ve BINAR The Science of Sales Hiring

Welcome, everybody. Welcome to this latest edition of our webinar. We are happy to have you. We're happy to have Rocky as our guest, and we're covering the topic of sales hiring. A few housekeeping notes. We're recording this session and we'll make it available afterwards on our website and on our YouTube channel. Channel. We will have a Q and A at the end, but for the first 25, 30 minutes, Rocky and I will chat and warm us up to the topic, and then we'll open up the mics for you all to be asking questions. Rocky, instead of me introducing you, why don't you introduce yourself and give us a little feel for why you're the right man to talk about sales hiring.

Well, thank you, Hannigan. Thank you for allowing me to be a guest here today. I know we've been talking about this for a long time, and in the first five minutes here, we were just talking about how what a black hole sales hiring is for a lot of business leaders. So, Rocky, the grown I've been in the sales development, sales hiring business for about 35 years. We've worked with 200 different industries, plus thousands and thousands of salespeople. 200 different industries brings us a lot of different best practices. And so when you think about sales hiring and the mistakes that are often made, it causes about a 75% failure rate in our world with our process and our tools will get you a 95% success rate. So we've been doing this a long time and we've taken all the best practices from everybody, and we really look at sales hiring from a different lens than most people. So today I hope that we can share some great best practices and help people walk away from here with some nuggets that'll prevent them from making a hiring mistake again.

Well, let's start with the some of the statistics that we put out there. When we promoted the webinar, we said that traditional interviewing is only 14% accurate. I, you know, from my personal hiring experience in the sales space, I, you know, I always said if I got more than 50% right, I was doing a good enough job. And I said it jokingly, but apparently I beat the statistics by far. Where's that number coming from, Rocky?

You know, it was a study that I read back about two years ago, and I cannot quote where it came from, but you can talk to any sales consultant, business owner, fractional leader, and I think everybody would agree that traditional interviewing just is not that great. And whether it's 14% or 20%, it's certainly trusting of our gut. And when we're wearing rose colored glasses or we get emotionally involved and we need a salesperson and somebody shows up and they look good and they sound good and they act good and we think we've got all the bases covered. We're not really looking in depth enough from a scientific standpoint. And we believe that there should be another third party set of tools and eyes and a different approach to sales hiring because the traditional process just doesn't work. The traditional method for hiring salespeople just doesn't seem to cut it.

Yeah, I mean, obviously hiring the right people is relevant for whatever function you're hiring for. Is it a particular problem in sales? And why is it a particular. And if. Why is it a particular problem?

Yeah, great question. So let's say that maybe we own a manufacturing center and we're going to hire head of engineering and we identify what that job description is, what the task, what duties, what the leadership capabilities need to be. And we, you know, send that to hr. We write an ad, we place it out there. The engineers resumes come in, they look good, we go through the process, we interview them a couple of times. We have them interview with some other team leaders, some other executives, and we make the decision to hire this particular person. You bring them in, you give them their workspace, their tools, introduce them to people and you know, within about 30 to 45 days they have settled in and they become part of the community and the organization and they're doing great. When you think about salespeople, when they're hired, you write the ad based on the job description, which is typically wrong. It talks about the task, the duties, the companies and the opportunity. It doesn't describe the ideal salesperson, it doesn't identify those competencies that are required to be successful in that role. It doesn't talk about what kind of rejection they're going to have. But same thing happens, they place the ads, salespeople send their resumes, which everybody looks like a superhero as a salesperson on the resume. Right. Never seen a bad resume. And they all have one presence club. And somehow. So what's important on the resume is what's not on the resume. But once those resumes are sorted through and you know, they bring them in for an interview or two, salespeople are really good at first impressions. They're naturally good at having conversation and they're usually better interviewing and telling the interviewer what they want to hear than the interviewer is and asking the right questions. And so it's different in sales because sales is dysfunctional. And I can say that because I are one. But when you think about the interview and the process, then they get hired and now they're competing. They're competing with the internal resources, they're competing for the sales manager's time, they're competing for leads, they're competing in the marketplace against the competitors. They're competing against the other dollars that are being spent on other things in the organizations that should be spending money with us. And so it's a whole different world. And we have to look at it from that lens and be able to do things differently to cause the salesperson to expose their strengths and expose their weaknesses.

