How to Recruit Killer Sales Reps

Hey, guys. What's up? Matt here. And welcome to the episode of Coffees for Clothes. There's a little bit of a different episode today because we're in la la la la la la la.

Lockdown.

Shouldn't you be wearing a mask?

Yeah, you're right. I also wear a. I'm not sure if, you know, but when I sit on my couch at night, I also wear a seatbelt.

Okay. I wear a helmet, but that's to protect me from falling. You know, it has its value.

To be fair, you don't have very far to fall.

Yeah, I know. The Hazmat suit's good too, so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm in the office pretty much by my onesie. We have one other guy in here, so we're nice. And Covid safe.

Yeah.

54 people in hospital in all of Australia, So therefore, I mean, time to lock it down. Anyway, I'm not going to get into a rant.

We were negative.

I am actually a little bit sick.

Right.

So you can hear my voice sounds extra sultry today, which is a microphone.

Setting, which is why I'm at home, because I don't want to catch his diseases. You know, he's got worse things than Covid.

Yeah, yeah.

I got Covid, like, 22 right now. So I'm on that next level.

Covid living in the future as I get there.

Yeah. So welcome to the episode of Coffees for Closers. Apparently, that's just going to keep happening anyway, so. Yeah, let's cue the intro.

If you listen to this podcast, you will make your first million within three years. I'm going to repeat that. You will make a million dollars within three years of the first episode. You listen to. We don't want pikers. We're not here to save the manatees. We're here to make podcasts. You really want this? You listen and review.

Put that coffee down. All right, so what are we gonna go over today, Jimmy Jam?

Today we were going to talk about some of the recruitment stuff and what. And as well as, like, you know what. What you can do is the business owner when something like Covid happens. And. Okay, you're stuck from home, you get sick, and you're responsible for the majority of the sales coming into your business.

Yeah.

Or you get crunk. You get crunk. God damn, that's annoying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, essentially, there's.

I think there's a couple of things you can have. Do three, you could do six, you could do nine. Damn, these sales Is fine.

Well played.

I knew where you go with that. If you're a sales guy or if you're a business owner, right? So I'm kind of speaking to two different people at the same time. It's like, if you're a sales guy, what level, what kind of redundancy do you have within your processes within your business? And if you're a commission sales guy, like you have a business, right? You are a business owner, right? What are you doing to create redundancies? What are you doing to make yourself better? But also, if you are a business owner and you're someone who has commissionally sales reps or even salaried sales reps, like, how are you making sure that one. All your guys have all the things that they require in order to be successful? How do they have. Do they. Are they the people who are the right culture fits long term. I actually had a very, very interesting conversation with one of our gu. I won't name him, but he left a little while ago and he went to go be like a sales manager for a big coach, right? He called me up saying, man, we got this recruitment and placement company. They put guys in our. They're just so green, I just can't really work with them. We need you guys to come in and place some sales reps for us. And I was like, sweet. And I was like, I'm more than happy to take your money. But I was like, you're a sales manager now. And I was like, and you're also a friend of mine and I want the best for you. And like, maybe throwing money at this problem is the right answer. And don't get me wrong, if you are throwing it, I want to catch it. Well, maybe you need to train them well. But I was like, let's have a look at what's happening. Because I was like, he's like, we just need some killers, right? He's probably listening to this. And I tried to give him a really interesting perspective, which I don't think a lot of people have. Like. And I told him, listen, man, if your business requires killers because he's a killer, he's a phenomenal salesperson, top 5% in the world type thing, right? And I was like, listen, if your business requires a bunch of you, that's a real problem. Because like, that's not a sustainable, like, especially if you're looking for them, you can make them over the next year, right? We can make those guys, if we have the right culture fit, we can put the development. If we get Five really good culture fits. We can create two, maybe three killers out of that group.

Right.

But sorry, if you get that culture fit, they also have to have the work ethic. Yeah, Right.

Which I kind of assume that's part of the culture.

Right.

If you have a culture of development, like, you can't come into sales sniper and not want to work hard. You're gonna get swallowed up pretty quick.

Right?

So I was like, listen, man, like, you need to be able to be successful with mid tier sales reps, right? Because if you don't, then your marketing sucks. Like, if you have to have killers, that means your marketing is weak.

Right?

