1983 – Building a Predictable Sales Pipeline with Corey Quinn

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

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1:05With us right now, it's Corey Quinn. Corey, you help agencies specialize, simplify, and escape founder-led sales. You are found on the web at CoreyQuinn.com and anyone, not everyone, anyone, not everyone.com. Corey, it's great to have you. Thank you, Josh. Super excited to be here. I'm a follower of your show, and it's great to be a guest. So thanks for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. By the way, that's the title of your book as well, which we're going to talk about, anyone, not everyone. But Corey, give us just kind of an overview of the work you do and who you serve and the impact you have in the world.

1:45Sure. So the 10 ,000 or the 30 ,000 point view is I have 17 years in the agency space and running. I started as a sales guy selling PPC and SEO and made my way all the way up to being a chief marketing officer for a nine-figure agency. the last role I had was that chief marketing officer role. I started there when it was doing about 20 million as an agency, and we grew it all the way up to 150 million in six years. A lot of the learnings that I had and the executive team had at that agency resulted ultimately in the book that you just mentioned, Anyone, Not Everyone, combined with a lot of other insights from best practices, my experiences, as well as other successful agency owners.

2:31So, yeah, today I just, you know, I'm passionate about helping agency founders who are stuck in founder-led sales. I help take their hand when they're ready, and we walk down the path together. The result of that is that they are no longer tied to that founder-led sales role. Yeah. Do you mind just sharing a bit about the typical life cycle of folks that you, by the way, and I work with? But and listen, you know, for our own company, you know, we've got a great team. Now, I've set it up in a way that it's pretty easy for me. So I wouldn't say that I'm too burdened in the way I do it. But truth be told, you know, my influence is largely as of today, founder led sales.

3:15And if we're thinking about the typical life cycle, this is normal. This happens every day. This is, you know, someone's very good at what they do. They start a company and well, who's going to do the sales? They're going to do the same. Exactly. This is exactly the natural part of an agency or any service-based business. This is a natural part of the growth, right? Like you said, you are a specialist in a specific service. You provide great value. You start a business. You start working with clients. You start building the business. But then eventually what happens is that, and this isn't true in every case, it's for those founders who want to really kind of scale and get to seven, eight figures, that they find themselves stuck in that founder role when it comes to sales.

3:59They just can't get away from it. And it is for those folks in that situation, it can be really tricky, you know? Yeah. So why is it that most founders aren't able to escape that role? Yeah. Well, it's a great question. Thanks, Josh. So there are three reasons why - Here comes the softball and the pitch. Yeah, that was beautiful. I was hoping you'd go there. So there are three reasons, three primary reasons that cause founders to get stuck in founder-led sales. Number one is that they lack a focus in who they serve, which I don't think is a challenge based on my understanding of your business, Josh.

4:36I don't think that's necessarily something you're faced with, but I'll tell you an example of someone who came to me. His name is Tyler, and he is an agency founder, very well connected. He runs EOS, and he's involved in the EOS community, and he's involved in Vistage. And so he has this fantastic network, and he's the CEO of an agency. And as a result of this network, he has all these opportunities to say yes. And so he says yes to the retail business owner to do marketing for them. He says yes to the manufacturing company and to the attorney and to the lawyer and to the dentist and so on and so forth.

5:12And as a result of that lack of focus, saying yes to everyone, his sales process is extremely nuanced. He has to be able to go into a conversation with an attorney and be able to make sense of their world. At the same time, at the next phone call, be able to do the same thing with a manufacturer. As a result of that complexity and all that variables floating around, it's very difficult to have a salesperson you pull off the street to be able to handle those conversations with skill. And so what he's lacking is a sales system, number one. Number two is having watered-down positioning. What I mean by watered-down positioning is many agency founders are in love with their technology, with their specific unique approach, their IP.

