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- May 30, 2011
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Since I'm back searching for opportunities and a business model that suits me I figured I'd give back to the community and share my learning over the last 3 years.
I think my insights and learning will be most relevant to you if you run a sales team, a group of employees, or even a leadership team.
First, lessons from my last venture:
After UltraInbound was taken over by GoHighLevel I learned a few things.
* Industry and market research needs to be VERY thorough. As a web developer, my desire to build fast was a huge mistake. By not being aware of the other players in the market and facing the realities of their capabilities, and understandings deeply how to properly compete with them, I was setting myself up for failure.
* I learned that by partnering with someone who's already preoccupied with other ventures isn't a good idea. My partner's other business took off and left me hanging at the first sign of trouble. And because he had 50% of the equity, I felt stuck. Next time I know to ensure we get our operating agreement squared away.
* They say, "It's not how many times you get knocked down that count, it's how many times you get back up". This couldn't be more relevant to me. After that last venture, it took me 3 years to start again on my own, and instead of making definite plans and charting my next path forward I simply clung to the idea that I'd buy into the current business I worked in after demonstrating enough value. I made my offer(s), and it never happened. That should have been my clue to immediately start planning something else.
Ok.. now the story and lessons I learned from running a sales team.
I was still working at the auto dealer as a web developer when this agency owner asked me to join him in sales doing straight commissions sales. It included recurring commissions, and I thought that if I made enough sales fast enough, it would create a passive income I could use to start something else. I thought, worst-case scenario, I'd understand how to sell marketing services and could start my own agency on the side and then venture off on my own. What actually happened was that I ended up in a merry-go-round o revolving clients who would stay and go. I closed 10% of ALL my leads in the first year, and I turned out to be the top sales person on a team of 2 other experienced sales people. One of those sales people was making $200k/year selling payroll services, and the other was an average car salesman - super good heart and sweet guy.
I learned that I can sell, and I can learn really fast if I'm 100% immersed and obsessed with something. I also rationalized that this skill would serve me well for the rest of my life.
Soon, the company was growing, and the owner wanted someone to manage the sales team so he could focus on other things. It appeared he trusted me the most, and had a strong affinity with me, so he promoted me to sales manager. Or as he called it at the time, "head of sales". I basically learned everything I could about sales management - to my surprise there was VERY little published on the topic of sales management compared with sales in general. So I ended up reading tons of leadership until I stumbled on Sales Management. Simplified, my Mark Weinberg. That was my first introduction to actual management, and it laid a perfect foundation for a first-time manager to learn from in helping a sales team. Knowing what I know now, I'd say it's actually a great book for general management, including what Jack Welch calls "Differentiation".
When I got promoted I had mastered a sales process of my own design. Over the next year we brought in 4 more sales people as I moved our bottom performers out. I taught those new sales people my process, and with our marketing well optimized, our offer still fresh in the market, and with plenty of our margins being dumped back into our ads, we jumped in revenue from $1M to $2.4M in 12 months. We peaked at just over 110 clients at one point. We were collected $4-26k up front from total strangers who we'd probably only had 2 hours of conversation with AT THE MOST. It was mind-blowing to me that this was even possible.
The owner of the company decided to start another business without leaving the agency with solid management because he expected our core marketing tool, Facebook, to rise in costs to the point we'd go bankrupts fairly quickly. That should have also been my cue to GTFO. But instead I got determined to overcome that. And with that, we lasted another year where I had also made a few mistakes myself along the way.
For example - I was determined to build a strong culture in my sales organization. But I sacrificed sales performance in the short term by not hiring and properly vetting my new sales reps. I intentionally didn't let the other sales people back in because I felt they were back cultural fits, and I pushed good performers out because they were stepping on the toes of others, were arrogant, etc. I look back and think to myself - "endure them, learn to manage them well instead of removing them. Replace them with solid performance/culture fits. But don't sacrifice sales, only upgrade."
We ended up with 2 sales people and 3 appointment setters who, at first, were cold calling randomly until I realized... we have an internal list of close to 4000 leads that slipped through the cracks. So I designed a pipeline system that would fill the calendars of my 2 sales reps.
Another mistake I made was to split the leads between the top and bottom closers evenly for a time. Every single time I did this it was just bad for everyone, except for the bottom performer. I learned to balance the mindset of a leaders and manager... a leader being someone who can touch hearts and motivate and train and coach, and a manager who sees numbers and understand that each person needs to generate ROI as an asset.
