Josh Pitchford | Spending Too Much Time With the Wrong Prospects?

It’s typical for 20% of the salespeople in an organization to be responsible for 80% of production, says Josh Pitchford, a consultant with Sandler Training. It’s also common to not recognize what sets those superstars apart… it’s a mystery even to the salespeople themselves.

Josh shares strategies for distilling what top performers do into a process that everybody can follow, which results in more sales success across the board.

A big part of that revitalization is recognizing that not all prospects are created equal.

We talk about how to determine the accounts worth going after, as well as…

• Why sales training won’t stick unless you do this
• How to keep the right potential deals moving forward
• What happens when a salesperson does “too much”
• The 5 Dials of your sales process you must watch

Listen now…

Episode Transcript:

Michael Webb: Some people focus on selling processes, like internet marketing or selling to senior level decision-makers. Other people talk about process tools and measurement of data and systems thinking, but not many people talk about how these can be brought together to motivate people and create wealth for everyone. That’s what we discuss in the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. I’m Michael Webb and today my guest is Josh Pitchford of Sandler. Welcome here, Josh.

Josh Pitchford: Hey, Michael, thank you for having me. Appreciate you taking a few minutes to chat today and looking forward to the conversation.

Michael Webb: Yeah, me, too. Tell us a little bit about your background and what happened that led you up to being part of the Sandler organization.

Josh Pitchford: It’s funny. Not to make my story start with it was a dark and stormy night or anything like that, to go that far back, but it’s funny. The short story is, I’ve been exposed to sales my entire life. My parents owned two small businesses that then got bigger and so I was exposed from a very young age to business principles, sales, all those kind of things and I was learning this stuff at a very young age by osmosis and didn’t even realize it back then. I was just kind of bored with the whole thing because it was the same conversation every night at dinner, but now looking back on it, it was massive.

It was a background to get me started on what turned out to be a career and then a few years ago, I was the National Director of Sales of the company. We had about 650 salespeople and I can talk about that more later, but we found Sandler and we wanted to implement Sandler across our process. Our process was good, but we used the Sandler selling system in order to overlay our process and prove it and I just fell in love with the process. A lot of things were inherent to how I saw the process and saw the system and what I brought already, my thinking, and that allowed me to kind of fall in love with it and I decided I wanted to go out and do it and so I decided to become a trainer close to three years ago now here in Alpharetta.

Michael Webb: Okay, what was it about the “process?” What were the principles or the observations that you had made that were so stirring to you, that were so motivating to you?

Josh Pitchford: Well, there’s a couple of things there. I never wanted to be the high pushy sales guy. The stereotypical thing that if you go and Google, sales guy, and hit images on Google, you’re going to see a Herb Tarlek-dressed kind of guy and I wanted to always avoid that. With Sandler and a lot of things I had learned growing up is it’s not what we want to pitch, so to speak, it’s what does our prospect need and what are their reasons for wanting to do business with us? And instead of trying to push something down their throat, try and understand what do they need and do I have something that may fit their needs.

We have something in Sandler … it’s a book we have and it’s called “The 49 Sandler Rules,” and they only put 49 in there because they couldn’t make the thing as big as War and Peace because there’s about 248 of them, but my favorite Sandler rule is “Sell today, educate tomorrow,” and I learned about that when I was about seven years old. My mom had people talk too much during the sales process and they end up opening Pandora’s Box quite often on themselves by talking too much as opposed to asking questions to uncover more about the buyer’s motives as opposed to their own.

Michael Webb: Okay, and since you made that observation at seven or your mother made it for you-

Josh Pitchford: Yeah, it just means more now that I’m older, let’s put it that way.

Michael Webb: Okay, all right. So were there any other principles that kind of attracted you?

