Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.069)
If you're business owner struggling to scale your business effectively because you're resistant to doing sales yourself and your sales team isn't delivering results, then our guest, Christopher Filpiac, is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. Christopher, so excited to have you here.
Christopher Filipiak (00:18.252)
Hey Adam, so good to be here. Thanks for having me on the show and looking forward to this conversation today.
Adam O'Leary (00:24.089)
Absolutely. So I've heard you discuss how mastering sales as a CEO can transform a business. Why is it so crucial for business owners to personally lead sales efforts before delegating to a team?
Christopher Filipiak (00:36.706)
Yeah, I think what happens is when you're in relationship with money and strangers and sales and you have that ability to create whatever you want, whenever you want it, which is what sales is, and we use it in the context of money, that you create a culture that is pro-sales, right? Pro-change and growth, pro-sales, pro-helping people. And then when you've mastered it yourself, meaning...
that you can make whatever amount of money you want, whenever you want to make it, and there's no resistance to selling, right? You're not afraid of cold calling. You're not afraid of knocking on doors. You're not afraid of talking on strangers. You don't take it personally if you get rejected or if someone says, no, there's no resistance to asking for the sale. When you do that, when you're at that point, you're thinking and you're feeling
lead to you making decisions that are in line with the truth and from a place of cause and effect, not from your own resistance or triggers or limiting beliefs. So you build a business that views sales as an expression of love and makes decisions from a place of cause and effect, not from any type of, like I said, story around sales.
And when you do that, that's going to cascade down into your sales organization because you have this culture of what sales really is and you're coming from a place of truth. Where it gets dysfunctional is if the CEO has some stories, beliefs, thinking, feelings that are not in alignment or not coming from place of truth and then you create dysfunction around sales.
in the organization and so that's why it's so important for the CEO to master sales. Primarily, the other thing that it gives you Adam is it allows you to
Christopher Filipiak (02:46.882)
have extra cash around, extra revenue, extra profit, right? So that's another bonus of the CEO mastering sales.
Adam O'Leary (02:57.979)
That's awesome. So what you're saying is to have a sales first approach for the organization, correct? Amazing. Very cool. So let's talk about that a little bit because I think that's interesting. So how would we go about creating that kind of sales first foundation?
Christopher Filipiak (03:02.474)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Christopher Filipiak (03:13.516)
Yeah, so.
Christopher Filipiak (03:17.718)
It's an awareness of going, look, I have a business, right? I started a business as a founder or I'm leading a business as a CEO or a mashup of those two things, because I work with a lot of founder CEOs. And the purpose of business is to help people. And you can only help people if you make a sale with them, right? So that they can receive your service and pay for your service. So it's building an organization that is aware enough to go like,
that's what we're doing. We're in the business of helping people. We're in the business of providing service. We're in the business of change and growth for our clients. And it doesn't matter if you're selling a stick of candy to a little child, right? Or you're providing some coaching service or you're implementing a big transformation or you're a large manufacturer, like all of those things. The core of that is to recognize that the only thing that...
moves money and lets the business grow is cash coming in and service going out. And sales is the vehicle, is the tool that does that in a business.
Adam O'Leary (04:31.268)
I love that. And I guess one of the things that happens for organizations and founders especially is if they're going ahead and doing sales initially, they need to be able to outsource it. And I think that comes back to documentation. Is that correct?
Christopher Filipiak (04:46.424)
Well, yeah, you can build a system. I think at some point the CEO's business development or sales effort is going to transition as the business becomes more mature and you build the competence around sales into the business itself. What happens is the founder CEO will typically be the number one salesperson for the organization. And then as you build those processes and those systems and that...
awareness, competence, culture. Once you have that system in place, then you can start bringing in other humans to scale what's working. And then the CEO's business development work will transition and mature, but they'll always be involved. Adam, I've seen, think every, like, I joke, I'm like, even like Richard Branson and Elon Musk are in sales and they're running like these huge global quarter.
corporations, but they're talking to shareholders, they're out speaking, they're out promoting, they're talking to the press and that's a form of sales and business development they're recruiting. So that skill of sales I don't think ever goes away and I know for a lot of my clients even those that are in the nine figure range, so you're talking hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Those CEOs are still doing large deals. They're still providing thought leadership. They're still having conversations with clients and that's a form of selling, right? Yeah.
Adam O'Leary (06:25.346)
Absolutely, and especially let's think of it if somebody already has salespeople in place, how does that kind of change things? I mean, is the CEO still doing sales? Like, I mean, I just kind of want to hear it from you.
Christopher Filipiak (06:30.679)
Mm-hmm.
Christopher Filipiak (06:38.699)
Yeah, every company that I've worked with, the CEO is either growing revenue and involved in sales or that company isn't growing as fast as it could be. So there's something really powerful and helpful for a CEO to be involved with sales, with or without a sales team. And so you may have a sales, like I said, you may have
It's going to depend on the maturity and the sophistication of the business, but you may have a sales team and you may have some sales systems in place and you may have like, you know, a VP of sales or a chief revenue officer. But I still think that the CEO's involvement in sales is a prudent and viable strategy for driving revenue and growing that business. It doesn't mean that
that's gonna be their primary job, right? And they may only do it an hour or two a day, right? But I still think, you know, some type of talking with the market, making sales is a really good strategy for almost any CEO. Up to the point where, you know, again, because it's about developing that sales mastery, you wanna keep leaning in.
to be a master salesperson.
Adam O'Leary (08:11.436)
Absolutely, and what happens if say the sales team is not performing as well as you might want it to?
Christopher Filipiak (08:19.531)
Wally?
