Uncover Pain Your Buyers Don’t Know They Have with Marcus Chan

0:00Marcus Chan: Every sales leader wants the same thing. A team that's in front of more prospects, following up faster, and closing more deals. But most teams are losing hours every single week to admin work that has nothing to do with selling. Belay's sales assistants are U.S.-based professionals who go through rigorous vetting processes before they even join the team. Less than 3 % make the cut. They're matched specifically to sales teams to take that operational weight off your reps so that they can do what you hired them to do. close deals. Download Belay's free guide called The 5 Reasons You Aren't Hitting Quota, The Sales Operations Gap Examined.

0:35Marcus Chan: Pick up that guide today at belaysolutions.com forward slash gravy or text gravy to 55123. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, bestselling author, fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked. And I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Welcome back to the sales gravy podcast. I'm Jem Blunt Jr. I'm your host. And today I have one of my favorite guests I've brought onto the show back. He is the CEO of Vinly Consulting. Marcus also hosts the Revenue Vault podcast. Mr. Marcus Chan back on the sales gravy podcast today. We've got some interesting questions I want to ask him before we get started.

1:13Marcus Chan: Marcus, welcome back to the podcast. What's going on, man?

1:15Jeb Blount: You know what? I'm pumped to be here. We had so much fun the first time. I'm glad you didn't ban me for the podcast. I'm actually back a second time. So thank you for having me.

1:22Marcus Chan: This is a truly a really fun space for us to talk about the things that are I think so pertinent to the sales organization and sales industry. And you have a lot of really interesting insights here that sometimes it's hard to put your hands on, but it does make sense to have in the back of your mind as you are a leader or you're a salesperson who is looking to go into leadership. And a lot of this has to do with just skill development. And skill development is easy to talk about. There's so much content on the internet. We have so much space and even Sales Gravy contributes to this where we have so much content around skills, but actually developing them takes an extra step.

1:56Marcus Chan: You kind of sent me a note last night where we're emailing back and forth about what you wanted to talk about on the podcast. And you brought up a really interesting point first, which is asking deep transformational questions with your prospects. I want you to dive into that and what that means to you when you go into these rooms and with salespeople and you're going to actually start coaching them. What does that mean to ask deep transformational questions with your prospect.

2:21Jeb Blount: I think a lot of salespeople, they know, yes, I should ask questions. And sometimes they even are given a list of questions to ask at wherever they work at. So they get out of the call the prospect. It's maybe five, 10, 12 questions, whatever. And they kind of go through a list. It's very transactions, almost like a interrogation versus a conversation. And that prospect at that point will leave that conversation and probably never think about you ever again. On the flip side, I think about transformational conversations. If you put on a different hat for a second and you think about when you have a really deep conversation, an afflight conversation, you realize certain insights, maybe during or after, and they help you think in a different way and not by convincing you, but you realizing it, that's transformational.

3:12Jeb Blount: And what happens if I call like that is you're more likely to take action on whatever it's going to be. So the goal of a sales conversation is to get someone to take action. So you can't do it by transactional questions. You want to be transformational. And that's questions that get them to really think. And let me give you some examples because some people list them up. They're like, that sounds cool in theory, but what does that actually mean? For example, if someone says, hey, what challenges do you have? It's not bad. Maybe you'll get some challenges. But let's just say I want to really think because that question by itself is not that deep.

3:51Jeb Blount: If I said something like, what are the specific challenges you're facing with your specific sales work of 100 reps that become very problematic if you did not solve them in the next 12 months? Now you're thinking a little bit differently. And the response is going to be a little bit different, right? Right? You know, so when you start to think about this, and you can apply this to any part of your sales process, they can start to realize certain things. And then that leads to deeper questions, which allows you to have more insight. But they might say something like, well, we hit 40 % last year as a sales org.

4:24Jeb Blount: We're about hitting this year. And they stop talking. Okay, cool. We'll tell them a little more. because you guys missed by 40 % last year. What are the potential negative ramifications you're seeing across the business as a result not hitting in the number last year? Now we're at some point we can think in other ways, right? And you can go deeper and deeper, deeper. It's like the saying goes, instead of going a mile wide and steep, go an inch wide and a mile deep because that's where all the gold is.

