"A Rant Every CRO Can Relate To" with Mike Wirth

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Episode Transcript

Tim Geisert (00:05):
Hey, welcome to the Selling Excellence Podcast for business executives. We all know B2B selling isn’t getting any easier, and what’s worse, it’s getting more expensive. Hello, I’m Tim Geisert to your host and partner at AuctusIQ a Selling Excellence as a service company. Our goal today is to give you insights on how you can turn your sales force into a company asset. We hope you enjoy.

(00:30):
That intro. It makes me kind of want to run out on the field, run through the tunnel, get out there on the field, get information, and just hit somebody.

Mike Wirth (00:38):
And lose by 17 points.

Tim Geisert (00:40):
Oh God, don’t say that. No, we’re going to win. We’re going to win, man. Oh, today, we got a great day as well. It’s football season, it’s fall. And I’m here with my good friend Mike Wirth, who’s the chief commercial officer at a company called ProviderTrust. And your kind of kicking ass, aren’t you?

Mike Wirth (00:56):
We’re doing okay, Tim. We’re doing okay.

Tim Geisert (00:58):
Doing okay. Yeah, he’s okay. Four X and five years. Okay.

Mike Wirth (01:02):
Yeah, we’re pretty proud of that. A lot of people are working really hard to get that done.

Tim Geisert (01:06):
Well, what’s going to be cool about this is how we’re going to spend the next 20 minutes or so going really deep into the company, how you did it, what’s really important-

Mike Wirth (01:17):
Tim.

Tim Geisert (01:18):
What? Yeah.

Mike Wirth (01:19):
So I mean, that’s great. We can do all that stuff. But I thought when you told me, you asked me to come do this, that this was going to be more of a therapeutic session for me like a-

Tim Geisert (01:28):
Oh, yeah. I guess we need to go over.

Mike Wirth (01:29):
… cathartic maybe, where I can get some things off my chest. I work with salespeople I have for a long time. Guessing a lot of people that are listening. I’ve done the same. And salespeople are kind of a pain in the ass.

Tim Geisert (01:42):
So you want to talk about that?

Mike Wirth (01:43):
I’d like to get that off my chest a little bit.

Tim Geisert (01:45):
Let’s get that done.

Mike Wirth (01:46):
Let’s do that.

Tim Geisert (01:46):
I mean, I want you free from all of that.

Mike Wirth (01:49):
It’s some pet peeves that I have about salespeople. So let’s start with this. This is an easy one. I’m see if this resonates. Okay. Sales will say all the time, I want to develop me. I want development. I need more training.

Tim Geisert (02:02):
Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Mike Wirth (02:05):
But you go out and you do all this work to be able to figure out or you survey your sales force, what do you want to learn? You talk with them, you round with them, you sit in on sessions, and then you go out and you have to secure resources. You have to get dollars for it. And you bring in some types of a training company or other approach to it.

Tim Geisert (02:21):
What happened with that? They bitch about it.

Mike Wirth (02:24):
They do, they don’t want to sit in the room at all for any of that stuff, right? It’s like you get these big folders and manuals, they go right in the bottom drawer. Or you might as well just take them, throw them in the trash right away, and you do some kind of big dinner.

Tim Geisert (02:36):
Yep, big dinner, lots of booze.

Mike Wirth (02:38):
Cocktails ahead of time. And so now everybody on day two is not listening. They’re hungover. And the amount of emergency phone calls that start coming up from clients, I’ve never seen more emergency phone calls in training week-

Tim Geisert (02:53):
Why is that? Do these clients and these prospects, they know when the training’s going on?

Mike Wirth (02:57):
I did start, yeah. Maybe that is my fault. Oh, wait, I did put that at the end of the quarter, didn’t you? Yeah. But then they’ll say other stuff that they want. They want freedom. Salespeople want freedom, right? Don’t-

Tim Geisert (03:16):
Leave me alone.

