Easing Sales Communications with Ankesh Kumar

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Tony: 	

Welcome. I'm your host Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world, and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and here's the successful entrepreneur who provides insights and guidance you can use to move along your vision path. Listen to my shows on all the podcast platforms, such as Spotify or iTunes, Apple podcasts. Just search for Tony DUrso and please subscribe too, and I've made a little switch recently as most of you know, I'm calling you Success Squad versus Visionaries, because you really are visionaries, but it's kind of passe. So I wanted to modernize it, spice it up a little bit and we came up with the word Success Squad. So, there you go. That's your name. All right, Success Squad.

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Today's show is about easing sales communications with Ankesh Kumar. Let's see what we can learn today. Here's some info on Ankesh. He was born in India, grew up in London and created numerous companies in Silicon Valley. AT Systems went to 22 million in four years and sold to the parent company of Monster. Personic went to 25 million in four years and merged with Kronos. And he sold patents to Google for sharing as a page ranking mechanism a year before Facebook's like button. At the end of this interview, I'm going to do a summary recap of what we went over. So, stay tuned for that. Here we go. 

Hi Ankesh, welcome to our show. It's so great to have you on with us today.

Ankesh: 

Hey, Tony, how are you?

Tony: 	

Ankesh, I can't wait to find out about LetsChat.Chat. It's a very cool platform, very cool application. It's really got my interest. But before we do that, I would love to follow your journey to success, Ankesh. Can you tell us, how did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Ankesh: 

Oh, wow! I'm glad we got a little time here. actually I was in was born in India, and at the age of 3 my father who worked for Air India got transferred to London. So, I ended up doing all my education in England. I grew up close to Heathrow Airport. I studied down in Portsmouth and in Brighton, and funnily enough, I actually did my first undergraduate in hotel and catering management, which has nothing to what I'm doing right now. But it was a lot of fun. I didn't pursue a career in that industry, because it was you end up working very anti-social hours because that's when people are out eating and drinking, and I'm pretty social myself and I wanted to be on the other side of the table, at the other side of the bar, and so I ended up doing a MBA, and finally a Masters in Information Technology.

I actually came to the US in ‘89 on vacation, and I just wrangled myself a visa. This was the time of the first Iraqi war.  The economy wasn't that great, but I managed to get a work permit, then I worked for a staffing company for a few years and then decided to start my own company. So that was around about ’94, and the company actually grew pretty rapidly. We did a million in the first year, 5,15 and 25 million. I ended up selling that company to the parent company of Monster, the job recruiting site, which was called TMP. Simultaneously, actually I started another software company called Personic, and we raised about $15 million of venture funding for that company. We grew 1/8, 16, 24 and the company was finally sold to a company called Kronos out of Portland. So since then, I've been doing some personal investment and doing a few startups myself and growing my two daughters, obviously spending some time as they were growing up and on field trips and stuff.

 But on the business side, a few years ago – actually, it was 2010 - sold a patent to Google around sharing as a page ranking mechanism. I'm sure all your listeners know the Facebook Like button, which indicates popularity. We actually filed the patent on that a year before Facebook launched it, and Google ended up buying that IP. And so that's a quick overview prior to what I've been doing at LetsChat.

Tony: 	

That’s very interesting. So you're the one responsible for the like button, huh?

Ankesh: 

Well, I take a little bit of credit.

Tony: 	

Well, I like that...very cool. And so now you are the founder of LetsChat.chat, I believe the founder or CEO. How did you come about the vision for that platform, which is now a really big success?

Ankesh: 

Yeah. We all know that sales are all about communication. I mean, it's a two-way process, whether you're buying on a consumer side or on a business side, the buyer is communicating with the seller what their pains and problems are, and the seller is communicating with the buyer what their solution can do, and both of them are doing due diligence or discovery, and it could be a very short discovery, 30 seconds on a website, or it could be months or years-long on a large B2B sale. But if you look at the communication that we do on the consumer side, we all use some form of chat, whether it's WhatsApp, I Message, Instagram, Snapchat. So it's very pervasive. If you actually break down the three main forms of communication, I'm talking very generically, email, telephone, and chat on a personal life is about one third each. And it can vary for people depends on your work environment if you are doing more email, and in work environments, you do have things like Slack, etc. 

