How Do I Build a High-Performing Sales Team for My Payroll Company? Scott Goldberg Explains

That's part of it also. I want someone who understands not everything's going to be handed to you. You know, it's not all inbound coming to you. You got to go out there and sell the brand. People may not recognize the brand. Now, I think we're lucky at Dominion in our footprint. A lot of people do recognize our brand, but still, it's not like a big box brand.

The only thing I was really good at in sales was getting people out of my pipeline very quickly. And, you know, BANT is maybe an overused term, you know, budget, authority, need, timing, but it's so simple. If you don't have those things, why waste your time? You should not be trying to convince people to use your products and services. They have to have a need. Welcome to Payrollin', the show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, This is the podcast for you. And now here's your host, Matt Vadie.

Let's go.

So Scott, we are sitting here at September 4th, 2025. We are at the footstep of selling season doorstep. I don't know if I'm using the right word there. What is your guys' approach at Dominion to selling season? Does it change at all versus the rest of the year? Tell me a little bit about how you guys think about selling season.

Well, let me start. I think selling season really is the end game for everything you've done all year, right? I don't think you can all of a sudden turn on a switch and build a huge pipeline, particularly when you think about selling timelines for larger deals, right? Selling season, if you want to think there's a selling season, really starts July 1st. If you're not in these bigger deals for the most part by July 1st, your chances of closing them are going to be limited because somebody else is already in there establishing a relationship. I think the difference in selling season is closed mode and you have this impending event that creates urgency standing right there with January 1st starts. So our approach is leveraging the January 1st start, but it's really taking advantage of all of the work we have done during the year to build up to that. The other thing that's important to think about during selling season, you've got the final filings September 15th with CPAs. So now's your opportunity, you know, you can't go after them till April 15th. You have this little window over the summer with them, but now you got an opportunity to go out there and leverage some CPAs. So we accelerate our CPA activity after September 15th. We certainly try to get into more opportunities, but I don't look at it much differently because if you haven't done the work leading up to selling season, you're not gonna have a great selling season. That's the way we look at it. You gotta put the work in earlier.

Such a great point. So many great points, but let's, let's add some context here. So you're the chief sales officer at Dominion Payroll. You lead all outbound and inbound efforts there. Everything related to sales and the sales teams trees up to you. You've grown the business development efforts there by 350% during your time there. Tell me a little bit first about the markets, the segmentation that you guys have among your reps. You mentioned going after the bigger deals, right? So what industries, what size deals do you guys chase typically? Do you segment reps? And then let's talk about How on earth have you accomplished such success in that role since you've been there?

Yeah, organizationally, we have 35 people in the sales organization. We've been as high as 42. Trying to do a little bit more with less this year and drive ASPs up, right? So that, that's one thing we are trying to do. And we changed our hiring profile a little bit to accomplish that with a little more experienced reps. We were looking for that 1 to 3 year window. Now we're looking for more experience. And driving the ASPs. So for those of you who don't, who may be listening to this at some point, who don't know Dominion, we are a national organization. We have offices in Denver, Louisville, Dallas, Nashville, Tampa, Columbia, South Carolina, and our main office in, uh, in Richmond. So we have people throughout the country. I don't really operate under territories, or we don't operate under territories, the organization. And I will tell you, we maybe have 2 conflicts a year. We do have some segmentation with CPA-centric and bank-centric. We do have a CPA and bank-centric team, which has been very successful for us, but I want everyone going after everything. And that really gives us some leverage when we're recruiting. They can sell 1 to 5,000. You know, there's a sweet spot we all target based on our service models and things, but I want everyone going after everything. I want them to have the transactional business of 5 employee weekly, and then I want them to get the 700-man biweekly. So from that standpoint, it allows them to fill their funnel with multiple opportunities, keep their confidence up that they're always closing something.

Let's talk a little bit about that because I'm actually going through this right now. I've got a new sales rep I'm onboarding at the moment. And, you know, I've been of the mindset of like, look, let's give you 400 listed accounts that you can call on inside of a territory. Because if I give you the whole world, then, you know, you could, you know, you get lost in the, ooh, I can sell this and ooh, I can sell that. And then you, you're, you know, when everything's your target, you have no target, right? And so the, tell me how you kind of manage that process in terms of thinking like what's the 30, 60, 90 look like when you're onboarding a new rep and trying to get them into territory and trying to get some traction early?

Well, let me clarify so they can sell $1,000 to $5,000, but we have a playbook we operate under. So each month we have a vertical that we're attacking and we start building that playbook out the previous year in October. We'll start building the playbook for 2026 next month. So we're, we're attacking when they're prospecting verticals. And then we're also prospecting a particular COI each month. It doesn't mean they're not calling other COIs, but this is where our emphasis and our marketing support will be for the month of September. And we tie that to really what's going on in the industry. And then we have an upsell product that we're focused on each month too. So we're very laser focused on what we're doing. Doesn't mean they're not doing other stuff, but they're required to be doing these things. And the 30-60-90— 30 really is training. You know, we want you all to know training. I don't want to eat our young where, hey, you're so worried about getting something over the goal line to keep your, your job, you're not getting the tools and empowerment you need to be successful over the first 30 days. 60, we're looking for you to build a pipeline. We want you to put 10 opportunities when you come outta 60 days in your pipeline, 10 closable opportunities in the next 30 days. That could be an upsell, that could be a 2-man. I don't care what it is as long as you have 10 closable opportunities. And then at the end of 90 days, we, we expect you to be, have closed $20,000.

