Shownotes
Physics defines work as force times distance times alignment. In sales, that's effort times results times whether those results actually get you what you want. I saw a junior SDR post on LinkedIn saying "sales training is a joke—just dial your face off." He's one-third right. Volume matters. But here's what gets lost: you drive to work every day, doesn't make you a Formula One racer. It's intentional volume that matters. Josh Braun responded with something so well-written I had to share it: "Drop someone in a pool with no training and they'll kick really hard, flail harder, and burn out in 20 seconds. Put them with a coach who adjusts their breathing, reach, and timing, and suddenly they move further, faster, with less effort. Top reps don't just make more calls—they make better calls." I'll share my own riptide story from last summer: I got caught surfing with my kids, swam as hard as I could, made zero progress—actually went backwards. Two surfers pulled me sideways along the shore to escape it. I could have swam all day and never made it. That's alignment. This episode breaks down why volume reveals your gaps but technique closes them, why I've wasted $30K on useless sales training but still believe in the right coaching, and why physics would say if you're booking appointments that don't convert, no work has actually been done.
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcripts
So I get this idea... I said, "You know what we could do? We could get really targeted with who we're calling. Like we could get really focused. Let's look at giving history, let's look at, you know, who's up for renewal, let's get ahead of a couple things. Can we run a special campaign? Can we, you know, get people who have like a higher propensity to give?" And I've got all these ideas. And the only way that I knew how to make this happen is to manually go through the list of members. But I'm basically going to have to go through 10,000 of these things and scan it.
I go up to work. I get the list. I pull up the computer. I go up to the office at, I don't know, 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. and I bring a six-pack of beer with me. Put it in my fridge and I just start scrolling. And I just start looking. And I have like a manual tag for everyone that I find. And I did this for probably... it was all night basically. Like I scanned the shit all night. I made it through almost all the list. I had to finish it the next night. But at the end of two nights of just like very laborious, you know, scanning and adding an asterisk to each one, I get this really high target list.
Then I go to the team, I pitch it. I say, "Listen, I've got this campaign. Here's what we're going to do." The team attacks it. I had a killer team at this point. Even though we were behind, there were a whole bunch of variables going on. But I knew I could ask... "This is what we're going to do. This is the campaign. Here's how we're going to do it." And they said, "Boom." And we crushed it. We fucking crushed it. It was the closest that I had come in more than 10 years of executive and senior sales management there to missing a number, and we didn't miss it. Like I think we hit it on like one of the last two days of the year.
So that's kind of the gist of this. Now here's the thing. Somewhere along the way in my career I learned you can build systems to do a lot of this, right? Like I sat there for basically, let's call it 14, 16, 18 hours of just manually scrolling and finding things. But I got the result that I wanted, right? It wasn't terribly fun. It was very manual... it was just monotonous. But it was the thing that I needed to do to get the result that I wanted.
I learned throughout my management career as I went into more senior roles and CEO... like you build systems to do this. That's not going to necessarily scale. I was relying on a whole bunch of intuitive knowledge at the time. And you know, even today, like the first solution somebody is going to think of is "let's build an AI thing for that." I got really good at learning systems. The problem was, also somewhere along the way, we got so good—or I got so good—at spotting opportunities to build systems that the system itself became the priority and the result didn't.
It was like at some point I realized: Wait a second. We continue to try to systematize stuff. We continue to try to make it scalable. We continue to try to make it organized. We continue to try to make it fit into a box and run clean and be efficient and reduce the amount of manual work that's involved and increase the consistency by doing this through tech. As I got good at building systems, it progressed into some like a mis-prioritization of the system becoming more important than the result.
I later evolved and I realized: You know what? Some of the ugliest, most manual, least organized shit that I have ever built has made me the most money. And made businesses I worked with and for the most money. When you start to prioritize the system and you start to prioritize efficiency over outcomes, what happens is you start to fall in love with the process of building that system and the idea of building that system and the functionality of that system and how efficiently it works and how automated it is and how intelligent you think it is. And then you go: "But does it get the result?"
Right? Like I see this all the time. And I've done it personally with like content systems. People are so proud of their Asana or their ClickUp or their notion templates and their this and their that. And you go, "Is it driving any leads? Are you really building a brand? Is it doing anything that truly moves the needle in business?" Well... no. Okay, cool system, man. Same thing with like lead distribution. Same thing with CRMs. I see it all over the place in businesses. And I'm speaking from experience here. We inadvertently start to prioritize system building instead of outcomes. We prioritize the means instead of the end. And nobody understands the importance of this more than I do. Like I understand the importance of systems for scale and processes for scale. I get it. Like I've scaled.
But you scale once you realize that's the thing that works. You know, it's the manual 18 hours of work that looking... you go "What am I looking for? What are the patterns? What are the observations? What did I see?" And then you work backwards and you go, "Okay, can we systematize that? Because I know that gets the result." And here's the result I want. Not 100% certain that these are all the variables and this is the thing that needs to be done. I'm pretty sure. So let me build a system first.
It's: Do what you need to do to get results, and then figure out how to make getting results easier. Then systematize it backwards. Now, interesting thing is, back to the chamber story, we hit that number. And then I told Ops, my Ops team, kind of what I did. And I remember the conversation... and she ran Ops... she said, "Why didn't you tell me?" And I said, "Well I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what to ask for first. Right? Like if I knew the questions you were going to ask me... you're gonna be like 'Okay well what do you want it to run? What do you want it to look for?' I don't know. Like I mean, I had to do this."
And the cool part was, she said, "Okay, walk me through it. Like let's do this." Like sit down. And we sat there for a couple of hours and I went through and just said "This is what I'm seeing. This is what I'm seeing. This is what I'm seeing." She said, "Okay. Got it." And came back a couple months later with a way of rebuilding that same list and adding some scoring to it that enabled us to create a multi-seven-figure stream of revenue on the fundraising side. It was built from a very manual process that was based on kind of intuition, something that didn't scale at all. And then through the process of figuring that out, we figured out how to scale that.
What we didn't do was make a phone call that night and say, "Hey, I need to get to this list and spend the next two and a half months fucking around trying to build an AI agent to do it for us," and then have December creep up on us and go, "Well, we didn't hit the goal."
So I record this, I'm sharing this as much of a reminder for myself as I am advice to anyone who's gone through this. There is nothing wrong with doing the monotonous, laborious, unorganized, ugly work first and making sure that you determine what gets results, and then figuring out how to systematize it. And for me, it is always a flag when I see people leap immediately to efficiency. Like, "Hey how can we automate that invoicing process?" Hold on. Like, yes, I want to do that. But can we make sure like the timing of this thing works and that the workflow of this thing works and that these other pieces work before we go jump in and try to create all this efficiency? Because it stacks up, it builds up, you end up with all this tech debt and quote "systems debt" that net-net isn't efficient and worse, isn't effective.
For me: It's results first. How do we get results? How do we get the outcome we want? Then systems. Then determine how are we going to make this more efficient? How are we going to automate this? How are we going to incorporate AI to take some of this off of my plate? And then we also have something to validate it. Like, did this work relative to this? And that hard work on the front end that I see people right now avoiding more and more and more creates an opportunity for companies that are willing to get the order of operations right on this. So, hope it helps. Adios.
