00:00 So hey guys, welcome back to another episode of B2B Rebellion. Really happy today to have somebody that we've been doing quite a bit of work with in the past couple of months, and somebody I've known from my career for quite a while, is Aaron Ross from Predictable Revenue. So you may know Aaron from a couple of the books he's written. He's also, you know, you may come across on LinkedIn. A couple of books he's written of No Predictable Revenue.

00:29 and also from Impossible to Inevitable, the more recent edition. He's also known as well for having a lot of children running around behind him. And I always... I'm laughing, I'm fucking out. So, you know, I always enjoy our conversations, Aaron. So like, I'll let you give yourself a little bit of an introduction, maybe, you know, what predictable revenue you're up to, what you guys offer, and also, you know, your past a little bit. So over to you, mate. Yeah.

00:57 First, let me get my audio working again. I realize this is like everyone's dealing with this right now. We got kids, dogs, I don't know, maybe you're showered, maybe not. And for a lot of people, they were working at home or doing remote sales. A lot of people were used to field sales and you know, we're all friends here. So I know for me, cause I've been doing remote stuff for a long time and having kids break in on me for years. And like, I'm glad we're all in the same boat now, you know.

01:26 Absolutely. Absolutely. So how's business being made? How's business being a predictable revenue over the past couple of months? Yeah, I know it's been picking up. So I know back in kind of maybe April when the world panics, everything goes in lockdown, I know for a couple of months, we, so predictable revenue.com is a business and we do outbound sales services, right? Either helping people build outbound teams, a lot of it's kind of different flavors of outsourcing, whether from

01:56 your people prospectors for you. And we also do like training consulting. It's all about creating results from outbound prospecting. So, and we've got about 55 people. We're doing, gonna plan on doing like 7 million this year. Pre-COVID. So April, May, I don't think we sold, I don't think anyone customers signed up in April, May. We had some churn. I don't wanna say 10%. It was, it wasn't life threatening.

02:24 I mean, it's definitely alarming. So there's some businesses that just hit the wall, right? They're just, they're done, travel. And some businesses got a tailwind. And there's so many businesses, like most, that are kind of in this middle where, yeah, things are slow, but we're not, we've got to adjust and adapt, and that's kind of where we are. So for a couple months, I mean, just roughly, nothing, anything, anyone signed up. And then now we're signing up, starting to sign up a lot more customers. What we're doing, we kind of rejiggered our product offerings a bit, and this, that, the other. So.

02:54 I haven't changed my stance from the beginning, which was in March, you know, this thinking and still feeling that this is the, you know, we're all getting this chance to hit the reset button on how we work. And a lot of the world and the markets and businesses are being, you can use the word disruptive, but really it's just kind of, it's like that we had this puzzle and the puzzle has been thrown up in the air. It's all coming down into new shapes. Like it's being re everything's being recreated. It doesn't feel good for most people, most businesses.

03:23 It doesn't mean something at the end of the world. It's kind of like when an old forest burns down so the new one can grow. And so ultimately this would be, for people and for businesses, it can be a great thing for you if you look ahead a year or two and realizing there's always these big, I don't even want to say recessions, just kind of like cataclysmic events that happen every few years or few decades.

03:51 and you get through them, hopefully most people do, and if you embrace it, you can come out better on the other side. If you resist it and kind of hope things would go back to where they were, you know, stuck. Let's pick a case right now, and we're just talking about how in the United States, a lot of states and locales and governors are like, hey, let's reopen. We gotta get open. Gotta get open, this pandemic thing is a bit of a fad. Let's not make a deal, I know. And...

