awesome buddy awesome thank you thank you whoo I'm gonna take you guys on the road with me that was crazy awesome to be here thanks for sticking out here on Tuesday so that that really was the message to me even in scale one of my best mentors I said I'm worried about scale and he looked at me he said okay everything you do in a week those are all blockers to your scale all of that stuff when you're ten times bigger you can't be doing any of it and so for agencies I talked to a lot of you I was like okay what what are your blockers and so many of you have delegated delivery not that hard operations finance but to the survey we just did what about sales are you doing most of the sales how do you scale it and the questions were well I can't find anyone I can't find anyone to do it does what I do I can't afford them how can I compete with the tech companies and that's what we hope to demystify here is how can you look forward in a given year and you have a big revenue target and you don't as the agency owner you don't have to close one of those customers that's when scale is really gonna happen fast so that's why we try to unlock when I talk to folks about their scaling you folks are a lot better than this but like some of the business when I talk to that guy oh yeah how are you going to scale like well I'm gonna hire salespeople and give them a territory and a quota what we really want to bring to life here is a machine a sales machine that's where I talk about how he builds so the machine is built on who we're going after all of you have slightly different target markets who is that what is their buyer journey that they go through and they think about your service and let me build a sales process on top of that buying journey we're gonna talk about how to do that there's two inputs to the machine you put two inputs of the machine sales people and demand I'm going to talk about how you can find sales people and make a mere mortal be able to follow the process that you do demand Jen I'm not I don't have time for today and you folks are pretty good at demand Jen thank you folks were pretty good the machine runs on three pieces how you coach your reps how you compensate your reps and your pricing model the pricing model sort of dictates how your buyers and their sellers behave that's how our machine runs I'm going to talk about the coaching a little bit on the compensation and three things come out of that in sequential order the first thing that comes out is some sales activities some demonstrations some pitches some proposals then comes out of forecast and then comes our revenue that's the machine that we're gonna build okay and I will post these slides if you don't want to take pictures all right that's where we want to get so let's start off with the sales process how a lot of you folks to be in this room to have got where you are I oh I think like less than 1% of human beings are natural born sellers but sales can absolutely be taught it can absolutely be taught so the question is how can we codify what we do so a mere mortal maybe even someone that isn't even in sales can learn to do what you do just as well okay so let's start let's just level the playing field and talk about what is good selling quick survey sort of an image question who is the sales person here the money-hungry good-looking guy on the left or is the helpful young lady on the right is it the sleazy cigar smoker or is it the thoughtful academic who's the salesperson is it the devil or is it the doctor okay kind of interesting pictures but like if you do a search in Google for sales person every image on the Left shows up and none of the images on the right are you kidding me like a hundred years ago we invented this field called sales what do they do they go out into the market and represent us with our potential buyers and over those hundred years they evolved to become money hungry sleazy Devils and they're not known to be helpful intelligent professionals and that's all different now folks are completing part in fact we have names for that type of selling show up and throw up show up and throw up pour selling alligator selling little ears big mouth right in the last session they talked about listening this is the type of everyone's asked me every week what is AI gonna disrupt sales as I am gonna disrupt sales this type of selling is large is largely going away it's amazing how many sales professionals still teach the chills out that way and because of the you know we I'm not gonna give you all the stats about today's buyers empowered we talk about that stuff all the time here's some great anyone know gondii oh this company is on fire in San Francisco gon gon G I got the link down there you can check it out out of San Francisco they're bringing sort of machine learning and AI to sales they're finally codifying what we've been talking about this is a so what they do is they have software that listens to your sales calls and they they sort of they they segment what's going on who's talking the buyer or the seller what are they talking about are they talking about product competition is it an objection they have these really cool algorithms to figure that out so this was like I think 50,000 sales calls across like 700 companies top third performers talk 46% on the first call bottom performers talk 72% stuff we knew but that's a big difference okay here's what the call looks like top performers look they spread the questions across the call they switch speakers every three minutes about 12 switches in that our bottom performers all the questions come up front they pepper them with the same questions and then they just talk right this is the codification that's coming out and this is what the call looks like five minutes of rapport three to four business issues enough features not insights not services business issues that they're talking