Sean Carson
Appearances
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And that's really where our services come into play, which is very unique with respect to co-execution.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And then others we're working with that are already affiliated with our partners and may look to really ramp growth. And the way we can do that takes on multiple different forms, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, it's a really good question. I wish I had the answer or silver bullet, because if I did, we'd probably be oversubscribed on this session. But I think there's a couple of things at play. One, I think that you got to meet your customers where they're at. And with technology today, I mean, look at how we're having this conversation, it's via Zoom and digital, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
So 10 years ago, I'd probably be sitting in a studio or you'd be in my office and we'd be having the discussion live. That's much different. What's important is to take the same approach and provide the same type of experience. and elicit the same type of emotional response, be it a partner, a customer, a colleague, whatever that looks like, no matter how you're engaging or interacting with them.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And many times, you know, when we're working with clients and partners, you know, we talk a lot about the selling environment and how dynamic it is today and how much it's changing.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
how much it will continue to change i think the most important thing to do is anchor in on the experience when you have a meeting with a potential customer when you leave when they leave that meeting are they leaving better informed um feeling good about their business and and what they discussed and with clear and concise next steps on on what it is that they should be focused on you should also if you're a sales professional or a sales leader or a ceo
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
or private equity partner that owns a business should walk away feeling the same exact thing. It shouldn't matter whether you're texting somebody or meeting them through Zoom, having a coffee with them, talking to them at a trade show, or meeting person to person and face to face.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
It may be helping to augment some sales talent, maybe sourcing sales talent, helping on demand generation strategies and tactical execution work streams, working with the existing sales professionals and marketing team members to help better enable them and help them perform at a higher level and really everything in between. And that's why I use that term intentionally as growth services.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
You really want to just ensure that those activities are driving those key outcomes based on the type of time that you have with those individuals. And I think if you focus on that, if somebody wants to meet via Zoom, great, meet via Zoom. Show up, be professional, ask the right types of questions, be what I would call professional.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
interested uh and curious before you're being critical and then you know give them the opportunity to learn and and get that sense from you as well so that you have a commonality that helps you continue to collaborate and look to accomplish the the same objective right and i think that's a really important component of how people should focus their commercial efforts today
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
the opportunity to make a material impact for people. Everything that I do and that my company does really boils down to that. Like if we make promises and execute and deliver against them, you know, it's going to have a positive impact on the people that we're working with, which in turn is going to have a positive impact on us. And, you know, we don't lose sight of that focus.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And that's something that, you know, we care deeply about. And that's what gets me up every single day.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Thanks, Scott.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
There's a lot of really reputable and very smart sales and marketing and commercial resources that are out in the market, we like to think we're a bit unique in that we not only help it in the advisement, but then we also help with co-execution to really drive those outcomes as efficiently as possible.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, it's a good question, Scott. And it's a, you know, our firm really focuses on the latter. We tend to spend a lot of time with first or second institutional round capital financing relationships. And you hit the nail on the head. It's generally a founder or a small team that have been responsible for carrying the workload. And as a function of this
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
capital infusion, how do they take what those individuals and those teams have done so well and make it repeatable and scalable? And that's ultimately where we tend to spend a lot of time. So it's not uncommon for us to get involved with a founder-led business and to work with them on replicating the types of things that they do just
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
innately because they own the business and they're deeply involved in it and they exude confidence with their customer base. When you start to scale commercial aspects of a business, you need to help translate that confidence and also that intellectual information throughout the rest of the team members.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And so that's an opportunity where we kind of come in and work alongside everybody to ensure that we extract the right information, help put it in the right format, and then help support those activities to drive the best possible outcomes for that organization.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of change happening at a very rapid pace. And I think the one thing that we tend to see that's explicitly evident is that people are really, really taking their time to understand what it is that they do well, and what their customers look like that are aligned with those outcomes. And so we spend time with organizations to really dial that in.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. So Sales Empowerment Group is a growth services firm. We are private equity held by an investment partner called RFE. And one of the things that we do here is to work with other private equity-backed businesses on their value creation and execution projects.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Knowing your customer is really, really important. And the barriers of entry are really low. With the right technical aptitude and a right value proposition and solution in the market, you don't really need the massive amounts of overhead that you previously did even 10 years ago to solve important problems.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
