Scaling with Intent: Removing the Constraints to Growth with Holly LaBoda

Joe Lynch: [00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome to the Logistics of Logistics show. My name is Joe Lynch. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today’s topic is scaling with intent, removing the constraints to growth with my friend Holly Labota. How’s it going, Holly?

Holly LaBoda: It’s wonderful. I’m having a great day here with you, Joe.

Joe Lynch: Yes. It’s always nice to talk to you. We talked a few weeks ago. We were supposed to do a podcast. I was– had a cold. We’ve talked a lot, but we haven’t talked on the mic. Holly, please introduce yourself and your company and where you’re calling from today.

Holly LaBoda: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I’m Holly Laboda. I hail from lovely Minnesota in the Minneapolis metro area. And my company is Formula L. I’m the founder and chief growth officer there, and we work with sales leaders and help them with all kinds of problems that they’re trying to solve.

Joe Lynch: So now I know you work with a lot of logistics companies, and you always have from– you’ve been around for a while in this for being a very young woman. But what problems are you solving for your– or helping your customers solve?

Holly LaBoda: [00:01:00] Sure. So I’ve spent my whole career in logistics working with sales leaders, and I tend to see a lot of the same problems that they’re working with where they have a particular outcome they’re trying to drive. More pipeline activity, higher margin, like whatever your outcome is, reducing customer churn.

And then they’re trying to figure out how to deploy it. I’m the figure out person. So what I’ve been working with them on is like there’s all of these pieces that are so chaotic of your system, but figuring out how to get from a strategy to field execution is the gap that we try to solve for our clients.

Joe Lynch: Holly, it’s it’s a lot of changes in the last ten, ten, 15 years in our business, and I’m gonna– I’ll set it up a little

bit, and I’d love to hear your two cents on It

It seemed like when I came to this business, I’ll say ten, 15 years ago people, if you were a freight broker or you’re a carrier, people just tended to make cold calls. They might not have a good website. They might not have a social media presence [00:02:00] at all, and not using a lot of technology. It was like, pick up that phone and make those phone calls. And then it’s flash forward everyone had to get a good website. Everyone had– has to get really active on LinkedIn and YouTube and Facebook and build that community. And oh, and you need a CRM. And then recently it just seemed yeah, let AI automatically make sales for you. And so I feel like there’s a lot of people going, “Wait, what am I supposed to do?” And I’ll throw this, my own challenge. Used to be if you were a company, a small company, you go, “Yeah New thing.

We gotta do social media. Didn’t plan on it, but we gotta do that. New thing, gotta do a website. No choice. Oh, now I have to make podcasts and videos and have a YouTube channel. It felt like we just– somebody just took a pile of disparate tactics, strategies, tech, and threw it at us and [00:03:00] said, “Here you go. No problem.”

And I think it’s a big problem.

Holly LaBoda: is a big problem, and it’s contributing to so much of this chaos that anybody who’s trying to grow anything is feeling right now. Because all of those might be strategies that have a ton of merit. They might be the key that made one company go from X to Y, right? But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what your company needs to get there.

You have to figure out what your specific goals are and then try to figure out this, the tactics to get there instead of just slapping on every new strategy that comes out.

Joe Lynch: Yeah, and there’s a lot– been a lot of people, a lot of companies who’ve been very successful. So those people, they move from company to company, often start companies, and I think they’ll say, “Hey, I– the reason I started this company is ’cause I was so successful at blank, decided to go on my own.”

I think some of the challenge sometimes comes ’cause you don’t maybe have the bench you had at your old company. You don’t have the resources. You don’t have maybe a boss [00:04:00] who said, “You must do this. You must do that.” Or maybe not the brand. All– There’s a whole bunch of things that you might have had at your last company that you don’t have at your current one, and I think that’s where it helps to have outside fresh perspective that you bring.

Holly LaBoda: Yep, it does. I come from a big logistics shop, and a lot of the people that I work with are my former colleagues that are in that particular situation that you’re talking about. They came from a big company with all this infrastructure and all this guidance. Now they’re at a smaller organization.

They’re like, “Help, I don’t have any of the resources I used to have.” So we’re building that out for them. But that’s one idea. But then the other idea is you take like a brand new… You take a high-performing seller and put them in a sales leadership position, or you take a sales leader and just plop them into a different company.

Any of those cases, what worked before might not work now, or the market changes and what worked before doesn’t work now. So helping to figure out, okay, if your strategy is changing or anything that’s surrounding it, like the marketplace is changing, then all of the tactics need to [00:05:00] change too. And that’s what we’re working on with our clients.

Joe Lynch: like it. I like it. So tell us a little bit about you, Holly. Where’d you grow up? Where’d you go to school? Some career highlights before you started Formula L, and why you started Formula L

Holly LaBoda: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I’m a Minnesota girl, born and raised. I went– I grew up in southern Minnesota. My dad was a farmer, my mom was a banker, like very like corn-fed Midwestern kind of a thing. I went to school in more mid-central Minnesota, St. Cloud State. And then after that, I needed to stretch my legs a little bit, so I lived in Florida for a while, I lived in Dubai for a while and then a couple years of running around, and then I came right back to the Midwest, as so many of us do.

And I’ve been in Minnesota ever since.

Joe Lynch: So when and why did you start Formula L? Give us some of the some– the– give us some of the career stops before you started Formula L. Oh

Holly LaBoda: sure. So I would say like my most relevant career progression happened in the last 18 years or so. So I started at C.H. [00:06:00] Robinson in 2008.

Yeah, that was my– that was what pulled me into logistics. I never thought this was an industry that I’d work in. But I came… They needed to solve a particular problem, and I came in to solve that problem and then loved it and stayed.

Like so many of us that accidentally get into logistics, that happens, like that’s the story. But I worked there for 10 years. I built a lot of their sales curriculum, ran all of their sales curriculum for a while. And then Moved into talent coaching and development, so as an HR business partner, a lot of talent guidance, strategy coaching for all of these folks.

