Lessons from 1,000 Mistakes: Kevin Gaither on Scaling Startups & Sales Teams

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news.

Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems. Check out our new gateway NPS-1 on our website. Uh, it's a game changer. So today's special guest is Kevin Gaither from InsideSalesExpert.com., and Kevin is a sales expert. So we're going to talk about sales today. And what we were talking about earlier was, you know, there's a lot of trends in our, in the, in industries, all types of industries, no matter what industry you're in, as to, you know, should you hire 1099 salespeople, have people on salary, and then the whole discussion about virtual assistants. You know, all this offshore virtual assistant stuff, which is, you know, very, very interesting itself. So welcome to the show, Kevin.

Hey, thanks for having me, Allen. I really appreciate it. Let's, let's do it. I got plenty of opinions on this topic.

All right. I mean, I know in my industry, you know, merchant processing, you know, point of sale, You know, it's a mixture and, you know, it's a mixture of 1099, inside salespeople on salary, outside salespeople on salary. I mean, the virtual assistant thing always baffles me because you— it's like you can hire like 5 virtual assistants or something, but then you need an employee because it's not going to be me. Is that you needed somebody who's watching all these people, like, doing whatever tasks you have them doing. So, sure. Yeah.

Well, let's, let's cover the 1099 versus salary piece first. And in fact, why don't I come, come back at you with a question? You've been in your— and I'm very well, very aware in merchant processing that 1099 is, is, has been extremely common for a long, long time. What, what have you seen as some of the downsides to having 1099 salespeople, you know, selling your products and services?

Well, one, they could go sell for anybody. So because you can't hold people exclusively to your company.

That's right.

So that's one thing. Another thing that we see, so that kind of, you know, can water down your sales force if you spend time training somebody and then they go run off to another company. Yep. That, that's one issue. Another issue is you don't have control over their schedule, production.

That's right.

Things like that. I mean, definitely the pandemic accelerated the ability to do inside sales and talk to people over Zoom, because I date myself back probably 10 years ago selling, you know, we sell some SaaS products and, you know, I would say, oh, well, let me show you the demo. They're like, oh, you coming out to the office? No, here, let me send you this link.

Yes.

You know, and I was, you know, this, it was not like the clearest thing you ever saw.

Yes.

You know, and I would show people a demo on the computer. They're like freaking out. I can see your screen. Oh my. Yeah. Yeah. They'd be like, no way. I'm not doing that. They didn't even. Know it was possible.

Yes.

And I see a lot of companies in my industry hiring people to do inside sales more than that. I mean, they're companies who we used to do business with. They're competing with us for the same customers.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And what's the big— what's the big— there's one— I know the answer to this question. I'm just posing this to you, of course. What's the one big benefit to hiring 1099 employees?

Well, the benefit is, is you're saving on salary, so you don't have to dish out salaries and you don't have to spend time monitoring these people. I mean, and then from an outside salesperson perspective, you know, car insurance, like you have to take out extra insurance for unowned auto on these people if they weren't a 1099. Yeah, that's right. We get them to sign paperwork saying that, yeah, they have a license and they have car insurance. That's right. We're responsible.