Mike Wirth (03:17):
… micromanage me. Leave me this right. Give me my space, right? You hear this all the time from salespeople. You know what they want. They want to know exactly what they should do every step of the way. That’s actually what they say, that it’s like, “I want freedom.” But then a deal gets hard, gets complex, and all of a sudden, they come to you, and they say, “Well, this didn’t work out. You told me to say that.” I mean, it might have been something that I said six weeks earlier on a separate deal that never, it has no applicability here whatsoever. And it’s like, well, what do I do next? What do I do now? Where do I go with this stuff? I feel like I’m talking about, I mean, I love my children. I love my salespeople that I get to work with, but man, sometimes they just do stuff that wants, you want to drop, kick him into the lake when you hear this kind of stuff. That’s what you want to do.

Tim Geisert (04:03):
You love them and you hate them, and you need them.

Mike Wirth (04:05):
Yes. To all the above and need them. I mean, the hard part is also interviewing him where you’ll go through and you’ll interview these folks and you’ll find people like, “Oh, he’s gregarious. Oh, he’s outgoing. Oh, this is somebody you really should bring onto your team. She’s dynamite at talking to folks at are a cocktail party or whatever it is.” And you interview them like, “Yeah, they’re great.” And turns out six months later that the biggest contribution they made to your business was that interview that they gave six months ago. Because they’re still “building relationships.” And that’s all that they do is just build relationships.

Tim Geisert (04:38):
So are those the three rants?

Mike Wirth (04:41):
That’s enough for night now there’s more, Tim, but I like the language is going to get more colorful and I’m not sure.

Tim Geisert (04:47):
That’s okay. This is a podcast. Joe Rogan has set a whole new level of what you can say on a podcast. Well, okay. So training. Yeah. Freedom. Yeah. And then the interview head fake as we call it. So what are you doing about it? I mean, let’s just kind of talk about this for a second. I mean, you took this since coming into this role, four X growth in five years. That’s pretty impressive. I mean, you didn’t get that all done just by these pet peeves that pissed you off. You must have done something about it.

Mike Wirth (05:21):
No, I’ll dial it down here a little bit. And really, the thing that I started with Tim, and that we started with the ProviderTrust was a premise that the most important decision, and I believe this, the most important decision that we make every single day is who we decide to hire and who we decide to not hire. That is the most important decision that we make. And we’ve built a process now to really try to identify what makes someone a high performer in our organization, and then very intentionally try to help grow and develop and create an environment for growth and development for that talent that we identify, bring in, and then can grow up in the way that we want to help go to market in our respective domains.

Tim Geisert (06:01):
So a lot of people talk about that, but the people who listen to this, and the feedback I get is give me some specifics. What exactly are you doing?

Mike Wirth (06:11):
Yeah. So it starts with really… So what I would say, as opposed to selection, we define what it means to be working at ProviderTrust. So if you come visit us or would see the employment brand that we have invested a great deal in to be able to share and communicate and represent, building your employment brand is incredibly important. We are a very value centered company. So lots of companies have words on the wall. Enron had in integrity was one of Enron’s. So that worked out for me. So everybody can say stuff, but we live our values. So much of what we do is we project that, but then that helps us to attract right talent that isn’t selected, but it helps us to be a viable employer of choice.

Tim Geisert (06:58):
But if you have that, I mean, there’s probably some self-selection that happens on the site, right?

Mike Wirth (07:03):
Yeah, we want that message to be magnetic. We want to be able to tell people, we want to repel people, or we want to attract what that message that we’re putting out into the universe. So part of what we’re saying is that this speaks to you, “Come talk to us because we’re like that.” And there’s a lot of folks that will even interview with us and go, “Are you really like that? Is that really the case?” And yeah, that actually it’s more so than even what we’ve kept.

Tim Geisert (07:25):
You probably like that when somebody’s kind of questioning it a little bit.

Mike Wirth (07:27):
Absolutely.