And then the last couple of years I was supporting the commercial strategy directly. So here’s where we wanna go as an organization, go to market redefinition, like all of that kind of stuff, and then strategy deployment. So I took all of that, launched it into Luminaries, did that for eight years with a business partner who also came from Robinson.

And we learned a lot over those eight years and the– all of the things that we did really well at Luminaries, that we did really well when I was doing work at Robinson I [00:07:00] put just started fresh over six months ago and put it all together and said, “The ones that do this really well, what does that look like?”

And that’s what Formula L is.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. That’s a great background. I’ve had a lot of dealings with C.H. Robinson in the past when I was helping a big 3PL select a partner,

and fantastic. Unbelievable unbelievable company. I interviewed the president not so long ago from there. Anyway great outfit. It’s interesting.

I, I did some work up in Minnesota with a company, and I remember they all s- t-two people said to me when I first started working, they said, “What’s common here in Minnesota is y-you grow up here, y-you hate it because it’s cold, it’s this, it’s that.” He said, “And then you leave, and then you come back.” And a friend of mine who’s an executive recruiter s-said, “Minnesota is a weird place to recruit to.”

He goes– It was C-level people, and he said [00:08:00] It’s hard to get somebody who’d never lived there to go b- go there, ’cause they just go, “Oh, it’s cold.” But if you can find somebody anywhere in the country s- senior management say, “Would you like to go back to Minnesota?” They’re like, “Yes.”

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. So like you don’t get it until you’ve experienced it. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Lynch: Very nice. I enjoyed my time up there. Anyway so I wanna talk about– We, we identified four things we wanna talk about, and I think these are the four points you guys work on with your customers. First off, set this up a little bit. We had COVID, which was just a crazy event. Obviously, lots of families suffered with illness, job loss, cr- crazy time. But there was a lot of people in logistics who made a lot of money. It was– It seemed like you were shooting fish in a barrel if you had capacity. And I know you guys work with warehousing companies and tech companies, everybody else, so it’s not we’re just talking about freight brokers or carriers.

But it was an explosive time for growth, and it seemed like venture capital was here and saying anybody who [00:09:00] had a tech-enabled solution was gonna get funded. And boy, then it all ended, and I think we’ve had four years of slow growth. It brought a lot of people down. And I know a lot of companies that seemed to have all sorts of money for this, that, the other thing to grow, all of a sudden it was like, we’re just hanging on. And slowly but surely, it seems like here we’re talking at the end of April 2026, that it s- looks like things are moving in the right direction, just in time for the Iran stuff to upset that. But hopefully that’s not going to impact us too badly. So doesn’t matter all that, what’s happening in the economy.

We all have to sell anyway. But it’s harder than ever. So the first thing, and this is your approach, so I’ll let you talk more about it. But the first thing you guys do is this identifying growth constraints. Talk about the beginning of your process, including identifying growth constraints.

Holly LaBoda: Yeah, absolutely. So [00:10:00] the idea behind this is this this idea that I’ve been playing with for a decade maybe, is we all go through this, individuals definitely, but organizations go through these growth leaps. So they’re these big transformative moments in your life, like even think about you, Joe, like where you were here and then all of a sudden you ha- y- you jumped here and you had to figure out how to make that work.

Where whatever was working for you here is not gonna work anymore at this particular level. So that’s the idea around growth leaps and people have to redesign their entire organization to make sure that they’re continuing to grow or they will slow down or decline when they’re going through those big things.

So the constraints is a similar idea, but like a little bit easier to wrap your head around, is there’s probably something based on my Size or scope or amount of size, revenue, talent, whatever it is, there’s probably something that is making it harder for me to [00:11:00] grow right now. And if I can figure out what might be slowing me down, I can figure out how to speed it up.

That’s how we always start engagements, and the growth constraints is like a baby little one where you can just do it online without talking to me and just see if that’s, if that reflects what you’re feeling right now.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. I think, with that any intervention, there’s always this current state assessment, and somebody doesn’t do that, th- there’s something wrong. And by the way my master’s degree is in education geared towards consulting and training,

Always remember the teacher and professor saying this, besides they said the nonsense, the usual nonsense they said, but they said, “You’ll find a lot of customers will say, ‘All we need is sales training. We’re gonna bring a sales trainer in. All we need is customer support training. We’ll bring that in.’ All we need.” And he said, “Don’t fall for it. If– Don’t work with anyone who s- says, ‘We’re gonna skip [00:12:00] the current state assessment. We’re gonna skip, we’re gonna skip the place where we identify what’s going wrong and move right to the intervention.'” And you, with your background, you could say, somebody called and said, “Holly, all we need is sales training. I got all these young guys, all these young gals. Just come in and do sales training.”

What would be the problem with that?

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. Yeah. The– like I have people that come and ask me that, right? All the time. Especially at Luminaries, that is what people would come to us for all the time. That’s what they knew us as. I also have a master’s in education, so the same kind of background, but performance improvement and like the same idea as…

Yes.

Joe Lynch: That’s what mine was called. It was called Performance, Performance Improvement and some Instructional Design or something like

Holly LaBoda: Oh, really? We might have the same degree. We’ll have to… I’ve never met another person that studied that.

Joe Lynch: Yeah.

Holly LaBoda: interesting.

Joe Lynch: I liked it. That was g- it was good. I’m glad I did it.

