224: Mimiran: A Whole New CRM System (Yes, We Need Another One) With Reuben Swartz

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FTC 229 | Mimiran CRM

 

You’d think that the last thing we need is another CRM, but most systems fail in one spectacular way or another. Mimiran is more than just a CRM. It is a whole way of thinking, a whole philosophy embedded in software that solves problems instead of creating new ones. Behind this innovative tool is the nerdy, introverted and just plainly brilliant mind of Reuben Swartz, the Chief Nerd at Sales for Nerds. Do you hate selling? Well it’s probably you and the greater part of the world. Listen in as Reuben shares with Mitch Russo how he turned his hate for sales and CRMs into a passion to build – wait for it – a sales tool and a CRM. Ironic? It’s anything but.

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Mimiran: A Whole New CRM System (Yes, We Need Another One) With Reuben Swartz

Welcome to this moment in time when you get to chill out, tune in, and extract wisdom you could use to grow your business with your first thousand clients. We are here to support you by making sure you know what is working and not working in the business. If you have a business that’s in need of some love and some revenue profits then I want you to grab my product. It’s called Profit Stacking Secrets. This started out as a new client assessment that I distributed to every new client before I started working with them but it became much more powerful that I decided to offer it to my audience as a way of helping them assess their own business and grow it. The first part is free. You can pay for the second part which is only a little bit of money. Hundreds of clients later, I’ve refined it to have what you need to grow quickly with very little investment using strategy instead of cash. How does that sound? Good to you? Go to ProfitStackingSecrets.com and get your copy. Now on to my incredible guest and his amazing story.

My guest is an accidental success, so he says, in one way. He started out interning for a Silicon Valley company then decided to move on. He was a coder, introverted yet talented and possibly his biggest goal at that time was to avoid wearing dress shoes and talking to customers. He’s a nerd. He remained in the background helping other founders become wealthy. You go to work for a founder, you do your best, you work hard and you get your paycheck for your job, just over broke, until one day, he realized he was burnt out. Free of encumbrances, no wife, no kids and no house, he took a break from the BS of big enterprise and realized the absence of a solution in of all places to proposal buildings space.

That’s not a space I’ve paid a lot of attention to but he found that little itty-bitty niche and he found his way in so he builds one but his customers weren’t exactly thrilled. They wanted a lot more. They wanted more features, more tools and more ways to close deals so he did what all good development nerds do. He wrote more code. He listened to customers. He ended up with a magnificently simple but powerful system. I don’t want to call it a CRM system because he’d hate me if I did, but it is a CRM system. He’s here to share his wisdom with us on exactly how he did it and what you could learn from his experience. Welcome, Reuben Swartz to the show.

Thanks for having me, Mitch. Thanks for making my story sound glamorous.

Let me tell you, Hollywood is your next stop, I promise. You’re right in there. Reuben, you have an awesome story. Let’s go back to the beginning and tell that story with a little bit more detail.

It’s funny you mentioned the whole dress shoes thing because I do remember overhearing a conversation with some of these MBA types who were walking down the hallway of the office building we were in Austin complaining that there was nowhere in Austin that you could buy decent shoes. You had to do that when you’re in New York. I thought these people are living life all wrong. I remember my first customer trip, I got called out to do some support and they were having some problems. They didn’t have anyone who could talk to me. They didn’t have anyone technical so I couldn’t help them. Instead of realizing that my real mission was to show that I was supporting them, I was like, “I’m going to get back on the plane and go back because I have other customers who need help.”

I had somehow tossed my rental car keys in the dumpster along with my fast-food wrappers. I don’t know how I did this but as I’m crawling through the dumpster, trying to find my keys when I finally realized where they are after I’d gone back and forth to my hotel room and walked a lobby at umpteen times, this is a sign that I’m not supposed to do this. I’m supposed to be in front of my computer, in my shorts, in my sandals and not messing with any of this stuff. What I realized over time was as much as I like to think that software is cool, complicated and hard, it’s easy compared to getting people to get on the same page, change and behave differently especially big teams of people who might have different incentives.

