The People and Process Mistakes That Hold Sales Back

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[00:00:00] Kurt Schneiber: There's a common denominator of success in sales, and it is that successful people learn to make a habit of doing things that unsuccessful people don't like to do. And there's a little secret behind that, and that is that successful people don't often like to do it either. They just do it anyway.

[00:00:18] Lee Brumbaugh: There's no silver bullet in sales, but on Sales Against the Odds. We're here to give you the best shot at building a sales infrastructure that helps you scale. I'm your host, Lee Brumbaugh. Hello everyone. This is Sales Against The Odds. Again, I'm your host, Lee Brumbaugh, CEO of Sales Xceleration. Very excited to have Kurt Schneiber joining us today, expert, EOS implementer for the last, I think 11 years. I read in your bio, Kurt, out of years, 11 years Houston Salt Lake City. And I'll say before we jump in, I've had the privilege of working with Kurt offsite with him, with different companies and if there's anybody, they can get to the heart of how to help you grow your business at EOS Implementers, Kurt. So Kurt, thank you very much for joining us today.

[00:01:04] Kurt Schneiber: Well, that's a very nice introduction. You're probably lathering it on a little bit too thick, but anyway, I'll do my best to help people understand how this all works. And it's good to see you again late.

[00:01:15] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, and Kurt, I think a great thing about this, again, another thing on your background, not only an EOS implementer, but for those in the audience, Kurt's been a CEO, sat on boards, been in teams at ran sales team, so something that can really give us a host of information expertise today. So Kurt, before I jump in, tell us a little bit about how you got down the path of us and got started helping businesses grow.

[00:01:40] Kurt Schneiber: Well, it's interesting. I've run businesses all over the world in different industries from finance and consumer products and technology and software and payment systems and things. And it's been really fun and along the way. The last one I was in was Minnesota and it was a financial payments platform, technology joint venture between two large companies. And I was the CEO of that joint venture company. It was fun. We had maybe 600 people, 700 people, and about a hundred million dollars of business, give or take. I run bigger businesses and smaller business. That was that one. And along the way, it wasn't working exactly the way I thought it should work. And one of my colleagues whom I'd hired had tried to be an EOS implementer, but he wasn't quite ready to do that full time. And he said, Kurt, you got to read this book Traction.

[00:02:28] Kurt Schneiber: And I said, okay, I'll read that. I'm a voracious reader. I read, it took me about maybe a week or so really quickly, I said, oh my gosh, we should do this. They didn't teach us basic stuff in MBA school. And I said, okay. So we started on our own for about three months and then we hired an implementer and it just, everything got better, faster, better people choices, better decisions, faster decisions, clear on who should be in what seat, and the business and the process of running the business got better. And so effectively that when that business finally sold, I decided, my wife said, Kurt, you've been taking me all over the world. I mean, we've lived in Egypt and Israel, Saudi Arabia, Greece, India. So she said, my turn to pick, where are we going? She said, we're going to Houston. I said, okay, because our second daughter lives here.

[00:03:22] Kurt Schneiber: She was the first one with kids. I said, okay, we'll go to Houston. I'll figure out something to do. And it just came as an epiphany that maybe I can do for a couple of years this EOS thing for people. I like to coach, I like to help. It just feels good. And I said, okay, I'll try. And I called my former. He said, nobody's in Houston. There's a few clients there, people travel in. You could start. I said, okay, I'm going to do that. And I started Lee. And what I found is, well, first off, I pushed my chair out of the way. We're going to talk about sales a little bit today. So I pushed my chair to the back of the room in my home office and I said, I'm not sitting down until I have 20 clients. But what happened is as I gathered clients and began to use the process that is EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, I found a couple things.

[00:04:12] Kurt Schneiber: One that I love the work and that when we coach people, coach business leaders to have a core focus, which is kind of combination of their niche and then their purpose, cause or passion, I better figure out what mine is. And I figured it out. I writing and thinking, writing, thinking, and it was to make a positive, meaningful, and lasting difference in the lives of the people I meet every day. And in this work, I get to do that every day. And I feel at the end of the day, having worked with people that dug out of there, leaving my session room here better for having been here for the day. So that's a little more than how I got here, but it is why I'm still here. So I thought I'd do this for two years and then go get a real job. And here I am 11 years later, still doing this work.

[00:05:04] Kurt Schneiber: I don't have to hunt too much anymore. Mostly referrals. But it's just really a pleasure to be able to be in a room when people are getting a little bit better and not be the person that has to make the change, but the person maybe who sparks the change that helps use practical tools and disciplines, kind of greasy fingernails, things that somehow as they implement these tools, they get leverage and they move faster, simpler, at a better pace with more ease than they would've otherwise had I not been with them. And so it's really a blessing. I think frankly,

[00:05:42] Lee Brumbaugh: It seems like a pretty good compass to have. Helping people get better one step at a time seems like a good weighted guide for the last 11 years. And that's what I love about Sales Xceleration. Same thing when you take a business owner that was on the verge of failing and help them turn around their sales and their, it's that type of impact. That's what we do, what we do. So I love the passion. You can hear it in your voice. So Kurt, speaking of that passion, talk to me a little bit about mainly you work with companies in the SMB, small to medium sized businesses, that space. And so when you think about it, what are the biggest, if you could, I know there's a lot out there, but what are the biggest obstacles that you see companies in the SMB space coming to you with today as you're in these EOS sessions?

