Robert Cornish’s mission is to use aesthetics and communication to improve and move people through the end-to-end sales journey. As the CEO of Richter, he helps Fortune 500 companies—from Disney to Dell—with their end-to-end B2B sales journey. 

Join Jim and Robert as they dive into enterprise sales and what deal teams can do to stop making mistakes in pre-sales, sales enablement, and customer experience. 

3 Key Takeaways

• Alignment and Elimination: Robert advocates for maintaining alignment in a company’s vision, mission, and offerings. He suggests that cutting out misaligned elements, whether they’re customers, products, or services, can lead to a clearer and more successful path. Several times in Richter’s history, Robert cut whole swaths of customers. Why? Because deep down he knew that his agency couldn’t serve them to his standards.
• Thought Leadership: Thought leadership and personal branding are significant for businesses of all sizes. Robert mentions the importance of having influence, thought leadership, and a clear point of view to stand out and attract attention as part of your strategy for getting in front of B2B companies. 
• The Bigger the Company, the More Refined the Target: Robert believes that a purposeful approach is essential to B2B sales. He stresses the need to get in front of the right person from the start of the sales cycle to give yourself the best chance for success. 

Resources

Robert Cornish on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertmcornish

Read Robert’s book, What Works, co-written with Wil Seabrook: https://amzn.to/47p3u61 

Listen to Robert’s What Works as an audiobook: ​​https://adbl.co/2BvqS4I 

Subscribe to Robert’s newsletters: https://robertcornish.substack.com/ 

Richter’s website: https://www.richter10point2.com/ 

About Our Guest 

Robert Cornish is the founder and CEO of Richter Group of Companies, a management, acquisition, and venture group that owns Richter10.2 Media Group, Social Media Press Kit (SMPK), and Richter10.2 Video. Since 2002, he has successfully launched and run five companies. Through those companies, he has helped implement effective growth methods that have resulted in Richter's consistent success. 

Some of Robert’s achievements include: 

• Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Selling Power Magazine, and Inc Magazine. 
• Guest speaker for Association for Corporate Growth Los Angeles, IASA Summit, and West Point. 
• Interviewed for 33Voices, EnTRUEpreneurship Podcast, and IDEA Magazine. 
• Published author of What Works, a book about lessons Robert learned while growing his multi-million dollar agency. 

Richter is one of the fastest growing companies in America, as shown by the following achievements: 

• Made the Inc 5000 list five times. 
• Made the Silicon Valley Fast 50 four times. 
• Won the Entrepreneur360 award two times.

About The Dirt Podcast 

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

If you love what you are getting out of our show please subscribe.

For more information on how we dig into the dirt check out our other episodes here: https://www.orchid.black/podcast

About Our Company

Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses. 

Website: https://www.orchid.black 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orchidblack/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OrchidBlack 

All contents of this show are rights of Orchid Black©️ and are not to be used unless authorized by written consent.

Robert Cornish 0:02

If you think about art I, I took art all through school and through high school and everything like that. And when you did when you paint something, there's a point of view that you paint from. So everything would was sort of aligned with that point of view when you paint something and I think companies that way when you have a you have a vision, and you have a mission and then everything should align with that vision and mission. Theoretically, including even just each deal that you do if a deal is not closing, something about it is not aligned, you've got the wrong person or it's not the right offer and you're not solving the problems. So if you get it aligned you're gonna close the deal and and I think alignment is a super sacred thing and accompany

Jim Barnish 0:41

Welcome to another episode of The Dirt the podcast, where we go deep into the obstacles that business owners face while growing their business. I'm your host, Jim barnish. And today's guest is Robert Cornish founder and CEO of Richter, whose mission is to use aesthetics and communication to improve and move people through the end to end sales journey. My favorite part of today's discussion is when Robert goes heavy into enterprise sales, and why so many deal teams get it wrong, as it relates to pre sales, sales enablement, and customer experience. Before we jump in a big thank you to our sponsor, OrCAD, black, a strategy firm that helps founders maximize the value of their business, positioning them for a big exit. And a big thank you to our listeners. So if you found value in this episode, subscribe, share, bring more people in Let's rock and grow. Alright, Robert, let's dig right in. Who is Robert? And what is Richter?

Robert Cornish 1:44

Jim Barnish 3:32

So you, you mentioned evolution of your business, which I can imagine being that it's been over a decade, as has been, there's been quite a few of them. How has how has Richter evolved since its inception.

