My Secret to Building $100M Sales Teams (Step By Step)

Summary

• When hiring for a sales team, prioritize candidates who respond quickly to communication as it reflects their work ethic.
• Look for intelligence in a potential hire; they will represent your brand.
• Hire salespeople who are good listeners and can balance conversation, indicating social awareness.
• Evaluate coachability by role-playing and providing feedback; improvement after feedback suggests they can adapt and learn.
• Emphasize understanding the customers' problems deeply rather than focusing solely on product knowledge.
• Implement a 14-day onboarding period where new hires listen to successful sales calls to immerse themselves in effective sales techniques.
• Train new salespeople using a script based on a question framework, guiding customers to a natural conclusion.
• Continuously role-play with new hires to help them master the script and refine their sales approach.
• Introduce new salespersons to live calls gradually, with a half schedule, so they can review calls and receive feedback without wasting leads.
• Sales management involves regular training and motivation; clarify KPIs, maintain a competitive environment, and provide incentives.
• Maintain high standards by having a visible leaderboard, clear KPIs with bonuses, and a policy of cutting the bottom performers quarterly.
• Sales managers should exemplify strong work ethic, consistency, and lead by example, reinforcing a culture of excellence.
• Frequent meetings with trainees, transitioning to weekly and bi-weekly meetings as salespeople become more proficient.
• Use testimonials and customer success stories to keep the sales team motivated and remind them of the value they provide to clients.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with the recruitment process when scaling your sales team. Look for candidates who are quick to respond to communications because it shows they have a strong work ethic. Always pick someone smart, good at listening, and able to have balanced conversations. These traits are super important.

You want to test if someone is coachable during interviews. Try a role-play. Give them feedback, then see if they can do better the second time around. This will tell you if they can adapt and learn.

When you hire someone, have a 14-day onboarding where they just listen to successful sales calls. This helps them soak in what works. Make sure to have smart scripts for them that ask questions leading to a sale. Practice these scripts through role-plays every day so they get super good at using them.

Start new salespeople with a half schedule for live calls. This way, they can review their calls and improve without wasting leads. Keep training them, and give clear goals or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Also, create a competitive environment with a leaderboard and bonuses, and don’t be afraid to let go of the bottom performers every three months.

Sales managers need to be role models. They should work hard and show everybody what good work looks like. Also, meet with new trainees a lot until they learn the ropes, then meet less often as they get better.

Finally, keep your team pumped by sharing success stories from customers. This shows the team the real difference they make for people, which can be super motivating.

Remember, it's about understanding the customer's problems really well. If you can do that, they'll trust you and be more likely to buy from you.

Good luck out there!

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"you can test work ethic by how quickly they get back to you because you are a lead to them"

– Alex Hormozi

"if you can explain to somebody exactly the problem that they're going through, they will buy whatever you have"

– Alex Hormozi

"if you're not cutting, you're communicating with the team that's okay to suck"

– Alex Hormozi

"motivation comes from culture and the standards that we set for ourselves"

