EntreLeadership - #389: How to Coach Your Sales Team with Jeb Blount

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

If you started a business, odds are you know how to drive home a sale. But you can’t be the only one on the phones and running the business forever—it’s just not sustainable. If you want to take your business to that next level of performance, you need salespeople to think and act like you do—to leave the cave, kill something, and drag it home! Jeb Blount, sales and leadership thought leader, draws on his years in sales consulting to show you just how to coach your sales team to serve and win the hearts of customers time after time.   entreleadership.com/podcast Jeb Blount's website Sales Gravy website #381: Debt Is Never the Answer with Dave Ramsey Sales EQ by Jeb Blount Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching The EntreLeader's Guide to Delegation Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   As an Amazon Associate EntreLeadership earns from qualifying purchases.   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I don't know what feelings come to mind for you when you hear the word sales. Maybe you've been sold to. Maybe something's been pushed on you. If you're like a lot of people, your experience with sales is somebody's manipulating you to do something that you don't really want to do. That's gross. If you're a small business owner, if you lead a business, if you're part of a sales team, the truth is you don't have a business if you don't sell.

From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast. where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and today my guest is Jeb Blunt. Jeb's an author, speaker, but he's not just one of those motivational gurus. You know, the last thing we need is more hype around this topic.

We need real answers. We need real people given us solutions for not just how to sell stuff, not how to push things on to people, but actually how to serve. At Entry leadership, we teach that doing something, sells well is what's all about serving people. And that's what Jeb believes. A lot of organizations are doing this well. They're serving. They're selling. They're growing. And some organizations, they're not because they're actually spending less time selling and serving and they're spending

a lot more time just talking about it. The problem for a lot of small business people, and I was there, I left the corporate environment and started my own business, is that you plan to plan to plan to plan to sell. So you spend more time trying to get your business card set up than you actually do trying to go out and get customers. So, you know, entrepreneurs are the first salespeople. And if you are an entrepreneur and you're a business person, you're always going to be the number one salesperson for your organization. You can't ever forget that. So for small business people, acquiring customers and keeping customers is the number one thing that you do. That's how you make an impact in your organization. And it's how you scale. And if you don't do those two things very well,

everything else doesn't matter. I want to talk about, the art of sales and how that works in a second. But, you know, let's stay with this idea that small business and entrepreneurs, you know, these guys figure out, they figure out how to sell, you know, and oftentimes I'm visiting with the founder of a small business who, you know, they are still selling actively and they're actually kind of getting stuck because they can't go work on the business and build the operations and lead and build the team because, like you said, they're still their number one salesperson. There's this tension of, well, I'm bringing in revenue. how do I let that go while I go build the business?

Well, that goes back to you can't scale yourself. So if you're going to run a business, you have to at some point elevate yourself to a leader. That doesn't mean that you're not selling anymore because in my business, when we have deals in the line, my salespeople bring me in, and sometimes I'll be the person that pushes it over. But the goal is to coach them to the point and grow them to the point where they don't need me. Because my whole goal as a leader is to make myself obsolete so that people don't need me in the deal. However, I think that is the inflection point for every small business is when does the business owner and the entrepreneur move from doer, right, to scaleer? And I was listening to your podcast with Dave that you did a couple of three weeks ago.

And, you know, he was talking about not borrowing money or not taking VC. So when you're growing slow, as he says, and I'm a business that grew slow with no debt, no, you know, no capital, no investors. Good for you. You know, the point is that you have to, there's pain in that scale. And the hardest thing that you're going to do is hire your first salesperson, you're probably going to fail. And then when you hire the second salesperson, you're probably going to fail. And you have the third salesperson, you're probably going to fail until you find the right person. But why is that?

Why do you have to fail so many times to get it right? If you're a really big company and you're hiring salespeople, you have the capital to go out and find talent. You've got an HR department that does the recruiting for you. You've got a battery of test to bring them in. And you have the ability to hire lots of people. and maybe you hire 10 people and three of them work, but you're still ahead. But if you're a small business owner and you're selling and you're doing and you're delivering and you're taking care of everything and then you're trying to be good at hiring people,

and professionals that are good at hiring salespeople fail often. So small business people come to me and, you know, that we coach and they say, well, you know, how do I hire a salesperson? And I say the same thing. It's not easy and you're going to fail, but you need to do it. And you need to understand that you're going to have to go through the process until you find that anchor. And once you find that anchor, then you take care of that person, teach them what you know, and then go find the next anchor. We want it to be easy. We want there to be an easy button

around this. There's not an easy button around it. There's not an easy button for moving. There's not an easy button anywhere in business. There isn't. And so what happens, though, is then you end up hiring people. I can say the next steps. You hire people and you do, you scale yourself. And then one day you walk into a conference room and I've been there. And all your people are sitting in a conference room, and they're having a conversation about systems and processes and workflows and all those things. And you look around and there's nobody in the organization selling anything. And you have to say, stop, wait a minute. We can be the best organized systems company in the world. But if we don't go sell stuff, this doesn't make a difference because we're not creating

cash flow. Right. So you move from balancing your time into business versus working on the business to then helping balance other people's time working to grow the business versus working, you know, on the business. And the problems continue to grow. They're just different. But the fact doesn't change that a business's job is to get and keep customers. That's it. That's number one. You do that. You're going to win. And that's it. I think one of the scariest things for founders, when you're selling as a founder, you're building a relationship with people who you're asking them to trust you. And you have a product and you have a service that you're excited about and you're delighted. to offer them because you know it's going to change their life. And if something goes wrong with that

product or service, you personally are going to guarantee that it's taken care of. And you're building a relationship. And there's a trust exchange. And the idea of bringing somebody in from the outside to sell, oftentimes the fear is, well, they're going to do this transactionally. They're not going to have a heart. They're not going to have the compassion and the empathy that I have as the founder. How do we find the people that are going to care, Jeb, the way that I care, I believe in this thing. It's my life's work. It's my dream. How do I find the people that are going to feel that way? Well, my wife, who is our CFO and, you know, a wonderful leader in her own way, said to me back in 2011 because I was really frustrated because of this reason. And part of the frustration was that I

built the business and so I knew where everything was. And all the customers, they came to me. Because if I said it was going to happen, it was going to happen. And I would do whatever, if I had to not sleep for a week to take care of a customer, I would do that. And they become your friends. And they are there. And it's my reputation. It's what I believe, you know, if I say it's going to happen, it's going to happen. And she said to me, you will never find people that will care about this business as you do ever.

So quit trying. You're delusional if you think you're going to do that. You just need to find good people who are nice and kind and understand customer experience and know how to take care of people. And then you've got to train them and trust them. And you've got to start getting out of the way. So one of the inflection moments, both in our marriage and in our business, because, It was one of the first times where she, like, really from a business standpoint, became my mentor and helped me because I was so close to the business I couldn't see beyond it. And at the same time, she was right.

