Richard Walton (00:01.452)
Hey Rich, welcome to our podcast. Nice to meet you.

Rich Walker (00:05.283)
Hey, pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Richard.

Richard Walton (00:08.99)
well, we are delighted to have you. first of all, I just like to say it's, I was on your podcast a couple of months ago, which I thoroughly enjoyed. if I'm memory serves me, it's called the customer. The customer wins. Is that right? Yeah.

Rich Walker (00:24.471)
You got it. You got it. All about how we help customers win.

Richard Walton (00:28.526)
I know this is a podcast about sales, but very quickly, what's your obsession with customers? Where does that come from?

Rich Walker (00:39.523)
So it comes from a couple of things. think innately, my mom taught me this, that delivering excellent value and service to people makes everybody happy and makes your job easier and better. And I think you derive value from how you help people. Second, lots of studies have been done that show, mean, Gartner Group, McKinsey, et cetera, that show if you focus on a better customer experience, you will drive growth in your business. And I'm a firm believer in that. My own customers have demonstrated that to us.

because our customers are the ones growing by 7 % a year versus the industry at 2 % a year, year over year for two decades now. And I'm not taking credit for their growth, but I know they're attracted to us because we improve a critical part of the customer experience, the last step where paperwork's being filled out.

Richard Walton (01:26.254)
Okay cool thank you.

Henry Walton (01:27.972)
Out of interest, was the primary driver for starting the podcast? I don't know if you'll give me an honest answer here now, but what was the primary driver for starting the podcast? Was just what you wanted to hear and learn? Was it acquisition?

Rich Walker (01:40.833)
Well, you know, I'll give you the honest answer. I want to be on stage at industry events talking as a keynote speaker, a panelist, what have you. So I need to be seen as a thought leader. And what I thought about was nobody wants to talk about forms. That's a very boring topic because that's what we do. We automate forms. So instead, I said, what else am I passionate about that is of interest to everybody? And I'm passionate about customer experience. We've done a great job on our company. And then I sought out ways to figure it out. And I'm thinking, do I want to get a PhD? No, I don't want to go back to school.

or certifications and then I stumbled across the idea of the podcast and I thought, man, if I talk to dozens or even hundreds of business leaders about what they're doing, I will learn the most valuable insights from the real world about how to deliver the best customer experience. And frankly, that's been happening. I have been gleaning these secrets, these like little nuggets from different people with different perspectives that really drive for a better experience. So in the end, I haven't been brought on stage yet.

But my podcast is my stage and we're getting a lot of value out of talking to people.

Richard Walton (02:42.478)
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, in for full transparency, I think we're here for very similar reasons. As you, this is why we started our podcast. You know, in our business, we work almost exclusively with founders who are involved in the sales process. And we are fanatical about understanding and learning from them. think we, you know, our business is to help them.

Henry Walton (02:43.031)
We'll see.

Richard Walton (03:09.453)
navigate that and to ultimately remove them from that journey. But we've still got a lot to learn as well. So I guess that brings me on to my next question. You know, in advance of this you shared with us, I think that you've been involved in the sales process since your business's inception in 2002. Is that right? 2002. So. So, do you?

Rich Walker (03:28.405)
Yeah, that's right. Over 20 years of being in the sales role somehow.

Richard Walton (03:38.861)
Do you wanna get, are you happy in the sales process? Do you wanna get out of it? What's your, what are your plans for the future?

Rich Walker (03:46.657)
You know, look, the short answer is I'm loving sales more and more as I go. And I don't see myself being in sales forever, but probably I see myself in sales for the next two to four years at some level. Let me give you a little bit background. In college, I really wanted to learn sales. So I started working in financial services. I worked for a stockbroker and an annuity salesperson, investment banking. And I saw a lot of different facets to sales and it actually turned me off.

It turned me off because I saw people selling things for the sake of a commission for their own benefit versus what was right for the customer. And I came to see sales as this manipulative, conniving, like self-serving role that people would have, and I know that's not fair to everybody. And so I really looked at it and said, I don't want to do sales. I want to do business development. I want to create relationships. I want to serve people for a long time, but I don't want to sell. And even to this day, I don't like being called a salesperson.