I love that. And it's repeatable. It's easy to recognize. Now let me ask this, so when you look at— when we think about Q4, do you weight your quota in terms of annualized quota for Q4?

Yes. So we actually have first quarter is— trying to remember— first quarter is 20%, second and third quarter are 25%, and fourth quarter is 30%.

Excellent. Makes perfect sense. And you guys recognize bookings the same way. Now I remember I was fortunate enough to see you speak at the IPPA a couple years back, and when I walked away, I was like, that dude definitely works at ADP or somewhere like that because of exactly what you said, the monthly, you know, we used to do the old, you know, each rep or each month we'd have somebody else leading the campaign for the month. We'd be vertical or product focused for the month and we'd just hunker down and make a bunch of dials every week and kind of target that one product service vertical, whatever it was for the month. It works really well. I mean, that's the thing, you know, I was just having a conversation with a fellow payroll bureau owner yesterday and I was like, hey, I'll send you over some campaigns. I said, I offered up some sales assets and I was like, really nothing's changed. Like we need campaigns, right? It's got to be 8 to 12 touches. It's got to be, you know, some physical, some verbal, some on line, all the things. And that's another thing that I remember really well from that conversation at IPPA was you talked about your campaign cadence and also some of the point-based stuff you do for your reps on a weekly, monthly, annualized basis. Talk to me a little bit about that point-based stuff. Are you still doing that? What does that look like?

Yeah, we still do the points, but we've kind of shifted a little bit. So the point system is really, okay, for a phone call, each call you make, you get a point. Each email, you get a half a point. You get a demo, you get 10 points. You close a deal, you get 25 points. And the idea is you may have had an off week, but you can still feel good because you the activity, what we're really focused on now, and that's the baseline to get to the next stage. So we're tracking points, but really what we want out of the points is what we call 16 critical activity events each week. So the points lead you to the 16 critical activity events. And a critical activity event is a first-time meeting, is a demo, is a proposal, is getting a quality referral, is a COI meeting. I think I said client meeting. If you can do 16 of those a week, the combination of that, at the end of the day, if you do that consistently, you are skiing backwards downhill playing football. I mean, that's what it takes. We're still an activity-based business. So it starts with doing the work of the prospecting, the generation, the campaigns, the emails tied to our cadences. But the end result of that has to be meetings, has to be quality activity. And that's where the 16 quality activity events comes each week.. And we track that very closely. And our ultimate goal is of the 16 quality activity events and closable transactions in a 30-day window. If you have 10 closable transactions in a 30-day window, the data shows you will make your monthly quota 82% of the time. It's that simple. Data doesn't lie. And I will tell you my whole career that, that data point, because I track it closely, has never changed. It is 82%.

I love that.

Yeah.

My first boss at ADP told me, he's like, look, if you book 2 quality legit meetings every single week, you'll make President's Club. Yeah. And, you know, because there will be a whole bunch of other meetings that you have in a week that are not quality, not legit. And a lot of people fill their pipes with that stuff. And that's what, you know, having a conversation yesterday with our new rep of like, hey, the only thing I was really good at in sales was getting people out of my pipeline very quickly. And, you know, BANT is maybe an overused term, you know, budget, authority, need, timing. But it's so simple. Where if you're not, if you don't have those things, why waste your time? You should not be trying to convince people to use your products and services.

Don't blue sky yourself, right? I mean, I would rather get a no. Now, one thing that I do think is important on that is getting the no, like not letting people ghost you. And what we tell people is, and we just had somebody call back a very large opportunity yesterday and we got the no out of it earlier. Now they've called back and they're interested. If you don't get the no and something doesn't go right with the decision that they made, they're going to be too embarrassed to call you back because they ghosted you, right? Or to reach back out. If you got the no, you left it on terms with if something doesn't go right, you know, call us. So getting a no, while not as gratifying as getting a yes, is as important as getting a yes because it will come back around at some percentage.

So let's go back to— you mentioned something that is actually a mindset shift I've had in recent years too. Now, our sales team is not nearly the size of yours, but I cannot— now that we're primarily focused on PEO more than anything else, I cannot hire a rep that does not have experience. It would be a 2-year training experiment, and, you know, we wouldn't be able to qualify their success rate for so long. But you talked about, you know, no longer targeting that rep with 1 to 3 years experience, which used to be sort of the golden rep, right? Like, they're still early enough in their career where you're going to get them at a reasonable rate and you can get a good comp plan, but they've got enough experience where you're not— they're not cutting their teeth with you. That was like the perfect— 1 to 3 years was awesome. But so you've shifted away from that. Talk to me a little bit about your philosophy there and how that's changed.

