Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Steven Rosen and Steven is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Steven is the founder of star results and he's an executive sales and leadership coach. My other guest today for this discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving win rates is Kristie Jones.
Kristie is the founder and principal of the sales acceleration group. Now, one note before we jump into today's discussion, I talk about it every week, but if you haven't done so already, I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter. You want to join the more than 60, 000 sellers and sales leaders who are receiving win rate Wednesday and each week they get on Wednesday, one actionable tip to improve their win rates and a lot of other great sales advice as well.
So you can subscribe by visiting my website, andypaul. com or you can subscribe on my LinkedIn profile. Okay. If you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank my guests, Christy Jones and Stephen Rosen for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the win rate podcast with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.
 Welcome everyone back to this episode of the win rate podcast today, joined by again, another all star cast of panelists. We just said people heard the introduction, but we're gonna give people a few seconds to introduce themselves. So Kristie, we'll kick off with you. Tell us a little bit about you.
Sure. I'm Kristie Jones. I work with mostly BC backed earlier stage startups, helping them build out their sales processes and strategies. I help them hire net new sales reps, as well as customer success reps and do executive coaching on the side. That would be my side hustle. So, founder of sales acceleration group, and I'm very excited to be here.
And I know our topic today is going to be a good one.
Yeah. And people may have heard Kristie when she was on my previous podcast years and years ago, I actually had a company called sales acceleration group. So, I gave those domains up and she has them now. So.
Okay. You know, she's crafty.
Got them for a good price too.
Yeah. Yeah. All right, Steven.
Okay. I'm Steven Rosen. I have a company called Star Results, which we've been in in business for 20 years. And what I do is I help sales leaders. I am a sales leadership coach, trainer and mentor. And what my belief is that sales leaders are the key to driving success in sales organizations. And I spend all my time with them, helping them get, to be great.
All right. We're going to come back to that topic because there's a lot done back there, but so Kristie, you talked about, I hadn't heard this term used a net new hire as in I always think about net new revenue, but net new hire. So what's a net new hire. Got
I have to just separate that out because particularly when I'm working with early stage founders who sometimes are what I'll call tech founders they don't really understand the difference between hunters and farmers. So I say to them, are we talking about net new revenue? People who will bring a net new revenue or people who are going to.
Help and build the relationship and renew them afterwards. So yeah, I've just started to, it makes it easier to explain sometimes the hunter farmer gatherer thing is not always as well known as we would like it to
Yeah. Interesting. I like that. So I did want to talk about hiring a bit because you know, Stephen, you've written about it recently. It's something I'm really interested in because again, as we look at this whole topic of success within sales, clearly it starts with hiring. And So you'd read something about the four essential components of sales hiring.
I wanted to dig into those because first thing you talk about is you talk about having a fit interview but define fit for me. When someone's like hire someone. Because I believe that you know, fits everything, right. As is, you know, as people on, we assume on LinkedIn, yes. Colleagues of mine, former clients of mine that write about, you know, hey, how to become a consistent seven figure earner.
And the caveat to that is always, well, sure you can be as good as you are. But if you're not in the right situation, it's not going to happen for you. So, so talk about fit and the fit interview.
I thought you were gonna talk about my most recent article, which says higher tiggers over yours, but okay, we can talk about fit.
Well, we can certainly talk. Yes, but yes, I have to admit, I sort of glanced over that one, but yeah, go ahead.
That was a good one. It wasn't there was some good stuff in there, but the point was clear. So in terms of fit. You know, if you have the wrong person, so, so what you're looking for is, do they have the right background to be successful? So you should kind of have some hiring criteria that you look at, you know, I came from the healthcare industry and then we labored between a science background and a business background, right?
Which is best, and in some cases we hired both. So, so fit in terms of the right education, the right experience, how do they fit with the organization? , if you're a You know, an entrepreneurial organization, you want to hire entrepreneurial people. If you're highly structured, you want people who've worked in a highly structured environment you know, in the old days, I used to avoid interviewing people from a large pharma company because.
They didn't do things themselves. It was one of four people in a sales, in the sales territory. Right? So when I'd ask, what did you do? The answer they would give me is, well, we did this. I'm not hiring. We I'm hiring you. So I want to spend time before I move someone on to understand. Do they have. You know, the right behaviors.
Do they have the right skills? Do they have the right attitude? I wonder if they're going to fit my organization. And I think, to me, that's a starting base. If they do, then you can move them forward. But that you can quickly screen out through what I call a fit interview. You can do it in 15 to 20 minutes.
But if you're pushing people along, , like, I don't know if it's in that article, but I have one about the plug and play.
Okay.
sometimes companies like to hire the plug and play. And you say, what's the plug and play. They have industry experience. They know the customers, they know the products.
It's easy for the manager to get them up to speed, but maybe they carry some of the baggage of the industry where there's a sense of entitlement. They haven't worked that hard. And I don't want those people. I want someone who's gonna be, for lack of better words, an Eeyore. Someone who's excited about their job, who's gonna go out and find a way to make things happen.
So now you've got me thinking about Winnie the Pooh. So somehow I didn't really think about Eeyore being, you know, an upbeat personality.
He's
have picked Tigger too, Paul, Andy. I was like, yeah, I would have picked Tigger. I would've thought he was going to tell us Tigger.
Yeah.
did I say?
You said Eeyore. Dude,
Oh, I'm not, that was a Freudian mistake. I
Oh, okay. I was like, I
was sure
say hire the Eeyore?
Tigger.
Oh my god, I must be nervous here, I don't know, but no, hire the Tigger.
Okay. Okay. good. Cause that's what Andy and I were going to do it anyway.
Oh, my God. That's a Freudian flip. I don't know why.
Yeah. Well, hopefully not freudian, but yeah, just a slip up. So, so,
There you go. Throw the whole show off on the first.
Yeah, I think there's an element to fit, though, that companies. Ignore, which is a fit with the customers, right? Is I ask this all the time. Ask on the show.
