Episode 88: Growing Your Sales Team without Sacrificing Quality, with Stephen Rhyne

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Right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered sales teams. Today, all the way from New Braunfels in Texas, we have Steven Ryan joining us. We've just had a fabulous discussion around where he started life. Four teenage daughters where I live and personally I really enjoyed having a few minutes with Stephen. So I think we're going to have a great recording today. But before we do so, let me introduce Stephen and then I'll hand over to him. Stephen is currently the CEO of Conveyor. He was also the founder there. But essentially what Conveyor do, and I'll let Stephen explain it himself, is that they help large businesses, in particular onboard train and retain more reps for over a decade now. So Stephen himself, He's got about 20 years of sales experience and everyone who listens knows that. I love to talk to people who have carried the bag because I think it gives you so much deeper experience when it comes to leading people. So Stephen, with 20 years experience, I think we can say he knows what it takes to rebuild and train successful teams. But Stephen had a great story and I'll share some of it now. He actually started selling knives with Cutco and I think here in Australia, the first thing we will think about is Tim Shaw from Dentel. All those advertisements selling knives, it wasn't that type of company. Cutco was very, very different. But he eventually developed the rep management software essentially that has launched his software company today. So Conveyor today, it's all about simplifying back office and admin tasks so that you can actually scale your field teams with some serious momentum. I think in the last year, Stephen, he's done about 500,000 potential representative interviews just with one company, which is pretty amazing to think, right? Just one company, right? 500,000 rep interviews must be a huge company. We can talk about that later. But as I said, he now lives in Texas, he's got four teenage daughters. And I'm really looking forward to talking with Stephen today because we're actually going to have a really good look around finding and onboarding talent which is a really difficult part of any sales leaders role. So first of all Stephen, thank you and welcome to the strongest sales teams podcast.

Thank you so much for having me, Ben.

My pleasure. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself or Conveyor? Choose your own adventure here before we get into finding and attracting talent.

Yeah, so as you said, I started my background in direct sales with Cutco and I cut my teeth learning how to sell. Actually hit kind of hall of fame with that company in a sales role, just you know, individual contributor. And then I took a little stint as a technical recruiter actually. And that's where I was really introduced to technology. Eventually came back to co and I had an opportunity actually to take some of this technology experience that I've learned and build out their sales rep relationship manager. So it's like the cat herding tool so to speak. Because remember these are all 1099 based sales reps. So that was where we really started the company. And I actually not everybody knows this but Conveyor started out as a platform used by speakers and trainers and thought leaders. I kind of left the reservation a little bit and really wanted to get out of the, you know, my experience with direct sales and go build like a, my corporate microlearning platform. And ultimately after many years of doing that, I came full circle, came back to the industry that I love so much, which is the space of helping basically any company that is needing to have very large field based teams. So I mean that doesn't just have to be consumer wares or home services. We work a lot in the spaces of solar and you know, pest control and you know, home security, but also real estate insurance. When you have to get a lot of the same role and you have to grow an org, whether that be real estate or agency or any kind of agency, you have to do that really, really, really efficiently and at mass scale. Another one that we see a lot is like the gig economy or the need for technicians. And so those are other places that we play in but our platform, what I liked, it's really easy when I talk to people in sales like your audience because when I describe recruiting and onboarding and training more like what they're used to on a day to day basis, which is a Sales funnel. Then everything starts to click with regards to how recruiting and onboarding and training should look like. It's essentially the same stuff you're already doing with your customers, but you treat the candidate like a customer and you build out a funnel that's just like a sales and marketing funnel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think far too often recruitment is still seen as a one sided journey where there's not enough time spent understanding if you're a good fit for the potential employee rather than if they're a good fit for you. But let's get into it. Specifically, I'd love to start around how you see businesses scaling their teams, or sales teams in particular if you like, without compromising on quality. Because it's a significant issue as you grow your team, how you have that same quality of not only competency that you're building, but also that you're attracting the same quality level of talent. So what are your thoughts on that, Steven?