Yeah, I'm really looking for people with, you know, minimum 5 years experience, preferably 10, no more than 3 companies. And, you know, my mindset, and I've got to get over this, this is old school. I would look and see the transaction nature of people moving around and, you know, it's just the nature of the business now that people do that. But it still is unsettling to me to hire someone who in 10 years had been with 5 companies. I can't get over it. Is that a quality? Higher or not, right? I would like to see some longevity. Now, one of the things you may remember, I said IPPA and some of my friends rolled their eyes from some of the other companies. I don't like to hire someone directly from one of the big boxes. I would like them to have had a stop at a smaller company at one point. And the reason for it is that there's a lot more resources that they have at an ADP where you and I grew up, right? And, or some of the other big boxes. Than we're able to provide as a bureau. And they need to roll up their sleeves a little bit more with us, but they also control their execution a lot more than they do at a big box. So I would like to see them if they were, you know, I just did hire someone who directly from a big box, but traditionally I'd like to see, hey, I was somewhere before the big box or somewhere after the big box and I've experienced a smaller company a mid-sized company versus, you know, a Fortune 100. So that's part of it. Also, I want someone who understands not everything's going to be handed to you. You know, it's not all inbound coming to you. You got to go out there and sell the brand. People may not recognize the brand. Now, I think we're lucky at Dominion in our footprint. A lot of people do recognize our brand, but still it's not like a big box brand.

Well, and I've always said here, the number one thing I've learned over the last 11 years, if there's one characteristic, one skill, one whatever you want to call it, I'm hiring for, and I don't quite know how quantify it just yet, even after 11 years, it's resourcefulness. Because to your point, like, I mean, when I look across our A++ players, every one of them, they will get the job done no matter what happens, no matter what, you know, business line we shut down or we start or we transition into new territories or we acquire someone or whatever, like they're going to get the job done no matter what happens. And so with salespeople, very much the same. I remember I had a VP of sales tell me once, like we were all pissing and moaning about our commission plan changing. And he was like, you know, he did, I was one of them. I was complaining like, oh man, we're going to make less money this serious, it's going to be awful. He's like, Matt, the best reps always find a way to make the money. And that just stuck with me of like, you know, you got to just figure out how to play the game and how to win at the game. And that's, that's a life skill of resourcefulness and how to get the job done. Right. Well, tell me a little bit about the scope and size of Dominium. You talked a little bit about the number of, you know, what's the total employees? I don't know if you guys share revenue publicly. I mean, tell us a little bit.

I can't, I can't really share the revenue, but you know, we're at 177 total employees right now organizationally. I can share that we were bigger, but again, organizationally As a whole, we're trying to do a little bit with less. And I think if every organization looks internally at themselves, you'll say, yeah, there's a little bit of trimming we could do. We have 35 sales reps, 35 people in the sales organization this year. Again, we've been as high as 42. I do believe if we, from a revenue standpoint, I think we are the largest independent payroll bureau in the country at this point. And we continue and we continue to grow. You know, our sales plan is over $6 million this year of new revenue. Which I think when we compare it to other bureaus, that's pretty significantly larger than my peer group that, that I work with. So we've grown, we're stable, but we're just like a lot of companies that have a unique story. We started out of our founder's parents' garage, David Gallagher, and David Fracken joined the company, our other founder, I think at client number 3. We have 5,000 clients. We process 150,000 checks a week. So, you know, we've scaled it a pretty significant size. Or to a significant size.

Yeah. I mean, look, for those doing math at home, you know, I don't do public math. I've said it on the show before, but you're talking $25 to $35 million company here, right? If we look at rep per FTE, I can back into that.

I would say we're significantly bigger than that after 22 years. Yeah.

Right. So the, uh, I love it. It's beautiful. Well, talk to me about the quota. How do you guys approach quota? And then also inside of that, going back to the reps and how their focus is, you know, do you allow them? So if I come here and it's been, you know, Look, man, I've been selling nonprofits for the last 5 years. Like, I just really want to double down on nonprofits.

Are you going to give me a— Rock and roll, man. Rock and roll. We got a guy, he's a manager now, very good manager for us. Started as an SDR, moved up to a rep, and then I promoted him 2 years ago. We, when he was a rep, we used to call him Pastor Jack because he just hit it with churches. He just hit it with religious. So any church that had opportunity and he prospected them. What was great about that is he had a story to tell, right? I sold this church, I sold that synagogue, I sold this. He knew what he was doing. So yeah, I think, I think I'd love them to master. We have certain verticals that people are excelling. Some of it due to partnerships that they built that drives them that way. Others just, it's taking them there and their client base and then they get client referrals and they've built that out. Quota-wise, I approach it a little differently. You know, maybe it comes back from my years at ADP where I felt like you sell $500,000, so your quota is 525 next year. Never mind, you got a once in a lifetime deal. I believe the best quota carrier is one who's over quota, right? One who's over plan. I can take care of acceleration and pushing the envelope by President's Club quotas. But, you know, we've got quarterly and annual bonuses. I want people to hit that. So we're reasonable with our quotas. I'm not trying to, you know, I'm not trying to kill people with quotas. Just because you had a great year, that doesn't mean that's going to be your quota. "Hey, now you're going to get a quota bump. You need to get a quota bump and we need to back into what our quotas are going to be based on what the organizational target is. But we're not going to kill you. We're going to be reasonable. We want you to achieve. We do want you to make club." So quotas are tied to tenure and they're tied to experience and they're tied to salary. If I'm paying somebody XYZ and I'm paying somebody just X, well, XYZ has to produce more to justify that salary. So there, there's a couple components. It's a process we go through as a leadership team with, with, you know, I have 5 sales directors and 2 specialists on our leadership team. And we go through it as an organization. The managers challenge each other to make sure we're being fair. And, you know, you don't hear, well, why is her quota this and mine's this? That's not really fair. And geography comes into a little bit. Our brand's better known in certain places. So I wanna be fair about that too.