And her words ring in my ears all the time as I'm dealing with people and I'm frustrated. And even yesterday, you know, I left here and I was here at your conference speaking. And I got in my car and I was talking to my CSO and I was really, really frustrated. and before I made the phone call, I listened to her words and said, you're never going to find people that are going to care as much as you do. So instead of trying to will people to have that same level of passion, it's step back and lead and coach. So we have good people working for us,

but they're not going to get it at the level of the entrepreneur or the leader, and it's delusional to believe that they will. And the truth is, in business and sales and life, you cannot be delusional and successful at the same time. That's true. So that awareness allows you to, step back and say, okay, how can I coach this person so that the next time they face this issue, they know what steps to take. And then beyond that, recognizing that you cannot scale yourself,

you cannot scale yourself. So even though when I take care of customers, it's a different level of taking care of customers, I can't take care of every customer. There's no way I can have a business that has many, many customers and do that. So what I had to do, and this was important, I had to let go. That took about two years, like 24 months of letting go to let other people take care of customers that trusted and believed in me and trust them. And then at the same time, I had to pick and choose. So there's a handful of customers that I own and take care of and there aren't anymore. I don't have any more time to put it in those customers. Well, and it sounds like what you're saying is it takes time, maybe two years, maybe more, to develop the confidence that the results and the outcomes and how the customers are taking care of will be at the level that you expect, right? Your standards. And maybe confidence isn't the right word. Maybe it's trust. Because, you know, the moment that you have confidence, you start moving into complacency. And if you move into complacency, you're moving into mediocrity. And so as a leader, I'm constantly paranoid that we're going to let a customer down. And we do. It happens. So I'm always looking for where in our system are we failing in customer experience? Because one of the things that I know to be true about business in general, whether you're small business or big businesses, in the sales process and in the service process, your customer's emotional experience. working with you and your people is the most consistent predictor of outcome of any other variable. So what you're looking for are people having a great emotional experience.

It doesn't mean that we're going to be perfect, but are they doing that? That's why I go back to it's not about hiring people who can operate at the same level that I do or see things at the same level I do. It's hiring people that believe that delighting your customer and taking care of your customer, whether you're selling to them, the emotional experience of buying or you're servicing them, that they believe that. That's true. And Trisha on my team is like the most amazing human being. Like somebody calls her up and they got a problem. When they walk away, they're like, oh my God, I talk to Trisha. She's amazing. They send me notes. Like she's incredible. And we messed up, but they're happier because they spoke to her. And that's the kind of person that you want to bring on and not worry about whether everything's going to be perfect. Well, and sometimes they do it better than we would do it. You know, they have skill sets that we don't necessarily have. And I think as leaders, one of the best things we can do is, you know, we put people around us where we have deficits. I want to come back to this notion of, you know, nobody's going to care as much as you do.

Because to an extent, I certainly agree with that. I would say no one's ever going to have the same vantage point that you have as the founder. What we figured out at Ramsey's Solutions is, while people may not care about the business as much as Dave, they do care as much about the mission we're on. That's true. And there's a difference in that greater purpose and people making a contribution to, hey, we believe in this mission to make a difference in the world. What's the difference between caring about the mission and just caring about the business or maybe having a different vantage point? I think that's a really good separation. So caring about the business, and that's what Carrie, my wife was talking about. Nobody's going to care as much about the

business and the mechanics of growing the business and accelerating the business. What I have is people who care about the mission. Our mission is advancing sales as a profession. My people, live and die in making an impact in people's lives. And so they walk away and they feel great about it. Or we get a letter in that says, you know, you changed everything for our organization. And, you know, we get those from, you know, Fortune 100 companies all the way down to small businesses. That's what they live for. And I think that's the key. You have to help get people who understand the mission. And I think as a leader, you have to define the mission. So there can be no ambiguity in what your mission is. So once you define the mission, you've got to get people who follow that and believe that.

And I think that's the key. The same time, you also have to make sure that people, people know and believe that they're doing worthwhile work. So if they're, if they believe in their heart that what they're doing is making a difference, that makes all the difference in the world. So you said your mission is to grow in advance. Say it one more time. To advance sales as a profession. Depending on where you come from, when you hear the word sales, if you're like you and me, it's this magical, beautiful, wonderful thing where you're serving people, you're helping people get access to the things that improve the quality of their life or their business. And there's also a stigma around that word. So how do you define sales? Well, sales is like you, I define it the way you said

is helping people. I mean, I'm solving problems. Problem solvers are the champions of the business world. If you just think about that way. If you're an entrepreneur, what do you do? You go solve problems. People pay you for that. Right. So as a salesperson, your job is to go solve problems. But why is there a stigma around sales? Well, I mean, if you look at movies and TV and, you know, the sales profession as a whole, I mean, if you look at everything that most people see, it's a cartoon character of what we actually do. And people don't necessarily like salespeople. Salespeople don't even like salespeople.

Why? Because people like to buy, but they don't want to be sold. I mean, that's a basic tenet of sales. So there's a stigma around the profession itself. And, you know, I listen to micro talk about blue collar folks who are working in, say, plumbing or welding under the ocean or what have you. And there's a stigma around that, right? So do you want to be the person turning a wrench who's making $300,000 a year,

turn their rent? or do you want to be a person who graduated from college with a polysci degree and you're working at Starbucks? And most people would pick the polysci degree because they see that as better. It's prestigious. Exactly. But salespeople make more money than doctors. They make more money than lawyers. I'm regularly because of the company that I keep and the people that I work with, working with salespeople who are making over a million dollars a year and income just by helping people.

They're solving problems. So the stigma around it's the same stigma anywhere else. Sales is essentially the blue-collar job of the business world. However, if you're a company, you get this. The salespeople on your team, if you're the CEO of the company, you're the C-O-O or the accountants, you may not get this. But the salespeople on your team or your superheroes, they're your elite athletes. If you don't have them, you don't have a business. So there are people in organizations that get that and people that don't.

There's also, if you think about it. Well, let's also clarify this. I mean, the money is a lot of fun, right? I mean, the fact that your opportunity is not limited as a salesperson. And I think that's fantastic. I think it's capitalistic. I think it's what, you know, if we could figure out how to put our receptionist on commission, we would do that, right?

