The Hardest Thing I’ve Done in Business

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week jolz Liz picarazzi and William Vander blumen talk about sales specifically the transition most Founders have to make from handling sales themselves to building a sales team Jay Liz and William also discuss the value of going to trade shows the pros and cons of compensating salespeople based on commission and the differences between inside sales and outside sales the kind of person Jay says that can go out there and cold call all day long and get the door slammed in their face it's very hard to find very hard to keep very hard to train very hard to control and that's been my biggest challenge in Business Without any doubt even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which the most important news of the day for business owners and which you can subscribe to at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are Jay goz whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home Liz picarazzi who is CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins and William Vander bluman who is CEO of Vander blumen Search Group a houston-based recruiting firm that works with churches and other faith-based organizations the episode is titled the hardest thing I've done in business welcome Jay Liz and William it's great to have you all here Liz last week you told us something I found intriguing that I'd like to follow up on you mentioned that after the pandemic hit you brought your husband into the business as coo and that he's taken over many of the responsibilities at City bin that you didn't think you were good at one of those areas you said was sales um and I'd like to talk some more about that can you tell us how were you handling sales before Frank joined the business first to make a little correction I actually am very good at sales ah but when my business is small and with both of my businesses when they were small I was very involved with sales so as the business scale sales and I you know delegate to other people and we have more and more customers most importantly it tends to get um a little disorderly You know despite having CRM and other sorts of HubSpot tools but what I've found is that if I set up a sales process and it's being followed really well I don't need to be that involved with sales I do not manage sales very well so that's what I was referring to to last week is that I've never been a sales director sales manager that has 10 people working for me pounding the pavement like I've never had that and I know it's something I'm need I'm going to need to get to um so until we get to that point Frank my husband he is the sales manager and he manages a team of three and he's doing a really good job at it but he also has never managed a sales team so we know we we could get some extra help with this we definitely want to scale you know we've got a great product when I'm out there selling I do a great job but we just need we need to scale our sales operation you've mixed up three things in one so I just want to clarify you just mixed up inside salespeople and you said people pounding the pavement two completely different things so managing an inside Salesforce is nothing like managing an outside Salesforce from my experience and number two is wait make sure we understand what what distinction are you drawing drawing between inside and outside is inside people who work in a retail store no person sitting answers the phone hello and they go hi I'm look and they can explain the products and services versus someone going out there looking for a business completely different well it's like inbound outbound so our inbound is very strong with our SEO game with our email newsletters with our inbound even on phone but the outbound you know people going out there to hunt to go into new markets we've never never been in hiring ex external salespeople I've dabbled with that a little bit but it really is to your point Jay it's about the the external sales team um internal we're doing pretty well so Liz what percentage of your sales would you guess are inbound versus outbound probably 9010 90 inbound yeah same here is it more of a transactional sales process or a consultative sales process does that make sense yeah it is it's definitely consult yeah so when you figure out how to do outbound sales in a consultative process please send me the notes because we cannot figure that out and so we we just keep pouring more and more effort into marketing toward the top of our funnel increasing our sqls and focus on inbound sales almost exclusively so wait explain that to me does that mean it seems to me William and you're that you've got fish in a barrel there's so many churches in the United States you can clearly get the list are you sending out actual mailings to them nope nope um our I first of all I don't think it works I think the history of direct mail which by the way is history except for a few of our clients which still insist on doing it they Market to a little bit older database history of direct mail is like a 1% return and I would say the same's true for outbound calls and so I could hire had a mutual friend of ours that I'll leave nameless suggest that I hire a few Young Guns just make outbound calls make a hund call calls a day maybe you'll Land one um it's not just that it's cost ineffective it dilutes the brand and this is just my opinion and and to remind listeners I have a religion degree with a philosophy minor and I've said this before but most people that have those degrees spend their entire career saying do you want fries with that so I am learning as I go wait come on William how long have you been running this business in my opinion if if we're just calling saying let me tell you how we can solve your problem today hey we're here when you move I know how to I know how to sell like that I think U the brand we're trying to drive is thought leader trusted advisor it'd be kind of like what Goldman Sachs used to be in its absolute Heyday they didn't do cold outbound calls you came to them because you knew they were the best so so we're focusing our efforts on content that drives people toward us as experts trusted advisers for instance I mean the vast majority