INBOUND 2016: Matt Sunshine "How To Find and Keep The Best Sales Reps"

Center for Sales Strategy. It's a 33 year old sales performance company. We work with companies, helping them to grow their sales effort. And that involves everything from selecting the right people and making sure you focus on their talents and developing them the right way to helping build sales playbooks and doing sales training, everything having to do with sales. And so when it comes to this hiring thing, we spent a lot of time on it over the years. Over the last 16 years, since 2000, we've studied salespeople, like really studied salespeople. And let me give you some. An engineered solution or a customizable solution. They don't just sell a widget, right? So if you sold office furniture, that's a customizable solution. Because you're not selling the same desk to everyone. You're selling a solution to, to an office problem and they sell to sell again. So they're looking to, they need to build a relationship. They need to have a, they want repeat business. So that's kind of the salesperson. So when I tell you about the talents that you might be looking for, if you are looking for someone to go out and if you're. How many inbound partners here? Any partners. Okay, so if you're looking for a salesperson for your agency, it fits, right? Cause they sell a customizable solution, they, they sell to sell again. And they need to build that relationship. And it's B2B. All right, so let's get into this. So first thing is, with the right people you can do almost anything. And with the wrong people you can do almost nothing. And does that make sense to everyone? Like, you gotta have the right people sometimes. In fact, I was recently involved in a conversation this past Monday a few days ago where a CEO of a fairly large company told me, well, Matt, we can teach anybody to sell. Which like I know, right? It's like, yeah. So we had a good conversation. So here's my agenda for the day. We're going to talk about what is this sales talent. I'm going to tell you what they're called and how to spot it and what to look for. We're going to talk about recruitment and selection. We're talking about the behaviors that lead to performance. Talk a little bit about sourcing talent. We're going to, we're talking about this concept of building the talent bank, which I think is one of the strongest concepts going like, if you left here with nothing except understanding the concept of a talent bank, it's worthwhile and then the importance of overall fit. So this is A pretty famous picture. It's been around a long time. Everyone know who that is on what day? Combine. That's right. This is combine, right? This is where you go to show off your stuff. How about that stuff right there? Right. But it turns into that. So what is this? It's potential. It's not experience. If you were looking for someone that's won four super bowl rings, you wouldn't pick him. At this day, it wasn't him. But with the right training, the right coaching, the right fit, the right right plays, he had the talent. You get this. Steve Jobs said, I noticed the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that you're. Given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream. The A small team of A players, A plus players can run circles around the giant team of B and C players. And you look at that and you go, sure, that makes sense. I mean, how much better is your top performer than your bottom performer? 10 times, 100 times? A lot. So what we did is we studied the top. We studied those top performers. We also studied the bottom performers, and we looked for things that separate. We looked for the talents that didn't show up. So let me ask you a few questions. Show of hands. If it's a job that involves numbers, I'm your person. Raise your hand. Yes. Okay. Not very many. If you want someone who can create instant warmth, comfort, and trust, ask me, because I can do that. Raise your hand if yes. Okay, how about this one? If I trained as hard and as long as Michael Phelps did, I too, could win all the gold medals that he's won. Who thinks they can? Yes. Last question. If you spent a year living in Poland, you could speak Polish almost like a native. Raise your hand if yes. How many of you have spent a year in Poland? But yet you knew you could answer that question, right? That's because you understand you probably have a talent for that. You don't have experience. So sometimes when we talk about talent, people confuse it with experience, and they say, well, no, you were very capable of answering that last question. You know yourself, you know, if you have that talent to do that. I could probably spend the rest of my life in Poland and I'd never be able to speak Polish. I took four years of college Spanish and I can't speak English. Anything. I've tried. Just some people have a natural talent. Some people don't. So what is this talent? So, talent, you know, what Your talents are. Because they're your yearnings, right? They're the things that you do that you get a lot of satisfaction from. They're the things that you do that when you do them, you excel at them really, really fast. You have rapid learning. Or there are those things that you do and you're like really good. Like the first or second time you do it, where other people might struggle, you're like, this is kind of easy, those things. Like without getting scientific, without doing any sort of formal interviewing and behavioral study, you can