The Four Funnels that grew Collin Stewarts Agency to $5 million in ARR

Welcome to out-of-scale agency. I'm your host Jordan Ross, alongside my co-host AJ Casada. And on this podcast, we are going to help you scale your agencies to eight figures and beyond. Collectively, we've worked with thousands of businesses, helping them add hundreds of millions of dollars. I myself are an eight-figure portfolio and have built this podcast to help you learn the lessons faster so you can grow your business without fault that had it. Thank you for tuning in and let's begin. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the show. I'm AJ Casada, co-founder of RevenueBoost. And today I'm here with my good friend Colin Stewart, founder of Predictable Revenue and author of his new book, The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers. Some of you guys might remember we had Colin on our show about a year, a year and a half ago. So now he's back as a returning guest and funny enough, both of us just caught up recently because both of our cold email campaigns caught each other in like the same week or two. So that was pretty funny. We caught up and here we are. And Colin's got a really interesting story for those of you guys who don't know him. He actually built one of the top outbound cold email agencies, overly outbound SDRs of service in general. You guys were doing like calls as well, right? And he had built it to up to 70 employees, but then just in the last two years, dramatically changed his business, reinvented his model, and now he's running a very lean, lean consulting agencies. So really excited to talk about the journey of building that up, but also why he changed it, what he's learned, and what he's building now, and also talk about the new book as well and how people can find customers. So yeah, welcome, welcome back, Colin. AJ, always good to see you. Yeah, as always a pleasure. So yeah, just talk real quick about what you guys did at Predictable Revenue and specifically like what was the moment that led you guys led you personally to saying like, Hey, I'm done with this and I just need to shut this business down after already bring it up to such a successful level that a lot of people dream of. Yeah, I mean, I think we started, I can't back this up, but I think we started the first cold email agency back in 2012, 2013. This one, we first started doing it. We were doing it for ourselves in 2012, and then we, I think we started getting paid to do it for others in 2013, something along those lines. And so we'd seen the evolution. I remember what it was like when we first started doing it. It felt like magic. It felt like you were giving people superpowers. You know, we were always constantly chasing that dragon. You know, the first couple of years were intoxicated. We went zero to a million of revenue in like 12 months as a bootstrap services business. And like the way we found customers was they found us, you know, like the irony of that business was we were doing cold outbound for other people. And it was working extremely well, but we were not doing it for ourselves because we didn't need to because we couldn't keep up with the inbound demand. And that inbound demand floated us up to a few million or revenue. I think we, did we ever really, we invested a lot in trying to diversify and having different programs. And I don't want to undercut anything anybody did a predictable revenue. But like Aaron's book, you know, I built a company around, you know, the book, predictable revenue. And then we ended up burging with Aaron and being like bringing that book into our company. And like the book, the newsletter, the website, the traffic, that produced pretty much all that revenue. And so when we looked at something that, you know, it bounced up to four or five million dollars in revenue relatively quickly at a fairly steady pace. And we just kept seeing it was cold email kept getting harder, kept getting harder. And we had this realization that demand and channels kind of follow the technology adoption lifecycle. If you've read Crossing the Casm, Jeffrey Moore talks about this. We're basically, you know, the people that are early to a new technology get the majority of the benefits and then the people that are late get the least. And we saw something similar with cold email. And so we were kind of always looking for that next channel. We were trying to figure out how do we get back to the good old days where you could send an email and get 20% reply rates. And like things were super easy back then. And so obviously you're trying to find, I don't want to say a way back to when it was easy, but like a way to relive that old glory of like doing incredible work for clients and this and not. And it just can slowly getting harder and it was boiling the frog, boiling the frog. And eventually in around 2018, cold email was getting really challenging, at least to our standards back then. And so we realized that we're going to need an additional channel to reach customers through. And our thought our hypothesis was we need to do phone and social. When we made that pivot, you know, or we did see our customer lifetime go up, we did see customer satisfaction go up, we saw results go up, all good signs. But it was a dramatically more complex business to run. And I think I made a pretty key mistake there in that I had an inflate business running that was, you know, well, it's doing pretty well. I had gone from, you know, what, it first started, I started in an individual contributor role. And then I hired an IC and I stepped into a manager role. And then I hired a manager and a few managers and I moved up to like a strategic role. And when we went from old model, you know, just called the email to new model with SDRs involved, I stayed at that strategic level. I didn't get in, get my hands dirty and build stuff. And I think that was a pretty critical mistake that just the way I went about it was I think I made a decision from a lack of confidence in that I didn't think I was a sales development expert enough to go and build an SDR team. I couldn't call the bunch. I had called email the bunch, but I thought I needed a specific person because I wasn't confident enough in my abilities. And I think this