[00:06:23] Kurt Schneiber: Well, it's interesting. I think if you were to think about the EOS world, I think there's six key components. One is vision, getting everybody on the same page. One is people in the right, people in the right seats, the people hit your values and are good at their jobs. What is data? Having good scorecards and measureables for individuals? What is being able to solve issues? The issues component, what is the process component? Getting your business almost franchisable, it's so consistent, right? And the last one is attraction, execution, follow through discipline, having really good priorities, having good meetings, et cetera. And not to go into too much detail there. So you asked what do people stumble first? I would say the hardest one at the beginning is the people component. Because they've been working with, they've founded a company, they grew the company, people joined them early, the company's gotten bigger, changed more, maybe different segments.

[00:07:15] Kurt Schneiber: And the people they had at the beginning might not really be the best people to get to the next level. So it's hard to make the emotional choice that's based on analysis. This person is really good person, I love this person. She's really a great person to be with, fits our values, but not that good for the new job, the job that takes us to the next level. But once they get their mind around how to discuss this straight with people to assess, are they willing to step up and can they step up and they realize maybe they can't, then they move on, becomes easier for them because they've made that first decision. The second decision, they realize that over time, not only people down in the machinery of their business, but also in the leadership teams sometimes have to change. And once they make those choices and new people are hired who actually fit the culture fully and are really good at the jobs, we say that they get it.

[00:08:13] Kurt Schneiber: They have the capacity to do the work, then things get better. The second gap for people, which is hard, very hard. And that's the process component that's about deciding that we're going to make our business more predictable by documenting our processes simply. And then training, coaching, measuring, managing people and updating our process so that over time they become consistent. So think of a Chick-fil-A where you go through a Chick-fil-A, and I'm not a big fast food guy, but my grandkids like them. You go there anywhere you go, it's always the same. Food is the same, people manage the same, the cleanliness is the same. They know how to adjust when things are a little bit busy. They do that the same way. It's awesome from a consistency perspective that allows them to franchise move up. Now you could think how they get there. Well, that's a lot of training, a lot of coaching, a lot of requirements for people who are managers to having done all these different things.

[00:09:19] Kurt Schneiber: So we'll come back to that when we talk about sales, because that's a hard component and it's a learned skill to make your business predictable like that. And many people have a hard time your mind around that. Not that they don't think it's good. Someone could say, well, it'll take all the creativity out. Frankly, I've never really heard that much. If you get the basics just right, the extraordinary stuff is a little bit easier to manage. And that reminds me of analogy I use sometimes, which is the best hotel I ever stayed in Lee was the Four Seasons hotel in Mexico City. I know there are better hotels. I haven't stayed in one, right? I've seen some good hotels. I think it's a courtyard hotel. The weather's nice. It's three or four restaurants, really good. But the guy who founded the Four Seasons hotel chain is Isidor Sharp. He said that you have to systemize the predictable so you can humanize the extraordinary, right? So that's that component of systemizing. The basic things is hard for people and it's a long-term grind, takes work, persistence, et cetera. So those are the two things that I find most consistently or challenging. The people component and the process component.

[00:10:30] Lee Brumbaugh: So let's take a start with people. I want to get into both of those actually, but focused on sales oftentimes, and we've been in these together, Kurt, where you're going in and you're looking at your rocks. We'll get into later what those are. But the person, that sales leader is not the right person to see. Maybe somebody that's been with the organization. How do you get them to identify that maybe that person in the right sales seat is not the right person to go from? You said from five to 10 million, they were great at getting you to that first step, but maybe they're not ready for the next level of growth. How do you get them to recognize that?

[00:11:03] Kurt Schneiber: That's a really good question. As of all your questions probably are, but that question gets to the real root of a challenge that people have when they run their businesses is, does this person really have the skillset to accomplish the things that we want to accomplish together? Now, this is hard because they've experienced this person in one way, but now they're thinking longer term, one year, two years, three years out. I could probably survive with that fellow for next year, but I don't know that he's going to get us the next place. So then they got to say, what really is required? What do we need? So if you think about a sales leader, so often companies think if this guy's a great sales guy, I'm going to put him in a management job, he's going to coach and train and et cetera, et cetera.

[00:11:54] Kurt Schneiber: Well, that's a different skillset. I do think that great salespeople can be great managers, but they don't always want to. They want the promotion, they want the status, but they might not want to do the work required to coach 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 15, 20 people who are out there knocking on doors trying to win business. That's a different skillset. So for example, I have a client here in town, it's in the construction space. I won't go deeper, I don't want you to need to figure out who it is, but they hired a guy and that guy got him to a hundred million dollars of sales, but he had his hand on every single deal. And as they faltered at a hundred million, oh my goodness, the pipeline's not growing anymore. Our backlogs sort of stuck. It's actually shrinking as the operations team has caught up and they're doing better and better and they're building out all this stuff that got sold last year. Now the backlog's going down, what's happening? And they dug in and realized that this fellow had not built a team of great salespeople. What he'd done is found some people who are brave enough to open the door and then he would fly in and work his magic, close a deal, and then fly away. And that's not, he was really good, by the way, not

