How to Optimize Your SaaS Sales Strategy

When they’ve gone door to door to sell a product for any amount of time, a salesperson truly learns what they can take. Being a good sales rep can absolutely be nurture over nature and with the right processes in place, any company can turn out a good sales team and garner great results.

Today’s guest,  Ali Mirza, comes from a pure sales background. These days, he is mixing his true old-school sales experience with expertise in the online world. He started Rosegarden consulting about 8 years ago and now focuses on helping SaaS businesses build out their sales processes. Rosegarden helps set up a salesforce that does what they need to make the sales while following a set of parameters that can be repeated over and over again. Each of his custom sales processes is tailored for the client to achieve consistent, long-term growth.

Episode Highlights:

• Ali’s sales background and how he got into his current business.
• His beliefs on natural-born salespeople.
• How to find and hire rockstar salespeople.
• Where Ali starts in creating sales processes for the client.
• How much the process changes from client to client.
• The amount of flexibility given to sales reps within an organization in order for them to be able to do what they do best.
• The correct balance of product knowledge for the reps who are selling the SaaS product.
• How SaaS business owners can achieve continuity between the sales reps and the backend team.
• When a business should start to think about systematizing their sales processes.
• How the process is measured by Ali and his team.
• Some standout successes Ali and his team have achieved

Transcription:

Joe: Mark I understand that our friend John Corcoran referred someone to Quiet Light to be a guest on the podcast; Ali Mirza. He’s from Rose Garden Consulting. First of all, John thank you very much and if anyone else has suggestions for a great guest like Ali please send us an email. We’d love to have some people on that can help you grow your business or sell your business or even buy your business. Now as I understand it Ali is in the SaaS world helping people optimize that sales process, that onboarding process which is kind of challenging and critically important in the SaaS area right?

Mark: Absolutely and John and Jeremy I think they’re just going to become our new podcast guest sourcing agents because they’ve been referring so many awesome people over that have really added to the podcast quite a bit. But Ali comes from this traditional sales background and he and I talked quite a bit about this because that’s my background as well. When I was a teenager my very first job was a telemarketing job. Yes, I was one of those guys. And then I also did B2B door to door sales for long distance optimization. I mean talk about some of the most brutal conditions for learning basic entrepreneurship. Ali comes from that background; he’s really good at it. He’s a killer sales person and so what he does now is he works with SaaS organizations to help optimize their onboarding processes. And how do you set up a sales team that is both free to do what they need to do … is it not this tight like script that a sales person has to have but still have these processes that are repeatable and can be optimized so that you’re not losing money through your onboarding process. It’s the same thing as like CRO; Conversion Rate Optimization.  So many people have these leaky conversion funnels and just by optimizing those they can increase the revenue substantially. This is the same thing with any group and any SaaS business that has an onboarding process for potential clients. So kind of an old school soul … young guy but old school soul when it comes to the sales process and mixed it in with the online world.

Joe: I’m looking forward to listening to this one myself, let’s get to it.

Mark: Ali, thank you so much for joining me I appreciate … first of all your patience because I cancelled this podcast on you twice both for totally legitimate reasons. My mom’s basement was flooding the first time. I was literally like outside shoveling snow when I was texting you saying I can’t make this one and then the last time was I a little bit lost my voice. And it’s still kind of gone but thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Ali: No problem. I appreciate you having me.

Mark: Do me a favor and let our listeners know basically why I’m having you on the podcast; what’s your story and what do you do.