But like, if you've got average marketing and weak or green salespeople, that's not good. And it's going to be really difficult to have any sort of unemotional viewpoint as to what actually is going on. So what we need to do is dive through the data. Because what I don't want to do is have you pay me a bunch of money. Me find guys who are actually pretty good, who have good potential, put them in your business, and they underperform as well. Because not only do you have a bit of a sales issue, but you've also got a bit of a marketing issue. And I want to be able to delineate between the two. Like, if I put Marco in and he kills it, that doesn't tell me anything.

Yeah, it does, right.

It just tells me Margo's good at selling. You know what I mean? But if I put like an average salesperson in there, right, and they do fairly well, I go, hey, your marketing is pretty strong. This guy's pretty good. He's doing well, everything's okay. That's really good. So just trying to provide a different level of insight. And it's like, you know, some. And I was like, you know, there's three options I can. One, I can just find and source new people for you. Two, I can take the guys that you have and we can really throw some time into them. If they're good dudes who you like being around and want to have a beer with, and they work hard, let's.

Just make them better.

Let's just make them better.

Right?

The system they've been taught, I think is not fantastic.

Right.

But it's fine. And then the last one is that I can just have my guys come in and do it for you.

Yeah.

So, yeah, but I was like, that's probably not what they want, but yeah. So just providing some insight, you know, we had a meeting today with one of our, I guess, mentors, Michael Chu. Yeah. He runs a business called Champ Dev. They recently acquired Trouble Buyers and a few other businesses. Like six other businesses. And yeah, so we were kind of talking to him about a few different things. We sort of run and manage his sales team and train his guys, and he helps us out with some stuff as well. He's really good at sort of vision stuff. And one of the things that we kind of really realized today that, like, we probably provide a lot more value. A lot of the stuff that we put out there is just pure sales training stuff.

Right.

But a lot of the stuff we actually do with our clients, because our clients are business owners, not salespeople, is like, we, we coach them on how to have not only effective sales processes, but, like, how to look at sales in their business a little bit differently.

Right.

And so, like, how do we actually use sales as a barometer for the success? And like, it's the temp check of how aggressive we can be with the growth of our company.

Yeah. And the potential scalability of it. Right. It's funny. It's just like that's why we've grown.

So fast, because our business is so sales related that like, literally the only metric that matters for us is how good we are at selling.

Yeah.

Hence our model is so different. I told, I was, I told the guy today I was talking to because I had a meeting with one of our clients to kind of just realign some of them and look to remove some people out of certain parts of the business and just sort of do a little bit of business coaching on certain insights that I had for them. And I was like, you know, your ideal client pays you two and a half grand a month. My ideal client pays me a hundred grand a month. I was like, so don't compare my growth with yours.

Yeah.

I was like, let's not. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't really make sense to do that.

You comparing apples to oranges and trying to make assumptions that one is better than the other or one has more potential when it's not true. But like, yeah, as you said, like, you can get those insights from sales as well as from marketing, but there's a very larger scale understanding of what to do with that information and how to utilize it to make proper decisions. And that's a skill set that you can have sales. But there's so many factors where, you know, you could look at close rate, make decisions on that, but, you know, an average business owner would make a decision on close rate. But to gauge like the potential of scalability, you have to ask like, what are the factors that are affecting close rate?

Exactly. And it's the nuance that actually gives you the idea. One of the business owners came to me and said, man, you guys are only closing at 10%. I was like, yeah. He goes, what's going on? I was like, oh, the guy's a killer. Nothing to do with sales. Yeah. And he was like, what do you mean? I was like, well, like you have no lead flow. So we're putting literally everyone who comes to us into a sales call.

Right?

Literally everybody.

Right.

Which means that like we're putting people who have like 90% of the people we see have no business having a sales call, but we have no volume. So it's like, let's say, let's say of the people, when we can look at that because we have a lead quality metric from, from. Is it 1 to 5 or 0 to 5? 0 to 5. 0 to 5.

Well, 0 is just like they know shit.

Yeah.

You didn't actually speak to them.

So you can essentially one to five right. Now normally what we try and do is book three fours and fives into sales goals. And then ones and twos would just go into like a long term farming where they never go into a sales call, but in famine levels. Right. You know what I mean? Like, your priorities change a little bit and you go, okay, well, hey guys, do we actually care about close rate or do we just want maximum sales? Let's say I close 1 in 15 of a 1. Because like they're literally just incredibly unqualified, Barely even in the niche. They're just random people who clicked on something.

Yeah, Right.

If I close 1 and 15, but I'm closing 70% of my fours and fives, 50% of my threes.

Right.

Overall my close rate would be like 20%, which is not good. It's like it's fine. Not from triage. That's not good.

Right.

