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Bill Russell: Today on Keynote

Ian Koniak: (Intro) That's the great paradox. So in order to sell more, you actually have to care less about your own motivation and care more about the client's motivation and make their goals and their outcomes, your goals, instead of , getting the sale or.

Getting a certain commission, your goal,

My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare one connection at a time. Our keynote show is designed to share conference level value with you every week.

Bill Russell: Now, let's jump right into the episode.

(Main) All right. It's Keynote. And today we're going to talk about selling to the CIO and we're going to talk about it with Ian Koniak, CEO a sales coaching business.

We're going to talk a little bit about that later. But Ian was actually the Salesforce sales rep who sold me on some solutions early on in my tenure as CIO at St. Joe. And we're going to riff a little bit on selling to healthcare CIOs. We're going to talk a little bit about the life of a person who's in high tech sales selling.

To ordinary people like myself and the toll that takes on people. And we'll talk we'll get a little honest here. Ian, welcome to the show.

Ian Koniak: Great to be here. And it's especially, this is the first time we've done this, where I interviewed you on my show and now I'm a guest on yours. So it feels yesterday we were just talking.

Bill Russell: Yeah, and it was fun. It was fun to talk. So you put me in front of a bunch of salespeople and said, how does the CIO think? And now I'm going to put you in front of a bunch of people in the healthcare IT industry. And say, What are we saying to salespeople?

But with that being said I want to give people some background here. Tell us about your journey. How'd you get into sales, and how'd you get to Salesforce? And just give us a little of that background. I'll

Ian Koniak: give you the CliffNotes version. I was a teacher before I got into sales. So I didn't want to go to work.

Didn't know what I wanted to do. I went to school up in Cal and was I lived abroad, studied abroad, and I love traveling. So I headed down to South America and taught English for a year in Venezuela. Ended up falling in love. My visa expired and I had to go back and live with my parents with no job, no money, no girlfriend.

So I was like, how can I make as much money as possible? And be able to fly her from Venezuela to the US and pay for college on a student visa when I was 23 years old, and that seemed like a daunting task, and I always was, pretty social and I had some summer jobs working in retail, so I thought I'd give sales a shot.

And What I really liked was or uncapped earning potential. I didn't want someone to tell me what I should be paid and sales offered a career where your income directly reflects the value you bring to the marketplace and what you sell. And for me, that was a very fast way to be able to save enough money to get somebody I love to the U S and be with her and get out of my parents house.

And that's how I got in originally

Bill Russell: things that you mentioned, people get into sales because of the unlimited.

earnings potential, but that's one of the traps too, isn't it?

Ian Koniak: It is, because when you make it all about the money you're never fulfilled because it's an extrinsic motivator, right? As opposed to, finding fulfillment through purpose or through service or through having an impact.

And when you're just chasing the money and the recognition, it's fleeting. And also it starts over every single year, your quota resets, it Typically goes up, your territory changes. So it becomes this kind of hamster wheel you got to stay on. And, it

Bill Russell: burns out a lot. I was going to say, it's got to lead to depression.

I can't imagine yes, I made it. I'm going on this trip. And then all of a sudden it's zero, like you're starting all over.

Ian Koniak: Here's an interesting stat. There's a report that came out, it's been coming out the past four years. It's called the state of mental health in sales. And it's published by the sales health Alliance.

The CEO is one of my friends, a guy named Jeff Risley. And it's gotten worse and worse every year since they started it. Now, 70 percent of sellers. rate their mental health as fair or poor. And I don't think it's coincidence. I think the industry is just you're being told you're only as good as your number and it's resetting all the time.

And there's so much fluctuation and movement. And especially in high tech with companies like Salesforce or Microsoft, Google, there's constantly layoffs. There's a ton of pressure on the stock. And I think that takes its toll over time. And that with some of the survey results.

Bill Russell: the other thing I'll say about that is when you're selling to the CIO.

We can sense that. We can sense your underlying motive. it comes out in where you decide to push and how you decide to talk and how you, respond to certain things. How do you respond to delays? Hey, that, that's going through contracting. It's going to take six months.

And, you just, you start to feel it. And you're like, it just doesn't, we don't like dealing with people like that. And don't know It's hard to say, hey, don't be motivated by the money. Cause but at the end of the day level of trust when you finally find that partner that is not motivated by money.

And you're like, yeah, this feels better.