Robert Cornish 3:47

I mean, that that is very interesting. Because what I what I learned is that, you know, you don't always end up where you started off. So when you look at the company, like you may start, I think the most important thing to a lot of people who are starting companies as well is like just be a little bit more pliable and flexible, because that's kind of what happened with me, it was like when we, when we when I started Richter, it just, there was a simple idea that we had a simple product to sort of pitch and sell. And it was we called it web, web media PR, in fact, and we built like web media, PR campaigns and charged a insignificant amount of money essentially. And, and I just call my rolodex, like literally, I had, I had saved all the business cards that I had from all these different contacts over the years in a binder. And that's literally where I started, like, just emailing them to say, hey, here's who we are, and here's what we're doing. And I still have those emails and then and then just calling and letting them know, like, Hey, here's, here's who we are and what we're doing. And sure enough in the first five days of business, we close to customers for $2,000 You know, and and it was like, Okay, that's enough to get us through to the next week you know, and and you I mean, it's completely bootstrapped. You know, and so we kind of did that. And the first month, we ended up doing $30,000. In the first year, we ended up doing like 400,000 as a place to start, you know, and then by the end, without going back to the question of evolution, it continued to evolve based off customer's needs, and what was working for them and what wasn't. And so as we were sort of doing things, we were like, oh, you know, that they need help with this. And then they need help with this. And they help with this. And then, at some point, as we start pivoting, we were like doing that. And then we had this social media Prescott thing we created, and then we had, you know, this reached system to help support demand gen, and then it kept evolving. And each time I would kind of zero in on on what we call the target public. So when we looked at the database of the kinds of customers we were working with, that worked extremely well for Richter, I kept sort of obsessively, ever every, like, six months, I would like zero in on that, and like, like, sort of focus in and I started to see, oh, it's really b2b tech of like, where, where we're winning and where, what's working for us and what's working for them. And so then we would fine tune and focus into that, and then we will solve the problems related to what they need, and then it kept growing. And next thing, you know, it's sort of pushing into, oh, now we're working with SAP, or now we're working with hp, and then it kept going. And it was like a process of elimination a little bit. Like, we actually there was multiple times where we cut whole swaths of customers. And we were like, just Nope, you know, just cutting, we even had a subscription service at the time. And we went through the customers one by one and told them, we're canceling it, and we're getting a we're turning this off, and we're not doing this anymore. And, and so basically, it just kept evolving into I think, more and more of who we are and more and more of what serves the customer better. And, and also kind of where you want to go because you end up having needs and, and ideas and things where you feel like your skill sets fit best, just things that you naturally wake up and go, I like to do this, you know, like, like, I think more than just somebody saying, I have a checkbook, let me pay you. At least this is true for me. I like to be happy in the space that I'm in and be doing stuff that keeps my interest and stuff that I feel is relevant and solving a bigger and bigger problems. So it was kind of the pursuit of like, for what we do, let's make Rictor mission critical to our customers as much as we can and keep trying to solve the biggest, most important problems possible for the people that we people in companies that we like to work with. And that was that just kept evolving. But we you know, we've all met multiple times over the years and just kept kind of pivoting and changing. Not drastically. But, you know, it continues that way.

Jim Barnish 7:54

What are some of the things that you had to stop doing on the journey?

Robert Cornish 7:59

Well, I mean, like, you know, today, they call it reputation management. But we were actually fairly successful with reputation management, we call this just web PR, but there was a lot of people that had, we would deal with these customers that you know, like they would have some FINRA fine or something like, that'd be like a financial firm that had some fine from Finland, it was shown up in the third results on Google. And then they've been some other company that like, kept getting bad reviews. And we realized, like, you know, we can't like, like, for example, if, if a company is not going to serve their customers correctly.

Jim Barnish 8:37

He can't he can't reputation manage that.

Robert Cornish 8:39

No, no. And so like, we started looking at the profile and like, the kinds of customers that needed reputation management, you know, we're like, you know, I think we're gonna walk away from this, you know, and it's, it's funny, because it's frustrating, you know, and we, our heart was always in the right place on it. And, but it was almost like you're adopting problem jobs to some degree.

Jim Barnish 9:03

Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's a, that's a good one. I mean, it's like you, you start off with this, this mission and this purpose of who you want to be and how you want to serve and, and little things come up like that, where, you know, you're either going to stay on that exact mission and do things that might be a little bit counter to your human nature, right or you're going to shift your business towards you know, something else so that's that's a really that's a really good example and anything else like that? Yeah, that came up.

