John Asher—Stop Losing Winnable Deals: 10 Strategies to Improve Sales Performance

John Asher  0:00  
Always be curious. Always be coaching. Get them to ask you about how you can help.

David Bush  0:05  
Yeah, reminds me of Brian Tracy's line that said, "Ask questions skillfully and listen carefully." Those six words have taught me a lot. And if you ask enough questions and shut up, most of the time they'll ask a reciprocal question that is related back to what it is that you do, and then you go right into the conversation. Welcome to the Business Builders Playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind predictable revenue growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by BDR AI, the AI-powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting, so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started. All right. Well, welcome everybody. My name is David Bush, and I am with BDR AI, and it is my distinct pleasure to be your host and moderator for this exciting kickoff to a webinar series that we're going to be doing on a monthly basis with the amazing John Asher from Asher Strategies. Many of you are already familiar with John's work. He's been around doing this expertise modeling around sales performance and how to stop losing winnable deals for decades, and many of you are familiar with his works. You've seen some of the things that he's doing, but today is going to really just bring you back the strategies to help you to win more deals and to close more of those transactions. And I can't wait for you to hear some of the brilliance that he has mastered over the years. He's got decades of experience in sales, leadership, and business growth, including helping build an engineering company to 165 million dollars in annual revenue, and developing sales strategies used by executives and sales professionals around the world. And his work combines sales aptitude, emotional intelligence, neuroscience, strategic planning, and repeatable sales processes to help companies to generate measurable top line growth. And it's my pleasure to welcome all of you to the webinar and the video series today, and to introduce John Asher. John, thanks for joining the webinar.

John Asher  2:14  
Thank you for the introduction, David. Welcome all. This is going to be a monthly seminar series. You all know the title, and I will add it into about six different webinars that cover all aspects of how to close deals faster and at a higher rate. So important one we're going to look at, and that's the people part of the issue. So I have been hiring salespeople for probably 25 years, and in the beginning, I didn't do too well. But after a couple of decades, I have figured out for myself and for my clients the best way to hire salespeople. Using this process, in the last 20 years, I've never hired a bad salesperson. The number one, as we all know, the world has grown more and more technical, and when you have a buyer who's a technical buyer, they really want to have a technical salesperson, or at least a salesperson who can who can talk the talk. So the first thing I want to know is, do they have the intellectual capacity for the job? We have a very short, easy to administer IQ test that will tell us. And when you watch salespeople perform in the field, those that have a natural talent for sales and are smart, they're the ones that are bringing in most of the business. Number two, do they have the natural talent for the job? That's the other assessment we've been using for 23 years. Statue been around for 45 years, called the Advanced Personality Questionnaire. And then, are they are they an honest and person with high integrity? And that's not our assessment, but there is another company out there called Criteria, very inexpensive. They have an assessment to figure out whether people are honest or not. I've been using it for a long time. I have hired two executives in my past who failed this test. I hired them anyway, and both of them fit me right in the right in the butt. So I'm a strong believer in this, and when salespeople give you know references, of course they give their good references, not their bad references. So I'll never take those just by getting them. I'll make a phone call to the person who gave the reference, so I can ask questions and make sure they're going to have the right behaviors. Then, of course, in an interview, I'm going to repeat that: Do they have the right behaviors for the job? Example would be: You're selling a inferior product at a premium price. How do you overcome that? What are your techniques? Would be just an example. Of a question I'll ask. I've got about 20 of those questions. I'll usually ask about 10, and then you know will we fit into our culture? And I'm sure we all have a culture in our companies. The best way to determine a culture, by the way, that I've I've heard six speakers on culture. Here's the best way to determine: get your executives in a in a room and ask them one simple question: If a candidate for our company asked you, "What does it take to get ahead in the company?" Well, how would you answer it? So then, take what all six executives say, put it on the board, and you typically will come up with five or six values, and that is essentially the culture. It's what people. It's what people do. But most buy companies. The other one's a longevity issue. We have that. We have the same culture. Work hard. Work smart. Keep it simple for the for the customer. Over deliver and have fun. And so we want to know if the if the if the person is a curmudgeon. I said we don't want to do the company to hire. This was essentially my hiring process going over several decades, using it to use it thoroughly. You you never make a bad hire. Now let's look at the big picture for sales. When you watch great salespeople, they have brilliant product knowledge, gives them power, confidence. They can really add value to prospects and suspects. And this is pretty much binary. If you have a lot of this, you have a good chance to make a sale. But if you don't have enough to impress the customer, you literally have no chance of making this thing. Second, they've learned skills and tools. Third, they're suitable for sales.