4:51Marcus Chan: This is so powerful and is a challenge for even the most skilled sales professionals. This isn't about your skill level. It's about just your ability to play with a bit of a free hand. And I want to challenge you a little bit, Marcus. So I'm a sales rep or I'm a sales leader with a team of sales reps. And you tell me all of this and it sounds great. I go, Marcus, this is awesome. Makes sense. I totally understand it. The challenge is I have a sales cycle that's three months long. I have a quota to go hit every single week, every single month. I've got a quarterly number to go hit. And if I don't hit those numbers, I'm put on a PIP plan.

5:26Marcus Chan: And I have to qualify deals as quickly as possible before I even take them into the sales process, because otherwise I'm spending time with people who weren't going to buy for me. So how do you coach that someone like me, someone in that space to say, OK, I understand what you're saying. You got to qualify. That's why we have those list of questions. But you have to think differently about how you go into that meeting. What is that conversation like? How are you kind of turning the tides with that organization?

5:50Jeb Blount: Well, I'll say first off, I've been in those shoes for a very long time, right, for well over a decade. right the point of having this a million dollar number for myself to having a nine-figure quota as an organization so i felt the pressure especially for you know publicly traded companies where growth and earnings are required for you to keep your job i remember those stress and pressures and i totally get it i think ultimately this is a shift in thinking i'm a firm believer that 10 of all buyers you're going to talk to are probably going to buy right this is whether good, bad, or this is going to do it anyways, right?

6:24Jeb Blount: This is why I think even the worst reps use at least a 10 % closing ratio, right? You're like, all right. Blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. And then I'll say there's the other end, the other 10%, they'll never buy. It does not matter how effective you are from getting executive sponsors, multi-threading business cases, quantifying business impact, creating the ROI, blah, blah, blah, they will still not buy. But then there's the middle 80%. They can be swayed out of the way. Now, if your only goal is getting on the call and you're trying to qualify them to basically take an order, you can continue doing that if it works for you, if you're hitting the number you want to hit.

7:06Jeb Blount: But I would say that middle 80%, that's where you print money and you make a lot of cash as a sales leader and sales rep. The point I want to point out here is most people have two types of pain. There's active pain and there's latent pain. Active pain means they actively have a pain. So most reps are real good selling that. They're saying, hey, I have a problem. Please help me sell it. And hopefully you do a good job selling it, right? That's why blind squirrel finds a nut. The elite reps can take a latent pain. So this is an underlying pain the prospect has no idea about and get them to realize it's a real pain and ultimately sell them.

7:46Jeb Blount: And that's where the elite reps live. They're not order takers. They're making it happen. And I want to give you a really simple example to illustrate this point. Most people probably have a car. They're driving a car, right? Now, let's imagine if you get an oil change. So if you have an electric car, you have an oil change. Now, Jeb, do you own a car yourself? I do. I own a car. Is it a gas car? It is a gas car. So you probably have gotten an oil change before. So you go get an oil change. You're sitting in the lobby. what happens when they call you up?

8:15Marcus Chan: Oh, they tell me that my air filter needs changing. I've got a bad fuel rod flux capacitor and my pistons are wonky. Most people, what do they usually stay and do at that point? They either go hard no or they're like, okay, sure, I guess I'll pay for that. Now, I'm a hard no guy.

8:33Jeb Blount: I'm a skeptical guy. I'm like, I don't think so. What happens is like, you're like, my car's driving fine. The flux or whatever, I don't even, And I don't think that's a problem or whatever. All right. Now, if they were a really elite mechanic, they say, hey, Jeb, let me show you something. So you go in the bay, the hood's opened up, they pull something out. You don't even know what it is. And they're like, look at this thing. Your kids in the backseat, they're breathing in this gross thing. I think we should take care of four of you. What do you think? All right, makes sense. Okay, let's do it.

9:03Jeb Blount: Right? So that latent paint is now active. And they pull out something else. They're like, here's this like blackish liquid. You don't know what it is. They're like, if you don't fix this, your brakes will go out and you guys will get horrible accidents in your family. Now, since we're here, I could just take care of you. What do you think? Not more than likely, right? So what they're doing here is they're taking a latent pain, a pain you did not realize, exposing light and showing you that ticket size goes up. Now you bring it back to selling in our world and B2B, right? So if you're just taking the act of pain, you'll get the smallest deal sizes, the easy ones that already say yes.