So but we would then get. Yeah, we could then take out the ones and the twos and we can go, hey, look, we're closing at 65%. Are you happy with that? Sweet. Now these people have been pre identified as very, very low quality or low chance. But because we've booked 15 of those and sold one, you got an extra sale. We spent 15 hours doing that work. Are you happy with us? Because I'm happy not to do the 15 hours, but do you want that sale? Yes, I do. Okay, then shut your mouth.

Right.

And just Let me do my thing. Like, I'm making choices right now. If someone is struggling to make sales, we can identify that and fix it.

Right.

Like, we can just fix it. Like, it's honestly not that difficult.

Right.

And we can move people around and we can figure out what's going. Right. What's going wrong. We can usually within two weeks, identify problems, fix problems, put the person out into the wild again, and they can go out there and hunt.

Right.

But if we're making choices, it's like, it doesn't really need to be a thing.

Yeah, it's. It's. It's also really good, particularly on a new offer. We do that anyway. Because those ones, you can. You don't have to be perfect. You can mess around. You can try different tactics, see how things work, play around with different things, and use that as pure practice for. Objection.

Handling. This is actually a really good thing that grinds my gears. I should do a segment.

You know what grinds my gears?

Grinds my gears. And then have it like the. You know, it's behind a desk, like Peter Griffin.

Yeah.

And have the gears like this. Grudge grinds my gears anyway is when.

Let's get you animated.

Yeah, that's a great idea. It's getting expensive.

You know what really grinds my gears?

Put that out, by the way, Charlie. That's. That's fine.

Now you leave it in. Charlie.

What?

Like, I. What I. What really grinds my gears is like, when, like, a new sales reps, especially, even experienced sales reps, like, they're not that busy, they're not making that much money, and they complain about, like, underqualified leads. It's like, yeah, I understand that can be annoying, but tremendous opportunity to get better. Like, if you want to get really good at fighting, probably spar against people who are really good. Right. So when you get in the ring, you know what I mean? Like, you know what's going on. And so, like, I think that people just, like, I hate the term mindset. I don't hate it, but it's just, like, they just look at things the wrong way. It's like instead of looking it as an annoyance, look at it as an opportunity. Like, because it really is, like, the only reason why I'm like, I consider myself, like, one of the things in sales that I know I'm very good at is objection handling. I know I'm really good at it.

Right.

Like, I got that way because I sold a lot of broke people. And it's like, that's the only way you're gonna get good at it. Like, you can theorize. Objection. Handling all you want. And I can script it out for people. But for people to sit there and do it in real time, they need practice. And it's like, that's why that term, strong marketing makes weak sales. It's really true. And vice versa. Really strong sales makes weak marketing. But I think it's like if you can be very conscious of the activities that are going on and I really think, like, I don't hear many people talking about these things about like the decisions that are made within a sales cycle and sales process that are business decisions. And everyone's just trying to increase close rate or increase job rates. Like, yeah, those are all good things to try and do. But like, I don't want close rates at 80, 90%. That means we're not charging enough. It means we don't have enough volume.

It means it's too easy.

It's too easy. Let's turn the volume up in the leads and let's lower the qualification or so we can get more people. Or let's ramp the price up, right? Because if we can close at 90% on a 10k offer, let's go to 12, see what happens. If it's 80% at 12. Perfect. Let's go to 14. But 70% at 14. Sweet. Let's go to 18. It's 50% sweet. Okay, well, I was at 10, now I'm at 18. I'm closing at 50% instead of 80. So I'm actually making the same money, but I have half the clients.

What do you think is like optimal close rate? Like for 65 business awesome. We're on the same page. I was literally gonna say 65.

65 is perfect, right? Like if you can get this is post triage. That's not like one call close. Killering stuff like that. Like, that's a little bit different. It's gonna be, gonna be less. It's gonna be less. Like if you can hit 40% on a one call close, straight to sale, that's. That's fantastic, right?

That's equivalent to 90 for us.

So, yeah, it's really good because like you just have. Unless you have like heaps of conditional logic that just weeds everyone who's not like ready to buy money in hand type stuff out. But if you close the goes 40%.

On a one call close and they paid a deposit to be on that call, you probably suck.

Like, if you, if you can get 65%, that means that I think like you're you're optimizing everybody's opportunity and you're. You're pushing the limits of, like, what you're going to be able to pay, you know, because in my opinion, like, more money, less clients is better. The business is more scalable.

The.

