Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
88. The 5 key activities of successful sales managers with Rocky LaGrone
There are five key areas where all sales managers should spend their time and energy, and in this episode, Cory and Rocky dive deep into each of them.
If you are in sales management or have sales managers reporting into you, this episode will serve as a good assessment of opportunities going forward. Enjoy!
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads. Let's go. Today's another debate episode, but instead of having a guest on here to debate against from the sales development experts, we're going to talk about the five things that sales managers should spend their time doing. Stick around, get all five, put them in practice inside of your organization. Rocky, how are you?
Speaker 2:Very good. Corey, Thank you for having me as a guest. I've been looking forward to this.
Speaker 1:I love it, man. Well, if we're going to talk about five things, let's rattle them off real quick so people can figure out if they want to stick around or go back and listen to one of my other episodes.
Speaker 2:Well, the coaching, motivation, accountability, growing the team and recruiting, hiring stronger people.
Speaker 1:Those sound important.
Speaker 2:Critical, critical, critical for growth.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, I talk about coaching all the time, so we're going to get to that one in a second. Let's start with motivation, because I think that's one of those that people don't really know. If I asked 10 people what the definition of motivating your team is, I'd probably get 12 answers. So how do you think about it and wrap it in the context that somebody can take and go implement tomorrow?
Speaker 2:Sales is always up and down. You know peaks and valleys and most managers one. They don't understand what motivates their people because they haven't asked, they haven't gone through exercises, they don't really know what the personal motivation is for them to do what they need to do to hit their own personal goals. So they can't leverage that. But when there are peaks and valleys, most people start trying to motivate when they're going downhill or at the bottom and it's too late. We've got to start motivating when they're almost at the peak three-quarters of the way up. That's when we've got to start motivating. When they're almost at the peak three quarters of the way up, that's when we got to think about when the Valley's going to hit and let's get them through that to keep the Valley higher.
Speaker 1:I love that. That seems counterintuitive, because a lot of times you see managers oh, he's good, let him go. We're going to go work on this other problem child. Or you know, little Timmy's struggling. So we're going to go work with little Timmy. We're going to let the people that are doing great just do great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when you get there it's too late. And if they don't know what's going on in their personal life, they don't understand their personal goals, then they can't really leverage that and they can't look forward and see what's going on or how to help those people. I mean, life happens. Sometimes people go through you know life experiences and their head gets down and you know they have a bad week, a bad month, a bad event happened in their life but we got to stay ahead of that and they really don't motivate with the comp plans like they used to. Most people aren't motivated extrinsically anymore and there's just not enough motivation tools for managers to use and they don't know what they don't know. Not their fault, good people just don't know what they don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, here's a question for you that's probably not provocative, but it's closer to provocative than not. Imagine that you're a remote manager and you're early in your management career. How do you appropriately engage in somebody's personal life?
Speaker 2:I think you have to have one-on-one time and conversation and get to know them. You can't. I mean, relationships are built through shared experiences, right? I'm going to give you a football coaching example. We all know well. Anybody who follows college football knows Nick Saban. Seven-time. You know championships more than anybody else Was at LSU for a couple, alabama for several. He spends time with his players every single week just listening, just listening to what's going on in their life and what they do. And so, as a remote manager, it's even more important to have regular connection, scheduled connection, daily updates, daily huddles, weekly meetings, weekly coaching sessions. It's not big brother looking over you know the sales team, it's really coaching. I mean, baseball teams, they have a coach. Football teams, they have a coach. Why can't sales teams have a coach? That is supposed to do what those other athletic teams do, which is to keep the sales team performing at high performance.
Speaker 1:Yep, I love it All right, so moving from motivation to accountability.
Speaker 2:Yeah, probably one of the biggest challenges for managers, because I mean, if you think, a lot of managers get promoted to management from being the salesperson, so there's that thing, and then managers don't hold salespeople accountable to what they should be holding them accountable to.