Tim Geisert (07:28):
Can it be this good? Can it be this… What, huh?

Mike Wirth (07:30):
It’s exactly right. So that brand helps us. And in our recruitment process, we’ve got fantastic recruitment team and people operations team that is really bought in to the concepts that we’re looking for because we’re not looking as much for pedigree as we are for what I call aptitude or potential for greatness. There are lots of people who have a job description that are some type of sales or business development, but not everybody has what that inside that stuff that’s inside you get there.

Tim Geisert (08:00):
So are you looking as much, if not more so for the intangibles as the tangibles? Or do you look at mostly intangibles?

Mike Wirth (08:08):
We certainly look at both things, but I can’t put in what wasn’t there to begin with. I can’t put in what wasn’t there to begin with. So they’ve got to bring that to the table. I can teach a lot about our business. I can teach a lot about our space, but I can’t find those innate drivers. It’s like what’s going to keep somebody just lying awake at night trying to figure out another angle to get through that deal. It’s 11:00 PM on a Thursday where some people are like, “Ah, it’s 5:00, I just closed off.” That’s not what great salespeople are. That’s not how they’re wired. So we’ve built a process that helps us screen for our values, screen for what we don’t call it a culture fit. We call it a culture ad. I don’t need just-

Tim Geisert (08:49):
Culture ad.

Mike Wirth (08:49):
Culture ad. We don’t need just what we’ve always had. We need to continue to push and stretch our brains-

Tim Geisert (08:55):
Interesting.

Mike Wirth (08:56):
… and bring in people that aren’t just automatically homogenous. Because when we look for these core talents and those core values, we then can free ourselves up and then that stretches and makes our team even stronger. So when you talk about things like hiring for diversity or hiring, that happens when you just build a process that is about welcoming being a culture ad not limiting to what you’ve always looked for historically.

Tim Geisert (09:22):
Yeah. That’s pretty cool. Culture ad.

Mike Wirth (09:24):
At the center of this, And Tim, I know this is familiar to you and I’m thankful for your experience in this domain as well. One of the most important things we do to quantify that potential is the psychometric assessment that we have at the core of our process. It’s critical for us to get that lens because otherwise you see these people who are gregarious perhaps, but they might not have that persuasive ability or that closing skill or that achievement drive that’s going to really put them over the top. So we put that at the center. We also, in our selection process, a couple other things that are so important, I want our team to interview those people after they go through the psychometric assessment, not before. So we’re going to do that-

Tim Geisert (10:06):
Why do you believe that?

Mike Wirth (10:07):
Because we don’t want somebody to fall in love with criteria that might be a false positive, right?

Tim Geisert (10:14):
Oh, that’s never happened. Mike, what are you talking about?

Mike Wirth (10:18):
We all have candidates that we’ve known over the years like, “Oh, there’s no way this person doesn’t make it.” And then they don’t. And this happens across every industry happens in athletics all the time. How could this person not be a five-star performer? And they’re not. So we don’t want our managers, we don’t want our team members to fall in love with someone who can’t even make it through that threshold. But then once they get through that threshold, now we want to make sure that they’re the right hire for us.

Tim Geisert (10:43):
So really, I mean, what you’re doing that is always our belief is you need to run sales, run need to run sales like a business process. You’re just running your selection as a business process.

Mike Wirth (10:55):
And I content, our most important part of our sales process is our selection process that we run. And it involves that screening psyched assessment. It involves Tim also talking with team members without me or another manager in the room. There have been people that I have wanted to hire over the years where my team members, salespeople said, “Don’t hire that person.” Because what they said to me in the interview is not appropriate.

Tim Geisert (11:22):
You’re not supposed to listen to your people, man. Geez.

Mike Wirth (11:25):
But, and it’s interesting because when I learned this lesson, I was in a company that had multiple divisions. I was running one of the divisions and the salesperson I passed on, everybody thought I was crazy. They hired her in another division, and she didn’t work out was a cancer for the team. But I didn’t pick up on that. My team members did. They could see something that I couldn’t. And she allowed that access.