If that's a manufacturer of a new product that's designed to help risk mitigation in travel or a software application that's designed to help transfer data from one platform to the next and all things in between, there's a really, really high priority to ensure that you're delivering value to your customers and that you're able to communicate that and find them effectively.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And so that I would say from a commercial standpoint is top of mind. Every single business that we work with, you know, table stakes is really understanding like who is your ICP and what is it that they obtain from working with you? And how are you helping them to solve critical problems in their business?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And then extrapolating that out back into things that are going to be important to growing the top of the line.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, that's right. I think the biggest difference between founder-led businesses and private capital businesses is the time horizon for growth. We know the requirement for private equity is they want to buy a business, help infuse capital into it, and give it more resources so they can continue to do the great work that it's done. But there is a limit to the timeline.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And so when you think about hold periods, even though they're extended now, just privately held businesses that are just run by founder owner operators typically don't have that same level of acceleration required to hit these pretty significant growth metrics. And so that puts a lot of pressure on those teams, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And if they haven't been oriented to that type of environment, they could tend to try to do everything all at once. And that can be certainly problematic. So when you have a right type of framework and the right type of approach, you can take the risk out of that journey and help to provide a better path for you, your employees, and most importantly, your customers, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Because if you start trying to grow too quickly without taking into account customer resources to manage your clients appropriately, you can create your own internal problems. And so How do that balance is going to be really, really important as you start to execute against the plan?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Once a private equity sponsor buys a business, they have grand plans for that organization, implement capital to help fund growth. And so we typically work alongside operating executive teams and deal team members to support management in that journey. And we have a unique approach to that, which hopefully we'll spend a little bit more time today talking about.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, sure. Happy to. So on the AI front, we see it as a catalyst. I think there's a lot of noise out there right now with emerging technologies and the capabilities that come along with them. The first thing that is natural from a human response is a little bit of fear, a little bit of uncertainty. What does this mean for my job? How is this going to upset how we're operating the business today?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
We have the benefit of working with hundreds of companies across multiple industries. So SEG or Sales Empowerment Group, We primarily work with industries in the B2B sectors across all verticals. We're not really oriented for consumer-based businesses.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And as a result of that, we get a lot of visualization in terms of how customers that we're engaged with are already using AI, what the gaps potentially are in terms of where we can pull forward those capabilities for those businesses. And one of our core values is we're going to be our best customer.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
When we make recommendations to our clients and our partners, they're likely deep-rooted into strategies and tactical execution of things that we're doing every single day ourselves. That also gives us an advantage in the market in that we operate very, very lean for the size and the scale of our business, but we also have proficiency across all of our internal teams.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And so an example may be, you know, our, you know, demand generation and lead sourcing efforts, they're leveraging the same platforms and technologies that we've advised clients on implementing into their business. And so we can be not only a good resource, but we've also had the opportunity to understand what works well and what doesn't.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And that, I think, is a really important attribute because the way that technology is being leveraged, particularly AI today, is changing so quickly. And so what works for one business may not necessarily be viable for another. And without that technical aptitude or experience, you could waste time, energy, effort, and money all in the same.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And so that's an opportunity that, you know, we feel very confident when we give a recommendation or give guidance that it's sound and that it's battle tested. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of changes on the AI spectrum. And I would say that it should be a catalyst for growth. Even myself, I leverage AI tools across, you know, multiple work streams every single day.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And that has given me an advantage there. versus myself 10 years ago, where everything was much more manual, where I was relying on other people, resources or departments to help provide me the information that I needed to be effective. Today, that's just not the case.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, it definitely is. And, you know, I like to be a consumer of technologies. I think the more you can understand anything, the better informed you can be and the better the opportunity is for you to help it be useful for you and what you're doing both in your professional and personal life. And so I would encourage people to lean in and start to leverage those things.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