of Pastors in the country are nearing retirement age we could be doing cold calls about succession instead we poured our eggs into the basket of let's write a book on succession which is now in every library at every seminary in the country and is the textbook on the matter and and people come to us and I won't say outbound sales is a bad idea I just think for us what I found is uh we're a brand new idea with zero trust factor and highly consultative in sales and that has led me to believe that the best thing I can do is put free content out that builds trust and then when they call have incredibly good inside salespeople that are consultative in their approach okay again you've mushed three things together that are completely different you said well Direct Mail only gets 1% that's a good return if you bought a 10,000 person list 1% of 10,000 is a 100 people and for what it cost to do a a stupid mailing with a beautiful letter address to the right people if you had a 100 live leaves from that would be a home run so 1% is is a great return number one number two is you've mixed together outbound calls with mailing two completely separate things I would think that a beautifully Written Letter to the head person in a church saying a lot you here's what we do would get some attention and I and people always go oh I throw all my direct mail out do you think these people do that thing because they lose money I get direct mail every day it's obviously working for some companies they would stop doing it so I I I don't think Direct Mail is dead by any stretch of the imagination and I think you could send out a very sophisticated letter to the churches and until you try that and tell me it doesn't work I think your opinion is a guess versus I tried that and it didn't work well you know what Jay you've actually given me a lot to think about and you've been at this longer than I have so I I'm going to take that to heart and go back and drop back to my team particularly uh maybe a direct mail toward succession clients which tend to be older which actually read mail maybe you're right what I don't want to do and and and like you say it's just a guess what I don't want to do is get a 100 leads and then have 99,900 potential clients think that's an ambulance Chaser he's just trying to do a slick sale I don't want to be around him I think you're overly sens I think a sophisticated mailing with a beautiful letter looking like it was just written to them is not a bad brand thing well you you have just made my hour J I'm dead serious you giving me something to think about listen I've tried lot you know I I had a big idea one year that you know I sell to people to buy art and there was the Gold Coast artfare so I had this idea I'm going to hire one of those airplanes with a banner artist frame service flying over the 50,000 people that are buying art at the art fair and and it was thinking out of the box and I did that now did it work no it was complete failure cuz it took me about 3 seconds when I got downtown I realized you can't look up at a a banner when you're down downtown Chicago that's for people looking out over the horizon the point of my story is it was a complete failure but that was one failure I've got three other success stories that I kept doing so you know you got to try some stuff it that one aggravated me just because they clearly knew at the airplane company this wasn't going to work so let's go back to to where we started with Liz I think what she described as kind of a classic entrepreneurial dilemma um it at most companies the person who starts the business is the one is the person who sells it best but you can only grow so much doing all the sales yourself at a certain point you have to grow beyond that Liz I'm curious you you said you weren't good at managing a sales team how do you know what what didn't work when you were managing a sales team one I don't really enjoy it that much I don't know exactly what that means but having like a scorecard and tracking the sales and finding out where it is in the funnel um it's just not my my forte you know I'm definitely more of the creative person the Visionary and said you're good at sales arguably you might be the best person at the company to teach someone else how to do what you were able to do yeah I I think that's a big part of it and the people that are in the company I have taught them on the existing segments that we're working with and so we primarily work with property managers developers you know affluent residential homeowners and so they only need to deal with those customers but I have a couple of segments that were're starting to get business from without trying that I want more of so Harvard University for just a couple of their dormitories needed trash enclosures and they came to us so we've got a great installation up there we've got a great case study but if I say to the team how do we get 10 more Harvard's we don't quite know where to go with it you know we're not getting traction with some of the things that we're trying so that's where the idea of if I had an external Salesforce and I had someone who was a manufacturers rep for a brand that sold to facilities managers at colleges like Harvard could someone pull out their Rolodex and be able to get us into a hundred other universities I feel like something like that should exist but I haven't been able to get to it first of all when you describe management of your Salesforce as keeping track of that's not really management I would argue I question whether you hired the right people in the first place number one don't know and number two did you train them properly because if you hire the right people and you train them properly you're not selling brain surgery there's no reason they shouldn't be able to have an intelligent conversation with a customer that calls in so I think that could work but again I'm going back to why not do a mailing to the facility managers of every University or there's magazines that are targeted just to those people that's all they do and I there's other ways of management than the most expensive one that I found is hiring an outside salesperson and managing them that salary pay 10 10 mailings that I think you could get some great leads