Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor
and creator of SAAS Academy.
And this episode, I'm going to share with you how
to hire a world class salesperson or really just
somebody that's amazing, that can hit their quota.
And be sure to stay to the end, we're
going to share with you how to get access to my signature
Rocket Demo Builder process to help
you double your close rates and reduce your sales cycle.
And let's get into it.
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In my career, I have hired dozens of salespeople.
I recently just hired a new salesperson last week,
and in their first week, they closed the first deal.
That was, they came on Wednesday,
Friday closed their first deal, on Monday,
they just closed their second one.
I said ring the bell.
They were all pumped, emojis, emojis, emojis.
For some reason, this guy just loves emojis.
Millennial.
Anyways, I want to share this strategy with you,
because a lot of my coaching clients run into this issue
when they go from founder-led sales to sales team-led sales.
And it's really just this angst, where
they want to make sure that they don't waste their time
and money hiring a salesperson that just can't do the job.
And what I've learned in creating this process I'm
going to share with you guys, is that if we do it right,
we get predictable people that show up
with the right characteristics and values and communication
styles, so that we know based on our customer market, who's
going to resonate best with them.
And I've made, literally, I hired
a guy, wasted almost $80,000 in paying him a base salary,
and all he did, early days when I was in my early 20s,
all he did with way, I'm beating the bush,
I'm beating the bushes, I'm going to,
I'm going to create opportunity.
We're still working the deal, working
the pipeline and all that.
And I was too young to know any better.
What I decided to do, was educate myself.
And I read all the sales books.
Everything from Chet Holmes' Ultimate Sales
Machine to Jeffrey get Emma to Brian Tracy, you name it,
I've read over probably at this point, 50 plus sales books.
And I've taken all of that, put it into the training
that I use with my coaching clients, with my own business,
and I'm going to teach it to you today.
Number one, profile.
Here's the coolest part of the world we live in today.
Well, not the coolest, because the internet's pretty cool,
and a lot of other stuff are cool.
But one of my favorite parts is the fact
that we have enough knowledge about default behaviors,
that we can actually profile individuals that before they
come into our business, and understand if they're going
to be a good fit for a role.
So I'm not going to share what specific profile tool
you should be using.
You can ask below in the comments and people jump in.
But for me, what I love the best,
is that I can profile my best salespeople
and use that aggregated profile to actually hire the next.
And again, what I've learned, is different industries
have different needs from a salesperson.
If you're doing pure outbound, you
have a different requirement for that kind of person
than if you're doing pure inbound and more of an SDR type
role or kind of inside sale.
So you want to profile.
Now here's key.
Some of you are saying, well, I don't
have any salespeople, Dan, and you're
trying to teach me how to hire salespeople.
Perfect.
Here's what you do.
Find anybody, ideally in your network.
If you don't have a network, go search Dream 100, Dan Martell,
and learn how to build your own network.
Find somebody that has salespeople
that you know are really well, profile them, and then use
that in your pattern match to find the next level of people.
Because it's in that that you can get
rid of 99% of the noise.
Because guess what.
Great salespeople know how to sell you.
And the worst thing you want to find out, is you got conned.
You literally had the guy that showed up and ended up
in your business because he was a great, he had a gift of gab,
but he literally had no sales skills whatsoever
to actually do what you needed him to do.
So profile them.
Number two, top of the funnel.
One of the most important things for any hire, specifically
salespeople, is you need to get as many people applying
for the role at the top of the funnel.
How do you do that?
You make sure your job application page is very fun
and it sells the opportunity.
So make sure that you understand what
motivates salespeople, and put that copy in your sales page
or application page.
Number two, it's like sub number two.
So it's like A, let's go A, B, because this is step number
two.
A is application page.
B is use your team.
One of my favorite things to do is ask them
if they know any people that are in sales.
Go into their LinkedIn.
Sit next to them.
They're next to you.
Hey, open up your LinkedIn, search sales,
look first degree connection.
Look through the people they already know and say,
hey, do you think they would be great?
Can they apply?
Because the good thing about salespeople, is they're
always looking for the next best product that's
going to have the highest velocity of sales,
so they can increase their commissions.
So that's really valuable.
And then for me, it's look inside your own network.
So if you have an email list, you'd
be surprised how many times you're working,
you might have customers that would
love to sell your product, because they're
the biggest evangelists, the biggest champions for you
already out in the market.
Why not get paid to do that?
I was recently talking to a candidate that
applied for, we've got another salesperson we're hiring,
and he goes, look Dan, the truth is, I already
promote you at every one of the dinners I host.
It would just be really amazing if I could do that and be
aligned with that outcome.
And I was like, whoa, you do dinners
and you talk about my coaching?
And he's like, yeah, because you've
taught me so much about how to really think about my business.
And I was like, that could be a really cool sales channel.
Imagine if we hosted dinners, you invited people,
you work for me and then we kind of used that as lead gen.
He's like, that would be amazing.
That's the opportunity from within your network.
Clients, customers you already have,
but we want to add to the top of the funnel
so you have a bunch of applicants.
Number three, video.
I think that anybody, and this has been proven through,
Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in Blink,
that we can tell so much based on somebody's interactions
from communicating with them.
We can't even explain it, but we can tell.
