In his latest episode, Chris focuses on project management and selling. His ultimate goal is to hire and retain the best and brightest employees, confident in their abilities, so he can focus on adding more value to his organization in other places. The only way to accomplish this task is through effective project management. Chris talks about the importance of revenue and having effective and efficient operations to grow and scale your business. He defines capacity and states that there needs to be a balance in order to avoid financial strain on an organization. Finally, he shares his belief that business has never been easier than it is in today’s financial climate and challenges the audience to remember that and get to work.

Setting objectives and key results is important for project management too. Chris talks about this on his episode "How OKRs Help Us Manage Projects".

Chris is the President and partner at Juhll.com, a full-service digital marketing agency that helps clients achieve business goals by delivering superior results. He’s also the founder, operator and investor in Banks.com, a trusted financial online market place for all things financial on the web. In his podcast, Chris discussed the latest trends on digital marketing as well as the challenges of being an entrepreneur with a no-bull approach.

• 01:06 – The proliferation of content and information in today’s society
• 03:18 – Why most of the information Chris consumes is reactive
• 04:27 – The project management system, Jira
• 09:43 – The importance of having your business goals map back to your daily activity
• 13:15 – The 40-hour work week mandate
• 16:17 – The desire to continuously get better at project management
• 18:26 – Making a greater impact in his organization
• 21:52 – The importance of creating a list of daily tasks and sticking to it
• 25:12 – Two key business problems that are in constant need of attention
• 26:37 – The definition of business capacity
• 28:54 – Finding the balance between growing a business and growing a team to support that growth
• 31:44 – An example of hiring in anticipation of growth
• 34:55 – Chris’ ultimate goal
• 35:39 – The importance of awareness and visibility
• 36:42 – Chris’ take on the current business market

“I am personally trying to figure out how to be better at fewer things and not get caught up in the chaos. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” (08:43)
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“Don’t be the executive – don’t be that person – that’s a leader that’s like, ‘I’m too big for this,’ because guess what? This is the way the world works now.” (16:57)
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“I don’t need to be on every single call, but I’m on every single call because I’m afraid of not having the right outcome.” (20:22)
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“The genesis of all this, for me, is to figure out how to find the best and the brightest, maintain them, and have more of my time to do what I’m good at.” (34:56)
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Chris Snyder: Seriously, seriously this is what we do, and I think I had stated on another show, it's not about balance, it's about integration. If you don't like it, and you feel like you're always out of balance, then don't do this. Go be a yoga instructor.

Harry: Welcome to Snyder Showdown, an original Juhll Agency production. This is the show for unvarnished conversations about what's really happening in the world of digital advertising. With the stories from the trenches about what's working, and what's not. With your host, President of Juhll Agency, and founder, operator, and investors in banks.com, Chris Snyder.

Chris Snyder: One thing I was thinking about for this show, since we basically agreed on the cadence of hey, every Friday, let's just convene and have this conversation.

Harry: Yeah.

Chris Snyder: Instead of me trying to predispose what's going on, because frankly I don't have time. If I had time to sit here and spend three hours on a podcast, I should just be spending three hours generating revenue for my fucking business, right? I just don't have time, and so what a lot of listeners get, is raw.

Harry: What's interesting, is this is the life of an entrepreneur, right? This is the life of a business owner. This is exactly what's going on in all our lives, and it's almost like you are documenting the journey.

Chris Snyder: You're actually hitting my point, my point is every Friday you and I are going to have a check in. You're going to ask me what I've been up to for a week. I thought about this a little bit here and there when I got a chance, because once you start diving into knowledge work, or once you start diving into an Excel spreadsheet, or once you start dealing with people, or having management items that you need to address, or client items that you need to address, or accounting items that you need to address, right?

Chris Snyder: Whatever the case may be, your mind should be focused on that thing, and it really shouldn't be focused on, oh, what am I going to talk about on my show this week, right? That seems a little off from a prioritization standpoint. Anyway, I say all that to say that I'm going to talk about what I did this week. I'm just going to pull up my calendar and start talking about the shit that I got done this week, that I think for the most part, has been pretty exciting.

Chris Snyder: About three weeks ago, I don't know if you've been to my website, the agency website, juhll.com. The agency website has something on it called a chatbot. That chatbot is from a company called Drift, D-R-I-F-T, if you've never heard of them, yeah. David Cancel's company, he's a serial entrepreneur, he's done this a few times. It's no secret, our agency's in the lead gen., business.

