The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Transforming Your Sales Strategy: Hiring Dynamic Sales Teams: Build a High-Performing Sales Team through Cultural Alignment and Modern Hiring Practices by Theodore Fluck

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Transforming Your Sales Strategy: Hiring Dynamic Sales Teams: Build a High-Performing Sales Team through Cultural Alignment and Modern Hiring Practices by Theodore Fluck Amazon.com Dynamicsalesteams.com Discover the secret to supercharging your sales strategy in "Transforming Your Sales Strategy: Hiring Dynamic Sales Teams" - Build a High-Performing Sales Team through Cultural Alignment and Modern Hiring Practices. This comprehensive guide reveals the strategic blend of evaluating company culture, setting precise sales needs and goals, and establishing a streamlined hiring process that yields high-performing sales teams. Uncover the crucial role that company culture plays in your sales success. Explore the tools and methodologies needed to conduct a deep-dive cultural assessment of your organization and understand how to align your sales objectives with broader organizational goals. Gain insights into a six-step sales hiring process that sets the foundation for your sales success. Learn the importance of cultural alignment in your hiring process and discover strategies for selecting candidates who resonate with your company's unique ethos. Find out how to leverage professional recruiters and assessment tools to enhance your hiring process efficiency. Master the art of making the right sales hire with a comprehensive exploration of the ideal salesperson persona. Learn how to conduct effective interviews, focusing on behavioral interviewing techniques that can help predict future performance. Discover the secrets of an impactful onboarding program and delve into the significance of continuous training, professional development, and setting reasonable performance expectations. This invaluable guide draws on real-life case studies, providing you with practical, actionable strategies for transforming your sales strategy and building dynamic sales teams. Learn to assess your company's unique sales needs, establish an effective sales hiring pipeline, and set expectations for new hires. Whether you're a business owner, sales manager, or HR professional, "Transforming Your Sales Strategy" is an essential resource for fostering a high-performing sales culture and achieving sustainable business growth. "Transforming Your Sales Strategy" is your blueprint for sales success. Invest in your organization's future today by discovering the path to building dynamic, high-performing sales teams. Your journey to sales success starts here. Don't miss out. Dive in now!

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. For 15 years and over 1,500 episodes, I think it is now,

we've been bringing you the greatest minds on The Chris Voss Show, the most brilliant people, the people who expand your mind, knowledge, your energy. You'll have these craniums that you'll have to order new from Amazon. The Chris Voss Show family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your dad who just looks at you and has never told you how proud he is of you. Oh, wow. I just

scarred some people with bringing that back. So welcome to the show. We definitely, people are like, dude, you hurt me again. So there you go. Take it up with your psychiatrist. That's what I do every Friday and Thursday and Wednesday and Tuesday.

Anyway, guys, go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Give us five-star reviews, even though I just shamed you about your father-daughter-son relationship. Go to LinkedIn. Do as a TikTok one, Chris Voss one. I don't know. You know the drill, boys and girls. Go check out all that stuff. I'm just trying to get to the amazing mind we have in the show because I'm really excited to talk about what we have today. We're going to talk

about sales strategy, hiring dynamic sales teams, building great teams, et cetera, et cetera. It's going to be freaking awesome. And so we have a brilliant mastermind of this data, data, if you will, and author of a book that just came out June 30th, 2023. The title of his book is called Transforming Your Sales Strategy, Hiring Dynamic Sales Teams, Building a High-Performance Sales Team Through Cultural Alignment, and Modern Hiring Practices, which is good because you don't want to be operating those 1800s world hiring practices. Theodore Fluck is the author, and he joins us on the show today to talk to us about his latest book and let's get into it. He is a leader of sales and marketing teams. He's emphasized creating dynamic sales strategies aligned with

modern market demands. Successfully mastering three fractional CRO engagements. Within eight months, he developed and implemented two strategic sales plans. These engagements also involve comprehensive CRM analysis, integration of new sales cycles, and enhanced customer experiences. His engagement with the business community includes monthly webinars and LinkedIn Live, hey, we're doing that now, presentations to hundreds of listeners, in-person presentation to CEO peer groups, and recruiting three sales directors for fractional engagements. I'm sorry, his sales leadership is characterized

by the precise identification of target markets and development of innovative pricing models to capitalize on profitable opportunities. With years of experience leading sales and teams, he's published several insightful books, and we'll be talking about that in his latest one. Welcome to the show. How are you, sir? I'm doing excellent. Hopefully, as well as your father says you're doing. You know, he's dead, but he told me once he was proud of me when I was 30, and that was the only time.

Hang on to that one. Yeah, it's pretty much the only one I got. That's good. No, he's a great dad. He did his best. Theodore, give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, you bet.

It's out there, dynamicsalesteams.com. It's that easy to get a hold of me. So that's what we do. We build dynamic sales teams. There you go. Do you want me to refer you as Ted or theater through the show? Call me Ted. There you go.