One thing that you mentioned is the fact that salespeople are really good in, in conversations and first impressions. It is their job to sell themselves. Because if you're in B2B sales, the first thing you sell is yourself. And then you sell the product or service that you came to present.

Yeah, right. Yeah, absolutely.

So the other statistic that we quoted in the invite is the, the 10 million candidates that lie on their, on their res. Can you talk a little bit about the, the, the accuracy and the, the quality of resume writing?

Yeah, I think most of them today that we see are written by Chat GPT or some type of AI or some kind of resume program out there. And you know, again, they all look good and they sound good. And, and so what's important is not what's on it, but what's not on it. You know, it's like, okay, you made president's club. Well, how did you do that? How many sales did you make to do that? Were those sales current clients that you didn't really have to work for? How many new clients were they? What was the sales cycle for that? What were the price points? What was the competition in that? How did you overcome that? What were the biggest objections? And so we need to look at a lot more in depth of what that information is saying. When you think about, you know, tenure, I think another stat that we had in there was the Average tenure is 18 months for salespeople. And a lot of companies are throwing out resumes for great salespeople because they believe it's job hopping. But I don't care if they left, if they were bettering themselves. What I want to look at on the resume as well is what's the pattern? So if they've left their job every time they changed in the first quarter, then that tells me as a leader, I need to start looking to Motivate this individual in the fourth quarter and get them on a high note before they go into their natural biorhythm. Low point. And sales is always up and down, and we've got peaks and valleys, but I need to look to see what is their normal rhythm and where do I need to start motivating. Because if we start motivating when we're going down the hill, it's too late. We got to start on the three quarters of the upside to keep that valley at a higher point. So the resume can give me tons of information that most people just don't know what to look for.

And you said earlier it's. It's what's not in the resume.

Right.

It's the things that were not mentioned that, that, that are equally important or maybe even more important.

Yeah. So you had the biggest account in the company. Well, was it a family member? You know, was it, you know, your cousin who was working this place that got you in? I mean, we want to know more. I was interviewing the client, a debriefing interview with a client last week, and he says, yeah, well, this guy really loves training. He said he'd been through this and that and he loves it. He's always looking for training. And I'm like, okay, well, I would expect a salesperson to say that. Right. Did you ask them what they learned from the training? Did they ask them what they're applying today from the training? Did you ask them what kind of results have they seen from that training? So it's really going the second, third step beyond just what's on the surface.

Yeah, I mean that then, now we've moved on into the, the interview.

Right.

And how, what type of questions to ask, what information to look for. Can you give us a picture of what you think the best practice looks like for interviewing salespeople?