I asked you, I talked to hiring managers. So when you're, you know, putting together your list of criteria, of what's really important for you. you asked your buyers what they need your salespeople to be?
great
And the answer is uniformly no. And I'm saying, well, think about it. Cause I'm a huge believer that I think that clients hire salespeople hire in air quotes, hire salespeople to help them make a decision.
Right. Because
what it's become now.
sure. We see the data. Oh, buyers don't want to, don't want to talk to salespeople. And I'm sure. I think that's again, universally true. No one wants to talk to a salesperson, but if they are talking to you, it's because they need to, and if they need to, there's something they need to accomplish and they need your help to be able to do that.
So, you know, much as a company might hire a consultant to help them make a big decision, you know, strategic decision at a company, I think similarly to a degree, that's what buyers are doing with sellers and you wouldn't hire a consultant to help the company without. Understand where they have the attributes and the skills and so on.
You need to help them make a decision. It's just not a perspective that hiring managers seem to have at all.
Kristie, what do you think?
I agree. I think I got a little bit of spin on this. So a, I'm a big proponent of cultural ad versus cultural fit. So I really appreciate.
explain what did you mean by that?
Well, I think particularly in my SAS B2B world, people want to hire. So I'll just get on my soapbox, but I won't laugh. I won't be on there for long.
I'll go quickly. It starts with the VCs in my world, right? So white men in their forties, fifties, and sixties invest in other white men in their twenties, thirties, and forties, and then we end up with a bunch of white Mail sales reps, because that's what cultural fit is.
But to your point about, are we taking the buyers into consideration? That model, if you will, is eliminating also probably some buyers. Who don't fit that model, you know, don't fit into that demographic, I guess I should say. And as a result of that, your unconscious bias is unconsciously biasing out potential buyers for you.
So I would start with that comment.
Is that a problem?
No, I don't
Yeah.
I talk about it. I talk about it openly all the time. We have a white man problem.
But
SAS B2B VC backed companies have a white man problem for the most part.
yeah, not a revelation. I don't think for anybody at this point in time,
nope, not shocking. The other thing that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and I've got a book coming out in August of next year, which I'll just shamelessly plug right now called selling your way in,
um, the playbook for, I just did, Playbook for setting your income and owning your life.
And the very first section of the book is all about know yourself before you have to know yourself before you can know your prospect. And one of the reasons I wrote the book is because I walk into companies a lot and find that sellers are in the wrong seat on the bus. And I think one of the reasons is we just talk about what I tried not to talk about earlier, which is hunters and farmers and that there are so many sales jobs out there.
And I think that individuals as they who want to be in the sales profession, don't spend enough time understanding themselves, what motivates them, how do they like to be financially rewarded? What are they passionate about? And as a result of that, they're actually applying for jobs that, that really aren't a fit for their traits.
So I'm a big trait person as opposed to characteristics. And so the traits that they have don't match the job that they have. And that I think is why we're at a 64 percent of only 64 percent of sales reps are hitting quota. Because I don't think, I don't think they fully understand that there are, you know, you, maybe you're better fit for an onboarding or implementation specialist.
Maybe you're a better fit for a sales engineer, you know, like maybe you're just in the wrong job. And so I wrote a book to help people try to know themselves a little better. And then I helped them try to identify what I thought would be a better fit for them than maybe that the one that they're in.
If 64 percent of sellers are in quota, you know, the world would be different, but you know, most data is it's around 40%. You know, even worse.
tact on that, by the way. If I could add
Yeah. Well, so, but it brings up an interesting point. Steven, let me just make this then, you know, move over to you is you're using the, sort of the hunter farmer. One construct to think about it, but you know, let me get back to what I mentioned before by asking customers, because there's another question I'll ask hiring managers.
So how many of your customers say they want a hunter, right? That they want your salesperson to be a hunter.
Everybody,
They want a consultant, someone who's going to help
they don't want a hunter that has no
oh, you're, oh, my, oh, I'm sorry. When you're talking about my customers tell me
no. I'm not
My, my customers, buyers, right. My customers,
Well, and the fact that they think they want a hunter is part of the problem because you hunters, what's a hunter, right?
I want, you know, I think you would, I summarize salesperson for me is, yeah, I want a curious, open minded problem solver.
Yep.
I don't want a hunter. A hunter is going to end up in these salesy behaviors that drive, you know, quota attainment and win rates low. Steven.
here's the challenge though, particularly, I guess, in the world that I live in. So I think I live in a different world than a lot of people. We need those people to be able to be prospectors. Right. And so the difference, I think that the trait problem comes in. This is where the, this is where this comes in.
Right. We want them to go out and find new people who want to talk to us. But then, so that's 1 behavior and 1 set of traits. Then we want them to shift their behavior to becoming a consultant. After, you know, after we've had them spend all this time going out and trying to find the new. Find the new prospect, right?
So that is a, there is an issue with that.
Well, but that's, from time immemorial, that's how certain I was raised on sales. I prospected and I was consultative in the way I sold when selling, you know, seven, eight, nine figure deals. I don't think that's, I don't think that's a dichotomy. For some reason, people think there's such a different personality set and it's not.
Steven, go ahead.
what's happened is those jobs have been split, right? They're SDR, BDR, right? And I don't know if that's working. Like everyone does it. I don't know if that really works, to be honest with
Well, they're fast coming together. Believe me.
So they're coming
way more companies focused on having the AE's self sourced leads or hire France and other leads. Yes.
So, so, you know, we're talking about hiring and certainly one of the steps that I feel is the fit interview. But one of the other steps that most companies don't do is you can learn from your hiring process and get better at it. And to me, it's a combination of. You want great interviewing skills when you do you know, show me what you've done in the past.
Give me an example of a situation how you resolved it. It gives you a sense of thinking Like I said people who say we I never hired them because I don't hire me But on the other end I have for the last 20 years and before that when I was in industry Used a profile and I can show what the profile is doesn't really matter because if you understand Okay, so I use what's called the pop which is predictor of potential You But we customize it to understand what is successful in organization A and we look at source traits.