kind of see what talents are just based on your yearnings, the things that you rapidly learn, the things where you have moments of excellent that making sense. All right, so let's talk about Michael Phelps for a second. He's always fun to talk about. So a few of you raised your hands and said that if you did train, you Too could win 23 Olympic gold medals. Most of us said, I could train as often as Michael Phelps, it wouldn't matter. There's no way that I'm winning a gold medal. So is it the training or is it the talent? It's both. Of course, it has to be both. But so many people think if all you do is the training, it'll work. You really do need the talent. So Michael was born a little bit different. First of all, he's 6 foot 4 and he's got a 30 inch inseam. Can you picture what that looks like? Right? All torso, right? Six foot seven, wingspan. His wingspan, a normal person would be six four wingspan. Your arms are as long as your body. His arms are long. His fingertips dangle near his knees. He's got double jointed knees. He wears flippers and his post race lactate levels are equal to what we would have at resting. He's got talents that we just don't have. Me and him, we have the same coach. We could spend the same time in the water. I don't have those things and there's nothing wrong with that. There are things that I can do that he can't do, right? There are things that you can do that he can't do. That's not one of them. And by the way, he's gangly and uncoordinated on land. And if you ever saw his TV show about where he tried to play golf, you'll know it's laughable. He even laughs at that. He's not good at everything. He's great at swimming. So when we hire salespeople, we want people that are great at sales, right? So just because someone is an extrovert and they love to talk. Doesn't mean that they're going to be great at sales. Right? It just means that they're an extrovert and they like to talk. They may or may not be good at sales. So just like in sports, there's talents, in real life there are too, and we have just as many. Actually, I should say it this way. We have more non talents than we do talents. Many more non talents. The list of non talents is like way long. The list of talents is very short. But we all have talents. We all have non talent. So imagine a group of people. Imagine how great it would be if you knew someone had the talent of optimism. You probably know those people, they're always optimistic. Or how about that person that just has that uncanny way of building trust. Someone's a super negotiator or highly focused. They never drop the ball full of ideas. I mean, that would be good to know about someone. And I'm suggesting that as you interview people, you look for those things and you worry less about what they've done in the past, because you're not hiring them for what they did in the past. You're hiring them for what they'll do in the future. So look for their talents, but also be aware of their non talents. Because that same person that builds trust, she's low stamina. And that same person that's highly focused, she's not very business savvy, her business acumen's not very good. That same person, that is instant friend maker. Well, he messes up all the details. He's just not good with the details. So we need to know both the talents and the non talents. I just say to everyone in here, how much better would you be at developing people if you knew what their strengths were and you knew how to develop them? That's what we have to get to. Because it's one thing to hire them, it's another thing to develop them. And if you're going to spend the time and effort to hire, you got to spend the time and effort to develop. So the list of talents, why is this moving? So armed with that list of talents, armed with what you know and what you need right now, you got to go find these people, you got to go out and get recruitment and selection. So this is the talent bank, and this is what I want everyone to really focus in on. So the talent bank, like a real bank in the real world. The more you have in the bank, the more options that you have, the more you have in the bank, the more options that you have. When you don't have anything in the bank, you don't have any options. I talk to sales leaders all the time. They will tell me about a salesperson that they have that's really struggling. They've been struggling for like nine or 10 months. They're not showing any signs of growth, and they're frustrated. The person who owns the company is frustrated. Everyone's frustrated. And I'll say, well, why don't you just give that person another job? Or part company with them if you have to, but they're not having success. Your culture is defined by what you tolerate. What are you doing? And they'll go, well, I don't have anyone else, so this person's good enough. Oh, that hurts. A guy like me, that's tough to hear that they don't have anything in their talent bank. So if you think of a talent bank like this, you constantly are looking for people. You're constantly sourcing, not just when you have a job open. Like always. When I was. When I didn't own the center for Sales Strategy, and when I was working at a company as director of sales and head of Sales, I interviewed one person a week. One person a week, interviewed 50 people a year. What I did, it was just kind of what I did. Didn't even have openings sometimes, but figured if you're interviewing 50, 60, 70 people a year, you're going to have a pretty