In this week's episode, Bill sits down with Chris Atwell, founder of Mindset-Conquest and a performance leadership coach specializing in manufacturers’ rep agencies. With nearly two decades of experience in sales and leadership across distribution and manufacturing, Chris shares transformative strategies for scaling sales teams, embracing tech, and adopting social selling practices that actually work.

They dive into the evolving world of rep groups, the problems with CRM resistance, how leadership must enforce standards, and why marketing isn't just an afterthought, but a vital part of the revenue engine. This is a must-listen for manufacturers, industrial sales teams, and B2B businesses struggling to modernize their approach.

Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today, I have a very special guest with me, Chris Atwell. Chris is the founder of Mindset Conquest and a leading expert in peak performance leadership, helping manufacturers' rep agency owners achieve transformative growth. Drawing on more than 18 years of experience in sales and leadership within the distribution and manufacturing sectors, Chris blends practical industry knowledge with cutting edge leadership strategies. He is passionate about helping leaders clarify their vision, master their mindset, and build high performing teams. Chris, thank you for joining us today.

Chris: Thank you very much for having me.

Bill: And that was a mouthful, but we're going to unpack a lot of that intro here today and talk about something that I am passionate about. I grew up as an operator in a number of my father's companies and ran sales teams. We had rep agencies for our furniture manufacturing company. We had in-house sales team for our equipment company. So I've seen the different blends and the different way those work. And I just want to start, Chris, maybe by asking you to maybe go through a little bit of your background of what led you into becoming the founder of Mindset Conquest. Like why are you here?

Chris: Yeah, great question. Great question. So I started my sales career approximately 20 years ago, working in logistics where I was exposed to national accounts in industrial wholesale distribution and construction. I worked in that industry for about four years, offering solutions to these sorts of industries. And from there, I went to a company called Ackland's Granger, Granger Canada. And Granger exposed me to manufacturers' rep agents. We were working with thousands of brands in the catalog and I was in a national accounts role. And what I found was the, the products that I was most successful selling happened to be the products that the manufacturers rep agents were working alongside me to build relationships with potential clients and close the business. From there, I went to manufacturing and I worked in the plumbing industry for a number of years. I developed a technical sales strategy that exposed me to manufacturers reps at a deeper level because I had to work alongside of them in geographical markets all across North America. Really working hand in hand with them on developing business for new products. And then I worked for another manufacturer in the fastener industry where I was exposed to them as well. So I've been working alongside manufacturers rep agencies for well over a decade. And what happened was as I was leading a sales team for a manufacturer, I over COVID, started to coach. I started to coach people on habits and routines. And the reason I started to coach is actually quite personal. I overexerted myself over COVID. We were all searching for something to keep us occupied, busy. And I was training in the gym at home for hours on end and competing in CrossFit, but I wasn't treating my body with respect. I was, I was drinking heavily, was overeating and I was quite dehydrated. And one day, make a long story short, here I am competing in CrossFit and I wake up the next morning with what's called rhabdomyolysis. It's near kidney failure. Okay. I'm literally, I can't move my body. My urine is black like coffee. And I do this because I had to give some test samples to the hospital and I was like, well, what's going on here? And I just, I was in the hospital for five days by myself thinking, what am I doing with my life? Am I gonna be in this corporate world forever? What do I want out of this journey? And there was this calling for coaching that showed up. So when I got out of the hospital and I knew I had to make some changes to my lifestyle, I started coaching on habits and routines. And it was more of a part-time thing, helping buddies and people that I knew. When it started to develop into something bigger, and I got a call one day from an old colleague, an old business partner. He was a manufacturer's rep out of Atlanta. And he… just bought the business from his father-in-law. So he was a sales rep at the time and he's now the owner. And he says, Chris, I could use your help. And in that moment, it just, it was like a download. Boom, holy smokes. Like this is way bigger than I thought, this coaching business. And that's when it all started to make sense. And I went all in on this industry. So, and I've been doing it for years now. Yeah.

