#025 Trial Insights with Duane Dufault

Steven Morell: Welcome to our new episode of Speak Revenue. Remember, revenue is not a goal. It's a result, but a result of what? In this show, we turn our eyes from the output towards the input. We speak with sales leaders, revenue leaders, entrepreneurs, about their journeys. So join us on our quest to uncover and learn the root causes of their success. Let's figure out what works for them and what didn't! Today with our special guest Duane Dufault. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. 

Duane Dufault: You know, Steven, I love the topic of this show. I think we were talking about it before we started recording about revenue being a result or a lagging indicator rather than the primary thing If ruffles some feathers, because it makes people feel like that's not a priority, but it's all the things that lead up to revenue are the things that you can control about getting revenue. So I love it. Excited for today, that's for sure. Again, Steven, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. 

Steven Morell: Thanks for coming, and thanks for bringing all the heavy weight of your knowledge and experience into the show. Whenever I look at metrics and dashboards, I try to sort out: what is a result? What is the cause? What is a leading indicator? What is a trailing indicator? But before we dive in and we already already fall in, before we dive in, for those listeners and viewers who don't know you real quick, who are you, what do you do, and why are you so successful? 

Duane Dufault: Uh, well, the most successful thing. I guess it's up to the beholder, but so again, my name's Duane Dufault. I am a seasoned sales professional. I've been in sales for . Just about 15 years, 10 of it being in sales leadership specifically. In the last five years, I've been really focused on the CRO functionality, so Chief Revenue Officer. So that way I am involved in the marketing piece, the sales piece, and the customer success piece, and all the things that layer underneath that to really help craft the revenue journey for the business as well as focusing on a customer. And so for right now, what I'm doing right now as, by the time this comes out :I'm actually the CRO for a SaaS company called Time Doctor. And so it's a great opportunity, great company, and honestly, the CRO position and just that focus has been one that I feel has been in my focus or in my skill sets I've been trying to develop for my entire sales career. Because only focusing on one piece of the conversation or one piece of the customer journey always felt like I was missing something and we are missing opportunities. And so there's so much that rolls up into the CRO. 

Steven Morell: What does the Time Doctor do? 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. Yeah. So Time Doctor is a remote workforce management tool, and so it is designed to help optimize remote companies, help time track, help with project management, help keep them on task. And so it enables companies to understand what their workforce is doing on a day-to-day basis so they can work from home, so they can work from a ski lift on their laptop so they can do the things necessary and that the employee's taken care of, the company's taken care of. And there's no concern from an employee's perspective, am I getting acknowledged for my job? Am I doing the right thing? Am I on task? Or from the employer's perspective is our team doing the thing they need to be doing that day? Are they focusing on work, you know? So there's that on both sides of the coin. That Time Doctor really helps take care of. 

Steven Morell: That's a huge problem that you guys are solving. I happen to run a distributed, remote company, and I know a thing or two about how challenging this can be and how wonderful this is. So it's a love-hate relationship. Before we dive in deeper, let me understand the ideal customer is the relatively small SMB, the small team, or are we talking also the large international teams. 

Duane Dufault: That's great... 

Steven Morell: What is your ICP? 

Duane Dufault: That's a great question. We do both . And the reason why we can do both is just because of the versatility of the product itself and the team that we have. So you can come in and you can get into a trial, and you can get in and set it up, and start using it. Teams can start, adding their information, logging time, putting the projects in and connecting it to the different programs and whatnot. But then at the same time, we work with 5-6000 employee companies that span the globe. And so one of the, one of the primary reasons we're able to do that is one versatility product. But then the team, the way the team that we've got set up has experience in both areas and we understand the needs and the unique needs of these larger businesses versus, you know, the 5 to 10 employee type companies that need the service as well. 

Steven Morell: Are you doing the slack move? Infect just a small group/subgroup of the team and then one day the whole enterprise is using it and nobody ever decided to purchase this.

Duane Dufault: I like the word infect. I haven't heard that used that way before, but so what you're describing 

Steven Morell: Post Covid, right?