John Asher  6:49  
They've got that general intelligence, I imagine, Kai IQ. They got a natural talent, and they develop these higher levels of EQ, emotional intelligence, so-called soft skills. They're motivated. They got that fire in the belly, that internal drive to make things happen. They got a compensation plan that they like. They've got a competent sales manager, and the company has these great processes and technologies to grow the company, hiring and onboarding new salespeople, developing and coaching them once they get them, and then having a strong pipeline. So when you can put a check by all five of these, real strong correlation to the elite salespeople in our country. And Harvard University Research Department on sales for 45 years, they have real data on how many salespeople they are, who goes to the top, etc. They claim there's 25 million salespeople today in the country, and they claim there's two Pareto or 80-20 rules that apply to them. First, 20% are elite, 5 million. 80% 20 million. million are not so high, and their turnover rate every year is about 37%. Second 80-20 rule of the 5,000,020%, 1 million, bring in 80% of the new logos, not up to cross selling to the current customer, but actually a new customer and a new logo. So that essentially means we got 1 million really elite salespeople in the country. Now look at these five factors. When you can put a strong check after each one, very strong correlation to average data about the elite salespeople. Now let's see where this assessment fits in. So the suitability for sales based on national talent accounts for anywhere from a third to two thirds of the sale. In other words, if it's a technical buyer and a technical salesperson where relationships aren't quite so important, it might account for 38% of the sale. On the other hand, if it's the apparel industry in New York or Toronto, where it's all about relationships. You got the relationship, you have a good chance of making the sale. If you don't, you don't. There's a thumb rule for most companies, about 50%. It also shows the natural talent for salespeople helps salespeople develop these emotional intelligence skills. Shows how much drive they've got. Shows the confidence of the company sales manager, and helps company companies hire new ones and develop them once they've got. And then finally, our other assessment, the key assessment called Agile. So this is where this assessment fits in, and why it's so important to use a personality assessment before you hire someone. So the reason we it's been the APQ Advanced Personality Questionnaire has been around for 40 years, used globally. And we've been using it for 23 years, and the unique part of it is it's the only assessment that has all six of these attributes. You can use it for hiring and development, very predictive of job success. So the APQ folks went to Salesforce, randomly grabbed 140 salespeople, which is what you need for statistically significant results. What's how much they sold for two years, and then correlated to their personality traits. Then they went to Oracle, Honeywell, 15 large companies with big banks and salespeople, put all that data together in a meta-analysis, and so it makes it very, very predictive of success. It is one of two assessments out there that cannot be gained, and that's the APQ and caliper. All the rest of them, you name it, you name it, DIS, Cultural Index, Predictive Index, etc., can easily be gained. And I have a good friend who's a sales recruiter for salespeople, Barry Deutsch. He wrote a book, and the name of the book is "You're another person I hired." Meaning, it took the assessment. It says you like doing these things and you don't do them. WTFO, Navy Navy term. And so, then Barry will go on to say what probably means they gained it, and then he'll go on to say that if you hire a salesperson who gained it, you are subject to what he calls a $250,000 hiring.

John Asher  11:32  
You say at $250,000 you should have got in sales if you had hired the right person, but didn't directly enables development of EQ. I'll show you that in a second or two. It has that associated IQ assessment, and now, of course, like almost all the assessments, it's powered by AI. So this is why we've stuck with this film for 23 years. It was the only only assessments against the old six of these.

