- Hey there, Dan here:
serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this video, I'm gonna teach you how
to ramp up your salesperson faster
without spending a tonne of your time.
Be sure to stay to the end, where I'm gonna share
with you my Rocket Demo Builder.
It's a framework and nine-box model
on how you can close deals faster,
twice the win rate in half the time.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
So over the years, I've hired dozens of salespeople:
for my company Flowtown, Clarity, my current business.
Pretty much every business I'm involved in,
there's usually a sales component to it,
either biz dev, when I worked with Udemy
helping them build their growth team,
I worked with their sales team
to do partnerships, et cetera,
so it is something that's near and dear to my heart.
It's also something that I invested a tonne of time and money
and energy into perfecting myself.
If you don't know this,
when I started, I actually coded for almost a decade
in writing the software myself,
but realised that for me to build a team,
for me to hire key people,
for me have somebody else sell and not be founder-led sales,
I needed to learn how to hire and train and retain,
and manage a sales team.
And that's what I've done over the years.
In this video, I'm gonna share with you the exact strategy
that I coach my clients.
I work with some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies
in the world, from proposify.com, clickfunnels.com,
caret.com, helping them instal sales processes
specifically around ramping up new salespeople
to hit quota fast.
So let's go over those strategies.
Number one: filter.
So even before somebody shows up in your business,
you need to filter them
from even coming onto your team, okay?
So things that I look for: one, are they motivated, okay?
I cannot, one of the things that I always ask myself is,
"Is their most selfish version of this person aligned
"with what I need them to do or become in my business?"
And that's why I'm very big on asking them,
"Five years out, paint me a picture of your perfect day."
And I wanna kinda hear and see what they're aiming towards,
because if that's where they're going inherently themselves,
and it's aligned with my business, then we're gonna be good.
So positive, I gotta tell you.
One of my team members, Wendell,
is literally one of the most positive people in the world.
So when I think of positive, I want somebody like that.
And the reason why, for a salesperson,
is they're going from rejection to rejection
to rejection to win.
And if they can't keep that enthusiasm and positivity going,
there's no way they're gonna be successful
selling your software.
So that's number two.
Three is, and really these are two things.
There's test project and profile assessment.
So test project is getting them some clients to call.
Sometimes, if I don't feel comfortable giving them clients,
or lower-value leads, I will simulate that,
where I'll have them do a sales call with a team member,
and have the team member impersonate
a real client situation, and see how they handle it,
and give them objections and just listen
to how they deal with the objections,
and the flow and the conversation.
Do they maintain the frame?
All of the things that you should hopefully know
about yourself if you're selling,
that you can teach to the sales person.
And the fourth thing around filtering is making sure
that you do some level of personality assessment.
Things that are under the surface, that you may not be able
to pick up without doing some kind of Meyers-Briggs,
ProfileXT, I use Predictive Index.
There's a bunch of different ones out there.
It's not a commercial for which one's the best
for sales people, 'cause everybody's gonna argue their own.
But I do suggest, if you're gonna hire somebody,
any role, really, you should put them
through some kind of profile assessment
so you can get a sense of, maybe,
your top sales person against them,
or yourself against them, to make sure
that you have another data point to make your decisions.
So number one is filtering.
Number two: training.
I can't tell you how often I see sales teams,
when I scratch under the surface,
and I ask my coaching clients:
"What's your training schedule and your process
"and your rhythm for making sure your sales people continue
"to get refined aspects and training from anybody?"
The answer is "Very little."
No formal training.
I'm gonna tell you this.
If you have not bought a existing sales training programme,
Winning by Design, Jacco is brilliant.
You can go check out his videos on YouTube.
Sandler training is well known in the industry.
There's, obviously, the Grant Cardones of the world.
They have training.
This is, again, not an endorsement for any specific trainer,
more so than you need to have a training process built
into your sales process.
The ramping up of a sales agent is very much a:
do, learn, do, learn.
So they gotta go do some sales calls, learn some new skills.
Do some sales calls, do some learn skills.
And you always wanna make sure
that you're perfecting one aspect of the sale or the call,
not multiples in one training.
So I call it, like when you're a golf swinger,
and you're trying to fix the swing,
you don't change seven things.
You change the grip.
You change your feet positioning.
You change the way you move your hips, or whatever.
I am not a golfer, so I have no clue.
I can just imagine.
But you want to make sure that your training is there.
I know some sales team that it's a morning routine.
Every salesperson has to watch at least three videos
in their training vault, and they move forward.
Every week, for sure, there's a training,
where they say to the top three sales rep,
"I want you to extract something that you did well,
"so from your audio notes or whatever,
"and I want you to teach that
"to the rest of the sales team."
If you have been doing sales calls,
please tell me you've been recording them all
so that you can extract the calls that went really well
or really bad and add that to your playbook
for onboarding and training a salesperson.
The other thing I'll do is I'll pay people to read books.
So there's a bunch of sales training out there,
from "The Ultimate Sales Machine" from Chet Holmes,
the Jeffrey Gitomer stuff, literally,
there is hundreds of sales books,
and you can just say, "Here are the top ten sales books.
"If you read this, I will give you $500 stipend."
So you can just literally pay the salespeople
to read the books.
Some of them won't need to be paid,
but I don't mind paying them,
because I'd rather them read the book,
give me a synopsis of the book, and then pay them
so that I know they're watching the training.
So make sure you train your people,
not you, somebody else's systems, ideally,
that you buy, licence, get them access to,
and also reward them with books.
Number three: measure.