Duane Dufault: Post covid term. It's good. I think It's plenty of time. It's not too soon. I think it's great timing. But it's just plus the nature of the product too, right? It's a time tracking app for remote employees and some people can see it as Big Brother, but... digress a little bit. So on, on the question around how we infiltrate or infect the business, however you look at it... What you're asking about from my experience is traditional textbook like product-led growth where someone can go in, anyone at any organization can start a trial or an account of something like a Slack or Calendly or even things like Asana or Monday.com. They can go in and start up their own account. And they can use it for as long as they want without having issues depending on usage in price walls and stuff. But when they start adding in their employees from sending them messages or adding them to task boards or anything like that, then those employees at those companies start using that product too. And then once they reach a certain threshold of users or things they're able to do then, they have to pay for it. That is like the simplest explanation and textbook version of product-led growth. However 

Steven Morell: Yes. You said a keyword, you said trial. And you said you had a sales…

Duane Dufault: Yeah.

Steven Morell: …so I know that this is something that is being debated a lot…

Duane Dufault: Yeah.

Steven Morell: …because people think product- led means no sales team, a bunch of data engineers. I think we both have a different opinion here. Confront me with yours. 

Duane Dufault: So I think product led in general has been misunderstood for a very long time and people think it's a new thing in the last 10 years. If you bought a Microsoft computer back in the late 90s, you had a disk to set up software, and when you put that disk in, it prompted you to do things. That's the original product-led growth. Even today, I don't get a phone call from somebody or a guy who doesn't show up to my house to help update my software or my drivers on my computer. That's where product-led growth originated. It's guided prompts to help you use and get value from the product. And so to the question about the trial and product led. Honestly if you have a trial that has a paywall and then you can't use the product any longer, it's not product led. That's just part of the buying process to inside of a step, inside of the go-to market phase. A traditional and true product led, you have a freemium option, you can get in and use it, and then there's a viral effect to where other members of the organization can use it, but… if you are in like HR Tech for example, it's not like Billy Bob from the service department can go start up a trial account with a payroll company and just start using it and then invite their coworker to just start using it. That's not, you can't do that in HR technology and that's where I think there's a big confusion. Okay, we're product led, and then someone comes in and starts a trial, regardless of what happens. They're like, oh, that doesn't go to sales. Can't touch it. Nope. That's product led. That's the prospect of raising their hand, saying, or not raising their hand, saying, we don't wanna talk to a salesperson. And I think that's doing a, it's causing a huge issue in companies growth because they're trying to apply a cookie cutter process to their go-to market without understanding what true product led is and how it fits into their market. And so what we do, what I do in HR Tech specifically is: Sure, have a trial for days. That's fine. Not for days, at least 14 days , but what you have to do is you have to mechanize the onboarding process inside of the trial to where you can capture. Potential information to understand the ROI of that prospect to know are they a high value or are they low value? So if, is it SMB, is it enterprise, is it mid-market? And you have to decide where you want to insert that sales person in that trial experience. And where you insert that sales person is gonna ultimately be determined by, what are your metrics on the backend? How much money are you getting from this? What are your conversion rates? But you can still have an element of true SMB. At the very low end, so that way you don't lose money on the cost of acquisition and you can still convert them on their own. But... 

Steven Morell: Let's talk about trial, because I think there is a confusion out there that a trial is something different than lead magnet.

Duane Dufault: Yeah.

Steven Morell: Which is an artificial fan that you're putting up, in both cases, they fill out... First of all, let's talk about what a lead magnet 

Duane Dufault: Right?

Steven Morell: Is not a form on your website with a stupid ebook, behind that. That's not a lead magnet. Not in 2023. Lead magnet is a complete solution for a very narrow problem. 

Duane Dufault: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Morell: I think Gong did a great job, in ... and I'm saying this in every other episode, in creating lead magnets, they have a software that records sales conversations. It's only useful if you actually have sales conversations. If calendars are empty, it's utterly useless. So what did they do? They produced all kinds of lead magnets, like the 25 templates to meetings. The 25 called openers to get meetings. They enabled their audience to get meetings by providing entire solutions for a very narrow problem. And the problem being: what do I say when I cold call? What's my first sentence? Here are 25 examples. Oh, thank you. And now they have a foot in the door. So I think a trial and a lead magnet is both getting a foot in the door and giving the prospect a first of what it would be like to do business with you. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: From your perspective, what are the criteria that a trial needs to do in order to be a good trial? 

Duane Dufault: Hmm. 

Steven Morell: It's not a demo. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: It's not a self-service demo. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah, that's a good question. Because you almost have to phrase it, almost have to look at a trial from the perspective of a trial. The purpose of a trial is to help the prospect take action on the lead magnet. To implement the solution for the lead magnet, not just educate them about the problem. It's now here's how to take action to solve the problem, and here's an option to use. I like that way of thinking. I'm gonna write that down. So the I'm always looking for better ways to like phrase and position, 

Steven Morell: We have recorded it. 

