Walter Crosby—Sales Hiring Secrets: 7 Strategies to Hire Salespeople That Actually Sell

Walter Crosby  0:00  
He had a thing where he was like, "Here's the cap, you can't make more than 350 grand. I got to a point in there where I was just above his cap. It didn't make sense for me to work an extra 10 hours a week. Think of your compensation plan as a set of instructions for your sales people. You want to incentivize them to do the things you want them to do, and that shouldn't involve a cap for hunters.

David Bush  0:23  
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. Welcome, everybody. My name is David Bush, and I get a chance to be your host and moderator today for this exciting conversation Q and A discussion on sales hiring secrets, the seven strategies to hire salespeople who actually sell. And today I have with me the amazing, the uncommon Walter Crosby, who is the founder of Helix Sales Development and the creator of the sales hiring secrets concept, and he's going to be sharing with you today some amazing strategies and also revealing some blind spots. We're going to talk about seven specific blind spots that can also double as strategies. We're going to give you an eighth, even bonus strategy that's going to uncover another blind spot, and I know that you are going to become awakened. You are going to see things that you have not seen things in the same way in the past because of Walter's vast experience and expertise and education on the concepts of sales integration, not just sales training, but sales integration. So, Walter, I'm so excited to jump into this topic today, and we had so much interest from people that had questions on this specific topic about how do I actually hire sales people who actually sell versus tell me they're going to sell and tell me their goals and then underperform. So I'm excited to get into this today.

Walter Crosby  2:12  
I'm excited to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a few weeks now. Yeah,

David Bush  2:20  
well, you've built a repeatable system to fix what many revenue leaders, CEOs, business owners, founders are in desperate need of fixing, and if you could maybe give everybody a little bit of a background and just bring them up to what puts you into the position today where you're known by many of those who were familiar with the EOS attraction system, EOS implementers, as well as businesses that have been running on EOS, and beyond that, people that don't even know anything about EOS, that you have become the go-to expert on sales integration. Talk a little bit more about what brought us here today. Um, well, thanks. I,

Walter Crosby  3:00  
I've been in sales for 40 years, right. I'm old, and the way I like to position that is that's 40 years of making mistakes, 40 years of experience of that, where I, where I've learned the hard way about everything when it comes to sales, the fundamentals, and about 10 years ago I created the agency I have now, because I wanted to do something, I wanted to elevate the sales profession. When, when, when people think about salespeople or sales person, what's the image that pops into your head? Dave, yeah, it's not necessarily a positive, always. No, it's the loud blazer, the white shirt with the clip-on tie, and the used car lot, that that hard, pushy salesperson. And you know, I think that those people exist, and they're, you know, a blotch on the on the record for the rest of us that are are literally trying to do the right thing. Sales is about helping people, and I think when we get that straight in our mind, we do it properly. Where we were looking to help people that we can help and tell people that we can't help, we can't help you, and maybe be a resource for them, but you know that integrity and that honesty is something that you know we're trying to bring back to the profession, you know, one salesperson at a time, so you know, as I was, as I was looking, working through this, my agency, I've iterated a few times from, you know, helping manage sales teams that were smaller, that the founder just didn't have the time to focus on the crazy salespeople in his or her organization, and, you know, the long story short, I love working with entrepreneurs, they're they're the heartbeat of this cup, this kind. Tree, they're the ones who are driving to get better. They have some passion for what they built, and the ones that are working with EOS, right? Those, those folks are special in my mind, that they've, they're looking to get better, they're looking for that edge, and the model gives them structure, that model gives them language to work with, and what it does for me is that it helps me identify the group of entrepreneurs who really care about scaling, who really care about growth, and and they all have similar challenges when it comes to that that scaling piece, and we'll talk a little bit about some of those, some of those today.

David Bush  5:50  
Yeah, well, you've had experience working in 27 different organizations that were running on EOS, you've got 40 years of sales experience, you've written two different books on how to fix the things that are broken, and what I love about Walter's personality style is that he's a truth teller, he's a transparent guy that's going to tell you exactly what you need to hear, whether or not you want to hear it or not. So we've kind of set up this Q and A, Walter, to just tell business owners and CEOs, revenue leaders, the truth of exactly what they need to do to fix the problem that they're having with their current sellers, and how to scale revenue and their company and profitability, and you have it broken down into there's four specific blind spots that you believe are mindset driven, and then there's four that are more action driven, so let's just start off with the first of the mind spot, mind focus, mindset focused blind spot, and talk a little bit more about what's the most pressing number one issue that our participants today that are watching live or watching a recording need to be able to uncover,

