Mastering Sales Experimentation. Podcast with Andy Paul (Part II)

Sell Like A Leader – Episode 8

In this episode, we dive into:

– Mastering experimentation in sales: why a sales process can be stifling, the importance of tolerance for ambiguity, and how managers should encourage their sellers’ individuality within a sales framework; how to structure your experiments to draw valuable conclusions, know if an experiment was successful, and the danger of small sample sizes; why sellers should embrace financial conversations with prospects, and the need for genuine interest and assistance beyond the sales paradigm.

– Experiment #3: it’s all about business acumen!

– Rapid Fire Q&A

Note: Part I of this interview was released as Episode #7. 

About Andy Paul

David Kreiger continues chatting with Andy Paul, a renowned sales expert, author of three best-selling books (including Sell Without Selling Out), and the host of The Win Rate Podcast.

Podcast Key Takeaways

• Andy Paul articulates a profound argument for prioritizing business acumen in the sales domain. Understanding the decision-makers’ perspective is not merely advantageous—it’s crucial for substantial sales success.

• Andy underscores the undeniable importance of genuine human connection in the process of selling. It’s about transcending transactional exchanges and fostering empathetic and meaningful interactions with prospects.

• Rigid adherence to a pre-defined sales process can be limiting. Andy Paul emphasizes the significance of adaptability, advocating for a flexible approach tailored to individual strengths that can capture opportunities within the sales landscape.

Connects

Connect with Andy Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realandypaul/

Connect with David Kreiger:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkreiger

Subscribe to the podcast and follow our Podcast LinkedIn page so you don’t miss any episodes!

Transcript

David: Welcome back to the Sell Like a Leader podcast, the podcast for revenue leaders who are on a mission to cultivate a high-performing sales team within their organization. I'm your host, David Kreiger, founder of SalesRoads, America's most trusted sales outsourcing and appointment setting firm. 

And this is part two of the episode with Andy Paul, renowned sales expert and author known for his innovative B2B selling strategies.

We ended part one talking about the three experiments that Andy thinks sales leaders should have their salespeople run. As a quick reminder, Experiment 1 was about having your sellers travel, which seems so pre-2020, right? To meet accounts. Experiment two was for sellers to do their first call without mentioning their product.

So two pretty interesting experiments. I'm curious to see the results as [00:01:00] I run them at SalesRoads. If you haven't listened to part one, I highly recommend you do but today, let's pick up where we left off and start by finding out what is the third experiment that Andy wants us to run. Number three.

Andy: Three. It's a little bit bigger one. It's sort of with sales leaders as well, but, the experiment I would try is don't train sellers on sales skills, only train them on business acumen. And if you're a seller, the experiment is, invest in a business course, learn something about business acumen, understand the outcomes that really matter to your decision makers because no one's buying a product, right?

Your CFO is not buying a product. They're buying increased cash flow. They're buying some financial result that's meaningful for the company. And you need to learn to be able to express the value that you provide in the terms that are relevant to them. Because what the company is doing when they make a decision to buy your product or service is they're making a decision about how to [00:02:00] allocate their capital.

And you need to be able to justify the allocation of that capital. But it speaks to a bigger issue, which is that especially in the SaaS world, we're looking for intent data. We're looking for buying signals, but the data has been put out there before this saying that upwards of 80 percent of large purchases aren't budgeted at the beginning of—

David: Hmm.

Andy: Because somebody showed up and made a case. For how they should allocate their capital.

And yeah, it's been more recent data from some of the sales tech companies have talked to buyers saying, hey, if you can make a service in your outbound, if you can intrigue a decision-maker about a specific business case, they'll invest their time, right? I just saw one of those recently.

It's not like decision makers are closed off to sellers, but the message has to resonate with them, right? Yeah, people will find the money for things that earn them a return, or that generate additional cash, or whatever the metric is they use. But you gotta be able—comfortable—to start learning how to talk in that [00:03:00] language. 

