21. John Buckner ~ Insightful Selling

Transcript

0:03 All right, we've got another episode of Tailwind. Today we're joined by John Beckner. John, tell us a little bit more about yourself.

0:10 Yeah, thanks Austin. So, we're really am very grateful to you for having me. I have a a company called Insightful

0:17 Selling. I help organizations turn their sales around and get to be high performance sales teams. I was 30 years

0:25 in corporate America and executive sales and marketing roles. So for me now working primarily with small to midsize businesses, lots of privately held

0:33 family businesses, this is special to me. So my dad had his own business and his father before him. And so for me to

0:42 come into this stage of my life and to be able to be of assistance to help organizations grow, I can't think of

0:48 anything, you know, more special than to be able to to do that now for these organizations that I can assist in their

0:56 journey. Yeah, it's it's such a simple concept, but the fact of the matter is is sales is what drives a business forward. And that's really the thing

1:05 that most companies that I see need the most help with. Uh myself included, somebody who had some startups and struggled with them. Um because I just

1:14 didn't I wasn't a good seller. And I'm still in the process of becoming an okay one. Uh but just the difference between being terrible and being okay uh made a

1:22 huge difference. Um, but you're telling me a little bit more about your dad's business and his reluctance to prospect and I asked you to stop and give it to

1:30 me fresh. So, I'd love to hear it fresh uh for the first time here.

1:34 Yeah. When I was age 12, you know, dad moved us to a small town in rural foothills in North Carolina so he could

1:42 own a small land surveying company and he had that itch like his dad before him. So he left a large public company

1:48 to enter his entrepreneurial chapter and you know dad was an engineers engineer steady conscientious

1:56 he there wasn't a single land surveying problem he couldn't solve so armed with a bush axe and a clipboard dad he set

2:04 out to measure angles and distances he used to always tell me son what we do is we measure angles and distances and this was in the vast farmlands of North

2:12 Carolina so for a while he used his predecessors name and phone number because in that day if your company's

2:20 had a place in the yellow pages that was essential because you wanted that phone to ring right but after a couple years dad transitioned to Buckner Associates land

2:29 surveying and civil engineering and based on his reputation for quality work you know dad hoped he could sustain and eventually

2:37 you know this expands little enterprise so I worked with him for eight summers and I remember on the way home from a

2:44 job one time I said to dad, "How do you get customers?" And he said, "Son, I want them to come

2:51 to me." And unfortunately for us, you know, revenue pres proved to be more elusive than that. So, good quality work

3:00 wasn't the only factor. And for the bigger jobs, these large outfits started coming out of Charlotte and they had teams of men and high-tech equipment and

3:08 lower prices. So instead of subdivisions with 300 homes, you know, dad was relegated to lot surveys and other meager jobs and from the clients who

3:17 found him in the yellow pages, right? So did he not realize that despite his professional engineering license that that was important? It was a good

3:26 credential, but would it would it be sufficient to obtain new customers?

3:31 And you know the answer to that, Austin, dad fell prey to one of the most common issues that inhibit revenue growth. He

3:37 preferred the other part of his job to the sales part of his job. And unfortunately, our surveying company

3:45 dwindled. Sadly, he didn't realize that he needed to survey for new customers if he wanted to deliver the beautiful

3:53 engineering that he enjoyed so much. And so, you know, I do this a little bit to honor my dad. So I want to help other

4:01 organizations that find themselves in the same place DAB was in th not just strive but thrive and especially on the

4:10 revenue and using prospecting as a key discipline in order to grow their business.

4:16 Yeah. Uh so did he ever come to the realization did he ever have his aha moment when he was running that company where he went I actually have to do some

4:24 uh some prospecting myself or it was it unfortunately just like a long lesson learned which I've had plenty of those.

4:31 Yeah more the latter Austin. So the long lesson learned when it came to dad and we didn't create you know substantial

4:39 value and it wasn't when we finally had to exit the business it wasn't a big sale because we hadn't you know we

4:47 didn't have the broad customer list hundreds of maps in the registar deeds in our old county with dad's official

4:54 stamp on that map and that's part of his legacy but we're still you know I think when you think about dads the dad and

5:03 and and moms who have their own business and they and they they are all about excellence in whatever the function is of what they do.

5:12 Yeah.