You have to be, it's a balancing act, right? You don't want to go all in and just take everything that chat GPT or Bard or Grok throws out at you. You know, you have to understand that it's not perfect and it requires validation, but if you can get 80% there in a couple of minutes, use that balance of time to then validate and then go put it to work for you.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, it's a great question. We always bounce back to the budget. So in those two different industries, you have certain coverage models that are going to inform overall net sales expense. And that should really be the foundation of your commercial plan to help build and fund your execution for growth. So if you're running a high transaction, high volume business,
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
type of commercial organization, you may not need all the insights and information and data points that say a professional services firm that's running quarter million to half million dollar engagements. That being said, you should still take your time to prove out the effectiveness of your solution in either case.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
And so, you know, we're advising clients, we always want to, you know, balance back to the budget and back to the thesis. So as you look at the range in those two analysis, that's going to really provide you with what resources can you fund? And then with those resources, what are the activities that they should be focused on?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Yeah, for sure. We tend to get involved with companies at all different stages of the investment lifecycle. So some of our partners we work very closely with prior to them closing a transaction to help get a better sense of the commercial opportunity, what's working well and what the potential areas of improvements are.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Happy to. Generally, we get involved and we like to get very intimate with the organizations or end clients, portfolio companies that we're working with. So more often than not, a partner and us will have a dialogue, a private equity sponsor about the business. and what the plan is. And then they make an introduction for us. We get to meet the management team.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
We like to learn a little bit about their vision and what it is that they do and talk to them about our services. But our engagements start with assessments. And we like to get intimate and understand the organization, the people, the process, and the tools that they're leveraging to drive growth from the inside out. And those can run from two to six weeks.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
On average, I'd say the majority of our engagements are about four weeks long. And we provide a very frictionless environment, both from a time investment and capital investment inside of that exercise. From there, we'll come back with the organization on what we've learned. And is there alignment on the things that they're doing on a daily basis?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
relative to what their overall goals and objectives are and making it sound simple but you'd be surprised that many organizations are misaligned where the activities are not really tying out to the outcomes that they're expecting and and there could be an issue or there could be even a larger opportunity that they're missing as a result of that and so as we round out those assessments and complete that work you know we bring everybody back together our partners in the private equity space the management teams
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
and key personnel and review what we've learned. And there's generally about three to five questions that the board and the CEO or CRO and our partners want to have answered. So we'll answer them and then we'll come up with if there are opportunities that we see that could accelerate what their objectives are or accomplishing their objectives, then we talk about those as well.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, I think the most important thing is to talk to your customers and talk to your frontline leaders and to the people that are out there in the market every single day. Be curious before you're critical. That's an important mantra that we have. Truly understand where you're driving value. And then think about ways that you can continue to compound that value in the market. And so, you know...
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
There's definitely an importance on leveraging emerging technology and capabilities, AI, in your strategy and execution. Don't try and do everything all at once. My boss has a good saying. It's like, don't run with scissors because that can be problematic and very distracting. Try to focus on what you're doing really, really well and continue to drive towards that.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
with the opportunity of expansion.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
In terms of specific to go to market, ourselves, the companies we're advising and our partners, we're getting really, really focused in delivering value first and ensuring that even in commoditized markets, you have a plan of driving thought capital to your customer base and your potential customer base, ensuring that people look at you as a thought leader in the space.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
and can help provide insight and perspective to improve their business. That's always something that I think people can tend to lose sight of, but it's an important one to focus on.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, it's critically important. And this culminated around the same time that we started to see significant run-ups in interest rates. And so as you imagine, those of you who are involved with or oriented to the private capital spaces, that has a direct impact on how businesses can operate and the freedom to fund strategic and growth initiatives.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mentioned earlier, we take an inside out view. So we typically will spend several weeks with an organization once we're engaged. And the data analysis is a critical component of that. Many of these businesses, as you mentioned, they're mid-market size businesses. They don't have tremendous amount of internal resources.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