Early in my career, when I was selling really large stuff, we would have this conversation early on in the sales process. We'd use this qualification. We'd use business case to qualify people. Oftentimes, people look at business cases we do at the end. This could be another experiment for somebody else.

Don't look at the business case to justify your proposal. Use the business case to justify continuing to talk to the prospect.

What we want to do is say, look, we're going to provide a—we'd call it rough order magnitude pricing, right? ROM pricing—and we're going to do this preliminary business case.

And if we didn't get the buyer's commitment that, oh yeah, if these numbers are good, yeah, we're definitely gonna make a decision to move ahead, if they're good, plus or minus 10 percent, right. You know, things change over the course of a deal, in general, this range, this is good. 

So we were doing these, the financial talk and the financial calculations and the business case presentation early, concurrent with discovery, right? This is what we think we know based on this is our rough, our order magnitude, what this is going to look like. If that's within the range, will you make a decision?

Yeah. Great. Let's keep [00:04:00] talking. If it was no, we need to learn more. It's okay, when would be a good time for us to talk again?

David: Don't know if I've heard of any really doing business acumen training during training processes. And so I think that's a really interesting experiment. And not only do they focus on sales skills, but they focus so much on the product skills, right? 

And so that's almost two orders of magnitude of experimentation, because sometimes they're only just talking about the product, not even the sales skills. And you're talking, I think, if I'm understanding correctly, about even going one step further and really talking about business acumen.

Andy: Yeah. If I had to prioritize training, I'd start with business acumen, do product, leave sales skills for last.

Because again, I've talked about the four pillars—connection, curiosity, understanding, generosity—we all pretty much have that, right? We need to fine-tune it.

We need to have the right mindset around it, but really don't need to be trained. In fact, in some cases, like with curiosity, we need to give people permission to be curious. And there's a lot of people ask a [00:05:00] lot of questions, sometimes considered disruptive. You would see this in some people talking about discovery is that don't ask too many questions.

It's yeah, I don't think so. If they're silly questions, sure. But if you're holding thoughtful, if you're trying to engage the buyer, if you're really making an effort to understand, I've never had a prospect tell me, ah, enough with the questions. I think teachers tell me that but yeah, not a prospect tell me.

Cause they're like, wow, this person's really making an effort to really understand what's important to us.

David: Do you go about looking at some of these experiments or thinking about these situations to try to figure out what's working and what's not working? Is this quantifiable or is it just too difficult? 

And so these are, I think, the struggles that a lot of sales leaders have. We want to use the metrics, but the metrics can sometimes be fuzzy.

Andy: Yeah, which is fine. I think what we've seen is the sort of evolution. And I—again, this is not a generational comment. It's just the way things have turned out—let me take you back. So I remember starting at this [00:06:00] one company years and years ago. It was my first day.

Turned out to be a job that was my first enterprise sales job after having done a bunch of channel sales. And there was a guest speaker at the sales kickoff. That was my first day of the year, sales kickoff. 

And I just remember the speaker and he said, the key skill that you need to master—and it really isn't necessarily a skill perhaps, but mindset perhaps—he said, is a tolerance for ambiguity.

He said, this is the people who succeed. And he was a business school professor and he had studied this. The people who are succeeding are those people that can come into situations where there actually is a fair amount of ambiguity and be able to navigate through that. And I think that is really the key, right?

As my point before is not everybody's gonna be exactly the same. They may look the same, but they're really not. And the differences may be small, but those differences are critical. And so there's this degree of ambiguity that exists. It's how do you navigate the ambiguity? 

And that was really the theme of my last book, Sell Without Selling Out, was saying, look, there are four—I don't even call them skills—but [00:07:00] four attributes you need to be able to possess to succeed in selling and really in life in general, but focus on selling, which is the ability to connect with somebody on a human level.

So you can build the credibility and trust. Your curiosity, this authentic interest in things that are important to someone else. The ability to take that to a level of understanding where you make the person feel heard, that you really did understand them, and then help them achieve the things that are important to them.

