The Game with Alex Hormozi - Selecting Exceptional Salespeople | Ep 652

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

“The best salespeople are born in my opinion, not made.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares his approach to hiring exceptional salespeople and building high-performing sales teams. Emphasizing the importance of innate traits, he highlights the need for effective recruitment strategies such as hiring from similar companies or thorough candidate interviews.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:08) - Recognizing talent and building sales teams(2:44) - The role of training in sales(7:21) - The importance of selection in sales(7:51) - The cost of finding vs training salespeople(10:14) - The impact of sales on business cultureFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was May 24, 2022)

When we're selecting for exceptional salespeople, if you pay less, you have to talk to more people to find them. And then you have to have low tolerance in terms of how quickly they make a sale. And I would say for us, if someone has done a full sale cycle and they haven't closed the deal, I already know that they're not a killer. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with Acquisition.com. I always wished Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy.

I remember I was driving back home and I got this text and it said, Hey, we closed two sales today. And there had been four people who had walked into the business. And I had to pull over the side of the road because I got so emotional. I got teary because it was the first time that someone else had ever sold something besides me. And so that was the first moment when I realized that like this could become a business that did not require me. I want to walk you through one of the most important steps, which is, How do you hire excellent salespeople and how do you recognize great salespeople?

And so now I've built, I can't tell you the amount of sales teams that we've now built up. But I can tell you this is going to be specifically about recognizing talent. And so a couple quick frameworks that I want to go through. Number one, when I started in this business, I took every single sale and it was because I was so afraid that somebody would waste the opportunity. So if you have that fear, I understand where you're coming from. Second, when I had my first sale that was not me, I just had this emotional breakdown because I was like, oh, my God, this could actually happen. And I promise you, if you haven't had it happen yet, you will when it does because you realize that this business can actually work without you and other people can make it rain too. And then I'll tell you a quick story that illustrate the next point then I would make.

So as I hired some salespeople, now that first salesperson were they except you don't know, but they were able to get the job done. later on I had my first kind of like killer and his name was maru negretti and he came in I don't know a year or two into the business a year into the business uh ish I guess maybe less than that he so quickly was able to assume the sales role and to show you how laughable this is he started and I was about to start training him and some lady walked in the door and I was like hey man like I can take he's like no I'm good he's like go to your thing he's like fitness institution accountability. I'll get, I'll figure it out. And he ended up closing this first lady who walked in the door for a paid and full. And I remember walking in like completely dumbstruck. I was like,

he didn't even know what the pitch was. But she walked out giggling, happy, so excited to start. And what that moment taught me was that it is good to train salespeople, but it's better to take great salespeople and then just point them in a direction. And so this has informed a lot of the thinking that have around talent in general. And I'll tell you a couple of frameworks that have informed this. But like, if you look at Harvard, Harvard doesn't produce the smartest people. They select the smartest people. And then they put smart professors in front of them. But like the base level of intelligence of everyone who's at Harvard is already exceptionally high. And so like even if the teachers at Harvard were not exceptional, the students are. And they would be successful independent of that

because their selection is so ridiculous. Right. And so. And so. And so. And so. And so. And so. And So if we can think about our own companies that way, especially if you're in the service business, like look at the biggest service companies out there. Like look at McKinsey. Look at Bain. Look at Bcg. Look at basically a lot of the finance world or service-based businesses a lot of times, right? And they're able to do that because they create such a pool to select from that they're

able to skim for the best talent. Right. I heard this quote from Estuary who's the founder of Chick-Fleye, is HR head said, you win the championship in the draft. And so it was such a belief that they had about picking the right people even more so than training. And I would say that I have moved in that direction of a little bit more nature than nurture when it comes to roles, specifically, sales especially. There are certain characteristics about building rapport, about having certain dynamics or energy, whatever you want to say, that like, Mario Negretti, when he walked in, he had all of these things. And he didn't even know the pitch,

but he won that sale off of just pure rapport. And so if I'm going to allocate the same level of time to training somebody, I might as well start with somebody who has a much higher base. Because I could spend 10 hours to take someone from a 2 to a 4.5. Or I could spend the same 10 hours taking someone from a 6 to a 9. Right. And the thing is I'm also going to get more bang for my buck in terms of my hours of training with somebody who has a natural proclivity for selling.

compared to somebody who does not. Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything.

My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur. What's interesting about this, and this is just like my observation, is that you just have to be willing to talk to more people in the recruiting process. And I will say, like, from a recruiting standpoint, there's two kind of things to look out for. If you cannot pay super handsomely based on your price points, which you need to maybe fix later. But like, if you can't pay super well for the sales person, then you need to look harder and you'll need to interview more people and you'll need to probably run ads and user network.

