Dan Martell - September 09, 2019


How To Hire a Sales Rep


Episode Stats

Length

12 minutes

Words per Minute

204.03957

Word Count

2,475

Sentence Count

143

Misogynist Sentences

3


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I share with you how to hire a world-class salesperson, really just somebody who's amazing, that can hit their quota. And be sure to stay at the end where I give you access to my signature Rocket Demo Builder process to help you double your close rates and reduce your sales cycle.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Hey there.
00:00:00.500 I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor,
00:00:02.240 and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.560 In this episode, I'm going to share with you
00:00:05.520 how to hire a world-class salesperson, really just
00:00:09.040 somebody who's amazing, that can hit their quota.
00:00:11.880 And be sure to stay at the end where I'm
00:00:13.160 going to share with you how to get access
00:00:14.800 to my signature Rocket Demo Builder process
00:00:18.320 to help you double your close rates and reduce your sales
00:00:21.600 cycle.
00:00:22.720 And let's get into it.
00:00:30.000 In my career, I have hired dozens of salespeople.
00:00:39.800 I recently just hired a new salesperson last week
00:00:42.340 and in their first week, they closed their first deal.
00:00:44.760 That was, they came on Wednesday.
00:00:46.640 Friday closed their first deal.
00:00:47.800 Monday, they just closed their second one.
00:00:49.640 I said, ring the bell, right?
00:00:51.240 They were all pumped, emojis, emojis, emojis.
00:00:53.360 For some reason, this guy just loves emojis, millennial.
00:00:56.400 Anyways, I wanna share this strategy with you
00:00:59.600 because a lot of my coaching clients run into this issue
00:01:02.480 when they go from founder-led sales to sales team-led sales.
00:01:05.880 And it's really just this angst where they want to make sure
00:01:08.840 that they don't waste their time and money
00:01:10.540 hiring a salesperson that just can't do the job.
00:01:13.340 And what I've learned in creating this process
00:01:15.940 I'm going to share with you guys is that if we do it right,
00:01:18.260 we get predictable people that show up
00:01:21.080 with the right characteristics and values
00:01:23.020 and communication styles so that we know,
00:01:25.360 based on our customer market,
00:01:27.660 Like, who's going to resonate best with them?
00:01:29.740 And I made, literally, I hired a guy,
00:01:32.760 wasted almost $80,000 in paying him a base salary.
00:01:36.140 And all he did, early days, when I was in my early 20s,
00:01:39.000 all he did was saying, I'm beating the bush.
00:01:40.500 I'm beating the bushes.
00:01:41.820 I'm going to create opportunity.
00:01:43.580 We're still working the deal, working the pipeline,
00:01:45.620 and all that.
00:01:46.120 And I was too young to know any better.
00:01:48.660 What I decided to do was educate myself.
00:01:51.160 And I read all the sales books, everything
00:01:53.420 from Chet Holmes, Ultimate Sales Machine,
00:01:55.280 to Jeffrey Gittimer, to Brian Tracy, you name it.
00:01:58.680 I've read over probably at this point 50 plus sales books
00:02:02.920 and I've taken all of that, put it into the training
00:02:05.280 that I use with my coaching clients, with my own business
00:02:08.100 and I'm gonna teach it to you today.
00:02:09.860 Number one, profile.
00:02:11.600 Here's the coolest part of the world we live in today.
00:02:14.400 Well, not the coolest because the internet's pretty cool
00:02:16.060 and a lot of other stuff are cool.
00:02:17.400 But one of my favorite parts is the fact
00:02:19.180 that we have enough knowledge about default behaviors
00:02:22.200 that we can actually profile individuals
00:02:25.700 that before they come into our business
00:02:27.200 and understand if they're going to be a good fit for a role.
00:02:29.840 So I'm not going to share what specific profile tool
00:02:33.160 you should be using.
00:02:33.900 You can ask below in the comments and people will jump in.
00:02:37.380 But for me, what I love the best is
00:02:40.200 that I can profile my best salespeople
00:02:43.380 and use that aggregated profile to actually hire the next.
00:02:47.380 And again, what I've learned is different industries
00:02:49.760 have different needs from a salesperson.