9:41Jeb Blount: But if you get really good at asking deep transformational questions, it's not just with single stakeholders, through all the stakeholders in the deal, you can expose the deal and make it far bigger and sell them far more. And I'll give you a really, really simple example. At one point, I ran a sales team. We sold for basically every floor, every door, every business in America, if you will. And the average deal size was about, for a simple amount, about$10 ,000 in average annual volume, right? So that's what most reps should do. My team is still the S &B. So even I say most people think it's very transactional.

10:12Jeb Blount: Going, kind of taking order, if you will, get what you can, on the next one, play the numbers game. So we just ask deeper, better questions like we talked about here. And so my team, we have 4X the deal size. We had a higher win rate. We had greater deal sizes. We had presence club faster. We made more money. Deals are more profitable. because we sold more things and stuff into those accounts. It was stickier business. So now churn went down with greater lifetime value. But that's a power when you go from selling on latent to active. So on the fastest ways, transform how your team performs and what they do on calls.

10:50Jeb Blount: So if your team is not where you want to be, this is one way you can coach them and guide them to become better on their calls.

10:56Marcus Chan: I'm a leader listening to this and I'm going, Marcus, I've been saying this for years. I can't get teams to do this. They still walk into meetings and they ask pretty good questions. So Marcus, they're not bad. They just ask, hey, what are your challenges this year? How are you planning to solve them? What are your main goals for this year? And they're like pretty good, but standard sales open-ended questions. You've now brought up the point that I've been trying to make as a sales leader, which is if you ask things like what are your challenges this year, you're going to get the same answer that every Joe Schmoe off the street has asked them in the sales conversation.

11:23Marcus Chan: And you change that. You're the mechanic now. You're going, hey, I want you to think about your air filter and not think about your fuel lines right now or think about your oil change. This is something over here in this corner that you've kind of ignored and you know it. And they're like, yeah, I have ignored it. Thank God someone's saying something to me. I want to talk about it. You're this mechanic now that's really, really asking or bringing this latent challenge. But as a coach, as a leader, as someone in a business, okay, how do I actually get my reps to do this? I mean, from a behavioral standpoint, they're not changing their behavior.

11:49Marcus Chan: So Marcus, what are some exercises? What are some ways that leaders can go about this challenge that actually creates change in the field and not just like a fun podcast you share with your team on Slack channels?

11:59Jeb Blount: Let's walk through super tactically, right? So I'm going to show you through some very simple operating rhythm things you can do literally right now. It's how I've taken teams from the absolute worst to number one, hidden practical of every single year, blowing numbers out consistently. Okay. So it's going to be very, very simple. So the first piece is you have to search, teach them what good looks like. Okay. So for example, one key operating rhythm outside of onboarding is you should be running a weekly training meeting, not put on by enablement. you're teaching it as a sales leader. Okay. And you want to go through in a very simple structure in terms of how you run the meeting.

12:34Jeb Blount: So first off, I call the edge framework, four steps. Educate them first. Teach them in a repeatable framework on how you actually do it. So for example, I teach what I call RIM, which is when we ask questions, we want to cover the relevance, the impact, the motive. Educate, you know, here's what the RIM looks like, here's the framework. They say all the cool stuff that's going to theory is what they're thinking in their head. then you as a leader demonstrate what good looks like. You pick the rep on your team who you know is going to bust you up and be hard on you because you want them to be hard on you.

13:06Jeb Blount: And you're going to show them what good looks like. You act as a salesperson, they act as a prospect. Let them be tough on you. Show them how you fight through and dig into it. Just like how you just challenged me on it initially, same thing. Let them challenge you. So you can show them what exactly good looks like. A couple of things happen when you do this. Number one, you can see it live. Number two, the trust in you as a leader increases. Because oftentimes leaders act like armchair quarterbacks. They don't think, you know how to sell me more in today's time. So you demonstrate. Then after you demonstrate it, you go in the R, you're going to do real plays.