If you can pay well, the best salespeople are already employed. And so it comes down to recruiting those salespeople from other sales jobs, ideally from companies just like yours, so that they already know a lot of the things coming into it. So it decreases the ramp up time for them because all we were to really doing is swapping products and the actual sales cycle, the type of sale is at a transactional sales, a long sales, it's a software sales, it a coaching program cell, whatever it is, right? There's so few variables that were changing that they can immediately jump and go, which also allows you to make a judgment on their proficiency faster. And so as a quick

side note to this, because this is something that I've given a lot of thought, if you look at the top salespeople and sales trainers, and this is going to drive home the point that I was making earlier about it being much of it being born, all right, is that if you look at the top people who are in the space, you look at Jordan Belford, right? You look at Bradley. And some people would would say me in term from a selling perspective. All the guys that I know who have taught sales were exceptional salespeople day one. Bradley started selling cars when he was 18 years old and was the top salesman at 18 years old. When he started and he was like, I just found something I was really good at. Jordan Belford talks about how he didn't know how to train anybody in his book. And then all of a sudden he for the first time

ever wrote out a framework to explain the straight line sales system, which became his book and all that kind of stuff, but he up to that point, it was just what he naturally did. Right. And I can tell you, in my instance as well, I'd already closed thousands of deals before I even consume my first sales training. And so, like, I do think that if we are selecting salespeople, I think it's much more about selection than it is about training. The training is to remind them how good they are, not necessarily to make them good. All right. And this is something that has shifted over time for me specifically. Now, if you're like, well, I suck at sales, you can absolutely put way more time into yourself than a business would reasonably put into an employee. You have you all the time. So you can

train you in all your off hours and you're spending your own time to invest in yourself. But from a return on investment perspective, the cost of finding a good salesperson compared to the cost of training a bad or mediocre salesperson is significantly lower. It's much easier to find the right people than it is to take somebody and then make such a crazy extensive training unless your entire model is we just take on every single person who walks in the door, like 24-hour fitness has this model. They take on anybody who has a pulse, and then they put them through a ridiculous culling process, and then 10% of people make it in the first 90 days, right? That's their process, and then those people know how to sell, right? And so they just make ridiculous requirements

that almost no one can meet except for exceptional salespeople. And they let that. They have obviously training systems or whatnot, but for the most part, it's teaching them about their process and just having old salespeople, explain to new salespeople, some of the tips and tricks that have just made them better, rather than teaching the fundamentals of selling. And so back to you, if you're somebody who's not good at sales, that's okay. You get there through practice and repetition. But in terms of, like, you have to get good at it because it is it is core to running a business, especially a small business is learning how to close, right? And so if you take time to learn it, it's okay. It's a skill that you're going to add in your

arsenal. And then it'll allow you to recognize good salespeople in the future. But you can't spend a year trying to train somebody who's not good. You can spend a year trying to train you. right and that's the difference and so when we're selecting for exceptional salespeople which is what I'm saying selecting for exceptional salespeople if you pay less you have to talk to more people to find them and then you have to have low tolerance in terms of how quickly they make a sale and I would say for us if somebody doesn't close a deal in the first sale cycle meaning like depending on the length of the transaction like some people you know there's all transactional sales some people might be a two week sale cycle or a one-month sale cycle, depending on what you're selling. If someone has done a

full sale cycle and they haven't closed the deal, I already know that they're not a killer. Because every single killer I've ever had closes deals in their first cycle, just like Mario Integrity, like I said earlier. The killers come in and start killing and then they just get better at killing with the tweaks and the trainings that we have, right? The guys who don't do that are like, no, give me another shot. I like, I just got to learn like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And the thing is, it's like, it just drags on an inevitable consequence. And so, right? now if you have somebody in her team and you've been in that dragging it on and they're like just barely good enough to stay on the team in every single quarter you're like are we going to let go

with this guy i don't know he's not like a winner but like i guess we kind of need him to keep putting some numbers up if you get rid of the people who are dragging the team down the culture of the team will improve and i promise you whenever you cut the bottom the top moves up right and then it also will set the new bar for the person who comes in it's like this is how a world-class team operates are you up for this. And the thing is, is the tighter and the higher that team is, the faster they'll point the person out if they don't fit, or they'll immediately accept and glob in the person, they'll become part of the unit. So if you're looking for salespeople and you're looking to scale the sales team, the best salespeople are born, in my opinion, not made. We can select for those people,

either through recruiting them directly from people who have very similar businesses to us, or we have to interview many more people and the feeling you get in that tingle when you're like, oh, God, I really have to have this guy. That's when you hire. Not when you're like, I mean, I guess this guy can do the job. Can't do that. It's not going to work. Right. And then on the flip side, once that person is in, if they haven't closed the deal on that first cycle, like, the longer I've been doing business, the shorter my tolerance for somebody not being exceptional is. Because every person that has been exceptional, I know immediately. And so I just have less and less time where I think, maybe they'll turn it around, maybe some more training. We'll get them there

when a lot of times you win the draft on the pick.