Because your raise is effective when you are. But here's what I figured out. I've been really fortunate to make a tremendous amount of money in sales. And most of that money, I don't really know where it is now. But what I do have, I keep this folder, it's people that are customers who I sold something to, and they send me a thank you note about how that thing changed their life and the difference that it made. I got a letter from a lady just the other day who they came to Entree leadership. I sold them a ticket to their first event. I want to say 10 years ago. And she and her husband were stuck and they were broke. They were struggling. They came in what we offered them, help them have these breakthroughs. And then fast forward 10 years, she lost her husband tragically just a few months ago. And she wrote this beautiful letter that brought me to tears that said, thank you for believing in us more than we believed in ourselves back then and dragging us into this thing. So we thought at the time,

time that was actually a gift, you know, to what now is our legacy for our family. Even though my husband's gone, I feel like I can, I can do what we need to do to lead and drive this business forward generationally. And you can't put a price on that. The fulfillment, the beauty, the peace of mind as a salesperson, when you believe in what you act. Now, we got to talk about that in a second. You have to believe in what you're doing. But so much more than the money I've found, I'm curious your journey on this, but the fulfillment of knowing you're helping people. Well, I think that's one of the things that separates people. So when we look at, go back to the trades, right?

So, you know, I've got a man crush on microbe. But he's a great guy. But, you know, he talks about the industrial arts and the pride that you get in doing a job and doing it well, no matter what the job is. And I think it translates the same way. In sales, it's a craft of helping people solve a problem. So nothing that for me is more impactful than I walk through someone's, like in my old days, I could walk through their manufacturing plant. And I can see things they can't see.

Not because they're not, you know, I'm better at them than they are. It's just that I have a different point of view. Like I'm like a consultant, right? So I'm able to show them something that changes everything in their organization and they follow up with a letter. And one of my favorite letters very similar. It's not as heart, you know, wrenching as that. But it was a CEO who in a meeting told me that all my competitors were the same and that he was sick and tired of dealing with my industry and all the things that happened with it. And I said, well, can you want me around your place and just take me through and show me what's important to you?

And he did. And I listened to him. And his biggest issue was he just didn't want his line shut down because it cost him and his employees money. So I said, I'm going to come back with a blueprint for how we'll never shut your line down. And if I do that, would that be interesting? He said, yeah. So I came back with it and we put it in place. It cost him a lot more money.

And I've got this letter that he wrote me. And the first line is, you were right. You know, all companies in your industry are not the same. And I have it framed and I hold on to it because it meant the world to me that we were able to change his mindset about what salespeople were and what service could be. What's cool about that is you get the money, you get the commission. But he gets the better end of the deal because he's got a lifetime of a better operation, right? His business is forever going to be changed as a result of what you provide. I think that's the key.

It's when I was making about the, you know, you can make more money in the sales profession than you can being a lawyer, right? which is what I wanted to be until my dad, who's a lawyer, said, don't be a lawyer, going to be in sales, you'll make more money. Trust me. So you know that, right? But the point is that if you lead with money, and I think you're making this point, if you lead with money, you don't win. If you lead with help, if you lead with solved problems, you win.

And that's how I've always approached sales. And I'll tell you a short story. I was out in Portland doing a training for a big insurance company. So I wrote a book called Sales EQ. And we have a lot of human influence frameworks in, in SELSEQ. So if you just think about sales, cells is just getting a series of commitments. It's just asking people to comply with a request.

So the way the brain works is pretty simple. And there's, you know, humans are predictable because of that. So I teach these things. So one of the guys grabs me and pulls me out and says, you know, I was, I worked for the CIA. And then when I retired, I came to work for this insurance company. And he goes, you know, the things that you're teaching are the exact same things that we learned when I was in the CIA. So when we'd be interrogating somebody are trying to get a, you know,

someone to turn and get on our side. Because it's all psychology. It's all psychology. And he goes, he says, so what's the difference between that and what you're doing? I said, well, what you were doing was you were manipulating people because the outcome that you wanted was them to basically, you know, turn or give you information. For me, I'm never, ever, ever, ever going to sell someone something that they don't need, don't want is not the right thing for them. So the difference is that I'm not trying to accomplish the outcome of getting what I want. I'm trying to accomplish the outcome of getting what they want. You know, you bring up a great

point, and I can think of two situations that I've been in as a salesperson where I just felt gross. I thought that, oh, this is this is borderline lacking integrity here. And one is trying to sell something to somebody that didn't actually need this thing. But I was using the psychology, the mechanics, a borderline manipulation to go, whatever it takes, just get this product into the world, whether they actually need it or not. It's really not. cool, right? That's not good. And the other one is when I don't believe in the product or service. I mean, I've tried different things in sales prior to working at Ramsey where, you know, it's the opportunity for me, you know, that I get recruited and you're going to make great commission

and I get in there and I figure out, this product's terrible, you know? So talk about the idea of believing in what you do. Why is that so important if you're going to win long term in sales? So this is one of the, I think one of the misnomer is about selling. I'm going to try to take what you said, but I'm going to break it into a couple of pieces here. The misnomer is that you have to believe in your product in order to sell your product. So you have to love and be passionate about it. Well, that's true for a subset of people. Like you work for Ramsey. This is the top tier of, you know, of education. Everybody knows that this organization is number one in its space. Well, there's a few hundred people that get to work here, but the rest of the people are not working at Ramsey. They're working

someplace else. So same thing. You know, if you work for hours. and you're in the Apple store and you're selling Apple, like you're selling the top tier. A few people get to do that, but most people don't. Most people are selling mundane stuff. Like, they're selling construction and plumbing, and they're putting decks on the back of people's houses. They're, you know, I sold industrial uniforms, not a sexy product, okay? Right. So I didn't particularly wake up every day and was passionate about selling industrial uniforms.

What I was passionate about was going into people's organizations and helping them solve problems that were that were related to what I did. So one of the biggest accounts that I sold was a big utility that needed to protect their people from arc flashes. So we put them into safety uniforms like Nomex. And it was fascinating getting in the middle of it. I had really no interest in no max. I mean, there wasn't a product that I got excited about. What I got excited about was the process of selling and helping my customer. But even in that case, you're doing something that matters. You would have to agree that just because it's mundane doesn't mean it doesn't matter. That's exactly right. But that's what I think that the problem is, is that we say those words.

Like, you've got to be passionate about your product. And everybody's thinking, well, I need to find a company that's like the number one. Well, most people are selling for number two. Most people are. I think what we're talking about, though, that you can't find yourself in this situation as a salesperson is your product sucks. Yeah, that's different. Or it's half butt, or it's not delivered with excellence. So you could have even a commodity that still represents excellence. And you have to be able to stand behind from an integrity standpoint, I believe in this thing, right? That's true with one exception. Every product has its flawed.