David Bush  12:01  
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John Asher  12:56  
just to give you an example of why it's so important to hire based on natural talent, I'm sure many of you have read Good to Great. Fundamental to Good to Great, I'll quote one of the co-authors, Jim Collins, was get the right people on the right seat on the bus based on natural talent. Then, 10 years later, the Gallup organization did a study on what it takes to be a great manager. Unbelievably, they interviewed a billion employees, 80,000 managers, and then wrote the book called "The First Break All the Rules." I think it's the best HR book ever written. And what the title means is what you thought it takes to be a great manager ain't necessarily so, and here's the new rule. First rule: find out what people love to do and put them in a job where they can do what they love to do. Basically, the same thing as good to great. Second: find out what people aren't good at and don't try to fix them. In other words, don't take your best account manager and for both ends to hunter unless they also have the hunter gene or the classic. We're growing. We're adding salespeople. We need a sales manager who gets the job. I think we all know the answer: the best salesperson. And now we've shot ourselves in both feet. We've lost our our best salesperson and gained a crappy manager. That, by the way, is me. So my first job out of the Navy, I did well. I was more mature than most of the salespeople, and I got promoted to. I was an Army guy, by the way. I'm a Navy guy. I got promoted to sales manager. I was thrilled. My wife was happy. More money, etc. After about three months, I was politely fired back to Hunter. Sales management for me was a miserable job. So, find what people are good at. Put. That job, find what they aren't good at, and don't try to fix them. By the way, just for fun, the third rule is: don't micromanage people as a manager. Set goals for them that they agree to, and then manage to the achievement of the goal. And then the fourth rule actually applies to bigger companies: is if you see people leaving, they don't leave the company; they leave the manager. So if you see people leaving, then take a look at the manager. And there's several other, but basically these two are saying the same thing. Then there's these global McKinsey studies six years in a row with Gallup, and the objective of the studies is what percent of employees in developed countries are fully engaged. I'll show you what that means here in a second. And globally, it doesn't change much year to year. It's about 23%. Last year in the U.S., it was 21%. Then, of course, Global asks you know the McKinsey and and Gallup asks the obvious question: How can this be so low? And the answer is actually fairly intuitive. Kids graduate from high school or college, they need a job. They get a job. It's an okay job. They like it okay. The manager thinks they're doing okay. Everybody's at a bounce link. It's okay, but they're not fully engaged. For them, it's just a job. And when you watch people that are fully engaged, is here's what they're doing. This is what a fully engaged employee means, and then this is what the disengaged employees mean. For them, it's it's really just a job. So in our in our work over 20 years, when you can go into a company that's got the average 20% fully engaged, and you can do all kinds of things with process, moving people around on the bus, etc. If you can get to 40% fully engaged, that's the knee of the curve. It makes this exponential improvement in the company, what we really covered, and I'm trying to prove to you with great data, is get the right people on the right seat on the bus based on natural talent. Now let's look at the soft skills. The study on emotional intelligence started at Yale, has been taken over by Harvard, and it's called the soft skills, the people skills. And for David, for me, for all of you, two thirds of our successful life is related to these higher levels of emotional intelligence.

John Asher  17:52  
The other third is essentially everything else: our IQ, our knowledge, skills we've gained, experience we've got. So there's a lot at stake here with with EQ, and the APQ is designed to show people how to develop these higher linguals of EQ. The 1.0 is just seeing your nine personality traits, self-awareness. So all psychologists will say the first step to self-improvement is self-awareness. See where you're starting. EQ 2.0 is seeing from your trait scores which ones are really high or really low. They're called extreme traits, and if you know what they are and learn to stretch from them, change your behavior appropriately, or don't say what you know, what you'd like to say, but you shouldn't. You shouldn't say. So those are all extreme traits, and when you learn to stretch from them, you can do much better and have better personal and professional relationships. So very broad. EQ 3.0 is for you and your job. Are there any red flags in the personality traits? And if you know them and stretch from them when you need to, you will get better results. So very narrow is the person and the and the specific job, and that EQ 4.0 is recognizing that there are four personality styles in almost any assessment, and recognizing that you know you are, and being able to get along with the other other other three personality styles at the expert level, is the highest level of emotional intelligence. When you go back and look at the Harvard data, 1 million elite salespeople very strong correlation to them that have the higher levels of EQ. This is why EQ is so important. And when you take the assessment, then there are reports that show you how to use all gain all all these levels. And so this assessment has the same four-person balance cells as disk does. So if you're in the top left here, it's called the driver. In other words, you're you're task oriented, big picture oriented, and impatient. It's all about tasks and get going. If you're a people oriented person and big picture, that's who I am, and the big talkers of the world. If you're a supporter, you're detail-oriented and people-oriented. And then, if you're the thinker, you are an analyzer. So you've got to you focus on tasks and and the detail. So none of these personality cells are better than others, just just different. And knowing which one you are and how to communicate with the other three highest level of EQ. Now, of interest, there are very few people who ever where this comes naturally. And I'll give you two presidents who are known to have this innate capability, and that is Clinton and Reagan. We're known to just read other people like that and understand them quickly. So now I'm going to show you the nine personality traits that the thing measures. And so now think to yourself: if you're going to hire a hunter salesperson, would you want them to have a lot of this, a moderate amount, a little bit. Most of you, I'm sure you know, you want this to be high. You want you want salespeople to be driven to make quotas. So independence. If people are really independent, it means they want to do what they want to do, when they want to do it, how they want to do it, under what conditions they want to do it and screw the rest of y'all. That's me, by the way. And so I'm sure you you know that most salespeople like sales because they are into that. They want to have a lot on this one. Assurance is essentially to have the gumption to ask for the owner when it's the right time. So you obviously would want salespeople to have a higher level of assertiveness. If you're highly optimistic, you think everything's going to work out, every deal is going to close. A good matter. If you're an idealist, you're going to ask a whole bunch of hard questions to make sure it is going to turn out. So you really want the salesperson to be have a high degree of optimism. Drive for recognition. When you're high on that, it means you like going to trade shows, meeting new people, making new relationships. So there are five traits where you want the salesperson, the hunter, to to be high, have a high amount.