Yeah. How do you maintain quality? Okay, so first I would say that there's always going to be the thing where this sounds counterintuitive, but recruit more. Okay, so sounds opposite ville, but just bear with me. So you know, a common thing you hear in SaaS world, my world, software as a service world, is when you're hiring reps higher in pairs or you know, when you're initially hiring sales reps, hire multiple because you don't know what you don't know. And so if you hire one, you think that that's your limited, you know, you have to train that person. But what I've seen time and time again happen is that companies don't want to grow into pain. So when they don't create efficient ways to recruit, they settle for the quality in which they can get now. So they don't want to let go of that rep or create a hire. The companies that recruit like crazy can set a higher bar in terms of their expectations because they just can't. They can say no to a rep or they can cut the bottom 10% because they have the power to bring in more potential, you know, recruits.

Yeah.

Now, so everything in terms of quality I think comes down to being having the willingness to say no or the willingness to say it's not working out. But if you can't say you don't have the willingness, you're scared to lose your existing people that are almost hitting quota or almost, you know, doing the role well. And I could just work on this one person, you know, to get them across the finish line. Now granted, we were A training platform. So I care about, you know, training reps. Okay. But in terms of understanding that the more you pay down the cost to bring in more potential, it's just like sales. If you have poor quality prospects coming in, you are going to say yes, you're gonna make discounts, you're gonna do all of those things, you know, all of the concessions that you would normally do because these are the only prospects. It's like you accept the world with which you've been given.

Right.

And so building the top of the funnel more actually makes you be able to have higher quality.

Yeah, great. There's a couple of things coming out of that and I'm certainly an advocate of. When you are out hiring for sales teams and you're hiring for growth is to hire more than one salespeople. We are inherently hired because we are good at building relationships. You might call that influencing. It doesn't really matter. But we should be very proficient at interviews. Certainly when you compare us to other roles at a comparative level, salespeople should really know how to nail an interview. However, what that can do is mask whether or not they're any good at their job. And unfortunately, interviews, there's a role for them. I think they're somewhat flawed, as in the only data point that you have, plus, say referees to hire people. But there's obviously lots of work being done around that at the moment. But certainly if they're so strong in these interviews and they're backing themselves in that much, then put a few of them on and survival of the fittest. And invariably in most of these companies, it doesn't come down to, well, what happens if I have. I hire three and three are performing really well and I have to cut one? Well, invariably what happens is if that front of house funnel is driving sales, you actually end up not cutting any of them because you've grown the business and you've moved magically into your next phase. So, yeah, hiring multiples and not then needing to hang on to those that aren't performing to keep a bum on seat. If you like. Really powerful. I really like that second piece is that if you're regularly out there prospecting for talent, just like you are prospecting to fill your funnels, then you're able to come across the talent on a more consistent basis if you like, which gives you a greater chance to hire in good people. So I love those points. Thank you. What about using your existing team to help you attract top talent? Have you seen anyone do that or have you dabbled with that yourselves?

Oh, yeah, definitely. My glasses that I have, the colored glasses I have are for maybe less high acumen, long sales cycle type of, you know, salespeople or technicians, it's mostly, you know, not just entry level, but maybe they're selling a product that the sales cycle is less than a month. Okay. That's where we do a lot of our experience with. But what we've experienced a lot is that context. Being able to recruit candidates that come imbued with a little bit of the context of the role already will win out all over job boards 99% of the time. And so, you know, it's the referral. Now that sounds like a basic. Like, everybody's, of course, you know, getting one salesperson to refer the rollout to another. Of course. But the devil's in the details. And what we are always saying is like, build a stupid, easy way for your existing reps or your existing people to sneeze out the role. Do not make them educate someone on that role. Do not make them follow up with that person. Do not make them do anything but saying, this is what I love about my opportunity here. If you're interested, scan this QR code and you'll learn more. And then that kicks off a nurturing sequence to that candidate or that prospect explains the role, references that person's name. It links back to who actually was the one that initially referred, to, referred them. There's a leaderboard on those people that actually referred that. And you're literally nurturing that potential prospect without the rep having to do anything. The initial, you know, the sneezer. And so you can't expect reps to recruit and be great at their job in sales and hit quota and also run this, like, sidecar aspect of recruiting. It's just too much. And so you just got to make it dialed in. And we see companies, I mean, the one I was telling you with the sets, half a million people for interview. Most of their recruits are what they call personal recruiters or PRs. Most of their recruiting comes from another recruit. And they start the recruiting process right after the rep actually launches into the role. So they're already recruiting even before that person has been, you know, fully successful in their role. So the R naught, the contagion speed is great. It's probably a terrible term, but you don't even get me what I'm saying.

Degree or time of incubation is very short. Yeah.

And I understand time of incubation, that's a better word.