good strong talent bank. And when you do have an opening, you have people to go to, so you always want to be looking and screening. And I believed in having a screener. And a screener, to me, was just a set of questions. The same set of questions. I asked every single person the exact same set of questions. And the reason why I did that you is because I didn't want whether or not I liked somebody to be based on what type of day I was having. Because if I was having a great day and I met with someone, I might think that they're a great candidate. And so my notes might say, oh, circle back with this person. I really like them. But it really could have everything to do with I was having a great day. Or conversely, if I was having a bad day and I met someone and maybe it just wasn't very good, I would say that was. So I asked the same questions the same way every time. The. That was my screening process. And then I'd put that person in my talent bank and I'll show you what a talent bank looks like in a second and then I would recruit them. That's what I mean when I say sustain. I would recruit them. I would constantly circle back with them. Think of it as a lead nurture. Think of it like a nurturing campaign. Right? You're not ready. They're not ready right now. You're not ready to give them a job. They're not ready to take a job. But you want to keep them in your talent bank, so you want to nurture them. So maybe that's every month or every six to six weeks, you reach out to them, maybe send them something about your company, but you want to keep them in your funnel. That's on the recruitment side. On the selection side, you want to be specific. When you have a job opening, you want to draw up what I would call a job spec sheet. And I'll show you what that looks like here in a second. You want to have a job spec sheet, because now you know what you're looking for versus just picking someone that you happen to get along with or someone that has. You know, I have twin daughters. So if I met with someone and they had twin daughters and like, oh, wow, we're like, the same, and maybe I favor that person, it has nothing to do with talent. It'd be all the wrong reasons to hire that person. So you want to have a spec sheet, keeps you honest. You know exactly what you're looking for. Then you make a withdrawal from your talent bank. Then you screen them again. Maybe you take two or three people out of your talent bank. You say, these are the best two or three that I have, that meet the job spec that I'm looking for. I'm gonna interview them all again. Then I'm gonna make the selection. I'm gonna select the very best person. So that's the recruiting and selection process that I follow. It's the recruiting and selection process that all of our best clients follow. And it's the one that works time and time again. It's repeatable. It's predictable. You know exactly how it's gonna happen. There's no guesswork in it. So let me walk you through what some of these things look like. Again, we're looking for talents we're looking for, and you just got to ask the right interview questions. Right? You got to ask, you know, it's not, what did you do at your last job? But it's like, do you think people have a right to their own opinions? And if someone disagrees with your opinion, do you have the right to change their mind? Right. That has nothing to do or how much do you like to convince people? So we want to look for those talents. I'm not saying that we shouldn't look for skill. We should also look for skills. You should also look for experiences. But the mistake most people make is they don't look for talent. I put talent first. So let me explain the difference. Skills are how to find new prospects or how to approach prospects or how to ask better questions or how to gain a. Those are skills. I can teach someone how to ask questions. I can teach you how to do that. I can teach you how to approach a prospect. I can teach you how to gain a commitment. Here's what I can't teach. Can't teach someone how to be curious. I can't teach someone how to be competitive. I can't teach someone how to be caring. That's not a teachable thing. Now, if someone is curious and I teach them how to ask questions, that's magical. That's magical. If someone is competitive and I put things in place so that they can win, I use sales contests or I give them goals to achieve, they're going to really accelerate. If someone's not competitive and I give them challenges to win and keep score and all that, they're going to look at me and go, you're in my way. You're bothering me. Stay out of my way. Look for the things that you can't teach. Think of talent the way you think of land, right? You can't create it. You can only develop it. Look at another way. Everyone has, like we said, their long list of non talents, their short list of top talents, you can improve. You can improve your talents by 10 times. You can improve your non talents by 10%. So we often say that it's our job as sales manager, sales leaders, to not put in what was left out. Sorry, I'll go back. Not put in what nature left out, but bring out what nature put in. I can't make you something that you're not, but if you got it in you, I can really develop it. So part of this whole finding and developing and keeping top players, if a top, a top sales rep will leave your organization, if they're not being developed, if they're not growing, if they don't see an opportunity for them to grow and develop, and I don't