Call him Ted. One of my favorite movies, Ted, by the way. Already, people are loving this over on the Facebook there. Exciting for this conversation. Thank you, Matthew, for the call-in. What motivated you to write this book? How many other books do you have? this is actually one of two full-length books I have and I have a few other e-books that are out there. Both of the books that we published

were top new releases for Kindle and I was really proud of that. It's been a really great eight, nine months going on now since I ventured out and did this on my own after leaving 25, 30 years of sales work for other people behind. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview synopsis of the book and that good stuff. Yeah. So really what it comes down to is the deconstruction of old dogmen, old myths, and the way people have been selling for years and the markets are changing people buy in different ways now. So we really have to take a look at what a dynamic sales team looks like and how to go about

hiring one um and chris you've had enough people on your show you've been doing this long enough so you know that when it comes down to having great teams it comes down to great organizational culture and that's not the posters or the crap that you put up on your wall that's actually what the people doing the work every day say it's like to work in a company. So we want to really take a hard look at what an organization really does value, what they make their decisions on and what the effect of those decisions are.

And there's no judgment there. If you're all about profit and high growth or any relentless sales and skyrocketing your revenue, excellent. You just need to be able to have a sales team that can keep up with that and that you're going to have the support systems in place for them.

If you're more into a customer-centric organization, you want a more empathetic sales team. What the book's really about though is identifying those things in the organization and then working through and finding those things within your sales, within your new hires, new recruits and creating a sales culture that really supports the organization.

There you go. Culture is a really important foundation for a company. And you almost have to set it up from the very beginning, especially if you're an entrepreneur or I suppose if you're an incoming CEO, you've got to either decide if you're keeping that culture or laying it. Why is that important in your mind, in your writings? Well, mostly, I mean, let's face it. I mean, people these days, particularly as we come into new generations coming into the workplace,

are just, I mean, they are at work to enjoy what they're doing every single day. They're not going to be there for 15, 20 years. They're not even going to be there for five years, right? So if culture is that important to why somebody is being attracted to the organization, we can have, there's plenty of literature, plenty of information out there that supports people who really enjoy the workplace sell better. And if you're passionate about your product and the people that you're working is now going through maybe the second iteration, maybe the third iteration of where their organization is. Is it really the company now that they started out with? And are they really saying the right things?

Are they really doing the right things for their organization to thrive? And that really is what it comes down to. There you go. So what you're saying is people are supposed to enjoy their jobs and their work note to self uh take the chains down off the walls and quit the flogging of the employees it's uh it's a trade-off right next week do that next week wait till next week always tomorrow i'll start my diet at the same time we do that right that's true pretty much yeah there you go uh and in culture how you set a tone for culture uh the environment of where people can uh talk about issues uh ask questions you know uh if you create a culture that people

live in fear of being seen as making mistakes or not knowing what they're doing can be very damaging because if you don't have a culture that learns that can build um it can be it it'll just impact your company yeah absolutely having that type of exposure is important and you have to be able to you don't have to go so far as to say you have a safe space in your work environment but you have to be able to speak openly to your boss and be able to talk about the issues and problems not really be feel like you're going to be relentlessly judged for that. If you're having problems, you have to be able to bring it up and have people who are going to help you through that. And it really just does come down to support and how invested are people in being good servant leaders and how important it is to the prioritization again of the company to make

sure that the people that they're working with are feeling supported and that you're actually, you know, putting your money where your mouth is. You want to grow the company? Great. Do you have the best products for them? Do you have the best software out there? Does the marketing team have enough money to invest in really supporting great market qualified leads for the sales teams?

That's really what it comes down to. And people want to feel heard. They want to feel supported. There you go. We have a safe space in my office. What we did is we're up on the fourth floor and we took a window and we put some labels on it that says safe space, go through here.

So yeah, that's a joke, people. We don't do that. Please don't call me HR. I'm going to be in trouble again. Well, that is your show. It's my show. I'll do what I want and I'll go to jail for it. No, I won't.

So anyway, jokes, people, jokes, people. Someone's going to write me. But it's okay. You want to save space. Here you go. That's your culture, Chris. That's your audience, and that's your culture. Again, it's okay to be who you are.

It's just a matter of attracting people who are like you just for your podcast, which is extremely successful and has an excellent audience. And there's other organizations which may not be the same. That's okay. My job is just to make sure that you have the best sales team, the best support out there to increase the revenue and give you what you need to do based on that, right? That's exactly what we're talking about. There you go. Note to self, Ted says, quit terrorizing the employees, damn it. I am a fun guy, I swear. There you go.

There you go. So one of the things you talk about in your book is a six-step sales hiring process that sets the foundation. The one thing I learned a long time ago is hiring, hiring, hiring is so important. If you hire the right people, if you take the time, this is important. People just don't hire the first person who you take the time that's this is important people just don't hire the first person walks in the door right if you take the time do multiple interviews do your background checks and all that sort of good stuff if you hire right you will solve so many of the problems you have in after you hire people and problems and nightmares i mean when we started

hiring right and spending the time oh my god all the nightmares that we had with bad employees went down. So talk to us about this six-step hiring sales process. Yeah, it's a hire slow and I hate to say it, but fire fast. You know somebody's not a fit. That's what the window's for. Yeah, I mean, people know if they're not a fit and you know if they're not going to be a fit for the organization, it's not going to work well. I mean, honestly, I mean, that's just something that's really important to look into. But most of the six step process, I'm going to take your audience through all six steps now on a podcast.

