Sales Leadership with Mike Carroll
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Changes in Sales Post Covid
Sales have become more comfortable with remote selling using tools like Zoom and Teams.
Salespeople who primarily sold through in-person visits, such as those who did "milk runs" or drove pickup trucks, struggled with the transition to remote selling.
Communication has changed, with it being harder to reach people on the phone since many are working remotely without switchboards or gatekeepers.
Prospecting has become more challenging for acquiring new clients, forcing salespeople to be more creative with social media, content, thought leadership, email marketing, and text marketing
Remote conversations have become more common, even with the ability to meet face-to-face, and closing deals over Zoom is now a viable option.
Identifying Good Salespeople:
HR, talent acquisition, and sales leadership need to align to improve the quality of salespeople
Sales managers should be prepared for interviews and avoid unconscious biases
A system should be in place to clarify what qualities are needed in a salesperson, such as a job scorecard or description.
CEOs and leadership teams should focus on building a better leadership team
Sales leadership needs to give HR-specific feedback on what they are looking for in a salesperson.
Aligning HR, talent acquisition, and sales leadership can improve the quality of salespeople.
Sales leaders should get crystal clear on what they are looking for in a salesperson before beginning the hiring process.
The Sales Process:
The sales process involves considering the selling environment that the salesperson needs to thrive in.
Sales leaders need to consider who the salesperson is calling on and at what level in the organization, as well as the type of product or service they are selling.
It's important to think about the types of resistance points a salesperson may encounter, such as the typical sales cycle and the amount of resistance they are likely to face.
Push and Pull Between Experience and Attitude
There is often a push and pull between experience and attitude in sales hiring, with some companies preferring to hire experienced salespeople while others prioritize attitude and a willingness to learn.
CEOs and sales leaders often believe they need someone with industry experience, product knowledge, and domain expertise for a sales position.
An A-salesperson with strong sales skills can be trained in domain knowledge and are more important than domain experts who can't start conversations or ask thought-provoking questions.
Hiring a 15-year veteran who knows the exact product can bring bad habits and shortcuts while hiring someone young requires good onboarding and training.
Hiring young salespeople and training them can be successful in some companies, but it depends on the industry and the company's culture.
Onboarding and training are essential for new sales hires, especially those without industry experience, to ensure they can succeed in the new environment.
Pressure Test and Measure
Use a pressure test to measure how candidates handle sales-specific situations.
Assess core competencies for sales success through a pre-employment assessment.
Shorten the timeframe from hire date to revenue production by implementing a well-crafted sales hiring system.
Recruit all the time to always be in the market for high-producing salespeople.
Consider candidates who are stronger than your top performer to potentially improve your team.
Salesperson to Sales Leader
For startups, the founder CEO is usually the first salesperson, and they may bring on one or two more salespeople to help.
By the time they get to three or four salespeople, the wheels may start to fall off if there is no sales leader in place.
The first sales leader should be evaluated to determine if they can eventually build a sales organization.
There's no hard and fast rule for when a CEO should bring on a sales leader, but it's usually when their time and focus can be better spent on other parts of the business.
Salespeople are difficult to manage, so a VP of sales is recommended for startups or small sales teams.
A VP of sales may also have to carry a bag and sell while building up the team.
When Sales Process Begin to Suffer
The sales process begins to suffer when the CEO is spending too much time selling and not enough time on other parts of the business.
If the CEO is not naturally good at sales, it's better to hand over the reins to a sales leader sooner rather than later.
However, if the CEO is good at sales, they may hang in there longer, but it's important to find a sales leader to take over eventually.
CEOs can still occasionally be involved in sales and leverage their network and relationships to get meetings that others may not be able to.
The CEO's attitude and comfort level with sales will impact how long they want to stay involved, but they should avoid micromanaging salespeople.
Hiring a sales leader is different from hiring a salesperson as they will be responsible for building and managing a sales team and require leadership skills in addition to sales skills.
Interview and Onboarding Process
The interview process for a sales manager should involve a rigorous process similar to hiring a salesperson.
When interviewing for a sales manager, focus on their ability to coach and develop people, their philosophy on coaching, and their ability to create a culture of accountability.
Ask questions about meeting rhythms, learning styles, communication, EQ, and adaptability.
Sales VP or CRO roles require interaction with other departments, so focus on their ability to smooth things over and advocate for the sales team while supporting company goals and objectives.
When hiring for sales manager or sales leadership roles, ask for examples of how they have developed and promoted salespeople to management roles.
Also, ask for examples of how they have handled underperforming employees and high performers –Top performers want to be held accountable, so ask questions about creating a culture of accountability.
Finally, ask about coaching, accountability, and motivation and listen for stories and examples of successful coaching and management.
Pre-employment assessments can provide insight into a candidate's thinking and wiring, as well as their evolution as a sales leader.
Challenging interviews can help verify the claims made by candidates and ensure they know their numbers.
Good salespeople love to be sold, so it's important to get them excited about the role and the company's vision.
Qualifying a candidate's decision process is important in managing the offer process and closing them effectively.
The success of a sales leader is typically measured by revenue, but other factors such as team performance, sales process improvement, and customer satisfaction should also be considered.
Measurement of Success
Quality of coaching and leadership can be measured by improvements in the problems brought by the sales team over time.
Revenue, average order value, gross profit, and progress in the sales process are important metrics.
Getting the same problems repeatedly can indicate a need to reassess the team and coaching strategies.
Sales leaders should strive for consistency, accuracy in forecasting, and a structured process behind the numbers they share.
Forecast accuracy is critical for operations, employee engagement, and retention.
Sales Leadership
Good sales leaders should build strong relationships with other members of the leadership team, including marketing, service, and operations.
Sales leaders should work to understand and collaborate with other teams in the organization to drive mutual success.
CEOs can help to smooth relationships and build bridges between teams by facilitating communication, clarifying goals and priorities, and creating a culture of collaboration.