Josh Pitchford: Yeah. I could go on for days, but the big one … and you and I have chatted about before, that the fact of the system and I mentioned earlier that we had a great process at my previous employer, but we wanted and system. And one of the things that we uncovered there and that I continue to uncover with my clients now and new prospective clients that I go meet with is they typically have the 80/20 problem. The 80/20 rule, Pareto Principle, and we’ve all heard of it and they wonder why 80% of their production comes from 20% of their salespeople. Not that you’ve ever heard that or anything, right? But, really, it’s because they don’t have a reliable, proven, transferrable system and they don’t know where it goes right and where it goes wrong. Their people are good because they do certain things, they do them consistently, they know it works, but then they can’t scale that. They don’t really know what they’re doing.

It’s the same reason a PGA Tour player is not maybe a very good teacher of the golf swing. They’re so good, they don’t know why they do it. That’s the reason some of your best salespeople can’t tell you why they’re so good. But when you have a system, you’re able to have a system for prospecting and timing new opportunity. Having a system for running opportunities from the minute they go in the funnel until they turn into revenue for the company and actually closing the opportunity and turning it into more opportunity inside those accounts. Your best people are doing those kind of things, but they don’t really have a system. They just kind of do it and so it’s very difficult to scale those things.

What I love about Sandler is there’s a system in the process and everybody comes to us … not everybody, but a lot of times we get, “Hey, will you train our salespeople?” We even were known as Sandler Training and we’re in the process right now of rebranding. We’re actually dropping the training part because we’re so busy training, but we have found that most companies need implementation of systems and processes, the things that are reliable, proven, and transferrable to make sales orientations great and then they need to train their people to that. But there’s a whole different layer than just, “Hey, come in and teach our people some tactics and hope for the best.”

Michael Webb: I don’t mean to pin you to the wall here, but let me ask you for a couple definitions because those are two key words, right? Process and system. What’s the difference?

Josh Pitchford: Process and system, the difference in how I see it, is the process is everyone’s got a sales process and whether they know it or not, there is typically … I see it is usually five to seven steps, it’s longer, shorter, more in-depth, based on the length of your sales cycle, obviously. But that’s the process. You should probably be able to try and define that in five to seven steps, big steps. And the system is how do you go about executing those steps? So, the step from hello to cha-ching, right? Prospect, there’s revenue. And how do you go about executing those steps is what I see is the system overlaying the process and that’s what I get from a lot of people is prospective clients. They’re a little nervous that I’m going to come in and kind of reinvent the wheel and I don’t mean to do that and I don’t want to do that, typically. I’m not going to redefine their process, but when you overlay the system on top of it, you find efficiencies in there that either help tighten up sales cycles, find more actionable pain from people and improve margin. I mean a lot of times-

Michael Webb: Make that concrete. What’s an example of that?

Josh Pitchford: One of the companies I work with, long sales process, nine to 18 months typically. They’re in an industry that they do large complex programs. I won’t get too deep into it, but for instance, we gave them a tool we use at Sandler called the Upfront Contract and the Upfront Contract is one that you set expectations going into a meeting and then you can use Upfront Contract from the backend as what are the next steps? In layman terms, it’s hey, what is our next step? But there’s a system about going and making sure you get what we call is a clear future. It’s amazing how much work they were doing that resulted in lost opportunity that went in the pipeline and then buyers went dark or those things that happened and they were finding themselves in follow-up and chase mode all the time and it was extending sales cycles and they were doing it themselves because they weren’t locking down a clear future or a clear next step before they left the table.

And it wasn’t … and clear, is not, “Hey, give me a call next Tuesday. We’ll set something up.” That is as blurry as you can get. I would much prefer, “Okay, here’s the date, here’s the time that we’re going to get together, here’s what we’re going to talk about and here’s why me, as the sales professional is coming back.” Who else needs to be in the room? And so you’ve got those four things, date, time, agenda, and participants set up for your next step before you can leave the room. Giving a clear future has helped tremendously as far as making sure more of what went in their funnel came out and shortening your sales cycle just tremendously.