Sure, sure. The, the first thing we would recommend, obviously, is a phone screen. Right. Once the candidate has, you know, passed through the stages that we've got set up the candidate assessment tools that we use, we can talk about that a little bit later. But the, the first thing I want to do is try to put them in the same environment they're going to be in when they're in front of your clients and your prospects. Right. So most people would start a phone screen like, hey, Henning Rockley grown. I had us down for a call today, wanted to spend a little time with you and, you know, ask you a few questions. And, and so they're nice and they're polite and they make it easy for the salesperson. So I'm not saying we want to be rude, but I'm not going to make it easy for the salesperson. It's going to start off like this. Hinting. I had us down for a call today at 3 o'. Clock. Is it still good for you? This call is to determine whether or not you are going to be invited in for an interview. I need to ask you four questions and then based on the ad, based on the job, I want to put that candidate on the spot, let's see how they perform. And then I'm gonna, I'm gonna send them away. I want to treat them just like the prospects do. Heading. I'm not sure if you're going to be one of the three that we bring in for a face to face interview. We'll let you know. I mean, that's what prospects do, right? They give you a thinking over a stall, a put off. And the good salespeople can help overcome those and put some, you know, parameters around that. So. Or the candidate's not going to do that. So I want to see how they perform. Then when we get them to the face to face interview, whether it's a zoom interview or some kind of, you know, platform like this or face to face, I'm not going to go. Hey, Kenny, thanks for coming in today. Have a seat, we'll be right with you. It's, it's. I don't want to help them build bonding and rapport. We know most salespeople can do that, but let's see how they do it. Maybe I start with Hanning. I'm really sorry. I was hoping to have 30 minutes. I only have 15. Tell me about yourself. Let's see how they respond to that. I want them to say, hey, that's a nice wallpaper. Hey, you know, it sounds like you're really busy. Maybe we should reschedule. You know, I want to see what they do because when they go see your prospects and your clients, they're, they're not going to be saying, oh, come on in, let me tell you all about our problems and what we do. They're going to say, so what you got for me? How can I, how can you help me today? You know, you got that best price. We're really happy with xyz, so why should we do be be doing business with you? They're going to put pressure on them. So let's kind of build those interviews out like that. But be nice, polite, respectful, but don't make it easy for them. Yeah. And let's have them expose. You know, I want to know if your, if your job requires hunting, I need to know that they can hunt and that they will hunt. And so I can't just ask, well, this job is going to require a lot of prospecting. How do you feel about that? I mean, that's kind of like, oh, every salesperson. I love prospecting. I love meeting new people. I just enjoy that. But in reality, I want to ask the question to kind of covertly find that out. Hinting this territory is doing about a million, we should expect it to be doing about two and a half million. Assuming we made you the offer and you accepted, how would you go about building that marketplace in this territory? What would be your first three steps? That's when you're going to hear, well, I would cold call or, well, what kind of leads do you provide? That tells the tale right there. Hitting on your last job when you were developing new business, what did your call sound like? You were making calls. Right. Let's role play, put them on the spot, make them role play. If they haven't been doing it, they can't do it. If they can, if they have been doing it, they can. And that's not harsh for salespeople. We know a lot of people that are not in sales think that's too harsh, but it's not. That's what sales people expect. That's what we do. Right. So I think the interview itself is really critical. I think the way you run that interview and the way you put them off again in that first interview, I'm going to give them a stall, I'm going to put them off. Henning, I'm not sure you're going to be the right person that we're going to bring back for the second interview. We'll let you know. Again, I want to hear questions, I want to see how they respond, how do they deal with that, put off. And if they just take it, then that's what they're going to do in front of your prospects. Right. When your prospect says, well, I got to talk to the accounting about this, or we got to talk to the engineers, or we got to talk to whoever, oh, great, we're going to call you back. Instead of what's that conversation going to sound like? Tell me a little bit about that. So I think the interview in of itself is really critical. I think the ads to attract the right people and where you place those starts that off. And then obviously, as you move through that hiring process, I I want to test them every chance I get. If they are somebody that's going to be someone I want to pursue, I want to give them a project between the first and second interview.

So I was definitely an interviewer that or I am an interviewer that's more on the nicer side. And I know that because when I, when I turn people away and told them that they, that we decided not to go forward with them, they were always surprised because they felt that we had a really nice conversation and they took it as a signal, as a buying signal on my part that I was going to hire them.

Yeah, yeah. And, but that's salespeople too, right? I mean, most of them wear Happy years instead of being a little bit, you know, maybe I'm not sure about this opportunity. Let's, let's be a little more, you know, conservative as opposed to going, oh, they said they love me. It's like, you know, the golden retriever going to get the paper every morning.

You mentioned assessment, assessment tools earlier. What role do you see them play in the hiring of salespeople?

