Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So, if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Well, we have a. I was going to say fresh off the boat, but that’s not the right words. A newly crossed border from Canada, as I say, into the USA and not a citizen, but certainly a new resident in America in the United States of Glenn Poulos. He’s pulled up his old business, he’s exited his old business, packed his bags, gone south across the border, now living in Orlando and he’s here to talk to us today about, well, about what we talk about every week, sales teams in the wonderful world of sales. Just to give you a bit more background other than a border loping Canadian. Glenn is a president of his own company, it’s called ProgUSA. Very heavily involved in the electrical testing, measurement equipment, distribution game. Really nice industry when it comes to talking about sales and sales theories because it’s such a, such a long-standing mature industry and you really do need to be on top of the game.
And I’ve seen that first-hand in my experience in this industry. He’s a published author, book’s called “Never Sit In The Lobby” and the piece I like is 40 years’ experience in sales. Having not only run his own businesses but also scaled sales teams across North America and now into the States as well. So, he’s also exited businesses and they were well over eight figure businesses. He’s a speaker, he’s a podcast host. So, we what he does, he does across many channels and he’s also LinkedIn top voice around practical strategies that help salespeople both close deals avoid those common types of traps. And he has a very direct and honest style which we’ve found out so far today. So, Glenn, welcome to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and what you do.
Glenn Poulos:
Oh, thanks, Ben. And, yeah, 40 years is hard to believe, but what, 20, 25? It became 40 years because I started it in 1985, and prior to that, I was a failed government worker. So, I got kicked out of the Canadian government for working too hard, as I like to tell the story. And, yeah, my boss came to me in 1985, and he suggested that I would be better suited in a different business, and he suggested I go into sales. So, I joined sales in 1985, and that was where I started my thing. And I worked for a company for a number of years, and then I realised that, you know, sales was the kind of a, a cheat code for, you know, making a lot of good money when you maybe don’t have a super higher education. Like a brain surgeon makes a lot of money, but they have to go to school for 15 years. I had a little bit of college, and I learned that you could make really good money in sales. I learned you can make even better money by running and owning the sales company and hiring extra people and leveraging not only yourself, but others. And so, after a few years, I approached those guys about starting a business, spinning off a piece of their technology, and they turned me down. And so, I decided to quit. And in 1991, and I started my first business in this burgeoning market, which they said I wouldn’t be successful. It was a cell phone industry. And we all know the cell phone never really went anywhere, right? Like, who needs a cell phone? And that was in 1991, actually. And, you know, Canada was just building the analogue cell phone network at the time. I’d had the cell phone, I guess, for a few years and ran a company till the early 2000s, sold it, got a chance to start another company doing similar business, ran it for 15 years. And in 2022, I sold that. I did three years with the private equity having sold the business, and that kind of timed out at the end of last year. And in anticipation of that, I bought a business doing a similar kind of business, but one in a different country, in a different technology area, so that I was honouring my competitive, you know, the no competes and things like that. And the other difference from what I’m doing in Florida is that my first two businesses, the first one, I had two partners. There were three of us total. The second business, I had a one partner. And the third business, I’m just doing it by myself. And it’s kind of like just a, you know, can you do it on your own kind of thing or where can you take it now? I only have a few years. I’m 63 now, so it’s not like I have 15 years again to do another 15-year stint but like to see where I can take it for a few years and then maybe retire into the Florida and or Canadian sunset, one or the other.
Ben Wright:
So yeah, cool, I like it. A few things to unpack there in 1990. Did you say 1991 into the cell phone industry?
Glenn Poulos:
That’s correct, yeah.
Ben Wright:
So, I think I’m 42 and my first cell phone or mobile phone I think I had was when I was 15. So that would have been 1997. Yeah, I think it was one of those Nokia 6510’s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was 2 cents per text message, $2 a minute for calls. We tap away on the click, click, click, click, click, click on the phones. And I think I had the blue face, the black background and my mate and I used to text each other. We’d hide it under the desk at school and text each other and yeah, you’re right, the industry really hasn’t matured at all over the last 30 years. I mean we’re still not relying on mobiles at all, nor do we have of screen time every day.
But in fact I’d say it’s very similar to the sales industry. We talk about evolution and no doubt the cell phone industry, mobile phone industry has evolved tremendously, but sales has as well. I remember doing a podcast about 20 episodes ago around the 10 Commandments of Sales from one of my friends when she was back at university in the 90s and she. They’ve evolved, Right? I think out of the 10 we came to a conclusion that there were four that have remained, there were four that have changed drastically and there were two that you’d argue have evolved. So, a 60 change rate to the world of sales. And of course the pieces that had remained were very much the principles around building relationships, around listening, around seeking out needs and so forth. Right. And look for everyone listening if you hear a pant in the background. Lovable two dogs. Yeah, yeah, we’re all for a bit of personality on the podcast. So, sitting down there close to his feet.