Walter Crosby  7:03  
I think, if we start off with this every sales seat, right, it's not generic, and what I see often is the business owner puts a job posting out there, and they were not really focused on what that person needs to be great at, so I think that's the first part of this, is if we're not really clear about who it is we're looking for, how we know when we find them, so you know, the the analogy that we often use is, okay, we want to go to California, and you know, we're on the East Coast, lots of ways to get there, right? If we're going to jump in a car, you know, which road are we going to take? Are we going to take the scenic route? Are we going to take the road that's less traveled? Are we going to get there as fast as possible? So we have to define that, and if it's, if it's too generic, and we create a list of responsibilities and accountabilities, and put that out as a job posting, you know, that's the, that's the blind spot, right, because that's what everybody does, and I, you know, it's that becomes the constraint with for the business owner to literally find the right person, because what we're, what we're looking to do is identify what they need to be great at, so that when we write a job posting, we tell them you need to be great at hunting, you need to be great at selling value and differentiating, right. We need to give them the two or three things that they must be great at to be successful, and if that's going to be hard, tell them. Right, salespeople that are competent love a challenge, right? They want to know, hey, I can, I'm a hunter, I can sell value, they will help self-identify and bring them self into the to the role and look, they're looking for something that is a good fit for their skills, so you're, you're doing a couple of things at the same time, if we make this shift, and the shift isn't rating the job posting, although that's the outcome. The shift is thinking about what they need to be great at. There was a security organization I worked with for a while, and when we started, we started with them, like, okay, what do you, what's the sales role, and the president was like, what are you talking about, they're going to sell our product line, like, yeah, but what does sell mean here? And an hour later, we had, he discovered that he had hunting role, or what he called business development, new logos, and then he had a different role that was what we called an account manager. Year where they have, here's 10 accounts, you need to touch them on a regular basis, and you need to go grab more share of their wallet, you need to grow this and maintain those relationships. And then we had, you know, a bit of a farmer role, where here's five accounts, don't screw them up. We've had them for 30 years. They love us. Just nurture them, be super supportive, right? Those are three different roles, three different skill sets. So, if we don't stop and think about what they need to be great at, then we're going to get a bunch of hodgepodge applying for the, for the role, we don't have the criteria to select people, because we're not really sure what we want, and you might need all three, you might need two, you might be interviewing, and you might find somebody that would be a great account manager, but you don't have that role open right now, because you're looking for the hunting role. Okay, shoot, we're always going to be recruiting, so you hold on to that person and you nurture that person as as time goes on, but when we're not clear about what that looks like, we're never going to be successful in finding the right rep, because we're we're not clear on the criteria, so if this show is

David Bush  11:24  
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Walter Crosby  12:46  
Well, it, you know, we use the security company as an example. They were taking a shotgun approach, they just wanted, quote unquote, a salesperson, but they really were looking for a biz dev role. They really needed people that could go knock on a door, open up new accounts. Now they were clear about what tier that they were looking for, right? They had some smaller types of companies that were for a certain product niche, and then they had larger, more enterprise type customers. So what we divided was there were two different business development roles, right, but it took really getting clear and asking questions about what we needed to achieve. What's the outcome that this salesperson is needs to get to, and if they do x, is that going to be satisfactory? And if we set them up to fail, that's not the salesperson's fault, you know, that's our fault, is as leaders to put the right to pick the right person, right right seat, right person, and if we don't, if we don't align that, we're going to fail before we start, so it, it, it's worth taking some time to think about the roles in a different way, and to think about with great clarity. What are the accountabilities for that? What's that scorecard going to look like for that individual? And then you can, you can start to create the right job posting, but we're what we're really trying to do is attract a right person and repel the wrong person, so if we're looking for a hunter, you're not going to find very many farmers that do that, right? They're not going to be interested, or that the job posting will scare them away. So, what we're doing is saving time, not having to sift through a bunch of resumes, and we're helping create the criteria before we start, but most importantly, that that mindset really has to shift from everybody that's going to be going through that process, is you know, we get the sales, the CEO to help set that strategy, be really clear about what it is that we want, and then they can start. Step out of the process and come back in at the end to do that final interview. Make sure it's a perfect fit. Make sure they're comfortable with the individual and the interim. That's where all of the hard work is done, and we can, we can help that that team member, that hiring manager do it well.

David Bush  15:20  
Yeah, I know that you talk about using a sales hiring scorecard to really define the seat. You want to talk a little bit more about the five different categories of that scorecard?

Walter Crosby  15:31  
I mean, there's a, there's a variety of elements to that, and it really comes down to what is important with each customer or each client's, you know, needs were we're looking for a scorecard to create objectivity around that, so when you have a scorecard for your L 10 and we're looking at what those, what that individual is going to be responsible for, we're doing the same, taking that concept and applying it to the each stage of the hiring process, so we're looking at, you know, their their ability. We use a tool to assess their predictability of being successful in sales, and then we do a phone screen that is evaluating their ability to follow direction and be articulate and them explain why they might be a fit, and then there's a, you know, sometimes we do a culture interview, you know, when a company really has a culture locked in, and that's really important. It doesn't matter if they got all the skills in the world, if they're not going to fit the culture, let's not waste our time, if we could find out if somebody's like, I have one client who, like, no, they had a no dick policy, right, a little colorful, but it was accurate, they just didn't want to have people on the team that were going to going to spoil the culture and create and wrap the boat, so figure that out first,

David Bush  17:00  
you know, if they, if they couldn't play nice in interviews, they certainly weren't going to play nice later. So, we're, we're thinking about selection rather than hiring in that process, and way the bias definitely ends up preventing a bigger problem afterwards. And, as Brian Tracy says, the longest day in a business owner's life is the day that they lose confidence in one of their key people, and the day that they fire them or transition them, and yeah, hiring somebody that doesn't match those key components of what you're trying to accomplish is just going to be a frustration for everybody. So, let's talk a little bit more about blind spot number two, sticking with the mindset blind spots, the industry experience trap. I think all of us would like to go out there and find somebody with industry experience, so we don't have to train them on some of that, but you, you've often said that there's a trap involved with that.