Sales leaders often find themselves in disputes with other departments such as marketing, legal, finance, and operations.
Sales leaders need to lead by example and set the expectation that internal customers will be treated with respect.
Building leader-to-leader relationships with other departments is crucial to creating a collaborative work environment.
CEOs should stay in touch with their leadership team and have their finger on the pulse of where friction points are arising.
Sales leaders should treat other functions as internal customers and encourage their team to do the same.
CEOs need to reinforce the importance of the sales function and support their sales leaders to create a collaborative work environment.
Sales Challenges and Successes
Sales face unique challenges, such as people lying to them and competition tearing them down.
Salespeople often work alone on the road, making it a lonely profession.
Sales is not a safe or predictable profession.
Success in sales is often quantified and easily visible, putting pressure on salespeople.
Salespeople are held accountable for their mistakes and failures, which can be highly visible within the organization.
Revenue and margin are the obvious metrics to measure sales success.
Leading indicators, such as the right number of conversations with the right people and expanding existing core customers, should also be measured.
Measuring early in the sales process can contribute to future success and help repeat it.
Book: The Sales Team You Deserve by Mike Carroll
The book "The Sales Team You Deserve" was written to fill a need for a different approach to sales coaching and building successful sales teams.
Outlines the roadmap to get the sales team a CEO deserves, starting with recognizing blind spots.
Provides a typical transformation program, including good sales leadership, coaching practices, hiring and upgrading the team, appropriate compensation, and a good sales methodology.
Emphasizes that the focus should be on making the salesperson's job easier and more effective, rather than investing in new tools or CRMs.
Helps clients through sales coaching and training to improve their sales team's performance.
Conducts sales assessments and audits to identify areas of improvement and provide recommendations for optimization.
Supports clients in developing and implementing sales strategies that align with their business goals and objectives.
Transforming Sales Teams with Mike Carroll @ intelligentconversations.com
We evaluate the existing sales team to identify strengths to build on and areas that need improvement. Sales managers are taught how to have effective coaching conversations with salespeople.
We utilize a range of programming, including the sales valuation that measures 21 core competencies to help salespeople overcome self-limiting beliefs that hinder their ability to execute a tactic.
We help sales managers elevate their coaching skills and provide online resources to help salespeople improve their skills.
We implement a sales process over four to eight quarters, with a typical engagement lasting one to two years.
Clients typically double or more in sales as a result of the transformation process.
We have found a niche with software companies or anyone hiring salespeople to help them implement sales hiring and onboarding processes.
We have recently launched "Intelligent Sales Growth" to make our services more approachable for smaller companies with just a handful of salespeople.
We provide a combination of online resources and group coaching to make its services more accessible to smaller companies.
Thanks for listening!
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[00:00:0] 00:00:0 Intro
Mike Goldman: All right. Our next guest is someone I have known. God, it's at least 10 years, 10 or 11 years, something like that. Initially through a coaching organization that I was a part of where he wasn't part of the coach. He actually coached the coaches.
you're good when you're coaching coaches. So, he coached the coach. He's worked with a number of my clients. His name is Mike Carroll. Mike is founder and managing partner of Intelligent Conversations, and he brings more than 32 years of business-to-business sales experience to help middle market companies drive remarkable growth.
Mike works hands on with senior executives, sales leaders and salespeople to build profitable sales cultures. He's transformed hundreds of sales teams by changing behaviors and leveraging proven methodologies to increase sales and improve profitability.
And the first thing I'm gonna do is yell at him because he sent me this bio and forgot something very important that thankfully I didn't forget, is he's also the author.
Mike Carroll: Oh, there you
Mike Goldman: You gotta get this in your bio man. He's the author of The Sales Team You Deserve. At least I hope he is cause I did have some questions about that.
Mike Carroll: Yeah, I've got it right here. yeah, and you're right, I'm always scrambling to get my bio up to date and it seems every time I edit it, I have to add. It used to be more than 20 years experience and now it's like more than 28. Now I'm like, oh man I've better add a few. So yeah.
Mike Goldman: Billions of years experience. Hey, welcome to the show. I didn't want the first thing I did was to yell at you, but I have to yell at you for not having the bio.
But hey, welcome to the show. And I wanna start off with just something that's timely and then we'll get into the book and get into a number of other things. But has sales changed? Kind of post covid over the last three years or so, how have things changed? And I asked that first cause it may, that may be some important context or maybe not.
You may say Mike sales is the same damn thing it's always been. But in your mind, how has it changed or has it not changed over the last few years?
[00:02:17] Changes in Sales Post Covid
Mike Carroll: I think we've gotten, whether it's sales or other parts of the organization, I think we've gotten a lot more comfortable selling remotely, having Zoom conversations or teams conversations instead of face-to-face. I think the folks who really struggled with Covid, the sales, are I call them the guys, right? the guys who drive a pickup truck and maybe they're an electronics distributor and they do their milk run and they go from one job site to the next and they pull up blueprints and say, what parts do you need today? Let's go get some chicken wings.
Those guys really struggled making the transition to more of a technology sale, but for the most part, I think you're right.
Sales is sales. What's changed is the way we communicate, it's a lot harder to get ahold of people on the phone, right? Think about it. People are working remotely, so there's really no switchboard. There's no gatekeeper. A lot of people were only available on their cell phone, and that's not always readily available.
So if you didn't have existing relations with your client, if you're trying to acquire new clients, it got a lot tougher to get ahold of people, it's forced people to be more creative with social media, with connecting through content, thought leadership, with email marketing, with text marketing, those types of things.
So, I think prospecting has changed a little bit, but I think in general it's like we've seen everywhere else. It's getting used to remote conversations. But at the end of the day, sales is sales. We're now back out in the field. We're able to get together face to face, but I think even with that, I don't know that we're doing as many face-to-face meetings post covid as we were pre covid.
I think there are conversations we're comfortable now having remotely, and we don't feel like we need to just take a trip to close the deal when we can close it over Zoom.
