Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 33 - 3 Mistakes When Building A Sales Team
Synopsis:
Building a sales team can be one of the most freeing moves for an entrepreneur—but it’s also one of the riskiest if done wrong.
In this Peaceful Profits episode, Mike Shreeve reveals the three most common mistakes business owners make when hiring salespeople—and how to avoid them.
From hiring “overly experienced” reps who don’t fit the startup pace, to overlooking detail-oriented habits, to bringing on people who refuse to follow up, Mike shares lessons learned from 15+ years of building sales teams for his own companies and clients.
You’ll also learn the single factor that can make up for nearly any weakness: belief in your product.
Transcript:
3 Mistakes When Building A Sales Team
[00:00:00] Hello, my dear friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Let's talk about three mistakes when hiring a sales team. Hiring a sales team is, in my opinion, one of the best and most liberating and freeing things. a business owner can do in the help industry. It's also a very scary thing. It is a difficult thing, not because the act of hiring a salesperson is difficult, but because of where your business needs to be in order to be ready for hiring a sales team.
Now, I am [00:00:30] not a sales expert. Ask anyone on my team, especially my sales team. I am not an expert in the actual Act of selling, right? If you know anything about me, I prefer to make the math work first rather than having to be the greatest salesperson on earth. If you don't understand what that means, listen to a bunch of the other podcasts.
I just prefer to make selling easy rather than having to be the best salesperson ever. That said, for the past 15 years, I have helped many clients build sales [00:01:00] teams, and I myself have built many more. Of my own sales teams. So there are basically all that means is I've made a few mistakes and I want to tell you what the worst ones were so that when you build your sales team.
You can avoid them. Okay, because we have to understand. This is the serious stuff here. When you make a mistake on your own funnel, you're the only one who gets punished, right? You lose some money and whatever. That's what happens when you make a mistake in marketing. When you make a mistake with team, we're talking about the lives and occupation [00:01:30] and financial status and financial well being of other human beings.
I'm not, I don't want to make light of anything when it comes to hiring or working with team members. Okay. So these mistakes are very serious and they are worth deep consideration. Number one, hiring overly experienced salespeople. So I have hired very young, new salespeople, and I have hired the middle ground where you might call middle of the S curve.
If you're not familiar with the S curve, [00:02:00] highly recommend you go watch it plenty of stuff on YouTube and et cetera about that. And then I've hired at the very top end of the S curve. Where you have people who have been in sales for many years. Now, I have found that the least effective salesperson for a job SMB, which is small to medium sized business that is within the startup phase, which I would argue all SMBs are in startup.
Companies that really almost the entire help industry six, seven, and lower [00:02:30] eight figure per year companies. I, that's still very like in that startup stage, very experienced long time in the game salespeople. They struggle. They struggle in that startup mode. Or many who have had long, successful careers in sales, it's a very different pace.
It's a very different energy. It's a very different level of expectation. A lot of salespeople, when they reach that point in their [00:03:00] career, Sales as a profession can sometimes be very hierarchical in the sense that when you're young, you grind. You put in the time, you put in the effort, you do the boiler room thing, you hit the pavement.
But as you become more experienced, one of the perks within that community is that you no longer have to be a part of that pace and that that world. And so what happens [00:03:30] I found over and over and over again, when we hire very experienced salespeople, we call them overly experienced, they have very unrealistic, For the needs of the business expectations.
They're not unrealistic expectations for them They've earned that kind of job in the world of sales They've earned the ability to not have to pound the pavement anymore because they put in the time however, I'm telling you right now if you're listening to my podcast [00:04:00] you probably are an SMB and you probably have the exact kind of Environment and pacing and etc Where a, an overly experienced salesperson would just not thrive, whatever the opposite of thriving is.
Now you run into a major problem, which is overly experienced salespeople are expensive. They're very expensive. So you have this very expensive person on your team [00:04:30] who is completely the wrong fit for the pacing environment and situation that you are in. And what do you think happens? Conflict. Massive conflict.
The sales person is looking at your organization and saying, your organization sucks. Because in their mind, and probably in the job they were at before they worked with you, they were in a more corporate established systemized setting where they were the chief of many and they had perks and et cetera, et cetera, and they're now working for you and what are you?
You are a cowboy operation. You're a [00:05:00] startup. Things are changing all the time. You don't have the system. You're duct taping things together. You're literally putting the plane together as you're falling out of the sky. And so of course in their mind, what do they think you are you suck this business is horrible.
