Aaron Magden - Ep.37 - How to Systematically Scale Your Sales Team

This is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast brought to you by G4 Marketing. Interviews with today's top home improvement entrepreneurs about marketing, sales, money, mindset, and lifestyle. Now here's your host, Brian Kaskavalciyan. Hello and welcome to the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. This is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group. And on today's episode, I've got Aaron Magdon, who is the co-owner of Window Nation. Now, I interviewed Aaron's brother Harley on episode 21 and just talked about how they've grown Window Nation in a relatively short time into one of the largest home improvement companies in the country. In this episode with Aaron, we focus specifically on growing the sales team, and I know that that is a big issue with a lot of smaller— well, small and large companies. Building a sales team is not an easy thing. It's actually one of the hardest things probably to do in the home improvement business, and Aaron has just done it over and over and over and over again. And so I thought it would be really valuable for us to talk about how they do that, how they set it up from the beginning when it was just Aaron all the way to now when they've got over 100 salespeople. You're going to get a lot out of this episode, so listen real carefully. Thanks for being here. Let's get to it.

All right, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. And with me, of course, is Aaron Magdon from Window Nation. Aaron, welcome. Thank you for being here.

No problem. More than, more than happy to chat today.

Cool. So tell us a little bit. I, you know, I interviewed your brother Harley a few episodes back, and I thought it would be cool to get the other side of the story from the other brother.

Um, the better looking one.

The better looking one.

There you go.

The smarter and better looking and taller and all of that, right?

Right, right, right.

All right, so give everybody kind of like the 60-second backstory on Window Nation.

Yeah, so basically, you know, Harley and I started Window Nation, just him and I in a small office in Maryland back in 2006. I used to run the appointments and he did basically the marketing and the accounting end, and then built, built it from there and added a few sales reps, opened up in Virginia, and now we have 9 locations We're in 5 major markets. We have over 100 sales reps and just built the company to the 5th largest window company in the entire country.

Wow, congratulations.

Family-owned and operated, and it's been a, it's been quite of a ride.

Yeah, I'll say. So what's it like managing 100 salespeople? I mean, we have hard enough time managing 1 or 2, let alone 100.

It's like a big nursery school. It's just a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot of babysitting, right? Yeah, but I mean, when you have— when you have that many sales reps, you know, you got to have good management watching over everyone. So we have, you know, we have assistant sales managers, we have sales managers, we have regional managers, VP of Sales. It's all about holding them accountable to the sales system. You know, you have to have a system in place. If you don't have a a system in place, then everything goes broke. And it's what I call basically style selling. Everyone's on their own doing their own thing, and they're selling themselves without really selling the company, the product, and, and the, you know, the total value proposition. So it's important to, to make sure that everyone does stay on point, and the managers hold them accountable to what they're supposed to be doing in the field. And, you know, it's practice, drill, rehearse, and it's just, you got to keep making sure that the reps are following, following the orders.

When you say hold them accountable, what does that look like?

Holding them accountable, so, you know, they have to have metrics. You can't just let the sales reps go out there and say, all right, time to go sell, make, you know, you Sell whatever you can, and hopefully everything sticks and makes it happen. I mean, you have to have metrics in place such as closing percentage, such as cancellation, or, you know, you have to hold them to a certain cancellation rate. You know, we use something called NSLI, which is net sale per lead issued. Basically, how many— basically, you know, for instance, if someone has a $2,500 NSLI So for every lead we issue, they bring back $2,500, no matter if it's a no-show, a no-demo, a sale, or no sale. You know, we look at all these different metrics and they must meet these, and we hold them accountable to them. And if they don't meet them, then, you know, we retrain them. So, you know, the cost of a new hire is very expensive. So we're big into training and building our reps up.

Now, how often are these measurements looked at?

They're, they're looked at once a month. We have one-on-one meetings with them, but the managers, you know, manage them weekly, you know, so no one, no one falls off the deep end and have, you know, you can have a bad day, but let's not make it a trend. And, you know, we'll look for trends and then You know, they'll work with them in the field. So everything's, everything's managed by a CRM that we have. And, you know, it's, it's the managers look at it weekly, and but it's the managers meet with the reps one-on-one, or, you know, once a month.

Once a month. And are there weekly sales meetings in all of your offices?

Yeah, absolutely. You gotta, you gotta have the sales reps you know, see face-to-face with the manager. There needs to be training involved, you know, otherwise the sales reps are just going to be on their own doing whatever they want to do and there'll be no structure in place. So got to have sales meetings at least once a week. Sometimes, you know, we'll have them twice a week.