Glenn Poulos:
But I’m praying they go to sleep soon. Normally they fall asleep, they’re just absolutely insane. The timing couldn’t be worse. I’m sorry for that.
Ben Wright:
Do you know what?
Glenn Poulos:
But I’ll make up for it with some golden gems. I promise I will speak over them and speak some, hopefully spit some good gems. While we’re trying to avoid listening to them.
Ben Wright:
Pots of gold will be fantastic. But a bit of personality into these podcasts is absolutely fine. That’s life. Okay, so today what we’re here to talk about is how you can spot future mistakes or problems within sales teams. And certainly, the aim is to avoid them down the track. Your dogs agree with me right now. And if we can’t avoid them, how we can certainly fix them. So that’s going to be our focus for the next 15 to 20 minutes or so. And okay, so let’s kick straight into the most common mistakes that you see sales teams or salespeople make. I would love to hear your thoughts around that, Glenn.
Glenn Poulos:
Okay, so the one mistake that I see the salespeople making, and now I’m hiring a new, like, in a new company, new job, new world. And so, I’m meeting, you know, a lot of new people. I came from a business from 15 years where a lot of the guys had been with me the whole time. But I’m realising a lot of people are, they’re trying to virtualise everything, right? They want to do everything from the comfort of their cockpit with three monitors. And I can do it over Zoom. And that’s the absolute biggest mistake I’m seeing them make right now, is not getting in front of the customer and trying to convince themselves that virtualise is good enough. And it actually isn’t. And the reason why is because you can never see really what the competitors are doing when you’re on Zoom, right? You know, when you get there, if, when you’re in the building and you get behind the door, you can actually see what, you know, the coffee mugs, the, you know, water bottles, the mouse pads, the pens and T shirts of the competitors that they’re wearing and where you really fit in. And you can see how your product will be used. And so, you know, thinking that you can do it remotely is probably the biggest mistake, you know, that I see the salespeople themselves making. You know, the companies that are hiring salespeople, some of the things that I see them making are lack of clear goals, lack of, you know, the onboarding is, you know, shoddy at best, right? There’s no clear. It’s kind of like sink or swim, sell your fired, that kind of a thing. You know, not setting a set of clear metrics, right? Like forward looking metrics, reverse looking metrics. You know, how many calls do you have planned? How many calls did you make? You know, what’s in the funnel, what’s your close ratio, you know, what’s your gross margin monitoring and managing to those metrics on a weekly basis is one of the winning factors that I found in my last business. And it really wasn’t until we put a lot of that in place that we turned the business where we really turned a corner in the business is what I’m trying to say. And so monitoring and metrics is a huge part of it. And. And yeah, so I mean, I could keep going, but those are some of the top things that I see companies making. And then the salespeople themselves, we can dive into whatever aspects you’d like to on that too.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Okay, so three things that have come out of there. Number one, you’re seeing sales teams get lazy. So instead of getting out, hitting the pavement, wearing the rubber off their shoes, and meeting their customers face to face, there is too much selling done virtually. And look, I certainly acknowledge that there is more efficiency now and effectiveness, I think, in having a hybrid, a combination as to how we make customers. Right. We don’t necessarily need to go and meet customers five times face to face to get a deal done, but certainly when we’re talking about enterprise level deals, there is a certain amount of face to face work that we need to get done. So fundamentally agree with you there.
Second base you spoke about, there is an onboarding program that isn’t really setting up salespeople to sell. So, we’re seeing, or you’re seeing, the really common mistakes being that simply people are onboarded into a business and it’s how you get out there and go and sell. Right? No sales process, no strategy, no training, no real onboarding program. And the third piece, there is very much around not measuring progress. And measuring progress doesn’t always have to be results. I certainly with my team, I measure results, but I also measure pipeline size and I measure number of meetings. They’re the three key metrics that I measure with any team that I work with. So, and each of those you measure at different stages of a salesperson’s lifecycle and a business’s lifecycle.
So, okay, great. And look, I think those three are very chunky, common mistakes that we see salespeople out there make. But certainly, the first one I think we see there is a growing trend of reducing time out in front of customers. And I don’t know if there’s enough analysis around how that correlates to close rates. So, I really like that one.