00:02:51.960 If you're doing pure outbound, you have a different requirement
00:02:55.300 for that kind of person than if you're doing pure inbound and
00:02:57.940 more of an SDR type role or kind of inside sales.
00:03:01.480 So you want to profile.
00:03:02.740 Now here's the key.
00:03:03.340 Some of you are saying, well, I don't have any salespeople,
00:03:05.140 Dan, and you're trying to teach me how to hire salespeople.
00:03:07.780 Perfect.
00:03:08.380 Here's what you do.
00:03:09.280 Find anybody, ideally in your network.
00:03:11.440 If you don't have a network, go search Dream 100, Dan Martell,
00:03:14.780 and learn how to build your own network.
00:03:16.660 Find somebody that has salespeople that you know really
00:03:18.780 well, profile them, and then use that in your pattern match to
00:03:21.960 find the next level of people, okay?
00:03:25.000 Because it's in that that you can get rid of 99% of the noise
00:03:29.200 because guess what, great salespeople know how to sell you.
00:03:32.540 And the worst thing you want to find out is you got conned.
00:03:35.300 You got, you literally had the guy that showed up and ended up
00:03:38.840 in your business because he was a great, he had a gift of gab
00:03:41.340 but he literally had no sales skills whatsoever to actually
00:03:44.240 do what you needed him to do.
00:03:45.680 So profile them.
00:03:46.880 Number two, top of the funnel.
00:03:49.380 One of the most important things for any hire,
00:03:51.580 specifically salespeople, is you need to get as many people
00:03:55.180 applying for the role at the top of the funnel.
00:03:58.080 How do you do that?
00:03:59.080 You make sure your job application page is very fun
00:04:02.800 and it sells the opportunity.
00:04:04.660 So make sure that you understand what motivates salespeople
00:04:07.800 and put that copy in your sales page, your application page.
00:04:11.200 Number two, it's like sub number two.
00:04:13.600 So it's like A, let's go A and B because this is step number two.
00:04:16.400 A is application page.
00:04:18.800 B is use your team.
00:04:21.080 One of my favorite things to do is ask them
00:04:23.060 if they know any people that are in sales.
00:04:25.020 Go into their LinkedIn.
00:04:26.360 Sit next to them.
00:04:27.240 They're next to you.
00:04:28.220 Hey, open up your LinkedIn.
00:04:29.220 Search sales.
00:04:29.840 Look for a degree connection.
00:04:31.140 Look through the people they already know and say, hey,
00:04:32.920 do you think they would be great?
00:04:34.060 Can they apply?
00:04:34.760 Because the good thing about salespeople is they're always
00:04:36.540 looking for the next best product that's
00:04:38.300 going to have the highest velocity of sales
00:04:40.240 so they can increase their commissions.
00:04:42.720 So that's really valuable.
00:04:44.540 And then for me, it's look inside your own network.
00:04:47.700 So if you have an email list, you'd
00:04:49.260 be surprised how many times you're working.
00:04:50.840 you might have customers that would love to sell your product
00:04:54.020 because they're the biggest evangelists,
00:04:55.380 the biggest champions for you already out in the market.
00:04:59.180 Why not get paid to do that?
00:05:00.680 I was recently talking to a candidate that applied for,
00:05:03.720 we've got another salesperson we're hiring,
00:05:06.080 and he goes, look, Dan, the truth is,
00:05:08.160 I already promote you at every one of the dinners I host.
00:05:11.120 It would just be really amazing if I could do that
00:05:13.560 and be aligned with that outcome.
00:05:15.300 And I was like, whoa, you do dinners
00:05:17.600 and you talk about my coaching?
00:05:18.940 And he's like, yeah, because you've
00:05:20.140 taught me so much about how to really think about my business.
00:05:23.620 And I was like, that could be a really cool sales channel.
00:05:26.860 Imagine if we hosted dinners, you invited people,
00:05:29.760 you work for me, and then we kind of use that as lead gen.
00:05:32.260 He's like, that would be amazing.
00:05:33.880 That's the opportunity from within your network,
00:05:36.440 clients, customers, you already have.
00:05:37.780 But we want to add to the top of the funnel
00:05:40.120 so you have a bunch of applicants.
00:05:41.780 Number three, video.
00:05:44.340 I think that anybody, and this has
00:05:47.140 been proven through, Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in