04:20 Obviously, and then of course within weeks, cases spike, because they're holding onto the past. But I actually really don't know. I feel horrible for all the restaurants. Like everyone's got challenges. But for restaurants and small business owners, and I don't even know. So maybe they're doing that out of desperation for all the small businesses that are still shut down. Like, I don't even know. But there's a lot of opportunity. Like,

04:48 It may not feel good to people right now. I think there's still so much stress and financial anxiety and uncertainty and life uncertainty. We have teenagers that don't know if they're going to go back to boarding school in September or not. And we have nine kids, a couple in college, a couple in boarding school, and they don't know. So they're OK with uncertainty. Nothing's predictable. Being unpredictable. How are we going to get through this? How are you going to?

05:16 So I know for us as a business, what's really worked is just taking it's like step by step, day by day, week by week. And, um, you know, in the beginning, like one of our values was we, we didn't want to have to, we wanted to be able to get through this without laying anyone off. It was a goal and we haven't laid anyone off yet. We let a couple of people go who weren't a fit, which is different. Um, so I think we're fortunate in that place, having a strong brand and a great team to have a great chance of that.

05:45 And, uh, but you know, who knows, we'll see. And I know that as long as it's, it's just, it's really easy to get cut up in so much anxiety and certainty about the next even months and much less years. So for us, it's just being really present like today, this week, this, this month, maybe two months, just like really short-term focus towards the day to day of. Iterating and adjusting and being okay with things being, uh, changeable. Cause we haven't even seen the big recession yet.

06:14 Yeah, sure. Sure. That's going to be a couple of months down the line for sure. I mean, you mentioned a couple of minutes ago about you guys signing new clients. And I like I like the analogy you gave there just about it's a bit like, you know, when a forest burns down and the soil is now fertile and it's time to grow again with those new customers, how are you advising them? I guess it's it's tough, right? Like what advice do you give to you? Have a framework to have something that you give them.

06:42 Yeah, well, okay, so we focus on outbound prospecting. We can do some teaching. We have a bunch of our own people who do it. And so I think, you know, a lot of the outbound prospecting results in terms of meetings and calls have come back in lots of ways. It's just a bit different, right? There's lots of people who are at home, not at the office, so there's calls. So I don't get into the details, but prospecting and outbound still works. For some companies, better than before. Some companies worse than before, but still works. And I'll give you one example.

07:11 Like we're focused more on more on LinkedIn and have been for the last year, but even, even double now, because LinkedIn has been expanding so much COVID. So one of our most, our most popular services is a, so we used to have like a $6,000 service and we kind of dropped that to 2,500 with some permitting stuff. So it's kind of a lower base to start. It's focused on LinkedIn. It's like an easier people to get started and so on. So it's good adapting that for the times.

07:41 And advice is kind of the same. It's like, you know, like, who's your ideal customer? There's going to have to be some iteration. It's going to take a few weeks or six weeks, a couple months, to kind of get the ball rolling. It might be faster, it might be slower. You know, great things don't happen instantly. So like the advice actually is the same. I think a lot of times, again, just going back to, as if things could change, there could be another black swan. You know, like the government's just still propping up economies right now.

08:10 and salaries. I don't know how many tens of millions of people filed for unemployment in the States, but if the United States stops propping that up or when they do, can they really prop things up for 18 months? I don't know. Maybe. I suppose if they do it for six months, maybe they can do it for 18 months or however long this takes. What if COVID mutates? There's all these uncertainties. I think it's just...

08:36 People want predictability, but you just can't have, you may, you have to be ready to not have it right now. Do your best, do your campaigns. People might be slower deciding, and you just, you gotta kind of do what you can to embrace the current reality and adapt and not try to take prior expectations from the past and overly color your expectations for right now. For sure, for sure, I mean.

09:03 Yeah, it makes plenty of sense. It's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, but it's actually the truth, to be fair. You know, it's a good, mature way of looking at things because we don't know what's gonna happen next week. We don't know what's gonna happen in two months from now. I mean, yeah, it's ridiculous. So you can do, forecasting is pointless. You can do scenario planning. And I understand, especially if you have, if you're a public company or you've got investors, like there's a lot of pressure.

