Stop Telling Stories and Start Making Your Business Case

Timur Hicyilmaz (co-founder, Insight Revenue) joins us to talk about why it is time to stop focusing on storytelling and start making your business case in order to reach your quota. Timur shares his perspective as a researcher of B2B sales with ideas for: Why so many sales teams are struggling to hit quota these […]

Timur Hicyilmaz (co-founder, Insight Revenue) joins us to talk about why it is time to stop focusing on storytelling and start making your business case in order to reach your quota.

Timur shares his perspective as a researcher of B2B sales with ideas for:

  • Why so many sales teams are struggling to hit quota these days
  • The psychology you need to understand to be successful in economic downturns
  • How technology is changing the day-to-day of reps

 

Transcript

[00:01] Mike McNary: Welcome to Mimeo's. Talk of the trade. I'm Mike McNary. In addition to leading the sales organization here at Mimeo, I'm also interested in unlocking the secrets of sales and marketing. In each episode, I talk with creative leaders to find out how they approach problems like motivating sales teams, structuring the revenue cycle, and fitting product to market. At the end of the conversation, you and I have new takeaways to apply to our everyday life. Let's jump into today's episode.

[00:28] Mike McNary: Hey, everyone. Mike McNary here, welcoming you to another episode of Mimeo's Talk of the Trade podcast. Excited for our episode today titled stop telling Stories and start making your business case. Our guest today is Timur Hicyilmaz. He's the co founder of Insight Revenue, and I'm really excited to have him on the pod. Welcome, Timur. How you doing?

[00:50] Timur Hicyilmaz: Good. Thanks, Michael. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:53] Mike McNary: Yeah, we're excited to get into it. And for those in the audience that might not know a lot about you, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[01:00] Timur Hicyilmaz: Sure. I'm a researcher by trade, slightly different than maybe most of your audience, and I've done research on a lot of things. I've done it around clinical operations. I've done research on the energy preferences of consumers in Japan. But sales and marketing has really become my thing. I spent many years at a company called CBE, now acquired by Gartner. It's where I led the study. That's what became the Challenger book and the Challenger method. The study design was mine, and the analysis that came up with this notion is, look, there are many ways you could go about the world of selling. Turns out people have fallen to one of five profiles, and guess what? One approach is a lot more successful than any of the others. That insight, in some ways, is the insight that stuck. So I spent a lot of time around how do you get people to replicate those behaviors and skills, like what's necessary for it and what we're currently embarked on it's. Me and a couple of others, we're building out this new company, Insight Revenue, and our goal really, is to help people transform their sales efforts.

[02:19] Mike McNary: Yeah, I love that. Listen, if you're selling today and you're not familiar with the Challenger method, you probably either haven't been around for long or you haven't been paying much attention. So that's really impressive. It's touched a lot of salespeople and I think helped a lot of people close a lot of business over the years.

[02:38] Timur Hicyilmaz: This is my sincere belief that, honestly, like most people, should be able to demonstrate the key skills in it. I say this slightly jokingly, but honestly, in some ways the takeaway is, look, if in doubt, try and be interesting to your customer. Deliver a message that's relevant, interesting that they think they're going to be able to use, and if you don't remember anything else, try and do that and you're much more likely to succeed. And by the way, there are many ways I can help you become more interesting.

[03:07] Mike McNary: I don't doubt that. Now you mentioned your newest venture. You're a co founder of Insight Revenue with your partners. What's been your favorite thing about starting Insight?

[03:18] Timur Hicyilmaz: I think the best part is in some ways you get liberated from the past. Look, there are three of us. We all bring a lot of experience to bear. We've worked in a variety of different settings. And if you work in a much larger company setting, you become captive to your niche a little bit. You have a viewpoint, you make decisions, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons, but it gets very hard to sort of escape what you've done in the past. For us, this is a great chance to start again. Our vision is we think we can do this better.

[03:51] Mike McNary: Right.

[03:52] Timur Hicyilmaz: We're going to build on the research and the findings of the past, but we're all going to adapt it to a more modern age. And I'm loving the conversation so far. That's really exciting.

[04:03] Mike McNary: If somebody wanted to reach out to you and your partners at Insight Revenue, how would they do that?

[04:08] Timur Hicyilmaz: Honestly, LinkedIn is probably the easiest thing. Even if you manage to only have spell my name right, chances are you'll find me. I think it's pretty unique. There aren't that many Hicyilmazes on LinkedIn. They might all be related to me. I don't know exactly.