00:05:49.880 Blink, that we can tell so much based on somebody's
00:05:53.880 interactions from communicating with them.
00:05:56.540 We can't even explain it, but we can tell.
00:05:59.220 So one of the first things every applicant needs to do is
00:06:02.420 submit a video answering questions.
00:06:04.820 Because for me, and I don't, I'm not involved in the
00:06:07.660 recruiting process till the very end because we have a very
00:06:09.860 structured thing called the Talent Pipeline that I actually
00:06:12.360 have created and I coach my clients on.
00:06:14.500 And my team executes the Talent Pipeline.
00:06:16.540 So, but the first step is every applicant for the sales rule
00:06:19.780 has to submit a video answering specific questions
00:06:22.640 and through that, we can get rid of a lot of noise.
00:06:25.620 We can get a lot of people that think they're really great
00:06:27.660 at sales that we know that if they were talking
00:06:29.880 to a customer, they would be confused.
00:06:32.060 They wouldn't be able to respond.
00:06:33.260 They just don't have the right tonality.
00:06:35.160 Not good or bad, just not a fit for us.
00:06:37.220 So make sure that you ask for a video.
00:06:39.260 Step one, use that to qualify them to make sure
00:06:42.700 that you don't waste a bunch of time.
00:06:44.140 I mean, doing 15 minute phone calls with a bunch of,
00:06:46.400 a dozen candidates, that could take up two days of your life
00:06:49.640 when literally watching a three minute video
00:06:51.580 can help you save all that time.
00:06:53.380 Number four, test project.
00:06:55.280 So one of the things that's really important,
00:06:56.980 once you find somebody, they go through the process,
00:06:59.140 video, interview with the team, profile assessment, et cetera,
00:07:01.540 you're now at the test project.
00:07:04.120 We wanna make sure that we throw them into the deep end.
00:07:07.660 So what we do is we give them an email address
00:07:09.280 for our company, we send them a dozen leads,
00:07:11.220 and over a two week period, we see how they perform.
00:07:14.360 How did they communicate?
00:07:15.760 And yes, we give them some training and our VP of sales
00:07:18.360 will coach them to make sure that they have some support.
00:07:21.160 But at the end of the day, I want to see how they respond
00:07:23.600 just natively, inherently.
00:07:25.360 What are their default habits?
00:07:26.840 What is their communication flow?
00:07:28.740 What do they do without any training to let me know
00:07:31.740 if they've got the foundation that we can build upon
00:07:34.980 and even see if they can get some deals?
00:07:37.180 Because that's super exciting.
00:07:38.980 I see too often, literally, I was talking to one of my
00:07:40.980 coaching clients the other day and he was like,
00:07:43.380 yeah, we've had this VP of sales for a while.
00:07:45.120 How long? 11 months.
00:07:46.280 How many deals have they closed? One.
00:07:48.500 Wow. Here's a question.
00:07:50.000 How many deals could you have closed in that same time period?
00:07:52.560 Probably a dozen.
00:07:53.660 All right, I'm cool the founder selling 20% better
00:07:57.500 than a salesperson, but not by a factor of 10.
00:08:00.840 There is an issue there that we might be able to fix
00:08:03.440 in this next step, but make sure that you fix
00:08:06.300 the test project upfront so that you can evaluate
00:08:09.340 true simulation of a work environment
00:08:12.720 with the salesperson so that you can see
00:08:14.620 if they've got what it's gonna take.
00:08:16.220 Number five, sales playbook.
00:08:18.620 Here's the reality.
00:08:20.440 If you expect somebody to come in and you just say,
00:08:23.860 figure it out and give them leads to start closing deals,
00:08:26.940 then you will be dramatically disappointed.
00:08:29.700 And the reason why is sales is not something
00:08:32.940 that just happens, it is a process, it's repeatable,
00:08:36.100 and if you do it right, it's scalable.
00:08:38.240 So what I recommend, okay, and this is what I teach
00:08:40.380 my clients, is if you're still the founder doing this,
00:08:43.700 and I have a very structured template that I teach.
00:08:46.060 But if you're the founder, just grab everything
00:08:48.000 you're doing today and put it in a Google Doc.
00:08:50.080 I'm talking about your email templates.
00:08:51.740 I'm talking about your objections.