John Asher  22:59  
Now, this would need to serve other people. If this was a customer service job, you'd want it to be high, obviously. For the hunter, you don't want it to be too high or too low, because if it's really high, they'll build rapport forever and never close anything. If it's too low, they can come across as too cold. They want to be moderate. Self-protection is the only trait where it's not obvious what it means. So if you're low in self-protection, it means that you can get your feelings hurt easily. You have a hard time overcoming rejection when people reject you. It's kind of devastating. If you're high, you don't have that problem at all, but you can be uncoachable. So you want the salesperson to be in the middle. You want them to be overcome rejection, but also be coachable. I trust everybody until they take advantage of me. My wife doesn't trust anybody until they really prove themselves to her, and so neither one is good or bad. But for the salesperson, you want it to be in the middle, and then so we got five three you want high, three you want moderate, and then the last need to analyze if this is a sales engineer assessment, you obviously want it to be high, but it's not. It's the hunter, and you don't want the hunter all bogged down in analysis paralysis. So it's low. So you want it to be low. So the reason just to show you this and go through this is to show that this is not rocket science. This is actually pretty intuitive. Now, when you go into a company, and we can all the salespeople, this is an example. You'll see their trade trade scores from five to 95. These scores, by the way, used to go from zero to 100, but nobody likes seeing that there's ever a zero in something. But the goal is to find for the 95. If you took it, if you're as high as you could go, it'd be 95. But as long as you could go, it would be popular. So I've got myself in here also. Here's a quick explanation. I'm I'm a 95 for intensity drive. This is high as you can go. In many ways, that explains why I've been successful in life. That's that's the key strength for me. Here's the blind spot. In my third CEO job, HR came and said, "John, do you know why Jack and Sue left?" I said, "Well, I know what they told me," and she said, "That isn't why they left. You were requiring them to be as driven as you are, and that's not them. So you were burning them out, stressing them out. They had to go. So that was very useful for me to learn. That's an example of a tree where, if you're really high, it can be great, but if it's really high, can also be a blind spot. I mentioned my independence score is as high as you can get, and you know what that attitude what that attitude's like. By the way, I went to the Naval Academy, and I was always in trouble because my independence score does not go well at a service academy. You're supposed to conform, and and that ain't me. Need to analyze is kind of obvious. So when you're real low like that, it means you're a big picture thinker, which is good. And where you want people in executive management jobs, you want to be the big picture thinker. The downside, of course, is in some cases the details are incredibly important, and the details can can really mess us up if we don't pay attention to them. Now you can start to see in a group: if you took three people and put them on a project, you would not want them all to be super high because they got the big picture, but they'll all go off the cliffs again because nobody paid attention to the detail. If you had three thinkers running a project, they'd never get anywhere because they're gonna keep on analyzing more and more data. They get to start to see how this can be the tool can be used in inside of a company to help people and groups work together better. My need to serve is fairly low, and here's how I'm compensated.