So we try to support them in pulling together information and data that can be usable and help understand why where there's health in the business on the commercial organization and where potentially there could be, you know, some areas of opportunity. And so, you know, as we think about that exercise, that's critically important. Data analysis is first and foremost.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
From there, we can draw some assumptions about, And then we provide a lot of times, you know, what we call like a high, low or a probability index into those assumptions. And we're not talking about a lot. You know, it's typically two or three things that are executable within several weeks of And then some which tend to move forward into months. But our total engagements last 12 months.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And that involves all things that we're doing on the execution side, not just consulting. But one of our core components is we own the execution in conjunction with our clients as a way to mitigate risk to them.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, depending on where... they're resource constrained. In many cases, we can take an advisory role. We can be the interim CRO. We can support the CRO or sales leadership team with augmented sales talent resources. But we're working very, very tightly correlated with that team and owning the outcomes.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And what I mean by that is, you know, we've got that revenue plan that we've helped to solidify with them. And then we're going to resource and staff both restructuring internal resources to align to that, or supporting them with some augmented personnel to help drive towards those outcomes.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And ultimately, it's SEG's responsibility to ensure that those targets are hit, or we need to continue to refine as a function of the plan that we've outlaid for business.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, and it's a great point to surface up, Scott. So, yeah, demand generation, outbound, lead gen. Again, we're going to fill the holes or increase the areas of where opportunity may exist. Anything commercial falls into that category. We have a fully blown marketing and revenue operations team that supports our engagements.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
So we work with a business that was an industrial manufacturer, domestically based. 90% of their organization was inbound via their e-commerce channel. And they knew at the time that they were...
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
receiving orders from massive size businesses, Walmarts, you know, targets, et cetera, but they had no actual direct outbound or sales function to meet those customers where they were at and to proactively engage with them. And so part of that
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
So there's an old saying like revenue solves a lot of problems. When you think about maximizing enterprise value, you can do that two ways. You can increase organic top line, or you can go buy and bolt on and build bigger businesses.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
process in working with us was to help solidify an appropriate, you know, demand generation infrastructure to support them beyond just paid search and their e-commerce channel, and then build a team underneath that to develop an ICP and to develop talk tracks and, you know, sales process and sales management and truly build that outbound infrastructure from the ground up.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And then once it was fully productive, that client had the opportunity to lift and shift those resources and infrastructure into their business. And so that was a widely successful engagement for us and a good example of where we did kind of everything under one umbrella.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, sure. As it relates to demand generation, I think it's really important to provide focus on two types of what we call journeys that exist for potential customers. Some customers are very early in their process and it's not warranted to engage with them. We call that early buyer journey work stream.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And many organizations look to execute both, but there's definitely a priority on the organic top line because it's generally speaking when done correctly, the most capital efficient approach to increasing enterprise value for an organization. Less risk. Integrations always carry risk. There's certainly other components that are challenging with respect to M&A.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And then there's later buyer journeys who are actually customers that are actually ready to engage. And so really understanding the difference is critically important. I think a lot of organizations fall into the trap of just putting everybody into one bucket.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And it's important to, you know, create more consistency in your measurement on, on separating those out buyer intent is really, really important. And so a lot of what we're able to do is to establish strategies that help provide visibility into where and how potential customers are engaging with either your existing customer base, your partners, your assets, your information, or the, the,
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
materials that you're putting out there to provide exposure for your business. And so, you know, those are, I think, two critical things when we think about demand gen that are really important. The old methods of, you know, throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks are still being done every single day. There's a lot of companies that are doing that.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
I think the challenge is that you get some success, but it's unpredictable, right? So when we think about a true direct sales and commercial organization, what everybody's really after is predictability. Yes, we're going to grow revenue, but we want to be able to do it in a way that we can understand and predict it going forward.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, I love that question because it comes up often, right? And particularly in verticals that tend to be a little bit more commoditized. The reality is there's a lot of valuable data and information inside every single business. There is only one business that exists that has the customers that it has. And so that is unique and that is differentiated. And