Bill: Well, no, that's great. I mean, not great that you had the trough, but often we each of us on our own personal journeys have different peaks and valleys. And thankfully you were able to come out of your valley healthily and make the necessary changes to move forward and also identify a market niche that is in desperate need of support. Because, you know, when I was a younger man, there were rep groups everywhere and there was competition and there was support and it was a really well-known way of life. And it seems to me today, and I'd like to ask you, like, what is the state of rep groups, rep agencies in 2025? Because it is not what it was 20 years ago.

Chris:From my observations and the market research that I've been following is that the demand for manufacturers reps is increasing. Okay. So we're seeing a high demand for this type of partnership across multiple industries, whether it be construction related businesses, furniture, electronics, medical equipment, safety, you name it, automotive. More and more manufacturers are seeing the benefit of including rep agencies as part of their sales ecosystem. And the state, from what I can see, is very healthy. You've got a growing industry with a large output in terms of economic output, and you've got a.. businesses that are thriving. In fact, there's a lot of consolidation happening in the industry. There's a lot of private investment firms that are watching this industry saying, hey, there's an opportunity here for us to start buying up a lot of these agencies and creating national conglomerates. And that speaks for itself right there.

Bill: That's fantastic. I think if I was going to allude to maybe a difference between where it was 20 years ago and where it is today, the things that I've observed is we have to have a rapid adoption of technology. I think it was, what was the musical with the Anvil salesman? And he went to train stops and dropped the Anvil and that was the gag, right? I think that was in the Music Man or something. Anyway, that old school approach isn't what the rep group of today is. I mean, they're very sophisticated. They're very organized. They have a high level of adoption of technology. They are aligning themselves with manufacturers, with the marketing. It's a different ball game than it was 20 years ago.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. You're seeing, I wouldn't say that it's like that across the board just yet, but there's certainly a desire to get there. And that's where, from my experience, I get the joy of helping a lot of organizations move towards that vision. There is certainly adoption of technology when it comes to CRM systems, using data for decision-making, sharing information across platforms with their manufacturing partners. So that sort of adoption is increasing over time. It all depends on, because there's still a lot of multi-generational stuff happening in the early manufacturers' rep space. And that old guard who did an amazing job at building relationships and leaned on that relationship selling approach, still doing well, but that's not where the future is going anymore. So lots of shifting happening for sure.

Bill: Well and certainly that relationship approach is not scalable because companies today are not willing to wait seven to 10 years. Right. And I think the other issue we're dealing with is a supply side issue. There aren't as many people going into the rep space, especially in industrial and manufacturing as there were 10, 20 years ago, because it is not as new and as exciting as the things that young people are more excited about today. Right. I don't see a lot of college graduates like, man, I'm going to go sell iron. I'm going to go get dirty. Like, that's just, they want to do crypto and influence and drive the Lambo and do all that fun stuff. But no, I think that's, that's interesting. And I think when the rep groups I've had experience with have been multi-generational and it appears that those are massive generational shifts, but the times are really compounding the magnitude of those shifts when it goes from one generation to the other. Do you see that?

Chris: Absolutely. I mean, you see it in the behaviors, the habits, the routines that each generation has adopted. You know, you've got some generations that are really tied to their phone, their cell phone, and using social media to promote themselves, DMing people on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook to get in front of people. And then you've got the, you know, the ones who are still on the golf course every single day, bringing, contractors there, which is, you know, that's, that's a great lifestyle too. Right.

Bill: Yeah, it's hard to walk away from that, right?

Chris: So yeah, yeah. But I think what's important is that everyone's recognizing that there's a digitization happening here that is absolutely unstoppable. It's, it's the reality that we're facing and the the agencies that are adopting those and whether you've been there 30, 40 years or two, creating that standardization around the expectation of where and what people should be doing on a daily basis following a process is how they're winning, how they're being very successful.

Bill: So Chris, I'm going to jump around a little bit and jump into something you just mentioned. And it's a topic that is near and dear to our hearts is social selling and this modern rep. I think this, you know, the Missing How podcast is about discovering what's missing for manufacturer and B2B companies. And whether you're working with a rep group or you have an internal rep group, right? I mean, either way, it's a rep group, whether there's an agency or you have a department. How important is it to have a set of behaviors and disciplines around social selling, around posting on LinkedIn, on inviting new people to be in your ecosystem? What are you seeing and how are you coaching rep groups in that space to be more effective in adopting social selling?