If you have that framework, ambiguity is immaterial because you're now armed to say, okay, it's slightly different, but I've built up some credibility and trust. So I can ask maybe some questions that I might not have asked a normal prospect, a regular prospect. I'll keep digging till I get there.

Sort of get this level of understanding and agreement, concurrence with the buyer. And I'll have identified some way that I need to be able to help them. And I do that. And if I do that repeatedly, hey, I'm probably gonna put myself in position to win the deal. 

It has nothing to do with the product, nothing to do with the process. It's how am I helping them accomplish what's important to them?

David: Can you expand even a little [00:08:00] bit more? 'Cause I think, we had talked a little bit at the beginning too, and I think it's fascinating because I think as sales leaders, we do think about process. I've got to define the right process so my team can win. I've got to train to the process.

I've got to coach to the process. And. You brought up some interesting points that I think process can sometimes be stifling, can sometimes not allow salespeople maybe to maneuver in the way that they need, that they get caught in the technology that they're using and trying to follow the process. 

Using the framework you just brought up. And so can you talk a little bit more about how, even though a lot of us have been trained that you've got to create a sales process, why that can be maybe counterproductive?

Andy: It's because your process doesn't work, right? You can slice and dice win rates multiple ways. Unless you're winning more than you're losing, arguably your sales process really isn't working.

And if you look at your individual sellers and say, oh gosh, my top seller is a 30 percent win rate and everybody else is below that. Then you're saying, why am I insisting on people [00:09:00] adhering to this process? It does not work. There's no other way to look at it. And this has been the thing that blows my mind.

We talk to SaaS sales leaders. They don't get that. They're thinking—and I had one guy push back on me, and I've talked about this to other podcasters. He had wrote about this: win more than you lose as a basic standard of professional selling.

He says, "I'm really suspicious of high win rates." I said, "Well, why?" He said, "Because it means we're not having enough conversations." And I said, "Well, look, you have this go-to-market learning curve, right? We're new, we're going to market first time, or maybe a new segment. And yeah, we're going to cast our nets pretty wide.

We're going to talk to a lot of people, but we're going to, as quickly as possible, narrow it down right to our ICP, where we got strong product-market fit. We should reasonably expect to win more than we lose. Once we get to that point, until we dominate that market segment, why are we talking to other people?

Why are we having lots of conversations outside of that? It's insanity, right? The more targeted you are, [00:10:00] the higher your win rate, the more deals you're going to win, the better you're going to do." But not a soul, individual that kept thinking this and kept pushing on this.

There's some big naming on the VC community: "No, no more conversation." And it's, no. If I want to have more conversations outside my target ICP, I'm going to hire someone as head of strategic business development. And that's their job. Go have those conversations with people that are outside your ICP.

That could be the next segment you're going after. You have somebody to do that. You don't have your sellers do that on a day-in, day-out basis. They need to be focused on the ICP.

David: And going back to what you said at the beginning—the context of what you just said, with the process—and part of the reason the process doesn't work is it is really hard to take something in from a top-down perspective and dictate the way a sale should be made, because a sale can be made in so many different ways based upon the circumstances, the person you're speaking to, the company.

There's many variations. What you said at the beginning about [00:11:00] experimentation—you brought up Darwin, right? One of the things and the reason why evolution has worked is there are millions and billions of mini experiments along the way. What is going to be the most adaptable?

What's going to survive in this environment, right? And without those experimentations, we would all still be single-cell organisms. Right. And there's a great—and I love that you brought it up—'cause there's a great analogy with what we're talking about here with the sales process.

If you dictate a sales process, you are giving up an amazing infrastructure of your team to have these mini experiments, bring back what's working, what's not working, what's working for them, and you start iterating the whole thing. Which is why I think the framework is so much more powerful than the process, because it allows for that within itself.