Chris Snyder: B2B and B2C, if someone's coming to your website, they're probably going to hit a form. If you have not fully optimized that entire experience, both on the paid media side, and on the landing page side when they hit that form, then you're probably not doing the best you can do from a revenue standpoint.

Harry: Okay.

Chris Snyder: We've been doing that, lead generation lead optimization stuff for 12 years or more. After reading and looking at the Drift technology, and just really hearing David and his team beat that drum about lead forms suck, lead forms are dead, everybody hates fucking lead forms. I'm like, "Dude, yeah I hate lead forms, I hate them," right? "I'm with you man."

Chris Snyder: Anyway, I basically started talking to a lot of my clients about this Drift stuff. Online chat's been around forever, right?

Harry: Yeah.

Chris Snyder: I mean, let's not get it wrong. There's been other companies that have done a really good job, e-commerce companies, they do scripting in the back, right? One chat agent, one human being chat agent can handle 10 conversations all at the same time. Some of these folks sit in different countries like India. A lot of telephone companies use them for customer service, and then they move their way into e-commerce and started up selling in car.

Chris Snyder: There's a lot of this that's been around, but the interesting part about Drift, is it allows me to be connected to my website. Being an entrepreneur that doesn't have a team of salespeople, I'm the team of salespeople.

Harry: Yeah, I can relate.

Chris Snyder: At our size, I really don't want anyone representing our business right now except for me. Candidly, that should be my job. Candidly, that should be 80% of my full-time job.

Harry: I've heard that, I've heard anywhere from 50% to 90% of a business owners time should be on Biz Dev.

Chris Snyder: It should be on Biz Dev, and when you don't do that, you get yourself in trouble. I can talk for days and days about that. We could record 10 episodes about how Biz Dev should be the number one thing for you. If you're not doing that, you're just biding time. It's going to happen, it happened to me, you lose a bunch of clients, and if you don't have that pipeline full, you're screwed.

Harry: Yeah.

Chris Snyder: What I'm getting at with the Drift thing, and getting at with what happened to me this week, is this agency has been around since 2006, so that's 12 years. During that time, if you stick it out, and you do the hard, along the way you meet a bunch of people. You have clients, some you keep, some you lose. Just randomly, a business that I drove down to San Diego to see probably 8 years ago now, the CEO, who now, I mean this is a very large organization now, multimillion dollar business.

Chris Snyder: They have a very famous domain, which I'll leave nameless, because I want to tell a whole bunch of good stuff. He was poking around on LinkedIn, and then saw someone that was connected to me. He had a great product experience with another company, and then realized that someone from our team had done a thing with another thing. He was like, "Oh, holy shit, I know these guys," and then he basically came to my website.

Chris Snyder: I have a Drift bot on my website, and that Drift bot pops up, and it basically says, "Hey, how can I help you," right? By the way, that shit is on about as much as never, right? I don't walk around with my Drift bot on, on my phone waiting for someone to call, it doesn't work that way.

Harry: The great thing about that, and I use intercom in a similar way, and you can start making connections with Zapier and Slack and all that stuff to get communication. I think the important thing, it might be where you're headed with this, is the fact that we can now have these time delayed conversations, so you don't have to be literally sitting on your website watching this.

Harry: Because of something like Drift bot, I think you were able to now pick up that conversation.

Chris Snyder: Here's what I was thinking too, I was like, "Holy shit, what were to happen if this guy were to come to my website, and I didn't have that?" The CEO of this company came to my website, which oh, by the way, I mean who knows? Maybe he would have hit me on LinkedIn, not sure, maybe he would've done something else and found me, not sure.

Chris Snyder: The way I looked at it, was for the first time ever, this thing like made a lot of sense to me. It was a personal and very valuable experience. By the way, for anyone out there listening, it's fucking free, so don't sit here and say, "Well, I can't ..." Yeah, the complicated shit's expensive, right? They got to have a hook, and they got to get their technology installed. They got to get it distributed, and that's fine.

Chris Snyder: I had the paid version, 300 bucks a month for a long time, it was so robust, it was overkill for what I need. I dove headlong into that technology, and I built full blown question and answer lead forms with that technology for my clients. I recommended, I actually hit up the CEO and the VP of sales, one of our biggest clients, they're a $13 billion company ...