You're no good And you're thinking hold on a second. You said you were good at selling You said you were experienced. You said you knew how to and that dynamic Is poisonous not just for the salesperson not just for you, but for everybody [00:05:30] You have to understand Salespeople carry the business on their back Salespeople, and then marketing, and then fulfillment and operations, in that order of carrying the whole thing on their back.
And it's a very dangerous place to be in your business if your salespeople are thinking to themselves, I don't really want to be here. I don't want to carry this thing on my back. So overly experienced, in my opinion, is really [00:06:00] bad. For most SMBs, let those salespeople go get the positions they deserve in a corporate gig where they can make an unbelievable amount of money without having to do the hustle of, SMB sales, right?
Number two, salespeople who lack the ability to track and manage details will cause areas of collapse within your business. We always think of salespeople [00:06:30] as very personable. We think of them as, in emotional ways, meaning we look at and say, okay, a good salesperson is somebody who has personality, they're on the phone, they can be convincing and etc.
And we assign salespeople a lot of soft skills and we encourage that and we love it and it's great. That's what we all do when we think of a salesperson. However, while all of those attributes are good and true, if they cannot pay attention to detail, then It doesn't matter. You need to find the salesperson [00:07:00] who enjoys tracking their progress who can't stand not knowing what their close rate is, who is able to remember people they've talked to and weird little details about the people they've talked to.
These things that I've just listed here, among others that are in the world of detail, add up to a tremendous contributing factor to the success of the salesperson in your [00:07:30] organization. If somebody isn't able to consistently track themselves, how do they know whether they're doing well or not? How can they give you feedback about the leads that you're sending them?
How do you know that they're holding themselves responsible for their performance if they're not even tracking what their performance is? If they can't remember simple things like tracking, then how can they remember the details of the people that they're working with and talking to these personal [00:08:00] touches?
I just think about any executive or concierge or high level experience that you've had where you walked away and you said, Oh my gosh, that was unusually amazing. What's one of the, what's one of the elements of that experience? Personal detail, right? They remembered your birthday. They remembered you liked a certain thing.
They remembered that you etc so that personal detail it can go a long way in Selling especially if you have a longer sales cycle, it also shows the salesperson's [00:08:30] ability to listen And at least the way that we do sales and I found it to be the most effective way in the help industry. When people are coming to you with their problems to be solved, we have found that the best listeners tend to be the best salespeople.
And we have also associated an ability to track and retain detail as a sign or symptom of the skill of listening. The skill of listening. So look for that when you're working [00:09:00] with your salespeople, when you are talking to potential sales prospects and attention to detail is as important, if not more important than their personality, ability to empathize, or even believe in your product.
And the one more thing I should add here, because I did talk about it might collapse areas of your business. If you are in the stage of your business thinking about hiring, or you have hired before in the past for sales, there's always something in the back of the mind of a business owner. What's that? I hope they represent me well.
I hope they don't over promise or under deliver. I hope that people who go through them are well taken [00:09:30] care of, that they show up on time to the onboarding and etc. I can tell you that it's very difficult for a salesperson who's not good at details to represent you well for the following examples.
Say for example, they forget to send the contract, they don't get the person on board, or they forget to send the email, they accidentally say the wrong thing that isn't true, and then the client comes back a couple weeks later and says you said that, etc. That little feeling you have in the back of your mind, that's very difficult.
If you're, thinking about hiring someone, if you want to feel better about that, [00:10:00] of, are they going to represent me well, detail is a contributing factor. Their ability to track and retain detail is a contributing factor in that hire. Okay, next is refusing follow up. So there's this weird thing that is happening more and more in the internet marketing space, which is that leads are trash.
That people who come on the phone are dispensable and they're garbage and if they're not ready to buy now They're never ready to buy ever which is I've been doing this now for 15 plus years I have worked with some of the best sales trainers in the world in building [00:10:30] teams and watching them train salespeople again I'm not a sales expert but in every single instance I have ever seen That is just simply not true Meaning that if a lead doesn't buy on the phone, they're never going to buy.
That's just simply not true. And even within organizations, if they're honest with themselves, they can see that's not true. So for example, you may have a salesperson who is anti follow up. For example, they say, I'm just going to sit here on the phone. Whatever calls come in, those are the calls we're going to take.
And then A couple weeks later, they may [00:11:00] say, Hey, I talked to so and so again, and it was a really great call, but I'm still not going to follow up. And the reason that so and so got on the phone again is maybe because some emails, the person saw the email, like a broadcast email, for example, or they saw a promotion, and they got back on the call, right?