Ali: So what I do I’m still trying to figure that out half the time but my story … so I got in the sales when I was 19 years old. So I was a guy that would go door to door at Sun Life insurance. I did that for four years. I built up a team. I was the number one agent in the country and handled about 50 sales reps under my belt. Things are great and all but as a true entrepreneur, I knew that that wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be for the rest of my life and obviously my [inaudible 00:04:19.6] wasn’t fulfilled. Long story short we have decided to start my own company; Rose Garden. That was almost eight years ago now. Originally we started off as kind of like a hired gun. I didn’t like the bureaucracy and all that stuff that came with selling insurance and so I just hey I’m a salesman just let me sell that’s all I want to do. So we’d go into companies, you put us on retainer and we could sell for you and when we close the deal you pay us bigger. That worked out great for a while; 2 ½ years or so then one of my clients this is great but if you get hit by a bus tomorrow we’re back to square one. And I said yeah you’re right about that and then he said well why don’t you write down what you do for us. I said well that wasn’t our original engagement so why don’t you pay me for it? And so he said yes. And that’s kind of when the light bulb went off and I understood that wait hang on, building people sales processes is infinitely more scalable than me actually selling for people. So that’s about five or six years ago or so we pivoted. And since then we’ve almost exclusively been building out sales processes for our companies.

Mark: That’s awesome. So I actually come from that direct sales background as well; like I cut my teeth my very first job. And most people’s first job was like McDonald’s or something like that right, fast food? I think at the age of 12 or 13 I made a promise to myself I would never work in fast food and so my very first job was a telemarketing position. And boy you learn pretty quickly how to deal with that and I think probably … I’ll put this as my worst job because I was kind of burnt out at this point. I was in that for about five years of doing telemarketing in some of the worst stuff out there too. I did door to door business, door to door telephone long distance service sales. They would send us down, it was a team of us, we’d go down in like teams of three and we would really hit like a downtown area and some small town, knock on doors to come see a long distance bill. All these are … oh my gosh man that was brutal but it was an awesome experience as far as learning how to A. be an entrepreneur but also B. how to sell.

Ali: Yeah.

Mark: A great background for an entrepreneur.

Ali: Yeah I know I mean going door to door that will put some hair on your chest. And once you do that I mean you don’t really fear things anymore. I think a lot of what holds people back as entrepreneurs is the fear of what could or what realistically what will happen right? If I take this risk will it pay off with, will it break me? I don’t have that anymore. When you have to knock on someone’s door and try and sell them some life insurance it’s … all inhibitions … when you do that for a few years all inhibitions are gone. You just have enough wee care anymore.

Mark: Yeah you learn how to laugh off the nose and actually appreciate the guys that just like in telemarketing the best thing that we could have happen is somebody hangs up on us right? Because that’s a very quick no, I can immediately get on to that next prospect. And you get kind of this cold like I don’t care if you do that. There was one guy at the door to door telephone long distance company where he actually had somebody throw a wrench at him so that’s actually a little bit more aggressive. Hopefully, that doesn’t happen but yeah you’re right that puts hair on your chest. You learn very quickly to lose that fear. So alright today I want to talk … you do a lot of consulting for SaaS companies and helping build their sales processes. And this is obviously really important for just lowering that cost of acquisition. If you have a more efficient sales team you’re going to be signing up more people. So I want to get in that. I’m going to kind of open up with a question here that … I don’t know maybe it’s a softball question but aren’t there natural born salespeople? I mean isn’t it really coming down to … and I know what you’re going to answer on this but doesn’t it come down to … again I did a little show prep; thanks me. Doesn’t it come down to finding just those rock star sales people?

Ali: So those are two different questions right? So a natural born sales person in my opinion and my opinion is always right of course.

Mark:  [inaudible 00:08:11.9]

