Why Sales Struggles Are Usually Leadership Problems

Why Sales Struggles Are Usually Leadership Problems

Tim Fitzpatrick
You're leading a B2B company, and you know growth depends on more than just hustle. You've built something valuable and you're ready to scale. Sales still feel like a moving target. Your team's busy, but deals aren't closing fast enough, your messaging isn't quite landing, and you're not sure where the breakdown is. In this episode, we're diving into what really drives growth, including why sales struggles often point to leadership issues, how a sales playbook can change everything, and the biggest mistakes founder-led companies make when trying to scale revenue. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult, and it definitely shouldn't be guesswork. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Scott Peterson from Carver Peterson Consulting with me today. Scott, welcome, and Thanks for being here.

Scott Peterson
Thanks, Tim. I appreciate you having me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, man. I'm excited to dig into this with you today. Before we do that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions. Help us get to know you. You ready to rock?

Scott Peterson
Yeah, let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, man. So when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Scott Peterson
With my kids. That's an easy answer. I've got three kids, seven, five, and four. So they're all packed in together. They're busy, they're active, and they're a lot of fun. So I'm coaching teams, and we've got a really active neighborhood of little kids running around. So it's fun spending time with them. Cool.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It goes by super fast. Mine are, well, mine are 15 and Almost 14. And I had multiple people say early on like, oh, it goes by so fast. I mean, it's so hard to appreciate that, but it does. It goes by so fast. So enjoy. What's your hidden talent?

Scott Peterson
That's a tough one. Let's see here. I don't really know. Basketball has always been a good sport for me. I still play. I played throughout life. We were just at our family cabin. I was water skiing this weekend, too. Then when I was in the high school competition, it was dancing. So I can move a little bit.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. Man, dude, you got all kinds of talents. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Scott Peterson
The one that stands out to me was from my high school basketball coach. In his never-ending quote, we would hear this over and over again, was Suck it up and deal with adversity. And as a high school kid, I think that was pretty good advice. It was learning to overcome adversity at an early age, no complaining, and just figuring out a path forward and a path forward with a good attitude. So suck it up and deal with adversity.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's a good one. None of us get through this life unscathed, right? There's always something. So that's a good one. Anything about you that surprises people?

Scott Peterson
I think personally, when I get to know people, the relationship can get to a pretty good depth pretty quickly. It's going to be very open and genuine and pretty transparent. And so I love meeting new people. And after 30 or 45 minutes, oftentimes, we feel quite comfortable with one another. So I think that's probably the thing that surprises folks the most.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What does success mean to you?

Scott Peterson
Freedom. Freedom of time would probably be the biggest thing. So I've got these young kids. My wife is at home with them. I'm coaching teams. And so being able to do those things and invest time, like how, when, and where I want is probably the greatest measure of success for me. Yeah, above anything else.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. Where's your happy place?

Scott Peterson
Two. One's on a basketball court. I just have so much fun when I'm playing hoops. That's a very great spot for me from a competitive standpoint, from an exercise standpoint, a physical standpoint. And also there's just so much connection that comes when you're in a good run with a good group of guys. So that's one. The other is we've got a family cabin up north in Wisconsin, and you actually just came back from it this weekend. It's beautiful. You're in nature, you're on the water, there's fishing and bald eagles. Our little kids are out there trying new things, water skiing and whatnot. And it's just a really, really special place.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, very cool. Is it on the lake, near the lake?

Scott Peterson
Yeah, it's on the lake. It's my in-laws, and they've had this in the family for a long, long time. So it's a really, really cool thing to be a part of.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's awesome, man. Now, how tall are you?

Scott Peterson
Just under 6 feet.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. So you're not super, super tall. Some people say they're super into basketball because it's hard to tell when you're doing things virtually like this, and they're like, Oh, yeah, I'm freaking 6'5. And I'm like, Oh, my God.

Scott Peterson
Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm an average size guy. And my favorite part of my athletic story is that I walked on the Oregon State basketball team when I was a sophomore in college, and I really had no business being a part of that team. But I found my way. I played in one game, I hit a three, and I've got some grainy YouTube video out there somewhere that can prove it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's awesome. So what qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Scott Peterson
I want to be with people who are open and genuine and honest and also positive. I want to do good and talk about important and real things. And so I prefer deep over superficial. I like one on one versus group. I like really getting to know people and people that are willing to do that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So tell me more about what you're doing at Carver Peterson.

