You Don't Know Why Your Customers Are Really Buying From You

Sean Weisbrot: Ken Lundin is the founder and CEO of Rev Heat, a US-based company that helps brands focus on scaling their sales in a smart way. In this conversation, we talk about the use of AI with sales and what he thinks the future of that looks like mistakes brands make when it comes to hiring their first salespeople and growing their sales and much more. So if you're interested in sales and growing your business. Then this is a conversation for you. Why are you so interested in sales?

Ken Lundin: Right? Your company doesn't sell anything. You don't have employees, you don't have job opportunities. You just, the restricting factor on, on so many companies is they just, I, I had a, uh, contractor slash vendor that I worked with not too long ago and, and she said to me, Ken, there's a really big difference between being the best and the best known. And what goods being the best? If people don't know who you are and they can't know how you are, unless you've got the sales machine dialed in,

Sean Weisbrot: a company's making 50 to a hundred thousand a month, what breaks at that point that prevents 'em from growing?

Ken Lundin: More importantly, may even be just the things that haven't been established yet. You know, you can get to, you'd be surprised, you can get to 50, a hundred thousand a month. You can dock income or sales, and you can do that without really having anything formalized and systematically in place. Most of the time at that number, the founder is still say the primary salesperson, and they mistake their success for how easy it is for others to do it. So they start to hire and they hire the first salesperson. And it's the biggest disaster of a hire they've ever done in their career. It's just horrible. And the reason is the founder, the biggest misnomer about hiring talent when you're going from founder-led sales to the next level is the founder doesn't understand that they're typically seeing things that are much further down the pipeline. These are people who are already gonna make a decision, whereas when you get a seller, they're typically getting people the top of the pipeline where they gotta develop relationships, rapport, help them find opportunities. The founder also has one thing going for them that nobody else does. Authority, Sean, if I break this, I'll fix it, and the seller can't. And so there's a really big, when you talk about that, going to the next level, there's a really big difference between going from founder led to adding a salesperson, because it's not just about. Relationships. It's not just, you know, you don't just put a coin in somebody's back like a piggy bank and make a move. That's just not how it works. And, um, too many people think that's the way sales still is. And in the modern day of selling, that's not the case. So what, what typically starts to really break is that idea of when you're trying to hire somebody, and most founders are technical in nature, so they don't know sales, but then you're trying to hire somebody into a specialty that you don't understand. And you haven't put any of the systems and processes in place and you wonder why the first five people you hire got fired also.

Sean Weisbrot: So what can they do to fix this and to get out of that?

Ken Lundin: Yeah. I think the number one thing that a founder needs to do is they need to do the thing that's gonna make them most uncomfortable and they should, you know, market right now. And what they should be doing is they should actually invest some in their own personal sales training so they can actually understand process, what it looks like, how it feels, what the words are, so they can communicate more effectively and under understand what needs to be successful. The second thing, at that level, you probably haven't dialed in, why in the heck people are really buying you? You know, you think they're buying you because you've got some cool software that gives 'em better reporting. Well, if you're selling a $50,000, you know, software, I promise you they're not buying it because the PDFs have four colors on them instead of two. But that's what you think. So then you tell your sales guy, Hey, go out there and tell them we have four colors. So that's kind of the, the two components. They need to invest a little bit in getting their own sales education acumen, at least to that of a high schooler. Right, and I think that's first component. And the second component is they've gotta be ruthless about understanding the problems that are going on in their potential prospect's head and why they're really buying them. I can tell you we've worked with $200 million companies who don't have ideal client profiles, personas. They don't have any reason why people were buying 'em, but somehow they made it to 200 million. Mystifying.