But it really does come down to that. Just just like what we're talking about. There are steps in the deliberate process. It is not just throwing something out on Indeed or LinkedIn and putting out some blanket, boilerplate resume, job description, and then just rifling through the 200 resumes that you're going to get out there and just calling a few that you like. That is not what's going to build you a dynamic sales team or a high-performing sales team. People going out there right now and just like, Oh,

we're going to hire a whole bunch of SDRs and we're just going to hire all these business development reps or sales development reps. And they're just going to get as great leads and bring it. I was like, that's not a strategy. You know, that's just throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. And,

and frankly, that's crap. And it's only going to get you crap results in the long run. You might have a great quarter, but nothing's going to work in the long run that way. So the six step process is really, again, identification internally, take a good look, know thyself, right? Take a good look at yourself first or your organization, take a good hard look at where you're going to be able to find quality employees or quality sales

reps go through there. And then what does it look like in the behavioral interviewing process? Are you actually going through a process of behavioral interviewings where you're trying to find those traits that line up with the characteristics that your company needs? And then of course, you know, I consider it part of the interviewing process, but it's the post interview, what the offer looks like, what's the win-win for both companies and do not turn your back after the offer. Like, you know, there's tension on both sides of an offer. So we talk about that as well as part of the process to make sure that it is a win-win and that everybody's heard

and that you're putting your best foot forward in those first few weeks, which it matters so much for a new hire. So that's part of the six-step process. Yeah. No one wants to feel slighted and then take that into the workforce. You know how many times I've had people,

I mean, high paying, $200,000, $250,000 jobs and people are negotiating over a week pay, excuse me, a week vacation. I'm just kind of like, really? I mean, really? Like we're saying a week vacation, an extra week vacation is important to this person. You can't find it. Like that's just stupid. And instead of thinking like that, I mean, it's just ridiculous.

Like to lose great candidates and great people because they value their vacation time, their time with their family more than they do an extra comp bonus. I mean, you have to be flexible. You have to understand that and make good offers that way that really hear both sides. Yeah, because people, you know, everyone's different. They need a little bit in tweaking stuff to make sure people are comfortable. Maybe they have a family or some other issues or maybe they've taken care of a loved one that has health issues yeah you got to be careful about the nickel and diming and i suppose you got to balance the the other thing how has sales changed because you know you're talking about modern hiring practices you're talking about uh you know there's a different environment of sales when i grew up

because when i grew up you went you went knocked on people's doors and yeah you know you met with buyers of big companies. And you would meet them personally. And you'd use phone calling and stuff like that. And card databases. Do you remember the old index cards, the 3x5s? Oh, yeah. Put them in the back.

That was the era I grew up in. Move forward, put them in the back, move forward. In fact, my mom still has some of our old sales things from our company's index card boxes that she uses uh and you mentioned about i think we mentioned your bio talking about crms and different things how has things really changed and need to be updated with uh people's mindset because some you know i'm still using three by five index cards that's okay if it works stick with it right don't don't fix what's not broken um but at the end of the day though there are absolutely uh there's there's just so many tools out

there. But we can also lose ourselves and our tools. Again, like we talked about AI and things like that. We talked about like right now, the ability to generate leads is astronomical, but that also has destroyed your email inbox. It's also maybe never answer the phone. And it's also made it very hard to sift through all the chat that way, right? So it just adds another layer of complexity to the sale. With these technology platforms and with the removal of the barrier to entry for so many people across the globe, now we have other nations doing people's SDR work, as I was bringing up earlier, and all of a sudden we're just getting plastered with more and more information out there, but it's not quality. So let's lay a foundation on what SDR is for anybody.

A sales development rep or a business development rep, which is typically what I feel it should be is, is that person who's really handling the low bearing fruit or helping the sales team in their processes, helping reschedule people who were already on the calendar may have dropped off people who said they were really interested, but we're just having a hard time getting them back on the calendar, things along those lines. But what it's come down to is just, just people just,

you know, blasting as many DMS out there as they can and crappy emails with zero value to the client to try and get them on someone's calendar. we have to do a better job of that definitely and we're part building and qualifying for hell's sakes i get i get people that pitch me on like linkedin and stuff they're like hey we we have steel manufacturing of wheels for you and you're like how what in my bio on linkedin gave you the impression that i'm in some sort of steel manufacturing business? Yeah. I just got one this morning that said, hey, I'm a Harvard grad like you.

I'm kind of like, sorry, not a Harvard grad. It wasn't that guy, right? But Chris, it's kind of funny, though. But it happens. And it happens daily, right? Especially when you become a person of influence and more and more people are seeing your name out there. But really what this comes back to is that to answer your original question, that what's happening with the market that was changing, people are making their decisions on their own.