What is the— what does that kind of look like at Window Nation? What do those meetings look like? What's kind of the structure? How long are they?

You know, various topics every time, but you know, definitely one component is always part of the selling system, practicing that industry, you know, industry news or trends, what's going on, you know, reviewing the competition, a lot of role play. You know, it's really a mixture of things, challenges that are happening in the field, you know, a lot of praise. Going on, a lot of motivation, because, you know, sales is tough. It's like a roller coaster. And if these guys get down on themselves, you know, that's when they start second-guessing themselves, and then they get into a rut, and then big problems happen. And that's when you lose— that's when you lose reps. So you got to motivate them. Even when they're having a bad day, you got to get them motivated.

How do you do that?

Well, you gotta— you You got to be in good spirits with them. So it's always about, you know, going over positive numbers, you know, success stories, you know, bring in, you know, donuts in the morning, lunch in the afternoon, putting out stiff contests, putting team contests together. You know, the morale's got to be positive in the office. You can't, you know, I don't think ruling with an iron fist these days is the way to go. And I think a lot of companies still do that. They come in and, "You suck," and, "You're terrible," and, "Get out of here." And, you know, they have high egos, some of these managers and owners. And quite frankly, that's just not the direction, especially with a lot of these younger millennials and such. That's just not the way things are moving towards these days.

It's interesting you bring up millennials. So I would— so you've got some that are selling for you?

Yeah, I mean, we have some, and some of them are great, and some of them have little to zero work ethic and they don't work out. Yeah, it's, it's really a mixture. It's really a— though it's all boils down to the work ethic. If they have a good work ethic and they're, they're, they're taught right, they're great. If they are prima donnas and they just got out of college and they think everything's gonna be, you know, they're gonna work 9 to 5 and they're gonna go into these houses and everyone's gonna say yes and lay down, they got something else coming, right?

Are they— do you find that they're tougher to deal with in general?

Absolutely, absolutely. Yep. A lot of them just, you know, are rebellious. They think they do things on their time. They're not as responsive. They're just— I just don't think they have the work ethic a lot of times as others. And it could get challenging. But like I said, it's a mix. So it's— you'll know. You'll usually know within the first 90 days if it's you have a solid millennial, if you have one that's not ready for the in-home sales arena.

Have you had to change anything in your training, hiring practices, meetings, accountability? Have you had to change anything because of the millennials?

Um, not really. I mean, They're either going to conform to what we do or they're, like I said, they're not going to work out.

They're not, right?

Um, and so it's really what we're not going to change for them. They're going to, they're going to follow what our processes and procedures are. And at the end of the day, they're going to appreciate it because we have a strong work ethic and, and we teach everyone and we train everyone and we're patient. And, um, you know, when they go in the slumps You know, the strong will survive and the weak will go by the wayside and they'll give up. Right.

Yeah, good. So one of the things, one of the things that I find so valuable about this podcast is, and any really good podcast that's about, you know, helping somebody be more successful, is that success definitely leaves clues. And one of the things that you've said in, in the few minutes that we've been talking, at least 3 or 4 times, is you've used the word system, specifically selling system. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because this is one of the things that, as we go back through episodes and you, and you listen to the most successful contractors in the country, that really the, the, the real wealthy contractor, they all talk about systems. So can you talk a little bit about selling system and kind of what that— what does that look like? What is that?

Think about a selling system as a roadmap, right? So when you're trying to get to a destination, okay, well, these days we use MapQuest or Waze or whatever, and you plug it in and it tells you to take this turn to that turn to this turn to that turn. A system allows you to get to the final destination just like a map will. And it allows you to navigate through the entire, basically, sales cycle that will allow you to get to the close, if you will. So it's basically a map that's drawn out that teaches the sales rep how to get through each step, whether it's, you know, you have the warm-up and the, you know, the measure, or, you know, whatever product you're selling. And then get to the presentation and this demo. But you have to lay the groundwork down so people could follow something. Otherwise, like I said, a lot of times, you know, these sales reps are just style selling. They're trying to sell their charm, they're trying to sell their attitude, they're trying to sell themselves. But what ends up happening is, is that they're not creating that roadmap where at the end they're going to get a yes. They're just going to end up falling on their face because they're not getting the proper commitments. They're not going to be able to smoke out the objections. And at the end, what's going to happen is they're going to basically be speechless because they're not going to— they're going to— they've missed closing, they've missed getting the commitment, so the objections won't come out at the end. So it's basically, like I said, basically a roadmap to get you to the final destination.