Michael Webb: Probably also, it reduced the number of deals in the funnel down to the ones that were really deals because if you can’t squeeze those specifics out of a prospect, he might not be ready.

Josh Pitchford: Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. It’s a great qualifier and that’s what Sandler is really all about, is qualifying opportunity. I like to say when a suspect, if you will, won’t agree to a clear future, that might be a really nice “no,” and you need to go for your “no” at that point that this might not be a priority, they might not have the budget, they might not have actionable pain at this point. We need to go for “no.” They’ve disqualified themselves and this isn’t a priority to them right now to continue on your cycle and go move on and find a better prospect to spend your time with.

Michael Webb: And that can be a hard thing for a salesperson to accept, right?

Josh Pitchford: Yeah, all salespeople love for every deal to close, but I think that we all know that that’s not going to happen. We’re dealing with human beings here and so we’re not going to close them all, but sales managers, sales leaders, presidents and CEOs, they love it. They’re able to call a spade a spade and, hey, that’s not a viable prospect right now, let’s move on. We might need to go back and check in with them at another time and sometimes that clear future is not a right time now, but let’s get clearer on when we should reach back out to see if it makes sense to rekindle the conversation.

Michael Webb: All right, so now there is another meaning for the word “system.” I was in the sales training industry, as you know, for more than seven years and this was one of the reasons I left the sales training industry, because … and you’ve seen this, too, but I want you to tell me the extent to which you’ve seen this, where in sales they want you to sell smart, they’ll pay for training to help you sell smart and they’ll give you these methods and techniques, like for qualifying and you’re getting a specific agreement on next steps and so forth, as you were talking about. And, still, in the end it matters if we make the number, nothing else, right? And in a system and I’m looking in the appendix in my book here for the definition, it’s a set of connected things or parts forming the complex whole that works together for a specific purpose.

And in sales, the tradition is, as a salesperson, you’ve got to manage the front of your funnel, right? Prospecting enough, and then you’ve got to manage the deals and qualifying and then you’ve got to manage the closing and you can’t spend too much time trying to close the deals you have now because you’ve got to keep prospecting at the front end and that all can be true, particularly in an environment where the salesperson is responsible for everything, but it also is a way to run yourself ragged because you can’t do all that stuff in many environments, particularly today where customers don’t want to talk to salespeople, they want to look up information on the internet and the sales guy can’t control what’s on the internet. So, the sales manager’s response is just work harder.

I mean, you can tell from my voice, I get UGH, because they hold salespeople accountable to get the result and, yet, there is no feedback here saying, wait a second, this salesman’s at capacity. You can’t really do any more. What part of this is his responsibility and does he have control over … what part does he not have control over? Is there a way to make this work more effective and not just push people to work harder? I’m going to stop. I probably loaded that with all kinds of my own biases and stuff, but you see what I mean by the difference between a system if this environment with feedback that we respond to and it’s not just a salesperson, it’s the whole bullpen, the whole sales force, the whole region and it’s finding, winning and keeping and it’s not strictly just about what salespeople do and trying to make sure the salespeople are working as hard as they can and each individual salesperson is as expert as they can be and not analyzing it any further.

Josh Pitchford: Absolutely. A couple things that I always kind of hang my hat on and I’m making a couple of notes here as we chat. One thing that I always bring up very early in my own process as I’m qualifying opportunities with different sales organizations I work with is we get the call every now and then saying, “Hey, we want you to train our salespeople,” and then the leadership, sales management or leadership in the company thinks that they’re not going to be involved and we’re just responsible for training their salespeople. That’s a non-starter for us. Magic sales.

Michael Webb: Teach them the magic words and you’re done.

