Nobody starts a business and doesn’t think of growing their sales revenue. The only question is how to go about achieving the growth you envision for your company. Joining this episode is the CEO of Business Success Factors, Doug C. Brown, to share part of the knowledge he’s gained from growing thousands of companies. He drops some hard truths that business owners need to be facing and addressing when it comes to processes, systems, and the goal they’re trying to reach. He also talks about the necessity of assessments and audits, even if it’s something that everyone does not embrace. Also, learn the simple formula of business and realize how easy it would be if you can manage to detach yourself personally from the resulting outcomes of your process.

—

Listen to the podcast here:

Sales Revenue Growth With Doug C. Brown

I talked with a guy by the name of Doug Brown who works with companies in sales revenue. He’s a growth expert there. He’s worked with enterprise nationwide, Tony Robbins, Intuit, P&G, CBS, a lot of great experience, but he has a system that he talks about. His company is Business Success Factors. I thought it would be good. I don’t usually have people on who are in the same business that I’m in because I don’t want to confuse everybody because I have a very specific philosophy and I want that to come across, but he has similar philosophies. I wanted to have him on. I think you’ll enjoy it. Doug Brown, Founder of Business Success Factors.

I was always building businesses on the side, whether they were small businesses or trying to make them large. I’ve done about 35 of them and some of them have led me into some interesting roles as, let’s say, independent president of sales and training for guys like Tony Robbins, Chet Holmes, and Russ Whitney. I’ve done a lot of the backend for a lot of the trainers, built them sales teams, and things of that nature. What’s led me to where I am now is, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of businesses and I’ve discovered one thing. They all want to grow sales revenue but most of them don’t have a process or a system to do it, so I created that.

When I go into a business, whether it’s a $5 million or $500 million, you would even think the $500 million businesses would have good processes, and they don’t. Some do but it’s not given. When you talk about a process, that can mean a lot of different things. Give me your definition of it.

We can take sales methodologies and talk about them, whatever it might be. The system itself is about ten different facets in sales revenue growth and then the processes are those sub things within each one of those facets that make the facet work optimum.

Can you give me a hard example?

Get an assessment and audit the process. Audit sounds like a bad word, but the reality is, it reveals things. Share on X

Most companies that I’ve worked with myopically focused on 1 or 2 facets. Let’s say they’re focused on usually getting new clients. That’s the big one for everybody. What they’re leaving out is, “How do you increase the buying frequency of that client or the transactional value of that client? How do you get that overall retention up? How do we increase the number of people selling for us?” Things like that. The speed to purchase, margins, prices, even things like meaningful communication, how are we communicating with our clients internally and externally? How are we improving the skillsets of the people that are within there? There are all kinds of facets within these processes, within the facet that a lot of people though are myopically focused on that 1 or 2 things, and they’re missing simple things a lot of times.

I like to say that people love to talk about the outputs and hate to talk about the inputs. What’s it going to take for us to get a new client? We resort a lot of times. As you say, “What are the behaviors? Let’s pound out 100 calls a day.” “Let’s do that.” Then that doesn’t work. We’ll go, “How about 200 calls a day?” We’re working on the wrong end of the problem a lot of times. You mentioned something about this idea of once we get a client, are we getting all we can go out of them and are they getting all they can out of us? How do we take our 1,000 clients that are doing $20 million and get that to $40 million? Maybe that would resolve our problem of pressuring our people and hiring a bunch of people to make 200 cold calls a day that doesn’t work on the front end?

We could reduce our expenses and improve our profitability on the top line. A lot of times, they’re not thinking about farming the account, but the system is not set up. The whole customer journey is not set up as a sale system. It’s set up as 1 facet, maybe 2. Marketing sort of and then sales. They forget things like customer service. Customer service can be a huge source of sales.

The customer journey stops when the first transaction happens than the customer journeys are. It was like, “That’s where it is? That shouldn’t be where it begins.”

They should be looking to expand the sale at every single turn throughout the whole customer journey, and they don’t. That’s why companies are poor at things like referrals, follow-up, and a bunch of things. They all have blind spots. You had mentioned $5 million, $500 million, or $5 billion. Every company has a blind spot. It’s usually only a few things that will unearth the revenue and get them that untapped revenue coming back into their lives. The wonderful part is they’ve usually spent the marketing money already, so that’s sitting there. It’s pure profit.