Ali: Yeah exactly, right? I would do it. I think it was the Charles Barkley book where it was like I may be wrong but I doubt it. But in my opinion, there’s no such thing as a born sales person. The only things that are born are baby boys and baby girls. Sales people are trained. No different than there’s no lawyer gene, there’s no doctor gene, all these other things. There’s no sales gene as much as people would like to believe. A lot of what we attribute that to is people that are just outgoing, charismatic, extroverts. That’s learned. That’s nature not … oh, I’m sorry that’s nurtured not nature. So it depends on external environment built, factors and things of that nature of what your personality ends up to be. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’re going to be at closing and actually bring money in the door. We know lots of extroverts that just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and burn deals. So there is no such thing as a born sales person. Now, looking for a rock star that’s a different thing; you’re looking for someone that’s … you may not know what you’re asking for but really what you’re asking for is somebody that’s already trained that someone else has put the work into and now you’re going to … you’re fixing to benefit off of their work. That is more reasonable than looking for a natural born salesperson because at that point what you’re really saying is someone that doesn’t have sales training but just going to sell. And so looking for a rock star is someone that has that sales training that you can vet their experience. Now that being said that’s incredibly difficult to find especially in today’s market. I mean if you can sell your … sales is the only money side of the balance sheet. Everyone else is an expense we’re the only income, right? So sales … when someone can sell someone’s picking up your company, you’re not going to let them go. So good salespeople are golden handcuffed in. Of course, there are founders and companies that drop the ball with great sales people but the likelihood that you’re going to find that person on the open market is next to none. They know people that know people that don’t land on their feet pretty quick.

Mark: Yeah I think one of the problems I see with a lot of companies especially as they’re scaling is the founder might have that ability to sell the product but they can never really expand beyond that. And I actually have this problem with Quiet Light when I started initially. I went through … I think it was probably within the first year of Quiet Light, I went out and I hired five people that I thought were going to be really good at this but they ended up not really working out. Some of them did a little bit but not really, they all kind of phased out. It wasn’t until Jason joined the team that I stumbled upon I would guess in your world the sales process. And I never really thought about in terms of a process because we don’t think about in the same way here at Quiet Light but I’d like to get into this a little bit as far as finding out what that process is for your company. I would imagine depending on what you’re selling and within the SaaS world specifically as well. The process is going to differ quite a bit from if you’re selling say a $300 a month SaaS product versus … I think I just talked to somebody yesterday where his average price upon is $20,000 per year with three year minimum commitments. So what does that process look like when you’re going into an organization and you want to start to identify A. the characteristics of that sales process and am I even putting this in the right way or do we talk [crosstalk 00:11:35.1] skill process?

Ali: That’s exactly what we do. So every sales process we build is custom and unique. Now at the surface level or at the face value after the fact there’s only so many ways to skin a cat and so I could just turn around and be like oh you know what Company A sales process looks quite a bit like Company B but we can’t start there, right? So we have to treat everything unique and custom from the beginning. And then it may end up looking somewhat similar to someone else’s but we arrive at that independent of that. So we’re not trying to predetermine. Yeah, so our process of how we do that is first thing we do is we do an assessment. So we’ll actually go in there and spend a day on site and work with their sales leader, the founders, work with the sales team and really understand everything that they’re doing right that they need to continue doing, everything that they’re doing wrong that they need to stop or change, and everything that they’re not doing that they need to be doing. And so we start at a very high level, they walk us through their process, they walk us through their typical deal flows and cycles and so we start to really pick out things from there. I’ll get them into one of those three categories and then from there we get very granular and look at all the tactics. Then we build a report and say step by step right if I was your VP of sales or if I was the founder of this company or you know I had to build a process this is what I would do. So you get a little diagnostic and I basically can walk you through it step by step. It helps you understand what you need to do in what you do. Because sometimes even if things that we’re doing is right it’s just having that extra validation from someone who sees it from … we’ve seen hundreds of SaaS companies do it the right and the wrong way. I’ve seen crazy growth, I’ve seen two, three, 400% month over month and I’ve seen one or 2% year over year. So you can pick out patterns pretty quick.

Mark: Yeah. How much has that sales process changed though from one organization to the next? I mean for example Quiet Light Brokerage, when I hired on those first five people as brokers I took on somebody who was really good at relationship based sales and was fine with taking that sort of long term sort of approach and then I also hired somebody who is the number one salesperson for Quick Books Online but he was much more close. He was a closer and that’s what he wants to do and frankly, he struggled a lot and didn’t really do so well. So at one point and more specifically for the people listening here and they’re thinking about the sales team that they have how much do you look at the company, what do you look at with a company I should ask to start to determine okay this approach is right versus this approach is wrong as far as what they’re doing?

