Call The Damn Leads

It's three in the morning in Vegas. Daryl Dittmer has a flight to catch, a proposal in hand, and a several million dollar deal waiting for him in Salt Lake City. His partner isn't answering texts or calls. He finds the guy on the casino floor playing Texas hold 'em, drunk.

Coffee. A stop at Denny's. More coffee. The guy still smells like booze, and he's slurring his words when they walk into the meeting. Daryl watched about 75 to 100 grand in commission walk out the door because somebody else couldn't treat the night before with any respect.

Here's the part that makes Daryl worth listening to. He was 20 years into his sales career when it happened, so it didn't put him in a slump and it didn't shake his belief in what he was selling. He stayed pissed, kept doing business with the guy anyway (best deals on the block), and used the situation to get better terms.

He also came up the hard way. Blue-collar house, Dad was a mechanic, in recovery at 19. He told his wife a bunch of stories from those years, and she said, "That's not the guy I see in front of me right now." He told her to remind him to write a book someday. Two books later, with two more in progress, he's still writing about the thing that stops people from moving.

His definition of success changed somewhere in the middle of all that money he was making. Ask him now and he'll tell you it's waking up in the morning with a smile on your face, and that getting there means figuring out what doesn't work for you and throwing it off the table. Sometimes that's social media. Sometimes it's people.

And when a young rep asks him where to start? Get your why figured out, and make it big enough to keep driving when you get your butt kicked.

In This Episode You'll Learn

- How Daryl handled a partner blowing a several million dollar deal, and why he kept doing business with him after

- The way he turned that blown call into better terms without shaming anybody into anything

- Why the moment a deal falls apart doesn't have to bleed into the next two weeks of your pipeline

- What made him stop chasing money as the scoreboard, 25 years ago, and what he swapped it for

- His approach to giving people hard feedback they never asked for, and why he thinks holding back is unfair to them

- The morning practice he runs six days a week (and the reason it's six, not seven)

- How to build a why that survives hang-ups, slammed doors, and a spouse who's tired of your hours

Find Daryl

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryl-dittmer-734205294/

Website: https://www.daryldittmer.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095169161814

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whenistopfighting/

Call The Damn Leads

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals - Tales of your wildest sales stories and tactics to succeed in your sales career across various industries."

Join Drewbie Wilson, a sales veteran with over 20 years of experience, as he brings you insider stories, humor, and actionable strategies to excel in your sales journey.

Your weekly dose of:

• Wild Sales Stories: Engaging tales of real-life sales adventures.

• Proven Tactics: Actionable strategies to boost your sales game.

• Humor: A fun and energetic perspective on the world of sales.

• Expert Insights: Learn from seasoned professionals in various industries.

Don't miss out on the insights, humor, and strategies that can take your sales career to new heights! Sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and small business owners striving to enhance their sales, marketing, and personal growth to achieve financial success and time freedom.

If you'd like to be a guest on our show please leave your contact information and a brief message selling us on what makes your story worth sharing!

https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

• Follow Drewbie: https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides

• Follow Call The Damn Leads: https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnleads

Two women walked out of Wicked in the middle of act one because there's a goat on stage. A goat represents the devil, apparently. The green witch didn't bother them. The flying dragon didn't bother them. The magic didn't bother them. The goat did. Then they took their Wicked tickets down the street and tried to walk into the second act of Jersey Boys, because hey, they bought a ticket to Broadway.

That's the opening story, and Teri Pruitt has a hundred more. She's been in theater since she was 15 and working professionally since 1992, everything from church basement theater and dinner theater to touring, TV, film, and now wardrobe on Wicked. Her whole job is making sure that when something goes sideways at 8:15 on a Tuesday night, the audience never finds out.

She led with "I don't really have crazy sales stories." Then she spent 20 minutes describing exactly what a great salesperson does. Read the room. Match the energy in front of you. Know what the person showed up expecting before you open your mouth.

The line that stuck with me: sometimes the show goes on BY STOPPING IT. Fix the thing, then keep going. Because a problem you run past doesn't stay the same size... it compounds, and now you've got a bigger one with an audience watching.

If you've ever wondered how somebody turns it on for an audience night after night without burning to the ground, this one's for you.