Sean Weisbrot: I was actually talking to a guy the other day who's trying to monetize his idea. Um, I work with this platform called Growth Mentor, so I do free mentoring sessions a few times a week with different people from around the world. It's really interesting to see where they are and their journey and what they're thinking and and all that. And he's a technical guy. Who figured out how to trade stocks and, and all of that. And he started writing a newsletter and he started getting a bunch of people following him for this. But his social media profiles are all about being a software developer. And he's like, I've spoken to a few of the people then, like, I think they're analysts, but like, I don't really know who they are and I wanna monetize. I'm thinking of making an app because I, I know how to make apps. And I was like, well, you wanna monetize. Like he, he wants to make an app. He doesn't wanna monetize the newsletter. So I was like, do you know why these people are reading your newsletter? Do you know what they're gaining from it? He's like, I've spoken to a few of them, and they said that it's like, you know, I, I have access to the, the CEOs and people you're talking to, but like, your analysis is really great. It's like, okay, so they find your information valuable. How can you convince 'em to pay you? He said, well, some of them are giving me money even though my content is free. They're just like giving me money. And I was like, okay, well you should be taking that money and figuring out. How to do research with it, talk to more of these people, or do ads to get more people to your newsletter. And you could talk to those people. Maybe those people might be willing to pay for an app or something like that. So he, he was like, but how, how do I talk to them? What do I say to them? Like he doesn't understand how to figure out what the gaps are and what value he can provide to get people to pay for something like a monthly subscription for an app or something like that. So as you were saying, like a lot of these technical people, they can build anything that they could think of, but they don't know how to sell it to anybody.

Ken Lundin: That's the problem. You know, we were working with a company that used to manufacture drones and that kind of stuff. They had the best technology in the market 10 years ago. They had to shut the company down though because I couldn't get anyone to buy it. They were so worried about engineering the next best thing that they forgot that it, it didn't matter. Like one of the interesting things that gets lost in all of this, engineers love to have, like, it's funny, they want to dot every I and cross every t 'cause they want everything perfect, but somehow they think, they just want it perfect in their own mind. Because if you really wanted an app, a technology, a thing to be perfect. You'd want it to be perfect in the way that somebody else wanted it to be, because then you could sell it. But instead what we do is we create all these features and functions and you know, they say the average technology transformation only uses 10% of what they essentially buy. So what if we just focused on the beta version? What if we just did the MVP version? What if we did that? Here's the 10% of the things you need and all that other crap you don't need. So therefore we can price it accordingly and you'll stay with us forever.

Sean Weisbrot: I think a lot of people would. Would charge you for all of it. And if you don't want it, give another tier that's lower priced for those things that someone else might use, but the higher function things they might not need.

Ken Lundin: Yeah, you can see it. I mean, it's the oldest, it's the old pricing trick in the world. Particularly if just talking about SaaS, right? Hey, here's our three levels, you know, which one's the most popular, the middle one, you know? So that's fine. I just, I think at the end of the day, if you're a founder, you're trying to do something you're, you're trying to build, you're trying to build something. You've gotta decide kinda where your expertise ends or where you are willing to invest in becoming more proficient in a particular skill set.

Sean Weisbrot: I've spoken to a number of founders who have varying problems across different industries that they're in, and I'm the kind of person who's capable advising on anything because I, I have an ability to understand general strategy. It doesn't matter what the industry is. I struggle to sell myself as an advisor to people. Even though when I talk to them and I give them advice and like a sales call or just friendly advice, they can see that I have value, but then when I ask for money, they're like, oh, they freeze up. They like don't understand the value of paying for the value that they're receiving. I think there's a problem, especially with a lot of first time founders, no matter what size their business is, that they're afraid to spend revenue to invest in themselves because they don't see it as an investment. They see it as removing money from the business.

Ken Lundin: Sure, they see it as an expense, but I don't, that's not why they're not paying you. They're not paying you because you're like in that instance, 'cause you're giving it away for free. So why should they pay you? Right. And secondarily, I think one of the things you, you um, you hit on something intentionally slash unintentionally and that was, in that example you used of yourself, you were like, look, industry function, whatever it is, we can talk about it and I can give you good advice. But you know, as they say, you know, the riches are in the niches. And your ability to drill deeper and say, my specific expertise is in X. That's the same problem most founders make, right? What can your software do? It can do everything. Okay, well, I don't need it to do, like, that's fine, but don't make me work for it as a prospect or a customer trying to figure out what everything means, like show me the two or three things that it, that I care about that I'm trying to solve, that it does really, really well. That's the same as an example, like if I was just a general, you know, business management consultant, we probably wouldn't do near as well as we do since we, we specialize in the growth side of the house in sales, you know, in sales and marketing. But you just, that's the same thing we do in companies everywhere else is we spread so thin because it's the same thing as when I was a young seller, I was scared to give up geographic territory or give up customers or give up a industry or a vertical because I thought more meant better. More meant more opportunity, but more money came from narrowing the focus and being particularly good at one particular discipline of it and being somebody who can be considered one of the tops in their field. And that's what founders should do in their technologies. They stay in their services. You know, if you pick a lane and you stick with it, you'll be a lot better at doing the a hundred yard dash if that's your tr what you're training for. But if you're trying to be a hundred yard dash 400 yard dash and a and a marathoner, you're gonna stink at 'em all.