mean get a promotion, I mean grow and develop, they'll leave, they'll. You can grow your strengths 10 times now. You can grow your weaknesses. We're humans, right? We can learn, like we said about Michael Phelps, I'm a pretty good swimmer. I mean, I know how to swim. And if I took swimming lessons, I would get better, there's no doubt. In fact, I did. I took swimming lessons because I was doing some competitive stuff. I took swimming lessons and I saw my hundred yard, my hundred heart, my 100 yard time go down just a little bit. Snap. I couldn't win an award, couldn't win a. Couldn't make, couldn't make the local, any team. I got faster though. For me, I got faster. If it was a talent, it really grows. All right, so remember, everybody has talent. Everyone. Not everyone has sales talent. Everyone has talents. And you probably know that about people. You probably spot that in people. So what are the talents that you want to look for? Well, let me do a quiz real quick. How many people? Raise your hand if you think you're naturally curious. Almost everybody. Okay, how about how many people are competitive? Okay. Not some people. How many people are caring? Okay. How many people would say that they are in the top 1% of people in the world when it comes to curious, competitive and caring, not so many. Hands go up, right? That's what we're talking about. We're looking for the extraordinary, right? We're looking for the exceptional. That's what you want. You want the exceptional. So that means that they're hard to find. So what are the top talents? So let me share these. These are them. You can take pictures of them or I know the deck will be available as well. Top performers have work intensity. They are work a love. Its not workaholics. Work a love. Its like the worst thing that you could tell someone with high work intensity is to tell them to take a vacation, to calm down. They don't want to take a vacation. You could probably convince them to leave, take a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. But being off that much time, people that have high work intensity actually enjoy when they're on vacation, checking their email maybe once a day for 30, 40 minutes just so they know they can get that done and then they'll go back to being on vacation. They enjoy themselves more. Anyone like that in this room? Right? You know what I'm talking about. Not everyone's like that. How many people know people that when they go on vacation they turn it off? They want nothing to do with it. Right? Neither one is right or wrong. People are different. Oops, sorry. Discipline. It's what you think. Highly effective salespeople. B2B. Salespeople have a whole lot of discipline, command. This might not be a word everyone's Familiar with command. Command is the ability to move something through the process effortlessly. Command. People with command have no problem saying so. Is that a yes? So can we get started next week? They have no problem saying that. Someone with high command. I'll give you a question, I just asked it before. Do people have a right to their own opinion? Most people say yes. If someone disagrees with you, do you have the right to change their opinion, change their mind? People with soft command or no command will say change their mind. No, I don't have a right to change their mind. I can certainly share with them my opinion and you know, everyone's entitled to their own opinion. I'll do my best to get them to see my way, but I can't change their opinion. People with high command, same question, will say, change their opinion. Yeah, absolutely I can change their opinion. In fact, I usually do. Command, that's command. Not everyone has it. You ask that question to a bunch of people, you see how they respond. See what I mean? Problem solver, problem solvers. The talent of problem solver is, is someone that can solve problems. They also can find problems, right? They also find problems. For example, anyone, how many people fly on airplanes pretty often? So when you're standing in line at TSA trying to get through, do you find yourself not caring and just checking your email, being on the phone, do you find yourself getting accident, aggravated, or do you find yourself trying to figure out how they could fix the situation? People that find themselves trying to figure out, huh, I wonder why this is like this. And asking questions and trying to figure out a better way, that's problem solver. That's the best problem solver I can give you. Does it mean those people that get frustrated and get angry at all are different? They're not wrong. That's certainly something to get angry about. Interpersonal is exactly what you think. Interpersonal is not the ability to be nice. Interpersonal is that ability to really get to know someone quickly. I'll give you a quick story on that. So a good friend of mine, best friend, he's loaded with interpersonal. Like absolutely loaded. I have like probably situational, interpersonal. Like sometimes you see it, sometimes you don't. It depends on the situation. So we're with a client and we're all getting in. This client was taking this guy and me out to dinner and we get in her car and I'm sitting in the back, he's sitting in the front and they're having this whole conversation about her children and what sports her children play and so we get there and we get out of the car and as we're going into the restaurant, she excuses her, she had to go to the bathroom. I said to her, I go, hey, how