you said to me on Friday is, every week you find a way to reach outside your industry. Can you talk about how that’s or your your existing swim line of customers talking about how that’s changed your business? Well, what the basically what I’m doing is, is I specialize in going after new business a lot with any company or any any product that I’ve been selling. And you know, we have you have, you have certain verticals that you work in, like I was doing very well in hotel and hospitality, and manufacturing and technology. And those were those were going very well. And I was you know, making a lot of appointments and doing things there. But then I also say to myself, how am I going to continue to stay on top? How am I going to avoid that up and down bell curve that happens in sales where you make a ton of appointments, and then all your activity drops off? What I said is I have to look at other verticals that I know nothing about. I want to go into another vertical and say, okay, who are the target buyers, in this market, whether I was talking to vice president or communications, vice presidents of media, whatever, and I’m just emailing them about what I’m doing. I pick a region, I pick a you know, and I send out an email or I try to contact 25 to 30 people, I do it once a week, I call it like Freaky Friday, I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna try to reach out to people that probably have never would never talked to before. Or maybe it doesn’t even apply to their business, I use 30 of those, I get like three or four of them that would call me back and say, hey, yeah, this could maybe help us, you know, and if you do that, and that just as your prospect level, but then you say, Okay, well, it worked in this vertical in this area, I can now and I have a new vertical to swim in. And that just means more prospects in my funnel. And the more prospects you have in the top of your funnel, the more that’s going to come out on the other side, you know, you can’t sit there with blinders on, you got to keep continue to go wide to get get stuff moving in the right direction for yourself. And that’s, that’s it because the more prospects you put in, the more deals you’re going to have, you’re going to stay at the top of top of the sales chart, you don’t want to be at the bottom, you want to be at the top always there, you know, and, and the only way to do that is to prospect more, make more calls, reach out to new people and find new verticals to work and talk to somebody else about it. You know, Jim, how often have you been talking to somebody someplace and all of a sudden, they’re in a different business, they go, Hey, you can help me. That’s something you know, just by talking to somebody you’ve never talked to before, just to you know, out doing stuff like that. And I say, Tim, I can both of you, Tim, you’ve done that to where you’re talking to somebody, Tim Cook and all sudden boom, someplace else, and then you’ve got another prospect to work with.

Tim Kubiak 7:49
So when you bring clients in, and what I want people to understand is, right, part of it is you can’t just keep banging on the same people the same message over and over again. Right. Yeah. And that’s, that’s, that’s beating your head against the wall. That’s not gonna work. Yeah. And there’s a huge difference between how you approach the market because a lot of people here, oh, yeah, it’s email. It’s not often email, it’s this, it’s that you guys really are coming at this differently. I want them to try and draw that out. So people get really the power of what you do. Sure. Yep. That’s exactly correct. Tim. So, you know, what changes? I think, from our perspective, is we’re taking both behavioral science, so we’re adding some elements to, to what motivates people to want to listen.

Tim Cook 8:39
You know, one of the things that kind of resonates with everybody is the term brevity, because we seem to always get stuck in.

We get emails a lot, right? We get a lot of things from a lot of people. And they’re usually very well put together glossy, if you want to right click to get all of the the rich content to it. That’s things you can do. We actually cut through all of them. We don’t utilize any, there’s no, there’s no graphics in our emails that we send there.

If a paragraph is constitutes three sentences, it might be three sentences long. And it might say, you know, hi, john, instead of dear Robert, you know, it’s a. So there’s some things that we’re doing on our end. And the nice thing about sales punch, is that the exact same technology that we use, to help customers find appointments is exactly how we market so we do the exact same thing for ourselves to find opportunities for ourselves, as we do for our clients. So it’s a it’s the synergies there.

Tim Kubiak 9:51
It’s the old adage, you eat your own dog food, right?

Tim Cook 9:55
Correct. Correct.

Tim Kubiak 9:58
So, three, three, sales.

Guys have a call, somebody got to use it, use that one.

Chris Bremmer 10:03
I’m sure we’ll have more analogies as we work through this.