But going back to the salesperson to customer … sorry, salesperson to buyer, chat is not very pervasive, and you think that there are all these large companies that actually do chat functionality, but why isn't there? So, that was really where initially came up with the idea of saying, well, let's try to make chat more commonplace for communication between buyers and sellers.

Tony: 	

I got you and we're going to drill into that in just a bit and tear it apart and see all about it. But before we do, what's the purpose for what you do? What's the reason? Why are you doing it?

Ankesh: 

You know, that’s a really good question, actually because I've been asking myself that question for a few years because I've been in a fortunate situation where I could not have to work so hard but you just have this drive, you want to change things, you still have the energy, and just interfacing with people. I think some of the best relationships I've had are people that I either worked with, or have been employees in companies of mine, or working with partner companies, and keeping yourself mentally stimulated. It's always nice to come up with an idea and then to see it come into fruition, and I don't know, you just keep wanting to do things. It's a challenge. It's almost like when they say why do you climb Mount Everest or why do you want to run a four-minute mile? It's that kind of thing. It's just like you really see a void here. I see an opportunity and let's make it happen. One of my favorite business saying is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Now you can have an idea, chat’s not pervasive in business sales, but then the actual execution of it and putting it together, the ups and downs and sharing the successes. It's a sense of fulfillment. 

Tony: 	

Let’s drill into it, let's chat a little bit, let's tell our audience about it, which by the way, is comprised of entrepreneurs, solo-preneurs, small business owners, and so forth.

Ankesh: 

So Let's Chat … there's actually two important components to it. One is actually just a chat feature, and the important part of that is actually going back to why we felt that it wasn't pervasive. The biggest issue we felt was privacy. So if you are a buyer, if you're a CFO, IT manager, HR manager of any company, you really don't want to share your cell phone number with a transactional relationship, with the salesperson that may not be there next month, and your cell phone number getting out there in the wild and we all know now we have OTPs for our banking and everything else, and I won't get into that. 

But privacy is obviously very important to us. So, the way that we actually allow a buyer and seller to communicate, is basically an individual – let’s assume a small business owner or a salesperson - would create an account at LetsChat, and they will enter their cell phone number. And then from that, they'll get a link. So, if you guys are familiar with products like Calendly, where you get a calendar appointment, you can just put a link into your email, we're doing something very similar, but as opposed to setting up a calendar appointment, if the prospect or your buyer actually clicks on the link in the email, it will invoke a private chat session in a browser. So, what that means is that the prospect or the buyer do not disclose their cell phone number, and they don't see your cell phone number either. It just happens through that link, and so that's a very, very important component of allowing that. 

So clearly, there are times you can think of scenarios. For example, if somebody is putting an RFP together and the buyers are questioning, they don't want to pick the phone up, or they don't want to wait for an email response, they can just hit the chat button, have a quick dialogue, have a quick question, the same way we do when we use chat for short-form communication, and that all of a sudden comes into the picture. 

The second part of the solution focuses around chat bots and I actually preferred to use the word engagement bots, because chat bots really scare people is like machine learning, AI and it's not as complicated. But a simple example would be if a prospect clicked on your link, and you happened to be on an airplane or in a meeting and you couldn't respond to the chat, it'll give them an option - hey, john, would you like to leave a message? Ankesh is not available right now. So there's an auto-response if you like, and if you can think how that can be extrapolated, and so, that's the chat bot feature. So another example, if the prospector says, well I don't want to leave a message and say, Would you like some information? Can I provide you something? and it has that little bit of dialogue and that can be sort of configured as much or as little as the person wants.