is, I think that's why I made the decision. It's hard to say with certainty about something that, you know, quite a while ago. But I'm pretty sure that was it. And so I stayed at the strategic level. I didn't get in and role my sleeves up and and build, get my hands dirty. I think another factor is probably that I had like six-month-old twins turned boys at the time. And so life was personally active that I didn't have the personal bandwidth to get my hands dirty. I didn't go on and build it. I didn't, which, you know, it doesn't sound like that much from the outside. You go from email to like adding to more channels, but it's a dramatically different business. And I think the fact that I didn't go in and build it, it just always had this misalignment of, it was my company, but it didn't feel like my company. And so I think the reason, one of the reasons why that business had to die is it just didn't, it didn't feel like mine. It didn't, you know, when I built the call to email, the processes, the way we did things, it all felt like an extension to me. The, and not that me is good and everybody else is bad, but the way that, though we had built out the upout, like agency, the SDRs and that, it just didn't feel like cohesive. It didn't feel aligned. It didn't feel like it was just missing that thing that brought it all together. And I do think that was my responsibility to build that. And so anyway, I don't think we ever really delivered to our full potential. You know, and we had some great people, great systems tools, opportunities, and this and that. And I do think it was like the internal process, the internal, you know, way we had built it that just was getting in our way. And I think that comes back to the fact that I didn't go in and create all that connective tissue as the founder, I tried to outsource that. And so that was kind of one of the reasons. The other reason, I mean, we look at the spending in the market and AISDR. I just saw a lot of people and a lot of kind of downward pricing pressure on AISDR was bringing to agencies. And it kind of seemed like the collapse of good work where as an agency, you have this this call to make where you can get your price down that you need to do less work, right? If you want to have good people, good people, especially in sales development, cost lots of money. So you can have good people and lose money on every account and have cheap prices or you can have good money and charge a fair rate. And it was just becoming harder and harder and harder to charge a fair rate and have long lasting customers. And what did it for me was we had a couple of measures internally of the value that we were creating for customers. And it just wasn't high enough. Like the percentage of customers that were making it to, you know, our desired outcome of we had onboarded them to sales development. They had built pipeline and they'd got their first closed one deal. And just the ratio of that was deteriorating because clients weren't sticking around long enough to get there. We were getting too many people that were churning at three months going, you're not profitable. We're not profitable. This will never be profitable, which is just the absolute dumbest thing I've ever heard. When in the sales process, I told them, hey, it's a 12 to 18 month 24 month process, you're not going to close a deal before six months, probably about before seven months. And you might get a few in the first year, but it totally depends on your sales cycle. And when the third customer of the year churns, who has a six, eight month sales cycle, and they say, I'm churning because I haven't closed a deal on three months, you're like, this is stupidity. Not on the customers part. I mean, certainly on the customers part, but it's stupidity of myself to continue to do this thing that I know isn't going to work. Like, I'm telling people the truth and being candid about what's going to happen. And they're not listening. And they're expecting like these crazy results. And it's probably putting their job in jeopardy. And it's definitely wasting their money. If you build 98% of an F1 car, but like those last two percent were like the bolts that would hold everything together, you're definitely not going to take that car on the track. And that's what it felt like. And so I just I had this bad feeling for too long. I was tired of taking people's money and not feeling like I was producing a high enough return. And so by looking at our own standards, it was like we are not doing a good enough job. We can't keep running this. And so that was the I made the hard call. We had to shut down like 30 people, like let go of 30 people, which obviously was not fun. And it wasn't their fault, you know, ultimately I'd take it on me is like I didn't build this team, this organization, you know, properly from the get go. And I never really, you know, got and got my sleep, my hands dirty. And so I we had great people that were doing great things. But I think it was just yeah, we couldn't generate that result. I think the large part of it was internal 100% on me. I do think there was that outside pressure of like, oh, well, AISD are so cheap and easy that, you know, why is this cheap and easy? Yeah, I mean, that's that must have been a really hard call. And I could hearing you talk about it in more detail, it makes sense that, you know, I could imagine you were quite spoiled with the 2020 2012 results. So everything in 2018, I was just looked to like absolute garbage, right? Because yeah, like how could you even compare to what results you were getting back then being the first cold email agency? Yeah, it's it's hard. It's hard. And like we used to have a really clear line that we could draw from like, you know, we booked all these meetings. We saw deals close and then and then when everything when deals like COVID and then the 20 to pull back in 21, 22, the numbers just got harder, you know, these pipeline got pushed out, marketing got a little bit more involved. And so it was a little bit more multi touch and so it's a little bit more hard, a little harder to get attribution on deals. And I was just tired of fighting with clients over, you know, whether or not we were producing valuable work, I just it wasn't the work