But,

Holly LaBoda: so cool. But it helps you figure out that stuff because, of [00:13:00] course, I can come in and do a prospecting training if you’re not, if you don’t have enough pipeline. I can do that. Is it gonna get you the result you want? Probably not. So if you wanna take a smarter approach, then let’s do that.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. And it’s one of those things also, Holly, If somebody said, “Holly, we already know what’s wrong. My young people don’t know how to do sales. Come in and d- help them and give a refresher for some of us who are older, and then we’ll be all set.” And what– I, I call it the feel-good intervention. Why is it a feel-good intervention? I don’t have to say that we don’t support our existing customers. I don’t have to say, and maybe that’s the truth, maybe it’s wrong. I don’t have to say we have a poor compensation. I don’t have to say we have a bad re- we have a horrible recruiting process. I don’t have to admit that I’m a bad manager or the sales manager doesn’t know what he’s doing. I don’t have to admit any wrongdoing. All I do is say, “Holly, come in and train me.” And Holly comes in and trains, everyone [00:14:00] goes home, says to the girlfriend, “Yeah, my company loves me. They’re getting me sales training.” And n-nope, no harm, no foul. And the problem with that is there is a problem in there, and you weren’t able to identify it.

You just decided without any sort of research, without any sort of discussion, we’ll jump to the solution, sales training, and it’s not correct.

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. And sometimes that’s part of the solution, right? I usually don’t tell people, “No, I will never do training for your company.” I’m just saying, yes, you might need prospecting training in this example, but let’s also look at making sure your sales process is clear enough, making sure you’re actually aiming at the right targets in the first place, and your ideal customer profile is clear, and your team member knows who they are.

Those kind of things are cheaper interventions, and they make that training approach so much better.

Joe Lynch: Yeah, and a lo- a lot of times also, there’s just companies develop the way they do, and you might say, “Hey, [00:15:00] Holly’s not getting it, the sales done.” You’re like how many customers she have? They have 16 customers. Does she manage those or somebody else?” “No, she does.” Do you think the reason she’s slowed down on her sales is ’cause she got 16 sales that she’s

currently managing?” ‘

Holly LaBoda: cause you had no book.

Joe Lynch: “Yes.” “And if, if you’re okay with her doing that, or maybe we get an account manager who manages those existing clients.” It’s a funny thing because I’ve heard people say that to me for years. Yeah when Joe came in, he was great. He was guns a-blazing. He got 10 customers.” And then what?” Now he doesn’t do much.”

Holly LaBoda: Of

Joe Lynch: Now he’s got 10 customers. And yeah, we’ve also in our business had, I think traditionally, I go and get the customers, and I manage the customers. And then somewhere along the line, people said, “We’re gonna get a guy who’s gonna be the SDR, and then maybe a gal who does the sales call and wins the business, and then an account manager who manages it, and we’re gonna have a team that [00:16:00] manages that customer.”

And I’m sure you get into all of that, right?

Holly LaBoda: Yep, that’s actually one of the… You brought up the growth constraints. One of those constraints that people don’t even think about as a constraint, in my experience, is the coordination constraint. So there’s, there– think about that, Joe. Like, when you were going out and selling all those deals and then managing that customer, if that was a real example or not you didn’t have to coordinate with anyone ’cause you were doing it all yourself.

There’s lots of, there’s lots of drawbacks with that approach. Actually, my favorite argument to have with any sales leader is the value of a hybrid role or a player coach or a sales/account manager role. When you’re two things, you’re not either of them very well. But the coordination constraint is something that I have seen just eating into big companies’ selling time because all of a sudden your solutions are more complex.

You need to have your onboarding approach signed off by the implementation team. You need to have your pricing approved by so and you need to look at, you need to pull in this particular subject matter expert for this ocean [00:17:00] component of your proposal. So it gets tougher to do those kind of things when you move into that specialist selling.

It’s, in my opinion, once you reach a certain scale, it’s the right move to make, but you do have to be thinking about how do we make it easy for these people to actually work with each other and not dramatically slow down our growth engine?

Joe Lynch: Yeah. I’ve t- talked to a

consultant a few years a- few years ago, and he was working with a lot of logistics companies, and he said, “There’s a lot of these very successful owners who left somewhere else ’cause they were exceptional at what they were doing, and they s- built these companies.” And he says, “And they tend to be the number one sales guy at their company, and they’re also tend to be the best at the operations.

They know more ’cause they’ve been around longer, and then they’re the ones who care about the financial piece.” And they get to a point in their business where they’re getting older, they’ve got some money in the bank, they’ve done well, and any new customer is a [00:18:00] giant imposition. It’s difficult because they already have customers. And they said the constraint to growth in that situation is that a– the owner isn’t an executive. He is not in charge of sales. He’s in charge of sales. He’s not in charge of operations. He’s in charge of operations. He’s not in charge of finance. And it’s… They said the problem is now you have this big opportunity that’s gonna grow the company by 20%, and he’s just “Oh my God,” “This is gonna kill

Holly LaBoda: exhausting because that leader is the bottleneck. That’s the, that’s what we call the capacity constraint too. Anytime you have the founder-led growth to something else, you’re gonna have a capacity constraint. Or if we can’t add this giant big client because of that. Anytime the buck stops with you because of you that’s a capacity constraint that we need to figure out how to

Joe Lynch: Only I’m– I’ve experienced it myself in this business. I’ve had a very successful career. The hardest part of working the hardest place I’ve ever worked is [00:19:00] for me.

And I say I w- I would let myself go if I could find someone else to replace me. So the first thing you’re doing, they’re bringing you in, and what does this look like when you say identifying growth constraints?

Are you going in with the senior management team? Who are you meeting with?

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. That growth constraints, that’s usually a conversational topic when we’re starting some of these things. When we start actually working together, we’re doing, This is our our growth readiness or accelerator diagnostic, like figuring out how ready you are for whatever growth is in front of you.

Then we start working with the senior leaders, yes and s- couple of one-on-one, like we would prioritize a couple of kind of interviews. But then also with the sellers too. We wanna make sure I’m talking to some of your high performers, some of your middle performers, maybe one or two that are struggling to figure out what are those pieces of friction in your system that’s making it harder for your team to do what you’re asking them to do?

And then we pull all of that stuff out and try to reduce the friction.

