Ep. 217 – Dan Morris is on a mission to help 1000 businesses by 2025 by using the “4 R’s” any business needs To Maximize its Sales Process

Dan Morris is an investor, advisor, and B2B growth expert with a mission to leverage his experience to impact 1000 businesses positively by 2025.

Helping companies to succeed in volatile markets, increasing profitability from existing strategies, and helping CEOs take positive steps forward to grow their business is where Dan’s expertise is focused.

Before turning 30, Dan left a finance career to join a digital agency that showed him what a fast-growing services business could be – it went on to sell for £100m. He then launched a digital signage network publishing content to thousands of screens, and helped a content marketing agency reach #61 on the INC. list.

 

Most passionate about

• We are working with businesses that need some help with growth. We help B2B, SaaS, and services businesses that are stuck in that six- to seven-figure revenue range and that need to break through to the next level.
• We help them identify and break down that barrier.

Dan’s career and story

• I started my career at a very large bank. They taught me to negotiate to understand numbers very quickly, but I realized that my calling was really with smaller businesses that were moving much faster—a lot less red tape and a lot more entrepreneurial energy.
• I found myself working with a group of entrepreneurs who had several different businesses. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, we were working on a very exciting project, selling to a group of banks, but all of a sudden, they ran out of money. The opportunity arose for me to go with that group of investors from the UK out to the United States and help them build a business that became 61 on the Inc. list in the next four years.
• When I left working with those businesses, I trained as a product manager, then worked with technology businesses and SAS companies. My training as a product manager helped me to focus even more on what the customer really wants, how to really get the customer to understand the value of the technology, how to build technology that really works for the customer, how to communicate that in sales and marketing, and how to talk with the technology teams.
• I really wanted to give away some time and understand technology businesses that were out there and that I could potentially be a part of. As I worked with lots of those early-stage customers, I recognized that there was a big opportunity in helping them build those initial building blocks.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• Aligned with exactly what we do today I advice entrepreneurs to take the time to review. Have a look at who you’re actually working with. Talk to them and understand what they’re actually using your product or service for.
• If you review, you can build that information into a refinement. You can focus more on delivering more for what people are already getting from you. Then, once you’ve developed that refinement, you can roll it out.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I think the biggest fail for me was not realizing earlier how many people we could help if we just kept it simple and delivered on this four-Rs framework, rather than being tempted to get in and try to fix everything within a business.

Biggest success with customers

• We were onboarding in January 2020. This is a company that had been around for nine years and they’d grown to hundreds of thousands of revenue, even around a million dollars in revenue.
• They’d been in a heavy services business they’ve been a heavy into the software side of their business. And they’d struggled a little bit with who that core customer was. Over the years, they’d had a lot of successes. Then they’d come back down to a point where they just said, “You know what? We really need some help focusing.”
• So, we got involved with that team. Great people. We went in and reviewed who their ideal customer was, where their leads were coming from, what was happening as a result of that marketing. We worked with their existing team to refine who they were focused on and where they were spending their time. We rolled out new processes, a new CRM, a new layout, new messaging, new coaching to help the salespeople stick to their focus. Over the next four quarters, that business five X their revenue.

Dan’s recommendation of a tool

• HubSpot
  • It has an extremely effective Partner Network. They’ve got a very easy-to-understand tool itself and an excellent knowledge hub that’s free for CRM people.
• CRM
  • For entrepreneurs, there really is an excellent combination of value, where you’ll be able to use the CRM platform for free, use their knowledge base for free. And then, when you’re ready, you can grow into their marketing tools or their sales tools as well.
  • CRM is the core of a lot of what we do.

Dan’s one key success factor

• It’s always setting a goal that requires urgent work. You know, just being busy is a state of thrive. Me, personally, I don’t do well with spare time or idle time. I just don’t really know what to do with it. So, if I’ve got a day that is packed with things that we’re working on, and adding value in that way, that really gives me a great sense of fulfillment.
• I think, in my early career, it was definitely curiosity. I was always curious about how we could bring the most value to a business. And so, I would always research that business more than any other person in sales. Then I inspired my sales teams to do the same because it got them better results

 

Dan’s Mountain

Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed?

• I grew up in a family that was very much focused on hiking and climbing mountains in the UK. When I got into my career, I definitely had an aspiration to become a CEO one way or another. So, I worked my way up the career track to become a CEO. When I become CEO of a company that I built for a group of investors, I stepped off the top of that mountain—not directly, but, you know, I sort of walked down and then had a period of time when I was like, “Okay, well, what’s the next mountain to climb? I’m not really sure what it’s going to be.”
• Setting the goal of making sure that we help 1000 companies before the end of 2025 is the current professional mountain for me, and the team that we’re building all the time. A personal mountain for me this year is that we’re training to ride 980 miles, which is the length of the United Kingdom. There’s certainly a lot of preparation for this climb so, yeah, I’m definitely about mountains. That’s how I see the challenges to be prepared for the climb.

 

The best way to contact Dan:

• Website
• LinkedIn

 

I’d like to invite you to a free masterclass about “7 practical free ways to get more customers”