It's less administrative burden on the business. The sales guys are still, like, they don't feel like their time's being wasted, but they're still, like, having to push to get the sales. Like, again, like, that's why we raised the prices for seventh level. We also altered the program, so we raised the prices, but tweaked the program to be a lot better, to be a lot more scalable, a lot better, a lot more infrastructure, a lot more help. Right. So we kind of had to raise the price, but also the guys are closing it like 90%.

Right.

So it's like the marketing is super good. It's like, now what we have to do is keep raising the prices. So if you're out there and you're thinking about turning seventh level, it is going to incrementally go up nearly every month.

Right.

Until I get enough pushback to where I stop doing it.

Would you even consider it marketing or would you consider it a sales process?

Well, it's both. Right. So the process that generates the interest is the marketing. And then once they're registered interest, then it becomes a sales process. Right? So like, we do marketing in the group, we do content to create engagement. Then from there they reach out, we create a problem. Then from there, boom. Now once that person's in like an active DM conversation, that's now a sales process, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So, but yeah, the marketing is the best marketing we have of any account that we're on.

Yeah, yeah.

Because we do it because we control it. We control a lot.

Yeah.

We have, like, we have the power to make the decisions that we want to as the people running the sales process.

And we can ramp budgets. And, you know, I went super aggressive on the budgets in one of the months. It didn't work out at all because we had an ad scene that was a bit subpar. But that's a whole different question. You know, I okayed them for like 35,000, 40,000 for the month. I was like, let's go, baby.

Yeah.

And then got a new guy on Charlie. Shout out to Charlie Valor from Valor Media Crushes Facebook Group lead generation. And he got our Facebook link will.

Be in the description Charlie.

Yeah.

And he literally, like, I had to convince him to do it, and he got Our group joins down to cool. They were like $42 a join. He got him down to like sub 10 bucks.

Yeah, I think he shaved $40 on average. Right. Because our cost goes up as the content that we're doing starts to get old and watched a lot. So we usually come in at about like $4 and it increases out to 7 as those ad sets get used in use. As opposed to the other guy who was sitting around like the 42 to 50.

I thought about sending him the metrics and been like, man, you should like, I really like you, but we should hop on a call and we should go over like, how is this guy doing this? So much better, you know what I mean?

Kind of petty. I feel like that's more of a petty move.

No, no, no. Like to actually help him out. Okay. To be like, hey man, like, let's have a chat. Because this is. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

Depends on the person of how they take feedback and critique. You know, some people would love that, others would hate it. Yeah, good question. You know, I'm better than me, so.

Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because we're on. I think we're on like we're on both sides. So we on a. We own a coaching company, seventh level.

Right.

First 500k month. What you do.

Right.

Happy days. We own the commission on the agency. What's the other thing we're doing?

I think it's what starts with an R. Recruitment. That's it.

Yeah.

Placement recruitment.

Yeah. So now we're recruiting sales reps.

Right.

So really, like, you know, a lot of our content, we're going to start to steer in different directions. So we're going to really focus on two things which we really focus very hard on one thing which is just content, just for salespeople. Now we're going to keep doing that content, but then add more content which is around like business owner stuff. So we might talk about the owning of coaching businesses and sales processes within the stuff. But I think like, I think it's important for sales guys to hear that stuff because I think sales guys tend to like wrap themselves in bubble wrap and like they don't understand like gross margins versus net margins and like what they're commissioned. Like if you take a 20% commission, right. And don't get me wrong, like I'm all for taking high commissions. I think what you get, I think what you provide and what you get given by the business is going to dictate it. Like if the person, if you like, if you get A setter, for example, you can't take 20% because now your comm is also. There has to be a com for the setter. So if you have setters, immediately knock 5% off.

Right.

So now the max, you're going to get like 15, because now there's multiple mouths to feed. Also, like, if that person is also doing like paid ads and organic and they're doing all this strategy for that, like, you're gonna knock it down again because now they're gonna be giving you multiple streams with like, with lots of value. So, like the more volume a business can give you.

Right.

And the more infrastructure they have around you, the less money you're gonna make per sale.

Yep.

Right.

Just hands down. But the more opportunity you have, the more development you have, the more career trajectory you have. Trajectory, Trajectory. Right. Trajectory you have. Because there is that infrastructure. There is that, like, there's that support team around you. But like, man, like, if you're just a lone warrior out there doing your thing, you can get 20% for sure.

Right.

But if you're not a lone warrior, and this like, usually the 20% is reserved for small businesses that like rely heavily on the closer to do their own setting their own dialing their own lead gen as well. Like where they're out there kind of like calling all the old leads and that kind of stuff. And sometimes you can even get the 30% if you're actually generating your own leads as well, where you're doing like cold outreach.

