1521 – With A Purpose Behind it with Founder and CEO of Elev8 IO and Great Dane Ventures’ Gary Garth

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now founder and ceo of elevate.io and great dane ventures it's gary garth gary thank you so much for joining us hey josh thank you so much for having me absolutely you are found on the web at elevate.io that's e-l-e-v the number eight dot i-o and also garygarth.com uh gary you're also the author of the book, The Zero to 100 Million Sales Blueprint. Well, that doesn't sound like a bad blueprint. I'm interested. Right? Yeah. This bad boy right here, 420 pages packed with the entire framework on how to conceptualize your sales strategy, how to effectualize it, and who to hire, which systems to implement, how to run sales meetings, everything anything you will need to grow revenue right that's why it's called zero to a hundred million it's not just pure theory it's actually the the lessons i've learned along the way in my last projects that's crazy is it an audiobook that's gonna be a long audiobook 400 and some pages it is they asked they asked me if i wanted to narrate it myself i was like hell no i can't do that yeah i don't blame you like a whole week in the studio so that's a lot of talking it's on Amazon.

2:14You can get on my website. It's a paperback, hard copy, and Kindle version, obviously. Great. Great. Going to get it. I'm going to get it. All right, Gary, give us an overview of your impact in the world today. Yes, for sure. I'm a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, now also author. I've launched a couple of different projects. Everything I do right now is, frankly speaking, with the purpose behind it. I have run six different companies over the last 25 years. I've been fortunate to launch, scale, and exit a few of them. I was a millionaire when I was 25 years old. And at one point, I just came to a crossroads, so to speak, where I said, you know, it's not just about making money.

3:01How can I actually make a difference also, Am I just making my last agency, we had thousands of clients, 300 million on managed ad spend, but the majority of our clients was actually attorneys, personal injury lawyers. And I was like, how am I helping the world today, just helping these guys slip and sue kind of accidents and help to facilitate that? So my new marketing agency, we work a lot with companies that has raised funding, particularly software as a service, B2B. We also work with a niche vertical that is addiction treatments and industry. And that's strategically handpicked because of the scenario where one out of three Americans has mental health issues and addictions is at a staggering high.

3:48Only 11 % of people that are suffering with addictions actually get an opportunity to go to treatment. treatment. So at the same time, you had all these addiction treatment centers that actually are not at full capacity. So it's like, why that what the heck is going on? You got all these people suffering, you got all these people looking for patients, clients to help. And how can we connect the dots there? So that's the main driver of that project. At the same time, I also launched this goals, grit and greatness project, which is basically a planner, there's a lot of planners on the market. But this is basically my notion of everything you need to do to execute effectively as an entrepreneur or a high achiever.

4:24And it's all about daily positive habit building, starting with the end goal in mind, tying everything up you do with a purpose and then establishing annual goals, quarterly goals, distilling that into weekly daily priorities, reflect on those exercises and then ongoing optimize your performance, so to speak. So I tie that very much up with all my projects, the investments I have through Great Inventures, Elevate.io. And I use it even for my huddles for all my employees. Every morning we kick off a sales meeting and I say, okay, Freddie, what's your top priority? And what's your number one priority today?

4:59How's that tied up with your multi-target? How can I help you influence towards that goal? So that's basically my why, all of those things. Yeah. You know, I love that you're working with, you know, addiction treatment facilities. You know, and that strikes me. My wife is a licensed marriage and family therapist. You have a background in mental health as well. That's where I went to college for way, way, way back when. I got distracted with internet development or internet entrepreneurism in the meantime. But yeah, that strikes me as an industry that I wouldn't say is like incredibly sophisticated from a marketing standpoint.

5:39And so it almost strikes me as kind of an underserved market, perhaps. That's correct. Yeah. How does that factor into kind of the counsel that you give other companies that are really looking to grow in scales, like looking for those opportunities that might be underserved? Yeah, absolutely. So it was sheer coincidence I got into the addiction treatment as selling the shares in my last company. I was fortunate to exit with a good amount of pocket change, and I had some time to reflect on what I wanted to do next, and spent a whole year traveling the world, doing plant medicine, and asking the spirits for some direction, etc.

6:23And that's how I came on it, that I wanted to invest in the addiction treatment centers. And throughout that diligence process, I just learned that, you know, marketing agency was not necessarily, and I knew a thing or two about marketing. So I could detect that, okay, these strategies, I do not believe in enough to put money into this project. I don't think that's going to get the phones ringing. I don't want to make sure that we had a capacity and the cost was very high. But, you know, besides that, if I look across all the companies I've been blessed to work with, my last project, I was reselling to other marketing agencies.