Ian Koniak: That's the great paradox. So in order to sell more, you actually have to care less about your own motivation and care more about the client's motivation and make their goals and their outcomes, your goals, instead of , getting the sale or. Getting a certain commission, your goal, because that's what leads to the big sales and the commission is being a partner and not being attached to whether or not they buy from you.

And it's ironic because the way people are measured and the way managers lead is very much about pressuring people to get the deal now. And you probably went through that with a lot of your partners and vendors where, there's the end of quarter pressure, but that's actually the worst thing you can do for, The partnership for the relationship and for your own success is to put that pressure.

I call it commission breath, which is when anything you say spews of like your motive versus

Bill Russell: that is, that's, I'm going to use that commission breath. That's really good. Now, should people listen to you? You were a fairly successful salesperson.

Ian Koniak: I think when it comes to sales I have the credibility because I was in sales 19 years.

Right now I'm still in sales in a sense as a business owner, but it's very different. But I had a, 19 year career selling technology and of those 19 years I hit quota 16 of the 19 years and made our club and I sold over a hundred million dollars and myself and my teams and I also was the number one enterprise seller at Salesforce.

So as far as someone who's Walk the walk and done the job. I'm not taking some training and getting certified as a trainer or a coach. I've actually done the job and teach what works based on my own experience in the field. And I think that's different from a lot of trainers who weren't great at selling.

So they became trainers.

Bill Russell: Yeah, 100 million. I think a lot of people would trade spots with you right now. Like you, 100 million for Salesforce is doing something. The not hitting quota. Was that early on? Is that what, did something like switch early on or? Let

Ian Koniak: me, yeah, let me give you the story.

And you're an interesting part of the story. So here's what happens in my first nine years of sales or 10 years, sold copiers and printers, which is technology. It's high tech, but it's more of a commodity, right? Everyone needs documents. Everyone needs to print.

We sold to healthcare companies. We sold to government. It was very much a. Price play and an efficiency play and it was something that I work with the CFO and generally do an assessment of their printing costs and show them how they can save money and get better equipment. It was fairly straightforward and it was very transactional in nature.

But there was a cap and honestly, printing was declining and I saw the writing on the wall and our company had put in Salesforce and at that point I was leading sales teams and I was getting a ton of value off of using Salesforce to run my business. And I saw an article in Forbes magazine that said that the average seller at Salesforce in the enterprise made about 300, 000 a year.

Now I was leading a huge team and making around two to 250. And I was like I'm playing in the wrong sport. I got to get over to software. So I was determined to get into, to software. And after three interviews in Salesforce, I finally cracked in and got a job. I don't know if you remember Grant Wood, but he was my boss who I brought in to work with you guys.

And he had worked with you at CA before that and Anyway, Grant had come from HP. So he saw the pedigree and the DNA of the copier and printer rep. And he said, I'll give you a shot. And I went from selling copiers to being an enterprise seller at Salesforce. And my first year with the help of St.

Joe's in that deal, I actually overexceeded. So now I'm 11 years in a row over quota and I'm thinking I'm hot shit. My, my ego is really out of control. I just thought, I knew better than anyone. And I took this very like grinding, transactional, Hustle approach to enterprises. And while that may have worked in the short term, I'd say I got lucky my rookie year.

Cause I happened to reach you at a time when you were unhappy with your current provider. And, we, it just got you at the right time, but that approach wasn't necessarily being a strategic partner and being, really an expert on the problems that my clients face. It was more about grinding and persisting and sending a lot of emails.

And that's what I knew. That's what I did. It turns out that doesn't work in the highest level of the enterprise typically, right? Unless you get someone with good timing usually that approach is not as effective as being a strategic partner and really understanding how and where you can help people and being an expert.

And I wasn't, and I was an expert at grinding, but not an expert at the problems that we solve. So those next three years at Salesforce, after my rookie year, I missed quota.

Bill Russell: Three years in a row?

Ian Koniak: Two pretty bad, then I changed teams and I went to the commercial division, which was more transactional, more higher volume.

I, demoted myself from enterprise to commercial because frankly, I was going to be fired. So I had to get out of there and I wanted to stay at Salesforce. So I somehow snuck into the commercial division And in that year, I grinded like crazy. I had a lot of accounts and I still misquoted this time by one deal.