Duane Dufault: Hey, this is a recording where I'm gonna get to hear it again. And so it's so what makes a trial a good trial? First off, If it's a true trial experience where at the end of a certain time period their account access is gonna be blocked because they're not paying for it, give them access to the whole damn thing. Let them test out the full functionality of the product. And you run into apps where you need to select pro or standard, whatever before you get into the account. And then if you select standard, you don't get the access to the premium type of functionality. I'm like, then you just bottleneck people's opportunity. . Let 'em have access to everything. Who cares? It's not gonna, it's not gonna hurt anything. If anything, you're gonna get a ton of data. You just have to know what to do with it. 

Steven Morell: The more they use it, the more they put in their own data, the more they're invested. 

Duane Dufault: Exactly. And so that's actually one of the things that makes a good trial is like how they're using it. But before they use it, it's like you need to. You need to prompt them to do stuff. You can't just drop 'em into a blank home screen with nothing. Because there needs to be some type of guides or prompts or nudges or walk me guides or something that helps them along the path to get the account set up. Because 9 times out of 10 there, it's a net new environment, net new subject for that prospect. And so you have to show them how to do the things necessary to even use it . If I run into products like this all the time where they will prompt a user to go and do something like, Monday for example, they don't do this specifically, but a good example is they'll go and they'll have them go and create like a project board, but you're blocked to create a project board because you haven't set up your name, you haven't set up your contact information, you haven't set up your missions or your teams, and so you hit like this user issue and then you bounce because you say the product doesn't work. So some of the best trial experiences actually guide the prospect and the user to set up their admin functions to where: Hey, you need to make sure you have this, this, this, and this done, and then you can go set up all the other things because then you're not gonna be blocked. You're not gonna have any friction in that 

Steven Morell: Keep this threshold as low as you can. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. Yeah. Because the problem that I see a lot of companies face or try to solve inside of trials they misunderstand the term time to value. And they think that it's, you just need to get them to buy within a couple of days. You need to boom, get them to convert and pay and all that stuff, and you'll take care of it after the fact. But it's about step ladders. You have to understand that you have to get from one step to the next, to get there. And if they're meeting a ton of friction points before getting to the checkout process, they're not gonna get to the checkout process. And so if you can go through the trial, it's honestly very boring to think about. It's mind-numbing. It's not exciting for product teams and growth teams to think about, Ooh, we need to create a video on prompting them to set up their overtime rules and their payroll tool. Right? Those aren't exciting things, but you have to remember who's signing up, and so the best trials get them to do their. Baseline admin settings, so that way the very next thing that you do, like you mentioned, is using it and investing their time into it. Because you want to make sure that you make it easy to use and then they know how to do it. So you have resources, you prompt them with videos or guides or little pop-up things, or the chatbot shows up or something to where you're helping them use it and set it up along the way, which is where decreasing time to value comes from. And so the better you can do that, the more you can reduce the friction in terms of them getting to those success markers in the app, the much higher likelihood of it converting regardless of the size of customer. It could be one user, it could be a thousand users. It's still a human being clicking the button. So you have to think like that. 

Steven Morell: So on that then people hear the thousand user type company, they're like isn't that enterprise? Is it mid-market? Do they come in since they came in on a trial, should sales even talk to them? 100%. Yeah. Sure. Exactly my point! And that was my personal experience, in a prior role, we had two types of inbound leads. We had those that would fill out a contract form, we would have those that fill out a signup form. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: That's essentially the same thing. Sales were not allowed to talk to the signups because they're product led…

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: …that both is a hand raiser. And I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated how willingly we are investing time. Time is the most valuable resource because you can always get more money, but you never get your time back. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: We are willing to spend hours on a trial, testing a product, or even go through demo calls and meetings, but how often we are not willing to spend $9 90 on the cheapest plan to try it out. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah.

Steven Morell: People are more inclined to invest time than money, initially. Before this turns around and is willing to invest more money to save time. 

Duane Dufault: Oh yeah. Time is much more of a respectful currency in business. 

Steven Morell: Talk to me about the misunderstanding of hand raisers and trial versus inbound lead. Who should sales contact? And how should they make the decision, who to contact? 