So one of the first things every applicant needs to do
is submit a video answering questions.
Because for me, and I don't, I'm not
involved in the recruiting process till the very end,
because we have a very structured thing called
the talent pipeline, that I actually created and I
coach my clients on, and my team executes the talent pipeline.
But the first step is, every applicant for the sales role
has to submit a video answering specific questions.
And through that, we can get rid of a lot of noise.
We get a lot of people that think
they're really great at sales that we know that if they were
talking to a customer, they would be confused,
they wouldn't be able to respond,
they just don't have the right tonality.
Not good or bad, just not a fit for us.
So make sure that you ask for video.
Step one, use that to qualify them,
to make sure that you don't waste a bunch of time.
You do a 15-minute phone calls with a bunch of,
a dozen candidates.
That could take up two days of your life, when literally,
watching a three-minute video can
help you save all of that time.
Number four, test project.
So one of the things that's really important
once you find somebody, they go through the process, video,
interview with the team, profile assessment, et cetera,
you're now at the test project.
We want to make sure that we throw them into the deep end.
So what we do, is we give them an email address
for our company, we send them a dozen leads,
and over a two-week period, we see how they perform.
How did they communicate?
And yes, we give them some training and our VP of Sales
will coach them to make sure that they have some support,
but the end of the day, I want to see how they respond
just natively, inherently.
What are their default habits?
What is their communication flow?
What do they do without any training
to let me know if they've got the foundation that we
can build upon, and even see if they can get some deals?
Because that's super exciting.
I see too often, literally, I was talking
to one of my coaching clients the other day
and he was like, yeah, we've had this VP of Sales for a while.
I said, how long?
11 months.
How many deals have they closed?
One.
Wow.
Here's a question.
How many deals could you have closed in that same time
period?
Probably a dozen.
All right, I'm cool the founder selling
20% better than a salesperson, but not by a factor of 10.
There is an issue there that we might
be able to fix in this next step,
but make sure that you fix the test project upfront,
so that you can evaluate true simulation of a work
environment with the salesperson so that you can see if they've
got what it's going to take.
Number five, sales playbook.
Here's the reality.
If you expect somebody to come in
and you just say, figure it out, and give
them leads to start closing deals,
then you will be dramatically disappointed.
And the reason why, is sales is not
something that just happens.
It is a process.
It's repeatable.
And if you do it right, it's scalable.
So what I recommend, and this is what I teach my clients,
is if you're still the founder, doing this,
and I have a very structured template that I teach,
but if you're the founder, just grab
everything you're doing today and put it in a Google doc.
I'm talking about your email templates.
I'm talking about your objections.
I'm talking about the talk tracks
that you're using on demos.
If you're using my Rocket Demo Builder,
take the framework that I teach and your answers
to those questions to guide the prospect through
to make decisions.
What's your follow up sequence look?
Write those things down.
What training inspired you?
What books inspired you?
What YouTube videos inspired you?
What are you doing to succeed as a founder selling?
Put it in your sales playbook.
Everything from the avatar the product suite.
The offer the pricing the how to deal with objections,
how to deal with the competitor set.
Everything should be at least in a Google doc,
so if you hire somebody, that can hit the ground running.
I see this too often.
They're just like, we didn't really train them.
We just said, figure it out.
You might think just because you're
a startup that you get away with that.
You can try it.
It's not the way I like to build companies,
because I won't get results.
If I'm going to invest time, even if they're
on pure commission, it doesn't cost me anything,
my time is very expensive.
So we want to make sure that we invest time and money
to support our teams to be able to get to productivity
and quota as fast as possible.
And the way to do that, is you need
to have a sales playbook that outlines all the things that I
just mentioned that you give on day one,
once they're ready to start with you,
that you use to have them self-train,
educate, understand their product,
and really get inside the mind of the customer.
Too often in today's world, customers
are showing up in your sales pipeline way
more educated than your sales reps are on your own product.
And that's a scary thing.
So you might even have in your sales program,
go read all of our cap terror reviews.
Go read all of our customer case studies.
Go read this, et cetera, because all of that
becomes context and ammunition that your sales rep can use
to overcome and to help persuade customers
or what I always think is enthusiasm.
Just like, give enthusiasm for their, the opportunity for them
to solve their problem.
So you want to do that in a sales playbook.
So really quick recap, how to hire a salesperson
that can hit quota extremely fast.
Number one, to profile them so that you only
recruit people that are like your top performers.
Number two, focus on top of the funnel.
Number three, video applicants only.
Number four, test project to simulate the real world work.
And number five, sales playbook.
As I mentioned beginning of this episode,
I want to share with you my Rocket Demo Builder.
It's a framework I created where I go over the five
hot principles that you're going to need to know about even
doing great product demos that'll help you close twice as
fast and shorten your sales cycle.
And I even go over the nine box model of the questions
and the flow of the Rocket Demo to take it
from an hour, an hour and a half down to 30 to 45 minutes.
And I'm talking about credit card customer on the call.
Click the link below to download your copy.
And if you like this video, be sure to hit the Like button.
Subscribe to my channel.
If you're new.
And leave a comment letting me know
what was the most valuable aspect of this video.
And I would love to challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.
Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.
Your quota.
Ready?
How to hire a salesperson that can hit quota.