And good sales processes and good marketing processes are really putting out probably 90, 95 percent of the content, 90, 95 percent of the solutions out there for their audience to have, to read, to process through, to go online and find, or to download, whatever it is to get to it. But really what's happening is the salesperson really is there to validate the answers that a consumer has already come to on their own. So there's so much data, there's so much information at their fingertips, getting that quality, being the resource of the quality data, the quality information, really the answers to the questions that they're looking for, is much more of the process of sales was before. It's not going and knocking on. And I was made, you know, cut my teeth in the financial services industry, the

medical industry, where just like you were saying, it was knocking on doors, it was going through the do not enter signs in the hospitals, because you knew that's where the doctors were. So that's what the job was. You're standing next to the OR and the operating table going, hey, I've got my sales book here. You want to look at it? He's like, I'm doing an appendix right now, buddy. I'm a little busy right now. He's like, you're already scrubbed in.

You're ready to go. Can I show you my new sculpting tools or whatever the hell they called the suture tools and stuff yes yes yeah i'm like hey we're we're a little busy right now and you're like should i clean up right now or should i be in here yeah yeah got somebody else help me out with this whole premise i can do here it's it's sales has really become presenting the content in a valuable way and of value to and presenting those solutions that's of value to the client and constantly being there as a resource. And I think what's really changed that way,

which is the irony, again, it goes back to the getting away from the people who are just inundating you with all these calls and developing much more of a transparent relationship as you are really there to help with the solutions to their pain points, the solutions to their problem.

And I've always said, everybody wants to go home earlier on a Friday and look great in front of their boss. And if you have a solution for that, they're going to come to you. And that's really what we're trying to do. There you go. And solutions are important. So how hard is it to find good salespeople?

I mean, nowadays, I mean, in the old days, you know, we get paper resumes and stuff sent to us and, you know, calls and interviews. But now if you, you you know you put something online you're getting like five billion people sending you stuff how hard is it to filter for people that can actually sell i mean yeah i i come from you know one of my early jobs was the car business and so you learn in the car business i used to joke with my vice president i'm like i wish we had enough money where i could send people to what well, we did, but the problem was whether or not we'd maintain the investment long term. But send people to a three-month boot camp at a used car sales lot, and you will learn sales like nowhere else on the planet from a used car sales lot. You'll actually learn a lot more.

You'll learn a lot of interesting things. So it used to always be funny. I'd go over the used car sales lot and some police officer would be just, you know, as a lunch break, driving through the lot, looking at cars or something.

And like all the guys run to the back, you know, that have outstanding child support and stuff. I was never here. You know, it wasn't me. It wasn't me um so there you go it was always fun to watch um but uh you learn a lot and and and i would i would have people that would have college degrees in sales which i don't know how you really do but i guess you can learn in the

book um but they would come they would come work for us and they couldn't sell the way at a paper bag yeah and yet the the hardcore those old those old uh you know cocaine snorting smoking sales guys were you know they were the guys who were ready to go always at the golf course with the with the crown royal and their clients and making all the money and driving around you're like where are you right now they're like i'm in a limo with a client and a couple of hookers. No, I'm just kidding. Don't do that, people. But how do you find good salespeople now? Yeah, it's difficult.

There's no doubt about that. But they are out there, of course. And I don't think the good salespeople have gotten lost. I just think they're a little bit harder to find. And they're harder to find, I i think because there are so many poor performers out there or charlatans really um people people pretending a lot more um to so to speak and uh you know so it's funny because we've gotten our way from actually selling and listening to clients and listening customers and actually having good community like good communications

good connections with people and we've gotten into like influencers and, you know, how great do I look and what am I doing? And that has its place. Don't get me wrong. It certainly is important to be somebody of value and to be an influencer in your market. But that seems to be the trend in sales when really you got to reverse that script and go back to what does the client need? What does the client want? How am I here for the client? And you have to have a little bit of empathy, you know, for when you're out of Crown Royal, you have to have a little bit of compassion for the client. Because you're going to kill out there.

So it really does come down to that type of work. And I mean, honestly, just as you said, the resumes and the electronic processing of any type of applications to find people is next to impossible. But you know, it's still out there. Human connections and great referrals. And I think for a while there, well, thank goodness, the pendulum shifting back though, for a while there, we got away from even being able to legally ask for

referrals. It was as if you couldn't ask a previous employer or a previous connection with somebody what they were like to work with, because, you know, the attorneys are all up in arms, and that could be something like a defamation lawsuit which is ridiculous um but honestly yeah i mean i can't again what's the guy i keep coming with stories stories again and again and again i ask people like did you did you ask for the references and did you actually call them literally one out of five times somebody's actually calling old yeah no Yeah, no one calls the references. That's been that way for decades, man. It's insane. There's no way in hell I would hire somebody without calling a reference.

And it doesn't have to be a previous employer either, but you've got to be able to have some type of check as to who this person is actually going to put on paper to speak for them. And that's going to be a really good indicator of how well that person can perform and speak and what they really are like. Yeah, it's amazing. We used to have people that would just give us resumes where they clearly put their whole family in the references and i'm like did you work for

these people yeah or or did your mom have a company but you know like like i'm gonna call your mom and she's gonna tell me how bad of an employee you are. Come on, man. It's your mom. Yeah. She might. I mean, who knows? She's honest, right? She's really honest. Could be the toughest critic out there.