There's less, less all kinds of liability. There's no, no, you know, no taxes on them. No, no benefits you have to pay, no salary. And basically they eat what they kill. And it sounds fantastic. And I think that, you know, for your audience's sake, for your audience's sake, you've, you've answered the question. But in summary, you know, which is better, 1099 or a W-2 employee? And it really all depends on the span of control that you want to have over those employees. And if you want to, and like you said, shit, man, they could be 1099 employees for 3 different providers. There's no exclusivity. And there are some people that want that kind of, some salespeople that might want that kind of, you know, flexibility, but asking them to submit pipeline reports, meeting reports, good luck. You know, you're not going to get that. And so it depends on your, uh, it depends on the span of control that you want over your salespeople. Personally, personally, I cannot stand building an enterprise sales org or an inside sales org, um, which I've done both multiple times, um, without that level of span of control. I've got to con— you know, you you can't— you know, this is the old adage, Allen, you've probably heard before. You can't manage outputs, you can only manage the inputs, right? And it's a funnel. And so, it's a certain amount of meetings, you know, you would call them door knocks or something like that, but a certain amount of conversations turn into a certain amount of meetings that turn into a certain amount of qualified opportunities that turn into closed one opportunities that turn into revenues. And it's a a funnel. And if you can't control the top of the funnel with respect to their outbound activities and the meetings that they're setting and that type of thing, um, you know, I— you cannot create a repeatable engine. And that could be inside sales or enterprise sales. Now, a really, really important distinction here, because you mentioned inside sales, right? Um, I'm in California, but this applies mostly throughout the United States. If you have an inside salesperson, you can— you must pay them as a W-2 employee by the hour, hourly. So yeah, so that makes them non-exempt from overtime, which is a double negative, honestly. Non-exempt, in other words, you have to pay them overtime. And so the idea of having a 1099 inside salesperson that just, that just doesn't, that doesn't exist.

Yeah, dude, you can't meet the requirements of that because once you tell somebody you have to be at work at this time, right, to do this and you have to do that, they're an employee. And I'll tell you another thing that I just went through an audit with my workers' comp, and they wanted to know if anybody from that works in the office had any responsibilities to go travel outside the office to even go to the bank or do anything. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. We, you know, when we, when, you know, when we got bigger, we had to stop that. We were like, okay, employees cannot do anything outside of the—

Yeah, that's right.

Anymore because that's too— they want to charge you like an arm and a leg.

Well, yeah, just all— well, we live in a litigious society and that is, in fact, a scary story, Allen. I, as quickly as I can tell this, A friend of mine decided— what, got an opportunity to stand up a 30-person sales team from scratch in Arizona, which, by the way, Arizona is an unbelievably employer-friendly state. And, uh, and he very quickly, in like 90 days, hired 30 inside salespeople. And when I said to him, hey dude, make sure that you pay them by the hour, you know, non-exempt, track their hours and all this kind of stuff, he goes I don't have time for any of that stuff. They're just base salary plus commission. We're moving so fast. I said, all right, man, at your risk. He hired a guy who came on board and absolutely did zero work, zero effort, wasn't selling a darn thing. And my, my buddy then of course has this performance conversation with them, like putting them on a PIP. No sooner did he have that conversation, he gets a call from a lawyer and the lawyer goes, yeah, it seems as if you're paying your salespeople incorrectly over there. And, and really did this like double switch on him and ultimately shook him down for money because he threatened a civil lawsuit, you know, a class action lawsuit against him. So it is not something to mess around with. So anyway, 1099. Versus W-2, it all matters in terms of the span of control that you want over the sales, over your salespeople, because you can't dictate what they do at 1099. And as far as inside salespeople are concerned, which so many businesses have inside salespeople because of the efficiencies there, you just can't pay them 1099. You have to pay them by law, otherwise you're going to get in trouble.

Yeah, I've seen, I've seen companies get sued because they had 1099 inside salespeople. Sure. And then all of a sudden you hear about, oh, this company, blah, blah, blah, then they, they're getting sued. And then you find out that they were, you know, had rules and all this stuff. And then the next thing you know, they're out of business because they just bankrupt the company to—

well, that's right, that, that's right. In fact, um, when when I had my 350-person inside sales team at ZipRecruiter, Allen. Yeah. At first, we had them on salary plus commissions, but I kept saying, hey, just, we need to formalize this when we can operationalize the payroll piece. And eventually we switched over and what we learned, which I didn't know this before, If you pay overtime, not only do you have to pay overtime on the base salary, but you have to pay overtime on the commissions during that period as well.

That's crazy. I didn't know that.