Let's talk about lead generation. So I think one of the things in this industry, you know, this has got to be the number one topic year in and year out. You know, I was on the planning committee at IPPA for years and it was like, you know, oh, do we want to talk about opening doors again? Well, yeah, because it's always a topic, right? It's the blocking and tackling. Like if you were— we were talking about sports before we jumped on. It's like if you go to any, you know, football camp right now, they're still going to be working on blocking and tackling. Like it doesn't— you don't just stop one year and go like, ah, no, we got this all figured out. So you know, we've got all these different levers to pull nowadays, right? You've got inbound, you've got paid ads, you've got organic stuff, you've got SEO, then you've got the traditional— what we've grown this on the back of, and that's referral partnerships, outbound, you know, smiling and dialing, showing up at buildings and, you know, creating relationships and working a territory in person and over the phone. Where have you guys seen a shift over recent years? And one of the exercises we did on an episode a couple of years back, because I brought my sales manager on, we said, hey, let's look at the last 10 deals. You know, where did they come from? Was this one— oh, this was This one was a referral, this one was a website lead, et cetera. You know, talk to us about that exercise too and how you evaluate the channels and their success rates.

So going back to your earlier question about segmentation, lead gen is seg— we segment how we approach that. So we don't get a lot of pure inbound. We don't put money into it. You know, we do things and, you know, to be frank, most of the true inbound leads we find are fraud, right? So pretty easy to identify when it's a Gmail account. I think we all know what the indicators are and we all have our lists. We have to document where we do get some inbound is through our partners. So we have banking partners, we have COIs, and we create landing pages for them where they can submit leads. If a bank teller talk to somebody or a customer service agent, they can submit the lead right through a landing page, which we've embedded into their network. So that's what we're seeing inbound. Now, what we see is when you look at deal size. CPA deals, why we had a really great month last month with CPA deal size, um, and it spiked, uh, by 200% due to some larger deals we got. CPA and bank deals here, broker deals here, and then our self-gen deals should be here. We should not be prospecting during our prospecting sessions anything under 50 employees. Your singles and doubles should come from your COIs. That's how we look at it. Work your CPA because they're going to come in volume, and we operate it for our COIs under a thing called And I'm going to talk about this at IPPA, a 10V4. So I want a 10V4 plan. I want our people to have 10 COIs at a minimum who will give you 4 deals that close a year. That's 40 deals, right? Think about whatever your average transaction value is. You're halfway or a third of your way right from that to your annual quota, right? Then you prospect and you get X number of deals, 2 deals a month from your individual self-check opportunity.

Boom.

And then if you can get the one bombski, as I call it, a quarter, you know, the 300, 500 man or person, the plan works. So you want a 10v4. Now, some of our more tenured reps have a 12v4 or a 14v4. Some of our newer reps are 2v4, but I don't want them working 100 COIs. You can't effectively call on them. You can't nurture them. You can't service them. But if you can get to 10 to 15, who you're really servicing the hell out of, right? And you're calling on a regular basis and it takes 6 visits to get a lead from a COI. Then you got that basis of your transactional business. Then you go to your individual prospecting of the 50+. Boom. And you throw in broker-based business, which are gonna be larger transactions because they are 50+ deals for the most part, broker deals. So 50 employee plus, you got an average transaction value of a broker deal of $12K. So you're looking at your smaller stuff of $2,500 to $4,000 from CPAs and banks. Brokers at $12,000, and then you move up your individual prospecting, and then that Bombski comes in and you've been working for a year and a half and boom, you got a plan.

The Bombski. Spoken like a true Philly fan.

Oh, man. Yes. Yes. Saquon will unleash a Bombski run tonight, I'm sure.

Yeah. Don't get me started on Saquon. We got into it before. So again, we're sitting here September 4th, 2025, first day of NFL football season tonight. His Philly— Philadelphia Eagles are playing the Giants fan. We've We've got a whole dialogue going here, but let's dig into that COI piece for just a minute because this is something I think, especially the smaller bureaus, they understand the power of referrals. I mean, we all understand the power of referrals. It's very simple, but they don't often understand. And honestly, we don't execute this very well at Guru all the time is like the commitment level and the precision that it requires to become a qualified real referral partner with a CPA. Let's just use CPAs as the example for this. Talk to us about your approach with your CPAcentrics. What are their expectations? Wins? How frequently are they going to see them? What do, how are they creating value for the CPA partner as well?