Chris: You can build relationships through social selling. That's the thing, right? Every sale started with a conversation. And you don't make money if nobody knows you. You don't sell if nobody knows you. So in today's world, yes, there's still the traditional trade show. Yes, there's still to a certain extent, cold calling, knocking on doors, driving from location to location. But you have access to the entire world at your fingertips through these different platforms. And one of the things that I hear some of my clients say sometimes, oh well, my clients aren't on social media. That's, that's so false. I mean, everybody and their grandfather is on some sort of social media scrolling up and down today. So social selling is, is something that you should add in your toolbox because social media is the new cold call. It's just the way it is. I mean, look at how powerful advertising is. Look how powerful the algorithms can be. You say something in your phone and it shows up on your feed. So you want to be the one showing up on your potential client's feed. You want to be the one showing up in his messaging. Because if you're trying to call him and email him, he's not getting back to you. What other routes are you going to take? One of the best routes you can use are LinkedIn, for example, right? And you can build trust and a personal brand at the same time by leveraging these systems the right way. And you can create awareness around the products that you offer, the solutions that have helped many of your other customers. So to me, it's a no-brainer. There's a resistance to it. And I understand that, but it's new to many of these folks. And when you do something the same way for so long, it's hard to pull out of that routine. So I encourage it. I help people understand the value. But at end of the day, every sale starts with a conversation and you need to start the conversation somehow. And using social media to start that conversation is a very powerful tool.

Bill: I have a story here that kind of illustrates this. I had a client who had left the industry for three years. He had gone and done something else completely unrelated to work. It was more in like a pro bono nonprofit space. And he came back into the industry and he called me one day and we're having a conversation. He's like, and he's, he's referencing all these things in my life and my career and talking about it. And I was like, how long has it been since we've talked? He's like three years. And I was like, how do you know all this about me? Well, I see it on your LinkedIn all the time. I've watched your podcast. I see the posts. I've watched the reels and I had not been able to keep up with him in the same way because he was not active in personal branding and in the same way. But the other thing that I guess that's an outcome of that is as soon as he came back into industry and needed somebody, he called me. Because I was top, you know, was top of mind to him. He was aware and he had seen that I had continued to refine my craft. Like I hadn't just stagnated. I have continued to do whatever it is I do and, and keep that moving forward. What do you think the biggest challenge is for these rep groups to go from no social selling to like, buying in because like I struggle with this. I have clients who I'm like, hey, we're doing this work on LinkedIn. We're creating authority content and your employees don't like it. Your salespeople don't like it. Share it, repost it. They aren't doing independent posts themselves. I mean, there's some statistics out there that like less than what, 2% of the people on LinkedIn generate 95% of the content. It's some, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's, completely upside down. Right. What do you think is the biggest thing that's keeping these rep agencies and sales reps from engaging the easiest cheat code that has existed in industrial and manufacturing sales probably since the cell phone? Because you don't have to go to the phone booth and check in and get your messages. I mean, I'm not that old, but I.. you're not that old, but like, mean, the cell phone was amazing. Amazing. And now we have this new cheat code. What do you think that biggest, barrier is for them to engage it?

Chris: Well, one, they don't fully understand how to leverage it. So they don't, they don't understand or know how to use it to their advantage. They perceive it, LinkedIn in particular, as an online resume. Right?

Bill: Yes, I've heard that. It's just about getting a job.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's an old school mentality. It's, it's evolved so much from there, but that's, you know, nobody's looked beyond that. So one, really knowing how to do it, right? But agencies themselves, oftentimes they don't even have a plan. They don't even have a goal in mind of what it is that they want to achieve with any sort of marketing, right? And if you're marketing as a whole, you need to have goals and objectives in place, and you need to develop a strategy to support those goals and objectives. And many times what I see with manufacturers rep agencies is that their goals and objectives are very focused on sales. Okay. And they're just, they're driven by that particular metric. What people fail to understand is that marketing is the act of attracting potential customers. Sales is the act of converting that potential customer into a paying customer. Right. And what we see a lot in this industry are different marketing approaches. If you're in the construction business, you're marketing your product on projects. You want to get the specifications. So you're marketing to engineers. You might market at trade shows by doing a booth somehow and displaying all of your products. But this is, this is a tool that you can leverage to do that. So you need, but you need a game plan. And if you don't have it on your radar as part of your long-term planning, you're not going to include it.

