Speaker 1: 0:19

Thank you. Meet Evan Polin, the president of Polin Performance Group. A master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience, evan is not just a consultant. He's a force in sales, focusing on mindset, planning and skill development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services, the Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency. An expert in growth marketing With 20 years under his belt, craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed.

Speaker 2: 1:11

And welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. I'm Craig Andrews, my partner in crime, Evan Polin. How are you doing this morning, Evan?

Speaker 3: 1:18

I'm doing great, Craig. How are you doing?

Speaker 2: 1:20

I'm doing awesome. I'm super excited. The reason I'm super excited, as most of you don't know, but Evan gifted me with a chance to go see our fighting fills yesterday and and as I was sitting there preparing for this podcast, I was thinking you know, what we have in common is that our clients have a similar problem One target market versus core. Core market or core I'm sorry, Core customer, excuse me. Sometimes we have the burden of explaining to them about who are you trying to target, and they come to us and they go. I don't know anybody who's willing to buy my product Like yeah, sure, and I know that you have a similar problem with that as well.

Speaker 3: 1:59

Yeah, absolutely. Oftentimes clients try or my clients try to be everybody, be everything to everybody at the beginning, and that's very difficult to build and grow a business that way. It's very difficult to know your ideal client when you're sitting in front of them.

Speaker 2: 2:19

If you think that everybody can be your client and in a minute or two we're going to bring our guest to the stage, scaling and growing a business is really difficult if you don't know exactly what you want that business to look like, and a lot of times, if you don't know that information, you make my job, evan's job, much more complicated, because we have to spend more time and resources just trying to figure out who you're trying to talk to. So, needless to say, we're going to bring to the stage Kevin O'Connor. Hey, kevin, how are you today?

Speaker 4: 2:44

I am fantastic, gentlemen, and you mentioned the Phillies are off to a great start, so yeah, it's a great day.

Speaker 2: 2:50

Yes, it is, yes, it is.

Speaker 3: 2:51

So the only thing as good as that and we're only alienating a small part of our audience is that the Braves are as off to as bad of a start as the Phillies are a good start.

Speaker 4: 3:01

We're going to talk a lot about data today. No team that's going 0-7 has ever made the playoffs.

Speaker 3: 3:12

Fun fact, I like it. I like it Bringing the data. Evan See there, I'm starting to get a trend going here and that's a trend I really like to hear there you go, there you go.

Speaker 2: 3:17

So, kevin, why don't you tell everybody who you are and where you're from?

Speaker 4: 3:20

Yeah, sure Thanks. I'm Kevin O'Connor. I work with a company called Align5. Our mission is essentially to make entrepreneurs' dreams come true. So we do a lot of work around the entrepreneurial experience, but primarily what I do is I'm a scaling up business coach, so I help companies implement the scaling up business operating system to help fuel growth and grow their companies. So we also help companies in some specialized areas sort of HR support and I have a big background in acquisition integration I've worked on gosh probably over 35 acquisition integrations in my career so we also assist companies who are acquisitive with the integration process after they complete the deal.

Speaker 2: 4:01

Very cool, Very cool. So in today's topic we're talking about core customers. Kind of identify for us what you define as a core customer.

Speaker 4: 4:10

Yeah, very simply, your core customer is the customer who you can generate the most profit from and who absolutely loves your product. They are fanatical about your product or service. If you're familiar with a net promoter survey or net promoter score, these would be your promoters right, your nines and tens. But also, on the flip side, these are the customers that you're generating the most profit from, and so we'll talk a little bit, I'm sure, about revenue and profit, but these are your most profitable I can't repeat that word enough customers.

Speaker 3: 4:43

So there's a difference between how much revenue someone may give us and how much profit we actually make, and that's important.

Speaker 4: 4:51

Yeah, really important. We have a saying, and it's not mine, it comes from a gentleman named Alan Miltz. He's a software called Cashflow Story where we help clients kind of understand the levers that they can use from a profitability and cashflow perspective. And the saying is revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is, we like to say, monarch.

Speaker 2: 5:10

Now Wow, wow, we're going to have to use that one, evan. We're going to have to use that one for sure.