Robert Cornish 9:34

I think it was it was things where they were like dead ends you know, how you start doing something and sometimes you think, you know, this is not exactly what I wanted to be it'd be kind of a dead end and it's not going the way you want it to go. Exactly. And and something about, you know, the word alignment that's something to talk about today a lot. I think that when you look at if you think about art i i took art all through school and through high school and everything like that, and when When you paint something, there's a point of view that you paint from. So everything would was sort of aligned with that point of view when you paint something. And I think companies that way, when you have a, you have a vision, and you have a mission, and then everything should align with that vision and mission. Theoretically, including even just each deal that you do, if a deal is not closing, something about is not aligned, you've got the wrong person, or it's not the right offering, or you're not solving the problems. So if you get it aligned, you're going to close the deal. And, and and I think alignment is super sacred thing and accompany. And so I basically, it's a process of elimination based off alignment, like you can sort of feel when something's not aligned, it could be somebody that's working for you. And you got to get rid of that person, because somehow they're not aligned. And it's the same thing with a product or service that you're selling. I think when you're doing something, and something about it is not aligned with where you're trying to go. Maybe it was in Italy, or you thought it was, or it was a good idea, but it's not monetizing. It's not going the right way. It's not solving the customer's problem the way you want it to go. I think mostly you should kill those, you know, and then and then move into things that they flow. You know, they're they're flowing like water, because because it's it's aligned.

Right. Well, do you have any examples on on your team of when you've, when you've experienced maybe that lack of alignment or misalignment? And yeah, and persistence towards towards alignment lead to just a significant breakthrough at Richter?

Well, I mean, just with my ex business partner, I mean, we I think that was the number one thing, we we started the company together, and he's a good guy. It and what I, what I realized was it we just weren't aligned, you know, and, and, and we would talk about things and, and it was, you know, he might say that we were on the same page, or we were looking at the same picture, but I knew in my heart that we weren't because he had a picture in his mind that he kind of was working toward or had, the way he was speak would be things that he, they went in a different direction than me like for me, I'm like, let's go build 1000 person agency and like, solve this exact problem for the, you know, b2b, largest b2b companies on the planet that do these exact things. And let's blow it out. And let's build it big. And then we'll go by at every other company that we can, right. And, and so somebody might speak, but then their actions are misaligned. And so eventually, it just got to the point where I was like, Okay, let's talk about a buyout, essentially. And it got a little tense. But ultimately, it was a good solution. And I ended up buying them out. And then he went on and did his own agency. And I don't keep up, but from what I understand, it's, it's moving more in the direction of what aligns with what he wants to do. And with Richter we, like, we, it was like, it was like cutting, you know, it was like cutting a resistance. And then we were like, spring loaded after that, like, after that happened. And it like, freed up everything. And we went like, you know, the stats went up the next year, we hit more revenue, we did better, you know, and it just felt it felt like it was you got sort of an anchor off the line to some degree, you know, and I think that it's not that he's trying to sabotage or destructive, and this is true of hammer any other person, I think if you're not aligned on a team, like if you're in a rowboat, and you got three people rowing, and you're in the last thing, and you're kinda like, maybe we should go over here, and you're kind of rowing over there, the three in the front or gotta go, dude, really, you know, like, can you just wrote the same same sequence time that we're rolling this way? You know, and it's such a drag, it's like, exhausting, you know,

one into not to overuse your your analogy, but like, jumping out of the boat would get you there faster than somebody in the back rolling against the motion, right? So, yes, sometimes it may feel like, you know, we need all four of these people in order to get where we're going. But in reality three can get there faster than four. Right? So that's, that's cool. In the end to hear about what your business partner went on to go do something that aligned with what with his pursuits and in his human drive, right. It's cool that it's not like he fell out of the boat and then drowned. Right? It's like he found his own boat. Right. So yeah, that's, that's very cool to hear stories like that. And I think there's, I've had to let go of and part ways from or however you want to, you know, talk about business partners, co founders before and it's hard, it's really hard.