We felt we had to add that piece to just the pure chat, have some structured responses in case the person wasn't available or the buyer prefers to rather just like you go to a website, sometimes you don't want to talk to someone. You just had a couple of quick questions and their chat bots are fairly pervasive on website. So that’s just a quick overview of the solution.
 
Tony DUrso: Ankesh, when I go to a website, and I'm looking around, a little chat will open up always. Hi, how you doing? Can I help you? Sometimes I ask for something, sometimes if I'm stuck or whatever, and I realized very quickly that I'm just speaking to a computer, and your LetsChat.Chat, it's very similar to that on a website. It's just your application and your system. the way that's done?

Ankesh: 

Yes, it's very similar. The big difference is that that's typically for inbound leads. We are used predominantly for outbound, so the way that our customers use us is they embed the links in the outbound emails, or you can put it in LinkedIn or whatever and so, you as a salesperson, correction - I mean as an entrepreneur, I'm a sales guy talking to people all the time. Anyone that actually wants to communicate with someone you know if that person has chatted, what information they've looked at, and then when you reach out to them, you can be more informed.

Tony: 	

This is Ankesh Kumar, easing sales communications, and you can find him at Let's Chat.Chat. That's Letschat.chat.

This is the Tony DUrso show where you could learn from the wisdom and success of others, to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about easing sales communications with Ankesh Kumar, but first, it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.
 
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Tony: 	

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Today's show is about easing sales communication with Ankesh Kumar. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you so stay tuned for that. Ankesh is currently focused on creating a chat box service to improve the communication between salespeople and their prospects, which is discussed in depth in this interview. All right, and now back to the chat with Ankesh. 

Ankesh: 

There's fairly hot topic in sales right now, as you're talking to Gartner this week, and it's called Intents, and we've seen this on the web pretty often, because if you click on any website, Google and everyone else knows your intent, because what you're clicking on, they can analyze that. But when you are communicating with prospects through email, you don't get to know that. So one of the things that our customers are doing, we're putting their value proposition or their topics that are the typical, for example, privacy GDPR, you can think of the stuff that why people buy, what those topics and then someone click on that topic.
  
You're really much better-informed than you go can and get an article. So, if they're clicking on GDPR, for example if there's the latest article in New York Times, you can go back to that prospect and say, hey, I know you're interested in GDPR. So that's what I mean by it is more for outbound sales and then inbound. So just trying to nurture the relationship and be more personalized so we really try to focus on the back end on content personalization.

Tony: 	

A lot of people in my audience could podcast, have a class that they're selling, and are looking forward to coaching or consulting or something like that. So when they send out a communication, let's say it's on an email, generally on a newsletter, whatever, we may have various links that go to various pages, but in this case, just kind of walk me through it. This would just be a little box aid. If you want to know about this, click here; you want to know about this, click here; you want to know about this, click here. Something like that?

Ankesh: 

Correct, correct. We as human beings are very visual and it’s been well-documented that our brain reacts to visual images significantly better than text. So, what we actually do, and I'll give you a live example, we're actually pushing a campaign live next week. So, people actually said to us, hey Ankesh. Do people actually click on a button? So we said, let's test it out. So we sent out 500 emails with a button, and we got a 25.8% response. So, nearly a quarter of the people actually clicked on it. So now my next campaign is actually taking a pie chart, showing that 25% and I'm embedding that in the email. Now as opposed to just having an image, which by itself is a good thing, if people click on the pie chart, they're taken to an engagement page, and this is what I was talking about with the chat box functionality where there are options. So this engagement page, simplistically you can think of it as a landing page, but it's more interactive than a traditional landing page. So, the prospect can look at my company's LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, About Us, so I can curate that content and their interaction, I get to see all the interaction that's going on. 