(11:51):
The other thing that we added, Tim at ProviderTrust, it’s been so helpful for us, has been what we call the pitch and is part of the process.

Tim Geisert (12:00):
The pitch.

Mike Wirth (12:01):
The pitch where we actually say to the salesperson, we schedule a follow-up interview.

Tim Geisert (12:06):
Uh-huh.

Mike Wirth (12:07):
And then I have the recruiter call this person literally at 4:30 the day before and say, “Actually, what we want you to do tomorrow is we want you to present what you’ve learned about ProviderTrust and why you think you would be an asset to the team.” And at first when I did it, the recruiter was like, “You can’t do that to candidates. So there’s a war for talent. There’s all this kind of like.” And that’s true. And there are some people that have said, “No, I’m not going to do that.” But we call.

Tim Geisert (12:34):
Mean they back out.

Mike Wirth (12:35):
They back out. They’ll say, “I don’t want to do work that hard for it.” Well, that tells me a lot.

Tim Geisert (12:38):
Absolutely.

Mike Wirth (12:40):
And so we’re like, we’ve worked so hard to recruit this person. I’m like, “I don’t care.” Because that’s exactly why I want to do this. Because how many times in sales do you get called at 4:30 where I need this by tomorrow? I got to see how you’re going to respond in that situation.

Tim Geisert (12:53):
Absolutely.

Mike Wirth (12:54):
That’s the job. So we’ll set this up and say, “Hey, you’ve got to do this pitch.” And then they ask all kinds of questions right like, “Well, what’s the format? What’s it going to look like? How long does it need to be as a PowerPoint?”

Tim Geisert (13:05):
Who’s all going to be in there?

Mike Wirth (13:05):
Right. Who’s going to be in there? It’s actually a good question. Good with them asking that part, right? But when they start asking about how long is it supposed to be supposed to be? As long as it should be, right? And then they come in and they’ll do the pitch. And so that’s typically to me. And then at least one other sales manager, our recruiter likes to sit in there because she is really scared about how I’m going to treat these people. And then we’ll bring in another sales team-

Tim Geisert (13:27):
You’ve given her no reason.

Mike Wirth (13:29):
Absolutely. And so then what we do is we haven’t do the presentation and I did panic. I don’t give them anything, right? Unless they try to talk to me, absolutely I’ll do it. But it’ll be like, “Hey, I want to make this conversation.” There’s a pet peeve, Tim, “Hey, I want to make this a conversation.”

Tim Geisert (13:46):
Add that to the list.

Mike Wirth (13:47):
Hey, let’s make this… And then they talk for 15 minutes and show you. And they’re nine slides in and their first question to you is, “Hey, do you have any questions?” I’m like, “Yeah, why are you being so weird? You just said, do you want to have a conversation with me?”

Tim Geisert (14:02):
Why you’re so weird?

Mike Wirth (14:03):
Yeah. But you said you want to have a conversation with who talks like that. “Hey Tim, I’d really like to have a conversation with you.” Let me talk for 15 minutes straight, not ask you any questions. But then 15 minutes in say, “And how do you feel about getting your moles examined at the dermatologist?” I mean, it’s like, “What?”

Tim Geisert (14:18):
Well, you were talking about that. We were driving up here, we were talking about this. I was like, if your wife comes in and says, “Hey, I like to have a conversation.” It’s like your defenses go up immediately. You’re like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, what?”

Mike Wirth (14:31):
Mental tape. Roll back, roll back. What did I do? What did I do? What did I say what I do? Where was I? What I say what I do? Where was I? Yeah. But the pitch part, you see how they react in that moment of stress and uncertainty.

Tim Geisert (14:45):
You put them in the fox hole.

Mike Wirth (14:46):
We do.

Tim Geisert (14:47):
That’s great.