[00:13:17] Lee Brumbaugh: The next level, not the next level,

[00:13:18] Kurt Schneiber: Not the next level. And they want to go $200 million, and so that's another a hundred million dollars. So they had to let that person go and find someone else to put in that seat. And what became obvious is that the real gap, and this is frequent why it's not just that one experience. The real gap is when you have someone who has to step into what we call a leadership management and accountability role, little abbreviated call it LMA, and that skillset of coaching, leading, managing, challenging, rewarding, recognizing, encouraging and sometimes whacking 'em on the head to get 'em moving in the right direction is a skill that hasn't been developed while being a hunter. It's different. It's very different. I went

[00:14:10] Lee Brumbaugh: Through my first company stop early. My career was Johnson & Johnson. They recognized that early, right? They had a management development program. You go into three weeks of New Jersey and they'd have psychiatrists, they put you in a bowl and they're judging you how you react and all those types of things. It was a really interesting process. But my point around it was the people that you thought were typically on the President's club that were always hitting their sales numbers, were not the people that thrive in that environment. And J&J was early enough to recognize that on as that, like you said, we were trying to build great leaders that can manage and elevate people. And that is a different skillset. The other thing that I think is interesting is you went from people to process, and that's so much connected as well because that great sales leader helps you build a process. So let's go to the second area. When you think about sales process and the teams you've worked with, where do they get stuck as far as implementing a repeatable, scalable process? And obviously you can even say people like me that you've worked with, leaders come in and help them that are really good at that skillset.

[00:15:08] Kurt Schneiber: Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm just going to carve back just a tad first. And that is one of the things that good leaders do in sales is they can assess is this person a hunter or a farmer? And those are kind of terms that people throw around so easily, maybe too easily sometimes. But if the business has built, let's say 10 clients that accomplished 80% of their revenue and they know that they got to keep those clients happy, what happens over time? What will have happened over time is they've naturally developed a set of people who are really good at farming, who really going and managing a relationship, keeping it going. But what I've learned that the good sales leader sales process, you uncover this, by the way, is he or she is able to assess that skillset. And those relationship managers are awesome, but hunters are different.

[00:16:05] Kurt Schneiber: That ability to say, I will go and knock on that door. I'm going to get some nos and O I'm going to get some nos and I don't care. I'm going to keep going back. I'm going to knock on some new doors, I'm going to go knock down doors. And they revel in the victory and they like the kill, right? So they're hunt and they kill, and maybe that's not the right best analogy, but they use those as words sometimes. And so first before the process becomes important is the simple but difficult assessment and evaluation clarity. What do I need and what do I have? A person who has the capacity to be a great sales manager, might need to be coached by someone like you, Lee, to say, let's look at how we assess these people. They can look at their history, they can also use tools of various sorts, which you probably have in your hip pocket. You pull out this, you pull out that. I've used a couple along the way that helps parse those two different away from each other. And that's a really good part of the process is who do I have, what do I need to accomplish and which kind of people do I need to have more or less of?

[00:17:17] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, and there's lots of great tools out there. You can use predictive index culture index. There's PXT assessments. I mean, you can now learn, we know from the tools that we have of where they're going to, where they get their energy from, where their strengths are, where their weakness are. And I'll even go a step further than just hunter farmer. One thing that I've learned through the last few years is you can have somebody that's a hunter, but they're a hunter at somebody that needs to turn and burn a lot of volume. They're really good at hunting that $5,000 deal. But if you put them at closing that $200,000 C-suite deal, totally different ballgame, right? You can be a good hunter for the quick $500 deal, the $50,000 deal, the $5 million deal. And even those individuals are very different.

[00:18:01] Kurt Schneiber: Can they sell off?

[00:18:04] Kurt Schneiber: Do they have the ability to talk to someone more senior and be able to build that connection and trust that's required. And so when you think about a sales process going the next step on this assessment process, right? First I believe that sales skills are learnable. No one is born a salesperson and personality is not required. A certain kind of personality is not required being super gregarious, a little more introverted. Either one of those can be really good salespeople. A great salesperson is understanding that sales is a trust game. It's like a four act play, let's put it that way, right? First you have to trust the person that's in front of you wanting to sell you something. Second, you got to trust her company. Who does she work for? Is that company credible? Third, you got to trust the product or service that this person's trying to help me buy.

[00:19:04] Kurt Schneiber: And fourth, you got to trust the deal. And if you go out of that, then you're probably going to miss the deal more than win the deal, right? Because it's confusing to people. So a good sales process in a company will help a sales team and individuals there on learn and understand how to build trust, the interaction, the human connection that's required, learning pace, voice skills, listening skills, being truly a caring person who wants the best for the other side of the table. Learning that sales is a grand profession wherein you help people who are struggling with something, make decisions that have them be better. If you come to the sales that approach, then you're much more likely to build that trust, right? Listening, well, asking good open-ended questions, and then moving through that, how do I position the company as a trustworthy thing? What do I do? How do I differentiate us from anybody else that's doing that? And a sales process backing into the process part. A sales process will train people how we as our company distinguish ourselves from others. And that process requires that salespeople do it the same way.