When you mention traits, yes, you're right on. And traits don't change that much over time. Traits tend to be consistent, not like attitudes. So we add that into the process. It's not the hiring decision. It's one of the inputs into the hiring decision,
But we learn from, if we have a large sales force, what, who are the most successful people?
What do their assessments look like? So we can match those and we can do that every year. Maybe the business is changing what profiles are having the best success. in terms of performance and use that as part of the hiring criteria when we look at people. So yes, we look at a fit. We'll do a behavioral vent interview to understand how they think, what they've done in the past.
Can they demonstrate or give examples of what they've done? But we also, I also feel that science gives you parts where some of the things you can't interview for, or can't even train which is, you know, we, some people call sales DNA helps in that
Please. Please. Please. Yeah. I hate that term, by the way. But go ahead.
I'll repeat it. No.
No, I think the sales DNA is An illusion. But anyway, go
okay. So maybe it's your wiring, right? How are you wired? And what is the right wiring for this specific industry or company? And I think that in some ways comes back to the customers, not directly asking the customer, but what you can see through your number of salespeople is, What profiles are delivering the best results and which ones are delivering the worst results?
And it gives you an indicator how you can get better at hiring if you constantly validate your system and two it's able to assess certain things that are so hard to pull out even great interviewers have trouble pulling out things like You know, how what drives somebody how are they motivated?
How well do they fit our structure? So if you're an entrepreneurial environment, you want someone who doesn't want any structure If you're in an Oracle or a Pfizer as I used to use, you want someone who loves structure. So, so part of it is it tuning your assessments to your own organization as to what success looks like?
I'll shut up now.
No, I, no, it's good. I'll admit I'm a, an assessment skeptic and I think they're useful as a data point, but I think that the correlations oftentimes drawn are spurious. And I don't, cause, and let's just take the perfect example is okay. They're touted off a time as, you know, we highly correlate to sales success.
And I said, well, shit. Yeah. We got 40 percent of sellers at best making quoted these days. How are your assessments done on that? Right. We've got,
assessments.
the company is using, we're in that total, right? The companies are using them. Are they experiencing, you know, 60, 75 percent sellers sending quoted the answers?
No.
Well, my
so that's.
are
That's where my skepticism comes from. I see it useful as a data point, but you know, when I started hearing people talk about sales DNA, I look at, you know, having worked in sales for gosh, I dare say it 46 years now is in all sorts of events, mostly in the tech world, but in different varieties of tech from, you know, large systems to recurring revenue, all this stuff.
It's like. Yeah, if there's a million salespeople, there's a million unique ways to sell
You know,
and I think it's hard to sort of capture this idea that there's DNA because I've seen, you know, the most successful salespeople persons I ever know, knew working with the client, it was number one seller for my clients. I kid you not pathologically shy
okay, so
you would not have interviewed him. You would not have given him the time of day. And yet he had a strong technical background and just crushed it with clients because he was empathetic. He understood, you know, but it was hard to get him out of his shell. Right. So you'd say, Oh, this person's out.
And I just, I could go on.
No, but the assessment may not pull that out the assessment is looking at the same things for your top sellers And your bottom seller. So you're looking at correlations. So look hiring
point is he, my point is he wouldn't have gotten to the point of taking the assessment.
fair
never gotten
that you're gonna miss right to me. It's batting average, right? As you mentioned 40 percent, are hitting quota. Well, that's a pretty bad batting average for sales success It's good for baseball. But so so if you're hiring protests is picking up a higher percentage through using profiles.
I think profiles are great, but they are a data point. I'm not saying they're the be all and end all. Some people use them as the crutch to make decisions as opposed to a valuable piece of information to dig deeper.
But let's look at your hiring in general though. It's because I believe in a system where what you want to do is you want to create a scorecard for a candidate. And say, look, there's all these elements we're evaluating and it could be fit. It could be, you know, just details on their resume. It could be, you know, you create the categories and generally work with clients as well, sub system where they.
We'll sign, you know, there's only five to seven things that they're really judging. And you have a score one to five, you know, very simple. And to your point, Steven earlier, so say, look, we're going to, we need somebody to have a minimum score. Let's say of a 30 to get hired across all these different attributes, because it could be a mix and then we're going to track, right.
We're gonna go back and track how the thirties do, how the 20s do. And so few companies do that. It's mind boggling. And. It's a simple way. We're supposed to be data driven. And this is an area where it's not being used very widely. And it's crazy.
So, well,
that's what my podcast is going to be about is knowing what you do and actually doing it. Cause that's the problem we face in most cases is companies have bought into the, we can go back and we can look, the organization that I work with has done more validation studies than any other group. So it's not a perfect tool.
It's got to be fine tuned for your organization.
But use the data. Right.
Right. Well, that's the problem in
data.
We should execute better. We should do better in discovery. Let's train on discovery, but we still don't f ing do it.
Yeah. The sales leaders, again, since we're going to be, since sales leaders are going to be interested in this topic, sales, again, if we were all doing, if they were all doing it right, recruiting would be. 25 or 20 percent of their ongoing job on a day to day basis. We also don't do that.
Right. So we're not always, you know, always be closing. How about always be recruiting? And then we don't have to, yes, Always be coaching.
right? Always be coaching, always be call monitoring, always be doing, you know, sending it on the demos. Yeah, we're not doing, we're not, there's nowhere near as much coaching in general going on as there should be, but part of that is.
I find all these sales leaders that I'm working with that, you know, aren't at the very top are spending all their time in meetings. The amount of meetings that go on and I tell sales professionals and sales leaders. If the sales professionals are in more than five hours of meetings a week, we get a problem that aren't, that are not related, that are not client or prospect
Better climate.
Internal, right. If you're on four or five hours, yeah, if you're on more than four or five hours of internal meetings a week, then what's going on here,
But you know what? To find one organization that doesn't fit that bill, I try to train managers on revenue generating activities, RGAs versus time sucking activities, which are meetings, emails other stupid stuff that we have, that we do. And that probably, you know, if you boil it up or boil it down, whatever the case may be that, you know, most leaders are pretty good at leadership.
They're pretty good at culture. The biggest problem they face is they don't do enough of what they should be doing.
right?