that I wanted to be doing with my life. And I was he was making me absolutely miserable. Like I was we had business that was doing millions in revenue. And I was deeply unhappy with the business. Yeah. And it's only going to be a worse overtime, right? So that's no, that's really a bold to make that call. But I think it's sound like it was an inevitability, right? So even with some of the churn challenges and the numbers getting more difficult over time, you still have much better client retention than most other app on agencies. I know, what are you tripping that to? Like, you know, being able to keep clients for 12 months in industry where a lot of HC just keep clients, three months, four months, five months. What did you guys specifically change that helped you improve the retention? So if you look at like cold email to like the sales development side on the cold email side, it was so kind of pre-2018. It was, you know, our process, we had a great process. We had things extremely dialed at one point. And this is not a flex unlike we were able to send this much email, but just a flex on our ability to create this infrastructure back in 2018 when everything was manual. I think for one client, we were spending $22,000 a month on Google workspace accounts. And so from a validating the list, from a buying domains, from a setting up new, you know, email accounts perspective, we had our processes dialed. We knew what to do. We built a tool called the carb.io that was powering a lot of our cold outbound. So we had our own tool that like, it helped us get more out of every cold email. And I think that was, especially in the early days, that was absolutely our secret sauce. That tool, we were trying to turn that into a SaaS tool. And that's a little bit of a different story, but I think that was our secret sauce in the early days. And as we shifted, were we doing, you know, we still had a lot of really talented account strategists. I think that was a huge advantage. I mean, I think when you look at a big business or like a small business, a million dollars versus like a medium-sized agency, we'll call it at like, especially a cold email agency, five million. It's probably a fairly medium-sized cold email agency. You have the advantage of having way more people. And having you're able to fill more roles, you're able to do more training, you're able to do more marketing, you're able just to just do more as the company gets bigger. And so I think we had the advantage of the fact that when we made the transition from cold email to SDR agency, we had more people, we had more money, we had more operating profit that we can invest and making the services good. And so for somebody who's trying to replicate that process, if you're starting cold, it's a lot. Like we had a recruiting team, we had an onboarding team, a training team, we had like seven highly trained account strategists that had been doing cold email campaigns for a long time. And like, man, I didn't quite realize the luxury that we had back then. And so he was just the base of experience that we had. And I think what started to erode that was like COVID and when everybody went, there was two things. Everybody went remote. And then we ended up staying remote because we ended up expanding our hiring, you know, across, around the world. Like we had a team in Mexico, we had a team in the States, we had a team in Canada. And I think most of the teams in Canada or most of the team from an SDR perspective was in Mexico, but most of the management team was in Canada. And I think just that spreading out geographically, I feel like we lost a bit of that connected tissue that made us a fun company to work for. And we never ended up going back to the office. And I think that kind of murdered the culture a little bit. And so we ended up losing a lot of the like, the fun things that made PR a fun company to work at. And then having the multiple centers of gravity, it was just a very complex business to run. And so I think those are the things that kind of started to break down. But what you to answer your question, you know, why did we why were we able to get up to 11 and a half months of an average customer lifetime is a combination of great people that had a great amount of experience with a bunch of amazing processes. And the fact that we had a number of longstanding customers that had been around for three, four years. And so those bring up the average. It's hard to be a year, one year, two company and have a high customer lifetime average because mathematically, most of your customers have just started. Yeah, for sure. You know, throw all the clients you guys have served. What do you see as a good client for outbound versus not like something where you just know it has is going to be much more likely to be successful and get that first deal quicker? Strong product market fit. That's the thing. And we spent so much time trying to figure this out. And like you can, you know, barring doing free work for clients for a month to see what they're like to work with. It's really hard to to assess, you know, the product, the size of the market, and how well it fits and where the gaps are and like how strongly they're, they're positioned against their competitors. But ultimately, what it came down to, we looked at our clients and number of times in a number of different ways. This was the exercise that led me to the realization that the strength of your product market fit is a multiplier of your go-to-market efforts, which is a very fancy way of saying the more people that want your product, the easier it is to sell, which everybody who's ever sold anything knows this to be true. But I feel like when we scale it up, then we say, okay, well, now this applies to your go-to-market, like you're called email, you're marketing, you're anything that you're trying to capture top of funnel. It applies to and it's a little, it becomes less obvious. But once you kind of see it, it's like, oh yeah, of course, that would be it. Of course, that would be a thing. And so the best customers had the best products in the best markets, which may have business, just the dumbest model, because our best customers wouldn't last 12 months. Our best customers would last six months or