about and then setting the next step so there's some guidance on what we want to codify for a mere mortal now I think we as founders as agency leaders potentially if you have sales enablement we aren't causing the show up and throw up because I wish I use the word services here I apologize but we we start with what we offering in our service and we build a pitch deck and we build a website and we build a brochure to tell everybody what that thing does and we give it to our salespeople and say go sell and that forces to show up and throw up but instead what we really want to do is teach our salesperson first and foremost about our buyer let them figure out who the buyer is and then use that to figure out how to sell them and position your service many people take an inside-out approach and I want to teach you an outside-in approach okay so that's going to start with a buying journey that sits on the bottom we build a sales process on top I'm gonna throw out four pieces to the the journey alright four of these I'll give you examples of each cut and the only thing to think about it do any of you actually have sales training in organization if you think or it means some of the organizations you go into good question to ask them what percent of the sales training is about the product or service and what percent is about the buyer most sales training organizations I see it's just all about the product and the offering and there's very little about the buyer and so we you nodded your head yes to a lot of things I've been saying so far I think this has just spilled over some from some legacy ways that we used to sell okay so what is a buying journey I use a simple framework awareness consideration decision success here's a case that we teach at Harvard Business School around a company called data Co I pulled this one because it actually is a marketing agency so what they do is they're an agency that has a software capability and a services capability and what they do is they help large organizations to understand their return on adspend okay so the way that this company would teach their salespeople is they say okay at the awareness stage what are we hearing from our potential buyers before they even know our company exists what are they talking about in terms of the challenges what are their biggest challenges what are the opportunities they go after what's the terminology that you use well sometimes they need to just calculate their you know return on adspend sometimes they need to lower their cost of customer acquisition sometimes they have trouble with attribution and sometimes they want to invest in brand equity okay so great so how do they think about solving that from a category perspective well I talked to some people and they said they built an internal tool they hired a consulting company to help them they're gonna buy some software but we are in the box of software plus consulting so maybe they're looking for both that's a good news for us and the orange here tells us what is the advantage of our category we're in the software plus consulting category how do we differentiate from the other options and if they say yeah you know I do want to I I am looking for some a software combo consulting hybrid well how are you making the decision are you looking for the cheapest are you looking for the one that's been around the longest are you looking for the one that has the most experience in my industry and your orange box there tells you your unique differentiy and relative of the competitive landscape and then finally how are they going to measure success remember this conversation ideally is happening before they even know what we have before they even know what we have I want my buyer might my seller sorry to point where they are now the red boxes are misaligned with our value prop if they're in the red box and I don't reframe their perspective they're gonna buy someone else but if they're in the green box they're they're other around us now you and I can sell any one in any one of those boxes but the pitch is very different and that's the difference between a natural-born seller they understand how to do that versus a mere mortal and this becomes a blueprint on how to ask questions with a purpose to understand where is the buyer in their perspective before they know much about our service and then do the right pitch okay so when they are in a red box my students will ask me and the companies are investing will ask me well how do I know if I should try to reframe that isn't that unethical isn't that selling ice to Eskimos and I'm again don't sell ice to Eskimos this is what you want to do if someone walks in and they they explained to you there problems and they say we really want to invest in brand equity and we don't help with brand equity what you want to ask yourself is if you quit your job and you were in their shoes would you agree with them or do you think they're wrong do you think they're making a mistake with their strategy if they're right walk away to invest introduce them to a partner the house with brand equity ask for a referral to someone that you can help but if you were in their shoes and you think brand equity is a joke for them and they should be invested in lower in their CAC then you got to reframe that perspective but regardless the pitch is different so our first piece is helping our sellers understand the buyer journey ok let's talk about prospecting have you seen this data from inside sales comm this is good stuff oh geez I rarely walk into a company and this may help you if you if you help focus on the sales consulting side there's so much opportunity to just improve the efficiency against the leads and demand that they're getting so what this analysis shows is what's the best time to call a lead it's 8 a.m. and 4:30 now what's interesting is like if you walk into some of these like bro