Hey, this is Meridith Elliott Powell, and sorry, we are about 20 minutes late this morning with sales logic due to some technical, uh, difficulties. I don’t know. Mark’s pretty cold here in North Carolina. So maybe streamy yard was having a bit of trouble getting with it. But nonetheless, here we are, uh, around nine o’clock Eastern on Saturday morning time for, uh, my favorite part of the week sales logic. How’s the week been for
You that, but that’s, <inaudible> cold weather in, in the Carolinas. Come on. We, we can do better than that, but Hey, it is great to finally be here. Yeah. So we were talking in the green room, so we’re ready to go live.
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Hey Mark Hunter nine o’clock a Saturday morning or about nine 30, actually. And you are right Jack hub love technology when it works. And when hiccups on you, well, you gotta roll with it in this day and age. It is the age of uncertainty, but nonetheless, we are here for another episode of sales logic, hoping the audience hung with us a little bit late. Maybe grab another cup of coffee because we got a big show plan. Now, every week we come to you talking about sales, what you need to know to be more effective in today’s marketplace. We start the show with a question from our audience, my favorite part of the show. We’ve got a hot topic, a really great book that we recommend that you be reading. We’ve got a new one hot off the press and we leave you with a lightning round. So mark, what do we have on tap for today?
Well, what we have on tap is really impressive that you’re able to get streamy yard to work on your flip phone. So that’s true fun. OK. Okay. Packed it, serious nature. The topic, how to build a sales culture that every team member feels connected to. I, this is a great topic. It’s a great topic. And, uh, it really comes to us by way. The question, the question comes to us from Christian in St. Paul, Minnesota, where it’s probably about three degrees right now, I’m a CEO of a growing startup that needs to become a real business. Hmm. Been down that path before we have been in business for 10 years and last year, you know what hit the fan. We grew by 60 employees. I think he’s a little bit beyond a, a startup. Yeah. And I can feel the bureaucracy taking over. I feel like operations, finance and fulfillment are slowing us down. We seem to be coming the company of no. How do I turn this ship and get everyone on board to believe that being nimble and flexible is key to our customer experience. I need everyone to be in sales help. <laugh>
I, I, I love this question and I really hope everybody in the audience, um, is ready to take some notes and ready to, uh, weigh in. First of all, I love the fact that he’s still calling himself a startup and he is been around 10 years. I hear this all the time. And you added 60 employees next year. You have moved well out of startup and well into a cycle life cycle, two or three of the business. And you’re right. This is where the pain points of bureaucracy come in because you’re too big to be, to just have two people in a room, making, um, a decision. And you’ve started to create these departments. And these departments are important. Finance is holding you to the budget. Compliance is making sure you don’t get sued. Purchasing is and fulfillment or dealing with supply chain issues and all the things that go around there. But number one, if you want everybody on your team to be in sales, you need to declare that every, whether they indirectly or directly impact the customer is, or is in sales, you need to define the culture that
Way. Hey, and you know what? One of the things that I see and I see this in every startup I work with, it’s kind of a stair step. You grow and you plateau, you grow, you plateau, you grow your plateau and there’s internal factors as to why you plateau. And there’s external factors. Let’s deal with the internal ones. The internal ones is because suddenly, now you’ve added an HR person. Well, so if you’ve added 60 employees, you certainly have, you certainly have an HR department. And what does that mean? They begin to put processes in place. Well, as you grew, you undoubtedly put in purchasing, well, you, us, what you put in processes. And what happens is the silos begin to become bigger and bigger. And what you have to do as the owner, as, or at least the principal shareholder will say, Christian, uh, this company is you have to make sure that our people all singing from the same songbook, and this is what really breaks down.
Because again, people become siloed. So I’m gonna challenge you, Christian, what’s your level of communication with every member of the organization and are the KPIs of each individual department focused on the overall objectives of the company. Again, I find so many times that they’re are not, the KPIs are siloed. No, it’s got to drive. You put everybody in sales when everybody is starting to really sing the same song, the same message of what the company is attempting to do. You’ve been in business 10 years, you’ve got an established presence in the marketplace, but do your, do your employees understand that?
