Today on the Book More Show, we're talking with Craig Lowder from MainSpring Sales.

Craig shares how his book Smooth Selling Forever established his credibility and sparked meaningful conversations with many new leads.

Craig explains how a book can do more than sell - it can strengthen relationships in today's digital market, and really set the stage for a trusted relationship. We explore shifting sales strategies, with Craig emphasizing adapting methods to virtual selling.

From online presence to tracking indicators, his insights are actionable as he emphasizes the importance of audits and feedback loops in sales performance.

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS

• Craig discusses his transition from corporate life to entrepreneurship and the founding of MainSpring Sales Group.

• We explore the role of Craig's book, "Smooth Selling Forever," in establishing credibility and fostering meaningful business conversations.

• Craig and I examine the shifting dynamics of buyer decision-making in today's market and the importance of being present during the online research phase.

• We discuss the need to adapt traditional sales methodologies to fit the virtual selling environment, emphasizing the importance of tracking leading indicators over lagging ones.

• Craig highlights the significance of maintaining a robust online presence and delivering a differentiating message to attract potential clients.

• We delve into how advancements in AI can enhance personal connections in a digital context, making it crucial for businesses to stay ahead of the curve.

• Craig emphasizes the importance of writing a book to showcase expertise and how it can serve as a powerful tool for business growth and trust-building.

• We discuss the proactive role sales executives can play in content creation and lead generation, even when corporate support is lacking.

• Craig shares insights on conducting a sales operations audit to identify areas for improvement and leveraging external resources to enhance performance.

• We explore the nuances of professional growth, focusing on refining and systematizing processes and preparing for future transitions through effective systems and trusted individuals.

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Craig Lowder:
Website: Smooth Selling Forever
LinkedIn: Craig Lowder

TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)

Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Bookmore Show. It's Stuart Bell here, and today joined by Craig Louder. Craig, how are you doing?

Craig: It's a wonderful day here in Wisconsin. Thank you for inviting me, Stuart.

Stuart: I'm excited. So this is one of the shows. I kind of reference it sometimes with how I know the people, just to give the audience context. We're kind of 170 or so episodes in now, so there's a bit of a bit of history about how the show runs.

So the conversation with Craig came from a LinkedIn introduction through mutual conversation and again one of those really interesting calls, and there's such a strong crossover with our audience here that I think this is going to be really insightful for people, not only because you've used a book for your business for a long period of time, so they'd be interested to hear a little bit about that but also the nature of the work that you do in the kind of orchestration of new business through referrals and cold connections and helping people make that outreach, which, at the end of the day, is why the majority of people who write books with us write those books. So, with that being said, why don't you give a bit of an introduction to everyone about you and what you do and then we can dive into some details?

Craig: Thank you, stuart. I grew up as a child if everybody's seen that movie First person in my family ever to go to college, received a degree in marketing and a graduate degree in marketing and finance, did the corporate route for about five years and decided I was not a fit for corporate. And for the past 40 years I've been working in small to mid-sized business. What does that mean? Those are companies anywhere from startup to 200. And typically it's in the 10 to 50, 10 to 75 million dollar range.

And back in 2012, I decided to get off the road and stop doing turnarounds and restarts and go into my own strategic sales consulting business called the MainSpring Sales Group. And as part of that, like we all meet the best people that we can possibly meet through referrals. I was introduced to a gentleman that spoke on sales out of Philadelphia and he says Craig, you really ought to write a book and I know just the guy you should write it with. And he introduced me to my publisher. And back in 2016, I published my first book, smooth Selling Forever, which was designed specifically for small and mid-sized business owners who were struggling to significantly and profitably grow their top line on a predictable and consistent basis.

So this book was designed to share my experience over three decades and what are the 12 reasons that I found why sales are falling short of expectations I'm going to use the word expectations literally anticipated, dreamed of, et cetera and what to do about it. And this has become a bestseller on Amazon and my publisher just asked me the other day he says you use the book differently than a lot of our other authors and speakers do Can you tell me how many clients and how much revenue this has potentially generated from you since 2016? And I said you know what. I'm glad you asked 28 new clients and just short of $1.1 million in personal income.