[00:20:26] Lee Brumbaugh: And the great thing is so many people think when they're looking at sales process, alright, it's just five or six steps of what the salesperson takes. But back to your point earlier, this is really a sales process that's tied into the company, the best sales process. You told that story of that rainmaker who was still involved in closing deals. Look, if you've got a CEO that is good selling where the company is, you know when to insert that CEO to close the deal. Yes. I mean, founders should not be like, oh, I've hired a team of five people and I'm out of it. Now the point is, where do we use the entire company to advance the sales process to close more deals and bring more value to the

[00:21:02] Kurt Schneiber: Customer? I'll share experience on that. When I became the president of a software business in New York, I came on with, oh, here's a bunch of options. I got into the business and the CFO pulled me aside about two months in, said, Kurt, I dunno if we're going to make payroll. A couple months said, what? How come that be? Oh my gosh. And so I fired the sales head. They weren't making a lot of progress, but by then I kind of got my arms around the company and I knew what was going on and I said, look, I'm the head of sales. I'm the president at the front end of the business and the head product, people doing other stuff. So okay, let's go. And I told the salespeople, I will never make a commission and I want to write checks for you that are bigger than my compensation because the only way I succeed is if you succeed.

[00:21:48] Kurt Schneiber: But if you don't bring me in when you know I can help you get that deal closed and you lose, that's on you, right? So that's a very good point you make. And a good sales trainer, coach, leader, or someone like you, Lee, who comes in from the outside, has to recognize, can these people sell up? Is the CEO or someone on the leadership team good at coming in to help accentuate the strengths and get up to the right level to make decisions so that that's a part of the process of building trust and the company. And then of course, trust the product, trust the deal. And so a good process will help salespeople know how to do that consistently so that we present ourselves well. I think businesses like science, if I do it this way, my hypothesis is then I will get this.

[00:22:37] Kurt Schneiber: If it doesn't work, then I got to go do something else. But if the salespeople aren't doing the experiment the proper way, then I never know what's working and what's not working. So a sales manager, a sales leader has to have consistency in the process right now. There are people, when I started the EOS, there was 60 or 70 of us who would do this. Now there's 875 of us, give or take almost 900. And some of them aren't doing very well. And the reason is not because they can't manage the room when they're with people in the session, they can't sell having a hard time selling. And so when you get them one-on-one, you realize they're not doing some of the things that are required to do to get yourself over the hurdle. So that's number one in the process. Number two, I think is not number two necessarily, but one of the things that's important in their process is to truly understand your target market.

[00:23:29] Kurt Schneiber: What do they look like? Where are we hunting? When I say look, the demographic qualities, size, industry, all that, where are we hunting? We only have five salespeople. Well, we're national. We're going everywhere. We're global. You're not global. You only have five. Where is the best place for you to win new business? Oh, southeast Texas, maybe over to Florida. Oh, okay. Well, that's where we're going to focus. Can we take an order somewhere else? Well, sure, but don't hunt all over. You'll get too dispersed. You got to say focus, right? So that's really important. Then the third thing is more difficult, and that is who actually buys the product? Who makes the decision? So what I've learned is to help companies wherein there might be more than one person influence a decision to develop a heat map. That's what I call it. I made it up. I completely made it up. It might be

[00:24:22] Lee Brumbaugh: Real. I you have to. I'm with you a hundred percent. Yeah.

[00:24:24] Kurt Schneiber: Here's in the middle, who influences the decision? Who's making a decision? Because what we learn is everybody involved in there operates their life from WIIFM, what's in it for me? And if you don't understand someone's with 'em who's on the other side of the table, then you can't help them make a decision. Is it keep my boss happy? Is it'll be a compliance with some rules and regulations. So a good sales process will help uncover the specifics about these people who are actually influencing the purchase.

[00:25:04] Lee Brumbaugh: Most companies don't have the bandwidth to build a high functioning sales department to allow them to meet the revenue targets with Sales Xceleration. They don't have to. Our experienced fractional sales leaders consult and implement your sales strategy, infrastructure management and team development, discover how we deploy these proven sales solutions to address your sales challenges. By going to our website, filling out the contact form, we'd love to hear from you. Well, that's the key point you made is these people. Because so many times when you talk about influencing the sales process, you focus on the champion. I know Bob Bob's the guy. Bob said he's making the decision. Bob's going to do it. And what you do is you do a great job of cultivating Bob. You give a proposal that hopefully you do it live with Bob, and then Bob says, great, I'm going to send this over to my CFO and we'll see what happens.

[00:25:55] Kurt Schneiber: And that CFO has not been along the journey. I mean, when you think about it, when you think about the champions genius need who developed, there's the approver, which is typically your CEO, your business person, the business driver who sees the field. Oftentimes that's also the CEO, your champion who's probably been spearheading the project, the domino who often comes in late, that could be a board member that you don't even see. They could throw a whole wrinkle. The thing in that evaluator that could be procurement, CFO. My point is there's typically four to five people that could influence a deal. And if you're that CEO and you're stuck of saying, well, my sales team keeps coming to me, we don't know why the deal's closing, we don't know why we're trying to expedite it, it's because you haven't surrounded yourself around that entire deal. If you've got four to five champions or advocated for you, you can get movement. If you're counting on one that's going to push it to other places, then you're lost. Then you're playing with luck, so to speak.