There's a couple things. First of all, you have to look as an organization, why would a CPA do business with you and refer to you as an individual and as a company versus somebody else? That's number one, right? Because everyone's pinging on them. What are you going to do differently? And the last thing any referral partner wants is that phone call of, why the heck did you refer me to these guys? They suck. Suck, right? I mean, nobody wants to hear that. Now, what's the advantage that we have as bureaus? When you look at the big boxes, they're primarily calling on CPAs, they're turnover, it's somebody new all the time, right? That's what you hear. Now, there are very well-established centrics within the big boxes who have been doing it for years. I know a number of them. I started with them way back 30 years ago at ADP. But A, you need to show you're going to be there. So the plan is be there without your handout, show value. Yeah, food's great. Individual baskets are great. All that's great. You're buying business. That's great. But what are you doing for them? So what we do differently, and this is public because we talk about it all the time, we've set up a specific COI service model. So if you have 5 or more deals with us, you are going to be serviced in a different component with our organization. When you call in, we know you are part of a COI relationship and we can feed that back. What the biggest difference for us has been, and if people go out and look at Dominion Payroll's LinkedIn, we post it every week, what our service scorecard is, how quickly we pick up the phone. You may have seen it, all of our service levels. We've taken it down a level. And again, this is public. We do individual COI scorecards so we can go to you, Matt CPA, and say you have 22 clients with us. They have 401 employees. We answered the phone in 20 seconds or less, 91% of the time for your clients. Those that didn't were on hold 17 seconds. Our average ticket medi— uh, medium resolution for you was 1.6 hours. This is how we're servicing your clients. To my knowledge, no one else is doing that with CPAs. Now, what we require CPAs, bankers, or brokers, we do it for all of our COIs who have 5 or more clients with us. What we require of our sales force is to meet with those COIs monthly to review that scorecard. You need to review that monthly to show them how we're servicing them because all they're ever gonna hear about is, is a hiccup we have. We wanna show them the, the goodness. Additionally, when they get a referral, you gotta like keep the COI. They don't wanna know every detail, but I met with Joe, everything went well. I'll let you know how we progress. You gotta let them know. You can't like dine and dash on a lead, right? You gotta, gotta keep 'em, keep 'em updated. About what's going on. Also show value in education. There's a lot of things going on in, in laws and marketplace and overtime that they may know about, but share that with them. You know, we've rolled out some new products recently. Educate them on that and make sure they're okay that we're good selling those to the clients and talking to their clients about them. Make them part of the process. Some CPAs don't want to be, but most do. Most will want to know, hey, we have an unemployment compensation Hey, you know, we're seeing unemployment rates go up in this state. Do you mind if we talk to your clients about this service? Hey, we have an HR service. Do you mind if we talk to your clients about this? Here's what we'll charge them. Are you okay with that? Make them part of the process so they're not surprised. So we train on this and we have special decks and educational processes we use about our service model. But I would say the biggest thing we've done, and again, I don't think it's any secret because we post it on LinkedIn all the time, is the COI-specific scorecards.

Well, let me just double-click on that piece for a second, and maybe not COI-specific. And if you're listening to this and going, what the heck is a COI? It's a center of influence. Uh, I don't know that I quantify that. The, um, Dominion does a fantastic job. It's funny, I was just getting on our team a couple weeks ago about this. I was like, we have amazing numbers, right? We answer, we respond to everything in less than 2 hours. We, you know, we've got a 99% client satisfaction score. We get all these awesome ratings with great comments every week. Like, we need to be pushing that stuff out in our marketing. Dominion does a great job of that. Now, if you you don't have those metrics, you know, this is probably losing you a lot of trust in the respect that, you know, ADP paychecks, they're going to go in there and they're going to talk about how small you are and how you can't serve the business. And they're going to tout their average 12-year retention rate of a client. And they, you know, picking up a phone and X number of rings or less than 20. I think it would— the number we used to use was we answered 80% of calls in less than 20 seconds and all these things.

They don't do that anymore.

Heck no. Good grief. But I mean, it's so easy to roll out a Zendesk or any customer support system and get this data. And funnel your, you know, we started with a support@guru.co email address before we had a support team. And, you know, customers say, oh geez, I really like emailing matt@guru.co. Why would I, you know, it's like, look, we talk about it now where, hey, look, we've got an expo. Like if you've ever been in a restaurant, the person that takes the ticket and matches it to the dish of food and gives it to the server, that's what happens inside of our support system where it's like, hey, we want to make sure, like if your server is busy, we want to give it to the person who can handle it right away so that you get the answer and you don't have to wait. But if you email matt@guru.co, you might wait wait 6 hours because I'm in meetings or whatever. We want to get you the answer straight away. So don't be scared of the support emails, people. That's one lesson inside of there, because you, you have to envision scale. And at scale, you can't be having your clients email Joe at, you know, joespayroll.com, because Joe leaves or Joe becomes the owner and he wants to delegate and elevate, he's never going to have the ability because everybody's so dependent on him. So set those expectations early. I talk to founders in the payroll, HR, and accounting industry every single day, and they all tell me they need more of one thing. It's not more money, it's not more AI tools, it's more time. How do I get more time? Well, I hired a virtual assistant through OutsourceScale.com that helps me manage my inbox, manage my calendar, handles administrative tasks for me, helps support my marketing efforts, and much, much more. The cool thing about OutsourceScale is that they actually train the virtual assistants on the latest and greatest AI tools to make sure that they can't only do that administrative work for you that you need to get off your plate, but they're doing it in the most efficient and effective ways possible. I've been so happy with my assistant from Outsource Scale that I've actually added multiple other teammates to our other companies through them. Their pricing starts at only $7.99 a month, and they make it super easy to get a new teammate onboarded and part of your team. Very quickly. Check them out today at outsourcesscale.com.