sales teams out there what's like a sales persons day they wake up 7:30 hit the gym right then they come take a shower they come in the office nine o'clock they're getting a coffee talking and they're friends 10 o'clock they hit the phone's 12:00 they go out to their favorite lunch place 1 o'clock they hit the phones again maybe do a couple demos by 4:30 they're on the foosball table drinking a beer you don't I mean it's like completely opposite this is what it should be wake up hit the phones from home right hit the phones that's when the you got you folks for executives you're in meetings all day you are on email on your phone in the morning wake up hit the phones then go to the gym at 9:30 take a shower again in the office at 10:30 do your meetings have your lunch maybe do your team meeting then in the middle of the day and then have a coffee go for a run and then hit the phones that's the process for for demand generation whether for your team's or the people your consult if you Halla lead within five minutes you're ten times more likely to get a connect with them than if you wait another five minutes it's crazy I walk into these companies I'm like how fast you call your leads I think we never measured it they come back three days on average okay here's a very easy way to quadruple your return on marketing call your leads in five minutes ridiculous it's easy to operationalize okay and then if you call lead six times your likelihood to get them on the phone is 90% but most organizations call their leads once easy optimization on your prospecting guide okay whether for you or for your clients so here's what a prospect you know we've have Cadence's from from sales laughs we've got outreach dot IO this whole sales automation space has been great we can set up this sequence it's what's in the sequence that's interesting so here's a company that you know not quite exactly use but it is an agency they're an agency that helped maybe some of you are like this they help people set up Shopify - for their e-commerce function okay so they had this really cool webinar hey Shopify plus just came out watch our webinar will tell you all about it and whether it's for you so get a bunch of leads from that most people I work with this is their prospecting god hey Michele it's Dwight from ICT we specialize in create and ready to sell you commerce websites for your business are you free at 1:00 p.m. to discuss not bad elevator pitch it's okay the problem is the second email the second voicemail and email is the same friggin thing are you getting these voicemails like 95% of the voicemails again same friggin thing unless you're selling pencils I can't imagine that that's optimized so let's talk about a prospecting playbook that you can teach a junior seller in your organization use that will be effective step number one is just teach I mean a sales people don't understand how to look at a LinkedIn profile and figure out what to do with it you know where what does it mean if they have worked at the company for one month versus 10 years that's a big difference what does it mean if they studied psychology versus business undergrad what does it mean if their last job was CTO these are all huge signals to us that the mere modern sales person doesn't know how to do quick little tangent I was this is actually a company we invested in and I was on a trip with my son two hour drive and I had to do a diligence call on this woman she's CEO of the company and my I said Zane I'm sorry I got to do a call a business call but listen I know you sometimes like to hear about business so I'll put it on speaker and you can listen and then we can have you can ask me questions at the end about it he said go that's great and I'm like in fact why don't you check out Michele's background on LinkedIn and let me know what you think of her background so he takes my phone he looks at her background he's like oh dad Michele's backgrounds awesome and I was like why he's like look there's a bridge and there's water and there's a city and like it's yeah I was like so we had some due diligence training there it's a true story all right so so that's our sort of four and then we've got our first level data that many of us have like well what does it mean our sales people even using the fact that we sent in 27 emails and they open to those to tell us a ton can I tell what blog articles they read that tells us a ton what webinars they attended I can use that and these buyers forget that they did this and they feel like they're reading our mind and we're a different type of seller for them and now I can actually put out something that's meaningful it's Ryan from ICT I noticed you you know went to our webinar I took a moment you're come to look at your e-commerce presence and I'm gonna send you a few ideas on how to improve it let me know if you want to catch up and go through that and two days later you know I found this case study of one of our customers that are in your industry that you might like and let me know if you want me to walk you through it like this is the type of stuff that's gonna grab attention when you're leaving leaving the same voicemail you're getting those I ain't up right when I hear the person's name these voicemails I don't hang up on maybe they're not calling me back but there's a value adding dialogue that's happening and the break-up email is the most important one hey Ryan at ICT I've not heard back from you so I'm going to assume that you you had you were effectively increase your e-commerce website it's no longer a priority so call me if anything changes you get the highest call back on that so if you do end up setting up a prospecting guide make sure that your sellers get to this point okay now you're selling a big companies Tiffany was Tong talking about sound of big companies let me tell you how this is working I asked some of the