You build a tight relationship, you know, your, your, your brothers or your sisters or, you know, whatever, like, whoever it is that you have that dynamic of family almost, and it's like so it's really tough, right? Because it's a business. It's not a family and it can be like a family a little bit. So it's like it's it's got retching sometimes to have to go through that. And then it can get. It can get, like, a little heated and and and it's unfortunate, you know, because it does kind of burn bridges. But I think sometimes it's for the best not just for you, but also for them.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's, let's switch gears here for a second and talk about enterprise sales. Because that's, that's your jam. That's my jam. Like I, I love talking about all things growth, especially as it relates to selling to big companies and selling big deals. So like to talk to me a little bit about the problems that you're solving for your clients, obviously, a little bit different demographic, then we're where my business sits from a, you know, size perspective. But talk to me about some of the problems that you guys are solving and in the results that you're seeing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, when customers come to us, it's, it's usually the same things like it's, there's problems in pre sales. And by pre sales, they just simply mean, there's an audience they're trying to get after there's an exact people that they're trying to get after. And it was start by profiling those exact people. So when you look at, in any b2b sale, we're really just talking about human human HGH. And there's an element of like, okay, first of all, who are we going after? And number two? What are they? You know, what are the pain points or problems or challenges that they're trying to solve? And how can we speak to those things? So number one, identify them. Number two, understand where they are? Where they are online? How do we connect with them? How do we get to them? Number three, what's the messaging? What's going to resonate with these kinds of people, these exact people? And then and what is the flow of actions? Like, what is that sort of journey or those breadcrumbs of like, how are you going to sort of pervade? You know, like gig? How are we going to get to these people and like, get their attention and then route them into sales. And so that's, that's sort of what we would call pre sales is step one is like getting their attention in the first place, a lot of companies, even if they're really big companies battle obscurity. So that's problem number one of like, getting the right attention from the right people. And most computers, companies, when we talk to those companies, they're not saying, hey, let's throw out a giant net, they're saying, we need to get to very specific people in a very specific roles in very specific companies, right. And so it's, it's more of a surgical approach to go. Like we're targeting exact people. And that could be something like a LinkedIn ad campaign, it could be a series of Content Strategy, it could be a series of just mapping all the assets and everything they need, or thought leadership, whatever. And then once we have their attention, it's looking at how do we support the sales journey? How do we support the sales people to make sure that they're taking that from A to B to actually close a deal? And so a big part of is just mapping those various different journeys, mapping out the messaging, mapping out the content? How do you sort of how do you create the journey to make it as simple as possible to arrive at a close deal. And, you know, I have different views on on how you need to do that, as somebody who's in b2b sales like as what what those people should do, a lot of the responsibility we have as an agency is actually to help support the pre sales and sales journey and training of the team to make their life a lot easier. So like taking taken Apple as an example, when you think about like Apple, you would have a keynote event. And then it pushes over to like, you've got the new product they launch. And then you have this beautiful like Apple altra page for the Apple Watch, right? And it's like, it just takes you right through it, you're like order. You want to kind of emulate that on the b2b space and kind of go how do we? How do we put all the steps in the right sequence? So it flows into sales and through sales in the easiest possible way? And what ends up happening a lot of times is that what's the it's very fragmented. So I need acid says, this is a deck that says this and I ate blah, blah, blah, says this. But reality is, it's like, everything kind of happens in a flow in a journey. And so we want to orchestrate those steps to sort of move it to the to the each step one after the next to arrive where they need to arrive, and then arm the team with everything they need. And what we know in b2b is a lot of b2b sales folks follow up on average three times but it can take 1819 25 Plus contacts to close a deal. And you go, Well, why are they fired three times you go, well call reluctance. They run out of assets. They don't know what to say. They don't know how to handle things, whatever. How can we orchestrate the process with everything that they need? So they're, they're able to stay the course and include increase the probability of closing deals. These are the kinds of things that we work with our customers on to to help them do that. And in a very large company, you have a huge amount of salespeople. So you kind of run into credos law of like, 20% do an 80% of the work. And, you know, we're trying to help 80% to more, in many cases, the 20% with the 20% are usually like they're fine, they're good, you know, they're doing what they do. You know, and And what we want to do is increase efficiency and productivity and the probability that things are going to close are things going to happen. But having said all that, it could be a myriad of things like companies are working on, you know, go to market strategy, or they're working on a trade show, or they're working on a product launch. And so sometimes it just means that we're coming in and helping support whatever's coming up. But I always use the same method of like, let's start with the outcome, the objective, what are we trying to do? And then let's define the approach of how we're going to get there. And then the tactics are within their approach.

And what's the approach that you're usually getting brought into most comp most commonly?

Well, I mean, I mostly it's pre sales, I would say, like nine times out of 10 is pre sales. It's, it's, it's the, the nonstop problem of, we need to get in front of more people and drive more people into sales. Like that's your that's probably problem one. I mean, it comes up with every single company that you ever talked to, and you can, you can go through all these different areas of training and customer experience and everything. But the main thing is that most companies are trying to figure out how to get in front of more people and drive more people into sales, even though sales in many cases are muffing it and they have a ton of opportunities. And they're the you know, whatever. It's like, there's a ton of

yeah, oh, yeah.

Yeah, we call pre sales. But But yeah, exactly. Like some people call it top of funnel. And, and it's like that is the constant. You know?

And what, what are some of the most common things that are a good starting points for you as you're as you're helping them get more eyeballs as you're helping them, you know, get get get more pre sales.