Mike Wirth (14:48):
And here’s great about it, Tim, is then we’ll go through, give a little feedback and then I coach him because I want to see how they’re going through.

Tim Geisert (14:57):
You give them real time feedback right there.

Mike Wirth (14:59):
Absolutely [inaudible 00:15:00]-

Tim Geisert (15:00):
Why?

Mike Wirth (15:01):
Because number one, I want them to know what’s it like to play here. I think that’s fair. My style of leadership is not for everyone. Again, it’s magnetic, but the people that I get to work for my sales leaders, they’ve embraced this notion as well that the most important decision we make is who we do or don’t hire. And so if you do that and you live that, now you’re really trying to create an environment that is, let’s make sure we’re getting the right stuff and making it one that we’re evaluating the real things. So we want to give them feedback. I also want to see how they react to coaching. I want to see can they take feedback.

Tim Geisert (15:43):
Are they coachable? Are they willing to listen?

Mike Wirth (15:44):
Right. And coachable is nothing-

Tim Geisert (15:46):
They get defensive.

Mike Wirth (15:46):
Well, exactly right. Do I get defensive? How do I receive it? But then can they actually put it into process? So what we do is. I’ll give feedback and then I will pick out an area and have them redo it. I’ll give them about two minutes. Okay. 90 seconds say, “All right, so I’m going to give you 90 seconds to put that together and I’m going to have you redo that again.” And they’ll look at you like, “Are you kidding me?”

(16:11):
But I’m like, “How else would I.” If you can’t take feedback from me? And granted, we got no relationship or very limited relationship at this point. They don’t have that kind of trust and psychological safety. But I’m asking them to risk. I’m asking them to take a little risk with me because I’m being vulnerable. I’m telling them stuff right about our company. I’m telling them about what I think about them, just like I want them to risk a little bit and try. And if they do that, if they’ll take that little risk with me time and time again and is born out and the feedback, I give is hard every time. Because their closes are terrible on these presentations every time nobody ever closes as well. I mean, what do we know about sales? If you want to get a sale, you have to ask for it.

Tim Geisert (16:51):
You got to ask for it.

Mike Wirth (16:52):
You have to ask for it at the end. I’m like, “So do you want this job? I will ask, do you want this job? What do you mean?” I go, “We’re close was for shit.” And they’ll look at me-

Tim Geisert (17:03):
And you just sit there, wait.

Mike Wirth (17:04):
And yeah, I stop. And they’re looking at me. This is not any interview I’ve ever been. And the recruiter’s saying there, she’s got her head in her hands and Jen, she knows it’s coming. She knows I’m going to say this. And she still is like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe he’s doing it again.” But I want to see what they say.

Tim Geisert (17:23):
Well, I will tell you mean your crew that I’ve worked with. I mean, it’s a topnotch bunch.

Mike Wirth (17:28):
Thanks, Tim.

Tim Geisert (17:29):
They show up to play every day.

Mike Wirth (17:30):
I’m so much so proud-

Tim Geisert (17:31):
That must be where it comes from.

Mike Wirth (17:32):
Tim, you-

Tim Geisert (17:33):
I just didn’t get lucky. There’s a process ball.

Mike Wirth (17:35):
Absolutely, right. And the part, it doesn’t work 100% of the time. Absolutely not. Our retention, Tim has been amazing.

Tim Geisert (17:43):
Really? Even through all of this, through COVID.

Mike Wirth (17:46):
Through COVID, through the great resignation we have lost. There’s been there’s been regrettable turn in sales, regrettable turn one person in two years.

Tim Geisert (17:54):
Wow.

Mike Wirth (17:55):
Regrettable turn.

Tim Geisert (17:56):
Wow.

Mike Wirth (17:57):
And so much of this is because we focus on this so hard, and I do care deeply, A team member once say, “You care very intensely.” And sometimes-

Tim Geisert (18:12):
Well, that kind of fits the character.