Speaker 3: 5:16

We'll give Kevin credit the first time, and then after that, it's ours there you go. Alan, but we'll never, have a good story. That's right. It's Kevin's as far as I'm concerned. You heard it here first, people.

Speaker 2: 5:29

Okay, so I know, in a lot of times in our space we talk in terms of marketing, we talk in terms of target market.

Speaker 4: 5:41

Kind of in terms of marketing. We talk in terms of target market, uh, kind of give me a little bit of clarification between target and core customer, just for them to understand. Yeah, I mean, your, your core customer is obviously the end person of your product and service, but the market is really kind of where they proverbially hang out, right. So the more we know about our customer, the more we know about where they kind of do business, where they hang out. You know, for us, we work with a lot of entrepreneurs, so where are entrepreneurs out? You know, for us, we work with a lot of entrepreneurs, so where are entrepreneurs? They're in organizations like young professionals organizations. They're in organizations like EO entrepreneurs organizations. They work with a lot of what we would call centers of influence financial advisors, attorneys. So our market, from a coaching perspective, would be those arenas and our customers are actually the entrepreneurs and the firms.

Speaker 3: 6:21

And, as you're working with your clients, what are some common mistakes that you see businesses make when they're looking to try to define who their core customer is?

Speaker 4: 6:28

Yeah, this is my favorite, Evan. So again, core customer is a scaling up sort of competency that we talk about in the framework of STRAT. So scaling up, if you're not familiar with it, is based on every business. Every industry needs to get four decisions right People, strategy, execution and cash. And so in the strategy aspect, how we define our core customer, and I'll get in front of a company It'll be our first planning meeting and I'll stand up there and I'll go hey, who's our core customer, tell me about our customer.

Speaker 4: 6:57

And they'll start naming names. And I'll go hey, who's our core customer, tell me about our customer. And they'll start naming names and I'll go all right, tell me why. And you can probably guess where the first thing that they gravitate towards Well, they spend the most. And then I'll ask a question that usually gets silence or like a blank look Sometimes in the entrepreneur it's a look of just pure fear and panic. I go okay, what's our profit margin on each of these customers? So that is the number one area is we mistake the customers who are paying us a lot versus the customers who are are making a lot. And the second thing is we can't look at that as a transactional or some sort of like non-winning relationship. You're making a profit from that customer because they see tremendous value in what you provide. So we have to view it that way, like we can't feel guilty about the profit we generate because if we're doing it all right, the customer is also generating a massive profit.

Speaker 2: 7:53

So I know that Evan talks a lot about value from his sales sessions. You know, when we see value, we try to explain value in terms of the process it took to get that client in the door. From a marketing perspective, evan, how do you define it from a sales perspective, in terms of value in the sales process?

Speaker 3: 8:12

So I think you know some of what you said. I think a lot of what Kevin has mentioned in terms of okay, if we're working with our ideal client and they're utilizing us, what is the ROI that they are going to see if they're working with us and our services or our product is working really, really well for them and can they see that value? And can they kind of put metrics around what that value is? Are they able to really kind of determine what that is? And if you're able to do that, and as you're selling your services, if you're able to articulate that value and give examples of where other clients have seen that value, it can help click for your prospects that, oh geez, we want that too. And how can you help us to do that? Or and this is okay also, clients will go.

Speaker 3: 9:08

That's not my problem, that's not my issue. I really don't see a lot of value in that. And then we can disqualify that opportunity. Maybe on the surface they seem like a good ideal client, but as we dug deeper it wasn't an ideal client. I'm okay with that. I just want to get to that answer earlier. If that's actually the case.

Speaker 4: 9:28

So here's my favorite story about how to talk about this. Right, there's a serial entrepreneur very successful entrepreneur, by the name of Jeff Hoffman. Jeff was a former owner of the Miami Marlins, I think he started Priceline. He tells this great story and he talks about one of his businesses. He goes out to two sales calls and he's with a salesperson. First client they go to they've got you know, evan, you're probably familiar with this They've got their pitch deck. They're sharing the deck. They get two slides in the customer's like where have you been all my life? Like how can I sign? And when Jeff tells the story, it tells it really quickly. The salesperson goes oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, let me just finish the rest of my deck.