Oh, it's so crazy and so complicated. And just to be clear, this isn't just California bullshit. Like, this is, this is a federal thing. This is, you know, in Arizona we dealt with the same exact thing. And as a result, we said we don't pay overtime.

You know, I noticed that with a couple of companies that friends of mine work for, they were like, yeah, we just got a new comp plan like a couple of years ago. And the comp plan, they took away— they gave everybody a raise and then they took away the commission aspect. So they only pay a bonus.

Oh, interesting.

They're based out of California.

Yeah, interesting.

And, and I was like, well, I wonder why they did that. And that must be why they did it, because I know that— I know California has like really strict, um, surveillance on the 1099, you know, thing. And they even— I even tell people that do 1099 in my business, I'm like, listen, let me explain something to you. When you're a 1099 sales rep, you need to get a corporation or— yes, an LLC single member— yes, set up with a separate bank account. Yep. And everything so you can run all your expenses through there. You can get paid not in your personal name but in your company name.

That's right.

So that you're, you're protected, you know. And also You know, when a company's paying you, let's say they're paying you residual income, because I just dealt with this with somebody, and I said, you know, you're basically messed— you're messed up. Somebody, a part— their significant other passed away. They were 1099 for a company similar to mine. Yep. And I said, you know, that he was getting paid in his own name, so now they don't have to pay him anymore.

Yeah, that's right.

And You don't know, you don't know the business, right? And maybe if you went to them and you cried the blues, they would pay you. They don't have to, but they did end up making a deal with, uh, the significant other to, to— so the person didn't— wasn't like left destitute. Yeah, no. And they said, listen, you have to incorporate and do this stuff and blah blah blah, and then we'll continue to pay this, you know, residual income to your corporation. And you would have to learn how to deal with these clients.

Well, yeah, and the books and, and running the books as well.

And you're gonna have to run, you know, but a lot of people don't understand that. And then all of a sudden they find out, oh, this guy never incorporate— the person never incorporated. And then they're left without the income from, from that. So it's super important that you set yourself up for success, you know, and you don't have to name your company some crazy thing. Just have a generic name so that if you want to have other businesses, you just set up a different DBA and run it all under, you know, a generic corporate name. Yeah, that's very, very important so that you have continuation of getting paid, you know, no matter what happens.

Yeah. Well, and you can, you can, if you do it right, you can also write off a lot more expenses.

Oh yeah, of course you can. I tell people you're going to make on average 20 to 30% more money because now you're going to be paying your cell phone bill and your car and your other expenses and whatever expenses you have that are related to work, a computer, etc., etc., etc.

So that's right.

You know, advertising costs or whatever the costs are that you're printing business cards, you know, it all adds up. Software you use.

That's right.

Paying your accountant, it all, it's all a business expense and you're going to, you know, benefit from all of that.

That's right. But it's, it's a level of effort, though. And back to the topic at hand, level of effort. Yeah, it's a, it's a level of effort that a lot of people either don't understand or not willing to put themselves through it. And, and that's another reason why 1099, even for the employee, can be, can be a bit of a pain in the, you know, pain in the, in the butt as, as well. So Yet again, span of control, complexity. The W-2 is far easier. And look, I deal with founders of pre-IPO tech companies on a regular basis, you know, $10, $20, $30 million companies with sales teams that are growing. And it always seems attractive, Allen, to go, well, why don't we just hire a bunch of commission-only salespeople? Sure, sure. But what are you going to get? You know, you're going to get salespeople that are not committed to you. And frankly, I've seen very few of those 1099 salespeople, at least in technology, at least in technology, that are worth their salt because the competition in technology sales doesn't pay $10.99. So, you might think that you're going to save a few bucks, but it's pennywise and pound foolish. But for me, it's the span of control, period, end of story.