00:08:53.420 I'm talking about the talk tracks
00:08:54.880 that you're using on demos.
00:08:56.780 If you're using my Rocket Demo Builder,
00:08:58.840 take the framework that I teach and your answers
00:09:02.720 to those questions to guide the prospect through
00:09:05.560 to make decisions.
00:09:06.460 What's your follow-up sequence look?
00:09:08.100 Write those things down.
00:09:09.520 What training inspired you?
00:09:10.860 What books inspired you?
00:09:11.960 What YouTube videos inspired you?
00:09:13.800 What are you doing to succeed as a founder selling?
00:09:17.360 Put it in your sales playbook.
00:09:19.160 Everything from the avatar, the product suite,
00:09:21.880 the offer, the pricing, the how to deal with objections,
00:09:25.440 how to deal with the competitor set.
00:09:26.820 Everything should be at least in a Google Doc
00:09:28.840 so if you hire somebody, they can hit the ground running.
00:09:31.680 I see this too often.
00:09:32.780 They're just like, you know, we didn't really train them.
00:09:35.420 We just said figure it out.
00:09:36.660 That, you know, you might think just because you're a startup
00:09:38.700 that you can get away with that.
00:09:40.060 You can try it.
00:09:40.780 It's not the way I like to build companies
00:09:42.580 because I wanna get results.
00:09:43.580 If I'm gonna invest time, even if they're on pure commission,
00:09:46.380 okay, and it doesn't cost me anything,
00:09:48.520 my time is very expensive.
00:09:50.560 So we wanna make sure that we invest time and money
00:09:53.660 to support our teams to be able to get to productivity
00:09:56.660 and quota as fast as possible.
00:09:58.400 And the way to do that is you need to have a sales playbook
00:10:01.700 that outlines all the things that I just mentioned
00:10:04.200 that you give on day one once they're ready to start with you
00:10:08.180 that you use to have them self-train, educate,
00:10:11.340 understand their product, and really get inside the mind
00:10:14.100 of the customer.
00:10:14.780 Too often, in today's world, customers
00:10:17.660 are showing up in your sales pipeline way more educated
00:10:21.320 than your sales reps are on your own product, OK?
00:10:24.920 And that's a scary thing.
00:10:26.600 So you might even have in your sales program,
00:10:28.800 go read all of our Capterra reviews,
00:10:30.500 go read all of our customer case studies,
00:10:32.680 go read this, et cetera, because all of that
00:10:34.760 becomes context and ammunition that your sales rep
00:10:37.820 can use to overcome and to help persuade customers
00:10:42.860 or what I always think is enthusiasm,
00:10:46.000 just like give enthusiasm for their,
00:10:48.100 like the opportunity for them to solve their problems.
00:10:50.640 So you want to do that in a sales playbook.
00:10:52.940 So really quick recap, how to hire a salesperson
00:10:55.480 that can hit quota extremely fast.
00:10:57.200 Number one, profile them so that you only recruit people
00:11:00.640 that are like your top performers.
00:11:03.280 Number two, focus on top of the funnel.
00:11:05.420 Number three, video applicants only.
00:11:08.800 Number four, the test project to simulate the real world work.
00:11:12.800 And number five, sales playbook.
00:11:15.560 As I mentioned beginning this episode,
00:11:17.100 I want to share with you my Rocket Demo Builder.
00:11:19.760 It's a framework I created where I go over the five hot
00:11:23.240 principles that you're going to need to know about even doing
00:11:26.400 great product demos that will help you close twice as fast
00:11:29.580 and shorten your sales cycle.
00:11:31.040 And I even go over the nine box model of the questions
00:11:35.080 in the flow of the Rocket demo to take it from an hour,
00:11:38.720 an hour and a half down to 30 to 45 minutes.
00:11:41.580 And I'm talking about credit card customer on the call.
00:11:44.620 Click the link below to download your copy.
00:11:46.520 And if you like this video, be sure to hit the like button.
00:11:48.560 Subscribe to my channel if you're new.
00:11:50.500 And leave a comment letting me know what was the most valuable
00:11:53.600 aspect of this video.
00:11:55.940 And I would love to challenge you to live a bigger life
00:11:59.000 and a bigger business.
00:11:59.840 And I'll see you next Monday.
00:12:01.800 Ready? How to hire a salesperson that can hit a quota.