Eventually, competition started to creep in and our sales slowed, and slowed, and slowed. Our CEO was running a whole other company, the agency was overstaffed, and we were churning customers faster than we could bring them back on.
I've got a lot of learning lessons from this:
* Hire for performance & culture fit. In the early days, just hire for performance and the swap out the bad apples.
* Embrace 20/70/10 ala Jack Welch. Don't tolerate dead weight on your sales team, it brings everyone down.
* Keep your metrics simple and get a general idea of what's going on, but don't let them distract you from what matters the most, spending 90% of your time coaching, giving feedback, reviewing calls, etc. You need to stay side-by-side with your most promising reps
* Be FAST to create processes in order to orchestrate what you want done. Write up your SOP quickly, train everyone on them immediately with a walk through.
* Accountability done right is crucial - It's done one on one, not in public (Honestly, if you're giving critical feedback to someone in a group setting and you're heavy-handed about it you're being an a**hole). But it needs to be serious. However, the expectations you set need to be crystal clear and they need to be expectations the person actually owns. Set your hard parameters, but then ask the person to give you their targets AND a real plan for accomplishing them. Then follow up at regular intervals to track progress and coach them.
* Celebrate wins. When it comes to working with your departmental team, celebrate wins every chance you get. Build a culture of praise, appreciation, and excitement. Life is much more enjoyable this way for everyone. I had 0 turnovers from people quitting except 1 person who wanted to start a sales consultancy. Everyone else left because I either fired them or I pushed them out.
* When it comes to working with a leadership team, meeting at least once per week, I recommend the agenda and cadence that the book Traction by Gino Wickman outlines. I was in charge of running these leadership meetings each week - one change I made to our stats tracking was to use trending graphs over a 6 week period to get a visual sense of the direction things are headed in a simple google sheets document. The most productive part of these meetings, however, is when you tackle the issues the company is having systematically and establish accountabilities for each member for the week, exactly as the book outlines. I've read that Wyane Huizynga and other excellent leaders would skip the wins and everything else and get straight to the problems.
* Have an exciting large vision to talk about incessantly for your team. Don't talk about revenue and profit and all that because regular employees just think they're making you rich. You have to use 1 metric that isn't monetary to help them get a feeling of their progress. People started to ask, "Where are we going?" often. And even though I wasn't the CEO, I'd give them my vision as if it was the company vision. They need something to look forward to. And since I was a sort of pseudo CEO being that the owner showed strong favoritism toward me, I leverage that for the good of the company's morale.
* Use "democratic" leadership - by making people feel involved in decisions. HOWEVER, you gather voices - not votes.
* Give praise often. Say "Thank you" and "please".
* If you can, get one on one time with each of your team members whenever possible to share something personal. There should be some form of relationship there as it will make giving hard feedback easier and feel safer for them. They have to know you're trying to help them and they're not on the brink of getting fired constantly. Unless, they're on the brink of being fired, in which case they should know that with some form of formal "strike" system. But that means they need to know what the rules are. Lay this out for them clearly. I had a sales rep that I constantly would have to talk to about things. He told me he was anxious about being fired. So I wrote the exact values and expectations I had for him, and he said, "THANK YOU! Now I know I'm doing just fine. I wasn't clear about it so it felt like everything I do is wrong". This made feedback to him much easier and safer for him.
* Set up systems and rules that handle bad behaviors automatically so you don't have to spend energy bitching at people constantly trying to change behavior. For example, our pipeline had grown somewhat complex. I had appointment setters and sales people working together, but in order to get my metrics exactly how I needed them I needed the team to work HubSpot exactly as the SOP outlined, and I needed the sales team to do simple things like.. be at least 5 minutes early for their sales appointments to be briefed with the appointment setter. Well, our top sales person was feeling big headed and was breaking the rules. So instead of being in a situation that's like punishing a cat, I just made up a rule, "If you're late to a sales meeting brief, the appointment setter will immediately change the ownership of the lead to the next best performing sales person." Even though this makes no sense, because they're likely show up and swaping sales people at that point in time is unrealistic.. it fixed the problem. This is what Jeff Bezo's uses a lot, and it's called a Forcing Function. I used this a lot, and it saved me a lot of energy and got things operating much more efficiently without a manager hurting morale by constantly nagging people.