Right?

Yeah.

So, like, you know, there's different ways to skin that cat. But I really think, like, you know, for sales guys who aren't really businessman, they're 20% of the gross is probably more than that business owner is going to pull out from that client.

Yeah, like we've spoken, we actually, like, now that I think about it, we speak about business a lot more than what we think we do, particularly on these podcasts. And it's really good because, you know, to this point we've really specialized in coaching and consulting sales. And I think as a salesperson, you have to understand business when you're selling business opportunity or you're selling business consulting, business coaching, advertising or whatever, because that just feeds into the congruency. Right. You have to know that stuff to understand the pain points better. You have to understand the pain points to understand where to dig, to understand where to dig to identify the real objections. You have to identify the real objections to handle them effectively. It is. And you know, we've really come to that realization that we understand business just as well, if not better than what we do on the specific sales thing, because whilst we do the done for you sales, we're more than that. We've been consulting and running the sales team and running the entire front end of businesses, and we have conversations very regularly about the back end of some of the businesses we're in and go, how is this so bad? So often it's like, this is what I was doing. And then we suggest that they do it and things work better.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we've literally come to the realization.

I think, I think we're. I think we're getting there. I think our mentor Barry has a lot to do with that. Like, we have a. Barry is a. You know, if he's listening, he's a very, very bag d Magda Didi. He's a guy that I gave equity in the business right when we started and. And, you know, like, we gave him.

A lottery ticket for him, right?

Yeah, I mean, he's got a few lottery tickets, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, he has a deep understanding of business and he's exited from business and stuff like that. And so, like, he, like, he doesn't. It's really interesting coaching relationship.

Right.

Because, like, he doesn't actually tell us what to do, but he asks the questions and makes us create the mental space in order to come up with the answers, which is a more useful thing.

Points us into direction to solve the problem ourselves.

Yeah. And so then you have an understanding of the process that you use to solve it. Then from there you go out and solve it. So he'll just have a look and go, hey, guys, your gross profit margins are not looking fantastic. Okay.

Okay. Why is that? What caused it? What can we do about it? What actually.

And then I go, what we need to do from here is we need to have a look at potential ideas to increase our gross, you know, to do this, this, and this. So he's like, I would like you to do that.

And then we do it.

And then you go, okay. And then all of a sudden, because he knows how my brain works and my brain, like, I like problem solving. And so he'll go in and go, you need to go away. You need to think of, like, a couple of ideas to do this. And I'll come back and I go, these are my ideas. And they go, okay, which one fits up with our mission, our vision, our values? Which one fits with the infrastructure that we have? Which one is the easiest one to execute? Okay, let's do that now. Let's make that into a project. Let's assign roles and responsibilities and that's where the placement came from.

Yeah, we should be due for chat with him next week, I imagine.

Yeah, I always look forward to them. I sent him to one of our clients the other day, and I got a call from him like an hour later was like, what the did that guy just do to us?

I spoke to him this morning. I'm like, hey, I heard you had your soul ripped out.

Yeah, Barry's good.

That's funny.

Anyway, we should get Barry do an interview in the Facebook group.

I think we had a podcast with him very early on when our quality was poor and we had no idea what we're doing. Don't watch it, but maybe we should do it again.

Yeah, we're just watching the background, bomby. Just to give us the views, baby. All right, guys, that's what we got time for today, though, a little bit of an interesting one. We're in lockdown, so we're a little bit disjointed. Quality won't quite be as good, but whatever. You guys aren't here for quality content. You're just here to see our pretty faces.

Well, I mean, what we say is quality enough.

All right.

All right, guys, thanks for your time. Make sure if you. You're watching this on YouTube, you, like, subscribe. Hit the notification bell. Make sure that you go to the Facebook group with a closing code. And if you want to check out what we have, go to salesniper.net and you can download some free resources like the objection Handling Matrix. I believe the follow up Handling matrix is coming out soon. A 49 page document on whole things Follow up. I think we might charge like 20 bucks for that, though. It only took us six months to put together.

I also have a book coming. Gonna be exciting around development.

Oh, yeah, that one. Okay, cool.

Yeah, I was gonna be a surprise, but I broke it accidentally.

I know.

I got excited and wanted to show you.

Yeah.

Yeah, that looks really good. All right, guys, we'll catch you later. Bye. Bye. Put that coffee down. Coffee's for closers only.