Here's the other thing that is lost in this. So when we present our service numbers, right? Our response numbers. When we present our net promoter score and you're a prospect, how likely, think about this, how likely is they're going to ask for that data from who we're competing with. We've now put our competitors on the defensive because most people don't have the real data. And this is what happens. Is there any company in the world who says, "I've got bad service"? No. Everyone says they got great service, but what we're showing them is we really do. We're showing them the data to support that statement. And we'll say, I would ask you to challenge anyone you're considering to provide the same data that we're providing to you and see where we all stand, line it up.

Well, and again, that's the playbook, right? So we used to set the landmines where it's like, hey, look, is the money bonded that they're moving? Do they have this accreditation? Do they have this and that? And you're building a moat and you're putting the other person on defense before they even get a chance to really pitch what they have. And to that end, folks, what I often say on here is I don't like, the next question I had written down here is around new products. You mentioned some new things you're rolling out.

I saw that as part of your role is evaluating rolling out new products.

I want to talk more about that, but you know, I've got the Sun Tzu approach in terms of like, if we were ever going into a deal and we were head to head with ADP and ADP is pitching, you know, Workforce Now with payroll time and HR, well then we were going to pitch an ASO just to be different, right? Like we want to be 5, 6 times their price because it's like, if we're just going like, oh man, they're $500 a month and we're $475, like, can we win it on $25 a month and slightly better service? Like, no, this is like Sun Tzu says, hey, move them to a different battlefield. Like don't fight on their battlefield. So always when you can differentiate in such a way that like, and even this is positioning versus don't ever position versus the incumbent, position against the alternatives, which could be hiring an HR person, which could be the status quo. Like we don't want to position against our direct competition because then it becomes a feature battle, right? And you don't ever want to get into a feature battle and try to go head to head with a national because eventually they'll wear you down with their long list of bells and whistles, right? So new products, let's get into that. You said you guys rolled out some stuff recently. Talk to us about what you rolled out, why you decided to roll that out, and maybe even some things you've been killed over the years. He said, ah geez, they're just— the market wasn't there for that the way he hoped it was.

So, so a couple things. We've provided different layers of our HR services. We've, you know, we have the, the white glove HR service. We've added some layers which, which may be more effective. One of the things we just rolled out, uh, last week, and we actually just closed our first one yesterday, is a cyber insurance program. So most companies, 25 employees and less, do not have cyber insurance. And I think the number is 53% of companies companies experience, 25 and below, experience a hack each year. So we've rolled out a cyber insurance program, very cost-effective, and everyone really should have it in today's world. And it's kind of cool because it does unlimited scans, gives you insurance against ransoms. And, you know, the small companies are the ones who don't have the insurance when you look at the numbers. So that's a product we evaluated and actually rolled it out through our partner iSolved. You know, we resell the iSolved product, and I think there's a lot of value in that, that we're providing with that service. We have partners. We sell Postery Lead. We sell, you know, a number of services we've taken a look at. SayZoom is something that has benefited the company. So we look at third party. We do do unemployment compensation through a partner in Mississippi. So for those organizations, we do Traction, EOS, and one of the rocks I have every quarter is looking at new upsell offerings. And, you know, so I take a look. One of the values I get from going to IPPA or ISALPS Connect is looking at partners who could have something that we potentially want resell and drive additional revenue. You know, we've done some opt-out programs with partners that have generated significant revenue for us. So, but we evaluate those very closely before we do it.

Well, and it's an interesting philosophy with the cyber thing because I heard this great anecdote last week where a guy talks about, hey, I went to go visit my grandmother and every time I go there, she's a typical, you know, immigrant grandmother. She feeds me until I can't walk. And then, you know, she— I told her, no, no, no, I don't want any more food. I'm full. When she tried to bring dessert and she murmured as she walked away, yeah, your regular stomach stomach is full, but your dessert stomach is empty. And so like the, you know, we, we often forget about like the, our clients. Yes. Like their budget for payroll and HR tools might be spent on that, but they have other budgets that other things can go into. And I think cyber is the perfect example of like, hey, this is an upsell at the point of sale that is from a different stomach. Right. So I might have more money to go ahead and buy this at the point of sale that I might not have been thinking about. And that, you know, every time you go and check out anywhere, right. I always use the Amazon example. It's like other people also purchased, like, you know, there's, you've gotta have things that you're putting in there. And this is something I'm giving myself this advice at the moment, because when we started switching to the PEO, it's everything all in one. So there weren't a lot of upsells left. Right. And we're, we're very big on like a comprehensive pricing model where, you know, hey, you pay X amount per employee per month. We're not gonna nickel and dime you. We're not gonna do a bunch of add-ons. And so, yeah, that's great. But then we've got no upsells once we bring on a client. So we've gotta say, all right, what are the things that are a different stomach where they might be able to add it there. Let's talk about, you know, to start wrapping up here, the tools, systems, you know, what tech are you guys using right now? What's the tech stack from lead gen all the way through managing the pipe? Tell me a little bit about what you guys use and how that's changed over time.