Walter Crosby  17:52  
Yeah, so everybody wants industry experience, and sometimes that's because we're lazy, and we think that then since they know our industry won't have to train them, so there's a couple elements here, are they retread? If you look at their resume and they've been in your industry for 20 years and they've been with five different companies, maybe six, that's a problem in in a sales world, right? Are they just working and sticking around for a while, and come, somebody didn't, wasn't willing to hire the fire them when they should have, right? So they just keep moving from company to company, that's a problem, but I think you know, if we really want to nail the industry experience trap, it's them knowing your industry isn't as important as them knowing your buyer, so if your buyer is a facilities manager or your buyer is a CFO, it doesn't matter, right, which level they're at, but if, if they know that buyer, and they know how they think, and they know what concerns them, and they know their day-to-day worries, they know their dreams and their doubts, right, and they know the language that that buyer uses, and maybe they have a rolodex full of those buyers, right, because they come from an adjacent industry, right? Not necessarily a competitor, direct competitor of yours, but you know, a facility director might be buying cameras and security equipment, and they might be buying windows, they might be buying, you know, services, so if we have a similar sales cycle that is an adjacent industry where there's some complexity to it that matches your complexity, that is much more important than them having industry experience, because with you should be able to help this new can. At it in a couple of days, understand the big questions that they need to ask the buyers, and understand how you position your product with those buyers. If you can't do that in a couple of days, you, you probably need to rethink that explanation, because that first 90 days isn't about product knowledge, because we don't want our people going out pitching, we want them to understand our ICP, our ideal client profile, so the people that have a leg up are those adjacent industry sales people, and if you open it up and you list in your job posting those other industries that have an advantage, like we're looking for people who've sold these other products or services to this buyer. Right now, you've expanded your audience, you've expanded the, the, the opportunity to find somebody, you've made it a little bit easier, but it's narrow enough to know that you can start to talk to them. Do they really know your buyer? You know what? Tell me about some of the deals you've done that were, and you know which buyer was helping make those decisions, and if, if the buyer's table is similar to yours, you got to leg up, so that's a big mindset shift that is adjacent to the industry, but that industry experience I've always just called it bullshit. It's really that,

David Bush  21:33  
yeah, yeah, and I remember back in the day I met with the an athletic director, and he talked about I was a football player, and he said one of the best coaches that he's ever worked with in his organization was somebody that didn't just look for people that could play the sport that he was coaching, he looked for people that were athletes that he could teach them how to play the sport that he was coaching, and he actually brought in people of different sports to actually play the sport he was coaching, and that was one of his strategies to develop a very high-performance team that won a lot of championships, was looking for people that had capacity to do the things that he needed people to do, rather than just having a specific sport experience. So, I could definitely see some analogies with that. Talk a little bit more about how that looks in a implementation strategy. I know that you've used, you know, the OMG process. You've used assessments that really help understand sales DNA and things of that nature. Is there any other resources that you highly recommend as a part of your process and system?

Walter Crosby  22:40  
Well, let me go back to your analogy with the coach, that was a coach who really knew that he could teach and coach an athlete. You can't teach somebody to run fast, you can't teach them to jump high, right, but you can teach them the technique for that particular role, right? If they're an offensive lineman, if they're a linebacker, right, whatever that is, so there's that's a perfect analogy with sales, we, we want them to have the skill sets that are going to make them be successful in the role, so some of that is, you know, do they know our buyer, some of it is having a predictability of, we use an assessment tool that's very specific, it's only for salespeople and only for sales managers and leaders. We don't, we don't evaluate how smart they are, we don't evaluate whether they can spell well, we don't evaluate whether they're, you know, you know how they like to be managed. What we're evaluating is will they be successful in your role based on 21 core competencies, so we divide those up into do they have the will to sell, right? Do they get it, the sales DNA, which I like to explain simply, is what's going on between their ears, right? That's the do they do they want it, and do they, you know, have capacity for it? That's your skill sets, and that's the other piece, is the tactical skills that a salesperson has. So we can look at that and evaluate whether or not they will be successful in a particular role at a particular company, selling to your customers at a particular price point, because we put all that data in there and what pops out is 90% accurate and predicting success, because there's lots of variables, but the point is we're using one more data point to help the EOS model have some teeth, GWC is a great tool, but if you're using it by flying by the seat of your pants, right, and you don't have really good data, you know it's a guess, and what you know, I think entrepreneurs, if you give them good data, they know how to make good decisions, right, they have all the tools. So this is just giving them our process is giving them a dossier of information on a person, resume is a data point, right, there's always bullshit in a resume, we'll talk about that, but you know we're every element of our process is about qualifying and disqualifying candidates, and I've gone through many interviews where I've been on the candidate side, and I can tell you, I controlled an interview simply because my sales skills were better than the hiring manager, and that's not what we want, we want to be able to keep this objective, keep control, keep that candidate on their toes. Yeah, well, we've talked about two different