from and I've done it right or ads ads and trade shows too so I know in that segment absolutely they're definitely trade shows that we're going to start going to and their trade Publications I've gone to some I've i' I've gone to some of those trade shows because we sell to we sell artwork so we've we tried going to some of those those com those trade shows that are specifically for facility managers and they're looking for stuff like you're selling so I I wouldn't be so quick to be hiring an outside salesperson because that's been the most difficult thing I've ever done in business trying to hire train manage and get results from people who want to make $80,000 a year the Sal the salesperson you're going to hire for 30 is not going to do it in my experience it's just they can make a hell of a lot more money doing something else Jay what was your transition like going from being the entrepreneur who does all the selling to hiring a staff and managing people who do it for you well first of all to be specific I in a retail business so I had to just find people who could take care of customers they didn't have to go out and find customers that's a huge difference night and day so I started hiring people with art backgrounds and you know started learning how to train them and I have to say that that was fairly simple compared to the next 20 years I spent trying to find Outside salespeople to sell artwork which um it took me too many years to figure out inside salese are completely different than outside salese I always use the example of it's the difference between cats and dogs they both are similar but cats go out and will kill things on their own and figure out how to bring it back in but they're not always your best friend like a dog is they're completely different species and and and what I was doing was I was hiring nice people CU that's what I did in my retail business and I found out that just because someone's nice doesn't mean they know how to go out and find business business so um I hired lots of nice people that couldn't sell that couldn't bring in business and like I said night and day inside salespeople are not outside salese I I before I would go hire a salesperson and train them and set and wind them up and send them out on the market I'd be doing some mailings I'd be doing some trade shows I'd be doing some outbound well in your case people are looking for your product perhaps I would be spending time on making sure my website looks good which your website looks very good so I would think that that would be a great platform to to get customers to I do have a question about your website though I see that you're offering 10% off for signing up and my question is it looks like you're selling a first class grade product why do you feel compelled to give them 10% off because by giving me their email address I can mark it to them and that's worth a lot to me and you believe you have to give 10% off to get their email address it's been very effective yes you know because then if they give me the email address then they go into my drip marketing campaign and they're going to get you know 10 emails from me over the next couple of months um and we can track who comes in and buys from that how long is the 10% off good for is that forever is it just buy in the next 30 days I mean what it's actually forever it's for as long as they're on our email newsletter so anyone that gets our email newsletter can use that 10% off so theoretically You could argue you built it into your price that pretty much everyone that's buying is getting 10 off I would assume okay that might make sense yes I think you got a greatl looking website and a product that I'm amazed in Chicago people are they're just leaving boxes on the sidewalk it's unbelievable they're they're just leaving entire boxes on the sidewalk and I'm thinking how long is that going to last and it seems to me you're talking about delivery deliveries I would think that I'd be contacting UPS they have to be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in claims for products that were stld and I would think that they would want to help you your product I would but they actually have a competitive solution and that's that they have lockers at a lot of major retailers um including I think Lowe's um some gas station 711s um same thing with FedEx has those and as we know Amazon lockers are everywhere including in all Whole Foods so those lockers are not convenient I mean my product solves the problem of convenience because you're still having your package delivered to your home if you have to go to Whole Foods and get your package from an Amazon Locker that kind of takes away the convenience but you get the safety so I would love for them to subsidize my business but they have their own solution are you getting a good amount of business on people that just saw the bins out on someone's in front of their house and they call in yes so that is probably our best marketing is the product itself um people you know New York City in particular you have your you have your lockers your package Locker your trash enclosures right in front of your house it's not like in Chicago where you have um alleys and driveways um so I I would I would have loved to have gone into the Chicago Market but we haven't done as much there because people don't need to keep their trash in front of their homes they can put it in their alley in the back Here's my thought with that though you've got City bin in a fairly small logo on the side of the product and I would think you'd want to put it in the front of the product with doom on it so people can clearly see oh I can go right there and find out where these things came from and you got a great name and you got you happen you got the URL so I would think your greatest underused asset is simply the thousands of boxes sitting out on the sidewalk that people would just see you know when you buy a Craftsman tool chest they've got a gigantic logo plate on it and your your logo is very small on there I would think that would be your best form of advertising well it's funny that you said that because the logo that we use now is considerably larger than the last logo plate we used used and I'm pretty happy with the