Ever wondered why your sales team may be missing the mark? Imagine the potential of integrating the grit, determination and teamwork capabilities of athletes and military veterans into your sales force. Our guest, JR Butler, founder and CEO of the Shift Group, unpacks the distinct advantages of this approach.
In our candid chat with JR, we explore the compelling argument for transitioning athletes and military veterans into sales roles. These individuals are often imbued with qualities such as a robust work ethic, resiliency, competitiveness, coachability, growth mindset, and a knack for being team players. These are not just buzzwords in the sales industry; they're attributes that can significantly bolster the effectiveness of your sales team. What's more, JR compares the unique experiences of athletes and military veterans, shedding light on how these backgrounds can be harnessed for a successful transition into sales.
Don't miss JR's take on the critical role of coaching in sales and how to tap into this underutilized talent pool.
Ever wondered why your sales team may be missing the mark? Imagine the potential of integrating the grit, determination and teamwork capabilities of athletes and military veterans into your sales force. Our guest, JR Butler, founder and CEO of the Shift Group, unpacks the distinct advantages of this approach.
In our candid chat with JR, we explore the compelling argument for transitioning athletes and military veterans into sales roles. These individuals are often imbued with qualities such as a robust work ethic, resiliency, competitiveness, coachability, growth mindset, and a knack for being team players. These are not just buzzwords in the sales industry; they're attributes that can significantly bolster the effectiveness of your sales team. What's more, JR compares the unique experiences of athletes and military veterans, shedding light on how these backgrounds can be harnessed for a successful transition into sales.
Don't miss JR's take on the critical role of coaching in sales and how to tap into this underutilized talent pool.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Bray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. Today I've got a special guest. I'm joined by JR Butler, founder and CEO of the Shift Group, and we're going to be talking about recruiting athletes onto your sales team. Hey, jr.
Speaker 2:Hey Corey, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, excited to be here. This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart because my dad told me when he got his first job back in I think it was 1970 or so he said that his boss told him I only hire athletes and my dad played college basketball. That's one of the factors that led to him getting the job. I've obviously been grown up with this idea and the reasons why it's a good idea, what some of the risks are. Your old business is dedicated to this. Tell us why athletes for sales jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we do veterans too, but it's the same thought process behind it is anybody who's successful in anything? I think there's four things that make that up. There's characteristics and attributes and then skills and knowledge. When I think about a career in sales, which I've been in since I retired from hockey myself, a lot of the things that made me successful on the intangible and attribute side were the same exact things that made me successful in sales the whole business model. The idea behind it is de-risking the intangibles and attributes that are going to be indicative of success in sales. We try to do a little skills and knowledge. A lot of that, as you know, comes down to coaching within the organization, but we think that if you can guarantee someone has certain characteristics because of the life experience that they bring into the interview, you're de-risking your entry-level sales hiring process, and that's the thesis that we took to market with Shift Group.
Speaker 1:What are some of those characteristics?
Speaker 2:I think work ethic, obviously resiliency, competitiveness, coachability, a growth mindset, accountability and teamwork those are the five or six that jump right out when I think of all the great salespeople I worked with. Every one of them had those attributes and those are things that you develop in military service and playing college and professional sports. Those, I think, are the key leading indicators of success for any salesperson.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, some will say and I've seen it said that you can also get those from other places. I've seen people say you can get it from choir or from chest or from these other things. Is there a difference in terms of what you're getting from those things or the degree and intensity to what you're getting them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think, listen, by the way, I agree with that, right, if you meet somebody who's been dedicated to something like a musical instrument or dance or chess or anything like that, their entire life to this point, then yes, absolutely. I think, with sports, specifically, when you look at the college landscape, right, just thinking of college athletes alone, only 7% of high school athletes go on to play college. And then when you look at the college landscape, there's 19 million college students and only 460,000 play a sport. So the intensity by which you have to have those things is very real. And you're coupling that with the fact that those 460,000 kids have the same exact academic workload as the 18 and a half million other ones. But then they're also making the sacrifice of practice, lifts, game, you know, game tape, reviews, travel on the weekends.