Ali: I mean you got to start with who they’re selling to because even within a particular company between the service, offering, product, solution, whatever it is that they’re selling depending on which market and depending on who is buying that sales process very well could change. So I’ll give you a perfect example, one of our clients a SaaS company sells into the education or is an education platform. Let’s call it an online education platform that sells to large organizations. But they also have individuals, freelancers, people like … let’s call them hobbyists coming in there and buying their solution as well. So it’s an online learning platform but their goal is to sell large organizations packages and number of seats but they also have one offs coming in as well. So the sales process is completely unique for the one offs and the people that are buying less than five seats, a small organization that has one, two, three, developers or just someone that wants to up level their own development game. I’m not a developer so I don’t even know if I’m using the right terminology but that’s irrelevant.

Mark: It sounds great.

Ali: Yeah exactly there isn’t enough coloring right on a black screen with green—

Mark: Just like the Matrix.

Ali: Exactly, yeah. So the sales people what we have to do with them was we have to get that stuff off the sales people’s plate because we’re paying our sales people too much, in my opinion, to sit there and sell a $49 a month deal. It’s pointless, right? We were losing money at that point on that sale if we had to not only pay the sales person salary because there was some cost to fulfillment even though it was SaaS and then pay him a commission off of that and then it was just annoying the salespeople. Now you got to look at opportunity costs. So what we did was we segmented them completely because the guy that’s buying one or two seats is going to ask maybe not all of the questions but they’re going to ask a fair bit of the same questions that the person that we’re selling one to 200 seats too and I want all my sales people focused on that. So we have to segment that out, we have to change up the sales process, there was a lot of things that we did there. So even within the organization, the sales process changes. Now again we had to build that unique for them and we have to look at their … we started with their who’s buying, what are they buying, why are they buying, how are they buying, etcetera and reverse engineer the sales process that way. And you could look at that sales process and probably compare it to 10 other clients that I have and say well there’s a lot of similarities. Well yeah, there’s only so many ways to skin a cat but at the end of the day, if I had been like wow who does this client remind me of, it reminds me of this person let me bring this in here then you’re … it’s like renovating a house. I mean yeah you can put lipstick on a pig but at the end of the day, it’s still a pig.

Mark: So how much of that sales process vary within an organization, the concern I would have would be having a one size fits all sort of a strategy when different clients are going to be coming with different needs. So how much latitude do you give the sales people within an organization to be able to freelance that process or even within that process at certain steps?

Ali: A lot, so here’s what we do if you don’t have anything to benchmark off of how will you ever measure success? How will you know that … if you don’t have a control group you will never know whether you’re picking up all the money off the table? With that being said I’m not looking to handcuff and put my extra salespeople in a straightjacket so we give them parameters. We tell them here’s what you need to do. And again what it’s really used for is making sure that at first 18 months of a sales person they have more than paid for themselves. After 18 months, after someone’s been working … selling for a year and a half in a company they’ve pretty much worked most if not all types of deals that walk in and they know what to do. What I don’t want is oh you know this person … we say hey just go sell. What are they going to do? They’re going to burn deals and they’re going to flush out within six months so you have to give them something. But again if it’s too tight they’re not going to close or they’re going to look for ways around it. And your best salespeople, that same part of the brain that it takes to kind of see the seams and run that route and through a sales process, the same part of the brain to get to that and score a touchdown is the same part of the brain that does it internally and tries to figure out okay how can I max out my commission, where do I need to sandbag, what do I need to do, what leverage do I need to pull to maximize it for myself? And sometimes … a lot of times it ends up being very detrimental to the company. So don’t give your sales people enough rope where they’re going to hang themselves with. So give them a process because they’re going to go outside that process so anticipate that and say look here’s what a typical process looks like you go from A, B, C, and D. Understand though if circumstance 1, 2, or 3 arises this is where you can jump to, this is what you can do, this is how you can do it. And now you’re starting to turn their brain and you’re designing where they can cut corners because they’re going to do it anyways. So you at least design and you account for it.  I always do … figuring out when your P&L six months later after John’s left and be like oh shit all of his deals are about to fall through and we just … yeah. And then that happens all the time as much as … no one brags about that right? None of your entrepreneur friends are going to sit around and be like oh yeah I just got shafted for $50,000 of commissions that I paid some guy three months ago and now he’s gone and all his deals are about to fall through, I’m about to lose a lot of money. No one brags about that. Everyone brags about the logo that they closed. But that stuff happens all the time I get to see it from the inside.