Stuart: Right, and that's the key difference, isn't it that expectation gap or break from the traditional world where publishing is very the book is the product and we're doubling down on that as the gateway to things through to a more orchestrated way of using a book as a tool to start a conversation and engage with those clients. The conversation with the publisher there were they surprised because your approach was different from everyone else and this was kind of like new news to them? Or had they started seeing other people doing things and you were the best example? So they were reaching out to you as someone who'd been doing it for a while.

Craig: That's a great question, stuart. Many of the other authors that they work with are also professional speakers, so they were using their book to provide credibility in order to get them speaking engagements, along with their sizzle reel, and my goal was not to become a professional speaker, but rather have an impact on business owners' lives, and this was used really also as my business card and a credibility builder in order to convey to the reader that this is not my first rodeo. I've been doing this for a long time and the results that we achieved across a wide variety of industries in the b2b sector could apply to them, and it was designed to facilitate that opening conversation yeah, that orchestrating in that journey.

Stuart: They're using it with a particular case in mind, not just to kind of build it and they will come, type mentality. It opened so many doors because, as he said, the credibility, the authority, the value of the gift giving, the bringing all of the pieces together under one, within one jacket, under under one banner it has a outsized benefit compared with the same information spread out across a website or on various YouTube videos. Just the medium itself does something different. Do you find that the majority of people who get a copy of the book get a digital copy of the book or a physical copy of the book?

Craig: Well, or audio copy, which is the third, the audience that I think that is attracted to me. They like something tactile, something that they can hold in their hands. And what really surprised me, stuart, is when I would go in and meet with prospects or clients. There were post-it notes throughout it, pages were dog-eared, there were areas highlighted and it's like I never really anticipated this.

And hey, craig, you said on page 47 this Can you unwrap that a little bit for me? Yeah, and that was a foundation for developing a trusted relationship that was founded in depth and experience and having proof points, actual stories that I could communicate to my prospective clients. So again, they would say, okay, you've been there, done that. Now I'm still just wondering how you can help me. So I'm going to test you a little bit and see how you respond, and there's a way that I go about doing that to make sure that I cover the full spectrum of a business owner's needs and they understand there's a lot more than they imagined. Or there were a lot of things that they haven't even thought about yet that they need to consider to grow that top line predictably and sustainably.

Stuart: Right, that element that you were talking about there including some stories in there, and the fact that people turn the page over and in a conversation that, without the book, would have started with hi who are you, what you do? The discovery piece of the conversation, and both parties are kind of testing the ground as they go. But the fact that the book does so much of the preemptive work to get you on the same page, not only does it speed up that conversation because they know your way of thinking, but the fact that they're playing your words back to you and then when you elaborate and dive into it, they're not hearing it for the first time, you're just reinforcing something that they believe already because otherwise they wouldn't be on the call. Such an advantage over just cold outreach or even outreach in any other way. It's difficult to get that same volume of understanding or buy-in or belief from a client through email or video or anything that isn't a book. Now, not to say that those pieces that don't form part of the puzzle, for sure, but a book has an amplifier that really kind of accelerates all of the other things. Um, yeah, such a fantastic tool.

Let me ask you about the content. So you were saying that the first book there was kind of 12 steps or 12 elements that broadly business owners need to know about the pipeline or the funnel or sustainability. Those 12 things were they? It's the best way of asking were they kind of foundational to the work that you've done over the prior decades and they were really clear tentpole pieces that easily came together in a book? Or did you start off with an idea and then it was a job of work to pull together the actual pieces that went into the book?

Craig: That's a great question as well, stuart. It's really a compilation of my learning over three decades, listening to other very wise people and mentors, jumping into it both feet and breaking a leg and learning and always coming away with okay, what did I learn from that experience? Continue to do what I'm doing, do something a little bit different. So it's really a compilation of what I've seen, because at the time I went into business, we were still sort of in the era of the corporate man who goes to work and works for the same organization for 30, 40 years and I found myself changing companies every 18 to 24 months. So during those 30 years I was employed by probably 16, 17 different employers and each case they were facing the same challenge. They were on the same quest they wanted to grow that top line profitably.