I got frustrated with showing up at the end when people had made a bunch of decisions without considering the technical feasibility of some of those decisions. Everyone was working hard and I felt only getting a fraction of the benefit they could have gotten. When I decided I was going to go out on my own, I was like, “I have in my own head at least picked up enough of the strategy of business process to at least be dangerous on that. I know the technology. What if we could put all those things together?” At this point, I was helping big companies with their sales and marketing, specifically with their pricing. The irony was I was terrible at sales and marketing. Fortunately, these big companies had enough big problems that I could go in and help them with them.

It worked out well, they would refer me to people, asked me to come back and we got business through word of mouth because, otherwise, we wouldn’t get business but there’s a lot of irony there. My excuse was always a little boutique consulting firm is totally different from these Fortune 500 companies and I think there’s some truth to that. I absorbed a lot of the wrong lessons from my clients because they were successful companies. I was trying to emulate them. I didn’t realize until much later that I was emulating the wrong things, let’s say. It took me a long time to figure out that I didn’t have to pretend to be a salesperson or marketing person.

Stop thinking of what you do as selling and start seeing it as helping people. Click To Tweet

I could be who I was, an engineer who’s helping people solve problems. Let me help people solve business problems, not just technical problems. Let me be myself instead of all this BS that I absorbed from sales training, marketing training, and all these other things that I had tried to put into place. That made life much easier and more profitable for that matter. I didn’t feel like I was having to be inauthentic. I could be who I was. Instead of selling, I was going to help people because I still hate selling. Instead of marketing, I was going to teach people. Instead of networking, I was going to connect with people. All these things that let me be me, which isn’t perfect, but it’s fine. It’s better than trying to impersonate somebody else.

I have a question for you because this is interesting to me. First of all, I have to resolve the hanging parts that you left us out. What happened to the keys? Where are the keys? Did they end up in a dumpster? Were they back in the hotel? Where were they?

I tossed the keys in the dumpster. I feel like there’s a metaphor here somewhere.

Now that we got that out of the way, what I want to clarify for myself is none of these things you talk about were things that you didn’t like doing. There were things that if you had to do, you could, but they weren’t you. You didn’t feel comfortable doing them and you must have been uncomfortable doing them because you made that decision, “I’ve got to be myself.” Did this evolve over a period of time? Did you wake up one morning and say, “I can’t stand this anymore? It’s either I’m going to do it my way or I’ll go raise pot plants in the desert.” What was it?

I think a lot about that question and I don’t know the answer because memory plays tricks on us. It was a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit and so on. All of a sudden, there was a big change when I was like, “I hate selling.” I had had a lot of bad experiences, the software engineer who came in after the sales guy made the promises. Not the Glengarry Glen Ross image of sales but I had personally suffered from what I perceived to be sales tactics that I didn’t like. At the same time, that was how the game was played and I saw what happened to companies that were completely honest. They often didn’t even make it into the finals of the RFP process.

I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to feel like I was being someone that I could. I still remember that tension in your back when you’re impersonating someone else. I still have that muscle memory. I don’t want to experience that. One of the things I did realize was this is my business. Nobody is making me do this. I’m choosing to do this because it’s the right thing, but what if it’s not? What could happen if I started doing it the way I want to do it? It turns out you sell a lot more.

It’s a great question to ask. Let’s do a little survey here. The audience, raise your hand if you hate selling. There are a lot of hands out there, Reuben. I’ve got to tell you. We’re on the same page here. What did you do next?

I’m going to stop selling. I’m not going to think of what I do as selling. I’m going to help people. If I was talking to a friend, what questions would I ask? How would I act? What would be my next steps?

That becomes your software company that built proposals.