[04:29] Mike McNary: Well, that's great. And I think I like that notion of starting anew. Right. And gifting your insights and expertise in a way that is kind of complementary with other folks in your organization to bring valuable insights and teachings to people. I think that's really cool. So good on you for getting it started and we wish you the best of luck with Insight and I'm sure it's going to be a huge success.

[04:55] Timur Hicyilmaz: Well, thank you.

[04:56] Mike McNary: Yeah, of course. So let's get into the episode and talk a little bit about some of our topics for today. I'm going to start with kind of a bigger question, but I know it's a perfect set up for you. I'm talking to a lot of sales leaders, networking and just through some relationships I have. Why are so many sales teams struggling to close deals these days?

[05:17] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yeah, that is the conversation. I think there are two sides of the equation. Some of it is structural. Right. I wouldn't say this was a recession exactly, but it's certainly a loss of confidence. A part of me thinks, at the beginning of COVID everybody thought the world was going to end. It didn't end. In fact, it was boom times, especially on technology. And then interest rate starts to go up. Everything else happened. And so in some ways I almost feel like all of people's worst fears, they're now realizing them a little bit. But this is certainly not the financial crisis. I was around in that point. And I remember getting calls from clients asking us about how to manage accounts receivables. That was a genuine financial crisis. This, I don't think, is anywhere near there. It's more pronounced in sales than anywhere else in technology sales. I think interest rates make a big difference. Like the cheap money is gone and suddenly people start looking at value much more closely. I agree with software sales. I think you also have the fact that one of our experts made this point. So for the longest time, the fact that you have a platform, it's in the cloud. You no longer need to have it on premises. You could offload all the staff expenses. It becomes a variable expense for a lot of SaaS. There's a great default business case. You almost don't need to articulate it. Like, certainly the CFO and the CTO, they knew this really well. That alone, I think, drove a lot of momentum. That's no longer true. And then growth has… This is where I’m trying to be a little controversial. Growth, I think, is not just easier, it rewards. Good storytellers. Right? Because growth because when it's a time of growth, your job is to capture as much of that revenue as you can in the shortest time as possible. So you're looking to buy stuff, you'll build things. And if I can give you a good story around how to capitalize on it, then you were probably quite successful.

[07:23] Mike McNary: I agree.

[07:24] Timur Hicyilmaz: Now, however, times are a little harder. There is much more scrutiny on purchases, and that skill alone isn't going to carry you very far. Now, don't get me wrong, I think storytelling is an amazing skill. I wish I could do some of it, but you can't just rely on that. We're seeing sort of what I would describe as a sort of a systematic shift towards needing to deliver value on the terms of the product. And that's a lot of much more careful work up front as you're doing discovery. That's much more figuring out beyond the user pain, honestly, and I watch a lot of calls right, for a living. I think reps and companies are actually really fairly good at articulating the user pain. And that's often experienced by lots and lots and lots of people. But where they struggle a little bit is to be able to take that pain and link it to sort of one of a top level value driver. Like how, for example, does your product actually deliver product, increase productivity?

[08:37] Mike McNary: Quantitatively speaking, right?

[08:40] Timur Hicyilmaz: Quantitatively speaking, honestly, half the time I think I'd settle for just an inference chain. Just being able to say, look, our product does this, does this, does this, will get you that.

[08:52] Mike McNary: More leads means more pipeline, which means more closed deals if you keep consistent conversion rates. That's a very basic equation. But what you're saying is it doesn't necessarily have to look particularly hardy on a spreadsheet. But if somebody can follow the logic and understand how it's going to impact their business and affect their bottom line, that might get you there better than just the story.

[09:15] Timur Hicyilmaz: Exactly. That'll start getting you there. A bit of luck to have a conversation with you, because most people's business, everybody's business is a little different. Their numbers are going to be different. Their baseline is going to be different. You start piecing together that model with them, and then I think you'll finally have a sense of, okay, here's the ROI we can deliver. And very importantly, I think, is the counterpoint, especially in a time where people are resistant to making purchases, and the counterpoint is, so what's the risk you're avoiding by making the purchase? Like, what's the risk of the status quo? And I think a lot of people think of the cost of inaction as a little bit of, like, the value. You didn't realize that's not actually the case. That's a little bit like, I wish I'd bought Apple stock in 1990.

[10:02] Mike McNary: Easy to say.

