142: Jason Koons, a Forever Learner: #1 of 550+ at Sweetwater

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0:30 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram.

0:45 Scott Ingram: Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Jason Koons. Jason is the top seller at Sweetwater out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, out of over 550 Active Sales Engineers. Welcome to the show, Jason.

0:58 Jason Koons: Hey, thank you so much, Scott. Good to be here.

1:00 Scott Ingram: So this is going to be a lot of fun. And before we get into some context around your role and who Sweetwater is, let's provide some immediate value and talk about the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your consistent success in sales over the last 20 years.

1:18 Jason Koons: Sure. You know, to boil that down, you know, all of it's really just mindset, I think. In my case, I think probably the top 3 things that I could contribute it to is to constantly be in an awareness mode of your business, whether you're at the job or not, and just always be thinking about what's next and what's next after what's next. I put myself into that mode always, even when I'm just passively doing things at the gym or mowing the lawn or doing the dishes or any of those types of things. I'm not entirely sure that everybody has that discipline, you know, just looking around. And I feel like that's one of the big differences. The other thing that I've always subscribed to is just sprinting every single day as if it was the first day I was here. I always figured that if I was going to be anywhere away from my family, frankly, I might as well make the most of that. And then looking around at an active sales floor, I certainly wasn't the first guy here. There were many, many successful folks here before I ever started back in 2000. But I always questioned, if we all have the same set of tools and the same circumstances, then what makes somebody do so much better than somebody else? So just constantly being a student of those folks and then adapting that to my own style and never stopping. And then that probably segues into the third thing, which is just being a constant student. I spend a lot of time mostly listening these days, not as much reading. But listening to books and podcasts and anything I can get my hands on that may have any sort of relevance to sales, business, mindset, just really any of those positive life movers.

2:57 Scott Ingram: Awesome. This is going to be a ton of fun. Well, why don't we contextualize here? So who is Sweetwater? I'm talking to you using stuff that y'all sold me. And let's talk about what your role has been. I know you've got kind of a brand new role, so I'm interested in digging into that too. So just give us a whole bunch of context.

3:15 Jason Koons: Yeah, you bet. Sweetwater is the number one music retailer. And when I say music retailer, we're talking about pro audio equipment, instruments, PA equipment, tour gear, studio gear, just pretty much anything that goes into creating music. We're the top one in the country. We're a single location, I should say. So we're not a chain store. We're located in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Let's see, revenue last year was $1.2 billion, I believe, and we're on track for $1.8 billion this year to give you some idea of scale. And my role, well, when I got here was a sales intern, but my role for the last 22 years here has been as one of our sales engineers, which is the key position in the company that really built the company, being that we're very high-touch consultants and experienced folks from the industry that act as personal liaisons to the entire industry, all the equipment, to all of our clients.

4:12 Scott Ingram: Let's talk about that real quick because that's how this connection got made. Somebody reached out to me, it was probably a PR person, who actually, I'll have to send this back to her, actually sent a decent pitch. I get so many garbage PR pitches, it drives me absolutely crazy. But this one was really relevant and really on point, except they didn't realize that I only interview number 1 active individual contributors on this show. So her pitch was of one of your sales leaders and kind of this unique sales engineer model that you have. And I'm like, I love that. And I know Sweetwater because all of my equipment comes from Sweetwater, but I don't want to talk to that guy. I want to talk to Jason. So talk about that sales engineer model a little bit more because it really is kind of unique in the way that you guys have it structured.

4:57 Jason Koons: It is, you know, it's certainly in our industry and perhaps in others as well, you know, having a relationship-based sales model where the same sales engineer is talking to the same client throughout that entire process for as long as it's relevant. Which in a lot of cases are many, many years and decades. It allows us to really tap into the ability to create and develop true sales professionals because they can focus on the long game. It's not a matter of, hey, you've got somebody on the phone, you got to close them now because the chances of you hearing back from them again are slim, like we would see in a lot of brick-and-mortar, you know, walk-in retail business. That's allowed us to inform how we approach our relationships with our clients. We don't have to be pushy because of that. We realize that the key is the long-term relationship as opposed to just a transaction. And really the whole company is built along that. We're here in more of a servitude fashion than we are in a, you know, pushing the bottom line fashion. The bottom line just falls into place when you do all those things right.

6:05 Scott Ingram: Well, clearly, I mean, your growth numbers are pretty spectacular. So let's talk about your growth numbers. I mean, what has this last 20 years? We'll talk about the new role next, but what has this last 20 years kind of looked like in terms of your own performance and some of those relationships for you?

6:21 Jason Koons: Yeah, absolutely. I started here in 2000 and I was 20 years old, moved away from home basically at that point. So just a kid. And the way that we would structure it back in those days is you would come in as a sales intern, which is essentially an assistant or an account coordinator that would shadow one of the successful sales engineers that was already here. And we would do this for about a year, and then we would roll out on our own and start building up our own book of business. I did that in 2000. I can remember making $8.50 an hour. And in 2001, I rolled out as a sales engineer here. Over those years, which it's been, what, about 22 years now, I've had year-over-year double-digit growth percentages with no lapse in that throughout the time. I'd say about 5-ish years in, so around 2005 to 2006, I became the top sales guy here regardless of the tenure before me. From that point, I've had 16 straight years, or I actually calculated it as 203 direct consecutive months where I was the top producer of the company. And that actually went on from that point until I took this new role. So there have not been any lapses in any of those months, and it's been by a pretty decent margin as well. Right around half would be the next guy down, the next rung down. I earned the, I suppose, title of the top producer overall in the history of the company throughout those years. And the last few years, we're looking at like $12 to $13 million in business annually from my team. And my team was me and 2 other guys.

8:01 Scott Ingram: What is that team structure? What are those 2 other guys? What is that role?

8:04 Jason Koons: So those 2 other guys were account coordinators, which is essentially what I started as back in 2000. They called it something different at that point, but they're basically to assist with the work that that business or that book of business produces. A lot of administration type work, things that frankly keep me on the phone with clients.

8:26 Scott Ingram: Perfect. And then I interrupted you, so I'll let you keep going.

8:29 Jason Koons: Oh, you know what, the only other spec that I thought you might like to know is that of my book of business, that was working about 17,000 customers. So the size of my database was around 17,000.

8:40 Scott Ingram: That's insane.

8:41 Jason Koons: It's a lot of folks, but we have really great tools in place. We have a home-built CRM system here that we do everything in-house that is just based around our unique business model and it allows us to not only keep tabs on buying cycles and engagement with our clients, but I mean, frankly, it just allows us to remember things like what's Tom's wife's name and, you know, what gear does Tom already have, those types of things, which, you know, without that sort of system, it'd be a very difficult endeavor to handle that many clients for sure.

9:13 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I guess the other piece, I mean, you kind of alluded to it, but, you know, those relationships that you start are then kind of lifetime relationships. So as your book of business grows, You work with those same people, they know who their guy at Sweetwater is, right?

9:27 Jason Koons: That's exactly right, yeah. Do you know who your guy at Sweetwater is?

9:30 Scott Ingram: You know, this is just horrible prep on my part. I should have looked that up because as you mentioned the CRM, here's what I… again, I made one purchase a number of years ago. I got to a place with this podcast, I'm like, hey, I think I've earned a pretty significant upgrade in my gear. And so I spent a couple thousand dollars on, you know, a nice mixer and a good microphone and all of these kinds of things. What I appreciate though, is it's just a really friendly soft touch. Like he'll reach out every now and then just to kind of check in. Right. And it's not, again, it's not pushy. It's really relational. You know, I know they're there. You probably realize this guy's not going to buy much else for a while. So I'm sure I'm a very small fish in your universe, but it's been a great relationship.

10:13 Jason Koons: Yeah. And that's the idea, right? We want to meet the customers where they're at. Some will be very, very active and need touches every day or every other day. Some folks are exactly what you just described there, where, you know, they got into something at some point, but this industry never really stops. While you got your mixer and your microphone, there's a good chance that some years down the road there's going to be something else that comes up that can help you. And the idea of those personal touches and a regular cadence of those is simply to keep our name in your mind for when that time comes. You'll have a guy, you'll know him, and you'll be comfortable about it.

10:48 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And that next thing is probably not on the not too distant future. I just bought a new house and right now as we speak, there is tile going into that house and I'm about to build an office/studio in the garage. What's really cool about this place, it's got a 3-car garage and I'm still going to be able to build about a 100-square-foot space in the back of that garage without taking up a car space.