But it’s just you know, and it’s all about the appointments. And it’s about making the appointments for these people and working it to get to increase their brand. And the only way to do that is to talk to more people, you know, and engage them and engage them quickly. As Tim said, we’re not I hate emails, where it’s 53 pages long trying to sell me through that, here’s what I do, let’s talk about it, and then it gets more interaction and get on calls like this. You know, Tim, one of the nice things about what we’ve done, we’ve crafted a business model, where it’s, it’s virtually virtually risk free. So we only get paid if somebody attends the appointment, or actually the prospect that they’ve asked us to, to bring to the engagement, attends the appointment, and understands what’s going on. So if we could set 100 appointments, and nobody show up,

Tim Cook 10:59
it’s no risk from the customer standpoint, we don’t get anything out of the equation. It only works

if the person attends the appointment. And that’s the only way we get paid. So we actually take the risk out of the entire process forum. And we eliminate what we all understand to be the, the the kind of the dregs of you know, the front end sales process is the thing that nobody wants to do. You know, sales people, we tell everybody we like doing it, there’s not a soul on the planet that wants to sit there and go, I can’t wait to make 120 sales calls today. And find maybe one opportunity out of it, we can turn a list of 1000 names into 4060 120 appointments, which is a phenomenal number. It’s it’s the it’s the drudgery of sales, it’s eliminating that ramp up time or when you when you when you do it, I mean, I The reason I’m successful is people like what’s your success is like, I know how to dial my phone. And I know that if I make 100 dials, I’m going to maybe talk to 25 people and maybe set two appointments and maybe get one sale out of it. But you know, there’s, you’ve got you have those 100 dials, you get 25 people that are now your prospects that you can call it Other times, you know, and stuff like that. It’s just it’s gonna pick up that process. Yep. So what what Chris is basically saying is that process, it’s the old, the old paradigm, and that old paradigm in works for a few, we’re actually taking that paradigm and shifting that that direction. So salespeople are now focused on closing deals, and not finding deals, yeah, we’re gonna bring the deals to them, we’re gonna bring the opportunities to them. And the idea what we end up what we want to get accomplished is a 10, to 15 minute discussion about the value that they bring to their customers. And then their goal is after that 10 or 15 minute discussion, to set up a longer discussion, maybe a demonstration or evaluation of the products and move the ball forward from there. So we tee the ball up, and we actually hit it down the fairway. And it’s their job to have the short game to take it from the fairway to the green and then put it in.

Chris Bremmer 13:07
And then that’s where your redzone product can can can come in as a harmful plug for that, because that’ll be you know, how it came out of mind into something for yourself as well, you know, but we’re teeing it up. And then you’re helping them move through the process through your products. So it’s a kind of go hand in hand with each other, as well. It does.

Tim Kubiak 13:23
So in I want to come back to do they have to bring you a list? Can they bring you an ideal client? Do they have to know who they want to go after? Where

Tim Cook 13:34
would somebody start? Well, we certainly can assist them in creating a list. But we do need, we knew dealer list. And here’s the reason behind that. So we’re going to talk about so we have we viewed in three phases. So once we get a customer on board, then we have a 45 minute discovery call. So it’s sort of backwards and how we traditionally would kind of do a discovery call to see if there’s a you know, there’s a valuation process. We do discovery call afterwards. And we understand, you know, what they’re trying to get accomplished, who they’re trying to sell to, and we talk about who they want to go after. And one of the interesting things is and I think from pre sales guys on the call, we understand this is that leadership always wants us to talk to the C level folks. So the people at the top of the food chain, and I understand that, but that’s not where the meat and the potatoes start traditionally, from a standpoint of evaluating products. It’s the it’s the the mid level guys it’s the directors have of it or whoever that do the determination of where the of what they want to take forward to their VP or their C level person to say, these are the three categories. These are the three things we’re looking at. I’m choosing this one. So one of the problems we’ve always had is customers always want to come to say, we like I’ve got this large list of Have prospects and they’re all CTOs or or SVP of technology or whatever the case may be. And the reality is, those are wonderful names to know and should be part of your bag. But those aren’t the people that want to evaluate traditionally products from that standpoint, they’re, they’re the decision maker after the evaluation has been done, and they want somebody below them to to basically come up forward and say, This is my suggestion. And here’s the reasons behind it, boom, boom, boom, we want to pull that discussion to that level and not talk in terms of C level people. Because a C level people traditionally had admins. And admins do a lot of screening, but also set appointments without being aware of what the value is of the appointment for a CTO, and then the CTO doesn’t want to be on the appointment, because he doesn’t know anything about her, she doesn’t know anything about it. So our focus is on those mid tier folks that truly are the meat potatoes that do all the the the legwork to make things happen. When it comes to purchasing products.