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
You had asked a question earlier in our discussion about what's the advice that you have to a CEO or growth officers. And I said, talk to your customers, talk to your sales teams. Those engagements and experiences that your organizations have that are part of your client base are unique to them. And they're also unique to you.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
So while the service of the product may look and feel similar and maybe the messaging does, change it and talk more about the impact that you have for your customers and less about what it is that you do. And oftentimes, many companies, and we see this with a lot of different websites, it's all about them.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And a website isn't a mousetrap, but it is a place that potential buyers and clients will go to get more comfortable and more exposure to who you are. If it's all about you, you're missing a tremendous opportunity. It really should be all about the impact that you're having for them because that's emotional. And what we know is people make buying decisions based on emotion.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And so what we tend to do is help our organizations, clients, and partners really, really get smart and focused on sufficient ways to execute that top line growth strategies. And that takes a ton of different shapes, which I know we're going to talk a little bit more here in a few moments.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
They'll substantiate it financially, but the key driver there is the emotion that is elicited and the outcome that's going to be derived from that decision.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's timely. You know, it's... the the way that ai is operating today is so magnificent um the use cases are abundant and the applications are never ending and so you know today i run a team of six ai agents You know, our resources across our business, you know, leverage AI and several different categories and capacities.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And we help teach our clients on different ways to leverage and use that. We don't think about LLMs and applications like chat GPT and agents that exist in verticals or specialized functions of, you know, areas of business as displacement technologies. We see them more as accelerants. efficiencies for commercial organizations.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
The work that used to take a structured team a couple of weeks to do can be done in 30 minutes. Companies that are embracing this and leaning in and testing and learning, it doesn't have to be a large investment. It really is an investment of time and the commitment to trial and error and finding what works for you.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
There's a ton of use cases around AI applications today that work for business A that are not going to be effective for business B. And there's a lot of inputs that are going to really center around that. If you have a high transaction, high volume organization with low ACVs, there's a framework and a structure of how you should think about AI to support your commercial organization.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
If you're on the other end of that spectrum and you have more of an enterprise or low volume type of commercial organization with very high ACVs, that framework looks completely different. And so I think it's really important to understand, again, going back to fundamentals, what is the business strategy? Do you have that foundation in place?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Once you're equipped with data and information, you can start to then layer in efficiency capabilities to really drive forward the organization.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, it's a great question. The old way of pure volume play, we see that as a diluting effort when we think about where organizations can truly accelerate growth. with AI is to supplement, again, research, analysis, enablement, training, reinforcement. There's just a tremendous amount of use case that exists. And so I think it's critical to understand that
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
AI and the AI technologies that are supporting these types of alignments are really, really important. You have to trust and verify. You can't just take whatever chat GPT or Bard or whatever platform you're using spits out. You need to ensure that you refine it and that you've got a good process around how you're leveraging that for your business. Everybody's looking for an easy button.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
It is additional work and it should be directly aligned with how your people in your organization are approaching your customers and potential customers, how your customers are engaging and everything in between.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we're ways away from needs being input and solutions being executed without human involvement. I would argue that we'll likely never get there, maybe at some point, but when it comes to the types of decisions that impact both one individual, but then also in an organization as a whole, that human engagement and that human element is going to be really important.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
I think the opportunity today for businesses is to understand when is the right moment to engage with contact. You know, all those statistics I think are out there and they're continuously updated. So, you know, don't hold my feet to the fire here, but something of like north of 80% of purchase decisions are made in advance of a conversation, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And if you just take inventory on how the last major purchase decision you made and back it from the time that you made that decision until you started the process, you're probably going to confirm that that's how you went about your journey.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And so I think it's important as an organization is to meet your customers where there are, provide the type of information and insight that is going to be helpful and beneficial to a potential customer or client. We're an existing customer or client. Do it with confidence.