[00:26:45] Kurt Schneiber: I think you hit the nail of the head there. And that not only works for new deals, but it works for existing clients as well. And all of a sudden you're surprised that you get an RFP over the transom for one of your existing clients for a big piece of business and you didn't know about it. That's a bad sign. And that means in most cases, not all, but most, your relationship manager has nurtured that relationship with Bob, and Bob loves us, but the decision got taken away from Bob and it's somewhere up above or on the side or whatever because Bob hasn't done his job very well, and as a result, they're not happy with him or Bob's going to get transferred. So he is looking somewhere else because his W him is different now. And you didn't know that, right? So that's why I do think, now, I don't mean to be prescribing, not my intent, but I do think something like a heat map where who influences what?

[00:27:44] Kurt Schneiber: And also what happens in those things if you do it well, then Bob gets transferred to another plant in Louisiana. Bob loves you. Boom, Bob, how's your new job? It's great, but our suppliers are just not very good. Can you come over and see me? Absolutely. We'll come over. So there's the downside risk and there's also the upside of that. You nurture those relationships at different levels. They move. If your clients are bigger than you are, sometimes that happens. Then they move to different places and boom, you follow. Or they move to a completely different company and they call you and say, can you come and help me? We're stuck. So that kind of stuff happens. And what I've found, Lee, to go back to, one of the close part of your original question is that most small to mid-size business companies don't have a sales process

[00:28:33] Lee Brumbaugh: Or it sits on a shelf and gets dusty. It's not interactive, it's not ongoing, it's not engaging with the business. And that's the thing. We can say we have a sales process, but are we following those steps? Are we implementing and are those steps actually meaningful for the customer? If the steps are built around what's easiest for you versus what helps that company get what they want to have delivered? It's a totally different ballgame.

[00:28:56] Kurt Schneiber: It's very true. And so that's the gap on the people component. That is a problem or challenge that way, right? Better word challenge is that do I have the right person leading the sales team such that we have a process that leads us here, identifies clearly the list of prospects we should be calling on, the list of existing clients we should be totally tied with and consistently measures that and keeps track of it. Now that leads to one more question, is one more thought anyway, that most clients don't have a really good CRM or they don't know how to use it. And so I start them, I try encourage them. And I'm not a sales coach, so I encourage them, what is your sales process? What does it look like? Can you just do it manually? Hash marks on the wall, names of key deals, draw a pipeline on your big whiteboard, everybody.

[00:29:56] Kurt Schneiber: Look, where are we in? How do we get a person to hear from here to here down to the bottom of the decision making point? What are the key steps that happen there? Do we know that? Are we measuring those? Are they on a scorecard anywhere? Do we know? And so once they can figure this out manually on a whiteboard or a flip chart or whatever, then they can start to think about can A CRM help us? Because actually that is a CRM. It happens to be physical, but it is a customer and a prospect. Relationship managers, I manage my business 11 years on moleskin notebooks. I got this many of 'em, right? I'm okay with that because I know all my clients, I know it's important. I don't need a fancy CRM, but if I'm running a big business, I'm having a CRM. And the CRM isn't something that should be penal for the salespeople.

[00:30:49] Kurt Schneiber: It should be a tool. It should be a leverage tool. Tool that helps them be better scheduling the next meetings, making their next phone calls. What are they going to do next? What's the next level? Who do I bring to my next meeting to help me? Who's the influencer? Where are they? What are their numbers? Where are their birthdays? What sports teams do they like? All these things that make little connections because ultimately what happens when you use that kind of a tool? Well, Lee, is you build trust. They believe that we care about them, we talk to them in their language. So that's kind of my view. I'm not giving you all kinds of stories. I got all stories. I don't want to waste your time, but you asked me what's hard. That's hard because now we're in the process component and now that's let's design the process.

[00:31:32] Kurt Schneiber: Let's at least measure what we do now. Let's train people on how to do it right? Once they start training, they realize, well, that's not very good. We better fix that. So they get it. Maybe should be train him, measure something in the process. Are we making progress or not learn when they need to interject themselves to manage somebody when he's off track? And then when he's on, you're off track, they say, why are you off track? And he says, boss, that process, that's not really good. Well, tell me how it could be better if we did this, this, and this. It'd be much better. Now we can assess is it working or not? So that part of our effort to coach people in the sales world is sometimes hard because they often think it's more touchy feely, it's more soft around the edges, and you have to be kind of a Zig Ziglar type to be good at this.

[00:32:23] Kurt Schneiber: And I like to strip away the personalities and get to the practicals. What does it take to be a great salesperson? I'll add one thing and then I'll just ask the next question. And that is this. I recognize that there's a common denominator of success in sales, and it is this successful people learn to make a habit of doing things that unsuccessful people don't like to do. Now, I can't claim that as my own, but I continue to be a pro advocate. That's Albert EN Gray, 1947 little pamphlet called The Common Denominator of Success. And what he said to follow that up is, yeah, and there's a little secret behind that and that is that the successful people don't often like to do it either. They just do it anyway.