Speaker 4: 10:02

So that was the first meeting, the second meeting they go to, they go through the whole deck. The prospect asks a couple of questions. At the end of the meeting Again, evan, you can probably relate the prospect says, okay, let me think about it, I'll get back to you in a week, all right. So Jeff gets in the car with the salesperson and says, hey, what do you think your next steps are? And the salesperson inevitably says, hey, customer number two, I'm going to follow up. They had some good questions. I'm going to get that information. And that's where marketing comes in, craig, because now that salesperson should go back to marketing and say, hey, this first, this second slide customer, which I love, that it's easy to remember. Right, this is who we want to target. What do we know about this person? How much information we have demographically, intrinsically, and how do we find out where they hang so I can sell easier instead of harder? Right, and hopefully, jeff told that that salesperson find out where they hang so I can sell easier instead of harder.

Speaker 3: 10:56

Right, and hopefully Jeff told that that salesperson stop after that second slide customer says I'm good, I don't need to see anything else. Don't talk your way out of the sale 1000%.

Speaker 4: 11:06

And you know one of my favorite. We use a lot of sports and movies analogies with our clients and we'll probably talk about this later, but Moneyball. It was a great scene in Moneyball um, actually he's making the trade with um, with wade ed wade from the phillies for jeremy giambi. He's about to say something, hangs up and uh uh, jonah hill's character says I think he was about to say something. Billy bean says and you get the answer you want in the conversation right you want in the conversation, right.

Speaker 2: 11:37

So what I also liked about what you said there, kevin, is you mentioned about going back to marketing. So Evan and I, in one of our earlier episodes, was talking about there's a 208% increase in revenue generated when sales and marketing are working together. Right, and that's a perfect example of it. Our job is to take that data and find out what makes you successful and then double down on it, and so the fact that you would have that opportunity to go back, talk to your marketing team, versus us living in a silo and the salespeople living in silo, is a huge, huge disposition for the company to be in. Not to have the two sides communicating versus arguing and fighting among each other. Not to have the two sides communicating versus arguing and fighting among each other, and that's that's a great status to what you reference in terms of using the data to help you win.

Speaker 4: 12:20

Without question. And you know, one of the other things we preach in scaling up is the concept of meeting. Everybody hates meetings, this you know. But sales and marketing, it's the eight odd adage. When you're not selling, sales says the leads are bad, and you know, the marketing team says you can't sell Right, and then operation says we've given us the wrong clients. So the other aspect of scaling up is really creating effective meetings where these stakeholders are together and communicating every day patterns and you're moving quickly and so focusing on the effectiveness of those meetings versus the time and ensuring Craig to your point. Those discussions are constantly being had because marketing is a lot different than it was 15, five, even five weeks ago. That's right, and data and speed are what it's all about.

Speaker 3: 13:02

Wait, are you trying to? This sounds revolutionary. Are you trying to tell me that organizations where sales, marketing and operations are on the same page are more effective than organizations where they're all pointing fingers and not talking to each other? This is mind blowing.

Speaker 4: 13:17

Shocking revelation for your audience. But yes, yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:21

So let's talk, let's let's just pivot here into value and pricing. Give me your view in terms of pricing for value.

Speaker 4: 13:30

Oh gosh, yeah, I can. I can spend all day on pricing. The first thing we have to understand about pricing is is pricing for people is emotional and we are irrational. You know, you got. You guys talked about the phillies in the beginning of the game, right, and that same phillies ticket today is worth I don't know, depending where you're sitting let's say you're sitting the hall of fame club or a premium seat $250. When they make the playoffs, that seat is worth $2,000. Why? It's the same product. We don't even know if the Phillies are going to win. We don't even know if you're having a good time. The ballpark's the same, everything's the same.