Josh Pitchford: Exactly and it’s such a non-starter, that we cover it very early in our process. If that’s their mindset, we’re just not a fit because they’re throwing their money away because it’s not going to become cultural and to not continue to use different levels of the word “system,” but it’s not going to become systemic and cultural throughout their organization like it should and they’re not going to understand why we’re telling their salespeople to go out and do certain things like using a system for qualifying. Yes, well, a lot of the time salespeople are out working way too hard because they’re not disqualifying enough opportunities. They’re chasing bad deals and not realizing bad prospects are taking you away from really great opportunities and the opportunity costs are so great in spending too much time with bad prospects and doing things like unpaid consulting and RFPs, RFQs and all these things that maybe we shouldn’t be responding to those.

Depending on your world, it might not be a fit and who knows? Maybe we need to look into those and so I end up spending an inordinate amount of time with each of my clients. I’m very diligent about spending a lot of time with the sales leaders, all the way up to presidents, owners, CEOs. I spend a lot of time with them because when they understand the why and they typically get it very, very quickly because they see the opportunity cost of chasing bad business quicker, it’s fun to open up their eyes and all of a sudden they see, “Wow, we don’t have to work so hard if we qualify and we still close more business because by the time we get down to the end, we can close a lot more business because we’re much more honed in on the right kind of prospects, solving the right pain and we’ve done our homework to get to that point as opposed to chasing our tail with bad prospects.”

Michael Webb: Mm-hmm (affirmative), very good. With your clients … and just let me ask you this question about measurement. I’m sure when you get salespeople in a room and they start to get the idea of it and enthusiasm and particularly when they’re beginning to have some successes, close ratios improve and all that sort of good stuff. But I guess what my experience is, is that most companies really don’t pay a lot of attention to trying to measure that in any organized or structured kind of way. They just kind of go by feel. Is that what your experience is, too? Is that what you see?

Josh Pitchford: I’ve seen it plenty. I’ve actually had the thought in my mind. My previous employer … they were fantastic. We measured everything, so I’m very data-driven. That’s one part of my personality profile that doesn’t fit what I typically am, but I like data and I like to be able to measure results. And so I’ve had the thought multiple times meeting with certain companies first or second time going, “Wow, how have they been as successful and gotten as big as they are without paying attention to this?” And it’s a passing thought, I don’t say that out loud, but we end up changing the culture that is, okay … and we start asking some very pertinent questions that maybe they don’t know the answer top and it might make them a little not okay that they don’t know the answer to it, but it makes them realize we need to start measuring some of these things and we set up success criteria.

What is it now? What would you like it to be? With our clients, we do a quarterly value review with our clients. We sit down and we talk about what’s going well? What’s not going well? What does the team need? How are these particular metrics that we agreed on the front end, that we were going to measure and how are we tracking with those? What do you think is influencing those? How can we better influence those numbers? And have that conversation, bare minimum, quarterly with our clients that we kind of hit the reset button that way and I think just having that accountability on the upper level has a tendency to breed more accountability on the lower levels and it allows us at the upper levels with sales leaders, presidents, owners, CEOs, those kind of people that we’re chatting with … we can actually measure and we can look at the results. But we preach a Sandler rule with our salespeople, manage your behavior, not your number. And they get so wrapped around their result that they forget to do the behaviors that gets in there.

Michael Webb: You used the word “number.” Manage your behavior. Don’t manage the number, manage your behavior, but by the number, you mean their revenue, right?

Josh Pitchford: Their revenue, their quota, whatever it happens to be.

Michael Webb: Yeah, okay. And so when you have those quarterly meetings with clients, and good on you for having those, what kinds of charts and graphs and activity measurements are involved? Not just revenue measurements, but activity measurements?

Josh Pitchford: Sure, a fair amount of our clients have an outbound prospecting element to their role and we help them chart everything. How many attempts are your inside or your outside people responsible for that? And there might be different layers. Some of the, you hear about now, “modern sales organizations,” they have all the way from sales development reps to inside sales reps to outside sales reps, account executives and they all may have different layers, their roles. But we look at okay, how many attempts are they making? How many significant conversations are they getting in with new prospects? How many new meetings are they booking? And then from there, looking at what are the measurable, leading, lagging indicators before we even get to revenue that we need to pay attention to?

