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Mental Selling: The Sales Performance Podcast is a show for motivated problem solvers in sales, leadership and customer service. Each episode features a conversation with sales leaders and industry experts who understand the importance of the mindset and skill set needed to be exceptional at building trusted customer relationships. In this podcast, we get below the surface, tapping into the emotional and psychological drivers of lasting sales and service success. You’ll hear stories and insights about overcoming the self-limiting beliefs that hold salespeople back, how to unlock the full potential in every salesperson, the complexities of today’s B2B buying cycles, and the rise of today’s virtual selling environment. We help you understand the mental and emotional aspects of sales performance that will empower you to deliver amazing customer experiences and get the results you want.
Welcome to Mental Selling!
[00:00:00] Cate Hollowitsch: If there becomes this point of you are feeling like this sales process is hard and that it's taking a long time, there's clearly a disconnect if the folks that you're trying to target are not reacting to your marketing efforts and to your sales efforts. There's something happening there, and it could indicate that you still have too big of a target audience.
[00:00:26] Hayley Parr: This is Mental Selling the sales podcast for people who are dedicated to making a difference in customers lives. We're here to help you unlock sales talent, win more relationships and transform your business with integrity. I'm your host, Haley Parr. Let's get right into it.
[00:00:44] Hayley Parr: Welcome back to the Mental Selling Podcast, brought to you by Integrity Solutions, where we explore the mindset and skillset behind high performance sales leadership. I'm your host, Haley Parr, and today's conversation is one. Every sales leader, CRO and go to market executive needs to hear, especially if growth feels harder than it should.
[00:01:06] Hayley Parr: Our guest today is Cate Hollowitsch, principal consultant at Relevents Group. Cate is the creator of the Brand Blueprint, the Culture Canvas, and the Fear Framework for selfless leadership. She's a 2024 TEDx speaker, a multi-time industry award winner, an adjunct professor in digital marketing, and has spent more than 30 years helping organizations bring clarity to complexity.
[00:01:33] Hayley Parr: In this episode, we are going to challenge a few deeply held assumptions, starting with why you can't build a go to market strategy until you truly understand your brand. Why niching down isn't limiting, but liberating, and why go to market isn't a department or a launch plan. It's how the entire business operates.
[00:01:56] Hayley Parr: This is a conversation about clarity. Confidence and the mental game behind sustainable growth. Cate, welcome to the Mental Selling Podcast.
[00:02:06] Cate Hollowitsch: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
[00:02:09] Hayley Parr: Thanks for joining. Now, before we jump in, I'd really love to.
[00:02:15] Hayley Parr: Ground our listeners in your journey, um, you've spent decades really touching every corner of marketing. You know, you've built organizations inside and now you advise them from the outside. and your frameworks connect brand. They connect culture with leadership and execution.
[00:02:33] Hayley Parr: Can you walk us a little bit through your path and the experiences that shape how you think about brand in go-to-market execution today?
[00:02:41] Cate Hollowitsch: Yeah, it's one of those journeys that you're, I sometimes look back and think, how did I land here? How did I end up on this path? you know, I was a, a child of the eighties and, you know, the big business movies, I loved it. And I just, I thought marketing was always gonna be the fun thing, but back in the day, it was all what everyone today calls traditional marketing, you know, catalogs and postcards and tv and radio and, and all the things.
[00:03:04] Cate Hollowitsch: And it's evolved so much over that timeframe. And over the course of all that. the various managers I've had, the leaders, I've had the conferences I've gone to, the books I've read. All of it, I think contributed to my love of the brand. So as you think through marketing and what parts a job you like to do, the brand is the part I think that really stuck out to me as being so foundational to everything else, and that if that part's broken, all the rest of it's gonna be broken to. And so I, I just kind of boiled it down to that's the part that I feel really passionate about. And then that makes everything else easier.
[00:03:44] Hayley Parr: I mean, that's really helpful context because it really does explain something you and I talked about prior to getting started today.
[00:03:56] Hayley Parr: Something you're really, really firm on and that's that go to market cannot and should not start until the brand. Is clearly defined, and I think a lot of organizations get that backwards.