That's all for now, folks. Now I'll get to my execution thread and start to outline my journey in the next venture.
I think my insights and learning will be most relevant to you if you run a sales team, a group of employees, or even a leadership team.
First, lessons from my last venture:
After UltraInbound was taken over by GoHighLevel I learned a few things.
* Industry and market research needs to be VERY thorough. As a web developer, my desire to build fast was a huge mistake. By not being aware of the other players in the market and facing the realities of their capabilities, and understandings deeply how to properly compete with them, I was setting myself up for failure.
* I learned that by partnering with someone who's already preoccupied with other ventures isn't a good idea. My partner's other business took off and left me hanging at the first sign of trouble. And because he had 50% of the equity, I felt stuck. Next time I know to ensure we get our operating agreement squared away.
* They say, "It's not how many times you get knocked down that count, it's how many times you get back up". This couldn't be more relevant to me. After that last venture, it took me 3 years to start again on my own, and instead of making definite plans and charting my next path forward I simply clung to the idea that I'd buy into the current business I worked in after demonstrating enough value. I made my offer(s), and it never happened. That should have been my clue to immediately start planning something else.
Ok.. now the story and lessons I learned from running a sales team.
I was still working at the auto dealer as a web developer when this agency owner asked me to join him in sales doing straight commissions sales. It included recurring commissions, and I thought that if I made enough sales fast enough, it would create a passive income I could use to start something else. I thought, worst-case scenario, I'd understand how to sell marketing services and could start my own agency on the side and then venture off on my own. What actually happened was that I ended up in a merry-go-round o revolving clients who would stay and go. I closed 10% of ALL my leads in the first year, and I turned out to be the top sales person on a team of 2 other experienced sales people. One of those sales people was making $200k/year selling payroll services, and the other was an average car salesman - super good heart and sweet guy.
I learned that I can sell, and I can learn really fast if I'm 100% immersed and obsessed with something. I also rationalized that this skill would serve me well for the rest of my life.
Soon, the company was growing, and the owner wanted someone to manage the sales team so he could focus on other things. It appeared he trusted me the most, and had a strong affinity with me, so he promoted me to sales manager. Or as he called it at the time, "head of sales". I basically learned everything I could about sales management - to my surprise there was VERY little published on the topic of sales management compared with sales in general. So I ended up reading tons of leadership until I stumbled on Sales Management. Simplified, my Mark Weinberg. That was my first introduction to actual management, and it laid a perfect foundation for a first-time manager to learn from in helping a sales team. Knowing what I know now, I'd say it's actually a great book for general management, including what Jack Welch calls "Differentiation".
When I got promoted I had mastered a sales process of my own design. Over the next year we brought in 4 more sales people as I moved our bottom performers out. I taught those new sales people my process, and with our marketing well optimized, our offer still fresh in the market, and with plenty of our margins being dumped back into our ads, we jumped in revenue from $1M to $2.4M in 12 months. We peaked at just over 110 clients at one point. We were collected $4-26k up front from total strangers who we'd probably only had 2 hours of conversation with AT THE MOST. It was mind-blowing to me that this was even possible.
The owner of the company decided to start another business without leaving the agency with solid management because he expected our core marketing tool, Facebook, to rise in costs to the point we'd go bankrupts fairly quickly. That should have also been my cue to GTFO. But instead I got determined to overcome that. And with that, we lasted another year where I had also made a few mistakes myself along the way.
For example - I was determined to build a strong culture in my sales organization. But I sacrificed sales performance in the short term by not hiring and properly vetting my new sales reps. I intentionally didn't let the other sales people back in because I felt they were back cultural fits, and I pushed good performers out because they were stepping on the toes of others, were arrogant, etc. I look back and think to myself - "endure them, learn to manage them well instead of removing them. Replace them with solid performance/culture fits. But don't sacrifice sales, only upgrade."
We ended up with 2 sales people and 3 appointment setters who, at first, were cold calling randomly until I realized... we have an internal list of close to 4000 leads that slipped through the cracks. So I designed a pipeline system that would fill the calendars of my 2 sales reps.
Another mistake I made was to split the leads between the top and bottom closers evenly for a time. Every single time I did this it was just bad for everyone, except for the bottom performer. I learned to balance the mindset of a leaders and manager... a leader being someone who can touch hearts and motivate and train and coach, and a manager who sees numbers and understand that each person needs to generate ROI as an asset.