It eventually did. The whole proposal piece was also interesting as part of this. I like every other new consultant grab some proposal template from somewhere that was terrible but it looked “professional” and would get to the point where I would have honest discussions with people. They could tell that I cared. They knew what I was talking about. They can send me a proposal. I’d try to populate this template which was full of crap and then they would say, “What the heck did you mean?”

FTC 229 | Mimiran CRM
Mimiran CRM: Conversations are the fundamental unit of human interaction and the tools should facilitate them instead of replacing them.

 

This was another one of the things like, “Why am I doing this? This is stupid. Why don’t I reiterate and summarize the conversations that we had where we both agreed on exactly what’s going to happen?” One of the things I realized is a proposal is a story and not a brochure. The hero of the proposal is the buyer, not the seller. I got quite good at writing proposals if I may say so. One of the things that bug me was even when we had this agreement, people would say, “We need to start the project at the beginning of the next month or whatever. Can you have some people here?”

Even though at this point, I had already made sure that they had committed a meeting to review the proposal before I committed to writing it, half the time that would get rescheduled because these were busy people and they would be like, “Sorry, I got sent to China for the week or whatever. Can we reschedule?” I would never know, do I need to have those people in Chicago the first of the month or do I need to keep them in Los Angeles? For me, it was more of a cashflow issue. I got to pay these people, I want to make sure they’re busy and I want to keep customers happy. That was how it started.

I realized we’re building all kinds of interesting stuff for our clients but I’m still using Word, Excel, email, and prayer to close deals. Wouldn’t it be nice if I at least knew if and when a prospect was reading my proposal so I wouldn’t have to call and be like, “If you have any questions, did you get the proposal? I want to make sure you got the proposal.” You feel like the loser call on the girl for prom. I don’t want to give up but if I call too much, I sound desperate and it’s bad.

I’m going to fast forward a little bit here. You ended up building this tool that not only delivers the proposal but completely tracks what happens when the proposal arrives, is that right?

That’s right and lets the client sign it on any device and completely changes the way you create and close the proposals. I didn’t intend it as this great sales tool. I intended it as a way to manage my work with clients and my cashflow better.

That product is still alive and well but it’s evolved into being the Mimiran system, is that right?

That’s exactly right. I realized that this would be useful for other people and started getting people using this to send their proposals. They said, “This is great. Proposals are totally different. The whole experience is different. It’s faster. I never missed an opportunity.” Customers like them, they look great, they like that they can sign them. What can I do to get more leads in the front of my funnel? That’s now the bottleneck for my business. I was like, “I’m the techie amongst all you folks. I’m going to do some research for you guys. I’m not going to solve this problem obviously. I’m going to point you to the right stuff.” I realized that so much of the world, there are a million tools for online businesses where you get an email address and you automate until they click buy.

There are a million tools for big companies that have sales teams that are pounding the phone 200 times a day. If you’re a small firm or even a solo firm and you’re spending most of your time delivering work, you don’t need a million leads but if you get five of them and two of them turn into prospects, that’s going to completely change your year, there was nothing there for you that did things the way I thought they should be done. I was like, “I’ve got this great way to create content, share it online, and let people know when someone’s reading it.

What if I make it easy to embed a little button on a web page to provide, instead of a proposal but provide a lead magnet? This aligns with the whole teaching instead of the marketing philosophy. The proposals, the helping, instead of selling. What about before that? How do we find the right people so that when we have conversations that we help them, some number of them are going to turn into clients? Let’s teach them about the stuff that we do.” That’s going to naturally attract the right folks who want to learn about this stuff.

A proposal is a story, not a brochure. Its hero is the buyer, not the seller. Click To Tweet

We are talking to the amazing Reuben Swartz who has an incredible tool called Mimiran and its Mimiran.com. Reuben, let’s fast forward to the end game here. What is it that you have? You’ve gone beyond the proposal, you have the one button that sends a lead magnet. What else does this incredible product do?