[00:04:05] Hayley Parr: They're under a lot of pressure to move quickly, to hit their numbers, to launch new motions. So let's start our conversation there. Why is the brand really the starting point and not the byproduct of a go-to-market strategy? In your opinion
[00:04:20] Cate Hollowitsch: Yes, because I think when you said that really well, that, that sometimes they wanna, they're, they're under pressure. They've got all these things happening and they wanna just get out there in the market and do stuff. The spray and pray, either spray and pray marketing or spray and pray sales, however you wanna frame that, but.
[00:04:36] Cate Hollowitsch: That brand is what grounds everybody. That other behavior comes from scarcity mindset. We personally and professionally, you start to think, I'm under pressure to hit a quota. I'm under pressure to just launch my new business. I need to do this. I need to hit this metric. I've got to sell 10 of these before the end of the month, whatever those things are.
[00:04:58] Cate Hollowitsch: And then of course, that funnels down into our personal agendas of this impacts my. paycheck. This impacts my commission, this impacts my bonus, whatever the thing is that you personally are being driven by, all of that is stemming from scarcity mindset. And so there's this urge to just. Put activity out in the world and do it and hope for the best.
[00:05:20] Cate Hollowitsch: And yes, sometimes you get lucky. And what that does is it gives you the feeling that you weren't wrong. It gives you the feeling of like, there see it worked, and then we do it more and more and more. But that brand is what makes all of that easier. I don't think people realize how hard it is to maintain, spray and pray marketing or spray and pray sales.
[00:05:41] Cate Hollowitsch: Without that brand foundation. But once they get that established and they get clarity around who they are, who they're going after and what they're selling to those people, all the rest of it gets easier. and that's why I believe so firmly. And that has to be established. It also drives your internal stuff.
[00:06:00] Cate Hollowitsch: it drives who you hire, how you hire it drives how you treat each other. At work, it drives other internal decisions that are not external facing as well. Mm-hmm.
[00:06:11] Hayley Parr: So you touched on a few elements. Who you are, who you're. Target market is, but you know, the Mental Selling podcast are, the vast majority of our listeners are sales leaders, and I think a lot of people don't fully understand all the foundational components of what makes up your brand. So could you break that down a little bit?
[00:06:33] Hayley Parr: What are some of those elements that leaders must really nail before starting to build their go-to market playbook?
[00:06:40] Cate Hollowitsch: I think you will find various marketing people have different experiences or opinions on what goes into it. For me, there's nine elements. State really. The ninth one I put in there just so that the boxes looked even. I think it starts with your vision and your mission.
[00:06:57] Cate Hollowitsch: Those two things feed into your values, your company value system. You also need your targeted audience, your defined ICP. You need your brand positioning statement, which can be known as a couple of different things, a unique selling proposition, all of the variations of that. You need a brand promise, so the brand positioning statement is more about why a customer chooses to do business with you, a brand promises, what can they expect from you every single time.
[00:07:26] Cate Hollowitsch: How are you being consistent every single time? And then the last three items are connected. It's your brand persona, the personality of your brand, how you're gonna show up in the world, the tone and the voice you're gonna use that goes along with that. And then your logo, just what's your visual representation of that brand.
[00:07:45] Cate Hollowitsch: I think some people say, oh, I need a rebrand, and then they. Go get a new logo, but so much deeper than that. But that logo is the visual representation of all the other eight elements.
[00:07:55] Hayley Parr: Or they, they spend a lot of money with a fancy agency who does a PowerPoint presentation and gives them a few posters and think they're off to the races. But I think your foundational elements really hit what really matters and it. It's important to think through the change management of it all and the, the adoption of the different areas.
[00:08:19] Hayley Parr: These foundational elements impact everything that you're doing. And from a sales perspective, it really gives the teams. Not just the ability, but the permission to move differently. So what would be an example of a way from a sales perspective, thinking about our audience. How could they improve the way they approach sales conversation differently?
[00:08:47] Hayley Parr: Having a solid brand foundation in their toolbox.