Chris Snyder: By the way, we only have one of those, so I'm not some big shit guy here. We usually have one or two big companies that people know us, and they really value our services. I basically introduced him direct connect, the CEO to said $13 billion company. They now have Drift installed on their website, and they're training 10,000 sales reps on how to use Drift.

Chris Snyder: You know how much I got paid for that? Fucking zero, and do you know how much I care? Zero, and dude do you know why? It's because if you chase every single little thing, and you try to get every single little drip of every single piece of penny or dollar out of everyone, you're never going to win. I don't sell software, I like their solution, I basically am just trying to make the introduction.

Chris Snyder: I have a client, and it builds credibility with me too. Anyway, my point to this is what did I do this week? I got pinged from a CEO of probably a $50 or $60 million company, Internet company, drove down, met with them on Tuesday, all day meeting. We had a brief discussion on the phone, and then what came out of that was, "Oh, you've got this killer domain. Oh Chris, I had no idea, we haven't talked for 8 years, I had no idea you were investing in building banks.com."

Chris Snyder: Then I had another buddy of mine who incidentally got into a very similar domain space that had the same extension. I think that these businesses, even though it would seem from the outside person that they're very similar, they're not. They're actually very different, right? If you go to a .gov website, your experience and the things that you can do with that extension, are very different that at a .com.

Chris Snyder: Anyway, so here's what I did. I said, "Well that's interesting, because a buddy of mine has a very similar extension to what you have. I think he actually should be included in the meeting." I text him, the CEO calls me, we get this whole thing together, and I basically brought a business meeting together with banks.com and two other .com domains that probably combined, could build $100 million worth of value over the next five years.

Chris Snyder: Probably, first point to that story, is that was Tuesday, okay? Second point to that story, is when you're doing something as a human being, whether it's trying to play an instrument, whether it's trying to play a sport, whether it's your job, the only reason I was able to do any of this, is because I've been doing the same shit for long enough ...

Chris Snyder: I have staying power long enough for magical opportunities just to happen. By the way, they're not magical, and is not lucky, it's because I've stayed in this game long enough to sometimes get a couple of bluebirds man, it was good.

Harry: Define what you mean when you say bluebird.

Chris Snyder: Bluebird, that's a little bit old-school. Back when I was selling, which you may have heard this in some prior episodes. I actually don't know if I told this story, but I was an appointment setter in Cheyenne, Wyoming for a Kirby vacuum cleaner place. This was a very interesting job, I literally had the Yellow Pages, and I would literally sit in a room like this little dark room, I'd get out of high school, and then I would walk to this place, and I would basically just cold call your ass.

Chris Snyder: This was before TCPA, this was before the do not call list. This was before any of that stuff.

Harry: Boiler room type stuff.

Chris Snyder: This is boiler room stuff, yes, for sure, and I love that movie, right? Not for the wrong reasons, I love that movie for the right reasons. A bluebird though, and as your sales career grows, it's like you're just sitting there one day, and somebody's like, "Oh, I want to buy all of that." You're just going to get a shit load of commission, and you basically did nothing, that's a bluebird.

Chris Snyder: It's like a lead that you didn't earn, right? It's a win that you don't deserve. You're not that fucking talented, you showed up to work that day, it made your day. At 22 years old or whatever, you're like, "Okay, I'm going to go get some beers."

Harry: What's interesting is you use bluebird in conjunction with that story you just described, but it sounds to me like you've been ... I call it planting seeds, I call it this idea of you have this business that you're building, this reputation that you have, that conversation you had 8 years ago. I call luck when preparation meets opportunity. I don't really think there's anything as just stumbling into good luck, it's something that comes up as a result of all the hard work we've put in prior.

Chris Snyder: Yeah, yeah, no, that's absolutely right. For sure, I don't want to position it as oh yeah, Chris just walks around getting lucky. No I don't, I can share nasty stories, as all entrepreneurs can about getting their ass kicked in for many, many months and years, right? I've woken up many times with huge losses, right? Real economic losses, not just fake shit, like oh, I did something and pissed someone off at work, and now they're a little bit mad at me, like that's not a loss dude, that's something you need to figure out as a human being.

Chris Snyder: Anyway, so you got to be available, right?

Harry: Can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like for folks who are not familiar with those tools, what they can do, and the value that having it on your website, like why specifically just what that whole flow looked like?