And how do I do that predictably and sustainably? And I kind of fell into it's all about the strategic sales infrastructure. So it's growing, it's changing, it's understanding that the buying environment, our sales environment, is not static. Rather, it's constantly changing. Therefore, we need to periodically test our beliefs, our tools, our systems, either if there's something dramatic that changes in the business environment or you put something on your calendar, it says every three months, every six months, I'm going to sit down and review what I'm doing to ensure it's still working the way that I intended it to work and if it's not, it's a matter of stepping back and reassessing and saying what do I need to do to change?

Stuart: Right. It's such a great point, isn't it? Because there's so many indicators, particularly when you're busy and you've got to head down in the job. There's so many indicators that turn out to be lagging indicators rather than that upfront indication of what will still be successful this month and in a couple of months, in the future. It's very easy I don't want to use the word kind of sit back on your laurels, because I don't think that's the. I don't think that's most people do. It's just that all of a sudden, it's may the 14th as we record this, and yesterday it was new year. The year goes by very fast.

So if you don't structure something, put something in the diary, have a reason to review something, it's very easy to get caught out and, as you say, the ground's moved underneath and an algorithmic change has happened or a market change has happened, and you catch yourself on the back foot. That that philosophy of having those scheduled check-ins, those review periods, the framework which people review, the things that they're looking at, so if it's a marketing strategy or outreach strategy, or the email sequence or even their onboarding, that's very poor practice. I forgot to mute my phone before we started that practice of scheduling. The review is something that people can get their head around, but is there a particular framework or a way that you suggest approaching how that review is done? The idea of suggesting to people that they do like a ground up review of everything is a little bit cumbersome. But are there some techniques or pointers or tricks that people can have to make that process a little bit more effective or efficient there?

Craig: is. And, yeah, at the highest level you can do a SWOT analysis or a PESTEL analysis, but that really, or together, and that really takes some effort and it takes a group of people, including the owner, to have that discussion, a group of people including the owner to have that discussion. But for what I do, it's about lead conversion, execution sales execution four areas. Take a look at your strategic growth strategy right channels, right products, et cetera. Secondly, sales methodology your lead conversion process. Does that documented process still hold true? Third, and you mentioned that, lagging indicators what I refer to as sales success standards and, between us, we won't say it out loud, they're KPIs. However, results and you said it are lagging indicators and most companies need to focus on the leading indicators, which are the activities. So now we're getting into the 30. Well, what are our sales leadership or sales management practices? Are they still relevant? Are there ways that we can enhance them? And then, finally, hiring and performance management.

Most of the companies that I see today are struggling with what's worked in the past and we are in a different world of sales and marketing.

We are in a virtual selling and digital self-serve world and owners have to understand that if they're seeking leads. They need to have a very strong online presence in a number of areas and understanding that the old days of belly-to-belly selling is not what you need to be doing today and it's not the sellers that are driving it, it's the buyers. Particularly as they're getting younger, they're saying I don't want to meet with you, I can do all my research online. So the smart companies, they're still doing in-person meetings, but the many of those are moving to virtual meetings, like what we're doing today, and the telephone conversations are moving to virtual conversations. So we can go face to face, eye to eye, see the facial expressions and, as a guy that I used to work for, from Missouri, when he didn't believe something he'd say cripple that bird flat by me again. Or he'd say that dog don't hunt. And. But you know you could see it in his words, the expression on his face, and you lose so much if you don't see the expressions on someone's face.

Stuart: Yeah.

Craig: Stuart, you're not quite I'm not sure you quite fully comprehend what I'm saying. You know, come back to me, tell me what you're thinking right now, what you're feeling right now, so that we can develop a closer bond and a trusted relationship.

