In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Steli Efti, CEO of Close, a sales and CRM platform.

Listening to Steli Efti is like soaking in the most intense sales wisdom you’ll ever hear.

He’s a born salesman, and this interview is full of his detailed processes and quick-fire tips. From building, scaling and maintaining a sales team to generating outbound sales leads and closing deals, Steli lets us in on techniques that have helped him build the successful Close from (surprise surprise) an outbound sales service to a CRM.

He explains his “AQC” model for measuring the effectiveness of outbound sales, and how many cold calls you need to make every day to get results. I really loved hearing about testing whether it’s your leads that aren’t qualified or whether your sales pitch just sucks.

Use the links below to get the episode!

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

Quote to Tweet

“Qualify, pitch, manage objections then go for the close. It’s a process, not rocket science” (tweet this)

Show notes

• Steli reveals best practices and processes for building a killer sales team
• What types of companies should bother implementing a sales team
• Why Close don’t do outbound sales any more
• Setting up an inbound sales machine
• When to set up a sales team, and when not to
• Using outbound sales as market research and pure hustle
• Getting your first customer with outbound sales
• A solid framework for outbound sales explained
• Estimating the actual lifetime value of a customer to see if you need a sales team
• Back-of-the-napkin math for calculating the cost of outbound sales
• When it’s okay to pay $2 to get $1 back
• A quick trick you can use to make outbound sales way more profitable
• Identifying your ideal customer, and judging how hard it will be to implement outbound sales to go after them
• The most overlooked ground rule of outbound sales
• How to answer the question “does this scale?”
• What to do when you run out of leads
• Matching ideal customers to lead sources to reel in the best targets
• Why trusting bought leads is pure stupidity and manual scraping is much more accurate
• The types of professionals that are the easiest to sell to
• A rarely used method of generating sales leads
• You’ve got leads. What now?
• Implementing a system to get consistent demos, meetings and sales
• Planning out a month of sales activity in advance
• The importance of testing constantly: emails, cold calls, offers.
• Why 99.9% of outbound campaigns are high volume
• What does ‘high volume’ mean? How many cold calls or emails is that per day?
• Developing a minimum viable pitch
• Overcoming the fear of sales
• The most important outbound sales metrics to track when cold calling and emailing
• Calculating your “reach rate” to measure your sale team’s effectiveness
• The simple way to find out if a lead is qualified
• Finding out if your leads are the problem, or if your pitch just sucks
• Creating a list of common objections to close more deals
• Why you should follow up forever

Show links

TOOLS

• Close: https://close.com
• Close Blog: https://blog.close.com
• Elastic Sales: http://elasticsales.com/
• Process Street: https://www.process.st

CONTACT

• Steli Efti: [email protected] & @steli
• The Startup Chat: http://thestartupchat.com

In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Hack the Entrepreneur’s Jon Nastor about starting a podcast and getting 1,400,000 downloads. 

Podcaster Jon Nastor has been host of Hack the Entrepreneur (HTE) since 2015, and between then and now his podcast has quickly become a runaway success.

From a few tentative early episodes to 1.4 million downloads, HTE has exploded. How did Jon do it?

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Walter Chen — the CEO and co-founder of lightweight status reporting platform, iDoneThis.

Walter lets us in on some little-known secrets, busts a number of misleading marketing myths and shares some unexpected tactics that helped him get ahead.

The episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, you’ll learn startup marketing strategy from an experienced content marketer who — by any means necessary — pushed iDoneThis to $500k ARR. He says it’s okay for 90% of your content to fail, tell us the kinds of marketing emails you shouldn’t bother sending, and a trick he used to leverage the fanatical readership of Hacker News.

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It’s finally here.

I am excited to say after numerous delays the release of our brand spankin new podcast: Business Systems Explored hosted by myself (Vinay Patankar) and Tony Brown has arrived.

You can download and listen today on iTunes (iOS) or Stitcher (Android).

Why should I listen?

The mission of this podcast is to bring you (the reader-soon-to-be-listener) unique, insightful and detailed systems that can be used in your business today.

We take deep dives into topics like:

• Building and scaling content marketing systems to generate hundreds of thousands of views
• Sales hacking for getting the most out of your reps
• Automating boring recruitment processes
• Building a well oiled engineering team

Just to name a few…

And no, the podcast is not all about Process Street and no, we don’t spend 20 minutes asking guests about the origins of their business, what they eat for breakfast, or their first living memory.

Instead we do deep breakdowns into specific business systems with a specialist guest each week.

We’ve already interviewed a number of awesome people including Walter Chen (iDoneThis), Steli Efti (Close.io), Dennis Mortensen (x.ai), Jon Nastor (Hack the Entrepreneur), Tim Page (LeadPages) and have an exciting future lineup.

So if you’re interested in growing a business, improving your team’s efficiency, saving time, money or just like to hear awesome people talk about cool hacks, you should subscribe.

How do I listen?

Ready to jump into the first episode?

The best place to get the first episode is on iTunes (iOS) or Stitcher (Android) where you can also Subscribe for future episodes.

We will be releasing a new episode every Friday so keep a look out in your iTunes feed.

If you prefer to listen on your computer, you can do so at the Business Systems Explored Website.

Links to subscribe

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and rating 🙂

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

Now, time to get into the show with the first episode, hot off the press.

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