Joe Lynch: the next point and please explain, [00:20:00] is the next point you have in your process is called system-led growth, and that is not technology system. That is the old-fashioned systems before we called tech systems.

Holly LaBoda: Yes. Yes. The processes, the disciplines. Yep. Yeah. So we, that is the p- second part, this other thing that all sales leaders need to do all the time, or all leaders of any kind, is if you have a strategy, great. Here’s your cool idea for how you can grow. But you have to take that and you have to operationalize it into your processes.

So if you want to do X, you need to make sure your team is equipped to do this and this. You have this kind of thing available. That’s how we pull. That’s the leverage part of our process. So if we’re trying to achieve this, what needs to happen to make sure that we’re set up to actually get there?

That’s the second part that we do.

Joe Lynch: Yeah, and this s-sometimes can be where I’m interested in getting to this place, but w- I’ve seen this happen where they say, “We want sales trainings.” They bring in sales training, and then [00:21:00] the system that you use at work is never discussed. And then– and they, here’s the approach, and I’ve had where this, the vice president of sales and the director of sales doesn’t go to the training, and you’re teaching these guys, “Hey, this is the way you should sell your process, your product.” director doesn’t agree ’cause he doesn’t do it that way, nor does the vice president, nor are the systems in the company set up for it. So the whole idea that you have disconnected pieces, everyone has to be rowing the same direction for this to work.

Holly LaBoda: Which is, it makes sense. It’s so obvious. If you said that to somebody, nobody would say, “Jo, that’s crazy.” But it’s so hard to do when everything around us is changing constantly. To come back to the beginning of this conversation, when the market is shifting, the political climate is shifting, your…

Whatever that is going on, your strategy, even if it’s, even if your goals are the same, your strategy has to be different than it was two years ago because you’re in a different world. So it’s hard to [00:22:00] keep your eye on all of those things as a leader or a sales leader and figure out, “Okay, if I’m moving this, then here’s all the other stuff we have to do.”

That’s how our system just makes it easier.

Joe Lynch: Yep. And, one of the things that we– just speaking of disconnects I was at a little 3PL, and I was the general manager COO. Titles came easy at a little company. And so now I’m in charge of getting the growth going. And I came from an engineering and product development background. I was an automotive guy.

And so I was like, “I’m gonna get myself trained.” I– So I went to SPIN training, and they didn’t have it in Detroit right then. I’d have to wait three months. So I just drove to Chicago, four and a half hours, went to SPIN, SPIN selling. It’s fantastic. I think it was a three-day course. And then at the beginning of the third day, I was like, raised my hand.

I said, “Hey, you know what we didn’t touch on here, and I’m wondering if we’re gonna get into it, is we’re– we’ve talked about after we’ve got the customer, [00:23:00] and I’m wondering, and he goes, “Oh, you’re asking if we do prospecting?” And he goes, “Yeah.” He goes, “Not in this course.”

And I was like, “Oh. Oh, okay.” And then I was just sitting there. I was thinking, “That’s what I need.” I just sat through three days of this. We did very well once we got in the room. And so it was a weird dynamic. And so somebody could say the sales process begins when you have a prospect.” Other companies are… Like, for me, I was like, “We do fine once we get someone to talk to. We got no one to talk to. We’re making cold calls, sending emails. No one’s talking to us.” And so I’m assuming you go from the very beginning of the process t-through customer support and, renewing that customer after a year or two?

Holly LaBoda: Yeah, we look at the full journey because your relationship with your customer is, it’s not just isolated in one little part. We might not help you solve everything we find in every part of that journey, but we still have to look holistically for everything you just said. [00:24:00] And actually, the other part that this sparked for me is I love SPIN.

There’s lots of good stuff in SPIN. I’ve done SPIN. I think we did it in our Robinson days for a while. But there’s lots of those different things out there. But the problem is, when you pick up a methodology like that, no matter how great it is, it doesn’t connect perfectly to what you do in your company.

And sometimes we can make that mental leap, and sometimes it’s really hard to do it. Yeah.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. Again, taking just SPIN, what I learned, you wouldn’t be successful because we wouldn’t, we didn’t talk about outreach. Outreach is the hard

Holly LaBoda: Yep.

Joe Lynch: And we’ve changed over the last dozen years, two dozen years, whatever it is, la- last 10, 20 years I’ll say, with social media. So in the past, if some content was gonna be created, that’s marketing’s job, not sales’ job. We didn’t necessarily have SDRs. I guess we had s- appointment setters and stuff. But now it feels like I want my sales leaders somehow to [00:25:00] create content be on LinkedIn, being, being seen as a thought leader, being on podcasts like mine. There’s other podcasts, obviously. Much… It feels and I do believe we want a lot of our salespeople to be thought leaders.

That is work that they traditionally didn’t do.

How do you make that work with saying, “No, you are focused on sales”? Because writing an article, being on a podcast, that isn’t necessarily sales. It is new business.

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. It’s putting your messaging out there. It’s attracting. It’s that part of the sales process. Yeah. And I think it’s not for everyone, right? And this is back to that thing, like you can’t take someone else’s sales strategy and plop it in your organization because it’s probably not gonna work.

Because if you are doing like a really transactional brokerage selling, do you need to be on podcasts and leading with insight if all you’re selling value-wise is a price? Probably not. But if you are trying to have partnership-type [00:26:00] companies or lead with supply chain solutions, like here, a different way to run your business versus just a different vendor and a different price, that is a conversation that leads to thought leadership as a strategy.

So it really just depends.

