You've Already Earned It. It's Just Not in the Bank.

A lot of companies think that selling more actually makes them more money, and in theory that's true. But let's say we're working with a 4% EBITDA in a company. You've got to sell a heck of a lot at that. But if we can take that 4% margin to 20% — essentially a 5X on that bottom line — you could sell half what you're selling to get to the next level. We want to look at how we're growing the revenue while we're growing the revenue.

LEE: Welcome back to the Thoughts on Selling podcast. I'm Lee Levitt — sales coach, podcast host, and author of The Second Meeting and Together We Win, both due out later this year.

Today we're talking about the money that's already in your business. You've earned it. It's just not in the bank.

My guest is Doug C. Brown, CEO of CEO Sales Strategies and a revenue growth expert who's spent more than three decades finding hidden profit inside companies across dozens of industries. He worked alongside Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes, where he took one product from eighty-six thousand dollars a year to more than eight point two million — by adjusting a few lines of text.

Here's what to listen for. One: the twenty-one EBITDA drivers that show you where the money is sitting. Two: the plumbing company losing over two hundred dollars on every job and not knowing it. Three: the eighty-thousand-dollar commission a realtor talked herself out of by telling a couple to go home and think about it.

If you're growing revenue and wondering why the bottom line won't follow, this one's for you. Let's go.

So Doug — who is Doug Brown?

DOUG: It's a great question, Lee. Sometimes I ponder that on a daily basis. But I think Doug Brown's the guy who has always cared about human beings doing better and achieving more than they thought they possibly could. I remember that from being a little kid on.

Today, Doug Brown — or as I call myself, Doug C. Brown, because Doug Brown is a famous hockey player — in the business world, I'm the guy helping people find hidden revenue and margins in their business that they've already paid for. The money's not in the bank, it's just sitting in the business. I go find it, and I help them get it.

LEE: Let's dig into that. Peter Drucker said the purpose of a company is to create customers. Drucker was an economist, not a finance guy. He didn't worry so much about margins. But without good margins, you don't have a company. So let's jump in right after Drucker.

What do you look for when organizations are up and running and selling, they've got good product-market fit, and they have some existing beliefs about profit and pricing and customer service? Where do you start to unpack that whole situation?

DOUG: What I've noticed universally is that most companies focus on revenue growth. They think revenue growth solves all problems. Revenue growth is the flashy thing — "Hey, we did eighty-two million."

But when you're selling revenue at a loss, or even at a small margin, it's not fun. It's hard. Because that's the person who wakes up at the end of each quarter, looks at their P&L, and says, "Man, we should be doing better on the bottom line."

I just had this conversation with a plumbing company. They said, "We sold new jobs. Seven of them." They were all excited. They'd put all this money on the board. I was looking at their cost of acquisition, their marketing costs, their in-and-out cost of driving to locations, credit card fees, all of it. And I said, "Guys, you're losing two hundred and twenty-four dollars per job."

They said, "No, we're not. We've got this amount of money coming in."

After about a five to seven-minute review of the process, they said, "Oh my gosh, I never realized this."

A lot of companies think that selling more actually makes them more money. In theory that's true. But let's say we're working with a 4% EBITDA. You've got to sell a heck of a lot at that. If we can take that 4% margin to 20% — a 5X on the bottom line — you could sell half what you're selling to get to the next level.

That's what I help companies realize. And it doesn't mean we don't grow revenue too. It just means we want to look at how we're growing the revenue while we're growing it.

LEE: Doug, ultimately it's not how much you make, it's how much you keep.

DOUG: That is so true. It hit me big time when I was working with a company doing over a billion dollars. I asked them their margins, and they said, "Yeah, we sell over a billion dollars." I asked that question three times, and they kept saying, "Yeah, we sell over a billion dollars."

So I said, "How much money are you losing?" And they said, "Well, we're losing about seventy-two million a year."

So I asked — is that the goal? To keep building revenue? Do we want to be an Amazon.com, which eventually made it? Or are we looking to have more cash now?

They said they'd like to do both. And that is possible in every business. They just don't realize how much money's sitting in the business that they're not putting in the bank. They've paid for it. Maybe it's in underpricing. Maybe it's in proposals being stalled. Maybe it's in lack of follow-up. There are dozens of ways companies sit on this money, and we go in and unearth it. It could be in wrong ideal buyer fit.

