The Leadership Cadence That Generated $25 Million in Sales Last Year | Ep 63

$25 million in revenue. $6.4 million in commissions paid out. In this episode Nick Nascimento breaks down the exact leadership cadence behind those numbers — daily shoutouts, weekly one-on-ones, midweek check-ins, Throwdown Thursdays, quarterly retreats, and the annual events that build culture that lasts. Copy paste what works. Leave what doesn't.

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Transcript

— The number that started everything

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the show, guys. This is your host, Nick Nasamento. Guys, on this episode of the Rainmakers podcast, I'm going to be sharing with you the leadership cadence that I have used to last year. My sales teams produced $25 million in gross revenue and we paid out $6.4 million in commissions. I'm going to share with you guys the secrets of the cadence that I run. I I wish I had mentors that just had a copy-paste version for me when I started running my business. And I did have a lot of mentorship like that, but a lot I had to learn along the way of what works and what doesn't work. All right. So this isn't a one size fits all. It's just saying, hey, this is what's worked for me, my teams. And I guarantee you, whether you're a sales rep, a leader, a divisional regional manager, a vice president of sales, a CEO, there's going to be something that you guys can pull to implement from this podcast episode. Some of you guys might already have all this dialed in on your team or in your organization or doing this personally. But I uh it's just that one nugget that you need that could elevate your game 20, 30, 40, 50%.

— Why structure isn't OCD — it's survival

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Okay. So with that, I'm gonna be covering daily, weekly, monthly, semi-monthly, quarterly, um, and annual things that I do that are scheduled. And now the reason I do this is not just because I'm OCD, okay? When you get OCD plus ADD, you do stuff like this, but it's not just that. It's this structure allows me to build a system so that I never miss. Okay. And so as you grow, you recruit, you sell, life gets busy. All right. As you add people to your team, you don't want to miss certain things that are very important. Okay. So we're with that, let's jump into uh a couple of the things. So on the daily cadence, uh shout outs, all right. So there's two things we're shouting out daily.

— The one daily habit that tells you everything about your team

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Um, and these are diff very different than what we shout out weekly, all right. Um and praise, obviously, what you what you praise you promote. Okay. So what you you recognize you'll get more of. And so that's why we do this. So any rep who did over 20 decision makers the previous day, we recognize them, okay, um, in correlation in the sales training meetings. Okay. Uh so that's the input target. So for our industry, that's uh pretty, pretty good. It's above average, right? If they do that six days a week, they're doing 120 decision makers a week. And so anybody that does that in our organization with our training and our average set rate, sit rate, close rate is going to make 15,000 a month, which is a good money. And so uh

— What to praise if you want more of it

SPEAKER_00 2:11

the second thing that we we do is any rep that gets three or more sets the previous day. Okay, so that could be one or two sold. So those are output daily targets that you praise. So for your organization, it might be five, it might be seven. Um, you know, appointments scheduled, it might be 15, whatever it is, just have a daily output target that's optimal. And when people hit that, you praise them daily. Okay. With that, let's jump into weekly cadence. All right. I I break this down to help simplify. Again, you don't have to copy paste. This is just what works for me. Some of these things I highly recommend doing just a copy-paste model, right? Obviously, it will vary from industry to industry. Um, but with that, let's jump

— How the best leaders plan their week before it starts

SPEAKER_00 2:47

into it. So as a salesperson and as a leader, I have a couple focuses. Okay. When I do my weekly planning, I'm prioritizing, okay, my personal sales and volume. I'm planning those people out. I'm running out my prospects that that slip through the cracks I can reschedule. Then I'm going through my team. Who's on my team that needs help? What one-on-one do I need to schedule? Okay. Then I'm going through the people who are on the onboarding phase. These are new reps, you know, that have been onboarded the company in the last month. Uh, I have to make sure that they're getting extra time, attention, and focus, right? So this increases our retention and our overall growth of the company. And then uh last is who am I recruiting? Who's in the pool of people that I'm trying to pull into the organization, attract into my organization to improve the total volume of

— Monday — why this day sets the tone for everything

SPEAKER_00 3:28

our sales, right? So uh with that on Monday, it's a team focus. Okay. And so because of the weekly planning and the preparation, it's very easy. It should be dialed for you. Now, the first thing I'm doing is we're praising from the previous week. There's three things that we're praising. Number one is the top sold. All right. So anybody, obviously, the top three to five people, we're recognizing them in our in our space, in our company. It's anybody that sold two or more. So um, even if the top two guys, there's only two guys that did uh two deals, we only recognize those two. All right. So we we hold that standard. All right. The second thing is the top sit. So any appointments that were ran. Okay, now this is for praising setters, the the guys who are setting the

— The rep with zero sales who still got recognized

SPEAKER_00 4:07

appointments. So it's important that we recognize the controllable behaviors for them. They can't control whether the deal closes, but they can control what how many appointments they get and and they can control how many sits they get as well. So anybody that gets over four sits, right? Um, so for example, uh last week we had uh several guys over uh three deals sold uh for the week. But then we had two guys that had um one sold and then one other guy that had uh uh zero sold, but he had four sits. So obviously we're recognizing that because on average that guy's gonna close three deals in our company that in a week. So we're praising that behavior. And then we're doing top decision makers. So the the the amount of conversation or pitches that they had. So the top three to five guys, again, this in our company, the metric is anybody who did over 125 decision makers in a week. Uh, ideally, we want them to at least get a sale two or three sets, then we will also recognize those people. So we're praising on sold, on sits, and on volume.