three months and go, hell yeah, thank you so much. You helped to see that this hellbound thing is amazing. We were just hired in SDR leader and a couple SDRs. We're going to be on our way now. And the number of times we help folks do that was incredible. And like, if that's your North Star metric, great, but it's not a very profitable North Star metric. And unfortunately, our best customers were our most medium customers, where they didn't really have strong product market fit and they didn't really have weak product market fit. They just had like enough to be, you know, around. And like, I want the most medium customers is a weird strategy. Yeah, that makes sense. So then how can a founder tell if they have or don't have product market fit? And if they don't have it, do you think it still makes sense to work with an agency to run out on for them? Or is that something they need to maybe do themselves? Or, yeah, what would you advise in that situation if they don't quite have it yet? Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on kind of on where you're at in the the life cycle of like building out your company and trying to figure out things. And so the things that you can do to strengthen product market fit are customer development interviews. And the way I think about customer development interviews is exploratory where you're going in saying, Hey, I just want to talk about like loosely sales, you know, high level topic. And then once you find a pain, like when I found carb, it was okay. Instead of sales, then we narrowed it to, you know, sales productivity. And then we narrowed it. We got really focused on the productivity of your SDRs. And so once we got to that level of that narrowness, we moved to like focused customer development interviews. And then from there, we were looking for paper feedback. So like feedback on like, Hey, we're thinking of building this thing. Would you give us a feedback? And then from there, we did MVP demos. And so to me, that's kind of the customer development funnel. And I like to think of it in four different stages because ideally, you're interviewing future customers. And the only way you can confirm that they are future customers is by actually trying to sell to them at some point. It's not customer development. If it's just, Hey, I want to ask you some questions. And I'm never going to talk to you again. That's not customer development. That's a university research project. There's no teeth to it. And you know, I charge people customer development. Obviously, like, you don't want to bait and switch people into like, Hey, let me ask you some questions. By the way, now I'm going to sell to you. I'd like that's bad. It needs to be of an eventual gradual thing where like the single most important piece in the early meetings is learning. And so the thing that you can do to strengthen your product market fifth is more learning is being open to changing the product and adapting to what the market is asking for. And when you find something that is a 10 out of 10 importance problem that is a two out of 10 satisfaction, meaning you ask them, Hey, how important is this to you? And they go 10 out of 10. How satisfied are you with how you're currently solving it? Two out of 10. You're like, great. That's a in the book. I call it a hills problem. High importance low satisfaction. And just because I had to create an acronym, I got tired of typing out that so many times. And I was really allergic to creating acronyms, but this one was just actually my editor did it. I typed it a whole bunch. He's like, you can't put that over and over and over again. Anyway, and so you're looking for hills problems that have a big impact. And the number one reason why companies struggle with growth with L bound with any channel is they either don't have a big problem that they're solving or they're solving a big problem that somebody else has already solved better. And so they don't have anything that's 10x better than what currently existed. It's really hard to sell something into an audience that's already heard about it that has, you know, already made a decision to go with somebody else. Those are campaigns you can run, but they're really challenging. Like, I wouldn't want to be taken on a cold email client that wants to sell a new ERP system or a CRM system or a content management system. Like any of these things, these are all these have all been done before, right? And so you're talking about a written replace. And so anything that was new, novel, unique, you know, those ones always worked super well because those were the easiest to sell. And so yeah, if you're trying to strengthen or if you're struggling to like figure out, am I ready? The first step is will people even agree to my customer development interview? If I'm interviewing you about, hey, can I, I want to talk about, I want to interview you about left handed guitars. People like, no, I'm not interested in talking about left handed guitars. Okay. It's probably a sign, right? If you can't prospect and ask people, like, hey, can I pick your brain on this subject? And people aren't just interested in talking to about that. It's a sign that their hair isn't on fire. But if my hat was literally on fire, and you're like, hey, I've got a tool that puts out hat fires. I'd be like, hell yeah, this is getting hot. And like soon it's going to burn my hair, you know, like people are dying to talk about their problems. But if you're reaching out to something that isn't one of their top two or three problems, you're probably not going to get a very good response. And so if your reply rates on the easiest campaign in the world, which is, can I pick your brain? Can I get your feedback on something? I'm not selling anything. If you're not going to get good reply rates to that, you're not going to get good reply rates to a, hey, that thing that you didn't care about, can I sell it to you now? And so one, strengthen that, do more customer development interviews. And like, yes, you can use outbound to book customer development interviews. It's expensive. I say that because it's not going to produce any immediate revenue, you have to be able to invest in this for like 12 months or longer. Because customer development doesn't turn