That was certainly something when I worked with the Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes companies. I found one product set they were selling $86,000 a year on, and just by making a couple of adjustments, we went from $86,000 a year to $8.2 million in that same year on that same product. It was a matter of adjusting a couple of lines of text and adding a little bit of what the ideal buyer was looking for. Huge profit, because they were already spending the money. Thirteen dollars a lead coming in and going into nothing, versus thirteen dollars a lead going into a $1,450 product.

So it's really about the owner who wants to build a business that isn't owner-dependent, and who wants that business to make more money. Because when we have more money — look, we're always going to have challenges in business, because business does what it does. But you get to arrive at your challenges in style when you have the money versus not having it.

LEE: So what's your diagnostic approach, Doug? Without giving away trade secrets — how do you approach a new customer where you have a hypothesis that they could be doing better? Aside from the fact that pretty much everybody could be doing better. How do you create the hypothesis? How do you start to unpack things?

DOUG: The first thing we do is have a fifteen-minute conversation. Fifteen, twenty minutes. We've built an internal diagnostic within the company.

We have 21 areas. We call them EBITDA drivers, and each EBITDA driver has five or six sub-points. We listen to the client and what they're trying to do, and based on that, we go into one or two of those drivers and start putting the diagnostic in. Where are we today? Where should we be? Those types of questions.

We've taken all the mathematical formulas that are accurate representations of: if we were doing this and now we're doing that, here's the growth that comes out of it. We work through a few of those. We work with their revenue, their EBITDA, their operating cash today, and we show them a before-and-after in the first fifteen or twenty minutes. And they go, "Wow."

To date, Lee — and I've been doing this for decades — I've never found a company we couldn't find money in. I'm still looking for my first. Most companies are leaving money on the table and don't realize it. If a company is run tightly, they're still leaving money on the table. If they're running dysfunctionally, they're leaving a ton of it.

From there, if they say, "Wow, that's cool," we ask: do you want to go through all 21? Do we want to look at your aggregate data from different sources, match it against the drivers, and come up with a growth map?

Just to give you an idea — I did one with a $2.4 million company. A heating and air conditioning company. We went from $2.4 million to $4.96 million, and their EBITDA went from 13.1% to 28%.

LEE: And it wasn't because they increased their revenue. It's because they focused on a bunch of other stuff that also happened to increase their revenue.

DOUG: Correct. Essentially, we created a million dollars more in operating cash in that company. But the biggest thing that stood out to me was that the valuation of the company increased by $7 million. So if they went to sell that company a year from now, or even eighteen months to two years out, they'd literally get $7 million more than they would for their company today.

LEE: And you didn't charge them $7 million. So there was an upside for them.

DOUG: Huge amount of money. What we usually do is go through the diagnostic, and then I do one of two things. Here's your growth map — take it and do what you will with it, and we collect our fee for that. It's usually around $7,500, just so people know.

Or we take that fee and roll it into helping them go get the money. We work two ways. Some people say, "Just give me a flat fee and help me." Or two — which is what most people do — "Let's reduce that fee down and work on a percentage of growth." A percentage of EBITDA, a percentage of gross product margin, whatever we come to an understanding on.

That's usually the better one, and I like it better, because now we're growth partners working in tandem on their business. I never want to be an expense on somebody's books. So the first things I tend to go after are the things that pay back within the first sixty days. I'm trying to clear that fee in the first sixty days.

LEE: It's interesting. You see this all the time, and I'm sure nothing shocks you. I was fractional CRO for a smallish manufacturing company a couple of years ago. For a company in the under-$10 million range, they had over a thousand SKUs — maybe more than that — where their most popular items were literally a half dozen of them with some options.

DOUG: Yep.

LEE: And just managing thousands of SKUs is a huge burden. As the CRO, I made the very intellectual observation of, "What are you, crazy?" And we started to rationalize it.

The other interesting finding was that the company had been around for a while, and there were customers buying onesie-twosies who were getting the same discount as people buying $100,000 worth of goods at a time. It was because of historical precedent, or friends of the CEO. And again, I pointed out: "What are you, crazy?"

My guess is those are some of the simple kinds of things you run across.

DOUG: Very similar things. I actually just ran across this SKU thing in a software company. They had way too many SKUs. And as you know, as a CRO — when salespeople have too many choices, they get confused.

LEE: And customers, too.

DOUG: Yes.

LEE: That's old retail. There's a very good reason why Sears offered good, better, best. Three choices. If you're cheap, buy good. If you're not quite so cheap, buy better. If you really care for the best, here's a third option. And that's it.