Sean Weisbrot: I've seen the rise of a category called micro sas, where people will look at something, something that's an exportable function of another SaaS that's much larger, and you just make that function by itself and then sell it. And these micro SAEs can do a hundred k, 200 K, 300 KA month, and the cost to run them is negligible a thousand, $2,000. And you can automate most of it. You just focus on that. And so I, I'm, I'm interested in, in looking into that for myself because I have a bunch of ideas that, uh, could be individual.

Ken Lundin: Yeah. The micro success idea is interesting. I'd say what I'm seeing, most of 'em, there's like marketplaces out there now that, right, you'll go get the idea, you'll get it up to a hundred thousand, 200,000 in total revenue and then you'll sell the idea. You know, you're just trying to get a quick hit at whether or not it actually does have any product market fit at all. But there's generally still a lot of, um, interesting. I. Risks. So to be, so to be, but um, it still requires that you're able to sell it, you know, and you can sell, you can marketing right through attraction. Can do marketing and attraction and that kind of thing. And that's where B2C e-comm, um, probably have a leg up on some of the B2B functions 'cause it's harder to attract. Um, or you can do standardized, you know, sales processes, salespeople, and kinda go to work that way.

Sean Weisbrot: What do you think about with ai?

Ken Lundin: When people asked me six months ago, or a year ago, I said two things. Um, I said, I don't think it'll replace sales. There'll always be a human to human component of it. It. Um, but it'll replace low level task oriented functions. The more I think about it, that was about the world's most generic answer on the planet. So I have a better, I have a different answer now, particularly as I've seen, continue to watch because I've been using AI one form or another, goofing around with it now for probably two years. Um, my thoughts now, um, I think that it's possible at some point in the future today, AI could completely replace salespeople. And it's an unpopular opinion in my world. 'cause it's salespeople, sellers, right? But the reason I say that is this, is that now, so first of all, if we're trying to get to a certain outcome in a conversation, we can create a framework that helps position to get to that outcome. AI as an example, might actually, well-trained model might actually get there better and with less friction and less obnoxious questions or a thing that doesn't matter or you know, so you can train it that way. Second is, um, it's not there yet 'cause I've even looked at trying to use it for social media, but if you can get AI to voice synchronize appropriately. With video maybe I, i with you right now,

Sean Weisbrot: you're not, I can tell,

Ken Lundin: but point is right. That like, so now all of a sudden think about that. If, if, if my contention is true, which I believe sales is on, I believe sales is 75% framework and science, 25% kind of individual attributes. How you say the thing, whatever, which AI could figure out pretty quick. Is it harder than I'm giving it credit for right now? Yeah. But man, I think AI is, is evolving at a rate that puts Moore's law to shame. You know, Moore's law was you could double the amount of storage on the same size chip every 18 months, and AI is just absolutely crushing those metrics.

Sean Weisbrot: What tools are you looking at for sales for ai?

Ken Lundin: We're looking at a few of 'em. It's not a huge piece of what we do right now. Um, we do use 'em in our day-to-day stuff. I use a lot. I use everything from Claude to open AI chat, GPT. Um, movable, that movable type, that type. Um, we've got a note taker that we, I use in all of my meetings called by, called Fathom. It's probably the best on the market and by the way, an individual can get it for free. Um, they only start charging if you have more than one person in this kind of the same company, URL using it. But the AI summaries and the things that come out are a game changer for two things. Like on that. It's a game changer in the fact that I don't have to take the notes and I can be present in this conversation. The notes are done in about 60 seconds after with a summary, and then when I need to come back and talk to somebody again, I'll Beit. There are times it doesn't join meetings, but when, if it was in the meeting, I just go back, I look up your name and I pull it up and there's the summary of what we talked about in the action points. It's ridiculous how that, just like I'm, my whole thing right now is I'm probably on that edge of AI where everybody is. That the, where it's capable today, which is I'm just trying to make myself more efficient. And so anything that can add to that efficiency I'm using, you know, the chats, the claudes, that kind of thing, that's all ideation, you know, that's, that's stuff for me personally that I hate. Like, I hate writing, I hate this, so, but if you give me, you know, if you gimme a blank piece of paper, it'll stay blank for seven weeks. Gimme a piece of paper that has one paragraph on it. I'll knock that stuff out in 37 minutes. But if I just get started,