Joe Lynch: used to be a blogger. I used to write a lot more articles before I started the podcast. And I wrote an article that said, m- many years ago saying, “Hey, this The buying process starts maybe six months or a year or even two years before the sales process begins. And you’re invisible during those times if you don’t create content. And so I’m obviously I’m doing this. So I believe that this content that we’re creating today, someone will hopefully see this in a year and say, “Oh I s- I saw Holly. I like her. She’s had some good ideas. I love what she’s doing.” And, reach out to you. No guarantee though. That’s the challenge with that this kinda content. Everyone [00:27:00] wants a guarantee. But when I pick up the phone and say, “I’m gonna call 100 people,” there’s no guarantee that any of them are gonna

answer or any are gonna engage. And it’s a it’s a… Sales is a business of a lot of effort that doesn’t seem to go

anywhere, and we would never accept that in a factory. Where you say, “Holly and Joe are in this factory, and 90%

of

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. Selling is so hard, and I actually, I never thought I would spend this much time talking about selling or sales. I’ve never identified as a salesperson. But when I started working at Robinson and started working with the sellers there and realizing all of this stuff that you’re talking about that they were dealing with, it’s wow, you get rejected how many times a day?

Like how do you deal with all of this? Selling is hard enough, and the problem is, what makes it harder is that so many people are just not prepared in any way. They’re not given much kind of guidance from their [00:28:00] organization. They’re not given skill development. They’re not given the processes that they need.

That’s at the sellers. So now let’s take that idea to the leadership level, who have even more of a challenging job, and I think there’s there’s a bunch of research out there. You can probably dispute this fact that I’m trying to come up with right now, but I feel like it’s twenty-six percent or something pretty low, like less or maybe one in four-ish of sales leaders have ever actually been developed as a sales leader.

They might have had selling skills, and they might have had leadership skills, but the sales leader version of that is a little bit different. Growth leadership is different than other kinds of leadership, and most people are just making it up as they go, sellers and leaders alike. And that is just some people might thrive in that particular kind of approach, but it doesn’t have to be that hard.

Joe Lynch: do doesn’t produce product.” They’d be like, “Get them outta here.” Yeah. It’s it’s funny because I worked at a place where, they’re… You know what I say? “Always be closing. Always be closing.” And I was [00:29:00] like “That isn’t appropriate for what we sell.” We’re selling to people who are doing less than truckload stuff, and we need them to sign a long-term agreement with us.

That’s the only way we get good pricing from the LTL carriers. And So the whole idea of always be closing was like that probably worked really well. Something, maybe a car dealer where you say, hey, as soon as that guy walks away, the deal’s over. I’m not going to get this. So I might as well, I have to engage a little more aggressively. I don’t know the right way. There’s a way that you just don’t want that guy or that gal to walk off the lot because you know you’re not going to work with them at that point. They say, just looking, which we all say, right? And anyway, getting back to it, when you don’t have an approach and a whole bunch of people just a little bit of spin, little always be closing, always like I’ve just got charisma, whatever the hodgepodge of ideas that came together to create [00:30:00] your approach and it’s not working, that’s why you call Holly.

Holly LaBoda: And so often it’s just not done by design or intentionally. People have this approach they’ve cobbled together through their own ideas, for what they read in a book, through what ChatGPT told them or just what they have experienced and their hard lessons that they’ve learned over the years.

But it’s not always the smartest way, and potentially you will have elements that are conflicting with each other and making it so much harder than it needs to be. That, tho- that’s the kind of friction that we uncover. For example, this is one of my favorite stories, is I had a client that I was dealing with a couple of weeks ago, or a couple of years ago, on a discovery.

They’re trying to get to do better discovery, better deeper client relationships, better insights into their business, all the right stuff. They got the head of marketing in that in that company got up at the beginning of this workshop that they were paying us a lot of money to do, and she’s “I need to make sure you all remember to chase your RFPs, and here’s your incentive that you [00:31:00] get for every RFP that you start.”

Not even win, just start. And I was like, “Oh man. This is the wrong way.” Here we’re talking about this particular skill set and this behavior this incentive is over here. What do you think people are gonna do next? I just got them to do this discovery. They’re gonna go after RFPs.

Joe Lynch: I always feel like everybody’s business is a little different, but I’ve always felt like when you’re asked to do an RFP and they’re going to compare you on an Excel spreadsheet with 10 other companies, that right there is a show of you failed already. What you needed to do is get there before the RFP went out and convince them we’re the right guy.

Here’s our approach. We’re going to do it this way and you’re going to feel confident in our approach and we’re going to save you money and it’s a much better way than the RFP approach you’ve been doing. Let’s face it, some people are committed to an RFP. That’s what they wanna do. And I’ve always [00:32:00] said that there’s transactional players in our– the shippers. And when you say, “Hey, I’d like to work with you.” I used to get this, “I’d lo- love to talk to you about your freight.” “Oh tell me what you do.” “Oh, we do this, and this.” They go, “Cool. I’ll send you a spreadsheet for this week’s loads, and I just want you to give me a price.” And I said, “We don’t work that way.” That’s the way we work.” And you can almost never convince them that’s not the right approach. And I always would say, “I’m, I don’t wanna save $50 on tomorrow’s load for you. I wanna save you 5% and streamline the process.” A lot of people are just, that’s doesn’t appeal to them, and you can almost never convince them otherwise.

It’s trying to, it’s like trying to convince a Yankees fan to cheer for Boston today, it just doesn’t work.

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. Or the effort you would put in trying to convince them is not gonna be worth it.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. And but I think some– what happens sometimes, I call it the the friend zone, the sales friend zone, where they’ll pick up the phone and talk to you. You’re not getting their business. [00:33:00] They wanna do it a certain way, and you’re calling them, going and talking to them, and you’re never gonna win the business, but they’ll talk to you.

And very few people will talk to me. So I will keep them, keep going over there and “Hey, can I buy you lunch?” Who knows? Maybe this will work out. They’re talking to me. Who knows?

Holly LaBoda: Yep. Yep. That is– So I was just actually talking with a group of sales people about this idea of intent data or intent, ’cause that’s so big right now, and trigger events, and that, that was what we were talking about, like what’s changing in a person’s business to get

Joe Lynch: Please describe intent data for those who aren’t into it yet

Holly LaBoda: Yes. Yes. So the simple– I am not an intent data expert.

