EntreLeadership - How to Create a Winning Sales Process with Nigel Green

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

If you’re in business, you’re in sales. And if you’re a business owner who is still the primary salesperson on your team—listen up—this episode is for you. We’re bringing you two conversations with experts in Sales Leadership—author Nigel Green and Ramsey Solutions Board Member Brian Mayfield. In our first conversation, Daniel Tardy sits down with Nigel Green to hear why salespeople should stop hunting for sales and start farming for them. You’ll also get practical advice for how to overhaul your sales plans if you find yourself falling short of your goals. In our second conversation, Ramsey Host George Kamel sits down with Brian Mayfield to talk about how to take action when your sales are off plan, and how to continue to grow a thriving sales team.   The EntreLeadership Podcast Nigel Green’s website Revenue Harvest by Nigel Green Ramsey Solutions' website Download the 10 Days of Intentionality Schedule a call with Tim, our producer.   Learn more about the offers from our EntreLeadership Partners: BELAY  |  Gravy  |  Hite Digital   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

So when you hear the phrase sales process, I don't know what comes to mind for you, but you might be thinking, I should get one of those. I need a sales process. Or you might be thinking, I am the sales process. And if you're the owner, pretty normal that early on, you're the chief breadwinner for the organization. You're driving a lot of the revenue. But at some point, if you stay in the seat of top salesperson, your business can't scale. You've got to get away from doing all the sales and actually build a plan. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and the profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tardy, and in today's episode, we've got two great interviews on the topic of having a sales process and one that's repeatable, one that's predictable. You don't want to just have a good month. You want to have a great year, and you want to have a vision in your numbers that you can actually budget off of and plan the rest of the year.

That's what it's about. So first up, we've got Nigel Green. Nigel's been a good friend for a while, and he's a leading authority on building a high-performing sales team, and he's also the author of a new book, Revenue Harvest. Nigel helps teams not just hope that they're going to hit their sales numbers, but actually have a plan to do it. And a plan that runs out for 12 to 18 months, again, so that it's predictable. That's the key.

And then our second conversation is with none other than Ramsey leader, Brian Mayfield, on how to get back on track when your sales are off track. So at first, we've got a conversation with Nigel Green. And Nigel challenges us to shift our mindset away from being a hunter and to start thinking like a farmer. You know, in sales, if you're a hunter, whatever you have for dinner that night is whatever you killed that day. And then the next day you've got to get up and you got to go out and do it again. It's hard to grow a business like that long term. A farmer has a completely different mindset.

A farmer's building a process. They have a plan and they have systems. But you first have to shift your identity away from being that hunter and take on the mind. mindset of a farmer. If you are a farmer and there is no crop, you're not a farmer. Like you're lying to yourself. And farmers know that. So they're willing to do anything to make sure at the harvest there's something to sell.

There are a lot of sales leaders that don't understand that element of the identity. They like to be the VP. They like to travel. They like to meet customers. but they consistently miss revenue targets. And so that's why the tenure of a sales rep is very similar to that of a professional sports coach, three years or less, because they don't understand that piece. It doesn't matter how good you are at being the rainmaker.

You can go and recruit. You can market. But if you don't build a team that's capable of hitting numbers, you're not a sales leader. You're something else in a sales leader's role. A lot of business owners or top salespeople. really resonate. I mean, I resonate with that. You know, I've been a rainmaker, but you look up one day and you go, I have to be plugged in 100% for every dollar that comes in. And I love the agrarian reference, the idea of being a farmer. I guess the alternative is that you're a hunter. It's like you have to go kill something every single time. And the day that you don't go out on the hunt is the day that you go hungry. potentially or you don't understand that sometimes you can overhunt an area and then there's nothing left to sustain the business for some future period you don't you're so focused on hunting

that you don't see the market shift and now what do you do you were too busy doing this one thing that you didn't do your real core responsibility which was understanding what are all the ways you can serve a business or paying attention to how you know subtly is a nuance that shift in the market that affect the way in which a customer wants to buy. And a lot of entrepreneurs miss that because they are solely focused on closing the next deal, that they're not paying attention to where it's going. Right. Well, in closing the next deal, I've talked to thousands of small business owners.

They would all tell you early on, we had to say yes to whatever the next deal was based on whoever was going to pay, not necessarily based on a strategic plan or based on we've got a system. It's just we've got to pay the bills. And so we may say yes to somebody that's not the ideal customer or we may not get the price that we needed because we're just trying to get short-term cash flow. You see that a lot. And deal by deal, contract by contract, they have built the prison that they go to every day. The prison. That's what it was.

It's what it feels like. I had a customer in mine tell me, Nigel, I built this prison, brick by brick, contract by contract. But that same mentality of we will take any business because I'm saying. so focused on the top line revenue and paying for keeping the lights on or whatever the analogy is. And so the plan is really about knowing what it is you want to offer and sticking to it, understanding what is the total addressable market for this plan. And Dwight Eisenhower said the plan itself is useless. But the practice of planning, is essential and indispensable.

The plan itself is useless. The practice of planning is indispensable. How does that break down? Well, we had a Black Swan year in 2020. There are a lot of really thoughtful companies that in January and February went through the exercise of saying this is what we want to accomplish month for month. And then March happens.