size but I definitely will take that into consideration Jay I mean don't you think putting on it would help yeah definitely possibly if they think they can go right online and buy it definitely that's the whole point they don't have to think about it and they're walking with their phone in their hand they could literally they could literally dial right in when they're walking by someone's house while it's on their mind and and put it right in and boom now they call into your your your office and you have your well-trained salesperson close the deal boom exactly William I want to go back to you what was uh your transition like from being the person driving all the sales to what was the next step it was a lesson in humility um couple things I had assumed that like Jay you know let's find somebody you're doing framing let's find somebody that knows art then they can talk the language Etc ET Etc I figured if I'm selling at the time it was primarily to churches now we're helping schools find Headmasters nonprofits find CEOs and values based businesses find their CEO even on a for-profit side but back then it was just churches and I thought I needed somebody who had worked in a church who knew the language who knew all the things I went to a couple of interesting learning sessions that were sort of closed audience uh one particularly was led by the head uh the lead team of the sales department for Salesforce so pretty interesting so they talked about founder CEOs as either operationally driven or growth driven right so you get somebody who loves running the business or growing the business and that was their hypothesis and so obviously I slot into the growth I'm paying attention to this and I did all the sales I love selling things and so uh they said the number one lid to companies at the time it was like how do we get from 1 million to 10 million the lid for that threshold is the founder CEO who really believes no one else can handle the sales like they can and I'm like uh guilty is charge and then they said that the number one lid to a Founder finding an EVP of sales that's effective is the founder believing that the person has to come out of the industry they're in and they use the example of a tractor company that felt like they had to find Farmers from the Midwest that understood seed and all these things the bottom line of the the workshop was here's the deal salespeople can sell anything you just have to teach them what they're selling so you get good at teaching them the product they'll get good at selling and that's exactly what happened with us uh the second lesson in humility was that I am arguably the worst trainer manager of salese in the history of sales uh I brought on a wonderful team member Sarah who's been with me a long long time and she was selling uh homes she was the person when you drive into a subdivision and go to the model home she's the one sitting there and selling people their first home so high anxiety transaction highle widget uh lot a lot of the same things that our clients are experiencing on a sales call zero industry experience so we tried teaching her the business and she learned it very well and and then I said okay let me train you sales and I I even got a coach to teach me and I was just terrible at it finally I said Sarah now we're we're going to use the Book of Ruth is our training manual uh there's a line that says whether thou goest I will go whether thou stay I will stay in other words Sarah I don't know how to teach you so your desk is now next to mine for the next four months and you figure me out and figure out how and she did and she needed no industry experience she was able to figure out the sales without me doing training she's now turned into a fabulous trainer of salespeople and uh has has for lack of a better IDM given birth to an entire team but for me uh Lauren it was a lesson one don't be so arrogant William don't think people have to be in your industry to sell to your industry two don't think you know how to train just cuz you know how to sell entirely different prospects and and entirely different profiles of candidates to hire uh I I think I probably sympathize and empathize with Liz I don't like dealing with a sales team it's there too many people involved I just want to sell if I'm going to sell so a lesson in humility in in my inability to train even though I know how to sell and my arrogance at thinking people had to know my industry in order to sell to my industry wait you're leaving out the most important part how did you find her where did she come from referral of a friend uh in fact she wanted to she wanted to get out of uh she was working in this home sales thing and she's always been very values driven like she loves her church we were looking for some people on our research team U frankly we'd already filled the job and we we were really small at the time this was eight years ago and uh we'd already hired everybody but I met her for a drink with along with my coo and the three of us sat together for a while and when she left we were like okay we got to figure out where to put her so we created a role on the research team with the hope that maybe one day she could learn the whole industry and then become a salesperson so she sold you basically cuz she has what I call it no she it absolutely no she has it and which gets back to what I always say it's about hiring it's about hiring it's about hiring it's about hiring and most entrepreneurs I talk to almost all they're managing the wrong people and whenever I ask them wait can you explain to me where you found them they go oh it was my neighbors brother-in-law's sister and like they really weren't qualified they just put him in the spot cuz they showed up in your case you got a recommendation you talked to her you liked her you hired her that wasn't luck and she's successful that's what my whole companies fill with my salespeople I found that there's people that are better than I am at it because they're just smoo here than I am and I finally got to where I got better at hiring those people and I have to tell you no one ever asked for me and when I say no one I mean I can't think of the last time where someone called me down to the show oh so and so here they want