John Asher  27:28  
Because if if it's that low, I come across as too stiff or too cold. So at both companies, I only know the name of the employees. I know their their partner's name. I know their kids' names. I know when the kid is involved in little age. I know the name of the damn dog, and so do I really care about all that? I don't. But do I need to show that I care? I do. So that's me stretching for my love and needs with her. Assertiveness. This means you're you don't mind telling people when they need to improve and what they've got to do to get better. If you're alone assertiveness, you can come across as too timid. But that's not me. I'm happy to tell people what they need to do. I'm happy to coach people to to get better. My self protection, you can see, is real high. Meaning I'm uncoachable. Here's how I stretch. My wife likes to coach me. Do I like her coaching me? No. However, I've learned good marriage and relations do do better. So I can tell when she wants to coach me, I'll put out what I'm doing. I'll fully face her, and as she's starting to talk to me about something. I'm saying, here's what I'm saying to myself: Listen to your wife. Listen to your wife. Listen to your wife. Because if I zone out for a microsecond, how long does it take her to detect it? A half a microsecond. And then if she's giving me that protein, here's what I'm saying to myself: That's BS. No, that's wrong. That's wrong, Wilson. And then I'm stretching. I say to myself, "Come on, John. She's had good stuff in the past. She shut up, take notes, act on it." And I do. This is not a lot. The other way I've stretched in that is, I don't think I need a coach. I don't even want a coach. I've had a coach for 20 years, Joe and Bertrand, because intellectually I know I must have a coach. I've got too many extreme traits, and so I've got it. So that's me stretching. Right for recognition, the people who really high want to be recognized, want to be the center of attention, etc. People are really low don't want to have anything to do with that. Much, much, much rather be in the back office developing software. And to give you an example of this, when my mother passed, she kept scrapbooks, which real. Pictures, and so I inherited this scrapbook, and so I moved it through it one day. And my father was John too, so until he passed, I was Johnny in the family. But found my first grade report card. It said Johnny could be a pretty good student if he didn't always want to be the center of attention. Nothing has changed. That's why. Thank you. Why I love being being a speaker, and then interpersonal trust. I'm I'm I'm very high. And dealing trouble with that is I've probably been taking advantage of it at least five business deals for my couple of careers because I trusted people that I shouldn't have trusted. As I mentioned, I my optimism is is very high. I think everybody is going to work out. Old deals are going to close. And many people associate high optimism with good and low optimism with bad, but it's actually not the case. So when you're high, you're known as an idealist. If you're low, you're known as a realist, and you are going to ask all the hard questions to make sure it's going to turn out okay. Example: There's seven of us partners. Wendy, her kids were school age, so she couldn't afford a private school, so she moved to Richmond, where it's a lot better. And she's working for another company down there. And she calls back to Kyle Oak, one of the partners, and said, "You know, this company uses WebChat. So when somebody is on on the website and they want to talk to somebody, they can click. Someone can write it and talk to them. And you can turn it on or off depending on whether somebody's available. So Kyle helped me, and I said, "Great, let's let's try it." Well, our office manager had 14 questions about it.

John Asher  31:51  
It took two weeks to resolve all of our questions, and in the end, when we implemented, it was a lot different. My son was going to implement. So let's take me. Do I think about the 14 questions in this? Just how about it? Ask. I never thought about the thought about the questions. So thank goodness we had somebody in the company who's a realist who's going to ask all the hard questions to make sure it's going to turn out okay. So this is an explanation of the nine personality traits. What they mean, what it means to be real high. So the ones that are in yellow are over 80% or under 20%, and that's EQ 2.0, the extreme traits. And for that group, here are the number the the people that have are in the driver personality. Here are the ones in the communicator personality, and then a couple in the thinker personality, and none in the supporter. And there's nothing wrong with this, nothing good or bad. Just is what it is. So now, when you take the assessment, here's the first thing you see. If you're an executive getting getting the assessment, and these scores, these compatibility scores go from five to 95, and these are actually my results. So you can see for the first two outside hunter sales, short or long sale cycle time. If your company needed one, and I applied, I'm now look at my score for number 10. The account manager job. If you wanted me to come into the company and take over three major accounts and manage them. Will I be the right guy? I would be exactly the wrong person. I would be miserable because I couldn't. So this is very useful when you're hiring people to make sure you get them on the right seat of the bus, at least from the aptitude standpoint. And you also get to see how people are suited for management roles. It's like yay! I'm at least suited for number one. Again, where I shouldn't be. I think I mentioned already that the only job I've been firing from the sales manager number three. If I'd have known that score back then and understood these assessments, I would have never taken that job. Now let's look at Eken 3.0 compatibility for a specific job. This is Jane. She's actually one of our employees, but I've changed her name to Jane to protect her privacy. So there's the nine personality traits. The little black dot shows how much she has of each of the traits, and you can see in parentheses 1%. But now to see how she would be suited for the hunter role, let's take those studies in 15 large companies with big packs of salespeople. And it manifests itself in an overlay of red, yellow, green bath, and so you can see Jane is in the green for all trades. Her overall score is almost as high as you can get, and so if you were the hiring manager and she applied and you needed to hunt her. Your job would be not to let her get away. And if you had to coach her, you don't have to coach her. So I've got a handful of salespeople in those companies. They all work like this. We know too much about this. We're not hiring a hunter salesperson unless it's really high. So questions for the group: Do we have a sales manager in either company? We don't need a sales manager if they have a big problem to come to me or one of the other executives, and they rarely have a big problem. Now, let's see how Jason would be suited for another role. I like customer service. Well, her personality hadn't changed. The psychologists say the leopard does not change its spots. Meaning, once you take an assessment like this as you go through life, if you took it every 10 years, you'd get the same results. What happens though, as you as you go through life, we learn. We get feedback from other people about some of our traits that are particularly go over too well. We learn and we adapt. But to go through life, we adapt our personality style when we need to. We don't actually change our personality style. What we got, what we got.