No, I get it. And also, sometimes they'll reach an income level and then they'll be like, okay, well, now I have this residual income coming in, right? This recurring income. Now, I'm just going to go find another gig. I'm going to have this coming in here and I'm going to go do this gig, right? And you don't— then you lose that person. And then until, you know, and then hopefully they don't lose any customers, but at the same time you're not benefiting from them putting more business on the books, you know. Yeah. And it's, you know, managing inside sales is also not easy. Also, you gotta have office space, or you have people working virtually, and then you gotta have systems so they're logged into a dashboard and you're monitoring them and, you know, with screen record and all kinds of different stuff. So, well, you know, monitoring people, you know, that's, it's all part of the business. You know, you got to weigh it all out, you know.

Yeah, no, no, no question about, about that. I mean, look, even if you've got enterprise salespeople, you know, understanding what they're doing on a regular basis is key to building a repeatable, a repeatable sales engine. It's, you know, tracking metrics isn't just for the baby inside salespeople. That, you know, and let's face it, you know, I know in your industry this is far different, Allen, of course, but there's very few salespeople these days that are literally pounding the pavement and literally walking out with signed orders, you know, walking out of a store, a location, you know, like that. That's happened to me one time in my career where I walked in, had a proposal, the dude signed it in front of me, and I walked out. That's one time in my career since we used to—

I used to do that all the time. But in the age of electronics, we're trying to be more electronic. Like now we have signups. So like, oh, you know, we do you do a demo, you want to sign up, here's the link, fill this out, boom, go.

Exactly.

And that's basically, you know, we're trying to be just like Stripe. Here's the link, boom, sign up. That's it, you're done. That's exactly because that's what people want, especially the younger people. Anybody 40 and under doesn't want to talk to salespeople. They want to see what they— they want to see a demo of the product or get product information and then sign up. Boom. Yeah, that's it.

That's right. That's it.

That's kind of learn how to change Your business has to change with the times. But, you know, let's talk about some of these crazy terms, you know, like offshoring, nearshoring, virtual assistants, like, like this whole thing, like this. And I mean, I'm getting hit up probably 10 times a week or more. Oh, we can hook you up with virtual assistants by email, LinkedIn messages, sure, Facebook message, sure, sure. You know, and it's, you know, and I know that that the current administration is not thrilled with that and is looking at like, oh, well, if you're going to have offshore employees or employees in another country, you know, they're looking at figuring out how to tax companies on that.

Sure, sure. Well, most of these, most of these VAs, virtual assistant VAs, you know, you're hiring them on a 1099 basis. For sure. But here's the key. And I've done this in various formats and recommend this to sales leaders and to founders to utilize, but it only works under one condition. It only works under the condition that a process has been determined and documented. And once it's in a format that, that somebody can go step 1 is this, step 2 is this, step 3 is this, step 4 is this, um, to completion, and then go back to step 1 and repeat. When you've got something that is repeatable and documented, then it works really, really well. And I'll give you an example. Um, now there's a lot of tools like Clay out there that people can use, um, for, um, building lists and lead, you know, lead enrichment. But you can still go to some of these companies, these people that are on Fiverr or Upwork, and you can hire them to help you build lists. And, and they're not that expensive, you know, to, uh, to do— $5 an hour, $6 an hour, you know, depending. But when I have worked with these, uh, virtual assistants in the past, um, you, you have to be very clear about what that process is. It literally has to be broken out. And to your point, and you made this point, you know, beforehand, it really does take effort to, to make sure that they're doing the thing that you're asking them to do and doing it properly. And it does require some calibration, at least in my experience. Their first iteration of what they send you, you just have to be— you have to just know it's going to be garbage, and you have to go back and look at your process and go, where did it— where did I miscommunicate? And you may have a scenario that that person is bad, that's possible, but you have to err— when, when I have done this in the past, err on the side of my communication was not as clear in terms of what exactly needs to, uh, needs to happen. So I'll give you another example. A buddy of mine, um, a guy that used to work for me, um, has built a, uh, $10 million landscaping network. In other words, he can— he connects landscapers with property managers, um, and in, uh, in a network fashion. He's got people in the field, and it's a very repeatable process. They build a list. So he has these virtual assistants build a list, and they're all from Upwork, by the way, all from Upwork. Build, build a list of property managers throughout the United States or in very specific regions with names, numbers, email addresses. And then he has the same virtual assistants literally making cold calls to these property managers following a script. I have another friend of mine who runs a $2-3 million real estate wholesale real estate business. And any one of his— and he does advertising on Google for, you know, when you see the, you know, we buy ugly houses, right?