The next thing that my customer said to me is, “I love this lead generation stuff. I love the proposal piece. I hate using Salesforce. I hate using such and such. I hate my spreadsheet. Can you make Mimiran do the CRM stuff in the middle?” I was like, “The world doesn’t need another CRM, etc. That would be ridiculous.” You can see where this is going. I got frustrated because I realized as an introvert that I care about connecting with people. I enjoy conversations. They’re essential to business and life. I was trying to use various CRMs that I was integrating Mimiran with to keep up with the people who weren’t urgent.

They’re people that you want to talk to you, like having conversations with them, and the next thing you know, referrals come and you get a tip about parenting or whatever. You share a referral, you’re contributing as well, and the whole karmic wheel turns around in the right way. I couldn’t do it the way I wanted. The other thing that was driving me nuts was even for the urgent deals, all the CRMs have some way of saying here’s the next conversation, date, or whatever. If you forget to set that, it disappears. I’m like, “Why would the computer ever let me have something disappear like that? My customers are right. It took me a while to realize it. I’m sorry guys but we do need a better way to do this. We need a way to keep in touch with the people who matter to us conversationally, not via an email blast.”

Conversations are the fundamental unit of human interaction and the tools should facilitate them instead of replacing them. I added a way that the system would tell you when to talk to somebody again based on when you talked to them last and a feature called Call Mode, which I spent a lot of my day and it’s like, “Who do I call?” Click the button, it calls them, adds my notes, hit save, go to the next one. It completely changed the way I am. My customers interact with people. Going back to that tension in the shoulders to, “I’ve dialed a phone 25 times. I did a number of great conversations.” I feel great. As an introvert, this is mind-blowing even now for me. That’s where we’re at. The other thing that is worth mentioning especially for companies where there’s one person doing all the selling, you miss out a lot on that team competition that you do get in a big sales team, and it’s isolating. It’s easy to let a day or a week or even a month to go by without doing your prospecting especially when you’re in the thick of client work.

I realized I can network these people together in a way that lets them share some information without going too deep. You can connect with other users of the system and say, “I’m going to see how many conversations you had. They’re going to see how many conversations I had this week, this month, this quarter, year to date.” That psychology is powerful when you see, “Cheryl is ahead of me this week. Instead of blowing it off and reading the news for half an hour, I’m going to call some more people and vice versa.” You don’t win anything differently. You don’t win anything from beating Cheryl or whomever, but it’s all about you being your best self and growing your business. That’s something that has been missing for these small firms where the owner or who might be and be the only person but the person responsible for selling doesn’t have that psychological impetus to make sure they’re doing the sales blocking and tackling that you would get on a big sale team.

That’s certainly a unique feature. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a system that would measure you against all other users in the system in an anonymous way without revealing any pertinent information. That’s cool.

To make sure that I’m saying this right. It’s not anonymous and it’s not everyone else. You have to connect explicitly. You’re connecting with other people you know and say, “I respect Mitch. I want to be paired with him. Let me see how Mitch is doing this week. How am I doing?”

It’s a little bit different than I had suggested which is better because now I know I’m competing against you or you’re competing against me or whoever we choose. Do we have to be in the same company on the same database, logged into the same company system and all that?

That’s the whole brilliance of it. You’re in your own system, they’re in their account. The only thing you’re sharing is the number of conversations. The reason for that is, if you are having those conversations, good things are going to happen. For most people, that’s the area that they need a little extra boost on. “Let me pick up the phone and call people. Let me make sure I’m scheduling conversations and having them.” We’re not getting into how many proposals did you close and how much money was at stake or anything like that, here’s how many conversations I had this week.

You’re not the only introvert in the room here. I want to let you know that many of us tend to have those tendencies if you will. I’ve always been searching for tools to help me with some of that. This is one of the best ideas I’ve seen in a long time. My competitive side would say, “If I can compare the number of calls, can I compare the number of dollars too? How about I got to 30,000 in sales? What did Cheryl get to?” I don’t know if you plan on doing that. That might be a bad idea but it struck me that, “If we’re going to compete, let’s compete.”