[00:08:52] Cate Hollowitsch: Even before the sales conversation, it gives the sales team permission to say no. It helps them
[00:09:00] Cate Hollowitsch: understand who are you talking to in the first place. So before even having a conversation, it helps them figure out, should I have this conversation? Does this per, is this person, this potential customer in my ICP?
[00:09:15] Cate Hollowitsch: Does my product even work for them? And then once that's figured out, it gives them permission to not discount unnecessarily. Often, part of that spray and pray sales problem is that you're just flinging discounts. You've turned, I hate to say a brand name, but you've turned everything into JC Penney's.
[00:09:33] Cate Hollowitsch: Like just wait long enough and they'll put it on sale. you don't have to behave that way anymore because you know your product at that price. Is a fit for that perfect buyer, and you already know that going in it makes that part easier because you also don't have to rewrite your pitch every single call.
[00:09:53] Cate Hollowitsch: You don't have to redo that demo deck every single time because you've already pre-established that who you're talking to with what product, at what price is the right fit. For this exact conversation you're about to have, and then you can just, you're doing it by rote because you've got this down pat, and you're not relearning the system every single time.
[00:10:14] Cate Hollowitsch: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:15] Hayley Parr: Let's make this tactical. I think most organizations have a sense of their brand and maybe folks don't all have 100% alignment on some of the various of those nine elements that you mentioned, but there's some cohesion there.
[00:10:33] Hayley Parr: you were to talk to a sales leader and give them one brand related issue to address or fix or improve that they could do today, what?
[00:10:42] Hayley Parr: Where would you recommend that they start
[00:10:45] Cate Hollowitsch: I guarantee it's the target audience. I guarantee they have not niched down enough.
[00:10:49] Cate Hollowitsch: I, I'm a hundred percent positive that the weakest. Part of branding work with any business is that target audience. They're afraid to niche down till it hurts
[00:11:01] Hayley Parr: Niching down till it hurts. What a perfect segue to the next topic I wanted to talk to you about, because that really struck a chord when, when you and I were speaking before, that's a very uncomfortable thing for Many organizations that want to be available and do all things to all people, especially, you know, in, in markets that are challenged where you don't wanna have to turn deals down and you want to be all things to all people, and you want to have product availability to all people could.
[00:11:35] Hayley Parr: Could you speak a little bit about the kind of pain that tells leaders. That this might be an issue, like say more about niching down until it hurts.
[00:11:46] Cate Hollowitsch: if growth is hard, if there becomes this point of you are feeling like this sales process is hard and that it's taking a long time, and your team. Is rewriting every pitch deck and spending a lot of time doing research on potential targets. And, and in your meetings you're having this, the sales team is saying things about So and so's not getting back to me, or I've reached out to that client seven times and they're not responding.
[00:12:15] Cate Hollowitsch: And there's clearly a disconnect if the folks that you're trying to target are not reacting to your marketing efforts and to your sales efforts. There's something happening there, and it could indicate that you still have too big of a target audience. You've probably experienced it. How many cold dms do you get in LinkedIn?
[00:12:38] Cate Hollowitsch: Or you just wanna fling back and say, dude, I'm not your target, but they think you are. They think because you have a title in an industry, you are a procurement officer in manufacturing. Like, oh, nope, Those are the two indicators, but it really isn't, it's even more than that. So my trick of course is always to, uh, and I don't do math in public, so be, be warned,
[00:13:03] Cate Hollowitsch: but, well, I have to for some of this because my trick for the niching down is math it out.
[00:13:09] Cate Hollowitsch: When in doubt math it out. And again, it goes back to scarcity mindset. A lot of organizations feel like they can't niche down any further because they start looking at that total relevant market or total addressable market and think it's too small. Like, oh no, it's too small. That's not, it's not enough.
[00:13:29] Cate Hollowitsch: Or when LinkedIn or Meta gives you the size of the audience when you're trying to boost an ad, when it starts to feel too small, you're on the right path. When it starts to feel like, Ooh, that's tiny. Keep going. Go one more layer down. If it's millions and millions and millions of, of targets,
[00:13:47] Cate Hollowitsch: It's too big. And so I always encourage people to math it out.