Even though the people I'm working with now, we hired a firm to help us with sales. They're outsourced salespeople. They're very good at what they do and they've given me feedback. mean, I don't want to pat myself on the back or anything, but they have said like I am the best salesperson they've ever worked with and I cringe a little bit because I don't want to be a salesperson. But the reality is I'm not trying to sell anybody anything. I'm trying to solve problems. And what I've learned about sales is that when you have a solution and somebody has a problem and you can marry the two together,

You're just delivering value. I'm not convincing anybody. I'm showing them what's possible and they convince themselves. So therefore I'm not being the conniving or the manipulative salesperson in the role. Somebody can tell me otherwise. I'll learn if that's happening. I feel it's more about how many people can I help? It's not about the money anymore. It's really truly how many people can I help with what we're doing? We built this for a reason. Let's go use it.

Henry Walton (05:40.747)
Very nice. There's just on that very quickly, there's something that I always think is, you know, in coaching and they say, right, you've got to overcome these objections. And it's like, no, you don't have to overcome them. You have to understand them. And it's two very different mindsets, right. And one is about kind of this conniving, right, what tactics we got to kind of get around them. The other part is actually just trying to understand where they're coming from. You either have a solution that can genuinely help them solve that problem, or you don't. And it's either a good match or a bad match.

Richard Walton (05:41.923)
What

Henry Walton (06:10.681)
in.

Rich Walker (06:11.767)
Yeah, you Henry, since you guys work with founders, founders tend to be more about the relationship with people, about solving the problem, about understanding, but they also inherently tend to be really good at psychology and understanding people in general. So I don't like those tactics about always be closing or here's the takeaway clothes or all these things. And I haven't gone through any formal training on those things. The reason I don't like them is because

their hacks or shortcuts to human behavior. It's trying to trigger human behavior versus if you're very well versed at how you communicate and you understand yourself and your communication style and you learn how other people communicate, then it's no longer about triggering their behavior to what you want them to do, it's more about understanding and learning and working with them to get to the solution.

Richard Walton (07:05.225)
Reggie, I can't tell you how much this resonates with me. In fact, I wrote a LinkedIn post, I think last week called time for the new ABC. I truly detest always be closing. And I wrote about how I think it should be more about ask, build trust and collaborate. And, and I've been thinking a lot about why cells, the history of cells and why cells is seen as a dirty word.

Rich Walker (07:24.323)
I love that.

Richard Walton (07:33.001)
And think a lot of it has to do with, you know, 20, 30 years ago, the buyer had no information, none. So let's, let's take a stereotypical kind of hardcore salesperson. The car dealer springs to mind, right? You go in there, you don't have any information. The car dealer can tell you anything you want. These days you go on to chat GBT and tell, and say, tell me everything about the car. You've got as much information as your back pocket as the person selling to you.

So actually it is, think you probably saw it a lot, lot earlier on than most people. But I think unless my personal feeling is unless salespeople adopt kind of this new strategy, they're in big trouble because the buyers, have all the information. You can't force them to do things anymore. So there's always be closing thing. I don't know. I feel slightly allergic to it actually and the mindset that comes with it.

Rich Walker (08:23.563)
Yeah, I definitely am too.

Richard Walton (08:26.483)
Rich, I want to go into something that you sent to us in advance, because I know this is going to resonate with a lot of the people that we talk to, and I think it's something that we've experienced ourselves. You talked about, and I'm assuming that you hired a VP of sales as a step to removing yourself from the sales process, is that right?

Rich Walker (08:50.637)
So you're referring to one of the biggest mistakes we made, right?

Richard Walton (08:54.026)
I'm sorry. I'm sorry to go straight in there. But yes, but it's it's a good lesson for everyone. Let's let's go there. Yeah

Rich Walker (08:57.751)
No, it's fine.

Yeah, it's fine. I love learning from other people. So hopefully this is going to help somebody else. This is many years ago now. Gosh, what was it like 14 years ago. So it's been a while. And at the stage we were in, we were trying to figure out how do we grow sales. And so we said, let's hire somebody to come in and help us build a sales organization, build a team. And we were looking for that VP. I think we're actually looking for more like a director, but the person we found, he had published a book on sales and like, it looks very legit.