Speaker 2:They're looking at proposals, they're looking at the back end of the sales cycle instead of what creates those opportunities, and so there should be some accountability daily on the minimum fundamental activities that create those outcomes. There should be accountability to being at meetings on time. I mean there's a whole bunch of stuff, but when you start looking at the metrics, there's about 30 metrics that they should be tracking, and if you're not tracking all of those, then you can't start all at once and you'll have mutiny. But pick three or four, get those metrics measured, hold people accountable to it. The biggest problem with accountability is you can't have true accountability unless you have consequences and rewards right, and so a lot of managers don't understand that. And then when an event happens and it's time to talk about consequences, it becomes a emotional nightmare because the parameters weren't set for what happens with the consequence if you don't hit that particular metric and you're not doing what you're supposed to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you got to set that early, because if you do it after the fact that it becomes perceived as unfair.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I mean, when my kids were in school, I would sit down with them at the beginning of every year and go, hey, I expect nothing but B's. If you don't get B's, what is your consequence, what do you expect? And they would say, well, rip my eyes out. I'm like, no, that's not realistic, you know. So the individual has to be involved with the consequence and agree with it. Yeah, right, I mean, you've done training coaching for a long time as well.
Speaker 2:We used to do a lot of live training. You know, back in the days we would travel around every company every month, half a day a month, two days a month, whatever it was. And every time, at the end of the program, I would ask, ok, what are you going to accomplish in the next month? And what happens if you don't? Right, and one guy one guy I'll never forget was like I'm going to shave my eyebrow. I'm like, okay, that's great, you know. So it doesn't have to be huge consequences, it can be. You know you got to wash your nemesis car. You got to bring, you know, coffee, do something. You know you got to sing the national anthem or something at the next meeting. Right, you know something that is more embarrassing or hard to do than actually doing the thing you're supposed to do.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think a lot of managers are scared about accountability, at least at some point, because it's perceived as something else, and people like to slap the micromanagement label on stuff that's not even close to micromanagement, which is wild. And then you just get this standoff where there's no accountability and people are working on their bedrooms and who knows where.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and especially in the remote environment, it's like you have to have that daily contact. You have to have the real conversations about what's going on and if you're not measuring things daily, what happens? Salespeople wait till the end of the week. They didn't get it done today. They're going to go do this, they're going to do that, and then they try to get to the end of the week and cram it all in at once and something else happens and they don't get it done. So there's a magic to that too. When salespeople are doing daily behaviors, every single day, one day of the week, you're going to have that magic day where you're going to set five meetings, you're going to get two contracts, you're going to get all these things kind of happen. But if you don't put in the effort, then that karma doesn't show back up for you.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and once you get behind, it becomes really hard to catch up because you've got to do exponentially more activity to get back on track, it becomes overwhelming you know, and it's like okay, well, whatever. Yeah, exactly. No, I was reading the other day somebody was talking about stress and burnout and things like that, and it doesn't come from work. It doesn't come from hard work, it doesn't even come from long hours. It comes from either doing things that you don't want to do or doing things that you don't think are possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and stress is the biggest killer in the world. I mean health-wise, that's horrible, not good. If you're not happy doing what you're doing, go find something else to do, man, yeah, just leave quit. Lots of things to do, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's unlimited jobs out there for people that are good that want them.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, man. I was talking to a client's daughter trying to help her. She was about to get out of college and she was thinking about going to this new marketplace. She wanted to get into a particular industry and I gave her about 20 ideas of who to call and what to do and how to network and get things going. And she goes well. I'm talking to my friends and they're graduating and they're saying you know, it's hard getting a job. I said it's not hard getting a job, it's easy getting a job. If you don't have a job, your job is to find a job. If you spend eight hours a day looking for a job, you'll find one. I've never been out without a job since I was 11 for more than a day. I've done 50 different things at least before I got into this 35 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly All right. So we've got motivation, accountability, growing the team, yeah, so that's kind of a subset of coaching.