companies I work with who saw that big companies what they're doing because they're getting meetings I'm like how you getting these meetings so this company VTS they sell to huge developers like the skyscrapers that are out there the people that own those skyscrapers that's what they sell to like they own twenty Scott you know 50 skyscrapers across the country they're multi-billion dollar developers that's who they're trying to get that the CEOs of those companies so this this twenty five-year-old at VTS who was making I don't know seventy five thousand a year trying to set these appointments right he got it he was trying to get appointment with this guy the the chairman of Cushman Wakefield so he went online this is a multi-million dollar deal he went online he found out this guy wrote a book called my Montauk because he's got a summer home in Montauk and he likes to go fishing on his boat so what he did was he had customer yes he looked found his birthday in his background so he had custom-made a fishing bucket with the book on it and he sent it to the guys business and he found out he was speaking at this conference on Israeli bombs so we went there to meet him and ask him about the bucket now the guy was shipped in a limo security couldn't even get close to him it's like bummer so he sends him a note hope all is well Bruce you know I want to reach out is hoping you to meet you at the luncheon yesterday I wanted to see how you like the bucket for your birthday if you use it on your fishing trip also I'd relish the opportunity to stop by your office's s discuss BTS we work with all these other big brokers and here's a little bit on what we do your friend Steven Seagal is actually a big fan please let me know if you have any available in the next couple weeks later that day we'll set something up Laura please arrange the buck it's great Oh now it's good stuff all right now are you gonna do that if you're selling 10 $20,000 engagements no this is a multi-million dollar deal but it gives you a sense of the creativity this one I don't quite these these folks sell sort of like McKinsey ask engagements these are also a multi-million dollar accounts in they're going after Wells Fargo he's a little throw up he in the beginning it's a lot of like we do this we do that's a little bit to me me me but then he he actually listened to the Wells Fargo CEOs quarterly call and quoted it and said you know as John Shrewsbury discussing his q3 earnings this is how we're aligned with it and later that day hi Arthur and you know I get pitched all the time and I want to say thank you for the targeted and relevant email I'd like to learn more house next Tuesday work okay so just if you're selling big deals smaller deals the transactional stuff bigger deals there's some examples alright discovery call guide how do we teach you folks you get in front of a client and you you ask them questions it comes naturally I always my students are always like mark how do we show how do you sell because all the students they do show up and throw up right they think selling is about a great pitch and I Tom here's the best thing you can do to practice selling this Friday you go to a wedding you go to some business event find a stranger see how long you can ask them questions before they get pissed off at you before they feel interrogated that's the simplest example if you can get good at that you're gonna be great at sales I'll tell him like I practice a lot and I go to these weddings I go up to this guy and I talked to him for like 30 minutes all he knows is my name I asked him question after question at one point he's like hey no one even no one's ever asked me that question that's a great question I could tell him like changes his perspective he goes over as to his wife after 30 minutes he only knows my name is like that guy mark he's an amazing guy just because I asked these thought-provoking curious questions that changed his perspective that's Ellen how do we codify that for a mere mortal right so I use a really simple thing called the discovery call guide it's not a script it's just the I'll show you what's in here but it's just it's the patterns we looked at in the gone data the first five minutes is report how do I build a rapport right so like rapport for a mere mortal it's like listen it starts when I when I meet him in the coffee room or if I get right on the collar waiting for people to show up on the webinar sometimes I do some work for BCG and like we're with a client and we're waiting for everyone to show up and everyone's quiet what are you talking about dude this is our opportunity we got all the people sitting here let's start chit-chatting about like meaningless what seems like meaningless stuff about this higher they made or an acquisition they just did this is gold this is gold they think we're chatting we're qualifying we're discovering if it doesn't work hey why'd you take this meeting nice and open-ended number one and two you try those both 80% of people just start talking about their business beautiful every once in a while you get someone who's like hey enough about me come on I showed up to learn about your product tell me what you got so great no problem it would take me four hours to tell you my business when I talk to people like you they're either trying to decrease rich increased return on adspend increase the attribution or decrease CAC which one's your biggest problem and I'll tell you about that at least I have some guidance then we can dig into the why all right so I'm gonna give them some guide on some rapport I'm gonna give them some guidance on like the awareness stage what are your biggest problem what are your biggest needs why is why is the campaign measurement income a priority now all right I'm gonna talk about the concern what did you try did it work what do you want to try this year why do you think