The plan's gone. But because they were diligent to think through what could happen each month. And the elements of a plan are not just thinking about best case scenarios, but also accounting for the reality that it's some highly unexpected and inconvenient time adversity is going to hit. So they create margin and they think through contingencies. Contgencies being in the plan is what lets you pivot when things don't go as plan. Exactly.

A good plan has a contingency. And it may not be a plan B or a big pivot, but it may be a retrenching. Or if this, what's my next move? It's more about thinking it forward, playing chess, trying to anticipate what the market might do. And good planning requires you to account for that and create margins so that when adversity happens, you're not shell-shocked. And you don't just get so caught up in the problem that the business face that you can't go forward and move it forward. And good sales leaders, when adversity happens, when the plan's not going, the way they had thought.

They do a few things. The first thing they do is they check customer sentiment. Because what ends up happening in disruption is the way customers want to buy changes. So your sales process has to move. Your sales process should be mapped to a way the customer wants to do business with you. When that changes, your process has to change. So what you measure, what's important to make sure you're moving deals closer to close, If it's misaligned with the way a customer wants to do business with you, you're going to see not only drops in your conversion, but you're going to see false positives and false information in your data because it's no longer based on the way the market wants to buy.

So the first thing they do is they check customer sentiment and make sure the existing process is mapped to the way customers want to buy. The second thing they do is they try to think about marginal opportunity. Where can I go back to a customer I already have, either ask to do more of the same thing, or quickly uncover new ways that I can serve them in a new offering? What's an example of the customer sentiment, how they want to buy? What are the different types of sentiments? Or how would that change the way that you sell to your customers? So a lot of my business is in health care. So for the past 10 years, health care sales reps have enjoyed the ability to go to the hospital.

be with their customer, whether it's from disposable goods to more sophisticated devices that are implanted during a surgery. So the in-person, bring in some donuts for the receptionist, do the whole schmuse and get an appointment. Or maybe even something more significant, like literally helping the physician decide which size of screw or which size of apparatus to use given in a current situation. Or they're sitting there in the operating room and they're, they're literally scrubbed in there. Can't do that anymore. Now what? How do we add that same level of value when the hospital has made it impermissible for me to be there? And it's actually a safety risk for me to be there. So now the company owners are saying we can't even send our sales force to the hospital because we're putting them at risk. So is that a customer sentiment change or is that a market change? That's a customer sentiment change to say, hey, we still want to use your product, but you can't come here anymore.

Okay. And so here's, so at first, it may be a market change, but now the COVID restrictions have been eased. And customers are saying, actually it worked pretty well without you here. So that is definitely a sentiment change. We'd rather not have you here because for you to come back means we have to invest in all this vendor credentialing. We have to pay this money to make sure that you have all the vaccines that you need and that you're safe to actually come in the hospital. We'd rather not. And we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. in credential. We'd rather not pay that. You need to figure out a way to serve the business without being here. So I guess the risk would be that your your facetime goes down and ultimately there's a long tail of decreased conversions. But there's kind of an upside too, because if you don't have to physically go in and I mean, you're more efficient on your Salesforce side as well, right? You can be. And so what a lot of companies are realizing, in fact, I have a client that grew 533 percent during COVID, grew 533 percent.

because the way that they go to market was aligned with the way the customers now wanted to transact. What did that look like? So what it looked like is instead of having reps that flew around the country and might go to a certain geography and call on four or five hospitals, now they sit in Zoom, have a really beautiful demonstration. Marketing's worked on it. The brand is tight. There's video. It's got all the multimedia elements, but it's seven minutes. really clear, compelling, following the story brand, seven-step framework, using that, getting it done really quickly, and letting the customer decide, does this solve my problem or not? Doing that 10, 15 times a day versus three to five times burdened by thousands of dollars in travel and expenses. Still, there's expense of that.

You have to have a little bit of sales enablement and automation tools, but we're talking hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars. and their pipeline has exploded with opportunity. Yeah, so back to the Eisenhower quote. They had a plan. The market was disrupted. Customer sentiment changed, but because they had a contingency, or they were willing to sit down and retool and say,

okay, we still have a process, but the approach is going to be different as a result of COVID and kind of the way that our customers shifted how they want to buy. They built an expense budget for the year, tens of thousands dollars a month to be dedicated, travel and expense. Well, we're not doing that anymore.

more. How do we repurpose that to keep sales growing? So they invested in everyone got new video and microphone technology, made sure that everyone had the adequate internet speed, so really focused on upload speed to really host videos, gave them enablement software, invested in marketing to redo the seven-minute demo deck, and that was it. So we spent maybe one month's worth of travel and expense to re-kit the sales team and our pipeline exploded. Pipeline exploded. So what's the principle for a business owner out there? Okay, I hear this story, but I'm not in health care.

I'm thinking about our sales team. Maybe there's a handful of us. Things have been disrupted. What can I take away from that that's applicable to my business out here in Middle America somewhere? Audit some of your best customers. Think about whether you've got six months of data, a year of data. how have they wanted to buy from you?