Okay, so let’s look at the inverse of that. How do you see really high Performing sales teams being built without jargon, without fluff, without, you know, wasting people’s time.
Glenn Poulos:
Well, so the first thing is when it comes to hiring people, as I’m learning, again, like I said, in the deepest of the trenches and putting my money where my mouth is. Cause I’m, you know, I came from an $84 million company to a $4 million company and I’m rebuilding it from the ground up. And the numbers are just completely different. And, you know, and so I’m actually having to walk the talk and talk the walk that I’ve been touting for years, but I’d kind of gotten separated from as well. But the first thing is like, you know, first of all, when you’re building a high-performance team, you know, it’s like, hire slowly, fire quickly. And so, the, you know, that’s one of my golden rules. And I’m not happy that I have to adhere to it, but I’m proud that I’m able to do that in the sense that, you know, you’re given the 90 days in most environments, you can let people go in 90 days without having to give any reasons. You can just say, hey, it’s not the right fit. I’m sorry, we’re moving on, we’re going to go a different way. And you really need to make sure that if you’ve made a mistake that you correct it right away. It’s not like, oh, well, it’s the summer and it’s slow and it’s the moment you sort of feel like you’ve made a mistake, you have to correct the mistake.
And so that’s one thing. Two, you know, I find, you know, you need to make sure that you’re rewarding the right behaviour. And it’s not just top line. Like, we all know people in companies where they were the top producer, but they were a nightmare to deal with. You needed a, you know, a bulldozer or a sweep and a mop and, you know, a garbage pail behind them to clean up the mess that they made on every deal, even though they were the top producer. And really what that translates to is not adhering to the company’s core values. And so, I find that, you know, setting core values to the company, you know, is really important. And then you want to hire fire, reward, motivate, you know, acknowledge core values through a series of call outs and also sort of rewards and punishments. Right. That people are not only performing to the metrics, like you said, pipeline deals closed, et cetera, et cetera but also they’re doing it in a way that meets the values of the company and they’re not treating the inside staff like garbage or whatever. So you want to be rewarding the right behaviour. You want to be measuring and monitoring towards the core values. Again, like I said, cut the weak links quickly. And I guess also you want to be looking not just the market. That’s not really what I want to say. I don’t have an acronym for it or whatever. But basically, they want to be constantly raising the bar on, hey, you’re in Boston or you’re in San Francisco. And yeah, I mean, everyone has a two-million-dollar quota, but you should have a $5 million quota, right? I mean, you know, you’re getting to $2 million without even having to leave your chair because you’re in San Francisco and that’s a bigger market. You need a, you know, you. So you want to be raising the bar on a consistent basis. And so those are some of the things that I constantly, you know, conditioning myself to do and also others when I’m talking to them about building the right team. And the other thing is make sure your comp plan rewards the behaviour that you’re looking for. And you know, and that’s core, you know, as simple as it’s really base and commission. But I mean, people will figure out how to game the comp plan immediately. It’s what people do. It’s human nature. It’s not like a bad trait. But they’re going to do what you pay them to do, literally. Like that’s what people will do. And, and so you want to make sure that you design a comp plan that gets your job done. And there’s lots of comp plans and lots of ways of adjusting the variable and the base, et cetera, et cetera. But you want to make sure your comp plan really feeds into the goals of the business.
Ben Wright:
Okay. There’s something I really like about interviewing business owners, and particularly business owners that have been able to scale past the founders North Star. And what I mean by that is that they’ve been able to build teams out around them who run the business. And at an $84 million a year business, you’ve had to do that. There’s no way you’re running that on your own. And the reason that I really like interviewing business owners who’ve been able to do that is because they’re able to really simplify some of the key goals of building teams or selling or having a successful business because the corporate haze doesn’t exist in those business owners. And there’s three things there that you’ve jumped on. Number one, you hire someone, you don’t think it’s working, make the call. Far too often I see sales leaders give new salespeople just too much time. And the reason that they give them too much time is a, there’s some good faith in there. Without doubt. You want to see the best in people and you want to give them the chance to succeed. And I understand that and can certainly resonate with that. However, I think you can work through that pretty quickly as a leader when you apply the right metrics, right, to that salesperson, which is the second area you dive into there. So, if you are in any doubt as to whether or not this person’s going to make it and it’s left to goodwill to make that decision. Having the right metrics to recognise exactly how they’re working right.