Okay.

That's his business model, basically. Okay. And he gets— he does boatloads of advertising. And when these inbound leads come through, speed, speed, speed. So he has these virtual assistants calling these leads as quickly as possible. So that's step number 1, call as quickly as possible within 5 minutes and then follow this script, ask these questions. And if it scores to be this, then you send it over here and do this and mark this in the CRM system and all that kind of stuff there. I've also used these virtual assistants in the past and guided sales leaders in the past. Allen Kopelman, this one guy, he was burdened. And when I say burdened, he was up at night 2, 3 times a week till midnight putting together reports and decks for a meeting the following week with his, with the team and with his boss. And I said, walk me through this process. And it literally was the same exact thing. Go here, click here, download this, clean up data that looks like this, then take the data, put it into an Excel spreadsheet that turns into a chart that looks like this, that then goes into a PowerPoint presentation that looks like this. And it was such a repeat. I said, dude, you're doing the same exact thing every single time. You can have somebody do that for you and have that deck mostly created for you, and then you can do the interpretation and fill in the blanks, you know, from there and not have to stay up till midnight. And he did it, and it was a game changer. And I've done the exact same thing when I was at ZipRecruiter, um, and, and I had a virtual assistant prepare a deck for me up until a point where it needed my, my interpretation to, you know, jump in there. Now, there are— I'd be very careful, um, of the virtual assistants that are gonna like— that are promising the, you know, leads, because I've, I've been burned by that one before.

And yeah, there's leads and then there's people making phone calls for you. And you know, when you're doing that, you got to get like RingCentral set up and monitor what they're doing and collect all the data and like the RingCentral CRM. I've looked into doing all this stuff and it's, you know, it can be, you would need like a full-time employee managing all these, just managing that.

Yeah, literally.

And you know, you got to be prepared. Like if you're going to go down that road, you know, the same thing. If you're going to have 3 or 4 people doing inside sales in your office, you're going to have to have a sales manager. You just have to do it. There's just no way around it. You have to figure out, like, okay, this is how I'm gonna organize. It can't be like the old style. Okay, we're gonna have 10 guys come in, 10, whatever, 10 people, be politically correct, train everybody. So I remember, like, when I was getting trained in merchant services, or we were training people, I had a— we had a guy who was a trainer people would ask, oh, where are the leads? He would just throw the Yellow Pages at people. I mean, today if I said that to a, a 25-year-old, they'd be like, huh, Yellow Pages? Like, what's that? Like, yeah, Google. Like, Google, that's your, you know, that's where all the leads are, on Google. But it's, you know, today, today's day and age, I mean, we're even talking about agentic, um, bots where where you're going to be able to type something into, you know, a shopping robot and go, okay, I want— I did this the other day recently, and, uh, just to check it out if it works, I tried it on Perplexity and OpenAI ChatGPT, and I asked it a question about a product, and then it gave me product recommendations. Yeah, and prices and links and everything. Now, the ones on Perplexity, I will say they had sponsored links and there, and then I asked, oh, can I advertise my products? And they answered back, we're only working with a few brands right now. So internet is changing. Like, you know, I guarantee you if I put, and I should, I was thinking about putting a poll up on LinkedIn. Are you searching on ChatGPT or Perplexity, et cetera, et cetera? Or are you still searching on Google? And I ask people in general when I talk to them, They're like, if I'm specifically going to a website, I'm on Google. If I need to find something, I'm on one of the AIs. I'm like, wow, that's a massive shift. Yeah. Yeah.

