Building Elite Contractor Sales Teams: Proven Tactics

Baseball was a passion for me, and I would take 500 cuts at strikes only, and I must make solid contact with 200 of those balls. That's a.400 batting average. Or I had to continue until I could. And I had days where I had bloody palms and blisters and all kinds of stuff, but that was outside of practice. I was like, hey, practice is over now. I'm going to go and do this. Having that mentality and teaching that, encouraging that, getting that mindset in your sales team or whatever other team, like your production team, practicing what they do outside of work itself, your administrative team, practicing what they. How can I make this thing that I do more efficient, better, cleaner, allows for us to be higher performing, which allows for us to work lower overhead, increase production, and become more profitable ultimately as a company. Yep.

Nathan, you said something interesting when we were at lunch earlier, that if you can. If you can get a training or sales training put together and implemented, you can put together any other training inside of your company. So my question is. And maybe I butchered that, but that's you right on. Why? I mean, I think that's a valid question. Why is that? Building a sustainable and successful sales team is literally one of the most difficult things you can do inside your business. There's very few things that are harder to do than that. Hiring sales guys, by itself, not particularly difficult. Getting out in the field and closing a few deals, not particularly difficult. But training people who do not need constant oversight or pushing, and people who are continually successful day after day and week over week within a period of time, that doesn't. That doesn't cause turnover.

Okay.

Because with sales, you have a limited window. With most people before they. It's not that they don't want to work for you anymore. They can't. Yeah, they've gone two weeks without a paycheck. They've gone three weeks without a paycheck. Maybe they get to four, and they're like, I simply can't do this anymore.

Mama says we gotta pay the bills.

Yeah, gotta pay those bills. So building the not only effective salespeople, but consistently effective and longevity salespeople, one of the most difficult things you can do inside your business. So the reason why building a sales training program that's effective, okay. And sustainable is kind of a linchpin to the rest of your training is that if you can do that to training people, whether they're, you know, like a greenie right. Right out the gate, maybe yesterday they were washing cars, and now we're trying to teach them how to make sales because they just have that thing that we want. If you can do that, then you can train your people to do just about anything. Fair enough.

You really want to think about what that looks like. You mentioned a key point in training and in sales. We talk about what we call time to money. How much time does it take me to teach this person the first component of what they need to have success and thus earn income? If you apply that same thought process to somebody in production or marketing or administration, they have to have success right away too. If they're not having success in what they're doing, like you said, a week, two weeks, a month, they're like, man, I'm not doing well at this. And they know it. Even though they might be earning a paycheck, they're not feeling fulfillment in their work. You have to set that up. So what is the thing that they've got to do first that gives them success?

Well, think about it. How long, how long can you hold on to somebody who isn't getting paid? So you have a little bit more time with admin and production folks because they are getting paid. But if you can get somebody effective who isn't getting paid Now, a lot of, A lot of you guys probably offer training money. In other words, you'll pay somebody to hang out while they're getting trained. Generally it's, it's really, it's not enough to live on typically, but if you can get somebody effective inside of a window where they're not really probably able to pay their bills really well, but you can get them up and running that fast. Whereas production and admin, they're probably either making a salary or they making hourly, kind of regardless of how effective they are for a period of time.

That's why we say the sales thing. If you can learn how to build that thing so that somebody can earn the money to feel success, you can build any other training because those people have more time. Although I do believe they have to have some success fairly quickly for them to continue to want to learn, to want to be a part of what you do. Structuring a sales training, what does that look like? How do you put one of those together?

It should have a schedule. There's nothing more frustrating from a new hiree standpoint than feeling like the people who hired you don't know what they're doing. And without structure, it feels like they don't know what they're doing when you get hired and they go, well, okay, so today we're gonna talk about.

How.

To put a lead in the CRM and you're like, did you just make that up? Like, was that part of the plan to begin with?

Or even better, ride along with me, you'll learn.

Yeah, yeah, you'll figure this out, you know, and like you'll instantly lose a little bit of respect by the person who just hired you. And on top of that, like we've talked about, I think we've mentioned before, what was the book was Powerful Moments. I think that makes the statement that a massive, an overwhelming number of people will know within their first day whether or not they will be at this job for a while or it's just a stepping stone.

To be specific, it's 90% of people decide to quit the job they just took within the first 24 hours. So it's a job, not a career.

