Show notes
Many businesses spend a ton of money recruiting salespeople, but then ignoring the ones they have.
David: Hi and welcome to the podcast, today co-host Chris Templeton and I are here to talk about the terrible practice of spending lots of money to recruit new salespeople and then spending little to nothing to help the very people that they've recruited. Welcome Chris!
Chris: Thank you, David. Well, what are you so worked up about on this one?
David: What am I worked up about? I guess I'm worked up because I've been doing sales training and marketing training for much of my adult life. Nearly all of my adult life has been involved in sales and marketing in one capacity or another, and when I see this practice, it just sort of drives me crazy because it feels like people are saying they don't care about their salespeople or they certainly don't care enough, but what they're saying is, "Hey, glad to have you aboard, now I'm going to go find somebody else!" Right? It's about piling up and stacking up salespeople with the idea that it's sort of a revolving door and some people will spin out and some people spin in and the good ones might or might not stay. And I just think it's such a short-sighted practice. And as I mentioned in a previous podcast, I've done a lot of work in the promotional products industry where this practice is rampant. There are ads everywhere trying to recruit other people's salespeople. So the whole goal is that I want to try to get people at other companies to come work for me, right? And other people at those companies are trying to get my people to work for them. So there's this whole thing going on where it's this big sales person swap and they're so focused on creating this vortex of salespeople moving from organization to organization to organization that they forget that once they've recruited these people, if they were to simply help them a bit; simply train them on what's going to work well and what's not going to work as well, that they can be more successful. Their business could be more successful, their sales people can be more successful. It's more success all the way around and I just think this is ignored or avoided entirely too much.
Chris: I one hundred percent agree with you. Talk about what you can do to help a manager to change from being, “Let's see what sticks on the wall” to really taking care and helping their salespeople to become better at what they're doing. What is required in a sales manager's mindset to make that transition David?
David: Well, part of it is the salesperson or the sales manager rather, and part of it is the ownership. If the ownership is not willing to put any sort of funds behind it, then it's just not going to happen. But if a sales manager can just think in terms of, “What can I do to help and nurture this salesperson so that this person can get in front of the right people, be more likely to be saying the right things, be putting the best foot of the business forward?” That's the thing that drives me crazy, is the idea that a business would spend tons of money to recruit someone in and then just turn them loose and say "Go ahead, knock yourself out." In the promotions industry in particular, a lot of times these people are independent contractors and so management will very often use that as an excuse. They'll say, “Well they're independent contractors so we can't force them to do anything.” Which is true, but you can offer it - and the ones who are likely to take you up on the offer are the ones who are going to be the ones you want to keep. Cause the ones that don't want to do it anyway; they don't want to learn anything new, they don't want to grow. They're not going to be as valuable. So simply by offering salespeople the option of learning things that would help them to increase their sales and improve their profit margins, they're going to be a lot better off.
Schedule a Strategy Session
Click Here
Chris: And think about, we're talking sales and marketing here. Think about how important it is that message that you're giving to the salesperson that you care about them beyond recruiting.
David: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of times it doesn't even occur to them. You know the business owners are so focused on just bringing new people in that it doesn't even occur to them that they should be treating the people they have better. As a sales principle, we all know that it is far easier to resell an existing client than it is to go out and find a new client. But in this particular case, I think some business owners and some managers lose sight of the fact that the assets they have, the people that they have who have said, "I'm going to dedicate my time, my day, my life to your business." deserve some level of respect and some sort of level of commitment from the business ownership from the sales management to say, "Listen, we want you to be successful. What do you need? What would help you to be able to do your job more effectively? What can we provide you that would help you more than we've been doing so far?"
Chris: And so what do you do to help the managers and the ownership to see the value of training their own people? Like how do you help them to get the value of that?
David: I have no idea because this is the one thing that has just been such a sticking point for so long. There is just a small percentage of people who will actually do this and no matter what you say to them or how you express it, they're either going to buy into that idea that they should invest in their own people or they can just continue to ignore them and try to bring new people in and hope that works. But it's a mindset shift and it's not a mindset shift that's going to come from the outside. It's a mindset shift that is going to have to come from the person where they're going to have to have some sort of Ah-ha moment to say, “You know what, these people really are valuable to me. I do value the fact that they are committing their time and energy and effort to building my business and I want to do everything I can to help them, not just try to bring in other people who can surround them and sell stuff as well.”
Chris: Well, and I imagine a big piece of this is also you've seen the results of your work where a manager does say, “Oh my gosh, I really do need to spend more time on keeping my people well trained and giving them the tools and resources that they need.” When you see a manager that does that, the sales have to be so much better, don't they as a result?
David: They do and you also see the value that they place on their own people, we have clients, we have sales managers and business owners who do see that value; but as a percentage of the industry, it is a relatively small percentage that actually get it. To me that makes the ones who do get it just far more valuable to their people, to their clients and to the industry at large.
Chris: Are there specific things that you see from a training standpoint that managers really are missing the boat on, like specific issues that they ought to be training their people on?
David: Well, I think there's a lot of generic training. There's a lot of bare bones, be good to people and they'll be good to you and treat your customers nice and they'll be good to you. Right? There's a lot of that sort of things. Platitudes as opposed to education. A lot of the training that I've done in live seminars, in our webinars and various trainings that we've done has been related to very specific aspects of things like targeting. Which types of prospects and clients should I target? How should I lead in? What should my first contact be with a new prospect? Should I call them on the phone? Should I visit them in person? Should I write a note, wrap it around a rock and throw it through their window? There are lots of different ways to get that first impression made, but the key is to make it a good first impression and if it's just going to be a standard, typical cold call, that's going to be a lot different than if it's something more thoughtful and intelligent. And you've probably heard the adage over the years, sales managers who have been saying it for decades, it's a numbers game. It's just a numbers game and you have to make more calls and more calls and more calls; and sales is a numbers game, but it's a smart numbers game. It's not just about raw numbers, it's about doing the right things in quantities that make sense. Getting to the right people saying the right things, and you can do a lot less of that well and you'll get more clients than if you're doing a lot of the wrong things over and over and over again.
Chris: Boy, I have seen this over and over and over again, and I just think it's such a disservice to your company, to your salespeople; when you just decide that you're gonna let those guys loose, see which ones stick and give them, the 'Attaboy' when they've done the right thing. There's so much more you can do to make these sales people better at what they're doing and to make your business better as a result. Isn't that like the essence of this?
David: It seems so obvious, doesn't it? I remember having a conversation with someone who had a very large business and I was talking to a senior executive in this company and I was talking to them about training salespeople, and I asked, what is your budget for training your salespeople? And he didn't know. He didn't know. He's like, hmm, that's a good question. I'm not sure. And this is a person who was responsible for doing that.