do you know her? We had just like met. And I go, how do you know her? He goes, I just met her today like you did. I go, how do you know so much about her family and her kids and everything? He said, didn't you see on the car there were the stickers on the back of the car and had like three kids and their name underneath and a soccer ball. And I'm like, I didn't even see that. And even if I did, there's no way I would have asked those questions. That's just out of my comfort zone now after, maybe after getting to know someone. But he had no problem just building that instant rapport. Later on I found out that they were exchanging ideas because they both had a kid the exact same age and they're like talking. It's like, wow, that's interpersonal. And that's important for a salesperson to have. Interpersonal B2B. Enterpriser. Enterpriser means they have no fear of going after big dollars. Enterpriser means they have no problem talking to a CEO. In fact, people with high enterprise are name drop all the time. They name drop all the time. And then ambition. Ambition is they want to win. Think of it as being ultra competitive is ambition. Don't think of it as try hard. Think of it as competitive, like they need to win. And credibility is when something wrong happens, do they take responsibility for it or do they immediately say, well, it was because of this that it didn't happen, it was because that the lead wasn't very good, Right? Or do they take ownership of it? That's credibility, exactness, precise customer focus. Do they put the customer first? Do they always solve for the customer? And then if someone has high command and if someone has high problem solver, they probably have the ability to overcome call reluctance. And I don't mean call reluctance like for cold calling, because I'm not a big believer in cold calling. I mean call reluctance, just of call reluctance. Some people just don't like going on appointments. They just don't like that first encounter. They would rather deal with existing customers than have to deal with even a lead or even a warm lead. So you want that. So these are the talents that we look for all the time. That's what makes the exceptional. So let's talk about how you do that. So how do you find these people? So we Think advertising works. We've seen it work. We also know that LinkedIn works. I love client referrals. I think client referrals are maybe the best way to get it. Employee referrals, especially right after they start working for you in their first three months, when they start working for you is a great time. In fact, I would make myself a note, and I did when I was a manager, that during their first three months on the job, I take them out for lunch or coffee and say, hey, now that you've been here for a month or two months and things are going well and you're into the onboarding, who do you know that I ought to put in my talent bank? Give me one or two names of people I don't care. Not that are looking for a job. I mean, you can always give me those names. But just who are the really exceptional people? Who are the people that are good question askers? Who are the good people that always seem to be able to come up with just the right solution at just the right time? Who are the people that always get good results for their customers? Right. You can see I'm looking for those talents. I'm not looking for experience. I'm looking for the talents. College connections are great. Internal recruiters work Glassdoor is obviously something you ought to be taking advantage of. Internal candidates, marketing and sales clubs, former employees, former employees that left on good terms are great sources of leads. They know what you're looking for. They know what success looks like. So when you advertise, I want to give this one a few minutes of discussion. When you advertise, write for desired behaviors. Do not write an ad that says, are you looking for a job that pays this much money? Are you looking for a job? Look for behaviors. Like we just mentioned, so many people run the wrong ads. When you seek referrals, again, ask for those desired behaviors. Think about all those talents that we just talked about. Who do you know that can't turn off their email? They respond when you ask them a question, no matter what time, they respond back to you. Who do you know that when they respond back to you in email, Their emails seem to always be perfect? There's never a typo, there's never a punctuation. Who do you work with that's like that? You know those people, Those people have the talents that you're looking for. And as you're looking and as you just have your antenna, you're walking around, you're bumping into people. Be looking for people that show you that they have These talents, right? The way they take notes during a conference, the way they sit during an interview, the way they take them out to Starbucks, the way they order, the way they treat people at a restaurant. I love taking candidates out to a restaurant and just seeing how they treat people. Because how they treat people in the restaurant is probably a good indicator of how they're going to treat people, treat our customers. I want to see that. All right. If you want good bass, right? If you want to catch more bass, you should use bass bait, right? So if you want to find people with good problem solver, right? Ask good problem solver questions and don't say, so are you a good problem solver? Right. Don't be that transparent. But think