You've got 24 hours worth of a first impression for this person and you have no plan on how to train them. You just sit down and go, alright, here, watch what I do now. Which is already haphazard. And they go, they don't really know what they're doing here.

Well, this connects back to what we talked about in leadership. So if you're watching any of these videos or catching these short little snippets, going back to our leadership video, we said we had to engage people in a vision and. And then the next thing we need to do is educate them. If we don't follow through with that piece that we said we were going to do, we lose them.

So you need to have a plan on what they have to learn, when they need to learn it, and a schedule to implement that thing and it helps to have some expectations set for them. Because if I say to a new hire, I expect you to be able to do this, whatever that thing is within a week, you're also making a commitment to them that you are going to help them be able to do that. And you walk into a program where somebody already has that all laid out and you're like, great. You walk into a program where they have no idea what they're doing and it's clear from the outset you're already thinking, did I make a mistake here?

Yeah. I think whenever a great coach starts doing training, first off, like you said, there's a schedule to it, but that schedule looks something along the lines of the very first thing I'm going to do in my coaching is I'm going to connect the value of what we're going to be doing over these next three days. A week, 30 days, whatever they are, to what the ultimate result is going to be, that we're going to accomplish this thing, this is what we're trying to do, and connect that dot real quick about that up front. Then probably the next thing they're going to do is they're going to coach and teach on the actual culture of the business. They're going to talk about that first. Like, this is who we are, this is what we're about. This is why we do what we do. This is our mission. This is the things that we're trying to accomplish that benefit you and allow you to achieve your goals in life and give you the skills to reach your potential while you're here. Because if you don't set that foundational side of your training first before you actually get into the content of the training, it's hard for them to connect the skills and effort that they're applying to the why they're doing it and the benefit to them.

Well, you have to think of your new employees the same way you think about a new customer. You have to think about them the same way. Because if we all get a little buyer's remorse sometimes, especially when we make a big purchase, we go, oof, should I have spent that amount of money on that thing with that person? Now imagine somebody just made a career move with your business, and so they need to connect as quickly as possible. They need to feel that belonging. Right. If you're the person in charge of training them, okay, consider yourself production after the sales guy closed a deal. So the customer loves the sales guy, otherwise they probably wouldn't have hired your company in the first place. Sales guy is now handing them off to the rest of the team to get the work done. And then they don't hear from production for two weeks. They don't know what the next steps are or the next steps that were promised to them aren't being done. So all the promises by the person who did your recruiting and hiring now have to be fulfilled by the next person in line. And so those two people need to be in line. And then that new hire has to begin to feel that the promises that were made to them are being fulfilled.

A lot of times it's the same.

Person, and sometimes it's the same person.

Same person that's the coach, the trainer, and everything else that's doing the hiring. Especially smaller organizations, it could be the owner bringing somebody new on and training them, or they might have a sales manager a little bit bigger organization that if we don't Follow through right away with what it was we said we were going to do. The trust is broken. And once you break trust, it's hard to get it back, hard to get that respect back. So there should be a plan. Like that very first day, for example, in my contracting business, that very first day when they showed up, there was something special going on immediately. First off, everybody in the company, from me as the owner, to our leaders as managers, to the support staff and production, to the other sales reps that were in there, whoever was training, it didn't matter. Sales, administration, production, everybody knew who that new person or new people were because we would train multiple people at one time. Everybody had to be there. Like when they showed up, hey, welcome to team. I've heard a lot about you. You're going to be a great part of what this. And you get that belonging aspect first. Like, wow, they took this serious. Like, that wasn't just something that he told me in the interview. It was real. And then they walked into the training room. Their name was on the board. We had a gift sitting in their. In their seat. Yeah, like, well, and it does. It relates to recruiting, hiring, onboarding. And we're going to talk more about that in that. In that video. But that's how that training starts, is they start to belong. Then you're coaching them on why you do what you do. Then you start to get into the things that they do in the order in which they do them. So first thing we're going to do is this. And so if you are a company that's a retail company, relies on leads and stuff like that, well, first interaction on an appointment, what does that look like? What's the script? Let's practice it. Let's role play it. Let's walk those steps through. If you're more of a company that the people coming in for you are canvassers. Okay, what does a door knock look like and how does that go? And we practice that until we have that down first before we start to move on to the other things so that they can have success.