[00:13:51] Cate Hollowitsch: So let's say you're an executive coach. I, when you meet people and you ask them what they do and they say, I'm an executive coach, and you say, who's your target audience?
[00:13:59] Cate Hollowitsch: And they look at you like you're dumb and they say, executives. Like what? So there's so many layers and nuances to executives, right? Just the word executive. People who have variations of that in their job title, it's like 650 million people or something in the world. It's a huge number. But what if you just assume half of them are female?
[00:14:19] Cate Hollowitsch: So maybe you wanna be a coach for female executives. Now you can take that number down by half. Well, what if you wanna be an executive coach for female executives? Are in the last five to six years of their career and they actually need coaching to transition out of it. Now you can slim that down even further, but you see how that by slimming it down and you math it out, then if you're at a certain age, so if you're in your fifties, you are only gonna work another 20 years.
[00:14:47] Cate Hollowitsch: Maybe. How many executives can you even coach at any one time in the course of a year? 10. Then times the 10 years you're gonna work, you only, you need less than a hundred targets. You only need less than a hundred people to go sell to. But even niching down from that bigger target, that total addressable market, that total relevant market, you're still going to have more than 5,000.
[00:15:12] Cate Hollowitsch: People that fit that profile and that persona that you're picking up. And you only need less than a hundred of them to survive the rest of your career. So when you math it out, it becomes those small numbers are actually great. So now convert that to sales activity. Now I need to sell to those that group of 5,000 I need to sell to them.
[00:15:31] Cate Hollowitsch: Where do they hang out? What do they do? What do they read? What podcasts are they listening to? What trade shows do they go to? What newsletters Do they read? Are they on Facebook or TikTok or LinkedIn? Where do you find them? Now, your sales efforts become very targeted and very focused.
[00:15:47] Cate Hollowitsch: Your message becomes very targeted and very focused, and you say the same thing every single time. You only need one or two messages to get to that very specific bullseye of a niched down target, a niched down ideal customer profile.
[00:16:02] Hayley Parr: hi there. If you're listening to this show, it means you believe in making a difference in your customers lives and are looking for tools to grow in your career at the same time. At Integrity Solutions, we're changing the stereotypes about sales training in ways your customers will feel and experience every day.
[00:16:22] Hayley Parr: If you want to learn more about how we could help you and your team, go to integritysolutions.com.
[00:16:29] Hayley Parr: I'm struggling with this additional layer, and I'm not sure if it's an additional layer of complication or just something else to consider around buying intent. Now this is something that M Haldorf and I just talked about on our last episode, you know, m very well.
[00:16:44] Hayley Parr: and that is all of the signals that tell you someone's in the market. From a timing perspective for whatever product or service that you have to serve your ICP now, does that narrow down your niche or does that mean you have to expand because the numbers make it even more difficult.
[00:17:09] Cate Hollowitsch: I do think that kind of depends on the product and the situation. I mean, think about like, PPE items during COVID. soon as we got on the other end of COVID, that buying intent, that kind of scarcity, the lack in, in the supply chain that disappeared and then businesses that were selling, that they had to broaden a little bit because now that buying intent had changed, but.
[00:17:32] Cate Hollowitsch: Also, it could help you niche down and be even more targeted. So in that executive coach example, it could be just based on birthday, it could just be when these people hit a certain age. I wanna start marketing to them because they're going to be ready to start thinking about the next step in their career, where they're going after this or what retirement looks like.
[00:17:52] Cate Hollowitsch: it could also be other buying intents that matter if you are, a communications or a PR professional. It could be that when certain companies in the industries you're looking for have a leadership change, a CEO or a president change, that's your buying intent because that's your trigger to say they're gonna have.
[00:18:11] Cate Hollowitsch: PR needs that I wanna go after. So each business and each product is going to have to understand what those buying intents are. What are the things that keeps that customer up at night? What are they stressed out about? What are they hiding from their peers? What do they not wanna talk about? All of those kind of secret.