He had a ton of success. He was actually very wealthy, didn't need the job per se, and he was coming to us to help us grow as this young company. So I gave a lot of faith into how he presented himself and brought services and capabilities to our team. And we then proceeded to build a call center. So first of all, this was a misalignment of how we work, how our industry works versus how the salesperson's modality is. They were into the boiler room process.

call people, push them, demand that they get the signature on the contract, that kind of thing. And that has a harsh kind of push, which might be fine for commodities or something like that, but we're not a commodity, we're a service. And it's a very bespoke type of service. And it's business to business enterprise sales, which takes a long time. So he's trying to drive a sale very fast. And we have people in a call center, local in our office, six people just dialing for dollars.

over a couple of months period. The other thing he tried to drive is we should be pricing ourselves based on the value we deliver. And I'm not saying there's something wrong with it. There's a lot of truth to be said about getting what you can out of the value you bring a customer. And me, I think being naive and putting trust in somebody who had more experience than me, we went out to market with an ROI, return on investment calculator, and we started to show customers that we could save them 100 times what we had ever said.

Rich Walker (10:57.815)
So in fact, we talked to a customer, one of our existing customers, and showed them, because they were looking to upgrade and they were part of a larger organization, they had been acquired, and we said, hey, we're going to save you like $230 million, so you should pay us like $6 million, when the value of our product in their eyes was maybe a quarter million dollars. So you can already see the mismatch there. In essence, we kind of got laughed out of the room. We weren't physically in the room, but…

I worked with this VP to talk with this customer. I kind of let him drive the conversation and he had full faith and confidence we're going to save them $200 million so they should be willing to spend $6 million with us, even though there's no basis in reality for paying that much for our product. And honestly, Richard, this is a really hard thing because when you're an innovator, how do you price something that's innovative that has very few comparables? You don't know how to price it. So I was willing to go with that concept.

Richard Walton (11:50.932)
No.

Rich Walker (11:52.919)
But you have to always come back to what is the customer's perception of value? Regardless of actual value you can deliver, what is their perception of value? And he did teach me some things that I still use to this day, one is which is a confused mind will just simply say no. If you confuse people too much, they'll just turn off, right? But also I just kind of looked at that situation and the customer who I knew said, you guys sure you want to

Richard Walton (12:10.19)
I love that. Yeah.

Henry Walton (12:11.742)
No.

Rich Walker (12:22.647)
propose this with a tone that I understand now to mean back off, come back with something realistic and you'll win the deal.

Richard Walton (12:34.642)
And are you still there?

Henry Walton (12:36.321)
Yeah, yeah, I'm still here.

Richard Walton (12:40.754)
All right, we'll just hang on. can edit this out.

Richard Walton (12:51.43)
I don't think this is our internet then,

Henry Walton (12:54.933)
No, it's definitely not because we have different internets.

Richard Walton (12:58.664)
Well, I thought maybe it was with brothers. Maybe our internet's asynced.

Henry Walton (13:00.215)
We don't share this on the internet.

Henry Walton (13:10.487)
It's annoying we can't do our backgrounds.

Richard Walton (13:13.692)
Yeah, it's really annoying. This is like, this is like the pro version. Hey, Rich!

Can hear us all right? No worries, don't worry. We can edit that out. You're now on the right hand side instead of the middle. We'll have to come up for a reason why you've shifted to the right. I can't think of a good one, but we'll come up with something. Don't worry, we'll edit all this out. Is there a way that you can kind of carry on with what you saying?

Rich Walker (13:22.907)
Apologies. Yeah, I hear you. My browser's shut down.

Rich Walker (13:40.88)
Magic.

Rich Walker (13:47.875)
Yeah, where did I, where did I cut out?

Richard Walton (13:51.591)
you were, sorry, go ahead.

Henry Walton (13:54.284)
See you.

Yeah, when they gave you the chance to review the offer again.

Richard Walton (14:01.713)
back off. Yeah, the customer. Yeah, yeah.

Rich Walker (14:03.515)
I'm there. OK. OK. So are we ready? Are you recording still?