[00:33:10] Lee Brumbaugh: Well, look, it is the simplest things we do nowadays, and especially in today's world. It's like, well send an email, I'll send an email, and they didn't respond to the email. Sometimes it's hard to pick up the phone and dial and call and do all the follow-up steps, all those types of things. But if you're the right person and you've got a process that tells you that's the best step to cultivate the relationship and you log that into what you're doing, again, it's people to process to execution. And that's been our common themes today. And if you do that well, you've got that same hotel that you want to go back to in Mexico City you're in and you're again,

[00:33:44] Kurt Schneiber: Absolutely right now, I haven't been back to Mexico City very often. I went three times. You're killing the story here. We were good, but I enjoyed it every time. But it is, by the way, when I do travel now, I almost always end up in a Marriott property of some sort. They're not the four Seasons, but they're always predictable and consistent and adequate for what simple me wants to pay for.

[00:34:07] Lee Brumbaugh: This has been great of, again, sales, the right people, but the right process into execution has been a common theme to us the day with your experience in sales, anything that really stands out to you though that we haven't hit today, that you want a business order to walk away in helping their business go to the next level?

[00:34:22] Kurt Schneiber: Yeah, a couple things. One, a really important thing is to get the right people in the right seats. They're going to fit your culture. They're got to be really good at their jobs. We call it get it on it. Have capacity. And sometimes you might have somebody who you believe has the capacity, but just not quite the experience yet. And so then that's when I think of people like you Lee, to say, Hey, look, this person needs a little coaching, or your team needs some coaching. Let someone come in and help you. I'm here helping you with your business system. You invited me in. Maybe in sales. Your whole team would benefit by having someone who's an expert join you for a month, two months, three months, six months, and elevate your process, assess your people, coach your people, get them focused and become more professionals at what they do and change the trajectory of your company that way.

[00:35:18] Kurt Schneiber: So that's one thing that say, well, what else? What else is there? And I think that's really key. And so another thing I would mention is, and maybe it's embodied in a story. And so way back in the day, I used to work for Citigroup and I was managing a business that was, at that time more than 20 years ago now, was about a $600 million business. I had pretty much the whole thing was I was managing top to bottom and we had a energy company that was consistently ours. I won't name the name, it's not important. And it was a 20 plus million dollars client for us in my product set. Every year we had another company equally consequential in the energy space, $7 million. I said, why? How come shouldn't that be a 20 million client? I was new to that business and my European guy and my North American guy said, we should trigger this out.

[00:36:10] Kurt Schneiber: And so surprisingly enough, we went to a meeting in Mexico City, they dragged us out of our hotel into some two star, two and a half star hotel in the basement and negotiated with us to get this next deal. So what I did in that meeting as the head of the business, along with a sales guy or two and one lady as well, is I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me see if this hotel has a whiteboard. And I went and got a whiteboard and brought it downstairs and turned around so that we were all facing the whiteboard together and I'm drawing and writing and making pictures and exam and said yes. And we had something to do on our side and they said to do on our side, but they said, we want to do business with you. And we won the first deal, which was a Latin America deal.

[00:36:59] Kurt Schneiber: And they said, you'll never get North America because this other bank has that. Okay, fine. So then we won Eastern Europe and then we done a North Africa, and then we won a piece of Europe, regular Western Europe, and then North America came up to bid and we won that as well. So we took that company in 18 months. Banks don't move this fast, I move fast. We took that to a 20 plus million dollars business and they're still making that money 20 years later, they don't even remember my name, but the guy who I sold to at this company just retired. And we've kept in touch maybe once or twice a year, just, Hey, how you doing? He lives in London. I said, Darrs, congratulations on your retirement. It was a great relationship, blah, blah, blah. We were on the phone. He said, Kurt, I remember that day when you were in the basement with our guys and you pulled out of that whiteboard and we started doing stuff together and it just changed the nature of our relationship that you were just so greasy.

[00:37:57] Kurt Schneiber: Finger your nails, practical, not bankerly with your tie all on and all that stuff. And so what I say, what's the principle? You have to understand how people make decisions and don't get wrapped up in yourself. Get wrapped up in the mentality of the person on the other side of the table, really care about them. Try to align your WIIFM with their WIIFM so that you totally understand what they need and want and it aligns with you. And if you can do that, what happens is the trust goes up. It just magnifies the likelihood of you to win a deal. So if I would have that thing to add, it is not the story itself. It is understand the nature of what it's like to truly care about the person on the other side of the table such that you want the best for him and that hopefully matches up with you.

[00:38:51] Kurt Schneiber: And if it's not the best for him, don't do it. So when I'm selling now, this is my last thing, then I'll let you go. When I'm selling what I do, we're in a 90 minute meeting in the last seven minutes, I just kind of show how it works in the process. By the way, that's a good thing to have in your sales process. It's a proven process, right? How's this going to work when we work together? I get to a point in there, I tell 'em my price, my price is a little bit high. It's higher than anybody else in Houston. And I say, I look at 'em and I say, oh, it's guaranteed. If you don't like it, don't pay me. And also, you know what? If you don't like my cologne, but you like E os, I have other people that have better cologne than me, I'll be happy to introduce you. Almost always when they realize that I'm not desperate, they say, no, no, no, we want you. That's fine. Okay, so don't be desperate. Desperation smells pretty bad.