Mike Goldman: Got it. So to some degree sales is sales, but it has changed and in some ways it's gotten more challenging to build those relationships. And to that end, what I really wanna focus on in our conversation, since we're talking to CEOs and leadership teams that are trying to build a better leadership team, is I wanna focus on number one, how to find salespeople and we're gonna talk a lot about that. And number two, I wanna talk also a lot about sales leadership.
But let's start with how to find salespeople and not just find salespeople but find really good salespeople. Why is it so hard to find good salespeople?
[00:04:54] Identifying Good Salespeople and Leadership
Mike Carroll: Well, there's a number of reasons but the most obvious is salespeople can sell. And so, a mediocre salesperson can run circles around your best HR person. They, I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with CEOs who will say, Mike, the only thing that person sold, was getting me to pay an extra 10 K or 20 K in base salary.
After that, they didn't close another deal. And it's very frustrating as an owner, cause you feel like, okay, I know I need to invest. I know I need to improve the quality of the salespeople I have on board. And you feel like you're flying blind. Now, what can companies do about it? Number one, HR and the talent acquisition team and sales leadership need to get aligned.
I see a lot of finger pointing. I see a lot of sales managers who walk into interviews unprepared. They kind of wing it. They shoot from the hip. They're unaware of their unconscious biases. You see a sales team and it looks like the Duke University Lacrosse team. There's a problem, right?
Maybe we're hiring based on a certain profile. We need to get increased awareness and alignment between HR and talent and the sales leadership team. Sales leaders need to commit to giving HR detailed feedback so it's not enough to say, I didn't like that person. I just didn't feel it.
You have to be very focused and specific, and really do a good job of defining, this is what I'm looking for, this is what I need, and then HR has to go do their part of finding those people. Now we have a whole system, I don’t know how much detail you want to go into, basically it starts with getting clarity around what are we looking for in a salesperson, right? Most people have a job scorecard, or they'll have a job description.
[00:06:44] Sales Process
Mike Carroll: I wanna get into the actual sales process and think about the selling environment that person needs to thrive in. Who are they calling on? What level in the organization are they calling really high C-Suite?
Or are they calling more, mid-level managers and below? That's a big difference. What are they selling? Is it a product you can touch and feel? Is it conceptual service like engineering or consulting? Is it an established product category or is it a brand new no one's ever heard of it and you've gotta almost be an evangelical salesperson, right?
So, thinking carefully around the types of resistance points a salesperson's going to encounter. Who are they calling on? How big a ticket is it? What's the typical sales cycle? How much resistance are they gonna face? A lot of times sales leaders can't even tell you what that is, and then they're frustrated when the talent team is not presenting great candidates, so number one, get really crystal clear on what we're looking for.
Mike Goldman: Let me ask a question there, Mike, before you move on to, number two is there is in a lot of positions, but I find this more often in sales, this push and pull between all those things you mentioned.
Are they selling big ticket items and is it a executive level sale or you know what, all those things, is push and pull between, hey, that’s what our sales looks like so, we need someone who's got 15 years of experience selling products like ours in environments like ours.
Or the other side of it is we need a good go-getter person who's not afraid of rejection, who's got the right kind of sales attitude, and we'll teach them everything else. And of course, there's a whole lot of gray area in the middle, but talk a little bit about the push and pull between the experience and the attitude.
We're gonna train someone versus we gotta hire someone who already knows it.
[00:08:41] Push and Pull Between Experience and Attitude
Mike Carroll: I think it's a common mistake that we see CEOs make is, and even sales leaders where they think, I have to have someone with industry experience. They have to know our product. They have to have expertise in telecom or software or whatever. There are advantages to that. So, there's a reason why they have that bias.
But, in my experience, if I get an A player, really strong salesperson, doesn't matter what they're selling, we can teach them domain. You've got a whole building full of domain experts. What you don't have is a building full of people who can call at the right level, ask the thought-provoking questions that make the prospects stop in their tracks, go, I hadn't thought of it that way. Tell me more.
When it's time to bring in the engineering experts or the programming experts or the subject matter expert from the domain experts, you've got a building full of them. What you don't have typically is are people who can start those conversations.
So, I would, 99% of the time, there are exceptions, right? but 99% of the time I would say, give me an A player salesperson who's sold in a similar environment so same level of resistance, same level of competition, relatively similar, sales cycle and ticket size and all of that good stuff.
If they've had success in that in the past, even if it's in a different domain, they're gonna be able to transfer those hard to catch skills and learn the domain over time. But in the meantime, you've gotta support them with a group of experts who shore them up.
Mike Goldman: Got it.
Mike Carroll: I do have, sorry. Just one more thought. I do have examples of clients who really have this. I want to get them right out of college mindset. I want to take them, I like, typically I'm thinking of pump and filter company, right? They sell very technical, pumps and filter systems, filtration systems into like food and pharmaceutical applications. Right?
They really want to get an engineer and put them through a three-year onboarding program where they learn their systems and their way of doing things. They've had more success doing that than getting the 15-year veteran who may be bringing bad habits, who may be taking shortcuts.
And you know, so every company's a little bit different, but, and I can make the argument for hiring them young, right out of school.
I tend to like to hire people on their, I want to get them like on their second or third sales job. I don't necessarily like hiring them right out of school. I like, go get your first couple of years experience and then we'll bring you in. But it really depends on the company.
Mike Goldman: Interesting. And it sounds like what that comes with, if it's not a simple decision, right? Because if you decide, hey, I'm not gonna take the wiley 20-year veteran that's sold my exact product for our major competition for all that time.
If you're taking someone who is a few years out of college maybe, or second or third job, like you said, what it requires is some really good onboarding and training as well.
And I don't know if that's one of your steps. We only got to step one, but I just think that it would sound like that would be an important part is that whole training and development piece.