— One on ones — who gets your time first and why

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Okay. Second thing on Mondays are the one-on-ones. So it's critical that you get goals from obviously yourself and then from your people and starting with the top 20%. So if you have potential leaders or guys you're growing, your top guys, you want to get their goals first and really dive into them and spend more time with those people. In fact, you should meet with these guys weekly, okay? And if your team is small, meet with all your people weekly. Um, if you're growing, you want to follow the rule of

— The Rule of 7 — when your team gets too big to lead

SPEAKER_00 5:27

seven. It's hard to manage seven people effectively, sorry, more than seven people effectively on any team, okay. That's corporate, sales, it doesn't matter. And so, depending on your team size, if you're getting past that, you need to promote and build up other leaders and have them shadow you and how you run these one-on-ones and obviously drive other results, okay, that move them towards leadership. So we're meeting with our top reps weekly, and then uh the bottom 80% we're meeting with them bi-weekly. So every other week. Now, I'm not gonna cover in this podcast everything that we're we're covering in the one-on-ones, but when it comes to their goals, uh, we obviously want to do a 10 to 20% increase from the previous week. Sometimes it's 50%, obviously, it depends on on their schedule workload from the previous week, right? They only worked two days last week. You're not gonna set a goal for 10% more. So obviously you're gonna do for like 300% more. And then you're setting a goal for the team as well, you and your team, all right. What's 10 to 20% more?

— The goal you set inside the one on one that changes everything

SPEAKER_00 6:17

The second thing with these one-on-ones, you're gonna set one primary uh onboarding goal, okay, with your top top guys to help delegate to them to help train, shadow, mentor these people in the onboarding phase. Okay, so you and them are prioritizing these people. So, one example is get Johnny Boy his first deal by Thursday, right? So that's a specific target and a specific name. And what to do that, we're gonna shadow him twice, meet with him at the office twice. So having that outlined really helps with the success rate in your onboarding. And onboarding success precedes recruiting success. All right. So very critical thing. All right, and finally, the last thing you're doing with your team and yourself is you're setting one skill-related improvement. For example, uh improving the sit rate, improving the set rate, or improving your close rate. It's usually one of those three things. It could be other things like recruiting, uh, but it should primarily be focused on one of those three things. Okay. Now, if it's, hey, I'm gonna improve my sit rate from uh 35% to 45%. What actions are you gonna do that's going to improve that? I'm going to improve my tie-downs. I'm going to call the prospects the night before their appointment is scheduled to confirm ahead of time. Okay. These are just a couple examples of what you can do to increase the sit rate if that's one of your focuses. All right, Tuesdays.

— Tuesday — the most underrated day on your calendar

SPEAKER_00 7:34

These are the shadowing days. Okay, again, you don't have to do this, uh, but this is just a go-to thing that we have been pushing, is we do a ride-along day. Okay, so that as our leadership gets very, very busy, they already have predetermined times that they have blocked off so that people can write along and shadow with them. Okay, Wednesdays, uh, we

— Wednesday — the check in that can double your week

SPEAKER_00 7:51

do this weekly check-in with all of our reps. Okay, we're we're checking in what was your target. So, for example, they said, hey, I'm gonna talk to a hundred people this week, and I'm going to sell 10, all right, or or set 10 appointments, whatever the metric is, all right. So if it's Wednesday and Monday and Tuesday have already lapsed, so this is a critical part for leaders to to check the progress. For example, this person should be statistically at 40 uh conversations if their goal is 100 and four sets or four sold accounts if their goal was 10, right? Um, based on a five-day working period, if you're doing six, all those obviously those numbers could change. But on a five-day working period, uh, I'm just dividing the total goal divided by five, and then using that metric. So 20 conversations plus two sales every day. Uh, that's how I get by Wednesday morning, we should be at four solder set and then um 40 conversations. So if they're at 30, say, hey, buddy, we gotta, you know, pucker up, let's go, we gotta step it up. Now, if they're on 50, praise them. Say, dude, you're on fire, you got massive momentum. This could be a huge week. You're probably gonna end up with 11 or 12 if you keep this up. All right, so it's a huge opportunity to praise for their efforts or to correct them so that at the end of the week, if you didn't correct the behavior to 35, sometimes those guys can end at 60, but with a slight correction midweek, you can help them get to 90, 100 conversations or more. Ultimately, you know, that will likely double their sales for the week. Now, when you consistently stack these check-ins week after week after week and you run this cadence right, all right, you're gonna get completely different results on your teams. All