[00:39:43] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. Well, Kurt, I love what you're saying. You're keeping the customer first. You're relating on their terms, what's in it for them, what's in it for you together, and it's a partnership. So this has been great today. I know that we got into obviously sales process salespeople, but really tangible ways to sell. So if you are even that sole entrepreneur out there who's also consulting, hopefully there's some valuable takeaways that you're going to have with us. So again, this has been Sales Against the Odds. Kurt, thanks for joining us.

[00:40:09] Kurt Schneiber: Pleasure to be with you, Lee. See you soon. Bye-bye.

[00:40:12] Lee Brumbaugh: You've been listening to Sales Against the Odds. Be sure to hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. And if you want more resources on scaling sales, check out our website at salesacceleration.com.

[00:00:55] Tom Gardner: I’m hitting my coffee here first thing out of the gate. 

[00:00:58] Lee Brumbaugh: Alright, so we’ve got a special thing for everybody today. Tom has agreed to do. He will be on the hot seat. We’re going to go through five questions that will impact owners in the SMB marketplace because it’s six in the morning. Tom has espresso shots. So Tom, if you don’t get an A, you’ve got to, there you go with the sign. I like it if you don’t get the A, you’re doing a shot of espresso. So you’ve got five questions we’re going to time you at a minute or less. And again, focus on areas, tangible results of what we can do in the SMB space. Sound like a plan, Tom? 

[00:01:29] Tom Gardner: Sounds like a plan. I hope I don’t have to do that shot of espresso, but let’s see how it goes. 

[00:01:33] Lee Brumbaugh: Five of them. Alright, 

[00:01:35] Tom Gardner: Five of ’em nonetheless. 

[00:01:36] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. Biggest opportunity for SMB businesses. So SMB world to grow their top line revenue, what can they do to get real results? 

[00:01:47] Tom Gardner: Great question Lee. And this is one that we hear quite often and really I can’t look anywhere else except for leveraging AI in the use of small mid-size businesses. Everything from lead generation, getting the right messages to the right prospects at the right timing, all the way through doing things on scale and leveraging AI for the use of scale and even into coaching and developing of your reps, making sure that the reps and your sales team is really equipped to have the right types of conversations at the right time with the right resources around them. So leveraging AI all the way through the use of SMB from a growth standpoint is a key critical step. And I think the companies that really do take advantage of the tools and the abundance of tools in the marketplace today are going to be the ones that rise to the top here. So I would answer that with use of ai. 

[00:02:36] Lee Brumbaugh: Love it. Great answer. You’re not doing the first espresso, but you’re right. Embracing ai, we’ve seen it with all our advisors. Those that don’t are going to fall behind. And from an efficiency scale, it’s where we need to be. Alright, second question for you. Biggest mistake business owners make in SMB for that business owner? Today’s listening, he’s got a $5 million company. What’s the biggest mistake you see in the space? 

[00:03:00] Tom Gardner: I would say looking at and really underestimating the value of a proven sales process, a repeatable sales process. Really seeing business owners that either have their sales team trying to follow in their steps if they were a founder led sales organization and selling like they do, or really just not having a defined process that their entire sales team is leveraging. And what happens in that case, Lee, is that you see sales teams doing their own thing their own way, at their own time and they lose a lot of the insights into the business. Example, what has to happen for an opportunity to move from stage to stage? What are the questions that need to be asked? What information needs to be gathered? And if the team is really in sync and selling in a very similar path, they are able to get insights into the business to see what’s the likelihood of this deal being closed, what’s the likelihood of it progressing to the next phase? What type of information needs to be conveyed at that next phase? And when people are not following a proven or repeatable sales process that’s defined and agreed to, they’re losing the insights into the business left. So hopefully my answer is the right one here for you to stay away from that expresso shot, but I think it’s the repeatable sales process. 

[00:04:12] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, good answer. And again, it’s one thing to think you have it, but to know it’s documented, have other teams utilizing across organization, even with founder-led sales, bringing that CEO, that business owner back into helping close deals involved in the big deals at the end of the pipeline. I think it’s critically important. You talked a little bit about AI in your first answer, so I’m going to go back to this. What is your favorite AI tool and how do you use it from a sales perspective? 

[00:04:38] Tom Gardner: From a sales perspective, ChatGPT. Chat I think is one of the most popular that’s out there today, but I leverage it each and every day. And that could be anything from crafting of the right messages and emails to market insights, content creation. I actually leverage chat GPT in preparing to use other AI tools and other technologies. What types of prompts or scripts should I have created to be able to make other tools even that much more efficient and effective as well? So chat is one of those that I use each and every day just because the nature, the broad application of where that chat function can actually operate for us to 

[00:05:17] Lee Brumbaugh: Everywhere from finding competition, your messaging agree. My wife was we trying to, she’s redoing stuff out on the outside and she was like, can this furniture go in this spot? So she’s taking picture and my kids do know more about it than I do, but it is what you do to stay up and how you can use it for sales perspective, that’s absolutely critical. Alright, you’re doing good. You’re not drinking coffee, you’re going to question four, give me an example of a key learning you had from your sales career. Something that maybe is funny, stood out to you, anything that stands out that you’ve come across in your career. 