So if you don't have a sales scorecard,
you need to have one, and every rep needs their own,
and every rep should know how their selling
to different products skews.
So you might have different types of customers,
from SMB, to mid-market, to enterprise, and within those,
you might have different packages or solutions.
You wanna make sure that on a weekly basis, minimum,
your sales rep is getting a feedback loop
on how well they're closing or they're enrolling new clients
into your software.
As a percentage, you wanna give them their comparable,
if you have that for yourself,
"These are where my numbers, this is where yours at."
Sometimes, they just need to see the gap themselves.
They just need to know that "Here's where I'm at,"
and "This is what's possible."
Some people don't realise that a 60% win rate
on a sales demo or product demo is absolutely possible,
because all they've ever done is 10%, right?
And they're coming from some other organisation
that might have had a bad product.
They're working with you and they think 10% is good.
And you know that you're doing 80%.
So I always say, "Whatever the founder's doing,
"if you're selling today, drop it back about 20%,
"and that's what anybody else should do."
You have an unfair advantage if you're the CEO,
you're the founder, you're the creator of the product.
You exude passion.
You exude confidence.
It is just not fair.
They don't have that, so take that back 20%.
That should be their number.
You should measure.
You should measure their win rates by product, by skew,
give it to them on a weekly basis, if not daily,
so that they know, and create a leaderboard
if you have multiple salespeople,
so they understand their position in that leaderboard
so that they can use that as competition.
It's positive peer pressure, okay?
It's celebration.
It's knowing how they're doing in relation to other people,
and if you just have one rep
and you're not doing any of this,
they don't have the feedback loop that they need
to motivate them to change, to tweak, to get better.
Number four: coaching.
This is probably my favourite, most important thing
you should be doing.
So coaching comes in a few different ways.
Number one: every week,
you should be do one-on-one coaching with your sales rep.
This means that you are extracting,
and you can get them to do this, but pull three calls,
examples of where you dealt really good with objections,
and another one where you didn't, okay?
So you wanna actually have them pull
their three favourite calls, good and bad,
to present to you during the one-on-ones.
In that one-on-one, you wanna identify an opportunity
for them to improve one aspect of their swing,
AKA sales call, to work on
for the next two weeks to three months,
until that aspect of the call gets better, honestly.
It might be the same thing for six weeks.
So just stay on it until they finally get it.
You can even pair them up, or listen, what I love to do is,
I'll get one of my best sales rep's call,
if I knew that they handled that area
of the call really well, and I'll pull that
and I'll make them listen to it.
I think when salespeople have a hard time,
one of the best thing you do is make them listen
to old successful calls if they have them,
or other successful calls.
They'll learn through osmosis.
And then the coolest thing, out of all the conversations
that you can possibly have about coaching clients,
is the tool sets that we have today.
We have tools like Gong, I believe it's gong.io,
refract.ai, course.ai.
Here's what those tools do:
they, in real time, will listen
and process the audio conversation
between your sales rep and the buyer
and actually extract the different,
some of them do different things
so that you gotta check it out, what's right for you
and your size of organisation.
But some of them will actually categorise the conversation.
Let's say it's a 60-minute conversation.
They'll say the first third is discovery.
You know, problem analysis,
and then solution presentation or objections.
And they'll pull it out.
They'll even say, you know,
the ratio of questions versus talk time,
versus this rep versus that rep, is all different.
Literally, go check out these products.
I'll make sure I link them below,
because they can transform, some of them, like refract.ai,
comes with a coaching component,
so not only do you have somebody auditing the conversation
and the quality of your calls so that reps get some feedback
and you can clip out those audio responses
and save them as training, amazing,
some of them have mobile apps so you can actually,
like, listen to the call's reps if you wanted to,
you needed to listen some calls,
you can go on a run, listen to the calls.
And the coaching, for refract.ai anyways,
and check it out, I don't know
if they're still doing it or not, but they provide coaching
so you can have somebody else coach your salespeople
if you're already busy.
You have no bandwidth, but you have two or three or four
sales reps, you want somebody to support you on that,
there's tools and services that allow you to do that.
We live in an incredible world,
where we can get a rep up to 80% to quota,
ideally, within 60 days.
You know, that's my rule.
I've been able to do it in three weeks
because if you have a structured talk,
a track for the sales call,
you do your job on all the marketing side,
you can literally get 60% win rates on a call
in 35 to 45 minutes and just crush it
with your new salesperson, get them ramped up fast.
So quick recap: four strategies to increase the ramp time
of a salesperson to hit quota.
Number one: filter.
Make sure that you only get the right people
that are motivative, positive, go through the test project
and, ideally, go through a profile assessment.
Two: training.
Invest in your people.
Three: measure the win rates per product skew
and all the different data points for the scorecard,
and four: coaching.
Get the tools, get the coaching scheduled,
your one-on-ones, make sure
that they get the feedback loop from you.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
I wanna share with you an exclusive resource
called the Rocket Demo Builder.
It's a nine-box model.
It's the talk framework that you're gonna use
in your next demo, and you're gonna crush it.
So most of my clients are doubling their win rates
and closing deals in half the time.
So if you're dealing with long sales cycles,
this is gonna show you how to use the virtual close
to bring them down from 16 months to six months.
Click the link below to get access
to the Rocket Demo Builder.
It's yours absolutely free, and as per usual,
if you thought this video was valuable
and there's somebody in your life that you care about
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Smash that like button, subscribe to the channel,
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And as per usual, I wanna challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.
(cloth rustling)