Morné Smit — Sales Playbook for Greater Sales & Profit

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. So we're talking about having a sales playbook today. Creating and developing, using a sales playbook to build a whole a culture in sales that matches the company culture and really helps you fulfill and deliver the results that you want to deliver in scaling your company.

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My name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Bring our show to you every week and there's hundreds of episodes now on everything to do with getting the people right, including the salespeople. Getting your strategy honed, which always attracts the best people when you've got a great killer winning strategy, executing with consistency and high profit, low drama, improving the cash model of the company and you the leadership required to take the company and grow and develop over time. So all that and more@scalingcoach.com where you find our website, our information about our programs and things like that to grow and scale your company. Bootcamp summits, private workshops, ongoing private coaching programs like a whole range of stuff. I was gonna say something else stuff and more@scalingcoach.com of course you can also go wherever you're watching listening to this right now like and subscribe right there. All right. I'm joined now by my newer friend Mornay Smit in London today. You could tell maybe that his accent is in English, but he's in fact from South Africa. Welcome, Michelle Mornay.

Thanks, Paul. It's great to be here. Thanks very much for inviting me on.

Yeah, thanks. So we've had and discussed sales playbooks before and Life by Design with Jack Daly and Norna is Jack's business partner now. And we think this is like, you know, sales and sales management. Sales leadership is an evergreen topic so we want to come back and talk about it on a regular basis. So thanks for joining us. It's the evening where he is there. It's still morning where I am in California, but it's a good time to talk and connect. Mornay, for the listeners, viewers who don't know you, tell us a little bit about your background. I mentioned you're actually from, from Cape Town. So talk about that and how you got into sales and how you've become a sales trainer, speaker, etc. Like that.

Absolutely. Maybe one thing to mention that I'm not in London anymore, but I'm now a Miami and as of four months.

Ago, really, I'm talking to you in Miami.

No, I mean I'm in Miami at the moment. Yeah. So I, my wife is American and we made the move back to the US a few months ago. But still, obviously London was home for 21 years. So my, my kind of, my story of how that all came about is, I guess the story starts on September 13, 2001. So I'm getting off my first ever international flight between Cape Town and London. And I had sold everything that I own to make this trip happen. And this was going to be a new chapter in my kind of fledgling career. At the time I had a company, an advertising agency that was sponsoring me for a work visa. They called me four days after I arrived and they say, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but given what happened a few days ago, 9, 11, we had an office in the World Trade center tower and all global hiring is on freeze. Very sorry, but your work visa is canceled. There I am in London with very little money. I think at the time the South African ran to the British pound was if you sold a car, you could probably make one month's rent payment. That was about, you know, how that played out. So I'm in London with very little money, no job, no place to live and no prospects. So I reached out to some friends. I had two buddies from college who were staying in an apartment in London at the time. And they said, you know what, it's all good. You come and stay with us until you find a job. And I'm thinking this is going to be no problem. I'm, you know, young, young guy at the time. I'm a classic overachiever. You know, I was good at sport. I was valedictorian of my class, graduated summa cum laude. I'm like, I'm going to find a job, no problem. Cocky. A few slight issues with my plan. Number one, the two guys that I live with, one of them is an addictive online gamer. So he gets up at about 11am and then games all the way through until 3am and the other one gets up early because he's in the wine industry. Skypes with his girlfriend in South Africa. So the one computer that the three of us share is only available from 9am to 11am and I have to jump on and send out lots of resumes. And the challenge with that is that every time I send out a resume I get the same response. And that is, you look great on paper, but with the visa situation, it's too complicated. We don't want to touch it. So sorry, not for us. Five weeks in, I'm out of money and I find this little IT company in a not so nice part of London. And they said we're going to turn a blind eye to this whole visa situation, but you're going to have to fill this role that we've been struggling to fill. That should have been a big red light right there. So I'm desperate. This is not my dream job. I come from the fancy world of advertising. I have clients that are blue chip companies, but I need money. So I take the job. And what I have to do is cold call from the yellow pages every morning, the actual yellow pages for people that still remember that that's my list. So start at A and work your way through. And I'm selling Dell computers and Microsoft software and I'm hating my life. And then you know a funny because.

You don't like Dell and Microsoft, no great products.

But I'm, you know, I'm classically of that mindset that I guess a lot of people that are listening to this now is. And that's like I'm not a salesperson. Right.

Yeah.

So I, you know, needs must. And I'm desperate enough and I have a bit of resilience and I just lean in. So I'm calling in the morning and then I get in my company car and I'm driving around London going to see these small Companies with a MacBook pinned to a steering wheel because this is Pre iPhone, pre GPS. And I'm just hoping that I'm not in the middle of a turn when I get to the end of a page because I have to keep turning the pages to see where I'm going. Fast forward a few years and probably like many of your listeners, I start learning sales by trial and error. Yes, I make a lot of mistakes and I'm not too proud to say that some of them I make more than once. But I slowly start to learn the psychology behind selling, buying psychology, pattern recognition and I start getting good at it. So much so that I become a director of that company a couple years later and I help them build it up to. We eventually sell that business in 2005 to a larger IT company. I then take the money that I made from that and I buy a 51% stake in a small telecoms firm. And now I'm putting what I've learned in the preceding five years to good use. And I actually build a sales team for the first time. And we aggressively grow that telecoms company for about two years. And I managed to sell that business in 2008, just before Lehman Brother collapses and takes the rest of the world with them. And then I come out of one.

