Why I'm bullish on the 15% closer

Hey, I'm Dylan, and this is the High Ticket Sales Podcast. Since 2017, I've been completely consumed with the idea of making an online income. And believe me, since then I've tried and failed at my fair share of businesses. In 2022, I quit a 6-figure sales job to go all in on this remote closing thing I had heard about. Fast forward a couple of years into 2024, I took home over $400,000 as a fractional sales manager, all while running another business in the space that actually did better than that. This industry has allowed me to achieve one of my biggest goals, which is to earn well and do so on my own terms. On this podcast, you can expect me to share what's working right now for sales reps and sales teams, nerdy deep dives on topics that are interesting to me, and conversations with my friends. Minimal edits, no sales pitch, no script. If you do like this pod, make sure you drop a like and subscribe so that you catch the future episodes. Now let's get into it.

Hey crew, welcome to episode 2 of the High Ticket Sales Podcast. In this one, I really wanted to talk about the 15% closer. And I've been running my own high-ticket business for 4 years now online. For most of that time, I've paid 15% commission and a closing role with me has looked a little bit different. I've also owned a sales agency where we would pay 10%, we would pay 8%, depending on the role, depending on the leads, the quality, the ticket size, all of that stuff. But I want to break down a little bit more why the 15% commission closer has just been a better option for me despite being more expensive. So if you run a sales team, it's a little bit smaller. I'm not going to say like part-time, but not like a full 40 hours inbound calls and overwhelming demand. I just want to talk about my experience running the 15% commission closer. Now, I didn't start this way. The reason why I started paying 15% was because I didn't have the volume to get the quality of person that I wanted at 10%. I was like, well, I I gotta get off calls. I gotta get some leverage in my time and my schedule. Let's pay them more. Let's do 15%. But over time, we started to bump the revenue up and the 15% started to exceed $10K, started to exceed $15K a little bit.

I don't know, man.

I run my community team super, super lean. I've had one closer and myself as backup for the last like 3 years. I've had really, really good retention with the closers that we bring on for the most part. A lot of them have been with me for over a year. I would say like 75% of them been with me For over a year and these people become like family. They become a lot more ingrained in what it is that we do and the results, the process. They get bought in and they feel good about what they sell and all that stuff. So anyways, 15% closer. What this looks like for me today is I have an inbound closer that's kind of there to take calls Monday through Friday, full-time schedule, and one day on the weekend, just some sort of availability. The nature of selling to the people that we sell to, sales reps, sometimes they just need to meet on the weekends. So I ask my guys to take One weekend day, be it Saturday or Sunday, preferably Saturday. And it could even be a half day, but we just need some availability. One thing that I messed up on before though is I hired a 15% closer who would take 1 to 3 calls per day on average. Sometimes during a good season, it's like 2 to 5 calls, maybe 3 to 5 calls. That would be like really good for us if we stayed consistent with that. But I didn't have them doing anything aside from taking those, you inbound sales calls. So there's a lot of stuff that would fall through the cracks. And I found that the right people who I want in this type of role are entirely not opposed to dialing opt-ins, dialing people that applied but didn't book, dialing lead magnet opt-inners. And, you know, on the frequency of inbound leads that we get per day booked versus not booked, it's not a crazy amount of volume. Doing both things, closing and self-setting, are Well within the time allocation of how many hours we have in a day. Now, if it were a matter of the closer having 8 calls in a day, then he wouldn't have time to do the other part and I wouldn't have to pay 15% commission. If he doesn't have 8 calls per day, he's got 2, 3, 4, 5 calls, maybe 6 calls in a really good day. There is absolutely time to dial in and dial up on those follow-ups too. So we're talking like pre-call, never had a call. Never got to that point trying to capture those people. And then also like being super thorough with the pipeline. Now, one thing I'll say about my offer versus even others that I've run as a sales manager, others that I've been a part of as a 10% closer or 12% or 15% is we're very pipeline heavy. We've been doing this for a long time. We're really good at what we do. And so like pipeline closes are really common for us. Also, like people who watch our stuff don't book right away, but then come back into the funnel later after a certain YouTube video post or whatever. Super, super common. So it is like a long-term game and it's one It's one of those where like the sales rep who can stick in and build that pipeline, like they really have a pretty good size opportunity to work just like super lean team. Me, a handful of other people work hard, earn well, have high leverage over their time. Like I imagine maybe not the setting part because there's a little bit of ego versus setting or closing, but I imagine the closer who works with me appreciates the leverage that they can get out of this role. You're not going to make $30K per month selling for my community as it stands, but You can earn pretty well and feel good about what you do. So there's that. I think too, like, so I recently just went through the transition of getting a new guy in after having one guy in who had been with me for over a year and we had worked together on other stuff previously as well. I'm pretty sure in the month that this guy has been here, it's like almost a month, he's self-set and closed and gone and recovered 3, 4 deals.