into revenue right away, especially because there's a question mark on terms of around how much you need to learn in order to like actually produce something meaningful to the market. And so yes, absolutely, I've done customer development. I work with a lot of founders right now. And that is those are some of the campaigns that I will help them set up. We're doing a lot of other things, but that's definitely one of those things where if I feel like, hey, we don't have strong enough product market fit, I'm going to push somebody to like, hey, let's do L that. But for customer development. Did you know that the agencies that grow the most and scale the most are the ones that have mastered one thing client acquisition? I've spoken to thousands of agencies and this is almost always the number one problem holding the back. And it's hard because how do you find the time to work more on sales when you're already so busy running the business? How do you know what channels and what strategies to use? And more than anything, you know, we're in a competitive space. There's so many other agencies, marketers, consultants out there and it's hard to stand out. Now, fortunately, we've created a free Facebook group to help you solve this problem. We have over 10,000 other agency owners and beta-bunch printers in our group and you can join it for free as a podcast listener. Go to Facebook.com/b2b sales and marketing secrets or just add me on Facebook, Ajay Kassada and you'll see it on my profile. That's Facebook.com/b2b sales and marketing secrets. We share so much free training in there. Often, we'll stream these podcasts live so you can actually like hop on and ask questions. We share templates, resources, guides, all of our best stuff is in there as well. A lot of really useful materials. So definitely check that out. Take advantage of it. It's free. It'll only take you a minute to join. And if you want to go further, if you actually want some expert help, when you want someone to help generate leads and clients for you or someone to even work with you, one-on-one to teach you how to do it step by step, then I'd love to chat with you. Go to revenueboost.net/contact. That's revenueboost.net/contact. And you can book a consultation call with either me or one of my team members to talk about your agency and how we can help you grow. All right, let's get back to the show. So back at predictable revenue, would you you would just turn clients away if they had weak product market fit or you would maybe help them with customer development like in the old version of predictable revenue? I'd like to say yes, we turned clients away and we absolutely did. We had like our shit list of industries that we just we weren't going to take on another CMS or an outsource dev shop or yeah, these things that we've seen that we know we cannot make work unless they are extremely unique. We will say no to a deal in these in any of these segments. Outside of those ones where it was like we know we won't be successful, it's really hard to make an assessment of like strength to product market fit and a sales call and like our account strategy team would always be at odds with the sales team. They're like, oh, you sold another crappy one. Well, I'm not so arrogant to believe that I'm better than venture capitalists at picking winners and losers, you know? And so on the one side, like the deals that I thought weren't going to work. I've got a couple where I was like, hey, that's never going to work. It turned out to be our best longest standard customers. And the ones that I thought were like, hell, yeah, these guys are awesome. They got a great product, great market, didn't work at all. And so it wasn't all of them, but it was enough of them that I'd accumulated that I'd just lost any arrogance or ego around being able to predict whether or not a client was going to work. And so, you know, let's you start getting into the work, then it's much easier, but like even venture capitalists struggle to pick who's going to be the winner and who's got strong product market fit. And so if they're struggling and they got whole teams of folks doing deep analysis on markets and industries, I tend to give my sales team a break on like, yeah, we think this is going to work. I'm like, okay, that's probably good enough. If you have a good gut feeling on like, yes, it's going to work. Let's go for it because like, it's impossible to know ahead of time. Yeah, that's a really good way I'm looking at it. So when you would take on those clients, would there be a point where it's like, hey, we're nine months in, we haven't closed the deals. So I think we need to stop this. You guys need to go back to the drawing board or like, because I've always wondered as well with our clients at what point is Koldimo does not a viable channel the time and they need to rework some of that before they come back to us, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm a fan of being candid with like the client in terms of, hey, this is where we're at. I am happy with where we're at. I'm not happy with where we're at. And here's why. And like, this is what needs to happen. And most of the, I shouldn't say most of the time, but a lot of the time, it was, hey, this needs to happen internally on your side. You've got some things they need to get short up. And like, it's your sales people aren't following up or there are no nurture process or they're not handling the calls very well. And like, those are the things that as a cold email agency, you haven't, even though you've done a great job for some reason, you just haven't earned the right to like, have that conversation, you know, with the clients and have that influence over them. And so we would talk and share and try and do webinars and try and do like, I did a lot of hands-on, one-on-one work with clients and AE's and their sales leaders to try and get them to, to do the thing. But if somebody doesn't want to buy something, somebody doesn't want to pay for a service because they don't recognize that they have this pain, they're not going to want to pay for it. Even if it's free, even if it's extended the customer or extend the current engagement where you're doing outsourcing for me so that, you know, Colin will keep