that's gonna work are you looking for the cheapest one who else needs to be involved and what does it need to be done by okay the number okay I asked hundreds of companies why do you lose deals I'm kind of amazed at this I I would have thought its competition everyone says to me it's because they just go quiet the sense of urgency there's some number one reason and so everyone how do you develop urgency we're good at understanding budget we're good at understanding like authority but urgency that's a tricky one and this is a question I like to put my questions that have value for me in the seller at the top I looked I like to put my questions where it's mostly valuable for me at the end and I hope that I have huge trust by my buyer cuz they're gonna be tough questions and my urgency as I'm gonna say to the buyer okay this all makes sense you you told me that you you need to you know increase your return on adspend by 20% because you got hammered and q3 the streets all over you folks the CEO wants to know the CEO has a pitch to the board and she's looking to you for guidance on how to do it you have a meeting with her in four weeks and you need to understand how to pitch that you're looking for that solution is that true now here's the deal what if you don't increase return on adspend I'm not quite sure what the implicit stay it's January and hasn't gone up what happens that's the sense of urgency if they're freaking out you got a sale when they go sideways you remind them people don't connect the dots neurologically and that's the key question that's going to get us there so it's going to teach my reps and then this is where I end they transition from discovery to the clot to the the pitch is just the like the folks in the last session said the active listening of like this is what I found out from you you want to do XYZ by this day is that correct yes and then you have a soft close opportunity because you can say if I could show you the answer to this and it cost less than $150,000 what you said is worth four million to you next year are you going to do business with me they don't even know what I do yet they know very little about what I do if they say yes to that and why wouldn't they I just asked them what they spend 150,000 to create four million if I can prove it to them neurologically they're committed to you soft close right you can teach your folks how to do that alright and then this the playbook the there's a qualifying matrix does anyone use Bant or medic okay there's qualifying matrices that's a cheat sheet for reps to check off everything that's happening because the sales call is a very intense experience and it's just if you're managing a rep all you want to do is when you get off the call let's say we use bet Bant which is budget Authority need time and it was it was invented at Intel like 30 years ago or maybe it was IBM but it's just like when you do every time you meet with a rep like how the call go you just say what's the band and we just go through each one and you're wiring the rep to get at that information and what's really hot in vogue these days is to have a success qualifying matrix to last presentation they talked about customer experience I study customer attention and zschernig recive ly most churn problems is not because of the onboarding it's because of how it was sold in b2b right for your folks who are selling most bad experiences are because the way it's sold what was promised and so I can sell a deal without getting commitment from the end user if there's any IT thing related but our journey for customer success is going to be compromised ok so just real quick on the on the pitch side you know you go through all this great discovery with your rep and then they end up giving the same friggin demo that's a waste now you as great salespeople natural-born sellers we you know when I watched out to warn sellers they give the different demo every time different terminology different order of offerings need to customize it it's amazing that's hard to do but when I studied the demos at HubSpot I found that like 90% of them could be summarized into three different swim lands three orders of the pitch and so now I was able to standardize this for my team and say listen I know it's really hard to just do discovery and then give them a custom demo but it's easier to do discovery with my guide and they just match them with which of the three do you think is the best fit and give them that pitch three four or five something like that and same with the onboarding the onboarding can't be generic you know if they get promised XYZ the onboarding has to be in line with that as well I actually think you folks are good at that I think you folks are good from what I've been when here okay hiring what do you look for to hire okay my first Odyssey I think was the eighth sales person I hired I actually grabbed the number one seller from a big public company in Boston couldn't believe we got her I think we had 15 people the HubSpot at the time we were in a garage across from MIT and this top seller wanted to come join and I literally royal rolled out the red carpet and said welcome to hub spa teach us to sell I can't wait to learn and six months later I was amazed that they were not the top wrap they weren't terrible but they weren't the best and I was like how is this possible number one out of eight hundred and they don't we we don't know we're doing and what I realized was the person that if I thought about their environment they were literally running Super Bowl ads the company that the person came from you knew what they were selling within two minutes and when you were selling Hobbs we're out of time no one knew what HubSpot was no one knew what inbound marketing was it was a complete evangelistic cell and I realized at that point to sit in a conference like this and ask what your neighbor