Yeah, I would say with each individual department too, you’ve gotta go in there. And number one, make sure that each department understands how they impact the customer experience. Really declare that the most important, um, impact you have with the customer is that very first interaction, because we’re living in a time when the customer controls the buying cycle, they don’t have to buy from you. They can buy anywhere. They want to, anytime they want to, from anyone they want to. So the moment that sales person sells something and they have a bad interaction with fulfillment, that customer is out of there. Maybe they’ll buy once from you, but they’re certainly not gonna refer you and they’re not gonna come back. And you have to, you have to help the other departments broaden their view of the impact of what their due and how they touch the customer. Here’s the power of that though. Everybody wants to grow the business. It’s, it’s why sales is the sexy part of, of the business. So help somebody in accounting understand how they impact the customer experience. Give them pride in that.
You know what Meredith, I’m gonna push back on that a little bit. I don’t think everybody always wants the company to grow. What they want is they just want job security. Yeah. Uh, don’t overwhelm me. Oh, we’re too busy. We’re too busy. We’re too busy. Now this is the thing, cuz what you said was spoken straight from an entrepreneur, which is what you are. And it’s what I am. You know, we, we want more business, more business. We’ll figure out a way to do it. Let’s just bring it in. Here’s what you have to understand. As Christian, as the principal shareholder, as kind of the leader of the organization, you have to understand and communicate to every employee. It’s the outcomes that you create. And I talk about outcomes a lot, but I, I, I, I can can’t stop it because really what are you in business for?
You’re not in business to, to make widgets you’re in business to help people, whether that be B to V B2C B to G whatever it might be. So you have to stop and make sure that every again, every employee understands, why are we in business? What is the objective of what we’re thing to do? And here’s the thing, senior management, it’s easy as the company grows, you’ve gotta have a sense of joint relationships with people. They have to understand your goals and you need to understand their goals. That means, you know what, those company meetings, those company events are absolutely critical because culture is created not by the business. Culture is created by the individual people in the business.
Yeah. I’m gonna say Christian, if you have people on your team that do not want to grow your business, you have a way bigger problem than getting everybody on the sales team. If, um, you know, if, if that is the issue, then you need to do a litmus test. If people do not understand the connection between job security and growth of the business, then you’ve got some, you’ve got some work to do there at the very least the, um, the department heads, the people leading those divisions, um, that you are now calling bureaucracy. They need to, um, they need to understand, uh, what they need to do to get everybody on the team motivated. Again, I really can’t stress enough. The people need to understand why a new customer is so important. Why the customer experience is so important and how they impact it. Beyond that.
You need to just start saying everybody on this team is in sales. We’re all in sales. Start to take the dirty out of the word sales. I hate it when I go into organizations and they say, could you come in and do a presentation on sales, but don’t call it sales. And the reason I hate that is because everybody knows, I’m talking about sales. You know, they’re not fool by that. And you’ve gotta make sales an acceptable and actually a word that people are excited about profitability and growth are good. Things, make them good things in your business.
It creates job security. That’s what it does. You know? And, and, and, and this comes back to, you really have to hire on aptitude and commitment versus the skillset. I see a lot of organizations, what they do is they will hire people, uh, on the skillset. Oh, I, we need to get this HR person, oh, they know how to do this. I want somebody who is hungry to grow. And again, what’s very interesting. And, and this is a difficult mindset for business owners to realize business owners are in the business for life. They’re, they’re in it for life because they’ve made a commitment to that. Employees are not, and you gotta understand they’re coming at it from a different, from a different, uh, ballgame. And what does that mean? You have to understand what are their goals. I, I, I challenge. I challenge you, Christian. Do you really understand what the, what the goals are of the people you have working for you to department heads? And you know, what of the department heads, you understand their goals, uh, both personal and professional. And then they in turn understand their people’s goals. Remember leadership starts at the top. Culture starts at top. The way you treat your leaders is the way they’ll treat their people.