Everything does. So if you think about it, right, what you're doing in sales is you were selling in an imperfect world, right, woven into the middle of all this human relationships. So I sold a product. I sold industrial uniforms. It was not a perfect product, nor was it a perfect service. There were so many things that could go wrong. What I sold was, and what I believed in was that I knew that if it went wrong, there was

somebody behind me that was going to fix it. The misnomer I see with salespeople is they expect everything to be perfect all the time. And I'm, I've explained this, and it's never going to be perfect. Well, I think you're calling out the difference between, yes, we never have perfection in any of our products or services. But as a salesperson, when you can say, you can count on me. Exactly. You can count on my organization. And we're going to do everything we can to get you a perfect experience. And when we don't, we're going to make it right. And when I'm sitting down with young salespeople, that's exactly what I teach them. When I explain, you're a 23, year old walking into a 52-year-old entrepreneur's office. You can't walk in there and say,

let me tell you how you're doing it all wrong. You have to walk in and you have to be able to say, I'm just a salesperson. And when you're looking at me, it's probably hard to trust me, but I want to show you who's behind me. And I literally take pictures of the people that you work with who are going to back you up. They're going to make sure that even though you're the person on the front line that's looking them in the eyes, and by the way, this goes back to our conversation about scaling your business. You need to have, if you're an entrepreneur and you're adding salespeople, they need to be able to do the same thing. Because you're not selling so much a product. You're selling the fact that that product is going to get backed up. It's going to get,

you know, it's going to take care of them. And if you don't believe that, right, if you don't believe that if I sell you something and something goes wrong, someone's going to come help me or that we're going to back it up, to me, that's when you're in the world of like, it feels yucky. Like, I'm selling something and I know that when this product fails or there's an issue or they have a problem, that they're going to be on their own on an island. And I'm never selling that. Like, I've got to know. But the reason that I wanted to point this out is because I just think that so often people get hung up and especially salespeople, they get hung up and everything's got to be perfect.

And as soon as a customer calls and they have a problem, the salesperson begins to fall apart because the customer had a problem. And the reality is that that's why you're here. Like, there's going to be a problem. And one of the things that I learned early on in my small business is that when, when, I solve a problem. Like if the customer has a problem and I solve it and I respond quickly, man, that's a loyal customer for life. And crazy as it sounds, I did an event here with a company and it was a big conference and

I spoke. Afterwards, they had me sitting at a, I was shaking hands, signing books and everything. And this gentleman shows up and says, you don't remember me. But when you, this is like back in 2010. And we had a job board at a time. I posted a job on your job board and there was a problem. you called me personally and solved my problem, and I'll never forget that. It was the greatest thing.

We have it on camera. And I did remember him because I remember the phone call. And even then he thought we were a big company. At that time, I was the salesperson and the customer service person. But it made such an impact that as soon as the problem we called. And I hope our small business owners listening to this are picking up that if you have a wall in your business between the sales team and how the product or service is delivered and your salespeople are not able to advocate for the customers. inside their customer experience. You know, I mean, on our Entry leadership team,

your sales advisor is your advocate for the entire journey that you're on this trip with us. And so if you have a problem with your coach, you have a problem in an event, your sales advisor is empowered to help solve that problem and grab leadership and grab the other teams and say, no, we're going to fix this, we're going to make it right.

But you've seen this where so oftentimes, you know, sales sits over here in a silo, and then you've got product and service and ops over here in other silos, and sales, they've got their hands tied. They're not able to actually help the customers. You've got to tear it in those walls, right? Absolutely.

Because here's the thing, you know, when we work, going to organizations, especially when they're having a problem with customer retention, and we start looking at the issue. What we find is that almost all the time, the issue is response. So, like, if you survey this, 70% of the time when you lose a customer, it's almost always because of neglect because they feel emotional that you took them for granted. It is not because of a service or a product failure. So when we look at that, if you're not. If you think about it, I called in, you've had this happen to you, right?

I called in, and nobody got back to me. They promised they were going to get back to me. They didn't get back to me. That happens. Oh, that's the worst. So exactly what you said. And I love the word advocate, because that's the message that I send to my sales and service team constantly.

Your job is to be an advocate for your customer. My job is to protect the business. Like, I've got to make sure that we're making a profit, that we're not giving away our IP, that we're doing all the right things for the organization. I need to care at that level. And so do other people on my team who I put in place to do that. But your job is to be the advocate for the customer. And the reason that we have the people there to make sure we're managing the business

is because if you hand the keys of your business to a group of salespeople, they'll probably burn the business down. So you've got to have some checks. They'll give away the farm if you're not careful. You've got to have checks and balances. I'll make you a deal. You can't refuse. But where it goes bad is that say a salesperson makes a bad deal or makes a promise that you can't keep or whatever the case may be. Then as a business owner, you go, well, that will never happen again.

So then you put all these rules in place that tie your salespeople's hands. And when they're in a situation where they need to make their call to do the right thing for the customer. So our value statement, we'll do the right thing always. No matter what happens, we'll do the right thing. Even if it costs us money, we'll do the right thing. They need to be empowered to do that and know that it's going to be okay. While at the same time, we can't abdicate our responsibility for making sure that we can make payroll. So you can't give away the farm without some checks and balances.

Well, and I've found it, you know, if you'll teach your sales team how the business works. Yes. You said, guys, look, here's the tension we have to balance. We've got to take great care of the customers. But, you know, here's how profit happens. We have to charge enough. We have to keep our expenses down. I have found that if you'll invite people into that conversation and treat them like adults and assume they've gone through, you know, seventh grade math and they understand that, you know, revenues minus expenses can equal profits. Hey, it's really that simple. So let's all win together. Because if we can't keep the bottom line profitable, we don't get to stay here and continue to help those customers that you love. You know, it's a It's kind of this education experience. Well, it's part of connecting people to the mission. So what you were talking about earlier, you know, the difference between caring more about the business or understanding the mission, if you don't educate people about the business, that's a problem. So one of the things that we do in our organization is we have a scorecard that comes out every single month. And everybody in the organization, everybody gets it. I mean, from the person, like even the person who is mopping our floors, that person gets it.

Everybody does. What's on the scorecard? It's what we brought in. So here's what our revenue was. Here's our receivables. here's our net income. So here's our profit or loss for the month. So what happened? If there was a loss, here's why we were investing in something or doing whatever. And we grow that way. We cash forward everything. And it has all the stats. Like the sales stats, it's got the customer service stats. It's got

retention stats. Literally our entire company. So is that scary to share that with? I mean, that feels like a lot of sensitive information. It's frightening. It's absolutely frightening to do. However, I learned one of my greatest mentors ever got in Chris Dodds working for a really big company where we hit all the information. So all the information was all the executives had the information. He opened the books. We had, you know, in this, in this particular region that I work with, I don't know, 20,000 people working in the region. He did that. He came in as a leader. I, you know, I got the opportunity to work for him. And he started sending everybody the reports. And suddenly, like, you just felt everybody kind of come together around one thing they understood.