Yeah, right now we bounce back and forth with, you know, list generation. We've probably used everything. We're at Sales Intel right now. We're evaluating some other tools. We do that every year, but it starts with Salesloft for us. All of our cadences are built as Salesloft. One of the things we've built in Salesloft as well is we have, we have a term we use called Drive for 5. Find 5 pain points in a client and you got a better chance. So within Salesloft, they list the 5 pain points for each opportunity and then we can pull who has benefit enrollment as an issue and then we can drip on all benefit enrollment pain points. And that's integrated with Salesforce. We have some other things. We use MyEdge. You know, other tools, but we spend about $1,200 a month per sales rep on our tech stack.

Do you think about that in any terms of like percentages or is it just whatever it is, we just end up paying for it?

We evaluate, you know, like when we went to Salesloft, we, we started with revenue, just felt Salesloft gave us more. We looked at Gong and just based on ROI, just decided that was the right fit for us. Almost Salesloft.

What I'm going to do. So if you're listening to this right now and you're like, dang, like I got my pen and pencil out, I'm typing up notes, like, how am I going to consume all this? Like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take this transcript. I'm going to put it into AI. I'm going to create a playbook out of this conversation that says, hey, here's what you can execute at your organization. And so make sure in the YouTube video that in the comments, we're going to have a link to subscribe to our newsletter. We've been sending out a newsletter every single week with the payroll industry updates, the latest article of payroll, and people have been loving, like I've been going through and really, I'm personally curating the links that we're sending, you know, any big moves that the big players are making, any acquisitions that are happening in the space, any market movement. That's, you know, that's kind of how we got cued into one of our most popular recent episodes was talking about G&A Partners, a PEO, acquired GrowthForce, an accounting firm, which is kind of unheard of in this industry for them to actually consume an accounting, you know, a $10 million accounting company is a pretty big acquisition for a PEO. And those are usually our referral partners. And so that one got me off on a tangent. I must have spent, you know, 5 hours diving deep on both of those companies and trying to understand, you know, the market makeup and mechanisms that brought that deal to place. But check out the newsletter if you got feedback on it too. I mean, we've only been doing it for about 2 months. I'm wide open wherever we can bring value to the industry. I think that's been something that I've really enjoyed is not only, you know, the more you guys rely on payroll and for industry data, the more I've got to dive deep and the more I know and the better I get, the sharper I get. So it's been a kind of a self-fulfilling thing. But make sure you subscribe because I'm definitely creating a guide out of this and how I'm going to use it internally. You know, I just interviewed Chris, you know, Chris Caputo. I just interviewed him. Him a week or two ago and he talked about in his first 30 days he brought on a new rep and he was like, look, we just gave him the client list and had him set a meeting with every client and go out and say, hey, what can we do better? What are we doing well? And, you know, do you have a referral for me? And I was like, man, you just wrote my training for the first 30 days for my new rep that's about to come. And now he's been, you know, calling on new clients all week. And it's also just such a nice way for us smaller bureaus too, where it's like, hey, I don't have a sales management infrastructure where I can sit with him all day, every day. Let's get him in front of some clients. Let's get him in front of our people and have him actually, you know, hear from them what's what's not working. And then we're also getting testimonials, Google reviews, we're getting all the byproducts of that. So it's been a win-win-win. And so these, these things, these nuggets are incredibly helpful.

All right.

So let's look ahead. I mean, what trends are you guys watching? Obviously, you know, we're in the AI era, you can't have a podcast in the year 2025 without the term AI coming into the podcast at some point. But obviously, also, we're just seeing market shifts. I mean, I read a headline this morning, first time in a long time, there's, there's there's more unemployed people than jobs available. What are you guys looking at in terms of trends of, of how you're approaching the market heading into 2024 and beyond?

You know, certainly the unemployment spiking, and that's— I mentioned unemployment claims. AI, we have it internally. Our company has an AI task force, so we're certainly looking at on the operational side what we can do. Now, some of our tools have AI built into— when you look at Sales Loft, there's lot. You know, when you look at your tech stack, AI is a component of that now. So we're certainly taking advantage of everything that's, that's been offered to us. We're, we're looking at the market closely. You just saw the Dayforce, you know, transaction. So we're looking at closely. One of the things I find with companies when those things happen, they're not prepared to pounce, right? Because people aren't keeping their sales force up to date with who the competitor is that someone's using. You need to make sure that's done. That's one One of the things I will tell you, you know, the whole Paycor paychecks thing, we picked up a bunch of clients because we had that data. You need to make sure your organization is utilizing the CRM effectively. Only 23% of companies, I think the data point is, use CRMs effectively. So we're looking at the trends of the market really closely. We're looking at legislation very, very closely because I think there's a lot out there. The other thing we're doing is through some of the partnerships we have. Have with, you know, national organizations. There's certain structures they need, certain reporting they need— not necessarily structure, certain reporting they need. And we're focused on that. How do we deliver that to them to differentiate ourselves? So we're really trying to understand what companies need and what type of lift we can get by providing certain reporting. You know, out in California, there's certain reporting that they need. Restaurants in San Francisco, for instance— what can we do different to differentiate ourselves? That's what it's all about. The trends are about identifying them, understanding them, and how do we leverage and differentiate ourselves from that, utilize that to differentiate ourselves.