Well said, you know, Christian, I wanna add, um, what are you doing to show that you are in the sales business? You know, I have worked for many, a CEO that it’s been a long time since they’ve been interacting with customers. The company’s gotten big. They have a lot of other responsibilities. I can’t remember the last time they were on a sales call. Role modeling is so, so incredibly, um, important if you want everybody on the team to be in sales to believe that sales is important, pay attention to what you do, what you reward and what you focus on because is so much more powerful than any word that comes out of your mouth
Spot on. I was talking with a CEO yesterday of a fast company. One of the things we were talking about is, is you have to create this senior level leadership. And I, I, I shared with them examples from several different companies where one of, of the two top people, CEO and president or CEO, CEO, whatever you wanna call it. One is externally focused, focused, 100% on customers. And one of them is internally focused growing, you know, the operations of the business. And I said, if you can create a two-headed senior level team like that is, is gonna do yourself wonders because otherwise what happens is you, you wanna be externally focused, but you’re caught up doing internal stuff. You’ve gotta find that internal person. And maybe that’s the CEO and you let them go. I always like when the CEO is externally focused because yeah, me too. It, it just, it just creates this air I’m in sale. We are all in sales.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Um, John register, and if anybody on here, doesn’t follow John register, you should some of the greatest, um, articles and work on, um, coming through adversity and, uh, and challenging times. But you are right. John, the things we were talking about 100%, why there is a great recession. You don’t have to have employees leaving you. It’s what you do, understanding the goals and the things that, um, that are important to them and matching them to the goals of the business. Mark, you know, years ago, there was a great article in the wall street journal about, um, uh, I believe it was a new CEO of Proctor and gamble. I mean, this is a good 10 years ago. And, um, they were focused on the fact that as a CEO, they felt that their role was external. They were living in a time when there is more happening outside of the business than in, in it that could impact its, you know, ability to grow. That used to be that certainly was important. 10 years ago. It’s vital. It’s critical. Um, right now, if you are not interfacing with customers, if you are prioritizing the customer experience, how can you expect the people who work for you to think that way they will pay so much more attention to your actions than they will ever pay attention to the performance reviews, to the things that they are graded on or the words coming out of your mouth. If you want a sales team, you be the sales leader.
Let’s with that P and G example, cuz I’ll give you a backstory on that. There was a CEO, a couple CEOs before that di yer, who was only the CEO for about two years of P and G. He sat in front of a customer and said, we don’t need you. Okay. <laugh> we, we can see now, remember, remember they sell the retailers? Okay. They, they pretty much sell the retailers who in turn sell to the consumer mm-hmm <affirmative> and he sat in front of a major retail, one of the major retailers in the country. No, it wasn’t Walmart, but it was a biggie and said, you, we don’t need you. We can go to the consumer directly. You know, what’s very interesting is he was no longer the CEO within about six to nine months after. Yeah. Because again, not customer focused. So it it’s easy to lose your way. And again, I’m sorry. We’re kind of running off on a soapbox soapbox. Okay. That was a bad. That was a bad term talking about P and G. Yeah. So anyway,
Okay. I’m sorry. So right. How often should a CEO communicate in times of crisis to keep and build culture, love the two headed approach?
Uh, they have to be continuously continuously. One of the things that I always I always look at is privately held companies. And this company that we’re taught about here probably privately health. Are you sharing your numbers with the, are you sharing your numbers with the organization? Mm-hmm <affirmative> are you sharing your sales growth numbers now you don’t need to get into the full P and L no, no, but again, are you sharing them? Let them under, let them participate in the success of the company. Absolutely key. Hey, we, we should probably transition to the question because time is moving. Yeah.
We’re almost out of
Time actually. Yeah. How to build a sales culture that every team feels connected to. Okay. We’ve been sharing a lot of
Ideas. We’ve been sharing a lot, but you know, mark, I wanna follow up on what you just said is one of the most important things. If you want to, to sales culture, how does your company make money? Like you said, don’t share the whole P and L but the simplistic information around how your company makes money, how do you generate revenue? What expenses do you have? What revenue can they control? What expenses, um, can they control? What is the impact they specifically have? When people understand how your organization makes money, they will help you not only generate more revenue, but they will help you hold on to more revenue. They’ll we’ll work to cut expenses.