Recession and you escape just before the next one good job.

Just got out in time. Correct. And then, you know, one of the partners from the IT business calls me up and says, hey, what are you going to do now that you've exited this business? And I said, well, you know, I'm looking for opportunities. Well, why don't you come and work with me in commercial? Fit out. So office build. Office design and build, yeah. And I said, honestly, I don't know anything about it. That's why I'm not going to do it. He goes, it's not that hard, just come and try.

Yeah.

So we end up doing a 4x on that company over three and a half years and then I get headhunted by a mid market business which is doing at the time, in dollar terms, about $18 million. And I build a sales team there and we run that business for the next five years and we go from 18 to 180 million in five years with no external funding, no acquisitions, all organic growth. People ask me what that's like and I say, if you like movies and if you ever see the original Ben Hur in the last scene when he's coming around the corner and the one wheel from the charity has come off and he's barely holding on for life. That's what it feels like to do a 10x with no external money on a mid market company. But what it did do was anchor and solidify 17 years worth of trial and error. I finally had managed to figure out not only how to sell, but actually how to build sales teams that you can leverage through playbooks, through coaching, and you can grow sales not only fast, but profitably and predictably. Because I think a lot of people, especially the companies that we work with now, we find that they're able to grow their sales really fast, but the profitability suffers or they grow fast and profitably but they can't keep it predictably. So for a period of time and they've got feast and famine. So my kind of first 17 years in sales was really about figuring out what is pattern recognition. And I sold myself in six different industries. I built teams in those industries and what was fascinating for me was not the product or service, I was never interested in what I was selling. For me it was about buying psychology, pattern recognition, playbooks, like how to motivate and inspire salespeople. That's what was fascinating and that's what ultimately led me to found immerse. In 2017. I met Jack, as you mentioned, in 2018 and he's a force of nature as your listeners I'm sure know and really helped me to build a company that I have today which is, you know, Sales Development agency. We're on three different continents, seven different countries, across 31 industries and we're just having a ball. We're having so much fun taking startup scale ups and getting them to leverage playbooks and leverage sales teams to get to that next level of selling. So today I'm a disciple and a convert and an evangelist of bringing excellence back to the profession of sales. That's my mission.

You know, I heard a few things in there just to underscore before we talk about some of your client examples, but I love first of all the scrappiness of like getting the job in the first place. I remember my brother came out to stay with me and he'd been in the military and he was ready for his first job after his military time. And I said, well I'm gonna help you get a job really easily here. You're gonna go and you're gonna learn sales basics. And I knew he had the chops to do it, so I said you just call companies that sell office machines, you know, copiers, things like that, they gotta sell those things all day long. And you call in the morning before 9am and you find the sales manager, you get them on the phone, you tell them that you wanna learn how to cold call, tell em that's what you are there to learn and you'll be just like the freshest meat to them. He got a job in like two days flat and of course he did do a brutal amount of cold calling but he learned some things in the process. And then he went on, he went to telecom also as I did, in the same company actually that I worked for, Sprint for some years. And so I think that's really great. I think the other thing is that I hear that you love and have developed appreciation for systematic, repeatable sales, like a focus on engineering consistent performance, maybe back to your athlete mindset and, and school habits as distinct from the sales rock star. And I think with our clients and even my own experience, there have been times when I was tempted to hire that special rock star, and I have, and they have produced some results. Not always survivable, consistent or repeatable onto other people, but they would do things, and I've learned to love that more consistent. Like, let's follow the playbook, let's do the blocking attack thing and let's deliver great sales on a consistent basis distinct from. From the other.

Yeah, I think that really resonates with me. And what I tell, you know, the audiences that I speak to or the clients we work with is that you it's very, very risky to try and build a scalable business model on the back of trying to find extraordinary salespeople. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not advocating at all that people shouldn't go out there and try and find the absolute best talent that they can. I'm absolutely a fan of that. But what I am saying is, is that if your entire success model is based on you having to find these extraordinary individuals, then you've got to realize that there's always somebody that can outspend you for the best talent. So unless you have unlimited cash, unlimited resources, those rock stars are high risk. What we also find with rock star salespeople is that using, you know, the top grading methodology, they're C players. They're often very high in competence, but lower on core value alignment because the attitude is, well, I'm amazing and I make you a ton of money. Just leave me alone. I don't need to role practice. I don't need to be a team player because I'm making you lots of revenue. And I know this because, humbly, I was that sales guy at parts of my career. Yeah, I was the producer of the company and unfortunately, also a little bit of an ego. So you can't rely on that. I mean, I think irrespective of what you might think of their food, McDonald's have taught us a very valuable lesson, and that is you need extraordinary processes that can be run by ordinary people. And that's not an indictment on the people that work at McDonald's. What I mean is that if you can make your processes so extraordinary, then it means that you don't have to rely on finding the LeBron James of the world and the Kobe Bryant's of the world. You can buy good players, you can recruit good players, and the processes make them excellent. And that's really what we want to see in most scalable sales teams.