Speaker 2:But growing the team means, in my mind, and what we teach is you really have to help your salespeople get better every single day, and that's growing the team. And that means debriefing effectively, that means accountability, that means identifying the patterns. So too many people make decisions based on events, and what I want to look at is patterns, and when you look at patterns, you can then look and identify the core. And so, through growing the team, it's really about helping understand where the salespeople are struggling, whether it's the sales process, whether it's the sales process, whether it's you know, the beginning stages, prospecting, whatever it might be, follow-up, account development, land and expand whatever you want to look at.
Speaker 2:And we have to help identify whether it's a conceptual problem or whether it's a technical problem. And so a technical problem means they don't know what they don't know, and once you teach them that, then they should be able to do it. Conceptual problem means you've taught them that, then they should be able to do it. And central problem means you you've taught them that, but they're not doing it. So something's in the way, and that's a lot of psychology and a lot of communication, a lot of understanding of human behavior. So, yeah, the sales manager's got to be all those things right.
Speaker 1:Exactly Well, and I think where it starts for a lot of folks is you've got to be a good analyst because you've got to look at all the world of opportunities and figure out where to start. And the thing I see time and time again is people get into sales management jobs and they're not classically trained in a lot of these things. They're not classically trained in psychology, analytics, root cause analysis. Where are you going to learn this stuff if it's a core function of the job? And I'll tell you where you're not going to learn. It is a conference in Chicago for two and a half days in April.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you're going to forget all but 7% of that by Monday morning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're going to remember the guy at the bar that you met and you hammered a parlay because Tua was having a good game.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that two-day conference doesn't help them. Get it to unconscious competence Right In practice. When I get calls from people to say, hey, can you come do our event, our annually event or quarterly event, whatever it might, you'd be better off to buy a plane ticket and send them somewhere where they want to go, because that'll motivate them for something and give them a reward, rather than pay me to come in and waste your money and time. If you want to fix the real problem, we've got define the real problem and then we got to fix it. Yeah, and that takes time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've gotten to the point where, if someone wants to do a one day event, cool, we'd love to do a one day capstone event after we do all the other stuff on the front end, right Cause that works. That's great, I love doing that. But the introducing stuff live to a diverse audience. Okay, so 10 people. One thinks they know everything, one knows they don't know anything. You want the same thing for all of them and one third of the time that it should take. Cool, good design.
Speaker 2:And what you're trying to fix. They've been ingrained over the last whatever 10, 15, 20, 30 years of experience they have and you're not going to change in a day. Yeah, exactly. And then most of those events, there's no follow up, there's no support afterwards. You know it's OK, great job. We spent a lot of money on this conference, y'all go sell.
Speaker 1:now this question doesn't have a defined answer, but it, you know, probably some kind of range or anecdote.
Speaker 2:How long does it take to develop unconscious competence, where you can just do things without thinking about it? That's a difficult question to answer, but I'm going to do my best and say it depends on how much effort the individual puts in. So I can show effort and effort over time. Yeah, oh yeah. Consistent effort. Yeah, I mean. They say you can form a new habit in 21 days. I'm going to say 30.
Speaker 1:No-transcript but they don't get enough at bats with the specific thing. That's where the trick comes in right. So if we're trying to, let's say that we're trying to establish unconscious competence around. If we've got a senior person in the room and a junior person in the room and we want to ask a tough question to the senior person, that's a good example.
Speaker 2:Is the senior person on the sales team, or is that a prospect?