Stuart: Yeah, it's such a great point, isn't it? Even people's attention. I mean, it's easy to be on a phone call and walking around doing something else, but on a Zoom call you've definitely got that eye to eye attention and it makes so much more of a connection, much more of a connection. I like what you were saying about the multi-channel approach and the fact that there's such a expectation now of digital delivery of things or instant access to information, the fact that so much of the research is done beforehand, and I think it's a gap in some people's process where they assume that all of the knowledge is only what's delivered to people, it's only what they push out, rather than all of the either explicit or implicit knowledge that people gather before they even get to the call.

It's was talking to someone last week and we were saying that a book isn't at the same stage as a website. There isn't the same expectation that if you don't have a website. I mean, we're old enough to remember pre-website days and then website was a curiosity, and then it was a nice to have, and then it was a convenience and now it's a an indication that there's some kind of problem if a company isn't, doesn't have an online presence. A book isn't quite to that degree, but there's definitely a lot of telegraphing and bridging the gap between the old world of making a personal connection and things being printed on paper and typeset by monks, through to a digital delivery and a Zoom call and reinforcing some of the information that was said. So I think it's definitely an opportunity for people to revisit their strategy, particularly for legacy companies or legacy industries.

Going off on a little bit of a tangent here, but just as we're recording this, openai released their latest version of their model and the presentation they did had some videos showing the demonstrations and it was very interactive voice back and forth conversation with a with an ai agent. So the opportunities to kind of make some of that personal connection with people but then bring them to a real personal connection. It's people buy from people. They don't buy from web pages for a lot of the businesses that we're in a Bit of a tangent there, sorry.

Craig: There's a scary thing in today's buying environment. Picture an upside down snowman with three balls and, of course, the biggest one is on top. When a buyer makes a person's decision, they go through the process of cognitive thinking what do I need to buy? Divergent thinking Now who can I buy it from? In convergent thinking, this is who I'm going to buy it from. The cognitive thinking aspects is all being done online now. Or the buyers reaching out to people they know and trust and say, hey, I'm looking at buying this. Who do you know have you had experience with? And, quite frankly, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, with the younger professionals. They're doing all their research online. So it's absolutely critical that we are where they're doing their research and we're delivering an impactful differentiating message so that they say they need to be on the list under consideration. And maybe even before I decide what I'm going to buy, I may want to reach out to them and have a conversation with them to see if I'm missing anything, so that I get my decision criteria right.

Stuart: Right, yeah, that's a great point as well, and it does tie in with.

I mean, obviously the premise of the podcast is we're talking to people who have considered a book or have written a book at some point, so bridging it back to that subject all the time. It's not that a book is the right answer for everyone, but I think it gives an easy framework for people to hang their hat on or to overlay their business model. On the point there that some people, when writing, we hear people say, oh, I don't want to put all my secrets out there, I don't want to give too much information there, this idea that people have secrets and they've got a completely unique way of doing things. It's the absolute minority where that's correct. Now you might have a better way of implementing it, or the way that you deal with people, or the soft skills. All of that might combine so that it is better. But the knowledge, the information itself nowadays is less likely to be that thing. Two minutes of Googling will get you all the answers that you want, and then it's the discerning piece and everything else.

Craig: So that how true, how true. And because the shopping is being done online, you're better off giving for free, making easily accessible many of those differentiators. Otherwise you're never going to have the opportunity to have a conversation with that person, right? Because? They see you as just a commodity.

Stuart: Right and someone else. They've built that relationship with someone else who is given the information, whether it's on an email sequence that they've been receiving for years or a YouTube channel that they watch, or whether they're just searching for the first place and they resonate with a video that they see that helps them answer a question. So how then does that tie in with probably, I guess let's think about some numbers. So maybe 70 to 80% of the people who will receive this podcast by email are lists that we send out to small business owners or people responsible for their own book. So there's a very one-to-one relationship between the business, the overall outcome and the outreach that they do. And then there's another group of people who are kind of the sales executives or the advisors responsible for their own book, but they don't necessarily own the business.