Duane Dufault: I feel like we can do an entire 4 day event on this topic. You have to think about the trial as another step in the buyer's interests, right? When we look at the different stages of the buyer's journey, right? You have your awareness, your solution research, your decision, your commitment. That's just a step in that process. It is not, I say that flippantly. It is not a decision. It is a type of commitment that they're making to do further research. All it is just another step after submitting a form. That's it. and for me it's a higher interest level. It's a higher indicator that they're willing to be a customer than a demo request form or a webinar attendance form. And so you have to, first off, you have to know what those actions mean for your business. Simply put. And you have to understand how many of them do you have out there? Do you have any? Nothing but passive steps. Passive CTAs, like they just go, they go sign up for a newsletter, or they download an ebook like we were talking about before. Or are they active steps? Are they attending a webinar? Are they attending a requested demo meeting, right? Are they signing up for a trial? Those are active steps inside of the buyer's journey where it requires the prospect to use their time and take action on something. And so that's one thing that I don't see enough of is, are we prioritizing passive or active steps inside of the buyer's journey? You wanna have both of them, but when it comes to the trial specifically, if you're a tech company, a SaaS company, and you have multiple options for pricing and your pricing, you could have good, better, best, but especially if you're user based or you're usage based, where let's say you have a number of project boards or a number of invoices that you send per month, and that dictates how much you pay for that app. You need to collect that information. In any active form, active, you know, the steps they take. So it's on a demo request form. It's a webinar attendance form. It's a trial. You must understand what the potential ROI is of that particular lead. Roles and industries and all that stuff. Yeah, that matters. But to properly assign and allocate , like resources in terms of marketing spend, in terms of sales reps, you have to understand what the potential backend value is of that customer. 

Steven Morell: And I also think that you can only pull this off if you, if either the economic buyer and the user is the same person, or you have a deep understanding of those two. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: Because if the economic buyer is, say the VP Sales and the sales rep are supposed to use it, then you need to know who's doing the trial. Is this a sales dude or is it his manager? What do I deliver? 

Duane Dufault: Mm-hmm.

Steven Morell: You need to understand this difference, or you need to have a product where this is only for sales reps. This is not for their manager. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Morell: Eventually approve this for the whole team, but that's only when the whole team stands in front of them saying that we want this. 

Duane Dufault: No, and it's very good to call out, because oftentimes we assume people that start trials are always the same across the board. We're not paying attention to who is starting a trial . If we happen to figure out that it is a gatekeeper, quote unquote gatekeeper, a non-decision maker, a non-economic buyer, we just skate past them and then we ignore their involvement and just try to get the decision maker to save time in the deal when we need to make sure we understand their involvement, or we assume that it's the decision maker. And then we build the product experience, the trial experience for the decision maker when it needs to be for the end user itself. And so when it comes to. Your first question, the second part of that would be my answer would be the deep understanding. Like, from a sales perspective. To win in trial sales, you have to be like a next level sales rep because you can't just come in... you can, you're not gonna have a ton of success if you're coming in as like an entry level SDR, you're doing, simple qualifications through BANT and then handing off to an account executive. That could work. But to be successful in selling into a trial, you have to have a deep understanding of who you're selling to because you can't come in and be like: "Hey, are you interested in X?" Yeah I'm in the account already. I'm past that phase. I need to know X, Y, and Z. So you have to understand who you're talking to, the problems they're experiencing, how they're trying to solve it, and understanding their current situation. Like you have to be insanely curious and relevant within two minutes of being on that phone call with them. And if you're not, you're just gonna push them away and you won't get them back. And to add some context to that in, I always get pushback in upper mid market and enterprise segments when we're talking about trials. Mark Roberge the CRO, original CRO from HubSpot, third person employed, he wrote a book called "The Sales Acceleration Formula", came out in 2018, I believe, and he articulated this very well and validated my thought process and all this stuff. When we look at lead scoring. Traditionally it's broken past mid-market. Like once you get into, the multiple five figure type of accounts, lead scoring, I don't wanna say is just wrong, but it's more of a red flag than it is a green flag. Whereas if you get SMB mid-market accounts in, they're using the product, downloading the things, going to webinars, those are all really good things. But when you get into those upper customer segments, when you get into the six figure accounts or whatever, . Your, whoever's listening, whatever your version of enterprise is, I wanna emphasize that. It's usually a negative thing because what's happening is, like in your example earlier, the VP of sales of a 30 or 40 person sales company isn't out there starting a whole bunch of trials. They're not out there downloading eBooks and doing all that stuff. They're busy running an organization and making sure what they have is being optimized. Oftentimes ,what happens is they will give that task to somebody on their team. It'll be a rev ops person. It'll be an IT person. It'll be an enablement person that's going to find something to evaluate, to bring it to that decision maker. And so when you see a high level of usage from an enterprise type customer prospect inside of your trial account, that's not a great sign sometimes unless you understand their role coming into it. Because what they're doing is they're figuring out what doesn't work 

Steven Morell: Yes. Super valuable. 