5:12 What we want to do now Austin is help them get comfortable around how we obtain new

5:20 business which then gives them the freedom to do what they love and do it with excellence.

5:26 Yeah. So I I mean I totally understand that as somebody who's you know started my own companies and currently you know founder um you know I want to do the the

5:35 programming I want to do this all this other stuff uh but my primary function is a sales role and even as we grow and

5:42 we bring on a sales team my primary function will remain to be a sales role and I think that's one of those things that we just don't talk about enough and sure there's going to be different

5:50 amounts of um you know how much are you doing a direct sales process in your dayto-day day as an owner that might

5:57 shift and evolve, but you'll never really be far away from that. And like I got an MBA. I got I went through an entrepreneur program. Guess how many classes they gave me for uh on sales.

6:09 Exactly. And it was the only class that I really needed to have during that entire process.

6:15 Um I mean obviously I learned all that stuff, but none of the things I learned mattered because I was missing this big part of it. Um, so for for the small

6:23 business owners, the owners of their companies or whoever who's out there kind of hesitant around doing this prospecting activity, what are some of

6:30 the lessons learned that you know you saw throughout that process and you'd want other people to avoid that uh that

6:37 mistake of not doing that part of the business?

6:41 Yeah. So, one of the things that that I want to share is first prospecting itself. comes

6:49 from the Latin root word perspectus that we know we've heard of business perspectus before but it literally means a look

6:56 forward you know a view ahead and as entrepreneurs like you are and I am we have to have a view ahead we have to look forward right and so literally

7:05 back in the in the old days the word prospector had to do with somebody who was looking ahead to find mineral

7:13 deposits you know so this gold mining analogy is very apt here. So I wanted

7:22 you to know that not very far from me there was a Carolina gold rush and it it was about 1799. It preceded the

7:29 California more famous one by 50 years which came around 1848.

7:35 So what's kind of interesting to me is I thought that the gold miner was the same thing as the prospector, but in Toy

7:42 Story they got it right. So, this is actually I don't know if you can see this is a little Yeah. So, this is the prospector from the movie Toy Story.

7:54 So, guess what? The prospector actually wasn't the one who extracted the gold.

8:00 Yeah, that's right. The prospector's role was identify the promising territory. So find the place, study the clues, search for signs, test likely

8:09 locations, separate promising claims from barren ground, and keep moving until the valuable source was found, the

8:16 vein of gold. So only when the gold was discovered could the serious mining

8:24 began. So this guy was all about discovery.

8:27 Okay, it was about discovery. And that's kind of where I want to start. You got to fish where the fish are. Yeah.

8:35 You know, and so let's just understand that. Sorry for jumping to another metaphor, but the prospector would would

8:44 say where where in tarnation do we look, right? and he would just take his pan and kind of try out different streams

8:52 and there'd be a lot of dirt in the pan, a little shallow mountain and and and hillside streams until finally a few

9:00 flexcks of gold would kind of surface to the top. So gold it kind of surface to the top of the dirt when you would

9:08 shuffle the pan. It was a process as you know because you do this of sorting and sifting,

9:15 right? But the first thing was to fish where the fish are. So we know that from our marketing friends. So target

9:21 markets. We want to make sure that we know the this the market segment, the industry. We want to know the geography.

9:30 So what are the boundaries? Kind of like dad like what are the parameters and the boundaries of this map that we're looking at? He was great at drawing

9:38 maps. The ideal client profile and the buyer's persona. So that's kind of where we start. And that makes our work super

9:46 efficient. So one of the biggest pitfalls for salespeople is they have this contention. They'll go, "Well, this is a big time waste. I have to invest a

9:54 lot of time with a lot of uncertainty." So one of the unlocks in prospecting is make your time more valuable by being

10:02 efficient and by fishing where the fish are. And that's the upfront work to define where

10:10 we're, you know, our landscape, where we're going to put our rod and reel into the water or in the case of the gold miner, where he's going to stick his pan

10:18 in what creek or creek if you're an old-timer.