Right. And that's our society.
don't do the get your hands dirty part.
Well, they don't do what they should be doing, right. They get distracted. There's too many distractions.
Right. Like I'm here. My phone is turned off.
My hope it doesn't ring. My, my cell phone is turned off. My watch is off.
Here I go.
I'm focused.
Yeah, well, but, so that isn't that sort part of a bigger issue, which I like to frame as leaders in general, not just purely, you know, frontline sales managers, but leadership.
Isn't really that invested in sales and sales success, right? Is that over the years we've seen, especially in the last, I'd say two decades, much more focused on process or the coin operated seller, you know, interchangeable parts, cogs in a machine, plug and play as someone used before.
And I think we're seeing what the result of that is. And I, yeah, I think we start to see some changes even positively in this last year or two, but it sort of reached this dire state where. Salespeople don't think that leadership really cares and quite frankly, I'm sure most sales leaders out there are thinking how quickly can I find AI to take the place of the salaries we're paying and you know, COVID was a boon for a lot of companies because it said, Oh, gosh, we don't pay for offices.
We don't have to pay for T and E shoot. We're really cutting the slice in the sense like. Sure. But at some point there's a customer on the other end that somebody has to talk to and
We'll actually meet
direct conversations and everything's to be about, you know, seems to be about everything but that, or how can we squeeze that as tightly as possible?
And it's squeezed and look what you get. Not very good.
I don't have as much experience as you have, Andy. I may be a few years younger and I'm just teasing about it because you look
Probably. You probably a lot of years younger than I am, but yes.
for a guy who has 46 years experience in sales, kidding aside. But that is probably the, you know, I'm a very simple thinker. I'm not a, and I think, you know, like, one of my good buddies, Mike Weinberg, I mentioned
Even
Well, everybody knows Mike. Yeah.
I love Mike it's basics.
And that's how
Christie's neighbor. Christie's
they turn.
Yep yep, Mike's, yep Mike wrote the forward, Mike wrote the forward to my book and he lives down the street.
So tell him I love him, but I but to me, it's about simple basics. Our thinking is very similar. That's why only because you agree, I agree with him or he agrees with me but some of the, some of it's not complicated, right? And that's why I'm fascinated with people know what they have to, or should be doing, but for whatever reason, just don't do it.
Now, either it's a will, a skill, a fear. Maybe it's they're too busy with,
Beer.
French, caca you know, doing crappy work
I'm not sure. I'm not sure, honestly. I'm not sure everybody knows what they should be doing.
okay. You're
here's why I say that because I asked, I interview, I don't know, a hundred plus 200 for, I do a lot of the hiring for my clients, so I do a lot of interviewing. We're right now we're doing hiring two SDRs for a client.
20 phone screens in the next three days. So I'm going to, I'm going to interview 20 S you know, SDR candidates. And I ask everybody the same question. I do a lot of the other questions, Steven, that you mentioned about behavioral based, I believe the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. But I asked this question, tell me about the formal soft skills.
Sales training that you've been provided and some cases, they don't even know what I'm talking about and they start talking about product training. Right? And then I'm thinking to myself, so if you were never provided soft, so then that might, by the way, my follow up question to that, in case you interview with me is, so what have you done for yourself?
Yeah. I, yeah,
But if I'm a sales rep and I've been, let's just say moderately successful, I've been in the 50 year, 60 percentile of my peers, and I've never been provided soft scale sales train. So I just figured it out back in the day before pandemic, we were in the office, I figured out by listening to Susan next to me, right?
I started saying what Susan was saying. Cause Susan was having success. But I've just figured it out by OJT. And now though, again, cause we love to do this in my world. So I've just got promoted to sales leader. I've never managed anyone in my entire life. I have no leadership or management skills. And Oh, by the way, I was never taught sales soft skills. I only know what I learned on the job in my past jobs. So how am I supposed to teach my sales reps? And again, like I'm on the Mike Weinberg program as well. By the way we say we're siblings from another mother. I'm like, pick up the damn phone. Like, but if you don't know what to say, when somebody answers on the other end, if you don't know how to objection handle, ask for referrals, you know, hold your prospects accountable.
I talk about accountability culture, not only. Leaders holding their reps accountable. If you're not, if you didn't grow up in an accountability culture as a rep, you're not gonna be able to hold, you're not gonna hold your prospects accountable either, but that's a skill that can be learned. Like all of these skills for the most part can be taught, but if you weren't taught and then you got, God love you, we promoted the, you know, we promoted the top 10 percent to leaders cause we don't know what else to do, then how, then I don't believe they know how to teach soft skills, sales training.
they don't. And there's not the investment to do it. I like to pose the sort of hyperbolic question is okay. If we assume, you know, based on the data we're seeing from LinkedIn and other surveys, Salesforce, somewhere between 15 and 20 billion a year spent on sales training in the United States, which we probably estimate probably 90 percent of spent on sellers and 10 percent on management.
What if we flip that ratio? What if we spent 90 percent of the 15 billion on training managers and only 10 percent on sellers, because we're in a, we're in a business that's fundamentally an apprenticeship and
That's right. That's right.
and you need coaching. So what if we just focused our dollars there makes a lot more sense.
But again, this is just. You know, indicative of the fact that leadership isn't thinking about how to invest the money wisely and just serve. They're not sufficiently invested in modernizing sales, right? One of my big things is to point Christie was making before about, you know, lack of coaching. Why do managers have to coach higher coaches?
Well, they should be part of their part of the manager should be a coach.
No, forget it. Make them managers and hire people who are coaches.
Well, then you don't need managers.
You look at the premier organizations in the world that are focused on performance. And I like to use, you know, Premier League football clubs as an example of that. They've got specialized coaches for every function that happened in the field, practically on their staff, you know, my team is Liverpool, my club is Liverpool, you know, they've got a throw in coach, they've got a set piece coach, they've got, you know, it's that level.
So why don't we have a soft skills coach or more importantly is, you know, we know that we've got a mental health crisis and sales, there's the number of days lost. Of work due to that is substantial. How many days lost do you need to have to hire a freaking psychologist on staff?