Well, that's, you know, going back to the Chris Caputo episode. If you're listening right now and you haven't listened to that, Chris talks about one of the biggest inflection points of their business was when they started creating reporting that was for the construction industry. They had to build it custom, they had to build it outside their system, they had to hire IT people and developers to make it happen, but it was the catalyst to them making the Inc. 5000 4 years in a row. Like, it can be that big of a differentiator to Scott's point of like, hey, if I can do something unique for your industry that you just can't get anywhere else, now I've got a niche. Now I've got something I can burrow into and create that moat. And, you know, you talked about a lot of really important things there. And I think as we look at the market going forward, it's going to continue to evolve. It's going to continue to change. But one of the coolest things about this industry is like, if you and I recorded this 10 years ago, 80% of what we talked about would be identical. I don't know if that's cool or horrifying or what, but it is like the, you know, it is one of the things where, where every time I see somebody say, hey, look, I'm going to dominate this space inbound leads and paid ads, I'm like, man, good luck. Because, you know, even Gusto quickly learned like, yep, now all of a sudden we've got an inside sales team making outbound phone calls and like, you know, it dries up pretty fast in that respect. And there's only so far you can go. And the only real play you have there is what they did, which is being the lowest cost provider. Now they're nice supplements, right? Like, I mean, we want leads from all buckets. We want to make sure that we're getting some inbound, we're creating organic content, we're paying for some advertisement to stay in front of our prospects and our clients, but be targeted with those dollars. And at the end of the day, picking up the phone, creating relationships with CPOs CPAs, COIs, and partners that can refer you business and being there, right? There's something to be said.

You can't cheat the work. I mean, I don't know if you ever ran into my mentor at ADP. He was a gentleman named Jack DeCannis, right? When I worked at ADP. And for those of you who don't know, I was ADP 23 years, led 2 divisions at ADP. Jack was a guy who started the CPA program at ADP and he also was the testimonial letter guy. He would carry around his binder. Way back in the day, you would actually write the quote and try and one-stop close a deal. And as you're filling out the quote, you give them the binder, right? Here's all the clients I moved from Paychex. Here's what they have to say about the move from Paychex to us. And you know, the testimonial letters don't go away. Those strategies don't go away. The follow-ups don't go away. And if you look at Jack's, that people talk about the Bill Belichick coaching tree or the Parcells, if you go in the industry and look at Jack's coaching country, it's pretty significant. So the industry doesn't change. It's a small industry. Everybody knows everybody and everybody's got something to say about everybody.

Well, and especially you've got a team down here in Columbia, South Carolina as well. And I'll make this point. I thought about it when you mentioned that earlier, Kevin and the team here after you guys made that acquisition, like, like we are not competitors in my mind. Like we're all, you know, we have competition. It's not you guys. We're competing against the big nationals. Like we all, like you guys are incredibly large, but you're still a local player in my opinion. And it's like, hey, I'd rather, you know, I've called Kevin before, before that acquisition, but still I've said, hey, look, like we're in the deal, this client of yours, like I just want to give you a warning. Like, you know, here's what's wrong. Heck, I've gone out. I remember when we used to sell SwipeClock, I was in a competitor's deal and this lady was complaining up and down that like she needed to leave them because she couldn't get this report out of SwipeClock. I literally took SwipeClock open and I was like, here's how you write the report and use it. Like there's no reason to change payroll systems to get this report. Like it's in there. You're just not getting the support you want or you're not even picking up the phone and calling, but like, here it is. Like don't spend 30, 60 days of implementation to get a report that you could get in 20 minutes. Like, and so, you know, there's a level of professional courtesy that we can all sort of play with. And some of my best friends are now people in this industry that, you know, again, at face value would be competition, but in reality, they're my greatest mentors. So if you're not seeking mentorship and guidance from peers in the industry, you're just missing out. I mean, and I think Scott being on this podcast is a prime example of like, you know, he's opened up the playbook. He shared a ton with us today that we're all going to get better for. And what's the value to him? Like, none of us are customers. None of us are going to buy Dominion Payroll from him. Now, some of you might be a sales rep for him one day after hearing what an awesome boss he's going to be. But hey, that's, uh, and maybe you'll sell your book of business to him one day or to me if it makes sense. But Scott, any parting news? Anything that— where can people find you? What would you like people to remember from this conversation?

Yeah, look, Hopefully you'll take one little bit away that helps you, you know, in the industry and helps you find success. And from a leadership standpoint, empower your people. That's what it's all about. If anyone has any questions or wants to reach out to me, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm happy to help in any way I can. And, you know, good luck with a, with a great end to the year. And, you know, it doesn't happen overnight. You gotta build the, you gotta put the bricks in place.

That's right. It's like you, you reminded me earlier, like, how do you get in shape? What do you do? You must have some shake or pill you're taking. No, I work out and I eat be well.

Yeah, yeah. God, I wish it was— I wish it was a pill after my knee surgery. I had my knee replaced, for those who don't know, and I am, uh, struggling a little bit with the stiffness in it. So I wish it was a pill I could take and that would go away.

Praying for you and your recovery, brother. And please, you know, again, if you got value out of this, make sure you hit that subscribe button, make sure you follow along. I'm getting more interviews like this on the books here with great folks like Scott that are going to help all of us to raise the level of the industry. History. Appreciate your time so much, brother.

Thanks very much. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.