This Episode You'll Learn

☛ Why "the show must go on" sometimes means stopping the show cold, solving the problem, and restarting, instead of running past it while it grows ☛ How Teri reads an actor's energy the second she walks into a dressing room, and why matching it beats forcing them up to yours ☛ What "yes, and" looks like off stage, including the day the entire crew argued about where a horse wears its pants ☛ Why the best theater people take the work extraordinarily seriously and themselves not at all ☛ How a Broadway costume fitting takes 30 to 40 measurements, and why the trust has to come before it's earned ☛ The difference between a bad mood and what Teri calls a balanced day, and how naming which one you're in changes how the whole room treats you ☛ Why every crew builds its own shorthand, so a five-word sentence can fix a problem mid-scene

Find Teri

- Website: https://teripruitt.world/ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teri-pruitt-a2b341101/ - Google her by name, she's old enough to have her own name with no extra flourishes - Popping around Midtown New York? Stop by the theater, leave her a note, and go grab a coffee in the real world

Call The Damn Leads

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals — Tales of your wildest sales stories and tactics to succeed in your sales career across various industries."

Join Drewbie Wilson, a sales veteran with over 20 years of experience, as he brings you insider stories, humor, and actionable strategies to excel in your sales journey.

Your weekly dose of: ■ Wild Sales Stories: Engaging tales of real-life sales adventures. ■ Proven Tactics: Actionable strategies to boost your sales game. ■ Humor: A fun and energetic perspective on the world of sales. ■ Expert Insights: Learn from seasoned professionals in various industries.

Don't miss out on the insights, humor, and strategies that can take your sales career to new heights.

If you'd like to be a guest on the show, leave your contact information and a brief message telling us why your story needs to be heard: https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

Follow Drewbie: https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides Follow Call The Damn Leads: https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnleads

Timestamps

- **00:38** - The two women who walked out of Wicked over a goat, then tried to second-act Jersey Boys with their tickets - **03:47** - Teri's road in: theater at 15, professional since 1992, church basements to Broadway - **04:16** - What "the show must go on" actually means backstage, and why duct tape holds the world together - **04:46** - Stopping the show to fix the problem, because running past it compounds it - **06:12** - "Where does a horse wear its pants?" and the yes-and culture underneath it - **08:32** - Reading the room, matching energy, and why that isn't being fake - **09:33** - Knowing your audience, and what happens when they came for a comedy and got a drama - **11:56** - The therapy half of the job, and how curiosity is the whole tool - **13:42** - Balanced days, and why full throttle can't run 24/7 - **15:03** - The shorthand every show builds so a problem gets communicated in five words - **18:52** - The tape measure story: 30 to 40 measurements and no shame in the game - **20:16** - Trust given fast, earned after - **21:10** - What gets measured gets improved, from the fitting room to your sales numbers - **22:29** - Where to find Teri, and the standing coffee invite in Midtown

Shakti Sharma had a woman on two separate calls who kept climbing to yes and then sliding right back down. Both calls got stretched with the old "do you have five more minutes," and five more minutes never changed a thing. So she went into the third one having already decided she didn't want the sale, and opened with: put your credit card away, this is not a sales call.

Then she told the woman what she actually saw. The fear, where it came from, why it had been sitting on her business for years. Turned out a lot of it was inherited from what her dad went through. And at the end of that conversation the woman said, Shakti, I want to do this with you.

Shakti grew up in India in a house where she never had to ask for anything, moved to the US, and had to learn not just the language but every phrase and reference everybody else grew up with. Add being an introvert on top of that. Her words: a perfect mess. But the struggle is where all of this came from…

The part that got me fired up is when she asked permission to break some rules. The industry told her a 50% conversion rate is the standard, and if you're under it you're priced wrong or you're broken. That rule had her walking into every single call with a running loop in the back of her head. Is this the right person? Will they get the result? Do they even have the money? She calls that the skeptic part of the mind, and SKEPTICISM ATTRACTS SKEPTICISM.