Speaker 1:No prospect, senior person prospect. So we want to ask. Good, we want to ask a question. We want to ask a question that could be perceived as a tough question to the senior person in the in the prospect organization. Yeah well, we're not going to get an opportunity to do that every day. So, in order to get enough repetitions to achieve unconscious competence of, I'm not going to shy away from asking that person a question because they're a senior person and I perceive them as some kind of authority figures that I don't want to have a peer-to-peer relationship with. I've got to get away from that and I'm not going to get away from it unless I get some serious at-bats and repetitions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I call that unconscious biases. That's what's preventing that salesperson from feeling comfortable asking that question, which goes back to drawing the team. Is it conceptual or is it technical? And so what you're describing is a conceptual issue. So what we like to do is, instead of teaching salespeople questions, instead of teaching them techniques, instead of teaching them this and that and the other, I want to teach them how to think, because if you teach them how to think the right way, they will always say the right thing yeah, right. But part of that issue you just brought up is is rampant in sales where, well, I can't, you know, really have a conversation with that CEO. Well, you can't, unless you believe you're a peer and you believe that you have value, and you're and you're doing them a disservice if you don't help them see your value.
Speaker 1:Right. So instead they say thank you rocky. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it, you know.
Speaker 2:I know you're really busy yeah, yeah, and I hate that. It's like I know you're busy. Thank you for your time. I I was hoping you know it's like, stop all that no just be real with people you know, I mean if it's a fit, it's a fit.
Speaker 2:If it's not, it's not. You know we're not going to sell everybody. But, man, if you're not getting the at-bats and you're not doing the behaviors, you don't, you don't get anything. And sales is hard. Man, sales is the hardest job in the world because there are no two circumstances that are the same. People are messy, people are different, people are weird. While the fundamentals never change, the application of those fundamentals is what changes, based on the situation, the marketplace, who you're selling to, your products, your services, your own thoughts and beliefs and your competition.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, so there's variables, there's lots of variables, and the good news is that those variables are known. And one of the things, from a mindset perspective, that we find a lot of times is that salespeople or sales managers aren't clear on what game they're playing. So they get irrationally upset and I was. I was describing it the other day. I'm curious how you like this analogy. I love gambling analogies because they're fun. So I was saying it's like so you got a salesperson. They get upset when they lose a deal. Well, you know, we can argue if they lost it or not. Whatever, they did not win the deal. When they get upset, or you know, something doesn't go their way.
Speaker 1:Okay, so if you're playing roulette and you're betting on black, you're kind of flipping a coin with a house edge. You know 30, 36 numbers plus two greens, 50, 50 on the 36. And then you're given two points on the on the house. So you're going to win a little less than half the time. That's the game that you're playing. But if you're betting a number, you're going to win one out of every 38 times. So if you bet black five times in a row and you lose five times in a row, you kind of have a right to be upset that things aren't going your way. But if you bet a number five times in a row at one in 38 and you lose five times in a row, that's how it's supposed to go.
Speaker 1:There's no reason to expect that you would win. And so you end up in this world where a salesperson has a 30% win rate or a 25% win rate or something like that. That could be deemed pretty healthy, but they get upset 75% of the time, just like a baseball player getting upset. They've got 300 to make the Hall of Fame. So knowing what game you're playing is so critical to being able to keep your mind in the game.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And, and you know, it's okay to get upset, it's not okay to stay upset. Yeah, get over it. How quickly can you get back in the game? There you go.
Speaker 1:That's a good KPI. Let's add that to the management scorecard. How quickly can you go from being upset to not being upset anymore? What's your upset duration?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's amazing how salespeople let that impact their day. And so, going back to the activity and accountability, if you'll focus on what you can control and do your behavior every day, it doesn't matter, because the problem and why salespeople get upset is because they don't have a big enough pipeline and they're putting too much emphasis on one deal. And when that doesn't happen, it's like oh, what do I do now? Well, if you had 20 deals in the pipeline, one craps out. Who cares? Yeah, let's keep going, let's go find two more to replace them next next, who cares?
Speaker 2:let's keep moving, man.