11:10 Jason Koons: Oh, that's excellent.

11:11 Scott Ingram: So yeah, I'm going to need some consultation and some wisdom around, okay, how do I pimp that thing out? So Sure.

11:17 Jason Koons: I hear acoustic treatment all over the place there.

11:19 Scott Ingram: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I get to build the walls on that thing, so it'll hopefully be pretty intelligent in the way that we put it together. Very much purpose-built. Let's talk about this new role because I didn't even realize that this is kind of where I was catching you in your journey. And this is fascinating to me. I love this kind of philosophically. So talk about kind of what you've just stepped into.

11:41 Jason Koons: Yeah, absolutely. So my role now, which this is all very recent, January, I believe we finally you know, signed all of the paperwork on it. And my new role now is the Director of Sales Growth and Development. It's the only role within the company this way, and it focuses on the guys that have been here for potentially a long period of time, but more specifically, the already successful sales engineers that we have. Perhaps they've hit plateaus. Perhaps they're just finding the grind to be wearing down their interest in the sales processes. My role here is a holistic approach to reigniting some of that passion, as well as just finding those next steps to get them into their next gears, whatever that might be. Could be efficiencies, could be as mechanical as verbiage and just how that they're managing their databases and their books of business. A lot of it, frankly, is just attention towards those guys. Because as we grow, and we've had such tremendous growth every year for as long as I've been here, that it's hard to give the truly successful guys the attention that they really deserve when we're continually bringing up new folks and growing them. So my role is to focus on those guys in particular.

12:57 Scott Ingram: That's amazing. And we talked about this a little bit before we started, but roughly how many people do you think you'll be supporting?

13:02 Jason Koons: Depending on just what the role allows, frankly, in terms of time, I'd say that we probably have between 50 and 100 guys here that would fall within those parameters at the moment. That will continually change as more guys rise and become top producers here.

13:17 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's super fascinating. I know it's super early days, right? I mean, you're only just a handful of months into this, but are you seeing some things? Are you finding things and going, you know, I think this might be one of the biggest difference makers for somebody that is, you know, just been in this space for a while. They've kind of settled into their groove and helping them find that next gear.

13:37 Jason Koons: I have. I mean, a lot of it is frankly just talking through their career goals at this point. I find that a lot of these folks that have… I like the way you said it, where they settle into their groove. It's a good groove. There's nothing wrong with the groove that they've settled into, but they feel maybe unfulfilled because the excitement of that… I call it a sales buzz, you know, it kind of wears off over time. And they're not bringing brand new customers in from, you know, a small thing where they're selling Sweetwater, they're selling themselves. And then growing that customer over the next decade or 2 into these very large clients. They're not doing that as often these days because their book of business is mature. It's already a finely tuned database at this point in their careers. And so a lot of what they're doing is simply maintaining of relationships, which is a very, very big part of what we do. But it may not be as fulfilling to some of them as the early days when they were taking somebody from nothing to something in the sales process. And so a lot of what I've noticed even over these last couple of months is just talking through that concept with them and reinvigorating the ways to be able to get back into the core sales mechanics have really done great things for them. We've already seen numbers improve over these last couple of months, and not just result numbers, but the mechanics numbers, like how many phone calls they're making in a day, how open they are to phone calls coming in for them and just the overall level of engagement. A lot of it just comes down to finding excitement in the processes again.

15:15 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, we also had kind of a pregame conversation about you all are there in Fort Wayne, you're in the office. Talk about that dynamic because it sounded like kind of culturally that was important.

15:27 Jason Koons: It is. You know, we all had to go home like the entire world did for some time throughout the pandemic. We were actually very fortunate throughout that time in terms of how long we had to be out of the office. We're in a state where it wasn't mandated for a very long period of time, which was helpful to the company, of course. But aside from that, the campus itself is just very large and we grew the campus before we needed to. And so we had lots of space. So being able to bring people back and have everybody nicely spaced out was an easy thing to do for us. The reason, however, that we wanted folks back as fast as we could, and frankly why we haven't adopted a work-from-home policy quite yet, and I'm sure something's coming that way, I mean, it is part of the world, but it's very important for us to all be here on campus to support our culture. And what I mean by that is we've got just hundreds and hundreds of years of experience within the live touring market and the recording market and just the music industry in general, that we all rely on each other's credibility and experience. That's just more difficult to do when we're not physically in the same place, to be able to walk over and talk to somebody at their desk or in their office. Beyond that, we've become such a leader in the industry that dozens of manufacturers actually plant roots here in the campus as well. So many of our manufacturers that are our best partners, will actually have offices here, or they do have offices here, where we can go in and talk to manufacturers' reps at any point. They're here all week long, full-time hours. And there again, these are all little perks that we've been able to build up over the years to help in efficiencies and to help in our training and our just ability to serve our clients. And by all being spread out, that puts a rather large hurdle in place of something that we're pretty proud of.

17:23 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So Jason, you said this was kind of a sales internship. Was this your first job ever? I mean, was this your first foray into sales?

17:31 Jason Koons: It was definitely my first foray into sales. Yes. I have a weird background in that before I came here, I ran a tattoo shop and I was a tattoo artist for some time. You wouldn't know it by looking at me, by the way, but that was, you know, my adolescence basically. I learned to do that when I was young and then built up a shop until I was about, well, right around 19 years old or so. And so I was doing that kind of thing early. But it was just time to get away. I was looking for a place to move away to. I know that sounds weird, but I'm from Pennsylvania. My wife is from Pennsylvania. We're high school sweethearts, and we were just looking to kind of start life away from family so that we could get, I don't know, more accustomed to just the adult world. And that's what brought me here. In fact, I was looking at the studio as a place to work in here. Because my schooling was for recording engineering and I figured, hey, I'll just get into the sales gig here for a little bit so I can work my way over into the Sweetwater Studios. But of course, 2 things happened. Number one, I fell in love with sales. And then number two, I started making money and that kind of wrote the rest of my career.

18:41 Scott Ingram: That's amazing. I mean, so having been through this whole adventure, and I'm sure you probably get asked this a lot, I think you were saying you had 15 or 20 people that start basically every quarter and kind of go through your onboarding process. What do you tell the folks that are just coming in and just getting their start and are brand new? How do you tell them to think about this role and their sales career and that kind of stuff?

19:03 Jason Koons: Well, to boil that down, I think, because it's a 13-week, very intense program, you know, there are these guys that are coming in and going through that onboarding process. Sweetwater University is what it's called. It's not a small task. It's a 13-week program that's all day. Every day for that amount of time. There's testing, and they can indeed test themselves out of the role and never actually roll out into a sales engineer position. There's some skin in the game there when they come in to really buckle down and understand what we do, but also learn the processes, learn the equipment, learn how to deal with clients, frankly. If I could boil it down to one thing that I want to make sure that they leave that room with after those 13 weeks, it's that as tough as it might be initially as you're building up your book of business and as a result your income, try your hardest to focus on the relationships, not the transactions. All of the transactional stuff happens. It's just a byproduct of really great relationships, at least with our business model. And so if they can get themselves in that headspace, even when it's a little bit questionable income-wise, those first 6 months as they're building up their client base, it really informs the rest of their career.

20:18 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's amazing. And I meant to ask, and I'm sure had I not asked this question, I would absolutely be hearing from my listeners like, how could you not ask this? You built up this massive book of business and had all of those relationships. What happened to all of those clients?

20:35 Jason Koons: Well, yeah, and that was a process. Right. There's a lot of folks in there, and unwinding a business like that was definitely a task. And I'm still doing it. There are about 120 guys of those 17,000 that I'm still managing at the moment because they still have things going on, you know, maybe backordered products. Have you heard that we have a supply chain issue in the world right now?

20:57 Scott Ingram: I've experienced it indeed.

20:59 Jason Koons: So we still have some of that going, but by large, I took How do I put this the right way? I took my most active clients, frankly, my largest clients, and I wanted to make sure that they were getting the same level of service that they were used to with me for so long. Because it is tough, you know, even for the clients when they're moving from talking to the same guy for 15, 20 years, and they're kind of starting a new relationship over, not with Sweetwater. They know that the foundation is there and that all of the services that they're used to are there. But, you know, the cadence of conversation, even personalities and senses of humor and things of that nature, I wanted to make sure I really connected those folks with somebody that I knew here would have a very similar level of just approach. So I'd say that was probably 600, 700 clients somewhere in that range. The rest of them, we very simply open up the database to the rest of these 550 guys out here. After all of the initial handoffs are done and tell them to go at it. So now they're tasked with not only introducing themselves, but also explaining this new role that I took, because early on I realized that I was not going to be able to send an email to 17,000 people and have any sort of productivity for the next year with responding to those. And so, yeah, it's really just them hitting the ground then and really selling themselves throughout the process and where I went and then reestablishing and connecting with those folks to continue those relationships.

22:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah. What's funny is, you know, you've had to do this one time and your customers have had to experience this one time. I can tell you in the world of tech, this often happens 2, 3 times, sometimes a year. I mean, it is… oh yeah, it is a constant thing. And I think that's why your model is kind of so refreshing because so much gets lost. In that, right? And it's really hard to maintain a real relationship with a business when the face of that business is a different person every X number of months, or even if it's every year or 2.

23:07 Jason Koons: Absolutely. And that transcends into even things like the referral network. You know, when you know somebody for so long, referrals just come in because you're friends with these folks now. You know, these are long-term, true relationships. And you're right, when there's lots of turnover, things like referrals tend to die off because they don't know that the person they're sending their friends to is even going to be there the next time that they need to reach out.

23:32 Scott Ingram: Right, right, right. Absolutely. Well, I call the show Sales Success Stories, and I'm thinking we should maybe hear the story of one of your favorite sales.

23:43 Jason Koons: Sure. You know, I'm not entirely sure that I would label that as a sale, as more of an overall result of working a really great relationship. I think the best one that I can share would be my largest client was Facebook, or Meta now they're calling themselves, and all of their gravity as well. So like Oculus, the VR folks, Facebook Reality Labs, that whole umbrella, they ended up being about a $2 million account for me. And I've had great relationships there, but what's interesting and what I'm proud of about that one is the way that I fell into the ability to get meetings with the folks at Facebook was simply because I built a good relationship very early in my career here with just a gentleman at an independent recording studio out in San Francisco. Wasn't a huge client, but we just built a great rapport over the years. And, you know, every few months we would send him some stuff and we'd serve them in whatever ways they needed. And that went on But then the sales stopped at some point, some years down the road. But I didn't stop reaching out to him just to stay in contact. Frankly, I just enjoyed it. You know, I enjoyed his company on the phone, but it just didn't feel right to let that die off because this industry, folks move around a lot. You know, they would fall into a different role that would still require audio equipment in many cases. So I just stayed in contact. What happened in that time when the sales dropped off that I did not realize was that Facebook had acquired them, that entire studio, and they acquired them for the purpose of building out, well, probably lots of different tools for their platform, but they just needed an in-house studio there to do all of their audio production. And because of that relationship, it opened the door for me to be able to talk to folks above him in the pecking order now with Meta and Facebook. And, you know, they've got some money, that company. And as things grew, and especially as the whole new metaverse situation is growing, they began building up labs all over the country to be able to develop this platform that we're going to see more and more of coming, you know, in the next couple of years. Certainly lots of talk about it now, but it's going to be a pretty major change to just the social world out there, I believe. And that got me in the door to be able to be their sole supplier of all of their audio and even testing equipment for audio gear. And so I guess all that to say, I'm most proud of nurturing a relationship when there weren't results that many years later turned into my largest result.

26:24 Scott Ingram: That's great. What a great story. Now I'm going to ride the roller coaster all the way in the other direction. And the way that I've started to ask this, I had a guest who who brought this question to me a number of months ago. I love it so much. It's, what's your favorite failure?

26:39 Jason Koons: Haha, oh, that's a good one. The lame but truthful question or answer there would be any of them that I can identify a potential solution for the next time with. So not all failures I've had the, I don't know, maybe mental bandwidth or even just the time to really sit down and determine Where did this go wrong? How can I fix it next time? But when I can do that, those are my favorites because I always learn from those and I rarely make that same mistake twice. If I do, it's pretty easy to identify where the variables were. Of course, all failures are learning opportunities, right? But sometimes they're just not as easy to, you know, with everything going on in life, to really quantify. So While maybe not a very specific failure, I would say my favorite failures are those that I have the time, the wherewithal, and really just the aptitude to be able to dig into them and figure out what the issue was there.

27:38 Scott Ingram: All right. That was a little fluffy.

27:40 Jason Koons: That was a little fluffy.

27:41 Scott Ingram: I want the, you fell on your face and the pit of your stomach sunk and it felt awful. And I'm sure you did learn something. Those are the ones we absolutely remember the lessons and we don't do that again. Right.

27:53 Jason Koons: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, I can tell you the one where I just, I realized that this was entirely my fault. I needed to own this. I did burn a relationship with a rather large house of worship at one point many years back, simply because I wasn't hearing back from my contact on something we were working on. And I took it upon myself to go around that contact because I also had a relationship with his director. That completely burnt the entire relationship and I never did that again. But I'll tell you, that was a very painful feeling. They were a large customer, but the pain didn't come from the lost income that I would see from that. The pain came from just knowing that that was entirely my mistake. It was just a move I should not have made.

28:40 Scott Ingram: What is your approach on that? I mean, this is always a question, right? Is like, oh shoot, you know, I'm not getting what I need from this person. Do I go around them? What is your approach?

28:49 Jason Koons: Well, you know, typically my approach with that is just to be patient and let it ride out, frankly. If I've done my job qualifying early enough, then I'll know if I'm talking to the decision makers. If I haven't done that job, then I still need to be qualifying and figure out who it is I'm actually even supposed to be talking to. And in those scenarios, then it's not a problem because you're expressing to that client that your wish is to talk to somebody that can make those decisions and help the process along. In this particular case, or in cases where I know that they are the decision maker, but they're simply not getting back to me, but they may not be the only decision makers. Frankly, since that point, I just be patient. It's about the long game. I don't need to be reaching out to make a quota. I don't need to be focusing on finishing a transaction with any particular client. What I need to focus on are my long-term relationships with them because of all the things we talked about earlier. If we have a long view of the career, even all of those other things just fall into place.

29:56 Scott Ingram: This is so refreshing because you're on a bunch of topics that are just… I feel like we've kind of gone wrong in sales because we've lost that patience, right? Because we're pushing so hard and we're trying to force something that is going to develop naturally, right? Like, it's not about our timeline. It's about their timeline. And, you know, they've got stuff going on in their lives. And if you've done your job, it's going to come around. But instead, our reaction is to do like stupid sales tricks and, you know, like, oh, I'll give you a discount if you do this this minute. It's like, you know what? All you're doing is eroding your margins and frankly eroding those relationships.

30:33 Jason Koons: Yeah. And eroding your credibility. You're absolutely right. And, you know, some, sales models require that. If it's a high-traffic, highly competitive market, I suppose there's some validity to, you know, taking the deal off the streets in those realms. But what Sweetwater has done is just so different than that. You know, we have the highly tenured guys here because frankly, we're treated well, and it's an enjoyable position. And so we have this benefit of being able to play the long game.

31:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I love it. I love it. All right, let's get into one of my favorite things to do is really just pull apart your day and how you structure things. So the way I like to ask this question is, your alarm goes off in the morning. Tell me what time that happened. I kind of want the blow-by-blow until your head hits the pillow on a typical day. Oh, wow.

31:24 Jason Koons: Okay. Well, 5 o'clock typically is when I would get up in the morning. I'll grab some coffee and, you know, get ready for the day. Might hit the rowing machine if I feel so inclined. You know, it's funny, just as an aside, I find that things like working out, I always know I feel better after I do that. I know this like internally, but man, sometimes just getting the, especially in the mornings, just getting to that place where I feel like I can take this on is tough. And that actually translates into sales too. You know, just the mechanics of making phone calls and calling on your customers. Customers. You know, you feel better after you do it, but sometimes that can be tough to break that first nut. But we'll get up and, you know, take care of the kids if they need anything done. But I'm usually in the office an hour or 2 before the quote unquote shift starts. And I say quote unquote shift because I've never really approached this place as a job. I mean, I realize I'm an employee, but when I walk through those doors in the morning, I really do embody this idea that it's my place, that I own it. You know, I realize I do not. So this is not entirely delusions of grandeur, but for whatever reason, however I got into that habit, I feel like that's really helped me have the motivation to be here early, to get through all of my stuff in my email inbox that came in throughout the night, which is the first thing I do when I get here, set up my day, So that by the time 9 o'clock rolls around, which is when I typically like to start calling on folks, I'm ready to go. I know what my entire day looks like. I know what my tasks are going to be for the day. Certainly things are going to change throughout the day, but I know what my agenda looks like. And for me, I just sprint through that every single day to take care of a group of clients of 17,000 folks. The days are pretty full. You know, frankly, edge to edge. But I find that if I get in the mode of just sprinting initially, like right off the bat at 9 o'clock and nothing is holding me up, I'm not trying to figure out what's in my email inbox. I'm not trying to determine really anything about my initiatives for the day. It's really just carrying out those tasks that once I get through that first hour or so, I'm already in that mode and then I just end up sprinting the rest of the day through. Towards the end of the day, I'll make sure to set up my next day so that when I come in the next morning, I'm just going through emails, but everything else is already set up for me. And then frankly, when I get home, I turn off my work mind until the kids are in bed. When the kids go to bed, then in a lot of cases, I won't necessarily log in and do real work. I won't be talking to clients or I won't be responding to emails. But that's the time that I use to try and grow me, whether that's listening to books or podcasts or even just thinking about what my next steps are in a more 10,000-foot view of my career. And then I go to sleep.