In This Episode You'll Learn

☛ How Shakti closed a two-call stall by walking in having already given up the sale, and the exact line she opened with ☛ Why she stopped chasing a 50% conversion rate and what changed in her numbers when she did ☛ The homework play: what to assign a prospect between calls, and what their answer tells you about whether to take their money ☛ How to spot which of the four perception types you're talking to from the words they pick, and sync up with it ☛ Why she stopped separating "me the salesperson" from "them the buyer," and the question she asks instead ☛ What it costs you to onboard the wrong client, versus what it costs you to lose the sale ☛ How Shakti built an offer with a defined ROI without giving up the intuitive side she started from

Connect with Shakti Sharma

➢ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaktisharmaofficial/ ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialshaktisharma ➢ Website: https://femininewealthmovement.com/ ➢ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@officialshaktisharma

- FeminineWealthMovement.com (free Facebook community, she'd love to see you in there)

Call The Damn Leads

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals - Tales of your wildest sales stories and tactics to succeed in your sales career across various industries."

Join Drewbie Wilson, a sales veteran with over 20 years of experience, as he brings you insider stories, humor, and actionable strategies to excel in your sales journey.

Your weekly dose of: ➢ Wild Sales Stories: Engaging tales of real-life sales adventures. ➢ Proven Tactics: Actionable strategies to boost your sales game. ➢ Humor: A fun and energetic perspective on the world of sales. ➢ Expert Insights: Learn from seasoned professionals in various industries.

Don't miss out on the insights, humor, and strategies that can take your sales career to new heights! Sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and small business owners striving to enhance their sales, marketing, and personal growth to achieve financial success and time freedom.

If you'd like to be a guest on our show please leave your contact information and a brief message selling us on what makes your story worth sharing! https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

Follow Drewbie: https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides Follow Call The Damn Leads: https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnleads

Aaron Jensen got chased off a dirt road by a pit bull while knocking on doors. Three pit bulls, actually. Baby one was fine, Mama was fine, then Dad came out, and that was that.

Three years of door-to-door later, he took his sales skills online, became the first employee at a two-partner marketing company, and ended up a one-third owner of a shop that signed over 10,000 clients onto GoHighLevel. Top three providers on the planet. Seven-figure exit, $20 million in revenue.

Then he went and built an insurance agency. Which, as Drewbie puts it, is one of the least sexy things on earth.

Here's the part worth your time… Aaron's agents aren't doing 200 to 400 dials a day. He runs TV commercials on Hulu and Amazon Prime, the phone rings, and his people talk to about 10 hyperinterested humans daily. Old-school channel, new-school targeting. You can aim for streaming ads by interest, age, and income the same way you aim for Meta.

Drewbie and Aaron both cut their teeth in insurance, and they both landed on the same answer: get freakishly organized, then go work. 92% of insurance agents wash out in year one, and Aaron thinks it's because everybody gets sold the dream of doing it their own way.

If you've ever been handed 500 printed pages of Excel leads and told to start dialing, this one's going to hit.

In This Episode You'll Learn

☛ How Aaron targets streaming TV ads by interest, age, and income level, and why he says it beats Meta for fine-tuning who sees it ☛ Why do his agents talk to 10 interested people a day instead of running 200 to 400 dials? ☛ What dispositioning every single lead does for your follow-up, and how AI workflows fire off the objection someone gave you ☛ The reason 92% of first-year insurance agents don't make it, from a guy recruiting them right now ☛ Why experienced agents on aggressive comp plans take a pay cut to come work in his system ☛ How Aaron built the same plug-in-and-go structure that let his marketing company onboard 10,000 GoHighLevel clients ☛ Drewbie's take on why generating your own leads is permission to write your own paycheck

Find Aaron

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aaronjensenx/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-jensen101/ Website: https://www.climbwithridgewell.com/

Call The Damn Leads

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals." Each week, I bring you humor, real-world stories, and powerful strategies to help you excel in your sales career.

Expect a wild mix of: ☛ Real Sales Stories: Tales that entertain and inspire ☛ Proven Tactics: Practical tips for boosting your sales game ☛ Humor and Energy: Fun takes on the ups and downs of sales life ☛ Expert Advice: Learn from seasoned pros across different fields Whether you're in sales, an entrepreneur, or just looking to grow your business skills, don't miss out.