Chris Snyder: If you're super old-school, and maybe if you're new school, if you're whatever school, successful or not, and you're going to say, "Look, if someone wants to get a hold of me, they'll figure out how to get a hold of me." Well guess what? You're a moron, you're a moron. Why would you say that? Have you taken a look around? People don't even watch when they walk across the street nowadays, because they have their silly head buried into their silly phone.

Chris Snyder: I mean, that's a fact, right?

Harry: Yeah, the crazy thing is that some of them don't even bother now to give you the courtesy of looking up. I've had people come towards me with their head down, on their phone, and you would think at the last minute they'd look up and be like, "Oh sorry, and then ... No, they just keep going.

Chris Snyder: No, they keep going, right?

Harry: That's like the next level type stuff.

Chris Snyder: Yeah, it's next level shit, but look the question is Chris, why did you do this? How did you figure it out? How can people do it? Look man, first of all, be aware of what the fuck is going on around you. This has nothing to do with millennial's being on Snapchat, or my 95-year-old grandmother being on Facebook. This has nothing to do with that.

Chris Snyder: This has everything to do with having a current communication mechanism, right? That's it, I mean, I remember when cell phones came out, and everyone had one, one of those little Nokia's with the green screens. You thought you were fucking James Bond. You were awesome.

Harry: I had the silver one with the panel that slides out. At the time, that was the coolest thing ever, it's like a toy now.

Chris Snyder: It was super cool, and those phone bills were 400 bucks a month man for a bullshit plan that got no coverage. If you walked around the corner, you dropped the call, right? You lost your deal or whatever, so you had to be careful about what things you did on your cell phone, because it was not very reliable, right? At the end of the day, if you're passionate about this business, and you're really curious, and you're really trying to drop yourself into situations where you're trying to learn and experiment, then you will put a Drift bot on your website.

Chris Snyder: I don't care if you're super technical or not, if you fucking care about your business, figure it out. Actually Harry, I got a hold of you on your intercom bot.

Harry: You did, yeah.

Chris Snyder: Now that I'm remembering.

Harry: It's crazy, because it started to happen more, and this speaks to SEO. A lot of friends tell me just get more traffic to your site, because people are going to see that, and start the conversation. I think, to your point, of having a way to have those conversations in a way that's not specific to you being in one place, or even being in one time zone, there's this idea of time shifting now.

Harry: I recently got one last week from someone in India for a company that wanted to start a podcast. The only communication to them from them to me was through that intercom chat. We have a call next week early for me, it's a 6: 30 AM.

Chris Snyder: Yeah.

Harry: It's just interesting, because it's almost like this ability to just talk to people, it's almost like time travel, because you're talking to people when it's convenient for them to just jump on. Then you're getting pinged in the evening, and as an entrepreneur, we just see the message when we see it, and we decide if we want to have the conversation.

Harry: For them it's normal business hours, so if you're not responding, they're continuing their search for someone that can help them.

Chris Snyder: Yeah, and by the way, if you don't want to get up at 6: 30, you don't have to do. Do you know what I mean? I hear this too, because we have clients, some of them are large, some of them are small. It's always the edge case scenario, it's always the what if? It's like, "Well, if I put this on my website, and someone tries to contact me at 2 AM, that's not cool."

Chris Snyder: Turn your phone off, or put your Drift bot to sleep dude. Don't say silly shit, just try stuff, and try to get better.

Harry: It depends how you're setting up these tools, and there's a lot, not to overwhelm the listener with a bunch of tools. I connected my intercom chatbot to Slack, and Slack is my go to. Slack is like my conduit, everything comes in and goes out through Slack.

Chris Snyder: I'm with you.

Harry: Really helpful, and I saw that notification, so for me ... Slack knows not to ping me at night anyway, so it's not going to ping me. I'm excited about the ability for people to ping me if I'm out and about, and I'm just online at the store or something like that, and I'm having a sales conversation with someone. This is ... I don't know, what we live for, at least what I do as an entrepreneur, just to have conversations with prospects who are interested in my stuff.

Chris Snyder: This is what we do.

Harry: Yeah.

Chris Snyder: Seriously, seriously this is what we do. I think I'd had stated on another show, it's not about balance, it's about integration. If you don't like it, and you feel like you're always out of balance, then don't do this. Go be a yoga instructor, because if you feel like every other second you're stressed out and you need balance, don't do this, or don't do whatever the hell it is you're doing, it doesn't matter.