David Bush  25:53  
blind spots, specifically around the mindset, and that was the industry experience was number two, and then the generic seat being number one. Now let's shift into more of the action blind spots, and you talk specifically about the vanilla job post, which I'm sure complements out to the concept of making sure that you've got a generic or using the generic seat concept. But talk a little bit more about that vanilla job posting and how that can be a real blind spot to hiring those sellers that actually sell,

Walter Crosby  26:25  
so the blind spot for CEOs and HR people is that they think they have to be super polite and very genetic, generic, and how great everything is, right? And let's start, let's pivot that. Let's start to think about treating a candidate politely and professionally. It goes without saying, but also treat them like how a vendor is going to treat how you treat a vendor, right? And how their prospects are going to treat them. They're going to be challenged. We want to see how they stand up against a little pressure, we want to understand, do they can they articulate their points, can they back up what they, what they say. So, the job posting, when they're vanilla, it's just that list of accountabilities, that list of responsibilities that mean nothing, right? They just say, "Oh, that's an interesting company, I understand that industry, I will apply right, but what I'm recommending is sort of this Shackleton style ad, right. Shackleton was the guy that discovered Antarctica, and he had like a three-line post, and I don't, I don't have it memorized, but basically incredibly dangerous voyage. We're looking for brave guys, you may not come back, but if you do huge glory. He was incredibly honest about what was about to happen if they got on his ship, and he wasn't wrong. It was a perilous journey. So, let's be honest about how difficult this role is, that most people can't do it, that we really need somebody that has the hot spot to do it, whatever that is. Let's describe reality, and not, not hyperbole, but be honest, and in stop selling in the job posting. Right, there's a time for selling, it's not at the beginning. Let's be honest about what we're, what we're really getting into, and that that's sort of an action idea there. There's a bit of a mindset shift, but you actually rate a different style ad.

David Bush  28:30  
Yeah, I love that, and I just looked it up really quick. Then it's Jackal, didn't said men wanted for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return, doubtful honor and recognition, inventive success. They, according to legend, more than 5000 men and three sporty girls applied, so he had a pretty good return on interest in regards to that particular opportunity. But I love the creativity strategy around that, and it's not just being creative, it is being, you know, honest and transparent. So, anything else you want to share on the actual application of building out that job template?

Walter Crosby  29:13  
Yeah, there's a framework there that that we get into, but it's sharing the difficulty, which is what Shackleton did, being specific about the skills, because he implied that if you weren't a strong sailor and you were willing to tolerate some stuff, you weren't going to be successful. And what's your buyer environment like, right? Is it is it a six month sales cycle with, you know, three, four decision makers? You want to help them understand what that really looks like, and what's the on target earnings? Think about compensation in terms of if they're successful, what are they going to earn, right? In the variable comp plan, is you know, there's a base and there's some commissions or a bonus, you know, capture it in that on target earnings. Capacity, and use this filter, and this is part where people get frustrated or get scared. If this isn't for you, let's not waste our time.

David Bush  30:14  
Well, let's move on to the second action-specific blind spot, blind spot number four, which is the resume lie, and I like the word believe, and the word beliefs has the word lie right in the middle of it, and so we oftentimes can get led to believe something that's factual and truthful when there's actually a story behind it. So, talk a little bit more about how to uncover blind spot number four in the resume lie.

Walter Crosby  30:43  
Well, let me tell you a quick story. I graduated from the University of Michigan, and one of my friends from college got a good HR job from a big bank. I won't mention the bank, and you know we were kids, and we were graduating from the University of Michigan, so she had this bias. Any resume that came across her desk that had the Notre Dame on the resume, she filed it in the circular file, threw it away, and I'm like, Estee, you can't do that, like there's some.. it's a good school, like, yeah, once Saturday year we didn't really care for them, but it's a quality school, great education, you're throwing away really good candidates. Well, part of my filter, so you have that where people have a bias that's negative, but you also have a bias the opposite way. Oh, they went to the same school as me, so they got to be smart, they got to be great, right? So in the resume there's these blind spots that are just this natural bias that we have, and there's lots of biases, we won't get into all of them, but some of them can be really negative as far as how we evaluate and filter, but the the idea that there's lies in a resume, absolutely, and there's, and we're looking at sales resumes, so we, there's definitely some bullshit in the resume. I'll give you an example. His young guy had been in sales for five years, and he had lists of accomplishments in there, and I said, you know, I don't remember his name, but it's like Dave. Like, I see you've got some great accomplishments on your resume. Congratulations, and this one here is interesting. You're the number one salesperson in the Midwest for three years running. That's awesome. Tell me about the Midwest region. Well, you know, you know it's pretty competitive, blah blah blah blah, I'm like, yeah. How many sales sales people in the Midwest region? Well, he got me. I was the only one in the Midwest region, and you know, he, he admitted what he did, used some creativity there, but he admitted it. So, yeah, okay, you kind of be asking your way through, but I give him credit in that interview for being honest. You got me, is what he said. I'm the only one. Like, okay, fair enough. How did you rate with the rest of the company? He goes, oh, I was number three. Oh, out of how many? Well, I was number three out of 12. Like, oh, so why don't you just say you're in the top, you know, 20% of that, like that. There would have been nothing wrong with that, because, yeah, you're right, it probably would have been better. So, there's that's one example of something that was there to impress, but it wasn't, it wasn't honest, right? So, we can question somebody's integrity there, depending upon how they, they try to defend it, or if they get upset. I give him credit for admitting his, his, you know, being honest about his, his lie. But there's other lies in there, and there's a lot of things in a resume that talk about behaviors and activities, but not about outcomes. I implemented a new CRM. Okay, terrific. So, what if you can say "so what" to their claim, then they didn't give you an outcome that matters, because in sales it's the beautiful part of sales. When you sell, what's the number? Did you hit the number that we wanted you hit? Did you hit the revenue target, did you hit whatever target it was? So, if their resume is full of fluff and you know prose that describes things that they did, but not really, you know, benefits for the company, there's.. it's just hyperbole that, you know, not always an outright lie, but fabrication. Yeah, the good salesperson is always asking questions skillfully and listening carefully, and the sales leader needs to be following suit with that and asking questions like, walk me through the specific deal you're the most proud of from that year, and what was the buyer's.