John Asher  36:38  
So now let's put the red, yellow, green bands up for customer service role. You think they'll be pretty close to the hunter role? Obviously not. It'll be wildly different. So now you can see she's in the in the red for four traits and the yellow for a few more. And this is not the right job for Jane. And yeah, you are the CSR manager, and you're coaching really not. If you have six or seven of these, that's all you do is essentially coaching all. Now the system has coaching reports. So I was sitting down with Jane, and she was at MCS on her job. The coaching boy would say, "Cuts are about our intensity on drives," and it would say, "So Jane, there are seven of us. We work as a team, and your job is not to get the customer off the phone as soon as possible. Your job is to build long-term relationships. Stay on as long as it takes to get them totally 100 happy. And then with the independence, where she's super high, the coaches are board to say, "Come on, Jason, we're seven of us. We play off each other. We're all we're all part of a team. And you're not being a team player. You have to you have to be much more of a team player to succeed here. And then for the need to serve would be Jane. It's all about happy customers for life, build relationships, ask him about the damn dog and the kids, and then you can see in the server that's Jane, you're serious. So that was way too high for this. Be a much more of a questioner. Find out what's really going on. Keep asking more and more questions. So now the next day, Jane is going to stretch in those four traits to try to do better. At the end of the day, is she all fired up to grab her glass of wine with her girlfriend, or is she mentally, physically, and intellectually exhausted. I think we know the answer. And will she stay in the job? Probably not. I've got an MBA question for everybody. Let's go back to this this chart from the Hunter. So they can see there's yellow and green and red bands. He obviously wants the person to be in the green bands. So this is a hunter role. Here's here's the NBA question. Everybody ready? All right, everybody. When you think you have the answer, put in the chat. David can only want everybody. What is the significance of the width of the green bands? So you wanted to be in the green for every trade. Some of those bands are real wide. Some are pretty short, pretty narrow. So what's the significance of the four bands that are the narrowest.

David Bush  39:45  
Anybody have any comments they want to throw into the chat? We'd love to see what the significance. Your answer. What's the significance of the width of the green bands? Is that the correct question? Question, John? Did I posture it correctly?

John Asher  39:57  
Yes, sir. That's it.

David Bush  39:59  
I'm going to throw out my. Answer and just put myself subject to criticism and coaching. So I would say the intensity of that particular trait in a particular category versus being more of like a jack of all trades and having lots of different expertise across multiple different areas. I'm thinking it's the density or the concentration of being an excellent person in that particular category. That's just my first blush thought.

Speaker 1  40:28  
Pretty good.

John Asher  40:30  
Here's the simple answer: the narrower the trait, the more important the trait. And so, what that's telling us is when you hire a hunter, the four most important traits are intensity drive high, independence high, knee analyze low, and a third is high. So, those are the four most important traits for the hunter. Three of them high, and one of them low. So when the traits vary wide, it almost doesn't matter how much they've got it, as you as you can think. But the tighter it is, the more important the trait. I have a question for you, John, that

David Bush  41:15  
I'm curious about. If you're open to taking a question, when it comes down to a balanced team. Obviously, if you had a lot of people that had the specific traits that you're looking for, is there any challenge with having too many of the same kind of people versus having some diversity in the group where it actually creates more of a collective intelligence or a collective, you know. If you had everybody, and I know you're into baseball, so if you have everybody that's a really good at certain things, does the dynamic in the clubhouse change because everybody's the same or everybody shares some of the same traits? Is there any benefit to having some differences in a balanced group?