How has it shifted? Are you seeing that they're preferring a little bit more tech-enabled? Like pick up the phone and call your customers? Ask your reps that are front-line or circumvent them all together if you feel comfortable doing it. Asking them, how do you want to do business with us? How has it changed? How has technology? How has changes in the marketplace affected you?

How else can we serve you? You'd be surprised at what you're going to learn. Then the planning piece is about mapping. your process to that. So what a lot of companies realize from doing this work is that the way in which they've segmented their customers or segmented the market doesn't serve the business. They've segmented it by geography or some other arbitrary definitive line. And really the way you should segment your customers is by how they want to do business with you. If there's a real meaningful different in the way that someone in this industry wants to do business than someone in another industry,

That's how you should segment. So like in the hospital space, you might have some hospitals that say, we still prefer you come in person. And so there's a segment of in-person hospitals. And then you've got some that are going now we're good with Zoom meetings and demonstrations over Zoom. Like you would define segments that way versus like geography. And the truth is that people that are wired to sell through Zoom are a little bit different

than those that are highly relational. So you might find yourself with reps that have great relationships with their customer. They like to play golf. They've known them for 10, 15 years, a great at rapport. But now they don't get the benefit to use those skills. So you may have to think about the way your team needs to be wired to be successful in a more virtual selling environment. I don't think it's going to ever go away. There might be more, you might see more return to normal and customers inviting you back to the office.

But I think by and large, a lot of companies are deciding to absorb. the physical plant, not have a building, let everyone work remote. And if there's no office to go to, that type of selling is not really going to work. I think it's a big experiment, right? Because ultimately, what we know is companies are going to get results. They have to. You know, if the top line and bottom line aren't growing, then, well, no one really cares about work from home, not work from home at the executive level if it doesn't impact results. But as soon as it impacts results, a company is going to shift and adapt to follow what's going to get us the best results. And I think going forward, you're right. There's this constant experiment that's going to be going

of what's the right balance and blend of technology and then also face-to-face interactions. Like right here, we're face-to-face in the studio. And I can tell you, like compared to when we do a remote and somebody's Skype's in, the conversations are way more dynamic, the energy in the room face-to-face. Like, there's just something different. I don't even know how to explain it. But the guys and I, after every time we do a remote, it's like, yeah, that would have been great if they were in studio. There was something that was just a half a second delay or the body language is, you know, you can't quite sense it, even though you have video. And so I think it's an interesting time.

It is. When we're trying to, as a country, really, the whole world is running this big experiment of how much primal need do we all have to be face-to-face versus how much can we leverage technology? And that's, that seems to be a question that I'm answering a lot for sales leaders and executives. They say the same thing. We close better when we can get in front of the customer. Our reps just do a better job when we're face to face. That may be true, but what if your customer isn't comfortable with you coming to their office? In the same way, I'm sure you've had guests that have said, you know what, Daniel, I'm just not going to travel to Nashville. It'd be great,

but for me, right now, we're going to do this remote. So what's your answer? What's your plan? And how do you rethink your sales process to account for the fact that there's no more travel time? Your meetings have gone from an hour and 90 minutes down to 15 and 20 minutes. How do you sell in a world where that's the reality? So the first step is you got to have a plan. And then you talked about next after that, you're talking to your customers. You're trying to do it. You called it an audit where you're literally picking up the phone and asking the question,

and how do you want us to sell to you? So then based on that feedback, you're coming back what to retool the plan with the team? What's next? You're coming back and you retool the plan with the team. That's absolutely right. So you make sure that the sales process is step for step the way the customer wants to buy from you.

Then the work is on the sales team to take the numbers that the business needs, the revenue, earnings, whatever that holy grail metric is, the sales leader needs to assign it to individuals that can influence it. Assigned to individuals who can influence it. That's your sales team. It may be a receptionist. It may be someone in customer support.

That's why I say it in a very abstract way. Assign it to the individuals on your team that can influence that number. What are you assigning to them? A quota. A target. If the number is, if you need $200,000 in revenue in a month, you can't burden that as the entrepreneur. You're people on your team that can influence that number that need to share in that burden with you. So you have to assign it to the people on the team.

And it may not be equal. You may take the majority of it, but eventually we want to get to a place where we've built the team that burdens all of that quota, burdens all of that 200,000. Now with the like the 200,000, that's an outcome. That's at the conversion level, the bottom of the funnel. Are you assigning that objective to a team member or are some team members getting an upstream activity? So this is where a lot of folks get it wrong. You assign to the team what you expect.

Their job is to come back to you and show you how they plan to get there. So because we've already mapped the sales process to the way customers want to buy, it's the job of the seller with their new target to figure out how many activities at certain stages will I need in order to be successful. Good sellers, they just know this data. They also take the planning one step further. They begin to assign their target to the accounts that they have and the prospects that they would like to have.

So if you're a sales leader and you're listening to this and you've got a seller that's presented a plan to you of how they're going to get to their 200,000 number, and they've even gone so far as to show you the activities that they're going to do day in and day out, but they haven't done the work of names. naming accounts, naming businesses that they think would be a good match for your offering, there's work to be done. And you run the risk of falling short because you haven't assigned it to accounts.