How about sales leadership coaches?
brainer. It's a no brainer, an organization of
I love where you're going. And here's what I would say. And this is what I say to, to the founders and the owners that I talk to all the time. The sale, cause I like to use the word sales leader. Cause I think this is how I categorize it. There are four hats that person wears. Leader, manager, coach, and I say mentor. And so how much time? So when I'm interviewing sales leaders, I say to them, I believe these things. And so how much time do you spend? In each of those four buckets, and inevitably they say 80 percent in management, which only leaves 20 percent for the most important three
but what do they constitute? What do they consider to be management? Right.
checking their dashboards, checking their reports, sitting in on those internal meetings with marketing and like they, so they're managing and here's what I say. If I set the CRM system up well, I think I can manage my reps up to about 70 percent by just me being in the CRM. If everybody's got hygiene and everybody's, I'm holding people accountable, but completely CRM, I don't need to come to you and ask you what's going on with that deal or whatever.
I need to do deal strategy with you, but I already should know that you sent out two emails last week and you attach the proposal. You've given a call to the procurement department, like all that shit should be in your CRM system. Which should free me up from my management job to do my coaching job, which is really what I should be getting my 4, 000 and my stuff, you know, half of that in my base and half of that in my variable, like we're paying people a lot of freaky money and they're not, you know, they're not improving their, they're not up leveling
work for them. Yeah. Well, so I have a solution for that, which people listen to the show have heard, and that it would Oh it would absolutely work. So what you do is for sales leaders pay 'em their base, but the variable is they get a flat fee for each sales person that hits quota.
Well, it'll keep them focused on what's
That's it. So if your variables, you know, theoretically is a hundred K and you've got 10 sellers, you get 10 K plus, or, you know, it's binary. You're going to get it or not. 10 K per person that hits quota. And you don't think that would change the conversations internally about quota setting.
Or about the tools that managers need to have to help develop their sellers. It would change in a heartbeat.
I don't know.
Absolutely.
here's, but goes
the concept,
line values, you're If you had all your frontline managers knowing that they had to pull as many people as possible across the finish line to the point Christie has made before, you know, and she says 80 percent management for me, a big part of management and we can call it coaching sort of fit in there, but it's development of the capabilities of the organization.
And that includes the people, obviously
Here's
go ahead.
is in the business to business world. Number one, what they would do in that environment is they'd look close, more closely at their dashboards. And ask questions on the dashboards and I believe that's the big the area where they spend a lot of time But they don't really coach to me coaching is getting out in the field, you
Yes.
I asked one of the managers i'm working with she's relatively new and I said to her if you were to improve one area of your sales team, what would that be?
Just definitely discovery How much time do you spend focusing on discovery with each of your salespeople? Have they gone through a course? Do you coach them each time? Do you observe their discovery calls? Cause that's what you need to do, right? And then you can help build that. But what I'm saying is I'm not sure.
I like the message that sends to be honest. I'm not criticizing the message that
Well, that's their incentive to focus on coaching.
but is that the incentive? Because people know they should focus on coaching. Making part of their fucking job. Sorry
Well, but the fact is, it is part of the responsibility of not doing it and look at the results. We've got, you know, 40 percent of sellers making quota and instead we
at me you i'm sorry to cut you off i'm passionate about this, okay Did you talk about a kpi for coaching? No, okay. So it was another conversation I had but how do we hold managers accountable to coaching? I had a kpi that I used when I was in industry and the kpi was very simple It was 120 days a year which works out to 10 days a month and I tracked that And that went to my boss and then
here's what I'm, but here's what I'm concerned about. I love what Andy said earlier about if you don't, if you're not a coach, then don't coach, then hire somebody to coach. My concern is, again, be careful what you ask for. If I want you to spend 10, 10 times a month coaching me, if you don't know what the hell you're doing. Then right if you've never been properly coached
Yeah, it's just bad coaching.
And you don't have sales, soft skill training. What the hell are you coaching me
so, so yes, but interesting enough, there's a study that's an old study from a corporate executive CEB, which
Yeah. Oh yeah. We all know. Yup.
and what it's good. I use it. I've used this one for years. It doesn't matter how good a coach you are. The more time you spend coaching, the better your results.
If you're a better coach, that's great. The company should be investing in teaching managers to be better coaches, but it showed just more coaching itself. Improved performance by 17%.
Yeah, I know. I think we've seen that study or similar studies single biggest source of uplift and performance is more effective coaching. But to Christie's point is a, is it taking place? B is a good coaching or bad coaching. And C is there's a study that's done a few years ago.
I forget the name of the company. I had the CEO on the show. But he said that he, they did a survey about coaching and what they found out is in the results I saw was that, you know, 60 percent of managers said, yo, we're doing enough coaching and 80 percent of sellers saying we don't get any coaching at all.
yes. Yeah. Yes, 100%. So, so,
So it's make a mark that they're doing coaching on their KPI, but it's not really taking place. Right.
Well, there are things to put in place, like field coaching reports, right? That that somebody looks at. They don't just sit on a system somewhere. And
I think, but isn't the issue really when it comes to coach for me, cause I look at it very different. I think that. Coaching, that's the problem, right? Cause everybody's doing deal coaching and what's not happening is they're not developing the individuals and that's where, you know, my proposed cure for that is you focus the attention.
A hundred percent of the coaches on, I have to make these people better, right? I can't just rely on, I'm going to have three people be superstars and I'm gonna hit my number. No, my success, my pay is due on making everybody successful. And Hey, if they're not successful, you know, and we got all this finger pointing and sales, but you know, the reps aren't doing their job.
And I talked to a manager. So, well, you hired them, you train them, you coach them. You know, if a quota attainment's at 40%, you, we need to reframe that as that's a 60 percent failure on the part of management and leadership.
had a, you had, you made me have a flashback cause I spent my first eight years out of college in retail. So I was a buyer for Macy's and part of our part of our, Annual performance review was one component of it was how many of your employees got promoted this year.
And I was like, so basically what you're saying is what that KPI, that metric would be.