[10:02] Timur Hicyilmaz: I mean, exactly. That's not an actual loss. The loss is more this is more like the household insurance you didn't buy. And thus, in the case of a fire, you are still exposed to this gigantic risk.

[10:16] Mike McNary: Right.

[10:18] Timur Hicyilmaz: And that's the other part of, I think, the value equation, like how to talk about the downside of the risk. And we've been partnering, for example, with Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna around the Jolt Effect. Matt is like one of the original authors of the Challenger book. And what they have now delivered and built upon is much more sort of the advanced psychology of the sale. Because you can imagine the thing, right? You've got an agreement. All things being equal, if we bought this, we think there might be an ROI. And yet too many deals don't happen. They stall. They don't go out of the buying group. And what Matt I think has identified beautifully is like, so what are those unarticulated pain points? What does the buyer care about? And those are going to be very personal things. They're going to be things like they're literally afraid of messing up. Because the last time they implemented XYZ thing, it was a disaster. Their career survived, but they might not survive it twice.

[11:22] Mike McNary: Exactly.

[11:24] Timur Hicyilmaz: Do you really want to go to your CFO when times are tough and be like, you know, what I'd really like to do is to buy X.

[11:30] Mike McNary: Right.

[11:30] Timur Hicyilmaz: You can't do that without a good business case because the CFO, at least they're not going to buy adjectives. At least I haven't met one who is very open to buying an adjective. They're not going to buy something called customer experience. They would like to know what that customer experience actually translates into in terms of dollars and cents.

[11:57] Mike McNary: And they're involved in more deals now because of that what you said about the hesitation around indirect spend and the uncertainty around the economy and the cost of money. So all those things are driving them to be even further involved than they were previously, right, Timur?

[12:15] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yeah. No, absolutely. Like, on one hand, yes, cost of money has gone up. On the other hand, this is a pure hypothesis. My suspicion a little bit is that so AI generative AI in particular for a lot of companies, has sparked the thought of what should we do with AI? Because it offers you an opportunity to actually build something brand new that wasn't there. And AI, unlike a lot of current software, is really expensive. You're going to need cash flow and the use cases aren't really that obvious, I don't think. Like, what we have right now are some of it's very useful, some of it's very clever, some of it's a little gimmicky. But I can guarantee you that won't be true in 5-10 years because I'm old enough to remember people sort of said the same thing about CRM systems once upon a time. I remember having slightly incredulous conversations with people where they're like, you know, this thing won't catch on, it's too complicated, it's too slow, it doesn't measure anything.

[13:19] Mike McNary: Put it into this database or something.

[13:21] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yes. No, exactly. All of those objections were true at that point in time. Like, the systems really work monkey on flow. They didn't stay that for too long.

[13:32] Mike McNary: Yeah. And whoever cracks this, it's going to be the next I think we're all seeing it, right? You just mentioned everyone's trying to figure out a way to utilize this in a way that is beyond gimmick. And we'll call it immediate, we'll call them small, immediate recurring returns. But like, big picture value, who's going to crack the code kind of thing. Right, right.

[13:55] Timur Hicyilmaz: No, exactly. Somewhere there is like, clearly, I'm sure people are working on all kinds of middleware that sort of finds the data, combines it in a reasonably viable way and makes it available to you.

[14:12] Mike McNary: We're just talking about the sales applications. The whole thing is the potential for things fantastic and terrifying are all there.

[14:23] Timur Hicyilmaz: All of that way above my paygrade.

[14:24] Mike McNary: Yeah, you said it, man. I don't think either you or I are going to determine the fate of how AI affects humanity, but I think in sales, it could be a thing. Right? And I think it's already starting to become one.

[14:35] Timur Hicyilmaz: Oh, I mean, it's already like on one end I'm getting some I was receiving interestingly, the fashion for this seems to have gone out. I was receiving some really terrible clearly AI generated emails. Yeah, there's a lot out, little sonnets sort of playing on my LinkedIn profile and you're like, okay, sure, well done.

[14:56] Mike McNary: Don't email me again.

[14:58] Timur Hicyilmaz: On the other hand, if you want to do research fast, it's tremendous, right? Like, you can take one of the chat programs and just type in restricting yourself to ABCDE companies. Tell me how they differentiate themselves relative to each other.

[15:14] Mike McNary: Right? Yeah.

[15:15] Timur Hicyilmaz: Assuming the companies are big enough and there's sort of publicly available data on it, the answer you get back is more than credible. Yes. It gives you starting point.