Yeah, so if I can, if I can put an analogy to it, it's kind of like french fries at McDonald's, right? So regardless of which window nation I go to, regardless of which McDonald's I go to, the, the instructions for how to handle a lead in the home, or how to make french fries, is first you do this, then you do this, then you say this. Right, regardless of which Window Nation office it's in, right?

We basically create like a Starbucks. The coffee, right, the coffee in Seattle is going to taste the same in Cleveland, right? And that's, and that's basically how it's, how it's created.

Yeah, so I, I, I wanted to bring that point because I knew what you were going to say. That is, is really kind of the secret, isn't it? I mean, if you really want to grow a company, the thing that you cannot do is you can't teach anybody— you can't teach me, Brian, how to be Aaron and go sell in the house, right? It's just not going to work. So what you've got to do is you've got to take the formula and you have to put it out on, on paper, on a computer, however you do it, and then come to me and say, okay, Brian, you're going to come in first and you're going to do this, you're going to say this, then Brian, you're going to say this, then you're going to say this. Because I can't be you. And I think that's one of the big mistakes that a lot of owners make is that they don't have a system. What they're trying to do is get people to be more like them. And if they're closing 60%, because you could be— you probably would outsell most of your salespeople. I mean, you probably got a few that are as good as you, but for the most part, if you were to compare you against all of them, there's no way you would have been able to grow the company to what it is today. Is that accurate?

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, in the beginning, that was probably a mistake that I made, was I'm going to try to replicate 20 of me, but it's just not going to happen. They're not going to act, speak, you know, they're not going to act, speak, you know, everything like me. So you have to create the system that's scalable that you could train and it's repeatable and put into place, right?

No, absolutely. And for everybody that's listening, you, you know, if you stopped listening right now, you just got a ton of value because he just really gave you the secret formula to, to selling. It's not much of a secret, but it, it, that's the formula. If you want to grow a sales team, first you have to have a system. So It took you— so let's go kind of go back to the beginning of Window Nation when it was you out selling. Your brother was creating leads, you were out selling. How did you go from you to having 3 or 4 salespeople?

Well, once, once I was running after 4 leads a day, I said, oh geez, now we got to hire people. So, you know, we didn't have in-house recruiters, so on and so forth. So Starts off with recruiting, placing ads in various areas like Indeed and Craigslist and all the different forums that are now in place. Geez, there's tons of them now. And then there's grassroots. Go to the mall, try to find people working in the mall or working in furniture stores or hand cards out at gas stations. I try to find people, you know, in the, in the customer service sector that, um, that, uh, are good with people that I'd be able to train. And I'm not a big proponent of hiring people in the industry because a lot of them have bad habits, but I recruited and, you know, one, one rep led to two, led to three, and then you try to get referrals from your existing sales reps and you just keep building upon And, and the key is that once you had a repeatable, duplicatable, trainable, teachable system, then you could bring somebody in and teach them and say, okay, this is how it's done here.

Kind of like what Michael Gerber says in the E-Myth, this is how we do it here.

Yep, exactly.

That's, um, you know, that's one of the things I think that a lot of people struggle with is, is A is understanding that, okay, we need to create a system, but then also what does that system look like? Where does that system come from? In your case, you— did you develop the system from your experience?

Yeah, I developed my own system, but there's, there's great third parties out there that can develop systems for companies. But yeah, I developed my own system. That I've basically taken from a little— that from some of these third parties that I've learned through, through, through over the years, and then just basically my little special sauce that I've put together. So throughout the years, I've, I've developed, you know, the Window Nation system.

So when you were— again, let's kind of go back— when you guys were smaller, when you had, you know, 5 salespeople, I would imagine you were their, their sales manager. Correct. Yeah. What were some of your— what were your challenges back then? You know, somebody, you know, somebody that's listening that's got a few salespeople, what were some of your challenges then when you were at, let's say, 4 or 5 salespeople?