Bill: On our social selling scorecard, I'm just doing this off the top of my head because I wasn't even thinking about this, but our scorecard probably has 10 to 15 daily activities we're measuring to have a successful social media or social selling game plan. And I think you're exactly right. If there's a line item on the scorecard for most reps, whether they're internal or in a rep agency, it's yeah, be active on LinkedIn. Well, that's a direction, like north or south. That's not a roadmap on how to drive from point A to point B.

Chris: You're right. You're right. And you want to have clarity around what that goal or objective is, right? So I've got a scorecard as well, right? I've got metrics that we track on a regular basis. You know, how many new followers am I expected to have by the end of the year on social media platforms? How am I tracking year to date? My marketing coordinator gives me the results every month. What percentage of revenue did I generate through marketing activities? I've got a goal that is clearly set for myself and my team. And we're able to tie that back to, Hey, you know what? We got a message from Bill on Instagram or on LinkedIn saying, Hey, I saw you on this podcast. I would love to talk to you about your services and your coaching. Right there. Boom. I can tie that directly to a marketing activity. And when I close that deal, that gets added to that percentage. So you can increase your sales over and above your traditional approaches of reach out by doing these things. But you need to have a clear game plan in place and targets in mind.

Bill: No, and I think one of the other things I think that is holding people back is a hundred percent psychological. It's that imposter syndrome. Some people look at what you and I are doing today, Chris, having a podcast and it's going to go out on YouTube and you know, I'm going to look funny or I'm going to say something stupid and they’re not going to edit it. Whatever. I think a lot of, especially older people or more seasoned, whatever. They struggle with that imposter syndrome and don't want to look foolish online. Younger people, they'll do everything online. I mean, they don't care at all. Like if I ask a young person who's like 25 years old to be in a podcast, they don't even ask what it's about. There's just like yeah, sure. Whatever. It's about business and marketing. Yeah, I don't know anything about that, but sure. Why not? Like they don't care. Right. So I think that imposter syndrome is big. The actual mechanics of social selling is not that difficult once you get over the psychological, but, I think this is where your coaching comes in. If you're going to be successful in the sales game, it's about numbers. It's about consistent activity repeated over time. And then obviously measuring and modifying to what works away from what doesn't, right? That's always the case.

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Bill: Let's talk about another aspect of, as you're coaching these rep agencies and what are you seeing the challenge, like some of the challenges they're facing with like sales tech and CRM? What do you see as maybe some common themes and what's missing in the approach of a lot of organizations, maybe when you start with them and then you try and take them to a different level of maturity around their tech stack, CRM, marketing automation, et cetera?

Chris: Yeah. Well, I'll speak to CRM first and from a sales perspective, most organizations, companies in every industry are adopting these tools now and they're subscribing to these services. And the biggest complaint that I hear from owners of companies is that I don't have any data. There's no inputs. My team members aren't using the system. Those who are, it's lackluster, right? And it's kind of like, you know, every January people go and get gym memberships, right? And then they, you know, they go in front of LA Fitness and they see all the fancy equipment. They buy the VIP premium one saying that I'm going to go. And then, you know, a month later, they're not using the gym membership, but they're still paying for it. Right. And what happens is the gym membership, you know, the gym is good at selling the gym membership and all the equipment is available for you, but the gym doesn't teach you how to use the equipment. And the same goes for the CRM systems. Yes, they've got a lot of good online content and training modules and this and that. But one of the biggest challenges sales reps have in using the system is that it takes time and they're already running around all day long doing calls, quotes, submittals, problem solving, putting out fires, you name it. So taking the time to input data, administrative information to them takes a backseat, right? So that problem is real. And what is needed is somebody who comes in and helps them understand how they can input information effectively on a routine basis without eating too much time, but understanding how the end result of all that collected information is gonna help them in the long run because the goal of these systems, and most people don't realize this, is that it will actually save you time.