Tim Kubiak 16:12
I’m going to build on that a little bit, because I have a friend who’s a CTO of a pretty big place, right. And when I sit on calls with him on a couple of projects, we’re involved in together away from our day jobs. He’s always the one looking at the budget, taking the recommendations from the tech groups working with the other folks, he’s not the one going, Oh, I need to look at these five things, and make sure one is the best. He’s got a team bringing that to him to your point.

Tim Cook 16:40
exactly correct. And that’s, that’s the, you know, that’s the cell that we got to get through to our to our potential customers, right is that we understand you love the sea level guy. So we all understand that piece of it. But the equation really are the battle is at that that middle level where those guys do the evaluation of products. It’s not at the sea level up

Chris Bremmer 17:03
getting to the sea level people, they don’t want to be sold, they want to make a decision they want, as you said, Tim, they want somebody else to vet it. And we’ve got two choices, A or B, which one do you like better? They want to look at it for 10 minutes and go B, you know, or a you know, depending on what’s going to happen there. So it’s it’s good to know, but the people below them are the ones that are going to be you know, scrambling and doing what they have to do and vetting it out. And those are the people who are trying to reach out to you, which is that how you’re going to make your money’s talking to them that you know, once you’re hopefully going to that CTO level, you basically got a deal as your your it’s not you because he’s going to go yes or no, basically.

Tim Kubiak 17:36
Yeah, back to the redzone Guru approach that we use, right? It for people, it’s that big deal. And knowing who your coach and your influences are, before you get to that decision maker that approver. Right. And built the case, understand the competition and what you’re up against there. If you start right there, and you go top down. Yeah, I laugh people say to me, are you spend your day with CES? No, I spend my day with sales directors and sales VPS of varying size companies, because they’re the ones that understand what we do.

Tim Cook 18:09
exactly correct. And it’s the same concept here your world, we’re, we’re talking about the same, you know, the same set of circumstances.

Tim Kubiak 18:16
So let me pitch you a little bit of curveball and just see if your product might work for a growing segment of the business that we have is actually sort of those large independent brokers in the financial segment and in the commercial property and casualty segment. So these are guys that, essentially are business owners, they’re selling somebody else’s paper. And one of the things we’ve done my theme for the year is planning follow up and follow through with my clients. Right. So everything was build the plan? Are you following up on it? And are you following through on that follow up? If if we had a set of people like that, that said they needed? Look, I need 25 new clients in this size range? Is that something that can come to you guys on and say, Look, here’s who I want to target? I know what they look like, I know roughly where they’re at. Can you help me get in the door? Yeah, I

Tim Cook 19:05
think the answer to that is is a resounding yes. You know, some of the things that we’re struggling with early on are the the consumer marketplace, the residential real estate people. That’s it, that’s a tough market to get into. Just because it is a large group of people and the targets are so are so thin. But that’s a segment that works well. So Chris and I, over the last month have been have been working on modeling, return on investment. Yeah. And so, you know, we we turned around and came up with this. It’s a it’s a very easy set of math equations to figure out the return on investment from a perspective with working with sales punch. And so let’s say an example is a customer’s average contract size is $100,000. Now, I’m not sure how that equates to the organization’s you’re talking About what is any idea from an ASP standpoint or a contract?

Tim Kubiak 20:03
Yeah, you know, so literally the annual premiums are really between 25,000 and a quarter million depending on the size of the property and facility. Right.

Tim Cook 20:11
So if you fall within that range, so so that’s a, that’s a perfect case, right. And let’s say they have a close ratio of 30%. Right. And so let’s get $100,000 at 30%. And we bring 20 appointments a month to them, and so they close 30% of that, that is what that is six, six out of those, right, so that puts $600,000 into their pocket. And in the course of a month, we would have charged them. In this case, it would be like $8,000. So you do the math on something like that. And all of a sudden, if my math is correct, for every dollar they spend with sales punch, they’re putting $75 into their revenue, their top line revenue, right? Yeah. So if they would hire us for the course of a year and view us as a marketing person, at $96,000 a year, we’re gonna make them $7.2 million in revenue. I mean, that’s how those numbers roll out there. So would this work? Well, for that organization? The answer should be yes, it is just a matter of being able to tee it up making sure we have the right contacts, and then doing our magical the backend from a technology standpoint.