Speaker 2:I love it man all right they don't learn the right lesson out of why they lost that deal and make a change. And that's what the manager is going to be doing with growing the team and coaching, helping them understand what could they do differently. So you know, we ask companies all the time how often are your sales managers coaching? We ask sales managers the same thing. They go all the time. But when we change the question, how often do your coaching sessions end with an action plan and a lesson? The answer is never. Well, that's not coaching if it's not that right. Coaching is about helping people get better and change, whether it's potty training or military training or sales training. It's about change and it's small change. It's over a long period of time.
Speaker 1:So we roll into number four on the list coaching. We've got growing the team, where you're equipping them with the skills and the mindset to do the job, and then coaching, where you're helping with the application of that skill set and that mindset to get better and improve continuously over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And so you can't coach somebody unless they see you as somebody that can help them right, unless they have respect for you. So you have to earn trust, you have to earn respect, and managers don't work hard on that. I mean, when you meet with us as a sales manager, if you meet with a salesperson, it is the same as me as a sales call. You've got to work on your bonding and rapport. You've got to work on that relationship. You've got to build trust every single time. And You've got to work on that relationship. You've got to build trust every single time. And most people, even in the sales business, they overlook the relationship part of it, you know. I mean let's show some genuine care about people instead of just rushing to. You know the deal, well, how'd it go? Well, how'd it go? You need help. That's what most people call sound like Well, and then they go Well, we'll have that meeting. You need help. That's what most people call sound like.
Speaker 1:Well, and then they go join the calls, and so, instead of-.
Speaker 2:And then they take over.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hey, oh. I'm going to take over because I see an opportunity, and that's what I like to do as the manager.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:They want to be the hero. Prepping someone for a meeting.
Speaker 2:Debriefing with someone after a meeting, those those are way less fun than just going out there and working the deal, yeah, but, but sales managers tend to put the superman cape on too, right? Yeah, well, when I was in sales, I did this. Well, this is what we used to do. This is how we do it. Instead of going, well, what do you think you should do? Yeah, what do you think the outcome is going to be? And have you thought about this? And and what would that create? And what about this? So it's more about leading and coaching than it is about going and doing it for them. Right, because what you're describing is sales managers enable salespeople instead of empowering salespeople. Yeah, when they do that, when they take over, which is funny because they call it sales enablement now, I didn't put that together until now, but yeah, yeah, we're enabling the salespeople. It's like man, that's the hardest thing to do is let them go out and fail, but if they don't fail, they don't learn.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know. So if sales managers will spend 80% of their time on those four things alone, your team will grow. I mean, by just putting in the right accountability systems, you should. Companies should see at least a 10% growth. Yeah, no doubt about it. If you put in the right coaching program, companies should see another 10% growth. And if you have a sales system and a common language I don't care what it is, I mean some systems better, no system right. If you have that and the managers using that to coach with and the sales people can rattle it off. You know how many times you hear people go well, we have a selling system, okay, what is it? Uh, well, they don't know, they can't know.
Speaker 1:Or it's, it's. I love the one that I hear every week. Every week I hear this Well, you know, I've been through all of them, so I do a little bit of challenger and a little bit of spin and a little bit of medic, and so then I obviously just have to mess with a little bit. I say, ok, does everybody on your team do the exact same little bit of each one of those in the same exact way? Well, no, how do you coach them? Oh, good point.
Speaker 2:Which one do you use to coach your salespeople with?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And do they know medic in and out? Do they know spin in and out? I mean it's like man. There's so much more sales managers could do for their people, but they're also in a rock and a hard place. Right, they got commands from the top, they've got. I mean I say this because I are one but salespeople are like teenagers. You have to manage them. You gotta give them enough rope to let them learn their lesson. Well, you gotta manage them right. 80% of the calls salespeople make to managers is not to get their question answered. It's to plug in. It's to say, hey, look at me. Yeah, hey, I need your help. Hey, can, can you do it? Hey, I did this. Well, that's all great, but if you put in the right structure and weekly systems and processes, you'll save 10 hours a week as a manager yeah, exactly well, and the bad ones will self-select out to drag them along anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and so. So that brings us to the last one, which is recruiting.