So the other question is, well, why not just the website? Well, a website typically doesn't have things like YouTube videos and LinkedIn which really collect important content. And when they go to a website, people get a little bit overwhelmed. This is too much to find. Even today, Tony,
 when you went to our website, you didn't see the About Us? So people get a little lost and get frustrated, but if I can curate the environment that I want them to come into, and personalize that content. and so that engagement page is fairly unique and we haven't seen anyone else do that. But it sorts of gets you into getting 25% engagement on email is really high. I think we're targeting what we think as passive prospects, so if you're getting typically single digit responses, there's probably another 10 or 20% that are interested, assuming you target your list correctly, but it's a little onerous to hit the reply button and go through that whole due diligence. Going back to communication and as we started off saying, we just want to make that communication, frictionless. Allow them to have the chat option, allow them to get information from those different social channels, and be able to make an informed decision to then engage with the company.

Tony: 	

Ankesh, for the application, let's say for a newsletter application, I'll have an article or something, and then I'll say read more, find more, but instead, you're saying I'll get more response. If I turn that Read More link into an actual button, I'll get more engagement?

Ankesh: 

Yes, I think the advantages is that if you've got multiple articles, for example, so I think the real scenario is if it's just not one article, maybe that would respond well in just one email, but I'm thinking more of the scenario where you've got like case studies and YouTube, so you have multiple sources of information. For example, LinkedIn. Let's start with text first. LinkedIn recommend no more than 500 characters because people will just shoot out [unclear; 20:56] But then if you want to put in like a case study, so you do an attachment and anytime there's an attachment, you've got chances of getting filtered out and then you want to finish up with a YouTube video.

So, what we're thinking is that you have the engagement button, which will take you to multiple sources of information, and then so the information that you've curated to let people make a more informed decision. So that'll be as opposed to the newsletter. I think that we haven't really looked at it much. I mean, I can see some applications there, but I think it's really where people have they don't want to put multiple attachments and multiple links, because that's going to get spammed out and you are not getting it across. What can you get across with 500 characters typically? 

Tony: 	

Oh, now I get it. Let's go to LinkedIn now. I use LinkedIn, but I haven't seen their changes because periodically there's changes and upgrades, but the last I know you could send a message to someone. So, if someone wants some information, I would send them a little blurb, and then a link to wherever they could find that on the website. Can I use LetsChat.Chat for that sort of an application? 

Ankesh: 

You can unfortunately, yes, you said you can't put buttons so it would have to be a link and we're sort of predominately focusing on email now, and because obviously LinkedIn control that environment. That being said, we are doing some creative things with LinkedIn because as we all know, I mean, we started our conversation with talking about backgrounds, history, whatever, and whether we were all human beings, we have these icebreakers. 

And so, from the LinkedIn profile, we actually not only grabbed where people live, so we can find sports teams, where they went to university, we have a feature whereby if I have you in my database, it will actually give me not just all the information that you have on your LinkedIn, but also news articles related to that. So for example, I was talking to someone yesterday and they went to Tulane University, and so I had information about the Tulane University Sports, their Twitter feed. I could just say hey, by the way, and they were like, oh wow! You know that? 
They're in New Orleans, I could tell the weather and then also topics. So, if they put something in their LinkedIn profile, for example, sales enablement, latest news articles, and so I can say oh, by the way, I just saw an article on sales enablement. I know you're interested in that topic. My feeling about sales is always to leave the prospect more informed and feeling they've actually gained something from the interaction with me, as opposed to me always asking for something like an appointment or setting up a meeting, or learning more about their decision making process, and the ability to share information that would make them more informed, I think is really important. And that's really where we're using LinkedIn right now is to so people have a lot of information with their that useful

Tony DUrso: [23:47] Ankesh, one of the challenges on radio and podcasting is its audio only. There's no visual, and sometimes it may not be easy to follow and I'm unable to follow this exactly. I understand that right now if not something I can use in a LinkedIn message. Am I correct this something where I could take that image link, the Letschat.chat image link button and put that on my profile so that if someone goes through my profile and see something of interest, instead of a read more, or an actual text link, they'll see an image link, which would be more engaging for them to click and find out more. So, am I getting that so far?