Yeah, I think it's— I think it's just continuing to build the team. And what I mean by that is that, you know, when you just have, you know, 4 salespeople, let's just say, I think a lot of times what ends up happening is the sales manager will get complacent, or even the owner will get complacent, say, "No, I got salespeople. Let them run and do their job, and I'm gonna hang out in the office." Well, that's really not the way to go. The manager still needs to be in the field developing the reps, getting out there, helping out, still running leads, staying fresh. Managing the business, you know, still working the whole, the whole system. And that's— I see, I see a lot in smaller companies where the owner ends up being the sales manager, and then they don't have to run leads anymore. It's like they just hang out at the office, and, you know, things start to almost fall apart because they're not putting their best foot forward and developing further developing the reps. What are some of the—

and that's a really good example of, you know, what not to do. And what are some of the other mistakes that you see smaller companies make? Or maybe what were some of the mistakes that you made as you were growing your sales team?

I don't make many mistakes, Brian.

I know. You gotta give us a couple though. You made one, or you saw somebody make one or two, right?

Right. I mean, listen, the mistakes that I see with sales managers is, you know, sometimes being too hard on them because now that, you know, maybe you're the great salesman, right, and you're closing at 80%, and then you get these other guys in there and they're closing at half the half, you know, 40% or 30%, and you're pushing them too hard. And, you know, like you said before, you're trying to replicate yourself, and you get, you get too aggressive with them because you're giving them crap because they're not closing it at the same level because you expect to keep producing at the levels that you're used to producing. And then the morale shifts, and then you can start to lose sales reps. So you just have to be patient.

One thing, and it's— I'm watching the— our time here. I guess my last question would be kind of like, have you noticed like over time with all of the experience that you have with salespeople, are there any traits— I know you mentioned earlier work ethic, and I know that you and your brother— I know how important that is to you, to you and your brother. That's probably one of the things that you're looking for in a great salesperson. But what are some of the other characteristics that you look for in a great salesperson? Person?

Work ethic, like you said, is a big thing, but, you know, they have to have a good personality. They have to be competitive. They have to have that, you know, that, that, that fire in their eyes. They have to be aggressive to a point. I mean, more assertive, not as aggressive, but assertive. You know, I like people that have that have played sports because once again that, that competitiveness. People that could handle rejection, that have thick skin. I think those are all good traits to look for when hiring, you know, sales reps. I recommend also, you know, to have them take personality surveys, you know, dig deeper into who these people are and do they fit the bill that you're looking for and do they fit possibly your culture. You know, those are all key things to look at when hiring someone.

Do you use any of the profiling systems that are, that are out there?

We use it— we use a specific one that's, that's not really readily known in the industry, but we do use a specific personality survey. Okay.

Yeah, they're important, right? I mean, they, they will— they won't give you all of the answers, but they'll help you get close, right?

It's not like you have them take a personality survey and it's a tell-all, it's a yes or no, hire them. But it's just another way to make a, to make a decision on a hire. You know, you may be on the fence and say, oh, you know, I sort of like them, I like her, and then the survey comes back and it's comes out phenomenal and just reinforces your decision.

Well, Aaron, look, I'm looking at the time. I know you're a busy guy, and I really appreciate you, you coming on and being with us. And I think for everybody listening, I think this is another one of those episodes that you should immediately go back and listen to again, because I mean, I just, I just made a bunch of like— I was writing stuff down that I thought was really important that I Aaron mentioned. Accountability was huge. It's one of the first things that he said. We talked about systems. He mentioned systems 3 or 4 times. He talked about practicing, you know, having a system that's trainable and teachable. We talked about work ethic, and, and, and I think that this would be a really powerful one episode for you to go back and listen to if, you know, if you have a sales team or if you want to build a sales team. So Aaron, again, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being on this episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast.

No problem.

All right, everybody, until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group.

All right, so that's it for today's episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Let me ask you, did it help you look at your business in a new way? Did it spark an idea or ideas you hadn't thought of before? Do you have a list of action items that you can take and implement into your business or your life today. I really hope so. Now, before you go, make sure you subscribe to the Wealthy Contractor Podcast so you get access to the latest episodes as soon as they're available. We're always striving to provide you with great content, so you don't want to miss what's coming up. And a favor, I'd really appreciate it if you'd go to iTunes and post a review of this podcast. Let us know how we're doing. And finally, we started The Wealthy Contractor as a resource to help you, the home improvement entrepreneur, regardless of where you are on the wealthy scale, get where you want to go. We want to provide you with the motivation, the confidence, the resources, and the tools so you too can live the life of the wealthy contractor. Now, the wealthy contractor is a place where it's okay for you to want it all. In fact, it's not only okay, it's encouraged. So until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group.