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, I appreciate that. So my journey began over 12 years ago. I was working with a large enterprise business and we had successfully built a strategic sales channel outside of the private equity ecosystem that gained a ton of momentum. And executives at that organization had tasked a few of us across the business to come up with a thesis and where we could replicate that success.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Do it with defensible information so that when they're ready to have a conversation, you're now going to substantiate what they already know and provide that added layer of confidence to help them make a sound decision and provide the type of confidence that you're going to deliver on what they're looking for in a solution.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, it's actually a unique question, Scott. I think what we've found is that even in mid and smaller businesses, organizations have taken more of a share the risk in decision-making versus some of the probably latter portion of how that structure worked a few years back.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And what I mean by that is enterprise decisions, there's usually multi-threading, there's multiple committees, you've got to address the needs of both the ultimate decision-making group, as well as the users of product and services, and then generally smaller mid-sized businesses might have been a little bit more nimble.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
We're actually seeing that like sales cycles are elongated across the spectrum, both small, medium-sized business, as well as enterprise. And we think that's an outcome of the shift in talent from large enterprises coming more and more into the mid market, particularly in private equity, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
So again, going back to the customers that we support, many of them are private equity backed businesses. A lot of those leaders that have stepped into that organization to help drive growth have bigger business experience. And so they're comfortable with that type of structure and that orientation. And so
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
You know, the outcome of that is more decision making by committee, more of enterprise type buying examples and environments. And so it's really important to understand buying criteria for a customer. hey, as fundamental as training your sales team on who are the people that are going to be involved, what are the critical milestones that we need to address to ensure, what is your timeframe?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
That qualification is really, really important so that you can create a mutual action plan and help your customers actually be more efficient buyers than what potentially they may be doing without you. Yeah.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And we started actually in the VC community. And what we learned early on is that, you know, venture capital is sufficient. You know, we're invested and involved with many, many businesses. but there was lacking some control elements with respect to where and how we could accelerate decision-making. And so we landed on private equity.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
No, I think it's a fair question. We've got some perspective on that. Brand equity is always going to be important, particularly when the higher the decision risk, the higher the importance and substantiation of who you're partnering with to solve a problem. What we're seeing, though, is that many organizations and executives and business leaders are understanding that
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
There is also a lot of knowledge and capability in small and mid-size boutique, very, very specified professionals and resources that can drive a ton of value. And so that is a balance that needs to be weighed by the customer or by the business who's thinking about whatever initiative they want to execute. And there's certainly going to be pros and cons.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
typically bigger, more well-known brands are going to be a premium. That calculation needs to tie out in terms of value. And so when you think about large organizations who tend to command a premium in the market, if that value equation is sufficient, then ultimately you're in a good position. If what you're receiving as a result of
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
high brand equity, larger businesses is not as valuable as potentially a more specialized resource, then you're obviously going to need to think about that decision a little bit more carefully.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, absolutely. The best way to think about where and how SEG can be helpful to an organization is we work fairly democratically across all B2B sectors. We are not today, as it relates to industry or sectors, closely tied to consumer-based organizations. And I think we can offer perspective and insight, but the B2B motion from a commercial perspective is very different than the B2C one.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
We know what we're good at and we're sticking to that.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
I'm excited to continue on the journey that we're on and to help make a positive impact for our clients, our partners, the people that we work with inside the business. If we're successful at that, we're going to be successful in our growth strategy. And ultimately, it's been a fun ride up until this point, and I'm really looking forward to continue to grow the business moving forward.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And I was fortunate to participate in a long tenure in building that practice out. And as a function of that, came across our sponsors. So a sales empowerment group is actually owned by a private equity firm called RFE Investment Partners. And
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Well, you can see more about what we do and who we are on our website. And I'm pretty active, widely out there on LinkedIn. So I'd love to connect with all of you. Shoot me a note and we can have a conversation.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
It's definitely changed. And we've seen more and more of our clients want resources near or close to office locations so that they can be visible. What we provide advisement around is depending on the role type and the seniority. I think it has a direct correlation.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Those that are further along in their professional career, if they've been successful and can substantiate that success, they're going to likely feel like they've earned the right to have that as an option. Whereas when we're working with a lot of entry-level or lower mid-level professionals and resources, we encourage clients and them to create an environment where they can easily collaborate and