So how many of your sellers hit quota this year? Because it's, you know, you hear, you know, as we're again, Steven, you'll jump, you'll know, this'll feel very comfortable for you, but we're always talking about OTE, right? You know, like, What's the OT and I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, does it matter because you're not going to hit OTE?
This is the same thing when people are like, can tell me about stock options. And I was like, why do I need to talk to you about stock options? You are sure shit not going to be here in four years when it best. So why would I, why do you, why are you even bothering to ask about OTE? You know, chances are slim.
You're going to hit what you should be asking us. How many people hit last year? Right?
Right. And the knock on effect from all this this low performance is it carries throughout people's careers. Right? So I was reading this and I'd mentioned this on a previous episode, I was reading this interesting article a couple of years ago about what they do, what the program they've implemented in the Chicago Public School District, which everybody knows is huge or troubled school district, to reduce the rate of high school dropouts. And so they started this program called freshmen on target. And basically the intent, you know, simplifying the tent was they refused to let freshmen fail because they knew if they could get somebody through freshman year, they were having much
We're halfway home.
graduating and we could do something similar in sales and I called it seller on target.
And there's things you can do to ensure that the people that are coming up through hit a certain level of success because what happens with success, you know, if you have a seller in the first year that. Even if you have a far reduced quota and the goals are there, but they achieve it. What do they want to do in year two?
Achieve their quota. They want to hit their number. Once you've had success, you want to keep succeeding. And we have these basic psychological rules that have been known for decades
Success begets success.
Is help people succeed. Don't let them fail. But we have this, you know, Darwinian quote unquote Darwinian environment in sales that now we're going to weed out these losers and so on.
You hired them for a reason, right? Yes.
I'm going to go on a really big limb here and talk, but I'm going to play off what you said earlier about we have a mental health crisis. So, part of the things that I talk about in the book is the difference between the 90 percenters and the 10 percenters. And again, I pull from athletics.
So, I've been an athlete my entire life. To your point, I had a private coach. I saw a nutritionist. You know, I had, you know, I worked out in the gym with a different guy. You know, I had a personal trainer for two years. The, you know, for weightlifting, like I did, I had all of
You were a tennis player, right?
Um, I am A tennis player.
I'm, yes, I'm a tennis player now. I grew up playing competitive racquetball, but I switched to tennis. You know, I've been playing tennis for 20 years now competitively. So you, I've got all this. And so I talk about, you know, I didn't talk about this for a long time, but for the last three years, quarterly, as part of my team, my, you know, my professional team, I have a hypnotherapist. And she, you know, and I meet with her quarterly based on what's going on, but I need her to fill my head with all of the, you know, like, again, I need to, we need to, it's my responsibility to stop the negative self talk, but I want her to fill my head with the positivity and the things that I'm, you know, dealing with in that realm.
And then I listen, she records those sessions and I listen to them in between. I'm very hypno friendly, she says, so I can go under pretty quickly, but I like, again, like. P. S. Annie, nobody really calls me friendly that often, so like, I get really excited when she calls me a hypnophobe. I was like, oh my god, like, can you, like, that's on, we're recording that, right?
That's on a
recording. Yeah, I'm like, nobody, no, I don't hear that I'm friendly very often. But but again, like, we're also not talking about that. Right. We're not talking about positive self talk. We're not talking about visualization. I call it mental memory again, stole the term from muscle memory.
Right. So like I have a four, my forehand slice as a result of all those years of competitive racquetball is nasty. But it, I don't think it doesn't, it comes naturally. I never had to work on it. I had to work on it to make it like nastier, but like my muscle memory was there from all those years of going after school to the racquetball court by myself with my headset and pounding a, you know, 5, 000 balls a day or whatever.
But how about the, how about mental memory, where if this happens, I automatically do this. And so there's all of these things that I get, and I know that not everybody's in, you know, the jock thing, the sports thing doesn't work for everybody, but there are so many lessons to be learned from top athletes and how they treat their body, their mind, you know, their mental health.
How that what they put in their body what they eat I never hear anybody talking about eating better as the strategy to be a top performer in sales I never hear anybody talking about eight hours of sleep as a
strategy
You need to, you need
10 percenter.
follow. Brandon Flu Hardy. He spends a lot of time talking about that.
Okay, good. I will
Building a big community about
Like, when I'm in companies, no one but me is talking about this.
Like, I'm talking about it, but no one in companies, I'm not hearing anybody talk about, you know, I'm like, well, how many hours of sleep you're getting a night? Like, oh, I only need five hours. I go, that's actually not true.
That's like, scientifically not true. So you can't be, you can't be a top 10 percenter on five hours of sleep a night. You just can't.
I'm laughing because I had thinking back to conversation I had with a guy who was really very talented and worked for a client and I was fractional CRO at that point for the client. And he just seemed like it was dragging all the time. Well, he and his partner, his girlfriend, they were awake till two o'clock in the morning, everyday gaming, you know, online. And I was like, I said, you don't think this is having an impact. He says, well, I know it's having an impact on us all.
I'm just not disciplined enough to stop doing it.
knowing, and doing.
That's right.
enough to stop doing it.
Yeah.
By the way, another top 10% er trait, discipline.
Yeah. Of course. Yeah. No, I think there's a lot of parallels with athletics. And I think that's, it's, and I talk about this a fair amount is that there are lessons to be learned there in business and we're just not learning, right. How to manage performance. So for example, you talk about this a little bit, Christie is there is a science behind managing performance improvement.
Yep. And. You know, if you're a coach at one of the, like, you know, U. S. track and field or some of these other national associations, you're trained in how to do that, right? There's coursework, there's scientific coursework and academic coursework to do. You want to be a professional soccer coach in Europe and in the United States, but develop system adult in Europe, you have to get licenses.
You have to take classwork study. You have to
Shocking, right?
To earn your A license and your B license or C, B and A license. It's rigorous. And there's a science behind this. So, we don't do anything in that regard with people in our, you know, let's just talk about sales and salesman and sales leadership.
There's science in how you work with people to help them improve their performance. And we're just not doing it. And it's like, we're, that's what I guess. Like my point is like management leadership in general, my belief is just insufficiently invested in making sure that sales gets better.