10:23 I think both are good. So, I mean, I totally totally understand like the the metaphor there and how it it's supposed

10:31 to help us kind of start going through that process, but you know, would you say that the prospector still is going out there and maybe testing the hypothesis and finding some empty cricks

10:40 and having to go to the next one? And is it not one of these things where you can plan, plan, plan, but at some point in time, you got to just take your, you

10:47 know, your gold pan and get out there. I really appreciate that you've embraced my my metaphor and you're now you're

10:55 you've taken my words and flung them right back at me. Yeah. Yeah. There's an experimental nature to this and there's

11:03 a needle and a haststack nature. So that we're we cannot exhaust

11:10 all the cicks out there. In fact, we got to be willing to stick our pan in a lot of different creeks or we've got to stick our rod in a lot of different

11:17 ponds in order to find the fish. Now, but we're going to be efficient by being a little bit more selective with that.

11:23 And then the other thing I wanted to do is to help you gauge effort. So, going back to the the other pitfall is that

11:31 salespeople go into this fear of rejection mode.

11:36 I I'll tell you why they do it. It's, you know, prospecting math. to know your ratio. All right? So, let let me just give you an example. If you have a 100

11:45 prospects, it could lead to 20 conversations and then 10 meetings and finally five projects, right?

11:53 So, the paradigm that people get stuck in is that's a 5% hit rate, right? Know your ratio.

12:00 Yeah. Five out of these 100 prospects are actually going to be

12:07 projects or wins or that's my close rate.

12:12 So the way most sales people think of it is that's 95% rejection. Right.

12:18 Right. That's the wrong mindset. So I think part of what you do on your show, Austin, is that you kind of shift

12:25 mindset. So, let's not think of that as 95% rejection rate. Let's think about it as 5% yield.

12:35 Yeah, I like that restructuring for sure.

12:38 Yeah, 5% yield. So, know your prospecting math, know your ratio, and if it's 5% yield, that's kind of set up

12:47 my work plan, right? So, now I know that I've got my quotion of work is 100. So, who wouldn't do that? because we know

12:54 the value of those five projects in businessto business. Let's say we know the value average value of five projects. So, who wouldn't put out the

13:03 100, you know, outreach, that first contact, right? Let's begin by doing the

13:10 initial outreach whether that be by email by LinkedIn instant messaging by

13:17 uh text messaging by direct mail or some other sort of or making a connection at a networking event and going home and

13:26 putting that into our CRM because we've had a real quality touch and saying that's a prospect. I'm declaring that as

13:33 one of my 100 prospects. Who wouldn't do that if they understood that it's not about 95% rejection, it's about 5% yield.

13:45 Yeah. Yeah. It's uh and it's also interesting too to go back to like the very direct prospecting like example. I

13:53 and it's been a long time since I, you know, was on this little class field trip, but I remember them talking about how these prospectors would go out into the wilderness all by themselves looking

14:01 for a long time and then they would get insanely rich because they would find that vein of gold, but they were out there looking for that vein of gold for

14:09 a long time, but they were getting there probably in their instance like 1% of the time that they were actually hitting on their idea, but that was all it really took. And to some degree, it's

14:18 like, you know, you can have those higher customer acquisition costs to be able to say, look, look, I might need to reach to 500 people, but if that yields

14:27 me 1% and I get my five people, that could be all I need for the entire year, depending on how your business is structured or how things are, you know,

14:34 what your rates are or anything like that. And you don't necessarily have to even have a super high yield. Or maybe you need to have a very high yield. Um,

14:42 and it just becomes one of those games of trying to figure out does does your your addressable market, your uh yield

14:50 rate and your revenue off of that yield rate all line up and does that math actually like take you to the other to to success and if not play that game or

14:59 like restructure it. Uh, do you have any advice on kind of how people should sit down and navigate those waters?

15:08 Yeah, I do. So, I have a couple of thoughts and I'm going to go back to our gold miner analogy for a second. So, the first one is that, you know, a minor didn't expect to find gold in every pan.

15:19 He knew he was going to come up with a lot of dirt. Yeah.

15:21 So, here's the thing. A salespeople or business owners who have to put on their revenue hat, let's not expect a deal

15:30 from every contact, right? Let's not expect a deal from every call.

15:35 But let's first understand the yield going going back to our point and the other one I want to mention and this is

15:42 the number one quality and and it addresses the number one pitfall of prospecting.

15:51 So the number one quality is persistence. So persistent it's persistence is rewarded with gold. We have to be able to persevere, right?

16:00 And then we what it addresses is giving up too soon.

16:08 So inside that ratio, you know, 100 to get five.