Eventually, competition started to creep in and our sales slowed, and slowed, and slowed. Our CEO was running a whole other company, the agency was overstaffed, and we were churning customers faster than we could bring them back on.
I've got a lot of learning lessons from this:
* Hire for performance & culture fit. In the early days, just hire for performance and the swap out the bad apples.
* Embrace 20/70/10 ala Jack Welch. Don't tolerate dead weight on your sales team, it brings everyone down.
* Keep your metrics simple and get a general idea of what's going on, but don't let them distract you from what matters the most, spending 90% of your time coaching, giving feedback, reviewing calls, etc. You need to stay side-by-side with your most promising reps
* Be FAST to create processes in order to orchestrate what you want done. Write up your SOP quickly, train everyone on them immediately with a walk through.
* Accountability done right is crucial - It's done one on one, not in public (Honestly, if you're giving critical feedback to someone in a group setting and you're heavy-handed about it you're being an a**hole). But it needs to be serious. However, the expectations you set need to be crystal clear and they need to be expectations the person actually owns. Set your hard parameters, but then ask the person to give you their targets AND a real plan for accomplishing them. Then follow up at regular intervals to track progress and coach them.
* Celebrate wins. When it comes to working with your departmental team, celebrate wins every chance you get. Build a culture of praise, appreciation, and excitement. Life is much more enjoyable this way for everyone. I had 0 turnovers from people quitting except 1 person who wanted to start a sales consultancy. Everyone else left because I either fired them or I pushed them out.
* When it comes to working with a leadership team, meeting at least once per week, I recommend the agenda and cadence that the book Traction by Gino Wickman outlines. I was in charge of running these leadership meetings each week - one change I made to our stats tracking was to use trending graphs over a 6 week period to get a visual sense of the direction things are headed in a simple google sheets document. The most productive part of these meetings, however, is when you tackle the issues the company is having systematically and establish accountabilities for each member for the week, exactly as the book outlines. I've read that Wyane Huizynga and other excellent leaders would skip the wins and everything else and get straight to the problems.
* Have an exciting large vision to talk about incessantly for your team. Don't talk about revenue and profit and all that because regular employees just think they're making you rich. You have to use 1 metric that isn't monetary to help them get a feeling of their progress. People started to ask, "Where are we going?" often. And even though I wasn't the CEO, I'd give them my vision as if it was the company vision. They need something to look forward to. And since I was a sort of pseudo CEO being that the owner showed strong favoritism toward me, I leverage that for the good of the company's morale.
* Use "democratic" leadership - by making people feel involved in decisions. HOWEVER, you gather voices - not votes.
* Give praise often. Say "Thank you" and "please".
* If you can, get one on one time with each of your team members whenever possible to share something personal. There should be some form of relationship there as it will make giving hard feedback easier and feel safer for them. They have to know you're trying to help them and they're not on the brink of getting fired constantly. Unless, they're on the brink of being fired, in which case they should know that with some form of formal "strike" system. But that means they need to know what the rules are. Lay this out for them clearly. I had a sales rep that I constantly would have to talk to about things. He told me he was anxious about being fired. So I wrote the exact values and expectations I had for him, and he said, "THANK YOU! Now I know I'm doing just fine. I wasn't clear about it so it felt like everything I do is wrong". This made feedback to him much easier and safer for him.
* Set up systems and rules that handle bad behaviors automatically so you don't have to spend energy bitching at people constantly trying to change behavior. For example, our pipeline had grown somewhat complex. I had appointment setters and sales people working together, but in order to get my metrics exactly how I needed them I needed the team to work HubSpot exactly as the SOP outlined, and I needed the sales team to do simple things like.. be at least 5 minutes early for their sales appointments to be briefed with the appointment setter. Well, our top sales person was feeling big headed and was breaking the rules. So instead of being in a situation that's like punishing a cat, I just made up a rule, "If you're late to a sales meeting brief, the appointment setter will immediately change the ownership of the lead to the next best performing sales person." Even though this makes no sense, because they're likely show up and swaping sales people at that point in time is unrealistic.. it fixed the problem. This is what Jeff Bezo's uses a lot, and it's called a Forcing Function. I used this a lot, and it saved me a lot of energy and got things operating much more efficiently without a manager hurting morale by constantly nagging people.
That's all for now, folks. Now I'll get to my execution thread and start to outline my journey in the next venture.
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