13:44Jeb Blount: Not role plays. You're going to do real plays. Now they're going to role play together, if you will, as real plays. You're going to be tough on them. You're going to beat them up. Prepare them for the worst. Be tough on them. And they need to demonstrate that core skill you're going for, right? And then at the end, everyone gets coming back together. You can't pick one person and do the role play. And then you give action items, right? So now it's like, cool, we just taught this framework. Your number one focus this week is everybody executes on this. You're teaching, that's the operating rhythm.

14:14Jeb Blount: Then there's a second component. The second component is as a sales leader, your number one job is to make your team awesome and crush it. Because the more money they make, the more money you make, it works together. You should be in the field or listening to calls or attending live calls every single week. And on these calls, you know what you're looking for? Exactly what you train them on, right? Now you're going through, you're making sure they're tying the shoes the way you showed them, they're throwing the football the way you told them to do it. And you're making sure what happened in the classroom, in the real place, does not happen in real life.

14:51Jeb Blount: And you can coach them live after the call is done. Great job with this. Here's what you need to do next. Let's role play. Boom. They can go through it again. So your job is like a sports coach. They have that repetition built in, okay? That's another operating rhythm, all right? Then you continue to go deeper. Another operating rhythm is how effective are the one-on-ones you run. They should not just be pipeline reviews. You need to go deep into how deals are moving, right? If you're doing stuff like this, you will see an increase in their metrics. But you can go deeper. So let's say, for example, I sell a Salesforce CRM, right?

15:23Jeb Blount: and they're talking like an exciting deal they have in their one-on-one with you cool well you know like jeb what's the quantifiable business impact of them not stopping the problem hello boss i thought it was a great deal because it's a big number for my commission check exactly so then you get a role play cool walk me through how you did it pull a call review up go through it together and coach them live right so that's another operating room that you have to do consistently. Okay. So when you look at all these components, it's not set it and forget it. It's you teach and you're constantly reinforcing over and over and over.

15:59Jeb Blount: And let's just say a week goes by and you're not seeing a change of behaviors. Guess what the next week's training is on. It's just more real plays now. We're going to hammer this point home. It's not about something shiny and new. The best advice is true, not new. So you have to help them realize these core fundamentals is what makes them great. The key is, is if you're thinking you could train once and forget about it, not going to work.

16:25Marcus Chan: You're pulling the best out of people. You're not pushing them forward with a shove, a big shove at the beginning of the year at the SKO. You shove them forward and you hope they do better. And then you check in a year later and you go, I don't know this changed. I don't know how that happened. Boss, I've been talking about it and you send them the podcast, but you don't follow up on it. You don't have a system of operation that allows you to follow up with this. And I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, okay, this has been a great conversation. Okay. The skill of asking deep transformational questions is a fundamental skill within the elite sales force of the world.

16:55Marcus Chan: They do this really, really well. You have a coach that's not only breeding the ability for sales reps to reach eliteness through operational coaching, training, and follow-up and accountability to these things. But now we're in this place where they're like, Marcus, this all sounds good, but like, what kinds of questions did I ask them? my prospects and which kind of questions should I train my sales reps on? And I imagine that this kind of hits home for you because not every good question for every industry is the same. There's not like a list of good questions to ask. You can just check off.

17:26Marcus Chan: Resourcefulness. This is a skill that I struggle with myself. I have co-workers that struggle with this. I think I've worked on thousands of sales teams. There were salespeople who struggle with this and leaders struggle with this. Resourcefulness, finding the information or the resources you need in order to get this done. So like, let's talk about questions, for example. How could you go about finding the right kinds of questions to train your Salesforce on? I think there's a key piece, which is like where to find it, but how to think about solving problems.

17:52Jeb Blount: And there's actually two different conversations, right? So when we talk about resourcefulness, being resourceful means you'll find a way, despite the constraints, to get whatever you need to get done. Well, Well, first of all, let me back up. If you're listening to this podcast, you're already on the path for stuff because that means you are trying to get better already, right? But if you are not resourceful and you're like, oh man, what questions should I ask? You're like, I'm just going to give up. I don't even know what to do. I'm going to ask some people I'm not even going to know what to do, right?