Speaker 4: 14:14

So the one thing we have to understand about pricing is everybody approaches it formulaically Our cost is this, we need to make this margin, and I get it as a starting point. But what we want to do is take the customer from want to have it, need to have it, have to have it. When you have to have something, there's really no limit on what you can do on price. Now you have to provide that value. You have to show the customer that your product or service is going to add massive value. But once you make that connection to a point you can almost charge whatever you want. And again, you should never feel bad about that. We're not trying to take advantage of anybody, we're not trying to quote, unquote, rip off people. We're trying to match the value of our service to the value it's going to add to their business.

Speaker 4: 14:53

You know, um, the other example we use around pricing is like a can of coke, right? How much does a can of coke cost? Depends where you're at. Yeah, in a hotel minibar, it's five dollars. In the supermarket, when you buy it in bulk, it's 50 cents. You know, at citizens bank park, it's three to four dollars. So the same value, but this, this different, you know. And if you're selling that to someone, if they're dying of thirst and haven't drank a Coke in a month, that soda might be worth hundreds of dollars. But if they just have a full pitcher of water, it might be not worth anything.

Speaker 3: 15:27

So understanding that customer's needs and positioning your service as to how to add value is massively important and how do you help companies kind of build the confidence to go from the price per product or price per hour to go to more of that value building.

Speaker 4: 15:45

Yeah, a lot of data and a lot of investigation, right? So I'm working with a client right now their manufacturing company and tariffs and they're impacted right, a lot going on. And so the message is, hey, let's get out in front of our customers and let's get data and information. How does that product help them? Obviously, serve their customers and generate a lot of revenue. So, just taking a natural interest in your customers.

Speaker 4: 16:11

You know the first thing many salespeople or ops people or customer service people, when they call customers, go us how are we doing? What can we do better? That's all good information, but how about asking the customer how they're doing? How about asking what's going on in their industry? What are you hearing from our competitors when you gather? How does our product or service help you? What do you enjoy best about it? What might you like to see? Now, that's a loaded question, because your customers will want you in the kind of bankruptcy, right, because everybody wants more and wants to pay less. But if we can solve that and understand the ultimate impact for them, that positions us much differently as far as price, and again, price is relevant only to profit. So there are scenarios where, again operationally. You can improve your operation and perhaps even decrease price, but drive up margin.

Speaker 2: 17:04

You had something there, evan, I saw you.

Speaker 3: 17:06

Yeah, how do you help companies through that process when they're really, really uncomfortable and they're like I don't know that I can ever do this and I don't know if my customers are going to go from that? How do you kind of help them transition and help them with their thinking and their comfort level?

Speaker 4: 17:23

Yep, the first step is again, gather that customer data. If you have a system of feedback that you can investigate, fine. That might mean going out and talking to customers. That might mean some sort of customer survey. I always feel like a conversation with a customer is much more organic. If you're a company with thousands of customers, maybe you focus on back to that exercise we did. If you can figure out your most profitable customers, obviously start with them, and there may be some situations where you start with your lowest profitable customers and just understand what's not working or kind of where that is. So once you identify your core, where you know you're making the most profit, you get as much data and information. That pricing transition, evan, is a lot easier than, say, a customer who you're not sure is in love with your product. So it starts with data and customer feedback.

Speaker 2: 18:23

You know I can't. I can't explain enough the number of times I've had to go to clients and said the data doesn't tell me that this is a good move for you. And they fight me and they go. We've always done it this way, right? I mean that's kind of the typical line. And I said there is opportunity to touch that market because and actually I just had an exercise yesterday or the day before yesterday, excuse me where I had a client.

Speaker 2: 18:45

I said how often do you talk to your customers? And they go. Usually, when the job is done, I send them the report and that's it. And I said I and they go use it. When the job is done, I send them the report and that's it. And I said I need you to do me a favor. I need you to start with talking with 10 people and ask them how would they search for your?

Speaker 2: 18:59

Because he was trying to branch into a new service line. How do they find you now If you don't know that? It's hard for me to help you because you luckily got them in the door, but there was something that you offered that's different than your competition, that brought them to you. So I sent them out there and he sent me a text and said they searched for some term online that he totally didn't tell us anything about and he didn't even know about. Then I said, okay, now try the other nine. You can't go by one, right? Then the measurement of data you can't go by the one.