16:15 What I didn't touch on and I want to provide this as another another point is how many touches is it going to take?

16:24 Yeah. So this is the cultivation part, right?

16:28 So here's the data. So 80% of consummated sales require five or more

16:34 follow-ups and the average to get a first meeting, so a face to face like you and I are having now is about eight.

16:45 Yeah.

16:46 So I had this recently. I have a guy that I met at an event. He has the need for my services.

16:55 He even indicated that in small talk at one of the breaks.

17:01 So I tell you what, um I'm at about five and I'm ready to give up. Full confession. I'm human, too.

17:09 Yep.

17:10 Right. But but I know the data says eight to get a first meeting. He's not rejecting me. The need hasn't gone away.

17:19 However, timing, right? Convenience. But here's another part and getting it scheduled. And I've really worked on

17:26 this. I've made multiple multiple suggestions because I know in order to get together, we can sort of get to an understanding, maybe form up kind of a

17:35 contract about what I might do to serve him on his journey to get to where he wants to go. And I've portrayed a better way. I've portrayed already in my

17:43 communications a clear path, the destination I know he wants to go where I can guide him as his guide. He's the hero. I'm the guide. Okay.

17:52 Yeah. But here's the thing.

17:55 The need or the pain or the the aspiration that that that is going to be the motivating force. Lots of motivation.

18:05 One is I'm in pain and the situation's become intolerable. That's not the case

18:11 here. It's I have goals of growth and I aspire to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yeah,

18:19 John knows the way and he could actually help me get here. So, it's more aspirational, but this is the problem with aspirational stuff. It can be

18:27 postponed for a while big time.

18:30 So, I'm in I'm in postpone postponement purgatory. I don't like it. Yeah.

18:38 But I can already tell you, you know, Austin, that it's going to take me at least three more touches. But because of this podcast today, I ain't giving up.

18:47 Yeah.

18:49 because I want to be this guy and I want to be able to tell you in a few weeks or maybe a few months it might take that I actually got that piece of business that I told you about on the podcast.

19:00 Yeah, I want to hear that you got it for sure. It's funny it's funny how somebody can have a goal but then especially it

19:07 might be in the situation where if you're telling him he needs to prospect more, he might be like I don't know if I want that pot of gold more than I want to pick up the phone and call somebody that that doesn't know me at the moment.

19:17 So the pain might be imbalanced in the wrong way. Um so yeah. So I mean like so you talked about like you know the the

19:24 gold rush uh near you know near you North Carolina. Is there anywhere that we can dig out of this and like are

19:31 there other gold rushes we should take into consideration and what those might help us understand about the prospector?

19:36 Because it I had not really ever put it together with an actual gold mining or sorry I keep switching back and forth because I had gold miner and prospect is

19:44 the same thing in my head before we started talking.

19:48 Yeah, I want to tell you, you know, I want to go back to that analogy again at the at the end and just tell you about

19:55 what happened in North Carolina because I don't think everybody knows the story because it was much smaller. But before I do that, I just wanted to echo

20:02 something you said at the very outset and you said it for it was profound.

20:07 Revenue is the lifeblood of any business. M so you know the entire financial framework of a business from the budget

20:15 to expenses even how we pay everybody including the owners it all begins with revenue so selling and selling is a

20:22 critical part to play right so there's no doubt that recurring revenue from existing customers is vital like that's a part of it you have to retain those

20:31 customers and try to go deeper more customer penetration and then it's retention over time nonetheless

20:38 nonetheless with all of that said the ultimate measure and this is going to go straight to prospecting. The ultimate

20:45 measure is how many never done business before with accounts did we obtain this year?

20:51 It's the ultimate question often and here's the reason why it tests whether our value proposition is current and

20:59 working now in the present. Remember some of those customers you acquired a few years ago,

21:06 good for you. you've been able to retain them, but they, you know, they bought on the on the basis of who you were 36 months ago.

21:16 Mhm.

21:17 So, what I always like to do is do we have I like to know, do we have the capability of winning market share in 2026?

21:25 Yeah.

21:25 All right. So, on the front on the tip end of that spear is prospect.