David Bush  35:00  
Situation, and who else was involved, and what did you do that someone else wouldn't have done, and how did you separate yourself from the others? So, asking those clarifying questions puts that particular potential candidate into a position where they have to defend their claims, and I love that strategy, very tactical. Anything else you want to add into blind spot number four, the resume line.

Walter Crosby  35:23  
No, you, I mean, you nailed those other questions. It's, it's really defining what they put on on paper, if it really mattered. That's, that's, and so go. When you look at a resume, you should have a red pen in your hand, and it, when you're done, it should be the term paper of the guy who was failing class. That's what it should look like. It should be marked all up, circles, question marks, right? And you know, when, when we did interviews, when we're sitting across the table from somebody, they could see all of the red marks on the resume. It's harder to pull off these days, because we're doing what we're doing right now, but the principle stays the same. Be prepared, be prepared with some structured questions about understanding what the lies are, and really look to disqualify a candidate politely, professionally. Don't be a dick.

David Bush  36:14  
I love that. And we've gotten through halfway through the blind spots. We talked about the two mindset blind spots, which was the generic seat and getting to more of a specific seat that you're trying to fill, and the industry experience trap. Those were the first two, and then the second, or the third one, was the vanilla job post, and that was more of an action strategy: get more specific and tell people the truth about what the opportunity and the reward is for joining your organization, and then the resume lie. Make sure that you're asking those clarifying questions. So I don't see any questions coming in through the chat, so let's continue on and do another action blind spot, and that's the 30 minute verdict. And I'm assuming that this has to do with, you know, the evidence demands

Walter Crosby  37:00  
a verdict, and we should be able to come up with something fairly quickly. Well, it has to do. I hear, I hear it a lot. We're a founder who sat in the sales seat that understands sales. I can tell if a candidate is worthy in the first 30 minutes by asking them a couple of questions, and I'm going to push back on that. I don't care who says it. I think we need to be better prepared, and this ties in with the last blind spot when we're when we're looking at a role, especially if it's an important role in the sales organization, where they're hunting, we want to make sure we have at least five structured questions that we're going to ask every candidate about the role and about their background to make sure that they fit, and why the same, right? I mean, there's going to be a nuance, right? You might drop in and ask an additional question, but if we're not measuring the same answers against the same scorecard, then you were not going to have objective data to look at, so decide on the questions that are most meaningful to you, and we help a client structure those, we've got 5060 you know, questions that you know, sort of standard that we can work from, and then you want to make sure that those, that those questions are about the role, and then you're digging into how they learn, you're digging into what they do to learn, how do they get better, right, because these are these are nuances that are important as you start to understand, like this, this person has the skills, but they're pretty conditionally compliant, right? They're going to want to do things their way, or they're going to be a lone wolf, and that may not be, that may not fit your culture may not fit your team, so you want to understand and ask some questions about how they structure deals, how they, how they go about qualifying, and if they can't articulate the points that they're looking for to selling value, or how they, they find urgency, or they uncover a compelling reason for somebody, if they can't articulate those points, then they're not really using a system, or they haven't been trained well, or they're just winging it, and that necessarily isn't a disqualifier, but we want to be able to compare apples to apples, right? And there'll be, there'll be plenty of room for that subjectivity, right? The guy showed up on time. The guy was dressed professionally. She was very, you know, clear about her, her questions of us, like whatever those are. You have room for subjectivity, but you want to structure this to have the that objectivity with data. As opposed to I'll just, you know, fly by the seat of my pants, you know, and then realize you're wearing assless chaps and it's going to hurt. I love there's only one thing that people do predictably, it's that they act unpredictable, right? That's an old E-moth, emit quote, and I do think that there is a part of our just reactive model is that you know it structure isn't always comfortable, but your strategy about, you know, replacing gut feel with

David Bush  40:30  
a structured interview process that gasps the same questions to every candidate, use the same scoring rubric, the same evaluators. Now this interview becomes evidence collection against just ideas and just a vibe check. I love how you strategized around that.