Speaker 2: 19:31

Here's these other terms that they could come up with. That takes us from marketing and makes our brain explode. Right, because there's tons of different directions we can go from that understanding. That's their words. Part two to that is jargon. Jargon is very dangerous for us.

Speaker 2: 19:47

How somebody applies jargon in their world is different than how we might search it, which is different than how their customer base uses it. So a lot of times when I send the clients out to talk to their client base, I said I want to know the exact words they use. Don't summarize it for me. Give me the exact words they use so that we can go find what they're saying. Because we had a situation years ago when we originally started as a video production company and we were doing video production in Philadelphia. That was a high term. We researched all the time and then all of a sudden, within a month, it just switched and it became Philadelphia Video Production. Just that little bitty switch turned the change for us from a marketing perspective all along. That happens all the time online. That's why operating with data and making it fast is so important and having regular conversations are so important.

Speaker 4: 20:34

Yeah, you mentioned data and so I want to talk a little bit about, if it's OK, like Moneyball, and this concept of correlating your outcome to your key predictive indicators and, to your point, craig, our customers. We get mired in our industry and everybody does so. I'll share a quick story from our story at Apple Tree, which was our call center business. We were a boutique call center and answering service started from scratch. Our CEO, john Ratliff, started it from his commercially zoned apartment and we ultimately grew it to over 650 employees.

Speaker 4: 21:03

But one day he reads the book Moneyball and he knew I was a big baseball fan. He said you got to read this book. It's the best non-business business book of all time. And he says I want you to read the book. And he goes here's my concern. Like every other call center you've all called them, this call may be recorded for quality and insurance purposes and we equated quality score. So our internal assessment of the quality of that call to profitability and customer retention the better your quality score, the better your customer retention and thus your profitability. Right, I read the book, I'm like this book's awesome, right. And he says hey, I need you to go. Like what are?

Speaker 4: 21:41

That time we had about 12 to 15 call centers. I need you to correlate what our quality scores one to 12, and then what's our customer retention one to 12. So I read the book. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do that, but I'm going to look at like 17 other factors. Long story short, I put them on. This is well before AI, so we can all do this now in about five minutes.

Speaker 4: 21:59

It took me about a week in a spreadsheet. But wouldn't you know it? As John likes to say, the universe is a funny sense of humor. Number one quality score worst customer retention. Worst quality score, best customer retention. The rest are all the mix. What did line up almost one to 12, was we would do what we call an employee net promoter score, so we would serve our employees. What did line up number one employee net promoter score, so we would serve our employees. What did line up number one employee net promoter score? Number two, the retention following. And that's when it hit us like, okay, I'm not saying we don't measure quality, but our focus needs and, by the way, the happier people on the phone are going to be better with customers. What a shock. But then we started to apply that to all of our business. And then we started to look at sales, our salespeople. We were 24-7, 365, call center. We would get leads over the weekend. We started to see that the leads on Saturday and Sundays, the close rate, the win rate, was 4X during the week.

Speaker 3: 22:57

Wow, makes sense.

Speaker 4: 22:59

Right it does. Because evidently, intuitively, it was like well, if someone's that ticked off, right, that they're calling another place on a weekend, they're probably pretty hot to change. And so we started to put a salesperson on call and they hated it at first but then they were fighting about who could be on call because they were easy closers. So if you apply that kind of money ball logic, look at your ultimate outcome profitability, customer retention and look at all the predictive indicators that go into that and what aligns to success Everything from search terms, craig, to win rates that will be a game changer for your business. And it comes from baseball. Everybody measured the same thing for a hundred years in baseball and then one team the Oakland A's did it differently, and now you will not find a professional sports franchise alive that doesn't. 100 years in baseball. And then one team the Oakland A's did it differently, and now you will not find a professional sports franchise alive that doesn't have an entire data team.