6:56I personally had 200 resellers that I would communicate with on QPRs, annual business reviews, ongoing. and I would help to enable them to sell. So all of a sudden I had insights to tens of thousands of clients besides the 5 ,000 direct end advertisers I had myself. So I had a unique perspective into seeing what works, what doesn't work. And that's what basically gave birth to Elevate.io and our core offering is that it's a lot of good marketing agencies out there just fueling the top of the funnel, right? But what happens with all those leads is they fall through the cracks. So what we added to that equation is to make sure, I call it tech enablement.

7:36We have our own CRM, but we also work with other third-party CRMs, HubSpot, Salesforce, et cetera. We just configure to make sure that all the processes are in place. So we have all the key metrics for sales marketing standpoint is in the face of the entrepreneur and our team when we optimize in the campaigns. That way we know, is the return on this ad spend? Is it, or what's the cost per acquisition versus the lifetime value. Should we reinvest? Should we up the budget, so to speak? And then the last element, the third tier is that, okay, once we get that down, that's because of the book. There's a lot of people that reach out to me and say, Gary, this is great.

8:14It's endorsed by the head of sales at Google, Microsoft, Amazon. So people buy into, I know a thing or two about sales. So I go out and help companies establish the sales process. And it really all starts with, do you have a sales plan? And I know it sounds simple, Josh, But I swear, nine out of 10 companies I talk with, they don't have a sales plan. So they haven't started with end of mind. They haven't done strategic marketing, understand the firmographics, demographics, even psychographics of the prospects, how to get in contact with them, what's your messaging. They don't have a strong alignment between sales and marketing so that the collateral that they're creating is actually adopted by the sales team and effectively used.

8:56They're not using the right technologies to accelerate the performance. They don't have all the right reporting. How do they hire Ombra reps, train them, coach them? How do they create career path development so everybody's motivated and don't turn from a company standpoint, leave to another company? So there's so many facets into building a solid sales plan that can just put your growth on steroids, so to speak. And that's the third element of our services is that we go in and help. And that's everything in the details of if you reach out to, if a prospect reach out to you to inquire more about your services, most sales reps just send a follow-up email.

9:33They maybe have a process that maybe they give them a call more. Hey, you ready to buy yet? Hey, you ready to buy yet? We design like a sequence of like eight, 10 touch points with constant different angle, different value proposition where you have to ask certain discovery questions in the process that get leveraged throughout the sales process later on. So everything is built with a strategy in mind and then automated. and then we measure it so forth. So the results of that, just aligning those three things together, even though it sounds simple, it has direct incremental impact on revenue. Then you go into upselling, cross-selling and it can really do a difference.

10:16So that's something I would say that could apply for most businesses out there that are looking to grow, especially in 2023, right? Where everybody's uncertain about the future. It's all about revenue optimization, efficiency, and effectiveness. And from a sales standpoint, that's where you should double down. Now is the time to just double down on marketing and sales, if you ask me. Not slow down. On the contrary, turn up the heat. And show up in these potential clients' lives or potential customers' lives in a way that other people are not. Because you're right. I would argue that the vast majority of follow-up out there sucks.

10:52your competitors who are friends that's listening just right now your competitors aren't doing follow-up well you have an opportunity to show up in these lives it's amazing like you know i think about like even something as simple gary is like home services and um you know we spent you know close to a hundred thousand dollars on the home and we hired a lot of contractors last year and it floored me how few of them did any sort of follow-up in any sort of professional way. Like it was just, it is not a high bar. So listen up coaches, consultants, agency owners, B2B service providers. If you do not have your follow-up dialed in, you are leaving so much money on the table.

11:37You're spending all this money on acquisition and your conversion is not anywhere where it should, I'm guessing, and your sales cycles are probably nowhere as tight as they possibly could. All right, Gary, give us the elements of better follow-up today for 2023. Thank you for asking that question. I was biting my tongue to just... I know, I'm like, please let me interject here. I feel like I was the world's biggest slow-motion wind-up softball pitch to you here. Yeah. Okay. So first, what not to do? You mentioned this, allow me to resurface this email, allow me to bubble this up your queue, allow me to check in with you.