How can you tell if somebody's got what I guess we would call a successful plan? You know, like if I'm the sales director, maybe I'm the business owner and I put the burden of the planning on my seller, they come back. How can I inspect what I expect to make sure that plan is legit or not? know when to challenge them to go back to the drawing board and keep working on it. Again, it all comes back to knowing how they want to buy. So if I'm talking to you and you're a rep, your plan would be good if you showed me all the opportunity that was out there by stage. We don't have a relationship with them to, I talked to them three months ago.

They're interested. They have a current supplier. The contract is up. You want to look at the thoughtfulness down to how they want to buy. if your sellers can't tell you how they decide to use a vendor or to use a supplier, all the other stuff doesn't matter. Even for the companies that are maybe cold, we don't yet have a relationship with, there's a lot of information out on the Internet that'll show you who they're using now.

You can just find a ton of information through pieces of data like TechCrunch, Seamless A, Zoom info. Everybody's information is out there. So good sellers, even for accountants, We haven't even yet contacted. We should know a heck of a lot about them to determine if it's even going to be viable. And so I'm looking for sellers that have done that level of detail at the very top of the funnel. That practice sets into place really good principles and behaviors for closing business and retaining business.

If they're not willing to invest that level of research and sophistication, they're going to churn through relationships. And we know in a small business, it's a heck of a lot easier to keep a customer. customer than it is to go get another one. Right. So much easier. It's interesting that you put the burden of this on the seller. You and I have worked with salespeople that come in and they have this expectation, almost an entitlement. It's the job of marketing and other smart business people to make my phone ring. And then I just kind of parachute in at the moment that they're really hot and I take them across the finish line. But you're saying the person who's selling and closing should actually be responsible to think like a marketer and think about the entire funnel of going from a

cold audience through these stages all the way down to when they close. That's true. The roles of sales and marketing could not be more indistinguishable in today's world. Customers are transacting completely online without ever speaking to a salesperson. If you're not willing to do this work as a seller, marketing is going to figure out a way to automate you through a landing page, through an email. And so the extent to which you distinguish. yourself from marketing by doing the things that a machine can't do, that's how you stay relevant

in today's world. Well, the research. Like, we can get the data points. We can track, we can track user behavior on a landing page, the way they engage with an email list, but we can't, we don't yet have the ability to go and assess sentiment. And again, it all comes back to the sentiment. We don't yet have the way to do that through AI, the way that we can do it, actually doing a discovery call or sitting down with a customer and asking them, how does this problem make you feel? What are some of the goals that you have in your career, in your role, that fixing this problem will help advance your career? Marketing cannot do that. Right. Well, and AI can't, and I'm not sure it ever will be able to. So, I mean, I'm not smart enough to know what the future of AI looks like.

But it just seems like a computer or a robot's never going to be able to hear what's not being said. Correct. You know, I'm thinking about my sweet little daughter when Alexa doesn't understand what she's saying. Like she starts yelling at it, like gets real intense. Like somehow Alexa's going to know that now she's upset and Alexa's going to work harder to go get her the answer she was looking for or play the song she wants her to play. And I'm going, Alexa's never going to know. You know, like she's not. She doesn't understand.

And my daughter doesn't. But as her parent, I can sit there and go, okay, sweetie, calm down. It's all right. I can tell she's frustrated. I can hear her tone. I can hear what she's not saying. there's an intuition piece that you're talking about that I'm not sure ever will be delegatable to AI. Alexa knows where you live, what some of your spending habits are, how you use the internet, where you work, what your job title is.

But Alexa, to your point, will never know why in your role at work, mapping the outcome this solution provides to your business will advance your career or make you sleep better at night. And that's the job of the salesperson. Today's age, that's your... That's what makes you indispensable. That's what makes you indispensable. And the really good sellers don't fight with marketing. They let marketing do all that for them, and they help marketing do a better job of that so that they can do the one thing, understanding sentiment.

Why would you do this? What's in it for you? And they know that they may be the expert on their offering. they may be the expert on the industry, they may be the expert on the competitive landscape, they're not the expert on how the problem shows up in the customer's life. Marketing can never figure that out. I've always thought that one of the things that also makes salespeople indispensable

is their ability to appropriately overcome objections. You know, when things are easy and it can all just sail through a landing page and the prospect understands the value and the marketing, page facilitates a transfer, it just works. But if the prospect has a question or if they have a challenge or there's an objection on their side, or they're trying to get funding, a really good salesperson can come in and help them solve that problem. Maybe they need some more time. Maybe they need some more information. Maybe they need you to make a call on their behalf to someone else on the executive team and help kind of win them over or address some concerns that the CFO has.

it takes a lot of intuition and critical thinking skills, I think, to actually kind of take those objections, tease out what the real root issue is, and then come back with value that offsets that objection. So what marketing can do a good job of is assume why you would use it based on all this data of other customers that have used it, why they stated they bought it. Good salespeople understand that any motivation you already have. have to use the product or service is far stronger than any motivation I can give you. Any motivation you already have. Yeah, any motivation you are stronger than motivation I can give you. Yeah. So think about it this way.