DOUG: Auto dealers employ that every single day. You walk in, they show you the nicest car on the lot, then they'll show you the car with three wheels where the fourth one's sort of going to stay on. Or they'll go from the nicest one to the economy car to the mid-level. And statistically — unless the stats have changed — 60% of the time people will buy in the middle. That can be a great strategy for whatever the company needs to happen. The software company was doing the same thing.

You and I are both from New England, so — Friendly's Ice Cream. I remember growing up, walking into Friendly's, and they had, I don't know, 125 flavors of ice cream. People would literally be standing there going, "What flavor do you want?" And I'd say, "I don't know. There's so many to choose from."

I went into the military around nineteen years old, and I came back and Friendly's had knocked that 125 down to about 22 flavors. Whatever the exact number was. And it was so easy. "Oh yeah, I want the maple walnut. I want the chocolate."

So it can be complexity in SKUs, but it can also be complexity in process, where there's an overabundance of things that stall the client acquisition process. Last week I talked to a company — again in the trades business — and they had such a convoluted process to deliver that it was taking eight weeks to install something that should have taken a week.

Guess what? Customers were bailing, because they didn't want to wait two months. If you're in July and you want to buy air conditioning, you don't want to wait until September to get it. They were having huge churn. We tightened it up — it only took a couple of days — and people aren't bailing out anymore. That bleed stops. But that's an example of money just sitting there that companies don't pay attention to for a year, and all that money bleeds out. They still paid to acquire the client.

It could be very simple things, like referrals. I saw a statistic, and somebody reminded me of it today, that 90% of clients will give a referral if asked, but under 15% of people actually ask.

If it costs $600 or $1,200 or $2,000 — pick your number — to get a client to sit in front of your sales team, and it costs you nothing to get the next client or the next five clients, why wouldn't we do that? You want to improve your EBITDA? There's something you can do now.

Follow-up is another one people drop the ball on all the time. Proposals not being followed up on, or proposals not sent at all. I saw that in a company and thought, you've got to be kidding me. And it doesn't matter whether they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars or sub-million.

I looked at a plumbing company doing $772,000, and within two hours we found $226,000 in unclaimed EBITDA. And they were saying, "I can't pay myself at the end of the year." Well, no kidding — all your money's sitting here.

The fun part is that within three weeks we reclaimed $40,000 that they were just sitting on. That dropped right to the bottom line, and now the owner had some money to actually work with. Then we got $63,000 back within six weeks. We're working on the other parts of the process and growing the company at the same time. He wants to go from $772,000 to over a million. So if we get from a negative EBITDA to even 10% or 20%, he's in much better shape.

LEE: In my experience, some of this is just due to inertia.

DOUG: Yeah.

LEE: And some of it is due to organizations wanting to be customer-centric. Well, let's give the customer more options — and then you get to the Friendly's situation where the customer's paralyzed. There are so many options, I don't know what to do, so I'm not going to do anything.

DOUG: That customer-centric one is a double-edged sword sometimes. We all want to deliver so much for the customer. The other thing that happens is scope creep, in the form of change orders that don't get charged for, or a customer asks for something and we want to go so far for them that we're giving away things we didn't need to.

One thing I try to get employees to understand is that there's a simple formula in business. Money in, money out equals a result. Every interaction, everything an employee does — what they don't realize is that they're actually a cost to the company until they produce a profit.

With salespeople, I love to do this exercise. I say, "Write down your base salary. Write down the amount they pay you in benefits — healthcare, all of it. Add it all up. Where are you? Now, if the company's making 20% off each sale you do, what do you have to sell in order to pay for yourself this year?"

LEE: That's the cost of you just showing up.

DOUG: Exactly. Never mind that we need to make more than that. But it's usually an eye-opening exercise for somebody in whatever department to understand: oh, I don't just have a job. I'm getting paid something, which is money out, so I've got to produce money in.

And if I'm holding orders two weeks longer, that means at the end of the year there are two weeks we haven't performed on. That goes against the 52 weeks. And usually you're closed for another couple of weeks on holidays. In the United States maybe you're closed for two days, but across the world — India or wherever — it might be a month.

Let's say it's four weeks. One month out of twelve. Right then and there, that elevates the number, because we've got to produce for that month not being covered, plus what we're being paid, plus what the company needs for profit. Otherwise companies go out of business.

LEE: Like IndyMac Bank. If you don't take care of the numbers, you might be unemployed.