[00:05:48] Tom Gardner: It’s funny the timing of this that we’re here drinking coffee at 6:00 AM my time. But one of my early career learnings was I had a sales meeting as an early sales rep and I scheduled that meeting into early to mid-afternoon. And so now I want you to think for a second, a darker conference room, big meal for lunch late afternoon. And here it’s one-on-one with this business owner and I’m doing a PowerPoint presentation and I feel like I’m just absolutely crushing it. Just I’m on mark with all of my message the whole bit. As I asked some questions of engagement back to my prospect, they really weren’t being answered very quickly or at all. And I had realized that, well I probably had put the prospect to sleep for a period of time there during a one-on-one meeting. So I think the key lesson that I learned is really schedule your meetings when you’re at your best schedule, where it’s applicable for you and your prospect to be at their best and to be very thoughtful and strategic with how and when you conducted meetings to make sure, did you carve load 

[00:06:59] Lee Brumbaugh: Your, this is the episode of the office where Michael’s eating all the fettuccine Alfredo before you did the prospect is that’s what’s going on. 

[00:07:06] Tom Gardner: Very much so. I had plenty of coffee, but I may or may not have put my prospect to sleep in a one-on-one meeting. So I learned the 

[00:07:14] Lee Brumbaugh: Lesson about jogging his prospects before meetings. I got it. Alright on that one. Maybe you should take your expressor shot with that 

[00:07:21] Tom Gardner: One. Oh, I think it’s much needed here. Okay. Okay. See if I can do this. 

[00:07:26] Lee Brumbaugh: There you go. Out the sign and everything. Alright, now that you’re fully caffeinated, what is your last one? Number five question on the hot seat. What is the most important thing to do or not do when finding an all-star sales rep? 

[00:07:38] Tom Gardner: So many times I see business owners that really just leverage industry experiences, almost their sole criteria for hiring and they’re missing opportunities with some tremendous candidates. And so one of the biggest mistakes is overplaying that industry experience card. So encouragement here is have a thorough, well-rounded sales hiring plan, meaning who’s going to be doing the interviews, what are we going to be looking for? What’s that ideal candidate profile look like? Leveraging assessments if you’re going to be leveraging assessments to get further insight into those candidates. But having a plan and a thorough plan and an interview plan to be able to make sure that you’re making good hiring decisions and really leveraging all of the men and women around to have various vantage points into that candidate. And if you do, you’ll have a really, really good rockstar candidate that’s going to be added to the team. But having a hiring plan, 

[00:08:34] Lee Brumbaugh: Right? Love it. Yeah. Look, all the things we’ve talked about, if you still have wrong people in the wrong seats, it didn’t go anywhere. So absolutely having a detailed plan and there’s a much difference. We know salespeople can trick us, right? So there’s a big difference between interviewing the right way from a sales perspective of that hire versus just winging it. So good. Tom, you are off the hot this morning. Thank you for joining us. 

[00:08:58] Tom Gardner: Let me throw it back to you, if I could Lee here for a second. So I’ve been on the hot seat, but you’ve been such a generous host, so I would love to be able to put you on the hot seat for just one question if we could. Sure. Go for it. You had asked me around some of my key learnings as an early sales rep. I’d love to turn that question back to you. So you’ve had a lot of experience in sales and sales leadership and being the visionary of Sales Xceleration and all the key learnings that you have around you. What is one that you look back at and throughout your career is one of those most critical key learnings that helped position you for success? 

[00:09:31] Lee Brumbaugh: The one thing that stands out, and I go back to what we just talked about when you talk about all the processes and all the things that we do, if you hire the right person, so many times the business owner is wearing a lot of different hats. The team’s wearing a lot of hats and you start, you onboard that person, you spend three days with them, you regurgitate, you talk about your message and how you stand apart from your competition, and then you release them to the wilderness. And that’s really not how it should be. I was blessed enough to start my career with Johnson Johnson and their sales and management training program was amazing, but I had three weeks to practice and role play and message, and then I had mentors and managers working with me and riding with me. So in the SMB world, when you hire that first rep, you’ve got to invest in them. 

[00:10:14] Lee Brumbaugh: You’ve got to invest time, resources, energy. You need to onboard them a detailed onboarding positioning so that they learn everything about your company, they can message it back to you, and then you got to stay involved. You’ve got those first deals that come across, you’re helping them with pipeline development, you’re helping them with closing deals that you can’t be that founder that just hires a sales team and removes yourself. Whether it’s having a fractional person that’s helped supporting you, whether it’s having a sales manager in place, you’ve got to develop people. And I think that’s the biggest thing that stands out to me as a teams that develop people the right way. Were the ones that were able to scale their businesses and successfully grow. So that stands out. Hope that’s what you’re looking for. I don’t have a shot of espresso, so if it’s not you’re host anyway. 

[00:10:56] Tom Gardner: Well, you’re lucky you answered it very well because I would’ve not have made you do a shot of espresso either there. So well done. Thank you, Lee, I appreciate that. 

[00:11:03] Lee Brumbaugh: Tom, thank you for joining us. This has been Sales Against The Odds. We’ve given you five tangible ways to go back and repeat into your business. Hopefully this is helpful. Next time join us where we will have another great business leader learning, sharing with us all the insights that they can to help you grow your business. Tom, thank you for joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you, Lee. You’ve been listening to Sales Against the Odds. Be sure to hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. And if you want more resources on scaling sales, check out our website salesxceleration.com