[00:18:29] Cate Hollowitsch: Motivations internally are those buying intents that you're looking for, and there can be signals about it. People are gonna start posting certain content in their work careers on LinkedIn or those signals of a revenue dip, or if they're publicly traded, and you can get some of that information. So there's a lot of things you can do to find the buying intent, and it could either shrink your market down more, which could be good.
[00:18:55] Cate Hollowitsch: Or you need to expand it because now it's made it too impossible. Or the distance between when those target buyers hit that buying intent and when you wanna sell to them is too great. You may have to go back up just a bit. So it could be either depending on the situation.
[00:19:15] Hayley Parr: And that's what makes our job as go-to-market professionals so challenging and interesting and different every single day.
[00:19:24] Cate Hollowitsch: When you know that you just adjust, it becomes part of your quarterly review or your annual review process. If you know those details about your customer better than they know it about themselves. This isn't hard. It's just another part of the work that has to get done every year, but it isn't. It isn't hard when you know them that well.
[00:19:45] Hayley Parr: and then you're, you're proactively anticipating their needs and challenges and pains, and then they feel heard and understood and they're like, oh my gosh. X, Y, Z company understands me now I trust them and now I
[00:19:58] Hayley Parr: wanna work with them.
[00:19:59] Hayley Parr: Do you have any examples to share? Um, and you don't have to name any names, but where you approached a team and recommended the niching down and they kind of bulked at the idea, but it ultimately was a positive experience, unlocked growth or some positive outcome.
[00:20:15] Cate Hollowitsch: Yes, I'm actually working with another consultant who reached out to me for my advice on niching down, and he just felt I need to do this, but I don't know how. And that first conversation, he, I was actually thinking he's never gonna call me back again, because he just looked dear in the headlights over niching down.
[00:20:34] Cate Hollowitsch: So as a consultant, he was. Trying to think through who is my ideal client, and he was pretty convinced that he was niched down. Well, he wanted to work in the, like the supply chain part of, of businesses and thinking through the manufacturing to logistical companies to other things. But then within his target audience description, he also had FinTech sitting in there.
[00:21:02] Cate Hollowitsch: I'm like, tell me why FinTech is in there. What does that have to do with the supply chain? And it was more about the, technology type software companies that sell to the rest of the, the groups in his thing. But when we did that mapping and we started, we just used like a, a sales intel or a LinkedIn navigator kind of system, and we just put in the high level, okay, let's look at logistic companies in the us.
[00:21:23] Cate Hollowitsch: And when you look at logistics companies in the US and he discovered there were millions of them. And then I said, well, what kind of logistic companies do you wanna work? Just with railroads or maybe just. Over the water. I mean like, uh, barges, like that kind or shipping or do you wanna talk about over the road, like semi-truck type logistics?
[00:21:41] Cate Hollowitsch: What do you mean? And then he started, you know, he started thinking through that of like, wow, I really could just niche down and say I am only working with rail comp. You know, because there's just so many. And as a single, a solopreneur, a single person running his own company. And when I started talking through how many folks can you actually help in a year?
[00:22:00] Cate Hollowitsch: what's your workload like? And he put that math at play. And then we looked at that bigger picture. niche down into all kinds of very specific details. That CEO change, I mentioned was one of his buying intents that he came up with of what if I only work with companies that have a CEO change within the last 12 months?
[00:22:21] Cate Hollowitsch: we looked through the sales intel data about that because it tracks the internet these days, tracks all of that, and you can get that down to very small, small numbers. I think another, niche down that he and I talked about was, IPOs. We ran the numbers on how many of those companies had an IPO in the last six months, and even that number when he did just that number of just transportation companies with just an IPO, it was still five or 6,000 companies and in the rest of his career ahead of him, he can't help 5,000 companies.
[00:22:58] Cate Hollowitsch: The math works, and it gives you a lot more comfort of, yeah, I actually cannot help that many people over the course of a career anyway. Even a bigger business, even a, a company with multimillion dollars in revenue and hundreds of employees, there's still a cap of how many they can actually serve with their product and their, their ICPs.
[00:23:20] Cate Hollowitsch: The math is gonna be more than that every single time.