It's all about change. Really what good salespeople do are affecting change. If I were to tell you you needed to lose 10 pounds because of this reason, that reason may not resonate with you. But instead, if I were to say, if you were to say to me, I think I want to lose 10 pounds. Okay, why? And letting you tell me why you think it's important. It's been driving crazy for six months.

My clothes aren't fitting right. I'm embarrassed. Like, you've got all these emotional things that are tied to that versus somebody's telling me that I should just go do it. If you lose 10 pounds, you know, your blood work will be better. Your wife's going to think you're more handsome. All the logic. All the logic behind it versus, well, why would you do it? And good salespeople do that.

They ask questions in a way that understands or allows you. you to characterize how the problem exists and why you would do it. They understand why you're motivated to change. How do you ask those questions in a way that's not, oh, I see where this is going? You're, you know, you're baiting me to essentially say, here's all the reasons that we should work with you. It seems like you need to stay away from assuming that you're the perfect solution initially and just get them to kind of camp on their problem agnostic to whether you're the service provider. Is that kind of the approach? I think the, it sounds a bit counterproductive, but just asking questions like, well, why would you do it, Daniel? What are all the other things

you could do with this budget? Because oftentimes what we're competing against in sales is not against a competitor. It's the choice to do nothing at all. Say more about that. So a lot of deals are lost because it's just not important right now. Or some other problem in a completely different offering category that has nothing to do with you seems more important for the business to tackle right now than what you're trying to solve for them. So zooming out a little bit to try to understand what's really going on here. What is really motivating you? What is your scorecard in your role? How are you compensated? How are you judged to try to get a sense of for what you're really competing against. Oftentimes, it's not a competitor. It's either the

decision to, I don't think this is important right now, or how is this more important than these other things that I've got to accomplish in my job? It's really interesting. It seems like if you're losing the business to just not doing anything versus another competitor, they probably aren't feeling the pain at a level that they're actually motivated to do something or they don't have the desire to make a change. If it's between you and another competitor, it's like they have made a decision that they're going to solve a problem. It's just a matter of how are they going to solve it, is it you or the competitor. But I've had that so many times in sales where somebody's going, yeah, you know, you guys are awesome. We're not going with somebody else, but we're just not

ready to do anything yet. And usually that's an indication that they don't feel the weight of, they don't have that emotional engagement we're talking about. So most customers aren't taking meetings with you to determine if it's you or a competitor. They're doing that research beforehand. The customer has all the information at their disposal to decide on the vendor most of times before they even take the meeting. They've already made the decision. What you're competing against is just that. Ambivalence. So in the planning process, you know, we talked about you got to have a plan, then it's going to get disrupted, then you check in and do the audit with customer sentiment, then you and your team build or you retool the plan together, you've given the objective to the team,

and then at some point, the ideal state would be what, that your team is just going out and getting the results. Like, as the business owner, what are we going for here when we have this plan that team's operating against? So the role of the sales leader, whether you're the business owner or you're in the title. But for a lot of folks listening here, they're the chief sales officer, chief finance officer, they wear all the hats. Good sales leaders build a team that understands how to build a plan and execute the plan and report back on the variances. your job is to remove yourself from selling and basically remove barriers for your sales team. You can't do that if your plan doesn't have a process and hasn't been assigned to the rep level, to the product level, and to the customers you want to have level.

When you do that level of diligence with the plan, you can then give the plan and the expectations on how to execute that plan to your team and hold them accountable for bringing to you barriers. so that you can remove them so they can get back to executing the plan. That's good. I've always said that a plan gives you power to accomplish things that you didn't think could be done. You know, and it's like we try to do things without a plan. It's like, how you can't do them. But then you put a plan together and you realize it lets you tap into leveraging the team.

It aligns the team around a common objective. It's got these contingencies we've talked about. And that really is the power when we get into the storms, we get into the issues, we get into those objections and blockers that you're talking about. It's like this bulldozer that just let us, we just push through. And the ones that didn't have a plan, they end up hitting those speed bumps and they falter. And it's these successful businesses who say, hey, we're not going to leave it up to, we're just going to do our best in the moment.

We're actually going to take the time and the space to plan, do the critical thinking, do the customer audits. That really is the secret weapon. The other thing a plan does, and I talk about it in the book, is the third principle of the book is prepare. the plan shows you where you need to prepare. It's going to uncover training opportunities. It's going to uncover ways in which you need to make investments into your sales or marketing teams so that they can be successful.

Or you need to prepare your delivery team, your fulfillment team that, hey, by the way, we're planning to double the business. So how do we make sure they are equipped in the event that we're, the likely event that we're successful in doubling the business? We've got to prepare the business for that. We've got to prepare the team with the skills hard and soft that they need to go and execute the plan. There was a time sales was all about motivation and rah-rah and motivational quotes and things like that. And I think inspiration and motivation still matter, but it really has shifted and selling in the new era is about having a plan, understanding the data, having your metrics dialed in.