Yeah, it's that combo. I was advising a company, I mean, a lot of years ago now, and I'd been working with them for a couple years and there'd been a lot of focus around the culture and that. And this is a professional services firm on the west coast and. And at that point they probably had 400 employees and they hired this new guy. And I remember the CEO was, he's concerned. He's like, God, this guy's such a rock star and he's already producing results, but there's just something wrong with him and my team. And so we looked at the company values to see if there were any clues there. And what he came to realize as he's talking through this thing and describing him like, well, you've talked to me for a long time about how proud you are and we've done so much work on the culture of the company and the values in action in your business. And now you've got this person who's kind of a rock star, but he's a solo act and that's not team. And you're focused around team and working together and that kind of thing. It doesn't say it exactly in the values, but that's the thing. It was like a dagger. It was an emotional moment.

He's like.

So he went back and he, he eased the guy out of the company, sent him on, you know, found it. That's the appropriate way to do it.

That's really tough because, you know, when somebody's a big producer, working them out of the business can be hard, extremely painful. Especially if you're a scaling up company because you're holding on to that revenue generator. But it's what I tell my clients is if you put, if you have a room full of people that are healthy and you put somebody into the room who's got the flu, everybody else gets the flu, not the other way around.

Yeah, I hired a rock star in another company years ago and as our strategy got honed, we started attracting like really great people. And the quantity of resumes that we were applicants that we were getting was huge. Anyway, so I hired this person. I'm like, this person can sell. And they did, in fact, they like, huge increase across the board in a new sector for us and doubled the company in a pretty short period of time. But at great, great cost to both the team and our reputation in the market. The thing is that this person was really driven to produce sales results. But the care for our brand and our values and our legacy, they could care less about that. They were definitely about their results and their comp and things like that. So the damage to the company's reputation and our was really noticeable. But it didn't show up at first. At first it was disruptive cause now we had new customers and lots of money coming in. But what followed shortly after that, the aftermath was, right, like people who were expecting things from us that we're like, we're never doing that. New customers, regular customers who want things from us. I'm like, whoa, that's a long ways off. And they were mad livid. That's terrible.

We have a client. Jack and I have a client in Dallas. Actually. It's a great example of the converse of that. This young gentleman, I think when I met him a few years ago, he was in his early 30s and he had started this business in the logistics space. So they were effectively an aggregator of logistics needs for small companies so that you could compete on rates with the big providers.

Yeah.

And his father had run a similar business. So he had the benefit of having somebody teach him, you know, what not to do and some of the lessons learned. But he started this business with a little bit of family and friends kind of seed capital. And the approach that he took was so dramatically different from what a lot of us do as entrepreneurs. Right. We start a company, you become the best salesperson in your own business. And then when you think you've made enough, you hire your first salesperson. He did the opposite. He said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take this money and I'm going to invest it in building a sales team. I'm going to go out to certain types of colleges. I'm going to look for students who had an academic and a sporting background, because I want to know that they can play as a team, they've got some grit, they've got interests outside of academics. And I'm going to hire a very, very specific profile. I'm going to start with five salespeople and one sales manager. And this is the really brave thing. He hired a sales manager before he had any revenue. And he said, when I hire the sales manager, they're not going to sell. The job of the sales manager is to grow the sales team in quantity and quality. The sales people have got to grow the revenue They've got to find more customers and grow the ones they have. And by the time I met him, he was, you know, maybe a year or so into this journey, and there was two sales managers and 10 salespeople. And we helped him build a playbook, which it wasn't a big playbook. It was maybe 16 pages, but in terms of quality, I have to say one of the top 2% playbooks that I've ever seen. And they replicated this model. And keeping in mind that they're hiring people out of college with no sales experience, and they come in. And the rule is, when you join this company, you get an hour of coaching on the playbook every day without exception.

Right.

You know, like, if you did sport at school, how often did your coach cancel practice? Never. This role practice was never canceled. Every morning for an hour. He took that business in three and a half years from zero revenue to $74 million in a pretty crowded space that's pretty rapid with sales people with zero experience, by working out the playbook and practicing the playbook every day for an hour. Because the belief in this business was what Nick Saban said at Alabama, which is, we don't practice until we get it right. We practice until we can't get it wrong. And he just mobilized this team, and they went out and they dominated that vertical. And it's a great example of what can happen if you stop this reliance on I need a rock star. What I need is an incredible playbook and a good sales manager that can coach it until you just can't get it wrong.

Yeah. You said something else, I think that's interesting in there. You talked about salespeople grow the sales, the others grow the salespeople, and the focus on it. Stanley McChrystal gave a keynote at one of our scaling up conferences a few years ago, and he said, you know, a farmer doesn't grow anything.