You're going to have to, you, you, it's, it's hard to fix that if that, if that's the case without some new knowledge and information. And most of that knowledge information is going to come from the outside to help you understand and gain perspective on why that's not working. Right? So there's something in your sales system and your sales system is a combination of the people in the system.
your own mindset, your own bodies, your strategies and tactics and your behavior and your activity. So there's something in that sales system, right? That's not working and you need someone who can come in and help you figure out why it's not working. And if it was working and it's no longer working, you can look at...
you know, what changed, right? Like what in your system changed and then you can develop a plan to either change back to what was working or come up with new mindset, new strategy and tactics, new activity so you can adjust to the change. If it's not working because you're trying to get to a new level that you've never been at before, then again, you're have to invest in
Adam O'Leary (09:44.591)
Hmm.
Christopher Filipiak (09:48.117)
new resources, new people, new ideas, new strategies and tactics that can take you to that new level.
Adam O'Leary (09:56.022)
Absolutely, and when you come in and look at a company I guess what would be the the step-by-step process that you typically go through to kind of identify that gaps because I know you make a bold claim where you say that you can help a sales organization go ahead and add a million dollars in revenue So what are those kind of step-by-step processes that you use to be able to make that happen?
Christopher Filipiak (10:16.075)
Yeah, so one of the things, you know, having worked with hundreds of companies and done sales, personally been involved in sales for dozens of companies is an understanding of kind of what those building block pieces are that need to be in place to allow a business to quickly add a million dollars in revenue. Like there's some fundamental things, you know, sometimes it's solved, but it's things like there's some marketing things like...
market problem solution result messaging, right? There needs to be an offer that looks at that. You need a way to consistently create and have sales conversations. You need to be able to look at the metrics and the reporting to reverse engineer how much volume of all that you need to hit the sales goals that you actually want. You need to be able to have designed conversations so that when someone does have a conversation with you, you know what you're doing.
There's some logistical things like just to facilitate the deal most companies have that and then The last piece is you need a set of marketing plays to actually create those Conversations so when you know what those fundamental building blocks are of a sales system You can first start by comparing You know kind of what that business is doing to kind of what a standard
is and go, hey, here's what you're doing well. Here's what needs improvement. Here's what's missing completely. So that's kind of the first step is to just go through all a company's stuff and look at what's working, what's missing, what needs improvement. Help understand where they're trying to go. And then also talk with the people in sales because...
Christopher Filipiak (12:13.814)
whoever we're being and whatever we believe in here, like whatever the mindset is, is what's creating the results. So oftentimes, you know, there's a mindset issue. So you need to be able to talk with the team and interview the team and understand what needs to shift internally to have the results that you want. And then the last piece is just really looking at the activity, like what are people actually doing in their behavior? you know, so.
Again, it's like looking at people's calendars, like talking about what they really have going on and really looking at the activity and see if that's aligned with the result that they're trying to create. And so that's what an assessment looks like. And then based on that, you can have a really good understanding of what needs to shift and what projects are required to allow you to add the revenue. And then you just go.
Okay, it's actually really simple. We just need to do these things at this volume with this mindset go And if you do it, you'll you know, it's like it's like it's math, right? It's like cause and effect. So Yeah
Adam O'Leary (13:26.391)
That's awesome. And what would be a simple win that somebody could go ahead and implement today in order to help them drive revenue?
Christopher Filipiak (13:36.429)
Talk to more people. Like, just ask more people to buy. I really think, you know, out of all my years of doing this, like, you can improve the strategies and tactics, okay? You can get better forever about that. That's gonna be a continuous journey. But what it really comes down to is asking more people to buy at a higher dollar.
I think that's the shift to make. I know...
that can be either very liberating and create a lot of freedom or you can be, you're, sometimes you could be like, what is this guy even talking about? I'm doing like everything that I can. But the truth is like, you're not, like there's so many more people that you can talk to. And if you're not hitting the revenue you want, you're just not asking enough people, right? Yeah, so I think that's the biggest.
shift. The other two shifts around that are...
clarity on what you want and making a decision that it's gonna happen. Right? Actually being willing to change and grow, Adam. Like you have to, if you want more money, you have to do something different. It's like a change, it's like a change and growth thing. And I know, you know, even for myself and for my clients, like we're all like, we're willing to change, like we're willing to grow and we're all working really hard every day. But if you're getting the same result,
Christopher Filipiak (15:17.056)
you're not actually willing to change and grow. And that takes a level of maturity to like look at and be honest with yourself about.
Adam O'Leary (15:27.289)
Amazing, and where can people go to learn more about you?
Christopher Filipiak (15:29.866)
Yeah, for sure. So people can find me at my website, christopherfilippiak.com or on LinkedIn, linkedin.com forward slash Christopher Filippiak. Those are the places I hang out and
As a gift to the audience, there's actually a Sales Ready Organization self-assessment on my website. Right up at the top it says SRO assessment. You can click on that and begin to understand kind of what those fundamental building blocks are. There's five main categories, mindset, leadership, marketing, sales, and project management.
It's totally free to take and if you just takes a few minutes to do you can take that assessment and then I'll send you a customized report of kind of what's working, what's missing, what needs improvement and what needs to shift and what you need to do to achieve the revenue that you want. So that's available to anyone listening today. Yeah, for sure. Adam, thank you so much for having me on the show.
Adam O'Leary (16:35.693)
That's amazing. Well, thank you so much, Christopher, for jumping on.
Christopher Filipiak (16:42.656)
really appreciated the conversation.
Adam O'Leary (16:45.196)
Absolutely and everybody please make sure to go download Chris's assessment go check that out because Christopher is Amazing at what he does. So thank you all for joining me and I will see you on the next episode