👉 Want to be a guest? https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

Follow Drewbie: Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnleads

Rachel Rutherford walked into a breakfast meeting in Atlanta, off a red eye, five months postpartum, and sat down at the wrong table. Introduced herself. Started the meeting. Told a table full of complete strangers how glad she was they could finally make this work.

Her coworker had to say her name out loud to snap her out of it.

She's a CPA who hated accounting for six years, quit with no plan, trained people at a gym for a while, and got asked one question that changed everything: have you ever thought about getting into sales? Ten years later she's leading the team.

What she brings from the accounting seat is the part most salespeople skip. Rachel starts with the end in mind and works backwards, and she says there are only three levers you can ever pull… how big is the case, what's your win rate, and how many at bats are you getting. That's it. Pick the one you're going to move and go move it.

She's also sharp on the trap Drewbie sees constantly: tracking activity and never tracking what came out of it. "How's your kids?" is a nice conversation. It's not a valuable one unless something moves.

And she doesn't pretend the basics are easy. Somebody calling you to say they're taking a 35% increase to your competitor and here's what they think of you is real world, and the answer is still keep your cool and go back to the fundamentals.

This Episode You'll Learn

☛ The three levers Rachel says every sales number comes down to, and how she picks which one to pull

☛ How to work a revenue goal backwards into what your team has to do today

☛ The funnel a relationship seller should actually be measuring, from leads to contact rate to proposals to closed business

☛ How to set a time frame up front so you know when to cut a prospect loose without it getting personal

☛ Why a five minute call tells Rachel most of what she needs to know, and why she gives people a shot anyway

☛ What makes an interaction valuable instead of just friendly, and how to tell the difference on a client call

☛ Why everything that works on new business also works on renewals

How To Connect With Rachel

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelcrutherford/

Website: https://podmatch.com/guestdetail/1782355958784351d8c7504d3

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals."

Each week, I bring you humor, real-world stories, and powerful strategies to help you excel in your sales career.

Expect a wild mix of:

• Real Sales Stories: Tales that entertain and inspire

• Proven Tactics: Practical tips for boosting your sales game

• Humor and Energy: Fun takes on the ups and downs of sales life

• Expert Advice: Learn from seasoned pros across different fields

Whether you're in sales, an entrepreneur, or just looking to grow your business skills, don't miss out.

👉 Want to be a guest? https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

Follow Drewbie: Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnleads

Max Ivey sent Drewbie an email before this episode ever got recorded. It pointed out a few things on the Call The Damn Leads website that were hard for a blind person to navigate. Drewbie read it, had a small heart attack, and went straight to his site to start checking.

That whole exchange is in this episode, out loud, on the record.

Max is the blind blogger. He wanted to own carnivals like his four uncles. He ended up brokering used rides, then coaching, then podcast guest booking, and then got argued into accessibility work across four interviews where he kept telling the company they had the wrong guy.

Here's the part that should get every business owner's attention: the disability community is somewhere between 1.3 and 2.25 billion people, spent over 13 trillion dollars last year, and is loyal as hell to brands that make a sincere effort. Meanwhile less than 5% of the internet is accessible.

Max also thinks his own community has been going about this wrong… scaring business owners with lawsuits and fines instead of showing them the upside. He's trying to change that conversation, and he says so plainly.

If you own a website, this one's going to make you go look at it.

In This Episode You'll Learn

➣ Why accessibility work also cuts load times, cleans up your code and helps your SEO ➣ The market size nobody's counting: 1.3 to 2.25 billion people and over 13 trillion dollars spent last year ➣ The first thing to do today, which costs nothing: go use your own website and try to buy from yourself ➣ Why every step of your site has to work with a keyboard, and what happens at the checkout button when it doesn't ➣ How Max got talked into a whole new career off one thank-you note on LinkedIn ➣ What Max tells salespeople with disabilities about their own story, and why hiding the challenge kills the connection ➣ Max's free offer: he'll review your home page and score it between hideous and exemplary

Find Max

‣ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maxwellivey ‣ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/TheBlindBlogger ‣ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwellivey/ ‣ Website: https://www.theaccessibilityadvantage.com/home ‣ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/maxwellivey

Call The Damn Leads

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals — Tales of your wildest sales stories and tactics to succeed in your sales career across various industries."