 

There’s one thing to say that there’s always a blind spot, but I have my impression of what stops. Let’s say, it’s a $100 million company. You got a VP of sales, 4 or 5 sales managers, 30 or 40 people. What stops them from shining the light on their entire system of generating new clients and generating revenue from existing clients? There’s got to be some stopper or several.

There are several. One is they truthfully don’t know where they want to go. They’re honest, but there’s a difference between honesty and truth. The truth is the objective measurement. They truthfully do not know how much they want to grow by in the next twelve months. They get a number in their head. They go, “We could project this. We could do that.” There’s not this concrete, “This is going to be hit, and we’re satisfied being there. If we exceed this, great.” Most of them don’t know that benchmark. The second thing is people have emotions. A lot of times, even leaders in companies or divisions don’t want to be exposed to a certain group within. They might be doing things that they want to either cover-up. The third thing is they don’t know what they don’t know. They’re not investigating that because they don’t know. They can’t see it. It’s blind.

There’s one also that probably fits into one of those three that you mentioned. There’s a resistance some for some reason to, and it’s sexier than hell to talk about, “Let’s grow from $20 million to $25 million. Doug, here’s your quote. It was $1.2 million last year. It’s $1.5 million this year. Everybody, good? We’ll see you back here at the end of December.” There was very little attention paid to, “How are we going to do that? How do we get from $1.2 million to $1.5 million?” It’s easy to say, “Doug’s always done it before. Post pandemic, maybe there’s a different strategy or Doug strategy could get him to $2.5 million, but he’s bicycling around his territory trying to pick up leads or whatever the old antiquated thing.” There’s a reluctance to getting down and dirty into how are we going to make that happen? Do you concur or is that part of the clarity?

It’s part of the clarity from my definition, but I do concur because it’s not only part of the clarity, but it’s part of the blind spots in the process. Let’s say Doug is exhausted. Why is Doug exhausted at that point? What is causing the issue of exhaustion? Is Doug not leveraged properly on his abilities, his skillsets are not there, or is it the system that he’s within the of the customer journey? There are all kinds of reasons for it, but I fully agree with what you said.

When I bring people on, I always like to ask them a pointed question about, I’m a VP of sales or a CEO, founder of a small company, either way, you’re talking with Doug Brown, who is both CEO and Founder of Business Success Factor. What advice would you give to a VP of sales or president of a company who has read and said, “We might have an issue?” What would be 1 or 2 pieces of advice to begin the process?

Behind every corporate agenda is a personal mission. Share on X

I would sit down and get truthful. Do we want to do something about this? A lot of companies talk about it but they don’t want to do anything about it. They’re uncomfortably comfortable. If you’re uncomfortably uncomfortable, then the next step is, “What is that true north? What is the goal that you truly want to achieve?” Most goals can be achieved. The resistance in the planning part of this is the key. Once the goal is set out, “Let’s get it assessed. Let’s find out where we’re at. Are there any impedances? Is there good stuff? What’s happening, that’s great?” Let’s get the whole picture, get an assessment, and audit the process. I know audit sounds like a bad word, but the reality is it reveals things. Once we do that section of it, let’s take the goal, take the assessment, where we want to go, where we are, and let’s build a growth plan to get there.

That’s a good point there about the clarity of where we are going. I don’t think companies, at least the ones I’ve worked with and I can’t say much about it because I don’t want to give away anything but there is a reluctance to set a goal out in the future and say, “By the time 2022 ends, 2 or 3 years out, we’re going to be this company, doing this business, and market with these kinds of people.” There’s such a reluctance to do that because it’s like, “We’d been through a lot in 2020. Maybe you had this clarity of focus. Maybe 2020 would have been an awesome year instead of an average year?” There’s this reluctance to get deep into clarifying where are we going and what does it look like when we get there?

We have to detach personally from the outcomes a lot of times. That’s the hard part because for a lot of business, especially who started their own companies organically or whatever and they’ve grown them to high proportions or they’re trying to grow them to high proportions, they have a lot of their own personal self invested in the business itself. The reality is that business is simple when you remove people from the equation.

Tell me more about that.