If you’re gonna ask Kara Brown to describe it, she’s gonna describe it very differently than I do probably, and she’ll be right. But what what I was talking with this leader, these leaders are about is intent data is exciting because it’s people demonstrating trackable interest in your solution.

So if they go to your website, if they engage in something, if they’re, I don’t know, all of these different signals, there’s all this stuff out there. So that’s [00:34:00] access, right? Or that’s that shows you that they’re interested in something, and they might be willing to give you access. The other part is, though, like why they’re interested.

What changed in their business that got them to go out and look for a solution that’s different in the first place? That’s what, in this particular case, we were talking about focusing on trigger events, but that helps you understand the business context behind the intent. And if you can focus on that as a salesperson, that, especially if you’re doing like bigger strategic, trying to get partnerships, that’s an entrance strategy that is gonna open you up to a different conversation.

Joe Lynch: Yeah, and there’s a whole bunch of different levels of intent data. So the pr- probably the easiest one for most people listening to this podcast is you have a website and let’s just, I’ll say 10,000

people visited your website last month. If you find some number of them that are, you can identify them as shippers maybe even people you’ve talked to recently or maybe six months ago, and they’re on your website [00:35:00] five times over the last month, and they spent 15 minutes looking at two articles, those are the people you should be calling this week, not people who just randomly popped up on your list. And that, that i- that’s showing some sort of intent to working with you. There’s all sorts of companies now that have popped up, 6sense and others that are have intent data and Audience Labs. And by the way I was just texting with Adam Robinson from Robinson Agency about intent data the other day, and then he’s, he wrote an article on it.

And he’s open to it. He just says, I, I– he goes, “I feel like I’m not seeing all the results I want.” But I s- I think he sees what’s coming though, which is more information about who I should call as opposed to just shotgun,

Holly LaBoda: and then you have to figure out, once you know that they have intent, what do you do with that? How do you get in a way that’s “Hey, I saw you were looking at me. [00:36:00] Knock, knock.” There’s a different approach, and that’s bringing it back to the insight and the business trigger and all of that stuff.

Joe Lynch: Yeah, and you never want it to come off as stalking either, where you’re like, “Hey,” we all experience a little bit of this when you’re w- you know, you’re talking about a product and then you’re watching YouTube and you have that commercial for the next six months and you’re like, “God, I should never have said that, that brand.” So there’s another part of your process. This is leadership alignment. Please explain. Please elaborate.

Holly LaBoda: Yeah, that was one of the big pieces as I was sh- as I was shifting from Luminaries to Formula L and what’s the big difference here? Leadership was an intentional layer that, that we added into this operating model. We’ve done leadership development, sales specific leadership development for years and years.

But having it be an ingrained part of the model and the deployment of the how versus just making me a better person is the different shift. So yes, you have to have certain skill sets to be a sales [00:37:00] leader, but when you think about bringing that strategy to execution gap that I was talking about, sales leaders have a certain roles to play in encouraging that, like this, these certain approaches.

So here’s the behavior I need out there, here’s I’m showing up in your ride along, here’s the k- questions I’m asking you. It’s bringing the management and coaching behaviors into the process and making it part of deployment versus just what you do in general.

Joe Lynch: Yeah, and I’m assuming part of this leadership alignment is saying, “Okay, I

have– Holly’s a great sales leader, but I also have her over here doing customer support. Can I say Holly’s gonna be 100% sales? She’s really good at it. She’s good at customer support, but– And I don’t have a customer support problem.

I have a sales problem. Let’s focus Holly 100% on this.” As you said, if you have two jobs, one of them is suffering at all times, and we sometimes have our [00:38:00] salespeople doing multiple jobs.

Holly LaBoda: Yep. And sometimes we need them to for long term or short term, and that’s part of what we have to do. But it’s not a sustainable long term strategy that will lead to predictable results, in my experience.

Joe Lynch: I heard another story a friend of mine who’s doing some consulting in this space, and he said there was… I think there was f-four

or five guys who started up a brokerage, and they were all friends, and they were all working well together, but no– And they said, “Who’s in charge of operations?” It was like I do some. Tom does some. Jerry does a little bit.” Who’s responsible?” I guess the us three.” One guy

Holly LaBoda: Yep,

Joe Lynch: is in charge of ops. And then, “Who’s in charge of sales?” We all we all have our contacts. We all touch it.” Nope.

Holly LaBoda: that means no way.

Joe Lynch: in charge of sales? Yes, exactly. Yeah. When you [00:39:00] say we all are, means no one is actually responsible for sales, and that’s– and From what my friend said, It

was awkward and there was a lot of ego kind of stuff where people… And one of the guys in that discussion said, “You know what? I’ve been thinking for a while that I don’t even wanna work here anymore. I love you guys, but I don’t wanna work here anymore. I wanna go do this. I’ll still be an owner, but no longer get a salary for doing this.” And he said it, when they finally got to a place where he said, “Here’s in charge of the finance, here’s in charge of ops, here’s in charge of sales,” whatever your divisions are, and somebody’s gonna be the CEO. Because they were all friends, because they all came in, they were all owners, they didn’t want to say, “Holly, you work for me.” And you’re like, “Wait, we’re partners.” Just we can trade off every other year if it makes sense, but I’m gonna be the boss for now just ’cause someone [00:40:00] needs to be the boss, and maybe next year we flip.” It’s not easy. These are, these, a lot of ego get in the way for these things.

Holly LaBoda: is. It is. There’s ego that gets in the way of it, but the clarity that you’re talking about, that, that conversation of here are the jobs that need to be done, and we’re not getting them done by sharing them. So let’s talk about how to move forward with that. Even though it resulted in that one partner moving in a different direction, that’s probably the right direction for them and the company, and you are elevating the conversation.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. Yep. And then again that we’re talking about, that’s a senior management. And again, I think when we get down to the lowest level, probably just as bad, maybe worse depending on the company, where

you have this guy’s an SDR and he works for this sales leader who’s who’s waiting for him to do something and unhappy the way he’s doing it, and he feels like he doesn’t have the resources.