Chris Bremmer 21:21
And and Tim, you mentioned, you know, that your your client, your tech company, or your it has a has a target customer, I want to work with people that have properties that are over 5 million to $500 million, or whatever. And you know, that have this this type of revenue, I mean, they’ll have a good customer list, but we have the ability to help them get a better customer list, depending on what they’re going to do, we can make suggestions to them, or we can help them build a plan around that to make our lives more effective, we can do that we can do that. for them. It’s a it’s a bit longer of a process. And that does happen on our discovery call. So now that we’re talking about that we’ve had, you know, people that give us a list and they say this list is great. And then we go through the list, let’s say it’s 1000 names, and I said well, we got over 500 pounds back skewed, this is not good. You know you’ve got there, this is not a good list, you know what you then you need to help us and we need to refocus your list to get that. What do you like, what are you looking for? Then we can put it together and do something to help them there as well. You know, it’s, it’s it can be very specialized as they want or is it broad as they want. But again, they’re only getting paid for the results that we get. So it works out? Well.

Tim Kubiak 22:25
If you just gave me an idea, right? A lot of people you they’re in at midsize companies, they’re in larger companies that have multiple divisions, you know, multiple subsidiaries. So if somebody came and said, Look, I’m dealing with the New Jersey, Pennsylvania Delaware group of XYZ Corp. And now I want the New England in the Mid Atlantic corridor, or however they define it right? Could they come to you and say, Look, these are the titles we sell to these are the people that use our product today? Can you help us map to who the additional people are? By organization type? And by organization? Absolutely,

Tim Cook 23:01
absolutely. One of the things that we’ve done, we’ve put a contract together with with one of the largest list organizations. So from a from a demographic vantage point, they have the ability to drill down really, from targeted, however that you’d like to target it right size, contacts, sea level,

Chris Bremmer 23:22
titles, venture capital money, yeah, when somebody gets an infusion of cash, when they get infused, they got to sell the product, you know, we can we can we can watch that stuff. And we can build a very comprehensive list, you know, and it will be targeted. And but unfortunately, we build that target list for them and then use it, it doesn’t work well, that means they’ve got to revise their message. So where else we’re helping them along multiple aspects of what we’re doing this type of thing, and it can be done, you know, but it also it gives a sales organization a real wake up call to how good their prospects, let’s start. I mean, I’ve worked for companies, they’re like, every prospect in this list is golden, and I call them and every prospects, the emails don’t work, or every prospects, the phone calls don’t work, because people have moved on to other things, you can help clean up and do that stuff. Because you know, Jim’s speaking to sales leaders like we all do Is everybody wants an accurate list, an accurate list is the is the is the starting point. And the more accurate it is, the better the results will be from it. And we can help improve that if it does get to be an accurate list.

Tim Kubiak 24:24
There’s also the reality that, you know, not everybody is in an active buying cycle for what you’re selling. Right. Yeah. And that’s one of the things I struggle with, especially with early stage companies and founders. This is great. It’s going to be the next we’ll whatever, right? Everybody needs it. Well, a nobody knows they need it. Right and be the other thing is is not everybody has it. And some sales cycles might be 30 or 60 days, some sales cycles might be three years to keep them warm and keep them going right Yeah,

Tim Cook 25:02
no, you’re exactly correct. I think that the, the the value that we bring is, is the immediacy of what we can be accomplished. Right. So if, if, if a sales cycles, 24 months, which, you know, I think we’ve all probably been in that that before, you know, from a tech standpoint? No, I was I worked with a, an organization that did signal processing in the, basically in the defense space. And those sales cycles are five and six years long. Yeah. So so you know, we might not fit well in, in that environment might be the case, just because of who they’re going after and what they’re doing, we have to think about those things. Yeah. But for the vast majority of business to business transactions for the vast majority, we probably can tailor a solution that fits their needs, and whether it’s working on the front end to create to create a valid contact list or prospect list, and then pushing things forward from there. But our endgame only is beneficial to us if we can put, you know, basically Fannie’s in the seats, right. It’s just like a sporting event. So we’ve got to get those people to attend meetings, and understand upfront what the meeting is all about. So we our pitch to our pitch to their customers, is about their product, not to try to attend some nebulous meeting, we you know, we talk specifically about what we’re trying to get accomplished, and what the meeting is gonna be about. And if there’s a value. So I think we’ve probably a lot of goodie bags, but yeah, we’ve got to pick and choose our battles.