That is so spot on. Along with that, share with them customer success stories, share with issues and complaints that customers have had. Let them see how that customer interaction is happening. And you as the CEO, you, as the president, COO, you have to be communicating to people. Hey, you know what? I was just talking to a couple customers the other day, or I was just out visiting a couple customers, sh share the stories. The narrative conversation has to be around. Sales has to be around customers, invite sales people. One of the things that I always tell organizations, you know, and again, we’ll go back to Christian, Hey, you know what, Christian, you may wanna take your HR person and have them spend a day out in the field with sales people. If, if, if they’re out in the field or if they’re on the phone, but, but shadowing have people shadow what sales people are doing. You wanna create a sales culture. That’s a great way to do it. Yeah.
What also has say the flip of that, and the flip of that is have the sales people spend some time in your back office departments for a couple of reasons. Sales people need to understand what happens to the customer. Once the sale has been made what’s happening. The other is that they can help the, um, operations teams identify opportunities to create more or to create a better experience. I was just doing a sales training last week with, um, a customer complaint department and how to turn every customer complaint into a sales, um, opportunity when customers are unhappy and you solve that problem, it’s one of the greatest times to create a sale or to get a referral, but you have to, um, this isn’t, you know, look, I do sales training and I’m an advocate of sales training, but doesn’t matter how good or spot on I was in a day. It’s not gonna take a hold. It’s not gonna take hold. You gotta have it happening all the time. So invite the sales people to hang out with the operations people, the operations people to hang out, um, uh, with the sales people and every, everybody get a taste and be able to see the value they bring and bring the input.
And they also see how hard it is. Because again, a lot of people stand off on the sideline. Oh, sales is easy. All they have to do is take orders. No that’s called customer service. Sales is about creating incremental opportunities. Again, that’s a different soapbox. We’ll run down later, but here’s full thing. People don’t understand saying how difficult sales is. Sales is not an easy, easy job. It, it it’s work. And when, when every other department understands that it’s amazing how people then begin to get behind sales. One quick thing that I love doing, and I’ll share the example. It was actually with dove bar. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a dove bar who
Hasn’t had bar you haven’t, if you haven’t had a do bar, go get one right now. You just zoom it.
I am, I am. I am in the, the dove bar, manufacturing and offices. And I believe it was Burr Ridge, Illinois. This goes back 15 years ago. And it was very interesting. But at the end of the day, they suddenly, this buzzer starts going off 1, 2, 3, 4, and, and people in the office are just going ballistic. They’re just going nuts. They’re screaming, they’re yelling, counting, counting, I’m going, what is this a cult? Uh, have you had too many dove virus? And what it was was at the end of every shift, one person from the production line was allowed to ring this buzzer based on the number of, of truckload orders that they had received that day. What a way, what a great way to bring operations, you know, manufacturing into the sales process. Yeah, absolutely. And it became a coveted prize to be able to be the one to ring the buzzer. I love that. Yeah.
I wanna answer John register’s question here. He’s saying for entrepreneurs, who should they? And when I say, um, they, I mean, I, okay, John, we’re answering this for you share the high level P and L with usually it’s my business coach. Is there a strategy that would work to share with a client, uh, or a speaker’s bureau? Number one, um, John, if you have with you like a virtual assistant, like a webmaster, like somebody like that, make sure that they fundamentally understand the workings of your business. And what I mean by that is what are your revenue generators? Do you do keynote speaking? Do you do some training? Do you have some books to sell that they understand those pieces certainly share with your business coach, if you work pretty closely with some your bureaus. Absolutely. They understand the ways that you, um, that you generate, uh, that you generate revenue with a client.
It’s a little more delicate than that. We don’t do it necessarily with a P and L but with a client. I always make sure that they understand all the different ways that they could use me that there’s. Um, I just had one this morning. I had a guy reach out to me for an event in, um, in March. And I said, let’s set up a call. There’s a lot of ideas on a lot of different ways that we could, um, approach achieving your goal. Now he’s gonna buy one of those. I feel really confident, but at the same time, I wanna let him know the depth of which he could use me so that when I circle back after the event, there’s a lot more things that, um, that, that we could do. So, so you first get really clear on your revenue and on your expenses.