Walter Crosby  40:47  
It's there's a, there's a parallel with how we sell, right? We should have a sales process, we should have a sales methodology. Well, we're just doing the same thing in reverse with a candidate, right. We're following a process, we're following a cadence, we're being consistent, and as soon as we see something that we can't overcome with that candidate, we can be done. It's the right thing to do. I think that's another mindset issue that is, is always there. It's okay to have somebody not be a fit, it's way better to do it in the interview process than to hire them and find out six months, 12 months, 18 months later. The worst case scenario is you hire somebody and about 90 days in, you're like, "Oh crap, we made a mistake, and then then they don't fire them for 18 months, right? Really, really, really bad happens all the time.

David Bush  41:43  
Yeah, the oftentimes the evidence on the back end of a sales team member that's not actually selling is directly correlated back to the beginning phases of how you attracted them, recruited them, hired them, or interviewed them. And I think that you're really making that clear. So, let's go back into a mindset specific blind spot and shift into blind spot number six, and this is the capped top performer. Talk a little bit more about how that mindset shift needs to happen.

Walter Crosby  42:14  
Yeah, it's, it's a, it's really a challenge for some business owners to pay a salesperson well, they, they send some business owners, not all, some really resent writing large commission checks to sales people, and maybe that's because their, their comp plan is wrong, maybe that they, it's too generous, it maybe it's because they have a problem just paying their salespeople really well, right. So top performers, when I say that, I mean the A players, and the data has been great. It's been consistent for 30 years. 6% of all salespeople are what we consider elite, right, a players top, top right? They're always performers. And then there's 14% of all sales people that are good, some really good, right? They're performers, you know that B plus A minus player, right? You want them on your team. They're the guys that hit for get on base, they're the guys that you know, maybe not hitting home runs all the time, but they're integral part of your team. And then you got another 20% that are above average, depending upon how we define average. The rest you just run, you don't want them anywhere near your team, right? They're just awful. They're the salespeople that we, because there's such a low bar, they become a salesperson because they don't know what else to do. So we want to, we want to look for those top performers, and those top performers want to earn, they're motivated by money, they might be motivated because they want to be part of something bigger than them, they want to be able to help a particular marketplace, whatever that is, but they want to earn, so we want to look at a compensation plan very early to make sure that it's palatable for the company, that we're not, we're not killing our margins, and we're being fair to the company as well as being fair to the salesperson, you know, if a salesperson is making a million dollars a year and they're bringing in $200 million of revenue, then there's a 30% margin. I don't know how many times we want to do that, right? If, if with the, with those people, with those salespeople, maybe we want to duplicate that, so we want to make sure that it's fair, it's structured properly, the payout is right, but I see sometimes where there's a cap, like, well, they can't make more than $250,000 right, that's just the limit, and I work for a guy who's a great. A great guy, super smart, taught me a lot about the construction industry and about how to structure deals, but he had a thing where he was like, "Here's the cap, you can't make more than 350 grand, and you know, I got to a point in there where I was, I was just above his cap, and you know it didn't make sense for me to work an extra 10 hours a week, right? I lowered my handicap, as you know, for golf that summer, because I had reached my, my cap, I couldn't earn any more money, so you know, he called me on, I said, "Look, your compensation plan is a set of instructions for us, so you've told me that I can go work on my handicap, right, because I can't, you know, the return on investment isn't there, and he tried to convince me otherwise, and I, he couldn't, and I couldn't convince him that his instructions were faulty, right, I would have worked hard to get to half a million dollars if it was possible. So, you know, think of it if you take nothing away. Think of your compensation plan as a set of instructions for your sales people, and you want to incentivize them to do the things you want them to do, and that shouldn't involve a cap for hunters,

David Bush  46:21  
and my brother has a great story. When he's running his direct mail business, he had a W-2 top salesperson that earned $3 million I think it was $3.2 million in commission, and his personal income that he took home from the company was $3 million So the top salesperson to earn four than the guy that took all the risks, provided all the capital, put all the nights, holidays, and weekends into it, but that was a mindset shift, because he knew that if he could end up getting the top performer to have an unlimited cap, where he could earn a tremendous amount of money, he would attract a whole lot more top performers into his organization, which you see this in professional sports all the time. Walter, I mean, you see organizations that struggle to win a championship because they are focused specific on being responsible with their salary cap, not necessarily being driven towards winning championships. So I'm just kind of curious, based on your background and any stories that you maybe could share of specific examples of owners that are revenue leaders that actually made that shift and immediately started to see things change in their ability to find salespeople that could really sell and be a leader in the marketplace and see revenue growth and scalability. Any examples of specifics that you could share?