18:23Jeb Blount: Okay. Now, if I was resourceful, I would ask myself, maybe my company doesn't provide the training. They haven't provided the playbook. I don't know how to prepare my organization. Okay. You know what? Like, where could I find the best questions that are most specific to what we're doing? Well, if it already has been running for a while, if they're running all recordings, hey, maybe our best sales calls. Okay. Maybe what I'll do first is I'm going to go get our best rep sales calls. I'm going to run it through Gemini, ChatGBT, Claude. I'm going to give a simple prompt and say something like, I want you to analyze these top 50 close one deals, the discovery calls, uncover exact core components that we're uncovering consistently on these calls and example questions for each component.

19:13Jeb Blount: Make me a click in sites list, be precise, and show me examples of where it came from within the transcript. Now that's the resource already, right? You can do it with a free subscription of any AI platform, just even doing that. Maybe 50 call trans, maybe you have to pay for a little more because it's a lot of data, but you get my point, right? So that's how you start to think resourcefully, right? To solve things. Because ultimately, if there's a constraint in place, you have to figure it out. Now, if you have more resources, because you allocate more resources to get it figured out and get more help, right?

19:43Jeb Blount: That's a really easy way to be resourceful in a situation like that.

19:47Marcus Chan: So going into a follow-up call, I want every important note right at my fingertips, not buried somewhere in a scribbled stack of notes. And with Plod Notepin S, I always have them because it's a wearable, portable note taker that lets me stay present and focused on customers during every single meeting. Plod captures the conversation and turns it into organized summaries and action items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's Recall has that ready for me. And that's why Jeb Sr. and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Note Pen S. Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes.

20:21Marcus Chan: Go to plod.ai forward slash jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash jeb and use code jeb to get 10 % off your purchase. When you go about the behavior of resourcefulness as a leader, so you are coaching someone and they have the one-on-one, you did the weekly training, you talk about, you know, transformational questions. Again, just kind of go back to this, like on the ground example, you have a one-on-one with somebody and they are sort of doing the, I don't know where to find these things. You haven't provided me with this information. I'm not sure what even the best reps are doing because they're not on our team, you know, blah, blah, blah, these kinds of conversations.

20:59Marcus Chan: And in some ways it's hard because they're valid in some ways and invalid and that we know that that's not resourceful. So it's your responsibility to go make yourself better in a lot of ways, but your leader, your coach, you're sitting in this room and someone's kind of giving you that line of, I would say excuses, but that's, that may be a little strong, maybe a little negative, but they're giving you those kind of excuses. What as a leader can you do to start embedding resourcefulness back into these people and transforming their behaviors? I'm gonna give you two responses to this.

21:27Jeb Blount: I think the first piece I understand is, well, number one, with what they're saying, is this a systemic problem or is it a one-off and they need to be more resourceful? So whenever I think about problems getting brought to my attention, I think about it in a very simple way, right? So I use, I call it MPP framework. I look in the mirror. First, I say, I'm the first in the mirror. Did I set this person up for success in this situation? Did I give them the proper tools, training, onboarding, resources, but I can remove their excuses? In a situation like that, I might be like, I didn't. I didn't do those things, right?

22:00Jeb Blount: Then I look at the next one, the P, what's the process look like? Even the process of making sure they know what he thinks, is it dialed? I also know now that process is probably not dialed. And then I look at the last P, which is the person, right? I look at them, is it on them? So I think the first piece is in a situation like this, my number one goal as a sales leader is to make sure I eliminate all their excuses for they being successful. And I remember making the same mistakes that I had. I remember early on the sales leader, man, they're underperforming, I'm about to go on a performance plan and they're saying, it's your fault, Marcus.

22:33Jeb Blount: You didn't trade me, you didn't onboard me, you gave me resources, it's all your fault, you gave me the worst territory. How do you expect me to perform? Your fault. And they were right. So if the first piece is systematically solve those core things, they don't pop up and bite you in the butt later, right? It's kind of like if you're coaching you all up front, it's easy to take ownership, right? Because that makes it easier to challenge the resourcefulness. Let's just say, for example, we know in this situation here that we didn't do all those things anyways, right? Because it's too late anyways.

23:01First off, you can't be defensive because you're like, well, you're a dummy.