And it's sometimes a case where that second group of people, although they're completely responsible for the book themselves, for closing the deals, there is a bit of well, I'm waiting for the corporate organization to do some stuff. I'm sat here struggling for leads because the parent organization aren't pulling their weight, aren't doing their things. Now, for me, I think that they've got the opportunity to take ownership of that and even if they're not the parent organization, they've still got the opportunity to create content, to write the book, to create the videos, to outreach to people talking about that industry. With the people that you work with, do you find that a kind of a cognitive gap between people wanting to improve their sales but almost kind of sat waiting for the company to do some more stuff, or is everyone that you're working with a little bit more dialed in and proactive, whether or not they own the company?

Craig: That again is a great question. I feel that they fall into two camps. That's my experience. Either they're waiting for the company or they don't know what they don't know. They don't know what they're missing and how they can I'm not going to say fix or improve, but enhance what they're currently doing. And in many cases where a company has a senior sales leader, they're really looking for a resource to help them make those changes so they can enhance their performance. And they need to understand that I'm a resource, that I can enhance their performance, and they need to understand that I'm a resource that I can work alongside them and actually do a lot of the work for them with their input, so they don't have to do it.

In most cases, sales leaders say I'm already too busy, I can't take on anything else. Well, we're going to bring somebody else in to help you. No, that's my job, I can do it. And the reality is it's kind of a catch-22. They want to do things differently or they're not quite sure what other options exist for them. So in many cases it makes sense to bring in an external resource to help them open their eyes. Open their eyes and I do that through a sales operations audit to help them determine where they're good and where they need to take a closer look at at specifics in order to enhance the performance of the sales department.

Stuart: Right and those audits on the sales operations does that. I guess it works equally well for both. But is that mainly for small individual operations or sales departments where they've got multiple sales team members as part of the bigger organization? Does it have to be it only works at the organization level or does it equally work for individuals?

Craig: Yeah, there's actually a third option there, stuart. If I look at the businesses that I work with, they're bringing me in as a hired guy and a hired consultant to work alongside the sales team to assess, design and deploy solutions, but they're responsible for execution. So my role is of an external sales consultant resource break, fix it's broken, let's fix it, let them execute. I'm also hired with larger companies as a retained sales operations person that works as part of the sales department to put in the strategic sales infrastructure and marketing infrastructure that's needed in order to enhance performance. And the reality is we have to get good at lead conversion or sales execution, before we should turn on the lead generation pump. Why? Because it's like taking a bucket with holes in it out to the water pump and trying to fill it with water, and imagine that water is leads. Unless you're doing a great job of converting your leads, a lot of your good leads are going to evaporate into the soil.

Stuart: Nothing is going to happen right, it's such a great point and I think maybe we talked about this on the when we were catching up prior to the podcast we talked about the pulling the wrong lever is pretty ineffective and the difficulty is where there's kind of for good or bad siloed thinking around. Okay, well, I've got control over this element and I can send more leads into the funnel, but I don't necessarily see the conversion bit down the road. I was I can't remember whether we talked about it or I was telling someone else there was the NHS in the UK, the hospital medical service. There was a big push like it was headline news that waiting times accident and emergency was terrible and people were sat there for 10 hours. So there was a big push to reduce waiting times in A&E rooms. Well, that was fine and the numbers came down. It was headlines about how good it was.

But then six months later there was a report about how many people were on trolleys gurneys behind the door of A&E. So they were being processed and assessed at that first checkpoint. That was being measured. But then they were just being put on trolleys in the back in the corridors because there wasn't enough room to be actually seen. So this idea of pulling the wrong lever. Yeah, it's fine to get people assessed, triaged, at that first point, but if you're just moving the problem further down and I like your analogy of the leaky bucket it's a really wasteful to think that this is the answer to move, when actually he is pushing people into a system that doesn't that they can't convert.

Craig: Yeah, so, regardless of whether it's sales or medical services, it's all systemic is the issue, and the challenge is really getting to the root cause of doing that analysis and find out in what ways that we can change the moving parts in a way that we're more efficient and more effective.