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
got very close to the thesis that we had built here and understood that in the delivery that we're putting forth, it's pretty low risk, high reward outcomes relative to some other areas. And so that's really a little bit about me and about the business. SEG or Sales Empowerment Group was a founder-led organization that had
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
In person and virtually, I think, you know, ultimately it's going to come down to the business objective and what the growth requirement is. There's a lot of great talent that's out there in the market and remote work is an opportunity to tap into talent pools that maybe prior to that shift were not as feasible.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
So I think it's careful evaluation and looking at the business and the demand and making informed decisions about it.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, fire away.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, this is a great question. Building personas and being up to speed on how a certain role type is being impacted by AI is just as important as leveraging AI to help support that construct. And so a good example of that is, in the commercial organization, you're seeing what used to be completely separate functions of sales and marketing now becoming more and more blended, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And the necessity for efficiency is to have those functions operating very, very correlated and tightly intertwined for a multitude of reasons. So as you look at building out ICPs and leveraging AI to do that, the inputs are more important than the outputs. And so creating the right type of data and information on who the target profile is, is going to be really, really important.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And it's a great use case for AI applications. You know, if you pull 25 people and type a roll down from LinkedIn and load that into an AI application to spit out commonalities or consistent traits and attributes across that subset of population, you can quickly get to a point of understanding what the difference is and the items that are consistent for that type of persona is going to be.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And that should then move further into building out your ICP in a substantiated way.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Thanks, Scott. Thank you, everybody. Have a great day.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
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Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
organically developed, concentrated clients within a handful of private equity partners. And so when I stepped into the business, my mandate was to expand and grow that. And we're very fortunate that I think our services deliver on what we say they're going to do, but most importantly, that
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
tailwind of rising rates really shifted a lot of the focus back into executing organic revenue growth strategies to create value across portfolio investments. And so that's ultimately how we got to where we're at here today and the journey that we're continuing to execute against.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, thanks so much, Scott, and thank you all for joining us today. We're excited to chat a little bit more. As Scott mentioned, I'm an executive within the organization. We are a growth services firm, and we use that terminology intentionally. Everything we do is designed to help accelerate organic revenue and top-line growth for businesses.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, that's a great question. And we could probably spend the entire session talking specifically about that. But I'll surface up a few points. I think, one, there is a tough environment for many businesses because of some of the dislocation in the past few years.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Organizations either underperformed and are now chasing to make up that lack of performance given coming out of the pandemic era, or they significantly overperformed and and now have really difficult grow over targets when the overall commercial environment has changed quite a bit as a function of some of those larger shifts in the market, interest rates rising, talent disjointment.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
So we're seeing a lot of organizations looking for strategies and ways to actually execute more efficient growth And our approach to supporting that is to help people understand
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Embrace new and emerging strategies and tactics, AI being one of them, looking at how they're serving their customers, both the existing client base and new customer acquisitions, but also not losing sight of fundamentals.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And more often than not, when we get involved with a mid-sized business who may just received institutional capital or they're looking to recapitalize or move from one sponsor to the next, You know, we see some areas of deficiency on fundamentals. And so it's really important to think about it just like you would in your thesis or building a house. You got to have that foundation in place.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And so there's always going to be emerging trends and technologies and they're accelerating so quickly. We use them in everything that we do today and help support our clients execute with those capabilities. But they're only as good as the foundation that they're built on. And so I think that's an important thing to pay attention to.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, it's a great question. It's first and foremost, is your commercial strategy, which is the mix of sales and marketing, is that directly correlated with the business strategy, right? And I think all of our evaluations start there. And we tend to take an inside out view of an organization. So we like to get very intimate with the management team, get a real good orientation of the business.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