That'S good.

Plants do the growing in the soil. The farmer simply creates and fosters the conditions for growth. So the plants do the growing. We're going to create the conditions for it. And you think about it as a leader in the company, whether it's overall leadership or sales leadership. You've got to bring the team together and create the right environment. Developing the playbook, teaching them the playbook, regularly practicing and drilling the playbook until they've got it and you know where to go and you can use it in a masterful fashion.

Absolutely. And I think that there's, you know, there's two elements to that for Me, there is sales leadership and then sales management. One is more strategic and one is more tactical, in my view. And what I often speak to CEOs about is, even if you're not the one who's managing the sales team directly, you have by default, by default, you have a huge responsibility for the sales culture. And we talk about, you know, creating the expectation of success, we talk about empowerment, we talk about the four pillars of sales culture. And then in addition to that, you need a sales manager or multiple sales managers, depending on the size of your team, who can actually execute that culture, who can reward and recognize the behavior that you're looking for. But somebody's got to set the tone. Actually, I have a story about here in Miami. I came to Miami, I think it was last June, and summertime here, as you know, very hot, humid, and we have rapes, rainstorms every day. And I arrived at Miami Airport, and I got a rental car. I won't name the name of the rental car company. And I said, look, I can see that it's raining outside. Can I maybe have an suv? Because I'm going to be driving a lot. And. And they said, no problem. And they put me in. In an SUV. And within the first 24 hours, this car was dead. The amount of water had just killed the electrics in the car. So I thought, okay, well, look, that's pretty unusual for a new car, but I'm sure it happens, right? I'm not going to get upset about it. I'm sure it's going to be fine. So I said to my wife, you know, we're going to have to replace the car because I've got meetings. And so I call up the car rental company and I said, this is what's happened. First of all, they go, yeah, this is the wrong department. So they start bumping me from department to department. So after about four different transfers, I eventually get to a human being who says, we're really sorry that that happened. Don't worry, we're going to fix this for you. Yeah, the closest car rental office to you is at this location. You don't have to go back to the airport. And I thought, wow, this is amazing service. You know, the bumping around of three different apartments, that wasn't fun. But this is going to get resolved. I'm happy. So I go to the office and I sit down. I've got a meeting that starts in two and a half, three hours. And I'm sitting there, and while I'm sitting there, this lady's being Harassed by people. And I'm starting to hear that she's saying, we don't have any cars. And I'm thinking, you know, the first thing that I thought Bull Was that episode in Seinfeld where he's standing at the counter and he goes, I had the reservation.

That's why I have a reservation.

He goes, well, we don't have cars. He goes, but that's why you take reservation. She goes, I know what a reservation is. He goes, I don't think you do. I don't think you know how to take a reservation. Just know how to keep one. And I was so tempted to do that bit, and I thought, no, that's not going to win. I step up to the counter and I said, I'm here for a replacement. The vehicle is back at my apartment because it doesn't run. You need to get somebody to come pick it up. She goes, well, first of all, even if I had a car, we wouldn't give it to you. I'm sorry, what do you mean? She goes, because the other car hasn't been picked up yet. I said, oh, I haven't told you the story about how my wife was on the phone for three hours yesterday trying to get the tow truck to come pick it up, and then they gave us a time and they never showed. Well, that's clearly not my fault. Okay, we're going to do the blame game, okay? I said, well, what do you expect me to do? She goes, you're going to need to call back and you're going to have to go back to the airport and do it anyway. Long story short, I think the car eventually got picked up. I go to the airport, I had to take an Uber to my meeting. I come back and then I go to the airport. I get to the airport and I say, look, I need to speak to a manager. A manager shows up. I tell him my whole story about the tow truck not coming, being passed around, going to the car rental place, being told that I can't have a car, they don't have any cars. And I said, look, I need you to replace the car. But I also, because of what I do for a living, I also need you to make a decision in this moment about how I'm going to tell this story. He says, what do you mean? I said, well, I speak about sales for a living, and I can either tell this story that this was a terrible experience or it was a terrible experience that ended really well. You decide. He goes, oh, are you saying you want money off? I Said, no, I'll take that off the table. I don't even want you to give me a discount. I just want you to make me feel like you care about me. And he goes, well, you know, I think it was a 600 rental. He says, I can give you $50 off the price. I said, I don't think that you heard me. Eventually I said, you know, whatever you can do is fine. And I walk away from the booth and I'm feeling really angry about this. And I'm thinking to myself what a poor job this rental company has done in empowering their team to actually have happy customers and how this is definitely going to be something that I speak about on stage. And then as I'm walking away, I noticed this gentleman, this manager, walking out of the booth and speaking to someone else. And by their body language, you can tell that the person he's speaking to is the actual boss. So, so me being me, I just wait until I see the actual boss on his own. And I walk over to him and I said, I'm sorry to ambush you. I'd like to tell you a quick story. And I tell him the story of the last 24, 36 hours of my life. And he looks at me and he goes, come with me. That's all he says. He takes me into a booth. We sit down. He says, can I have your license? Everything, Everything. He types a few numbers on the keypad and he hands me a sheet of paper. And I take the piece of paper and it's the invoice. And at the bottom it says, amount due $0. Like this. And I think to myself, all along, even though I didn't want money off, somebody had the authority to change the narrative of this interaction. But nobody was empowered. Not the person on the phone, not the lady at the counter, not the so called manager at the airport. None of them were empowered. When I found the actual person, by chance he made, he changed the narrative of that story entirely. What I want to know from companies is if I go into your business, how empowered are your salespeople to make decisions on the spot? How empowered are they to. To create raving fan customers for you? Is that in your playbook? Do you have, like Rick Ross did when he ran Dataflex back in the 80s and 90s, do you have five questions that if your salespeople sat in front of a prospect and they asked these five questions, is it right for the customer? Is it right for us? Would I be accountable for this? And you get, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, if they did the thing that they were supposed to do, would you praise them or punish them? We live in this instant gratification society where. I ordered something on Amazon this morning. I just got a notification. It'll be at nine o'clock tonight. That's the world we live in. And yet there are companies like this car rental company that thinks it's okay not to empower their salespeople. That's a cultural thing.