FTC 229 | Mimiran CRM
Mimiran CRM: The person who buys the sales tools is not the person who has to use it day-today. There’s a big conflict in incentives.

 

I have had some people asking for that. That may be coming at some point.

CRM has been around for a long time. I’ve got to tell you, I used to run a CRM company many years ago when I was the Chief Operating Officer of Sage PLC. We had several. The real question with CRM is the implementation. Getting people to use it is a bear. That biggest excuse you hear from salespeople used to be, I don’t think it’s the same anymore or as bad, is I’d rather be selling and playing with the software. Take us down the pathway here as to how you and why your system both overcomes that and gets past the psychology of dealing with stuff that might be distasteful to a lot of people.

I know because I’ve used dozens of CRMs and I’ve hated all of them until this one to varying degrees. When I was consulting, I would be pulling a lot of data out of the client’s CRM systems. It was obvious that there was a passive-aggressive battle between the VP of sales saying, “You need to enter stuff to get paid.” The rep is saying, “What’s the minimum amount of information I can enter.” One of the things that I realized there is that the person buying the tools, the VP of sales, is different than the person using the tool on a day-to-day basis.

That is a powerful insight and important to anybody who’s selling into the corporate community. Could you repeat that statement? It’s impactful.

The person who buys it, the VP of sales let’s say, is not the person who has to use it day-to-day. There’s a big conflict in incentives. The irony is that the VP of sales wants to buy this thing so that he or she can track everything, which is a noble goal, but to have reasonable data to track, you need people to want to use it. The interesting thing for me and from my tribe, we are both the user and the VP of sales. We get both sides of the coin. We need to have an overall picture of what’s going on but we have to be able to do the individual functions easily enough that there are reasonable data for us to report on. One of the things that always bugged me was how many clicks and things I had to do to deal with basic stuff.

One of the ideas with my system is we want to keep clicking to a minimum. Everything is like, “Here’s a list of people to call when you’re supposed to call them.” That was the first evolution of the CRM. I was like, “There are too many clicks. I don’t want to click in and then call. It’s like click one button and then have the system do the work for me.” The other thing that I realized was, I looked at many reports on notes out of Salesforce and they were garbage. What’s the minimum number of characters I can enter because it’s a waste of my time?

What I realized is when I’m writing a proposal, if you go and you take me up on some of the freebies at the end of this episode, you’ll appreciate this but the proposal being a story starring the customer, whose words are in the story? It’s the customer’s words so I need to know exactly what their problem is and what they want me to do to solve it. Once I had that down in my consulting days, I could put together a killer proposal that they would read through once and say, “You got it. Let’s do this thing.” How do we incorporate that into an online tool? Wouldn’t it be great if I could Live Search my notes while I’m putting the proposal together?

When I’m looking for where I talk about the problem statement, I have a little method I use, I type “P:.” The prospect describes a problem they’re having and I write down exactly what they say, so when I’m putting the proposal together it’s like, “Search for P: and make sure I’m dropping in the right problem statements and editing them appropriately.” All the work is already done for me. Now there’s an incentive for me to take good notes. What about people who aren’t prospects? The people who might be partners or they’re never going to be prospects or they’re interesting people to talk to, I want to know what we spoke about last time.

I want that to be easy for me to see. Were there any action items that I need to follow up on? Who is this person’s ideal client so I can refer people to them? Suddenly, there’s minimal overhead for me to put information in the system and a great advantage for me having it at my fingertips as a user and not as the VP of sales. That’s the big thing. Is there utility in me doing this? The other thing is for me especially, how do I use this tool to let me help, teach and connect instead of sell, market, network, and feel a little sleazy? A lot of it is people don’t know exactly what to do. If you have done nothing but run marathons in the tropics and suddenly you’re at the top of the ski slope, it doesn’t even matter how good your skis are, you feel completely out of place.