09:32 and responsibility and obligation and employees and families. Like there's so much weight towards hitting certain goals, having goals, hitting goals and responsibility. And yeah, that can be useful pressure to kind of drive you to change and adapt. And again, like we got to, having a family, having to pay rent, like we got to change. You can't just hold on to embrace new reality, but you know, no one knows.

10:01 And if anyone's trying to make predictions, no one's ever known the future. Some people get lucky in guessing. I think you can probably predict the future, but not when it happens. If you're good at predicting the future, you can't say when it's going to happen. I mean, we'll see. I have no idea. Yeah, for sure. Basically. For sure. That makes sense. I mean, you did mention one thing there about Outbound being quite successful at the moment. Or for some industries, it's working quite well.

10:31 Yeah, and he's working for us better than ever for our clients. Yeah, that's really good. I mean, getting appointments now, sales cycles might be a bit different in terms of win rates in length. So for sure, for sure. I'm hearing I'm hearing some waves like that. If you can show real value, once you get in front of people, people are still looking to buy. Like if you can prove if you can be more valuable than you have been in the past, if you're really solving a problem right now.

10:58 or you're scratching that itch properly, whereas in the past it might have been a noise to have. Now it's a sort of like if you're able to really prove the value, which was always the case. But like it sort of goes to the point and I was going to ask you this, do you think that people or salespeople sort of got a little bit complacent over the past years? It's been somewhat, you know, they did maybe need to sell as hard. I've been hearing that as well. Like now it's really it's more about, you know, you need to go in with not a hard sell, but you need to you need to really

11:28 to like master your craft almost, more so than ever right now. Yeah, I mean, yes, but I think it's not even so much the salespeople can be. Most of the time it's like the product, I think it's the last bunch of years, like the economy's been great. And so there's all kinds of companies and products that were created for all kinds of needs. It's not even that they were nice to have, it's just when COVID hit, all the needs changed, right? So all the nice to have the needs kind of changed around.

11:58 and people's decision making change. So there's, you know, it's like that you're rolling the dice cup, right? You rolled a new set of dice and it's coming up all five. Before it was all sixes, now it's all twos. So you got, everyone's got to do the musical chair or so re-scramble. So I don't think people got complete, I mean, complacent, I don't think it's that. I think it's just, it's a scramble and now you got to re-scramble. As a scramble for everyone. That's one thing you just put there, everybody in the organization, right? Yeah.

12:27 And again, we've never seen a world with this much challenge in its own way, because it's four billion people. Some billions of people are affected in the economy. It's just unimaginable, which means, too, there's never been more opportunity. Like, you know, in five or 10 to 20 years, we'll look back as the kind of it could be the greatest entrepreneurial creation, period of creation that we've ever seen. May not feel like that right now, but that's again, if you have that mindset.

12:56 You know, it's like, I don't even know what's gonna happen with schools. Cause what if, what if kids can't go back to school this year? You know, online learning doesn't work. It's possible. And there could be a whole ton of disruption in schools. I have lots of kids, right? Ages. And to me, I kind of schools, we need the structure, the online learning, the remote learning thing is just kind of a waste of time, honestly, the kids are just good through the motions. I mean, a lot of people would say a lot of structured education is going through the motions, but.

13:24 I have a lot of kids where if they don't have a structure like that, they don't do anything. They just distract themselves from learning. So I don't, to me, for a lot of kids, it would be perfect maybe through this over the next year, a few years, there's a newer model which blends some structure in a school setting with some, off two days at school a week. In Scotland, they're talking about two days in school and then people switch, it's part time.

13:54 Like that actually could be better. I don't know. I could really know the whole school thing is so, but you're going to see business, like all kinds of businesses and economies and sales models, everything just restructured the coming years. So the one example is like, if you've been used to field sales, you've never really done much more remote and you're uncomfortable with it because it's kind of weird and it's not, you don't really get to know people it's kind of flat. Well, you have to have that skill now. So how can you just to be get better at it?