DOUG: Correct. And a lot of times employees, to their credit, have never been taught this. When I first had my jobs, I didn't look at it this way. I looked at it as: oh geez, I make this, the government takes this, I get paid this, I can take my girlfriend out on this. Or I can go hang out with my buddies, or go to karate, and it's going to cost me this, but I have this much left. I never thought about what it was costing my mom or dad to actually pay for me to live in that house.

I think it's one of those things where we just weren't taught this way, and we go into a job expecting the same thing. And if we own a company, we tend to take that same thought process in.

Going back to it — it's always great to take care of the customer, but like you said, sometimes the customer gets confused. And frankly, the customer doesn't want to be loved that much sometimes. Which can turn into, "This is kind of creepy. I don't want to shop here anymore."

LEE: When it comes to money, salespeople — unless they're coached otherwise — tend to map their own belief systems around buying onto their customers. They assume customers will buy the same way they buy. So if I'm an impulsive shopper, I'm going to assume my customer is impulsive, and I'll deal with them that way. If I'm an analytical shopper, I'm going to expect that everybody needs lots and lots of detail.

DOUG: That's buyer's bias. And yes — you'd think if you're analytical you need all these facts and figures. But I can be very analytical and still not buy analytically most of the time. I'm a "give me the bottom line" type buyer. My wife would be the analytical buyer. She'll look at a lot of items and cross-compare the quality and the context of price and all of it. I'm just, "Hey, I need shoes." I go and buy shoes. They don't have to tell me about the quality of the leather or the inner sole. If they feel good, I'm ready to roll.

But that's where people lose sales, as you're rightly pointing out. If I'm selling as the bottom-line buyer and that person needs the analytical side — or they need more of the human side, where they want some feeling in the process, or confirmation from social proof — I'd better be talking about that. "Did you know this shoe was worn by these people, and it was given this approval seal by so-and-so?"

If I'm not doing that, I'm going to lose the customer. And remember, folks — those of you who own companies or are solo entrepreneurs — you are paying money, time, energy, labor, something, to get in front of this conversation. So the more of these conversations you can improve, the higher your close rate goes and the higher your profitability will be.

LEE: And a related topic: in 99.9% of cases, it's not the buyer's money. It's the organization's money. The buyer cares a lot about achieving their business results, and not so much about the money — because again, it's not their money.

DOUG: There are always two factors. There's the business return on investment, and when it's not our money, most of us are a little less worried about getting 100% of that. But there's also a personal return on investment that people don't pay attention to. That could be the buyer using somebody else's money, but they're more concerned about how they look politically in the company if this goes wrong, or whether they have job stability.

If we're not talking to both sides of that coin, we're going to miss sales — or worse, repel people.

I watched a realtor do this one time, Lee. It was crazy. I was sitting there listening. This was a $4 million home. Back then it was 6% commissions. So let's say the real estate agent, after splitting with the agency, was getting 2% of this. So 2% of $4 million —

LEE: One percent of $4 million would be $40,000. So $80,000.

DOUG: Eighty thousand. Yeah. An $80,000 commission.

The lady's in the house with the couple. The wife is selling this house hard to her husband. "Honey, look, the kids will be right here by the pool. We could have the barbecue. You work so hard — when you come home, I'll have food ready for you. Imagine spending our quality time here. Go up in the bedroom. Look at the view out back."

She was pressing it hard. She wanted this house. And the husband kept saying, "I don't know, hon. It's kind of a lot of money."

She even pressed so hard that she said, "Honey, listen. You know what? I'll cover the whole mortgage. I'll go back to the law firm and work part-time, and I'll cover it. You don't even have to worry about it."

And he's still going back and forth. "Yeah, but I think this, and that."

And then the realtor said these words: "Hey guys, listen. I'm listening to your conversation. This is a really important decision for you both to make. I think you ought to take a few days and think about it."

And I just saw your face, Lee. Astonished.

LEE: What the heck?

DOUG: Right? I was sitting there going, "Oh my gosh, no." And they said, "Okay." The husband was like, "Oh, thanks."

LEE: There's his lifeline.

DOUG: "We're out of here." A week later, this realtor couldn't get hold of these two people. Somewhere around a week later she got hold of them. "Hey, how are you?" "Oh, hey, thanks for showing us the house. We're doing fine, thank you."

And she said, "Well, have you made a decision?"

They said, "Yeah, we're not going to take that house."

"Oh, okay. Well then, I'll show you other homes."

And they said, "Well, we bought another house."

She said, "Where?" They told her the street. And she said, "Well, that's just the next street over from where I was showing you the house."

"Yeah."

And she said, "But those homes are much more costly." "Yeah, yeah, but it suited us better."