coaching the sales team. And so we definitely tried. But to answer your question to be ever shut clients down, we shut a few clients down, but instead of like coming to them and saying, Hey, we're shutting you down, this isn't working. We have the mindset that like, it is your decision, you know, whether you want to work with us or not. And if a client is working with us, then we want to do absolutely everything in our power to try and make them successful. There's no quit allowed. There's no give up, right? There's nothing that's kind of too going too far for our client. It's like, do what we can to try and make them successful. And this is one of my biggest frustrations with clients because when you don't have that influence, you can't really make an impact. And I had so many clients that would like way too many clients that we'd make it to the six month mark. And I remember this one. We had two SDRs on the account. We did six or seven months. We booked like 67, 68 meetings for them in six months, which was okay, not great. And like, this is meetings held too. So like, we booked a lot more. But this is like meetings that were held. And they closed zero of them. They did a three month sales cycle. So like in theory, we probably should have seen something. And the rep had literally nothing in his pipeline. Like, literally nothing. And when I was grilling them in the accident interview, because I knew the founder, I wouldn't say we were buddies, but like, I knew him pretty well. And I was like, so I asked him the question, I'm like, why I was just exasperated. Like, we've gone through everything. I can't figure out why you guys didn't close anything. And he's like, oh, we've never closed a deal in this market. He's like, oh, yeah, no, this is like, this is market development for us. I was like, man, we would have done things so much differently. Had you told us that out front. And like, that's one conversation that I hated hearing after the fact. Like, I'm happy to help go and explore, but like when you're taking a new product or an existing product into a new market, strengthen product market fit isn't established yet. And so you need to go back to interviews to like figure that out. You can't just go, I mean, you can just go try and sell into it, but like, you're less likely to get sales out of it. And so that was one conversation that I hated having, where, you know, we're trying to open up a new market and you're not successful. And they're like, oh, you never got clients in there before. And so you're like, great, we just wasted everybody's time for six months. The other thing that drove me crazy was when reps just wouldn't follow up with deals. They would take a deal. You'd book a meeting for them and they go, yeah, that one's not good. You're like, well, why not? They're like, oh, well, they're not, they didn't show up to the call with a bag of cash for me. And you're like, oh, so you don't want to do a sales job. You want to just take orders, right? You want people to come like you're cashier standing at Walmart. And they like come to you with their money and they go, here, I want to buy this thing. You don't want to actually work for your commission, do you? That really frustrated me because it wasn't just the sales people. It was the fact that the sales leaders allowed that, that they set this culture of if there's no deal that's going to close in the next 90 days, then we don't want them in our pipeline. In some ways, it's correct. And in other ways, it's just the absolute dumbest thing I've ever heard. Because the reason why it's a good idea is you don't want to clog up your discovery, your disco pipeline with deals that aren't going to move forward, right? But that doesn't mean that if somebody isn't ready to buy from you within 90 days, that you should reject them and you should never talk to them again. If they're not ready to buy yet, you have the right person at the right company who's early in their buying journey. And so as a sales person, the best people to talk to are the ones that haven't made up their mind about what color they like or, you know, what competitors you know, special feature they're enamored with. And those are the ones where you have a real opportunity to kind of help them shape how they see the opportunity. It does require more work. But, you know, does it belong to your disco pipeline? No. It belongs in a different pipeline. It belongs in your nurture pipeline, which is just these are closed-lost nurture deals. In my CRM, I like to delete closed-lost. There's no closed-lost. There is closed-lost nurture. And there's closed-lost FOAD, which stands for leave us alone and perish loosely. I'll let you work out what it actually stands for. And so that's very rarely used. And so if it's closed-lost nurture, I have next actions and next action state on it. And like if you're an AE working under me, you were hitting up those every 90 days with a somewhat personalized, you know, message called LinkedIn something. You're going to touch everybody that you've talked to every 90 days. And so this was the, like this frustration kind of born, the idea of the four funnels that, you know, you need four funnels to grow, and that, you know, you can't just be chucking away these opportunities that are really good opportunities. But they also don't belong in your like main closing pipeline. Yeah. So let's talk about that. The four funnels that drive growth. I know that's also your new book, you know, the product market fit and the four funnels are really a big part of that. I love to take out product markets by the way. And I definitely encourage everyone listening to get Collins a new book. We'll link it below. It's on Amazon, right? Let's dive into the other side on the, what are the four funnels that drive growth? And how did you come to find this? Meet Disco Managed Nurture. So Meet is your prospecting pipeline. Disco is your discovery pipeline, like we just talked about. Manages, how you manage your customers. And nurture is, you know, how you stay in touch with people that aren't ready to buy yet. I get into this partially out of frustration, partially out of, you know, listening to Aaron speak. And I remember a webinar he did must have been 10 years ago. And