Chris Bremmer 26:39
Yeah. And picking and that first call with them, Tim is a 10 minute call just to kind of go over the services. And then if the person is interested, he may say, Yeah, that’s great. But my sales cycle for this product, my sales cycle for our product isn’t going to start until July. Okay, so that means you got to call him back in July. And that’s when it’ll start. And then you’ll work it that way. You know, you contact people outside their sales cycle. And I always love the prospect, say, Look, I’m really interested, but we’re not doing anything with this until October. Okay, I’ll market for October. So then I start calling them in July, to remote to to to remind them about we’re going to talk again in October, that again, adds to the adds to the sales brevity and the prospect base for the people that they’re working with. I mean, how many people have you ever called they’re like, thank God, You called? We’re in this sales cycle. Right now. I’m like, okay, Who’s punking? Me? You know, I mean, because that you know, that yeah, it’s like, you never call someone when they’re starting that sales cycle. It’s always we’re halfway through it, or we’ve just changed vendors, you know, to do something else. Oh, they just changed. Okay, well, I gotta call them in a year and see how it’s going or six months. There’s different ways to do this. So it can work that way. But it’s the punch aspect of it makes it really up, grant that sales cycle and make it better to speed it up or to get your ducks in a row for deals down the road. Because, you know, if you’re not tracking, then you’re not doing anything. Right.

Tim Kubiak 27:53
I’ve got one story about once when people were happy to talk to me. Yeah, ready for this? Yeah. So my hair was still Brown, and it was still all here, right? That’s how long ago it was. And what I found out was one of my tech manufacturers was discontinuing. It was a telephone handset using the business, the business world and lumberyards, manufacturing facilities. It was sort of on the low end, but it was super popular. I found out it was being discontinued. So I took a $3 million position in inventory in it. Right before it when disco I sat on it for 90 days before I leaked out that I had 10s of 1000s of them, and I put the price up $25 a set.

Chris Bremmer 28:38
That’s that’s the way to do it, that it was suddenly happy to talk to me. Yeah, all the sudden, hey, this guy’s got, you know, like, Yeah, it does. It does happen that way. But nine times out of 10. Nobody wants to know that you’re not in their sales cycle. This is not when it’s going to happen. Or, oh, we’re going to RFP or when you go into RFP, July. Okay. Well, you know, in Yeah, you know, that’s when you got to talk to the people, you don’t want to talk to you to get that stuff done. But you know, it’s just, you find out what it is. And when it is moving forward, I would love it. If when I talk, I’ve talked somebody on Hey, this is the right time to do it. When I worked in the insurance business, I was busy health insurance business end of the year from October through the end of the year, because everybody changes in January, we had another blip of business in July, because some companies renew in July or January, that’s when I was super busy. The other month is when you’re scrounging around trying to find business for the guy that renews in August, and you just had to you had to do that you have to pick it and work through that cycle. I do that now in talking to people on the deals I’m putting together.

Tim Kubiak 29:34
Yeah, it’s some of my best customers are the guys that when I called them and said, here’s what I do to help you win deals. They’re like, Oh, no, we got this and they call me when they lose that $10 million deal. like Hey, dude, we lost this. We got a problem. Okay.

Chris Bremmer 29:48
And then your price goes up 20% to talk to him because that’s the

Tim Kubiak 29:51
way it’s my day rate is much more if you just want me by the day. Absolutely.

Chris Bremmer 29:56
But it’s it’s you you have to do that and you’re right. I mean, I love Writing, I’ve written big deals. And it’s great to write big deals like that. But where you make your money is in your sweet spot of your transactional businesses. And then

Tim Kubiak 30:10
so bring it back to what you’re doing and sales punch the catalyst. I know who my targets are, you help craft that messaging, that simple set of text that’s going to get people engaged. Is that part of your service part of what you provide?

Tim Cook 30:25
Completely? Yep, yep. And then we just kind of throw it over the technology wall, we send out emails to their list. And we you know, we do the analytics behind them. And it’s at this point is relatively rudimentary, because it is just some basic things we’ll send out if let’s say we have 250. Let’s say we’ve got 1000, a contact list of 1000 that we want to send out in the first month, we’ll send out 250 a week, over a four week period, the first week, we’ll do 50 a day for five days, they make a determination of which, which two or three days do the best for us, then the next week, we switch gears and we do a B testing. So we’ll add a different email to the equation. And then we’ll excuse me, we will work within the function of those two or three days that has the best bang for the buck. And then we understand which ones have and then we do morning and afternoon as well. So we’re turning around and costly honing down. So in week four, week five, we have a very good understanding of how many appointments we’re probably going to get rolling forward per week, based on the fact that we do Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the afternoon and Thursdays in the morning. And we use, you know, email, the third email in the in the set of four that we put together, we’ll use email three or four depending on the case. But the bottom line is we develop this little analytic template for the customer. And then moving forward. We’re just we’re driving that town. So yeah, beautiful. Yeah, it works like a champ. It does, yes.