And when you think about it, it's very, very logical. As salespeople, we love to get referrals from our existing customers because we think it is a great element of social proof where we can be building trust and building relationships more quickly than we might otherwise do. So and the same comes down to recruitment. When you have others saying, hey, you know what, I work here and, and I'm really enjoying it. Why don't you get in touch with us and see if there's something that might work for you. So certainly love it. So can I ask 500,000 rep interviews, what type of industry is this business in? That's a lot of interviews.

So that's actually Cutco that. So they're one of our clients. So that is Cutco. And so they do a mass interview.

Right.

So they, you know, set them for a group interview and then they do a very efficient, you know, group presentation of the opportunity and then do a post interview after that. So, you know, yeah, it's a big numbers game for them. But we also have companies that are, you know, vectors on like a different level. And then we have other companies that are doing about, you know, say 8,000 to 10,000 signed reps per year.

Yeah. Wow. Big numbers. Huge numbers. Okay, great, fantastic. So let's say we've got the sales representatives on board. We need to train them and get them up and running, particularly when we can. When we can acknowledge that every salesperson has a ramp in period. It's very rare that someone will walk in the door and hit the ground running from day one. I've certainly seen it happen, but it doesn't happen all that commonly. So how do you go about onboarding sales reps to make sure that we can actually get them running as quickly as we possibly can?

Yeah. So this is a thing I'm passionate about because in our space, the recruiting process doesn't end with an offer letter. Even in the non we have in the US in the States we call it 1099. I always want to, I'm curious what Australia calls the 1099 role. Is it just an independent contractor? I guess?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Commission agent.

Yeah, yeah, commission agent. So many times as we all scale, we take departments like the recruiting department, we put them in their own little silo and then we make the HR department and then we make the training department. Okay, think about this. We do this with marketing and demand gen and sales. We departmentalize each one and then, you know, we have these conversations around your MQLs aren't great. You know, I don't like your MQLs they're not SQLs. And why do you. You know, it's the same stuff that happens in recruiting and the onboarding and the training phase. And what happens is that the rep journey, the actual rep experience for that individual candidate is trash or it's really fragmented. So, for example, you get an email from the recruiter and they give you an offer and then you get this random email from this onboarding tool that's like obtuse and it comes this direction. And then, I mean, we've all experienced this, right? And then you get a random message from your manager saying, hey, this is your training that you need to go to. And meanwhile, you're going like, I don't know, maybe I'll look at some other opportunities out there. And that's what really happens. I call it kind of silently quitting, right? There's people that kind of silently. Nope, out of the process and go look at other opportunities that look like there's more confidence in that space. So a good onboarding, going back to your question, good onboarding is reselling and re hooking the candidate, like realigning with the candidate right after the offer. So once you get an offer, then it's like, here's what your onboarding is going to be like. It's going to be on rails. It's going to be like a concierge app. Everything is going to happen. Don't worry, there are no dragons in the closets. We're going to do this, then we're going to do this and we're going to do this. It's only going to take this long. This is what we expect from you, right? There's a video of what it's going to be like to be on the team. You know what I mean? Like, hi, whatever you want to do, but you're resetting the hook at that, that onboarding. Start giving a big digital bear hug and you're only giving them what they need to get to the next step. So instead of a barrage of texts and emails that are not explicitly put in the right order on what's next, you're putting that on a, you know, a nice rails. We've all purchased stuff and this is why I always say go back to your sales and marketing activities, right? So if a customer signs up, you'd want to make sure, like a good customer success manager, you know, stewarded that onboarding and got them on. You wouldn't want, you know, five emails to go out to them about the new product feature that came out when they haven't even used the first core features of the product first and things like that.

Right.

Well, we do that to employees all the time because we just say, well, they're going to be here, they're eventually going to get it right. But what really matters is about the aha moment for that candidate. It's about belief building. So, like, I like to use the example of Uber. So the very first time you used Uber, it was really, probably really impressive from some people had a bad experience. But I don't know about you, but first time I use it, this is nuts. Like, I didn't have to think about where the car was. It just showed up. I didn't have that anxiety of like, who's this person's name? It's right there. I know their reviews. I can hop in the car, I get out of the car, the tipping happens.

Yeah.

And that's why it's so popular, because it takes what was a terrible experience with a lot of question marks around. When's the cab going to get here and what's this person's name and what are they going to be like? It just took all that out. And that's the type of experience that people expect in, like, everything now when it comes to purchasing or buying things online. So why should our opportunity not have an incredible interface like that? Okay. And so that's what we try to promote.