Ankesh: 

Yes, so correct. You can't use the button within LinkedIn. So, when you go to Letschat, it gives you the option of copying either the button or the link. So, in the same way, you have a Calendly link, you can have a link that will take you to the engagement page, but it won't be a visual button. You're correct.

Tony: 	

All right. I think I understand that. And earlier you said one of its biggest applications is an email. They talked about the newsletter; we send out our newsletter via email. But obviously on an email if I sent out an email, regardless of the size of the list, I could put anything in that email I want. So I can put in the image link, the Letschat.chat image link for different images, for different items or of what I offer to engage whoever might be interested in that particular thing. So far, so good?

Ankesh: 

Yes, I would put one image link, because there's a sort of a text or ratio for getting filtered out by the spam filters, usually one image. And that's, I think, the advantage of Letschat, because one image link or engagement bot, as we like to think of it, will then take them to an engagement page where you can have multiple pieces of content. So for example, people love video these days. Obviously that lets people sit back and consume that. So I have like a 30-second pitch on YouTube and a five-minute demo as well if people want to get more information, LinkedIn messaging, links to articles, to there's a menu structure there that they can carousel, that they can click through and do the due diligence so by having one link to this engagement page allows me to share multiple pieces of content to the prospect.

Tony: 	

This is the Tony DUrso Show, where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path, just to have the chat continues about easing sales communications with Ankesh Kumar, but first, it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Follow us on Twitter at Voice America TRN. Get the lowdown on guests, new shows and your favorites. That's Voice America TRN.

Tony: 	

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Tony: 	

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All right, we're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about easing sales communications with Ankesh Kumar. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. So, stay tuned for that. 

And now back to the chat with Ankesh. 

We have the entrepreneur/solopreneur again as mentioned before. They are looking for speaking opportunities, they are looking to get a podcast, they sell a course or a class, they have a book, they have different items. So when they send out a communication, they may be focusing on one thing. Hey, I just released some information about my new course, but they also want to engage anyone else that may be interested in any of their services. When I first went through Letschat, I thought that it would, sort of like a funnel, direct the person to whatever is of their interest. And now just to clarify, we're saying on the email, it would just be one image button, which would then take them to a place which would then in a way, filter them out or funnel them to what their interest is?

Ankesh: 

Correct, and the entrepreneurial [unclear; 32.44] will create that engagement page, and it's got some clear call to actions like going back to the chat for example, set up an appointment, leave a message, so more option than you have in the email. So typically an email is either call or hit the Reply button. So now your prospect has more options to look at curated content, and secondly to reach out to the person if they're interested.

I always think of it as a subset of information. I think that marketing, you can create a lot of marketing information even if you think to yourself, what are the three or four pieces that really convert people the most and put that in and if you can try to engage them. So that's the way that we see this working.

Tony: 	

I got you and I think I've got the big question of all questions here. Not trying to put you on the spot, but we see, as we mentioned earlier, there are AI type chats all over on websites. It's unusual not to see them. So, the question here is, Ankesh, what makes Letschat so different? What makes it so good?

Ankesh: 

Yes, I think it comes down to focus. In fact, I was talking to someone at Google the other day, Google actually showed, I think it was last year, the ability to set up a hair appointment or book a restaurant, and I was talking to this individual, he was telling me the amount of data that they had to collect to make that automated, as opposed to trying to boil the ocean, trying to get every single scenario and doing a focus on one vertical. And to be honest, there's three or four big players - Microsoft, IBM/Watson, Google, Amazon – they are the big four players. Everyone else is leveraging the underlying technology. So, what that means is that if you focus on a vertical, like what we're saying, this is for outbound sales, when you're working and you're thinking about that scenario like you were talking about entrepreneurs, what are they thinking? What are they talking about? And that's even different, but there are products, like you said, on websites that handle inbound leads, and they are thinking about it from a different way completely. 