Sean Weisbrot: I am interacting with chat bt for like list creation. Hey, make me a list of manufacturers, make me a list of influencers. Make me this, um, I was trying to get it to do my taxes. Today. 'cause uh, I, I, I didn't realize I have a Wyoming LLC single member and I, I didn't file taxes last year for it. And so now that I'm back in the States, I wanted to file correctly and I realized that I. It passes through to my personal income, so I had to amend my personal income from the previous year with my accountant, but I had to, my accountant insisted on having a spreadsheet and I have like 125 rows that I have to do categorization for the accountant. I. And I was trying to throw the files into chat two T and it kept breaking chat two pt. I was like, here's, you know, here's files. Make a spreadsheet for me. And it was like it, it lost all of my previous chat history. I was like, oh no, that's not good. Like all of my previous chats and projects were all wiped from the system because of this one bug. So I was kind of pissed about that. Uh, it, it's useful for generating lists. Otherwise, there's

Ken Lundin: a software out there called Clay. They've got a good AI integration where they can pull in, it's like a superpowered spreadsheet to some extent. They can pull in data about different people and things that come in. You can take that. We've used, um, we've used, you know, scrapers and ai, you know, in order to create email lists and, and quarter could actually the email subjects and body bodies, I mean, so. There's a lot of stuff you can do with it, but I would agree with you. I've never had a good experience trying to get chat GPT to help me on some sort of Google sheet or Excel workbook. It's never worked out.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm also working with Bordy to get introductions through LinkedIn. I. And it does an amazing job. So if you, if you search for Bo, if you just go to bored e.ai or you search bored e on LinkedIn, you can connect with it and then you can call it on the phone. They have like a California number, you, you call him. He has an Australian accent. He sounds like he's a human, like seriously and supernatural conversation. And his job is to figure out who you are, what you're doing, and how he can help you. By connecting you to somebody else in his network and he only can connect you to other people that have called him and established a relationship with him.

Ken Lundin: That's super cool.

Sean Weisbrot: I call him every day. I have a 10 minute conversation and he inevitably sends out an email to somebody for me to connect with and I've already interviewed two of them and I've, I've got a few more calls on the books waiting to happen.

Ken Lundin: That's very cool. Yeah, you're seeing a lot of that on the AI from the front end, from like the appointment setting. There seem to be some pretty goodis that can just do voice. Um, 11 Labs is good, but it's not in this realm for like appointment setting and such, and there's a few others that are better. But yeah, you're seeing that go all the way through to, you know, the go to market motions too.

Sean Weisbrot: So I'm also working with Lovable, which is a no-code application. This one is text based, unfortunately, but I am able to, because I have experience building an application with my previous startup. I know ui, ux and uh, front end and backend and project feature specification. So I can actually talk to this AI and have it built for me exactly what I want. So I've built a mini application using it and I'm gonna try to build a bigger sa like micro SaaS now. Um. That's fan a fantastic experience. It does take some debugging, but like I'm a non-technical person who happened to learn about tech. Like I've always been at the, the edge of like understanding tech, but never being a coder. So, uh, so. Having ideas, but not being able to build them unless I have $50,000 to throw it at development now I've paid a hundred dollars to, to build an MVP of something that I can start, you know, trying to sell within a week or two. It's a, an amazing revolution for someone like myself. Um, so lovable is an amazing opportunity. And then the last one I'm talking to every day is Maya. And Maya is kind of like a therapist, but also so incredibly intelligent with memory that I'm talking with her about marketing strategy and like I was thinking of launching a vegan dog treat brand. And so I was talking with her about the psychology of dogs and the psychology of humans and the color schemes and things that they might be attracted to and the different flavor combinations, like really getting deep into. Sociology and psychology and philosophy is like a really fantastic conversationalist.