34:35 Scott Ingram: What time does that typically happen?

34:36 Jason Koons: Oh, 11 o'clock at night or something like that.

34:38 Scott Ingram: Nice.

34:39 Jason Koons: Yeah, I can't stay up much later than that these days. We're getting older, you know?

34:42 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So 2 things on that. One is, I'm a big fan of this, like, you know, doing the work to really set yourself up so that when it comes time to crank or it comes time to sprint, you don't have to think about what do I do next? So how do you determine what that list of actions you're going to take is the next day? I mean, especially given just how huge your account base is or was.

35:05 Jason Koons: Sure. Yeah. I'm a big fan of compartmentalizing tasks. And what I mean by that is I would say I could probably boil it down to 3 major categories of tasks that I would have on any given day where they're, you know, customer-facing. One, we'll call it a bucket of customers, will be my things that I need to do that day. These are time-sensitive things. Maybe I'm following up on a quote. Perhaps I'm updating somebody on tracking information, but something where the customer is either expecting something Or I know that something is time sensitive where it would be best served if it happened on this day. I prioritize that stuff first. And so I'm always working through that before I get to any of my other 2. Again, we'll call them buckets. The other 2 buckets would be following up on previous orders. That's a huge one for me. Following up 2 to 3 weeks after somebody has taken delivery of something that I have sent out to them. It's not something that's required, right? The transaction's already done. But man, it's such a relationship builder. And I've also found that over the years I've calculated about a 20% closing ratio on those specific types of phone calls, whether it's right on the phone call or something that comes through immediately after, like the next day, even if I'm just leaving a voicemail, by the way, there's something about that extra touch where you're genuinely concerned about how they feel about the thing that they just purchased from you, where it really solidifies the relationship. But then there's also this magical thing that happens in between the time when they've received something and are happy with it, but before their credit card statement comes in, there's nearly always something else in our industry that somebody wants. And in fact, I've studied up on this, I guess, social phenomenon called Diderot effect.

37:06 Scott Ingram: I don't know this one. You're going to have to explain this.

37:08 Jason Koons: Oh, it's pretty interesting. You should Wikipedia it or something at some point. But it's this old philosophy and really a social phenomenon of it being more likely for somebody to purchase something after they've already purchased something within a certain amount of time. It's based in some old… I'm going to have this wrong because I haven't looked at it in a while, but it's based in some old, like Renaissance era or like old Roman times gentleman named Diderot. And there's a cool story about some robe that he bought and it just made him want to buy more and more things, something along those lines. But when you really start digging into the psychology behind it, it's very interesting. And I've kind of built my cadence of following up on orders around that concept. But, you know, even more so than that, what I find is customers are just refreshed to hear from somebody that is genuinely interested to make sure that they're happy with what just went down, even after the money has been made. And then my third bucket, which would be the third thing that I jump into, would be my proactive… we'll call them relationship or touch base calls. I'm not a big fan of the term touch base because it just kind of sounds generic and not agenda driven. But that's kind of what it is, right? These are folks that are not expecting to hear from me. I've got a relationship with them, or maybe I just have like the tiny little seed of a relationship with them. But I want to stay in constant contact with these folks just to be able to build up that relationship and build them into, you know, a good client, frankly. So those are the 3 things that I would do throughout my day. My things that are time sensitive, which are my real actionable items. My following up on the previous orders, and then it's time to be proactive, which is essentially just prospecting out of your own already built book of business.

38:59 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. So you're obviously, you know, really being thoughtful and thinking about this stuff and how it works. I'm wondering if you've got any other gold nuggets. I mean, the 20% lift because you just reach out to follow up on a purchase a couple of weeks after they get it is brilliant. Do you have another thing like that that you're like, I just do this and it makes a huge difference.

39:20 Jason Koons: Ooh, I'm not prepared for that one. This is gonna sound fluffy as well, but it really is true in that I think sales is a huge percent of it is just having a personality, just being somebody that somebody wants to talk to. And I say that with your question just because there's a skillset to be able to turn that on even when you don't want it turned on. Even when those days just… they're not inspiring days, you know, who knows what's going on in your life at that point. I think being able to turn that on as needed, being on stage, so to speak… actually, that's a Disney thing, right? That their characters that walk around are always on stage and their staff members are always on stage. I kind of always looked at it that way. When I'm on the phone with somebody, I'm on stage. And I think that can be problematic for some folks. To let whatever's going on in their life kind of seep into their personality while they're engaging with the customer. So maybe that's a nugget. Perhaps not. It's not really saying anything that folks don't already internally know, but maybe a good reminder.

40:28 Scott Ingram: Well, but I think it's really, really real, right? So here's a couple of things that are kind of going on. I mean, I have done… I've lost track of the numbers. This is my 140-somethingth interview, I think. And we'll have your show notes because we're about to get into lots of link territory here in a minute. So folks go to top1.fm/jason-koons or top1.fm/whatever this episode number is. I have found that the thing that makes great sales professionals great, I mean, everybody I talk to is literally at the top of their game, at the top of their company. They have found their way. They have figured out how to be them and do that because nobody can out-Jason Jason better than Jason. Well, that was pretty good, right?

41:14 Jason Koons: Yeah. I like that a lot.

41:16 Scott Ingram: And the second thing is, cause we're about to get into this territory too, is Jeff Bajorek has been in and around this community. He's been to every summit since the first one, Sales Success Summit, since the first one, what, 4 or 5 years ago. So he's been kind of studying top performers and he made this really great observation because I think a lot of people might get frustrated with this show in that I don't get into just a lot of the really tactical things, right? Like, how are you qualifying? How are you doing this? Because the reality is, and what Jeff observed astutely, performance has very little to do with those things. It has way more to do with mindset and these other outside kind of intangible things. And so that's what these conversations are really focused on. Right? It's all of those other outside things because the reality is that's what makes the difference.

42:09 Jason Koons: I would agree. And if those foundations are built, all of the other stuff just kind of happens over time. You learn how to close, you learn how to qualify, you learn how to present, and you'll pick up little nuggets of things you can try along the way, see how that fits with your personality and just with your overall demeanor. But ultimately, you're going to find yourself closing naturally if you're mindful about it. You're going to sell yourself, you're going to sell your company, not within a scripted paragraph, but within a conversation naturally, sprinkling in the relevant info that the customer needs to hear as it's relevant and in a natural way. And that can take some time to build that up. But you're right, if you can do that while still being yourself, I think that is a key to success in sales and in business in general.

43:02 Scott Ingram: Well, I think it's probably similar to, you know, being a musician or a performer, right? It takes a minute for somebody to find their voice. And I think the same is kind of true in sales. It's, you have to kind of work at this for a while before you can kind of really get a sense of, oh, okay, like this is who I am. This is what I'm about. This is my strength. This is the stuff that I really need to lean into.

43:24 Jason Koons: You know, I love that analogy. And in fact, you could even back that up with just going back and listening to early records of certain, you know, very famous bands. You know, listen to what Led Zeppelin sounds like on Led Zeppelin 1 versus what they sound like on Led Zeppelin 4, or, you know, Beatles on Rubber Soul versus The White Album. It's an evolution, but they're becoming themselves and learning what that is. That's a great analogy, Scott.

43:46 Scott Ingram: Thank you. Thank you. Well, the other thing that I find that's very, very common is that, you know, we are… the top performers are students of sales. Like, this really is a craft. And you talked about kind of your evening routine as you're doing a lot of this listening and working on yourself. What is that information diet? What are you listening to? What are your primary sources?