Chris Snyder: If you're a banker, if you're a lawyer, if you're a doctor, and you always feel like you're out of balance, you're not doing the right stuff, right? It doesn't bother me one bit to look down on my phone and see someone trying to reach out to me and ask me a question, I don't care who they are, I'm just going to respond. This business is not big enough for me not to take 10 or 15 Drift conversations a month, it's not that big of a deal.

Chris Snyder: Guess what? 90% of them are going to be dog poop, but hey, guess what? It's called sales.

Harry: Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting Chris, because most business owners ... Well, I don't want to speak for most business owners, but a lot of business owners don't put enough importance on that. They're always looking to build systems like they want to grow. They're like okay, how quickly can I get a salesperson in there? How quickly can I get someone in a project manager, or ops manager?

Harry: There's all these positions, but sales, I think, is one of the last ones we need to let go of, because it's almost the only way we have to understand what the market is asking for, and what type of problems people have. I mean, I am just like you, I want to be front and center with those conversations, because I want to understand what is it about that I'm saying to them that either convinces them, or doesn't convince them that they should work with me?

Chris Snyder: No, it's exactly right, and you what the interesting thing about sales is? I want to have one of my good friends on to talk about this at some point. I've been in sales since I legally could, legally could, since I was 16 years old. I've worked at a telemarketing company, and I think I've talked about that. Before that, I mowed lawns. I would go around the neighborhood, and I would literally knock on people's doors, and I'd be like five bucks to mow your lawn, right?

Chris Snyder: These were big ass yards. I think before that I knocked on a few business doors, and I wound up at a barbershop literally sweeping up hair on a military base. These guys, these young guys would come and get all their hair shaved off. I'd be standing there with a broom, and I swear to God, as fast as those guys would sit in the chair, all their fucking hair would be gone.

Chris Snyder: I'd be sweeping it up, and I think a haircut back then was $4 or $5. Then the next would sit in the chair, right? I'm frantically sweeping up hair after school, or whatever it was. I don't even think you're allowed to do that shit nowadays. Getting back to the point a little bit, selling, if you love what you do, you're passionate about what you do, and you're good with the content, you're good with what you're trying to sell, and you believe in it, I've always been the guy that can sell what I believe in, right?

Chris Snyder: It shouldn't be that big of a deal, if you're an entrepreneur, and you love what you do, and you're really trying to make it work. You're trying to make it work for the right reasons. You're not trying to make it work so you can go buy a fucking Mercedes, so you can look as good as your buddy who's an investment banker or whatever.

Chris Snyder: You don't have the confidence in your own game to simply go out and sell shit because you believe in it, you're only selling it because you heard that salespeople make a lot of money, and therefore it will buy you a Mercedes Benzo. Like fuck that, guess what? Guess how successful you're going to be? Probably a little bit successful at the beginning, and then a lot successful, and then fucking miserable the rest of your life. That's what's going to happen, right?

Harry: Yeah.

Chris Snyder: You're going to wake up in the airport with a wheelie bag looking around at a bunch of other old people with wheelie bags that just got done selling shit that they don't believe in and they don't care about. You're going to come home to a benzo you never drive, because you're on a fucking airplane all the time, and be like, "Oh, yeah, I guess I hate selling, I fucking hate sales." Okay, well, that's why you hate sales.

Chris Snyder: You don't really like what you do, it's not about selling. You know what? The other thing about selling, now that we're going off on the selling tangent, although it is still relevant to selling on your website with a Drift bot, everybody sells. Whether you define it as that or not, you know how many times a day my kids sell shit to me?

Harry: Yeah.

Chris Snyder: Dude, they are selling from the morning until the night.

Harry: The interesting thing there, is that it ties back to that comment you made about people not having a passion for selling, or getting tired of selling. I think if they don't believe in what they're selling, then they're going to lose interest fast. If they don't have a vested interest in what they're selling, and they just feel like they're doing it for the benefit of their boss, or for the company, they're not going to have an interest in it.

Harry: Your kids, they have an interest in what they're selling you, because they know that if they can convince you, that it's going to be an awesome day for them. I think we have that unique take on it as business owners, because it's literally how we stay alive.