This just popped into my mind. The five dials and you might have heard this before, but another great Sandler trainer in our network taught us-

Michael Webb: I don’t know what that is, go ahead.

Josh Pitchford: The five dials. You know, when you go into … and it’s not so much now, but you go into a cockpit on an airplane, the old-timey ones, right? They had dials all over the place. No pilot could keep up with all that. My brother flies widebodies for American Airlines, so nobody can keep up with that. But there are five dials. Five things that they need to pay attention to every single minute of the flight. And maybe in sales, it’s every single day, every single week we need to pay attention to these five dials. But we know enough that if we see one of those dials out of whack, we know where to go look to go look at where’s the true problem at.

And so we’re encouraging them to track their five dials on a daily or weekly basis and then probably every month have a download on the next layer, the lagging indicators and then those quarterly value reviews are where we really take a large look at the business as a whole and where’s the sales organization headed, what are other problems inside the business or other areas that may need improvement. It can either be customer service, leadership, management, all the other things that we do as well.

Michael Webb: Marketing, lead generation.

Josh Pitchford: We could go on for days, right?

Michael Webb: Yeah, very good. Very good, so how many of your client companies actually have management symptoms in place to track these improvement ideas and so that they’re following them through and actually making changes and actually proving that they’re improved, that things are getting better?

Josh Pitchford: All of them, once they start working with us. Very rarely do we walk in that they’re all set in stone. It’s music to my ears when I interact with a new prospective client that is already doing these kind of things. I was meeting with a guy this week that was already talking about building on his sales playbook and I’m like, “Wow, you are on top of it.” I’ve met with new prospective clients before that have walked in with key metrics already charted, wow, and they’re pointing to true numbers that they want to improve and so that’s the rare occasion, though, unfortunately. But that’s part of our role is that a lot of times we hear, well they just need to go out and make more calls. They just need to do more and they’re not really tracking what is more? What are you hoping to get out of more? If they’re already doing more and not doing it well, what’s the point?

Michael Webb: It can’t be just work harder, because there’s a big limit to that.

Josh Pitchford: It can’t be that. Absolutely.

Michael Webb: It’s hard for some companies to not do. I mean, that’s hard to not do.

Josh Pitchford: Absolutely, but need to realize our most precious resource is time and it’s not just do more, it’s do better and more improved things with the time that we’re granted and so we help them identify those things that are going to be the highest and best payoff. What are those five dials they need to be paying attention to? What are those key indicators, those kind of things that we need to be paying attention to all the time that are going to lead to success which is everybody looks at the final scoreboard, right? And we back it down to find out what are the true behaviors that we need to implement and the accountability structure that needs to be in place in order to make that better.

Michael Webb: So, as you look at clients and deal with clients, where would you say the biggest sales problems are, typically?

Josh Pitchford: The biggest sales problems are, number one, not enough prospecting activity. I was actually talking to someone earlier today. One of the biggest problems that I see is either new in their career, sales professionals don’t even know what to do, to do prospecting activity. In its most basic form, for instance, they don’t do their prospecting dials, for instance, because they either one, have call reluctance, because quite frankly they don’t even know what to say if someone answers the phone, so if they do make a dial, all through the rings, they’re praying for voicemail the whole time and having the voicemails get returned. And so, all the way from there. And then once they get established and once they’ve got to book a business and they’re rolling and they’re getting meetings and they’re getting proposals and they’re getting new sales and new clients all these things, they forget to do the things that got them to where they are and so they don’t leave time to find new business and new logos and keep the flywheel going, so to speak.

It takes a while to get that flywheel going when you’re new and it may not take as much to keep it going, but far too often, more established salespeople are the ones that … they don’t do anything and then all of a sudden it dries up and then they’ve got to go get that flywheel going again and that’s the hardest thing.