"What did you spend?"

"Five point two million."

They went up $1.2 million. So somebody made $104,000 in commission. This lady made nothing. Why? For exactly what you're saying — she wasn't selling to both sides of the fence.

And that real estate agency, it costs money to produce that client. It took time, energy, labor. And no sale, where that sale would have been fine.

LEE: What does it cost to have a listing these days for a house like that? It's got to cost an agency $25,000 or more to market it.

DOUG: I'd have to talk to the real estate people to find out the exact cost, but it's not inexpensive, like you're saying. And you lose ten deals a year like that, folks, at $25,000 — that's a quarter million dollars punched right out of the business. That quarter million can do a lot of things. You can hire other people. You can do an AI overhaul in some companies for that kind of money.

And I love what you brought up earlier, Lee, about inertia. Because I see inertia as inaction and trying to be perfect. I see that elongate things so far out that they never get done, or they never get off the ground — because perfection's the enemy of forward motion.

I see that time after time in companies where they had great ideas and never could get them off the ground. They're trying to scale and make a $50 million thing before they made it $50. I always tell them: look, get started. Make it functional.

LEE: Yeah.

DOUG: Get it started, get it functional, make some money, and then make it better.

I have a client right now reinstituting a new product line. I said the same thing. Let's take some of the old product line, get it in play, get it functional, try to sell it. In our first week we sold about $14,000. Wasn't a lot of money. But we sold something. Average of three customers on that $14,000. So we have some proof of concept, and now we make it a little better. And a little better, and a little better.

That's what you do, folks. You don't wait for perfection, because the market's going to tell you certain things you can never figure out ahead of time. I don't care how many focus groups you have, I've never seen it go 100%. I'm dating myself with focus groups, but —

LEE: Years ago, Tom Peters put out a book — I can't remember the name of it. It was in the early '90s. One of his key comments was, "Just do something." You'll learn by being in action. You'll learn by being in the market. As you said, Doug, if you're standing on the sidelines analyzing, running focus groups, or running AI on Reddit comments, you're going to get an artificial view of what's going on. And the proof is: will someone give you money for this?

DOUG: When people say to me, "Well, what do you mean?" I say, "Have you ever had a child? Or do you know somebody who's got a child? Somebody new, first baby?"

I don't care how much you prepare for that first baby. When you have the baby, you get feedback immediately on things you didn't read in the book. There's a difference between reading in a book that you may be sleepy or tired, and — I remember my first, we brought her home, and she screamed from midnight to five AM nonstop.

On a serious note, you're tired, and you learn things. You learn why she was screaming for five hours straight. She had a tummy ache. But you don't know that. It's one of those things you're not going to know until you get the feedback that's happening in real time.

So like you said — just jump right in. But don't go spend $20 million, folks. Jump in small. Start, get something functional, make some money, prove the concept, then make it better.

LEE: Doug, what do you see coming up? We're living in a world of change. We can do things today in minutes that would have taken months before, based on computing power and AI and the ability to outsource almost anything.

Six months ago I would spend two hours a week shopping for food. I decided that wasn't a good use of my time. Today, food shows up at my front door. We can outsource almost anything. Is this going to be better or worse for the companies you're helping to find greater success — however that's defined?

DOUG: I think it depends on how it's deployed. Here's my big thing. Anything that is routine, that you can proceduralize and automate, we should look at. And not to reduce headcount — we're not looking to get anybody fired. That's not the purpose. But if you're doing something manually that can be done automatically in one-fiftieth of the time a human being can do it, we should be moving those human beings to higher-level tasks.

With one caveat. It still has to accomplish the same mission you're looking to accomplish with the human being. If you move to an AI setter and your set rate drops 30%, it doesn't make sense to automate that process. You can test it on a very small population to see how safe it is. But if you've got AI assistants and it's enhancing the process, that's different.

We went to Vegas, Lee, and we normally don't stay at the Rio, but the Rio had this amazing deal, so I said all right, we'll stay at the Rio. We went for a conference not too far from there.

I pick up the phone and say, "Hi." And she says, "Hi, this is Rita. How may I help you?" I say, "Well, Rita, I'd like a couple extra towels in the room." "Oh, great. What time frame would you like them in?" "As soon as I can get them." "Would fifteen minutes be okay?" "Yes, Rita, thank you so much."

I hung up. Then I called the front desk, and Rita picks up and says, "Hey, it's Rita. Mr. Brown — I remember talking to you earlier about towels."