Speaker 1:See, look, he's doing my job for me. Look at this guy. He's so good. He's got all these microphones in the background. Nobody can see this cause it's audio only. So Rocky's sitting here. He's like all right well.
Speaker 2:I got my five things that I'm going to do that I'm not that's my, that's my coaching and leadership.
Speaker 1:Rocky, I'm pulling you along.
Speaker 2:You led me and I didn't even know it. That's what it's supposed to be.
Speaker 1:All right, recruiting, bring us yeah.
Speaker 2:Hiring salespeople. Right, you know, here's what you probably see this too. But the challenge is and I had this conversation with a client the other day typically HR talent management sometimes the smaller businesses, the comptroller, the CFO, is responsible for hiring salespeople. But they don't have any sales experience and it's not their fault and they do their best. But salespeople are great at interviewing, they're good at first impressions, they're good at giving you the answers they think you want to hear. If you don't have sales experience and you haven't coached salespeople and led salespeople and trained, you don't know how to read through the smoke and mirrors. Let's call it yeah, he's keeping it family friendly. He can't himself.
Speaker 1:He's keeping it family friendly for y'all out there.
Speaker 2:Look at Rocky. I don't know who the audience is. I don't want to offend anybody, but the traditional hiring for sales doesn't work right. I mean most HR or whatever they write an ad, it's based on the job description, which is typically wrong. I mean, I've never seen a job description that really does a good job.
Speaker 1:They copy it off their competitor's website.
Speaker 2:Hr says, oh, we need to go, we work at AlphaCorp, we need to hire a salesperson, so let's go to BetaCorp and rip off their job description and just change some words. Yeah, and it doesn't really define what that salesperson is or does or who they are.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the fun one, I always ask them. They say Corey, my team will not do outbound. I say okay, cool, show me the job posting you use to hire this person. What, why would I do that? Just show me the job posting. Where does it say outbound?
Speaker 2:Oh well, they don't require me right?
Speaker 1:No, they put you know what they put up. Right, here's what they put on the job description. They put you will come in and be a strategic leader and report to the VP of sales and you will own this and grow this and all of those types of things. And then they bring you on and they say here's a phone book, go cold call some people, types of things.
Speaker 2:And then they bring you on and they say here's a phone book, go cold call some people. That's ridiculous and then setting those expectations up front. So recruiting is probably one of the biggest costs on a P&L right. Hiring bad salespeople and keeping weak salespeople. Biggest hidden cost on a P&L it's four to five times what you pay a salesperson when you hire the wrong one. So a lot of sales managers aren't necessarily responsible for that but they get the last look. But they're sitting there with pressure to fill this vacancy, to fill this territory, to put a butt in the seat, to make quota. And they got a headcount, they got to meet and they don't want to push back on HR. And so who suffers from that? The VP and the president.
Speaker 1:Let's get real tactical. You're a sales leader out there. Hr is doing it wrong. How do you push back? Yeah?
Speaker 2:politely, regularly with great ideas. Don't go and say how bad it is, but say hey, here's a couple of things I'd like to suggest. Are you open to any help?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I know you're a huge fan of pre-hire skills assessments, so talk to us a little bit about how to integrate skills assessments into the hiring process.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of companies use it at the end of the hiring process, when they've already worn rose-colored glasses to the interview process, and then they're just looking at it as justification of what they think they learned about the candidate. Where we would like to do it early to disqualify candidates, even if it's a difficult job market and even if you do have to fill seats, you know what skill sets you're getting. So I want to measure grit, I want to measure the unconscious biases that prevent sales success and I want to measure the skills. So it's like what do you want to know about that candidate 90 days after you hire them? That's what we need to know before we ever make them an offer.