Even when In the help industry, if you're following standard strategies, et cetera, people will get themselves back on the phone, right? Which shows that just because somebody doesn't buy on the first call doesn't mean they're never gonna buy. So if that's true, if it's true that leads aren't trash, and I believe that they're not, if it's true that just [00:11:30] because they don't buy on the first call they're never going to buy, then you have to ask yourself as a business owner, what then are we going to do about that?
Because we spent a lot of time, money, and effort to get them on the phone in the first place. We know that if they got on the phone they have the general need that we have a solution for, there's just some reason why they haven't purchased today. The reason they haven't purchased today might not be known to us because they maybe didn't trust us enough to tell us on this phone call, [00:12:00] but at the, whether it's known to us or not, it is a changeable reason.
So I'll give you an example. Prospect gets on the call in love with what you do. You drop the price, or they say, I don't have money. Are you telling me, honestly, are you telling me that people's financial situation can't change? Because that's the only reason that you would not follow up with someone who told you that.
Is because you believe that someone's financial situation can't change. That's the only reason. [00:12:30] There's no other compelling reason if somebody said, I love what you do, I love everything, but, ah, I just can't swing the money right now. And That's often the most sort of what people think is the unbeatable objection, right?
They don't have money. They can't buy it There's nothing I can do So if you take that and I really ask yourself, is that true that people's financial situations don't change? I don't think it's true Maybe that's because of my own personal experience of having the extreme occur to me where I was literally homeless To now whatever the opposite of homeless [00:13:00] is You So I believe that people's financial situations can change, and I believe that if you stay with them long enough, if you stay front of mind, top of mind with them for long enough, they will remember you when that change occurs.
That's called follow up. That's what follow up is for. Now, take that as the unbeatable objection of whatever we said. I don't have the money, right? That's like the biggest, most unbeatable objection. Now go down the list of lesser objections. Can't do [00:13:30] it till I talk to my spouse. Okay. You don't think that they can talk to their spouse?
Or that their spouse's mind can change? That you can follow up with them and help them? If they were on the phone there and said, This sounds great, this sounds wonderful, this sounds amazing, the only objection is I need to talk to my spouse. You can't look me in the eye and tell me that you don't think that people's spouses minds change, or that they themselves dig deeper and deeper until they willingly either say, I'm gonna do it and my spouse is gonna have to support me, or I figure out a [00:14:00] way to show that my, to show my spouse that they're comfortable with this purchase, etc.
And again, we just go down the line of objections. You have to, only people who believe that people who show up on the call are going to be stuck in time in whatever version of themselves show up to that call, and they're stuck in time forever as that person. Only those kinds of people don't follow up.
Now, what that means is if you're hiring salespeople who don't follow up, it's [00:14:30] because of that belief 9 times out of 10. Not because they're lazy. Not because they don't want more sales, not because they understood, maybe, for example, it's not even because they don't understand that you paid all this money and spent all this effort to get a lead on the phone and, I've never found people in sales if they make it past all your other filters and they're on the team and they've gone through training, they're not out there to hurt you.
They're not out there to, screw your business or anything like that. They just have belief. [00:15:00] Stuff. Just like you have belief stuff. Now the problem is that a salesperson who doesn't believe in follow up, it's very difficult to get them to believe. Why? Because it is a belief which is connected to additional effort.
So you're not just getting them to believe something, you're saying, I want you to believe something and then I want you to do something new, more in addition to, which when you first start doing it has very little reward and has a lot of negative pushback. If you tell a sales team [00:15:30] today, Hey, what I want you to do is I want you to go and start following up.
The first thing that's going to happen is they're going to follow with people and nothing's going to happen. One, because if this is the first time they've ever followed up, they're not very good at it. They don't know how it works. They don't know what to expect. Also, what's going to happen, so they're not going to get a big response, and then the other thing that's going to happen is somebody's going to say, Hey, stop bugging me.
So there's rejection. It's one of those, if you know anything about changing people's beliefs, changing a salesperson's belief about follow up is one, it's really hard to do. So if they don't believe it when they show up, it's going to be hard to get them [00:16:00] to believe it through the process.
Which is why, it's one of the mistakes, right? So mistake number one, overly experienced. Mistake number two, a lack of attention to detail. And mistake number three is they refuse to follow up. They refuse to build long term relationships. They just want to pump and dump on the leads that you're bringing in.