[00:11:46] Pressure Test and Measure
Mike Carroll: So, what, so I won't point you with all the steps, but basically, you get clarity on the position and then you write the ad and then you network to source people who fit that bill and then you bring them on. We have a whole series of steps that we go through, including a few challenge interviews.
One of the mistakes that I see talent teams making when they're bringing in salespeople, It's not like any other position. It's not like the office manager where you wanna be warm and friendly. I don't wanna be rude or unprofessional, but I want to put a sales candidate through a different pressure test that I really won't do on, it wouldn't be appropriate on other positions.
So, I want to test and measure them. How do they handle pressure? How do they handle quickly switching topics? Just like in a sales situation where the prospect jumps around, I'm gonna jump around and put them under some pressure, end the meeting abruptly, see if they try and keep me on the phone.
Those types of things work really well. And of course, we use a pre-employment assessment that measures the 21 core competencies that are must-haves for sales success and that tells you what to interview around, that tells you what to do in terms of onboarding, it gives the leaders some insight into how to coach and onboard this person.
Anything I can do to shorten that timeframe from hire date to revenue production is gonna give me an advantage. So those are all some of the things that, that really, when you implement a well-crafted sales hiring system and when you're recruiting all the time, one of the things we tell our clients is, don't ever stop recruiting.
You can always find room for a really high producing salesperson, even if you're not actively looking. Always be in the market, and if every now and then you see a candidate who's stronger than your top performer, what a great situation to be in. What a great opportunity to look at your team a little bit, differently.
Mike Goldman: Love it. I wanna stick within the hiring process, but I wanna jump up a level from the salesperson to the sales leader.
Mike Carroll: Yeah.
[00:13:42] Salesperson to Sales Leader and when the CEO is the Sales Leader
Mike Goldman: And I wanna run around in that space for a little bit and let me actually start even higher than that. We'll get down there. So, a lot of the clients that I deal with, and I'm sure a lot of the listeners are in situations where they're small enough that the CEO is the sales leader.
That's very often how it starts out. I know in my business I'm the sales leader. I probably always be the sales leader. What's that point? when should a CEO, assuming you've got a company that is scaling, at what point should a CEO say hey, maybe I need to bring a sales leader on board and it can't be just me anymore.
Mike Carroll: So, if we're thinking of a startup, where the founder CEO is the first salesperson, and then maybe they bring on a couple more, one or two more salespeople, and then they're that leader, the wheels are gonna start to fall off by the time they get to three or four salespeople.
One of those first salespeople you have to have an eye on, could this person eventually build a sales organization.
And that's tricky because the person who can sell, especially in a startup environment, isn't always the same person who can lead. So, I don't have a hard and fast rule like hey, by your fourth hire, always do this. But I think the way to look at it is, when does the CEO's time and focus become of greater service by focusing on other parts of the business and not worrying about being the only rainmaker, being the person who has to manage the salespeople.
Salespeople are difficult to manage, right? they're all going to their, the beat of their own drummer.
We have to invest time coaching and developing them. We have to hold them accountable. And I think once you get beyond the first initial couple hires, it’s probably time to either bring in a fractional VP of sales or begin to look for a VP of sales for a startup or for small sales team.
That VP of sales is gonna have to carry a bag as well. They're gonna have a number, they're gonna have to sell and start to build up to the team. Build up the team to the point where they have the luxury of just managing and coaching and not having to hit a number as well.
[00:15:57] When Sales Process Begin to Suffer
Mike Goldman: Yeah, and I imagine you, to your point of there's no hard and fast rule, your third hire or your fourth hire, but it would seem to me like you are, if the sales process begins to suffer because as the CEO you're not spending enough time, or the sales process is fine, but other things start to suffer.
Because as CEO, you're spending too much time selling, that's the time it may be beyond the point that you need to find someone.
Mike Carroll: I think it depends on the CEO, it depends on that, his or her strengths. Some CEOs are naturally good at sales, and they like to, they maybe hang in there a little bit longer because they're good at it.
Understanding that handing the reins over to a sales leader doesn't mean you'll never be involved. I think I would like to see every CEO occasionally involved in sales.
CEOs can get meetings that no one else can get. I know I have a CEO's, very engineering, operationally minded, and they're a precision manufacturing company and they were expecting to close a big deal and they didn't get it.
And I coached the CEO on how to call the opposite CEO, much bigger company. This is my client's, like a hundred-million-dollar manufacturer. They're calling a billion-dollar company, he called the CEO and said, I'm just looking for feedback and you know what happened and the client CEO didn't know, but got him to the right party, so he is referred down and had a really constructive dialogue on where they missed the mark.
No one else in the company could have gotten that level of feedback. And it was very hard for the CEO, he was very uncomfortable. I had to hold him and spoon feed him every step of the way. But he did it and he got tremendous insight.
The CEO's attitude and how long they wanna stay in sales is really gonna depend on what their background and comfort level is. If you are an OPS guy or a finance guy, you're gonna look to hand that sales roll off pretty quickly. In that case, I'm coaching them to stay involved maybe longer beyond their comfort zone.
For the person who's more of a sales and marketing person, they may hang in there a little longer, much to their detriment. They may be better off to go focus on something else and tighten up operations or whatever and not be in the middle of the sales process.
Mike Goldman: It's probably really hard. Not probably, cause I've seen it and so have you. It's really hard to take that CEO who is very sales focused and in an entrepreneurial organization that happens a lot. it's hard for them to stay involved without micromanaging.
Mike Carroll: And they drive people nuts and high performers won't stick around and yeah.
Mike Goldman: I'm a CEO. It's time to find a sales leader. How do, you talked a little bit about the process of hiring a salesperson. How is hiring a sales leader or is hiring a sales leader any different?
[00:18:40] Interview and Onboarding Process
Mike Carroll: It is different. So, all of the things that apply to hiring a salesperson, getting really clear on the role and the kind of past experience that will transfer well, those, all that applies, right? Putting them under some pressure, leading them through a rigorous interview process and rigorous onboarding process.