5:57But the problem is they're selling to buyers who are not sophisticated. Very unsophisticated buyers won't be able to tell your AI from the next guy's AI. And as a result of that, you end up losing deals to competitors and competing on price, despite having this wonderful differentiator. So they struggle with that. As a result of that, the founder has to use their relationships to bring in new deals, right? They can't rely on the market because they're undifferentiated. That's number two. And then number three is when the founder says, enough is enough. I'm no longer going to sell. I'm going to hire an SCR or I'm going to hire a VP of sales to come in here and build this for us.

6:35The minute the founder leaves, the sales drop to the floor. There is no pipeline development. And that's really just having a lack of a great system and a strategy to systematically build the pipeline. Anytime you have all three of those, a business that doesn't have a clear focus, that has a watery positioning, it doesn't have a clear strategy to just build pipeline, the founder gets sucked in every single time. Yep, yep. And, you know, there is something, and I'd really love for you to address this. I mean, there's a concept or a dynamic about founders who might struggle with bringing in a team or bringing in an individual or setting up these right systems because they say, well, listen, at the end of the day, I'm actually very good at selling because I've got so much.

7:22And they wave a magic wand in the air. Founder magic. Yes. Right. Right. And, you know, look, the other day, Josh, it is not if a founder is happy selling, then they're probably not going to talk to me. Right. I know I know many agency founders who have a boutique agency who love working with the clients hands on, loves to take all the sales calls. That's fine. It's those agency founders who are struggling to get out of that role. Maybe they've outsourced the marketing and sales piece to someone who does like LinkedIn lead gen or cold calls or cold emails. Those rarely work, by the way. Or they've hired an SDR or a sales manager or someone to come in.

8:02And what they find invariably, by the way, because they don't have a sales background, typically they are more of a technical founder, like an SEO background or whatnot, or a PR or media background. What they find is that a sales team really needs a tremendous amount of time and effort to babysit and to help train them up and to do coaching calls and stand-up meetings. and you need to have a system too. So all these things are required for success building an in-house team that they typically don't either have the experience or just the raw resources to be able to do that. Yeah. Tell me a bit about your book, Corey, and it's titled Anyone, Not Everyone.

8:44So obviously I'm looking at the title here and I'm curious. I think that's intentional. Yes. So the fundamental problem that I solve, that we solve, that my last agency that grew from 20 million to 150 million was the fact that we were specialists in a specific vertical market. We started off with attorneys. We mastered that. Then we moved into home services. We mastered that. And then we moved into franchise and multi-location businesses. And we mastered that. Most agency founders come into the business as generalists. They're serving businesses of all shapes and sizes. And as I mentioned, that's one of the very things that's holding them back.

9:24And so one of the things that I read about in my book, and I give a lot of tools and resources in there about how do you choose a specific vertical market, an industry, if you will, or a niche to specialize your agency in? And once you've decided to specialize, then you can begin to do the marketing that becomes much more powerful than before. Yeah. Yeah. So who should be reading the book and what would you expect the transformation to take place when somebody reads? The person who needs to read this book is going to be the agency founder who wants and desperately wants to escape founder-led sales, but has struggled to do so.

10:04Okay. This is meant to be, it's a really hardworking book. It's like, you know, it's a little bit of theory. most of its practical application, right? You can go in chapter by chapter. You build first set of chapters all about finding the right vertical market. And then it's about really positioning your agency relative to that vertical market so you can communicate your customer empathy and care. And then the third section is all about helping to grow your agency. So it's really a roadmap for that agency founder who has done everything that they can. They tried everything and everything has failed as relates to growing their agency.

10:44And once they've suffered enough from none of that working, and then they realize, okay, I'm finally going to take this idea of specializing and niching down seriously, that's when they typically are ready for the book. Corey, came this out for me for someone that maybe they're the founder and the CEO and the entire sales team. and yeah, maybe they're a little bit burnt out, but they say, you know what though? That's why I get into business. So I can work really hard and this is just what it takes in order to succeed. And so maybe they take that as a point of pride, but they also would acknowledge that, you know, it's hard and I don't always enjoy coming to work.