Well, we've been using a tool set for about 30 years now. That is a sales specific assessment. It's not personality. Right. So if you kind of look at assessments and, and there's obviously lots of different thoughts around this and we've probably all done or heard of Myers Briggs, which most people don't know, that Myers and Briggs were Carl Jung's second wife and stepdaughter. And so Carl Jung carried on his work from Freud. Freud, you can trace all that stuff back to Socrates and Plato. And there are some fantastic assessments out there. They would typically fall into three categories. Personality assessments, which, you know, kind of tell you if somebody's warm and friendly, amiable, they can make friends, if they want to sit in the corner and work with numbers, if they're hard charging a type players, or maybe they're peacekeepers. Right. Well, those assessments kind of assume that because somebody can build relationships, then they can go and make sales, but that's just not true. Because if all of our friends or clients, we could say that's true, but all of our friends are not clients, so that's not true. And making friends does not make sales. While relationships are important, that doesn't make the sale, that gets in the door, that gets you the leverage to ask tough questions, but it doesn't make the sale itself. So personality assessments are misleading for sales success predictability. The next might be behavioral where you take a group of people and say, here's the top performers in this industry or this company or this team or this organization. And these are the behaviors that we've identified that are making them successful. Well, I can't disagree with those behaviors or any of those studies, but what they don't do is they don't look at the bottoms. And those bottom performers have some, if not all of those same behaviors. So behavioral assessments are misleading for sales because sales is different. Right. It's not about what behaviors we normally have. It's what behaviors do you have when you're under pressure in front of six people, with your job on the line, with the competition in the next room, with your boss breathing down your neck, with all kinds of other things happening that don't happen in other worlds. And so behaviors are misleading. And the third would be aptitude. So I don't know if anybody plays golf, but let's suppose you've been watching golf and you see that Schaefer, number one golfer in the world, he's won several tournaments this year so far. Fantastic to watch. Let's suppose Henning, you and I went and played golf with him and he gave us a lesson and he taught us how to curl the ball and fade the ball and hit it high or hit it low and put 40ft and come out of the sand and, you know, shoot a 62. Well, at the end of the day, we would have the aptitude, but we wouldn't be able to go play in the pga. And so just because you know something doesn't mean you're going to do it. So this assessment that we use is based in sales. We're looking at sales competencies. It's grit. Do you have enough grit to sit there and ask more questions? Will you get through the learning curve on the hiring side? Will you study enough? Will you be able to take concepts and use them quickly? What's the ramp up factor? Do you take responsibility or do you make excuses for lack of results? So, so in this assessment, we're looking at 21 core competencies. And each competency has attributes that make those competencies up. They're not one dimensional. And so when we look at the client's business model and identify the ideal salesperson, what are the behaviors, what are the attitudes, what are the skills, what are the. And when I say behaviors that's different than the assessment behavior, that's behaviors like how many calls are you making, how many people do you need to meet with those kind of activity behaviors? And then once we can customize that role, then all of these 180 unique findings are weighted based on that role. And so this third party assessment gives us really a scientific approach because we've got two and a half million people that we've evaluated, we've 36,000 companies. It's amazing the data that we can pull out of there to say this salesperson will be successful in this role, this salesperson will not be successful. So we're the only ones that make a recommendation, people that are recommended. And this is third party studies that have to validate this for EEOC. Third party studies say that 92% of the people that are recommended and hired are with the company a year later and exceeding expectations, 75% of those people that are not recommended but hired anyway don't make it past six months. So you've got science in your favor if you follow that. And the assessment in and of itself is amazing. But there are other pieces to the puzzle that really make a great hire. It's not just the assessment saying recommended or not recommended, because we're not recommending that you hire them, we're recommending that you move them to the next step of the interview. And so when you think about using assessments, a lot of companies will use the assessment on the back end of the hiring process where they got two or three candidates because they don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for each report. Well, these are unlimited. So we want to put them on the front end of the hiring process and automate that and really provide a great candidate experience to help them understand why we're asking to complete a questionnaire early and then through that interview and hiring process. By the time you get to the second interview, it's pretty easy because the second interview is what most people want to do on the first interview and that's sell the opportunity and sell the company.

So hiring managers that are not professionals, that are not in sales, are probably the most challenged in interviewing salespeople. Now there's a whole group of professionals out there, recruiters that are supposed to help those individuals and do at the very least some form of pre screening. I mean, what role do you see them play today in a scenario where, you know, only 14% of interviews are accurate?