to see you the average frame shop it's all about the owner they got to see the owner and I you can't grow a company like that have any of you tried uh compensating salespeople on straight salary and not on commission I have has it worked yes what I didn't want was Cowboy culture of that's my lead not yours I wanted a pull for the team mentality and so we've played with a lot of different things and Sarah really put me at ease saying William I've been selling stuff for seven years now and I think I've had seven different models for compensation so just treat me fairly give me a number I will perform better if there's a number on my head than not so we set a salary plus a bonus if you hit numbers um so it's not really commission uh it was companywide numbers not her personal numbers of course the sales team was Sarah and me so you know uh now uh we're a little more commission based but it's very low commission and there are two commissions one for your individual sales and one for sales of the team and then Sarah who leads the team is only on sales of the team so we're trying to make her replicate herself and be just as incentivized to have an amazing team that doesn't have her doing sales calls but just to be clear it's inside sales the leads are coming into her correct yes or is she going out is she going out and looking for business or are the leads coming in and she's dealing with the leads very very rare that she uh goes out looking very rare okay so my point is that is an inside salesperson and If you hired her and said here and wound her up and said you go out there and find business she probably couldn't do it because like I said cats and dogs completely different animals uh the per kind of person that go out there in cold call all day long and get the door slammed in their face it's very hard to F very hard to keep very hard to train very hard to control and um my that's been my biggest challenge in Business Without any doubt that I'm a retailer I'm used to hiring nice people to take care of customers and hiring an outside Salesforce is just 180 degrees away from running an inside Salesforce I look at what corporate world which is been doing search longer than the nonprofit world has done and you've got uh Spectrum where one is just Cowboy culture and Consultants are rewarded based on the sales they produce and the bills they collect it's almost like they're a solopreneur using the house brand and then the other end of the spectrum is we're all going to get paid based on how the company does and your tenure is what weights your bonus and that feels more like Europe than the United States so I'm trying to find a middle ground and I don't know that I've got it figured out I'm wide open to listeners sending me something to to find a way to split Solomon's baby or or you guys on the on the call um it's it's a wild tight RPP to try and ride I think the fact is you're still a business that's going to be mostly an in if you generate leads by doing good marketing your inside salespeople and I think it's just a much easier business model than hiring someone to go out there looking for business uh and I I don't think it's broken at the moment from what it sounds like it sounds like you got to figure it out I I don't know that you do have a dilem it sounds like you got it figured out and if you did a little more marketing meaning mailings whatever all of a sudden you have more lead coming in life is grand well my next meeting is with my marketing guide just because I've already texted him during this podcast saying okay Jay says we have to meet do the math you send out 10,000 envelopes and you get not 1% you get 0.2% that's 20 people that responded that say oh that's interesting call me like I got to think how many of those would you have to close to pay for a 10,000 piece mailing two one Liz how about you have you had the issue of the salary versus commission we have and we do a hybrid right now that I think is working fairly well um so we have a really fantastic employee that came in as an assembly he did assembly um and then he moved into the shop and then he started doing sales and then he started doing scheduling so he's very strong in in internal sales um and he's also good at doing all the scheduling so he gets a salary for all the operational things that he does in the business which are pretty significant and then he also gets commission based on the sales but in listening to you one thing I realized is that he's really good at those two things together in a way that he never could be if I had him trying to p on the pavement which I've been kind of encouraging and it hasn't been going very far so it's like looking at what is he like as a person how does he work best I think that where he's at right now is really good and that there's some danger in in having me try to get him to get like 20 more universities so that's the sort of thing I would encourage him as a non external salesperson to try to do and that's where I'm not getting the traction and it's not like it's his fault but I have this idea that he can do inside or outside that's what I've it's like telling your dog run out there to the tree run up the tree and get that bird for me it ain't going to work and it's not their fault they're dogs I mean meaning they're friendly they're happy but you got to feed a dog outside salespeople go out and and and they're like the cat they go climb fences they kill birds they come back with something in their mouth it's a different animal and I've been doing this for 20 years and I have never succeeded taking an inside salesperson and converting them to an outside salesperson I I maybe it's just me but I don't think so have any of you ever hired a sales consultant or thought about hiring a sales consultant what do you mean somebody who comes in and looks at your uh you know who's whose job it is to look at a company's sales operation and uh make suggestions about how better to manage it yeah so so at the risk of getting kicked off the podcast and never invited back I'll be transparent I am a Tony Robbins guy sorry cut me off right now sorry Lauren I had gone to one of his Mastermind smaller Gatherings and uh hired one of his top level coaches that was particular to sales uh who