[00:23:24] Hayley Parr: those are some powerful numbers. That's great.
[00:23:26] Hayley Parr: I wanna transition to Misconstrued quite a bit. And this is this concept of go to market, being kind of a moment in time initiative, often around a single campaign launch or push or product, like a product launch, something we assign to a marketing team, sales team, product team.
[00:23:49] Hayley Parr: But. You had mentioned that go to market, it's not a departmental function, it's an enterprise wide operating system. Walk us through that breakdown. What happens when it's siloed and that shift when there's more alignment?
[00:24:03] Cate Hollowitsch: well, back in the day when I worked in CPG, I was thinking through how much focus and attention and perfection, perfection for the next life. But perfection goes into a go to market. Strategy the way the vast majority of the world thinks about it. Like you said, it's for a specific product launch or a campaign or a moment in time.
[00:24:25] Cate Hollowitsch: But think of all the effort and all the things that go into it. You get a, a project manager, you have a well-built out plan. Every I is dotted, every T is crossed. The timing is pristine. Things launch and hit in the right order. Everyone knows what they're doing. marketing, sales, product, customer service.
[00:24:44] Cate Hollowitsch: They're all working together to get this baby out the door and everyone is super dedicated to it. What if we behave that way all the time? That was the thought I had. What if we behaved that way all the time? Even about the product that's 20 years old that we've been selling for a million decades and nothing's changed with it.
[00:25:03] Cate Hollowitsch: 'cause it works. Even that product, what if. Everyone treated it that way all the time. So that's why I feel like it's not a thing. It's not just a moment in time. It's not just a department. It's not marketing's problem or sales problems. It's the CEO problem. Like everybody has to feel like every approach to every marketing lead, every sales demo is part of this go to market engine, this operating system, and they treat.
[00:25:33] Cate Hollowitsch: The whole annual business goals as if it is a single moment in time, campaign or product launch.
[00:25:41] Hayley Parr: Hmm.
[00:25:41] Cate Hollowitsch: See what I mean? And everybody is putting that level of attention and detail and rigor and connectedness to it. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
[00:25:51] Hayley Parr: You know what my knee jerk reaction to that was is that sounds exhausting. And then my brain goes, but the point of an operating system is repeatable, scalable processes, and that's what a launch. Provides.
[00:26:11] Cate Hollowitsch: Yes. And if you have that ICP figured out and the products that go with them, you're not doing this across 500 skews anymore. Because you're now aware of which skews are not bringing you any revenue or which ones aren't bringing you margin or which ones are, well, we created that for that one thing.
[00:26:25] Cate Hollowitsch: The pet projects like it all dies off and now you're doing it for the things that are really focused on bringing the most benefit to the organization. And yes, it may feel exhausting, but yet it isn't because it's also routine. And get better at it. Practice makes perfect 10,000 hours of practice. So when you're doing this, go to market operating system, more and more and more, you get better and better and better at it.
[00:26:52] Cate Hollowitsch: So yes, in the early days it's probably like, oh, that was slow. That seemed to take forever. But you're gonna get faster and better and more pristine about it. The more, the more you stick with the idea.
[00:27:03] Hayley Parr: And so what are some real work examples of what that looks like when it's done well, when there's a shared language across the organization or a shared pros, shared processes, what departments are impacted? Like what, what does that look like?
[00:27:16] Cate Hollowitsch: I was just talking about this yesterday with somebody, and I think what it looks like when it doesn't work is the signals and the communications and the conversations and the information doesn't flow well between all of those players. So when it's working right, customer service knows When a customer's on the phone and they say something, customer service instinctively knows, I need to pass that information to.
[00:27:41] Cate Hollowitsch: Marketing. Marketing instinctively knows, oh, that's a defect in the product and we got to fix it. Sales instinctively knows thanks. That is a trigger. That's a buying intent. That's a piece that when I hear that, I can call them and go sell them something else or do an add-on.