And then you find ways to, um, to share that with people. But most importantly, everybody that works with you needs to understand it takes for you to break even where that break even happens and how much it takes, and then what are expenses they could control when everybody starts to look for ways to decrease, um, uh, expenses. That’s huge, you know, we have had the chat really lighting up, mark. You are so right. The things that we have been talking about, mark Breman exactly. They break down silos. When you get operations to work with sales sales, to work with operations. Now we have a depth, um, uh, just such a depth of, of understanding and Jack Hubbard, uh, the master of sales training, it’s everything. After the sales training that helps build a sustainable culture. We are amazing sales trainers, but you have got to have the leaders in there holding on, on that. Yes. So, all right.
I’m gonna have to put another quarter in the machine to keep the show going, because I mean, it’s amazing. Hey, look, let let’s jump to the book. Andy Paul, notice how I do my best van of white. Actually you should be holding book anyway, sell, oh, there you go. Sell without selling out great book. You know what I like about it? Not only is it a fast read, but it’s Andy being Andy. Yeah, because he shares so many different strategies. This book is just coming out right now and very much encourage you to grab the book.
Uh, yeah. You know, it’s also got like, if you don’t know, Andy Paul, you should follow, um, Andy Paul, I got a comment too, that we’ve got mark and John building a network and connecting here. I love that that community is being, um, built. But what I want you to understand about, uh, Andy is, um, gosh, I mean, he is wicked smart when it comes to sales, but he has sort of a, an eclectic approach.
Oh, really? You’re kidding me. Yeah. <laugh>
And so, um, uh, you know, and it’s it’s chapters, like, are you a sales leader or merely a sales boss death to the sales strategy. So if you wanna be challenged and pushed a little outta your comfort zone, really look I up, um, this book sell without selling out a guide to your own sales success by Andy. You’ll hear mark and I, um, talk about it, uh, quite a, quite, quite a bit more often,
Okay. We gotta jump into the lightning round because lightning’s gonna strike us because, uh, this show goes in a couple minutes, top 10 ways to ensure sales is top of my, for every team member go you
Sales leader, be the role model. Be the role model. Be the role model, never start or end a meeting that you are not talking about sales.
Well, you just took the number one thing for me, but Hey, get your, get all members of the organization out. Working with sales people shadow them,
Reward sales every day for people at the back of the house, every positive impact they make reward it, comment on it for, um, for everybody in sales. When you win a customer comment on it,
Share customer success stories, and share customer complaints with every member of the organization.
Yeah, I would say that you need to, um, you need to find ways to ensure that everybody on the team understands how they directly or indirectly, um, impact the sales experience so that people are very clear on what they do to generate revenue,
Share your personal customer visits by taking sales people with you. As you’re out making sales calls, you have to be a salesperson in your senior role in the company.
I’m up with how your organization makes money and revisit. At least it needs to be part of the onboarding process and needs to be, um, uh, and needs to be in at least an annual review.
I’ll share one more. You share one more. We’ll close it down at the end of the day, make sure that you understand the sales culture is not the organization. The sales culture is the people that means you need to be spending one-on-one time with your sales people. Just getting to know them, not beating them up, just getting to know them and appreciating them for what they bring to the party.
Yeah. Last but not least everybody’s performance review needs to have a sales piece in it. You may think what I mean. How the heck could I do something in accounting? You can, if you want sales to be important in your business, then it needs to be something that everybody’s graded
On. Hey, with that, let’s go ahead and close it down here. And Hey, duke, send us your questions. Sales logic, podcast.com. Send us a question cuz it’s really how we drive the shows. But anyway, Hey, thank you for listening to sales logic this week. If you like what you hear subscribe, right? And you the show on your favorite podcast app, if something we’ve said has earned you a single dollar, consider telling a friend about our show. It’s how we grow to help you grow. I’m Mark Hunter and I’m Meredith Elliot Powell. Remember when you sell with confidence and integrity,
Uncertainty suddenly becomes your
Competitive advantage and the sale becomes logical.
All right, we will see you here next week and barring no, uh, technology, uh, issues. We will be right on dime at nine o’clock Eastern. If you wanna pick up Andy’s book, the link is right there. Please reach out to us, uh, send us, uh, your questions on sales logic. You’re an amazing audience. Cannot thank you enough for the, the engagement that you bring, uh, to the table. And, uh, we’ll see you right here next week. Go land some business.