I want you to feel like you’re in exactly the right place because you have this great expertise that you can then use in the form of lead magnets to bring new people in. You can use when you connect with people and talk to them about their problems without having to try to sell them and so on. Between those things, we’re optimizing the tool itself for both the user and the VP when they’re the same person and then also letting that person be themselves, it makes it much easier to get a CRM up and running and get that virtuous cycle going.

Instead of selling people, make it easy for the right people to buy. Click To Tweet

For the audience who prefer to have a system where you sell market and feel sleazy, contact me after the show, I’ll set you up with one of those systems. If you don’t want to do that, then check out what Reuben has for us because it’s exciting. Here’s the thing that I’m noticing from what you’re saying. It’s not so much software, Reuben. It’s you. You have embedded your way of thinking, your methodology, I hope you’ve embedded it into the system. If not, how do you share the things that you do that make you more efficient using your own software? How do new users start to learn how you use the system? More importantly, how can they use it more effectively and more quickly?

It’s a great point and I am user number one and that’s a huge advantage. I’m not the user and the VP of sales, I’m selling, marketing and developing this tool. It’s all integrated and coherent. I have conversations with my customers and even before I did this with other clients, how should this work in an ideal world? We can’t always get 100% of the way there, but if we could get to 80% instead of 12%, that would be great. There’s this constant process of trying to make it as easy and authentic as possible. When you sign up, there’s a bunch of online help. You get a bunch of emails saying you do this and do this.

The biggest thing is if you take me up on it, I will onboard you for free. Not everyone needs that or wants that. As part of the onboarding flow, it says, “Click here to schedule your free concierge onboarding session.” You and I will spend an hour together and you hit it right on the head. Twenty-five percent of that is software and 75% of it is how do I think about this so I’m excited to be part of this? Instead of feeling like sales and marketing is a necessary evil that I need to grind through to grow my practice, how can I be as excited about that as I am about my mission of helping clients? For me, it’s realizing that it’s all the same mission.

Let’s go up about 30,000 feet here because the software is going to be powerful for many people. I know there’s going to be a few of us who try it for sure. What I want to focus on now is who is in a situation where they’re not that familiar with sales. They’re introverted. They don’t like the process. They think it’s sleazy. The last thing they want to do is get someone on the phone and say, “What do you think? Do you want to hand me $5,000 or so? What’s the deal?” Nobody wants to do that. What basic advice would you give to people who are reluctant to move forward by selling? How can they get past that? How can they get comfortable with it? More importantly, how could they build an internal process that lets them do it more comfortably than they could before?

The way I’ve resolved that is say, “I hate selling. I’m not going to sell.” I’m going to help people. I’m going to treat people like I would a friend and I’m going to ask them much more nosy prying questions than I used to do when I was a salesperson because I need to understand what’s going on with them. The same way I would if I was helping a friend out with his problem. That’s part of it. The next thing is to think about nobody likes to be sold but we all want to buy. Instead of selling people, make it easy for the right people to buy. Don’t make it confusing or hard for them. You’ve had some great guests on your show on this subject and it comes down to your positioning.

If you have strong positioning and you attract the right people into conversations, a good percentage of them are going to be interested. You want to make it easy for them to buy and they’re going to want to do business with you. They’re also going to tell you the things that you need to tweak, refine and iterate to make it easier, better, stronger and so on. If you have no positioning or you have weak positioning, you’re going to waste a lot of time with people who are not qualified, going to be wishy-washy, going to be maybes and it’s going to feel like a real struggle. If you’re feeling like, “I don’t know what I stand for.” You’ve got to figure out what you stand for and by extension what you stand against because you can’t serve everybody in the world anyway. You don’t need $1 billion tomorrow. You couldn’t handle it if it came in the door.