somebody asked him after the webinar, maybe he was in person. Like, what's the formula to predictable revenue? And he said something along the lines of consistent, top of funnel, plus consistent follow-through equals predictable revenue. And that idea kind of stuck with me, but it just didn't have enough structure to be meaningful because what he meant was if you're booking enough meetings and your AES have, you know, follow a consistent process and working them through, then you're going to get predictable revenue. And while that is true and accurate, I felt like it needed just a few more kind of pieces for it to be useful and applicable. And I had an axe to grind with all these idiots that were taking a sales conversation and saying, oh, there's no project in 90 days. So they're not entering my pipeline at all, which was just the biggest waste of time and effort and money possible. And so that frustration with clients saying, oh, there's no project in 90 days. Like, they're not ready to buy. So therefore, I chuck them. And this is not a valuable connection that you've made for me was the biggest genesis of it. Because when you look at it, and when you look at the the growth of a company, there is, right, these four funnels act as kind of a chain link system, right? If you are very good at managing your customers, you're very good at closing, but you're not good at prospecting. Well, your growth is going to stagnate, right? If you're not good at adding new people into the top, going to stagnate. If you're good at adding people to the top, closing manage and customers, but you're not adding the nurture column, you're not going to following up, you're probably missing 80% of that prospecting pipeline. And so you might be able to grow a little bit, but your growth won't be able to like really, really, really do it. And so if you're missing one of these, it kind of multiplies the results of the whole buy zero. And that was the realization that we had that we realized, okay, this needs to be a little bit more formalized as a framework. And so yeah, that's where we, that's kind of where it came from and why we started implementing it. Yeah, I love that. And I think that's a great, great analogy about it being a chain link, because if one of them is off, then the whole thing kind of breaks. I would imagine from my experience working with the clients that nurture is definitely the most neglected, but whatever you found to be the most neglected or the one, maybe not the most neglected, but the one that, you know, you can, a company can make some quick changes and see like the most impact from, yeah, I mean, nurture doesn't typically exist in most of the clients that I work with, you know, they might have some like task or workflow for like how they nurture clients, but I like to have a, I like to have a very specific view. And so typically when I start with somebody, I'm like, show me your disco pipeline, show me your like main pipeline. And then let's go through all the deals in there. And let's, let's categorize them by what you're actually, what you actually need to do. And often you'll find up sales, new sales, you know, renewals, and then these like deals that were in there from like the last three years because they didn't want to forget. And as a rep, it makes it hard to manage that kind of the cognitive load of my pipeline, because you're looking at these stages, you're looking at what do I need to do next. And it's not immediately clear. And so usually the biggest opportunity is in cleaning up that main pipeline. And then saying, hey, listen, it's okay to close less nurture deals because most reps, the reason they're afraid of close less nurturing a deal or close, close lasting a deal is they don't want to forget about it. But if you create this other view that is very easy for them to see all the close less deals and they have next actions and next action dates on them, reps are no longer afraid to close last to market deal is close last. And so that's the first step is just establishing that there are multiple funnels. You need to be working multiple funnels and not just one funnel. And you want to separate out the functions and specialize the kind of roles of your sales funnel. And I think that can be a little bit freeing. I think the biggest piece is separating the disco funnel and the nurture funnel. Like that's the biggest area because if you have all of these four different types of deals all in one, your velocity, your pipeline velocity is messed up. If you get a deal that's been sitting in for 18 months and a bunch of other deals that are closing in three, it's throwing off your averages. It's also throwing off your conversion from like stage to stage. And then it throws off the volume. And so if you're looking at like, well, how many deals do I have in pipeline? Yeah, it's 78. Sure, but like, how many of those are actually moving forward? Oh, it's probably more like 12. Like, okay, well, your volume, I like to look when I look at a pipeline, I like to look at volume. So like the number of deals that are in there, the velocity, kind of what is the average land speed of an elid sparrow or swallow. And then conversion. So from stage to stage, you know, how quickly does one deal move to from one stage to the next? So volume velocity conversion. And that gives you a sense of like, our deals actually moving forward. And typically, they're not moving forward because, you know, there are too many deals in there and too many different kind of functions, too many different areas. And so when you separate them out, you start to see this movement and you start to see salespeople relax because they're no longer worried about losing opportunities. And so you were 100% right. The biggest opportunity is nurture. But in order to get to nurture, you need to set up the CRM, the views, the fields so that you can kind of manage both the disco and the nurture and the reps are not freaking out about if I hit this close lost. It disappears forever. Yeah, for sure. I think that's such a helpful way to break it down because I think when most people think of funnels, they just think they have one funnel for their company or they think about funnels just as like a marketing term for like bringing leads in. But