4.

Maybe. And like, that's just work that other— like, it was never the expectation for the other closers to do that stuff. So I feel like as a business owner, I get more juice out of the squeeze. This person is a little bit more in tune with what it takes to get calls on the calendar and capitalize. And I feel like the 15% closer is a little bit more incentivized to operate in the best interest of your business. That means capitalizing on the leads that come in and don't book and following up and just like squeezing the juice out of every Opportunity. There's definitely a higher level of accountability too. If this is like the only person on the team or you've got like 2 of these guys, 3 of these guys, it's like, dude, you own everything from lead to closed deal. There's been a resurgence of— I don't want to call it a resurgence, but there's been an increase in the way that people are measuring performance with sales teams. And one of these metrics is different variations of it, but it's basically like for every lead that you get, how many dollars are you producing? You could call it dollar per lead, dollar per booked call, dollar per showed call. There's different ways to measure it. But I mean, this metric is, I think, a better all-encompassing viewpoint of a closer. Like, I've seen people be top closer, top percentage, most cash collected, and still get fired because certain offer owners were evaluating their decision on criteria that other people set for them. But it didn't really make sense. Like, dollar per lead is the metric. Like, I give you one lead on your calendar. I give you one booked call. What do you turn that into? And I think this just incentivizes people to own the entire process. Like if someone no-shows, someone cancels and then supposed to reschedule but doesn't, like this allows your closer to really own that entire process, especially if the expectation is set for them to do that from the beginning. 10% is good. Or like if we're looking at standard setting commission, 5% is good, but it's really hard unless they're just extremely bought into you or the company or the vision. It's really, really hard to get them to go above and beyond because they can just, just about plug Plug in anywhere else at 5 or 10% and earn the same, if not more. So having buy-in, having like the relationship definitely is going to help you incentivize the 15% closer. But then also like once they start to see like, hey man, I do this setting work, I get more appointments, I close more deals. If my dollar per lead is, let's call it $1,200 and I could get, let's call it dollar per call. Like if my dollar per call is $1,200 and I can set an extra 2 calls per week, I mean. $1,200 times 2, $2,400. That's an extra $10K. That's an extra $1,000 in their pocket on a part-time schedule. Like, I feel like the ego in this space is holding back a lot of setters and closers. You know, I work on behalf of the setters and closers, and I kind of try to have their best interest in mind. When I say this, it's like, if you're going to go above and beyond, make sure it's an opportunity worth doing that in, where you've got the proof of concept that the offer sells, that people want it, that person you sell for has a good reputation. But this person that comes in and owns almost full cycle, I don't I don't want to call it quite full cycle because like the way that we run our funnel, it's a lot of organic. And honestly, it's not like as much setting as I would consider full cycle, but it's like a really high ownership funnel. Like the person that you bring in has to be the right person. They have to be hungry. They have to have drive. You can't coach people on that. I can coach someone on skill and objection handling if I have the time, which is another thing. 15% closer needs to come preloaded. They need to come ready to go because if I'm paying someone an extra 5% to own this shit, I want them to own it. I don't want to be in here anymore. You know, like, get me out. I'm going to pay you more. Get me out so that I can focus on other things like driving you more calls and fulfilling on the service that we sell. So they need to be ready, out of the wrapper, high drive ownership. It can't be too much volume on the setting side or the closing side, or else this is going to slip through the cracks. Hypothetical situation, my next steps if this 15% closer became overloaded is I would either hire in another one, which I would try to avoid. Maybe I would take a little bit of overflow myself to see if this is a trend that lasts. Otherwise, I would probably get in a phone setter and let the closer do closer duties, and we might have to negotiate commission, but I don't see that being a thing. Just like my thought process looking into that forward. I was talking to my guy through voice notes, I think this past weekend, about how, you know, there's a lot of ego around fat cat closers. I only want to take inbound leads. I don't want to dial. And it's— there's different reasons why people may or may not want to do this stuff. But like a lot of people think of dialing and they're like, yeah, I'm going to call year-old leads that don't even want— like they barely even showed interest to begin with. Keep in mind, when I'm talking about this 15% closer, I'm not telling them to dial those people. I'm telling them to dial people that opted into free trainings, lead magnets, resources, filled out our application partially but didn't book it in full. Right now we're having a little bit of a slower month