In the early stages, it’s not about sales numbers, it’s about meetings, it’s about quotes, it’s about some very different behaviours. And that second theme you touched on has really wrapped in behaviours, metrics and compensation plans, which you wrapped in later on. So make sure you’re setting your team up, that you’re recognizing behaviours that are the ones that you want, that you are using metrics, right, to recognise the outputs and the inputs that are the ones that you want. And then also that you have a compensation plan that is absolutely motivating. Again, the right behaviours and the right actions that you want. Really, really like that. For me, that is very, very powerful. And the third thing you spoke about then is always challenging people that what they’re achieving isn’t necessarily enough because different levels of experience will drive different sales and different territories or different products will drive different results. So, having that focus, that Kaizen of focus around continuous improvement, right, I think is absolutely fantastic. So really, really, really like that.
Okay, so we’ve identified what some of the common mistakes are. We’ve spoken about how we can build out those high performing teams about or without any fluff. What about accountability? How do you build that into your process and how does that help you avoid some of those future problems and future mistakes?
Glenn Poulos:
So, when it comes to accountability, for me it kind of boils down to, and in my last business we followed the program called E.O.S., the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It’s a very popular system running around the world. And so, a lot of really what I learned, I’ve learned in the last five or six years kind of coming out of a lot of the disciplines that I learned running E.O.S, which is the, an operating system just like dos, right. How do you run your computer? It tells you what to do when you’re moving files, whatever, right. So, you know, accountability to me is like clear expectations, public goals, like goals that are understood by not only the person, but other people know the goals of those people. And then you know, a cadence of check ins that is repeatable and disciplined, strictly disciplined. Not for instance, it might be a one on one, it might be bi weekly, it might be weekly, there might be monthly check ins of different sorts and what have you. But whatever the meetings are that are set up in your system, you know, the only excuse to not be there is vacation or a funeral. And it has to be your own funeral. And that’s the way we used to joke about it, that if there’s a meeting you need to, you know, at these kind of check ins, the one on ones or these specific kinds of meetings, you need to be there, you know, phones off, laptops closed, et cetera. And you know, these people, in order to be accountable, they need to own the outcomes of the results, right. They, you know, they can’t be blaming others. You can’t be high behind losses and you know, while you’re touting up the winds or you know, things like that. I also find that one good thing about like for to drive accountability is kind of this concept around leaders go first, right. And so, you know, I’m kind of the type, you know, where I want to be. I’m not the one that rolls in at 10 and leaves at 2 because I’m the owner. And, and I’m not saying I’m the first guy there every day because it’s just, I mean we all have different like lifestyle schedules. But I show up at a repeatable time and I leave at a repeatable time and I put in a full day, right. And when I’m there, I’m either available or not available. In other words, my door is always, literally always open unless it’s closed because I’m on the teams or some other kind of meeting of some sort or another. And so I find that, you know, leaders should drive the behaviour that you expect in, in others, you know, and when you see things that are right or wrong, call them out fast, you know, call it out fast. And I kind of repeating myself, but you know, if it matters, you want to measure it, right? Like I can’t remember the exact saying, but you Know what I mean? If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, right?
Ben Wright:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So many one liners around that. Gee, you’ve hit some of my all-time favourite in that minute or so there. And if we use that analogy around cell phones, right, what all mobile phones, what has and hasn’t changed over the last 30 years? One thing for me that hasn’t changed is that high performing teams are accountable. However, the environment that we work within now has made not only measuring but enforcing accountability a lot harder because of the move to the hybrid workplace. So we are now more reliant on the honesty and the work ethics of our teams. Which means metrics, behaviours, compensation plans are even more important to be motivating the right behaviours because we simply can’t see them all day, every day like we used to. Yes, there’s certainly some technology out there I’ve invested into a brand called Icana AI. It measures phone, video and look, we’re working on some fantastic face to face options, but actually measures all your sales interactions, provides you coaching, provides you analysis. A terrific, terrific tool. And I’ve invested in that because I think it’s doing better than sales leaders.
So, there’s some help out there from some of these tools. However, those principles of being accountable and having an accountable team are super, super important, particularly now when it’s harder than ever for us to measure them. I also really like the piece around leadership leading by example. I think too often that is falling down. And what I particularly see now is not enough leaders and sales leaders carrying the bag. And that doesn’t mean they have a quota that’s 100% or 50% of their teams. But what it does mean is they’re contributing sales into the business because that builds respect. And then the third piece there around what you walk past is what you accept. You’ve got to be really clear on your standards and what you measure.