Chris Bremmer 32:04
Doesn’t that the part of it is that we only get paid. When we set appointments, we get paid for our performance. We’re not we believe in this so much that we’re not asking for upfront money, they want to give us some will take it but you know, but we’re, you know, in the, in the, in the model in the model that they have. In the model we have is you know, you we make 10 appointments, we charge you a set dollar figure for those 10 appointments. That’s what we get paid on. Yeah, we’re getting paid to perform now like other places,

Tim Cook 32:31
and doing stuff like hey, Tim, real quickly, the the, the methodology we put together. So if you think of a traditional, like a drip email campaign or marketing campaign that a company puts together, if they get a 1% success rate on just a response, right, just a response of any kind, they’re pretty darn happy. Yes. So from our vantage point, we traditionally on the very low end art about 3%. And on the high end can hit as high as eight or 9%. And all you need to do is take a look have a you know, take a list of 1000 or do your math for 1000 and come up with what eight 9% is 1000. from a standpoint of setting appointments. It can be a big game changer for companies a big, big, big game changer.

Tim Kubiak 33:16
And you’re talking just so people listen to clear, you’re talking to actual response rate engagement rate, you’re not talking open rate. Exactly right.

Tim Cook 33:25
It is it’s correct, it is an appointment, a heart appointment set at 8% that’s a big number, that’s a big number. It’s not just chatting with them, it’s setting the appointment getting them to to attend, and then our our attending rates run in the 80% range. So you know, we understand that we’re gonna if we if we need to get 20 in a month for a client 20 appointments in a month attended? You know, we’ve got to put 24 on the books. Yeah. So which is just standard sales practice, we understand that. Yeah, so it’s a it’s it’s a methodology is it’s kind of scratching your head and mind numbing, because it is it can be overwhelming for a customer.

Chris Bremmer 34:09
And Tim for the customer. The other aspect of this is the fact that you’ve worked with new sales people you’ve worked with, with new people in an organization and there’s a there’s that that bell curve of ramp up that they have when they get started, you know, and if you know that can take three months, it can take three years, depending on the sales cycle on the deal with us before the people can come in and they can have appointments set up. So on the first day, yes, they’re making calls to make their own appointments, but they’ve got four appointments set up for themselves as a new person so they can go on these appointments that are pre qualified, that are interested, get them a little bit more comfortable with the product line and help them to move things along. You know, so it works out it works out well for that. Because you know, when you first started the company, they’re like, Yeah, we got nothing for you. Here’s the list. Good luck, you know, when there’s your to set your own appointments, but if if a sales director says Well, we just hired Chris, and I’ve got four appointments set up for him once a week for the next month, just so that we can get him on an appointment. Get them, you know, you work, we’re working with our verbiage and getting stuff done, that’s an added value. And that’s going to give that salesperson some more confidence to when they get started. So they’re not just have nothing when they start, you know, it’s, it’s a little something, you can sort of see the light at the end of the prospect tunnel with these four little things or whatever they got going going forward. And that helps build them up, make them a better salesperson and want to make more calls. So it’s gonna work well for that.

Tim Cook 35:25
And you know, one of the interesting you guys made this comment, it triggered me. I can remember I went to work a long time ago when they deregulated This is this an agency pretty significantly. But when they deregulated deregulated the telephony service telephone service Gendry in the 80s. Oh, yeah. Right, I can remember I started working for this long distance company. And I raised my hand during a sales meeting the morning we had like, 10 sales guys, all brand new. And I said, I said, How do we what who’s our prospect list? What are we going to go after, and he walked into his office and came out, when we used to have yellow pages. pages, and he set it on my desk, my desk. And I thought, Oh, my gosh, oh my gosh, what am I gotten myself into, but, you know, lasted several years enjoyed it, it was fun. It certainly knows bloody quite a bit. But,

Chris Bremmer 36:23
you know, now the yellow pages is Google, they go to go to Google, click it, you know, type in what you’re looking for, you’ll find five people start making those calls. I mean, that’s how some people get started with it, you know, if you’re gonna you know, but if you had four appointments scheduled first month to get you up, that’s a little bit more in your in your in your pipeline to get going and helps a new person or helps a struggling salesperson get through a difficult period, whatever I mean, it can be used in multiple different ways, I would take I’ll take a free appointment anywhere I can get it as a salesperson, you know, someone’s gonna do that. But, you know, it’s because I know how long it is to get it done. And how it is to make that making secure that.