Scott Peterson
Yeah. Well, my 10 year anniversary was last November. So I've been doing this for over a decade now, which is great. And in a nutshell, I've had the opportunity to partner with growth minded entrepreneurs that are trying to build and grow and scale. And for one reason or another, they just had a hard time putting together a repeatable and effective sales team, sales engine, sales process. And so that's been the audience that I've had an opportunity to interact with and partner with. And it's really helped these business owners change the way, change the trajectory of their business. It's been a lot of fun.

Common Sales or Growth Mistake Early-stage Founders Make

Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, dude, let's jump into it, man. I'm excited to talk about some of this stuff because sales and marketing tend to be things that a lot of business owners struggle with. It's not their area of expertise. They didn't get into this thinking, oh, my gosh, I want to be a great salesperson or a great marketer. You've been doing this for over 10 years. You've worked with over founder-led companies. When you look back, what's a common sales or growth mistake you see these early-stage founders making? How do you help them course-correct that?

Scott Peterson
It's a great question. So most of the clients that I have worked with over the last 10 years, many of them are a bit more mature in terms of the business. So it's not brand, brand new. This tends to be someone that's I'll just call it five plus years. Many of them are 10 to 20 years in business. And so these business owners, many of them were the original founder of Rainmakers. They started their business because they were good at something or had an idea about something, and they were able to build this original clientele. And that clientele has been very loyal to them because of their expertise. And they've been able to build and grow off of that. Now, at a certain point, they've gotten stuck, and they've had a hard time being able to break through and continue to grow and scale in a way that is important to them. So many of these growth-minded entrepreneurs want significant growth. And maybe you're thinking about an exit down the road and want to increase the valuation of their business. And I've recognized that if they're the ones solely responsible for business development, that the business can only be valued or worth so much. So they've tried. They've tried to build a sales team. They've tried to hire what they would consider top sales talent. And for one reason or another, they haven't been able to meet the performance that they would expect. So many times when I get introduced to a business owner, it's because that sales leader has left or maybe got fired or the sales team continues to underperform. And ultimately, business development is falling back onto that business owner for one reason or another. And so instead of getting back on the hamster wheel and just trying to do it again with another person, even do some really interesting dialog and look at the root cause of things and really try to diagnose what's not working that needs to work. And that's been the origin of these relationships. And it's just led to some really interesting dialog and a better way forward, ultimately.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you feel like some of these struggles that business owners commonly run into with sales is that they're trying to manage something that's not in their wheelhouse, right? And because of that, they don't see the gaps. I mean, is that an accurate statement?

Scott Peterson
That's a good mention here. So there's a couple of different things that I see, and I think it starts with that That original founder, business owner is what they're good at. So if you've got a technical founder that did not come through sales and marketing, they just don't know. They don't know what they don't know. And in a lot of cases, they view sales as this black box or mystery. And there's a more systematic approach that can be really effective. For those that did come up in sales, they might It might be a very natural salesperson, but have a hard time of getting anyone else to do it the way that they do it. And also, let's be honest, founder selling is different than your traditional salesperson. And so there ends up being this gap. And what I found is that a lot of the traditional salespeople are just having a hard time winning the right types of clients. They might be able to win business, but not the types of clients that have really impacted the ability for the organization to be stable and to grow.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So if I'm hearing you correctly, course-correcting is really about taking a step back to identify the root cause, address that, and move forward. It's not you need to do more. It's we need to figure out what the root cause is, and then we can build a plan around that.

Scott Peterson
Yeah. It has to start with data, and it has to start with observation. And that's why I like working with mature companies more so than brand new companies. The mature companies have historical data that you can examine. And what's really interesting, so I've been collecting data for 10 years now, the majority of my clients, their top 20 % of clients Clients is, I think, 83 % of revenue. So that 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle applies here. And so that's not overly surprising, but it's important, right? So I want to examine their data, their revenue distribution. And 20 % of clients is 83 % of revenue. The really surprising thing, though, is that it's the bottom 50 % of clients, 5-0, is yielding single digits in revenue. And so that's the one that tends to surprise people. And where things get really interesting is when you start to lay the time distribution over the top of that. Is sales and marketing efforts focused on that top 20 %? Is it evenly distributed across all 100 %? Is it tilted toward the bottom 50 %? That's where things get really impactful is how we're using and deploying our time.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's I think a lot of people that look at more established companies think, oh, they've got it all figured out. And it's like, No, they don't. We all have issues in our businesses at various times and at various growth stages. The companies you're working with have been able to get to a certain point, but they've hit a ceiling. They don't know how to push through it. None of us have it figured out. We're figuring it out along the way as we go. The challenges that we run into just depends on where we're at and what the stage is.