And there’s always that, we always have the marketing people say, “I gave you those leads.” And the salespeople are like, “Those leads are crap.” And then

Holly LaBoda: yeah.

Joe Lynch: says, “I [00:41:00] gave you these six things.” And you go, “They were no good.”

Help me understand what’s good, and so I can go after good, because we have to all make those, all those handoffs perfect, or the best we can anyway.

Holly LaBoda: Yep, and that, that is– That, what you’re saying right there, is so much of the reason why we always start with that clarity of current state and the definition of the goal because so many people think that they have some of– they have clarity of their ideal customer profile, but marketing thinks something different than this sales guy, so you don’t have clarity.

So let-let’s make sure we have all of those pieces and that everybody is aligned on them. And then we’ll move forward.

Joe Lynch: Yep. It reminds me of I’m a big football fan, and it’s a simple game. We’ve all watched it. When there’s new coaches, and a lot of times you’ll see the new coach will say, “I want you, defensive player, to… If you see this happen, you just run straight here, straight there. And I don’t want you thinking.”

A lot of times they’ll say, “I don’t want you thinking.” [00:42:00] And “All I need you to see the cue, do it.” And I think sometimes when we make it too complicated because I have multiple roles or unclear who does what I, I hesitate and I don’t make– I don’t do what I’m supposed to do. And that, by the way that also applies.

You ever watch the World War II movies or… you might not have to. Given my age and my gender, I have to.

Holly LaBoda: No I have watched and read more about World War II than any probably person should,

but…

Joe Lynch: notice that they always say, “Remember your training. Remember your training.” They’re constantly saying, “Remember your training.” ‘Cause the military we gotta give them credit for one of these things is that during World War II and other wars, they brought in a whole bunch of people from a wide cross-section of the population and got them all on the same page and working really well together.

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. Yep, that’s

Joe Lynch: Not easy and in horrible conditions.

Holly LaBoda: Yeah.

I think this is actually I’m– I don’t have a military background. I will not speak about anything like this because I won’t do it [00:43:00] right. But it’s that I always think of that Mike Tyson quote “Everybody has a plan till you get punched in the face.”

Joe Lynch: one.

Holly LaBoda: That I think it’s the same idea k- because the military knows that even if you have a great plan, things are gonna go crazy when you’re in the fields. You need your folks prepared for every possible thing that would go crazy, and they can make the right choice in a second without thinking because they’re already prepared for it.

We don’t usually have that same level of consequences that would come from making a slow decision, so we don’t have to ingrain it quite as much. But if we can get a little bit further down that path, then we can move a little bit faster, make quicker decisions, and make them in the right direction.

Yeah.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. So another thing you guys do is you do some coaching ar- around all these topics. Please please explain how that works in the process

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. So anytime we’re doing any kind of development of a person or a team, like not company processes, we always think at the behavioral level. So what are the [00:44:00] behaviors that this role is expected to do? How is this person performing against them? And then if there are things they’re doing really well, how do we amplify that?

If there are things that are slowing them down, how do we minimize so the, anytime we do coaching or any kind of development, we start with the behaviors, and then we develop that specific skill. We might do that in a one-on-one coaching development, like to practice it afterwards, or our learning labs are like broader virtual classroom development.

So start with the skill, learn the skill, practice and apply the skill with a person helping you do that me or somebody else on my team, the consultants that we work with. And then we’ve also infused AI practice in there too. So the practice and application that a coach would do is great, but the AI practice can give you just the reps to get them in over and over in a minimal discomfort kind of realm.

There’s not big consequences or anything that come with it. So AI practice, the manager enablement and coaching, and then the behavior [00:45:00] change measurement. That’s all the part of… Anytime we, we try to move the needle with an employee, like a person or a team, we’re looking at all of those things in a progression.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. I saw a stat, and I’ve seen this many times, but 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs played sp- competitive sports growing up, and I always think they all had coaches that– And you learn to be coached, you learn to take a little bit of criticism usually ’cause you go, “Hey, I take criticism from this guy ’cause he has my best interest at heart.” I’ve joked with my friends that I haven’t had a hard workout since a high school coach was not behind me calling me names, right? They see things. I have an executive coach and she sees things. She knows my strengths, she knows my weakness. She’s done those assessments with me over time, and she has said many times, “Why are you doing this?

Why are you doing that? Should you consider something else?” Where I [00:46:00] was like, “Oh, I didn’t realize I needed to consider something else.” And

Holly LaBoda: Yep. That’s so

Joe Lynch: coaching, coaching is so key. And by the way, all Fortune 500 companies, their senior management all has coaches now. That’s just the way it– These are the guys who are leading the biggest companies. They have executive coaches who they’re working with for good reason.

Holly LaBoda: Because none of us have to be heroes. We can all have a system that supports us to be better than we could be on our own

Joe Lynch: Yep, and again, so often you don’t see what might be very obvious to you, “Joe needs to fix this.” I don’t see it. I look in the mirror, I don’t see it. You say, “Joe, stop doing blank and start doing this,” or, “You have this strength that you’re not taking advantage of,” or, “What’s preventing you from following the process that we agreed that we were gonna take?” Anyway, enough of my blather. I’m gonna summarize what we talked about, Holly, then I want your final thoughts. Before we get into final thoughts, one more time, who do you work with? What do– Who do you work with, and [00:47:00] then what is the last straw when they go, “All right, I’m calling Holly back. I know I should have last year.” What is– Who do you work with, and why are they calling you back and saying, “Yes, let’s do this”?