Chris Snyder: Okay, so now it's about perspective, and it's about context, and it's about how badly do you really have to do this? In the end, in our business, if you don't sell, you don't eat, bottom line. Depending on how much you need to, "Eat," your vacations, your cars, your houses, your this, your camps, your whatever it is, all the things in life that, when you really break it down, aren't as important as they seem.

Chris Snyder: When you get yourself in a pickle, if you're just going to be miserable trying to outsell that cost, I don't know if you're going to make it, which by the way, I think one of the primary reasons why a lot of entrepreneurs don't make it, and this is a known fact. I'm not going to quote any facts, because I don't have it right in front of me. There's a very large percentage of businesses, especially small businesses, in which we'd be classified as, fail.

Harry: Yeah.

Chris Snyder: It's the direct result of not being able to fucking sell. It's not because you can't, because I just told you kids do it all day long, it's because you won't. You have some weird mental aversion to fucking asking someone for something. It's just for some other reason, and it's nonsensical. It's because the alternative is failure, and if you think about how you feel in your gut when you fail, it sucks.

Chris Snyder: Guess what? That same physiological reaction when you get overwhelmed with so many leads, you don't know what to do with, and you're generating shit loads of revenue, you feel the same way in your gut. One really fucking sucks, you're losing money. The other one sucks physiologically, because you feel the same way, but you're making shit loads of money.

Chris Snyder: You choose, you choose. What's going to make you happy? Feel like shit, or feel like shit the other way? I up, or feel like shit?

Harry: Where were you previously having those conversations before you had installed Drift bot?

Chris Snyder: I wasn't, well okay, I would say probably LinkedIn I would say, which by the way, I had a great conversation with those guys the other day. When I was doing sales way back in the day was ... As I do sales, and I still do a lot of selling, we had to figure out what title ... How do you get them ... I had to call administrative assistants at large companies and the gatekeepers, right?

Chris Snyder: I can't remember the name of the movie, but the Ghostbusters, you had Ghostbusters with Dan Aykroyd, and they had the very large statues like the gatekeeper. Everyone's like, "You can't get in to talk to a senior level decision maker 20 years ago." You don't even know who the fuck that person is.

Harry: Yeah.

Chris Snyder: Do you know how fortunate the sellers in today's world are? Dude, you have it easy, you have it easy, and by the way, at most of these big companies, which they never had for most of the organizations I worked for, now they also have sales development reps. Guess what? If you're an amazing salesperson, you don't even have to generate your own leads anymore.

Chris Snyder: By the way, I don't think you should. I'm just saying I had to figure out what the fuck I was going to sell. Let's say a company has three or four products, there was no BI, there was no intelligence, there was no CRM. Dude, I had a fucking PalmPilot, right? Then I went to a handspring, because I was like, "Oh, I don't like the big companies, I'll use a handspring."

Chris Snyder: I would literally write all this shit down in my own fucking database, because I did that. Then you'd go to the company and it would be like, "Okay Chris, we have like three or four or five products, and here's maybe what you should do." Nobody fucking knew, there was no BI. The way I tracked my calls was a piece of paper, and you did the little stick thing.

Chris Snyder: Then we got four sticks, you put a stick through the stick. You were like, "That's five, that's five mother fucker, I made five calls," right?

Harry: I was doing that recently I think a couple of weeks ago. I was keeping track of some stuff, that's ...

Chris Snyder: Yeah, dude, that's good, but my point is, is LinkedIn calls, and they're like, "Oh, for X amount of money you can get access to our entire fucking database." I'm like, "What?" I'm like, "What did you say," right? It's like you mean I can bang on anyone I want on InMail? Dude, it's just math, take a copywriting course, or if you're my age, or your age.

Chris Snyder: I hope you have a fucking clue, don't be an entrepreneur if you don't even know how to write good copy to get anybody's attention. At the end of the day, dude, you can get a hold of anyone on the planet nowadays. The only thing that's limiting you, is your creativity. By the way, I didn't say smart, I said the only thing that's limiting you is your creativity.

Chris Snyder: Back in the day, when you and I were doing it, I literally sometimes would go out and get whatever point letterhead ... The fucking piece of paper would cost $8, right? I'd be like, "Ooh, do I use UPS or FedEx," right? "Do I address it to him, or his admin?" Every single word that I would write on that memo, they were called fucking memos, right?