There's— and we're not even— we're not even at the, you know, I mean, look, you're talking about offshoring, outsourcing, nearshoring. It's— a lot of it is the same. It's the same flavor. It's the same flavor. In fact, Um, one of my other, uh, friends that I used to work with is partnering with, uh, um, uh, one of his friends is a CTO, and they're, they're looking to create these AI agents. Um, they are creating, they are creating these AI agents that are going to do a bunch of this outsourced work. Like, normally you would hire a VA to do it. Um, but, but instead, he's going to have these series of AI agents that, that would be, that would run on the behalf of the sales leader, frankly. That will do things on behalf of the salesperson to reach out when there's a signal event of some kind. Hey, look, and I'll give you the simplest example. One of your companies in your territory just raised funding and the AI agent will gather all the information, compose an email and send the email. And you know what? What's the difference between that and outsourcing? Like, what's the difference? It's the same damn thing.

I mean, it's the same thing. Like, I'm meeting with somebody, I'll go on Google and put their name in Google, see what I can find out. I'll even put them in ChatGPT and then it might pop up something completely different. Oh, I want to find out about Kevin Gaither and here's his LinkedIn profile or here's his website. And it'll give you a paragraph about this person. So it can be used while you're on the phone talking to somebody. And you can find out, oh, well, how's your wife and kids, and blah blah blah blah. Yeah, and because it's just searching the internet and it's coming up with— it's searching multiple sources at the same time. You can even compare a product. You know, everything's changing. You know, the internet's changing, work is changing, and I think a lot of companies are starting to shift from the 1099 model, right? And they're going, you know, moving ever so slowly into this, like, okay, we're gonna have our own sales force, but they're not going to be outside, they're going to be inside.

And I think, let's face it, we're all inside though. Like you said it yourself, the, the buyers don't want people stomping into their offices, right? If they even have offices, okay? The buyers don't want that any longer. And so this whole I find it, it's actually kind of a joke to me, frankly, when people start saying the distinction between inside sales and outside sales. Give me a break. Everybody is doing inside sales.

Okay. Oh, I'm saying like some of the people are stuck on the, I got to do outside sales. They don't want to get off of that. They don't want to get off of that bicycle. Right. Well, they're on. Yeah.

Well, those people will be on Social Security soon. So, you know, those old farts will have to go away eventually. And, you know, that's And don't get me wrong, you know, there is a time where you're dealing with a big deal, and a big deal, and the customer is like, you gotta, you gotta come to me, and you, we've got to go break bread, or we've got to sit down with the team and all that kind of stuff. Absolutely, get on a plane, go meet them face to face. But, but the idea of, of like what outside sales— the distinction between inside sales and outside sales is different. And you're correct, there is definitely a bunch of people that are our age, our age or older, that, that like still think that there is a real distinction between the two. And just there isn't because buyers don't need it. Buyers don't need people to be stomping into their office and wasting their time. You know, they're like, great, let's get on a Zoom call and talk this through. And I think that's— now, again, certainly merchant processing, it's hard to, you know, Pounding the pavement is sometimes one of the only ways you're going to get into a nail salon, for God's sakes.

So, again, unless it's somebody like opening a brand new nail salon and they just go to the internet, salon software, right? Yeah. Kind of like what we're doing now is we're, you know, putting out vertical specific type of products so that when somebody's searching, they're going to find, oh, smart invoicing product. Boom. There you go. Land on my website and, you know, come to the website and go, yeah, there's a smart invoicing product, that's what I need. Oh, I need this, I need that, or I'm looking for, you know, restaurant software. They'll land on our page for restaurant software.

Exactly.