Bill: Yes.

Chris: It's going to save you time. And salespeople have never been told that. They haven't been told that this is going to save you time. And if they have, they'll call BS because they don't understand how. So somebody has to come in and explain the why. Why is this so beneficial to you? Right? And I've got a sales velocity approach. Everybody understands sales velocity, probably. Right? We can, we can bring that word up, but when you know how many opportunities you need to have in your pipeline on your, in your CRM to achieve your sales objectives based on your average opportunity size, your close ratio and your revenue target, all of a sudden it starts to make sense. You're like, you're like, my gosh. Like I need 120 opportunities in here and if I close 30%, I'm going to make my quota for the year. But nobody's teaching people this stuff, right? So that's a big challenge right now is that, you know, the systems are in place, but there's a lack of understanding of the why is this so important for the salesperson, not just for the company. The owner of the company sees the value for the organization, but the end user of that has no idea why it's important.

Bill: How much of the problem in this space is the fact that every sales organization I've ever been around, whether internal or an agency, has one or two eagles, one or two people who are crushing it? I mean, and they're like 2 or 3x the next middle group and 4 to 5x the bottom third. And whenever, so I took over a sales group for my father's company, I had 40 direct 40 salespeople. One of the things I determined in that takeover was creating a system that emulated what the eagles were doing or had done was not repeatable. It was not scalable and could not be spun up quickly enough because those folks had generated that over 15, 20 years. I had to get the middle and the bottom up to speed fast. Right. My job was not to take these folks on a 20 year journey. It was like, yeah, two years. Everybody's got to move up a tier. Is it because even though we can recognize that in leadership and management, the lower third just looks at the eagles and says, I want to be like them. And they goof off. They don't do their paperwork. They never fill out the CRM. They just, it just happens for them. Well, no, doesn't. It's been 20 years doing these behaviors, they just didn't do them in a CRM. Do you see that like, idolization of the eagles as one of the impediments to the middle and bottom third being willing to adopt, and not only CRM behaviors, let's be honest, any of the daily behaviors that need to happen to become super successful?

Chris: That's a great question. And you're absolutely right. There's always going to be 10 to 20% of your organization are the ones who are going to generate the majority of the revenue. There's this fear that, if I push that guy too hard, then he'll leave and then there goes all my revenue, right? But the fact of the matter is that your success in your organization and your scalability is only gonna be as good as the standards you uphold and the processes and systems that you have in place, okay? That create consistency. So, if that top performer, that eagle is not using the CRM, but he's still generating results and you're letting him get away with it. If that top performer is, you know, you're letting him get away with the things and all the other people see that you're going to, nobody's going to use the system. Nobody's going to, going to follow the process.

Bill: There is no standard.

Chris: There's no standard. So it boils down to leadership. Leadership has to uphold the standard. Leadership has to enforce the standard. Whether or not you're a top performer, okay? You could be a top performer and an eagle because you at the end of the year always generate the most revenue, all right? But if you look at the month to month, you know, maybe you had a great Q1, a poor Q2, an incredible Q3, and then a weak Q4. You can't scale on that sort of inconsistency. You can't. So sure, it looks great at the end of the year, but it's not serving you or your business in the long run, right? So the solution to that, the way that it must be approached is that you create a standard and whether or not they're an eagle or a C player, everyone follows the process and you hold them to it, even if they're the eagle. And what you'll see then is this, right?

Bill: We were able to, over a two-year period, implement a standard. And we were able to then hit double-digit compounded annual growth seven years in a row thereafter. And we elevated everybody. The eagles went up a little bit, right? But they were, I think, at a capacity limit for an individual in that space. But we had the middle third and the bottom third doubled and tripled their sales and we saw a tremendous growth. But, and I will say the biggest challenge was getting those eagles. Here's a funny story. We had, um, we had them on the road and we created a, an app way back in the day where you could enter the call data right when you were done at the location, like enter the notes. And I thought this was like, Oh, this is going to save the guys so much time. Well, then they saw that we could track where they were. And it would track the business they were at and that would enter it in the system. So like a lot of this was made. Well, one of the sales guys took aluminum foil and wrapped it around his phone so we couldn't track them. So that was a standard issue that had to be dealt with. But you know, it's like those type of crazy things that people will do to try and buck the system. And but you have to maintain the standards.