Michael Webb: So, let me ask you this question because you said, they’re not doing enough prospecting, so is that a problem or is that a solution, that they need to do more prospecting?

Josh Pitchford: Well, I would say that that’s a problem, that they always need to go in and put more in, that they’re not doing enough on the prospecting side, but certainly activity cures everything.

Michael Webb: Oh, it does?

Josh Pitchford: Absolutely it does. Good activity cures everything and as long as we are qualifying opportunities and making sure when we are doing our activity, we’re doing it with intentionality and far too often, people … and going back to your point about just work harder? I’m not saying that. I’m saying that there’s not enough activity going on at times to support the kind of metrics they want to hit and so they have to be very intentional about it, that they’re out just making cold dials. Well, are they doing the things to keep the opportunities they already have? Are they just concentrating attaining new?

Michael Webb: Right, but so you’re looking at the … forgive me here for pushing back. I mean this in all respect. That you’re looking at this in a manner of what the salesperson does and I’m sure you’ve seen cases in some businesses where the salesperson wasn’t necessarily the only one who could go and do prospecting. There was marketing handled effectively, trade shows handled effectively, advertising handled effectively, that was able to cause the salesperson to be engaged with a qualified prospect, instead of having to go dig you some trenches and knock on doors, all that, I mean, right?

Josh Pitchford: Absolutely. And you know, in this day and age, it’s a concerted effort and to further clarify what I was talking about there is, it’s an issue I typically see throughout the organization that the sales leader just says, “Do more,” without giving them any direction on what to do and how to best qualify and spend their time appropriately. So that’s the reason we end up training sales leaders, just as much as we do salespeople because many sales leaders have been put into that position because they were the best salesperson and quite often those skillsets are independent of one another and they were the … go ahead.

Michael Webb: I got you. Forgive me for interrupting there. It brings up a story, an example that I ran across a number of years ago and I wonder if this would resonate with you? So, I worked with a client and national account team and they’re not growing revenue the way they needed to and all the salespeople felt bad about it and so we started examining what I call the undesirable results. What’s the evidence and data we don’t like? And it’s something from process improvement that is a precision in how we use our language, so we don’t confuse potential solutions, potential causes with actually the evidence and data that we don’t like. We’re not making our number, we don’t have enough qualified prospects. That’s the evidence and data we don’t like. The fact that we’re not prospecting enough, that’s a potential solution, right? So, we need to distinguish those things in order to actually have evidence and data lead us to what changes might actually create improvement.

So, long story short, this company found a salesman would spend six months and he’d land a big deal and then he had to spend the next six months making sure that the right pieces and parts and fittings landed at the right store at the right time with the right service rep, you know, because nobody else in the company was doing that and so there was the customer service part, servicing after the sale, that was the bottleneck. And, literally, they were spending 90% of their time on that and it had never been examined before and so when they examined it and said, oh my goodness, we have to fix that and started actually fixing it, then salespeople, maybe only 50% of their time was being spent on that part of the business and now salespeople, at last, they could move to working on finding new accounts and doing prospecting and so the bottleneck, we call it the bottleneck, moved out to the market trying to find people who would buy from them.

And so they started calling on new accounts and they were shocked because the accounts weren’t calling them back and so they realized that they didn’t know how to approach a new account and open these new relationships and, okay, “Well let’s go to the marketing department. They have to know how to do that, right? That’s marketing, so let’s have marketing do a lead generation campaign for us,” and it was a rude awakening to realize that the marketing department had less of an idea how to do it than the sales department did.

And so this took many months for this to unfold and ultimately one of the things we found out was that the company didn’t have proof statements for the value of its products. They were a mature industry and back at the beginning of the industry, they had the differentiation because their product definitely created a result, solved a problem for customers, but now most people already had one of these systems. This was a water filtration system. Most people already had one and there was no reason to switch to my client’s because they didn’t have good proof statements. Why not? Well, they were doing some sort of research in the engineering department to compare their product with competitors, but the funding for that research had kind of put off for a while. This was like five years before and so they didn’t have these proof statements, so it was much harder to differentiate themselves in the market.