And, you know, that's, that's how the sales are going to be made in the future. I mean, the, the whole thing is like the game has changed with like the SEO, so you also need to have, you know, other types of output, you know, blogging, podcasting like this. For sure. Um, you know, YouTube videos, outreach on LinkedIn, social media, because, you know, there's— everything's changing at a rapid, rapid, rapid pace with AI.

Yeah, which is great.

We're seeing a rapid change with, um, software development and all types of things involving AI.

So that's right. That's right. And it makes each one of those W— at least in theory, it should make each one of those W-2 employees more productive. The whole, you know, look, we're done with the zero interest rate policy or ZIRP days where money is cheap and, and you just hire, hire, hire, hire, hire. Like now since 2022, The mantra, Allen, as I'm sure you're well aware, has become do more with less. So, so this doesn't mean hire 1099 employees. This means have your W-2 employees where you have a span of control, but then enable them to have far more productivity and output by, by enabling them with AI tools. Now, this all sounds fantastic and every— and I, There's a founder that is in my mind right now about this. He is, um, he runs a $20-30 million, uh, tech company, and I'm working with him right now. And he has issued an edict: everything associated with our business, from engineering to product to marketing to sales, um, to finance, has to be, you know, everything has to be AI-enabled. Because he read an article about how ServiceNow increased productivity by 14x. Here's the key, man. If you put shit on top of shit, it's still going to be shit. And so, why am I saying that? Let's go back to what we talked about. You talked about these, you know, outsourcing, VAs, and things like that.

Okay.

That means having some other thing, this other entity doing something for you. And I told you that the key to making that work well is having a very, very clear and delineated process. Otherwise, it fails miserably. Okay. So, so the same thing goes with AI enabling anything. If you don't have a good solid process that the machine can then go, ah, got it, that's repeatable, we're going to follow that thing, then it fails. And so when I'm guiding the head of sales in this particular instance, and I hope you're, you're, you're Audience is like listening crystal clear because the, the, the— it is so— the AI, like, you know, loudspeaker is just turned up to 11 that you just can't get around everyone saying AI this and AI that. But if you have to have fundamental processes first before you stick this efficiency tool on top of it, so if you have a broken sales process AI ain't gonna help you.

Right.

If you have a broken sales process or a broken invoicing process, AI is not going to help you even in the slightest. AI helps make the repeatable things work, work much, much better.

I look at, you know, AI, it's like crawl, walk, run, you know, and the same thing, like, you know, if you're building a sales team, you you have to make your decisions of what you're going to do. You're going to be— go down the 1099 path, you're going to hire people and put them on salary or pay them hourly like you're supposed to do. That's how they have to break down everything today. And then pay people, you know. And then, you know, are you going to build this offshore team, you know, and then figure out which one is the best model for you? And are you going to incorporate AI into any or all of those processes, right? You know, so you got to figure, you know, that's what you got to figure out. And if you need help with that, you can go, you can contact Kevin on LinkedIn, Kevin Gaither. We'll post his link in the podcast. Go to his website, insidesalesexpert.com, and, uh, and get more information, and he'll help you, you know, if you need help building the sales team. And processes.

I appreciate that. And, uh, and a shameless plug, I've got 10 or 12 free sales leadership guides on, on my site, from, uh, interview templates to rolling out commission plans, uh, to, hey, how are you going to figure out if that sales leader you just hired is worth a shit or not in 30 days or less? So go to my site, insightsalesexpert.com, and those free guides you'll find, and hopefully they'll help you out.

We like free stuff for our listeners. So thank you everybody for listening to B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast. Thank you to Kevin, the sales expert, for joining us today. Talked about 1099s, set inside sales reps on, on salary, hourly, offshoring, VAs, AI. We dove into it all. And I appreciate it. You can follow us on LinkedIn. We're on Spotify Podcast, Apple Podcast, and YouTube. So check us out. If you need any services from Kevin, reach out to Kevin. If you need a merchant account, you want to see a demo on our NPS One platform, let us know. And thank you everybody for listening. Carpe diem, seize the day. Peace out.