The skillsets I'm looking at are different, so I wanna know, have they sold in this kind of environment? But I'm more interested in not, how are you're hunting and consultative selling and qualifying skills. I may want to explore that a little bit, but more through the lens of will you be able to coach to this?
I'm more interested in looking at their ability to coach and develop people. Their philosophy on coaching. How much time are you going to spend on coaching? Give me an example of a turnaround where you had somebody who wasn't performing, and you helped them elevate their performance. How do you handle a high performer differently?
It sounds counterintuitive, but your top producing salespeople actually wanna be held accountable. They wanna know someone's looking at them, it's really important that they get that attention. And yet, where do sales coaches spend their time? Sales managers spend their time always on the squeaky wheel, always on the person who's not producing.
If you take your top performer and get just a little bit more performance out of them, you're often gonna get a higher return on that time than taking your bottom performer and improving them dramatically.
So, the interview process for sales manager or sales leader. My definition of a sales manager is you're managing salespeople, right? So, I want to ask questions along, how do you create a culture of accountability? How do you motivate and inspire your team?
Give me a sense of what meeting rhythms have worked for you in the past. How do you learn and how do you adapt. How do you communicate based on your team's learning styles, right? So, we spend a lot of time about, where do things fall apart in any management role, whether it's sales, bad communication, right?
I can't tell how many managers just expect everyone to think like they do, communicate like they do, process information like they do. So we spend a lot of time, how aware are they? What's their EQ? are they able to adjust and adapt their style? What's a good coaching rhythm?
Give me some good stories on coaching, accountability and motivation. I may even ask some recruiting questions. All those types of questions. If I go up a level, so sales VP or CRO type role, that's someone who's developing managers. And then the managers are developing people.
Give me an example of someone you promoted from top salesperson to manager. Everyone has one. We've all made that mistake, right? So, when did you realize it was a mistake? How did you want, walk that back, who has been successful in that transition? Give me that story. Right? And, there, I wanna, I want to pivot my questioning a little bit more to how do you interact with other departments, right?
So, it's not just how are you developing these managers, but sometimes that CRO or that VP of sales is, smoothing things over with legal or marketing or operations, or you name the department, all the friction points that sales organizations seem to find, right? and drive everyone else in the company nuts.
You need a sales leader who's able to smooth that over. Ameliorate any concerns and be part of the leadership team first, and advocate for their peers on that team, and then hold their managers accountable to make sure that the whole sales organization is actually supporting the company goals and objectives.
Mike Goldman: I love that last thing you said about being part of the leadership team because I've seen many occasions where the sales leader is running off and just blaming all the problems on every other leader and before we're done, I may have another question on that.
That's a tough one, but I wanna go back before I forget, I wanna come back around. You said something when you were talking about hiring salespeople. One of the reasons you said it's difficult is because they're salespeople and if they're worth anything as a salesperson, they can communicate pretty well. So, that I would imagine is you know, five x a problem when you're talking about a sales manager or a VP of sales at that level.
So, how do you get around that? Is there a, is it just. You just gotta get really good at interviewing and figuring that stuff out. Or is there a tool or technique you've used at a sales leadership level to get beyond the BS that somebody may communicate, even if they can't really, or are not prepared to take action in that way.
[00:23:05] Importance of Pre-employment Assessment
Mike Carroll: We're a big fan of data, right? So we have a pre-employment assessment that we can use for inside sales, regular sales management, sales leadership. We even have a leadership assessment, right?
We're a big fan of using those tools, which kind of gives you some insight into how the person thinks and how they're wired and where they are in terms of their evolution as a sales leader. Right? It is a challenge interview, right? So, I want to ask them some tough, timely questions.
I wanna put them under a little pressure. I want to challenge the success they brag about on their resume. For salespeople, you'd be amazed, they'll have all these claims, grew sales 75%, say, okay, so what was your average order value?
Okay. And now how many sales would you make in a typical month? And so over the 18 months, you were there, what were your total sales before you got there? What if you break down the funnel and their numbers fall apart, right?
And I'm like, how do you, that's not 75%. How'd you get 75%? And they go, I don't know. That was, that's just what my boss told me. I'm like, if you don't know your numbers right. So, knowing your numbers is part of it challenging those claims they make, there's a bit of a challenge interview, but then near the end of the process, here's another thing, good salespeople love to be sold. Right? So, when you get to the second or third interview, the tables turn a little bit.
I've gotta get them excited about the role, excited about where the company's going. I wanna show them, here's where we are, here's where we're going. And with someone like you in this seat, we can get there faster.
You've gotta get them enrolled in your vision, get them excited about it, and then as you're getting ready to present an offer. You have to qualify their decision process. They're measuring you, they're measuring your ability to close them.
And so, if you're, if you are loosey-goosey about it and you're not really setting the next meeting, you're not really setting expectations. You're not managing the process. if it's a cross-country move, I'm gonna ask questions like, how does your family feel about this? How old are your kids? You've got high schoolers. You're really gonna move across the country that, like, how's that gonna go over? Or, oh, your kids are all launched.
What does your spouse say about this? I'm sure he or she's gonna be involved in this process. What’s that decision process? How much time will you need? If I present an offer on a Wednesday, could we talk the following Monday, give you, the end of the week and the weekend to hash it through with your spouse?
They're watching how you qualify and close them. So, it's a combination of things. I think it starts with the pre-employment assessment. We use that because it's so accurate and predictive and it helps you interview better and it helps you laser focus your interview questions, but it also then helps with the onboarding.
So that's part of it. It's also the challenge interviews and then it's the selling them on the vision and the potential, getting them enrolled in your company vision and getting them excited about it. And handling the close efficiently and effectively.
Mike Goldman: Love it. Now you've got them on board.
Mike Carroll: Yes.
Mike Goldman: How do you, and this sounds like a blindingly simple question, and maybe it is, but in case there's some nuance, there, how do you measure the success of a sales leader? Now, of course, the easy answer, the blindingly simple answer is its revenue.