21:31 So, and I'll tell you what, upstream for this customer acquisition goal, the ultimate measure, you guessed it, it's a prospector,

21:39 it's this guy or, you know, for a certain hours of the week, every week, we're going to be this

21:47 guy. And the way I want to think about it is daily ritual, weekly measurable,

21:55 monthly review. If we can do the daily ritual, set aside a few hours a day or

22:01 more depending on your business. And if we have a weekly target measurable, don't t don't measure every day, but

22:09 measure every week because inside the week there can be some puts and takes and then monthly review. What is that?

22:16 that management direct and skip level care about what's happening because remember there's a lag with prospecting.

22:24 What you do today may not pay off for 60 90 120 180 days. So it's a lag.

22:35 There's a lag between effort and return on investment. Yeah.

22:40 Big lag there. So get started today right with prospecting. It is the ultimate measure. You got to have the

22:48 You've got to have the discipline to start.

22:51 You've got to have the willpower to stay persistent. And you got to stake your claim in order to find gold.

23:00 So, that leads me to the uh the Carolina Gold Rush. It happened only a few miles from where I'm sitting right now. And

23:08 what what what really occurred there was in the 1800s there was this farmer named Conrad Reed. His son discovered a

23:17 strange yellow rock in a creek which is now very very close to where I live in Cabaris County. And for the years the

23:24 family used this strange gold rock as a doors stop. They were unaware that it was a 17 pound gold nugget.

23:32 Mhm. Yeah. That's right. Right here. Crazy.

23:36 Soon hundreds of prospectors were arriving in the Piedmont of North Carolina. They walked creek beds. They

23:44 they dug shallow pits. They carried pans from stream to stream. They were hoping to strike it rich. And one story

23:51 repeated itself over and over again. A prospect would spend weeks digging for a claim. He'd find a few flakes of gold, but not enough to adjust justify his

24:00 effort. So frustrated, he'd he'd move on, right? And the next the next man would arrive and he'd dig a little deeper discover and finally discover the

24:08 vein. And the difference wasn't intelligence. The difference wasn't luck. The difference was just a few feet,

24:15 right? And that's one more stream. And that was prospecting, you know. And so for every salesperson

24:24 who the phone the phone feels heavy, the inbox feels ignored, you know, the next call seems

24:32 pointless, the temptation to move on is is to what you really like to do. Like my dad, beautiful engineering,

24:39 it's so overwhelming that we tend to to to stop and we we we stop short of the

24:48 goal. We leave the putt short of the cup, right? And we were just about ready to score. And that's the message I

24:55 really want you to have coming away from today's podcast is, you know, the Carolina Gold Rush wasn't bought won by the guys that found the first flakes. It

25:04 was won by the prospectors who kept digging when everybody else went home. Yeah. And that's the reward.

25:13 It's worth It's worth pure gold. It definitely is. I I really want to you said something very interesting. I think

25:21 it it bears worth like repeating at the at the start of you know this uh this nice summation was um you know by

25:28 counting or by looking at the uh the new business one and testing your value prop. Um like just thinking about it

25:37 from the perspective of if nothing else other than to understand how the market has shifted, it's worth doing it, right?

25:42 cuz it's like well you know you might had a value prop that made sense in a market that you know like to your point 2 3 years old your value prop did exist

25:50 and it did make sense and it could sell but who knows what changed in those 3 years who know what changed in the last 3 months I mean things with technology

25:58 are so volatile now and just to be able to continue to maintain those conversations just to find out I mean

26:05 you were talking about the yield of uh of the revenue which is obviously the goal at all times But the other 95

26:13 conversations are at least helping you understand maybe my value prop needs to evolve. Maybe what they're giving me isn't the direct gold, but it's the the

26:22 flakes to then start understanding I have to start rethinking how I talk about what we do. Doesn't mean that the value has changed or you aren't

26:30 providing it, but how it fits in the marketplace has changed. And if you're not talking to the people on a regular basis, it's just it's gone from there.

26:37 Um, I think that one's so important because I've I've made those calls to different groups and I've had, you know, a month where it felt super dry, but I

26:45 learned a ton during it. Didn't get me any revenue, so it still kind of hurt, but at the same time, like I just think that's such a value a valuable perspective. And then to think about

26:54 also what you do now, how that affects you. You know, you're saying 30, 60, 90.

26:59 I've had things where I've started, you know, deal prospecting from a year ago that are finally getting over the line and were worth every step of it.