[15:25] Mike McNary: Yeah, it can scour so many information sources so quickly. I mean it's astounding actually getting to use it and I'm still trying to figure out and I think my reps are and you know what, actually it brings me to kind of the next topic I wanted to touch on with you. So we're talking about making this business case versus telling the story when you're trying to gain traction and the yes. And the implementation from a prospective buyer. So everyone's trying to do something with less right? Maybe less heads, less investment in one area or another. But oftentimes they're kind of flocking to technology to get that done right. So it might not be AI, but it could be something else. How do you implement new tech or a new solution in your tech stack in a way that ensures it will be successful and it will deliver some returns. Right? Just generally speaking.

[16:27] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yeah, no, generally speaking. I mean, what I've seen a lot and I've done some research on this technology is very structured. It gives work structure and I think a lot of what happens is when people see a slightly sort of maybe a more haphazard chaotic environment or the outcomes don't seem to be as repeatable as they would like them to be. They tend to think if only if we used XYZ thing then everybody is going to have to do it in this way and we will have solved our problem. In practice though, honesty, I think it's the other way around because if you just take technology and you give it to people well, they don't literally have to use it. Your high performing salespeople. That group of people is different from other groups of people who might have to use it. And so a lot of what I've seen is honestly, my biggest recommendation was make sure you have a pretty good sense of how to manage this thing, that you could say that implicitly, this is how we work to do this. And then I think you can use technology to make it more efficient. You can overcome the bottlenecks if you have a group of people who are used to doing one thing in a particular way, you might even be able to transform the way they do it through technology. But what you're not going to be able to do is sort of take this thing, give it to people and hope that it achieves the change you want. That's my biggest recommendation.

[18:02] Mike McNary: I think you're right on. I've seen too many times where people will dump a solution in without getting some sort of consensus amongst the end users or even having a structured implementation training process and maybe not even marrying it to some part of their playbook. I mean, how important is that?

[18:23] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yeah, no, I mean it's like you really do need to integrate these things a little bit more. My other thing with technology is I think the technology also makes it a little bit too easy to ask people to do their jobs perfectly. What I mean, in some ways it's the word playbook that triggered the thought. So I've certainly seen playbooks that are literally several hundred pages long, which is absurd. Yeah, I mean, they're beautiful. They are. An immense amount of money and time has been spent on these things. Every eventuality is accounted for. I cannot imagine a single person actually has read them, especially not if they were actually doing their jobs well, like high performers in particular. What would you like them to do? Would you like them to read the playbook or would you like them to go talk to a customer? And I think too often you end up with a lot of sort of dead technology, sort of shelfware, I think is the phrase.

[19:23] Mike McNary: I agree.

[19:24] Timur Hicyilmaz: An awful lot of really well meaning efforts that the doers in the best will in the world couldn't really execute on.

[19:33] Mike McNary: Yeah, you give somebody 100 things to do, they're going to do very few of them very well. Right.

[19:39] Timur Hicyilmaz: Basically they'll stick to what works.

[19:42] Mike McNary: You got what works for them. Right. And then you'll have everyone doing something a little bit differently. I once had a guest on the show, Timur, that kind of put it this way. It's like you can have what he called artists on the sales floor, right? People who kind of do things their own way but are able to find great success because they have certain skill sets or capabilities or natural talents that allow them to thrive with a unique go to market strategy or customer engagement approach, however you like to put it. But you can't have an entire floor of artists, right?

[20:17] Timur Hicyilmaz: You can't have it. No, maybe if you're sort of like, I don't know, a very high end firm of architects. Yes. Maybe each partner does it differently. Maybe. But you couldn't scale an organization that way.

[20:32] Mike McNary: I agree.

[20:35] Timur Hicyilmaz: And if you see that happening, my suspicion has always been that the organization at some level is subscale. Like in a sense of I've definitely had companies, clients where they sell a service whose applications is very undefined. It could be used in very different ways, could be used by organizations large and small and suddenly you end up selling into on paper it's a market, but actually every use case is very different. And at that point the thing really does start fracturing. That I think is a commercially really tough place to be because you have to make an assessment about whether these sort of micro segments could any one of them ever be large enough to scale? So you could have some to make it worthwhile, right, to make it worthwhile, or you end up with what you often see, which is like people de facto end up being specialists. And honestly, there's no technology on earth can accommodate that amount of variation.