yeah, it is like those four stages at being able to close and onboard customers. And yeah, that's cool that you also measure differently in the CRM. So you can actually look at the philosophy between each that makes that makes a lot of sense. Anything else you would advise on for nurture, you mentioned, you know, you never have just do a personalized reach at every 90 days or so, but anything else you're doing to kind of get you know, 80% of your deals actually come in through the long term. Yeah, the two stages of the two fields that I add in to every CRM that I I'm allowed into our next action next action date. And I require every rip every founder I work with to have a view where you can see deal name, stage, next action, next action date. And this is your primary view. As the sales rep, you need to be able to check this every morning and make sure that nothing is out of date, meaning there are no tasks with a date, a due date behind us. And you need to have one for your disco funnel and one for your nurture funnel. And when you have these two funnels separated and it gives reps permission to close last nurture deals. But then they need to tell themselves what to do next because if you're trying to so much of sales comes down to managing a bunch of little things and they have a book called Getting Things Done. David Allen, it's this amazing book about systems and process and how to like organize your life. And it's pretty old school. It's all folder based and yada yada yada. And so I stole a bunch of ideas from him. But the one idea he talks about is mind like water where you trust your system to manage like to not lose anything. And if you are able to follow your process and put things in the right place so you trust yourself to put things in the right place, then you can forget about all the deals that exist in your pipeline because you know that your system will take care of them and resurface them. And so when you have a next action and a next action date on every opportunity that's in your active pipeline you don't need to worry about them because you trust yourself that one every morning you're going to check it and push all the deals forward like action anything that you need to action today or anything you need just to action you know before today. And then two every Friday you're going to do follow Fridays which means you're going to take five deals from your nurture op list and you're going to try and move them forward. And that could be anything. And I start with five I do a Friday afternoons because I'm in Pacific Standard Time and Friday afternoons after three o'clock is nothing's happening. You know more than half the country is in the pub gone home to their families driving you're not getting replies to call calls you're not getting pickups you're not getting anything. And so this is basically downtime. And so I always do follow Fridays and my goal is to send five things. And as soon as I send five things mission accomplished. But the funny thing about sending five things are almost rarely only send five things. I'll send 10 or 15 if sometimes I won't have anything else to do. I'll send a whole bunch. And the goal is just to keep it five so that it makes it a really easy habit to initiate. I think this is an adam grant thing. But you want to think about from a habit formation perspective. You want to make it really easy to initiate the habit and then really easy to maintain the habit. And so having it Friday afternoon when you're least likely to be interrupted by a sales meeting or a prospect meeting or something is a makes it a little bit more bulletproof that way. And then making it only five makes it really really easy. And so when you have these two funnels and you're managing you know you're keeping your next actions up to date and kind of in future dates. And you have the next and you trust yourself to do follow Fridays. Right. Like that's how you build your trust with yourself as a rep. And like you don't need Salesforce or HubSpot to do this. You can do this in a spreadsheet with like two different tabs. So it doesn't require any fancy tools or anything. If anybody's listening and they're like, oh, I want to do this like drop me an email. It's my first name with two L's at pretty people revenue.com. I've got a free CRM template. I'll share with you. Yeah. Awesome. I love what you said. Zales is just a lot of little things. I think really or like if you're just organized, that's really half the battle. Right. It's not about as some like crazy advanced sophisticated follow strategies. Just it's just doing it and doing it consistently. Awesome dude. Really super insightful chat as always. And I love to have you back on the show again. Thanks so much for hopping out again and where could people find you and also find your new book the terrifying art of finding new customers. Yeah. You can find the terrifying art at Amazon Barnes and Noble in to go wherever you buy books. It's there. I believe it's all around the world. I've seen sales from India to Italy to Denmark, Sweden, UK, Canada, US. And so yeah, wherever you buy your books, it should be there. You can get the audio book. I mean, if you want to follow along with my journey, I write a newsletter for founders weekly called founders edition.co. And so follow me there. Amazing. We'll look it all below. And thanks again, man. It was a great pleasure. Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, please give us a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you're listening. And tell us what you think. It really motivates us a lot to make more episodes and helps us out a ton with getting the show out there. Now, if you're trying to grow and get more clients and you like me and my team to help you come up with a personalized growth strategy for your agency, we can help head over to revenue boosts.net/contact and you can book a growth call with my team. This will be a one-on-one call and we'll show you what's working right now when it comes to generating leads, booking calls, and acquiring clients at scale. And you can learn about our programs where we can work with you to help your agency scale and get you more dream clients. Again, head over to revenue boosts.net/contact and see you on the next episode.