compared to September. I mean, I partially dropped the ball on all the stuff that books us a lot of calls because I've been building out infrastructure to do this with like AI. Not that I'm making AI-generated content, but it's like to give myself the time to make original content and then have AI do all the heavy lifting on the backend in terms of distribution. So I've been dialing that in, a little low on calls, but my sales rep on a down month, Is still slotted to make a good amount of money, like a competitive closer income. And I mean, dude, I think we've just— he's been here for a month. I think we've been able to accelerate things at a faster pace than if he was just doing setting or closing. He is the only guy. But if I look at some of his just rough stats and keep in reference, we've done $100K months a couple of times. We don't really hover around there. We hover a little bit lower. I'd like for that to be the floor. Again, this In the name of the High Ticket Sales Podcast, I want to run this business in a way that cash flows good but doesn't take away from my life and me doing what is fun and important to me. I've been the sales manager on teams that went from zero to a mil a month. It's just a different kind of beast for my personal business that's service-based, fulfillment-heavy. I kind of want a lifestyle business that cash flows well. So I was going to look at some of the stats here. So like right now, just so you guys can understand the quality of the funnel, actually, I'm going to look at the August stats. So he came on for like 14 days. Close rate on calls scheduled, not calls showed, not offers made, scheduled call to close was 31%. Close rate on first calls that showed up, 45%. Close rate on offers made, 47%. And that includes like 2 or 3 deposit closes that weren't registered here. Dollar per lead, dollar per show metrics were all between $1K and $2K. The dollar per show revenue metric was over $2,000. So This is someone who has sales training, has been in this space for a while. Like you need someone who's going to come in and just be an assassin who's like, if it's slow, if there's no calls on the calendar, they don't think about, oh, how this, how this sucks. Like they've seen the potential. You also have to provide them the opportunity for them to feel the potential themselves. This isn't a dumb person. And then like they show up when it's slow and just like work as if it's not slow. They go and get resourceful, like do thoughtful follow-ups. That's another thing with a 15% closer. You're going to get probably, hopefully, Good follow-ups. Like our go, we use GoHighLevel pipeline is so dialed. It's so dialed. GoHighLevel pipeline stages, the way that follow-ups are queued, did not book sequences, all this stuff. And it just comes back to the whole theme of ownership because I could dial in these GoHighLevel pipelines, automations, all this. But like if the guy doesn't go through and do this and like do this stuff and move the leads and contact the leads, like it's not worth anything. Like I will have no visibility into anything valuable if he doesn't do that. So I think, you know, I've gone through my fair share of closers on this offer, paid 10%, paid 15%, did 15% with no setting, did 15% where setting was the standard. 15% where setting is the standard has proven so far to be really, really good for us. Really, really good for him. I prefer small, lean teams where there's less variables out floating in terms of what people can do and what they can say and how they can mess things up. So I kind of like to have super small team, have the control, and just scale that way. Now our ticket size is like, depending on the package, mid-4-figure. Investment. And so 15% may not be what needs to happen for you to get the same type of output from somebody. But I would also like to explain some of the intricate details like self-gens. We do pay a flat fee for self-gens. A lot of people have been in our funnel already, but if they fell out of our funnel without any serious communication, we will pay a full flat fee, self-gen fee, not a percentage-based. If they've been in our funnel and had meaningful conversation, And fell off, we will pay a partial self-gen fee, flat fee again. Another thing is financing. So like increased commission depending on the deal size that you're closing and the financing that you have. Like if you ever use these like Payva or Splitit, man, they take a lot. Some of these take even more like a ridiculous amount. So we naturally started charging more for payment plans just to make it worth us as a business not to lose all of our margin. And depending on the payment method used, if it's something that has super, super high processing fees, then this 15% closer may or may not get commission on the full amount. They will get 15%, but the markup that is for the split pay, regardless of financing or internal or credit card or whatever, they may not get that 15% on. We have a threshold that's set pretty much if the financing is above this amount in processing, that extra money that we charge goes towards that. Otherwise you get it. One of my biggest mistakes when I first brought on a 15% closer is Even though the call volume wasn't full-time, it was like 2 to 4 calls per day. I didn't set the expectation that this was full-time. And now I can very easily see how even with just limited lead flow, like opt-ins per day to different resources, like this can be full-time. And if you have someone who's earning like on a bad month, $5,000 