looks for in salespeople is very dangerous because the optimal salesperson is correlated with your context who you sell where you sell the value prop that you saw the complexity the competitive landscape all these things okay but I have found even though it's different it can be engineered and we don't lean into the stats as much as we should and so what I did was I just sat back and I said okay what are the 10 things that I'm seen in our top performers and how are they waited and what I codify like what would I mean by coachability what would a top score and coachability versus a bottom sporran coachability look sound like what about curiosity what would that I'm clearly define that and worked on it and so I kind of measured each one of these and I put it through a loop so even if I have hired three people six months later Mary is crushing it Bob is struggling why is Mary crushing it and are we looking for that in an interview process and why is Bob struggling and how did that sneak through so I could iterate on this formula and it became so critical as I got to take on more hires and even top people to hire this became a critical formula now we hired a lot of people and asked you after you got many dozens I was able to give my my PhD MIT buddies on stats the data and ran a regression analysis of the scores against success and this was the first regression I'm gonna tell you the end answer on where we ended up but this is the first regression so all the blue bars to the left were negatively correlated with sales success and the bars to the right we're strongly correlated what was crazy about this is look at the stuff at the bottom this is the sleazy cigar smoker you don't I mean all the stuff we think about good sellers closing objection handling convincing they were negatively correlated and the stuff we look at is like a great consultant or advisor stuff you're good at preparation domain experience intelligence and this totally set the different tone for the type of salesperson I wanted to go find very different from what I was getting counsel from the folks who've been in there for decades huge opportunity for us okay these three ended up in the top five for us which one was number one how many people think intelligence was the most correlating factor towards success in the HubSpot environment how many think it was coach ability how about curiosity good audience I see you got a coach ability first audience in a long time that most people say coach curiosity they were very close it took me a year and a half to find the coach ability one it took me a year and a half and it's my favorite thing to look for and I think it's a big one for you folks because I don't think you can find that like you can't find you you can't go find you right you want to go run your own agency you need to go find someone in the right career to director and we'll talk about in a few minutes and coach ability is going to be a big deal had this ain't right playbook you hire for coach ability we're on the right track so my most important sales process in my interview here I'm just gonna give you my interview I kind of warm oh sorry just so we can absorb that here I warrants I see in the in the lobby do they know who I am do they ask me questions right it's an opportunity for them I warm him up what do you want to do with your career I asked him about how they ranked in their last role you know and I asked him like why weren't you know you know why did you get so high in your ranking oh you know blah blah blah here's how I sell why weren't you number one everyone says it's their territory they all blame the territory then I asked which territory is the number one and then I go call that person a little tip for you all right it's a little little trick when you're pro you're getting people then I do a roleplay coaching Billy this is my most important thing do a role play then I stop and I have them self assess first off I tell them I have them self assess how did you do and then I tell them in every single interview I give one piece of positive feedback and one piece of improvement so they don't think that they're freak their bombing one piece of positive one need for improvement and they have them redo the role play that for me is the most important thing if in ten minutes I can teach you a little bit on how to sell I cannot wait to spend a day with you I cannot wait to spend a week with you especially if I build a playbook that I just talked about that repeatable playbook higher coaching ability build the playbook sometimes I talk to people and they're like oh dude you know Bob's not working out when did you hear about Bob where'd you figure it out all like the second day like how did that happen we're asking behavioral interview questions to sales people what are you gonna do with Bob to train them in the first month do that in the interview give him your playbook do role plays teach him to sell your service it's gonna be so enlightening as to how he'll do so sometimes light bulbs go off when you start training and red auerbach the Celtics owner said you can't teach height so what he means is like you know if someone's struggling to learn your service I think we're gonna get them there if someone has discomfort talking about money or picking up the phone we're gonna have to hire a psychologist okay so it's like decipher between the problems you want to take on and really weigh the stuff that is gonna be hard to teach okay all right and then this is a big for you okay so let me tell you a story last year I consulted for a public company that sells home alarms not a very sexy company all right home alarms they're based on like the Southwest and the biggest problem they had was their reps were quitting they'd had they'd spent a lot on college recruiting how are these 22 year olds out of like Arizona State and like you know a lot of these