I was talking to somebody who was struggling with her positioning and struggling with, “Based on that, what should my lead magnet be?” If you don’t have that positioning foundation, everything else gets harder. I said, “Who’s your favorite client of all time?” She told me about this woman she had helped and the details aren’t important. The thing that was interesting was she went from like, “I’m struggling.” That face you have when you’re struggling. Her face and voice lit up and it wasn’t because she made a bunch of money. She was jazzed about how she had helped this client. Go and find the next one of them.

The basic idea here is to get clear about who you serve and about when you say what you stand for which is what do you deliver? What do you mean when you say, I’m going to help a client? How do you do that? Articulate it in a clear and simple fashion. From there, I’ll use your words, just help out. Stay with somebody long enough for them to understand that you have the ability to do so and you’re willing to help. That’s what I’m hearing. I love that by the way. Does that make sense? Is that what you’re saying?

That’s what I’m saying. You said it better than I did. Every positioning book in the world says get specific with your positioning. Everyone fights it and struggles. I’m limiting my market. I don’t want to turn people away. I’ve been through this whole thing myself so I get it. The only thing that helped me trick my own psychology, if you will, was realizing that I hate sales and I like sales to be easy so it doesn’t feel like sales. When you have your positioning right, it’s easy and it doesn’t feel like sales. When your positioning is wishy-washy, that’s when you’re in all the assumptive close and all that other crap that everyone hates. If sales is so easy that you’re bored, consider expanding your niche. Otherwise, keep narrowing it until you get to the point that sales are too easy because after all, you hate sales to begin with.

Reuben, we’re at the point in the interview where you have delivered many golden jewels to my audience and to me. Thank you for that. We want to switch back to you for a little while because one of the things we do is we ask these ridiculous questions that are a lot of fun. I’m going to ask you the first one and you’ll see what when I say it. It helps us get to know who you are a little bit better. Here’s the first question. Who, in all of space and time, would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch or an intense conversation with?

FTC 229 | Mimiran CRM
Mimiran CRM: When you get your positioning right, sales becomes easy and doesn’t feel like sales.

 

Now, I’m going to reveal a lot about myself and my wife would be laughing if she is reading this. She is like, “You can never answer a simple question with a simple answer. You always have to ask more questions.” I assume I have some magical translator if they don’t speak English.

You have a magical translator. You have a time machine. They can even be fictional characters. My favorite person, if I could speak to James T. Kirk, he would be my guy. You can pick anybody you like.

Can I record this and share it? Is it just for me?

It’s for anybody you want. Since I’m recording this, when you and I go and find your person, we’ll record it together. How’s that?

It would be interesting if you could record something, you go back and you talk to Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, or somebody like that whether or not that’s the number one person I would want to talk to. That would be interesting for the people around the world to listen to.

Let’s make it just for you.

This came upon one of your other episodes. I’ve read several of your episodes and I was prepared for this question, but not enough to give a straight answer. The top two people on my list, Einstein and Bill Gates. I like Einstein because he had a way of thinking where suppose we threw out all these other assumptions and we took this thing as fixed. He changed the way we think about the universe which is in a much tinier way what I’m trying to do. Suppose we could take all these people who hate selling and make it different.

When he got older, he had the exact same problem that he fought against when he was younger. It would be interesting to see what happened and how did he rail against the quantum revolution that he helped bring about. He was too old to fully embrace the way he did relativity when he was a young man. Bill Gates, you have some interesting stories with him. What he’s doing is much more interesting than what he did in the software world, which is interesting on its own right. The way he thinks about utility and how do you try to maximize doing the right thing, it would be a powerful conversation.