But a lot of times, look, if you can't call the old boss because there might be something like that you left the organization or, again, there might be a situation where you do feel that there's like some legal things in there. You find out who worked for you before. If you're going into sales leadership, I want to talk to the people that you hired and that you promoted. I want to hear from them about what it was like to work for you and what your skill sets were, what you brought to the table and how you helped them backfill you as you left the organization. There you go. One of the things that we identified in our um in our interview process

is we took it from one interview to four three to four so if they're really good we'd go with three if we really were trying to flush them out we'd do four and the one thing we found that was interesting is people get really freaking comfortable especially after interview two like at three they they're they're showing up in shorts and their underwear and they haven't showered for a couple days and they're throwing their feet up on the recruiter's table yeah and they're telling us about um all their prison time and the rest and they're just they'll just tell you everything on on interview three or four and three's the magic number chris you're not you're 100 right with that yeah Anything after that. They think they got it in the can at that point

and they're just letting it all hang out. They're like, hey, you want to see a skeleton closet? Watch this. All the skeletons fall out. You're like, wow, that's a lot of dead bodies there, buddy. We'll call you next week. Don't call us. We'll call you. The other thing that I found

was telling my interviewers, interviewees interviewers uh it's been a long day um to is it monday no it's tuesday you see that's what kind of day i'm in but uh and i'm 55 the brain's gone all summer's kicking in um so the uh i'm going full die hard uh if i can stop segwaying too. Um, so anyway, uh, the, uh, the thing I found was getting my interviewers to shut the F up. Like I would have, I would find people and I was guilty of this too. So I'd always have to watch it. But spending nine, you know, the majority of the time trying to sell them on, on who they were on who we were and what we were doing.

Instead of shutting up. And the one thing I learned is if you shut up in an interview, people will talk. Just let them talk and stay shut up. If they got some bad juju or some closet full of skeletons, it'll come out. They'll eventually tell you. There's a really, really effective tool and effective power to silence. When you ask a question and you really do buy into the next person that speaks loses, there's some poignant questions that you can get into,

particularly on an interview if you're trying to sniff some things out there. If you feel that there might be a little bit of a surface level response when you're trying to dig a little bit deeper through that process in the behavioral interviewing process for sure but it comes down to like i've mentioned this before the one-third two-thirds rule is something great that i learned as an officer in the military as far as military planning but it also works as far as interviews goes you're talking one-third of the time they're talking two-thirds of the time and asking questions and you're not trying to sell your company to somebody if you're trying to pitch yourself or talking one third of the time, they're talking two thirds of the time and asking questions. And you're not trying to sell your company to somebody. If you're trying to pitch yourself or convince somebody this is a great place to work, then you're probably have the wrong person in front of you. They should be the ones fired up and excited to come and need to sell themselves.

So just remember, when you're interviewing, it's hard for a salesperson to remember that they're not selling their product anymore, right? And that's probably it, Chris. It's like when you're interviewing it's hard for a salesperson to remember that they're not selling their product anymore right and that's probably it chris you know it's like when you're interviewing somebody else they're the product they're selling you and you're in the buying end and you make and you make a great point they're showing you how well they can sell themselves because that's really what great sales people do they sell themselves first they build rapport first people buy from people they like yeah you know they'll people buy from people they like yeah you know they'll even buy from companies they don't like if they like the salesman you know i've i've been in lots of experience where i'm like i really hate this company i think they're stupid but i'll

meet a great salesman the salesman's like you know really cool and you're like you buy from him people buy from people they like and so yeah letting them seeing them sell and uh how they sell themselves but also being quiet like and i always go i don't know if this is in your book but i always go through the resume through the dates and confirm them and it's amazing how many people have just made up stuff or they've they've fluffed over dates like several times i've caught people on their dates and I'll be like, so you were at IBM from 1989 to 85. No, I wasn't. And you're like, am I smoking the crack today? That's only on weekends. But everyone in the audience is like, he's a really fat crack smoker, which is really weird uh that's an arty lang joke uh but uh basically um i would identify things there was two times where i found someone's prison time because they openly

admitted to me that um that the dates the resume were wrong they lied on them and then i was like so when we finally established that the dates they lied about were wrong, I'm like, so what were you doing during those three years between your resume? And they argued with me back and forth and it became, obviously, we're hiding something. I'm like, dude, you got to quit bullshitting me. This is your fucking resume. You handed this to me. I didn't write it. And I always love when they go, hey, can I see that resume?