Now, we weren't sending out really super sensitive information. I mean, there's some information that we don't share, like we don't share, you know, shareholder distribution with people, for example. That would probably not be appropriate. We don't share, you know, our bonuses or anything that how people are paid. But people should know, did we make money or not make money? I mean, did we, and if we didn't make money, why didn't we make money? So. Well, and I can imagine sharing that information, you know, what that says, the message you send

is, I trust you. I trust you. And we're in this together. I mean, I can't drive my area of the company if I don't know how it fits and how it's working with everything else. That's exactly right. So I learn from him, share the information, and it just works. I think that, you know, I don't know that everybody always goes through it, but, you know,

a couple times a year we get together and we walk through the financials. Here's where we are. Here's what we're doing. I think one of the, and I don't know, this may be unspoken for a lot of folks. I think one of the things that you worry about as a leader or an entrepreneur is if you start sharing the finances, then people may resent you because they can sort of surmise how much money you're making, you know, from that. And what I found is just the opposite. What I found is that people come to me and go, it's amazing, you know, how, you and you, you know, you and Carrie, because we run

the business together, how much you sacrificed for this, or thank you for the opportunity, or you changed my life or, you know, one of my people just bought a beach house that was on his bucket list. And he's like, if I wrote me a letter, if I, if you hadn't, you know, if you hadn't taken me in and we didn't work together, then, you know, I wouldn't have had this opportunity to do those things. So it's just the opposite. I think people appreciate. And more than anything, when they can, when you can show them that we're investing in a product or an offering or we're trying to accomplish something together, there's a cost of that. Well, there's a theme in everything you're saying up to this point, and that is that, you know,

our job as leaders is to educate the team. It's to empower them with the vision for how things work. And I know the mistakes where I've made in sales and leading a team, training a team, is I just assume that they get it. I'm hoping that they just know what I know magically. through osmosis, I don't know, and I get frustrated, I'm going, why aren't they doing it the right way? Or I'll listen and shadow a sales call and go, oh my gosh, they're talking the whole time, they're not asking questions, what's their problem? Well, come on, tardy, you never sat down and said, guys, let's talk about the power of asking questions. And it really is about education, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. And if you think about it, like, exactly what you said, like, if people think they're doing the right thing, why would it ever occur to them but do something else? And the problem, the reason that they think they're doing the right thing is that you think, well, they just get through osmosis. And I've been in your, like, I've got that T-shirt, and I've, and I've probably tattooed everywhere with the, you know, expecting people to understand things at the same level that I do. And I think even for a leader, and this is one of the reasons why, you know,

I think Ramsey is such a great organization because you have coaches to help leaders. Sometimes you need that coach to help you gain the awareness that what you're doing is not helping your team. Because if you ask questions, and if you really think about it, right, great leadership is a language of questions. It's the question that you ask. It's way more important than what you say. So as you start asking questions, one of the things that I, especially with salespeople and leaders is my guess is that the person who is talking knows in their heart that they shouldn't be talking. They're just not aware enough of what they're doing to change it. So what you should be doing at the end of that is- They may not know what to do alternatively. Yeah, because what I would

sit down and say is, listen, if you were in a sales call and the salesperson spent the entire time talking to you, how would you feel? And the person would say, I wouldn't like that very much at all. And I would say, well, how do you think the person that you just had a conversation with Phil's? And they would say, they probably didn't like that at all. Like, what are you going to do the next time? I'm going to listen more. Okay, great. So then you can slowly change behavior. Well, and that's coaching. Right. That goes back to what we were talking about in terms of scaling. So you hire that first salesperson as an entrepreneur, the second salesperson entrepreneur. Now you've got a real problem. So at this point, you're still selling full time. You're teaching them how to sell full time.

You've got the problem that you and I both have, which is you're assuming that they get at the same level that you do. And now you've got to be a coach. And the hardest role to play, whether you're an entrepreneur or you're just a hired sales manager is playing the role of the leader and the coach and the doer all at the same time. It is the most difficult thing in the world to do. So we go back to and there's no easy button. And for you as that leader, you've just got to realize that there's going to be this period of just pure pain as you just get through the process of adding people and sliding people in until you can build them. It was painful for me. I think back when I was a salesperson and, you know, I was blessed to just be really gifted with a lot of things that help in sales naturally. And I've been a sponge for all things sales my entire life. And I was exposed at an extremely early age. I was knocking on doors when I was, you know, literally 12, 13 years old. That's just part of my journey. And I think I got my 10,000 hours in. You know, Malcolm Gladwell talks about mastery in 10,000 hours. I probably had that before I graduated high school. It was just the place.

that I was born into and the family environment. And so so much of my ability in sales, I'll tell you, Jeb, it's almost innate or subconscious or it's an art that I've forgotten why I do it in that moment. It's almost become second nature. And my biggest struggle going from, you know, being a top performing salesperson to being that coach that you're talking about, to training the team is I couldn't figure out how to distill all this stuff that I just kind of, I just did from my gut. I didn't have processes. I didn't have manuals, and yet I was continuing to dunk the ball every time somebody would say,

go sell this thing. And I just assume people, well, if you don't know how to sell, you just, you don't have it. And I didn't realize that I could train them and teach them. And I didn't even know what to train them and teach them. So I think a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs can relate to this where they're going, I sell because I just figure it out. How do I turn that into training? How do I turn that into coaching?

How do I become that coach that you're talking about, First of all, you've got to learn how to be a coach. So we go back to asking great questions, being a good observer, slowing down just a little bit, not being so frustrated, which is a challenge when you're in a small business and everything is moving at the speed of light, and you're just holding on. You know, it's the, you know, I remember when we first started, I don't remember sleeping. Like, I don't remember sleeping for years. But I just remember the, you know, in the first four or five years of my business, just waking up with, you know, night terrors. They can see myself, you know, like, failing. And I could see it. So, you know, I'd get up at every morning and I'm driven, and that's a hard thing to do. But part of it's just slowing down and learning how to coach. How do you define coaching? Well, coaching is typically in the moment, right? So for me, a coaching is in the moment. I'm having a conversation. And coaching is using questions to help people change. So if you just think about it as a leader, like my role as a leader is train, observe, coach, and follow up. And everything else is academic. So my goal is to spend time of my people doing this. So I have to, it's easy to spend time working on the mechanics of the business, getting into, like, how many leads that we get in today or what have you.

It's a lot harder to wake up every day and say the way that I'm going to make the greatest amount of impact is to spend time with my people. So for me, coaching is the process of helping people become aware of what they already know. So training is teaching people what they don't know. Like if people think they're doing the right thing and I ask them a question and I realize that they don't know it, I'm not alone coaching, I've got to shift into training. I've got to teach them. But if I'm asking a question and I know that they know the answer, maybe because I just taught them the skill or what have you, but they haven't actualized it yet. Coaching is creating that awareness. And it's getting people to see that there are more than one possibility. So let me give you an example. And this happens

to business owners all the time. You, because you've been selling since you were 13 years old, when you run into a sales issue or a problem in a deal or a negotiation issue, whatever, when you look at it because you've got so much experience, you see a wide range of possibilities. There are a number of paths that you can go down. If you're new to sales or you're new to a business and you see a problem, all you see is this. And you've been there where someone's walking into your office or coming up to you and they're saying, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. And you're like, this is really easy. And you're like, why can they figure this out? Because you have experience.