44:07 Jason Koons: Yeah, well, so for the most part these days, I'm simply grabbing as many books on Audible to listen to in the evenings or on my way to work in the morning, many times on my way home from work, because I don't really consider my day done until I'm pulling in that driveway. But anything that pertains to sales, business, relationships, mindset… and I mean, I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of anything… but the one thing that I'll point out is that I'm not closed-minded as to the form that this info can take, meaning it could be very mechanical sales content process-oriented stuff like you were talking about earlier, but it can also be, shall we say, the abstract stuff, you know, maybe even the spiritual stuff, the things that are more along the lines of law of attraction, to name one, or things that are maybe more intangible. I just love it all, frankly. Anything that deals with psychology. Are you familiar with a book called Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz? I think who did that one.

45:12 Scott Ingram: I've heard of it. I've not dug into that one.

45:14 Jason Koons: It's one of those chewy books, and I use that as an example because it's not about sales at all. It's not even really about relationships. It's more about self-talk and the ability to create your own realities through informing your subconscious, which informs the actions that your conscious takes. And that kind of stuff, like the science and psychology behind just how folks grow, how successful people operate, just fascinates me.

45:44 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Do you have kind of a top set, you know, 3 or 5 books that you either find yourself going back to or that have just been really impactful and transformative?

45:56 Jason Koons: In terms of ones that I go back to, I would say some old ones like Napoleon Hill's Master Key to Riches, I believe is the one. He's got 2 really good ones that I typically hit up on, but that Master Key to Riches one, I'll find myself going back to those quite often, or that one quite often. But even just some simple ones that I go back to simply because I'm helping a lot of other folks as I mentor them through, there's some really easy reads that are just powerful that I've found over the years. There's one called How to Become a Rainmaker. I'm sorry, I forget the author at the moment.

46:28 Scott Ingram: It's not Maxwell, is it?

46:30 Jason Koons: John Maxwell?

46:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Is that one of his?

46:32 Jason Koons: I don't believe so. I don't think it is.

46:34 Scott Ingram: We'll put it in the show notes. It's all good. We take care of all of this stuff. Because I have Kevin.

46:40 Jason Koons: Okay, perfect.

46:40 Scott Ingram: Well, thank you, Kevin.

46:43 Jason Koons: That's one that I regularly go back to because it's very small. It's not a large book. It's easy to read. And it's just one of those where it's like nugget after nugget. You know, you don't have to look for them. They're just out there in front of you. But because there's so many in there, it's easy to lose sight of them over time after you've read it. So I do find myself coming back to that one quite often. Another one is Customer-Centric Selling, which is really kind of how I've built my business. I read that one early on in my career, maybe 5 or 6 years in, and that one has really informed just my mindset on how I approach the sales process with folks. And so I will regularly revisit that one just to give myself a reminder of, you know, what my business really is.

47:35 Scott Ingram: Love it. And that's probably a pretty good transition point because I wonder if that's kind of the answer. I like to ask if you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy.

47:44 Jason Koons: That would be the one. That's exactly it. In fact, I think about that fairly often, you know, because if you could just boil down what your business is and you can find a way to put that in a sentence or an idea, it really kind of informs all of your other decisions that you have to make throughout the day, I think. And Customer-Centric Selling, that very specific one. Oh, and also there's another great book called Raving Fans.

48:09 Scott Ingram: Both of those. I was just going to say, I'm not sure that I've read Customer-Centric Selling, but that's the exact book that came to mind was Raving Fans. Okay. I was just going to, I was going to mention that to you.

48:19 Jason Koons: Oh, that's so great.

48:20 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

48:20 Jason Koons: I mean, those 2 books go kind of hand in hand, in my opinion. They're very similar to each other in terms of just the ideals and the mindset that they put you in. They read a little differently, but they're both great for that. And if I were to boil down my business process, it would be of those.

48:38 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. That is so funny. I literally, I looked up on the shelf because I was thinking of Raving Fans. And again, because of this house move, if you're in Austin, I'm guessing a lot of these are going to show up at Half Price Books or something like that. I'm going to pare back my library pretty massively. Nice. So either that or just swing by. You can take all the sales books and business books you want.

48:57 Jason Koons: Sounds like a plan.

48:58 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Jason, you also mentioned that you're listening to quite a few podcasts. What are your favorite on that front?

49:04 Jason Koons: You know, actually, frankly, I'm not listening to many podcasts. I say podcasts in the context of just audiobooks. Got it. So yeah, I apologize, but I know one that I'm going to be listening to now.

49:16 Scott Ingram: Well, I appreciate that. Oh, very good. All right, you've listened long enough, and if you're a raving fan of this show, you definitely deserve a reward. While you can look up the links of all the books and everything else that's getting mentioned at top1.fm/142, what you won't find in those show notes is these special links to claim some additional Sales Coins because you actually have to listen. So right now, if you'll go over to salescoin.co salescoin.co/jason-sw. You'll be able to grab your reward. And if you don't have an account yet, go to salescoin.co/start to get that set up. Then keep listening because I think I'm going to do one more of these a little later in the episode. salescoin.co/jason-sw. All right, let's get back to this. And in terms of your kind of personal tech stack, like what are the tools and the apps that you find yourself using kind of throughout the day, right? I find we generally have 2 We have those that we use when we're selling and in that motion. And then we have kind of the other apps that we run our lives on.

50:25 Jason Koons: Sure. The answer I want to give you is nothing. And the reason I want to give you that answer is because if we're talking about tools or apps that I couldn't live without in terms of the sales process, I never wanted to build anything around a crutch like that. And I don't think that in the sales world, from a broad strokes perspective anyway, I don't think it's necessary. I need humans to engage with to make this all happen, not necessarily, you know, any tools that I couldn't live without that way. Now, having said that, obviously email, texting, phone calls, our CRM that I'd mentioned earlier is a huge tool for us because being able just to keep a mental bead on who folks are, especially at the beginning of a relationship, what the hot buttons are, what's going to be that first domino that you can push, those types of things. There's no way I'd be able to remember all of that without our CRM platform that we use. And there's nothing extremely different than any CRM platform that any sales professional would use. Just you have to take good notes and you have to know which notes to take.

51:38 Scott Ingram: Oh, okay. You have to say more about that. Okay.

51:40 Jason Koons: Well, certainly, you know, within your industry, what are the things that are going to be the real compellers for this client? It doesn't have to necessarily be, oh, this guy really likes this kind of sound. You know, if we're talking audio equipment, a lot of times it's this customer wants to feel this way. This customer wants to have this experience. And those are pretty global ideas. And once you learn that type of thing, you can apply it towards whatever the context of the conversation is throughout your entire time of working with them. Those are the types of notes I would take. Certainly things like their family notes and their personal notes. I would find those types of things more important than taking notes about even what their next purchases might be. That stuff just kind of comes. But if I can nurture the relationship by knowing more about them personally and knowing what internally their, maybe we'll say their love language is even, that to me was more important throughout my career than technical notes.

52:47 Scott Ingram: Okay. We're going to keep going on this. I'm just going to keep pulling this thread because this is fascinating. So how are you thinking about it and how are you capturing the love language type of detail?

52:56 Jason Koons: It's just part of conversations. I always try to have a real, actual, true, non-sales agenda conversation with folks, even during the sales agenda. And it could be just at times that I'm looking something up for someone and, you know, it's the stuff that you expect, you know, what are you up to later today? Anything exciting going on? Any vacations you're taking anytime soon? You know, just kind of like little things like that. But you can learn so much about folks by reading between the lines of the answers they give you. And those things have nothing to do with really furthering the specific sales agenda that's happening, but they do, right? Because you get this idea of who you're really working with. And when you can really understand the identity of somebody, then you can understand the identity of what's going to compel them.

53:45 Scott Ingram: So now I want to tie those 2 ideas together, right? So you're asking these questions, you're getting to know them, you're kind of reading between the lines and really kind of understanding what's at the core. What and how do you end up kind of noting those types of things? So when I have the next conversation with Jason, I know that, you know, family is really central to him.

