HOW YOU KEEP THE BEST SALESPEOPLE HAPPY AND SUCCESSFUL IN B2B

Hey, before we get into the interview, I want to make sure you're aware of our other podcasts, the Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers show, which is a very quick, under 5 minutes in most cases, sometimes just a few minutes where I answer your questions. You can just send me any question to my LinkedIn profile, Brian G. Burns, and I'll put it in the queue to answer. Also, the Sales Leadership Show. If you're looking to get into sales leadership or you want to hear from the world's best sales leaders, that's where I interview them. Check it out, the Sales Leadership Show. Also at b2brevenue.com, you can learn all about all the courses. Links are in the show notes below, as well as our link to our partners over at brevitypitch.com, the fastest, easiest way to become great at sales and practice. Before it's showtime.

Here we go. Have you ever seen a team where they lose the top rep? And I have before.

It's, it's definitely a punch in the gut to the, to the team and the, and the company. I mean, if, if you lose those A players that are really performing, it can be Really challenging to recover from that, just because there's so much you invest in those type of employees, whether it's ramp up, whether it's development, and obviously the revenue that they're bringing in. So it makes you think of how do you keep those best salespeople around? What are the factors that really drive keeping the best salespeople from a company standpoint? But also, what do the individual salespeople want to keep them staying around? Because the more we progress with social media and the instant gratification with everything going on, it's a lot more people tend to hop around. So it's It seems harder and harder to keep your best people these days.

Yeah. And I think leaders make the mistake of trying to treat everybody equal. And, and I've had managers that go, you know, my ideal thing is everyone comes in at 120% of their number. And I'm like, what are you running? It's this— that's not how nature works. You know, and I really— this annoyed the hell out of me, especially if you're one of the people who generated a lot of revenue. What happens 100% of the time to that number one rep? They take their territory and they put it into 4 or 3 or 2, and there's no really recognition. Maybe a little bit. Your trophy, here's your plaque. And all of a sudden that person's supposed to feel great. Yet the bottom player, somebody who for whatever reason was 40% of their number, their territory doesn't get touched. And there's political reasons for this, because the people above that manager, everybody wants it equal because the comp plan is equal. But how do you make an equal territory? How do you predict the future?

Right.

I mean, you, you want to predict the future of real estate. I'd love to predict the future of the stock market. None of us have that capability. We have pattern matching, but we don't have that type of forecasting capability. Now, once you piss off your A-player, you know, the person probably is generating at least 30, 40% of the Group's number. That person leaves, everyone says the same thing. Well, it was all luck, it was timing, they had the best engineer, this, that, the other thing. They all come up with an alibi of why they weren't there and why that person was. A little bit of truth, but not enough, because that person goes to somewhere else, does the same thing, but yet that team doesn't do the same thing. And this is the problem with sales, and it's been the problem forever because only a few great leaders figure this out. Because what they do is they want to hire nothing but A-players, cook the comp plan so they get either equity or commission, some reason to stay, and do it over and over and over again. Meanwhile, the C manager, let's hire a bunch of people out of college. I can get 20 for the price of 5. And maybe your sale is like that. You just need a lot of people sending spam all day and hopefully it comes back attached to money. Maybe transactional. But if a manager could recognize this. And cook it. The problem is that everyone else sees the cooking, right? Because they know what's fair and what's not fair. But it's not equal. Why does it have to be equal? Do all the Yankees get paid the same?

Nope.

Do all the movie— every actor and actress in every film get paid the same? No.

Nope.

And you hear this all kinds in sports. Why doesn't this team get paid the same as that team? Because no audience. That's why. There's not— there's nothing to pay them with. You gotta have it to give it. And people, you know, the causation and correlation thing are just not connected. And sales, it, it's not even the 80/20, it's Price's Law. And Price's Law, it's even higher focused. It's a square root, you know, of half of the, the revenue is generated by that one person. That's an enormous amount of revenue to walk out that door, as well as talent and experience, because they clearly know something or good at something that the other people aren't. And you could say, well, why aren't they sharing it?