Speaker 2:And so you can't interview salespeople the same way either. We've got to ask questions that are kind of a little you know two, three parts Machiavellian a little bit We've got to put them in situations We've got to. I mean, the only way you can know if they're going to sell is if they can do it in front of you, with you. And that doesn't mean hey, Corey, sell me this pen or wire manhole covers around right. Hey, Corey, sell me this pen or wire manhole covers around right. So I'm probably getting off the soapbox here, but I think sales hiring is a huge part of that and assessments should be integrated into it, and I want to use a tool that's going to measure what's going to be successful Not can they sell, but will they sell, and that's the big difference. And will they sell in your market against your competitors, at your price points and your environment, under your leadership. So everything that we do is customized to the client.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it.
Speaker 2:So what's HR's role in all of this? It can be a lot, you know it can be really good if they will get on board. The challenge is, you know they're getting pressure to hire people and our tools and our process sometimes makes it a little harder for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Cause you only let the good people through and they yeah Cause a bad salesperson. Think about this. How often does a bad salesperson interview for jobs?
Speaker 2:A lot, yeah, lots of repetitions.
Speaker 2:They probably get more job interviews than they get closed deals, yeah, so and what happens is salesperson's not doing well over here and they see they think it's time to leave. And you know there's 18 million salespeople in the country and they've changed jobs every 18 months, so there is a constant pool of salespeople out there. You just got to get in front of them, get the right added from. But you got salesperson A over here. They get unhappy. You know they decide to leave. They look, they go to interviews, they get a new job and their mindset change and they do really well for the first six months to a year. And then this company they lost somebody that winds up over here.
Speaker 2:But what you have is the same salesperson with a different face, yeah Right, and after 12 to 18 months they're going to blow out because one they're not getting what they need from leadership, coaching, accountability, management. Right, you got a dog, corey.
Speaker 1:I wish I've had dogs, and so I'm going to imagine my I've had four amazing dogs.
Speaker 2:I noticed this the other day Walking my dog and about every two 300 yards she looks up at me. She's looking for guidance. Cool Right, Same with salespeople. They're looking for guidance. Cool Right, Same with salespeople. They're looking for guidance. They need more help.
Speaker 1:My dog is looking up. She's looking for squirrels. She's like I'm going to go get me a squirrel. Teddy, watch me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she has more squirrels.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, they're looking for guidance because it's it's uh, again, there's variables and and and, so we we need to guide them on what game are they playing, yeah, how to play the game, how well are they playing the game and what tweaks if you don't know the rules of the game, you don't know how to win.
Speaker 2:And if it's not, changing you can't win.
Speaker 1:what's less fun than playing a game you don't know the rules to?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Working for a bad sales manager yeah exactly. How about that?
Speaker 1:Oh man, yeah, Okay. So imagine that you're a sales manager out there and your company hasn't given you authority over hiring. You're part of the process. They're going to work for you. I always find this wild. I understand why people do it I've done it but you have somebody that's going to be managing the person that's responsible for them, but they're not the person that makes the decision on if they're going to be hired or not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and then. So that affects the sales manager and their ability to build a great team, but it's also the biggest impacts on the VP and the president, because they're the ones responsible for profit and sales growth.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right. So if if HR doesn't hire great sales people and they have turnover and continue turnover, it's not HR that's in the boardroom and the CEO's office at the end of the year getting chewed out for not making the numbers, this is a VP of sales.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So you know, it just depends on the culture of the company Right To determine how much power and who drives the company. And if you're a true sales organization, then you make decisions based on sales. If you're an engineering company, you make decisions based on engineering, and so that's really what the present CEO has got to decide. Are we going to be a sales organization? Are we going to be run by service? Are we going to be run by technology? What's going to be the center point of every decision we make?
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I think different people need different things, and that's where the global HR approach doesn't work. So, for example, let's let's say that you have a, let's say that you have a 25 year old salesperson or 25 year old software developer. Well, the 25 year old salesperson has probably been actually selling for two years. Maybe that software developer has been actually selling for two years. Maybe that software developer has been writing code for 15 years. Yeah, it's a different world. Yeah, and you can. You can call calling for donations at university sales. Sure, there's something helpful there, but that kid was writing production quality code that was being used by other people in his mid-teens.