I'm like, no, you wrote that resume i'm like no you wrote this i'm not reminding you what you lied about you know it's funny you're bringing up these things about prison time and that's that's interesting i i have the privilege of not being able to hire too many people that i've been to that but you know you know you can find gaps on and this is actually a shame i think and i'm glad again that things are changing around with this people used to fear a gap that to have a gap in the resume like oh that would be seen like i was out of work or something like that you know where that's bad though is in women who are out of the workplace and they stay at home with their children for a little while and there's a lot of companies who would be like oh what is this you know two to

three year gap in here and she's like well i was i was raising my children you know and i'm coming back into the workplace or something along those lines and and i was just speaking to somebody about two or three days ago about that and just like how they were they were afraid to leave that gap on the resume i was like you know what you know that where that is you know where that that's okay you know go out there and tell them that was a decision you made and that's okay and it's not again again, there should be no judgment around that. But the fact of the matter is you're back in the workplace now. I do love the resumes that have those types of gaps in it

or those discrepancies when you're going through. And, you know, doing a little bit of extra, you know, doing a little bit of extra, I guess, like digging is a good way to go about that. As far as I mean, raising kids is a job in and of itself for both men and women. Um, it, you know,

I've had, I've had people put on the resume. I was, I was being a stay at home mom or doing a mom boss thing or, you know, some sort of parenting thing. I know a lot of parents are still trying to get out of the hole from COVID where,

um, one of them had to start staying home with the kids. Because if you've seen the cost of whatever it's called, the childcare and stuff, it's incredible. It's more than some people's yearly wage or monthly wage. There's plenty of people that are weighing the pros and cons. Do I go back to work when i'm really not working for anything just like is it worth being out of the house and building building up again when you're taking the vast vast majority of the money for child care yeah one of you one of your spouses is basically just all their money they work for every day goes to the the child care bill and so no doubt that you know at that point somebody's logically just got to stay home but you know they have good skills they have good uh abilities you know

and how to utilize things um do you do you find that uh uh you you talk about some of the different other ways to conduct effective interviews uh and behavioral interviewing techniques and i think that's really important uh in helping predict future performance. Do you want to tease out some of that in your onboarding program? Yeah, a lot of it has to do with really going through and finding out. I do something I call the spiraling technique,

which I think is really important to talk to people, which is essentially if you think about you're starting at one place and you're asking different questions around the resume, but then you're going to be back again, you're going to dig a little bit deeper and you're going to spiral around and keep coming back around again and again and again. I think that's a really effective way to learn more about whether or not people are giving you surface answers, have actually thought through some answers and actually really has some depth of their responses as far as that goes in the

behavioral interview process, which is important. And you're also looking for, and this is part of it again, part of the six step process is going through and finding out the corporate traits that you want to have. But you already have written down what are the characteristics that you want that support those traits. If you're a company that is all about innovation, you better have somebody who can handle change and you better have somebody who can you know adapt quickly right so those things need to be written down beforehand and you're looking for that you're asking the appropriate questions to find out if they have those characteristics and traits and the other thing i mean just to tease out a few things in here we always talk about i'm a big fan of the star firm format the situation task action and result so you can talk to people about that

and that should be part of their responses or even part of like your questions can be based around that. So star format, situation, task, action, and result. What was the situation? What was the task at hand? What did you do to fix the situation? And what was the result at the end?

Again, just a good format to go through and to think through. Are you speaking with somebody who can actually follow a decent process and think through their answers um good good good ways to go about it not just as we're like winging conversations here it should be a thought through process there you go i just learned something new the star method there you go awesome sauce um this is why we do the show i you know sometimes i learn more than my audience i wonder sometimes we're gonna have a test later for the audience.

You called me a genius when I came on. I thought I had to live up to a little bit for crying out loud. You're doing a great job. You're doing a great job. And I'm failing for myself miserably. So there you go. There was a question I had for you. Oh, yeah. You called in your title of your book,

Hiring Dynamic Sales Teams. What's the difference between a dynamic sales teams and a uh whatever the opposite of dynamic is i should google that well i mean it really comes down to uh organizations that can continue to adjust and maintain their sales velocity um and that uh you know they work through meaningful kpis to that are actually applicable to sales um you have a lot of sales teams which are great for a little while, but they become stagnant and dead.

You know, a dynamic team is continuously adjusting. They're adapting. They're adapting to their markets. They're adapting to their product changes as new product releases come out. And they're always continuing their velocity. I'm a big fan of energy. You talk about potential energy,

which is a great potential salesperson, but that person can't get out there and make it kinetic, then they're worthless, right? So we've got to keep our velocity. We've got to keep our momentum going through all the ups and downs, through all the buying cycles. And we have to be able to address that as an excellent sales leader and a good strategic plan addresses those types of things to maintain that velocity and that predictable income and predictable revenue for the organization. There you go. You want a learning, growing organization that can adjust.

There's nothing worse than sticking the mud. Salespeople are like, what's the new thing we got? I don't know. And there's so much changes now, especially with AI and stuff. What are you seeing in the world of AI that maybe is going to impact both hiring and sales teams and building a culture? Lead generation. I mean,

second, the information I can find out on a human being is absolutely frightening. And the speed that we can do that is true. It is, is, is pretty scary. The amount that like they, I've read about,

and I don't know much about like going too much further than this, but you know, you can talk about data and they say that data is like as valuable as oil is right now in the world and the globe. And that really comes down to people data too. And I mean, yeah, you know as well as I do. It can get a little bit frightening out there as to everything that Facebook knows, everything that they're pulling out of your Instagram, all your accounts. I won't even talk about TikTok right now.