Well, why would they?

You know, are you sharing your knowledge and experience with every mutton Jeff that walks by your house? No, you're like, I got my own job to do.

So it's true. It's, yeah, I mean, the A players or the best salespeople tend to get penalized to your point at the beginning there. It's at the end of the year, awesome year, 300, 400% the quota, whatever it is, and they automatically assume that, oh, they just need to chop up the territory. And that tends to be the bigger— oh, really any company for this matter. But the reason they chop up the territories, at least from my perspective, is that they only want people to make a certain amount of money, and they keep chopping it up so that there's that, that average that you can make is $200K per territory, and that's the OT or whatever it is. So the, the top people get penalized. So that probably makes them want to leave because they know they're just going to keep getting chopped. They're going to keep handing their stuff off to other people when they worked on it for, for years, probably. But obviously the, the financial side and the commission, the uncapped, is a huge part of keeping your, your top salespeople around. I, I did a poll recently and that one was the one that came up at the top, was uncapped commission or comp plan as being the top reason for it to, to help keep your Salespeople around, but it also goes deeper than that with the comp plan because a lot of times I see that the comp plans or the commission structures—you need a PhD to try to understand what it means or how you get paid—which also typically shows that it's going to be more advantageous for the company if they're making it that complicated for you to understand your comp plan. Then it's probably leaning more towards the company benefiting from it than you. If it's more straight up and then you—it's. Get to the picture quickly and you understand it. It doesn't change a couple times a year. You know about it at the beginning versus April or May. Maybe they, they do want their salespeople to make the most money in the company because I think the best companies too, the best leaders, they want the salespeople to make more than the CEO in some cases because they understand that Price's Law that you're talking about. But in addition to what you're saying, I think there's also a lot of games that get played with the way People get paid and that can be frustrating, especially to your top people. And that deters a lot of people from staying if they keep doing that. And usually the bigger they get, the more private equity or other things involved, the more that tends to happen.

Yeah, there's a lot of oversight when you have somebody making, you know, multiple 6 figures, maybe 7 figures. More than I made more than the CEO, and I remember him telling me that. And I go, "No, you didn't." He goes, "Yeah, yeah, you did." I go, "How much of the company do you own?" And he wouldn't tell me. I go, "It's more than me, right?" And that revenue that I brought in, what multiple does that get when you go and try and raise money? What does a million dollars get you? In capitalization, what's the company worth by an incremental million dollars? And in SaaS, it's typically ten to thirty times. So I got you ten to thirty million per million over quota. So that was thirty to ninety million in market capitalization. What's the problem? The problem is the game's over, and now we're trying to divide up who did what. And victory has a thousand fathers, right? Defeat is an orphan. So everybody was part of the victory, some more than others though. And now we're trying to divide up the credit. And I don't care about the emotional credit. I care about the financial credit. But the game's over, and anyone can make up any story they want about why we won, the same way they can of why we lose. It's subjective. So all they see is a big number, and the CFO goes, well, I could hire 10 times as many reps. Sure, you could hire 1,000 times as many squirrels. It has no relevance to what you're trying to do. You're trying to increase revenue. That is the mission. And this is where sales leaders get wrong. Their job is to increase revenue, but their focus and their actions are all decreasing revenue. That A-player leaves, there's probably 10 or 20% of your revenue walks out that door, marginal revenue that's irreplaceable, that there's probably no other human being on the planet that can generate that same amount of revenue because you have to train them. Let's say that person has a twin with the identical education and experience, but at a competitor or in a different industry. They come in, how long does it take them to get up to speed? 6 months, 9 months.

At least.