True.
It's shocking.
It's disappointing.
Yeah.
Well, what's the average tenure of a sales manager? One and a half years.
Well, and yeah, in the SAS world about, but less than 18 months. Yes.
months,
right?
do you know, how do you know if you're good or not? You don't.
You don't.
never repeat over your last year. Maybe you're really good and you're making changes to improve the team. It doesn't happen in 18 months yet. You have to go year over year to see you know, how good you really are.
Yeah. I haven't, I think it's yesterday I was reading and saw this report from hubs about why sellers churn. Cause you know, same about this. We're going to talk about leadership and yeah, most of the reasons sellers churn is because of managers.
One relationship with their manager. Yeah.
Yeah. It's well, that's it. Or the culture that's created or, and it's, it just doesn't need to be that way because the cost of the turnover is enormous.
Well, you know, I read, I don't read a lot of books, Andy, but the need to buy Millennials Matter, three things. I remember from that book. Millennials want to be coached, they expect to be coached after not, they leave,
Yeah.
right? So our newer employees,
And rightly so.
making up the bulk of our, you know, our labor force and I assume our sales force if they're not getting coaching, they're saying, Hey, this is not the organization for me. Which we know managers are not doing a great job coaching or they're not doing enough coaching.
So, so there has to be a relationship there with churn, right?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think the lessons that, that. That managers and leaders don't get. And I wrote about this in my last book, you know, I said our job as sellers is really simple. You know, our job is to listen to our buyers, understand the things that are most important to them in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they want to achieve, and then help them get that. And I tell managers. That's your job as a manager. Listen to your sellers, understand the things that are most important to them in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they want to achieve in their life and their career, and then help them get that. That's your job. Plain and simple.
Yeah. If you do that, you're going to hit your number. It's doesn't don't start with the number and work backwards. Help the people improve.
Do the right things and the right things will happen is what I like to say.
Yeah. It's a great way
comes back to doing basics really well. You know, if you go back to sports, the teams, you know, teams are losing while we're going back to basics or, you know, we're going to do the right things where, you know, we're going to follow a simple, we're going to simplify the game. Right. That's when you're on a losing streak, you know, okay, we're going back, not trying to make the extra pass in hockey.
We're going to shoot the puck. I think business is that simple. And I think we, we've overcomplicated it. You know, technology plays a distracting, distracting factor. Like, and I'm not anti technology. I love technology, but I think, you know, the first investment to improve is a technological investment.
And if your Salesforce is non-compliant or your leadership team is not ensuring compliance, you can put whatever you want in place. Salesforce how many unsuccessful CRM implementations have there been?
Sure. No I, yeah, tech doesn't solve.
Right?
I would make the argument that for all the incredible sales tech that exists, MarTech that exists, That sellers are less proficient and productive than they were 20 years ago before the heyday of all this technology, and we just, we're not being innovative and thinking about how we actually deploy it right in a way that, that does a couple of things.
1 is really helps our sellers improve, but also B is helps the buyer make a decision. You know, the focus of all the sales tech is the seller and the innovation and sales tech should be, how do we make it easier for the buyer to make a decision to buy from us?
Interesting. Yeah, I
I'll make one other sports analogy. Cause I started thinking about this after we started talking about it. If we treated sales teams, the way sports teams are treated. So again, big Kansas Jayhawk basketball and now football fan,
Oh, yeah. I think a good year this year. Yeah.
like so excited. I was like, Oh my gosh, we're going to have a football team too.
I'm like, what do I can fly my flag during, I can fly my flag during those months where I hit it in the basement
Yeah. Yeah.
Ah,
If you live in Toronto you hide because you we're always losing. So.
But think about like, think about how teams handle. Think about how teams handle players, right? So only, players who aren't performing, don't play. Leaders who aren't performing, coaches who aren't performing, don't get to continue coaching. Players who are injured, don't play. We don't want to make things worse. And if, you know, again, back to that whole sports thing, I started thinking about, I was like, if we just treated those, you know, again, not every team is going to, you know, not every team gets a bowl bid and not every team is going to make it to March Madness.
But in general, we don't put D and C players. We don't start them, you know, they're not part of the starting five. You earn your way into the starting five, you earn your way into playtime. And I don't think we're also doing that as sales leaders either making people, you know, and I keep thinking about how we, again, how we promote the top rep hitting 60 percent of quota to be the sales leader. And so, but you know, when the, you know. What Penn State's offensive coordinator for Penn State lost to Michigan. They were supposed to lose to Michigan. They weren't ranked higher than Michigan. The poor OC loses his job. Like they weren't supposed to beat them. Like statistically speaking, the poor OC in the middle of season loses his job.
Well, but the point is the franchise says, you know, GM says somebody got to take responsibility. Like we have to, you know, somebody has to go down for this. We can't fire the student athletes but again, like we're not, you know, we're not in, we're not handling injured sales reps well, we're not making them work their way to the top.
We're promoting people who are not in positions to be promoted.
And I think part of it goes back and maybe just because I don't have to wrap paper in a second, but it goes back to something you said earlier, you know, talking about soft skills, learning soft skills and so on is always stuck with this quote from a coach of the manager of Premier League team. I forget which one it was.
But, you know, it's a system in soccer, at least, where youth go through academies affiliated with a club. And at some point they transition men and
Yep.
women to the professional level. And what this coach said is, it says, yeah, when we sign a young person to professional contract, we spend the first X period of time, eight to 12 months, training the human before we train the player.
And just think about that. Right. They teach them how to operate in that world that they're going to go into as a human before they worry about the job specific coaching. And I think that's really such a huge opportunity for us that's missed in sales is we assume that the people we bring into sales know what to do, know how to be human, right?
We have, you know, our world has changed substantially. You know, when I grew up, I spent tons of time on the phone. That's how I talked to my friends.
really?
Well, it, like
the
are for having conversations. I thought it was for texting.
The landline. Interesting concept.