That's more demand generation. So I think that's the closest if you like, the cousin to what we're doing, but given that every day we think about that individual that's trying to generate more business, and I was giving the example a few minutes ago about finding icebreaker information. That's an example of when you're focused in a vertical or outbound setting, how can you increase that engagement rate, and that's basically our sole focus. So there's a lot of technology out there. people are using it from truck driving to so on and so forth, but I think it all comes down to focus and solving the problem for that individual.

Tony: 	

It's very interesting, and you may have answered this and I don't want to be redundant, but I just want to make sure we understand how it really simplifies the process. Instead of making it complex, it makes it simple and hopefully, I'm trying to make it simple in discussing it in the dialogue here. It's just that we don't have the visual. 

Ankesh: 

Right, right.

Tony: 	

But it sounds more and more like it does simplify, and I would like to make sure that we've covered anything else that it may do about that


Ankesh: 

Yes, I think that's a good point at least to focus in on, because you asked me what was the inspiration now. There was one other story I'll just quickly relate. I was at this conference - I won't mention the vendor - it was a software vendor down in San Diego and it was the night before the conference started and everyone was having a glass of wine and chatting, and one sales guy who worked for this company was … and your audience is probably very familiar with products that do sequencing of emails, automated emails to go out and like three days later, the person doesn't respond, send them another email and another email. So this is in the scale sales and games, it’s kind of big. There’re two or three big players out there, Sales loft and Outreach.io, and then there's a bunch of other small ones. 

But going back to the story, this guy said to me, you know this guy called me back up because you sent me 23 emails, and I’m just going to take the lead and say stop, and we all had a good laugh. And it was just really sad in a way because that poor guy, and my objective of this is really to make buying experience a lot better. So as opposed to the way that we're currently doing it is bombarding people with information, and we've got a great story. We all as entrepreneurs and solopreneurs have got something interesting we want to sell, but the limitation, as I talked about, was what you can put in that outbound email. This allows you to do that and allows the prospect so you have your say, you get a 3% response rate, why will we getting 25%? What was the reason for the 22% Delta? And I believe it's because what I categorize as passive prospect, people that you've got a buzzword in there using it could be security or something like that. Say it's a CFO you are selling to. It could be a cap table if you're sending something around managing in your capitalization. And that could be really important because they just got out of a meeting and they're interested in cap table. So they click on that, and then they can learn more on a self-service basis using the chat bot, or you've curated the information. So I think that a very important component of our value prop is as well as making sure that the buyer gets to learn more. They may not buy this quarter or next quarter, because they didn't hit the Reply button, but they just learned more. They know your brand and everything else. So, I think that's really where we're coming from. I don't know, honestly, you asked about the AI stuff. I don't even think about AI because there’s a lot of PhDs in Google and Microsoft doing that, and we sit on that technology. What we think about is the user experience and the buyer experience and making it easy for the salesperson and the buyer.

Tony: 	

Well, thank you for explaining all that. Very, very interesting. Is there a demo for anyone to check if we go to Letschat.chat? Can we test drive it? How does an entrepreneur get in and interface with your company on this and see if it's going to work for them?

Ankesh: 

Well, right now we're letting having people for free, so it's a freemium model. So they can go to Letschat.chat. All you do, it's actually very, very simple. You don't even have to sign up. Just go your LinkedIn profile and it just authorizes that. So that it's as simple as that. We're going to start charging when they integrate it into third party products, or we're fully integrated into Salesforce and Sales loft and outreach.io. So that's where we sort of make money before solopreneurs and entrepreneurs. People can go ahead and try it for free and if they run into any issues, we'll be happy to help them through it.

Tony: 	

Well, thank you for that. We would love to try for free and really check it out. Is there an ultimate goal with this? I got that it's a free model now. You're going to have a paid model coming in later. Guys better get on now while it's free. Where are you going with this? What's the future hold for Letschat?