Join Drewbie Wilson, a sales veteran with over 20 years of experience, as he brings you insider stories, humor, and actionable strategies to excel in your sales journey.

Your weekly dose of: ☛ Wild Sales Stories: Engaging tales of real-life sales adventures. ☛ Proven Tactics: Actionable strategies to boost your sales game. ☛ Humor: A fun and energetic perspective on the world of sales. ☛ Expert Insights: Learn from seasoned professionals in various industries.

Don't miss out on the insights, humor, and strategies that can take your sales career to new heights.

If you'd like to be a guest on the show, leave your contact information and a brief message telling us why your story needs to be heard: https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

Follow Drewbie: https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides Follow Call The Damn Leads: https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnlead

Jay Setchell had a rep named Craig who'd sit in the office all day making calls that went nowhere. So Jay walked in, told him to get his ass out the door, and rode along on his afternoon appointments. They started at noon. By 5:30 they'd booked two full weeks of Craig's quota.

That's 1982. GTE, the Yellow Pages, a sales binder 8,000 pages thick. The phone book is dead and almost everything Jay did with it that afternoon still works on a Tuesday in 2026.

He's got six decades in this business. He's also died three times. On the 4th of July 1981 he broke his neck, drowned, and came up paralyzed from the shoulders down at 31 and a half years old. He was out almost a year. Two days before it happened he wrote a $1,640 order in Minneapolis against a $20 a day budget… 82 days of quota out of one call.

The part I keep chewing on is the sidewalk. Jay had appliance dealers tell him everybody in town already knew who they were. So he'd walk them out front, stop strangers on the street, and ask if they'd ever heard of the place. Then he'd ask where they'd look if their washing machine died. Roughly half said washing machines, half said appliances. The guy was invisible to half his market and had no clue.

This Episode You'll Learn

➣ How Jay got a call-reluctant rep to book two weeks of quota in one afternoon, and what he made him redo before they ever left the office ➣ The sidewalk test that shows a business owner, in about 90 seconds, that half his market has never heard of him ➣ Why Jay set his own quota at 225% of what the company asked for, then kept raising it ➣ The two-choice appointment ask that gets a yes from almost everybody, and why Jay still calls it old news ➣ What a great salesperson says after the proposal is on the table (nothing at all, and for as long as it takes) ➣ How to turn a $30 a month upgrade into an easy yes by asking what ONE sale is worth ➣ Why Jay asks for a tour of the plant before he pitches a single thing to a business-to-business buyer

📲 Connect with Jay Setchell

☛Website: https://neverquittrying.com/ ☛ Book: *The Strength Within You: It's Always Too Soon to Quit*, on Amazon

Call The Damn Leads

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals — Tales of your wildest sales stories and tactics to succeed in your sales career across various industries."

Join Drewbie Wilson, a sales veteran with over 20 years of experience, as he brings you insider stories, humor, and actionable strategies to excel in your sales journey.

Your weekly dose of: ☛ Wild Sales Stories: Engaging tales of real-life sales adventures. ☛ Proven Tactics: Actionable strategies to boost your sales game. ☛ Humor: A fun and energetic perspective on the world of sales. ☛ Expert Insights: Learn from seasoned professionals in various industries.

Don't miss out on the insights, humor, and strategies that can take your sales career to new heights.

If you'd like to be a guest on the show, leave your contact information and a brief message telling us why your story needs to be heard: https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

Follow Drewbie: https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides Follow Call The Damn Leads: https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnlead

Neha Gupta got so excited about her product on a sales call that she did every bit of the talking. Then it ended and she realized she had no idea who she'd just spoken to or what their problem was. That warm lead said "we'll get back to you" and never did.

That call is why she built Breakthrough, an AI role play platform where reps can be bad at their job in private instead of on your actual customers.

Drewbie and Neha get into why salespeople hate role play so much. It's awkward. You get pulled up in front of the room, paired with a coworker who's more interested in hitting you with 19 objections and making you look stupid than actually helping. Or you get paired up and just... talk about the role play instead of doing it.