12:14Any news of this, trash that, please, just forget it, right? Basically, you can come a long way by just saying every time, how can I, to some extent, add value to this conversation? And that may sound simple, but it all starts with the initial step of sales process, the discovery call. Have you taken proper notes? Have you asked all the right questions? So you have all that intelligence in the arsenal throughout your follow-up process. because they may be swept. You may have the best price in place. You have got all the indicators that are ready to move forward. But for XYZ reasons, things outside your control, the deal just gets paused.

12:57You need to reinforce the value proposition of why you, right? So a lot of other people out there and a lot of people is hungry nowadays. So add value to every touch point. And that's basically, it could be as simple as I am really looking forward to get started. I took the liberty of adding a case study here that resembles a lot to your business. I believe we can do the same for you. Whatever that may be. It could also be that you touched upon a point that is actually impacting the revenue that you want to do a reference to. I add a data sheet or some market intelligence based on some solution that you're adding to the equation.

13:33Whatever it may be, come from a standpoint of adding value and an intelligent angle to it. obviously the last thing is like i put in my book nowadays there's so many so many hacks out there right everybody's on social media and the you know there's a get rich scheme and courses for everything and anything right and everybody's looking okay should i use chat gbg for this so can i do xyz for that you know i i would say like some of the best advice i can give is like pick up a book like the six principles of persuasion right you know it creates emergency viscosity right whatever means social proof leverage those emotional triggers that make us buy i know b2b sales is all about being logical and assessing and looking at the numbers but we're all emotionally driven right we we we lean towards people we like and we want to do business with people that are trustworthy so how can you leverage all those factors think about that in every single email you send out and i always tell my reps like when they're about to sit hit send.

14:38I say, is that the best email you can send? What's the purpose of this email? What a great question to ask. Is that the best email you can send? You know, and I got to tell you too, it's amazing. I remember one time talking with a guy and he was selling like a$60 ,000 product. And he said, so I said, so what do you do after you have your initial, you know, kind of discovery call? He goes, Oh, I put them on a drip sequence. I was like, what? And when I say drip sequence, I don't mean, you know, like, you know, a really well designed cadence. I mean, it was just an automatic email, where he was just going to like, send sales messages.

15:17Could you imagine, Gary, how you would feel if you had a conversation with someone, and then they just automated you? How you would feel? Or what about you reach out, you initiate a sales process, and they still hit you up with remarketing offers. I'm like, oh, my God, can you please just build out your audiences? I'm in conversation with one of your reps. Please don't market me the same way that I should get a free audit or take advantage of XYC or my CRM is wrong. I'm having a conversation with you guys already. And furthermore, the lack of personalization, it just pisses me off. I can actually walk away from deals like that because I feel like if they don't have the attention to detail at this stage, then what's going to happen once I come on board as a customer and already swipe my credit card?

16:01so no very very very very important a good point and and to your to your point before josh i mean if you spend marketing nowadays and you know just the cost per lead and getting them on the phone and creating the interest it's very expensive like you don't want to drop the ball at the finish line that's where you really got to up your game so um yeah that's very very important yeah all right so to our friend that's been listening to i want to make sure um you know what we've been talking about. I assume you talk about this in your book. And again, the book is the zero to 100 million sales blueprint.

16:41I suspect you talk about follow up a little bit in there, right? Quite a bit, quite a bit. It's, it's about 15 chapters. And it covers, as I mentioned, everything from the research, how to hire, train reps, onboard them, which I have like top 25 sales metrics you need to implement, how to align sales and marketing, like top 20, what I consider sales enablement corral, because that's another challenge for most companies out there, especially if you have a lot of entrepreneurs listening on this call. Does your marketing and sales department, are they wearing the same hat? Do they have the same KPIs and metrics?

17:15The results of just aligning everything and then getting into a system, I mean, it's hard to quantify, Josh. So I put a lot of emphasis on that because that's really the basis for how your conversations are going. Then how can marketing help sales? Recently, I just invested into a new project and we're scaling it up and we had to acquire all this sales stack. We had to have the calendar appointments setting software and some CRM and we need to buy some. We had all this software we need to acquire. So I was going through all these demos and I was like, Like, God damn, it's so mechanic, right? It's just like, let me turn on the button.

17:51Welcome, Josh, to this 20-minute session of how our tool works. Let's take it from the top. Zero questions, zero customization, where in my book, I put a whole script on like, as I see it, you paid a lot of money generating that lead. Then you had a discovery call to determine, is it a qualified lead? Then it got to your highly paid account executive, probably earning six figures or more, right? You spend a fortune up at this point. At that level, when you're putting on the demo, it's like they should just be pulling up the popcorn, walking into the Broadchai show, and just sit back and just get blown away.