You talk about that in your book, Revenue Harvest, a sales leader's almanac for planning the perfect year. And you break all these things down in a lot more detail on how a sales leader or a business owner would actually sit down with their sales team and put together an annual plan for what sales is going to look like. And I think it's one of the most underutilized activities that sales teams do, especially if you're kind of old school like me. And it's just a matter of, hey, let's just dive into this month and dial for dollars and just go, go, go. And it's all about lots of activity. But having this annual plan really can set you up for success. Well, I think that chance favors the prepared and the extent to which you can focus on being prepared with a plan, the luckier you're going to be. That's good.

Nigel Green, it's always great to have a chance to hang out with you a little bit, man. And thanks for coming into the Entry Leadership Studio. It's been a blast. It's been a pleasure for me. Thank you, Daniel. All right, folks, fun conversation with Nigel. I love how knowledgeable he is, but especially how much he emphasizes building a system, a strategy that's not just about this month. but it has a long-term vision for success in sales.

Now, you and I know that even though you have a goal for your sales, you may not hit it. I mean, some months you do, and you're always pushing for it, some months you exceed your goal, but there's some months that, well, things go sideways and you don't end up, well, following the plan. And, you know, it's important how we respond to that moment. So what do you do when you're off plan so that you can pivot and get back on track? We're going to talk about that right after this. All right, folks. at the top of the show. I've got George Camel in the studio with me today, and he's here to set up a

conversation that he had with one of our Ramsey leaders. Brian Mayfield, George, welcome to the studio. Thanks, Daniel. Happy to be here. Brian is one of our operating board members, and he's one of our top leaders in the company, and he knows a thing or two about sales. He has been here a long time, a lot of experience, and a lot of wisdom to impart to our listeners today. Yeah, and I got to tell you, a lot of our leaders here have done sales. Brian's the best. And I can say that as somebody who was one of his peers, we started here as young bucks in sales seas. And he was always that guy that I was just like, oh, I got to catch him. Like he's so good. And he's incredible with the negotiation side, putting deals together. I've always looked up to him.

And, you know, when we were young and green, we were pushing each other all the time. But it's been an honor to walk alongside him. And this guy knows his stuff. Yeah. And I wanted to kick off the conversation with them talking about what to do when you realize that you're off goal for your sales plan. I've been through that quite a few times. What you, you know, I don't know if this is going to come out right, but the one thing you don't do is nothing. Okay, you don't get to give up. Quitting is not an option. So you have to figure out, okay, first of all, why?

Why did we miss? Has something changed? Is there a change in the marketplace? Is there an issue with my service? Is there something in the way we're positioning it that's getting in our way? Because if you don't recognize that and solve for that first, you're just going to go deeper in the hole. But if it's just the minutia of the team or something that's happening within the team, you can figure that out. But, you know, as Dave will say in the middle of a crisis, step one, breathe.

You know, just think it through, figure it out. see what's in your way. Don't panic. You know, move forward and you can solve it. You just have to figure out what's causing the issue. It sounds like it's all about troubleshooting. Yeah. Pinpointing, hey, is it a team morale thing? Did we not communicate the vision? Is there a process issue? Is there a marketplace fit issue? And really, when you drill into that, now we've got something we can actually solve. Absolutely. There's a reason for everything. So as you start to develop a sales team, a lot of the small business owners out there, they're going, all right, I can't do it all myself anymore. I've got to bring on people to do this. How do you create that repeatable, predictable sales process? You know, Dave uses a term when he explains this success of radio. It's a mix of art and science. You know, art and do you have the right product and the right service that a customer is going to need in our world? Can you genuinely? help people with what you have? Is it something that you can get behind? Does it have value? You know,

that's, that's step number one. You know, you have to have a product. You have to have a service. But if you want to grow, that's the question. Do you build a, do you build a sales team? How do you build a sales team? You got to find people that also believe. People that see the vision. Obviously, they have to have to have talent. You know, they have to be able to paint a picture. They have to be able to tell a story. They have to be able to have a conversation. And it not feel scripted or like you're trying to sell them a bill of goods. But it's a mixture. It's art and science. So it sounds like there's a lot of relational, social skills involved in selling, but there's also the science to it and believing in the product you're selling. So let's say

there's a small business owner out there, and they started and they were the salesman, right? They're having to do all the selling themselves, and they bring this new person on, and they're trying to train them to sell the way that they do it. And intercepting that into someone else's brain can be a difficult thing. How have you found is the best way to approach that? You know, it's interesting, George, because I was that guy at one time and tried to bring a sales team on and tried to make them all like me. And it was probably the biggest mistake ever made in my life. You know, my sales mentor taught me early in. He basically said, don't be afraid to hire people that are different from you. I mean, David Ogilvy, he kind of coined the phrase.

Don't be afraid to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. And we just kind of adapted that into the sales side. But you are unique in your own style. Now, I can mentor people. I can take people with me and let them see how I do what I do, but I don't want them to be me. You know, it's almost if I created a sales team of a lot of me's, I would really be limiting my capability. Yeah, it reminds me of the leadership lid concept from John Maxwell there.