I honestly, I think it's so simple. I think a lot of it is so simple, it comes down to you've, you've got to obsessively study and understanding who you're going to and the more you know about the person like it, when you think about b2b sales at a high level, the more you know about the person, the more you can communicate the right message on on email, but also just on text, and then actually phone calls, the more you understand that person, the easier gets, because then you can like actually think the most effective method is a direct one to one approach of like, a direct outreach one to one approach to those exact people with the right assets at the right time, that's going to be the most effective. So if you're going after the Chief Revenue Officer of, you know, a $10 billion company, know who that person is, know what challenges they have, understand them, like, understand what's going on in the company, and bring a relevant offer, bring a relevant solution to that person, and then take a one to one outreach approach. And don't wait, don't wait for inbound, you can do a lot of inbound, you can do a lot of things to like, get their attention and route demand, those are all super, super helpful. The best thing you could possibly do is a one to one direct outreach approach.

Yeah, it's funny when I talk to a business and you know, ask about personas, right, which is kind of what you're getting at? And the answer is, the persona is the CRO, of a company between 5 million and 500 million in revenue. It's like, okay, well, that's not really a persona. That's, that's a role at a business. Right? So like, what do they care about? Where do you find them? Right, if it's kind of what you're getting at here. And so it's interesting that a lot of the pain points that you deal with, with billion dollar companies, you know, are the same exact ones that I'm dealing with with million dollar company. Right. So what, you know, what, what, um, what other commonalities are you seeing as it relates to pre sales and marketing?

Well, you know, I think, I mean, at least the billion dollar size, you know, I think, I think thought leadership comes up a lot. I think thought leadership is a big thing. A lot of companies are trying to find ways to get more attention more eyeballs all the time, you know, and I just saw yesterday or two days ago that Cisco was going to be turning. I think I forget the number. I hate to overstate it, but I think it was like 38,000 employees to be think then

to LinkedIn influencers. LinkedIn,

I was like, I was like, Isn't that wild? But that comes

out. Meanwhile, other companies won't let you have a LinkedIn. Right, right. And

but like we were talking about, I'm not going to name names necessarily, but we were talking to a customer and we were dealing we're dealing with the CEO of that company and doing a lot of their internal communication work for alignment and that, like we were talking about that exact topic of like, like LinkedIn, thought leadership and so you know, it it's it's not just a novelty, it's like it's important. These things in there. Really, it's important that people have influence and have some thought leadership there and are doing making the right moves. And I think today In 2023, the funny thing is, you know, how you you said, Well, what's the one thing or what's the best strategy or was this and that, I've always said, I really think it's compound, it's combative approach, it's like, unfortunately, you're gonna have to do all of these things, you're gonna have to do the direct response, one to one outreach work, you're gonna have to do your thought leadership, you're gonna have to do the ad strategy, you're gonna have to map the journey and route demand. I think it's all of those things. And I think that the thing that's going to work is a compounded approach, and making sure that you have a very thorough compounded approach to all these different things. And that's, that's ultimately what it takes. I think, every time we close a deal, I always think Man, that took like, eight times more than I thought it would take, you know, like, like, I'm thinking it should have closed, like back here at this stage. And, and I am often blown away by how many meetings, phone calls, zooms emails, and iterations of the proposal it takes to close a single deal from a company that knows us and that we are already a known quantity. And we've already done the work. And right. And then it finally closing, you're like, wow, you know, and so for me, I guess one thing I would just say to everybody is like, increase your sort of, like estimation of effort. And and, and overshoot everything? You know?

Yep. I do. I do know what and on that same note, you know, when you when you're approaching the various let's call, like, various stages of the sales journey, does that differ depending on the industry and size of the clients that you're dealing with? Or is is it fairly consistent? You know, like, what are you seeing as it relates to that?