Andy: I grew up in the era when the Green Bay Packers were at their heyday back in their first Super Bowls. Don't do the math. You'll figure it out. Hold on. But yeah. Vince Lombardi was the coach. Yeah. One of the greatest [00:12:00] coaches that ever has coached the game.

He was criticized for having these sort of vanilla offenses and so on. And he said, "Yeah, A, try to stop us, but B, it may look the same to you, but inside we've created this framework and we give people the freedom to innovate within this framework." 

And so, people could become the best version of themselves within this framework. And this is the work that I think too many leaders—we're talking about leadership—don't want to put in. Variances among individuals make them nervous. Compliance to a process gives me some comfort because I think the process is the key.

But if your process fundamentally doesn't yield very good results, what are you going to do to change it? And what we've done is we've just been lemmings marching over the cliff. Instead of saying, look, if there are a million salespeople in the world—to the point you just made—there are a million unique ways to sell.

My job as a frontline sales manager—and ultimately then as even a step or two above—is to say, look, [00:13:00] how do I help the people that work in this organization become the best version of themselves? 

They're not necessarily going to be the same. And I think one of the drawbacks we've seen to some of the great technology that comes out—like take Gong, for instance, or Revenue.io, call recordings—is it's being used to enforce compliance rather than being used to help people become the best version of themselves.

Because it's easier as a manager to say, "Listen to the calls and be like Mike, because Mike really does it well." As opposed to saying, "Let's listen to your calls and what can we use from other people, right?

How do I help you become the best version of you? I'm going to acknowledge that I'm not trying to make you like someone else. I'm trying to help you become the best version of you." Hey, if you've got 30 direct reports—oh, I can't see it. That becomes a little difficult. But how many people have 30 direct reports?

You're a frontline sales manager. Maybe you've got eight. Where else are you spending your time? Everybody says, "Oh, frontline sales managers are spending their time compiling reports for management." Maybe, but that's your choice as a manager. People get nervous when I say this, but sometimes just say no.

And it's your career. I, again, I wrote about this in Sell Without Selling Out as a seller. I did this in my career. I said, [00:14:00] "Look, I can't sell that way. I know you want me to do these things. I can't do that. So this is what I'm going to do. If I don't deliver, go ahead and fire me. I'm going to deliver because this is the way I think is going to work best for me."

Sticking within a framework—as I got more experience—I said, "This is going to be more compatible. This is a greater likelihood of success." And you have to ask for that freedom. It's your career. No one cares about your success as much as you do.

So you can just become a sheep, or I could say, "No, I'm going to take control of the way I sell and the way I want to sell and how I sell and yeah, measure me on my results." And okay, not every manager is going to like that. 

I was just talking to a young seller last week who took that approach somewhat, and yeah, the company said, "Yeah, it's not going to work for us." 

Number three on the leaderboard, just closed one of the biggest deals in his department's history, but they just thought he wasn't setting enough meetings. And it's [00:15:00] so—who cares? You're hitting your numbers. Process was all-important to them.

And another example—another woman I was working with who, yeah, put on a PIP because she wasn't selling enough proposals. She was close to 200 percent of quota.

People are so focused on the process. It's, nah—these people are killing it. Your job as a manager is not to bring them in line with the process.

How do I help them make 300 percent of quota or even better?

David: KPIs are so important, but making sure you focus on the right KPIs and the ones that are leading indicators are only that—indicators, right? 

So if you are maybe not having enough proposals, but your win rate is through the roof and you're hitting 200 percent of quota, you gotta be careful about managing to those KPIs because.

Like you said, that is also going to be a process that's messing everybody up and messing with people's head. And it's a motivational thing. I mean, I think one of the things you said in the LinkedIn quote, which I love, and you've echoed it [00:16:00] here, is: even if you're trying to learn from other people, right?

And that's okay. You can listen to other people's calls and see what other people are doing—compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to everybody around you, but learn from everybody around you. And that's a little bit of powerful and important difference.