Speaker 4: 23:51

And you're seeing it now in baseball again with these bats, yeah. So if you're not familiar with that story, they studied a guy on the Yankees and he was not barreling. So in baseball you want to hit it on the barrel. He could never hit the barrel barrel. So rather than coach him and teach him after 20 years of trying to hit something on the barrel, they just said well, why don't we just re-transition the wood, make the wood harder in these other places and so he doesn't have to hit the barrel? And that's what you're seeing out of these torpedo bats that have a lot of traction. But that came from data, so, so I cannot stress that enough. Moneyball your business and look at these outcomes and look at the traditional metrics you're looking at and if they match up, great, keep measuring them. But I will guarantee you we'll find a metric in there that leads to success.

Speaker 3: 24:37

Kevin, you've given out a ton of great information and for our audience, you may want to go back and listen to this episode more than one time. If there were just two or three key takeaways that you would have for folks listening today in terms of things that they may be able to start to directly apply to their business, what would those be?

Speaker 4: 24:56

Yeah, that's easy, and I'm sure you guys, but no one wants to listen to me twice, but here's what I would say. One find your calculation of profitability by customer and service and product and I know that can be challenging. There's accounting ways, but you can figure that out and you can apply. There's a lot of different accounting ways. You can work with your accountant or your CFO to sort of bucket that, but find out what your gross profit is for each customer, each customer, each service you provide. That's number one. That's you're going to find your core.

Speaker 4: 25:26

Number two start to what I call moneyball, your KPIs. So start with your most obvious outcome and it may be win rate, right, maybe win rate OK, of the deals we win, what happens most consistently, just like they did in moneyball, with on-base percentage being actually more important or just important than batting average. So what are your Moneyball stats? And then three, align your marketing with your sales team on your customer feedback and the data you're seeing what's leading to success. Those would be the three areas that I would tell everybody can do. There's AI, you can use a spreadsheet like we did, but you can get that data.

Speaker 2: 26:06

And I think that a lot of times, what everyone needs to understand is that it's a little rough in the beginning, but once you have that down, it's smooth sailing from there, and you have to go through the pain in the beginning to understand that this process is something. That's a process that's sellable. It's a process that can grow you very quickly and it's a process that can make sure that you can attract the right people because they're moving into a system that's already laid out for you.

Speaker 4: 26:33

One question Our primary client are clients that are looking to position themselves for exit. And you know, a lot of times in an entrepreneur firm the entrepreneur is doing a lot which makes it difficult to obviously sell that business. So, craig, to your point, if you have this sort of mousetrap and we call it in scaling up of an X factor, you have this X factor that not only could be applied to your industry but to another industry the value of your business back to what we taught, price for value. You can go from a standard industry multiple of three to five to 15. We've seen, we've participated in exits, we've gotten companies 10 to 15 times based upon their mousetrap and how that might apply to a different industry.

Speaker 2: 27:15

Awesome, awesome, awesome information, Kevin. We appreciate it, and so I want to remind everybody. If you have any questions for Kevin, Kevin, how can they contact you?

Speaker 4: 27:25

They can reach me at my email is KO Conner KOCONNOR at Align5.com. You can visit our website, align A-L-I-G-N, the number five dot com. We're also getting ready to put out. We do monthly events. We have a co-working and event space, a line space in Westchester, so we have monthly. We have Chris Voss as a speaker next week but we're going to have monthly events there for events geared towards entrepreneurs and helping them run their business.

Speaker 2: 27:51

Awesome, evan, any parting words.

Speaker 3: 27:53

So just like subscribe. You can find us on YouTube. You can find us on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, go to our LinkedIn page and you will continue to get great guests like Kevin and great content. So we are giving you the playbook. You just need to be able to pick it up and put it into place.

Speaker 2: 28:12

Bingo, evan, just like a true pro. Right there, all right, guys. Until next time, keep winning. Talk to you soon.

Speaker 1: 28:24

Thank you for joining us on this exhilarating journey through the world of sales and marketing. Remember, the playbook is in your hands and the possibilities are limitless. Keep exploring, experimenting and innovating, and watch as your business reaches unprecedented levels of success. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed on all major podcast platforms and follow us on YouTube, facebook and LinkedIn for even more exclusive content. Until next time, keep hustling and keep winning.