But it's there. People know it. People can have influence in it. And people can buy it. And if they're not buying it, maybe their government's taking it away from them and using it themselves. It's frightening. And be aware of it. Right. But I also know people it's like we're so up their eyeballs and I wouldn't even know the way out of it. Where I'm getting at with that, though, is Chris, is that your um buying patterns and the and are known and the

removing the barriers to entry what used to be you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of access for large corporations and big businesses now coming down to the small business owner and um they're going to be able to leverage that which is you know it can be a good thing um for the small business owner for sure but i see that as being the most immediate impact and the most readily available assets any small business owners for sure. But I see that as being the most immediate impact and the most readily available asset. Any small business owner's fingertips right now is leveraging the AI that's right there for them as far as their buyer personas

and as far as what their clients are currently doing and what they're Googling, what they're looking for and what their needs are. It's all at your fingertips right now. There you go. Well said. And to me, that's a real great asset because, you know, I can look at someone's LinkedIn and, you know, I mean, when I used to go into an office back in the old days and maybe you were the same, but, you know, you go into your buyer's office and, you know, he's got his, he's got a picture, maybe wife and kids or him sport fishing with a fish or, you know, whatever his thing is. Hopefully, you've done a little research, but you just kind of have to go off the fly of what you see in the room. You'd be like,

hey, I love to fish, man. That's awesome. I love fishing too. Whatever. You ask about the wife and kids. Most people talk about their wife and kids unless they're in divorce court. How long

have you been married? You'd have these tools that you could use to build rapport. The worst thing was if there was nothing unless they're in divorce court. But, you know, so they're, you know, oh, how long you been married, you know, and stuff. And so you'd have these tools that you could use to build rapport. The worst thing was if there was nothing in that office and, you know, he was some, I don't know, some nihilist or something. But now you can do that on LinkedIn. So I can go see what you're talking about on LinkedIn, your posts, and, you know, I can see like a picture of you and different background things.

Mike Wallace techniques is one of the things that I learned from where when I meet people, you look at the background, you ask them about what's in it. Because usually, especially with podcasts, they feature stuff that's really important to them. For you, it's your brick wall

that's behind you. It's a tapestry evidently we established before the show. But you with your brick wall it's behind you uh it's a tape history evidently we established before the show um but uh but you really like brick damn it and so god bless you because most people are gone for veneer at this point from the 70s um which i grew up with the panel the panel look which you know still hot bring it back it's probably retro as a new market yeah do you have shag underneath the brick there? I would never tell you if I did. Oh, boy. Wow.

We went there. I don't know what that means. But the point really is hiring better, building culture. And I suppose hiring for culture is really important as well because you've got to make sure that those people are culture fit. And one warning I would give to people, if you know a salesperson who loves a royal crown, don't hire them. Anyway, that's my opinion. I'm sticking to it. And one warning I would give to people, if you know a salesperson who loves the Royal Crown, don't hire them. Anyway, that's my opinion. I'm sticking to it. Got to be careful, right? I don't know what it is about those alcoholics, but they love Royal Crown. But if you do,

God bless you, but get help. But how important is it to hire for culture? And I guess your book probably teaches us how to make sure those fits work. Yeah, it is. I mean, look, organizations change and organizations themselves are dynamic. So even if you have somebody who's a fit one year, five years from now, they may not be a fit. And that's okay. That's just everything's a living and growing organization. But the idea is to do the best with the tools that you have at the time you have them. So you do, I mean, you can get, they say 30 to 40% more profitability

and more sales from people who enjoy the workplace and enjoy where they're working as far as the culture and that feel supported. When you're working with people, the top performing and high performing salespeople produce two and a half times that of an average or below average salesperson. So when you start to do that type of mathematics and that type of exponential growth that can

come from this high-performing sales team, you really are looking at multiples on multiples of revenue generation for the organization. That being said, it is a long process to deconstruct old sales processes and old sales dogma. And you do sometimes have to eliminate the bottom of an organization to make room for the new people coming in. Or the Crown Royal people. Or the Crown Royal people if they're out there. So when you take a look at the top performers,

they may have been 15 or 20 years ago, but then Crown kicked in and now they're not anymore. You're going to get in a lot of trouble with this one with Crown. HR's told me you can't snort the eight balls off the desk anymore no you're not supposed to be doing that anymore there's no drugs in the workplace yeah the copier works better for that because it's clear and has that smooth surface but yeah those are definitely definitely can you tell i worked in sales in the 80s i see i i can't i can for sure you put the coffee down coffees for closers oh we did all that like that pen thing

everyone's like the wolf of wall street does this pen thing on sales man that was being done way before wolf of wall street that was done you know in the 80s and 70s we throw a pen to people and be like sell me this pen yeah you know and then it was pretty much the glengarry glenn ross of of the things and i knew a lot of guys who are the al pacinos of of that movie and then the ball wins uh it goes back to your index cards right these are good leads i want the good leads i was like 20 years old watching glenn gary glenn ross the you know they'll always be closing and you know the brass balls out of the box uh that's right and like you gotta you always gotta be closing and i'm like okay we'll do some closing

but yeah a lot of things have changed with electronics but to me it seems a whole lot easier because you can background check your buyers you can get to know your buyers better it's easier to gain rapport if you utilize that and people please start using rapport building first like authentic you know take me to take me to dinner before you try and seal the date. Yeah. One of the things I can't stand is when people look at my LinkedIn profile and they come in and they assume four or five things automatically out of the gate. You have to be real careful with that. I mean, like, you can take the facts, you can take the facts at hand,

but it comes back to the questions we talked about earlier, Chris. It would be much better to go to what you can find on social media, you can see on Facebook much better to go to my, what you can find on social media. You can see on Facebook. You can go to my website and see all these different things. But ask questions and validate what your assumptions are before you go in. Because you come in and you start like hardballing all these great things and how connected we are and how alike we are. But you miss two or three times. It's kind of like it's annoying, you know.