Scott Peterson
To take one more step into that, when you start examining the clientele and that revenue distribution pattern, what I found is that the characteristics, the demographics, and the psychographics, even some of the trigger events that they're experiencing, they can be different. And maybe it's slightly different, not massively different, but it's still different. And so if we have limited firepower and bandwidth when it comes to sales and marketing, which many of my clients do, then how they're investing time and resources becomes a little more important. So for example, let's say that those top 20 % of clients that are driving 80 % of revenue, maybe the size of the organization is different or the geography or the current growth of the organization or the way that they value their vendor community more as partners versus traditional suppliers. All of these unique characteristics that we can start to delineate and bring some more separation. Well, then you can go build a really tight and targeted sales and marketing plan to go after those exact clients. And so when I do my initial prospecting, well, I'll back up for a second. When I start interacting with an organization and I ask questions about how they pursue new business, there's been times where I've heard them say, yeah, we just bought a list. We bought a list of a thousand. All these companies to go pursue and blah, blah, blah. And so we feel really comfortable, confident that we've got. And I'm saying, I don't want to go after a thousand for my sales targeted outbound hunting approach, I want to know who's number one on that list. If you were to take that list of a thousand, I'm curious how we got there in the first place, but if you were to take that list, which is the most prized prospect in that list of a thousand? What's the top five? What's the top 10? What's the top 20? If we can have a prioritized list and a really thoughtful approach to it, now we're talking. But too many of the organizations are just going through that list, one through a thousand or A through Z, and it becomes, what's the expression? An inch deep in a mile wide. Can it be just the opposite?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And it's a very broad approach to sales and marketing. Which is it's just not going to work. The way I think about it is rather than casting a line out in the middle of the ocean hoping that you're going to catch some fish, you know that you want to catch drought and you're going down to the and just cast a line, and you know that's where they are, and there's a very high likelihood that you're going to catch them. So we need to be much more targeted. And one of the things that a mentor of mine said was that specificity sells. The narrower we can get, the more specific we can get with our message, and that is going to make things much, much simpler and more effective.

Scott Peterson
Well, that... So you asked the question, what's the common growth mistake you see of early stage founders? So that right there is the answer to that question. And I did it, too. When I started, I was so broad that... And really, the reason why I was so broad was because I was scared to specialize. I didn't want to miss out anything. And quite frankly, I didn't exactly know. And so for early stage founders and early stage organizations, I think it's okay to cast a slightly wider net. When I am speaking with someone in that stage of their business, I'm pushing to be more specialized or as specialized as they can possibly be. Over time, and as they analyze their data and clientele and rank them, how do we get tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter until you really do have that niche-specific, I call it blue-chip, blue-chip client profile that we're able to really zero in our efforts.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Look, like you said, we've all been there, right? People are, Oh, if I go too narrow, I'm going to lose out on business. And it's like, think about how many clients you actually need. Most people don't need that many. There's plenty there when you narrow. But even if you're afraid to narrow in on one specific type of market because maybe you don't have enough experience there and you're not sure, you can still take a targeted approach for very specific campaigns. We're going to focus on these people for the next three months, six months, and see what happens. You can still do that. And that still makes it a lot simpler.

Scott Peterson
Yeah, it's a great call.

Why Sales Struggles Are Usually Leadership Problems

Tim Fitzpatrick
So I want to talk about this concept of growth is a leadership issue, not just a sales issue. Walk us through this a little bit, a time when shifting leadership focus helped unlock new growth for a client. Break this down for us.