Richard Walton (14:11.11)
Yeah, we're recording. We're just letting it run and we'll edit it out.

Rich Walker (14:16.539)
So the customer gave us a hint that we should back off and repropose and win, but we pressed on and lost the deal, of course. I didn't win that customer back for another, I think, six or seven years. If you count up 200,000 a year over five, six years, we lost well over a million dollars in revenue. And more than that, frankly, because had we won the deal, we would have expanded with them faster and made more money, because that's always happened. We always expand with our customers.

So I count that as a million dollar plus mistake and that was our revenue at the time. I don't even think our revenue was that high at the time. So it was a hugely costly mistake to us. It would have meant a lot for us to win the deal. So it was an incredible lesson. And of course that VP didn't work out because the call center produced absolutely zero sales in the four months that we were running it, but a lot of cost.

Richard Walton (15:12.263)
Mm-mm.

Henry Walton (15:13.441)
So Rich, you mentioned a couple of things that kind of went wrong when he was there, but I guess why else do you think it didn't work? Was it a timing thing? Was it the wrong person? Was it recruitment process? Was it your knowledge at this point? Like if you were gonna go back in time, what would you change?

Rich Walker (15:34.639)
You know, part of it was one of my partners had a real problem with what we were doing. And from my standpoint, wasn't direct enough upfront to stop it or change it and instead just tried to derail it. And so we were fighting in house around the process and we weren't effective. That's part of the problem. I don't think any fix to that would have saved the outcome other than maybe

some sense of saying, yeah, let's back off and give them our normal price. That would have saved the outcome. But at that point, yeah, actually, now I think about it, that's probably the best outcome that could have happened had the communication between my partner and I, one of my partners and I, been a little bit more transparent versus underhanded. And this is not to add blame whatsoever. I had my own faults in this too because I put too much faith into this person who was new to our industry, new to our product type, bringing a sales process that

really doesn't match what we do. I knew that in my gut. But we were, I don't want to say desperate, we were just really tired of struggling. Sales has always been the hardest part of our company. And we would only make a couple of enterprise sales every year, and that would grow us five, six, eight, maybe 10 % in a year. So it was really slow to grow this company. And we wanted the magic bullet. You know what they say, right? Sounds too good to be true.

Richard Walton (16:56.446)
Yeah.

Rich Walker (17:03.256)
So I was sold by a salesperson, go figure.

Richard Walton (17:03.898)
Thank you.

Henry Walton (17:06.167)
I

Richard Walton (17:08.805)
Yeah, that can happen. It's funny. It's, you know, we hear that time and time again. I would say when we talk to clients or potential clients, the most common thing that we hear, there's probably two things, but the second most common is I hired someone to take over from me doing the selling, generally business development managers, and nothing happened.

six to nine months, six, nine, 12 months, and I stopped them, let them go, and I had to start again. It's a slightly different story, what you're sharing, but we've heard it again and again.

Rich Walker (17:46.547)
no, I have those stories too. I didn't tell you about the other people I've hired that failed out. Years later, we hired another VP of sales and three years later, he drove our pipeline to zero in our pipeline.

Richard Walton (17:52.518)
Whoa

Richard Walton (18:00.42)
Right, yeah, yeah.

Henry Walton (18:03.372)
Just to spend a couple more minutes on this, mean so often Rich alluded to it then when we speak to founders it's because you said you know we were desperate right so enterprise sales takes a long time so you were hiring this guy

Were you seeing it to kind of fix the whole sales process from, you know, new from new lead generation to pipeline to building the sales process to closing and negotiation? Were parts of it working before? Like did you have leads but you weren't closing them or?

Rich Walker (18:37.093)
You know, Henry, I'm gonna give you a founder's perspective. I am a engineer product person, so I'm good at building products. Sales was not my first strength. It's become a strength, but it's not my first strength. I've always been envious of other founders who have this killer rainmaker salesperson as a founder. We didn't have that. So I kept thinking that that was gonna make the difference. How do I get that kind of person on board?

The truth is I made the first sale, I've made the most recent sale, I've made all the sales, I've been the negotiator, I've been the contract writer, I've been involved deeply, and I just didn't believe in myself. I didn't trust that I had the ability because I didn't like sales. I thought salespeople were bad, all the negatives, right? And it took me a long time. Honestly, one of the best things that ever happened was my other former partner encouraged me to go take an improv comedy class. He was right.