That's half a year. And you think you're increasing revenue. What if you cook a comp plan for them? What do they want? What would keep them? You know, money's a big part of it, a little bit of recognition, but most people want a little autonomy, a little creativity. Are they a big deal person or are they a new territory, new logo person? Do they like to upsell, or do they like to go head-to-head in a beauty contest? And you talk to great reps. Typically, when territories go down, their revenue goes up because the the smaller territory is more focused on what they're good at. So they'll take away Rhode Island and Delaware and. these, these territories that, you know, have state qualities but not state opportunities, you know. And you might even have like one or two accounts, but they might have more control, or you give them more support. Do you want more dedicated? In one company, I wanted more support. I needed more engineers. And I convinced them. I go, give me another engineer. I'll do another million dollars. I got another engineer. Just, I did it before. They had faith in me and I took a little quota for it and I would take quota for it because I could take an engineer, take half a million dollar quota and do another million. I'll take another engineer. Give me another one. Let's play this game all day. But they don't think like that. A lot of them think, well, I'll get another salesperson, which takes engineering help away from me with no quota reduction. So you get a new sales rep doesn't know what they're doing with an engineer who's very effective helping someone who does know what they're doing, but not very effective helping someone who doesn't know what they're doing. But then the argument, well, we have to grow. Well, I'm not saying don't hire additional people or don't grow, but you want to grow revenue, not headcount. They're not always tightly correlated. Otherwise we wouldn't have so much turnover. But if you're a leader—

That's right.

And you say, I got 10 people working for me, is much more impressive than saying I have 5 people working for me.

It does sound better. It does sound better. I read a stat that I think it was for any employee, but it costs anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 times what they make to replace somebody. So you can imagine for that top salesperson that's making XYZ amount, I mean, it's brutal to replace them. I mean, you have to go find another salesperson. So you're going to spend at least 2 to 3 months or longer. interviewing or trying to find a salesperson, most likely you're not going to find somebody anywhere close to that, that person that left. And then to your point, the ramp up, you're going to spend a ton of money training, ramping up for at least 6 to 9 months. And that doesn't mean that they're going to be ready to hit the ground running. It could take 12 to 18 months to really hit the stride depending on the industry. And it's, it's, it really does cost a ton to replace people, let alone those top folks. So it's, It's, it's devastating. And I like the, what you're talking about with the autonomy. And I mean, the, the best leaders are trying to hire people that are smarter than them or better than them underneath them so that the territory can run itself even if they're not around. So, uh, you definitely don't want to be, uh, the micromanager. And obviously if your numbers are good, that, that tends to get people off your back. But I, I think you also want those managers that It could be a crappy company that has a messed up culture, but you have a great manager that's letting you do your thing, and that makes you stay there longer because you can make money and you can get around that, that, that culture that's an issue. So you have to look at, at, at those type of things. And then ultimately, it's, you gotta figure out what, what does that A-player want? Do they wanna just keep riding this out for the next 5 to 7 years? Do they wanna get a new territory and just keep going after new logos? So you have to really Understand, obviously the financial part is going to be huge, but also what's behind their mindset or their psychology. Like where don't let them burn out. Don't let them go into the same thing and keep them excited or refreshed. And I mean recognition. There are a lot of people that do love the recognition part in addition to the finances. So if it's the President's Club trips or just little, some of it can sound gimmicky, but a lot of people eat that up and they want to be recognized publicly. on leaderboards or whatever it may be. So you have to, I think, understand the mindset of your, your salespeople and each person's gonna be a little bit different as well. But the A players, they probably are fun monies at the very top, but some of them could, they're very competitive and they might wanna be publicly recognized as well. So it just depends on the situation.

Yeah. And, and when I was a sales leader, you wanted as many of those A players as you can. Here's training and ride-alongs on crappy deals is not what you want to spend your time doing. As a manager, you only get comped on the very high end, right? It's much more backend loaded than a rep. So if you don't have flow of revenue coming in, people you can count on, people you don't have to babysit, people you believe, That's what you want. The stupidity that people are doing today with just hiring completely untrained, and not, not no fault of theirs. You're talking 6 months before they know how to walk. You know, who knows what they're doing all day? Because they don't know. They're hunting and pecking. They're, they're following their instincts. They're, they're just asking for deals. They're hounding people, but is it generating revenue? Could they take a deal even if they got one? You need the, the go-to people. And in sales, you get someone who's a go-to person, you got to keep them because everybody wants them. No manager on earth wants to sit around and train people all day. That's sales enablement. That's not sales leadership. They want to, they want to participate in big deals. Who gets those big deals? It's not the B players. And, and when you hire, you know, trying to get an A player requires you to do something special. Getting a B player who's not a know-it-all is really hard because once they're in sales, after about 5 years, You start to hear the same noises, blaming everybody else, and I'm, I'm a rock star. What happened here? Well, they unplugged my guitar. You know, it's like, no, rock stars are able to play music anywhere. So what's left? You know, put that money towards That A-player. And this is what I don't get. It's like, why at the same price are you buying B-players other than they're more available? You're spending the same amount of money, get an A-player, cook it up, right? Maybe don't fill a role and don't assign as much quota and tell them you're cooking it for them.