Speaker 2:So I think the intensity by which you have those things and the structure that comes with playing a sport at that level or above, or serving in the military, the intensity and the structure and, honestly, the repetitiveness of it over many, many years, that's it's measurable, like it's real. I don't think that that's not true for those other things, but it's a little harder to measure it when it's like, yeah, I really was focused on, you know, chess my whole life. It's like, well, tell me how that showed up for you every day. I think in sports it's really easy to talk about those things because of all the repetition you have showing those characteristics you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because at that point, when you're in it, it's the number one thing in your life.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:And it's overshadowing everything else. Whereas some other things that might be more casual, even if they were hard, even if there was commitment behind them, it's not the thing that's completely taken over your life and putting you in a completely different social and academic position than other folks that are around you.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:So, in terms of the intensity, walk us through this, because I don't think everyone is familiar for an in season athlete and an out of season athlete. How many hours a week are they spending on their sport when they're in college?
Speaker 2:On the low end, on the very, very low end, at a Division III sport where maybe it's not the biggest sport at the school. On the low end, you're talking 20 to 25 hours. On the high end, in the Division I, you're playing one of the big three or four, whether that's hockey, football, basketball, baseball, and then the same thing on the female side soccer, field hockey, volleyball, swimming. You're talking 40 hours minimum, like minimum, and that's in season, and then out of season is 30, right, like you know. You're in the gym, you're in physical therapy, you're in video sessions, like my spring, in a lot of cases as a hockey player, was just as busy as our winter in season. So there's a huge, huge time commitment that, unless you did it, it is hard to it, really is hard to grasp.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an incredible amount of time, and then there's recovery between that.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and you got to go to class.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and study for class and potentially, maybe occasionally have some fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and in some cases, especially at the Division III level, you're probably working too Like. You probably have like a part-time job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so people go through that, they get out. Tell me a little bit about what traditionally folks were faced with when it comes to the job market and how you're trying to change that.
Speaker 2:I think the biggest crisis facing athletes when they retire and veterans is the identity crisis that they go through, right, like you know, my entire life, until I was 24 years old, if somebody asked me who I was, my answer was I'm a hockey player. And then one day you wake up and you can't answer that way anymore, right? So trying to figure out what does that mean to you as an athlete or a soldier Like, what does being a hockey player? What did that mean to me? And like, doing some introspection and discovery of like, what does being a hockey player mean for my values? What does it mean for my strengths, my weaknesses, what does it mean like on a day-to-day basis that I enjoy doing? Or you know, a like-minded experience that is similar to my experience in hockey, that will check some of those boxes that I'm looking for.
Speaker 2:And I think that's the biggest thing that we do with all our athletes up front is give them a place to do some introspection and some self-discovery, because you have to start with the self before you can look externally and start looking at careers, and when you look at careers, you need to understand the day-to-day, you need to understand the expectations. Obviously, we allow them to do that, but we can't do that until they know what they're looking for, and they don't know what they're looking for until they know themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they've got to get to re-know themselves. Exactly 100%. I didn't play at that high level. I started on a basketball team in high school to school at 3,500 kids, so it was somewhat competitive.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:And the day I mean we played. I was 25, 30 hours a week in high school and on day of my last game I didn't know what to do. So the next day I just went and played golf. I was like I guess this is what I'm doing now. I don't think I've touched a basketball for two months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I need to set this aside.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah but then you do that so and then you know I wasn't anywhere. You're being able to play in college because I'm 6'6 and slow and that doesn't really work anymore. So the idea that someone then has to figure out who they are they were just the best and now they're gonna go into the sales world. Do you start these folks entry level just like everybody else? Do they get a leg up? What's that look like? Transitioning into a sales job?