Mike Wirth (18:13):
And sometimes loudly they’re like, But I do care so much about these folks. But they also care back. They care for each other. And that is all part of this formula that’s allowed us to be so successful here.

Tim Geisert (18:27):
We were talking about football, obviously it’s football season. We went to the game last night, had a great night, right?

Mike Wirth (18:31):
We did. It was beautiful night.

Tim Geisert (18:32):
And you look at the coaching legacies of the greatest coaches that are in football and have in football. And you look at their coaching tree where they all ended up. You were drawing a parallel to that because you’re running a business here. You’ve helped be a big part of the growth here at ProviderTrust, but that’s not really what drives it is.

Mike Wirth (18:55):
Tim, there things that motivate you. For me, it’s very simple. There’s two professional things that I just thrive on. And one of them is winning a deal. When we win a deal. I mean, whether it’s me, whether it’s somebody, it’s that fist pump, that image I always have in my head is like Tiger Woods hitting that pot, like that fist pump moment. That winning that deal. The other one though is seeing someone that you have hired, that you’ve worked so hard to bring in that you’ve watched just grind and sweat and struggle and seeing them be successful and knowing that whether or not it’s in the moment or not, that you got to have a part in helping to work for them and helping to create that platform for them and helping them. Like that feeling to me is there’s just nothing better than that.

(19:47):
And so I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of great people that are now sales leaders themselves. And one of the biggest compliments I can get is when they call me, and I mean, these are people I’ve worked with. In fact, there was someone that called me Tim, I haven’t worked with her in 10 years. And Joanie, I’m so proud of her. She’s, she’s been promoted twice. She’s run a team at a huge software company in the healthcare space. And she said, “Hey Mike, would you come spend some time with my team.” I mean, that is-

Tim Geisert (20:17):
Isn’t the best.

Mike Wirth (20:20):
I can’t even describe it. I was like, she said, Do I pay you? I’m like, Joanie, I will come anytime you ever ask me to come help you, I will come. And that’s a promise I make to our team members. That’s for a lifetime that doesn’t go away because this is what I work-

Tim Geisert (20:33):
So you went and did it then sent her an invoice, right?

Mike Wirth (20:35):
Absolutely right. Mean we had to hit our number for the quarter, Tim.

Tim Geisert (20:38):
So well, that 10 grand really made a difference. Well, it’s interesting. We’ve had some nice guests on this show, and one of them is Chris Erickson, which you and I are friends with. And she talked about, salespeople want to be developed back to your thing that they say they want training, but really what they want is development.

Mike Wirth (20:56):
I think what they want-

Tim Geisert (20:57):
And that begins with what you’re doing here.

Mike Wirth (20:58):
Yeah, I think what they want is also, well, I mean they want lots of things, right? They’ll tell you that. But really, what are they asking? What I think they’re asking for behind training, behind development is, will this help me be successful? I want to understand what it takes to be able to be successful. And understanding sometimes that it isn’t about product mastery per se, it’s about the relationship you’re building. It’s about understanding. Do you know that economic buyer? Do you know who the decision maker is? Do you have a champion? Do you know who your detractors are? Mapping that kind of stuff-

Tim Geisert (21:31):
Why you’re going to win? Why you’re going to lose?

Mike Wirth (21:33):
Absolutely.

Tim Geisert (21:34):
What are those key dates? And you said this on the way up and I’m going to tease it out of you. And you said it in this and that is teaching.

Mike Wirth (21:41):
Oh man. So I am a big fan of a lot of the work that y’all do at Auctus, I am. That the question of what did you teach them is one of the behaviors, one of the key behaviors is so important. And when you get a salesperson that gets that, they can do that. But it doesn’t have to just be their own knowledge that they can matrix in someone to help do that at the right time. And that they’re a salesperson can be a director. They don’t have to be the main actor all the time. They can be a director of the movie though and bring in that right person at the right time.