I mean, for our, for our own sales journey, it's been the same. And we've we've kept that process the exact same, and I still follow it to this day. And so we're, we're pretty methodical about our sales journey and how it works. But But for them, you do you do want to cater to the company, I don't think I don't think there's necessarily a one size fits all. Having said that, in b2b, it's probably going to be pretty similar, it's going to be probably pretty similar to what I said, some people do it a little differently. Like, you know how people go into and go on a link, you go on Salesforce, and it says that and then qualify, like lead, and then qualification and blah, blah, blah, you know, so however you want to do it, but I have my view on how that salesperson process actually works. And I think that if you ask smart questions, like if you go talk to the sales team, the b2b sales team, especially the the best reps that are doing well, and you say, Okay, so here's the close contract. What happened right before that? Well, I did this, and I talked about, cool, what happened right before that, what happened right before that, what happened, right, and you start to dissect it, then you can start sort of like you talked to a bunch of different reps, and you started to dissect it, you'll get a clearer picture of like, what does that actual sales process look like for this company. And then you can kind of map it and build what I would consider to be a repeatable model. And that's what you want. You don't want people just go and I do it like this, because that's gonna hurt consistency and outcomes. And it's hard to manage that too. Because if you do have a exact sales process, and you say, Okay, so you've sent the proposal, you can manage it better by saying, Okay, let's so now we're in proposal review, and we got to execute that step. You know, but if you don't have that, it's hard to even navigate it. You know? Yeah. But it changes a little bit based off the company. And but I, I do think there's somewhat of a universal process for b2b.

Yeah. And you're standing these these programs up, but it's not like you're just kind of standing it up once and then and then not learning from it. Right. I mean, at least I guess I'm assuming that that's not the case. But there's probably this level, this level of continuous improvement that you guys adopt with your clients, correct?

Yeah, yeah. And the other thing in that sales process, by the way, is you also have to cascade down the sub actions within each stage. So when you think about, okay, you're at Discovery. It's like, okay, good. That's a general stage. But what is the cascaded steps within discovery that need to be executed every time? You know?

Yeah, so So walk me through that. So yeah, obviously, you got your stages of the sales journey. And then you're talking about, you know, the actions, whether those actions be internal or external, that you're making as part of moving from stage to stage gate to gate if you will, right. Yep. What are some of the common gates that companies are often missing?

Well, I mean, I would say, I mean, look, I mean, one of the things number one and b2b Selling number, I mean, number one, the first thing comes to mind is is just not having the right person like going to the wrong person. And and not like so people were talking about qualifying, qualifying for that. I don't use that terminology necessarily, but it is true. It's like if you start in b2b with somebody who's not the stakeholder or not The person who's who's going to be the right person for the deal, what's going to happen in b2b is there's, as you know, you know, as you know, there's, you have a great call with somebody, and then they have to go take that pitch, take the thing that you just talked about, and they're gonna have to go to someone else who is the stakeholder, let's say, or a degree down from the stakeholder, and you're hoping that they're gonna pitch it the way you pitched it, and then represent it, but really, it's just gonna, they're gonna give them a number, or they're gonna go, it's 50,000, or whatever, and the person is gonna go 50,000 won, who's it for now, we're not doing that. So, so I think that's that, I mean, that's fundamental problem number one. So it like if you can get it on the rails from the very beginning. In other words, when you have a discovery, you have a discovery with the right person, as step one, so getting good at doing the homework and research and understand who is the right person, actually, because if you end up trying to go down and hopefully go up and get to the next person, first of all, your sales cycle is going to take very long as we know, time wounds, all deals, and it's just going to get you're going to eat, it's gonna get eaten away as you go. And then the reality is, you don't even know if the person you're dealing with who's going to be able to confront and handle the person that that needs to get confronted and handled, essentially, in terms of closing a deal. Right. And and probably not. So that's probably the number one thing that bugs, all b2b sales cycles.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's a that's a good one. I mean, I see that all the time. Yeah. And you guys, you guys, if I look at your website, you've got kind of things, core tiled into four areas of focus, right? You've got pre sales, which you've talked about sales enablement, internal communication and training. And then customer experience is that really, like if I were to dial down and say, What does Robert do on a day to day, Robert and his team is that is that those four quadrants kind of, you know, what you do?

Totally. The reason the reason this exists, when you think about in layman's terms, when you think about pre sales, you're just trying to get the attention of the audience, and you're trying to route them into sales. And then from a marketing however, you want to look at it. So you're just trying to get the attention to the outcomes, you're trying to read them and sales. And then in quadrant two, when you're when you're selling, you're trying to help the team close those deals, arrive at a closed deal. And then and then in training, internal calm, you're trying to make sure the team is aligned, and they're performing the way they need to perform. So the getting the outcomes are trying to get. And then in quadrant four, with the customer experience, you're trying to make it sticky. So they stay because we just invested all this money, and trying to get this customer and sell them and train the team do it the right way. And now we just want to make sure that the customer is happy, and they stay around. So when we think about the end end b2b sales journey. These are not just ideas, those quadrants these are what come up all the time. So after like literally like 1000s of conversations with companies, these areas come up constantly. And when I looked at the the ideal, like if I had carte blush, and and the customer say, here's a couple million bucks, just do whatever you want to do. I'd be like, great, you know, and we would just, we would just do, you know, make those quadrants ideal. The journeys within those quadrants completely ideal. So all the journeys were mapped, and we had every component part we needed to just build a better b2b sales journey. And that's gonna make everybody's life easier.