Henry Walton (19:32.855)
Amazing.

Rich Walker (19:33.837)
It completely changed my dynamic in terms of how I engaged with people. I used to be all about the business. We get on a call, I don't want to hear the small talk, let's talk about what you need and get it done. He was always about, let's talk about cigars and sailboats and whatever. I took that improv class and I woke up to how to communicate and to be in the moment with people and to be really active and listening with people. And now, if you look at where I am in today,

When I start the sales process with a customer, a 30 minute call will have the first 20 minutes all about them. Maybe the first 30 minutes will be all about them and we'll run out of time because I need to understand who they are, what their drivers are, what their needs are, what their problems are, what they've been looking at, what hasn't worked, what their outcomes are, et cetera. And the more I do that, the better the relationship becomes. The better the relationship becomes, the more open they are to hearing about solutions and wanting solutions.

Richard Walton (20:05.593)
Yeah.

Rich Walker (20:28.035)
So it's no longer sales, it's solving problems. So I think the truth is I just didn't have the right confidence or the right perspective.

Richard Walton (20:36.809)
I love that. and I think we're going to put into our product offering a improv comedy class for all the founders that we bring on board. rich it, you know, what you say really, really resonates with what I believe when it comes to selling. and I personally believe that most founders are actually very, are actually very good at sales and they are.

hesitant to admit that but also what they don't enjoy is a lot of the administration associated with sales. But if you can strip all of that away and you can approach sales in the way that you've been talking about and have three to four really high value conversations a month, then it's very different. And also if you're talking to people that really need what you are offering.

Rich Walker (21:15.833)
yeah.

Richard Walton (21:36.419)
And you can, and you get the excitement of, can really help this person. Then it's very different. Then it's not about selling. It's about forming partnerships. and talk to any founder about, Hey, do want to form partnerships with lots of people? They will say, yes. So it's, yeah, it's.

Rich Walker (21:44.047)
Yeah.

Rich Walker (21:49.263)
Right? Yeah. If you think about the sales process and break it down, I will never do prospecting. I'm no good with that. I need to talk to somebody who's already interested, who already knows they have a problem and then we potentially can solve it for them. So I'm way better at talking to somebody who has submitted a lead, let's say they've engaged with us. It's the same thing with partners too. If I go try to find a resale partner, that never works. If they come to us, it always works.

Does that make me a fair weather friend in sales? Yeah, all salespeople love high quality leads, obviously. But you know, I think if you want to strip me out of sales where I want to be is where I can add the most value. That is not in the upfront and it's not in the follow-up. It's not in setting the meetings. It is only in the process of solving the problem and giving them confidence that my company, my team,

that we collectively can solve the problem. And so that's where I want to stay. In fact, I have a goal within the next two years to free up most of my time away from tasks. I don't even want to answer emails. And I want my job to talk to people where I add value, my team, my customers, my partners. And that's where I want to spend my time from a sales standpoint. But you guys know this, if you want to scale a company, you're going to need a bigger sales team than just a founder at some point.

Richard Walton (23:06.585)
Okay.

Richard Walton (23:13.091)
Yeah. Yeah. So actually, that was my next question. You've got here that you've got a strategy that gets you out of the sales process by 2027.

Rich Walker (23:13.465)
So I have to figure that out.

Richard Walton (23:28.623)
Would you mind sharing, talking us through that?

Rich Walker (23:31.227)
Sure. So first what we did is we've hired a firm that's in our industry who knows our product, knows our customers, knows us, et cetera, to augment our sales process. They do business development. They've taken on the tasks that I'm not good at, the follow-up, the rescheduling the next call, the driving to a close, let's call it that. And they do it my way. They're very much about the relationship. They're about solving problems. They're not about the close or the sale itself.