Holly LaBoda: Yes. Yes. I typically work with heads of sales or company leadership, so CEO, CRO, at logistics and distribution companies and professional service companies. So anytime anytime people are– see a gap between what the results actually are and what they want them to be, they should call me. But usually when people do end up calling me is when they’ve already tried to fix it multiple times and it hasn’t worked for them.

So they’ve had… If you have three quarters in a row or something like that where you’re like, “Okay, we still aren’t putting up the pipeline numbers, we still don’t have the new logos we need despite all the times telling our folks to do it,” let’s talk. Let’s not have it be another quarter.

Joe Lynch: Yeah. Internal initiatives sometimes fail just because there’s… It doesn’t seem like there’s any extra resources. We said, “Hey, we’re gonna somehow find an [00:48:00] extra 10 hours a week to do this.” Where are we getting that? We’re already busy. Some- That’s why you bring in

a resource like Holly and her team who say, “We do this all the time. We’ve seen these problems at a dozen other companies, and we can fix them on a timely basis. And by the way, we’re 100%– we’re responsible for making sure the results get happen in your company.”

Holly LaBoda: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve done it before. We can help you. It’s easy, an easier path, a quicker path, a fast track to your growth. And what is a little bit different, I know we’re close to out of time, but what’s a little bit different about what– how we approach our customers is I actually don’t want you to be my client for 20 years.

I want to help you solve these solutions, figure out these particular problems, and elevate your skill set internally. That’s why the system is built the way it is. So then you’re just running, and you don’t need me after, after we figure it out. So we’re trying to make everything better and not ingrain ourselves forever into an [00:49:00] organization, which is a little bit different

Joe Lynch: Yep, I love it. I love it. So I’m gonna summarize what we talked about, then I’m gonna get your final thoughts on the topic. So I’m talking with a friend, Holly Laboda, and we’re talking about scaling with intent, removing the constraints to growth. We talked about, first and foremost, you guys come in and you guys have a four-pronged approach.

You do this current state assessment, which is really identifying the growth constraints, whatever’s holding you back. And it’s hard to assess that internally sometimes. It’s hard to see it internally sometimes. Holly and her team, they see this all the time, so they know what they’re looking for. You identify those growth constraints, and then you put the processes and the systems and the enable- enablement in place to get the system-led growth, not necessarily this heroic sales guy. Our business is famous for saying, “Oh, I need a guy with a book of business that will hire him.”

And I’m like… I said I say this all the time now. There is no such [00:50:00] thing as someone who has a book of business who can take it from company A to company B. Stop saying it. It’s stupid. But even if it was, live by the sword, die by it. Rather than be dependent on one hero or a couple heroes who basically own your business because they know everything and they do everything, you want systems, you want processes, you want sales enablement and of course, technology.

But technology’s the last thing we should be talking about. Technology is not the silver bullet. Le- next, last, or s- not last, leadership alignment. You gotta n- make sure that the strategy and the incentives and tools are all in place to push that to growth, and make sure that everybody’s in the right seats. Nick Saban has this thing, I think he said, “It’s my job to make sure that the right guys are on the bus.” And he says, “And secondly, I need to make sure everybody’s in the right seat.” Last but not [00:51:00] least, you guys do a lot of behavioral coaching around this stuff because some people are gonna have to grow. And by the way, we all want that. We want growth in our people. We want growth in ourselves. Sometimes that growth comes with coaching. The best executives in the world have coaches. Again, I– If you look it up, you’ll see Fortune 500 companies have executive coaches for their leadership team. There’s a reason. And I know everyone’s going, “We don’t have that kind of money,” but they see the value in it. And these are the, these are the Jamie Dimons of the world, so if th- if he’s getting coached, the rest of us can have a coach.

Anyway, put a big old bow on this one. Final thoughts on the topic, Holly

Holly LaBoda: So all of those things are real important trends. I think that r- if people are taking one thing away from this conversation, I’m hoping they take away that your growth strategy needs to be tailored to you, to your company, to your customers, to your unique marketplace. And then everything else needs [00:52:00] to come after that.

And if you’ve been having multiple quarters in a row, if you’ve had a dramatic strategy shift, like the market has changed, there’s been an acquisition, PE investment, something like that, or if you just feel like you’re tired of getting run over by your sales function and want a better way to do it, let’s talk.

Joe Lynch: Excellent. Excellent. So Holly, I’ll make sure I put a link to your LinkedIn profile, link to your website, any other link you and your go-to-market team give me, I’ll put in the show notes.

Holly LaBoda: That’s great.

LinkedIn is great.

Joe Lynch: yeah, and give me th- give me those links. We’ll put those in the show notes, and people can reach out and talk to you. What conferences will we see you and the fine folks from Formula L at?

Holly LaBoda: Yeah. I think I– our next one is going to be TMSA Elevate in Denver at the

Joe Lynch: Out

Holly LaBoda: of June. Yeah.

Joe Lynch: And you’re speaking there, right?

Holly LaBoda: Yeah, I have a couple of sessions. I’m on a panel about growth strategies, and I’m leading a session for sales practitioners who wanna do real discovery that actually moves deals forward.

Joe Lynch: I love it. What other conferences? I think,

Holly LaBoda: That’s the only one I’m committed to for the rest of the [00:53:00] year.

I do a lot of them early in the year like other people do. Curious about Broker Carrier Summit. I haven’t been to that before. I’m thinking about checking that out.

Joe Lynch: think that’s this… Is it this week or

Holly LaBoda: There’s one this in April, but I f- or maybe

Joe Lynch: then There’s

another one.

Holly LaBoda: another one, yeah.

Joe Lynch: Great event. Yeah, I can’t get to all of the events, but I talk to all the event people and each one has its own personality. Each one has a reason to be there. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time.

I love what you guys are doing.

Holly LaBoda: Thanks, Joe. This was a

Joe Lynch: you. It was fun for me too. It’s my pleasure.

And thank all of you for listening to my show. Your support’s very much appreciated. Until next time, onward and upward.