— Throwdown Thursday — 50% more results with zero extra cost

SPEAKER_00 9:26

right, Thursdays, we do something called throw down Thursday. It's where one rep challenges a superior rep, okay, somebody who's beating them in sales for the day. All right. It's a it's a fun way to compete and they'll create some kind of incentive or prize or or uh consequence. Consequences usually motivate reps more, right? Like, you know, buy the other guy a dinner or uh dress in a funny outfit to team dinner or whatever it is, you know, do some kind of cold plunge. Anyways, so our team does that stuff just for fun. So it's not even a challenge or a consequence, it's just a habit. But it but you get the idea. So third on Thursday is massive. It can drive inputs and results easily 50% with zero extra cost. All right, Fridays for me, I did a weekly culture team event. Uh, one of my other leaders does

— Friday — the hour that builds your pipeline without you knowing

SPEAKER_00 10:10

this on Wednesday. So we'll go cold plunge, we'll do a sauna, uh, team activity, breakfast, lunch, something like that. You know, so we do that on a weekly cadence. The other thing, too, on this could be Friday or Saturday, but for me, Fridays worked and Saturdays worked for a recruiting day. All right. And this was before I got into content marketing. Now I've Friday's blocked off for my marketing and content. I would block off one to two hours on both of these days to do a mass recruiting outreach, just communicating with people, checking in, see how people are doing, see how I can help people in other industries, other jobs, other companies, all right, to see if I can help grow the bottom line in recruiting volume for the company. So just one little behavior. I block off an hour to two hours. I do this with my leadership, and they'll reach out to people. A good recruiting outreach, you're doing 25 to 50 contacts. It's it's messages sent, phone calls made, right? And then the goal here is usually from that effort and that behavior, 25 to 50 conversations started, which can be done in an hour. You'll usually uh start uh 10 conversations, and from there you'll get three to seven people that will schedule a meeting and end up if you're good, you give good offer and you take care of your people and you're you're growing, uh,

— Sunday — why the leaders who win always do this

SPEAKER_00 11:14

you'll usually recruit one to three of those people. So simple habit uh can compound greatly over time. All right, Sundays, weekly planning, critical. I already mentioned this at the beginning of the podcast. I'll mention it again because it's so pivotal to the success. I've had a lot of sales leaders uh in my organization, other guys that I've seen fail in other organizations. And the guys who win always plan, the guys who don't never plan. It's like the one correlating theme I've seen is organization. And uh, it's hard to manage other people if you can't even manage your own schedule and your own self. When you start getting into leadership and you start growing and producing results outside of you, it requires you to have bandwidth and understanding of what's going on. And you have to look at numbers, you have to look at uh people's schedules, you have to look at trends of their data, and you have to make plans in accordance to those to help coach these people. You have to schedule the one-on-ones. And unless you're being proactive with your time and your plans, your goals, okay, if you're not measuring and you're not sitting down to slow down and look at the results, how are you gonna improve? Right. So this is like step zero to improving your personal performance as a salesperson, your life, and ultimately your sales team and growing any team or organization. All right, on the monthly cadence. So we're changing gears. So we just covered everything on the weekly, right? Now the days you do those things, not all of

— Monthly — the 60 day trend that almost cost us 5 sales a week

SPEAKER_00 12:27

them matter. Some of them do, like the midweek check-in on Wednesday, critical. Okay, so uh let's jump into monthly, all right? So, number one is a leadership month review. So you're taking out one to two hours to sit down as a leadership team and look at the data. And you're not just looking at this last month, but you're looking at the previous month before it. So you're looking at 60 days and you're looking for a trend. Are we going up or are we going down? And in some metrics, like on your volume and your conversations, you might be on the up and up, but you're in your sales might be on the up and up. But what often slips is little things like the set rate or the sit rate, or sometimes even the close rate might might slip. And even though the volume and the the sales are increasing because you've hired more people and doing more volume, uh, a lot of leaders don't look at the data and miss big opportunities and big windows. For example, this just happened to us. Our sit rate dropped 7% in our company, and it wasn't on our leader's radar until I looked at the data and said, oh, hey, we got to improve this. And just by improving that 10%, we're gonna net the company, you know, uh another five, five to six sales a week. So one little correction monthly, just slowing down to look at the data, look at the trends, and then set goals going into the new month. Which reps are we gonna focus on? Uh, what are the goals for each rep? What's the collective team goal? What incentives should we run? Okay, this this one to two hours is very powerful. It's this review, refine, and reflect moment as you set targets going to the new month. Okay, if you just set new goals, it's not nearly the same power as if you review the

