Not enough fiber in your diet? Feeling low, feeling lethargic? Well, Billy Bob's Bastard Beans are coming to you live with a new offer that might just blow you away. Jack? Back to you in the studio. Thanks. I thought you were going to keep telling them about Billy Bob's Beans, but maybe for another time. It's different podcast. Today, we're going to talk about opinions, because opinions are like... I'm not allowed to say it live on air, but you know. Right.

Epictetus today, and this is from his discourses, which, I think you're like... Put it that way. Bestseller. What is bad luck? Opinion. What a conflict, dispute, blame, accusation, irreverence, and frivolity. They're all opinions. And more than that, they're opinions that lie outside of your own reasoned choice, presented as if they were good or evil.

Let a person shift their opinions only to what belongs in the field of their own choice. I can guarantee that a person will have peace of mind, whatever is happening around them. Yeah. Do you like opinions? Well, look, what can I say? Opinions are wonderful things, aren't they? So I'm going to give you something we can talk about here. Yeah. All So we've been doing a few audits of businesses. So for this is for the sales consultancy business, not for we have a meeting. So we come in and we sort of find

those problems that are maybe slowing the team down. And I'm sure you've done this as well, where you go over what we call the zombie leads. the almost opportunities from, you know, a year ago, what happened with them? We don't know. They all fell by the wayside. Okay. Fine. Yeah. So what I was finding was I was just willing to kind of get on the phone to lost deals and find out what happened. Some of the things that were down as lost deals weren't lost deals. They were things that were still live.

or they were things where more information been requested or things where there was still a problem there, no solution had been found yet. But something in the process made the salesperson say, actually, I'm just going to put that down as lost or worse still kind of in the ether, no real decision, no real yes or no found because, yeah, I emailed them a few times, but I'm too scared to pick up the phone and have the difficult conversation. I think if you've got those zombie leads set in your pipeline,

There's a lot of things that can happen in just that. Yeah. A couple of times a year going over, right, let's reignite some of the lost opportunities and see what's happening. You, cause it's twofold, isn't it? You not only reignite those opportunities, but you also learn so much. like opinions, you've got to be careful with opinions, but actually feedback is so, powerful. We did it in ours. We got every meeting that had been booked for me or you for, or for, we have a meeting and we went over them.

And we just said like, what, what's happening? Like what, what, that is a pot of gold that some CRMs are sat on, but they don't do anything with at all, which is a shame. And the best approach is, Zach, it's Jack from We Have a Meeting. I don't know if that rings any bells. yeah, we spoke last year. Yeah, we spoke last year. Obviously we didn't end up working together. Bit of a weird one. We're just doing a bit of like research and feedback on how we can improve. I guess.

based on the experience we had last time, what feedback or honest opinion you could give me. And I work in sales so I can take hard opinions. Nice, because opinions are like? People. Exactly. Yeah, I did the same thing for one of our clients where I ran around his lost opportunities and he was like, yeah, these three, don't really know what happened. I sort of got ghosted a bit and he'd actually gone for like quite an aggressive email.

It was almost like the least you could have done was let me know kind of thing. It was a little bit too emotional. But I rang around and these three opportunities were all still live. One was like, yeah, I'm just waiting to see like if we can integrate with something. There was another one that was like, no, it's still very much live. I just need to pull a few more people in. And then one guy was like, yeah, the only thing I needed to know was does it do X, Y and Z? If I said it could do those things. yeah, then we'd probably want to move ahead. But it's

probably a lesson in trying to pick up the phone, have the hard conversation, even on the lost deals, because every opportunity is a learning opportunity. You either win or learn, surely? Yeah, win or learn. It's a lesson in communication as well. You must have seen that meme where it's like, have you spoke to the client? I emailed them. Why don't you pick up the phone? I'll email them again. Why don't you just pick up the phone and talk to them? I'll send one more email.

And that is a meme, but that is actually happening in sales organizations all over the world. Just hiding behind email rather than just picking up the phone and just asking the simple questions. Wow. Beautiful. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zach Thompson. Remember you will die. So sorry, Mr. Johnson. She didn't make it.