Mark: Yeah absolutely and keeping that process, you’re absolutely right. I hated it when I was in sales especially in telemarketing. Telemarketing is really churn and burn, get through as many numbers as you can and if I did a telemarketing job and was handed a script I guarantee you I freelanced because you know … you hear it, we all get the call … those annoying calls and the person can’t pronounce your name and they can’t really even … they’re tripping over the script and all that sort of stuff and that’s an extreme example obviously but having that looseness. Now with a SaaS product, obviously there’s a certain amount of expertise that somebody has to have, how important do you see that in the process of developing a sales team to make sure that you’re front end people doing product demos and everything else know that product in and out and how much emphasis should SaaS owners be putting on that part of the sales training process?

Ali: It’s a fine balance. So here is the thing, knowledge is ammunition and the more ammunition you have sometimes you might use like a tank to try and kill a mosquito because we see that all the time; it’s the show up and throw up right? But on the flip side if you don’t know what you’re selling how are you going to sell it so it’s a fine balance. Here’s the way that I like to position in and I don’t want anyone to get this confusing but I would like to teach my sales people everything they need to know about the product but also more importantly is teach them how to position it. It’s more important than teaching them what it actually does and when to bring it up and how to bring it up. Because I think that that’s important and once you start explaining that it prevents a little bit of that throw up and show up type of thing but on the flip side and this … everyone’s going to freak out when I say this but you need to know this much more than a prospect in order to sell. I have sold things that I have absolutely no clue what I’m talking about for one reason and one reason only subtext. It’s not what you say, half the time it’s what you don’t say. So if you’re a really good salesperson you don’t need to know anything about anything you just show up I mean not to toot my own horn but I mean like my head is already big enough as it and as you can tell I’m … no one is more impressed by me than me but I’ve closed seven figure deals not knowing what it was that I was selling. Because if you can ask the right questions not only are they going to tell you everything you need to know but they’re going to answer their own questions and all … you just have to know so little and position things. And sometimes it’s just as simple as nodding your head and be like “yup, uh-huh, yup” and it’s just answering their questions. And then they’re like you know what Ali I think I need to move forward with it. People do not understand the importance of subtext. Most sales people will never be able to master that so, as a result, it’s very important that you need to be able to teach them. You need to not only teach them what the product does but then how to position. I think that’s more important than the product knowledge itself but if we’re going to get really philosophical with it in my opinion subtext is far more important than anything else.