— The monthly event that builds culture without a team retreat

SPEAKER_00 13:56

previous goals, what we said we would do, what we actually did, why we fell short, or why we hit what we said we were gonna do. Okay. When you review like that, um you're able to build and compound and it creates a stronger leadership cadence and ultimately a stronger culture and better results. Now, the other thing we love to do in our company at Sparta is um we have a monthly workout or we'll have like a mentor meeting. So we'll get gather together, do a fitness workout, have somebody come coach us on health and nutrition. I'll share a couple of things that have worked with my diet, my transformation, my body and physique. Um, but we'll also do this with other things. We'll have a book club, you know, we'll talk about the most recent book we're reading and break down the highlights of the book and how we're implementing those things, right? Implementation is key, information is not. And um uh we'll have mentors come and speak to us. And so these things, uh, not just, you know, obviously they train in and better your people, but it's a great way to build culture, build connection, and it really shakes things up. It gets an opportunity to get proximity, get to know people better. It's one of the favorite, my favorite things about our company, what we do.

— Quarterly — why slowing down makes everyone more money

SPEAKER_00 15:01

All right, then there is the quarterly. This is massive quarterly leadership retreats. All right, we do these every three months. I'd say at least every uh four months, and if you want to push it every six months, but the more often your leadership team meets off-site. And when I say off-site, you can meet in the same state, like we've gone to just our local city and just met in a boardroom for a day and a half, you know. Um, usually you want two to four days. And to really think on the business, depending on the size and the scale of your organization, you want to do longer. If you're smaller, you can do one, one and a half to two days. And this is the time to think on the business. And again, it's like that monthly review, but more in depth. Like what pivotal change do we need to make? It's taking the time out to do the things that we keep getting pushed off the back burner. And and it's also helping you guys prioritize all the different things that you should be doing or you need to be doing or you want to be doing and help you identify, okay, what are the top three things that we we do this? It will cause a ripple effect and will help our company, our team, our leadership grow. So, in other words, it brings clarity. And if you execute without clarity, you're not gonna build very fast. Now, what's ironic when you slow down to get clarity, people take time off. So everybody will make more money and obviously be more aligned. Uh, there's more buy-in, and it's a very clear target of what everyone's setting out to do. And when you have everyone fighting for the same target and they carry their different hats and different roles and KPIs, the needle moves faster. All right, guys, then we have the annual. Okay.

— Annual — the $100K event that changed everything

SPEAKER_00 16:28

So we'll we do a couple of things. Number one, we run a big event last year for us. It was SalesCon. It was a separate entity, separate company, but we brought everybody from Sparta, other friends and family, and it was a big sales mentorship, a self-development event. It was two days. I brought my mentors, I put invested a hundred thousand dollars to put this event on. And so this is something that we we plan on doing annually, whether we call it salescon or whatever, like doesn't matter. I'm just saying run some kind of big event, some kind of get-together uh activity where you guys are learning, pouring in, and growing. Okay, self-development should be a pinnacle part of your your own sales journey,

— The one tradition every team should have at year's end

SPEAKER_00 17:03

growing as a leader, growing teams, growing a company, et cetera. All right, the second thing was just simple, and I'm sure a lot of people already do this, but like a Christmas dinner different things for the holidays, right? So it could be fourth of July, breakfast, barbecue. Last year we went shopping and brought a bunch of presents for kids that normally couldn't afford to have a Christmas. And it was a cool thing to get run together to be a part of that and then donate the you know to the kids. We b end up getting, I think, 300 plus presents. And it's just a really cool experience to go serve together, right? So this could be in your local town like we did, or you could go to a third world country. I've seen some of my friends do that in their companies. Also a great thing. All right, and finally on the yearly is this uh Christmas dinner, right? It's a great event to bring everyone together, celebrate the year. It's like a giant award ceremony, okay? So this is something that you and everybody in your company or team should be looking forward to. Okay. That they should have their goal set, that they're gonna collect some award on a stage in front of everybody and give uh their little speech or whatever, right? But it's important that you you you you have this for yourself and your company, that you have a target that you want to achieve and and you can imagine that moment of collecting that award. Okay, again, you could be a rep or you could be the leader hosting this and putting this on. This is a pivotal time to not just build culture, but drive more

— Take one thing. Implement it. Here's where to start.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

results, get people bought in in a great way to build relationships. Guys, thanks for listening. Whether you take my cadence or just one or two things, or you copy paste the whole thing. I hope this helps. I know these things will elevate your game to a new level. Again, even if you just take one thing, one idea, one nugget, and implement it, this was worth it. So that was helpful. Please leave a review. I'd love to hear the feedback and I appreciate you guys' love and support. Let's go win.