Speaker 2:It's entry. I mean, unless you're like we get career transition or sometimes maybe they sold like uniforms and they wanna sell software. Right, that's a little different. But if a kid's right out of sport, you know, we take NFL, nhl, major League Baseball players and they get BDR jobs. Wow, and a lot of that I think is a tribute to the athlete mentality of like carrying the water bottles Like. These guys have been through that before.
Speaker 2:Right, if you played like college hockey, you were probably the best player on your high school hockey team. If you played professional hockey, you were probably the best player on your college team. But when you go into that locker room your first day as a professional athlete, you're a rookie. You're picking up the pucks at the end of practice you're carrying the water bottles to the bench. So these guys and girls are used to taking a step back and earning it again. So I think for the most part there's not an expectation of like well, I played in front of 30,000 people, why should I make 100 cold calls a day? It's like nobody cares if you played in front of 30,000 people, dude. Like you got to pick up a phone and you got to earn it. So some people. It's hard, but they either get over it or they go find somewhere else to get trained.
Speaker 1:Okay, so they get into that job. Talk to me about your experience watching them pick it up and execute versus the general population that came from the normal world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what you find with people that are like that DNA of like being an elite athlete is like there's this development of passion that you don't typically see right, and I think it comes from a background in pursuing goals right Like as an athlete, you're used to being goal oriented and then doing whatever it takes to get that goal right. Like I wasn't passionate about shooting pucks but I shot 400 pucks every single day in my driveway because I wanted to play Division I hockey. I wasn't passionate about cold calling, but I wanted to make a million dollars as a salesperson. So over time I developed a passion for cold calling. I developed a passion to get good at discovery. I developed a passion on like doing really fast and intricate account research right Like.
Speaker 2:So you see this like I see it all the time where we meet a kid and then you know we talked to him three months after his job and he's like dude, I'm loving it. Like I'm learning all this. I'm getting really good at X, y and Z and as they get better at it they get passionate about it, just like they were passionate about shooting pucks in the driveway over time. Because when you start to develop skill at something, then that passion kind of comes with it. I just see that the passion comes a little bit earlier for our candidates. Then you see, in a normal, a normal entry level sales hire, I think Got it, and then does that translate to a faster path to success?
Speaker 2:totally, because if you're enjoying practice, then you're gonna do it more and that means you're gonna get better, faster, right? So you definitely see, we see faster ramp times and faster pass the promotions to that next role, which is what everybody wants.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you're working with athletes and military veterans. Contrast those a little bit. It's different. One's more. One's playing a game that becomes work. One's going to war with Gizwork. One is doing it 30, 40 hours a week, the other one's doing it 168 hours a week. One can go home to their family, one can't. There's some differences there. Walk me through how that comes to play, both in the transition into the private sector sales job and then some things that you observe the differences between the two when they actually are in the seat.
Speaker 2:It's a lot easier, I think, to bucket all athletes together, right, because whether you played, whether you're a female that played college basketball or a male that played the NFL, a lot of those characteristics are the same You're on a team, et cetera. The military is unique because the amount of different professions that exist within the military right. There are those folks that are combat vets, that infantry, but there's also people that were IT administrators in the military right. So it's a little harder to say, hey, military veterans are like that. But I think what you do see with military veterans is they're mission-driven and they're high character.
Speaker 2:I think there's always confusion around military veterans, where people that didn't serve in the military think of a lack of creativity, like you need to be told exactly what to do. But there's this thing called Commander's Intent in the military, which is relatively new in the last decade as the world has changed, the military has changed and now there's a lot more freedom and expectation in the military, where it's like this is our goal. How you get there is up to you, depending on the various units. So I think with the military veterans there's a much more thirst for like having a clear mission and like feeling like everybody is on the same team and trying to accomplish the same thing and less focus on these individual kind of accolades that you're gonna get throughout, whereas an athlete probably needs a little bit more individual focus and individual accolade and promotion and things like that. Right, I think that the veterans we work with are looking for a team-based atmosphere where the mission is clear and everybody's rolling in the same direction. That's kind of the biggest difference I see between the two.
