The Opportunity Cost of Not Having Top Sales Talent | Ep 46

Speaker A

00:00:00.160 - 00:19:27.050

This is episode 46 and on it I go over the opportunity costs of not having top sales talent and how to determine how your current team stacks up. I also include a bonus at the end of the episode you won't want to miss. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last. Hey. Hey. Today we're digging into the stuff that I seem to be doing every day lately and that is assessing salespeople and sales teams.

I've had the privilege of being brought into a friend of mine's new role in a company. I'll talk about it later.

I can't tell you any of the details, but he's been very successful and he's got access in a new company to a really great startup and they've got one salesperson and he has asked me to assess them, get my take on it. So of course I obliged and had this rep take my typical index, which includes three part assessment called Intermetrix.

It's a company I'm licensed with, but they have the discount values motivators and then the Hartman values profile. And across these three analyses I can see some really powerful stuff. And so had this rep take it.

And it was clear that this rep is not a fit for what they're selling.

And I was able to give just via text, while my buddy was in a corporate meeting with their team EOS planning meeting and could give him just text summaries, probably three texts that gave the details on this rep as to why he's not a fit and why he's not closing at the rate that they need.

But the bigger thing that came out of the conversation wasn't just the insights that confirmed all of his suspicions, but also the discussion that led to a whole bunch of questions he couldn't answer that got him to start digging deeper and deeper.

And I think I'll do an episode later when we are able to go through the overhaul of this sales process and sales team and building out a new team and stuff.

But the biggest thing that I realized is that when there's lack of clarity on whether a rep is performing or not, there also comes a whole lot of obscurity, vagueness, cloudiness, whatever you want to call it, around the lead flow and what's going on with the leads and lead quality.

And that's what led to this discussion with my buddy was that they say that he's closing 50% of the leads, but there's no reports on how many leads have inquired, how many leads didn't schedule, how many no showed how many get responded to and couldn't schedule, how many tried to schedule and the schedule wasn't available and on and on and on. And so this is where just the beginning of assessing a team and inspecting the sales process.

I know I talked in a couple episodes ago about like improving the closing process and working your way out. This is what I'm talking about here, is just taking the whole system under a microscope and it's really hard for business owners.

I mean, I get it, you're busy, you've got a million fires to put out every day and you've got all of these opportunities that you're trying to get to and the last thing you want to do is roll up your sleeves and start providing hard accountability to people that you're afraid will quit. And now you got to replace them and now you're back up a creek and you're having to do the sales. I totally get all of that.

And so I think what I'm going to outline here is how I dig into sales teams and what I look at and how I get under the hood and I'll talk about some examples.

I've got some case studies of past CL that I can give you more details on, but it's so necessary and it is the fastest path to improving revenue because you're already doing fulfillment. I imagine you're fulfilling fantastically.

I imagine your clients love you and they're getting great results and you wish you could just get more of them and they wish they could refer more people to you. So that's taken care of and your financials are fine.

You're paying your bills, you've got payroll covered and you've got money in the bank and you're taking money home every month and like everything's heading in the right direction that way. So like there's nothing to worry about there.

So getting into the sales and inspecting sales and marketing feels like a ticking time bomb for a lot of business owners.

It feels like, man, I just don't want to look under the hood because I don't want to know the truth of what's under there because then I don't want to deal with all of it. So whenever you're ready, here's the process I go through.

And first things first, we assess everybody, we have everybody take these personality assessments and we do it in a very friendly, non threatening way. The goal is we just want to understand how they're wired and we want to figure out how to get them into their strengths.

Now, we don't tell them if it's not possible to get them into their strengths, if they don't have strengths around the role that we need them in.

Obviously, we may be firing them or letting them go or cross training them or demoting them or whatever the multitude of things, but that's not my problem. We need to first get them assessed and we need to figure out what's really going on.

And so we get this out to them, they take it, and I start compiling all of the results. I've got a great dashboard in Excel, Google sheets that I made that. My mentor, Tom Schaff, I'll talk to you about him later. He's.

He's a fantastic sales trainer and a great resource when I need detailed sales training for reps that can be improved and that can have their strengths strengthened upon and polished. But I take everybody and I put them in this spreadsheet and when I go over their assessment, I'm looking for patterns.

I'm trying to understand the culture of the company. I'm trying to understand the culture of the owner and what they've established.

Obviously, I'd love to have the owner take the assessment because they're the ultimate salesperson. They're typically the best salesperson. They're the one that built this company from scratch.