Scott Peterson
I'd love to. When I first started doing this 10 years ago, I was coming off the heels of a 13-year career with an organization that grew massively. And I was leading a large sales team inside and outside sales. So that was my background. I was in my early to mid-30s when I started this business. I looked really young, and I was uncertain of my credibility coming into this, right? So it's a little bit of the context and backdrop. And so as I'm getting introduced to business owners in the Chicagoland area, they would meet me. We'd have a good conversation. They'd have struggles around sales. I'd give a little bit of my experience, and they would say, perfect. I've got a sales team or salesperson that I'm uncertain of. They're underperforming, and I'd like for you I'm going to spend some time with them and come back to me and let me know what you find. And so I'm like, great. I got my first client. I got my second client, right? And so I would go off on the side, and I would start interacting with their salespeople or sales team. And I would come back to the business owner, and I would tell them what I would find. And more often, what I would find was a lot of sometimes and it depends, and just inconsistencies in the way that they would approach their strategy and process and how they were set up from a structure standpoint. Those were a lot of the things. And then they'd say, okay, can you go help them and fix those things? Long story short, I was doing work in pockets individually. And if that individual were to leave their organization by choice or otherwise, then all that investment and work goes away. And the days that I was there, they would do it. The days that I wasn't there, they wouldn't do it. There was these inconsistencies. And so ultimately, It took me a little bit of time, but I finally realized that the business owner had to be a part of this with me. This wasn't an outsourced job. This wasn't like, hey, let's go get a fractional sales leader and one or two days a week that they're here, the ship is on order. And when they're not, it's not. And so over time, I started saying, hey, business owner, we're going to do this thing together. And we need to set up Foundations, like strong foundations around sales. We need to get a really tight sales strategy that you're a part of in constructing, designing, refining what that Blue Chip client profile looks like. There needs to be an active involvement in terms of the stakeholder sellers that we need to incorporate into our sales process and what they care about and how we can articulate our value messaging to connect to those individuals, to tailor to those individuals. And then we also have to define what good looks like at each incremental step of our process so we can do the same thing over and over again, regardless who's leading the sale. If we can refine our strategy and define our process and then have this playbook in place that we can teach and train and onboard our sellers into, well, now we can have some consistency. And through consistency, we can have some real positive outcomes. And so it wasn't until I forced the sales leader to be part of that journey with me that I started seeing the real impact of my work. I think there were positive moments, bright spots in it. But where things became really, really impactful was when the leadership was involved. And so that's what that statement's about. Growth is a leadership issue, not a sales issue. I'm just saying that the leader has to play an active role in this.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't mean that they need to be the expert and they need to know everything. But they have to have a high enough level understanding of this to help steer the ship. Is that an accurate statement?

Scott Peterson
Yeah. Yes. And so in so many cases, I'll go to the smaller edge of my ideal client profile where maybe founder Rainmaker has hired their first seller. Once they hire that first they're saying, Hey, I've brought someone in that I think is really capable and talented, and I don't want to micromanage them. And so I'm just going to be completely hands off, and I'm going to let them do their thing. And so I've seen that happen several times, and I've seen that fail. I've yet to see it work. I've yet to see that not work before because obviously, something has worked for that founder to grow the business to where they are. And so it has to be accounted for. And so I can appreciate wanting to give someone some freedom and some autonomy to sell the way that they sell. But there has to be clarity in strategy. There has to be definition in process. There has to be expectations in structure. And I do want that business owner to still have the visibility that they need and involvement that they need so that sales and strategy, so that sales strategy and leadership are all interconnected, not this joints from one another.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So the reason I'm asking these questions is because there's so many parallels here with marketing, right? Where when I think about building a marketing engine, I look at three key components: strategy, planning, and leadership. Strategy is the fuel. Planning is where you're picking the parts and assembling the engine, and leadership is that mechanic. If you don't have somebody that's overseeing that engine, maintaining it, optimizing it, it is not going to work long term. And that doesn't mean that the owner has to know everything about marketing or sales, but they have to know enough. Even if you hire a fractional or a director of sales or a director of marketing, as the owner, you still have to know enough to ask them the right questions and hold them accountable. If you don't, it's never going to work. Right? And that's the gap. I think a lot of owners I just hired a Chief Operations Officer or a Director of Sales or Director of Marketing. Yep, my hands are washed of this. It's now done. And that is a huge mistake because you're never going to be done with it. And you, as the owner, have to know enough about each one of those areas to ask the right questions and help guide that person on their journey. So that's one of the big issues I see. And so I love this conversation because it's not always a sales issue or a marketing issue. It's you don't have a mechanic that knows how to optimize and keep this engine running.