Obviously there's points in time where you've got to push and say, we get this done? Can we have a timeframe? And those are the harder questions that they love to ask that I'm just like, whatever. So first and foremost is building up that strength. Second is we brought a new product to market this year and the new product allows us to increase our revenue much, much faster than our existing product base does. Not to mention our existing product base for the segment we're in.

we have a majority market share. So to grow with the legacy product in our current space is actually becoming harder to do at speed. The new product, because it's just higher revenue potential and opens up new industries and possibilities, that's going to drive our growth. With that growth, because I've been bootstrapped from day one, we will have more capital to invest in the sales process and the marketing side to drive more leads. So the goal then is this year, launch the product,

We're starting to get traction with it, start building up the revenue. Next year, we are looking at significant revenue growth. That's going to fuel more investment in the sales process. And if we continue to do that, I will eventually bring in a sales leader who thinks like I do, who acts more like I do. One of the first hires I want to make right now is somebody who's a sales engineer who thinks more like I do about solving the problem, who can then get into the details better.

and leave me out of that. I can be more of the good stuff, like how you feel. It can be more about the technical stuff of how it works, because I play both of those roles right now. And all of that's going to keep freeing up more and more of my time. The day that I can hire a VP or a chief revenue officer who has the mindset that we have in terms of selling is the day I'll be able to say, I don't need to be in the sales process. So I think that's going to take a few years evolution.

Richard Walton (25:26.242)
you

Richard Walton (25:54.89)
You've shared some real nuggets today but I have to say I think this last one is extremely powerful which is hiring someone who behaves like I do when it comes to selling. Who's like me. And I think that's probably what so many people get wrong. If we go back to your story at the beginning it sounds like that person who came in was the polar opposite of you. So that's a really good nugget. Thank you for sharing that.

Rich Walker (26:14.959)
You

Rich Walker (26:18.553)
Right, absolutely.

Richard Walton (26:24.32)
Henry, I'm about to move on to… Sorry.

Rich Walker (26:24.629)
And I like that, I just want to frame something for everybody. The only reason I can say that is because this outside firm that I brought in is the first time I've seen somebody in sales who acts like me. So I believe it's possible now. I never believed I could find that before. That's why I held onto it.

Henry Walton (26:24.873)
Right, just hold on just quickly.

Richard Walton (26:38.102)
Yeah.

Henry Walton (26:45.367)
So just very quickly because I'm going to quote you if that's right because there's an interesting dynamic shift. In one of your points that you said to us before the meeting you said I've hired VP of sales, director of sales, VP of biz dev and then outsourced sales and they all failed. And then your last point says I currently have an outsourced salesperson that is amazing and we're closing more deals than ever.

So there's a shift that's happened. What do you put that shift down? Is it that you've found the right partner? Is there anything else there you mentioned about product? You mentioned perhaps, know, there maturity? Is it time? What else has caused that shift?

Rich Walker (27:22.383)
I think there's a lot of facets to it. My own maturity, the company's longevity in the marketplace, the brand awareness we have and the position we've earned in the marketplace are all playing into it. Frankly, my podcast has been helping because it's elevated awareness of who we are and what we do. But I think that one of the main things is that this team, they're not really trying to sell like a salesperson. They're trying to solve problems.

Here's a case in point. They have appointments, quarterly, semi-annual appointments with some of the largest firms in our industry just to show them what's new. These firms bring these guys in, this sales team, they bring them in to just simply show them new tech, new things, the frontier of what's happening so that these bigger companies can say, my gosh, that's something new we should consider or I don't care about that. So they don't have to sell. If we solve a problem, the company is going to show interest and then we get an appointment and that's happening.

So yeah, and Henry, I want to make one other point that I think is critical. If you find an outsourced sales team like I have, who's from your industry, knows your product, knows your business, et cetera, one of the first things we talked about was the no-fly zone. Like which customers are they not allowed to talk to? Which prospects are they not allowed to talk to? And I slept on that and I came back the next day and I said, you can talk to all of them. If you can help me close a prospect that I brought to the table.

Henry Walton (28:22.743)
just a matchmaking process, It's like dating.

Richard Walton (28:22.837)
Yeah.

Rich Walker (28:51.309)
even if I've been working on them for a year and they're about to close, help me close them. Help me bring them to fruition. And the reason I did that is because I wanted them to see success. I wanted them to see momentum. I wanted them to feel the process at any stage. And I didn't want them to feel like they have to start from scratch, go the nine to 12 months to make the first sale before they feel some level of energy from this. The truth is it took about four months to get our first major client contract done.