[21:39] Mike McNary: No, I think that's really well said. You're handling a number of different ICPS and maybe different platforms that can service all these verticals and target audiences. And it sounds really great in some respects because you have all this total addressable market, right. Say we can call anybody, right?

[21:56] Timur Hicyilmaz: No, exactly.

[21:57] Mike McNary: But in the end, the real scale is going to come from that repetition, knowing who to call, how to position, how to catch their ear, and then how to convert. Right. And if you're trying to do that across ten different audiences, it becomes a lot more difficult. And the uniformity of your salesforce, like you said, that subscale position is a tough place to be in.

[22:19] Timur Hicyilmaz: And you'll need more expensive you probably need much more expensively renumerated more senior people, honestly, to do that, to do that kind of selling. And for certain kind of businesses, that's fine. Like right now, we sort of have a consulting business. We obviously have a lot more variation in our system than say, a universal Saas platform would have, where the price list is literally on the shelf and you can get the app on your phone kind of thing.

[22:45] Mike McNary: Yeah, of course. But that specialization has its value too. It's just if you're trying to go from 20 million to 150, it's tough at that point.

[22:58] Timur Hicyilmaz: You need more process.

[23:00] Mike McNary: Yeah, I agree. I really like that. And I think you're so right about just kind of throwing the technology out there and just hoping for the best that people, top sellers or even middle ground performers are going to start adopting it in ways that totally change the way that they're able to interact with their audiences. It's unlikely, right?

[23:22] Timur Hicyilmaz: I think it is unlikely unless you plan for it very carefully.

[23:26] Mike McNary: What do sellers that are interacting with prospects and customers every day, what sort of modern tools do top performing people in those positions need to be proficient in nowadays that they may not have mastered or had needed to master in the past?

[23:44] Timur Hicyilmaz: One of the first things I realized during the pandemic is we suddenly got lots of inbound inquiries into so how do you do virtual calls? Because to a lot of lot of people in particular, it's obviously like it's a very personal business. You turn up in somebody's office, you get a sense for it's, people doing business with people. Pandemic changed that in a way that I not entirely convinced it's ever really going to go away. In that a lot of business became much more virtual and thus it became a lot more quantitative. Because it's on a screen, I can't literally read you. I'm going to rely on the numbers. I'm going to rely on the artifacts. So that, too, I think, has driven some of the changes. The place where I see individual sellers get tremendous legs, honestly, I think some of the individual productivity tools are tremendous. I see them being really well adopted. If anything. I see companies putting sort of blocks against them. If you can think of things like something like Calendly, for example, my impression was that when that came out, a whole bunch of high performers started using those things, whether or not their corporate systems enabled them or not. So it's like a BlackBerry. Once upon a time, I remember when that came out, people would just buy blackberries, whether or not that accommodated whether or not corporate infrastructure accommodated that or not. So it's always been I've done a lot of research around tools. High performers are… it's interesting they'll try anything once. They use more tools than anybody else. Typically, they'll try all the new ones, and they hope it gives them an edge. If it works, they'll keep at it, and then they'll use different ones to keep getting an edge. But it's all around productivity. What I've never seen high performers have a great interest in, honestly, is logging data.

[25:46] Mike McNary: Yeah, you said it, man.

[25:51] Timur Hicyilmaz: One, it's a thankless task. Two, it's a dubious benefit to somebody personally, and three, the pipeline meetings are going to be excruciating anyway. Yeah, a lot of the best sort of sales it, I think, has now recognized, okay, let's stop asking people to input data. Let's see if we can find the data and derive it from real interactions, like a lot of call audit tools. Honestly, we have some partnerships just being able to sort of get a sense for what are the real communications that are happening on email between a rep and a customer. I don't even need to know what they say. I just need to know, are the conversations happening? That data is far more reliable tells me an awful lot more about a relationship and an engagement than any CRM entry would tell me.

[26:45] Mike McNary: Yes. When are the interactions happening? Are they happening at the right intervals? Right. Are we talking to the right people? In what way? Format wise, I couldn't agree more. I think those are better indicators of future success than a lot of the more subjective stuff that we tend to dig into.