Tim Cook 36:58
So yeah, so some of the areas that we kind of want to focus on to moving forward for for people that might be listening, our product launches, right on the front end of a product launch, I mean, to hit the ground running, putting 30 4060 100 appointments together, for a product launch could be a big game changer, right could significantly change that perspective, as Chris pointed out, the new hire potentially giving them getting them up to speed from that vantage point, just maybe to see the sales manager do the presentation in the close five or 10 times so they can get comfortable with what the process is, right? It’s certainly one thing we all know, it’s, it’s much more in trepidatious, for us to have to do in front of our peers to do when we sit there and do role playing, it’s much more difficult than it is in front of a customer. But it’s also wonderful to see your sales manager just knock the cover off the ball in front of the customer, you’re like, this is how it’s done. And so so that’s another element of what we do, we obviously can set it up just from a standpoint of month in month out provide 20 3040 appointments for the company per month. So we’ve got a lot of scenarios where we can assist in, you know, in pushing this forward for customers.

Tim Kubiak 38:15
So you just gave me a thought so so many people are transitioning their businesses. And look, we’ve all got a tech background, a lot of the listeners do too. If you’re going from a traditional hardware background and incorporating more services, not just a product launch, but you guys actually could help people drive a services launch if they’ve done a maintenance or moving to a monthly billing, you know, op x versus capex model right?

Tim Cook 38:39
Oh, completely right in it as a service model is a wonderful opportunity for us. Right? Because that, that really we can engage them from the cap versus capex versus the optics. Yeah, good point. Good point. So

Tim Kubiak 38:52
I’ve got to ask Who did you Who did you sell long distance for?

Tim Cook 38:56
It was a company out of Louisiana, Monroe, Louisiana called LD d s long dismay. Do you know these guys? Yeah,

Tim Kubiak 39:05
it was my first job out of school. I was on the wheeling West Virginia office. I opened the Pittsburgh territory sold against pace. I’ll be darned.

Tim Cook 39:13
Yeah, I was in Dallas and it was LD DS. And the owner’s name first name was Freddie it couldn’t say his last name. But what a What a fun. It was a two years of it was the wild west of sales.

Chris Bremmer 39:27
Yeah. Oh, yeah. What’s up with a long distance company? It’s because most people don’t know what that is. Now they just pick up their phone and dial and they don’t realize there used to be you would have to dial 800 number 15 codes and then pound to get your long distance called duck somebody in Texas, or three cents cheaper. You know, I mean, it was different

Tim Kubiak 39:45
your code, but your pic code, it was your download, go through your carrier discount? Yep,

Tim Cook 39:50
yep. Yep. One of the guys that used to that became friends of mine I worked for him was a guy named Ray Miller and Ray had created you guys probably Remember this a long time ago, you’d have a phone card. And you’d have to punch in these 15? Well, if you were at a hotel, hotels would block that and you had to use their direct service, they wouldn’t allow you to do that. So every hotel call, you would talk to your wife for for three minutes, and you get this $37 bill for the phone service. Well, Ray was the guy instrumental in that hotel technology piece. And I’ve got a photo somewhere of Randy’s holding this check that that when he went public with with his organization, it was for like $34 million that he had generated for himself in his IPO. But what a different world and place in time that thank goodness doesn’t exist any longer.

Tim Kubiak 40:51
Yeah, What a small world.

Chris Bremmer 40:53
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That’s crazy stuff. Crazy stuff.

Tim Kubiak 40:57
You talking about Yellow Pages, since we’re telling stories about our beginning, literally, when I opened Pittsburgh, I had this side of the river between these two highways, and I walked the business district and not literally knocked on doors every day. And I had a young woman named Jennifer in the wheeling office. Who Has she set two appointments a week for me was the most amazing thing, because those were two glass doors. I had to knock on and go. No, I don’t make long distance calls. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Bremmer 41:25
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, you know, when you get when you first get started in a business and talking about cold calling, like, I remember I used to love I used to love to go into a building and have an appointment on like, the first floor, third floor. And then I go to the top of the building, get off at every floor and start dropping my business card off. And every single way, that doesn’t happen anymore, you get escorted out of the building. Because you can’t you can’t you can’t do that. But it used to be, you could do that. Or I would walk down the street and had every single business. That’s where I learned how to keep doing that stuff. And it was great when you walked in someplace. And he said, Yeah, I’m gonna evaluate next month or whatever, I’ll be back, you know, and stuff like that.