Yeah.

And you are going to attract better salespeople if you have that.

Well, you know, I can share two things about that. One, we've heard from Ritz Carlton before. And Ritz Carlton's famous brand, really well known. And even if you've never stayed in a Ritz Carlton, you have an expectation of extraordinary quality. They're known for hiring who they describe as ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen. The idea of really treating people with graciousness and hospitality at a high level. Of course, it's a premium product. It's not the Days inn or Motel 6 or anything like that, using some of our American brands. But so it's a global brand. And they practice many of our things like a global daily huddle and things like that. And they hire a particular way, but they do something else that's so fantastic. And they have authorized an amount, I don't know the current amount, 1500, 5000, something like that, that like almost anybody, maybe anybody can give. So I'm a busboy or a server and you're at breakfast and I say, how are you today? As I pour your coffee or orange juice. And you say, I'm okay, but God, I slept terribly last night. There was a knocking in the air conditioner or the room next door, like whatever. You say something, then I'm authorized to say, oh my God, that's awful. Breakfast is on us, you know, And I could just, without going to my manager or anything else, I do something to delight you and to try to interrupt that story in the moment, right? And we think about company after company after company. That is just awful. Now, I know, like, I'm a United flyer, right? But I'm not the top, top, top tier of United, which is a thing called Global Services. And Global Services is a special number that can make all sorts of magic happen. But when I got delayed last year and rerouted because of a cold combination of errors at the Amsterdam Schaipol Airport, where the station manager eventually helped me out. But before then, I'm in their hell of systems integration. And I have been rebooked via Istanbul to Fly back to San Francisco, Amsterdam instead of back to direct to San Francisco. I'm going to go Istanbul, San Francisco. It's kind of crazy on Turkish Airlines, which is, you know, thing. But Turkish Airlines is actually pretty nice and has fantastic business class. And so I was looking forward to it. And the airport is pretty epic and like that. So. But they can't get the systems to talk to each other. And I stood there for over five hours while they can't get. So they see my reservation, but they can't get a ticket thing between United and Turkish. Anyway, they can't fix it. A guy walks up next to me, he's a global services person. He's on the same problem, San Francisco getting rerouted. He like gets on the phone with his global services person. Boom, he's fixed and done and out there. I stand there for five hours. I like, I need to go to the bathroom in five hours. I can't get away from the counter, right? Eventually I'm dismissed at midnight. It's just awful, awful, awful. The next day I was treated late that night. And the next day I was treated extraordinarily well by the station manager. But everybody else was really powerless to do anything other than formulaic, perfunctory bureaucratic nonsense and call this number and wait on hold and oh, I'm the wrong person transfer. Like, what the hell is a matter? And I see this today in sales, formulaic stuff. Have you ever considered a podcast? Dude, look at the LinkedIn listing where you contacted me. It says I'm a podcast host. Then look it up. Do your research. Hey, would you like to book five minutes on my calendar? No, I do not want to book five minutes. I'm not even interested in what you're trying to get me. And now you want me to go book with you? What's the matter with you? There's so many awful funnels and booking systems and LinkedIn lead management that bear no humanity, no connection to anything real. It's like pure laziness on the part. So have a sales playbook, right? But bring some thinking and humanity to it. Like actually do your work.

Actually, it's a super important point. I mean, the, you know, this idea of a playbook, if, you know, for people that aren't familiar with that terminology, it's sports playbook. Yeah. You know, it's effectively a repeatable selling system, right? What are all the things that work? What are all your best practices if you've been running your business for five minutes or five years? What are all the things that work and didn't work. And let's actually get that into a format that you can coach. Right? Yeah.

Repeatability, consistency.