If I could be a fly on the wall and listen to that conversation, it would be fascinating. If you included me in the conversation, then it could never be one hour because the two of us would never let those guys out of the room. Thank you for those. You’re not allowed to give two but I’ll let you slip this time. If anyone else is reading and you’re going to be on my show in the future, Reuben is the only exception. You’ve got to stick to one. Here’s the next question. You know what this is because you’ve read my episodes before. This is the grand finale. This is the change the world question. Here it is. What is it that you are doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to literally change the world?

I’ve spent a bunch of time talking about it and I don’t mean that the CRM and the tool and all that. We’re all here for a brief amount of time and we all have amazing gifts to share with the universe. Most of us spend far too little time doing that and a lot of time living in the zoo, if you will. We’re going through some of the motions either because we’re constrained or we don’t know any better. You can’t spend all day glowing like some transcendent being. We’ve got to pay our taxes, go to the bathroom and all the other stuff that creatures have to do. How can we spend more of our time focused on delivering our gifts to everybody else and less time doing some of the grunt work? That’s what I’m here to do. I’m doing a tiny piece of it but the nice thing is it’s not a zero-sum game. It flows and it grows on itself.

Sharing value is not a zero-sum game. It flows and grows on itself. Click To Tweet

I’m doing a little different part of it than you are. I’m back at the beginning of that step where I’m helping people discover what that is. For me, the joy in life when I work with a client for the first time and we go into our two-hour discovery session is we uncover things that clients never expect. I don’t mean this to sound weird or something but it’s not unusual for men to cry because we have hit on the goal of their entire life for the first time in the way that I’ve been able to extract that from them.

When that happens and when they see that clearly, they can build upon it and build a great business around it. Using what you said before, focus only on the parts that they truly feel comfortable doing. The parts they’re not comfortable doing, we figure out how to get others to help do that. I love your mission. I’m on board. Let’s work as a team and we’ll change the world. That’s a great solution. Here we are at the end of the show and I made a promise to readers who stuck it out. Reuben, hit us. What have you got for free?

I’ve got a number of things. If you go to Mimiran.com, you can get proposal templates, lead magnet ideas, mutual NDA templates and a bunch of things that help with basic blocking and tackling of your business. I will explain that I’m not a lawyer. Run it by your lawyer but this is the stuff that cuts out the BS that I experienced when I started and it helps you get to the heart of the matter business-wise. You can also go to my podcast at SalesForNerds.io. Sales for Nerds is the podcast. For the most part, it’s a podcast but there’s also a proposal course because I realized that I had become something of an accidental expert on writing proposals. I got sick of doing one-off training for people. I was like, “I’m going to put this online so anyone can have it.” There is a $497 course there that is criminally underpriced because it pays for itself the first time you write a proposal. You can get that for free by reading all the way through to the end of this interview if you use the code FIRST1000.

I’ve got to tell you there are two parts to this thing that intrigued me. Number one, that proposal course, if you improve your proposal writing skills by 3%, it’s worth your time. If you are able to close one more proposal that you never could close before, it’s worth your time and it’s certainly worth the price. The second thing I would tell you is that if you look at what this software does, the price you have to pay, and the fact that you get someone like Reuben walking you through your setup and getting you going, it’s a ridiculous offer. Under that category, I would suggest you check it out and see if it’s a fit for you and your company. One question before I let you go. Is your system better for the small entrepreneur or is it better for the Salesforce type of client, the big corporate entity with lots of divisions?

Not for the Salesforce, big corporate entity with lots of divisions. Salesforce is a great tool for those companies when they customize it right. I am not trying to knock Salesforce. I want the right people to have the right tool. If you are interested in the software, Mitch, press me to create a discount code for you on that as well. If you go to the signup page, go through the signup process and you enter code MRMR10X. You get 10% off for life.

That’s some significant money. That’s hundreds of dollars. That’s awesome. Reuben, this has been amazing. Thank you for your time, for your generous sharing of your wisdom and skills. I can’t wait until we get a chance to talk again soon.

Thanks for having me, Mitch. I appreciate it.

It’s my pleasure.

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