Mark: The most valuable lesson I ever learned in sales was learning how to shut up. Honestly and I think it was in a Zig Ziglar book that I read way back in the day where he talked about that active listening and just being quiet and more importantly not just being quiet and looking and kind of blankly not listening but listening to what the prospect says and then being able to simply when you’re invited to that point to respond, responding to what they actually say. And we’ve seen this at Quiet Light and this is completely unintentional, we have a pretty soft approach with our sales process. But what I’ve found in the past is that when I tell somebody not to sell their business which we tell people a lot because I honestly think it’s in their best interest; oftentimes when we tell somebody not to do something the opposite starts to happen. They end up becoming more determined to do it and part of that is just dealing with entrepreneurs where all the smartest people are in the room and they wanted to … okay, I have one more question for you. I have two so if we can fit two in we’ll do it but one more big question and this is something that I find to be a problem with a lot of online service based companies and SaaS companies and that is the continuity between the sales person upfront and the back end team; so pretty simple sales person is over delivering, over promising what’s going to happen after. Do you consult in this area at all and how can business owners, SaaS owners look towards that continuity between their upfront sales person because not having to do the account management necessarily after the sale?

Ali: See both of that are training, right? A lot of times … let’s call me an optimist in this and I believe that most sales people don’t typically want to lie and so if they know that they’re lying they’ll probably shy away from it. Unless you get a shady sales person then all bets are off type of thing but I’d say the vast majority of sales people don’t want to lie and it’s just because you haven’t taken the time to properly train them on what actually happens after the deal is done. So for us, it’s very important to sit with customers of SaaS and really understand how because that’s really how we create the pitch. So we sit with costumers of SaaS, we see what people are saying, how they’re saying it, we interview customers, and once we understand that we reverse engineer the pitch. Once you give someone the pitch it’s black and white; what we do, what we don’t do, how we do it, and if you’re going off script it’s very easy to call you in and be like hey brother what’s going on here? You’re supposed to say we do X, Y, and Z why are you saying one, two, three, and then it happens a couple of times and you help them transition out. But you’re 100% right it’s all about setting expectations on the front end from a sales person with the prospect so that when they do become a client it’s not a problem but you as the founder, business owner, VP, whatever, the sales leader have to also do that. You have to set expectations with the sales people because a lot of times you’re like oh … and a lot of times this also happens, I’ll be brief with this is the founder is this visionary, delusional, optimist who thinks their product is the best products since sliced bread and is pitching it that way and the salesperson gets all jazzed, full of piss and vinegar, gets excited and says the exact same thing to a prospect then the prospect comes and finds out that half the widgets don’t work. I see that all the time too. So just be reasonable.

Mark: Yeah I know. I mean I dealt with that with a service company recently where the sales person showed me graphs and all these beautiful things and I’m like this is so clear like if they can deliver on half this and then I got into the account management stage and there’s a lot of tampering of expectations.

Ali: That doesn’t work at all. That’s on our roadmap for Q4.

Mark: Yeah I’m like well at this point you need to just kind of sit back and just kind of wait for  … that’s not what I saw, that not what I was told upfront. At what should somebody be thinking about putting in the sales process and I’m thinking again about really early stage people here they’re maybe just coming out of beta, they’re starting to go off for a launch and they might be hiring one maybe two sales people here. When should somebody be saying we need to start getting this process honed in?

Ali: I’d say first few sell. As the founder, you need to sell. After you’ve sold a few and you’ve kind of figured out what happens, what’s good, what’s not good I’d recommend hiring two sales people; let them battle it out together. Let them feed off each other, learn from each other. The goal is not the strongest survives the goal is both of them steel … was it steel, sharpen steel or whatever. Get back going and before you go and hire employee number … or salesperson number three, four, five, six, ten, that’s when you need to start the process. So after the first two people have started to prove it out then go from there. That’s when you need to start building it out and systematizing and documenting everything. And now you have become … it makes your life so much easier after that because again sales process is not something that you build once and that’s it. It’s a living breathing document that’s constantly being iterated but you need you to be the foundations start off of.

Mark: How do people measure this? I mean do you set up milestones along that sales process that you’re going to be measuring kind of like a funnel or are you just looking at inbound and out as far as inbound calls coming in or prospects and actual conversion rate.