[00:28:02] Cate Hollowitsch: Everybody understands that this is how you move a customer from a one-time purchase to. recurring revenue, whatever that looks like in your organization. It could be subscription based, it could be renewals, but all of those elements, every little piece of information, every customer touchpoint. One of my favorite things about this is everybody loves the CRM in this model when it's working
[00:28:24] Cate Hollowitsch: right? And you don't have those people that are like, Hmm, it's micromanaging and it's big brother, and I'm not putting my stuff in the CRM. No, when this system is working, right, everybody loves it and everybody wants to put information in there because they want customer service. If Bob calls from company A, I need customer service to know this thing so that they mention it to him.
[00:28:47] Cate Hollowitsch: Everybody wants to contribute to the whole entire system because it's making everybody's jobs easier along the way.
[00:28:55] Hayley Parr: Oh my goodness, Cate. We could go on forever, but, this has been incredibly grounding, in the absolute best way.
[00:29:03] Hayley Parr: I want to bring us home with a rapid fire section. I've been trying out this segment for the last few months.
[00:29:09] Hayley Parr: I think it's going well.
[00:29:11] Hayley Parr: think short answers. Instinctive responses that really just tie everything we've talked about, brand focus, go to market with just kind of this mental game of selling for our audience. Bring it all home so
[00:29:25] Hayley Parr: What is one word in your opinion that best describes a healthy brand foundation?
[00:29:32] Cate Hollowitsch: Clarity.
[00:29:34] Hayley Parr: Ooh, that's a good one. Okay, finish this sentence if you haven't clearly defined your ICP. Your sales team is actually selling blank. Excellent. what's the most common lie leaders tell themselves about growth?
[00:29:54] Cate Hollowitsch: Oh, that if they just do more activity, it'll fix the lack of strategy and focus.
[00:30:01] Hayley Parr: Ooh, that was a juicy one, and I think that we uncovered a lot of ways to address more intentional. Strategy behind those activities in this episode. Fabulous. Okay, one more and then I'll let you plug or share or leave anything you'd like to, provide to the listeners of Mental Selling before we close.
[00:30:24] Hayley Parr: Okay. If you could challenge sales leaders to do one really uncomfortable thing this year, what would it be?
[00:30:31] Cate Hollowitsch: I would challenge sales leaders to actually think about this ICP and very intentionally stop selling to customers that don't fit it.
[00:30:44] Hayley Parr: You heard it from Cate Niche down in 2026. Write it on a
[00:30:48] Cate Hollowitsch: Yep,
[00:30:49] Hayley Parr: it
[00:30:49] Cate Hollowitsch: yep,
[00:30:49] Hayley Parr: laptop.
[00:30:50] Cate Hollowitsch: yep. Do it. Do
[00:30:51] Hayley Parr: Awesome. This was lovely. anything, anything else you'd like to share or plug or, leave the listeners of Mental Selling before we wrap? I.
[00:31:00] Cate Hollowitsch: Yeah, I think just be brave. Just do it. When you niche down like that and you get really focused, the selling will become easier. But like any change, it's hard at first. And it takes some discipline and some rigor to stick with it. But if you want some quick insight into whether or not you have maybe a go to market problem, I do have an assessment people can take.
[00:31:22] Cate Hollowitsch: So if they go to go to market guru.com, there's a link to take an assessment and you can actually fill that out and it'll tell you, it'll give you back A PDF. That'll tell you where some of your go-to-market systems might be not ideal.
[00:31:36] Hayley Parr: Fabulous, and we'll drop that link in the episode notes as well. Cate, always a pleasure. Cannot thank you enough.
[00:31:43] Cate Hollowitsch: Yeah. Thanks for
[00:31:44] Hayley Parr: Yeah.
[00:31:44] Cate Hollowitsch: me. This was fun. I love talking about
[00:31:45] Cate Hollowitsch: this.
[00:31:46] Hayley Parr: was fun. Have a great rest of your day.
[00:31:48] Cate Hollowitsch: You too.
[00:31:48] Cate Hollowitsch: Bye.
[00:31:51] Hayley Parr: Thank you for joining us on Mental Selling. If today's conversation resonated with you, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with your network. For more insights on how to go beyond winning deals and build real customer relationships, visit integritysolutions.com. See you next time.