John Asher  41:58  
Yeah, let me go back to the personality of okay. So let's say it's a company you have four executives. The VP of sales would probably be the supporter. Outside salespeople would be the communicators. The CEO, the driver, and maybe the CFO or the CTO would be the thinker. There's not a perfect correlation. That that that way you would have a balanced team, executive team. For salespeople, you don't want that. You want all to be in the communicator. Pretty, you know, pretty much. Good. It's good. Good feedback. Thanks. The Donald's team is totally appropriate to an executive team, but not to the hunters. See, we're all five hunters. How many forgot to be right in that green box? Secondarily, in the in the red box, or kind of between the the green and the red. Good question. All right, so we've done about 2,000 case studies for companies. I'm going to show you one that I was in charge of. Engineering services company in New York City, growing at 15% per year. Growth slowed down the last couple of years to no growth. The CEO wanted help. He's an engineer. I'm an engineer, so I was a I was a partner helping him. So you ain't salespeople. On the seller do remodel. You know, you you close it. You need it. In other words, you're the seller. You own it down and close it, but then you also become the account manager. The comp plan was 50% base pay and 50% commission, so we gave them all the APQ. You can see in the second column it shows 5 to 95 their compatibility for Hunter, and the next one for account manager. Those are their two primary jobs: the primary hunter, secondary job account manager, and you can see their personality styles out to the right. As I asked the CEO, I'm doing. He said, "Well, great Bob Shell and Jill brought in essentially 85% of the new business, and they're so overwhelmed with account management they don't have much not on anymore. And Sally, Cindy, and Lisa been on board two, three years. They've done okay, but they never met their quota in any year. And you can see they're kind of a little moderate talent for hunting. And Jeff and Jose have been on board nine months of the year, and there's some activity there, but they haven't closed anything yet. Now, I highlighted where it might be a better seat for them. A couple of other pieces of information: the VP of sales was not involved with these people; he was only going after bigger deals, and the CEOs are. Family-oriented CEO, we take care of everybody, no matter what. A lot of CEOs are doing a tribe CEO, where if you if you're doing your job well, it's great. But if you're not, then I don't have to fire you. The tribe will spit you out. But this is a family-oriented CEO. So I just ask you, Debbie. What would you do? You're being paid handsomely now to give this to you advice.

David Bush  45:29  
Yeah, well, I'd probably go back to the Jack Welch strategy and you know probably give a a pit plan to Jeff and Jose to improve their performance. I'd probably end up creating some support structure, sales enablement for the top three, and not really expect too much change with Sally, Cindy, and Lisa. But that's my and if Jeff and Jose don't improve in a 90-day period of time with you know measurable progress over a reasonable period of time, we would career plan them into something different and always be bringing on a new person to replace them. So that's my quick view of it.

John Asher  46:06  
Good. So I recommend it that they provide a junior account manager to Bob Shaw Mitchell to take over some of the routine stuff, transferring the bigger bigger talents to Sally, Cindy, and Lisa. Now, Lisa didn't want to be an account manager. She wanted to go to inside sales, so that was fine. They got got two account managers who were getting all these customers to work with, and this is where it gets tough. But the VP of sales now getting involved showed salary her compatibility charge for Hunter and Cred, Yellow Green Vans. where she was in the red for five traits, and then showed her her hunter compatibility chart, where she's only went for one trade. So Sally could see for herself; she'd be much better off as as an account manager. And then the CEO started didn't have a customer service department, but he started one with Jeff and Jose, and then we trained the group. The VP now started getting involved in managing these people, and pretty easy to manage now when people are on much better seat in the bus. When you take that command of the only chart with the red, yellow, green bands. Oxon and Jill aren't in the red for any trade, so they're real easy to manage. Coach Sally, Cindy, and and Lisa went to went to new jobs, which was great for them. And when you look at the five who switched jobs. Only one was in the red for two traits. All the rest only in the red for one trade. So now you got people in a much better seat on the bus, much easier to manage and go. And then the five of them that shifted jobs didn't have that 50% commission anymore. Any more, so they started a new commission plan based on up upselling, cross selling, and getting referrals. And a good friend of mine, Barry Deutsch, who's a sales recruiter, dude, he helped them hire two new two new hunters. And so here's a result. Took about six months to get all this done. Then there was CEO wanted to go from zero growth back to 15% growth. He actually got to 100% growth rate, and the profitability of the company went way up. And the reason is, if your salespeople haven't had sales training recently, or never had it, haven't had the new training in AI and neuroscience, and they get it, and they start selling more. Since the sales really doesn't cost much, most of that new revenue goes right, drops right to the bottom line. So it's pretty much a perfect example of good to great. Get the right people in the right seat, training, and coaching. So that's that's essentially the end of this part. But again, just a couple more ideas here at the end. For those of you who are hunter sales, you have a much better, much a bigger and and tougher job than we used to. You go back 15 years; all you need was a fundamental skill. Now they now you need four sets of skills: the foundational, perfect listening, etc. Go out and close the deal, etc. The neuroscience-based skills have been around for like six years, but recently with AI help are even better. An example would be always offer the the buyer two or three options, and the buyer's behavior has changed so dramatically. Although their attention spans have gone down, they really don't depend on salespeople anymore for product knowledge because they can get it themselves. And then the use of AI assistants and agents. So it's tougher to be a salesperson today, and if you get going on the AI tools, it makes it so much easier. And so we'll be talking about this in the next webinar. I'm just going to show you a quick one slide about the tools that are being used by salespeople now. So Sales Navigator, almost every every salesperson has it. There's three levels: there's the basic level, advanced level, and the advanced growth. So Microsoft has spent a billion dollars upgrading the five tools of Sales Navigator, and you only get that if you have the advanced level. Advanced plus level is if you're selling as a salesperson. If you're selling enterprise-wide solutions to Fortune 500 companies where there's 11 buyers and two influencers, there's where you need the advanced plus.