Well, I would tell you that we've worked with a lot of recruiting firms and there are some fantastic recruiters out there. They are few and far between what we see. And if anybody on the call is a recruiter, I want to apologize up front. This is not aimed at you because there are some great ones out there. But most companies that go the Recruiter route. Right. So when you think about hiring sales people, you got three options. You can do it yourself. You got a 75% failure rate. It's a lot of trial and error, and it's very costly. When you think about making a higher mistake, you can go to recruiter. And that recruiter, typical recruiters would say, give me your job description. I've never read a job description. That's right. They take that job description, they go out to the marketplace, their database, and they go, hey, I think I got five or six candidates. They call them, they ask them if they're interested, and then they sell them on the opportunity, and then they call the client and say, hey, I got a great candidate for you. I've interviewed. What they really did was sell them on the opportunity. And so our tools and our process make it harder for recruiters because we're going to raise the bar, and we're going to make sure that those salespeople that get through the door have the selling skills that are capable of the position. Now, they may not have the technical skills. They may not want to travel. They may not have, you know, the other things that are required for the position, but we know selling. So then the recruiter hopes that that client hires that candidate, and they keep them for 90 days so they get the balance on their pay. And we believe it's just better to teach clients how to do this. So in 2001, I left a franchise organization. I couldn't be in the sales development business, so I started a sales recruiting company. We nationalized it. We franchised it in five years. We had to replace one person, and we were placing a lot more than one person a month. So it wasn't just one person we placed in five years that we had to replace. And so we. When we sold it, I took all the processes and all the tools and all the things that we had done to be successful there and just said, let's teach companies how to do this. Instead of charging them 20, $30,000 per position, we can hire several people for half of that and teach them how to do it instead of doing it for them because they need to be involved.

Yeah. You already mentioned the cost of a bad hire. Can you quickly sort of outline all the factors that business owners should include when they make a calculation about what it would cost them if that hire doesn't work out?

As long as it's okay, Adam, I don't want to make anybody throw up or get a stomachache. Go ahead. It's challenging. And when you have this conversation with business owners and presidents. It's CEOs and leaders. They just don't like it. But I'm glad you asked because there are some factors that are usually not included. And when you think about, you know, first you're going to make the decision to hire somebody, you got to start spending money on ads. You know, you can run 2, 3 ads, 2, 3 locations for a thousand bucks a month, but you're probably going to need two to three months because you may not get the first person. Especially in today's market with a candidates market. Right. Jobs report just came out. A lot more jobs got eaten up than they expected. So there's fewer people in the marketplace. But there's always good people, right? With 18 million sales people in 18 month tenure, then there's always a constant set of salespeople in the marketplace. So there's plenty of salespeople out there. The problem is the ads are wrong and they don't put them in the right location to attract the right people. But let's say you spent 2,500 bucks on advertising. Then you're going to spend time on resumes, whether it's you or an assistant executive, HR somebody. And they're going to go through the resumes and then they're going to throw out the wrong people because they're looking at the wrong criteria. And then they're going to do a phone screen, they're going to do an interview and then another interview, and maybe another interview and then maybe another interview. So some companies have five or six interviews, which great candidates don't live on the shelf very long. But by the time you add up all that interviewing time and effort, you might have 10, $15,000 from everybody's hourly time and resources. Then let's look at onboarding, right? When you think about what's it cost, well, you gotta give them a computer, phone, maybe some mileage, maybe travel. You know, there's a cost onboarding. You got payroll, of course. I mean, everybody wants straight commission salespeople. But that's rare today, especially when you think about how people are motivated. It's not always about money today. So when you look at the cost of the salary and the payroll, on top of that with Social Security and insurance and all of that, if somebody stayed eight or nine months before you stopped tolerating that they were the wrong person, you might be looking at another 80, 90 grand for the average salesperson. And then the real cost is lost opportunity. If you took your best producer and compared those nine months to this salesperson that didn't make it, what was the profitability from that? And so that's a big cost, but the really biggest cost is reputation. And if that salesperson wasn't doing their job, they're running prospects off, they're upsetting clients, you're losing business and that is priceless. So we find that when we're able to get somebody to actually go through the exercise, typically a hiring mistake is about three times what you would pay them annually. So it's huge.

So now I have a stomachache, but we'll open up the mics in a few minutes. But let me ask you sort of one final question from my end. We've talked about salespeople and that means we're talking about individual contributors. Is there any difference from your perspective when we're talking about a VP of sales or a chief sales officer, so a more senior role but still within sales?