54:05 Jason Koons: Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, it'll be small things, right? So I know that Jason, family is important to him. So when we're talking about whatever that next agenda might be, I'm going to ask about that family for sure. Right. I'm going to ask how the kids are doing, you know, and I'll make it relevant to something we can all relate with. These last couple of years have been extremely easy to do this because everybody on the planet can relate to the COVID pandemic. And it's so easy to talk to parents about what's going on with the schools in their area where their kids are going. Are they at home? Are they in school? How's that process been? But even without kids, right? How's their careers, their work, and what their workflow looks like now? How have things changed in their day-to-day? We're not talking about audio equipment here. We're just talking about them and their lives. And you just learn so much. And I have found that folks love to talk about themselves and their families and their lives. And so they will divulge so much more information to you, so much more useful information throughout those conversations than if you ask them what their budget is or what their timeframe is, or just like the stoic questions that we ask in sales. Not that I don't ask those questions, but they're many points down. They're definitely not a focus of any of those conversations.

55:30 Scott Ingram: Jason, how do you find the balance between these conversations that if you really get into it, I'm sure you could talk to a customer for hours, but you've got 17,000 relationships to manage. Like, how are you finding that balance and managing that?

55:46 Jason Koons: Certainly. Well, I will say that I have trained my book of business to understand that I'm busy, and I did that intentionally, but I did it from the angle of not being busy, or to put a finer point on it, not too busy for you. I never want a customer to hear that. No salesperson does. But more from the angle of I'm in high demand. People want to talk to me, you know, without straight up saying that. And it's important over time that I built that up because it allows me to get on and off of a call as I need to. I can control the trajectory of that conversation based on what is either needing to happen in that conversation. Am I making this phone call for a transaction? Am I making this phone call just to build the relationship further? Or things coming into my inbox where things start to get busy. It's not difficult for me to tell somebody because I've trained them to know this. It's not difficult to tell somebody, oh, I've got to run here. Is there anything else that we need to finish up? Because I can just give you a shout back when we have more time and I can really focus with you. It's been a big part of my practice. I'm glad you asked that because there is a skill set involved with being able to move things along without the customer feeling rushed ever.

57:05 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. And you actually answered my next question, although you may have another tip or two, which is, you know, just having kind of those go-to exit statements, right? They're like, oh my God, I can tell this is like a 30-minute story and I don't begin to have that kind of time. How do I shut this off without shutting them down?

57:22 Jason Koons: You know, a lot of times I will just level with them, frankly, Scott. I'll let them know, man, this sounds really interesting. Let's connect on that at some point because I really want to hear more about this story. If I'm being honest with you right now, I probably can't focus on it, but I want to. So I'll set something up with them and it's actually a nice way to get back with them anyway. I do find that on the cases where we've got a client that maybe tends to be long-winded, that that will refocus them for when I do follow back up with them to hear that same story. That same story now that might have been 30 minutes is now 10 minutes because they've had time to think about what they're going to say, I suppose. But also it reinforced that, oh, that's right, I'm talking to somebody that's a professional at their job that's in high demand. It can a lot of times just kind of get them more to the point. And I'll tell you, there are times that I will ask a customer to hold on the line quickly so I can handle an email or two. I won't lie to them about that. I'll straight up tell them that, do you mind if I throw you on hold real quick? I'm sorry, I just got to handle this thing real quick, but I'm very interested in what you're saying and I don't want to miss anything. And the same thing happens when I come back on that line 2 minutes later. Everything just comes to a point very quickly because they've had a little bit of time to formulate that, I think.

58:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Well done. Well done. So let's talk a little bit more about… I mean, you talked about… I think of it as just Jason being Jason, right? So how would you describe your style?

58:54 Jason Koons: I would describe my style as conversational yet quick. I mentioned it before, how I sprint each day and, you know, around the office I walk quickly, I talk pretty quickly. I just… I always have a purpose, I guess. And so I think I would describe my style as quick and to the point, but still conversational. I think it's important to… well, how do I put this the right way? When you're dealing with a book of business that large, you have to find some efficiencies someplace. Because you're right, I mean, if you've got even 15-minute conversations with folks in an 8-hour day, that's what, 32 conversations you can have that day. I think I did that math right. But if you have a book of business of 17,000 people, that's going to require 120 conversations a day. And so you do have to find little ways that are natural to be able to reel that in and really control the conversations, you know, to be in the driver's seat as opposed to being reactive to the journey that the customer is taking you on in that call. Yeah.

1:00:04 Scott Ingram: Jason, what drives all of this? What motivates you? How do you think about motivation? Like, what is this?

1:00:09 Jason Koons: You know, I'm just wired in a way, frankly, where I have a hard time understanding why somebody in the same role with the same circumstances and the same tools could be better than somebody else. I mean, I know why these reasons are, right? But all of those reasons are learnable. Everything that makes one salesperson not as productive as another salesperson are things that can change. There's nothing baked into a person versus another person. It might be easier for some folks to fall naturally into that. But if somebody cares enough to work at it, then there's no reason why everybody can't be number one at some point in their career, no matter where they're at, I think. And that's kind of always fueled me. I couldn't wrap my brain around a guy sitting next to me doing the same things, making twice as much money as me. And I realized that it's a bit shallow too to say that my main motivation is income. But if I'm being honest about it, certainly the vast majority of my career, that was the yardstick that I measured my productivity to. And so that did indeed fuel me. And then each year as I would see growth, the growth of that would fuel me, not really the dollar amount as much as just what strides am I making to get better. Everybody's motivated differently. I'm not very motivated externally. Even when I listen to these books, the books themselves don't really motivate me. It's what I'm learning that I internalize that then motivates me personally, if that makes any sense.

1:01:46 Scott Ingram: It totally does. I mean, it's basically all intrinsic.

1:01:48 Jason Koons: Yeah, I guess it feels that way, you know, if I'm gonna be on the outside looking in. Everything kind of feels like it starts with me internally. Like a manager here is, I don't think ever sent me an email or had a conversation with me in an office or anything of that nature where I've left that feeling like, oh man, that's exactly the push I needed. That push I needed has always been internal for me.

1:02:13 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that makes sense. So Jason, you opened with really talking about how important the mindset is. How do you think about that? How do you work on that? How do you develop that? What is your mindset mindset?

1:02:31 Jason Koons: Well, I think at the core of it, it's just being aware that it's a thing, right? Folks are their own worst enemy almost always, especially in sales, you know, because these glass ceilings or these invisible ceilings or what do you want to call them? The upper barrier limits I've read in books. You know, these are all just fake, right? Like these limitations we put on ourselves, they're just not real at all. And to become aware that having a proper or positive mindset is the key to unlocking those ceilings is, I think, the biggest part of it. The mechanics and how you work on that I think can vary depending on who you are. You know, in my scenario, I mentioned earlier, it's mostly listening to books, and the books aren't necessarily about mindset. It's just the act of being disciplined and in a habit of constantly feeding myself with knowledge that puts me in the mindset by itself, not really the content of what I'm listening to. And so I think the way to answer your question, the way that I maintain that is just frankly a habit of always feeling like I'm learning something.

1:03:48 Scott Ingram: I like it. I like it. Jason, is there something you believe that the average or typical sales engineer would think is crazy?

1:03:58 Jason Koons: Well, yes, I will tell you that the thing I had mentioned earlier where my follow-up on order calls, I have calculated are are about a 20% closing ratio. I still have a hard time really driving that home with my team out here, that they're that important. So I feel like a lot of reps don't see the value in the touches after the transaction until they feel like there's a potential for a new transaction. So a lot of guys do look at me crazy even when I show them the data on it. I think that might be the biggest thing that I can't seem to hammer home with folks.

1:04:36 Scott Ingram: That's fascinating. Maybe it's just a wiring and a philosophical thing. I mean, it just, it makes intuitive sense to me, right? Because, and maybe it's that pattern interrupt. Maybe it's, wait a minute, here's a sales guy calling me and he's not trying to sell me something.

1:04:51 Jason Koons: He just cares. Yeah.

1:04:53 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:04:53 Jason Koons: And you know, that's exactly it. You know, there's a famous quote that people don't care what you know until they know that you care, right? And what better way to really express that you're a teammate of theirs, that you're a partner of theirs? You're not a salesperson and they're not a customer. They have a journey or an ideal that they want to achieve, and you're there to help guide them along that process and to serve them in whatever way is necessary to get them to where that is. And that's not always a transaction. That's not always selling them something. Sometimes it's telling them not to buy something.

1:05:27 Scott Ingram: Absolutely, absolutely. What about the flip side? Is there something that kind of the typical sales engineer believes that you think is crazy?

1:05:35 Jason Koons: Not really that comes to mind, and the reason for that is because if I don't really resonate with an idea, I just let it go. If what they're telling me or what I'm hearing, even when I'm listening to very accomplished folks at conferences or in these books, if it doesn't resonate, if it just doesn't feel like me, then I just let it go and I don't dwell on why I feel like that is a crazy idea because I recognize that for them it probably is not a crazy idea. For them, it could very well be the key factor. So why discount that for them just because it's not for me?