14:20 If you are writing, if you're doing content, like you do have to, how do you get better at it? Because everyone's doing content. Like, there's just so much, there's limited great content from great people, unlimited great products. Like, you know, every niche is crowded. Like, it's a different, I mean, so how do you stand out? You know, so I would say one of the ways is by being more of yourself, right? How are you as a person, your own unique genius and your own style and your personality. So this is going to be a forcing function for.

14:47 businesses and people to get clear on who they are, what they stand for, their value to others. It's just an evolution of the past. It's kind of like speeding things up. It's not, it doesn't feel good. But that's why people, it's going to force people to do stuff because inherently we get stuck in our habits. For sure. Breaking the habit. And it's, it's, it's in the, in the business sense.

15:12 I agree with you, I think there's a lot of opportunity to come from it. I'm already starting to see people seize the opportunity. People are starting to grow, which is good. And it's those that really do something to differentiate, I think. And we've spoken about this so many times already, Aaron, that like you sit in your hands, nothing's going to happen. So like do something, you know, tailor your message a bit better to suit your audience. Now is the time to do it. There's also, you know, I spoke with I spoke with somebody today that

15:40 is in a fairly aging industry. And she was saying that it's been a real terror trying to get the rest of the leadership team to digitalize in the past. But now since COVID's come, they have no choice. But they were really, really pushing against it. Even when COVID first came, they were like, ah, this isn't going to last. And now they're like, OK, we really need to look at this. So this is, if you don't do that, you won't survive. Like, the company won't survive if you don't get digitalized. Welcome to the digital age.

16:09 Exactly, exactly. So like, I think it's put a bit of a, a bit of a kick up the ass of companies and people that haven't been like the retail sector being one in particular, you know, that's been Well, I know for us, for me, one of my kicks in, yeah, I would have resisted, I resisted going virtual. We know, so we had two offices, each one had about 20 ish people, one in Vancouver, one in Cancun, Mexico. I've been remote.

16:36 And I would have been the first, I was the first to say, we don't want our people to go remote because onboarding salespeople, it's just hard remote. But you know, we're going, and we were remote and we decided to stay remote. I've actually been a fan so far because of a lot of other benefits. And so that was kicking the ass for me is the benefits of having a remotely run virtual company. There you go. Because we're embracing. So, you know.

17:03 That's one, I'm sure I've had other kicks in the ass too. But it's funny what you can achieve when your hands are tied behind your back. You know, when you're talking to a person with nine kids and the bill is to match. Your hands and feet tied behind your back. Have you read this book? I have. It's chapter six. When you're basically you're constrained with time, money, sanity. Yes, part six. Impossible to inevitable.

17:33 read it. Forcing. Absolutely. I actually have it on my book. Wait, wait. Let's prove it. Okay. It's the first edition or second though. Oh yeah. The first edition. That's a good one. First edition. So I've got the first edition. You'll have to send me the second one Aaron. Yeah. I will. I'll get your address. Absolutely. Absolutely. But listen, look, we're coming to the end of it now, but it's been really, really nice to speak. Is there anything like that you'd like to leave with or?

18:01 Like where can people find you? How can they get work in with predictable revenue? Simple place to start is pred In fact, by the way, it reminds me one of our new things I'm trying out is like online workshops, the difference from webinars. I shall reach out to you about that. But pred main business. And then actually I would recommend this from impossible.com is the site for this, for the book from impossible to inevitable. It's really like the eighth best starter book.

18:31 But I'm on LinkedIn, probably not that hard to find. If you made it this far and you actually listened for my email address, because I think you needed to connect with me, you're probably able. It's airear at Pred I'm just curious. Send me an email to see how many people got this far and actually listened to that, caught that. I'm going to write it down. I'll bet I'll get five emails. If you get more than that, if you get overloaded, you know who to be blaming, this guy.

18:59 But Eric, or Aaron, it's been a real pleasure, mate. And thank you so much. Yep, thanks and good luck, everybody. Very nice.