The trouble with that is that I had a call with a client today and they said, oh, you know, we. We heard you speak and we went on your website and we really want you to help us build a playbook. But you know what? We're just going to put it together ourselves, internally. And I said, that's certainly an option. But let me ask you this. You've been in business for six years and you've never done it. Why now? What is different in terms of the resources that you have now that you didn't have yesterday? The cash, the time, the energy, the expertise. And then let me give you the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that all of a sudden, magically, you have all this extra bandwidth and experience in doing it. And let's assume that you pull together a really, you know, ostensibly a good playbook. A really good playbook.

Right.

One that I would look at and go, yeah, I think that's good based on the hundreds that we've done.

Yeah.

What then? Because if you give a playbook to someone and say, hey, this is our playbook, that's not going to get you a good result because of what you've just said, because it's a formula for success. But you have to practice that thing. You've got a role. Practice it with other people. Because guess what? That question that you wrote down to ask, you're not going to get the answer that you think you're going to get. You're not going to go, hey, Bill, do you want to book five minutes on my calendar? And Bill goes, thank you so much for asking. Yes, I would. You're going to get. Not only do I not want to do that, stop calling me. Hold on. I don't have that as an answer in the playbook. What do I do now? The playbook is a living, breathing, dynamic success guide, and you build them because of this core belief, and that is, there is nothing that happens on a sales call that you shouldn't be able to anticipate before you get there. But that's only true if you practice it with other people and if they throw you curveballs and if the business empowers you to make decisions so that when something happens, you don't go, oh, I've got to call my supervisor because I'm not authorized to talk to you about this. Yeah, yeah, that's the missing piece of the puzzle.

Let me go Talk to my manager. I'll be right back. Stay here in my office of hell for the next three hours. Right.

Just let me stay on hold for 40 minutes while I go and find.

Someone to talk to and get coffee, run to the bathroom, whatever else.

Absolutely no. And that's. And that's why it's so important for me from a, From a cultural perspective, you know, the empowerment piece we just talked about. And then from a sales management perspective, not only do you need a blueprint, not only do you need a playbook, you need the culture, the habits and the business where in this business we practice. Because if we don't practice internally, then we're practicing on life prospects. That's very dangerous and very expensive.

Yeah.

So what's the culture in your business? Right. That's what we want to ask.

Let's step back, actually, for a second. You shared a story in preparation that I think is useful and relevant. And coincidentally, I, a couple of weeks ago was with a group and. And I had this one guy tell me, well, I can't. I mentioned Jack Daly and doing sales playbooks and. And he said, yeah, hi, Jack Daly. He's. So now there's a guy from Europe, right? Western Europe. And he's like, ah, Jack. Oh. I'm like, he's so loud. He's so salesy. He's so American. He's like, yes. And I said, okay, good. So you, you have a particular cultural bias against loud and persuasive and Jack's.

All those things.

Jack's a friend of mine. Right. And yours. And I'm like, I get that all the time. I'm super, like, salesy and American and that kind of thing. And I just acknowledge it. So if you're going to take. And you think Jack would be. And his message would be good for your group, go back to him and say, listen, I have this guy. He's going to be just perfect for what we need. But he's definitely a sales guy and he's definitely American. And that feels like oil and water for us. But. But you could maybe include it because he really wants us to win. And he's a man of huge heart. Right. Like, who won't give up on you. I think that. So you shared the story about meeting somebody who needed to do that, but he had maybe an issue with salespeople. Tell us that.

Yeah, so I was at a. I was still living in Europe during COVID and you know, the European Covid restrictions were quite. Quite strenuous. Strenuous. I was living in central London at the time. And they, they locked us down in kind of in phases. Right.

Unless you're the pm. And then like you could have parties.

Then you can have parties and do whatever you want. Exactly. They locked us down in stages and towards the latter part of COVID you know, they would kind of put us in jail and then let us out and put us back in jail.

Yeah.

And during one of the. We're out of jail now, there was actually a thing where you could go to networking meetings and it was like, oh, this is amazing. I really crave to be with other people. So one of my good friends and colleagues from EO in London arranged a small networking gathering and I was a keynote speaker. And afterwards a gentleman came up to me. I'm not going to say his real name. Let's say his name was Kevin. Wasn't really Kevin. So Kevin comes up to me and Kevin's got a software company that he started six years ago and the company's doing pretty well. It's a lifestyle business, founder led. And Kevin comes up and he says, you know what, I really enjoyed your talk, I think I need your help. And I said, great, what can I help you with? He said, well, I've really tried multiple times to hire salespeople, but it doesn't work. I said, oh, okay, that's a pretty big statement. It doesn't work. Tell me about how you hire salespeople. He said, well, you know what? It's like, salespeople are a necessary evil. And it's like bing. That's the first red flag right there. I'm like, okay, tell me about salespeople being a necessary evil. He says, well, you know, they, they come and they absolutely ace the interview. And then, you know, they sell themselves so well and they convince you that they're the best thing and then they join your company and then they just, they rubbish. They just don't sell anything. And then after three months or six months, I've got to let them go and I've wasted all this money. How do I stop that from happening? Yeah. And I said, okay, Kevin, let me ask you a few questions. First of all, how do you hire, Tell me about your recruitment process. Said, I do what everybody does. I put it out on LinkedIn. Some people send me their resumes. I look at the resumes, I pick the ones where the experience matches exactly what I'm looking for. Then I interview a few people and then, you know, I pick the one that I like the best. And then that's my Salesperson. I said, okay, that little. That leaves a lot to be desired, but, okay, let's put that aside for the moment. And when the salespeople arrive, the salesperson arrives, what happens then? He goes, what do you mean? I said, okay. What I mean is, how do you onboard them? How do you ramp them up? What coaching and training do you give them? He looks at me kind of puzzled, like, sincerely puzzled, and he says, well, I teach them everything they need to know about our product. And then they talk to the engineers a little bit, and, you know, we give them business cards, and then that's it.