Chris: Yeah. And that's it. I mean, you need to treat your team as a sports team. Right. And there's standards, there's performance expectations that happen. And if you're that player on the team that's not performing, what happens to that player? Right. He gets traded, he gets benched. Right. So standards are ultra important and people will try to play the system, but standards are in place because process drives results. And you might have people who are amazing at doing discovery calls and uncovering pain points at determining what roadblocks are going to get in the way of them achieving this business, making an offer, but never ask for the close. Right? So as a leader of the business, you need to uphold the standard to know that, this person isn't following the process because they're getting to the offer and then they're walking away hoping that somebody's going to call them and say, hey, yeah, yeah, we'll take it. Rather than if you wrote in your procedure, standard operating procedure, once you've done the offer, you ask for the business, then things could change for you dramatically. You're going to increase your sales 20, 30% or two, three X per contributor. Right?

Bill: Well, I think that's exactly right, because the other thing that a standard allows that I've seen over time is that salespeople as individuals, they generally don't struggle with the same thing. So you have one or two people that struggle with closing, and one or two people who struggle with cold calling, and one or two people. But until you establish that standard and start measuring them against that scorecard, you cannot get them the… I don't remember which famous coach it was, but they said, I'm fair with everybody and I treat everybody exactly what they need to be treated with to get better. Meaning, I'm not fair. If you need to run more laps and you need to do more pushups because you need more upper body strength and you need more stamina, guess what? You're doing pushups and you're doing the runs. I think that becomes, and I'm sure in your coaching business, you see that, that while you can give global standards and recommendations to a rep group. But then it's also managing the individual strengths and weaknesses is where you can really see everybody inch up simultaneously. Do you see that Chris when you're coaching these organizations?

Chris: Absolutely. Organizations get really good at looking at the data at the top level. And then one of the things that is often missing when it comes to routines is structured team meetings and structured one-on-one meeting. So coaching these people into understanding that whoever the sales manager is, or if you're the owner and you're the sales manager, that you need to be having a structured approach at checking in with your team member and having a performance driven discussion, looking at those metrics, looking at the scorecard, right? Show me where you are year to date with your numbers. Show me, and you're not driving the meeting as the leader, the employee, right? Let them drive it. And then they're showing up with a clear picture of what their performance looks like, where the gaps are so that you can coach them into closing that gap. And a lot of that has to do with understanding where they're going to be spending their time and including a component of personal development into all of your discussions with your team members. Because everyone has to learn continuously, no matter what role you are. But you as the leader of the business, you as the leader of your team, you should have a standard operating procedure in place to support that.

Bill: Yeah. The more structure it seems to me, the better, especially with the organizations we're talking about. Now the flip side of that is you get into very large organizations and then they have too much structure. I have a friend who's an executive and he was in the financial services space and they calculated that their salespeople were spending 53% of their time interacting with paperwork, the CRM and the admin portion of it. And he was like, five years ago, it would have been 20%. It's no wonder we can't get anything done. All we're doing is compliance. So they had to make changes and kind of create a compliance and admin support, like layer to like to flip that script. But I think certainly when we're looking at the middle market and some of these smaller companies and some of these smaller rep groups, that is so true that more structure is better. And then that sets the tone or the standard for everything to kind of waterfall off of.

Chris: Yeah, and structure doesn't need to equal complexity, right? This is the challenge that we face and it happens to me. I'm like, I want to create a new procedure or a plan for this and then I overthink it and I make this complex thing. But this is why my team members, I've asked them, guys, let's have a culture of simplicity, okay? So if something is getting out of hand, because sometimes my brain goes that way, all right, call me out on it and we'll simplify it, okay? So structure can be simple. And that is the way that you should look at it. That way you don't end up with the added administrative burden. But sometimes we have good intentions and we wanna simplify things, but we inadvertently make it more complex.