Andy: And I think this has become a little more problematic with all the work from home stuff. It's because there's—I know some more companies are getting people back and so on, but it's, for me, so much of the learning experience was actually going on calls with other people and seeing what they did—not trying to copy them.

But taking the things that made sense. And it's—I think it's harder when you're soliciting to call recordings, right? Because there's not context. You're not necessarily in the room and seeing the body language and so on. Yes, you may be able to see some of the headshots in a pub, but it's not quite the same.

So I think it is more challenging for sellers in this regard to learn from other people. And that sort of affects their experimentation because there has to be a source [00:17:00] of inspiration for the experimentation, right? Either you're really thinking deeply about it or you've seen something somebody else has done and you want to try it.

That makes it a little bit harder, but it's still the way you're going to succeed. And, I don't know who said this, but we've all heard this: "There's only one you—everybody else is taken," right? You can only be yourself.

David: We're gonna have to get to rapid fire questions here in a minute, but I think with this, I think it's important because it is difficult in a virtual environment—but for sales leaders to facilitate it. I mean, we had a full company meeting last week where we broke into groups, we listened to each other's calls. 

It wasn't just—obviously we listen to calls in team meetings, but across teams. And we had everybody talk about them, what worked, what didn't work.

And so really facilitating and making sure people are learning from each other, are listening to each other's calls—because everyone is gunning to try to hit quota. They've got pressure and just even taking that time for the personal development can sometimes be a challenge for people.

And so creating space as [00:18:00] managers to facilitate that, I think, can be important.

Andy: Absolutely. But I also think along with that is there just has to be a degree of rigor that doesn't exist, right? When you listen to calls where people again naturally try to compare. It's—okay, so you've just listened to three or four calls and now—were they all to companies of a certain size?

Who’s the title of who you’re talking to? Were you talking to a man? Were you talking to a woman? Were you talking to a VP level or somebody lower? Are you talking—all those things have to be factored in, right? You can't say, well, we've listened to three calls and they were at a variety of people, a different variety of different size companies.

And what did we learn? It's—I think what we really learn is if we say, okay, let's listen to 10 calls that John made talking to, let's say, a male on the buying end at companies in this segment of the size, because that's the relevant experience. 

Gong, bless their hearts, you know, used to do more where they're putting out data about—you know, we may analyze a million calls.

And it's sure. But did you [00:19:00] normalize this so the correlations made sense? So you have to be really careful with some of that. 

And I think the experimentation, like I said, requires a certain amount of rigor, especially if you're a manager and you're saying, okay, overseeing some experimentation is—let's say, hey, let's just not go make—we're gonna try this 10 times. It's—we're gonna try this 10 times talking to this very specific case and see how that works.

David: I think that's a great way to structure it, and trying to help your team isolate the variables and structure those experiments is important because I think it's tough. And I think a lot of times also, as salespeople, you're living on the front lines and a sample size of one sometimes can be very compelling.

And all of a sudden, you had a bad conversation. You had a deal and it went sour.

Andy: Well, it can work the other way, right? Too. Yeah, I think a great example of this is the danger of small sample sizes—is social psychology and behavioral economics. The last 10–15 years there's been [00:20:00] this—what they call a replication, a replicability crisis, right?

As people publish these studies and they can't replicate the findings. And some of these are things that we take for granted, that we've taken as gospel truth. And even the great, late Daniel Kahneman retracted some stuff in the last five years.

They said, oh yeah, I guess we used too small a sample size. And yeah, even at elite levels, there's this—you have to be careful because there's tendencies, yeah, to overgeneralize from small samples. And danger in sales as well. It is.

David: At the end of the day, it's a social science, as we've talked about. And like you said, we've got to be okay with the ambiguity.

Andy: Ambiguity is your friend. Because in the ambiguity are the opportunities, right? If you're going into a situation thinking it's going to be—yeah, fit into this niche, it's this box and it's like this—when it's not, you can either be thrown for a loop or you can say, that's where the opportunity is, right?