I missed it the last day of our fiscal year. And it was one of the most depressing and, low moments of my career. Because at that point I knew the problem wasn't my territory. It wasn't my manager, it was me. And I had to face myself. And that's what brought me onto a journey of getting mentors and paying for coaching and joining communities of sellers and really trying to become much better my craft and frankly, better as a person in terms of somebody who cares more about the clients.

So that following year, I finished number one at Salesforce. And then I, every year afterwards, was a, club winner, top performer, and I ended up retiring from sales at 41. So I could coach and teach all this stuff that I didn't know as a transactional copier rep to strategic sellers who never had that training.

So that kind of was my origin story for my business.

Bill Russell: so let's give people the story selling. So fairly new at St. Joe's as CIO. You're a grinder at the enterprise level at Salesforce. We had a problem that we were trying to fix, which was communication was pretty disparate across our entire enterprise.

And we were trying to create a situation where we could create communities and have those communities share. And it was pretty common back then to look at say a Facebook model or something to that effect and say could we do this internally? And so that's what. We were looking at but to be honest with you, we weren't looking at it.

It was, we knew we had a problem and you just barraged me with emails. Now they were really creative emails. This is part of your grinding, right? They're really creative emails and each one was a little different. It had a little bit more. And finally, and I described this on your podcast.

I'm like, I'm receiving 250 emails a day. A hundred of those are from internal, 50 percent of those I have to respond to. So have to write at least 50 emails based on the emails I'm going to receive today and tomorrow I'm going to go through the same thing. Yours was one of the 150 others and something you wrote caught my eye and it was essentially.

Hey, somebody else in your industry, Stanford has utilized our solution to do this. And I go, I have that problem. Stanford's doing this to solve that problem. And I think my response back to you was either show me or prove it or something to that effect. And then you went into the next level of emails.

How many emails did you send me before I finally responded?

Ian Koniak: 15 before you booked the meeting. So I use your example in training. I don't know if you remember this. A couple years ago I reached out and I said can I use this because it's a really good example of persistence. Oh my gosh. And so it was 15 before I booked the meeting.

And you had responded I think after six. You actually started a dialogue. It was never more than one sentence. It was always a very short response like how long did this take? Interesting. How much would this be? Is your license model still the same? You were asking these very pointed questions and most sellers I think would respond by saying, let's book a meeting, let's book a meeting.

And I tried that, but you never would book a meeting. So I decided to mix it up and give you all the details. So I literally looked at the license model and gave you all the details of what was licensed in order for Stanford to do that, how long it took. I looked at the implementation. I got the details on that.

And finally, I think when you realized that it wouldn't be such a heavy lift or that it would be feasible to purchase based on kind of the model, then you took a meeting and that's, and you didn't even show up for the meeting. Interesting. It was David Baker and Jesus.

Bill Russell: I took a meeting. I took a meeting for someone else is what you're telling me.

Ian Koniak: Yes, you delegated someone else. And then you did show up a little bit later when we were further down a path. And then we got engaged directly and you met Larry Schertz, but it was 15 before that meeting actually took place. It was 15 emails.

Bill Russell: let's talk about some of your coaching.

And so what do you say to them today? Is it still fit? It's no, keep sending that email. What's the message or what's the approach if I'm the CIO? And St. Joe's doesn't exist, so it's mythical now, so we can just talk about St. Joe's. I'm the CIO at a 16 hospital system.

How are you coaching these people to get to me?

Ian Koniak: There's a few different strategies. But the general approach, is what I call hyper personalization. So if I'm trying to reach an executive at a large organization, the first thing I would do is I would Google your name and the name of the company or the hospital you work at, and I'd see what you're saying.

I'd look for any interviews that you've been on, or any podcasts you've appeared on, or any media. Publications, which a lot of times is when you're at a larger company at the C suite, they like to showcase, or maybe they've appealed before. So you're watching that. And then from there I'm not throwing into chat GPT or using any of the AI tools.

I'm actually trying to use my brain to figure out what are you saying? And what do you care about that I can link to? This is a concept called linkage. So linkage is the connection between what you sell or the problem you solve. Or your solution and the goals or the challenges which a an executive is facing.

So that's really the most effective is to go on and say, Hey, I heard your interview. Congrats on this particular initiative. One of the things you might not be thinking about or one of the challenges we see from other people pursuing similar initiatives is X, Y, and Z. That's where we can play and that's where we can help.

I'd love to chat with you a little more if this is something that you're facing or you're open to discussing further. So I have a template that goes like that with a little congratulations, cite what you learn, cite the challenge that they may not be thinking about, how you can help, but that's only the beginning.