11:31I don't like dealing with rejection. I don't like having sales conversations from time to time that feel uncomfortable if that's the way that they're doing sales. Help me understand why it's pretty important to be proactive on this topic. Yeah. So I just, it's funny, I just reread a book called The E-Myth Revisited. And Michael, it's a classic book. And one of the big takeaways, I was just thinking about this and writing an email about this. So one of the big takeaways I had for rereading this book, and I recommend your listeners, like everyone should read this book, it's really great, is that the business is the product.

12:06In other words, that the thing you're building as a business owner is a productized business that operates independent of you. So what does that mean? It has to have operations. It has to have systems and processes that allow it to be able to effectively be a sellable asset. Now, you may never want to sell your business just like Ray Kroc sold McDonald's, which by the way, is a very systematically run business. You can go to McDonald's in New Jersey, in Florida, in California, you're going to get the same experience, right? The reason why is that it's all process driven. You want to build a business that is extremely process driven so that if you decide to sell it one day, a buyer can come in and take that system and be able to continue to make money off of it.

12:52But even if you don't want to sell that business, you can run a business that doesn't require you on a day-to-day basis is process and system-driven, which means that it is typically very profitable. Yeah. Corey, share just a bit about how you work with your clients or how you help, you know, aside from the book and obviously your thought leadership, how are you creating change within these founder-led and operated companies? Yes. A typical founder will come to me when they are generalists, they are ready to specialize, but they want an expert to be able to help them, guide them through the process of going from a generalist to a vertical market specialist, including finding the right vertical market, doing the positioning around that, and then attracting new clients.

13:46And so the transformation is really, it's typically a three-month program, and we help them to go from that generalist to what I call a deep specialist. And by the way, deep specialization is the combination of having focus, having a massive action plan, and having empathy. Now, empathy is usually the one that people miss when they think about narrowing a business. Typically, agencies, if they're going to focus on a vertical market, they may go and do research and say, well, you know, which vertical market has the most businesses? and has the most spend in terms of agencies. And what they typically miss is this fact that you actually, to be successful today, you actually have to give a damn.

14:25You have to actually care about the audience that you're serving. Because I remember I was talking to a med spa owner the other day. I was interviewing her for my client. And she, this wonderful woman up outside Portland, Oregon. And she would say that, gosh, I get calls every single day, five times a day. I get text messages. I get emails from all these agencies trying to get me to do business with them, right? And all of it is just complete garbage and complete noise. The reality is that for you to break through the sound barrier or to create some signal amongst all this noise, you have to care.

15:01And the way you care, the way you demonstrate that you care is through your contents, how you show up. You understand their problems at a deep level. You understand how to solve their problems at a deep level. And you do that only by specialization, right? And so that's really the thing that my clients are getting through the book is an understanding of how to predictably specialize in such a way that allows you to separate from the competition and create a pipeline of predictable revenue. Yeah. Your website is CoreyQuinn.com. And then, of course, there's the website for your book, AnyoneNotEveryone.com.

15:37So next steps from here. To our friend that's been listening to our conversation, they're like, Corey, you've been singing my song. I am burned out. I don't want to be doing this forever. I want to increase the value of my company. I want to be able to shift and become maybe more of an evangelist out there. I don't want to have to be doing as many retail sales. I would love to be, you know, kind of leveling up in my focus. Absolutely. It's such a great question, Josh. So the best place to get started with this process is for your listeners, I'm going to give a special offer, which is that they can go to anyonenoteveryone.com, and they can actually begin to listen to the book that I published for free.

16:19Like the audio book, it's available on my website, anyonenoteveryone.com, and they can start to go through the steps in order to escape this founder-led sales trap that they find themselves in. Yeah. Again, anyone, not everyone.com. Uh, I, I, by the way, I purchased the book as we were talking right now. I'm excited to read it, Corey. Uh, but Corey Quinn, again, your website's coreyquinn.com and anyone, not everyone.com. Corey, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate the opportunity.

16:55Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

17:36I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

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