1:06:09 Scott Ingram: So this is a really interesting observation because I think that this is kind of the process of looking at and learning from other people and using it to kind of inform and build your own style and approach. And to your point, some of those things you're like, that works amazingly for you. I'm not you. That'll never work for me. So I don't even need to worry about that. Talk about, because you mentioned this early on as well, that you really kind of studied the folks who were performing at high levels and kind of looked at what they were doing. What was that process? And am I kind of on the right track there that you're like, that's useful. I'm going to try that. That's useful. I'm going to try that. That is weird. I'm not going to try that. Is that sort of the approach?

1:06:50 Jason Koons: That's exactly what it is. Yeah. You know, I looked at it as compatibilities. So, you know, I mentioned earlier when I started here at Sweetwater, the process was different on the onboarding than it is now. Now we've got all these systems built up and basically schooling that the sales engineers go through. But when I came in, it was more of a shadowing situation. I was working on somebody's team that was already successful. That could be hit and miss for folks. I was fortunate in that the gentleman that I worked with at that point, he had a pretty similar demeanor to what I felt like I could have. I was only 20 years old, right? So I was trying to figure out who I was anyway. I certainly didn't know who I was professionally yet, so I didn't know where I was going to land personality-wise as a sales professional. But I did find that in emulating him, fake it till you make it, right? He was already successful. I was talking to his clients anyway for that first year. So emulating the way that he approached things, even the vernacular or certainly the cadence of things and just the energy. He was a high-energy guy and that resonated with me. But that could go the other way. I could have very easily been put on a team I had no choice in this. I could have been put on a team with another very successful sales engineer that has a totally different approach, that was maybe more low energy, low touch, but still successful. I just kind of looked at those things as there's still something to learn from those guys. So when I did roll out into my own, you know, sales engineership, if that's a word, I did still take time to either have my desk moved near some of those folks so I could hear them. So I was constantly immersed in their sales processes because they were so different than what I was used to from my previous year with the gentleman that I came up under. Or I would just go in and spend an hour or 2 sitting with them. I would take, you know, this hour that I would normally go to lunch. Not today. Today I'm going to go over, I'm going to ask them if I can sit with them and listen in on their phone calls. And I would do that across the sales floor to these guys that I felt like there was something to learn from. And frankly, early on, that was everybody because I wasn't… I was new, right? I was still trying to figure out what this whole thing was about. And there were indeed some folks where I'd walk away with maybe one thing. But the rest of it I considered to be incompatible, and I was totally cool with that. I didn't really feel that that was a… they were crazy ideals for those guys to have. It just was incompatible with my style. And then on the flip side, I'd sit with folks where it's completely compatible and everything in between. So if, just like you said, if I could take little bits and pieces of what could serve me in the way that I work, I would do that and I just threw out the rest and not dwell on them.

1:09:53 Scott Ingram: Is that kind of the entirety of the process? I mean, I love this, right? Like, I'm just gonna sit and I'm gonna listen. Was there much conversation? Were you debriefing these at all? Were you doing more than that or was it just primarily observational?

1:10:06 Jason Koons: It was primarily observational. I mean, there would be times that we would have chats as the sales process was happening. You know, like he gets off a phone call and I mentioned, oh, I really liked what you did there. And then depending on the sales engineer, they might expand upon that. But in a lot of cases, I was just silent. I didn't want to get in anybody's way. They were doing me a favor. They were teaching me. And so I just wanted to be a student. And maybe I'd have a follow-up question later on down the road. But in a lot of cases, it was just kind of learning the different ways that people sell. And that just required listening. Though I will say that it's a lot easier to learn that when you're listening to both sides of the conversation as opposed to just sitting around somebody and hearing just them.

1:10:50 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, and now, I mean, the modern-day equivalent is we've got amazing tools like Gong, who is a sponsor of this show, where, you know, you can go back and you can listen to those recordings. And I think your approach is exactly it. What's amazing about Gong though, is you can go even further and listen to a particular type of call. You know, somebody in the community was just asking me this morning about We need to work on discovery. Oh, okay. Well, you know, these are the people that do really great discovery. Let's go listen to their discovery calls. And now, to your point, you actually get to hear both ends of that conversation and really immerse yourself. And so, it's even easier than it once was. You can do that listening on your own time. You can speed it up. You don't have to, you know, have it scheduled and give up a lunch or whatever it is. So, fascinating stuff. And is that something that found? Well, heck, in this new role, I mean, is that something you're doing? Are you just kind of sitting and listening just to get your head around, you know, the style and approach of these individuals you're now supporting?

1:11:47 Jason Koons: You bet. You know, in fact, that's a really great segue. I'm glad you brought that up. To answer that question, absolutely. I'm doing deep dives with these folks, you know, really immersing myself in their business. So it won't just be an hour of me listening to their phone calls. It's literally me monitoring their screens, their workstation screens, and their phone for an entire day per person. So I will spend an entire day literally sitting here taking notes and finding strengths and weaknesses, things they can expand upon just within their normal workflow of their day. And that could be efficiencies, that could be just ways that they're talking to folks, it could just be reflection in voice. You know, some folks come off differently on the phone than they think they're coming off. So that's a big part of that. But then, you know, you were mentioning about being able to search different types of phone calls for education purposes through… for websites like Gong and stuff. That's actually something that I've started doing in this role too, where for the entire sales floor, I have them sending me what they feel are good conversations. So I'm getting a regular stream of emails from the entire sales floor now of when they get off the phone. Doesn't have to be a sale, doesn't have to move the needle at all. But if you have that feeling where you get off the phone and it just feels good, like that was a good conversation, I'm having them send them to me. I'm going through, I'm editing them so that there's 2 or 3 small little clips maybe only 10 seconds apiece, and then identifying what we're actually hearing in those clips and sending it to the rest of the sales floor. So I want the experience of folks to be able to have like I did, where I would sit in and grab these nuggets from my peers, but I don't want them to have to take the time to go do it. I don't want them to have to determine what they're really actually listening to. Like, is this the qualification process? Are they presenting in this part of it? So I simply define what they're hearing, what's great about it, and then I edify that person in a major way of whose phone call it was, because it's just good karma, frankly, and it's just a positive email for folks to get.

1:14:11 Scott Ingram: All right, this is amazing. Oh my gosh, you're gonna need to create your own podcast with this stuff. Are there commonalities? I mean, this is so cool that you're just getting a stream of these, and I love the work that you're doing with them and to them. But what are the things that you're seeing consistently in those conversations that really stand out that you're like, this is the stuff right here?

1:14:30 Jason Koons: Well, they're all different, frankly. I know what you're… we're looking for, like a common vein there for this. And I'm sure there is if I think about that. But at the moment right now, what I'm trying to do is give, you know, these 550 folks out there a smattering of everything, because I realize that we've got 550 different personalities out there. Everybody's going to resonate with something different. And that's the reason I keep them very short as well. Even my sentences about them are just 1 or 2 quick sentences and a little 10 or 12-second clip, because it needs to be easily digestible. I think it needs to not be a hurdle or be be a roadblock or get in their way of their day at all. In terms of a common theme, honestly, the coolest thing that I've learned from this process is early on I had to ask for these phone calls, and after a steady cadence of them started hitting the sales floor, then after I've edited them, now it's… I'm getting too many. Folks are excited about it. They're energized about being featured in one of these emails that I send out to the team. And frankly, they're just looking for feedback on their phone calls, which I think is great because it's getting people to get into that learning mindset, especially after these last couple of years where frankly, we've been very reactive in nature because the business has just been so good, so busy throughout this whole pandemic situation for us that it's nice to feel sales professionals truly engaging in the processes again.

1:16:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I'm chuckling here in the background because in so many ways it sounds like this show, except for the brevity part. You know, these are very long interviews, right? And I think it's, you know, you love it or you hate it. The people who love it, well, they're still listening. So, they're with me. You know, but it really is, to your point, there's kind of common themes, but everybody is so different. And, you know, my job is just to Bring it out and allow them to kind of share. This is my playbook. These are the things. This is who I am. And that may resonate. Maybe it doesn't. You know, maybe you learn one thing. Maybe it's, oh my gosh, I need to listen to this 3 more times because Jason is me and there's a lot for me here. And also similarly, you know, I used to have to pull and pull and pull to get people on the show in the early days of building this thing. And at this point, it's kind of like, oh my gosh, I know I've made it when I get to be on the Sales Success Stories podcast and I have lots of people reaching out and it's a ton of fun.