who who had specialized in inside sales and I signed him to a six-month contract we met once a week um it was super helpful to me he gave me homework to do we had a very directed call um and he was he was part of the process of moving Sarah into her role I don't know that we would have gotten there as quickly without him that makes sense I think he's a smart guy he's Uber successful I'm sure there's something to what he's doing Lauren hadn't spoken yet Jason now maybe we're both kicked off the podcast no no no no no no no he has no podcast left then so I'm not worried about that maybe he's going to have to do outside sales Liz have you thought about hiring a sales consultant I would definitely consider it um we we've done Sandler training which has been helpful what's that um so Sandler is a sales training course I think it's somewhat of a franchise it is a franchise they all over the country yeah and so it's very specific to sales and um my main salesperson I sent that to him a few years years ago before you know he had done any sales and it did a lot of work um but that's a different thing than saying as a company how are you going to set up their your sales operation and and how are you going to differentiate how you set it up for inside versus outside and how do you match that up with your marketing I mean I think that there could be a lot done with that but I also have never had anyone say to me oh I hired this great sales consultant you definitely need to call him or her and if I did hear that I would call that person no I I don't I think in your business model I I don't think you're an outside Salesforce kind of company I think you've got this hot great product that so many people need I think that doing the right marketing to get leads to your inside killer crew of knowledgeable good people is the business model I don't see your business model being one where you hire six sales reps to go out and call on buildings I I don't think the Math's going to work I'll tell why I don't think that way so we're about 60% B to B and 40% B to C and our B Toc game with you know email marketing and some of the advertising and the we do direct mail and we do some ads you know that works really well for the other B2B we're talking about property managers Architects facilities managers they're these bodies these groups that tend to purchase in a certain way and um it's not I I feel like I don't have enough connection so like for example we've got a big um job with AT&T within their retail stores in the Southeast and I think we're in like 20 or 30 stores with our package delivery Locker because they have some very like expensive gear that they need to transfer between stores so our package lockers are being used as kind of an intermediary and I'm like okay well that's one type of commercial entity with a retail space who has a brain that can go out there and say I'm going to find 30 more AT&T's I feel like someone could do that someone that has sold into those types of Industries someone that has sold to universities before but it's not so easy because if I've gone on LinkedIn and I've tried to mine it for who has sold trash cans to universities that's not very easy to find but if I could find that person that sold supplies to facilities then I would think they would be really good at doing what I want them to do there are independent sales rep that call on those kinds of companies and they have six lines and they sell all those different things so I would be looking for an independent sales rep that's already into those places and says oh wow this is a great addition to my you know my selection I I don't think it's a full-time employee so it would be like a manufacturer's rep yeah and there's that's what you know I'm dealing with I've talked before I I deal with uh somebody who's selling into the autism space of we're selling exercise and we're selling an app and we found out that there are companies out there that do nothing but sell them into the school systems into governments and refining those companies to sell our app to and to sell our certification to because Reinventing the wheel trying to call all those places would be would be impossible and it and there are reps to do that so I think if you spent a little time just looking for reps that call on institutions you'll find out there's a bunch of them and they've got you find one rep group they've got 20 reps to work for them they cover the entire country Liz I'm curious you sell package bins and you sell trash enclosures they're largely targeting the the same customer I I assume are there any differences in the way you sell them yes the the need is very different so when we're talking about trash enclosures we talk a lot about you know trash hygiene and managing Recycling and keeping rats out and the pain of all those things the pain of having a package Locker or having a package stolen is very different they do work modularly together so we often get people that will buy uh a trash enclosure for trash Recycling and then a package Locker so they're getting three modules that all work together and that's a really cool thing to Market because we're selling it as a combination unit and um you everything about the space utilization and the design like I'm really excited about selling that it's been selling okay I wish it would sell a lot more but the modularity of it has been a big part so have you ever done a trade show for facility managers we have done them for um property managers which are kind of similar yeah um facilities managers like in a straight way we haven't but I I did get my assistant to pull together a list of all the trade shows that were with potential Target groups including exterminators um so if exterminators can sell s our um trash enclosures through to their clients that are dealing with rat problems you know we're the only trash enclosure that they can confidently recommend see I don't know that they want to though because if they solved the problem they just lost the customer I don't know if they have any incentive to to sell them a thing oh if you do this you won't have any more rat problems there goes their their customer I don't know that that would be the most motivated group to be selling through so my