So what coaching does is it compresses experience by opening people up to a wider array of possibility. So like one of the coaching questions I go, okay, what else could you do? What else could you do? So we put them all on the table and we go, okay, well, what would be the best path for you to take? So as they pick a path, as long as it's not going to break the business, I let them pick the path, which empowers them to make a decision. Because that's really what I have to do as a business owner is I've got to get people to start making decisions without me. Because if they do, my business will scale. If I'm making all the decisions and every morning, there's a line waiting in my office for me to hand out the orders for the day and you can't scale that way. Well, and how powerful you

is that when you have their back on those decisions. You know, I mean, I think one of the things we've got to do as leaders is advance as many decisions as possible to the front lines. But if they're not empowered to make those decisions, you're going to have that line out your office and you're never going to get your work done. And let's define empowerment, because I think we throw empowerment around all the time. Like, you know, it's like if you go to any, like go to any HR group and there's, and there may be one here. Like, we empower our people. Empowerment means giving power away. Give them the power. Yes. They give it away. Now, I just go back to, so, you know, four years into starting my business, we had grown to the point where I was working 24 hours a day and it wasn't sustainable.

So I had to, like, I had to start giving stuff away. And that was the hardest thing to do. So we go back to our original conversation about, you know, bringing on the first salesperson, trusting people with your customers, giving things up. That's the inflection moment. That's the pivot point. I empower people by giving power away. And that means that even in a situation where I'm coaching and I say, okay, what could we do? and they go, these are the things.

I go, well, what do you think the best way of going is? And they say, I'm going to pick that. As long as it's not going to break the business, even if I think it's the wrong decision, I'll say, okay, well, go do that, and then check back with me in four days and let me know how it worked out. Yeah, because you're investing what might be a wrong decision into this person learning and being a better asset for your organization. Exactly. And, Jeff, I want to highlight a paradox in this that you know this is true, but when you say, okay, we got to give our power away. What's interesting is you can actually give the power away and you don't have less power.

power. That's exactly right. You know, the misnomer is that if I give the power away, well, then I don't have power. But in reality, we both now have more power because I've given you power to, I trust you to go do this thing. That's why, like, the greatest leadership lesson I ever learned from a guy named Roger McKee was your job as a leader is to make yourself obsolete. Because when you make yourself obsolete, because I remember he said that, I said, well, if I make myself obsolete, then you don't need me anymore. He says, if you make yourself obsolete, there will always be something more important for you to do. So you'll rise. So you gain more power by giving it away because suddenly you're able to scale yourself and you can scale yourself. Then you have time to think. Now, if you think

about this as a business owner and a leader, like time to think is the most important thing that you can do because you're the person that's going to come up with the ideas or at least take the ideas and someone brings you and flesh it out. Oh, yeah. This is so underrated. I hope people are hearing this, that your ability to think and have ideas as a leader, when you get paid for what you know and not what you do, that's the place to leave from. Absolutely. It's the key. And by the way, that's how you make your sales organization better.

So I'll peel off a couple of weeks and just go think. And because I can go think, and sometimes it's on 18-hour plane flights, but I can think the business is running. And then I'm able to look at the organization and say, okay, the way we're going to scale next is to do this. and how are we going to grow us to go here. And that's just difficult if you're trying to do everything for everyone all the time. One of my favorite pictures of a leader making themselves obsolete, the movie Moneyball, have you seen it?

Billy Bean, the character played by Brad Pitt, you know, this team, the Oakland A's, they're in trouble, they haven't been winning at all. He comes in, he shakes everything up. He's out on the field. He's in the dugout. And they're trying to get traction. Eventually they get a win, and everybody's freaked out like, oh, we don't know what the – we've never done that before. And then they get another win. And he starts moving himself out of the picture.

And there's this incredible scene at the end of the movie where they've had this winning season. And they're going up against, I can't remember who the team is, but it's a pinnacle game. And they're going to win the pennant. And Billy Bean, the manager, who has every right to sit anywhere in the stadium. He can sit in the dugout. He can sit right behind the plate. He drives out of the stadium and he's on the interstate. And he turns on the radio to listen to the game because he knows.

knows at that point, he's built the team, he's built the leadership, he's built the management, he's made himself obsolete, he doesn't have to be in there messing with it. And it's just this really sweet picture of, and again, I don't think you're saying be obsolete. You're obsolete on the task so you free yourself up to do what only you can do, which is that critical thinking. That's exactly right. It's not, I'm no longer needed. It's just that my goal is to make people so good around me that they don't need me. And if they don't need me, then immediately we scale. And Moneyball is a wonderful lesson in Moneyball for leaders who are trying to scale and build a sales organization. And that is looking for the one or two numbers, the one or two data points that drive everything.

So, you know, on base percentage, for example, with Moneyball was a big deal. So if I got players that can get on base, if we get on base more often, then the statistical probability of getting home goes up exponentially because we have more people on base. It's a key metric. So one of the things about thinking is when you can look at your business and you can say, what are the key metrics that when I look at everything, every pipeline deal, every opportunity we bring in, what are the key metrics that move everything? I give you a great example of this because I was working with a CEO that they sell machines into manufacturing. And we were with this leadership group out in Arizona and we were working through this type of thing.

And I'm just asking questions. And by the way, the numbers were there. They were looking at the number every single day. And it turned out that they had a 70% close rate, 70% close rate when they had one of their customers come to their location and do a demo of the machine, 70%. That's unheard of. So we were in the middle of this. I just asked the question, like what percent? What's percent?

I'm just asking the question. So then I asked, okay, of the pipeline opportunities that you currently have in the place, and they have a little, you know, there's a data guy in the back and he's pulling the stuff out of the CRM, what percentage of the pipeline opportunities have? have come in to do a demo, 10%. Now, think about that, right? So if you looked at your business that way and said, if there's an inflection point in the sales process, when we cross this inflection point that leads to that level of winning, then how do I change the game in order to make sure that I'm getting on base more often?

Well, this is so huge. Charles DeHig and the Power of Habits, he talks about the idea of a keystone habit. And a keystone habit is something that when I do this, everything else automatically happens. And that's a keystone behavior. If you can get a customer, when a customer or a prospect in this case does X.

Exactly. Everything else just flows. 70% closing rate from there is an incredible thing. So when I look at sales organizations, especially large organizations that have a high activity rate, my number one metric, my money ball, is the first appointment. So when I look at salespeople who have a high level of first appointments,

I know they're going to be okay. It doesn't make a difference. What else is going on? Because they're putting enough into the pipeline first appointment. that there's going to be a flow through. And by the way, as a coach, if they're working on opportunities, there's something I can coach. I can work on it. If there's nothing in the pipeline, there's nothing I can coach.