Think about it. It’s a simple formula. It’s money out, money in, equal something. That’s business. We all want the equals to be a plus sign. When we get people in there, they start getting thoughts coming into this. A lot of thoughts are great, but there are some non-serving ones that come into it. That’s where I think that reluctance comes from in a big way, especially if the owner has been the one who’s grown the company. She or he has their identity tied to the business, or internally the vice-president of sales or president of a division, they’ll tend to defend that even if they don’t want to.

 

A lot of companies equate it to the Super Bowl that was played in the US where Tom Brady won his seventh Super Bowl. As you look back to, when he left the original team, because he’s with a brand new team in 2021, Tampa BAY, only two teams came after Brady after he said, “I’m leaving New England.” One was Tampa Bay, who got him. The other one where the LA Chargers. Nobody else wanted him. Why? Because he was too old. “Why would I want a 42-year-old quarterback?” All these teams are saying, “Our goal is to get to the Super Bowl.” Here’s a guy who’s been there six times. If he wasn’t full-time quarterbacking, couldn’t he give you a little insight on how he got there? We are black and white sometimes. I start to wonder, “Did teams want to get to the Super Bowl, or is that just lip service?” I don’t want to take you into sports, but I think the same thing applies. We want to get to $12 million, but we’re not willing to do what it takes to get there, but we’d like to get there. “You don’t want to get there.”

Since I’m a New England Patriots fan, I grew up in Massachusetts. The thing is that Brady left for probably other reasons that we don’t know, but also he was offered, I think it was $6 million or $7 million more at his career place. Why not take it? A thought occurred to me in equating this to business. A lot of times, companies look at top-line revenue and go, “Our budgets were in-line. We are here. Everything’s working,” but then a guy like yourself, or I come along and go, “That’s nice. You grew by 22%. How do you know it shouldn’t have been 34%?” They’re like, “We take a look. There’s another 6% here. Another 2% here and 1% there.” For the same amount of money out, they could have been bringing in more money. I still will anchor myself that a lot of times, it comes back to the personal agenda because behind every corporate agenda is a personal mission of some sort. That’s how it works.

I can go from $22 million to $28 million if I buy my way into the extra $6 million and give away my products. Back to your original equation, cash in versus cash out equals something. It’s not just the top line. It’s what we are delivering to the bottom line. A lot of what you talk about delivers that, not to the top line but also in the bottom. Shortened selling cycles, understanding our customers better calling on the right people, instead of people who don’t fit. I presume that’s in a lot of your work. Doug, you said you had a checklist that our readers could access. Can you tell us how we can get ahold of that?

It’s a marketing and sales checklist. It’s a self-audit. It’ll give you an idea of how you are doing. You could email me at [email protected]. I’ll be happy to have one sent out to you. It’s an eye-opening experience if you’re going to do this because it will poke holes in your current playbook but it will show you some good stuff as well.

He’ll send the checklist back to you. Doug, it has been a real pleasure. We need to do this again later in 2021. I’ll catch up with you again. Thanks for taking the time to be on.

Thanks for having me, Bill. It’s been a lot of fun. I appreciate being here.

Important Links:

• Business Success Factors
• [email protected]

About Doug C. Brown

I am Doug Brown, CEO of Business Success Factors. I started working for my families business at the age of three, since that time I have started and built over 35 companies. I have three college degrees, and I am America’s number one expert in revenue expansion and sales optimization. During college at Berklee College, Northeastern University, and Salem State University, I supported myself by selling music equipment to colleges, universities, corporations, and some of the world’s biggest bands such as Aerosmith, Boston, Billy Joel, The Eagles, Extreme and others. I served 12 years in the US Army, during which I was awarded the battalion’s most distinguished soldier award graduating 2nd in my class and was then enrolled at the Massachusetts Military Academy.

After my service, I worked at and became the top-selling sales representative for a 2-billion-dollar company. These experiences laid the groundwork to form my own consulting and auditing company.

I have traveled to 47 out of the 50 US states and 14 countries where I have consulted, coached, advised, and trained thousands of people in business, some of those companies include Enterprise-Rent- Car, Nationwide, Intuit, Proctor and Gamble, CBS Television. I have also served as an independent president of sales and training for companies of Tony Robbins, Chet Holmes, and Russ Whitney. My efforts have collectively generated over 500 million dollars in sales—my last client-generated 3 million dollars in new sales in 5 weeks.