question is when you did the trade show for property managers did it work it did it's been the best trade show we've ever done and we've done it for there you go I think that's your future do six trade shows a year and the business will just roll in yeah the ROI on that trade show a couple that are related to Property Management has always been there and every time I've tried to go to a trade show for something that's like architecture design or even waste related landscape architecture related none of those were worthwhile and it was disappointing because I personally enjoy those other shows more than property management but that is really where our main buyers are because for them if you're a property manager and you're dealing with a a building that has a r rat problem your phone is ringing all the time with people that are complaining about rats so you're not going to be very price sensitive about it because you just want the best solution so your phone will be ringing less with rat complaints so it simply gets to you need to go to people that have a problem and those other things Architects AR archs don't have the problem they're not getting the calls from the the tenants it's so you need to continue going to trade shows that they need to solve their rat problem and Exterminators and Architects all not not their problem they're not the ones that are on the front line I think there's a reason why some trade shows are working great and some don't have any of you changed your approach to sales because of covid are you doing anything differently today than you were before 2020 I'd say we uh we've just discussed this some on the other podcasts Lauren but I think what we've discovered during the pandemic is what we're calling the very top of the funnel and that is uh giving away free assistance during the mess that we're in uh and not making any money on it but building a lot of friendships that we think will Outlast the pandemic and so far that's paid off pretty well um you know ask me in 10 years but uh yeah so far that's pretty pretty pretty big Focus for us and it's it's uh good to help people there's that's there's always the benefit of doing a good thing um but I think it's also going to end up being a smart business move we sent out an email like we always do once in a while about here's a $25 gift certificate and I sent out a personal email to everyone saying you know pandemic hasn't been easy thank you for supporting us and it was a really heartfelt nice message I got back literally like a hundred emails love letters about how much they appreciated the email did that prompt you to build on that I mean are you sending an email newsletter out absolutely absolutely I yeah I mean I I got back like two paragraphs of you know from some people about they love the store and blah blah blah and it was like wow I I don't think that would have happened if I just sent out an email uh three years ago and just said hey here's a $25 GIF you thanks for your business I don't think I would have gotten that response and I'm not smart enough to have predicted that it was kind of a weird accident I've got good and bad in me the good in me is like look if if our business goes down during this I want to go down doing something good uh the more McKellan part of me is like we come out on the other side we're going to have a lot more friends we're going to have a very top of the funnel that's uh that's going to be profitable and hopefully those two things can coexist uh I will say we did not Bank on uh this lasting longer than a year and a half I I'd said 18 months and I was wrong uh and maybe we're almost done with it maybe we're not I mean China just locked everything down and Britain just said we're not doing anything anymore so who knows you I saw the other day a friend of me friend of mine sent me a text saying you know back in 2020 when we were in episode one of the pandemic we all thought this was an 8 episode documentary now we're realizing it's more like gry's anatomy and they're just endless Seasons upon Seasons so uh who who knows whether our strategy will pay long term but for now it feels right I was going to ask you about that we're just about out of time but I'm curious this has gone on longer than I think anyone expected um how you how are each of you coping with the current situation every two days I get another email someone's got it but no one's gotten really sick and we're wearing masks and doing what we can but everybody's pretty much numb to it and uh business is okay I got nothing to complain about I have to remind people once in a while that you know my parents generation lived through World War II or four years of wondering whether my father was going to come back alive so I'm sorry if if you're upset you can't go to brunch I remind myself of that cuz it's bad but it ain't that bad Am I Wrong hello Am I Wrong tell me living through World War II was that worse than this definitely William I didn't heard from you am I wrong I didn't live during World War II I I am not very popular on this Jay I actually am dead aligned with you I I'm endlessly optimistic I feel like we live in I mean what if this had happened 10 years earlier when there was not nearly the internet connectivity that we had what if it had happened you know fill in the blank with when we weren't able to communicate as the immunologists have to come up with vaccines I just what if we didn't get PPP money I completely agree with you Jay I you know we're going down the road of a podcast where I'm going to end up losing followers but I just think there is a culture of V victimhood out there that is really really not helpful to the situation why why would that cost you followers um because there's a culture of victimhood and I just minimized everybody's suffering and Pain by saying suck it up and deal with it so let's just keep trick you lost some people cuz Anthony Robbins perhaps and now you lost the boy I hope you're holding okay all right well my thanks to Jay gtz Liz picarazzi and William Vander blumen thanks for sharing guys wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to Me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess dubron found of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]