So, there are lots and lots of really basic principles that we’ve gone through in just 20 minutes. And I really like when we can have these episodes just to take things back to the core, back to the basics, you know, as your background behind you, strip things back to the brick wall, right, so that we can actually talk through the really big golf balls that move progress.
So, one last question for you, Glenn. You’re a sales leader at the helm of a team, right? I mean, not dissimilar to where you’re at now with your new business, right? You’re looking to really supercharge growth over the next 12 months, where would you start? Where would you focus?
Glenn Poulos:
So, the first thing I would probably do is, difficult as it might be, would be to like tighten up the team, right. Like I would be brutally honest about who is succeeding and who is not succeeding and I would be focusing down on the winner, you know, the winning teams, right. And getting rid of the crappy salespeople. I don’t know how to say it in a nicer way. And so, you know, really keeping the A players and you know, and it doesn’t sound like in this sort of question the way you’re posing, I have time to be hiring new ones, right. So I’m kind of like focusing on, on my A team. The other thing I would do is learn several times going in and out of this mistake is to like simplify your offer. Like focus on your winning propositions. And I always have this like in, you know, I didn’t get a chance to drop too many of my one liners from the book or whatever. But I like to lose quickly in the game of sales or I’d rather be last than second. Because second is just the first loser. And I don’t want to be hanging around bringing in engineers and flying people out to the and taking them golfing, trying to win a deal that I know I’m not going to win. So, I want to simplify my offer, go with my winning strategies and leave the rest behind and focus on that sort of a stuff. I would look at my funnel and I would clear out anything that’s not real. Like just brutally carve, carve, carve, get, carve it up and focus in on what are the real deals. And then look at the mathematics of do they meet your anywhere near the objectives of what you’re trying to hit? And if not, you’ve got to get the number back up. But you’ve got all this noise that kind of, oh, we got all these deals, but you don’t. Like you know exactly what I’m talking about, I’m sure. I would challenge everyone to whatever kind of prospecting they’re doing, whatever kind of marketing, front end marketing, lead generation or whatever, I would double it. So however, the investment is being proposed or delivered in some way, whether it’s, you know, telemarketers doing front end and you know, BDRs, SDRs, whatever, whatever that whole chain of events is that drives leads out through the. I would double that effort, right. And to drive the prospecting to get the A team because you Fired everyone else, you know, in front of the best leads, as fast as possible. And I’m really strong about pitching, knowing, you know, sharpening, having a sharp pitch. And so, on my website, there’s a thing called the punch. Perfect pitch and close. I won’t go into it now. There’s not enough time. But it’s. It’s how you develop a pitch that doesn’t suck. And it’s how you get attention, how you keep attention and how you figure out, you know, and how you deliver a proper presentation. And then at the end, the customer, if you’ve done it right, usually closes themself. And of course, you’re measuring the numbers. We talked about that several times tonight. And you want to, whenever you’re in one of these high, you know, environments where you have to, like, improve productivity or results really quickly, which is the sense I got from the question, you know, I would reward the results quickly. Not a. There’s not this delayed compensation factor. You’d have early and repeatable. Not repeatable, but recognizable. Like rewards that happened. And that really feed the greed. You know, you can say what you want, but greed is. Is a significant motivator, especially amongst commission salespeople. And, you know, leaders lead first. Or, you know, the top guys got to be out in front leading the pack.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. Lots of things in there. The ones I’ll just quickly repeat are get rid of the deadwood. Very rare. I work with a sales team that doesn’t have the bottom 20 to 25% not contributing. And I’m seeing more and more sales leaders do that right now. Get rid of the deadwood. Focus on the real deals, not the pretend deals. Get out there, lead by example, measure progress and incentivise. It’s going to work.
Excellent. Thank you, Glenn. We’ve had Glenn pull us today. Glenn, where else can people learn more about you if they’d like to connect?
Glenn Poulos:
I have a website where it talks about my book, but if they want to talk to me or communicate in any way, LinkedIn’s the best way. I’m there all the time and happy to communicate with anyone that wants to reach out there. Happy to talk to them there.
Ben Wright:
Excellent. Fantastic. Well, I can’t remember if you call them gold nuggets, but we’ve had a few of those which your dogs originally agreed with us at the start there on. They’ve absolutely quietened down. Thank you. They must be listening intently to the topic of today, but thank you very much. A number of gold nuggets in there. Teams that are listening yeah, please make sure you’ve written down two or three things that you can tweak to your business from today. That would be my strong recommendation, but until next time, please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
Avoiding Costly Sales Team Mistakes with Glenn Poulos