Mike Carroll: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: And of course, it is. But what else should you be looking at when you are, I guess it starts when you're figuring out what you want. You want to be figuring out what success looks like, but after you bring them on board, how do you measure the success of a sales leader?
[00:26:33] Measurement of Success
Mike Carroll: So, for a sales leader, I’m gonna come at this from a couple points of view, right? So, for when I'm coaching a sales I'll talk about how the quality of their coaching and leadership is measured by, are the problems your team's bringing to you improving over time?
That's the feedback loop. Revenue obviously, average order value obviously, gross profit obviously, but are we getting further in the process on our own before we have to escalate to a sales leader. Are we asking better questions? Are we bringing different challenges?
I love it when a salesperson or a sales manager comes to me with a new problem because they're at a point in the conversation they haven't been before because they did something I told them to do a couple weeks ago and now they're like, okay, I did that. Now what?
If you're getting the same problems again and again, a couple things. One, you should probably look at your team. And if you have the right people and maybe look in the mirror and say, okay, am I giving them effective coaching? Cause obviously it's not making a difference.
So, from the perspective of the leader to me, there's other measurements like overall retention and revenue trajectory and all, shorter sales cycle of that kind of stuff. But to me, the ultimate measure is the quality of the problems my team is bringing to me improving over time and if not, why not right?
Now, if I look at it from a different point of view, when I look at it from the overall leadership team, then you know, what I'm looking for my sales leader is consistency, forecast accuracy. I need to know that there's a structured process behind the numbers they're sharing.
If I'm operations and the sales manager is saying, hey, we're gonna hit this big order in May, and then April 25th, May becomes June. What do you mean? I just hired some people. I just adjusted some work I put this off, so I'd have capacity for May. Why did that shift? Why did that shift last minute? So that kind of clarity and accuracy of forecasting and predictability, having a rigorous system behind there so that it is about revenue growth, obviously. It's also about employee engagement and retention and, all those things matter a lot.
But what I think what's even more important is that accuracy of forecasting accuracy in being able to, if we miss a number, we have to know why and we have to be able to communicate exactly what happened and communicating that earlier rather than later is key. So those are how, so looking at it from the leader's perspective, but also from the leadership team's perspective.
Mike Goldman: I wanna go back to the forecast accuracy piece cause you had used that as an example of where someone on the operation side may say, what the heck? You said that order was coming. In April I hired for it. So that gives me my excuse to come back around to something you talked about earlier, which is the relationship of the sales leader to the other members of the leadership team.
And I'm sure we've both seen both good and very bad examples of that. So, help me understand. What should we be looking for a good sales leader to do? Again, we're not interviewing now. They're now part of the leadership team. How should a good sales leader make sure they're building strong relationships with, it's always sales versus service, or sales versus operations, or sales versus marketing.
I'd sell a lot better if you put more marketing better marketing qualified leads in front of me. Sales seems to be at the middle of a lot of those that pushing and shoving.
So how, I guess from two perspectives maybe as. As a great sales leader, how should a great sales leader think about building those relationships? And then secondly is as a CEO, how should a CEO be helping to smooth those relationships and build those relationships?
[00:30:37] Sales Leaders Relationships
Mike Carroll: Okay. So, it's amazing to me how often I need to be sales consulting practice. I find myself in the middle of ridiculous conversations mediating disputes between sales and fill in the blank.
Sales and legal, sales and marketing, sales and finance, sales, in operations, right? And I always start with sitting down with the salespeople and the sales leader and say, you guys are in sales. You're supposed to be the smooth-talking silver tongue. Like why are you fighting with marketing? Why are you fighting with. How can if you treated your ops person as if they were a customer, you would never send that email, you would never talk to them that way, right?
You would never fly off the handle like that. Number one, I think the leader has to have that lead by example mindset and set the stage for their internal customers. And we're gonna treat them as such. I think they need to really work to build that leader-to-leader relationship.
Again, first team is the leadership team, so I'm gonna talk to the COO. I'm gonna talk to the Chief Marketing Officer. I'm gonna talk to the Chief Finance Officer. I'm gonna make sure that I'm square with legal and make sure that leader to leader we're good. And I'm gonna, really set the standard and set the expectation with my team.
Look, we're not gonna talk to them that way. They're, no one here is trying to frustrate you. Everybody is acting with the right intentions. There are ridiculous barriers that departments throw in the way of sales.
There absolutely are. And rather than the smart salesperson blowing up the contract review person who's probably making 40k a year and not very well paid. Just checking all the boxes, like rather than blowing that person up escalate it to me, and I'll bring it down the other way and we'll work to make the system better, give them meaningful feedback.
That's the mindset I want the leader to have. Now, from a CEO perspective, the CEO has to stay in contact with everyone on the leadership team and make sure that she's got her finger on. Hey, where's the friction point?
And that means there's probably always an eye on sales like, okay, who's sales fighting with now? And making sure that they're supporting you know, that sales leader in their efforts to get along with all the other departments and helping the other departments recognize, hey, nothing happens until we sell something.
As frustrating as it can be, as manning as it can be to deal with late expense reports and incomplete details, but I need a contract by tomorrow or whatever. They're trying to make things happen and they're doing a job that no one else is doing. So, let's appreciate that and let's work together.
So that's again, I don't have a, I don't know if I have a hard and fast rule, but it really is communication and keeping your finger on the pulse of, hey, how's everyone getting along? Where are these problems? Let's surface those problems and not let them fester, and let's make sure our leaders are aligned and then each team has to hold their team accountable for behaving appropriately, not blowing people up for no good reason.
Mike Goldman: What I love about what you just said part of the reason I love it is cause I haven't thought about it this way and I think it's really powerful is there are two things that you said that I think if we put together, it's a wonderful formula. One is that sales leader, I love the idea of that sales leader treating the other functions around them as internal customers and making sure their people feel the same way.