And now all of a sudden now you have an annoyed salesperson. Excuse me, an annoyed customer instead so yeah like what we talked about earlier with uh you know uh people you know hey do you want to buy some metallurgy stuff and things like that you know you're like i'm not i'm not in that business i don't know i don't know what you are and the other thing i use in linkedin is is i see their posts so i'm like what are you talking about what's going on what's your shtick what's your brand yeah and what's important to them and so uh tell us what this fractional business is going on everyone's a fractional this that or the other i think i'm a fractional ceo but that's because i i just flake out on my duties half the time and play video games so is that what that

means or what's this new fractional thing everyone's talking about? Well, it may mean that for some people, and I'm not going to judge anyone for sure. Whatever's working for them is fine. But the fractional work really comes down to being able to get excellent talent and being able to come in in a different role than a consultant is the way I really see it and what I tell people. Whereas a consultant's going to come in and perhaps give you an evaluation and a plan and then hand it back to you and say,

go ahead and execute. When you talk about a fractional revenue officer or a fractional chief marketing officer, you're coming in, you're assessing, you're building that plan, but you're going to be responsible for the results to the long term. Typically, you don't have consultants who are engaged with an organization more than a year or 18 months. A fractional revenue officer is coming in, they're giving you a specific amount of time or a commitment to time. And that is and they're going to be able to produce, you know, X amount of project for you. If it's a CMO, if it's like, again, if it's a CRO in my role, I want to be able to take on like a new product launch or take on evaluation or rebuilding the sales team. Do that type of work with you for a certain amount of time and hit certain benchmarks along the way.

And again, be held accountable and responsible for results just as a salesperson should be as well. So I think that's the big difference between fractional work and consulting work. It's not just handing a plan and handing an idea out there. It's a template. It's really getting into and being involved with and learning the culture, learning the people and working well with them. There you go. Should we get a plug in for your prior book, Dynamic Sales Strategy? Yeah. I mean, again, Dynamic Sales Strategy came out in January, February of this year.

Don't hold me to the resume date that I put down on that, but it was definitely the beginning first quarter of the year. But the idea of Dynamic Sales Strategies is something we build off of for hiring dynamic sales teams. But it is. It's about assessing your current organization, taking a look at the complete revenue cycle, not just what you're doing with your marketing team, not just how marketing is transitioning those leads to sales, but what's happening post-sale. What are you doing to maintain your clients?

It can cost anywhere from three to seven times more to get a new client than it does to retain a client. But your customers are not always typically, we forget about them in their revenue cycle. And a lot of times, most companies and most products are making more money in years two, three, four, and five that they have from a current customer than they are in the initial sale when they bring them in. But we do a really piss poor job of managing that. And we don't have the right people managing that through the complete revenue cycle. So dynamic sales strategies is really around looking at the complete revenue cycle,

making sure that we're always upselling and continuously building those relationships with the client and being a value to them. There you go. It was out February 14th, 2023. Dynamic sales strategy, a leader's guide. I love leaders. A Leader's Guide to Maximizing Profitable Opportunities in Today's Fast-Paced Market. Well, this has been really insightful, Ted. Any final thoughts as we go out? No, I really appreciate the time together. It's

been a lot of fun and I do appreciate it. I'm just looking forward to getting out there with people and helping them bring their sales organizations not only to 2023, but where it's going to need to be in 2025 and forward too because times are changing. You've got to get ahead of the curve if you want to beat your competition for sure. Especially with AI. What's the way people can reach out and work with you and talk to you about doing some business other than just buying the book? Yeah, you bet. I'd recommend looking me up on the website. You can get a hold of me at www.dynamicsalesteams.com or look at my LinkedIn profile, Ted Fluck, on LinkedIn.

You can find me there too. Either one of those ways, you can DM me and we'll get together, and I look forward to having a chat. There you go. So thank you very much, Ted, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. All right. Thank you for having me.

There you go. Lots of fun. Order the book wherever fine books are sold, but stay away from those dirty alleyway bookstores because the books are kind of raggedy there. You might need a tetanus shot. Order it up. Transforming your sales strategy. Hiring dynamic sales

teams, building a high-performing sales team through cultural alignment and modern hiring practices out June 30th, 2023 by Theodore Fluck. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com 4chesschrisfoss, youtube.com

4chesschrisfoss and tiktok at chrisfoss1. Thanks for Marshall. Ted, great to hear some of the points you raised. Thanks for chiming in there, Marshall, as we go out. Thanks for tuning into my audience. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time. There you go. Fun is fun.