Sink or swim.

Okay, and then what is the kind of the environment that you expect them to work in? Well, you know, this is one of the big things that people love these days, isn't it? We let them work from home. So I give them a laptop and a phone, and they can work from home. Great. And then what about any kind of, you know, teamwork or kind of role practice with other team members? How many salespeople? No, no, no, no, no. I only want one salesperson, and I want them to speak to the other peoples in the company as infrequently as possible, because all they do is create chaos and confusion. Look, it's really simple. I just want an amazing salesperson who can work from home that I don't need to speak to, who can find me new opportunities, warm them up, sign the deal, hand it over, make sure that it gets delivered properly, make sure that the client's happy, make sure that we get paid, and then do it all again. Is that too much to ask? And I said, in a word, Kevin, Yes. Yes, it is too much to ask, because you're effectively going out there doing a pretty poor job of recruiting. And then once the person arrives, you're saying, here's a phone and a laptop. Here's a little bit of a brochure on what we do now go and make me money. And the less I can speak to you, the better.

Yes.

And what you focus on, you get more of.

Yes.

He was sincerely perplexed as to why he had failed to build a sales team multiple times over. Now, Kevin is an extreme example. And that was an actual conversation.

Yes, but no. That's really common. And when you're. It's really hard to read the label from inside the jar. Like, everybody else can see what's going on there. Like, we tell that story, and we can see instantly. And maybe our listeners and viewers can as well. But for Kevin, he's like, wait, what's wrong with this? I'm like, well, it's pretty clear.

And he was, at one stage I thought he was being, you know, ironic, but he looked at me dead pain. He was like, I need your help.

Yeah.

It was no surprise that after I explained to Kevin an alternative of doing things, he went, no, that seems like way too much trouble. And he never became a client. And I was very grateful for that.

Yeah. Well, love people, take care of them, develop them, figure out their perspective and what they need. Communicate with them frequently and consistently. Get the whole team's working together. Give them training and ongoing support and development coaching. Like, yeah, not like, oh, you're evil.

Right.

You're evil. But I need you. But I don't ever want to talk to you. Like, that's not good. Right.

You know the way that I explain it to people, very simply. As I said, here's, here's how I want you to think about it. Think about the relationship you have with your salespeople the same as your relationship with your spouse.

Yes.

There's a few commonalities there. Number one, getting into a relationship with your spouse is the beginning, not the end.

Yes.

Relationships. Marriages fail at an astronomic rate. Like this country in the US 2019 census. First managers, first marriages, 50% failure. Second marriages, 60% failure. Third marriages, 73% failure. Right.

Yes.

We don't even. Our judgment doesn't even improve with time.

Yes.

So we get into these sales relationships and then we stop loving the salesperson the moment they join. That's a recipe for disaster. The second thing is, you need to know that proximity is powerful. All of these distributed sales teams that we have now, people working from home, post Covid, that's great. But salespeople need proximity to the visionary. Yes. They need to actually rub up against you or they need time with you because you have a unique credibility, a gravitas. You've got some fairy dust around you because you're the founder and salespeople need to feel that so that they can convey that level of credibility and gravitas. Otherwise they just don't have any stories to tell. So proximity is power. Get them close to you virtually is okay. If you have salespeople all over the country, fly them back to HQ once a quarter and just rub up against them for two days.

Yes.

And you'll see how your sales will immediately spike.

Yes.

One of the pieces of advice that I got from my father in law when I got married was he said to me, monet, let me, let me talk to you. You're going to marry an Italian woman, I'm going to need to give you some advice. I said, okay, Carlos, go on. He said, some days you're going to have to choose whether you want to be right or whether you want to be married. And I said, what does that mean? He goes, it means that you've got to pick your battles. And in sales, the same thing is if you're going to go to war with your salespeople every time they don't sell like you, every time they do something or make a decision that's contrary to what you would have done, then there's zero empowerment. And they're basically that lady at the counter or that person at that rental car company that just goes, I don't know what to do and I'm not making this decision because I'm not empowered and if I get it wrong, you're going to punish me. So it's just easier for me not to make that decision.

Yeah, there's no room to fail. There's no permission to show any incentive or so. So many good things. We've been talking about consistent playbooks and how you develop them. We've been talking about learning to love your salespeople and creating a culture around that. About leadership versus management. Before we run out of time and end or show it, I want to talk about in just a second about celebrating wins and the importance of that. We talk about more cowbell all the time here. Where's my cowbell?