And if they're not put anything new in, but they have a large pipeline, what I know is that they're spending all their time working on deals that are probably never going to close. Like there's some clue in there. So when I'm looking at salespeople as a coach and I'm looking at a group, if I see a high number of first-time appointments, the very next thing I look at is closing ratio. And if everything's okay, then I don't need to coach that person. go spend my time someplace else. So, and every organization is different.

There's no one size fits all in sales and never has been. I know a lot of it, you know, small business especially, maybe they don't have the CRM, they don't have the data, they don't have the ability to kind of run analytics and have the data just jump up in front of your nose like that. If you don't have the systems or maybe the data's not there, first I would say you got to get the numbers, right? Because numbers tell your story. But if you don't, how do you start finding those keystone habits even just organically?

It's funny you say that because what I do as a consultant is in my organization does as a consultant, is we go to, and a lot of times really big organizations that have all the data. They have all the tools. You have all the people. And they can't see it. So, you know, we're literally walking in because we're asking questions as coaches. It's not uncommon for me to go work with a client and sit like on their sales floor for a week and say nothing and just take notes. I've had CEOs ask me, like, what do you think you're going to find?

I don't know. But if I do find something, I can promise you this, it's going to be something small and it's going to change your life. And it usually almost always is something small. So what I would say is it's not about whether you have the tools and the data. Of course, those things are great to have. They're nice and make life easier. And as you scale your business, you'll be able to invest in those things. But let's just say that you can't.

I don't like walk into a business and use data. I walk into a business and use my ears and my eyes. Like I shut up and observe. If you just think about thinking, right, it's really hard for a business person and do that. And this is my MO. I go get a hard copy of the Wall Street Journal, a cup of coffee, and a yellow Lego pad, and I'll just sit and watch. And it's exactly the same thing that my consultants do. What are you watching for?

I don't know. I don't walk in with an outcome defined, and that's the whole thing. Right. You know, part of observing is that you have to be unobtrusive, so you have to stay out. Like, you can't change what you're seeing, even though your presence there will change it. And you have to suspend your judgment. Like, you have to let judgment go. Because if you already decide what the outcome is, you're going to see that outcome.

And that's making an assumption. And that doesn't mean that you're not going to make assumptions because that's not possible as a human being. What you have to stay really, you're saying you've got to be really curious. You have to be, it's exactly, I'm still glad that you said that. Anytime we do, we put out a lot of books here at Ramsey, as you can imagine, you've written a lot of books. And, you know, the book covers a big deal.

Yep. And so we'll do these split tests. We'll get four, our design team, we'll bring down four options. And internally, we'll go, oh, that's the best one right there. That's the best one. And then we'll put them out kind of on a split test and, you know, float it out with a sample group. And every time, you know, a thousand people come back and they completely disagree with the one that we thought would be the winner because, you know, we're just like, we just don't

know what people are going to like. And we live too close to our own problems. But if we judge it, and we don't do that, you know, kind of that product market fit, that testing, that validation, and that's kind of what you're doing when you sit there and you listen. It's all about curiosity. So the question that I ask is, how come you do it that way? How can we do it this way? How can we do it that way. How can we do it that way? And I can give you story after story after story of the organizations in the last 13 years of being in business that I've walked into. And I asked those questions. And when I go, sit down with the leadership group and say, and I don't tell them what the problem is. I go, how come you do this? And they go, we're not doing it that way. And I go, let me show you the

evidence. And they're like, you've got to be kidding me. And they go, well, I mean, I don't understand why you would do it. So I ask a question in a way that gets them to start thinking. In that moment to suspend what you know. Because you start here, you ask how come and how come two or three times and you go, oh, I know how to fix this. Yet you bite your tongue and you keep asking and staying curious. What does it take to not judge or to not solution that in that moment? Well, that's one of the problems, right, with leaders is that we're always trying to

solutionize everything. We go back to scaling. So first of all, a lot of it has to do with faith. So you have to let go of power and control. So because when I say I want to solve your problem for you, that's power and control. role. Now, part of that I learned by being married, right? So I learned that, you know, when, if I come home and my wife says, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, problem with this, problem with that, what I did in the first seven, eight, nine years of my marriage is I would tell her how to fix it.

And it did not bring us any closer. I'm glad I'm not alone in this. And then I learned, right, through a lot of introspection and a lot of prayer and a lot of, you know, a lot of effort, a lot of growth that if I just shut up, then she would talk her way through whatever it was and almost always come up with a solution on her own. And then she felt better about me and more empowered and felt closer. And if she didn't know what the solution was, then she would ask me specifically, can you tell me what to do? But as leaders, as spouses, whatever, the relationship, when we put the solution in there, it's almost like we take away the dignity of that other person getting to discover what's inside them and their own journey of getting to that solution themselves.

But that's the heart of coaching, right? The heart of coaching is opening people up to possibilities, not telling them what the possibility is. No one grows if you tell them what to do. People grow by making mistakes. People grow by searching for the answers. So true. If they don't know the answer, right, that's training and that's teaching. And sometimes you have to do that.

Like, we're not asking questions of people and asking how come in an effort to terrorize them. I mean, this is not an effort to do that. And I think so much of this is faith. And that's a hard thing to put your arms around. There's no data around faith, but the faith that most people know what to do and the right thing to do most of the time. They just can't see it. And my job as a leader, as a coach, and as a consultant, is to provoke awareness,

because awareness is a mother of change, not do the change. So as a leader, like you asked me the question, if you wanted to see where Moneyball is in your organization, stop doing and start observing and become curious. Be a three-year-old. Why do we do it that way? How can we do it like that? Because if you brought a three-year-old in your office, they would go, how come the light looks like that? How come the carpet is that way? How come is this? That's what they would do. Why don't you ask the same thing about your business? You don't need data. You don't need a bunch of technology and software to be a great observer. And I just love that you said curiosity. That was just a moment where I just want to give you a big hug.