23:05Jeb Blount: Go figure it out, you know? Yeah, we both work here. Yeah, it's not going to change your situation. So the first thing I'll do, I'll just say, hey, you're 100 % right. So what could we do together to help set you up for success? Starting right now. We can't go back in time, but what can we do together? I want to show this rep is that we're partnering together that's not all on them. And we can go a little deep and they might be like, well, you know, it'd be nice if we had some training. Well, tell me a little more, what's that look like exactly? Well, you keep telling me that we need to ask deeper, more transformational questions.

23:39Jeb Blount: I don't even know what that means. Okay, so I'm going to start doing that. Cool. What else can we do? Well, you could also spend more time in the field with me. Okay, cool. That sounds like a good plan. What's that look like? We have five reps on our team, you know, at least once a week, one appointment. Okay, I can commit to that. Let's just start with that. Cool. Okay, I'm going to do those things. Now, what are you going to commit to? I want to make sure it goes both ways, right, as part of it, right? And that's why sometimes it's tough to just challenge them back. but you need to be more resourceful because reality is that might be a signal.

24:12Jeb Blount: The rest of the team is also struggling too. So instead of putting a bandit on the situation and say, hey, go up your call record and figure out questions and do that, now you're working together. Or you could flip it together. You still do the same thing up front. You could say, hey, listen, what are you going to do? I'm not sure. Okay, how about we work on this together? I have an idea. Can you go grab, you know, top five call recordings from the top rep, at least get the transcripts and just analyze the AI, point around, figure it out, just show me what you find out. It'll be perfect. And then we can discuss it together and we can train together.

24:42Jeb Blount: What do you think? So my goal is creating that ownership as part of it as well, right? But I think ultimately, if you do all of the things properly, the best thing you can do from a resourcefulness perspective is you have to hire people who are resourceful. Some of those things are also ingrained. If they're just not a resourceful person, you can't force them to be someone that they're not. Is that they're going to have

25:03Marcus Chan: all their internal wiring. This is the crux of a sales organization. organization is people who go and solve problems. You are a problem solver for your customer. First and foremost, you walk into meetings with the idea that you're going to help them. Helping them requires resourcefulness. How do you help yourself? Being resourceful. How do you help your reps? You have to be resourceful. I love this MPP. Look at yourself in the mirror first and say, did I set them up for success? In a lot of cases, I'll tell you this, I've been on several sales teams. And I think I told you right before this podcast is that I don't think I've sat in a room with an organization that had a true leader coach.

25:38Marcus Chan: And one of the missing pieces was simply those one-on-ones and those coaching sessions at the beginning of the week or middle of the week. And then having a one-on-one that held me accountable to things. It was more of, hey, did you get your numbers into the CRM? If you got your numbers into the CRM, great. Are you closing your deals? Great, okay, I'll leave you alone. Like that was it. And so I progressed by my own accord, by just experience and learning and being a part of, you know, this world that I just happened to be born into. But what most reps are seeking, if they are resourceful, You see this in college campuses across the United States.

26:07Marcus Chan: They have all of these great students who are like, you know what? Sales is a great profession to be in. And they're hungry to go learn. And then they get into a sales organization and there's no one there to feed them. And what you're talking about is a way to feed this organization. I love this conversation. I want to end with some positivity. I love that you're a competitive guy. I love that we live in a competitive world where we get to put the best version of ourself out every single day or choose not to. You have some great goals you shared with me this year that you wanted to get done. And I want you to just share what you want to get done this year.

26:35Marcus Chan: And then what are you going to do to get that done? Like, what is your method of madness?

26:39Jeb Blount: So number one, I'll show my finance goal, right? Which is I'm a firm believer on how can we drive the highest possible output per an employee? This is everyone, not the sales role, every single function. So all my goals is to hit a million dollars in revenue per an employee while running 85, 9 % margins. It's an intentional constraint because constraint creates resourcefulness, right? Absolutely vital. So we've done a few things to kind of drive towards this. Even leading up to this point, we have really niched down on the exact businesses we work with, the problems we solve specifically. That's been really cool, right?

27:20Jeb Blount: And what we're seeing because of that, way bigger deal sizes. So we're solving repeatable problems, bigger deal sizes, and then we're also doing increase the overall deal size as well. It's been absolutely key. So we're making sure we're going with the right people who have the money, who want our help, and they love the help, right? And then we get more referrals and all that stuff. The other component we're also working on as well is increasing the quality output per employee in any function. And obviously we're in a time of AI, right? But it's like, how can we leverage not just using the quad, not just using the Gemini, but how can we actually build agents to work underneath the person.