Scott Peterson
Dan Sullivan came out with a book called Who Not How. Yeah. And there's a lot of folks, founder, rainmaker, makers in this community or growth mind entrepreneurs, I guess, would be the right way to say it. They took that at face value and said, Hey, I'm just going to find the who and put them in this thing and let them go do it. And what missing there is the connection. And so the way that I've advised the companies that I've worked with is I would so much rather you build the plane and then hire someone to come fly that plane rather than hire to build a plane because you've got all this historical data that's unaccounted for, and you don't know if those two things match up, what you've done historically and the person that you're bringing in. And so by having the leadership team do the work of really analyzing their data, participate in understanding the outcomes of their data, refining their profile, defining their process, establishing their structure, with their optimal structure. Now there's some real ownership. There's some real understanding. There's real buy in and conviction. And so it goes from... It turns into this is the way that we do it. This is our methodology, our process, our playbook, which is the most important thing. So whoever comes in, there's a baseline understanding of it, and they're able to, at minimum, ask the right high level questions. Hey, are we pursuing the right prospects? Are these prospects that are in our funnel the right prospects? Are we talking the right stakeholders? How are we advancing from one stage to the next? Do we have closed loops in place? Really basic and simple things that keep your finger on the pulse rather than just being trusting and hoping. The expression I'd always heard was trust and verify. But I think it got misinterpreted as micromanagement if you didn't know how to do it the right way. And so by understanding the framework, the fundamentals, this allows you to trust and verify in a really effective way.

What a Good Sales Playbook Looks Like

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. You, Scott, you've talked multiple times about having a playbook. Tell us a little bit more like, what's a good sales playbook look like in your view? And where do most teams miss it, miss the mark?

Scott Peterson
Yeah. To me, a good sales playbook is very detailed and very defined. And so there's a few parts to it. The main parts are strategy and process. But from a strategy standpoint, really, the foundation of the sales and marketing strategy for me is that Blue Chip client profile. And so in a really simple model is a... It's a two by two matrix where you've got financial alignment and cultural alignment on the two by two. And so the clients that are aligned financially and culturally are what I call your Blue Chip clients. And that's what I want to win more of. I want to retain those clients. I want to make sure that we grow those clients. That's the foundation of a successful business, winning more of those types of clients. The opposite of the blue-chip client is the graveyard. Financially misaligned, culturally misaligned. The reason I call it the Graveyard is that's where businesses and salespeople go to dive. And so that gives us a Very clear. And the more that we can get specific into the characteristics of those two, obviously, like any bell curve, a lot is going to end up falling in the middle. And I'm okay with the middle. I just am looking to avoid and disqualify eliminate that graveyard and then maximize my focus in that blue chip. And so what I would typically see, and this goes back to question one of some of the mistakes, the common mistakes are that you put a... You're aim at the center of that two by two matrix and you just cast the shotgun spray out. I want to move everything up and right and take aim with a much tighter focus, a sniper approach to it. So when we miss, we just don't miss badly. So back to the playbook, that definition, GraveYard and Blue Chip are these contrasting profiles right next to each other. And then we get into the specifics of who we're talking to and what exactly we're saying and defining what good looks like at each incremental stage. When it comes to sales methodology, and this tucks into my process work, I've been a huge advocate and believer in the challenger work. So CEB, Corporate Executive Board, now bought by Gartner, wrote a few books. They did amazing research studies around B2B sellers. And their first book, about a decade ago, was the Challenger's Sale. And what they found was that in researching sellers, there were really five types of sellers. Let me see if I can get them all. Challenger ended up being the top performer, but it was the challenger, the relationship builder, the hard worker, the lone wolf, and the problem solver. Those are the five. Interestingly enough, when they exanded peak performers, the relationship builder performed at the bottom, which was interesting in complex sales environments. Challenger performed at the top. The characteristics of the challenger were teach, tailor, and take control. Those are really interesting things. The tailoring piece to me is that Blue Chip client profile and the stakeholders inside of it and what they care about. Taking control piece is we have a sales process that we've developed and are committed to. And so we can effectively say, this is the purpose and goal of this stage. The next step of our process is this. And then if aligned, we advance. And we secure that next step. The purpose and goal is this. The next step is this. And so we advance, advance, advance, advance until we either close-win, close-lost, or schedule out whatever that delayed date is. And so being able to take control of your process has everything to do with defining it in the first place. And so as sellers, we can't operate as challengers if we don't have these pieces in place organizationally. And I think that's been the biggest thing that's missing. So in this playbook, like I said, define strategy, define process, and then we just get really clear and expectations of what each person is responsible for and where handouts take place.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So the playbook, it ensures that they know exactly what that sales journey is going to look like. The steps are defined, how you do it is defined. There's certainly some flexibility there, right? But you have this overarching idea of where you're headed and how you're going to get there.