Now, that works really well if at the same time the CEO does the second thing you mentioned, if the CEO not only has his or her fingers on the pulse of what's going on, but if that CEO is to some degree reinforcing the importance of the sales function, cause it's too easy for operations and service and legal and everybody else to jump on them.
If the sales, if the CEO is doing what they can to support the sales function, reinforce the idea that nothing happens until we sell something. I think if you take those two things together, cause if the CEO isn't that supportive, it's gonna become really hard for the sales leader to have that internal customer attitude.
But if they know the CEO has their back, then they could afford to have that attitude. So, I love putting those two things together, beautiful.
[00:34:52] Sales Challenges
Mike Carroll: Everybody wants to be successful. Marketing wants to generate more leads. That's, that's how they get gratification and operations wants to deliver products on time ahead of schedule at a good margin. They want to produce things without errors, right?
Everyone's acting with the best intentions and yet, people get frustrated because they perceive, sales is just out golfing all the time, or they're always traveling, or their expenses are always late, or, whatever, and they have to recognize that sales is facing adversity that no one else in the company's facing.
They have people lying to them. They have people, trying to throw them off their game. Their competition's tearing them down. They're lonely. They're out on their own on the road trying to make things happen. All of these things, they get back to the office and everyone in the office has a nice, safe, predictable environment.
Sales isn't safe or predictable.
Mike Goldman: No, and what sales also has, which is a coach I love, but it makes it harder on salespeople, is as a coach, I'm always trying to help my clients quantify what success means for finance, for marketing, for operations, for sales, it's incredibly easy to look at numbers and see how they're doing, which is wonderful in terms of holding them accountable.
But man, it puts a lot of pressure on salespeople that everybody sees if an account is payable clerk is, is missing an invoice and finds it later that doesn't go as high up as the leadership team finding that out. But if a salesperson screws up and doesn't close a big deal, man, you could bet everybody knows about it.
[00:36:23] Sales Success
Mike Carroll: Yeah. And I think that, obviously revenue and maybe margin are the two obvious metrics that we measure a sales team by. I think getting some leading indicators, revenue's a lagging indicator, right? So, I know companies who are enjoying great success, or they go on a nice run, and you ask and say, how'd you do it? What'd you do? And they can't tell you.
The only thing worse than hitting your numbers is hitting your numbers and not knowing how you did it, and therefore you don't know how to repeat it and what to do next time, which goes back to the forecast inaccuracy and some of the stuff we talked about earlier.
To me, I wanna measure the incremental steps along the way that contribute to that sales success. So, are we having the right number of conversations? Are we having conversations with the right people? are we expanding our existing core customers or depends on what you're selling, obviously, right?
Some clients are more transactional, some are like land and expand or whatever, right? So, it depends on the market you're in and all that. But what are we measuring early in the sales process that can help contribute to our success, rather than just kinda look in the rear-view mirror and saying, hey, we hit our numbers last quarter. Hope we hit them this quarter too.
Mike Goldman: So, you've been doing this sales coaching thing for a long time,
Mike Carroll: Yes.
Mike Goldman: But last year you decided to write a book, it's called The Sales Team You Deserve. Why did you feel like there was a need for that book?
[00:37:49] Mike Goldman's Book: The Sales Team You Deserve
Mike Carroll: Great question. Thanks for asking. I didn't think the world needed another how to sell book. There's some great books. We use baseline selling, there's spin selling, there's the challengers there. There's a lot of the mechanics and the sales methodology books out there. Where I see CEOs struggle is there's a frustration they have, and I hear it time and time.
I've observed this pattern over the last 20 years that I've been in business, right? The CEO who's really happy with their operations and really happy with their marketing, and maybe they could improve things a little bit, but they're generally like, they understand it and they're happy, and I see them settling when it comes to sales.
They can't quite put their finger on it, but they know they're frustrated, and they almost measure the sales department by a different standard.
So, what I've tried to do with The Sales Team You Deserve is outline what we see as the roadmap to get the sales team you deserve. It starts with recognition as an owner or a CEO, what are your blind spots? Where you stand depends on where you sit. If you've got an operations perspective, that's gonna influence how you view sales.
If you have a marketing perspective, you're gonna, you're gonna look at features and benefits and how do we get something bright and shiny and let's just put that out in the market and sales will follow. If you are, if you're a legal, you're a lawyer who became CEO, you're gonna tend to look at things from a risk mitigation perspective.
Sometimes if you've got a sales perspective, but you've become CEO, your sales instincts are 15 years old and maybe what worked 15 years ago doesn't work now. So that creates a different kind of blind spot. But first thing is a CEO recognizing this is where I potentially have a blind spot, and this is what I need to do to adjust it. Then we basically outline our typical transformation program.
So, you know, let's get good sales leadership in place. Let's get good sales coaching practices in place. Let's hire, you know what we spent a bit of time talking about today. Let's make sure we're hiring and consistently upgrading our team. Let's make sure we're compensating them appropriately. Let's make sure that we have a good sales methodology in place.
Let's make sure, there's a lot of buzz around sales enablement. There is new positions where you have like chief enablement officer or whatever, you have all these positions. People spend gobs and gobs of money on new tools, new CRMs, new shiny objects, and yet at the end of the day, if it's not serving driving more revenue, it's a waste of time and money.
Everyone thinks that next investment is gonna make all the difference. No, are you leveraging everything you're doing now? So, I think, if the filter is, what am I doing to help make the salesperson's job easier and make them more effective, so they have more time doing what's hard, which is face-to-face conversations and less time entering stuff into a CRM with 85 fields to get to the next step. That's the perspective you have to have.
So, the book is basically outlining what are the steps an owner or CEO needs to take to really have their sales organization operating at the same level as everyone else and get the sales team they deserve.