The way they're [00:21:00] different than what I was expecting, there's an opportunity for me to explore because everybody else is going to overlook it because everybody else has been trained to march down the path. That's why I always want to—oh yeah, okay, wasn't expecting this. 

Oh yeah, okay. Let's go down this—let's pull on this thread, because if I pull on this thread, I'm going to uncover something.

David: And that's so key and I love ending with that, because I think it's just also the mindset, right? If you are of the mindset that I'm going to do things the same way over and over again and follow this one process, that's one mindset.

If you're of the mindset that I'm going to try different things, I'm going to be looking to see what's working, what's not working, you're going to grow every single day. You're going to get better. You're going to learn from other people. You're going to improve what you're doing and you're going to help more people and sell more.

Andy: Yeah, just to frame it a little bit, you and I were talking about pre-show—is if you're trying to do everything the same way all the time, it's—as I say, selling becomes very performative, right? That's what you're doing. I'm acting in a certain way in a certain environment. I'm expecting to get certain outcomes.

That's not the real world. The real world is [00:22:00] messy. It's chaotic. It's just the way it is. And so that's why this embrace of—tolerance of ambiguity becomes so important, because everybody is a little bit different. 

Everybody is a little bit crazy. Everybody is a little bit unique.

And that's where the real opportunity is lying.

David: And where it becomes—

Andy: Yeah, where it becomes fun. Absolutely. I'm so glad you brought that up, because what keeps you in this business and in this profession—and someone just asked me that—and yeah, that was my answer. It's just been fun.

It doesn't mean it hasn't been stressful. It's true, it's been stressful. But I've been incredibly fortunate. I've spent years traveling around the world, selling seven, eight, nine-figure deals to big companies. It's just me as a history major—you’re talking about social science, right? I was a history major selling these complex technical products.

We built up great teams to help, because it's always a team effort. But yeah, we won big, really exciting things. And it was just fun. That's still fun.

David: That's awesome. Well, thank you, Andy. That's great. And [00:23:00] now I'm going to ask you a few questions. Let me know the first thing that comes to mind here.

So what is one thing people don't give enough value or attention to in leadership?

Andy: Building trust with the people that work for them. And yeah, recommend a great book—Stephen M.R. Covey, I think it was called Trust and Inspire.

Yeah, I wrote about it in Sell Without Selling Out—that your job as a seller is to listen to your buyers, understand the things that truly are most important to them, and then help them get those.

And that's your job as a manager. Your job as a manager is to listen to the people that work for you, understand things that are really most important to them, they're trying to achieve in their life and the challenges they have and where do they want to go—and then help them get that.

And if you do that, you're gonna inspire people to work for you and to commit and to work hard. It all comes down to trust. So that's it: trust.

David: Beautiful. What is one skill you advise everyone in sales to master?

Andy: [00:24:00] It's two halves of the same coin, curiosity and listening. And I came out of school, I was a history major, I was selling computer systems, on-premise computer systems to good-sized companies. I knew nothing about business. I'd taken accounting in college, but I knew nothing about business.

I was 21 years old. I looked 16 at best. And yet I was able to command time and attention from CEOs and founders of companies I was talking to. And it was because I had showed up with a sincere interest in learning about them and asking questions to learn and listening to understand, not just listening to respond.

And I found that by doing that, I learned pretty early on that, oh, even if I really didn't have in-depth training, I could navigate pretty much any situation by being curious, asking good questions and listening.

David: What's your favorite business leadership or sales book?

Andy: Yeah. Dirty secrets. I don't like many sales books, but actually my favorite business [00:25:00] book is actually a secret sales book as well. The author was surprised when I told him that, and it's called The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier. 

And I can't recommend it highly enough. This is just a gem of a book about coaching and how to process and a structure and a framework for coaching.

I call it framework more than a process. But when you go through the process, it's also a great framework and process for selling because it's the thing I talked about, it's how you listen, the questions you ask, how you respond and how you help the person achieve the things that are important to them.