The part that surprised Neha most? It wasn't the new reps who got the biggest lift. A woman with 30 years of client-facing work told her a couple of role plays helped her finesse something she'd never figured out on her own. Nobody coaches you at that level. You just stop learning.

They also get into audio versus video avatars (the creepy forehead problem), why 11 hand-tuned personas beat a prompt you type yourself, and how the AI actually gets angrier when you keep saying the wrong things… and calms down when you start showing empathy.

If you've been doing this 10, 20, 30 years and you know there's a spot where you keep falling off the process, this one's for you.

In This Episode You'll Learn

➣ Why practicing on live customers is the most expensive place to make your mistakes The two ways companies run role play, and why both of them fail for the same reason ➣ Why Breakthrough is audio-only, and what video avatars do to your attention during practice ➣ How a role play persona escalates when you miss and de-escalates when you handle the pushback right ➣ Why a generic AI chatbot is the wrong practice partner (it's built to be nice to you, and buyers aren't) ➣ What a 30-year veteran got out of two role plays that no manager had given her ➣ How to spot the unconscious competence gaps that show up after years in the game

Find Neha

- Website: https://joinbreakthrough.ai/ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehagupta/

Call The Damn Leads

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals - Tales of your wildest sales stories and tactics to succeed in your sales career across various industries."

Join Drewbie Wilson, a sales veteran with over 20 years of experience, as he brings you insider stories, humor, and actionable strategies to excel in your sales journey.

Your weekly dose of: ➤ Wild Sales Stories: Engaging tales of real-life sales adventures. ➤ Proven Tactics: Actionable strategies to boost your sales game. ➤ Humor: A fun and energetic perspective on the world of sales. ➤ Expert Insights: Learn from seasoned professionals in various industries.

Don't miss out on the insights, humor, and strategies that can take your sales career to new heights! Sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and small business owners striving to enhance their sales, marketing, and personal growth to achieve financial success and time freedom.

If you'd like to be a guest on our show please leave your contact information and a brief message selling us on what makes your story worth sharing! https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

Follow Drewbie: https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides Follow Call The Damn Leads: https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnleads

Sarah Hutchins had a deal last year where the seller was her next-door neighbor. Dual agency, as-is sale, and a buyer who kept coming back for concessions on a property she already knew better than anybody. Try sleeping on that one.

She got into real estate sideways. In 2019 she was pregnant with her third kid and going through a divorce at the same time. She wanted something that got her out of the house and used a different part of her brain, so she answered an ad managing transactions for a real estate team. Her background was education. She knew nothing about real estate. Two years later a friend told her she was already doing every step of the job anyway, so she might as well go get licensed.

Then she moved. Arlington, Massachusetts to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, which wiped out the whole "call your mom, your auntie, your hair lady" list they hand you when you start out. What do you do when the phone book you were told to work doesn't exist yet?

She rebuilt it the slow way. Community events, her kids' school, showing up over and over until people said hey, I know who you are.

We got into what she tells clients when the wheels start wobbling, and real estate might be the most unpredictable industry there is for wheels wobbling. Her line is a puzzle. We don't know where the pieces go yet, and by the end we're going to have it together.

If you know somebody in the middle of a big transition right now, send them this one. You don't have to make a thing out of it. Just say you heard it and thought of them.

In This Episode You'll Learn

- How Sarah navigated her first dual-agency deal when the seller was her next-door neighbor, and why the buyer's side turned out to be the harder half

- Why she laid out the as-is terms with the seller up front, and what that did for her when concession requests started coming in

- The path from managing transactions for a team, to getting licensed, to going out on her own about a year later

- What she actually did to get known in a town where she had no sphere of influence yet

- The puzzle line she uses in a first meeting so clients have a picture in their head before anything goes sideways

- Why "put your phone down and stop looking at Instagram" is a real conversation she has with clients mid-transaction

- What she goes back to when a transition gets heavy, and the beginning-middle-end reminder she keeps in her pocket

Memorable Quotes

> "If you don't have people's trust, like forget it, right? They're not gonna wanna work with you." Sarah Hutchins

> "Sometimes taking the first step is the hardest… your gut doesn't usually lead you astray." Sarah Hutchins