Mike Goldman: Love it. And I think it's a book that is needed in a big way because there's so much good stuff out there about sales process. I don't think anybody's lacking there. But it's that bigger picture that, is missing. So that's great. So, as we wrap up, tell us what are you've mentioned some of them, but what are some of the ways you typically help clients?
[00:41:14] Mike Carroll Transforming Sales Teams
Mike Carroll: So, there's a couple things that we do. A typical engagement for us is with a middle market, lower to mid, mid-market, I'd say companies 20 million to 200 million in annual revenue, B2B.
The more complexity in their sales process. I love a really long sales cycle with lot multi-party buying situation. Those highly engineered, highly technical sales. We have an opportunity to have a bigger impact. We certainly have clients that sell more transaction and that's fine too. but that's our typical client and we'll implement an entire system, right? So, it starts with data.
We start by evaluating and understanding the existing sales team. What are the strengths we can build on, and where are their opportunities for improvement? Most sales managers do not spend enough time coaching, so we spend a lot of time early on in a program, helping managers understand what a good coaching conversation sounds like. What are some of the habits they need to form just in terms of organizing their schedule.
Every manager I talk to says, oh, I coach all the time. And what they mean by that is they walk around the hall and say, what's closing? How can I help? Instead of coaching for development and say, okay, hey, the number one thing I want you to work on as a sales professional is fill in the blank, right?
And you stick with a theme over time rather than got a minute spot coaching and let me go in and close a deal for you, which ultimately is just gonna frustrate salespeople, right? So, we'll spend time with sales leaders. Meanwhile, we'll work with salespeople. We have a bunch of different programming on, I mentioned the sales valuation that we do that measures 21 core competencies.
Think of those as a collection of beliefs that can hinder your ability to execute a tactic. It's not enough to just intellectually know, this is how you prospect, this is how you ask questions to consultatively sell, This is how you qualify.
People understand that they can improve, right? there is a certain benefit to going through and tightening up the process around those steps. But what's more important is understanding what are the self-limiting beliefs that prevent you from asking the question you need to ask.
Mike Goldman: By the way, I took this assessment, what, probably 10 or 11 years ago, and I remember getting the results and my first reaction was, oh, that's not true. This thing isn't accurate. And then Mike, you and I sat down and debriefed it, and it was really accurate and really helpful.
Mike Carroll: It's scary accurate and it's hard to read, right? I've taken it as well, and it's kinda wait a second, this says I only have 10% closing capability. What the heck does that mean? but it's measuring salespeople against a very high standard, which is what we wanna do. It's okay, nobody's perfect. How do we get you there? Where are your opportunities for growth? What are the strengths we can build on? And where can we help you improve?
And we have learning tracks and online resources that help salespeople kind of study on their own, reflections that go back to the manager so the manager can integrate that into their coaching. It's a whole program where, we'll help the manager elevate their coaching. We help the individual sales producers get better. Then we implement a sales process. And we do this over the quarter, typical engagement for us, Mike is four to eight quarters, so one to two years.
And, we have clients that have kept us around beyond that. But typically, that transformation process, if you call it six quarters, that's a pretty good standard for trying to move the organization in a positive direction. The companies we work with typically double or more in sales, right? So that's, we've got that track record.
Mike Goldman: I'm not sure anybody would be interested in that.
Mike Carroll: Yeah, probably not. Probably not. So, that's our typical program. We have a lot of, we have a couple of clients. One of the areas we're focusing on is we've got some of these really big companies like more than 200 million, that are hiring lots of salespeople.
We've found a nice little niche with a lot of software companies or anyone who's hiring like BDRs. they're hiring 15, 20, 30 salespeople a year. Just implementing our sales hiring piece and even helping using some of our online tools for onboarding. That's been an area of focus for us.
And then we've also recently launched, it, it's funny, we started out knowing each other through the coaching organization. A lot of the folks, and you've been kind enough to introduce me to many of your clients, but a lot of the coaches that are in my network work with companies that are below that 20 million mark. And really can't afford the full program like a 50 million company could.
So we've recently launched what we're calling Intelligent Sales Growth, which is taking everything we do with our core clients, those middle market clients, and we're distilling it down to a combination of online resources and group coaching so we can come in and make it a little bit more approachable for that 10 million company with just a handful of salespeople that really doesn't need as much time, energy and attention and one-to-one stuff from me or somebody on my team. So…
Mike Goldman: And then all they need to do is double their sales a couple of times and
Mike Carroll: Then they can pay the high rent. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a self-serving goal.
Mike Goldman: You're out for yourself. Oh my god.
Mike Carroll: A hundred percent. As long as we're clear about that, right? Yeah.
Mike Goldman: Love it. No, that's awesome. So, Mike, if people want to find out more about you, where should they go?
[00:46:19] Where to Find Information About Mike Carroll
Mike Carroll: So, our website's, intelligentconversations.com, right? So just, that's probably the best place. We have a LinkedIn page as well. I'm on LinkedIn. Anyone who wants to connect, just say, hey, I heard your podcast with Mike Goldman. I'll connect with you. So that's another good thing. But yeah, those are the, probably the two best ways, intelligentconversations.com or look me up on LinkedIn, look up intelligent conversations on LinkedIn, and either way will get to me.
Mike Goldman: And the book. Don't forget the book. The book!
Mike Carroll: Yes, thank you. Thank you, coach. Thank you, coach. Yeah, the sales team you deserve, right? So available on Amazon or at a bookstore near you, yeah, and it's funny because we actually, we did a promo where we, this is a little embarrassing story, but we did a promo where we did a 99 cent Kindle version and for the life of me, I can't figure out how to change it back. So go buy the Kindle version before I figure out how to change my promotion.
Mike Goldman: Lucky, you're independently wealthy and you're not looking to make a lot of money on the book.
Mike Carroll: I'm not gonna make a lot of money on the book sale. I'm not worried about that.
Mike Goldman: Get it now. Get it now. Mike, this was great. Thanks for coming on.
Mike Carroll: Thank you, Mike. It's always a pleasure.