Tim Cook 42:01
It’s certainly a character builder, when you have to go through those things in it, and we’re talking about it laughing now. But at the moment in time, it’s the most demoralizing end of the day, when you’ve got nothing to show for, for a lot of slammed doors, a lot of good outs, a lot of escorting you down the elevator, not the door. Events, it puts you on that list,

Chris Bremmer 42:22
you can’t get back in the building without an appointment. I was on list. You know,

Tim Cook 42:26
I mean, it’s just, it’s I mean, it’s, it’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to look back now. But the day was demoralizing. What we hope to do from a sales point standpoint, is eliminate that demoralizing aspect for a sales guy. And you know, and bring some validity right out of the chute.

Chris Bremmer 42:45
Yeah, yeah. And then you have that first four weeks where you make 1000 dials a week, and you made one appointment, you just like, Oh, I’m terrible at this, you know, and, and it will get better. And this will help you know, the salesman will help you get better right off the bat. So it’ll be better for you. So it’s a it’s really a good tool on multiple levels to help you increase your business, more prospects in the funnel, something coming out as a sale on the other side. That’s what that’s what the President wants. Right?

Tim Kubiak 43:12
Okay, gotta drive the economy. salespeople are the ones that make it happen.

Chris Bremmer 43:15
Yes, we do. And everyone hates us for that, let’s say, you know, all your sales. You know, I’m

Tim Kubiak 43:21
gonna reinvent myself as an Instagram fitness model influencer.

Unknown Speaker 43:26
Jim, I know you do what

Unknown Speaker 43:27
drives the economy

Chris Bremmer 43:28
now. Right? Get that hot yoga. You’re doing, Jim, that’s, that’s good stuff.

Tim Kubiak 43:33
I gotta get my vaccine. It’s been almost a year since I’ve been in the studio. So Well, I

Chris Bremmer 43:38
think we’re all still waiting for our vaccines. Well, that’ll happen. We’ll see.

Tim Kubiak 43:43
So guys where can

everybody find you? How do they start a conversation?

Tim Cook 43:47
You bet. So we’re at WWW dot sales, punch dot Guruji. You are you. And you can find us there. Give us a look. We’d like to chat a little bit if you’re interested. As I said, you know, when Chris and I were doing the modeling and and it’s like a 75 to one or a 50 to one in a traditional environment. Yeah, versus revenue in your pocket. So it’s a program works. We’re very successful at it. I’ve been successful for the last six or seven years doing this exact same thing for myself from working for another company, and then launching this now. And we’re amazed at the success we’re getting. And we’re, you know, we’re sending out 10 or 15, or 20, just beta requests, and we’re getting two or three or four people going, Hey,

Chris Bremmer 44:41
let’s talk we want to talk so we can provide some value. We’re basically giving our secret sauce to the mass market here what Tim and I have been able to do, and it’s it can be a very vast good tool to help. And we’ll go from there. I mean, you can we can contact you and then we can, you know discuss the process and what we can do to have a positive Get back on your sales business.

Tim Kubiak 45:03
So they can get they can get you through the website, anybody that’s listening that knows me or has connected me on LinkedIn or anything, you know, certainly they can find both of you there as well. Right?

Chris Bremmer 45:13
Yeah. And we’ll have a we’ll have our contact information is on the website as well. So we can do that.

Tim Kubiak 45:20
Okay, perfect. and links to the sales punch guru are in the show notes. So if you’re driving, just keep the episode up. You can click the hyperlink when you’re done same if you’re watching on YouTube. Guys, thank you for taking time on a Sunday morning. I really appreciate you accommodating any last things you want to add.

Chris Bremmer 45:37
I want to know if we’re gonna play out of that Marshall stack behind him that’s what I’m waiting for you to do now.

Tim Kubiak 45:42
So my real martial dude is actually a I blew the head. Yeah, I I had an extra pre emptive half a pre emptive in the game stage. So I had dirty and really dirty in my sound. Yeah. And it eats the DC electronics. So eventually, I’ve got to send it out and get it rebuilt for what a probably the fourth time.

Tim Cook 46:06
So, in a nutshell, I just want to say that that sales punch. Our tagline is where marketing collides with sales. So what we want to do is become the part of your marketing arm that generates opportunities and appointments for you for your team.

Tim Kubiak 46:23
So instead of dumping more money into maybe online advertising, do something that gets a measured result that you only pay for when you get it right.

Tim Cook 46:31
Correct. Correct. We’re zero risk zero risk you only pay for the appointments attended.