Duane Dufault: And, the time, the speed to lead. I harp on companies when it comes to the traditional speed to lead cliche phrase in sales more than any other type of lead magnet, because, especially in larger segments, because they're, you need to control the narrative because whatever they're getting into, unless your product team is absolutely amazing and optimized everything for specifics and whatnot. 99% of the time you get into the same trial experience with, regardless of type of cus customer or prospect you are. And the problem is when you get into those enterprise type deals, upper mid market type deals their use case is so specific to them that at the moment they get shown some generic walkthrough or generic thing. It's a negative thing, so it almost pushes them away. And so from a sales perspective, you want to be in contact with that person and control that conversation immediately. 

Steven Morell: I like to think of trial lead magnet, demo…

Duane Dufault: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Morell: …website. All your collaterals in this is my offering. And for me, the general formula for my offering is dream outcome… 

Duane Dufault: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Morell: …multiplied with likelihood that you will get it, divided by the time you need to get the value out of the product. So whatever the dream outcome for the customer is.

Duane Dufault: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Morell: They go: "BS, I don't believe that you can do this." 

Duane Dufault: Yeah.

Steven Morell: So now you have to prove you can, and there are, you know, our toolboxes are full of tools. 

Duane Dufault: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Morell: How can you prove that I can actually, you know, dream outcome: I'm not gonna make a 10 million extra. BS! You will not!

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: Now you wanna understand how. So, I can give you a demo and show you how it works, and then you go like, oh, okay, I understand how you're gonna make this 10 million. Or I can give you a trial and go like, try it out yourself.

Duane Dufault: Yeah.

Steven Morell: Or I could have testimonials. Like, If all your friends tell you: call Steven, he's gonna make you 10 million! Then you don't need neither a demo nor a trial. You will just sign up. This is a part of trust building, of making the customer believe that you could actually deliver the dream outcome. And then the big question is, do I get the 10 million ? Today, tomorrow,? No, you're getting it when you're 85, screw you. I'm not buying this. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: You wanna have this, like how long it's gonna take. And again, trial, demo, website, webinar, all our tools to show you how quickly you get value. And a trial is actually the opportunity to get that value created super fast. 

Duane Dufault: I really like the way you phrased that. I just took a note on that. It's like it's another step in building trust.

Steven Morell: I think we have a whole arsenal of tools on how to build trust and how to make the prospect believe that we can actually deliver on our promise. And trial is one, and if trial doesn't work for you, then screw the trial. You don't have to do 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: If you find out that, your economical buyer is the one that contacts you and they don't care about the user experiences because they ain't gonna use it. 

Duane Dufault: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Morell: Skip the demo. There is no obligation to do a demo. Get in, other customers who can give you testimonials, that it works. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah.

Steven Morell: Built that trust that you can deliver, you promise. 

Duane Dufault: I love the trust building exercise when it comes to those lead magnets, but what's interesting was just coming to mind. One of the, an old school and actually a current school method inside of sales coaching and training is when doing a demo. I've heard it so many times now that we're talking about it now, so many times I've heard we'll hand the mouse over to the prospect and let them work the screen and experience a product. That is literally what a trial is meant to do. Like…

Steven Morell: Yes. 

Duane Dufault: It's confirming functionality, it's confirming fit, like all that stuff. One of my favorite things that Mark Kosoglow talks about is a CRO over a Catalyst former Outreach, he says that the demo should not be where the deal is closed. The demo is confirmation of what they believe to be true after you talk to them into discovery and figure out that it's.

Steven Morell: Exactly. Yeah. Building trust. 

Duane Dufault: Like we're leaning way too much on a demo. We're just pushing people. We have five minute discovery and push them into the demo, and then hopefully they close and then we suck at follow up, or we push them into a trial and make them go on their own and basically say: Hey, if they don't get in and use it and activate, then we're never gonna touch them.