Speaker 1:Got it. And then, when you take these folks and put them on a team with people that don't have that same background, do you find that the client, the person that's having you place folks for them, comes back to you and says, hey, I want more of this, and what's their experience? As they compare and contrast the folks that you're placing against the other individuals, yeah, we always like.
Speaker 2:One thing that is unique about our model is we don't charge people to go through our training. So I think the best answer to your question is that 40% of our paying customers have come from companies that hired a candidate from us before we signed an agreement. So we didn't make revenue on the first candidate Candidate went in there and the company's like what is going on? Like how are you so far ahead of everybody? They tell them about shift group and then we typically get an email or a call from their hiring manager being like give me more Susies or give me more Dave's. You know what I mean. So we do see a high promotion rate, very, very, very low attrition like shockingly low attrition compared to the industry standard and entry level sales.
Speaker 1:How many people are coming out of the military and out of college athletics every year?
Speaker 2:150,000 athletes enter the job market and somewhere between 180 and 200,000 veterans retire from service every year.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of people. What are the most common career paths for these folks? The most common? What Career paths? Where are they usually going?
Speaker 2:Yeah, military lands and project management a lot Like, especially the special operators like the SEALs, the Green Berets, the special forces guys, and sales is still like even in without shift group. About 30% of professional athletes land in sales jobs already, but the highest percentage of athletes wanna stay in the game because of that identity crisis. So you see, a lot of people go into coaching, a lot of people go into scouting player development. They just wanna be around the game still and those audiences are our biggest target because if every athlete goes and gets back in the game, there's only so many coaching jobs out there, there's only so many scouting jobs out there. So those are the kids that we're trying to find out if they're a good fit, and if they are, we're gonna train the heck out of them.
Speaker 1:Got it and then, as they go into the, they go into the coaching job. Do you ever have them realize? Hey, maybe coaching isn't for me. I'm doing a boomerang back into the business market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, about 25% of our placements are actually coaches that come out of the programs we work with. And then there's a lot of folks that work in athletic administration too, that they were athletes, that go on and become student athlete development things like that, and they find they're missing the competition, they're missing the team camaraderie, like they're missing like seeing themselves get better and better at something over time. And those folks that miss those things, those are the ones that really should be in sales jobs, in my opinion. Got it.
Speaker 1:That sounds great. I mean, I think that if you've got somebody that has operated at that high level, who's spent not much time and not much energy on something that's very important to them, you're just going to eliminate a lot of drama, you're going to eliminate quitting, you're going to eliminate crying, you're going to eliminate the types of behaviors that just purely aren't tolerated in those areas, and that's what it's a real bad situation when you get that inside of a sales team. A lot of companies have it, a lot of companies deal with it it sounds like they don't have to.
Speaker 2:No, no. And there's one little nugget that I think gets kind of passed over when you serve in the military or you play sports at that level, the access you have to great leadership is unmatched, right, like you know, if you're playing college sports, for a coach who's made his career in coaching, they're a good leader, like they're setting really good values, really good expectations and really good standards. So these are people who are used to good values, high expectations and high standards, and that's something that I think sales leadership. You see a lot of that in sales leadership. So if that's the culture you want to build, you need to find people that understand what that means, and I think you find that immediately when you look at somebody who played sports at that level or served in the military. Is there, used to good leadership? So they want to be around that environment where there's high expectations, clear values and really high standards. So I think that's something that's missed a lot by the value of hiring these types of people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they're more coachable, requires less management bandwidth, but when they are being coached, the managers can have a huge impact on them 100%. Well, let me ask you this. This is interesting what would happen? So, let's say there's eight people on a sales team? Would it be better to have some athletes, some veterans, some other people and people from different walks of life? What team would overperform, in your opinion? That team, just a mixture, or a team that is just combat veterans?
Speaker 2:I think it depends on the leader first of all. Right, that's a huge kind of variable into that equation. I mean, listen, I'm a big fan, like I think sales teams should be diverse in terms of the backgrounds that they're in. I'd be lying if I didn't say that I think the team of athletes or the team of veterans would outperform the other team just because they would push each other right, like. I don't know if you saw, I did a post about Belgian horses.