So you call that doing the why, why, why, why? It got down to a systemic issue in the management of the company where they had de-prioritized doing the product and testing research to prove they had a value proposition and that ultimately made it difficult for the sales force. So, they re-prioritized and put more engineering resources to do those studies to try to solve the problem, but it was not a quick fix. You still have to have salespeople, have to overcome that problem and you recognize it and it still has to be done, but unless somebody in the company is looking around to find these problems and solve them, sales is just never going to get easier, is it?

Josh Pitchford: It doesn’t get easier when you’ve got a situation like that and that’s kudos to you. Going deep and deep, asking why, why, why and then having the leeway to try this and try that and all that stuff and having that timeline and I think those were some of the things we’re running into with these quarterly value reviews with our clients. That’s allowing us to uncover and bring to them that third-party consultancy side of our business that we’re able to help them discover that while the salespeople are always going to have a responsibility to do their part, is that they have to do their part and try and not put it off, but this is where we can go in and say, “You have this issue that we see over here, this issue. What have you tried over here,” and help them see the big picture.

And we’ve all heard sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees and that’s one of the main things that we run into and it’s another reason to have a system in place, is far too often people are very reactionary and they just react to whatever’s in front of them today.

Michael Webb: I’m really, really encouraged to hear you say that. Because when I started back 15 years ago, I knew that every company that I ever worked for, we needed better sales processes and so I set off to help people create better sales processes and we were good at it, but over time, I learned something and I didn’t learn it by myself. Some other people came alongside and helped me to realize it, but it was that now, you could give them a new sales process and only five or 10% of the salespeople would actually adopt it, you know, and the rest of them might use five or 10% of the training that they got. They got something out of it, but they didn’t really change anything and what I realized was that they didn’t really need a new sales process.

They needed a way to improve the process they already had and so that goes to your quarterly meetings where some of these more intractable things that are outside the purview of the sales department to service those and have a way of tracing it down and then actually making a change that makes sales easier just to hear you say coming from the training industry that you guys are aware of that, your clients are starting to be aware of that and that there may be … management may be becoming more ready to follow that path. That’s really encouraging to me, I’m glad to hear.

Josh Pitchford: Absolutely and it becomes very apparent when we put the sales department and the sales organization is what we’re known for and so we’re always going to help out there, start putting out those accountability structures in place and those things and all of a sudden, if your salespeople are doing their part and things are moving forward, all of a sudden that highlights other issues within the organization that may be easier to even see, that hey, we have this problem over here that we need to go address and we help people with that, at least seeing that problem, and what the solution looks like, who knows? Maybe we can help them see that as well.

Michael Webb: Very good, super. Well, this has been interesting. I’m real pleased we got to this place. As I told you when we started out, I wanted to check with a state-of-the-art sort of a sales trainer type person and check and see the awareness of this system’s thinking and, by golly, it’s there.

Josh Pitchford: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that’s the reason you and I saw eye-to-eye from the moment we chatted.

Michael Webb: Yeah, and so I want to thank you for making yourself available for this call. Is there some way that, if my audience, someone would like to learn more about what you do, how can they get ahold of you?

Josh Pitchford: A couple different ways. You can always go to our website, salesengine.sandler.com and few things there. There’s future events there. Go to Our Team. You can see me and my partner here. My name’s Josh Pitchford and Mark McGraw is here. Then our office as well. My email address if you want to reach out is josh.pitchford@sandler.com. Love to start a conversation and see if there’s anything we might do to work together.

Michael Webb: Super, well Josh, thank you very much. We’ll have to do this again.

Josh Pitchford: Hey, I really appreciate you having me on, Michael and I look forward to the next time. Thanks again.

Michael Webb: Me, too. My pleasure. Bye.