about it. Tell me about a situation where there was a lot of details involved, there was a lot of intricacies. It took a long time, but in the end, you were able to overcome them and have success. Share with me that story. That's problem solver. That's problem solver. And I ask that question all the time to people. I asked that question to high school kids because I wanted to see if the interview questions could stand up with any age. High school kids have never really been in a sales job, not a B2B sales job. Some high school kids could answer that question easily. Others would say, I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. Right? Others go, well, yeah, I can tell you I had a real tough situation. I had a teacher that I wasn't connecting with, and they were never there for office hours whenever I went in. So I tell you what I did is I went and found the head of the department, and I explained to the department head that I really wanted to get an A in that class. So I asked that department head if I could meet with him on a regular basis just for extra study time. That teacher ended up coaching me and developing me. I ended up getting an A in that class. That's a high school kid answering that question. That's problem solver. They figured it out. Good command bait gets more people with command, fewer without it. So ask the right questions. You'll see that your quantity of people might go down. The quantity of people that you think you're willing to hire might go down, but the quality of people will go way up. And in the end, what you want is the right people, right? You want the right people. You don't want people to come in and turn over. We're working with a client right now who has to hire their Nationwide client, they have to hire 438 people by the end of January. 438 people. That's a lot of people that they have to hire. And we've been working with them so that they will carefully hire 438 people, which is not easy because when you have that many people that you have to hire, you almost feel like you'll hire, well, they want to work here, so let's just hire them. We'll give them a shot. We had to explain to them the cost of turnover. Right? The cost of turnover is one of those things where if it was a real expense on an expense line, none of us would have it. But figure out your cost of turnover, the cost of making a bad hire. You'll spend a little bit more time on this kind of stuff. So again, going back to this whole process, I mentioned a talent bank. So here's what it looks like. There are computer programs that can do this. You could build it in Excel if you wanted, but a legal pad works just as well. A legal pad works just as well. So across the top you have just a name. Promising and ready, willing and able. And down the side you have veteran, mid level novice and newbie. And every single person that you meet, you put in there. And I recommend if you're going to do it on a legal pad that you write in pencil, because this thing is a snapshot, it's a moment in time whenever you're looking at it, because people become in and out of your funnel all the time. Obviously, if you do it in Excel, you can move people around. People go from just a name to promising to ready, willing and able. And then if you don't hire them, they're probably not even on. They go back to being just a name because they took another job. They're no longer available. So you want to make sure you have that. The other thing, I mentioned a job spec sheet before, so this is job analysis and spec sheet. And again, you can have this in the deck when you get it. But there's three things you're looking for. Talent, experience and skills. And they're all important. And I've spent all of my time here today talking about talent, because I really think that's the number one thing to look for. But in our business, we need to make sure sometimes that they have the right skills and they have the right experiences. Sometimes we don't have time to train them up and so they need to come in with some of those experiences. I don't want to belittle that. I'm just saying, let's start with talent. So would you invest in Michael Phelps as a golfer? No, you wouldn't as a swimmer? Yes. As a swimmer? Yes. Not everyone can do everything. So when you're hiring that salesperson, make sure you hire the right salesperson for the right job. Are they an account manager? Are they a business developer? Are they an ae? Do you have a sales process that has the same person doing all of those job functions? You have to make those decisions. And I want you to beware of glare. I want you to beware of glare. Because if what you want is a little puppy, if you want like a little 15, 20 pound dog, when you go to the store or the pound or wherever you're going to get your dog to the rescue to get your dog, and you're looking at these three lovable little dogs, they all look like the dog that you want. They're all cute, they're all small. You'll love them all the same, except after you grow and develop a little bit, they end up looking a little bit different. So depending on what you want, you might look differently. Because when you interview them, they all look like this. They all look cute and lovable. They all look like they're 20 pound dogs that you can sit on your lap for the rest of your life. But if you didn't hire right, you end up with something very different. You might end up with that or with that, when really what you wanted was that, thank you very much.