Churn and burn. Leads are trash. We'll wait for new ones tomorrow. Like that whole mentality is very it's just very damaging and destructive. It's also just not true. It's a false belief more than anything. All right, and the last thing is [00:16:30] Which is a little bit of a bonus because I said there were gonna be three But then I realized there's actually four is if they don't believe in your product that is let's see if I can say this in a way that really drives home the Impact of having someone on your team in sales who doesn't believe in what you're doing It is not only Unfair to you as the business owner Because you're out there working your butt off to create opportunities for a salesperson to work those opportunities.
It's not [00:17:00] only unfair for you, because they don't believe in the product, which means the conversion rate is going to be really low. It's not only unfair to the prospects, because look. I believe sales is a counseling job, an advisory role. I believe that a salesperson's job is to help people understand what it is they need to get what they want.
So it's unfair to the prospect if they're on the phone and they're talking to somebody who doesn't believe in what they're doing, who doesn't care what they're doing, who doesn't care about the prospect, who doesn't, it's just, that's not the purpose of a sales call in [00:17:30] my mind, in the help industry. Now those two are, that's true, unfair to you, unfair to the prospect, but it's also unfair to the salesperson.
Imagine, imagine what it would be like, and maybe you don't have to imagine, maybe you know this exactly, but just imagine what it must feel like to wake up every day and most of the people you talk to are going to reject you. Most of the people you talk to will reject you. And the few people who do say yes [00:18:00] are far and few in between compared to the majority of the people you talk to.
And you have to try to get people to believe in something. When most of them are going to reject you that you don't even believe in That is Not a good place for anyone to be in, alex hermosi If you've ever checked out any of his youtube stuff, he's a great sales trainer Probably one of the best in the world.
He always comes back to this idea of belief that when a [00:18:30] salesperson can believe in what you're doing and has the that charge of Buying into what they're talking about that can overcome a lot of other inefficiencies and deficiencies But you can take somebody who maybe isn't the best to follow up.
Maybe isn't the best at Detail who maybe is overly experienced But if they believe in what you're doing and they're committed and they really truly believe what they're doing You can overcome a lot of those mistakes and I would absolutely agree 110 [00:19:00] percent agree. I have seen it time and time again where we have had salespeople who are not very good at details.
Who are not, don't really do follow up, who are overly experienced, but they believe in what we're doing. And that in and of itself has made a huge difference in their performance versus almost anything else. So what that means for you as a leader of a sales team is that while it's easy to poke [00:19:30] holes in a salesperson to say if they only did this, we would get more out of them.
If they only did that dah. The details of those specific things they could do to improve pale in comparison to the most important question you should be asking yourself when leading your sales team, which is, do they believe in what we're doing? Do they believe in what we're doing?
Because if they do, then their shortcomings, just like my shortcomings as a business owner, will not derail us for [00:20:00] where we're, for where we are trying to get to. In other words, We'll still get to where we're going despite all of our shortcomings and if you are seeing or sensing a pattern That's life Okay, so it's as true for you as it is for your salesperson, which is really the ultimate lesson here That more than almost any other position in a company real life is reflected in the role of salesperson it is life on steroids.
They are talking [00:20:30] to You hundreds of people in very short amounts of time and having deep conversations and etc. So bring it back to belief and the other things are certainly stuff to look for and certainly stuff to be aware of. They are mistakes I've made and when you combine those mistakes with a lack of belief it is disaster.
It is absolutely disaster, but if you have those mistakes or those things, those personality traits, those habits, those behaviors, if belief is present, you can overcome [00:21:00] whatever it is that you need to overcome, which means, and then here's the point, which means you don't need a perfect sales team to have a very good sales team.
And this audio is not for salespeople. This audio is for business owners. So there's a big fear when hiring salespeople. That if they aren't perfect, this is going to be, I'm telling you, I've been doing this for 15 years, built a few for myself, built many for clients. It's not about perfect. It's not about perfect.
So if you have belief, you'll be fine. Okay. So that's it. My [00:21:30] friends, if you would like to fill your business with so many phone calls that you need to build a sales team, or if you have a sales team currently, and you would like to have us fill your sales calendars so you can grow and expand that sales team, give us a call PeacefulProfits.com/call. We love filling calendars. We love it. We love it. We love it. We're also very good at it, if I can toot my own horn. And you can chat with one of our salespeople, which we have wonderful, amazing salespeople on our team. And they're really great people. Really great people.
And they buy into our philosophy, which is that [00:22:00] sales calls should be about finding what the prospect needs and wants, and finding a solution for them that works for them specifically. That means we have offers ranging from do it yourself all the way to done for you. Let us know if you want some help.
Again, that's be full PeacefulProfits.com/call. Hope you all have a wonderful day. Hopefully this was helpful to those of you in the process of building sales teams, and we'll talk to you later.