Most likely that email doesn't even get read. I also teach a combination of multi channel outreach. So email's not enough. You gotta call them, even though it's old school. So

Bill Russell: The cold call isn't dead yet.

Ian Koniak: It's not dead. So it's video plus. Email plus phone ideally on their cell phone and there's ways you can get a cell phone And here's the thing everyone who calls a cell phone if you look at the numbers most people usually don't pick up Okay, so fundamentally it's spam.

It's people that are telemarketing, you know it because you'll pick up and it'll take a delay It's a one or two second delay and then it goes to someone that's not the phone prospecting that we teach. When we call, it's, Hey, I sent you an email. I know you're busy. I'm sure you may not have read it, but here's specifically why I'm reaching out to you.

Here's what I read. I'd love to set up a time. I might be interrupting. Can we book a meeting? So it's short. It's explain why you're calling, be direct. And it's going to sound very different than a telemarketer who's literally going down a script and just waiting for someone to pick up. So it feels a lot more personalized.

And it's that kind of combination. So that's the cold calling method, but much better and more effective is the referral method, right? If I know that you're on LinkedIn, you're connected with somebody else who's a CIO that we've worked with, in there, my connection, I'm going to reach out and see if they're willing or open to make an intro.

I'm going to write a ghostwritten email for them to send to you. And now you have a connection from a trusted source. So however, I can figure out what that common thread is, that common connection to you, I'm going to try and leverage that versus what I used to do, which is just hustle, grind, persist on my own.

So that's something that also advocate heavily for.

Bill Russell: Ian, from time to time, I'm talking to these people and they go, I'm over the Southwest. or I'm over the, even worse, I'm over the Northeast. And you go, how many hospitals is that? And they go, Oh, it's 50. What do you say to somebody when they're like, I've got 600 clients.

They don't really have 600 clients. how do they hit their number with that kind of thing. And I'm talking mostly the startups at this point, the startups tend to hire two or three salespeople and say. Let's split up the country and let's see what we can do. And what would you say to a startup sales rep?

Ian Koniak: Pick 10 and focus there and learn all about those accounts, what they're struggling with, master. There's really two ways you can hyper personalize. One is at the individual level, which I talked about, knowing the person and what they care about. The other is the account level. So really looking into what are the account's values?

What are the account's goals? What are the, Public information you could find if it's a public company, the 10K or the earnings reports. And what are they struggling with? And then is your top client that looks like them that's addressed some of these issues that you can share the information on?

So I would say to someone who has 650, like pick 10, maybe 20 at the maximum, because if you want to go deep, And you have to realize like right now it's not one decision maker anymore. There's probably five, 10 decision makers per. So if it takes 10 touch points to get to 10 different possible decision makers, that's a hundred different outreaches you have to do just for one account in that example.

How do you do that with 650? It's physically impossible unless you're using automation, which generally is not working very well from what we're seeing in the field.

Bill Russell: I've run into sales reps all the time that are so frustrated with health care. Because it's, as you say, there's no single decision maker.

Even though, you're talking to me, I give you to David Baker, now you've got to sell David Baker. David Baker gives you to his project manager or somebody else, and now all of a sudden you're in front of them, and then we go, Hey, this is great. We really like it in IT. Now we have to go sell the executive team, or we have to go sell the physician group, or we have to go, I see so many people get frustrated with that, but that is the nature of sales in healthcare.

How do you talk about the internal sale? How do you talk about them navigating that whole,

Ian Koniak: So for anyone who is curious, who might be listening and wants to understand what it really takes to buy at that level, there is a phenomenal book I recommend. It's called The Challenger Customer, and it's by the people who wrote The Challenger Sale.

It's a group called CEB, and they do research on, how customers buy and take that research and give it to the sellers to be able to use to set up their enterprise sales teams. And Challenger Customer. It's all about what the customer has to do to sell internally and for anybody who's getting frustrated I'd say get out of the game because patience and time and empathy and actually sitting on the same side as your client versus trying to sell to them.

Is absolutely necessary in the enterprise. You and I started, for example, working together in July is when we had our first meeting, we did a couple months of discovery analysis. We went back to pitch and maybe October, try to close the deal. Nothing happened, get you to Dreamforce. And we didn't end up transacting until January.