And I want to know what they're like and how many of their reps are either junior versions of them or the antithesis trying to compensate and be the yin to the or yang or vice versa.

And so when I'm looking at these patterns, trying to understand what's causing these people to have the success they're having now, what's missing that's causing some people to not perform at the level that we all expect. Not just you as the owner, but that person expects themselves to perform better too. Everybody wants to perform as best as possible.

And then I'm looking for patterns around holes on the team or where there may be opportunities to fill in or change the direction of the culture.

So I've got a client, his whole organization, it's a smaller company, but his whole organization tends to follow his pattern of he's very friendly, very kind, very conscientious, and he's decisive enough, but he's surrounded himself with people that are all mostly indecisive. So that's the pattern that I noticed for him. And so for his organization, especially a salesperson, and we found somebody, she should be great.

He made an offer to her and she should be accepting and should make a big impact in the company in short order. But she's higher on the D score in the disc. She's higher decisive, she's more direct, she's able to think and execute faster.

And in sales, we obviously want that in spades. We don't want salespeople that hum and ha.

That have to think about it, that are constantly going back and unable to tap dance with the prospects and adapt and deal with their questions. So that pattern showed up for that client.

And so when I see these patterns, then I go to the owner and I start talking about them and I start assessing what's going on with each of these reps because I'm just looking at them from one lens. This is not the comprehensive that is in stone that guarantees that this is exactly how this person is.

There's always room for interpretation, there's room for adjustment. And so I go back and I start talking to the owners about each person on their team and I say, do they do this, do they do that?

Here's what I see, here's what I think, how they're wired.

And so in the case of my friend who was asking me about their one rep, I was giving him all those perspectives and he's like, damn, that's exactly right. I need a new rep. And so that's typically when somebody's coming to me questioning whether somebody's good enough or worth keeping.

The answer is they're not. I am the confirmation that their gut has been right all along, but they just weren't certain. They don't want to be mean.

This person's probably been loyal. They are nice. It's always hard to fire kind, good people or let them go. It's never fun.

I've never found that to be enjoyable, but it is necessary, especially when you're in an environment where your opportunity costs are huge. So in this case, we're going to work on finding a replacement and it'll be straightforward.

I'll find a superstar, they'll get plugged in and he'll find an amazing outcome and improvement. And that's where this gets into all the questions that come up.

So in this particular case, they claim that this rep is closing at 50%, which is fantastic. But that's more of a testament to the product market fit and how great their service is, their solution for their target audience.

But when I asked about, well, how many leads are coming in, how many aren't getting scheduled, how many aren't being followed up with all of these things that just come to mind rapidly for me, he couldn't answer any of that. And I guarantee that this rep is wasting endless amounts of opportunity.

And so the 50% that are closing, it should be closer to 80% and it should be probably double what is actually getting closed because of all the unconverted opportunities and wasted leads that this rep isn't just not out of malice, not out of laziness, just not having the skill to be able to handle them.

And so when we start looking at all of those lost opportunities, I think that's the biggest part of the wrong people in the wrong seat leads to incredible opportunity costs for business owners.

We all know that the waste of mistakes and the waste of issues and liability type employees, people who are mouthing off to clients or I had one client, she had a bookkeeper that was just stuffing bills in a drawer, not paying them, even though the client had money, they were profitable. And this lady was just crazy. And it wasn't until they let her go that my client opened up the drawer and found all these unpaid bills.

So we know the hard cost of dealing with morons like that, but we don't pay attention to the opportunity cost of dealing with somebody that's not an 8 or 9 or 10 out of 10 for the role. And in this case, my hypothesis is that this company's losing out on double the deal flow, double, double the new clients by working with this rep.

And it's because I've already got somebody lined up for them and I think it'll be a great fit. And this guy has been in outside sales, so he could do inside and outside inbound, down to outbound.

And his follow up and his tenacity is so high that I guarantee he'll show all the ways that this current rep hasn't been following up. And so that's the bigger cost is the opportunity cost of what could have been, what should have been and how could you have.

And it's not to just make more money, it's how could you have expanded or been more stable or hired more people or served more people. All the things that to me is the negative of not paying attention to the opportunity cost.

And even if you don't want to grow your company at all, let's say you just want to maintain it as a cash cow. The beauty is that when you get better people, things run better without you.

So you'll get out of the day to day sooner, you'll have more time, freedom, you'll be able to be Able to spend more time with your wife and kids and you'll be able to spend more time with important people and things you care about. Because when you upgrade those people, things just run better.

