Episode #712 - Does Your Business Team Feel Motivated? With Aleric Heck of AdOutreach

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

The advantage of a growing company is that you get places for your best people to move up to. Whereas if it's a stagnant company, you know, you see this in businesses where everything's great for the owner. You know, they got the great lifestyle and everything, but it's kind of stagnant with the employees and especially problem with salespeople. And so the thing in sales is you have to get, you want two sided coin. You've got to have a good person makes a commitment to live up to it. You can trust them, good person. The other thing is a good person if they don't produce is useless. And so you've got to be a good producer. And you can't trust salespeople to keep themselves maximum motivated all the time. This is why we have coaches on athletic teams and even the pros. When they're going into the super bowl, the coach is in there just giving it to them because he can't trust. They may be average averaging $10 million a year per person. Plus they got the bonus of winning the super bowl, plus they got the ring of winning the Super Bowl. They got all the prestige bragging rights the rest of their life and they still can't trust these suckers to go out there and bust their rear and give the extra oomph, you know, so that's why the coaches just, you know. And so the thing is in running a sales force, usually you have to do things to keep the competition high. And have you run into that?

Yes, yes I have. And that's one of the big things that you know, we focus on leaderboards, we focus on. And actually, honestly those were one of the challenges that we faced a year ago was we had a sales leader that, you know, wasn't quite aligned with our company, wasn't quite kind of said, hey, that the team is as good as they're going to get, like et cetera, et cetera. Right. You want to constantly, I completely agree, be motivating the team, coaching the team, training the team. We do call reviews almost every single day, except when there's more of like a management style meeting. So we dive in and we want to make sure we're constantly reviewing the tape, we're constantly supporting them, we encourage them to dive in, do their own self call reviews, listen to their Best performing tape. But then also we want to make sure that we are putting up leaderboards. So every week, every day, Every day, they can see it every week. We're very like, clear, okay, here's the exact board that we're putting up in slack. We're talking about all the meetings we're diving in and then on the month we're looking at, okay, where did everybody fall over the course of this month and seeing where they're at. And one of the things that we do too is we have extra, you know, motivation. So in the past we've done, you know, kind of dream dinners where, you know, the top rep can earn a dinner. We've also done dream vacations where we've given away for like a quarterly top performing, like all inclusive resort in the Caribbean. So, so there's opportunities for us to really like reward them in different ways as well and pull their attention to the leaderboard.

But any other things you can do is like breakfast with a boss, more or less, or breakfast with you. You know, they value your time as much as anything. And so if they get a chance to go off with you and do something, that's a big thing for salespeople. But it's important to know the difference between employees working behind a desk. You cannot at least I haven't found anything, you know, I've tried in incentives. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And employees sitting behind a desk, they just not relate, you know, can't relate to the competitive type thing. Even when you create a some kind of category where they can do it, they just falls apart. But salespeople, salespeople, that's where they're different. Because your business, every business is a numbers business. But, but not all the employees are really geared on a moment by moment basis into those numbers. But the salespeople aren't. And you've got to have the. And the good salespeople are super competitive. Most of them will have been athletes in high school. They want something to go win, they want a prize, you know, they want something to go after. And when they're in front, they're a little bit in front of somebody else. They want everybody to know it. And so you've got to do those things. And that could be. It seems like that might have been an eye opener for you to learn the wonderful world of salespeople as you're building your company.

Exactly. Yes, it was definitely an eye opener. Is the difference on the sales side and how they need to be really motivated and inspired and also continuing to grow in Their ability to earn income, the leaderboard. They need to have something to win. I think it's not just about the monetary side, because I remember at one point, you know, somebody's there.

No, it's not just the monetary side. No. Well, you know, that's the big mistake is you. You think, I get all the money. That'll be enough. No, that's not enough competition. Yeah. And so what other things have you done other than the money?

Yeah, so. Well, other than that, we, of course, have the leaderboards to inspire that side of things. And we also have the dream vacation. So each quarter giving away a vacation, a top rep, and then we've done dream dinners. We've done. We've also done a few different times kind of ways to motivate them to put an extra. Like, for the appointment setters, the specialists. Like, all right, we're going to do like a Saturday jam session, and we're going to give doordash cards. You guys are going to get lunch, but we're going to, like, you know, hit the phones and tee up. This, like, last couple weeks of the quarter, whatever happens to be. So there's different things that we do to incentivize and motivate them at different times. We have in the past brought them out here to Austin. I think talking with you, I think there's actually a good. Because some of them are remote. Right. So there's a lot of, like, team members. I actually think, you know, that's probably something that we're going to want to do sooner here again, especially as we get to early in the new year here. I think we'll have another one of those.

Yeah, the face to face thing is important for salespeople to, you know, they need things to reach for, but then they need to see the people that do it, and you can have a lot of fun with it. I won't get into it, but I used to have a. I heard about the Banana Award early in my career, and you'd have guys making six figures fighting over the banana, you know, the top banana for the month. The idea behind the Banana Award is that you win the banana and you eat it. You don't stick it up in the wall because then it'll rotate. If you want another banana, go win another banana next month. And so just. But then we had the top banana and the second banana. You know, I used to do the thing where the guy finished in second place. I'd have him come up and make a big deal out of him, and I give him A little tiny banana. And then I'd give him the big banana and I'd let him award it to the top banana. And I'd have that guy come, you know, you can have fun with it. But the, the, in fact, I did that once and then the next month I didn't do it. And I had the guy who had set in that month, he set all the records that company and still stand 30 years later. And he came up to me basically in tears in his suit and tie that he didn't get a banana in the banana. Oh, wow.

Yeah, it just showed. It's the competition element.