(22:19):
And when you see them get that’s the power and influence that they have. They understand how to sell because now they’re not trying to be the panacea or the expert of all things. They feel safe enough and trust that they can bring in, Like me, I’m a silver, gray hair balding guy now, right? Of course, you should prop me up, but prop me up for five minutes in that session where I can say things that sound like we’re smart and good at what we do, and I’m old and they trust me. And now you go do everything else. We just won the biggest deal in our history.

Tim Geisert (22:49):
Yeah, you were telling me about that. Congratulations.

Mike Wirth (22:51):
Yeah, well, I mean to me, thanks. I mean, I absolutely work on this-

Tim Geisert (22:54):
And to the team. I mean, you guys.

Mike Wirth (22:56):
Colby.

Tim Geisert (22:56):
Big deals are team efforts.

Mike Wirth (22:58):
This guy, and I just shamed this guy in front of the company for his performance last year, just shamed him. I mean, he literally called me at one point and said, “Look, I can’t take any more of these.” Called me told me that because I was and what I was saying is like, “Hey, Colby didn’t make this and therefore we didn’t make this one in this division.” I mean, I said it because it’s truth. And he has worked so hard and embraced so much of what it is that we’re trying to do and has just been relentless. This has almost taken two years of his life to win this deal.

Tim Geisert (23:34):
Fantastic.

Mike Wirth (23:35):
It is 15% of our CAR.

Tim Geisert (23:38):
Holy cow.

Mike Wirth (23:39):
And he won it. I mean he just dogged this thing.

Tim Geisert (23:44):
And he was going to prove it to you.

Mike Wirth (23:45):
And has he? Yes. And have we worked together so closely, and we have cried, and we have fought and we have argued. And he has a great coach that went through our selection process that I hired, even removed me even further from the process, probably thankfully for Colby. But then I could marshal the resources I had to in our side of our company to be able to get a deal like this one. But I’m not client facing with this anymore. It’s very little at the end. So you see that coming around and coming full circle. So Colby, if you are listening to this, your recognition is known, right? It’s putting it out into the complete universe here. And I will broadcast this all over my LinkedIn.

Tim Geisert (24:33):
So this fine gentleman has gone from public shaming to more than public accolades and congratulations from you.

Mike Wirth (24:40):
Without question, without issue.

Tim Geisert (24:42):
That is the ultimate in the development. That is the ultimate development. And I’d love going back to what you’re talking about here. When you do those sessions, when you make them pitch, you’re teaching in the end, right? And that’s the key. That’s the key. All the way through their whole career.

Mike Wirth (24:56):
Yeah. Even people have said like that, there was somebody that I interviewed, we ended up not hiring, and Nick has called me several times afterwards. He’s running a sales team in the Nashville area now. And he’s called me and asked me questions and picked my brain on stuff and because it was a good relationship that we built, wasn’t a good fit for our business, but it was a good relationship we built.

Tim Geisert (25:16):
Yeah, yeah. Well, and those pay dividends, those come back. You never in different ways.

Mike Wirth (25:19):
The world is small.

Tim Geisert (25:20):
All right. So next time you’re in Nashville, have a couple brews on Broadway for me. Put some money in the tip jar.

Mike Wirth (25:27):
Yikes.

Tim Geisert (25:27):
And thanks a lot for coming and being on our podcast, Mike. This is fan free. Fantastic. Congratulations on the four X, but more importantly on that last win. Let’s go. Way to go.

Mike Wirth (25:37):
Thanks.

Tim Geisert (25:38):
All right. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Selling Excellence Podcast for business executives. I hope you gain some insight on how to help turn your sales organization into a company asset. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Sales Excellence Podcast wherever you get your podcast. And for more information about AuctusIQ or to schedule a discovery call, visit our website at auctusiq.com. Until next time, this is Tim Geisert, your host and partner at AuctusIQ, here to help you sell more and grow your company.

Speaker 3 (26:12):
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