Chris Snyder: I knew was important, and you know how I measured that response rate? Dude you can't, you can't. Well, the way you measure response rate in that case, is you just look at your commission check at the end of the year, and if you didn't hit your quarterly goals, you were fired anyway, right? That's how you measured that, but nowadays, everything is so systematic.

Chris Snyder: There's so many crutches to not be that good. Let's think about this, actually I'm glad you brought all of this up, because now, what did I do this week? Well fuck, I don't know, but we're doing this right now. I'm telling you right now, the more that I think about it, selling has never been easier, it has never been more available. There's never been any more systems to track it that are more mature and cost-effective ever in the history of mankind, never.

Chris Snyder: The only thing you're lacking is the fucking desire and the creativity to make it work. All you have to do is sit down and write something neat, and you can send a note to anyone on LinkedIn today, today. You can do that today for free. I didn't say access to the whole database, I said you could do that today for free. There's so many tools out there.

Harry: Have you had success with it?

Chris Snyder: I haven't done it as much as I should, because going back to what we talked about at the beginning of this conversation, I've been so busy, "Running a business," I haven't been selling as much as I should be. I got a real inkling over the last two weeks to just dive full blown into selling only, selling, selling, selling. I'm getting off the client calls, I'm not talking to senior marketing directors anymore.

Chris Snyder: Some are great, and I do like those conversations. Some waste my time, most can't sign my contract, most don't understand the value of what we provide, or the path, or the direction of what they should be doing. When I ask nicely or politely that we do it a certain way, they probably won't do it anyway, right? It's their company, so they can do whatever the fuck they want, I don't care.

Chris Snyder: At the end of the day, I've always been passionate about selling. I would say I've done it strategically over the past 12 years to build a halfway decent business, but I haven't done it methodically to build a really big business.

Harry: Are you doing that now?

Chris Snyder: I'm thinking about it.

Harry: What does that look like?

Chris Snyder: What it looks like, is me just eating my own dog food like I was just talking about with you, and really diving in head first into setting up my ecosystem for massive amounts of scale contacts, and getting the clients, and building the relationships that matter, instead of waiting for the bluebird. You see?

Harry: Yeah, I saw what you did there.

Chris Snyder: Yeah, dude, I don't even know how I did it, but that's true. You know what? That's true, and anyone can build a halfway decent sized business on fucking referrals and bluebirds. You can't scale it, I'm here to tell you, I'm in it right now, it doesn't fucking scale.

Harry: Every new entrepreneur does it in the beginning, because that's all they know, and they're so busy keeping their existing clients going. They're wearing so many hats, and they're doing good work, and then people keep sending them business. Then you find out the hard way, and I found out the hard way as well. It's not sustainable, and the minute you take your foot off the gas of the Biz Dev, inevitably you're going to get caught off guard by those two or three clients that just bail, and you didn't have anything in the funnel waiting to replace them.

Chris Snyder: By the way, all those things that you just talked about, they're all facts. They're all excuses for all of us. There are so many fucking excuses you can use to not pick up the phone, not send that InMail, not think strategically about your positioning in the marketplace. Dude, there's so many excuses. My last thought on this being groomed, from the point at which I left college and started to see what was going on around me with all this technology growth, and I decided when I was 19 or 20 years old, because I was working for Gateway selling computers, I decided I wanted to be in technology, I decided that.

Chris Snyder: I was good at selling, so I decided I was going to be, not a salesperson, I decided I was going to be a professional salesperson, a professional salesperson. There's a huge difference between being a professional salesperson, and some joker who's just trying to do whatever. I'm talking about someone who bought all the books, read the books, understands their craft, right? Asks all the right questions, getting to yes, Harvard business school studies, all this shit that you do to get where you need to go with professional enterprise sales in technology.

Chris Snyder: That was me, so then when I went to the agency side, and I did selling, enough selling to get us in this spot. Then you get enough referrals to get you to the next spot. Then when you lose everything, or a lot of that stuff goes away, someone who classifies themselves as a professional salesperson, is now sitting at a desk all day, basically doing account management, and basically doing operations, and basically doing everything except for fucking selling, you get hit from two directions on it.

Chris Snyder: Well, I'm going to say, I get hit from two directions on it. On the one direction I'm like, this is the football guy inside of me. Your coach going, "You should have made the tackle, you should have made the tackle, you should have made the tackle, you should have fucking worked out harder. If you would have been one step to the left, that fucking wide receiver wouldn't have beat you for the touchdown. Now you look like an ass hole," right?