Yeah.

That's exactly, I mean, it's how you approach deals as well or why companies don't make decisions is because it needs to be a must-have, not a nice-to-have. So it's the same type of thing with your salespeople. It's like if you're just hiring people to increase the headcount, it's more of a nice-to-have type thing if you're just hiring B players across the board. But I mean, the A players are really the ones that are the must-have that you have to focus on. So maybe you can be more strategic and not just hire 3 people and just hire 1 person that you think is a rock star to your point. But I guess that's not easy to figure that stuff out. And then they, the leaders probably have pressure from the CEO and other folks just add, hire 10 salespeople or the second they get the funding around. So Series A or Series B, they just immediately hire 20, 30 people in marketing and sales. And then a and a half later, they lay off half of them because they overpromised, underdelivered with, with that because they think automatically if you just hire that amount of salespeople, you're gonna increase revenue by XYZ. So it's just not, not the reality of the world we're in. And, and there's, there's also some intangible things too. I mean, with keeping people around, if, if you are investing in them in some form or fashion, I, I think those top salespeople, they're usually Always trying to push themselves to get better. So I mean, hire them an executive coach or something or do something different to invest in them. I mean, like that, you see that sometimes with C-suite folks where they will get them an executive coach, but why not do that for your top salespeople? I mean, because they're gonna most likely, they're open to feedback. They're doing really well, but they're probably a little bit humble and they're open to getting better with the right type of thing. So why not? spend money on that type of stuff. If you're not gonna do all the financial stuff, at least do some of that because that could, that could keep somebody around for another year or so if you do something a little bit different, think outside the box.

Yeah. Because when you feel like you're just another cog in the wheel, you don't feel much belonging at that company. But if they treat you, you know, what we used to call a made man, right? Like from The Sopranos, you got made.

Yeah.

So you're no longer a soldier, you're a capo. You know, you take the blood oath. You know, what does that mean? But it feels different, right? You feel like you're part of something. There's a lot of talk today about don't treat work like your family. Okay. Thank you, snowflakes. But don't it, doesn't it feel a lot better when you're part of a family than you are just a cog in the wheel? Oh yeah. When the CEO calls you and thanks you for closing a deal, when they do cook the comp plan for you, when they ask for your feedback, when they engage you about what can we do to sell more, because that person probably knows more about how and what needs to happen to sell more than any other person on the planet, and you're treating them like an expense, like a cost center, like commission is some gift that you give them. No, it's payment for something that's earned, and you forget about it as soon as it's delivered. As soon as you get the deal, then all of a sudden, yeah, we got the deal. You know, the service has been rendered. The value of the service goes down dramatically.