Stuart: Right, yeah, yeah For the greater good. Looking at it holistically, at the outcomes, not just the activities, which is difficult, whether you're working by yourself and you've got only a certain amount of time in the day. At it holistically, at the the outcomes, not just the activities, which is difficult. I mean whether you're working by yourself and you've got kind of only a certain amount of time in the day, so your focus gets narrowed on one particular thing, or you're part of a big organization and this is your role and this is someone else's role. It can be. Even with the best intentions. It can be difficult to think about that higher level or higher outcome thinking without someone else being kind of in the mix to prompt you with the right questions or guide you in the right way exactly the book and the people that you help and the kind of first steps that they take.

Again, the audience listening a bit of a mix of business owners and people responsible for their own book, but everyone's responsible for their own book in the sense of their own book, of business, not book. But everyone who's kind of raised their hand and is interested has been brought to the idea of writing a book as a lead generation tool. So they're all ultimately interested in more business, more sales. So the book's got 12 points in there. We were talking about some of the strategic reviews and some of the making sure that we pull the right levers. When you're talking with people maybe from stage or first meeting or that first introduction point you have to them what's the low hanging fruit or the first steps that people can take, as they're kind of thinking about I need to do something better in this world.

Craig: The first step is really a conversation or a reflection or a conversation with a group of trusted advisors to identify where we want to be a year from now, what are our goals a year from now, up to three years from now, and what are the challenges we're going to face in getting there. So I typically will talk to a business owner or a trusted advisor, even someone that is interested in publishing a book, and say what's your desired outcomes for that book, what are your top three initiatives, goals that you want to achieve, what are your challenges in getting there? The key, in my mind, is their ability to articulate where they're going, where they want to get to and the challenges they're going to face, and then from there you can get into a more extended conversation about needs, wants, challenges and, based on the business you're in and what your book is about, I highly recommend what I do is a sales operations audit. It could be an audit for anything, but it's designed to engage the prospective client and have them think about what they do, and I can tell you of the 32 questions that I asked about, 10% are getting answered complete.

90% is incomplete, and for two reasons. Number one I've never thought about that. No one has ever said that to me. We need to think about that or we've been thinking about it, we just haven't done anything yet, right yeah? So the reality the companies that I work with the authors, I work with, the financial advisors I work with they're already successful in their own right, so they're not broken, they don't need to be fixed, but rather there is a lot of opportunity for personal and professional growth there If you look at things globally and you look at it from a systematic perspective globally and you look at it from a systematic perspective.

Stuart: Right, it's such a great point, isn't it? Particularly, it's different for people starting off the career and they're just starting because they don't have this kind of group of assets mental assets or actual assets to do something with. But anyone who's been in business for more than a year, you've experienced at least 80% of all of the experiences that you're going to have for the rest of your life. You're just going to see them in different ways. You kind of know what the answers are, the objections and the questions that come up. All of that within a year has been at least touched upon once.

So there's some, some what's what I'm blanking on?

Not professionalism, but some execution techniques or speciality around how you can answer it and how comfortable you are with answering it and anticipating what comes next. Kind of, with the familiarity and experience, you kind of improve your game a little bit. But as far as the breadth goes and the opportunity to make those first conversations, those first outreaches, if you've been doing this for a year, it's not unknown, knowns, it's known, unknowns or whatever the analogy is. So having that opportunity to talk to someone or work with someone, or certainly will make sure that people can get a know where they can go to get a copy of the book as we wrap up in a minute. But it's not a knowledge gap, it's a execution gap. It's not an understanding gap, it a implementation gap. So I think that when people think about it in that way, it makes it a lot less daunting for people, because having that confidence that you know the stuff this is just about making it as efficient as possible. I think that makes it easy, an easier step for people to take.

Craig: They then just need to take the step I agree wholeheartedly, and I look at clients who have the attitude I'm a lifetime learner. I don't know everything and I need to surround myself with other smart people that I trust. I need to review what's going on in my business on a regular basis and I need to understand that systems should run my business and not individual people right because, it's all about putting systems in your business and hiring people who can execute and enhance the systems that are currently in place.

Right, that's what creates a winning team yeah, yeah.