John Asher  50:58  
But the average excellent salesperson today has got Sales Navigator at the advanced level. An example would be Account Hub. It uses intent to buy software to rack and stack your prospects, and also to rack and stack your current customers to see which ones are most likely to be buy more of what you're selling, and to be get other other other products to them. Account IQ is all about the learning about their company, the competition, and and and the whole area where they're operating. Lead IQ is all about the the person, the buyer themselves, and then Labor AI is a good email coach. That and I will evaluate how things before CSRs do not call. So it's it's essentially a sales training tool. So the AI is sending customized songs to prospects, and it may sound silly and stupid, but you'd be shocked at how effective it is. It goes back to Seth Godwin and the Purple Cow. So it's a it's a pattern interruption. And then you can have an avatar if you want that will speak in 51 different languages, and of course the chatbots. And then turn zero will essentially when you're so you're on the on the call with a with a customer, and in one earphone you're talking to the customer, in the other earphone zero is whispering current up and cross selling opportunities. This is a group of of tools now being used by elite salespeople, we'll cover it in a subsequent webinar. So now, if you're no use just sitting and getting, let's let's see if we can come away with some action items. Here is some that you might consider. Again, we've done 2000 of those case studies. And then finally, if you would like to have an APQ for yourself to try or a copy of this slide deck, reach out to Amy, and she will send them to you. So that Amy will see if there's any final questions.

David Bush  53:23  
Any strategy or tactic that you have found that's the most often avoided, missed, or not done well to help organizations to stop losing winnable deals? Other than just having the right skill sets and the right people on the bus. I know we're going to talk about this in future months in the seminar series, but I'm just curious: is there something you can kind of tease us with with a little bit of a strategy or tactic that you have found? Is that once you have the right people on the bus, make sure that you do this.

John Asher  53:57  
So we've got these 10 foundational skills, and people ask me frequently, "What are the most important ones?" The number one, have an inside coach who is your advocate. That's always number one. Number two, understand how to be a great listener, and number three, how to close the deal. Let me just pick on perfect listening. So the goal of listening to the customer is to get them to ask about your product. In other words, don't be selling your product. Give them information to get them to ask. Be the be the so-called perfect perfect listener. And so we've all heard the term "always be closing." That's old school, way old school. What's much better is always be curious or always be always be coaching. There's a couple of quotes back to that. One is from the late great Zig Ziglar, and that is buyers want to know that you care. Before they care to know what you know. Well, it's build a relationship. Ask them about their current problems, challenges, opportunities, and then keep on drilling down in that. And some at some point they'll say, "Well, so David, you haven't told me about your company, what you're doing. So how can you help?" That's where you want to get there. You want to be selling to them. You want them to ask you what what you know that you do. George Orwell, in the book 1984, has a famous quote: "We would rather be understood than love." I know it sounds crazy. It's probably fearless, but that being understood by another person is satisfied a deep human need. That that would be be number one. Always be curious. Always be coaching. Get them to ask you about how you can help.

David Bush  55:57  
That's great. It reminds me of Brian Tracy's line that said, "Ask questions skillfully and listen carefully. Those three, those six words have taught me a lot. Is that it is really about asking curious questions, and if you ask enough questions and shut up, most of the time they'll ask a reciprocal question that is related back to what it is that you do, and then you go right into the conversation. So, thank you, John, for your expertise and all of the great resources that you've shared today. And for those of you that joined us live, we're appreciative of the time that you took out of your day. And if you watched the recording of it, we're appreciative of you too. Please reach out to Amy Sawyer for a complimentary advanced personality assessment and/or the presentation slide deck. And her contact information is on the screen. We'll also put it in the show notes and the description of the video. So everybody, thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you on the next session. Thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders Playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today, hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who's tired of the pipeline grind. Building predictable revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with BDR AI, or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach out. We help business leaders just like you to build systems that actually scale. And if you're ready to stop being your company's highest-paid prospector. Let's have a conversation. Reach out to us at bdr AI. Until next time, let's keep building.