Speaker 2:Belgian horses are the strongest horses in the world. One, they can pull 12,000 to 14,000 pounds. When you put two Belgian horses together, when you yoke them together, they can pull up to 35,000 pounds. Wow, and the math doesn't work there, right, like, I was a sociology major, but it's like what's going on and it's because they're pace setter horses, so when they're together, they push each other to go further and harder and pull more weight. When I think of athletes and veterans, those are Belgian horses. They're used to being in a team atmosphere where they want to be the best, they want to set the pace. When you have eight pace setters, guess what You're going to get eight like really high performing people, because they're going to push the hell out of each other. You get one bad egg in there and you could be in trouble. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that one bad egg might be the person that's always complaining, the victim that's having a visual, whereas if you had yeah, I'm just thinking about this if it was all Combat veterans and the coach, the manager knew how to coach those folks. There is so much BS that would be cut through. You just wouldn't have to deal with right, right.
Speaker 2:They'd be able to run their, their sales, their sales meetings, like a mission, like a mission. Brief and frickin I rack like are you kidding me? Like think about how dialed in those people would be have you seen anybody do this? Yeah, we have. We have companies that we work with that that's specifically only higher athletes and veterans.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what's the management structure look like there. Do they have? Are they able to have more people on a team, are they? What's the what's the outcome that you've seen? If they're, if they're, in that position?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's there's, there's bigger, bigger teams, and and in all those cases the managers are always Athletes or vets themselves too.
Speaker 1:So bigger teams, so let's manage an overhead. That's the point. So that's just a direct impact on profitability in a positive way 100%, exactly right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because if you've got, I think, one of the things that we've seen in Silicon Valley with the bloat from the late 2000 teens and to you know, 2021, 2022 you don't see teams where there's a manager managing four people I know it is so expensive. You've got a manager managing four people. I know what are they gonna do. That's not a full-time job, and so then they end up meddling or go into meetings they don't need to go to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or or they don't do anything and they Sign out at 3 pm, right, yeah, exactly, it's definitely a problem and you know, you guys know your job as a manager is to coach, not do right. And If you've got a team of four with one manager, that manager better be doing and that's not really their job. That's not what you're paying them for.
Speaker 1:No, not at all, and they're incredibly overpaid, if that's, if they're in a doer role. Yeah, I don't know their salesperson. Three o'clock I love that same bankers hours. Barrow it, borrow it 3%, lend it 6%, get on the golf course by 3 o'clock 363.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it oh.
Speaker 1:Man, this is good. This is good. What about the? I Mean this is a fun question to ask. So you've got an athlete that made a bunch of money, somebody got a seven figure signing bonus, something that was a high-paying person. Are they going into sales or you only find the folks that had the, the lower end of the, the financial success?
Speaker 2:So our highest earning placement, made Like 15 million dollars as a professional athlete, made good decisions like financially pretty secure, like that's. That's a good enough amount of money that you can pretty much you know you can, you can work off of interest. You can live off of interest for the most part if you, if you, make good decisions. And he came to us about a year into retirement and he was just bored. He's like I want to compete again, I want to be, you know, the.
Speaker 2:The biggest thing we hear when we ask people what they miss the most is the locker room and Sales is unique and that it's a team sport full, full stop, right. So those people typically are actually really good because you know they're not squeezing the soap tight, they don't need the deal that they're trying to go after, but they enjoy the competition. They're there strictly for the competition, to to have a skill that they can work on, to get out of their comfort zone and to be a really good teammate to their, to their, to their colleagues. So those people, those high earners, are actually really good hires in my opinion that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:So they're not emotionally attached to the deal. They don't say this deal is my daughter's private school for the year right, exactly, literally right.
Speaker 2:They're not that motivated.
Speaker 1:So for folks like that that are really Really competitive, does remote work work or do they need to be in the office? Sit next to people?