So what you're saying is it's not about, hey, say it the way I would say it, do it the way I would do it. It's more about empowering them to do it the way they should do it, but in a manner that also fits within the constructs of the organization and the values and the principles. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what I say to them is let me show you how I do it. you know, I'd be happy to walk you through it. But, you know, I'm never afraid to bring someone in with me, but I never want them to be me. You know, I want them to have their own style because remember I said just a minute ago, you need to believe in your product and your service. And if you're trying to emulate me, you're trying to say why I believe in it.

Tell them why you believe in it. So as you start to approach building the sales team in this process, there's one side of the spectrum that's wild wild west everyone do it whatever you got to do to close the sale in your own way but then there's the other side where it's like oh they're just reading off a sales script and it feels stuffy and it's not relational is there this in between what is the right way to create that process you know the the crazy part about the sales process is you always think you know how it's going to go and that's what a salesperson they'll spend 90% of their time thinking about what they're going to say and trying to anticipate what the customer is going to react to them.

And they're right, right until they utter that first word. And once the conversation starts, everything changes. That's why scripting. Scripting's great as far as transactional type selling. If you're just turning and burning on the phone and you're asking questions and you're overcoming objections, it's not a bad thing to have a script. It gives you something to go by. but what really starts to separate a really good salesperson is when they don't necessarily

need that script. When they need a couple of bullet points or a couple of notes to keep them on point, but be you. I mean, remember again, you've got to believe in your product or service, and if you don't know why you believe in it, you're never going to be able to sell it. Wawa West, to me, means you never know what's coming your way. and there's a little bit of fighting in what you believe for. You know, I genuinely believe, and I tell my sales team, if a customer tells me no, I take it personally,

because I believe that I actually failed in the process of telling you about what I truly believe you need. Wow, that's strong. You have such a deep-seated belief that it's personal to you because you're saying, hey, this is something that is from the heart, from the soul that I've deeply value and believe in. And you saying no means you didn't believe me. That's right. Wow.

Absolutely. I mean, you need to love what you do. You know, life's just way too short. And if you think I have this gift of selling because you think you can convince people to do something, you're only part of the way there. I mean, you've got to get the passion behind it. You've got to love what you could do. You've got to believe in what you do, and then you'll become good at what you do. So it sounds like it's not as much about the sales process.

It's about finding people who care deeply and believe in what they're selling. For me, yes. Wow. So part of selling is getting paid, right? We all got to get paid. And implementing that comp plan that makes them feel value to salespeople, that can be a tricky thing. And I know we've seen a lot of changes at Ramsey here in our almost 30 years in business. how do you implement that comp plan where the salesperson feels valued for what they're doing?

Talking to an individual who owns a business, who's trying to expand their business, and it's grown beyond them as an individual. They can no longer just be the salesperson. They need to hire a salesperson. Or even if you're building this massive sales team, if you're adding your 20th or 30th person to the sales team, first and foremost, a comp plan needs to achieve your goals. What do you want to achieve for the company? What do I want the net result to be?

How much money do we need to operate and keep our doors open and be successful? That's where you start. And then you work your way backwards into your sales team. What's it work to you? Some things are harder to sell than others. You'll want to put more commission towards the behavior that you want to actually. that you want to activate with a salesperson. So you can offer more commission for it.

It's harder to sell. That's why you pay them a little more for it. The easier things, you know, you've heard the path of least resistance. A lot of young sellers especially will tend to gravitate toward path of least resistance. Oh, I can make, you know, I don't make as much money on this sell, but I could sell 10 of them and make more money. Well, your comp plan's broken because you're driving behavior in the different direction. So there's a little bit of balance there, but you've got to see. what you want, you got to know what you need, and then you work backwards into your comp plan.

Okay, but with all that being said, that's the business side of it. The question you asked me was, how do you motivate the salesperson? It has to balance itself out. Number one, you've got to get the right kind of salesperson. You got to get somebody that loves what they do, and you got to get somebody that sees a vision and believes in it. Okay, that's before you ever talk about how you're going to pay them. You get the right person in there.

Then you say, let me show you what winning looks like. but be honest with them it's not easy it's tough i mean i had to grow this myself as a business and i need you to help me grow it to a new level and when you do you're going to win too you know a lot of salespeople come into a mature business that a lot of people have put a lot of sweat and blood and you know sweat equity into and and built it up and they get to come in and benefit from that and but they think they're entitled to what the founder did in the beginning so there's a balance there, but, you know, be honest with the salespeople and tell them. This is going to be difficult, but I believe in you. I know you can do it. I know you believe in what I have, and here's what

I'm going to do for you when we get here. Here's what winning looks like. Paint the picture. People I've seen comp plans built that have negative incentives to it. Basically, if you don't do this, this is what you're not going to make. Those fail every time. You know, you have to be able to paint the pitcher is what winning looks like and when you win with me we're going to win together and this is what you're going to make i love that it's more about the vision and the partnership uh that'll help them get there and luckily a lot of salespeople are they're driven motivated people so if you dangled the carrying go this is what winning looks like there's a chance they're going to be willing to work that hard to get there you know there's a there was a point in time and even you know

even our cFO back in my early days when i was selling here he would look at me and he would go you honestly don't know how much you're going to make this month, do you? And I'd say no. You know, I just didn't worry about it. I'm just plowing through, doing what I do, doing enough of the right things, money will take care of itself. Now, I'm not saying that's a formula for success, but it was my focus. I just wanted to get out and do it, and I knew the plan. The plan had been presented to me, and I knew I could win with the plan. So if I just took that, if I just took and did what I was supposed to do, everything would work out. I've been fine so far. You believed in the comp plan. That's great. And a lot of selling, you know, we talk about getting out of your own way. And there's, there is kind of a mindset around selling and people can kind of get stuck. So how do we shift our mindset that may be getting in the way of selling the way we should be?