18:24Anything less than that, you're not doing it the right way then. So I cover all those topics. also is the thing about where you can outsource what technology stack in general, that's a big opportunity to select the right sales tech stack that can actually amplify your results, right? I'm a big fan of, for instance, like Good to Great by Jim Collins. To do a reference with that, he talks about the best top-performing companies of these 1 ,400 public trading companies that basically outgrew the market by 20x compared to their 1 ,400 peers. What they all had in common was these different traits. One of them was that they use technology as accelerators, not as distractors.

19:06And nowadays, there's a tool and there's an app for everything. So how do you select the right tech stack, combine it together, make sure that it accelerates results? So I give my tech stack suggestions in the book. I do an assessment of the market, more importantly, secure that you put an approach together, a stack, in other words, that gets adopted by your team, because the best system in the world, if not used properly, it's worthless, right? So there's a lot of focus on a lot of different topics. Apologies for the rant, but it's because I'm very passionate about it. I'm auto-deducting sales.

19:39I've read any single sales book. I could get my handbook, business book for that matter. I love reading. And there's a lot of amazing books. We could talk for a whole show about that. But on the sales side, a lot of them are very subject matter specific, right? So it's very, you want to close more deals or here's how to build that sales tech stack or sales management 101, whatever it may be, where I thought like, okay, if you're an entrepreneur and it's common knowledge that eight out of 10 entrepreneurs, they cease to exist within 18 months. And there's a lot of different hypotheses on that. My core principle is because you failed to generate enough revenue, as simple as that in most cases.

20:14So I wanted to create a book that any entrepreneur with sales skills or not can just follow the framework, follow the recipe, and make sure that they can avoid those statistics by having at least enough revenue. I always say I'd rather have a fulfillment problem than a sales problem. At least I can pay the bills and pay people to solve my problems, right? Yeah, exactly. That's the whole. Go ahead. I'm so sorry, Gary. I interrupted. Yeah, you're right. It's like most problems in businesses can be solved with the proper application of revenue. Like you can spend a little money, hire the key people, hire the consultant, hire the right people.

20:50So you can make a higher new platform, get some people to help you out. But you're absolutely right. Yeah, that's, you know, without cash, that just throttles or just chokes that the lifeblood of the company cash is the cash lifeblood of the company. So so your websites, again, Gary Garth dot com. One thing I want to point out, nice resource. I'm going to copy this up is you have a reading list page. That's wonderful. So go to Gary Garth dot com. Gary, you've been throwing out book recommendations. Every single book you've recommended is on the reading list page. uh scroll down to the very bottom for the popular links and you'll see where that's at um so garygarth.com and then your agency l of eight uh dot io e-l-e-v the number eight dot io um when somebody goes uh to either of these pages gary what would you recommend they do now that they've kind of heard our conversation yeah josh i would recommend first and foremost i would like evoke with you to uh make a special gift for for your audience i know it's a lot of entrepreneurs out there and and uh i know everybody's walking into 2023 with some uncertainty and how they should apply if they can if you can just there's one takeaway from this from this conversation today from my my small two cents is if you could just amplify your sales efforts your efficiency your effectiveness this year you will come out very strong this year right because this is an opportunity actually to to double down so i would like to get the word out there and would say everybody who goes to Gary Garth.com, go to the book page, right?

22:23And then if they apply the coupon code TTE for the thoughtful entrepreneur, right? Then I will discount the price. It's$30 on Amazon. I will gift it out for free. The only thing you get charged is a$10 handling and shipping cost, which is basically on a small loss to me. I just want to get this book out in the hands of every entrepreneur. And yes, I'm not doing it just because of my blue eyes. once you read these concepts and if it works, of course, you feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to have a conversation about helping growing your business as well. But nonetheless, I guarantee there's going to be a few golden nuggets that you can apply to your business and it will have an impact on revenue.

23:06Yeah. So I'm just goofing around with this right now. It apps tell your team. Thank you so much for putting that together. Got the discount code. Again, that's - One book per listener, by the way. One book, one book, one book per listener. But yeah, just put that code in TTE and just have to pay the$10 for shipping. So that's awesome. Gary Garth, thank you so much. Your wealth of knowledge. Great chatting with you. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. This was very fun. And anytime I would be happy to come back and talk about another topic. This was amazing.

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