And then the next three months, we just had deal after deal after deal closing, which was amazing, including one that should have closed nine months ago, but didn't. And this team helped us get it back to the table. I'm going to tell you guys another aspect to this. Because I let them into my sales process early with any given customer, and then combine that with opportunities they were bringing to us, they helped us improve our price. And so much so that they paid for themselves.

If I hadn't been open and willing to learn from them and very interested in their knowledge and expertise, and many founders aren't, they think they have it all figured out, we would be lacking all this revenue that they're bringing to the table.

Richard Walton (29:50.421)
Yeah.

Richard Walton (30:05.53)
Yeah, Rich, I'm really pleased that we're ending off on a positive note because, you know, Henry and I, run a consulting agency and there are great sales people out there. But I think, you know, just to finish off, think what's interesting to me is that you found an agency that is quite specialized by the sounds of it. And I think that's that that's really, really important.

And then the second thing is that they adopted approach that is very similar to how you sell. So I guess to anyone listening, you know, there is hope out there, but you need to find the perfect match for you. And that can be quite hard. But I like those two elements, know, finding an agency that specializes in your type of business and finding someone who matches your style. And I think if you marry those two things together, success,

is just around the corner or maybe three months around the corner. All right, I want to, Rich, we're gonna finish off with what we call our rapid fire questions. By rapid fire, I'm gonna ask you some questions. We're not gonna respond. Have fun with it. Let's see what happens. Ready? All right. Picture your business in 30 seconds. Go.

Rich Walker (31:22.074)
Hit me.

Henry Walton (31:23.415)
Are you ready? Here we go.

Rich Walker (31:29.083)
Quick makes it easier to process forms. So imagine your customer experience and your sales process depends on filling out forms at the end of that process, buying a house, buying life insurance, any number of things. And the last part of that experience is the most dreaded worst part. You make your customer fill out forms. We make it easier to pre-fill forms with data you already have, like from Salesforce, get it signed with e-signature like DocuSign and Sinex, and even capture the data off the form so you have perfect

clean data to put into your systems.

Richard Walton (32:02.777)
first tell us about the first sale you ever made

Rich Walker (32:06.991)
geez, well, the literal first sale we ever made was for a financial advisor who had a staff of five people and one person on their team's full-time job, 40 hours a week, was handwriting forms. Could you imagine handwriting forms for actual living? She got our software, within two weeks called us up practically in tears saying, you are gonna change my life because now I only spend four hours a week on forms, two of which is updating data in the database to be clean.

and two is finishing up the forms. She went on to become a financial advisor and the VP of marketing at a parent company. Her career totally flourished. And we knew at that moment that we were saving her so much time and having such a profound impact that we had to push forward no matter what.

Richard Walton (32:54.495)
What do you love about sales?

Rich Walker (32:58.396)
It's everything I've talked about. I love the solving of the problem. I mean, honestly, that's what it is. Yeah, I love to celebrate when a contract is signed, but the truth is we don't see revenue for quite some time. We don't see the growth for months as customers unfold. So it's not really about the money. I love to hear stories like the customer we're working with right now. They told us that if our system works the way they think it will, and I know it will, we're going to save them 1 million hours a year.

My jaw dropped. I'm like what we're gonna have that kind of impact that is unreal So yeah, I love solving the problem

Richard Walton (33:38.029)
Okay, what don't you like about sales?

Rich Walker (33:41.703)
the tedious, the follow through. I'm terrible at follow through. Ask me how often I look at my pipeline. Please don't ask. If I don't have my team looking at our pipeline, I just ignore it because I'm on to the next meeting and the next meeting and the next meeting. So I don't like the details. The truth is, as a founder, I want change constantly. So don't make me do repetitive work. This is why I made forms filling software, because I hated filling out forms repetitively.

Richard Walton (34:09.673)
Yeah. Okay. How often do you look at your pipeline? No, that's not the next question. Okay. Your top sales.

Rich Walker (34:14.16)
Hahaha

Sorry, say it again, my top sales what?