Yeah, yeah, he just said all the records. I mean he was going to a hero in the company forever. But no, he wanted the banana. And so we have to, when we're working with salespeople, we've got to operate with them the way they want to be operated with. And it's fun to hear that you're learning that because that will. The salespeople, the sales managers and all, they're the ones who you got to have that. You got to have somebody pushing that product out there. And as you go and look forward, how are you going to make this, how do you see making this a sustainable. What are you doing right now? Because you did apply, you know, you had the app review and different things. What is it that you're doing, your main thing you're doing now?

Yeah, so it's definitely ad outreach and that's empowering and helping businesses use YouTube ads to get more leads and sales and training them on that process. We have some select clients that we still run ads for. That's kind of where we're managing their ad campaigns. Those are usually high level clients, but in general the majority of our clients, we're training them on YouTube ads. We're helping them through the process, we're consulting them and we're doing that over time. And we're also adding in other elements like helping them with their YouTube channel growth and omnipresent retargeting. And essentially we want to create long term clients that we're working with consistently. So we've switched it all to a recurring revenue model. But it's still the same type of consulting, training, coaching, working with businesses on YouTube ads and YouTube. And then I also have another company called keyword search, keyword search.com that is a YouTube keyword and audience research targeting tool. It uses AI to generate audiences for YouTube ads. So the process that used to took. It used to take, I mean to say hours and hours and hours to go and research what keywords people are looking up on YouTube and on Google, what websites are going on, all of that. It could be done using AI in just a few minutes. And then you get all the different keywords. You just select which ones you want. You can sync it to Google in one click and then start targeting that audience. And so that's a software that I've created. I have CTO out here in Austin and we've developed that and that is something that all of our clients use. But also we're growing it in of its own. Right. It's a separate company and we're growing, we're doing a kind of a software play as well. And so it's mainly the consulting company, the software. I still have the original YouTube channel. I've got a small e commerce product that I'm just using YouTube ads to scale. But the main business is ad outreach, is helping, you know, businesses with YouTube.

Ads to shift gears. How has it paid off for you? I mean, the life you live now that you couldn't imagine you were getting yourself into as a young upcoming entrepreneur in the YouTube world. It paid off big for you. And so how has your life, what's your life like now?

Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. We've got an amazing, you know, office here in downtown Austin and we've got a portion of our team. About a third of our employees are here. And then, you know, we are generally a remote team, but it's also we fly out team member to fly out clients out here, you know, every quarter. But we've got like an office here, which I love. I've been dreaming about that for a long time. Kind of the energy, the excitement. And I live right down, down here in Austin. Kind of go back and forth between the office and here, but I also, I'm speaking a lot of different events, going and attending different masterminds. I've done both. I've sides of it where I've had periods of time where I've.

I've.

I haven't focused enough on events and I also had periods of time where I was doing too much. I was doing a little bit much of a tour. I found kind of that sweet spot for me. So once every one to two months I'm headed out speaking or going to a mastermind or whatever happens to be. And I also have the opportunity to go and do different trips. So a lot of those though are mastermind trips. So I might go to Cabo and speak in an event, but also be out there and mastermind with other people. Or I might. Last year I went to Germany. I spoke at the largest, you know, marketing conference there. This is marketing. And we're actually talking about the German roots of my name and your own German roots there too. So going out to Germany was a really cool experience. I got to have a lot of fun. I got to see the. It was back last November, so I.

Got to see where in Germany. Where in Germany?

Frankfurt. Frankfurt.

Frankfurt, okay.

And I had gone once before in 2019 to Munich, and that was to meet up with a couple friends. But so that was great. This was more of a business trip. And I also had a lot of fun, too. And so I think that part of it is I am doing a lot of work. Like, you know, I think that the reality of running a business, fast growing company, constantly growing, constantly learning being a CEO is I am doing a lot of things. I'm on a lot of calls. My also love what I do too. And I think that that's part of it. And that's not saying that I love every single aspect. There's definitely some things that, you know, come in. There's challenges, like I mentioned, but in general, like even hopping on here, doing amazing, like podcast, masterminding with people, attend different events, There's a lot of really great things that technically have a business element, but they're fun and they're exciting to do.

Yeah. Well, I could go on and on with you. That really enjoyed this, and hopefully you're going to do all kind of amazing things that you haven't even thought of yet, and then we'll get you back on here pretty soon. But I always let the guests have the final word to kind of sign us off. And so what kind of final word would you have for up and coming entrepreneurs that could be helpful to them?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the big thing is really to, you know, focus on how you can see that growth that you're looking to have through your ability to get in front of, you know, your ideal clients. And one great way is with video and with YouTube ads and what we're talking about. I think that one thing that really strikes me is, is and we didn't get to dive into this as much, so I think it's a good opportunity to kind of share. This is a reason that YouTube ads are so powerful. Video, so powerful is the best way, of course, to communicate with someone, to connect with someone is in person. But you go and meet every single potential person, you know, and shake hands all over the world. That that's impossible at the level of scale you want to grow. And so video is the second best thing to meeting somebody in person. You're connecting with them, they can see you, they can hear you, you're interacting, you're sharing value and you're having a call to action to lead them off to where they happen to go and they can learn more. And so I think that everybody here, I really want to encourage you to add video and YouTube ads to part of what you do. Now, you might be at a certain spot where you're kind of more organic, you're not quite ready for ads yet, or you're at a spot where you're ready for YouTube ads. But I think that I really encourage you to look at the power of video inside of your business. And I think that's a big opportunity for anybody who's listening or watching.

Fantastic. Thanks so much. It's been great talking to you and I look forward to doing this sometime again very soon.

Thank you.

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