Steven Morell: You know what I think sometimes about demos, you remember when in the good old days there were the sales flyers. And every salesperson was just dreaming of the magic sales flyer that I can send over and it's gonna close the deal. No flyer is gonna close the deal for you. No demo is gonna close ... We do the same thing with demos. We sent untrained, freshly baked salespeople, we just explained, you click here, you click here, you click here, and those are the five questions you need to ask. And then we sent them into demos. We used to, now it's not that easy anymore and we hope that the demo is gonna sell itself and the customer is actually gonna convince themselves that: ah, okay, I understand. I can conclude what it does for me. 

Duane Dufault: When we do that…

Steven Morell: And that should be a demo. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 2 things on that. The journey that you take your prospect through in a trial when you do it right, and you have the nudges and the instructions and all that stuff, that is technically a salesperson running a demo for them, just digitally and the other side too. When we do that, when we send them a recording of the demo or we're just presenting to them, or we plop them into a trial account with no guides or context or anything like that, we're assuming the prospect. Knows everything they need to know about their problem to take action. The human element in all of this is we know from a sales perspective, we know what our product is capable of and the problems that it solves. The prospect just understands the negative reality they're sitting in and they're having to go through it. If they knew everything they needed to know about their situation, their problem in the first place, they wouldn't be talking to you. They'd be using a product and they'd be the best customer in the world. The salesperson is there to help educate the prospect on what's really going on inside of their business to help them understand the exponential impact that solving this problem is gonna have. But that takes time. That takes you asking those questions and stop leaning on sharing your screen to blind them with all the shiny glitz and glam of a demo environment, they're probably never gonna set up. 

Steven Morell: Yes. If you don't understand the problem that they're facing. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: And most customers cannot really describe this, then it doesn't even make sense to start a demo because how can you. 

Duane Dufault: Well, yeah. It's the difference between discomforts versus pain points when sales reps here that a prospect wants to increase their efficiency and decrease cost, we like to jump for joy and say, we got a tool for you, but what does any of that frigging mean? And so we, in sales in general, we've gotten impatient. We don't go deep with customers anymore. We're only looking for people that are already ready to buy right now with no help in the process. And so there's, we need to shift in sales in general, not just

Steven Morell: ...speaking of going deeper…

Duane Dufault: Yeah, yeah. 

Steven Morell: …we are running out of time. I have a final question for you.

Duane Dufault: Yeah.

Steven Morell: And if you have been listening to this podcast, you know. what I ask. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah. 

Steven Morell: If I would have a time machine that can send postcards to the five years younger Duane. What would you write on that postcard? What not to do and what to do differently? 

Duane Dufault: Lean into your strengths and get outta your own way.

Steven Morell: Is it a version of trusting your gut? 

Duane Dufault: Yeah, that is, but the part of that is, the other part is get out of your own way. Trusting your gut is part of it, but just realize that you have strengths for a reason, and to grow you need to get outside of your comfort zone and do certain things like that. But to excel and be successful in anything you have to understand, you need to operate within your strengths, because that , your baseline belief and self-worth is based on your strengths, not what you believe you should be doing. And so if you are constantly trying to find new things and expand and all that stuff, that's great. But you need to find ways, and this was a, this is a recent belief for me the last couple of years, is you have to find a way to live within your strengths when you're executing. And, understand that to grow, you're gonna have to get uncomfortable, which you have to figure out how to incorporate your strengths because you want to be in the zone, in the comfort zone when you're executing, right? You don't want to be flustered, demo emotional and all that stuff. That's just what flow state you're operating within your strengths. And so that's one big connection that I've made for myself over the last, four or five years. And then, getting out of your own way, realizing that there are black swans everywhere, there are unknown unknowns, and you need to be curious. Use that curiosity to educate yourself in the path of where your strengths are. Right? And so there's two thought processes there, but it's just lean into your strengths and get outta your own way.

Steven Morell: That's really inspiring. Duane, thank you so much for that advice and for being here today. 

Duane Dufault: Yeah, it's been fun! 

Steven Morell: All right, everyone. That brings us to the end of this episode of Speak Revenue. I want to thank our guest, Duane Dufault, for joining us today, sharing his insight. There's wonderful conversation. I hope you come again because there's so many more topics I wanna discuss with you. Remember to check us out at our website: speakrevenue.com for a full transcript and additional resources. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you go for your listening leads, it really helps to get the word out. Also, follow us on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on YouTube, wherever you can find us. We'll be back soon with another great guest. Until then, stay curious. Keep listening. Stay safe. Talk to you soon. Goodbye.