True. It made me think of an analogy. I don't know if it's a close analogy or not, but I did staffing for a little bit and was in the healthcare world. And for decades, hospitals always treated nurses like a cost center, but then they would treat doctors like a revenue-generating center. So right or wrong, that's what's been going on for 50-plus years. And the nurses were always frustrated by this. They're always trying to lobby and change that. They're trying to change the system, obviously really hard. Then COVID happened and all of a sudden the, you know, there's all this crazy stuff going on and then they needed travel nurses all over the place. So all of a sudden the nurses became free agents essentially, and they realized how much they were worth and how much they could make. So now they could go across the country or go somewhere and make double, triple what they were making before. And then they're like, Wow. So then all of a sudden you got all these nurses that want to travel and it creates strain on those hospitals that are trying to pay them the bare minimum because they were treating them like a cost center. So there's this whole movement of them trying to make it more of a profit center versus the cost center of what you mentioned there. So it's an interesting analogy because if you do treat salespeople or whatever as a cost center, then you're just— it's transactional and you're not going to keep the, the best people around. You might keep the B players, C players around because they're, they're just gonna float and aim. They're, they're, they have no real plan. They're just gonna aimlessly end up wherever they end up. But the, the A players, the top people, they're gonna understand what they're worth eventually and they're not gonna put up with it at some point. I think it's probably with everything that's happened the last few years, I, I think people are more, they fight for themselves a little bit more compared to maybe in the past before the, the pandemic. So if you don't, focus on that, I think you have a high likelihood of losing some of those people. I know you moved around quite a bit in your career. I mean, you worked for a lot of different companies. I mean, and you were definitely an A-player, I would imagine, at all those, most of those situations. So what, what did you look for when you kept going to other companies? Was there, was there something specific outside of the money that you were looking for?

You know, the manager was important. The product was important. But at the beginning, everybody treats you great and they'll say and do whatever they have to to get you. But then things change, right?

Yeah. Then, then you start and you're like, oh shit, what did I get myself into?

Well, they take you for granted and, or, and you're trying to make a lot of suggestions and a lot of changes at the company. Some of them are much all of them they could care less about. It's, no, you figure out how to do what we want within this little square over here. And it's like, oh, okay. And I remember one guy, a VC, I overheard, yeah, Brian Burns thinks he knows how to run this company better than I do. And I'm like, I was thinking to myself, since you went to Harvard Business School and haven't worked at a single company, Other than giving someone else's money to a bunch of companies. Never been on a sales call, never closed a deal. Do you think I might have a little bit more of an idea about what would work here? Number one rep 3 years in a row, generated 30% of the company's revenue. You generated zero. Oh, you funded the company, and you're here because the company's not executing the way your limited partners wanted to execute, and you think you know how to do it. I'm not saying I'm smarter than you. I'm just saying I know how to sell this product in this market better than you. And I'm not even saying I know something. And I was like, I had a plan. It worked at other companies, companies that they envied, but they don't want to do it because they saw it was risky. Well, we're minutes away from going out of business. You know, they turned down this offer from Oracle. The executives got kicked out, new VCs came in, and this kid who's never worked at a company is now the chief operating officer. And I got along with him. I liked him. But this is not a spreadsheet. You know, you're not going to find the answer within one of those cells, change the equation, and all of a sudden now revenue goes up. That's what they think how it works, because that's how it works in MBA school. Of course, a year later, he's out. These are the people who know how to get it done. Don't go replacing them with a bunch of people who are just going to camp out and complain.

Leverage it.

And it's not like they're in marketing and they come up with a better ad. No, they generate revenue. But what do they do with the A-player in engineering?

Promote him, give him a bigger bonus and base salary, probably.

Anything. Watch what happens to a company when the chief architect or the lead engineer gets a new job. More equity. Oh, you want to work remotely? Fantastic. What else do you need? That's the product though. Salesperson? Oh, well, it's subjective. We don't know. So it serves us to think it's luck. So we'll think it's luck until next year when we find out, well, we're not lucky this year.

Very true. I mean, it's, it's a mix of all those things we talked about. I mean, money's for sure, the, the culture, investing in them, understanding all the stuff that we went through, but it, it's definitely worth it to, to put the extra effort to make those A-players feel good about it and keep them around. Because otherwise it's devastating financially, ramp-up time, all everything in between if you lose them.

Yeah. And what basketball team has a uniform comp plan? First year you start off at $15 million, goes up a million a year until it peaks at $30 million. Where would LeBron James play? Is he gonna play on that team? Michael Jordan, where's he going? Now, who knows how to win the game better, Michael Jordan or the owner of the team?

Definitely Michael Jordan.

Yes.