And I think it was the last week in January in our fiscal. And that was a quick sale cycle, six months. Because you had good stakeholder buy in, you had some budget. There were some things that were working for us, but that was about as fast as you're ever going to see as a six month window. In those six months, there might be 30, 40, 50 meetings that you're in and maybe, a lot more that you're not in that your champion or executive sponsor is trying to sell internally.

So I think it goes to the territory. You just need to have. Patience, number one. And the second thing is you need to realize you're not selling to your champion, you're empowering your champion to sell to their internal stakeholders. I don't know if you recall this bill, but. Helping them sell internally.

So what does that look like? In your case, you had asked me for a demo environment and that's not something that we normally give out. We don't give the keys to the Salesforce demo orgs, but we had built a very customized demo to show how the doctors and nurses could collaborate in this environment at St.

Joe's. And he said, Ian, can I have the demo environment? I want to show this to a few people. Now. hesitated, but I made a case internally and I convinced all of my leaders in the engineering team that it was safe to give you the keys if you will, which was a very tall order for a seller to go against the policy, but I did it.

Because you needed that to be able to sell internally. And I think if you think about your client as a partner and you're not trying to sell them, you're trying to help them sell and you're trying to partner with them to figure out what they need, whether it's case studies, whether it's a business case, whether it's research articles from McKinsey, whatever they need for supporting documentation to make the case internally, you want to empower them and give that to them and then make sure that they're Communicating with you on what they're doing in between those meetings.

And that's more of a partnership than it is, frustration because you're a champion's not able to get it done. It's your fault because you're not empowering them properly, or you're not helping them navigate the enterprise. And maybe they don't even know how to sell it internally.

So you got to coach them.

Bill Russell: I love what you're saying to see your person that you're coming alongside as somebody you are coming alongside of. You're not selling them, you're helping them. to be successful within their organization in terms of sales. And some of us in that role are at sales.

Some of us are not. Some of us, you're going to have to give us the deck, tell us how to walk through the deck do the whole thing. It's I want to talk about your path to coaching and then a little bit about your coaching business. So you retire on top and you become a coach.

Is that essentially the story or is it a little different than that?

Ian Koniak: It's a little different but you got the gist of it. So what happened? The origin story, besides me hitting a rock bottom and sucking in sales, was also I went to Six Flags and went on a rollercoaster.

This was in 2018 in December, and we got stuck upside down, 180 feet in the air hanging. Off a flying coaster for 30 minutes. We were stuck up there. There's videos of it. It was one of the most horrifying things I've ever gone through. And I legitimately thought it was going to die. It was one of those flying coasters where the track is above you.

So we're hanging, staring at cement 18 stories below. And I just, My life flashed before me and I realized that I had been, like you mentioned very selfish greedy. And, I had basically made my life purpose around being financially successful. And that was my identity. And it just hit me that if I died in that moment, I would not have helped other people.

I figured a lot of stuff on my own, but I hadn't necessarily, I'd taken the gifts that I'd been given and used them for my own purpose. Greedy pursuits, I'll call it. And so at that moment, I said, you know what? I don't know how this is going to work, but I promise. And I started praying. I legit thought I would die.

And I started praying. And I said, God, if you just get me down, I will start helping people. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I will help people. And nothing happened. And then I said, I'll start now. And then the coaster took off. So not only did that strengthen my faith, but it also made me determined to start helping people.

So my original business wasn't a business as it was a coaching, business as it stands today. And what I originally did was a media company, if you want to call it that. So all I did is I just started making videos every single day and posting on videos on how to sell or how to think, or, you How to manage your day or just basically shared all the stuff that I had gone through and all the mishaps and all the lessons I learned.

And I did it on Instagram. I did it for a year straight and got me a following. It got me, more exposure. And then I started teaching within Salesforce and going to a lot of the events and helping other sellers and Sure enough, people started approaching me and wanting coaching then I started taking money for it.

And in 2020 COVID hit and people were more isolated. It was harder to sell and my business kind of blew up. And then in 2021 I said, it doesn't really make sense for me to stay at Salesforce because I don't. Want to just help two companies at that point. I really dealt with big companies.

I only had two accounts. I'm like helping two customers be more efficient, make more money is not my life mission. I want to take this coaching thing to the next level, but I had been doing it in some form or fashion for two years, building the audience and testing the monetization of it. I built up a big wait list.