There's a few ways I can answer that question. The one that I find myself going to most often, I even use it in interviews with a lot of salespeople. It's how do you? It's how do you? you digest the word no um you know a lot of people when they hear no they just hear no way not going to happen never ever again me when i hear no i hear not right now um you know so not right now you know i told you if somebody doesn't buy what i want them to buy then i feel like i failed so the first no is really not not yet so you keep coming you just you keep going and you know one of the things that I've tried to teach is just as a rule of thumb, I work on the three no rule. You know, I need to hear no three times. You know, not right now.

Okay, you're getting closer, but I'm still not there. Okay, I'll take it. See, and if I would have quit with that first no and said, okay, thank you. You know, I would have missed out on something. So, you know, it's getting out of your way is understanding that it's not easy. And you have to persevere and you have to get better and you have to learn from others. and you have to keep coming and you have to keep going. A lot of people will talk themselves out of a sale before they ever utter the first word.

You know, they'll go through this prospect list and they'll say, oh, that's a good one. Well, you know, if I think about it and they might not like this because of this, but I could say this. And just shut up and pick up the phone. They're just too in their head about it. Yeah, just call them. Get out of your own way. You know, don't let the negativity convince you. you that it's not going to happen, let the customer tell you it's not going to happen. And, you know,

there's a lot of different ways of getting out of your own way. But if you love what you do, you know, I tend to say salespeople are wired differently. I believe that because I'm one of them. I mean, we're just like everybody else. But you've got to just be able to persevere. You've got to be able to learn. You've got to be able to move forward. And you've got to knock walls down. You know, you can't let no get in your way. So we've talked about a lot of different aspects of selling here. What is that one big takeaway, that one thing that the business owner listening can go do today to improve their sales process and see those results? Work with your sales team. Involve them in the process. Don't just go tell them what to do. You know, I mean, I had a sales manager early in my career.

I worked for a television station and the antenna. I mean, the antenna was down. The transmitter was down. We weren't even producing a signal. And so we're setting in the sales room and, you know, we're talking. I wonder what we're going to do now. And the boss comes in, you know, if you pictured, you know, the guy out of porkies with a cigar, that was him. He's like, what are you doing in here?

And it's like, well, we're trying to figure out what to do next. Go sell. We don't even have a radio signal. We're not even producing anything. What did we sell the future, son? Okay, we're going to sell the future. you know and you just you know but but the thing is you know the question you ask is what does a business owner do bring that salesperson in you know share with them why you want to see them be successful

this is what i need you to do how can i help okay what do you need clear the obstacles i do need you to get out there and sell something i do that's why i hired you that's why i built you a comp plan but this is what winning looks like and together we can just involve them in the process together we can. It's a partnership. For sure. Well, Brian, I love what you've been doing here for the last 12 years, and we stand on your shoulders as one of the leaders who has taken us from where we were to where we

are and where we're going to be. So thank you for your work. You're welcome. I'm blessed to be part of this place. All right, George, great conversation. A lot of fun. Always love hearing from Brian Mayfield. Now, here's the thing.

In the conversation with Nigel and Brian, both of them talked about planning. Both of them talked about having a plan, spending time to know what your plan is, tracking your numbers and knowing when you're off plan so you can get back on plan. And that takes intentionality. It takes sitting down and putting pencil to paper to crunch the numbers. And, you know, you've got to pull out Excel and run out a map for the rest of the year and plug in your, you know, how many leads do we need? What does our conversion need to be? If we get that conversion, what does that result in? in revenue based on the average ticket price, the average sales price per customer. You got to do the math. You got to sit down and you got to be intentional. So to help you guys out with your intentionality, our coaching team has put together a great resource, a challenge for you to help you kick your excuses and build some discipline to do the intentional stuff that let's be honest. Some of this as entrepreneurs is not our favorite thing to do, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. So this resource is going to be a game changer for you and it's absolutely free.

It's the intentionality challenge, 10 days of intentionality. To get this free guide, all you have to do is text the word, get intentional to 33444. Again, text, get intentional, all one word, no spaces, to 33444,

or just click on the link in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed the episode today, and if you did, be sure to leave us a review and subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episode. And if you're a small business owner between about two and 200 team members. We'd love to get your feedback on the show.

We'd love to have a live conversation with you and see how we can continue to improve to make it even better for what you are hoping to get out of this conversation as we drive forward. So if you want to help us out with that, just click on the link in the show notes and you can set up a call with Tim the producer. Thanks for helping us out with that.

As always, you can follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. We'd love to hang out with you over there. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited by Zach Bennett, and it was mixed and mastered. by Will Redder. I'm your host Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of George Camel and the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.