Scott Peterson
Correct. And let's see here. Inside of the sales process, to me, what I believe, what I practice, what I teach is that there's a qualification stage and a discovery stage before the proposal. And so a lot of organizations, and in some cases, there's a demonstration that's needed or an additional scoping conversation that's required before a proposal. But I've seen a lot of organizations that try to position themselves as custom or boutique or tailored, and they're crafting a proposal after one conversation. And that's just not it for me. And so what I found, what I believe is that there's a qualification meeting that takes place that's typically at a one to one, one of them, one of us. And we're just really sizing up. Is this a good fit overall? High level is the problem that they're trying to solve, align with our solutions. And where do they ultimately plot out on that two by two matrix? Are they Blue Chip? Are they Gravear? Are they We're in the middle. Once we've determined that this is a prospect worth advancing, then we would set our discovery meeting. The discovery meeting tends to be at a multiple to multiple stakeholders. Several of them, those that are involved in the buying journey. And again, one of CEB is really interesting research. So the follow up to the challenger sale was a challenger customer, where they found on average, there were 5. 4 stakeholders involved in the buying journey, and the numbers gone up. So as sellers, are we getting those stakeholders to the table? Are they part of the discovery process before weighing in and the decision making process where they never even interacted with us? So at discovery, we've now determined alignment. I want to get deeper, and I want to get the key stakeholders to align on the problem so they can agree on a solution. And so that's the key next step. And it just drives the business case. It helps us build a real business case that then we're able to create our solution on top of. So that That, to me, is just a really interesting part of that playbook. And to your point earlier, it's not a script. I want to give it to them in language that's them and that they can use and can be effective. But ultimately, there's key elements, key frameworks that happen inside of qualification, discovery, and proposal, and final proposal review, you name it, that we can execute in a repeatable fashion. So regardless, whoever is leading that stage of the process, they can do it and do it well.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I love it, man. This is awesome, Scott. Any last minute thoughts you want to leave us with before we wrap things up?

Scott Peterson
I just think that sales is such a beautiful profession. I think that sometimes it gets a bad rap. And Daniel Pink wrote a really cool book a long time ago called To Sell as Human and was trying to debunk some of that used car salesman. And I just think it's such a cool profession. I think it can be done with a lot of that stuff that I was talking about earlier, in a genuine way, in a transparent way, in a very real way, where we're not trying to sell people something. We're trying to figure out if they have the problem that we're experts at solving. And if so, then it absolutely makes sense for us to get to know each other. And I just think that if you're going to be a salesperson, be a professional. If this is your path, then just as I dreamed of being a professional basketball player, and those dreams came to a scratching halt at a certain point, if I'm going to be a salesperson, how do I become a professional at this. And that's the thing I'd like to leave us with is that it's a beautiful profession and that we can get better and better and better at it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Somebody once said to me, sales is service. It's about serving other people. And so when we struggle with sales, we need a reframe that's more positive. One of the things I say about marketing is marketing doesn't have to equal manipulations. It feels like it because there's plenty of people out there that leverage it that way, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Scott Peterson
I love that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Sales is the same thing. So Scott, if people want to connect with you, where do they do it?

Scott Peterson
Yeah, my website is carverpeterson.com, and I'm very active on LinkedIn. Those are probably the two best places to find me. On our website, I've got a Revenue Compass Assessment. It's 25 questions. It's a one through four grading scale. So you get a score out of 100. And it takes four minutes and six seconds to complete on average. And it gives you an initial diagnostic, the bright spots and bottlenecks of sales strategy, process structure, and performance management. And I think that's a really good starting point for people if they're just trying to get a handle. And super interesting to start comparing different stakeholders inside of the same organization. Just recently, I had, I think, about a 30 point swing in responses from folks in the same organization on the same-

Tim Fitzpatrick
Same thing.

Scott Peterson
Someone gave it an 80 and someone else gave it a 50. And it just leads to some interesting dialog between teammates.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Fascinating. Those of you watching, listening, go check out Scott. Connect with them on LinkedIn. Scott, thank you for taking the time, man. I appreciate you. And those of you that are watching and listening, I appreciate you as well. If you want to make marketing work, finally, head on over to rialtomarketing.com. It's rialtomarketing.com. Happy to connect with you there. And until next time. Take care.