state universities and they'd all leave three years later to join a tech company for 50% more money and I said so what and he's like what do you mean like so what you could hire more you are a path in their career that's how these Millennials think we don't do like a a 50 year golden watch journey anymore we're looking for 3 year segments you nailed your three-year segment he's like holy that's awesome I'm like you should start talking about that you start branding yourself at the career center this is your path to get into tech sales through our home alarm company we're going to teach you to sell and he did that and he got more recruits and they put him through a promotion path and made him managers and guess what less people quit they were so thankful on what this company did yeah they got the cause but they were so thankful and their tenure actually increased so just something for you to think about in you and replicating sales is not finding you you know you're not gonna find him at HubSpot you're not gonna find him at Google you're gonna find him at like ATP all right you're gonna finally think about the companies like who where do they go and find these sellers these these people and teach them to sell and it's not the sexiest sell today old school media is an example I hired a bunch of people out of radio they're amazing okay so just think about where you're looking they're probably not going to be you know 20 years experience making half a million dollars you're right you can't afford them you know some of you can but not a lot of you especially your first one that's a big bet but you can take a gamble if you think about it in their career journey okay and just remember great sales people you're not going to put up an indie dad and get them to apply you're gonna think about who those companies are ADP whoever it is to use ATP is gonna sue me after this speech you know whoever it is you think about like what the career journey would be and go call into those environments go find those people maybe even meet him here the other piece to this retention thing is is this comp we don't talk enough about this comp plan approach that I've used and hubs behind a lot of companies so it's crazy that I see people I'm like how do you promote your salespeople like how do you think about raises with salespeople like oh we do an an or review and usually like on average we give them a 3% inflation raise and I'm like that's BS man like sales success and failure in sales is so quantifiable you know I mean I can't look at HR and marketing and like my delivery people it's really hard to quantify like oh that's my best delivery person by 7% like that's hard to do sales I can get there I think that's my best sales person by 7% so we can be so quantifiable on how we promote people and so what I did was like hey you join our company you know 40 K base 40 K variable I know options don't really apply in this room as much but here's your and how do you get promoted you hit those targets once you sell $60,000 of recurring revenue monthly an average 5,000 month for three months in row I'll promote you I'm gonna give you a $10,000 raise on your variable and there's your new targets sales if you if it's the one guy made it in seven months one person it took 25 months but it's clear today and I was able to keep reps for seven years when the average was 2.2 on an inside sales team they're just keep going up the ranks and so anyone hire STRs or know what those are STRs BTR's so these are we're getting really in a specialization in sales this might be a good starting point for you if you're a one-person sales team right now just hire a junior person to set appointments I'll let you look at this but this is what we use for the STRs that is a brutal one of my students said I she said last week she's like yeah I just hire STRs I'm like listen you were in sales all the other students in this class have no idea what that is what's an SDR she said it's the shittiest job in sales alright and this is like like you're setting appointments you're cold card it's brutal and you want these people to last 12 months on the job if their job is changing every three months because you're slowly rewarding them including putting them into account executive training that's super motivating especially for this young you know this this young person that wants to move fast okay all right let's let's end up with the coaching part so first off what does a Sales Manager do the they don't like run the forecast they don't do the job for the rap okay when you promote a sales manager the first time most of them will do the job for the rap and that's just gonna make it rapidly lazy and it's gonna make them not confident a sales major need needs to get to the revenue through the reps don't even go to the sales calls they need to be a great sales coach and that's gonna scale so what's a great sales coach I'll use a golf analogy true story again I broke my hand golfing this year broke my hand had a 70 year old surgeon he's like how'd you break your hand I said golf and he's like I've been practicing for 45 years I've never heard that it says a lot about my golf game all right so one golf pro said mark take a swing I did he's like here's what I want you to do turn your hand over lean back in your stance put more weight on your right foot not left Figg 1 o'clock not 2 o'clock on your backswing and give me more wrists on contact I was like you got to be kidding me and the second guy was like all right mark take a swing and I did he he's like try this grip and do a hundred swings with that 20 minutes later he's like how's that feel like that feels good I'm getting this he's like now lean back in your stance take another 100 swings really basic example but haven't promoted like 20 25 of these sales managers they all do what the first golf pro did they see the 80 things that