Chris Snyder: The little voice inside your professional salesperson head is beating you up, right? You already feel bad that you're not doing it for an hour a day like you should be, and you should be, you found excuses.

Harry: At least an hour.

Chris Snyder: At least an hour, and then the other part of it, is you look at your balance sheet after you got your shit kicked in, and you're like, "Oh, yeah, that sucks too." I think if you're a sales guy in a situation like this, and you're not selling, and you're not doing well, right? You feel a little worse about it. By the way, we're doing fine.

Harry: What I think would be interesting, and this thing that you mentioned that you're going to be working on, this project to amp up, or enhance what you're currently doing from a sales process, it would be interesting, from a, follow the journey perspective, if we check back in on this topic. We put a pin in this, and you start putting some of that stuff in place. Then some episodes down the line, we'll come back, and I'll have a note to check in on you on that.

Harry: I think that will be helpful, because we talk about a lot of these topics. I think what's going to happen, is as you're thinking these through, and you're running your business, you're in the trenches, you're doing it. You're going to revamp what you're doing from a sales process, and I think that's helpful for the listeners. If it's all right with you, I'd like to revisit this once you give me the heads up that you've made some progress, and you want to check in on it.

Chris Snyder: Yeah, I just took a note in my Google doc with all these topics, and I just called it selling showdown, right? I don't know man, I'm uncompetitive, and I like to be challenged. I don't need someone to challenge me, I challenge myself, and I challenged myself a few weeks ago to get out of some of this stuff, and just go and create the opportunity.

Chris Snyder: At the end of the day, everybody sells, you've got to sell. If you're an entrepreneur, and you're not selling, you're just selling yourself short, right? Bottom line, banks.com, it might need funding, right? I'm going to have to go talk to some folks about that. I'm going to have to find them, we're going to have to identify them. What's the ideal profile of the VC that might invest in a business like that?

Chris Snyder: You've got to go through the whole thing, and you've got to go out there, and you've got to pitch these guys, and it's a numbers game, same deal. What about business partners, and I'm talking more vendors, not business partners like some want to be a business partner with me. I don't need that, but what about these business partners that we've synced up with over the years? You know how I've found them?

Chris Snyder: Dude, I found them by reaching out, calling them, talking to them, and then going through the whole process. This shit takes months, and also, just even talking about the agency and creating awareness, I don't know, you don't even need to sell. Why don't you just let people know you exist? It doesn't even need to be one of those things where it's hard-core, boiler room shit, you just need to figure out what your plan is to identify the folks who you think might buy your stuff, and be the best fit for it.

Chris Snyder: You need to take action on that, you need to take action on that.

Harry: Daily action.

Chris Snyder: Daily action, yes, daily action. By the way, I've done a lot of selling over my whole life, and I've been very successful doing it. A lot of it, honestly, a lot of it is just ... I think it's personality, I think it's preparation. Some of the books I read back in the day was, for every one minute conversation you have with a senior level executive, you need to spend 10 minutes of preparation, 10 minutes of preparation.

Chris Snyder: Let's just do the math on that, right? You're going to meet with an executive for 60 minutes, times 10, that's 600 minutes, divided by 60, you better be preparing 10 hours for that meeting. If you're not, you're going to fucking fail. You're just going to fail, and I hate to fail. I hate to look silly, and I hate to fail, and that's me. Maybe you don't, maybe someone else doesn't, by the way, I'm not suggesting you do.

Chris Snyder: I just want to make it very clear, that's me. If you're okay to walk in a room and look like a jackass, don't prepare for the meeting, just don't prepare. Ramble around like an empty fucking wagon, say stuff that doesn't matter, it's not meaningful, don't do any research on LinkedIn. Don't go to any of the million free websites out there that you can find out anything you want to find out about anything, and walk into that meeting, because you didn't give a fuck, and you're okay with just feeling like a failure.

Harry: See where that gets you.

Chris Snyder: Let's see where it gets you, right?

Harry: Thanks for listening to Snyder Showdown, visit snydershowdown.com to see the full show notes for every episode, which includes a recap, as well as any links mentioned in the show. Because it's Chris, we'll definitely have a few awesome quotes that you can share. There, you'll also be able to sign up for our newsletter, so you're notified when new episodes are ready. See you next week.