You just get to be a sponge, you know, you got to be curious. I think the time you get to a point where you're not curious anymore is right before the time you stop learning and you stop learning, you stop growing, you stop growing, you start dying. You know, you have to stay curious. So let's draw that back to sales. If you want to take one lesson out of that, 80% of sales, like the same thing we do in coaching is selling, right? 80% of sales is discovery, 80%. And it's the one thing nobody ever talks about, right? We talk about prospecting, call calling, and we talk about closing.

like those are the big things. Nobody talks about discovery. And discovery is everything. And what is discovery? Curiosity. It is asking questions. It is asking questions that help the person that you're having a conversation with think differently. It's provoking them to think, wow, maybe I need to change because in a lot of cases, the buyer is afraid. I mean, they're afraid of making a change because that's human. So if we're asking great questions, if we're learning about them, then as we start thinking about building a business case or building a proposal. We're building it based on what's important to them and what their business needs, and we're building it around them versus walking in and already having the solution. And this is what, back to your original question, why does sales have a bad

name? Because so many salespeople skip that step and they walk in and they say, hello, want to buy. Well, and they just word vomit all over you. I love that you're talking about asking questions. You know, we figured out with our sales team, the top closing ratios, we'll record calls and go back and and kind of watch the game tape. And we started tracking, this is one of those key metrics, percentage of time that our sales advisor is speaking versus listening. And the highest closing ratios, most of the time that sales advisor, if you record 30 minute phone call, you know, it's maybe 10 or 15% of the time

that they're talking because they're asking and asking and tell me more and why is that a problem for you? And what would it look like if that wasn't a problem? Tell me about success for your business and that discovery process. But, you know, people are listening to us. We're talking the whole time because we're on a podcast. But if you and I were on a phone call right now with the prospect, we'd be listening probably 10 times more than we're actually speaking. Am I right?

Absolutely. And I want you to think about this. There are five questions that your customer prospect is asking of you in every interaction. Do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you get me and do you understand me? And do I trust and believe you?

And the easiest way to be likable is to do. That's really good. Do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you get me in my process? problems do understand me, right? And do I trust and believe you? The easiest way to be likable is to listen. Like the people that you like the most in your life are the people that listen to you.

That's why I have a happy marriage and, you know, I've been married to the same woman or been with the same woman since we were in high school. At some point, I learned to shut up and start listening. I didn't do it for a long time, but I did. And if you want to make someone feel important or significant, what do you do? Like, you listen to what they're having to say. And the need for significance are important is so insatiable in human beings that when you sit down and ask questions and listen to another human being, you give them the greatest gift that you can give another human being. Like, you give them your attention. And when you do that in sales, what happens is they begin to like you more. And when we just break sales down, like people are buying on emotion first.

Likeability. Right. And it is that. But we think likeability is, you know, giving them a compliment or talking or all those type of things. Yeah. It's just shutting up. And then if you think about it, like if I were to ask you a question, you know, think about the person in your life that you would describe like this, this person gets me. Like no one else other, no other person gets me. Like, that's the most important relationship in your life. Well, the same thing happens in sales. If I'm having a conversation with you and listening to you and I come back with a business case or proposal that maps out for you, right, a solution that you define, not me, you did, you think, wow, this person really gets me and get, right? Once they get you. That's a great practical

exercises to go, okay, who in my life really gets me? Exactly. And really cares about me. And then you go, well, what do they do? How do they behave? Exactly. And when I behave that way with my prospects, they're going to feel the same way. Hey, Jeb, in our final thoughts here, just in the last couple minutes as we wrap up, I'm a small business owner. I'm listening to this podcast. I've been driving in on my commute, and I'm coming into the office right now. And I'm about to walk in and talk to my sales team. What's the first best step that I can take today that's going to start to take all this and maybe move us towards a better future as a sales organization. I think that if I were going to just give you one thing, and this is going to sound really strange,

it is to take a deep breath and relax and start thinking differently about your sales team. So if you treat your sales team like they're your elite athletes, they'll begin believing that they're elite athletes. And so much of what we do in sales because the work is so difficult is around a belief system. So for you as the leader, what I would start doing is start, you know, start like basically going in and telling them how important they are. And then the very next thing you should do is exactly what we just explained. I would take a step back from everything that you're doing and I would start observing. I would start watching. I would let people fail from time to time.

I mean, don't let people break your business failure, but allow them to fail. And then really start taking a look at the business, you know, the sales business itself and see, just do a diagnosis or an audit on what you're doing. And then once you do that, then my very next thing would be think about what you can do to raise the level of performance. You explain this with your sales team. We went and listened to the calls. And we found that people who did this are doing this. We'll do the same thing in your business. That didn't require data.

You just listen to the call. So go back and watch what's happening and listen. Go out with them in the field. Don't sit in your office. Go be with your salespeople. I promise you that the information that you're seeking will reveal itself in that moment. moment. And once you have that, then you'll be able to build a plan for how do you move to the next step, move to the next step, move to the next step. That's the key. Well, one of the six drivers

of a peak performing entree leadership company is profit. We believe that profit is the thing that fuels your business, that you invest back into your mission. And you can't be profitable. If you don't master sales, if you don't have a sales mindset, not just with your sales team, but everybody in the organization and embracing this idea of continuing to improve in this area. And you guys have just heard a incredible conversation with lots of gold on exactly how to do that. Jeb, thank you so much. This has been such a joy. And I know our listeners will get great value out of what we've heard today. But thank you so much for having me on. I'm so grateful. Thank you. Well, hey, what a fun conversation. And I love this topic. I'm proud to call

myself a salesperson. And you should be too. Because if you're not proud to be in sales, it just means you're doing it wrong. And today we heard some incredible things from Jeb about how to do it more right. I love that he said, just relax, just relax, don't overthink it, be a human, have a heart. You just got to show up and treat people the way that you'd want to be treated. You got to care about people. You know, sales is really at the end of the day. It's just a process that you go through to help people solve the problems they have.

And there's nothing more gratifying and more noble than actually helping people. solve problems. Guys, that's why we're here. That should be the purpose of every business on the planet, is to solve problems for people. And if you think you're actually solving their problem, you know what? You'll do anything to get them the solution,

including getting really good at sales. Hello, that's what we got to do, okay? So if you're a small business owner, if you're a leader and you're going, okay, tardy, look, I'm good at sales, but I'm trying to run the business and I'm stuck because it's just me and I'm our top salesperson, I get it. Most businesses start that way.

But you know as well as I do. If you're always the salesperson, you're going to stay on that treadmill. You're going to keep trying to react to all the situations all the time in your business and you're never actually going to scale your business. You've got to build a sales team. You've got to train them. And that takes delegation. So our team put together a resource to make this easier for you guys.

It's hard to do. It takes time. it takes intentionality, but there are specific steps for the Entree Leadership Company to make this something that becomes your best friend. In this free guide, teaching you how to delegate, the Entree Leaders Guide to Delegation, it's going to show you how to properly delegate. It's going to allow you to focus on growing your business instead of staying on that treadmill, instead of getting bogged down in the weeds and everyday tasks. All you've got to do to get this free guide is text the word Delegate to 33444. Again, text Delegate to 33444. Or just click on the link in the show notes.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link in the show notes. And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.

If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like the Rachel Cruz Show. Hey guys, it's Rachel Cruz, and I'm so excited to tell you about my podcast. A lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck. They're in debt. They don't even know where to begin, but they have this need, this want to get in control of their money. And if that's you, you have come to the right now. spot. So in each episode, you're going to get a ton of inspiration and practical advice.

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