It's typically over a 30 or 45 day period so that we have very, very good visibility into where the business is at and where they're looking to go and what the opportunities are either to correct things to help that or to add things to increase that. So when we think about what we're looking to accomplish, the fundamentals really come down into a handful of categories.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
One, are you focused on, from an outbound perspective, talking to the right types of customers, your ICP? Do you have one built? Do you have the right messaging that's actually communicating your value to those individuals or to those organizations? And then are you supporting your business with the right individuals to actually be the conduit to deliver that message?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
where we found ourselves highly concentrated was working over the past several years with a lot of mid-market organizations who had financing through private equity partnerships. And so we've established ourselves as a trusted advisor and partner to over 35 firms today and growing really to help drive efficiency in commercial organizations. And so excited to chat with you today and
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And so a lot of what we do is look at the team construct, the makeup, Those are some fundamental things that are really important. And we're leveraging, as I mentioned before, we're leveraging a lot of what I would call qualitative and quantitative capabilities to support businesses. We indexed probably close to 4,000 sales professionals in composite proprietary assessment makeups.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
We've trained over 600,000 sales professionals. And so we have a lot of data. And what we do is help take that data, structure it in a way that's gonna be useful for our clients so that they can get to decision points, either validating them or disproving them to make better decisions about the people that are working inside their business and the customers that they're approaching.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, it's a great question. And it's a mix, Scott, to be honest. In some cases, people assume that they know, right? And what we do is help to test those assumptions based on data analysis. In other cases, they really don't have an idea and they're trying to go a little bit too far wide and
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
where we can help is refocus their attention to help define who that ideal customer is and where they're actually driving value for customers and how to continue to do more and more of that. So there's definitely a correlation. I think the more mature a business is in their journey, the better they have done at figuring that out.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
The less mature or the more early they are, irrespective of how long or how short they've been affiliated with a private equity sponsor, we tend to see a little less confidence in the answers to some of those questions.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Well, a third of businesses are putting their head in the sand and ignoring it, right? Which I think is a normal human response. A third are paying attention, but not really actioning any type of execution decisions. And then there's this subset of clients that we're working with that have, you know, in conjunction with us, started to get a little bit proactive.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And so a good example of that is we're working with a client right now. We've helped solidify their ICP. They have exposure to the current friction in the market. And so what we're doing is we're creating like a prioritized ICP businesses that are limited in tariff exposure and doubling down on their outbound and go-to-market execution focused on those companies, knowing a couple of things.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
One, they're likely not going to be as impacted. So therefore, decision-making can be more normalized versus just looking at the target prospect database of everyone and anyone. And so they're really time-boxing a lot of outbound effort in that context. And the assumption there is,
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
They should receive normalized results in pipeline, customer acquisition, and revenue throughput as a result of that versus continuing to spread their sales resources across the entire sellable addressable market, which has a mix of those companies that do have exposure.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
answer any questions, share a little bit of perspective and what we're seeing based on the number of businesses that we're working with and some of the challenges and successes that we're having along that journey.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
Yeah, absolutely. Big levers to pull right now. Contract extensions, offers from a marketing capability in terms of decision-making now and deferred payment capabilities. People want business booked. And I think revenue leaders, those that are being very strategic, And their partners in the boardroom are looking at it as an opportunity to accelerate growth in the very, very short term.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And I'm talking over the next weeks, if not month, until things potentially calm down or maybe get worse. In either case, you're providing yourself with an opportunity to capitalize on your share.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
You know, again, it's probably a little too early to give a ton of confidence. When I think about some of the clients that, you know, have prioritized this, we're actively engaged in that dialogue. And, you know, there's also a major important area focuses on ensuring you have the right coverage. You see it in the public markets now. People are taking forecasts down.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
I think it's important to be realistic. If you're going to tighten resourcing, make sure you have the appropriate adjustment in the overall revenue plan and business budget as a result. Many, many revenue leaders and CEOs you know, are not thinking about it as holistically.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy – Optimizing Sales Teams & Working with Great Outside Resources Featuring Sean Carson 4-10-25
And so when they think about shifting resources or priorities, just understand that that's going to have an impact, not likely tomorrow, but several months from now as a result. So I think we are seeing it to an extent. Some organizations are being very proactive and tapping us to help support those strategies. Others tend to be taking a little bit of a wait and see approach.