Ali: I mean it’s both. I mean you’re doing a qualitative and a quantitative. So overall you … I look at the quantitative just so that I can have … it’s like a measuring stick but I really believe it’s more qualitative. You’ve got to listen to the calls because there is no perfect closing percentage. And I’m always concerned when someone has too high of a close percentage. When they’re like oh I close 80% of my deals I’m like something’s wrong there. So you’re either selling it too short or you’re dequeuing people that you shouldn’t be dequeuing, all of this other stuff. So the quantitative will only tell you what you’re prepared to understand and what you’re prepared to understand is filled in by the qualitative. So you got to listen to calls. You’ve got to figure out did we sell that for as much as we could have, was that too easy, was that too hard, what was going on in there. You got to figure all those things out and data can’t tell you that. Data can only tell you if that improved or didn’t improve and if you’re not doing the qualitative you very likely are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Mark: Absolutely 100%. Alright I want to talk about some of the success stories that you guys have had at Rose Garden Consulting because really when you start to look at this again I think two of the lowest hanging fruit areas of any business would be conversion rate optimization and two if you have a sales process where you have this on boarding process and you’re having that customer interaction improving that process as well because you don’t have to do anymore as far as bringing in the inbound traffic, you’re just optimizing what’s coming in. So I’d love to know more about some of the successes that you guys have had. What are some of the things that kind of stand out in your mind as far as kind of eye popping numbers?

Ali: One of our clients in three weeks we … their average deal was 35k, within three weeks just changing out their process we closed three deals that I think is just over 70 something and then it just kind of stayed there. And it was just by changing up the way that they spoke to their clients. So right there from the qualitative standpoint, we 2X in less than a month. That was a good one. One of our clients and the cases are online and so one of our clients we took from 5 million ARR to 12 million in one year and rank 500 in the fastest growing company. We’ve got several stories like that but for me the numbers are great and all but for me, it’s really … I just like going in there and proving things wrong because the best are the stories in where hey everything is great, we just need to go from 5 to 50 reps and then you start to find things that hey why are we doing it this way, why are we doing it this way? And all the sudden instead of going from 5 to 50 reps to hit their goal we go from 5 to maybe 15 and we’re hitting their goal because there was so much money on the table. So those are the ones that I really enjoy.

Mark: Yeah just making the existing team that much more efficient and being able to find out areas where like you said some of that qualitative stuff, they might have a high closing rate but they’re disqualifying people way too aggressively or they’re just not selling for it as much as they possibly could be. This is fantastic information. Where can people learn more about you or reach out to you if they are interested in getting somebody in to take a look at their existing sales processes?

Ali: RoseGardenConsulting.com is our website. You can always email me at [email protected] rose like the flower. My podcast is For The Close; that’s ForTheClose.com so anywhere shape or form hit us up I’m always happy to help and talking sales is my jam so I really enjoy it so anytime I can help I am always happy to.

Mark: And a huge shout out to Jeremy and John from Rise25, they connected us over at Traffic and Conversion. You’re actually the second guest that I’m having on who they hooked me up with.

Ali: Second, how am I not the first? You got me right in my fiddles there.

Mark: You know what you’re not the first because I had a delay. I had to cancel on you twice.

Ali: Who is number one? Who is first?

Mark: I just talked to him yesterday and you put me on the spot man so who was it? Oh the guy from Sourcify. It’s a completely different area and he’s talking about sourcing products from all over the world and manufacturing products and a fascinating, really smart guy. He made me feel like a complete idiot. But—

Ali:  [inaudible 00:32:31.5] on me.

Mark: You know what I like about having you on is that you’re a sales guy cut from the same cloth that I came from and so that’s just … I don’t know manufacturing like that other guy did. I feel like I could talk more with you although you know infinitely more than I do about scaling up these sales processes and I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of this information. I think you and I are probably going to talk for a full hour just because I could talk about sales forever. I think it’s fascinating but yeah thanks for coming on.

Ali: Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me, brother. I appreciate it.

Links and Resources:

Rosegarden Consulting

Email Ali

For the Close Podcast