Richard Walton (34:21.639)
your top sales tip.

Rich Walker (34:24.763)
Top sales tip, be insanely curious about your customer. Learn everything you can about them.

Richard Walton (34:30.174)
Nice.

Love it. When recruiting a salesperson, what do you look for?

Rich Walker (34:37.829)
Cultural fit is always number one. I don't care what role frankly, but if they don't fit within our culture, and our culture is very strong, you're gonna do what you say you're gonna do, you're gonna love what your role is and what you're doing, you're gonna design solutions that are easy to use or processes that are easy to follow, and you're gonna provide outstanding customer service. So if I have those four qualities in people, then I think I can move forward. In sales specifically,

We've talked about this. I want them to think like I do. How do we solve the problem, not how do I make the sale? Which is really hard, by the way. How do I give somebody commission who is money motivated and say to them, still go solve the problem. Don't worry about the paycheck. There's a conflict there. But in enterprise sales, if you're truly into enterprise sales, you probably recognize it's going to take 12 months to close a deal. So you have to have the long game in play.

The good news about the long game for my company is we don't lose customers. I still have customer number one from 20 years ago and they become annuity streams. It's incredible.

Richard Walton (35:42.137)
What do you dislike about other salespeople? What really puts you off straight away?

Rich Walker (35:48.435)
if it's all about them and they don't listen, if they have to get all the words in and they really have no interest in you, hey, this is the same thing as dating back when I used to, because I've been happily married to my soulmate for quite some time. But you go on a date with somebody, you finish the date and they're like, this is the best date ever. And you think, you didn't ask me one question about who I am. So anybody who's in sales, who just over talks everybody, can't stand them.

Richard Walton (36:15.613)
Yeah, for sure. And finally, this is a bit of a tricky one. How do you keep in contact or build relationships with prospects without being salesy? So you mentioned there's a 12 month pipeline for enterprise sales. How do you keep, how do you keep that relationship going?

Rich Walker (36:36.175)
don't know if this is a good thing or bad thing, guys. I am incredibly patient with silence. I've learned that customers go do what customers do. They think, they ponder, they change their strategy, they convene with different parties. I've had deals take four years to close because they kept changing their strategy. So I have learned to be incredibly patient in the process. And what I try to do, or what I encourage my team to do as well, is have a reason to reach out other than the sale.

I think if you can add value into people's lives, any kind of value, my podcast is a great way to do that. Reach out to them and say, you should be on my show, or somebody from your company should be on my show, or ask them if they're going to a conference that you're going to be going to. Say, I'm going to this conference. Will I see you there? One of the better things we did recently is we just told a customer, we need to come visit you on site. Can you make that happen? And they did. And that turned out to be the best tactic that we could have ever thought of.

to try to make things move faster, but more importantly, understand why they weren't moving faster.

Richard Walton (37:41.605)
Yeah, Rich, that was fantastic. Thank you so much. Henry's putting in a rogue rapid fire question.

Henry Walton (37:45.303)
I've got one last sneaky question. wasn't, well, I'm getting, it's sneaky. All right, are you ready? How many times did you practice your pitch? Because that was 30 seconds dot seven six. I mean, that was nearly on the dot. Amazing.

Rich Walker (37:47.311)
Go for it Henry.

Rich Walker (38:02.811)
I don't practice my pitch at all. I think I just say it enough times or I may have even said it differently today I just sensed that it was around 30 seconds. So I shut my mouth

Henry Walton (38:10.519)
Sounds good.

Henry Walton (38:14.089)
It was nearly on the nose. Impressive.

Richard Walton (38:15.867)
I mean, what's worrying me is that Henry was actually timing you. I was, he was getting ready to cut you off. Rich, yeah, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation. And I think you shared some wonderful kind of nugget, sales nuggets that resonated with me deeply. And I know with Henry as well, a lot of things that we believe. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Rich Walker (38:20.281)
Right?

Rich Walker (38:44.751)
Gentlemen, this has been my pleasure. I hope that you'll share back the nuggets with me so I know what they are because I may not recognize them.

Richard Walton (38:53.017)
We will, Thanks.

Rich Walker (38:54.789)
This has been amazing. Thank you.