28:01Jeb Blount: Each person now is a manager. Who's underneath them? I'll give you an example. So we're doing an AI hackathon coming up very soon. So the employee has all day to go in. Their only job is to look at what they're currently doing and how can they basically replace themselves so they can have a better and greater output using AI. We're going to find out what their outputs are, right? I'll give you a little reason why this is so important to me. I mean, just last week, I'm told I'm building some of these agents, you know? And one of them I built out. It took basically everything, analyzed it out. Basically, about 50 hours of work it would take me or someone my team to do.

28:42Jeb Blount: It basically built a playbook with all of that within two hours. Insane. It was like, cool. It will add in probably another five, 10 hours into it, right? But so still, I mean, what kind of done to do? A fraction of what was before is way better, right? So like, that's an example of one, right? I built another agent. It logged into my CRM, analyzed all the opportunities, everything, and gave me analysis. I created another one. It went into my Notion, which is a project manager software. It took a look at every single post, all for logging into my Shield analytics, built together a strategy of what we need to do next to take out the game to the next level.

29:19Jeb Blount: It did it while I was sleeping. I'm very bullish on this, right? So I'm like, okay, so we're going to make sure we got the right people, but then we also make everyone on our team AI augmented to be even better than the forces. I mean, we'll still do basic stuff like, you know, analyze college transcripts first. I mean, it's like certain things that say it's easy, but I'm like, man, this is the next level. That's what we're doing from a finance perspective.

29:40Marcus Chan: I love that you've added these constraints to your world and then you challenge yourself to the next level. And look, I love that this is the mindset that you have as a competitive person, you understand that, look, I'll never reach all of my goals. It's just not possible. But if I get 80 % of the way there, that's 80 % more than I was yesterday. And I love that. You also have a fitness goal, which I love as well. So like, let's talk about that. It's like base level. I mean, AI and all this kind of cool stuff and augmenting and a million dollars per employee. Like people are listening and going, that sounds really cool, Marcus.

30:10Marcus Chan: I don't work for you. But fitness is something that we all have the ability to impact for our own lives and in our own health. You have some crazy goals here. You explain them. I'm not even sure if I understand the math on it. A little background context, right?

30:23Jeb Blount: I grew up as a competitive swimmer. Well, first off, I was horrible at swimming early on. Didn't pass my swim classes. Finally passed. I'm nine years old and I joined the swim team for the first time. I don't even know how to swim really that well. Within a year, I'm one of the fastest kids in the state. Over time, everyone got bigger than me as they hit puberty and they basically ran circles around me, right? Now, I went through an obsessive phase where I'm like, I want to be everybody. I need to get better at swimming. So I became very obsessive, got super leaned out, super muscular as well.

30:52Jeb Blount: So fitness has always been kind of part of my life. I've got to maintain that over time. As I've gotten older, you know, I've realized certain things. I mean, it's harder to put on muscle. It's like, I can't eat the same way. I can't work out the same way I used to do. It's all different now, right? Over the last several years, I've really have tightened things down. I'm not 18 years old anymore, right? So right now, I have two targets from a fitness perspective. So number one is to have a 6.5 to 1 muscle to fat ratio. So here's what that means. So you take how many pounds of muscle you have, and then you take out how much pounds of fat you have, and you divide the number and you get a ratio.

31:32Jeb Blount: I would say probably the average male in their 30s and 40s, I think is around maybe like four, maybe somewhere around that. So right now I'm 5.5 muscle fat ratio. Ultimately, that means you have to increase muscle mass and you got to decrease your fat. I'm shooting for a 6.5 to one muscle fat ratio. That's the target I'm going for. Really hard to get to. Once you're above five, you're already a pretty high level for most athletes anyways. This works regardless of how tall you are, how short you are, et cetera, because it's just a ratio, right? And then also run sub 8 % body fat year round. Right now, I'm 8.6 % body fat.

32:11Jeb Blount: So I'm trying to get right below that level of tether. What is the reason for this?