are broken with this new salesperson like you may with your hire and they throw up on them for 90 minutes with feedback and they're just lost great sales managers can see the 90 things but they understand the one thing that's gonna make the biggest difference this week and they focus on that and they use the data where possible I call it matrix experiment sales coaching all right so this is an example of how we can set up our flow confirm the first this is each color is a different rep and we're just going through confirmed first meeting verified their needs got a verbal from the decision maker got a signed contract turned it into revenue and an agreeing and Fred in purple missed their number why different reasons Fred doesn't do enough activity and can't convert the activity my coaching is way different and another nuance here that notice that each one of these stages is not a thin the seller did it's a thing that the buyer did so important it's not I gave them a demo it's not I sent them a conch act it's tough the buyer did because that's showing progress in the journey and that's gonna hone your salesperson on how to move the buyer through the journey so needs verified that's basically they gave him a discovery call by didn't call gave him a discovery call I call that needs verified which means I gave him a discovery call and then I sent them an email summarizing what I found you need to increase return on adspend by 20% by this date because your CEO said so can you just confirm that's accurate and they wrote back and said yes the predictability of that action to a close way higher then I just gave him a discovery call okay all right so when I when I manage these folks I put together these coaching plans at the beginning of every month I have a one-on-one with each seller if you build the sales team one hour with each seller and I ask them what they want to work on I look at their numbers and we create a plan what's your diagnosis how are we my going to coach them through it and again sales is highly quantifiable so how will I know that it goes up or down I have extremely common issues lack of personal goals time management issues and how to fix them where to call reluctance happy to talk to you about after prospecting depth how to go deeper how to get more personalized and then how to develop urgency I talked to you about the urgency one but one of my favorite ways to do this is a film review so if you've been on two or three reps where you have two or three wraps I know some of you do I love to get him in a room especially in the beginning every day at five o'clock and listen to film so one person is on the hot seat they record a call and one person in the room I assigned a positive feedback and the other person I assigned to negative feedback we listened to the call and then the person on the hot seat whose caller was they get to self-assess this is what I like about I did this is where I could have done better then the positive person goes then needs for improvement then we will come open up to the room and then I go and I summarize it this is a great way to build camaraderie and to learn from one another film review you do them every day you do every week it's great you learn every day you'll learn a lot faster okay alright the last thing is just an align in sales or marketing once you got they think cooking you want to align these two teams I've talked to 500 sales teams and 500 and marking teams they hate each other you know this they hate each other all all marketers think that salespeople are overpaid spoiled brats and all sellers think the marketers do arts and crafts all day and they go back to their respective corners and they do their cold calls in our trade show booths and that is the kiss of death and we have an opportunity in today's environment to quantify both of these elements so some people do the lead score I'm not crazy about the lead score I feel like we end up with 50 pieces of data going into it and suddenly of this intern downloads an e-book 50 times and they're called and some CEO signs up to our blog and doesn't get a call that's cool so broken right so we just I just try to simplify it in terms of like where are they in their engagement and how good or a fit of a company or they are it's not good if like if a salesperson gets to leave that you generate and they call him like that was a terrible lead it was the intern at a company yeah but tell me about the company was it a good fit oh yes a perfect company sell it who do you think told the intern to download the e-book probably the CEO it's the company not that not the role don't even call the intern call the CEO and just tell tell her that people were downloading stuff and asked what's going on right so it's far more about the company we don't want to let this those sellers off the hook and I already showed you the data on how often we should call these things I can I can create a sales SLA where it's basically like all this remember Cauley in five minutes call leads six times in the next two weeks I can build that on my CRM and just build this dashboard which is called the do not be on a dashboard very simple it goes out every night and if you're on it you're not calling your leads right that's your mortgage payment I'm giving you these column and they and and they learn how to do that so now I can measure both these things the marketing SLA and the sales SLA every day it's September 15th where are we on the revenue goal from lead generation how we calling our leads sales and marketing are accountable to each other okay all right so hopefully we get an insight on the machine we didn't cover at all but hopefully this is far better than just like hire someone like myself and give them a quota and you have more insight on how to make this more data-driven and how to actually make this realistic even if we've got tight budgets