But in sales, we look at it completely different. Why? Because we don't want to, we don't want to see it. If we, if this person has all this power, then I have less power. Well, do you want to be rich or do you want to be right?

Ego. A lot of ego.

Lots of ego. And if you don't take care of your A-players, someone's, everyone's hunting the A-players. No manager goes to a headhunter and says, "Get me a B player." It's very true, very true.

But and to become great at sales, the best way is to model somebody who already has become good at sales and to hear other people. Who have become great at sales and the journey that they're going through, the false beliefs, the misnomers, the mindset issues, all of this stuff that gets in our way between where we are and the income that we want. Let's face it. We're in sales because we're money motivated. We're competitive. We want to be better every day than we were yesterday. And how do we do that? There's really, you know, read a book, listen to a podcast. That's good. Good start. I like it. But then you have to take action. And then you want both tactical and strategic ideas. You want mindset. You want strategy. You want to understand how companies buy. You want really deep content And examples, case studies, so that you can learn from other people's mistakes. That's what I'm here for. I'm here for you to learn from my mistakes. And boy, do I got a lot of them. So go to b2brevenue.com, sign up for the courses. There's 2 major ones. Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting fills up your pipeline, gets rid of that problem of, oh, I don't have enough leads. I don't have enough meetings. It gets those conversations started with the people you want to talk to. Now, it's not about a pitch. It's about a conversation. Now, everybody thinks of conversations when you're talking or you're online at the same time or you're on the phone or Zoom at the same time. That's not a conversation. A conversation is when the client is talking about what they care about, what they're interested in, And that is what we call qualification, where we can sense where are they and how do we build up that curiosity into interest, into urgency to get a deal. And these are skills that we need. They're lifelong skills that we need in sales. And then how do we get a deal closed? Yes, anyone can take an order. But what if they don't know how to get it done? You get a new account. Where you're trying to get a big change done internally. What are the issues? If you're not planning that through, odds are it's not going to get done no matter how much your champion wants it. So winning the complex sale solves that problem for you. Why waste all your time on these false positives or these no decisions? Because they don't pay very well. They pay Zero point zero. What you want to do is pay a lot. So sign up today. Invest in yourself. You're the asset in sales. Quit waiting for somebody else to approve it or train you. See if you can get it expensed. That should be your first sales obstacle. Your first sales challenge is how do you get your company to pay for it? Just go down, tell your manager you want to do this. I put a little example email in the show notes right below here. Just swipe up and take a look at that. And if they won't, you got to ask yourself, why won't you? Why won't you? Oh, it takes time. Well, you work all day. You're working wrong all day. Why not improve that? There's the time right there. Oh, the money, Brian. It's money. Well, you make more money if you become better in sales. And Start the Conversation pays for itself the first week because you're going to get at least 2 meetings just learning from the very basics of it. Closing the Complex Sale will pay for itself 100 times over. Students in it tell me it's the best money they ever spent because they now have control over their deals. And it doesn't end. Some give up. Some give up after they win their first deal and they think they've got enough. No, come back. Come back. Keep going. You can get even bigger deals, more deals, faster deals. That's what it's all about. Sign up today. Put the excuses away.

Yeah.

Excuses feel good, but they're expensive. Excuse— you know what the excuses are costing you? Tens, 50, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in lost income.

Really?

Yeah. The difference between where you are today— let's say you're making $150,000, decent, decent income, but you know there's other people in your industry making $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. Well, how are you going to do that? You all think it's just about getting a better job, a better territory, a better manager. They can help. Go do that. Then what happens? It's still you there with those leads trying to close those deals. And do you have the game?

Few people do.

Everyone thinks they do. Why not prove it? The market tells you what you're worth. Accept it. Now become better. And the way to become better is to improve every day. Really make a daily routine of learning and developing because it's not at the knowledge level. You have to become unconsciously competent at these skills, which takes Time, repetition, and emotion. And I show you how to do it, how I did it, how I've taught hundreds of people to do it. But you have to want to because I can't force you. A lot of people wish I could. So do I, but I can't.

So sign up today.

We'll see you next time.