Right, but that's not the reality for the people that are, that have come through high school and college and coming into the workforce these days, it's all asynchronous or predominantly asynchronous communications. Well, but that's not what we're asking them to do. We're asking them to go have synchronous conversations with people, and we assume they know how to do that.
And to your point earlier about soft skills. They don't have them for the most part, right? It's not, it doesn't make them bad people. It's just the way they've been brought up and socialized. And it's like, Hey, let's invest in that. But I've all the years I've been doing this podcast, I've heard only one company really that I've asked about has said, Oh yeah, we do that.
He says, you know, we bring new sellers in. We help them open bank accounts. We introduce them how to set up a brokerage account for the 401k. You know, we walk them
How to How to pick their benefits.
How did we walk them through that? How to just be a person in the real world and then learn how to interact with people before we throw them into the hopper to say, Hey, do this.
And
a hundred, fewer than a hundred universities in the United States has sales as a major. So, we're not, like, can you imagine like put hiring an accountant who didn't get an accounting degree,
yeah,
or a bus, a business degree. But we like, as a society. We devalue that the daily sales just did a poll that the results just came out.
I think earlier in the week or late last week, 66 percent of sellers fell into sales because uncle Bert said, you'd be great in sales,
right? I mean, it's the only profession, like nobody, uncle Bert didn't say you'd be a great accountant. Like, nobody says that
no, I, well, I fell in the sales. I had no discernible job
like that's, that's, but that's why we have no choice. But to provide that level of training. Because there was no apprenticeship for that. There was no college curriculum for this. And 66 percent of people fell into sales and never intended to fall into sales. And then we're still not providing them any training.
it's a really hard job, right?
A really hard job.
It's always been hard, but it's really hard. I remember going out and spending the first couple of years of my career making 30, 40 cold calls in the field every day. You know, I was an introvert. That was just. I hated that.
so
And, but we don't, yeah, there's things they could have taught me that wouldn't useful, but I think it's even more pressing now because it's, yeah, it's more complex environment in some respects.
It's just help people into it in a way that makes sense. And let's invest in our people. Stephen.
it's interesting. Andy aKristiesty, I think and you threw out the number I fret was three billion dollars is spent a year on seller training
15 to 20 billion.
20 billion. Okay, so
It's 15 to 20, the
So, okay, so it sounds like a lot of money 20 billion dollars. This is in the u. s, right? Sounds like a lot of money. I haven't figured out per person how many salespeople you have, but so.
Something's ineffective here. Training probably is one of those areas to start because it's not due to lack of investment, right? Cause we're saying, okay, companies are not investing. They're spending a lot of money. They're spending a lot of money on sales reps, salaries, and, you know, leadership salaries.
So, so to me, you know, leadership, they don't spend enough money training, to be honest with you. But that I see every day because they think their managers should know.
Well
but if you look at all the money that's being invested part of the issue is how we train, to be honest with you, because training without coaching,
yes.
Is called robbery,
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
And I'm not picking on the training industry. I'm just a small little fish in the sea. I do not do training without coaching. Someone says, Steven, can you train my managers how to do X, Y, and Z? My answer is, how are you gonna reinforce that?
But that's why I talked about earlier is if we, you know, flip the pyramid in terms of where we invest.
Yeah, no, I'm with you. You asked me that question on another interview, to be
Is, yeah, is that this is, this would make a difference, right? I think, how did I learn how to sell? Well, I learned how to sell primarily from my customers, but secondarily from my bosses, right? Conversations, challenge, the way they challenged me, the way they guided me and, you know, provided information for me.
It was an SSM, it was an apprenticeship. And now we're so focused on 90 day onboarding, right? We're going to get somebody to full productivity in 90 It's like, really? And to your point earlier about data, I'd be willing to bet that if we changed it and said, look, give me two cohorts. You do yours in 90 day onboarding.
I'm going to do mine, 180 day onboarding. And in year two,
Right.
my cohort's going to perform on a much higher level than yours. But we're so fixated on these artificial constraints that we put up. It's like you're investing in these people, right? If you make that investment to hire somebody, you want them to stay for 12 months, you want to stay for 24, 48 months.
right.
And the things we could change to make that happen are pretty straightforward, but the culture is just set up sort of against it.
Well, I'm not sure if people are thinking people are just in reactive mode. Right. And this is how we do things. And this is the model in the industry. And, you know, we're going to scale. How do we scale? Well, I don't know how you scale if your system doesn't work. On a small scale, but we'll scale it
Come back. We'll have a second session about that.
Okay, you know, i'm always open to
All right, we'll do that one because that's yeah, don't get me going on that one. That's Yeah, all right guys. This has been fantastic. Thank you for joining me. Time has flown. Kristie if people want to get hold of you linkedin, I presume
Yes. LinkedIn is the best way. Kristie Jones, St. Louis, Missouri.
saintly. I'll throw saint
do live near mike.
on the place. St. Louis.
leaving me
Pardon
to have a you have to have a bet when the maple leaves play the blues
Oh yeah. We got ourselves. Yeah. We lost our football team, but we got ourselves a little hockey team.
Yeah, you do
we have a little hockey team that always disappoints.
That's our base.
We have a baseball team that always disappoints.
Yeah, you know
We have a basketball team that usually disappoints. Well,
It used to be Boston Red Sox fans, but they've managed to win a few World Series now, but now we've got to leave.
Maple Leafs, you know, hockey is like, it's like religion here, right? People are passionate about hockey. I come from Montreal, so when I grew up, I went to four Stanley Cup parades.
Yeah.
But my poor kids have to deal with the disappointment
Yeah.
Toronto fans.
Yeah.
fun and games.
Their day will come. All right. Steve LinkedIn as well.
LinkedIn, you know, my website, starresults. com. Feel free to reach out there. And a website, a podcast that's coming,
Oh yeah. That's right.
January called the Sales Leadership Awakening Podcast with me and Colleen Stanley, who's a great partner,
Well, by the time this goes live, your podcast will be live. So
well,
check it out. All right.
we just want to hang on to Andy's Goat Tales and plus him pull us forward to be successful. I appreciate
right. All right. Thank you guys.