27:08 But now what I need to think about too is I mean I hope everything I do today lands in 30 days, but I have to also acknowledge that it might be something

27:16 that lands in 2027 or in some instances in 2028. and just continuing to to have that persistence that you were talking about and saying, "All right, well,

27:24 maybe it's that next stream or maybe I just need to keep working a couple feet down from here and not give up and not have like a couple more touches."

27:32 Um, so I really like that. I It's going to take me a while to remember to think of prospecting and mining as different, but I'll eventually get there.

27:41 Um, any other final thoughts? just kind of put a nice bow tie on, you know, uh what we've talked about so far today.

27:50 Yeah. Let's not be discouraged.

27:53 You know, less we be discouraged. We Let's just remember that there's a it's a world of opportunity. It's an ocean of

28:02 ponds, you know, to stick your fishing pole in. And I'll tell you something, going back to my point about a need with

28:10 a a problem that needs to be solved. And during the the time of the problem, there's tension and there's internal

28:18 turmoil that's still underneath the surface that's brewing or there's an aspiration that hasn't been met for growth. I mentioned that before and

28:27 trying to get from sort of point A to point B. Well, there's inertia involved in that. So things need time to ripen.

28:35 So a lot of times no isn't no forever. It's just the prospect is not ready yet.

28:41 So what that requires of us as prospectors is to be in the market all the time with presence.

28:49 So don't make no mistake that the effort is not wasted.

28:53 The fruit is waiting to ripen before it can be plucked. Okay? So that includes that the customer, our hero's got to be ready to go on the journey.

29:03 Yeah.

29:04 And as guides, we I mean we can't take them to that to the mountaintop. We can't summit the mountain unless they're

29:11 along for the journey. So that's part of it is really we have a lot of compassion for our customers and sometimes the

29:20 customer prospects and sometimes the enemy is inertia, right?

29:24 Roots waiting to be ripened or it can be plucked either pain driven and frustration and it's becoming more and

29:31 more intolerable. But make no mistake, something's going on there. And the same thing with the aspiration. maybe, you know, I I can't get to that in Q2, but I

29:40 can get to it in Q4. And, you know, John, I will give you the meeting. Come back to me the 12th time, right? And

29:48 finally, in October, I'll meet with you for no other reason. This guy's going to be responsive and great with my business because who follows up 12 times?

29:58 All right. I've already I've I've auditioned. I deserve it at that point, right? So that's I I just wanted to

30:07 share don't be discouraged. It takes time partly because these needs the fruit ripens intermittently and that is not always on our schedule.

30:19 So we have to trust in the process and lean in. Lean in and embrace the

30:27 process. That's how championship teams are made by the way. They're they're willing to subject themselves to and

30:33 they've learned to love the process, not just the game that that those occur periodically. But practice and preparation, as you know, is every day.

30:45 Yeah. Yeah. It's so true. I just redid a list that I had worked a year ago and I

30:52 had my message changed a little bit. Uh things have shifted in the market. I went back through that same list from a year ago and I got a bunch of yeses that

31:01 were all nos. And well, the funny thing is is uh when I was talking when I was talking to them when I was talking to them, I didn't presume anyone remembered me cuz who's going to remember the

31:09 person who reached out had a couple phone calls a year ago. But like one out of 10 people were like, "Wait a second.

31:16 Didn't you call me like before? Don't I know you?" And like, "You do. You do." And I didn't want to assume. And it was, you know, and it was totally fine.

31:23 Nobody was like, "Well, why would you ever call me again?" They're like, "You know what? let me listen to him. Like he's not going to leave me alone. So let's keep going. So I'm totally with you on the don't get discouraged part.

31:33 Even from like a one day to one week to one month, one year, you know, you gota all those time frames, you just got to stay persistent. So

31:42 great job. You earned that. You know, hey, I'm taking a lesson from you today, Austin. You're my You know what? I'm going to emulate you. You're a a poster

31:50 child for a good prospecting today. So, I think eventually you're going to you should enjoy this. I may have to send it to you out to Oregon

31:59 so that you can put it on your desk to remind the grays coming into my beard. I just got to let the beard go a little bit more. I'll look just like that guy.

32:08 All right, John. I really appreciate it.

32:10 Thank you so much for taking the time today. This is great.

32:13 Yeah, 100%. I enjoyed our our conversation. Please uh let's let's stay connected.