Yeah. Okay. So we're talking about nurturing our new people when they come on board, treating them as we would with a customer from when we first prospect or first engage with them, moving them through the stage with a very structured approach to get them to a point where they can have a go, no go decision with our business. Same with people who are onboarding. What I'm hearing is to be a little bit more methodical, one step at a time, to take them along the journey rather than vomit everything, get out there, sink or swim, away you go. Right. That aha moment I think you mentioned is really impactful.

This is the difference, Ben. Like, I think people hear me say that and they're like, well, great. Well, I understand, but what's the difference when you do that experience versus when you don't do that experience? I still have the rep. They rep didn't leave. Well, the difference is what if you could have a rep where at the point where you need to train them, they were so positive and so excited about the opportunity that if you didn't even give them the training materials for your industry, they just go on YouTube to learn about it.

Yeah.

There. That's how pumped they are. They just went and figured it out because they were like, this is where I need to be. You know, this is where I. And so the difference is getting someone who's ready and has the contacts and is excited to take the next step versus someone who said yes to. I want to move forward, but then is sitting on the sideline of whether or not this is going to work out or not. That's the difference.

Yeah. Great. Great. And engagement, I think, drives performance in so many areas. Okay, fantastic. So, Stephen, before we go today, there's a question I love asking our guests, and I think you're going to have an interesting answer to this. You're a sales leader of a team. You're wanting to really. Vroom, vroom. Right. Drive the throttle of your engine and grow your team as fast as you can over the next 12 months. So you're in a high growth phase for your business. Where would you start?

Where would I start? I would start with building the perfect offer. I know it sounds weird, but I would start with like, do you know Alex Hormozi?

Yes.

$100 million late, $100 million offer and $100 million lead. I would start with the offer, which is if I want to build a team, I would go to the people, not just my veterans, my crusty veterans. I'd go to the people that are doing really well that started in the last quarter.

Okay.

And I'd ask them, where were you in your life? What problems did you have in your life? What did you want, you know, that attracted you towards our opportunity? List out the things that were your objections to other things you were looking at and ultimately what caused you to go with us. It's like an entry interview instead of an exit interview.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I. Yeah, yeah, got it.

Build your offer. So start with the problems that the objections around your role. Then talk about, you know, this is just making a good offer. Make an offer that. That people would feel stupid not saying know yes to. Okay. Record a few videos with that rep and say, hey, why'd you move forward with us?

Great.

Real quick question. Like, what were the things that you were scared about with the role?

Okay, great.

Those are videos that you will use after you. The offer letter that you're going to send out to the rep right after the offer to quell any. Any thoughts they have in their mind about this not working out or not being the right role. Okay.

Yeah.

And so start there. And then I would focus on building that PR program. I told you about which is building it really, really easy for your existing team to, you know, throw out potential candidates and build out a nurture sequence. And you can do a nurture sequence on Conveyor, you can do it on go high level on a drip tool on a texting platform. There's a million different ways to do it. But yeah, I would start with incentivizing your existing team and incentivize them with this easiest make it really, really, really easy for them to share the role. That's where I'd start. So you're have two things. Don't start recruiting without having a really killer context and messaging for your role. Okay, that's what I start with.

So interesting. Right when I asked that question, most people will jump to the customer side. You've stayed on the in house side around getting the offer right for your people. So the offer being recruiting people in and then a nurturing sequence for them.

Right.

I love it when I ask this question. I get so many perspectives and for everyone listening you can jump back and you've asked this 30 or 40 times now and I don't know if I've had a repeat answer. So excellent. Stephen, thank you very much for your time. So Stephen Ryan from Conveyor. Can you tell people where they can easily get in touch with you if they'd like to learn a little bit more about you or what you do?

Yeah. So if you want to learn more about what we do or you're interested in, you know, high volume recruiting or onboarding and training, check out conveyour.com that's C-O-N-V-E-Y-O-U-R.com so it's like convey and your put together with one Y and check out our site. We've got a lot of content on the site that you can learn from and you can schedule a demo with our team. Schedule our demo.

Fantastic. Excellent. I've enjoyed today. I really, really like taking a moment to focus on our people rather than just our customers. I think they're both really important. So thank you Stephen for everyone listening. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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