Bill: So Chris, let's pivot here because we have a few minutes left and I want to talk a little bit more about Mindset Conquest and this Precision Pipeline Index. Sometimes I feel like whenever our potential clients hear from us and they hear marketing strategy or coaching, they feel it's too soft. There's not a playbook. There aren't proven frameworks and systems. You have certainly in this rep coaching arena have developed a framework and a playbook that you have consistently and repeatably implemented. You have the track record, you have the case studies. So maybe talk about that Precision Pipeline Index and your process. So if someone's listening and would be interested in getting that type of support, they would understand what you kind of deliver and how it isn't like, you you and I just, you know, with pom poms cheering people on.

Chris: Yeah. So the Precision Pipeline Index is my take on that sales velocity conversation we were having earlier, right? You've got a team who is being asked to use the CRM and they're not. There's a lot of pushback. There's resistance, which creates unpredictable sales and inconsistency in the way that people are managing their day to day, as well as your opportunity pipeline. So what I've designed is a simple framework. It's a formula that allows you to calculate how many opportunities you need to have in your pipeline in order to hit your sales objectives. And the Precision Pipeline Index walks you through that. The thing is, is that it's more than just the formula. We talk about standards, accountability, and enforcement, right, in a process. So as part of that toolkit that's available on my website, and it's free, it has an agenda. And what that agenda is, it's designed for leaders to hold their team accountable to actually using the formula, okay? So it's a bi-weekly or a monthly meeting where you get together with your team members and you go through all of the scorecard that really matters. One hour meeting, it's broken down with exact topics that you need to cover. And what this is gonna do is it's gonna allow you to see engagement with the CRM system in a way that's going to have an impact. It's gonna allow your team members to focus their time on where it matters most because in the pipeline, you're gonna start identifying where the low hanging fruit is, where the opportunities that are going to generate the most ROI exist, so that you can guide your team members on focusing on those rather than doing their traditional milk runs where they're comfortable and spinning their wheels on deals that just don't make any sense. So it's a playbook that gives you a proven step-by-step system to build your pipeline in a predictable high performing way.

Bill: Well, Chris, this, I could talk for hours about sales teams and development. I've, I've been involved in the sales side, sales management, and there is truly magic that can occur whenever you create standards, you create alignment, and you get a sales team leaning forward all in the same direction. I mean, I've seen it happen many times. I've had also I've seen organizations where their sales teams get off the rails. And that becomes a problem. And we've also, through some of my father's businesses had rep groups that we worked with for years and years. And we, back 20 some years ago, there were less, national rep groups in the furniture industry. So they were more regional. So we'd have three or four at a time. And you could see which ones were doing really well and which ones weren't. And you could start to see why, which led us to have better evaluation methods to hire the next group or, to have the churn. So I think the work you're doing is so important. And especially with the demand and supply issues that are in the industrial sales space, we need our sales teams and our sales rep groups to be very, very efficient because there aren't a lot of new market entrants and they got to do more with less. So I think that's just so amazing what you're working on. Chris, I want to give you some time here. We just have a few minutes left. Where can people find you? And all of the things you say here are going to be listed in the show notes, in the LinkedIn posts, all the places they put the stuff. But I want to give you an opportunity to kind of share about your business, your website, LinkedIn, et cetera.

Chris: Yeah, thank you. So if you're a manufacturers rep agency owner and you're finding that you're wearing all the hats in your business, you're spinning your wheels, you're being very reactive, and you don't have enough time in your day to focus on your business, you're very much in your business doing what I call the $10 tasks, okay? When you should be focused on the $10,000 tasks, give me a call, give me an email. I'm here to help you really understand how I can free you from that stuckness. And you can find me on all platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, at thechrisatwell.

Bill: Love it. Well, Chris, this has been just such a pleasure. I can talk sales and performance all day long because I've played in that space for a while and it's just such an important area. Thank you for joining us today and we look forward to checking in with you and see how things are going here in the future.

Chris: Yeah, thank you so much for your time, Bill. I appreciate it.