Speaker 2:Let's suppose that that code writer failed seven out of ten times. How long would he keep doing it?
Speaker 1:Done, gone Right.
Speaker 2:Sales people are dysfunctional and I can say that because I are one we have to deal with them differently, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't treat everybody the same. Fair doesn't mean equal no, absolutely not yeah, rocky, what do you want to plug today? How can people reach out to you?
Speaker 2:um rocky the grown sales development expert. There's only one rocky the grown out there. Hit me up on LinkedIn. Go to my website. Give me a phone call, 518-378-8456. Shoot me an email.
Speaker 1:Whatever works for you. We've got history made on the Sales Management Podcast the first guest ever to give his phone number out live. He's actually a salesperson.
Speaker 2:At heart I am man. I think it's the greatest career ever. I really have a lot of passion for it. I love it. I mean I got into sales by accident. Man, I, I, I was working at ups from three to nine in the morning. I was going to college from nine to two some days. I was selling life insurance at night and I was doing landscaping on the weekend and after 18 months of that I was dead, tired and wore out. I found an ad. It was like management potential 1200 a month. I'm like that would pay my bills. I have management potential. I go to the interview. It's the first group interview I'd ever heard of potential. I go to the interview. It's the first group interview I'd ever heard of. I'm like 23 years old, never heard of this before. There's 40 people in the room.
Speaker 2:So at eight o'clock it started. They show us a video of Norman Vincent Peale, and then there's another video Nightingale and then somebody comes in and talks for 30 minutes and then another video and it went on until three o'clock and I'm like what the hell is this man? I got stuff to do and of course I'm sitting on the front row and over the corner of the room I could see a, you know one of those conference room tables, but it had a sheet on top of it with something underneath and you didn't know what it was. At three o'clock the the main guy, calvin, went over and jerked the sheet off. It was parted out, kirby, vacuum cleaner. I laughed my head off out loud. I was like you have got to be kidding me. You kept me here.
Speaker 2:So he walks over to me and I'm on the front row. He goes what are you laughing at? I'm like you've had me here since eight o'clock this morning for a vacuum cleaner and he did a great thing and I didn't know it at the time. He goes yeah, you probably can't sell any of these anyway. I said I'll bet you I sell more than anybody in this room this weekend. And I did. Well, man, that was like that was 1984.
Speaker 2:And I think I made five grand that weekend selling vacuum cleaners. I mean, of course they had bonuses they're trying to get you in and everything Right. And then they had some trade in things. If you could find, you know I'm not going to talk about what they said you could trade in, you would get an extra, you know, 250, 500. And so I got all those done and, man, I quit everything.
Speaker 2:I quit school, I quit more UPS, like I was like this, is it, man? Well then, after the honeymoon's over, you know it's like okay, now you're real. You got to go knock on doors and, man, for every three doors I knocked on, I sold one. Yeah, and I was making money, but I sold one to an older lady with 13 kids and no carpet one night and I couldn't sleep that night. I'm like you know, you got some talent, you got some capabilities, but you're using them the wrong way. I can't do this anymore. And so I quit and got into landscaping full-time and then built a business and somehow or another gotten the rest of this is.
Speaker 1:That is one of the coolest stories I've ever heard. Thank you so much for sharing it with me.
Speaker 2:Corey, thank you for listening and having me as your guest. Uh, if you ever need a pinch hitter somebody's out, you can't show up give me a call, I love it. Thanks everybody out there, keep your are managers out there Keep your chin up, work hard, have fun, make your people have fun. It's time to be serious, but you can also have a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:I love it. Thanks, Rocky. This has been another episode of the Sales Management Podcast. See everybody next time you.