Stuart: It not only gives a an element of redundancy in case something happens that one individual you're not in a kind of like this key man situation where it all falls down, but also gives those individuals the opportunity to amplify what they do, because they might be the best person in the world at what their particular job, but they have to interact with other people. None of these roles are isolated completely. So at least then, having that system and framework in place, even if their piece is down and they're not going anywhere, how that interfaces with the other organizations, how they get the information in and then where it gets passed to, systematizing that it just streamlines the whole process absolutely, and if you're looking at career progression or you get concerned about somebody retiring, if you have the systems in place, then it's much easier for you to backfill that position, assuming that you're bringing somebody in with the right experience, skills and personality.

Yeah, just makes it so much more the opportunity to think about it while you're not having the pressure of a critical situation you need to deal with. Being able to think about that structure beforehand it makes it. What's the triangle? You can have it cheap, fast or good, and you've got to pick two of the three. You can't have all three, so at least by Cheap fast or good two of the three you can't have all three, so at least by four.

Craig: Cheap press are good. Yeah, you can pick.

Stuart: It's all a balancing act, right? Yeah, exactly so, at least having looked at the good element, the systematization element of it beforehand. At a moment where you need something fast, you're not having to sacrifice or let too many balls drop it at that critical moment. Time always goes fast on these podcasts it's it's like we enter a different time warp. It'd be really good to circle back a bit further down the track six, eight months out and then kind of allow people to consume some of the things that we've been talking about and then touch base again a little bit later in the summer and kind of give like the 202 level for people. But I want to make sure that they've. Anyone listening now has got the opportunity to learn more about what you do. Grab a copy of the book, for sure, and then kind of start working through these 12 elements to kind of refine some of their thinking around these things. So where's a good place for people to go, as they listen, to learn more about you? Get a copy of the book, see what the organization's about.

Craig: I believe there are two really viable options. Number one if what you heard today resonates with you, you can go to Amazon and pick up the book Smooth Selling Forever. It's available in Kindle as well as printed copy, either soft cover or hard cover. Or if you say sounds interesting, but I'd like to learn a little bit more, feel free to reach out to me directly. I'd be happy to have a conversation with you. My direct number is 630-649-49 4. You can email me at Craig C R a I G at smooth selling, not sailing selling forevercom(craig@smoothsellingforever.com) and be happy to have a conversation with you.

Stuart: That's perfect and we'll put a link directly through to those, both the Amazon listing and the email address and phone number. We'll put those in the show notes. So, whether people are listening on a podcast player or on the website, we'll have links directly through Craig. Like I say, time goes so fast on these calls. There's so much information to share with people. I think some of the takeaways that, or some of the elements that we've talked about today, even if people take that one takeaway as the seed and then can you just spend we're in the middle of may now. I think we're a couple of weeks ahead on on recording, so this will be the beginning of june probably when we go live. So that's heading into the perfect time.

The summer is typically a time where there's a little bit of a downside. We're way past tax season for all the financial guys and summer's breaking up and vacation time. So I think this opportunity to assess the situation, start to think about a review of the operations that you've got in the processes, grab a copy of the book and go through the steps and then reach out to you directly with questions. This, coincidentally, this podcast, I think, is landing perfectly for all people as far as timing goes. So, yeah, just thanks again for being so open and sharing what you do, and it'd be great to circle back in a few months and give people the next installment be enjoyable.

Craig: I hope that your listening audience has some actual items that they can begin working on immediately, and I'd be honored if you were to ask me to come back again and speak on something more in depth or a specific topic.

Stuart: Fantastic. Well, as people are listening and checking out the show notes. If you've got any questions for Craig, we can certainly address those in the next one, but the quickest route is absolutely reach out directly, so do that. But yeah, craig, we can certainly address those in the next one, but the quickest route is absolutely reach out directly, so so do that. But yeah, we can circle back and see what, see what has come from the audience and answer some questions. Okay, everyone, thanks for listening. Again, check out the show notes in the podcast players and on the website for Craig's contact details directly. Really recommend getting a copy of the book and, as I say, the summer is the perfect time to review the operations and really get those things dialed in. So thanks for listening and we will catch you all in the next one. Cheers.