So how do you measure the success of all of these services? In a client interventions and a client sales journey?

Yeah. Yeah, that's a that's a good question. You know, because it's like, you know, how there's companies out there that are like, you know, there's the elevator pitch, like the one sentence tell me who you are. Richter's, not that company. We have five or six minutes, we can say, well, here's who we are, you know, it's kind of like you think about Accenture. Companies like that. They're kind of have complex offerings, even IBM to this day, it's difficult to sort of articulate who they are and what they do. And I see Richter a little bit that way. And so when I look at the when I look at the problems we're solving, and we're a hybrid to help support the NN b2b sales journey and get the various outcomes or other problems that we're solving at the time. And when I look at the ROI outcome, we survey every customer after every single project or every single thing that we do, and we get a lot of feedback. And I would say the ultimate ROI is the reason we have we have probably 90% Resign rate with customers and their their, their raving fans, you know, and internally at Richter, we obsess over stellar products in a world class customer experience. And we really, every day we talk about this and so we're always doing surveys and doing things to collect data from customers and just understand we get a lot of feedback from customers and they tell us you guys are just easy to work with and use get it done. You understand us we've had you know there was a billion dollar company we were dealing with recently and they said they had a very large agency they were working with and they had to Read of chops, but they really didn't understand their space, they really understand what they did. And with us, it's like we live and breathe b2b And, and sales. And so there's an element where the ROI is just the intrinsic value of Richter all by itself. Now, we don't go to the degree of like, Let's measure all these metrics. And I don't even know that we can necessarily, because a lot of the time, they're taking these different component parts of the things that we're doing. And we're coordinating with an internal team. So we could gather it from them, I suppose, if we really want it to, but we generally don't we sometimes we get some stats and things like that. But most of the customers come back with a high resign rate, we have our survey, the feedback that we get is fantastic. Like, we get a lot of actual written feedback, you know, daily. And that's kind of how we measure the success. I mean, we could probably do a better job of like digging in. And here's this metric that says, here's the exact ROI. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think that's a good thing. But I, I also think that our it's kind of our reputation, you know, we've really built a reputation. And and when we have the calls, the customers know that we know, you know, excellent.

Yeah, yeah, I do know. So. Alright, I want to want one last question before we happen to the founder, five, and it's kind of about, you know, the future of Richter in the future, Robert. So where, where are you going next buddy?

Um, you know, well, we have a couple of companies. So we have, we have Rictor. And then we have content one, which is still, it's still growing content, one deals with midmarket b2b companies. And it has a very exact thing that does as a marketing retainer. And we just saw these two problems that come up all the time obscurity, and the sales journey for b2b companies. So that's growing, you know, that companies, you know, you know, doing pretty well and starting to really grow. And then we have another company called ARPI, that handles Richard productions, which handles all the live production work. So we're really working to do more films and documentaries and things like that with that company. And that's starting to get some legs. And then RGC is the company that I actually work with Rector group of companies and the vision there is actually find companies that align with Richter and with what we're trying to do and buy them out. And, and built somewhat of an ecosystem. So we have everything that we need, and we have really the strongest group of companies to solve the various different problems for these companies. So we are the most qualified player in our space. And that's, I mean, I'm a builder, I you know, if you put me on the beach, I'm gonna be building a sandcastle, you know, it's like, I, you know, for what's next is like, build the vision, you know, build the tree on and yeah, keep going. Yeah.

All right. It's awesome. Man. I was. So let's hop into the founder, five. First question for you is, number one metric or KPI that you are relentlessly focused on.

I mean, I want to say, I, I mean, the entrepreneur and CEO on me wants to say gross income. It's like, that's the, it's the thing. It's always but recently, I've been thinking more about the percentage of, you know, the income divided by our employees, like, like, how efficient are we being as a company, so very recently, it's kind of shifted from gross income to gross income divided by employees, so I can measure how productive and efficient we're being per person. I think that's what I should be focused on. And that's sort of so I'm starting to I started to move more there. That's a good

one. In fact, in 100 episodes, not one person has used that one yet. So you can have that one. And I love that one. Yeah. All right. Next one is top tip for growth stage founders like yourself.