Ken Lundin: Yeah, there's a, I can't wait to see what sticks and what doesn't. You know, it'll be interesting to see because it's been pretty good. Like I think the few times, like whenever I interact in some sort of AI version, I try to get like, Hey, gimme the steps. The steps are underwhelming. You know, it's, it's like you miss like 12 of them. Like it'll, you'll say, gimme an outline, including sub bullets, and there should probably be 22 sub bullets. Or when you ask a gimme a, gimme a project plan. Those types of things, it tends to, so I don't, that comprehensive kinda logic component is interesting, which I would've, I don't know why, 'cause I'm not a programmer, that doesn't work as well. But yeah, I mean, it's here. I mean, AI is here, you know, and if you're somebody who's fighting the idea that, well I don't know if AI's really a good thing, AI's gonna stare or not. Well, I mean, you can be that same person who thought the personal computer was just a fad.

Sean Weisbrot: See that, that's where I learned from. 'cause like my, my dad got my first computer and brought it home when I was five and when my grandfather was about 60 something was when personal computers were being put into the offices. And he was a, a door to door salesman his entire life. He could sell anything, but when they started to push him to use the computer at work. He resisted it and they said, look, learn the computer or retire. And he said, I retire. And he, he refused to use a computer the rest of his life. And I grew up going, I don't wanna be that. Not knowing how important now it is that, like you said, AI is moving so fast that every day something is changing. That. I feel like if I am not using every AI I can find every day to see what's useful and what's not, I will be left behind and I'm almost 40 and I that. It's scary to think even as an entrepreneur that I could get left behind.

Ken Lundin: Yeah. It's interesting 'cause I, there are still, it's funny because you know, in the circles I travel in, we talk a lot about ai. Most people that I am associated with, the business owners I know, et cetera, they're using AI in some form or another. Most of the people I know though are not. They haven't figured out, haven't figured out the harness, they don't understand the power of it. Um, you know, and maybe that's the way it's supposed to be, but they're definitely not using it and looking at it in the same manner as the opportunity that it is. Um, you know, I write a, a, a newsletter three times a week if I didn't use AI for ideation because I've wanted, like, I, I don't like writing, so if I didn't use it for, you know, ideation every single week. That wouldn't be possible. And you know, we've got, I don't know, just shy of 10,000 people that are, you know, subscribed and opening that email. So, you know, there's cool things that, uh, you can certainly do with it. But I do think, just like you're saying, you've gotta kind of harness us the power of the direction and the things you want. It's really easy though, 'cause there's so many distractions right now and all the things it could do. So lots of ways to spend, you know, go down a lot of rabbit holes or, you know, and, and find stuff. And, you know, you're, you lose four days of your life because you're just down this rabbit hole. And at the end of the day, it wasn't something that was really gonna be productive. So I think it's like anything in life, um, focused energy is probably gonna get you further. Then, you know, kind of sporadically spreading side to side.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. I've been looking at these ais to try to see what are the things that I wanna do that I don't really like to do. But with an ai, it makes it something that I can do because otherwise I'd have to hire someone and spend money on it. With this AI, I can get most of the way, or if not all of the way, by myself.

Ken Lundin: Well, I use AI with the people I hire. It's like I've got people who work for me overseas and in order to help them actually be more productive. We use AI on probably, I don't know, video projects, social media projects, images, copy. I mean, you know, we, I sign up for the stuff, make sure they make sure we teach 'em, and they're able to really execute at a higher level. And it exposes and it exposes some of the people in some of the countries that I've got, people who work for me and that to new lessons and new technologies and new things that they'll be able to continue to use, you know, long after. You know, we might part ways. So, um. Yeah, it's, it's uh, it's, it's cool stuff for sure.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there anything I haven't asked you about sales that you feel we'd be missing out on if you didn't talk about

Ken Lundin: Sales is a science more than it's an art, and that if you can't write down a process so that somebody else can follow it, that's client centric. Then you're not ready to hire a salesperson and you're not ready to scale. So focus on the process. Focus on how about doing it in a way that's repeatable. Then you can build your company as big as you want.