Ankesh: 

I think my best business is when I don't try to think too far ahead. I mean again, one of my favorite business saying is think strategically but act tactically, because I haven't raised any money, if I choose to, I do say there's an opportunity there because I think if we can get to a million sales people using it globally in say five years, if the charge is $25 a month, that's $25 million a month, 300 million a year, 10X on terms of valuation. That’s a $3 billion company but it's all back of the envelope stuff. You asked me what my motives are, it’s not about making money. It's just about making it easy for people. I kind of get pleasure. It’s funny. Actually, when I was back in England, I worked for an IT staffing company called Read Executive. Anyone from England would have heard of them. When I moved to the States and my software company, Personic actually started doing recruitment software, and five years later, or seven years after I left England, going back into Hounslow High Street and actually looking through the shop window - and so Read is like a Manpower, if you like - and seeing my software, it just gave me such a kick. So, it's just watching it grow. That's the part of the fun part. So, there is the potential upside financially, but it's more about just building something useful that people would like.

Tony: 	

Ankesh, are there any personal habits that you feel or you see are contributing to your vision success, that contributing to the success of what you're doing here?

Ankesh: 

Yes, I don't know, Maybe I'm sort of an outlier, but I really, frankly don't work that hard. I probably work 20 to 30 hours a week and I've always done that with every startup I've done, and I think that you hear these horror stories people Oh, working 80 hours a week and I think that's negative. If I've got a mental block, I go for a run, do something else and then it’s crazy how just pace yourself. Because the point is that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you have to make sure that you look after yourself. 

I'll tell you a funny story. When I first moved to the States, the amount of food you get, the portions are massive. I used to go to TGI Fridays after work every day and do the buffalo wings and everything, put on a bit of weight, and I used to wear a shirt and tie to work, and one day I sneezed and my top button went flying off, and I realized time to go to the gym. That was a really good habit I developed them. A lot of people say I don't have time, so I actually just put in my lunch hour. So I blocked off two or three days a week - Monday, Wednesday, Friday - and that really helped me. I think having some physical activity, going for a walk and stuff, and really trying not to work too hard. You want to build something that people love, and so it's easier to do that work or something really good, as opposed to trying so hard to sell something that people don't really want. 

So I think that's a really important lesson as well. So keep working on it. And then when people are like, oh my god, this is what I was looking for, then you definitely don't have to work that hard. I don't know if that makes much sense, but I try to be cleverer than hard working, if that makes sense.

Tony: 	

It makes perfect sense. You're speaking to someone who's put in the 80 hours a week for much longer than he wants to remember. 

Tony: 	

This is the Tony DUrso Show, where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about easing sales communications with Ankesh Kumar, but first, it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

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Tony: 	

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Alright, we're back on the Tony DUrso show, where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about easing sales communications with Ankesh Kumar. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and I'll share some pointers with you. So, stay tuned for that. 

Ankesh says as an inventor, entrepreneur, leader, husband, father and friend, it's important for him that he's bettering the lives of the people he encounters, and “also in 1987, he visited America and fell in love with San Francisco. He pursued postgraduate education in Information Technology to gain a skill set that would allow him to return to the Bay Area”. He sure came back with a bang, and now back to the chat with Ankesh. 

Tony: 	

When you have something successful when it's rolling, when it's going really well, you don't need to do that. Maybe at first, you have put in some extra time, but just exactly as you say, once it's rolling, it's like the car going on the freeway. At sixty miles an hour, it doesn't take much more gas to go 70 miles an hour.

Ankesh: 

Right.

Tony: 	

And it takes less effort. So I totally understand. I think it's a level of business. You're in a different degree and when you're in that status of the thing taking off, it's really going well, you don't have to do those 80 hours, so good on you. That's excellent. And for our audience, again, comprising heavily businessmen, entrepreneurs, any great resources that you would love to share with our audience visionaries?