Walter Crosby  47:50  
Yeah, there was a small company, they were distributor of promotional materials, they were only doing 3 million or so family-run business, they were doing fine. They had low overhead, and they had a couple of sales people who were just taking orders, but they called them sales people, and you know, I said, "Here's here's the issue, here's what they're doing, and here's what they're not doing, and here's, here's a plan to move forward. We try to help them see we're like, you can take a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, right? But we can make them thirsty, so we tried to help them see that if they did these two other behaviors, because they would be compensated more, that they would earn more money. So, of the two, one of them said, "Oh, wow, I can earn an extra 50 grand, that's going to help me do this and this for my kids, you know, help me, like, what do I need to do? The other one was like, "Yeah, I'm fine. So we helped help the other one realize that she was in the wrong seat, that it wasn't optional, that she needed to do all of the behaviors we want to do, not just the one she felt compelled to do, and we like, look, the other salesperson, she's doing great, she's earning a lot more money, so you know, in a few months we gave her all the chances in the world, and we, we made a change and hired another salesperson, so it was all tied to tweaking the sales plan, so that they got a little bit more of every extra dollar, and again, instructions, we help them see that if they did this extra thing, sold a little bit more, ask a couple of different questions, their income would go up substantially. That's great. Well, we're moving into blind spot number seven, and this is another mindset, mindset-specific blind spot.

David Bush  50:00  
And then we've got a bonus eighth strategy, eighth blind spot that we're going to talk about as we close up here today, but we're going to talk a little bit more about the autonomy excuse, so talk a little bit more about the blind spot that you see with sales leaders, revenue leaders, and CEOs, and how they have gotten into this autonomy excuse that's led them down a path of decreasing revenue, decreasing sales,

Walter Crosby  50:26  
so they think of sales as a little differently than they do their other departments, right? Accounting has to balance their books, operations have to have a certain percentage of being on time and quality, and when we look at sales, we think, oh, there's this alchemy that's going on, this magic that happens that we don't really truly understand. So, because we don't understand it, sometimes the this idea is that we just need to let them be, give them the room to operate, and that's a significant mistake. It's a blind spot that not everybody has, but it's.. it's.. I see it often, and it's worth talking about, because even the ones who do things well, they give salespeople a little too much latitude, right? I don't think we should be punching a clock, and like, if you decide to go home at 3o'clock on a Friday, that's not the end of the world. If you've made your numbers, however, accountability needs to be in place. We need to have clear expectations about what is expected to hit in the metrics. We need everything to be clear, and accountability can be handled in 15 minutes on a monthly basis, and people that are performing love accountability, because it turns into a pat on the back. It turns into like, Dave, you're doing a great job. This is three months in a row, you've exceeded your number, your pipeline looks really healthy. How you doing it? Like, talk to me a little bit, because I'm not really sure what else I can do to help you, right. So that's a very gratifying thing for a performer to hear the positives, and those people will say, you know what, I'm, I need a little help over here, where I'm a little concerned about this, right. They're always going to be looking for that edge. Sales is a very thin, fine edge business, and we're always looking for that, that little thing that's going to get us over. So, autonomy really, it really needs to be accountability, and we need to think about not giving them so much latitude, not micromanaging. So, here's the expectation: we want you to do this, this, and this, and if you hit that, great. If you're, you're not hitting your expectation, and it's a little bit off. Let's look at what it is that you're doing, what behaviors you're missing, what activities are not, and if you're doing all those things, maybe it's how you're doing it right. So that's not micromanaging, right. We're helping, and we're defining and setting up the expectations. The last step of accountability really is, you didn't hit your number three quarters in a row, you're not doing what we asked you to do. So we got to really take a close look at, like, what, what are you doing right? And that's when the people that aren't performing push back. I don't need micromanagement, really. I'm not micromanaging. We agreed on certain things, and you're not performing. You're not giving us what we asked for, what you agreed to do. And since you know we've set the expectation, we understand why it's important. We get to look at the details, so those people either find their way out of the organization or we help them out, but so I think about autonomy is you earn autonomy with accountability and sales is great, like you can, the boss I told you about, like, I could take time off because he knew my, I handled my no, I handled my business, the numbers were there, and if he called me when I was out of town, I answered the phone, right, and you know we had, we had a great working relationship, because there was a level of trust that I had earned over years of accountability and owning owning my actions, even when I made a mistake, right? That I was the first one in his office to explain, boss, I screwed up, I don't know how to fix this, I need help, right? That earned me more respect than than my numbers. So think about autonomy as something we earn,

David Bush  54:43  
yeah. I remember interviewing a leader that talked about charting out their actual sales team. Actually, the entire organization was charted out, and on

Speaker 1  54:55  
the

David Bush  54:55  
horizontal axis was capacity and a. Ability or skill, and then on the y axis, the vertical axis was how that, how well they were performing. So, obviously, the top right highest level of performance was people that had high capacity and high performance, and they talked about, you know, charting every single one of your team members to identify where they are, and each conversation would be different relating to that actual individual and where they were with capacity and performance, and I love the way that you're talking about coaching people up and not micromanaging them, but getting into a sales coaching rhythm where you're actually meeting with them and you're saying, hey, here's what happened, here's what you wanted to have happen, what's missing, and what's next, and being accountable. What is it? Stephen Covey says accountability breeds responsibility, and I love that strategy. So, let's, let's finish up with the bonus blind spot, and this is the HR handoff. And then, before we wrap up, I want to go into a little bit deeper, Walter, of how organizations can work with you to work through some of these blind spots and help them to increase their opportunities with inside their sales teams and business, so the last, the last blind spot I think is is probably the most valuable if you've gone through a hiring process and you found that a player, right, and you went through the hard work of getting that, you did all the things well, or maybe you got lucky,