So it's a short book, and he's done, deservedly so, he sold well over a million copies of this book. It's a great little book, recommended for everybody.

David: Yeah, I haven't heard of it. I will definitely check it out. What's your favorite quote, mantra, or saying that inspires you as a sales leader?

Andy: Really as a seller and a human, let's say, which are all part of being a sales leader, but I've got two for you, give me two. So the [00:26:00] first one is I recommend everybody. If you haven't read Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the greatest American writers from the 1800s. The amount of wisdom he had is still so relevant today.

And one of the things he wrote about back in the 1840s and 1850s was this sort of debilitating American trend toward conformity, even then. And so one of his quotes I really like is, quote, "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

And then another one that I had, this is really more sales specific because you're in a business, so much stress, and there's so many ups and downs in this business. And I saw this in Forbes magazine, really pretty close to the beginning of my career, the back of Forbes, and there was a physical magazine that used to have these series of quotes.

And this is from Paul Tillich, who was an American theologian back in the 1900s. And I just love this quote. He said, quote, "The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements [00:27:00] as well as one's deepest failures is a definite symptom of maturity."

David: I love—

Andy: Yeah. And it's just like, you know, don't take your highs too much or too seriously. Don't take your lows too seriously.

David: And sometimes, I feel like that's something that's just taken me a long time to learn is that sometimes what you think was going to be a high turns out to not really— And a low is maybe one of the life-changing moments of your life that made you so much better as a person. I love that.

Andy: Like losing a job, right? I mean, sometimes—I was just coaching somebody last week who had just, yeah, been let go. And I was like, I'm sure there's a silver lining here for you.

David: There always is if you have the right—

Andy: Yeah. It almost always turned out that way for me. Yeah, I was working for a startup that imploded on a Friday.

I went home. I picked up the phone. Business magazines, back when there still were business magazines, and read an article about this local company. This was in the Bay Area, another company in the Valley that was just doing this really [00:28:00] interesting stuff with satellite communications. 

And so I cold called them on Monday—this was Friday, the company basically shut down—and on Monday I cold called them and got an interview with the VP of Sales and went in and he was a guy that actually had offered me a job at another company that I hadn't taken.

I turned him down, but cold called him. Showed up, didn't know it was him until I walked in the office and we both looked at each other and said, don't I know you? It’s—oh yeah, you offered me a job.
And I turned it down. Didn't turn it down that time. Best decision I made.

David: That's amazing. And last but not least, what is the most important goal or project you're working on right now?

Andy: I'm trying to finish my next book. So yeah, I think I'm—I think I'm late on it, but it's hard to rush these things, they roll out at their own pace. 

So that, and then, yeah, once I finish that, then it's looking at, okay, with this book, what's going to be my plan for the next three to five years [00:29:00] in support of that.

And yeah, that will take me very late into my career.

David: I'm excited for the book. It sounds amazing. Definitely want to have you back to talk more—

Andy: Oh yeah—

David: The book as you finish it up.

I love our conversations. I always learn so much from you. And if they are not one of the 190,000 followers on LinkedIn, where can they find you or learn more about your—

Andy: Yeah. LinkedIn is really the place. Let’s say usual preamble, I think it's real Andy Paul, but just search Andy Paul. You'll find me. And you can visit my website, andypaul.com. And then my podcast—yeah, The Win Rate Podcast—yeah, we kicked that off. 

By the time this thing airs, we'll be close to our first year under our belts and yeah, lots of fun stuff planned for this year.

David: Thanks again, Andy. And thanks to everyone who's tuned in here. Hope you got a lot of value from the pod. And if you liked what you heard, please don't forget to subscribe to the Sell Like a Leader podcast. And always feel free to reach out to me with any suggestions, things you'd like to see.

You can [00:30:00] message me on LinkedIn, David Kreiger. And always can learn about what we're doing at SalesRoads.com. So thank you so much all for tuning in here. 

Thanks again, Andy.