I love it.

Right? So we talk about that all the time. I want to go to that, but before I do, let me just give a couple shout outs for things. Our show comes to you every week. If it made a difference for you, please share it with somebody else. If you'd like to drop us a note if we can help you find a coach or anything else in your area, infocalingcoach.com is a good email address for us. All those episodes and more. Scalingcoach.com like subscribe turn on your notifications. Get the show every week. We've been doing one or two shows a week for a while now and there's hundreds of them and more you can find@scalingcoach.com on every topic. And then let me also give a shout out to our show producer and my partner in crime, Wanda Mitchell, to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish, who created the whole scaling up framework and to the folks at Podfly Productions who go to work on getting our show produced and out the door and distributed show notes. Things like that every week. So big shout thanks to those folks. So I, I think I. We should finish with the importance of celebrating wins. And you talked about your own lesson in that. Maybe we should have you finish there.

Sure thing. I mentioned earlier about, you know, me at points in my career being that that Rockstar C player, salesperson and ego a little bit out of control. I own that. I'd like to believe that I've grown. So this is probably going back eight or nine years, maybe even 10 years. I was a senior salesperson for a company in the commercial fit out space, running a team below me. And we had a really good quarter, I think that Tuesday we had just won a maybe two and a half million dollar deal. And on the Wednesday, I'm standing in the open plan with a few of my team members and we're kind of strategizing for a pitch on the Friday, which was an even bigger deal, maybe around 5 million. And the CEO comes over to me and he says, can I just speak to you for a second? He said, congrats, by the way, on that win yesterday. What I didn't observe was you taking your team to the pub across the road to celebrate. Because that was a thing in that business. Part of the culture was you win a deal, we were pitching in teams of about five or six and you would take your team and you'd go to the pub across the road and you'd have a drink to celebrate, right? And the CEO was very clear about that's a thing. So I lean into the CEO and I said, listen, give me a break. I'm your best sales guy. This is the ego, right? I'm your best sales guy and I've made you a lot of money. So just let me do my thing. I've got a pitch on Friday, so let me focus on that. And once we've won that one, then maybe I'll take them to the park. And he just looks at me and he goes, just step away for a moment. And he used to do this thing. He wore glasses like you. And he used to pull his glasses to the end of his nose and then look at me like this. One of those, right? And he does that and he looks at me like this. And now I know it's serious. And he goes, let me explain something to you. Your ego is out of control. I pay your salary and you will take your team to the pub right now. So I'm like, okay, but I'm not interested. So my shoulders are down and my feet. So I drag myself I take my team, we go to the pub. I think we had orange juice. We come back, and as I walk back in, he said, come and sit with me for a few minutes. I just need to talk to you. So I go and sit in his office, and I'm kind of like this. And I'm like. I'm like a sulking child, right? He says, let me explain something to you. You might not care about celebrating, but while you were shoulders down, head down, dragging your feet to the pub, what you didn't see behind you was the five people in your team going, we're going to the pub. And what you didn't see particularly was another team at the back corner of the office looking over at you. A team that's struggling, and they're looking at you and going, damn it. Monet's team, they're not better than us. Why is it that they keep winning? If they can do it, we can do it. That's why you celebrate your wins. You're signaling to people in the business that this is an expectation of success. This is a winning culture. It's not about you, you egotistical salesperson. It's about everybody else that makes you as good as you are. And I'm happy to say that since that day, I've never missed an opportunity to celebrate because I was so humbled by that experience and so taken aback that I had lost touch with what was really the meaning of celebrating that. Now I'm a huge advocate and I can tell bore you stories all day long of some of the weird and wonderful and wacky things that clients of mine have done to recognize their teams in small ways and big ways, because the amount of discretionary effort that you get out of your team when you recognize success is unbelievable. It's many, many multiples of the dollars that you're going to pay them if you just do the thing that touches them to their heart.

Celebrate every day. Celebrate every win. Celebrate the appointment, celebrate the proposal, Celebrate the sale, Celebrate payment right. Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate all the time. More cowbell. There's never. Now. That doesn't mean that you don't have an attention on. Okay, we're still short of goal, but good job on getting the appointment right. We still gotta hit a number, but we're still like, oh, good job on that. Like, you could keep celebrating even as you're working on things, you get more.

Of the behavior that you reward and recognize.

Yes. So great. That's a great place to end it. If you want to know more about Mornay and his work. Emmersales we'll put the link in the show notes and here on the screen emersales immerse sales.com is I thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll have to get together sometime soon. Next time I get your way or you get my way it's I mean I love London, but I'm glad that you're in Miami. Weather's better there. Yes and folks may want to get if they go to your website, they'll find information on your programs, boot camps, all kinds of things like that that you've got to help develop a playbook and level up your sales. Talk to you again soon. Everyone keep scaling up. We'll talk to you again next week. Bye Bye. Foreign. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.