Ankesh: 

Well, I’m not sure if you mean from a technical standpoint. There's a lot of good products out there but what I found particularly useful is product call Lucia which helps getting email addresses and phone numbers. I also spend a lot of time listening to podcasts like yours, Tony. I think that's really good because I think when you can hear and learn from other people, that's been a great resource, and actually that really helps when you're driving and stuff. And often when I'm falling asleep, I listen to something as well, and networking. I think one of the things that I've done pretty well as well as build up an advisory board. So in whatever business you're in, if you just try to find people who are in the industry, so one great technique that I've used is because if you're trying to reach out to someone that is selling to, let’s use the CIO as an example, what's the chance of them returning your phone call but you give them something like what I was talking about and say, Hey John, I'm running this whatever IT staffing firm and  you'd be a great advisor to my company, you got about a 50% chance of them returning the call, and that's a really great technique and a little secret that I've used. I mean, the response rate is ridiculously high compared to regular outreach. 

And so, I think when you reaching out, just think – that’s just one example, as in an advisory board position and think about it? Just because you're saying we should chat about it doesn't mean you have to do it. So if you can throw that out to 100 people and you've got - guess what? 50 meetings roughly. So that's a really cool technique that I have leveraged a lot.

Tony: 	

I like that. Thank you for sharing that. And just before we go, I just want to make sure that you believe we've covered the key uses for LetsChat.Chat that would help our audience. Is there anything else that you believe is important to let them know about it?

Ankesh: 

No, I think you’ve done a great job, Tony. I appreciate it. I think I've got everything covered.

Tony: 	

Well, very good. I want to thank you once again, this is Ankesh Kumar, talking about easing sales communications, and you can find him at LetsChat.Chat.  Ankesh, thank you so much for this, and I really look forward to seeing how this takes off in the future, and I’m definitely going to try it while it's free for sure. 

Ankesh: 

Excellent.

Tony: 	

Hey, success squad. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. I learned so much; the insights are so valuable. So how did you like this interview about easing sales communications with Ankesh Kumar. As you got from the bio that I read, he makes his living building incredible tech companies and then selling them, and I know already that Letschat.chat is going to be a huge success because it's so important to that sales process. If I had this years ago, I would have easily doubled my sales. 

Now Ankesh, says that our main forms of communication break down into three segments - Email, Phone and Chat - Okay, got that. For the sales person and customer, chat is not as well used or pervasive as email and phone are, and that is the niche that Ankesh focuses on. 
Do you use chat to interface much with your prospects? And if not, if you had a very easy method to chat, would that help you in getting more sales? I'm positive it would, based on all the years of sales that I've been involved in. What a dream that would be. I love the privacy aspect and that the prospect feels safe with his or her phone number not being shared. There's no way for it to get out in the world, and the prospect won't have to expect a flood of sales calls from that company or other companies. I would think back in the day that something like that could triple my sales. Getting 25.8% response on an email to 500 people is astounding.  Do any of your emails get that kind of engagement? I think this is incredible. After having done sales for decades, I got great takeaways from Ankesh, that no matter what happens, you want the prospect to feel he or she is more informed and feeling they got something out of the interaction with you. You want them to have some value from that. That's brilliant there's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Follow me on Twitter and tweet me at @TonyDUrso. Hey, and follow me on Instagram @TonysDUrso Remember that S! 

Alright guys, now grab hold of your vision, decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. You know that. It always starts with a decision. 
Get my vision map to help you with the process. The free eBook is at TonyDUrso.com. I did create my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the vision map as my guide. I wrote it up so that you could do it too. And once again, check out all my shows on Spotify. It's all designed to help you get to the next level in your business or your career, help you move on your journey to success. And if you have iTunes or access to any Apple device, look up my name TonyDUrso and subscribe to my show. A kind review there will get you tremendous appreciation back in return. Thanks and remember just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso show.

We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern Time. 2 p.m., Pacific time on The Voice America Influencers channel.