Walter Crosby  56:30  
right? We could be honest, maybe you got lucky and you got an A player. You can screw it up in the first 90 days, you can literally screw it up in the first three days. I'll tell you a quick story. I work for a company that it was, oh, eight great economy was a little dicey, to say the least, in the construction space. So they hired me, it was a good gig, and I show up on a Tuesday when they told me to, and it was like a surprise. They weren't ready for me. The HR lady didn't have anything there. I literally sat in a conference room for an hour, unattended, unsupervised, right? I was walking around, like, you know, looking for the coffee pot, like, you know, nobody was there. The guy that hired me wasn't around, so really bad experience. And then once I did get through that first day, nobody asked me to lunch, nobody, nobody really gave me any structure. At the end of the day, the VP came in and said, "Hey, here's three books, why don't you read these next couple of days, and then we'll reconvene on Friday. I've got a couple of things I got to do this week, blah blah blah. They started looking at the books, and they were like engineering textbooks. I'm a sales guy, I'm not an engineer, math isn't my strong suit. I don't care about electrical formulas and electrical components, so day three, I walk in, drop the books on his desk, and said, you know, hey, his name wasn't Bob, but we'll call him Bob. Bob, I think we made a mistake. What are you talking about? I like, if I got to learn this crap to be able to sell that crap, then we're not in alignment, you know, we made a mistake, so what do we need to do to get me out on the street to go sell? So I needed a job, right? There wasn't a lot of them available, still stupid for pushing the envelope, but I got what I wanted, right? That was the start of them understanding that I was going to be serious, so I tell you that story to say that when we start an employee, it's there is probably four hours, maybe eight of orientation, right? And let's not confuse orientation with onboarding. Minimum onboarding is 45 to 90 days, and we're, we should map out the first two weeks of somebody's employment. They should have meetings scheduled with the right people, they're going to help them understand what they need to do. And this isn't product knowledge, this is where somebody, where people focus on product knowledge. We want to teach them about our ICP, and we want to teach them how to sell our products, so you can actually start onboarding in advance of them showing up. Send them a package of your swag, help them understand you're excited about it. Be ready for them when they show in, they show up, and then have it organized and be ready to teach them what they need to be successful. That's that's it in a nutshell. Yeah, just great onboarding experiences lead to obviously a launching pad, and you know, oftentimes just like the shuttles, you know, they got to use 90% of their fuel and 90% of their energy just to get them through the atmosphere, and if you don't do a good job at that, the whole mission is screwed,

Speaker 2  59:59  
so

David Bush  59:59  
I. Uh, you know, you've shared some amazing insights on these eight blind spots, and each one of these is a very costly blind spot, and now we're awakened to them. How do we implement all of these things, and how does Walter Crosby and all of his resources help in organized, or a leader that wants to get organized and get efficient on all these

Walter Crosby  1:00:22  
well sales integration is something that that I do. It's, it's my passion. So, I think there's two paths for somebody that's listening, or listening to the recording. I have a book called Inside Out: Why strong US companies have weak sales teams that maps out the whole theory, the whole thinking on the four pillars of sales integration. It's all there. If somebody says they watched the webinar, shoots me a DM on LinkedIn, I'll send them a free copy, a digital PDF. It's available on Amazon for less than 20 bucks, and maps everything out. All your tools, you can go from there. If somebody wants to go faster or is this curious, they can reach out to me through the website or through LinkedIn and say, I'm curious. I, you know, I'm going to say this with great sincerity. Everybody that calls me is not a candidate to work with us, and I don't say that to be rude. You need to be in the right spot with the right mindset of being just damn tired of failure at certain things and really needing to scale, so if we don't have those the right mindset, and you'll be ready to go do the hard work, because it's not easy, it's bumpy, there's challenges involved. I'm there to help guide you through it and smooth it out, but it's, it's, it's exciting to watch somebody create the wins once they see the path, that's that's the joy here. We like to get paid, of course, but the joy is watching things change for an entrepreneur.

David Bush  1:02:14  
Yeah, well, just like Ernest Shackleton's ad, I think that you've just laid it out beautifully, of being real, honest, and transparent, of it is a challenge. It's a challenge to take these blind spots and actually apply them as strength and strategies to scale and hire, or I encourage everybody to go pick up a copy of Inside Out. If you registered for this webinar live, you'll receive access to the contact information and all the links and things that you need. If you're watching a recording of this, you can look in the video description, and there'll be more links in the show notes. If you're watching this as a podcast or listening to it, so make sure you go out there and connect with Walter Crosby. What I've learned from Walter is, is that he's a serve-first person, he wants to serve people, even if they're not a perfect candidate or client for what he's looking for, he'll be honest with you and tell you where you can go to get great next steps. And if you liked this video, which I don't know why you wouldn't have liked it, because it was all really fantastic information, share it with another revenue leader, CEO, founder, owner that you think would benefit. So, Walter, thank you so much for your time today, and for sharing your expertise with us.

Walter Crosby  1:03:21  
Thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.

David Bush  1:03:25  
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@bdr.ai Until next time, let's keep building,

Unknown Speaker  1:04:02  
you.