And so, as I think through all the opportunity costs, I am reminded of a past client, Brandon Turner, and his company, Better Life Tribe. Brandon's a good friend. He brought me in just about a year ago, almost to the day in 2024, and he had launched Better Life Tribe.

It's a fantastic real estate investing, coaching program, education program, community. It's the best thing out there. He's so ethical and straight shooter, way under charges for what they offer.

But they had launched and they had gotten some great success out of the gate with his warm market. He's got a huge following. He sold millions of books, literally on real estate investing. And he was a big help in me getting my book launched.

Bottleneck breakthrough and huge, huge help for me in getting the book done. So he brought me in and he's like, man, it's just a mess. We don't know what we're doing wrong.

And they had been doing like a launch model where you could join during a certain window. And then so they used all that scarcity and that deadline to get people to join.

But there was no sales team, there was no sales process, there was no qualification, there were so many pieces missing. And so when I got involved, it was kind of like an all hands on deck.

I had to get him a new marketing director, I had to recruit salespeople, I had to build out the systems, really what goes through my sustainable scale framework. And if you haven't gone through that, it's available on my website, it's for free.

You can go to bottleneckbreakthrough.com resources and opt in for the sustainable Scale Framework masterclass and go through that. But it's all three of those legs, sales and marketing, and the systems of those to create a balanced revenue engine.

And so as I got in and started looking around, it was like, man, this thing is just thrash. There's so much chaos going on. And so we had to start with processes and the systems.

So we started with turning it into an application funnel and driving it to sales reps that were capable of closing qualified leads and could actually qualify them. So they had one sales rep and he was a good guy, he was a little young and so I couldn't push them hard.

But once I recruited top people, he performed, I could push him harder. And we were able to get the sales process started. And as we got it started, then we could work on the marketing and get better lead flow.

And once we got the lead flow working, then we could tune up the systems more. And it was just this virtuous circle that we were going round and round.

But the opportunity cost for Brandon was huge because it wasn't just the revenue wasn't growing.

It was that the feedback loops from the sales reps weren't getting to his coaches and his CEO or COO of the company and they were spending all this money.

They had a marketing director that had just started right before I got there and he was just doing old school, slam them in, volume play, and we weren't getting tons of quality. And so without that feedback loop, they were just blowing through money and they were blowing through opportunity.

So anyway, I think as you think, through dialing in your team and getting into all of the opportunity cost, it can be pretty big. And obviously Brandon's was massive because it was a startup and it had a lot of quick success in the first year and he's got a huge following.

So it was just magnified compared to typical clients I work with. But I think, as you think through, gosh, do I really want to go through this? Do I really want to get under the hood and see the mess?

Do I really want to risk the confrontation with my sales reps and the chance of having some of them leave because of providing a little bit of accountability will cause them to freak out and leave because they know they're getting away with an easy scam?

Or I don't want to provide accountability because that means that I have to be willing to fire them or else I can't, or else my accountabilities toothless and has no bite to it. So all of those things I think are real. And that's why, for me, offering to do assessments for free.

For listeners of this podcast, if you've got at least a couple sales reps and you're doing at least a couple million on up, I mean, the bigger the better.

I like working with teams that are doing 10 million plus, but if you're doing a million or two or more and you've got at least one or two sales reps and you just want to know, like, what's missing? Are they doing any good? Do they have any potential to be trained?

I can connect you with Tom after I assess them, but I'd be happy to do that assessment for free. It's just, it's so powerful.

It's like having an MRI done on your sales team if you want to expand and do your whole team, we can talk about a cost for that. It's pretty nominal. But I think after doing this enough times with salespeople and sales teams that it's, it's just, it's a mandatory thing.

You have to get your team assessed. You have to know who's capable, who's got potential, who can be tuned up and who needs to be replaced because the cost is just too great.

And as the market's uncertain and things are tight for so many industries, it's not going to get better anytime soon, and it may get worse for your industry. I'm not trying to use fear or any kind of scare tactics here. It's just we're in hard times. It's tough.

It's only going to get tougher before it gets better. So reach out.

Shoot me an email joshottleneckbreakthrough.com Let me know that you heard this episode and that you want to talk about doing an assessment for your sales team.

And we can have a quick call and go over the details and I can get you that link to have your team take it and then go over it with you and figure out what's next. But you need the clarity. So I hope this is a value. Hope to hear from you and have a great day.

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