to $8,000, I think that's enough to require basically full-time commitment and expect full-time commitment Output pretty much. And keep in mind, this is a bad month, $5K to $8K on like a call or 2 a day. Now, if you're a sales rep watching this and you're on a smaller team, this is one thing that I did with my consulting clients that I do the sales management stuff with. They basically go in as closers and then pitch themselves as a sales manager, take ownership over those other things, take the extra percentage, and now they're making more and they have the management spot slotted when it's needed when they start to hire other people. I think There's a lot of room in a lot of these teams to offer services, to offer help around things that they don't know that they need or they don't realize it's important. So if you can dig into what these business owners have and they're evaluating you as a closer, but they don't have a setter and you see there's opportunity, throw it on top and take $15,000. Same thing for the sales management. They don't have the sales manager, but they don't have anyone watching the numbers, building the flows, doing all this stuff on an offensive basis. Throw the $5,000 on there and take both. Be the closer manager hybrid. Be the guy that actually pushes this forward. That's one thing that's pretty invaluable amongst sales reps is the sales rep that takes the initiative to improve the role regardless of their pay. We don't want anyone out here doing free work, but if we know that by them doing more and being better, they make more and the business makes more, like why would we not make that the standard? Another thing that is maybe unique to this type of position is like I have one 30-minute meeting weekly with my sales team. And one of the guys is setter-closer combo or like closer who sets a little bit. And everything else beyond that is just voice notes. It's texts. And I feel like if you're not doing insane revenue and you don't have this huge sales force, why are we spending more time on calls? Like my idea of someone crushing this role is not them being Jordan Belfort. That's a lot less outside of my control than it is for me to market towards the right people and get people on the calls. That are easier to sell to and that should buy our product versus driving low-quality leads and trying to close anything with a pulse that gets on a call. So that's another good thing. They do need to come out of the box ready to go. But I also don't want to put the livelihood of my business into the hands of someone who needs to work financial gymnastics just to get a deposit for a payva split pay. So you need to be capable, but that doesn't mean we should build the process around his ability to do something like that. So I am in some senses a sales manager, but honestly with the AI, with the tracking, we have end-of-day reporting, the systems, the processes, the team that I have, like I'm more of a marketer than a sales manager. Well, I, I do a lot on the fulfillment side too, but like the guy in the role at 15% commission should be self-managing to the point where I tap in, see what's going on. I can already kind of see what's going on from the numbers, from our reporting, and then relay that to other parts of the business, be it content, fulfillment, client success, admin, whatever. And the machine grows. So here's my bull case for the 15% closer, how to hire the right person, get the right person in, guide them, support them, set the proper expectations. It's a little bit unorthodox. It's worked really well for me though, and it's working even better for me now that I've got someone in who's taking a lot of ownership over the leakage that happens naturally in any funnel. So Give it a try. If you need a 15% closer and you're a business owner, just hit me up. Send an email to the email that you're about to see at the end of this podcast. I don't charge for anything. I'll post a job for free if it's quality. And if you're not doing $500K+ per month or even like $300K+ per month, you could probably benefit by having a closer who does this. It keeps them in tune with what it takes to get these people on the calendar to make the most, I think, The incentives are truly aligned. It is in your best interest to have a sales guy that's incentivized for the right reasons. And I really don't see, like, even if we start making, in the event that we just blew up the business overnight in a good way, I really don't see why I would want to pivot to the traditional 5 and 10 model. Like I would rather just have another guy like this. And especially when you have one that could lead the way. So anyways, guys, that's why I'm bullish on the 15%. Closer, 10% closers, fat cat closers. Your days are numbered, man. Your days are numbered. That's it for this podcast. Thank you guys for tuning in. Like, subscribe, do all that stuff. I'll see you next time.

Well, you made it to the end. Thanks for tuning in. If you like this episode and you want to catch future ones, be sure to like and subscribe. I'm kind of just releasing these when I feel like I should. As of now, there's no formal schedule for new episodes, but if you think there should be, comment down below.

I want these to be fun for both of us.

Last thing, if you have something cool to share or you want to be a guest or you want to recommend a guest, Or you just want to complain about how bad this episode sucked, you can email me at dylan@serialsales.co. Thank you again for watching.

I'll see you next time.