32:15Marcus Chan: I'm sure it makes you look good, but there's gotta be something else to it. Otherwise, it's just math on a piece of paper and you look great at the end of the year. But like, why are you pushing yourself so hard for these goals, especially with the fitness piece? Like what is keeping you in a competitive place to keep pushing?

32:30Jeb Blount: I've learned long ago, you can only control the controllables. And I have found fitness and personal development, they have this weird overlap where you have a lot of control, more than you believe and realize. There's something to be said about when you set that goal. And if you don't get there, who you become along the way is this amazing feeling of progress and growth, right? Like realistically, 6.51 muscle fast is incredibly hard. Especially at my age to build muscle at level is very hard. But for me, I do it because I like to watch progress build. And I think it's really important to have other goals outside your work goals.

33:15Jeb Blount: You have your work goals, your business goals. I think that's great. But on top of that, when your fitness goals are dialed, that's great too. Now, here's the other subline why. I'm big on longevity. I don't call myself a biohacker, but I want to increase my health span. So not just my lifespan, my actual health span, my quality of life. So I know the older I get, the harder it is to build muscle. So if I can build more muscle now, which I know we're probably sort of losing over time. I mean, that's why you look at someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? It's not the same way you used to look.

33:48Jeb Blount: So it goes downhill, right? So my goal is as much as possible. So when I'm in my 70s, 80s, 90s, I have such a strong foundation. My quality of life is incredibly high. The body fat piece is kind of weird, but I believe it's like a status symbol. It's so egotistical, obviously, anyways, right? It's a gold medal. When you walk around, like if you're in a Cabo, Cancun, you go to the beach, you go to your friend, you're in a swimsuit, and you look dialed, and you have a six-pack or eight-pack, you're proportional all the way around, that's a level of status that you can't buy. You have to earn that.

34:24Jeb Blount: and that's a representation of the discipline you have to put in every single day, choosing to do the hard things every day when no one's looking.

34:32Marcus Chan: This is so foundational. It's so key. I'm so happy that you brought this up. Just like at the end of this podcast, you think of all this conversation. You have to have these goals outside of work. You have to be competitive in places where you aren't competitive right now in order to sustain competitiveness within work. And I love this quality of lifespan. Being 90 years old and not being able to move is not fun. It's just not the way you want to be. You want to be 90 and running a marathon. Maybe you don't want to be 90 running a marathon, but you know, you get the sentiment there. You want to have that good push.

35:00Marcus Chan: The lesson to learn from Marcus is when you put your mind into this place, the process is the reward. The ability to make yourself better, see the different progresses you can make. And then also say you're doing all this stuff in the gym or you're eating right when you're pushing yourself to kind of put yourself in a place that's uncomfortable. When you get into places where you have a lot more experience, pushing yourself to be uncomfortable there is leaps and bounds of progress, not just little bits. Marcus, thank you so much for your time on the Sales Gravy podcast. If you are listening to this right now on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, anywhere you get podcasts, give us a five-star rating.

35:35Marcus Chan: Leave us a comment. I'd love to see what you think about this episode. If you have not, you need to go over to youtube.com forward slash sales gravy. You can watch these episodes. Sit down and have a conversation with us if you'd like. Leave us a comment. If you leave a comment, I'm trying to grow that audience, so I'd love to SNJ gift. So ring that bell, follow us on YouTube, go to youtube.com forward slash sales gravy. If you want to invest in yourself, go to outboundconference.com. The biggest, baddest sales conference in the world is happening in Las Vegas in November. So go check out outboundconference.com.

36:02Marcus Chan: Otherwise, Marcus, where can people learn from you, follow you, and then ultimately get more information to make themselves better through the work that you do?

36:09Jeb Blount: One quick thing I want to mention about the workout thing. I think it's so vital. If you're a leader doing this type of stuff, it's inspiring to your team. When you are living the actions you talk about, they see it and it'll give them something to inspire towards. All right, now where to find me? Super simple. You can go to YouTube, look up Marcus Chan, a YouTube channel there, or look me up at any platform that you're listening to podcasts on. We have our stuff on there too. You can find me on LinkedIn as well or head to benlyconsulting.com.

36:36Marcus Chan: Awesome. Marcus, thank you for joining us on the Sales Gravy Podcast and we'll catch you next time.

37:08Marcus Chan: We'll see you next time.

37:14Marcus Chan: Thank you.