Speaker 2:I think generally in the office is better For, like almost all of our, almost all of our candidates, we do get the unique situations where they're older, they've got a mortgage, they got families in there, they're in a geo that doesn't have in office work. But the success of people that work in an office is significantly higher for us, according to the data.
Speaker 1:Okay, anything else you can share on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's. You know, our attrition rate overall is under 3%. Our attrition rate for remote work is closer to 10%. So those people are they're not Feeling that connection to their team and to their organization the way that the people that are going in an office and spending time with people are. I think, any listen, I like. I think it's great that we can all work remote. I think early on in your career, your first two or three years, you need to be around peers and colleagues that are going to push you and you need to have access to the leadership that isn't like a structured, structured one-on-one every now and then. It's going to be like kind of continuous engagement.
Speaker 1:In my opinion, yeah, there's those special moments that don't occur when you're remote. That's one of those things I always says that executive that you bump into at the water cooler, they'll talk to you at the water cooler. They're not going to take your slack message at 503 pm when they're playing with their kid.
Speaker 1:Right on, right on and it's like playing poker too. If you're, if you're only playing online poker, you're gonna miss so many things that you'd get it in person at the table. You just can miss out on it. It's a developmental moment.
Speaker 2:Totally. That's a really, actually really good analogy. I like that a lot, especially as a gambler.
Speaker 1:Well, it's funny, I talk about gambling in every single one of my episodes. For those of you that have been listening, you recognize that.
Speaker 1:We touch on it at least once, because I think gambling is critical in the world of sales, because not that you're just randomly picking a number on the real out wheel and hoping that you get paid 38 to 1, but because there's nothing that's guaranteed and if you work hard and do the right things, the probability, your expected value of your outcome is going to be good and it's going to be somewhat predictable, but it's not going to be spot on every time, and I think a lot of the things that JR is talking about today around putting people that have discipline and a competitive spirit and just mental toughness in the right position. That's what can help drive folks and teams to success. Where you might not see that, just taking the general person off the street that hasn't been trained in those types of skills 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that you're right on, and there's a certain amount of like. I've been gambling since I was nine years old. I grew up in Massachusetts. It's part of our culture and just the emotional stability of when lose. When lose, you've got to kind of keep that, because in sales there's a lot of roller coasters and if you're not used to that it's tough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. And then even when you get that one deal, it's guaranteed, but you think you might be able to sell two more products on it. That's like running a parlay, and we know that's always great Sitting there sweating Monday night for the sixth teamer.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, you need the jump ball to go the right way. Just get the right. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:You're betting jump balls. Oh yeah, oh wow, all right, got it, got it. I know your style Betting jump balls, betting coin. I think that was what Artie Lang was saying. This is a podcast. One time he said, yeah, the last five Super Bowls I've been down 10 grand before the game even started Because I got the coin flip wrong five years in a row.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, I'm in the same boat. Right now I'm on a cold run on coin flips.
Speaker 1:Oh man, that's great. All right, jarrah. Anything else you want to touch on today?
Speaker 2:No, I appreciate you bringing me on. I love what you guys are doing at Coach CRM. I think we need a better coaching culture and sales leadership across the board. I think we got away. We rode the bull market into people looking at dashboards and expecting reports, and that's not your job as a sales leader. Your job is to create the next generation of sales leader, and the only way you can do that is coaching. So I love what you guys are doing and I really, really appreciate being part of it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well. Thanks for joining us. If folks are interested in hiring athletes or military veterans, how do they reach out to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, just come to our website, wwwshiftgroupio, or find me on LinkedIn, JR Butler. You can always find me in the comments, chirping people.
Speaker 1:He's always in there having fun dropping insights, jr Butler. And if anybody wants a free version, not a free trial, we've got a free version over at coachcrmcom. Come check it out, coachcrmcom. This is the Sales Management Podcast. I'm your host. Coach CRM Co-founder, corey Bray. See you next time.