1:17:03 Jason Koons: Excellent. Yeah, no, exactly. And, you know, it just brings the fun back into learning. It brings the fun back into the craft. It helps break people out of those ruts of just doing a job.

1:17:12 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, and to me it's human, right? Like actually getting to hear people, you know, when they're in their zone, when they're doing their thing, when they're being them is so different than Oh, well, here's the 3 bullets. I mean, if I just took the statements that you gave me that said, Scott, these are my top 3 things. That's interesting, but it's way more interesting to hear kind of all the detail and all the nuance behind all of that.

1:17:37 Jason Koons: Yep. I entirely agree.

1:17:39 Scott Ingram: So Jason, we got to this a little bit earlier, but I wonder, and maybe this is a little bit more from a career perspective, in terms of the advice that you would give to somebody that is just starting out in their sales career today, what would you tell them?

1:17:54 Jason Koons: The first thing I'd tell them is congratulations. So many folks get into sales not as their plan A, right? Kids don't grow up wanting to be a salesperson. Typically, they want to be a rock star, they want to be an astronaut, right? But the sales profession, I just can't think of a better university to attend than being a salesperson early on in life. You just learn so much about, well, about life, frankly. You learn so much about yourself, about your capabilities. You're connected to… I mean, if you're commission-based anyway, you're connected to your livelihood in a visceral way that you just aren't in other paths. It builds your business acumen. It can be a tough career, but because of that, it can also be very rewarding, which is just a fulfilling, you know, life thing. So I would congratulate them first on making a decision to go down that path in the first place, no matter how daunting it may look initially.

1:18:57 Scott Ingram: Speaking of rewarding, I also want to say congratulations because you've just found your second Sales Coin earning opportunity. I appreciate you listening this far, and this link will get you even more coins than the first one. Pretty cool, huh? salescoin.co/jks is where you need to go to get them. Again, if this doesn't make sense, go back and listen to the last episode and you'll find it at top1.fm/coin-intro. Can't tell you how much fun I'm having with these, and I want to give you more and appreciate you being an actively engaged listener. salescoin.co/jks. And now back to Jason.

1:19:40 Jason Koons: Plus, you know, generally speaking, income has huge potential in sales in general, especially if you're at the top of your game. It's hard to find something as lucrative as what sales can be, you know, without jumping into highly specialized fields. And of course, all of the education and debts that go along with that. So if they're just first starting out, I would congratulate them in making a great career choice, even if it's not their endgame, even if they're only going to do it for 4 or 5 years. I feel like it'd be a better jumping off point to whatever career that they decide they want to get into after that than even what a lot of higher education can be.

1:20:24 Scott Ingram: I love that. I love that. That is so well said. And now here's what's really interesting. I think I have asked this question in virtually every interview. And now it's your job. So I ask, you know, what is the advice that you would give to somebody that's further into their career? And maybe they're good, they're doing well, but they just, they haven't found great. Like, what do you tell them?

1:20:51 Jason Koons: So it depends on what the issue might be. What I would typically tell them is to look inward. Like, First, let's identify the joys that you get out of this. What are the things that you actually enjoy about the sales process, or even just their career in general? I think very few people will spend a lot of time with that and come up with nothing that they actually truly enjoy. And once we can isolate what that is, like what brings them joy in that process, then it's pretty easy to identify what we can work on. Because at that point, we're just going to cut out the stuff that is opposite of that, and we're going to bolster up the things that they truly get the most fulfillment out of. Once you enjoy the process, everything else is easy, right? Like the struggles… not that you're not going to have struggles, but the majority of the major struggles that would keep somebody back go away. And then I would also really hammer home, in my opinion, and not everybody has the same opinion, but for me, I truly believe that building up a discipline of good habits is so important, even to the point where I know a lot of sales guys that would build out their weeks where they would do a certain type of task on one day and then do maybe another type of task on a different day. An example of this would be like maybe their Mondays through Thursdays are like you know, just kind of doing all the reactive stuff. And then on Fridays, they're going to choose to be proactive and reach out and build relationships and touch base with folks. And I never really loved that because I found it harder then to build a discipline of a, just a good habit and a system for each day when I come in. Kind of going back to your earlier question about how I set up my days. For me, it was important to always have this knowingness of what my day was going to be, no matter what the variables are that threw at me. And it helped me build habits where making 150 calls a day just became second nature. It wasn't something I had to strive for, for example. And then also, I would always like folks to try and really isolate what their struggles are. Like in words, like truly writing down what am I struggling with? Because I find that if we can name the struggle, then it's pretty easy to back it out at that point and figure out how to attack it.

1:23:24 Scott Ingram: Name the struggle. I love it. I love it. That is really good. And it's work, right? I mean, that's not always an obvious intuitive thing, right? Sometimes you really have to get pretty introspective and go, okay, what's What's really going on here?

1:23:38 Jason Koons: Right.

1:23:38 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:23:38 Jason Koons: And, you know, we're busy, right? In the heat of the moment, it's nearly impossible for most folks to be able to do this throughout their business working day, you know, to be truly introspective like that. And I think that's where things can fall flat because a lot of folks will clock out for the day and that is it. Like, that's until they come back the next morning. That's the extent of where their head is at in their businesses. But it's that time afterward when you've had a day and you've had struggles to be able to sit down, really identify what it is, and just put thought behind it. You know, really be mindful about the struggles, but also your successes. I think that's equally important.

1:24:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So good. So good. Jason, what would you want to know from the top sellers in other organizations?

1:24:27 Jason Koons: Everything. Right? Everything. I'm not going to limit or put a filter on my knowledge coming in because I don't want filtered results. If there's a top guy in any company or the top folks in any companies, I'm going to have something to learn from all of them. And so I just want to be a sponge.

1:24:49 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Is there anything that I haven't asked that you're like, man, I'd really like to know or even just like to share? There's this thing that I do that people should know about.

1:25:00 Jason Koons: You know, if I were to challenge folks with an exercise that are in the sales profession, I would challenge them to get into a habit of making a daily gripes and gratitudes list. That was a huge help for me, especially when I started getting in these burnt-out modes, which were always easy to overcome just by listening to books, for me anyway. But when I would get into those modes where things just weren't all roses, you know, I wasn't loving what I was doing that day or that week, maybe that month, frankly. What I employed then was just at the end of the day, took me 2 or 3 minutes before I would leave, I would simply make a T-table of gripes, the things that I'm frankly upset about in one way or another, or frustrated about, and then gratitudes. And what I found was that I'd fill up that gripes list. It would, you know, be, let's say for the sake of conversation, 10 things that I could write down on that side. And I would do that first so I could really just, I think, express my frustrations, but to myself. And actually in ink write them down. Like, what are these things? Identify them. And then on the other side, on the gratitudes list, I would do… as soon as I did my gripes list, I wouldn't think about those gripes really. I would just move over to the gratitudes list and I would just write down the things that I'm quite happy about. You know, the income I'm making, the ability to go home to my family every night. That was a big one for me because a lot of folks that are at my level in sales are traveling, and it's not as easy to do those types of things that are big values for me and stuff like that. But what I found was that 2 or 3 things down, I could throw the list away and I did it every day. Most times those same gripes and those same gratitudes would be on those lists. But it didn't take me long to realize that my gratitudes outweighed my gripes. Every single time. So if folks struggle with like especially burnout, that would be my challenge to employ some sort of cadence of doing that type of list.

1:27:17 Scott Ingram: That's brilliant, and I think it's also a really great way to kind of serve as a primer to that introspective thinking that we were just talking about, right? So instead of just you know leaving it all away, you know maybe on that drive home or you know you're walking the dog after a day in the office, go through that exercise and now you've already kind of. Set up your brain to think on that topic a little bit.

1:27:40 Jason Koons: That's right. Yeah. Yeah, it's exactly it. It's really just being mindful and treating it more than a 9-to-5 job where you're clocking in and then clocking out. It's your business, so treat it like it.

1:27:51 Scott Ingram: Jason, I have enjoyed the heck out of this conversation. Thank you for taking your time. Thank you for sharing your story and congrats on all your success in this new role.

1:28:00 Jason Koons: Oh, well, thank you, Scott. I've enjoyed it immensely as well. Great to talk to you and you take care of yourself. I'm sure we'll chat again soon. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast. To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.