Yeah, that's even more critical because you know, that person at the VP level is going to have influence over the sales managers and the sales managers therefore are going to influence the salespeople. And the VP also is going to have influence among the other peers at that level. They're likely going to have a lot more influence with the clients that they're dealing with and the bigger opportunities. They're likely going to have more influence over the vendors and they're going to have to be able to have the right mindsets and the capabilities and the skills even more so. So we've helped hire tons of sales managers and VPs as well. And there's a different set of criteria obviously in identifying one of those skills. But I mean, is this VP going to be somebody that's glad handing and you know, running all over the country or the world? Is this somebody that's really going to need to be a field general that is going to have to force change throughout the sales organization? Is this someone that really you just need a cheerleader or are you looking for kind of a business partner? I mean there are different levels of each of those positions. Sales manager and sales. And you know, if I'm looking for a sales manager that has run at least a team of five salespeople, that's a whole different experiment and experience than a sales manager who has had several different teams and different types of teams. Right. And then if you same, if you look at a vp, have they only had one sales manager and one team or have they had multiple teams? What is their responsibility? What's the strategy that the company is using to go to market. And all of that's got to be in alignment. And so there's even more complexity around those higher levels. But when you look at the failure rate, it's just as bad or worse. Right. Companies hire a VP and then they give them 18 months or less to make a change. And that's part of the problem. You can't make the effective change in that time period. They go in, they got to get to know the sales team, they got to get to know the business, the clients, all the things. That's six months. Or we can help you with some tools that would help you learn it in 90 days a lot faster and give you your path for success. But when you think about those VPs, usually there's two of them that are fired and then the board fires the president. Right. And that's kind of the process. So they're using the wrong criteria and they're not giving enough time and they don't have enough of the onboarding plan identified to make that successful. Yeah.

To your point.

Long answer. So the fractional model that you guys have is actually better than hiring a vp. Thank you.

We feel the same way. But to your point, a bad CEO goes through two VPs of sales before he himself or she herself is canned by the board. It's just, it's just the trickle down in a, in a hierarchy that puts the, puts a mark on the back of every sales leader and every salesperson.

Yeah. We say that the fish rises from the head up or it rots from the head down.

Yes. Okey dokey. Let's open the mics here. If you have a question, unmute yourself and I'm sure we'll put Rocky on the spot here.

I'd like to ask a couple questions if I could.

Nicole. Go ahead.

I like a lot of what you were saying as far as the comp, the core competencies and the focus, but one of the things that I find in working with is early stage founders is they have unrealistic expectations. So part of what I look at as my job is to help them understand what that sales role is. Not just the dollars they want to bring in the door. Yeah, but how much time do they want to commit to onboarding that person? You know, getting all of the enablement into place, providing a description that's realistic and a compensate compensation structure that either attracts and retains or gets rid of people. So looking at that from, from that standpoint. So I, I just wondered when you're talking about some of what I myself have been looking. I Without going too deep, I went through a number of VP and head of type interviews. And those initial round interviews in most companies is just garbage. I mean I read it in the job description. There's no reason for me to spend this time with you when everything you're asking is either on the resume or you had already shared it in the job description. There should be some extra value there or some revel revelation and maybe that's the salesperson in me, but it's a waste of time. So I also think that it's spending time with them. And how do you do those questions? But I when I heard you, you talking about the past performance, that's something that irks me even when I've interviewed for salespeople. I don't care what your past performance is if because and this is the reason why when you call for unless you have a direct person in that company, you can't really verify what the person told you unless you have a direct person that they were either there or they weren't. So for me it's about their potential and their adaptability. So it's more behavioral questions. If you were in this scenario, how would you approach this? And I liked when you, when you mentioned, you know, how will or what are your first three steps to build out this territory, you know those, those kinds of questions, how often do you run into that? I mean in, in my history and I have not done whole sales teams. I've managed peer groups and I managed sales. I work, I've coached and grown sales managers. But I've never specifically myself run a sales team. I've helped hire salespeople and I always focused on those behavioral type things like if you're in this situation, what, what are you going to do? What are these steps? You know, give me a plan for your territory. I have them build out like a proposal so at least have an idea that they have a structure and they have a plan in place. So I, so I guess the question is a couple things. Why so focused on past what they say? Because they can't really prove it. Instead of behavioral questions. And two, why are so many focused in that area instead of potential and adaptability?