[27:02] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yeah, and partly because they tend to think honestly, in some ways, I've always thought it was a little especially towards the end of a tough quarter, it's a really hard question to ask somebody. Essentially, you're asking them: So all things being equal, do you think you're going to make quota or not? And if you're not, by the way, there are all kinds of repercussions to this. What are you supposed to say at that point? Not surprisingly, people will tell you, oh, it's great. We just need to talk to a few more people. We're going to push it over the line, timing wasn't quite right. Well, maybe they're going to take a few, three or four more weeks. And the whole sort of the conversation you have around it makes it really hard for somebody to not provide you with bad data, which is key. But the other part of it is having done forecasts for people is so nobody asks you for more forecasts than when times are tough. They keep on wanting another forecast but.

[28:08] Mike McNary: Then micromanagement upticks in everybody, even the more passive and broader thinking leaders, they're going to get more granular more often. Right?

[28:18] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yes. And I'm very literal minded. At first I thought they were worried about the precision of the forecast, but I remember just finally realizing this at the financial crisis. I was like, I finally had the conversation so we could spend time on this and I will get you a more precise estimate of how badly we're going to miss the quarter. But let me assure you, my forecast will not change the likelihood of us attaining this revenue. But I think a lot of people really do think that if they just managed to forecast a little better, they'd get better revenue attainment. And the forecast is different because… again, back to sort of a system that could look at the engagement, maybe at the beginning of a sale, if you realize that, okay, you had a conversation with a senior person, then nothing happens for two weeks, then maybe if you had intervened maybe you could do something.

[29:13] Mike McNary: Yeah, I love that.

[29:16] Timur Hicyilmaz: But you can’t really do that sort of after the fact closer, closer to the end.

[29:19] Mike McNary: I agree. And I think the people that top sellers are going to probably bring in the same amount of revenue regardless of how well maintained some of their forecast stuff is, right?

[29:32] Timur Hicyilmaz: Often, and to be fair, again, I've looked at time spent data of reps and so one thing that happens for sure is so the better you are, the more transactions you have to handle. And so the very best reps often literally have no time towards the end of the quarter. And I think that part, everybody sort of knows it, but they don't necessarily accommodate it.

[29:56] Mike McNary: Right.

[29:56] Timur Hicyilmaz: And there are technologies like a good deal desk, for example, helps, helps a lot. Like sales support helps a lot. I think it's where sort of a good SDR or BDR really can in fact really be worth their weight in gold if they help them manage that. But it's just the numbers. If you have 20 viable conversations versus eight viable conversations and every single one of them needs a security review and you're going to have to follow up after every single one of those security reviews, well, yeah, you're not going to get that great data compliance.

[30:27] Mike McNary: Yeah, I'm with you, Timur. I love some of your takes on this, a few that I'm kind of taking away from our conversation. First. Is, in this day and age, you've got to make business cases versus telling a story. Right. There's got to be an ROI. That's measurable for CFOs making big buying decisions, right?

[30:52] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yeah. You can't rely on just one kind of argument.

[30:56] Mike McNary: I totally agree.

[30:57] Timur Hicyilmaz: That's the other way of thinking about it, like a senior person, so there's limited due diligence. You can do right about anything, but what you can do is you can see if you get the same information, if it's told in different, you know, you'd have a strong story, but if it isn't backed up in other ways right there, you'd say, oh, this information is less reliable, you're much more likely to veto it.

[31:21] Mike McNary: I totally agree. Another takeaway, Timur, is if you're going to implement tech to be more efficient, have a plan for adoption, implementation and measuring success, and then finally the modern sellers got to be a user of modern technology. It's table stakes nowadays. There are a lot of tools out there that can make you more efficient and know how to use them and when to use them. And you will probably close more deals and get more revenue.

[31:49] Timur Hicyilmaz: Yeah. If only because it saves you time. And the only solace there I can provide people is here. I'll risk one last hypothesis. My sense is that the platforms are consolidating for the everybody before. It's a bit like once upon a time there used to be many word processing software, pieces of word processing software. Now there's really only two or three. I suspect the same will happen to the you.

[32:15] Mike McNary: I'm with you. I'm waiting for those days. Right. This has been great, Timur. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast, share some of your insights and some of the conversations that you're having with your clients. And anybody's listening wants to talk to Insight, please reach out to them on LinkedIn and give Timur a shout and he can talk to you about your business. Okay, great. Sound good?

[32:36] Timur Hicyilmaz: Thanks, Michael. It was a great conversation.

[32:38] Mike McNary: Yeah. I appreciate it very much, Timura. Thank you.

[32:40] Mike McNary: Talk of the Trade is hosted by Mimeo the better way to print. Find out more at www.Mimeo.com.

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