certainty, I think, I think having more certainty in yourself and just just, I can't speak for everybody, but I would say you got to trust yourself. You've got to trust yourself and you've got to you're gonna get a lot of naysayers. You're gonna get doubters you're gonna get doubters you're gonna get people say that challenge you and everything's like that. Listen to yourself internally, really listen to yourself. And, and, and and do what motivates you, when you wake up and you go, what is it that you want to do? Forget scaling, forget scaling. When you think about the greatest companies, they they they obsessively built. They were obsessed with building the best product, the best company possible. And by doing that they scaled. So the question is, what is it that's compelling for you that's going to drive you that's going to help you do what you want to do and and is trust yourself on that lean into that just relentlessly stay the course on that thing? And I think, by and large, that that's the thing that's going to lead to scale, I think, I think obsessing sometimes on the metrics and how do we scale? How do we scale all the great companies that have ever learned and known and read? They scale by being graded by following a vision and a gut instinct and pushing that into existence? Um, and not not playing this game of like, should I should I not? Should I should I not and listen this person listen to that person, listen, you know, and you can get kind of spun out. So I think that

it's a good it's a really good one. All right, favorite book or podcast that's helped you to grow as an entrepreneur.

Okay, so the book I mean, I have it on my desk right now I liked this book. I like I like, I liked the ride of the lifetime or rather the lifetime thing, Bob Iger. He's probably my favorite CEO right now. Like when I think about great CEOs, and that that book, I really think Bob Iger is fantastic. And I don't think he gets enough spotlight. I think there's there's people out there that are like, really like in the spotlight and really NPR but I actually think Bob Iger is one of the greatest CEOs and leaders of our time. So I would say that, and then podcast. I I listen to a few I like Lewis Howes. I like Tim Ferriss, I kind of change up sometimes it depends on what I am interested in. So if I'm listening to I'm interested in mergers and acquisitions or private equity, or I'm listening to sales or whatever, I try to find stuff that's relevant, you know, or, you know, Sir Martin Sorrell, I was listening recently, the guy who's, you know, helped build WPP. And now he's doing as for capital and like to go to, like, when I'm trying to find data on stuff. I like to listen to things and, and I think, yeah, so sometimes it like an episode like that might be on Lewis Howes, or Tim, Tim Ferriss or some other thing, but those are pretty, those are common, I think.

That's, that's, that's awesome. All right. Piece of advice that counters traditional wisdom.

It's interesting that you counters traditional wisdom. I don't know I, you know, I, this probably is traditional wisdom. This probably is traditional. You know how you watch the tiktoks, or I don't have tic tac British shows up on it shows up on YouTube. And there's that kid asks all those people that drive cars and says, What do you do? Or you know, love your car? If you compound all those answers, every single person says pretty much passion and work hard. And so this is probably kind of cliche, but the reality is, it is simple. It's like what are you passionate about? And then work your face off? on that? Yeah, you know, and I think that the that's the advice, it's like, all things that are actually truths generally are simple.

Yeah, that's a good one. In fact, that might be your answer for the last one, which is what is going to be the title your autobiography?

Oh, no, the title my autobiography biography is going to be I can't help you. You know, because it's because I've, I want to write a book that talks about all these things, why can't help you? You know, because all the things that people do, they're getting in their own way on success and their other and all these other things. And I'd like to just list out all the pitfalls and everything I've seen people do. And in an odd way, it would be a very informative book book so people could go, Okay, I'm doing I'm not gonna be doing these things and helping

myself now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. A lot like that a lot. Yeah. Awesome, dude. Well, you've given a ton to our listeners today, Robert. So I was like, for a little bit of self promotion here at the end. How can how can those listening help you out?

Yeah, like, follow me, follow me on LinkedIn. You know, I I've been, you know, boost my LinkedIn following. And that would be pretty cool. Or share this episode, I would love for you to share this episode. That'd be great. It's always it's both ways. I thank you for your time. And it takes time from you. And it takes time for me and I, but I've learned a lot from podcasts. I'm really thankful they exist. Because I always wanted to have a scenario when I was younger record, listen to people have done it, and kind of pull back the curtain and understand like, what did they do? And I love the authentic nature pocket. So if you would share the podcast and you'd follow on on LinkedIn, it's LinkedIn for slash in for slash Robert M. Cornish. That'd be awesome.

Excellent. And that's the best way to get in touch with you is through LinkedIn. Yeah. Awesome, dude. All right. Well, you, you rock. Thanks for joining us on the dirt and to the audience. You know what Robert said, we took some time we gave you some insights. We're doing this all the time. So we'd love to hear what you think and share it with a friend. And that's the goal. The dirt is the challenges and obstacles that come with growing a business. So thanks for joining us. If you love today's episode of the dirt, make sure you rate it on your favorite platform. And if you really liked us, go ahead and leave us an honest review. Thanks again for tuning in. In Tibbett dirt