Yeah. So great insight, great question, Shakole. I want to know, not that I can verify what they did, but I can verify what they did by the interview. So if I say you were making calls in your last job, how many calls did you make a week? Well, I know what's realistic and what's not. If you weren't, if you say you're making $100 a day, then you're not having any meetings. Right. If you're making $100 a day, what did you say? How many messages did you leave? What did that message sound like? You know, so it's not so much that I'm looking for their past. I'm looking for their past experience to prove that they had the experience to be successful in this role. Right. So depending on what the role is, I mean, if it's an account management role or if it's a hybrid role, then I'm going to ask a different set of questions. It just depends on, you know, what that role requirements are for success. And that will help me drive my questions to help them prove to me that they have the strengths or they have the weaknesses that are not going to make it. And, and that's also compared to other candidates. Right. So which candidates do I have the most belief in and which ones have given me the most proof? So, and then what was your second question?

So it was why? So it was more, both more focused on, on searching for potential and adaptability.

Yeah. So I, I can tell what their potential is in the assessments we use. Whether they can, you know, train, triple, double, whether they can be better. I know that. And because I've been using these assessments for years, I can look at certain findings and I can tell you if I can fix that finding in three months, they'll double their sales. Yeah, maybe, maybe different finding, they could grow 10%. You know, so I'm always looking for that potential though. I don't want to leave that out. So thank you for asking.

It just, it seems like, and this is something that I run through my career because I've been in cross roles, I've not focused on one specific industry. And one of the things that I find, find interesting is that I don't care if I have two companies that sell the same product. Their sales process, their tools, everything. How that works is different. So what I did in this role, I'll give you an example for myself as an individual contributor. I worked with an organization where we had complete support. I got in another role and they, they talked a good game. You got in it. And I, I was, they wanted me to replicate my success. And I, and I explained it like, I like you. Like, like you can type 100 words per minute. So they want me to type 100 words per minute with my hand tied behind my back. You know, you're hen pecking with your nose and, and so it's like you have to have a real good comparison. And it's not always a apples to apples comparison.

Totally get it. Agreed. Hey, we had some other questions.

Yeah, Anthony, I saw you unmuted yourself.

Oh, I didn't mean to, but I do have a question, so it's perfect.

Go ahead.

So this is kind of two sides, right? You said you'd never seen like a great, not never rare. There are still good recruiters out there.

Right.

But a lot of the times when you're in that initial process, they have a check list of things that they're going through. And I guess my question is kind of some insights on how to get them to think a little bit outside of the box. And this is more specifically around, say a company's going from a person going from healthcare into B2B SAS or B2B SaaS into cyber security. And it's like you need seven years, you need to be born in a cyber security data center in order to get a job here or you won't. Right. So overcoming those things, how do you, how do you advise those individuals to kind of take a less biased approach to the interviewees in those types of.