So when I made the leap, I had a really proven model. I had a hundred people on the waitlist for coaching because I couldn't take them because I was still at Salesforce. And then I just opened the floodgates. And at that point, my income, superseded my Salesforce income which is really what I needed to know with confidence that this was going to be a

financially good move as the breadwinner for my family. So I'll make a long story short. It wasn't like, Oh, save up money, retire. It was prove out the business model, build a bridge. And then when you feel safe enough that the business is going to work, then cut the cord and do it full time.

Bill Russell: I watched a video about one of your masterminds earlier today.

And one of the things that struck me is. know you talk about advanced selling strategies and all those other things, but the video itself was really about balance, purpose. It was really about a lifestyle that is sustainable and not going to burn you out. do you spend so much time with salespeople around those topics?

Ian Koniak: The salespeople. Are miserable in general. I say miserable, maybe they're happy and they're smiling, whatever, but inside there, I feel like most salespeople struggle with feeling like they're not worthy because they're measured in their entire success, their career.

Bill Russell: It's that old ING thing. They have a number over their head.

Ian Koniak: That's right. And they genuinely don't feel worthy unless they're hitting their number. And what's interesting is in order to hit your number, you actually have to feel worthy first. You actually have to believe that you can help your clients. You have to know your worth to be able to walk away from clients that aren't good fit and avoid that commission breath.

So when I spend time on the personal side, it's about Feeling good about things you're doing regardless of your performance. So whether, it's how you show up as a spouse or a father, it's how you take care of your health. It's living your values, knowing what your values are. And if you can feel grounded in those things, generally that extends to how you show up in, in your work and how you show up with your customers.

And that's the type of person that, like you said that you want to be. Customers want to partner with versus someone who's just trying to hit their quota and get a deal done where, It just feels off for customers. So if I work on the person and help them feel secure in who they are, then they can show up in complete service to their clients, which leads to bigger commissions and better results.

And I found that the personal side is where people get the biggest transformation. That's one thing is how they feel every day, right? You want people to feel good about themselves so they can show up better for clients. The second thing is about discipline, right? A lot Salespeople, it's one of those jobs, your CIO, your calendar is literally booked from start to finish and there's no time to breathe.

Salespeople have the opposite problem. It's, you're sitting in your house and it's I got a cold call. I got to do research. I got to figure out like nothing's coming in. There's no inbound selling where that's an order taker, right? And that that's not the people I coach. For them, it's about the discipline of coming up with a point of view on how you can help a client, doing your research, planning your prospecting, writing emails.

All that stuff takes somebody who really is committed and disciplined and doesn't give in to distraction or procrastination. So a lot of that work is what will determine somebody who just puts in a full day and actually works on the right things, which generally leads to really good results in sales.

So I find the mindset piece and the habit piece is Probably 90 percent of what makes someone successful. And the other 10 percent is the skills, which come from experience and practice and just in time, frankly.

Bill Russell: you just said is so applicable for business owners. It's the same thing. Like you wake up every day and it's okay, what am I going to do today?

It's very rarely a day where you just go, Oh, these are the things. It's, some days you're working on products. Some days you're working on process. Some days you're working on sales. Some days you're working on marketing. And it really does take an awful lot of discipline to go, What should I be working on today?

What's the most important thing today? Talk to me a little bit about your coaching business. have you written a book yet?

Ian Koniak: No, nope. It's not on my short term.

Bill Russell: Not on your goals list, but you've generated a ton of content. So how do people engage with you a coach, assume you do some one on one, but you also have some scalable models as well.

Ian Koniak: Yeah. So when I started, it's funny you mentioned, cause when I mastered time management and discipline in sales, and then I made the leap to full time business owner, I use the exact same skills of working a full day on what we call RGAs, which is revenue generating activities. Anything you're doing that will create pipeline or advanced pipeline.

Those are the core tenants of it, but as a business owner it's marketing. That's how you create. Your awareness and your audience that ultimately goes to work with you in any capacity. So I had been doing a lot of marketing for two years. I got fairly consistent and good at it because I just practiced so much.

I was posting every day. And what happened initially is I had this big wait list of coaching clients, but then I also had companies that wanted to work with me. to help, train their sales team and also to help consult with them on how to actually design their comp plan or design their sales team.

And and you only have

Bill Russell: 2080 hours in a year, family that you want to hang out with as well.

Ian Koniak: You know where this is going, right? So I had these three revenue streams. I had one on one coaching, I had training for companies and then I consulting or an advisory business. And I, at this point, I'm like, I'll just take Anything that comes because I need to support my family.