And I'm thinking, wow, this lady is amazing. She remembers everything. And then I thought, oh — Rita's probably AI.

So I said, "Rita, are you a real person? Are you AI?" And she said, "Well, Mr. Brown, I'm actually AI, working for the hotel."

Well, guess what? If you call from any room at any time of night, Rita answers the phone. Rita got stuff done so fast, so quickly, that the client experience was actually elevated.

LEE: Right.

DOUG: Now, I tested it. I said, "Rita, I love you as an AI, but can I talk to a real person?" "Sure, Mr. Brown. Hold on. Where would you like to go?" And she transferred me to the front desk.

So that's an uplift, Lee. And you can deploy your human resources to bigger, better things at that point. So it can make it better or worse — because if Rita is not helping people, it's going to make it worse, and no one's going to want to come back to that hotel.

LEE: It's part of their whole brand experience.

DOUG: Like Whole Foods. We used to go there all the time. I still shop there. But their checkout process — ugh. The terminals don't work, at least the ones where I go. You're hung up and hung up, and then it seems like fifteen minutes before somebody comes by. It makes me not want to shop at Whole Foods.

LEE: I always go through the human line for two reasons. One, that. And two, I actually like to talk to somebody.

DOUG: They don't deliver on their brand promise on the self-checkout lines, it sounds like.

LEE: Not to me, anyway.

DOUG: And there are several companies trying to eliminate human beings completely from the process. You know who's done the best job in retail, I think? This company in Europe called Decathlon Sports. They deployed their people to actually be helpers.

LEE: To be on the floor.

DOUG: Helping, yes.

LEE: As opposed to at the cash register.

DOUG: Right. So instead of at the cash register, you walk through the door and someone greets you. "Hey, it's nice to see you. Is this your first time in Decathlon, or are you a frequent shopper?" And I said, "It's my first time. My wife's looking for a jacket, and I'd like to get some gloves because it's a little cold out." "Oh, let me walk you over here. It's aisle 12, down here on the left. Are you looking for this type of jacket or that?"

And you know what? We walked out with four items versus two.

Now here's the cool part. Where the cashier normally is, you take all four items and just drop them into a bin. The AI does its stuff, looks up all the products, brings it up on the screen and says, "Hi, is this correct?" "Yes, it is." "How would you like to pay, cash or credit card?" "Credit card." "Okay, just tap your card, please." Beep. "Okay, take your items."

LEE: Inexpensive RFID tags inside that let you skip the frustrating part of self-checkout.

DOUG: Yes. And you apply the same concepts to any business — a recruiting company, a medical supply company, a paving company, whatever. Then it makes it better. And if it goes the opposite way, it's actually working against us.

But anything we can proceduralize that has a systematic process to it, let's try to automate, because you can let your people actually do — well, in the case of Decathlon, how much more fun is it to walk around and help people? They sell more. I can just tell.

LEE: So in summary, Doug, what you're saying is that there are opportunities to improve business functions across the entire organization. We haven't focused on any one area — we've touched on a number. And getting into action: coming up with a hypothesis around what can be changed, getting an expert in like you to point to some obvious places, run some analysis, and then start somewhere. Look at the initial results, and then expand and automate.

DOUG: That's great. Then repeat and rinse.

LEE: And repeat and rinse. Doug, where can people find you?

DOUG: They can email me directly at doug@ceosalesstrategies.com if they want to have a one-on-one conversation. If they want to look me up, they can type in "Doug C. Brown revenue growth expert" or something like that — I'll be everywhere. It's purpose-driven to be there. My LinkedIn is dougbrown123.

I love talking to people, as you already know, Lee. So just reach out to me. My personal cell phone number is [REDACTED PENDING GUEST CONFIRMATION]. The people here in the company get upset. They say, "Why do you give the phone number out?" And I say, "I like when people call me." So — please, no spam texts. Please, please, no spam texts.

That's the way to get hold of me. And again, if you want to do a fifteen- or twenty-minute conversation to see if there's something there for you, let me know. I'd be happy to do it.

LEE: Doug, I appreciate the conversation. This has been very enlightening. Thank you.

DOUG: Thank you, Lee. I'm very grateful you had me here on your podcast. Thanks so much.

LEE: Thanks, Doug.

Another deep dive into the topic of sales excellence and the performance mindset. If you found this conversation interesting, I'd appreciate it if you'd share the podcast with a coworker or two. And to explore this topic in more depth, send me a note via the contact form on podcast.thoughtsonselling.com, or find some time for us to talk at meet.acelera.group.

Thanks.