So what you're bringing up is a really insightful point. So if you think about your example, going from healthcare to cybersecurity or SAS to either one of those, it's like almost everybody you talk to that wants to hire salespeople, they go, well, we want successful experience in our business. Our business is different. Our industry is different. You know what, you're right, it is different, but it's all the same. You know, the fundamentals are the same. It's the application of the fundamentals that change. And what a lot of companies don't think about is the parallel industries. Right? So let's take cybersecurity. Who are they selling to? They're selling to it. Sometimes they're selling to insurance organizations, sometimes they're selling to SaaS companies, sometimes. I mean, let's. Let's don't look at so much the industry. Let's look at who are they selling to, what is their sales cycle, what is the price points, what kind of environment is the company, how often are they managed, how much resistance do they face in the market, what types of presentations they're going to make. So when we look at the ideal profile of the ideal salesperson or manager or VP for a company, I can look at that because again, the number of years I can identify ideal parallel organizations and industries where you can take somebody and move them from one industry to the Other and they will hit the ground running because they've had the same sales cycle, they're selling to the same person in the organization, their products are similar in complexity, their price points are similar, the management is similar. So let me give an example. Years ago and this hit me like 1998 I think it was. I was working with a office company, Office products, right? We used to call them copiers, but now they call them business machines. And they changed the language to make it more professional, I guess anyway. And at the same time we were working with a company like Aramark, right, Laundry, they do the rugs, they do the uniforms. And so same week I had the meeting with both companies and when I went through the client profile with them, it was identical. And so that's what hit me. It's like, okay, they, they both have a price point at the time, about 500 to 1,000 bucks. They are three to five year contracts. They have three month window to go in and pick up business from somebody who's unhappy. They or secure and maintain that business. They are selling to the office manager. It's you know, typically a three week sales cycle. They both of those industries in the early 80s put a ton of emphasis on accountability. So they all had CRMs and they had tons of account management, I mean management for new business. And the managers were meeting with them on a very regular basis. So it's pretty tight management. So when you think about companies that say I want industry experience, it's like, well, do you also want industry baggage? Do you want somebody that's going to, you know, be able to go and call on your clients with a fresh perspective and help them realize you're differentiating, value you and close more business? Or do you want somebody that's going to come in and tell you why they can't do what you're trying to do? We had a trade show company we were working with and that very thing came up and we finally got him to look at it. So we hired a guy from some totally different industry. And because he was used to making cold calls, he happened to be in Maine that day. He drove by the L.L. bean store, walked in, got a meeting and sold him a $250,000 trade show booth because he didn't know he wasn't supposed to do it right? Now if you had listened to the owner, that would have never happened. And I mean they weren't huge. You know, they're probably five, six million dollars in business. But I mean this is a huge opportunity for them. So oftentimes it's helping that whoever's in charge of hiring and you know, you think about the businesses that many of us work with, they go, oh, well, let's send that to hr. Let's send that to our comptroller who's also hr. And let's send this hail the sales hiring requisition to somebody in the company that doesn't know sales. They've never sold a thing in their life. And they're going to go out to the market and interview and they're going to use that traditional approach. And it's just, that's the problem. You know, it's like, like the pig and the chicken at breakfast. Which one is committed?

Anthony, thank you for the question.

The pig is committed, right?

You think it's like hr.

HR is the, the chicken. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but they're not going to be in the president's office getting chewed out of why they didn't make the sales numbers. But the sales leaders don't get the opportunity to give the input into the sales hiring process. And that's a problem. That's got to change for companies to grow faster.

You think part of it is they're looking for a Rolodex. I mean I literally saw that on one of the.

That's fine, let's, let's pay to hire that Rolodex. Let's don't think we're hiring a salesperson. Do you have an opinion then on.

How to best leverage a partnership with the talent acquisition team? Because presumably when you were speaking earlier about, you know, that first round. Oh, my three year old's about to walk in.

When.

Hi, Benny.

When.

Sorry, I'm. You don't usually come in here, you.

Know, you were saying, you know, we shouldn't be too friendly on the first round and how do you leverage that partnership? Because I've, I've led sales teams. I've led teams.

I'm.

You're too busy to do your first round interview sometimes. So how could you be a better partner?

Well, we teach them. We teach them how to do it. Make them role play. Yeah, we help them.

Let me. Yes, Rocky, I have to thank you twice, first of all, because what you just described in response to Anthony's question is the perfect match system that we apply when we place fractional. Sales leaders go way beyond industry verticals this ask for. We want somebody from our industry. And look at the kind of sale that is happening. What are the key elements and what makes somebody successful in that sales role and then you can go to parallel industries and you find the exact same model. That's where you can get a salesperson from. Secondly, I have to thank you for being a guest on our show. How can people get in touch with you? Rocky?

There's only one Rocky the grown. Just go to any search engine, type in Rocky la groan. Or you can go to my website, salesdevelopment expert.com rockyalesdevelopmentexpert.com and we'd be happy to chat with you and see if we can help. Our goal is to help you grow faster. We do this because we want to, not because we have to. And I don't know how to do anything else. So we would love to work with you if you have interest, have a conversation at least and maybe we can help you through a couple of hurdles. Thank you, Henny. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you to the whole Vindux team.

And thank you everybody for joining. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Take care. Bye.

Great stuff. Thanks, Rocky. Thank you.