> "Even if it's the wrong way, you're always gonna end up where you need to be in the end. No matter how many twists or how many turns you're gonna take." Sarah Hutchins

> "I almost explained to them as it being a puzzle. We're not sure where all the pieces go now, but at the end we're gonna figure it out and we're gonna have all the pieces put together." Sarah Hutchins

> "That's the game right there. Just tell people to call the damn leads." Drewbie Wilson

Find Sarah

- Instagram: @sarah.hutchins.realtor

- Email: [email protected]

- Phone: 302-584-4460

Call The Damn Leads

"By sales professionals, for sales professionals — Tales of your wildest sales stories and tactics to succeed in your sales career across various industries."

Join Drewbie Wilson, a sales veteran with over 20 years of experience, as he brings you insider stories, humor, and actionable strategies to excel in your sales journey.

Your weekly dose of: Wild Sales Stories: Engaging tales of real-life sales adventures. Proven Tactics: Actionable strategies to boost your sales game. Humor: A fun and energetic perspective on the world of sales. Expert Insights: Learn from seasoned professionals in various industries.

Don't miss out on the insights, humor, and strategies that can take your sales career to new heights.

If you'd like to be a guest on the show, leave your contact information and a brief message telling us why your story needs to be heard: https://callthedamnleads.com/pages/podcast

Follow Drewbie: https://www.facebook.com/drewbierides Follow Call The Damn Leads: https://www.instagram.com/callthedamnleads

A gas leak blew half a duplex apart down the street from Jennifer Dechaine's model home in Alberta. Nobody got hurt, which is the lucky part. Then health and safety and insurance made her look at the charred thing for six weeks while she was trying to sell houses on full commission.

Every person who walked into her model home asked about it. Her competition was telling buyers to go ask her. So she owned it. "Yeah, it's my house." And then she'd point at the half that was still standing and walk them through party wall construction, because delaying and containing fire is exactly what that wall is built to do.

She was the top selling salesperson in that whole community with a burned out house in her window.

Jennifer fell into sales the way a lot of us do. She was a teacher, finishing her Ed degree, buying a new construction home, and the builder looked at her and said you're a sharp lady, come work for me. She spent the first few years too embarrassed to call herself a salesperson, back when the boys would pat her on the head for caring about her customers.

Then we get into the thing she's genuinely fired up about. Real estate has a skills gap it keeps calling a character problem. New reps get handed the keys to a half million dollar property and the FIO principle: figure it out. When they don't, the industry tells them they're not tough enough to cut it, which is a personal verdict with no training attached to it… and then everybody wonders where all the sales talent went.

Her fix is simple and it's the whole reason this conversation matters. Confidence, coachability, resilience, ownership. Those are skills. You can build them, and Jennifer has spent her post-corporate life building them with sales pros.

In This Episode You'll Learn

- How to sell through a situation you can't control by naming it out loud before your competition does - Why the longer someone's been in real estate, the more call reluctance they tend to carry - What actually changed: consumers have more information than ever and less confidence than ever, and what that means for your job - Where confidence comes from now that product knowledge stopped being the moat, and how to build it from self trust and your network instead - Why gifted problem solving is the part of sales AI can't take, and why Jennifer thinks this is our moment - The FIO principle, and how "you're not tough enough" washes good people out of the industry with nothing to fix - How to stop grading new sales talent on character flaws and start training the same things as skills

Memorable Quotes

"Challenges in sales, they break you or they make you." Jennifer Dechaine

"This is what great construction looks like when bad shit happens." Jennifer Dechaine

"My confidence stems in the fact that I am well resourced, I can use AI and Google and I have access to industry professionals. If there's something that I don't know, it doesn't matter, I'll figure it out." Jennifer Dechaine

"If you have cut it in the sales world, you are a gifted problem solver. Hard stop." Jennifer Dechaine

"Instead of treating these things like character flaws, we need to treat them like skills, because they are skills." Jennifer Dechaine

"At its heart, sales is service. It's beautiful." Jennifer Dechaine

Find Jennifer

- congruentprojects.com (the confidence ladder, the pressure spectrum, the in-between playbook, and her newsletter) - Instagram: Jennifer Dechaine - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-dechaine1/

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