I found that my focus was really divided and diluted focus gets diluted results. And about a year into my entrepreneurial journey, I said, you know what, I'm going to close down the advisory work, I'm going to close down the sales training for companies, which was requiring me to travel and a lot of prep and a lot of selling, frankly, to businesses who had to justify bringing in a trainer that was, 20 grand and above.

So it was very. Labor intensive. And so I just closed those two divisions and I went all in on the one on one coaching. And when I did that, I was still full and I realized like this doesn't scale well. So I took a step back and I created a a subscription platform. It used to be.

Pay me for 12 sessions of one on one and I'll coach you. And then when you're done, if you want to do more, great. If not, all good. Go out and fly, and it was just very intensive to have four or five, six coaching sessions a day. And these are people that are like literally pouring out their problems to use.

A lot of times it's sales therapy, more than sales coaching,

Bill Russell: Sales therapy, sales counselor. So it's not sales, I got it.

Ian Koniak: Yeah. So it was taking its toll. I took all their stuff and it's hard not to internalize that. So I said, you know what, this isn't necessarily scalable and I don't necessarily want to spend it's too intense.

And so I created a group coaching program and I created an online coaching program and I created these tiers of models that are subscription. So I said the minimum commitments one year, if you're working with me, you got to be committed, there's too much to do and you can't cover in a quarter. I changed the model a little bit where if they wanted to just get online training, they paid something, but I wasn't involved. That took a lot of building where I had to record all the content and the modules. That was a big project. But once it was launched, it became, very successful.

And I could also sell that to companies where they just bought the training where I didn't have to deliver it live. The second model was a group coaching, one to many, where I can take a group of people and do sessions 30, 40, 50 at a time. And The highest level tier was a one on one model where they got me and they also had the course in the group.

So it's scaled really well. Right now I have a hundred and I think we're around 170 active clients just in the group and the one on one and another 250 or so in the online program. So we're over 500 clients close to it at any given time. And and honestly, the best part is I can hire coaches.

So on the one on one I can train them in our methodology, and then I can have one on one coaches. So I'm really. running the business and delivering some of the group stuff. But I'm generally more free than ever before to work on the business versus being the practitioner that's delivering all the work in the one on one session.

you've

Bill Russell: overcome the e myth. Did you get to read the e myth?

Ian Koniak: I did. Yeah. E myth revisited. I read, it's exactly right. And that kind of mindset and that awareness I've delegated and outsourced a ton of stuff from my marketing to my webinars to, all of the sales. I have a sales team, even a BDR.

I'm running it like a SaaS company where I'm actually the CEO now. And it's I raised my prices substantially where if someone wants to coach with me, they're going to pay a lot more just because my time is very limited and that has enabled more people to go to the one on one with coaches.

I have a full time. Coach that's working and now hiring a second coach. So it's, it scales much better. And we'll be an Inc 5, 000 company this year. So we're growing really fast. Wow.

Bill Russell: Fantastic. Ian, it's great to catch up with you. We'll have to make this an annual thing to, what's changing in sales.

Maybe things never change, but. It feels to me like more and more people are saying, Oh, use these tools, use this marketing, use this stuff. And we can just revisit it once a year and debunk all the myths that keep popping up in sales. So that'll be fun.

Ian Koniak: Sales is so misunderstood, but ultimately it's about having conversations like this.

it's about knowing how to talk to people. Understand what they want, cutting the BS, being direct with them and not pitching and trying to sell. The less you try and sell, the more people actually want to work with you. Cause they feel like it's their motivation and not yours. So I think the old is forever new.

And honestly, I think it's needed more than ever with all the tech and all the AI people are just losing that human to human component. And that's where I'm really trying to focus, Bill. And you've been a great part of it.

Bill Russell: I appreciate it. And it's always good to have a sales coach who's wearing a t shirt.

I don't know. It just sort, it screams success like

Ian Koniak: in a beard.

Bill Russell: I don't need in a beard. Exactly.

Ian Koniak: It's not caring. The less you care, the more you win, the more you win.

Bill Russell: Ian, thank you very much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Ian Koniak: Appreciate seeing you. Thanks for having me, man.

Bill Russell: Thanks for listening to this week's keynote. If you found value, share it with a peer. It's a great chance to discuss and in some cases start a mentoring relationship. One way you can support the show is to subscribe and leave us a rating. it if you could do that. Thanks for listening. That's all for now..