– Alex Hormozi

"if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

the actual scaling of a sales team process the training process the onboarding process the management process Etc so that you can scale sales within your organizations the interview process what we're testing for is the speed of response you can test work ethic by how quickly they get back to you because you are a lead to them number two somebody who's intelligent so if somebody sounds like an idiot then it's the impression that they're going to be giving of your brand the next one is you want somebody who can listen so someone's dominating the conversation they're talking they're you know motor mouthing it's not a good idea you want somebody who's kind of an ambivert somebody you can listen and can talk when it's time and socially aware you want someone who's coachable and so you can measure coachability by saying Hey I want you to role play with me in this situation and you just give them a little bit of context I don't care about how well you sell me I just want to hear you talk through things and then what you'll do is you'll give them feedback and then ask them to try again now if someone can take the feedback without an ego then you have somebody who's coachable and if they make Improvement on the second try then you know that they can improve if someone is not coachable and they do not take feedback well you can already know way ahead of time that they're going to be terrible fit for the team now at this point they have to transition their general knowledge of sales to your specific product or service now I think one of the things that's overemphasized is proud technology which underemphasized is Prospect knowledge what we should be focusing on is who are we selling to more than what are we selling because who matters more in the sale the person the product the person right so we want to understand their problems so in depth because if you can explain to somebody exactly the problem that they're going through they will buy whatever you have because they will believe that you so intrinsically understand what they're going through once we've decided to hire this person I like to have a 14 day onboarding period what is covered in the onboarding period is that we want them to listen to sales calls that are good now if you don't have any sales calls that are good like I would recommend you go and sell and do it well and then record those calls and have them listen to it you want them to be bathing in good sales all they're doing all day long is listening to sales calls listening to sales calls listening sales calls and you can see if they watched it based on most software once they've watched let's say about 40 different sales calls they're gonna have a pretty good idea now in between those watchings you want them to work on the script the script should be in my opinion a question based framework it's a framework of questions that lead someone naturally to the conclusion when I review the salesforcement portfolio companies when they're trying to improve there wasn't a core decision that was articulated the sales people in general would multiple times throughout the sales say do you have any questions for me do you have any questions for me and that's an indication that the salesperson doesn't know how to close clearly not following the script because you're not asking the prospect to come with more reasons to not buy right you're asking them to make a decision it's going to be very clear at the beginning of the call which is clarifying why we're here and then labeling them with the problem so that's the closer primary clarify why they're there label them with a problem overview their past experiences and pains once you have that you've gathered enough info you say cool I think you'd be a good fit can I tell you about it you get invited to sell which is the S and then you explain in very short analogies why you think you're going to be able to solve two to three of the problems that they explained and then you ask for the sale and then enr are explaining what their concerns and then reinforce the decisions and so once we have a script do you want to boil down the decision to the most basic unit possible and the reason you have to do that thinking is because you don't want them to try and think about what the decision is you want to give them the decision that they have to make by the end of the call and so if you're selling a B2B service it would be like the decision we have to make is whether you're going to make more money on your own than you will with us in excess of our thing what most people do is they just talk for 30 minutes and then they just present the price and they just don't have any structure of the conversation and they don't actually do any fact finding they go on off all of these all these changes why are you here what is your problem what have you tried to solve here's how I think we can help you given what you just said to make this one decision which is can we help you more than you could on your own yes or no fantastic close that's it once we've clarified what that scripting needs to look like and that's big picture there's obviously wording but for the sake of this video I want to talk bigger picture so once you have that and this person is watched themselves in sales they're studying the script what you want to do is you want to role play with them you want to role play with them every morning during that process so they get better at it once they pass the role play test right and if you're like whoa that sounds like a lot of work well it is a lot of work to build a great sales team once they sell you on them being able to have this sales conversation then you put them on the floor on a half schedule you're not going to give them a full schedule because you want them to blow through a ton of leads you give them a half schedule the second half their day they're still reviewing the calls they had and then you're still meeting with them twice a day beginning of the day and a day the second week of this training when you're reviewing the sales costs with them they now have fresh ones that they went through that you're going to give them feedback on here's how you have these meetings when you do sales manager meetings you're communicating the goals which in sales is usually pretty sure straightforward you're making sure they're motivated and you're training them that is the point of the job you motivate and you train as long as they're clear on what their kpis are 30 minutes before the call that you have with the new trainee you listen to one or two of their sales calls at 2x you know speed take written notes of all the things that you would want to improve when you get on the call with them which should happen immediately afterwards because it's going to be fresh in your mind you then look at your notes and then you want to bold or prioritize one to two highest impact things that they can do now there's probably a hundred things they're doing wrong but you just want to start with the highest impact things and then you give them those things and it takes about five minutes to communicate that 30 minutes to review and write the notes five minutes to communicate the thing that the one to two highest leverage things that they can do to improve and then 25 minutes where you role play again with them with the new changes and then they go back the next day they do more calls you listen to see if they did the thing they didn't do the thing roll play again the next day you listen to recordings now maybe they got it right you say hey keep doing that you're getting better now let's also do this thing when someone says I got to think about it when someone says I have to talk to my spouse or when someone says that's a lot of money let's drill this overcome this is what I need you to say you have to Flex that muscle as many times you can get those reps in within that 25 minute period And so as you're scaling a sales team you need to do that with all of the Reps that is what Sales Management is it's not just like sitting there having one weekly meeting and checking in on people and asking them what their pipelines at you need to be reviewing sales calls with written notes prioritizing where they can improve the most and then communicating and drilling them on those things maintaining the culture of the team through three things one is having a leaderboard that is Visual and up to date at all times sales people are competitive you want to Foster that competition number two is that you want to have clear kpis and some sort of bonus and we like every 30 days to 42 days every four to six weeks having some sort of big little thing that they can brag about winning some sort of sales competition of the different objectives that we have optimized for the one that has worked best for all of our portfolio companies is optimizing for cash up front there's three things one is the leaderboard two is the kpi in competition and the three is that you have to cut the bottom 10 on a quarterly basis if you're not cutting you're communicating with the team that's okay to suck and it will drag down the culture of the team and so the job of the manager besides training is motivation motivation comes from culture and the standards that we set for ourselves and what you agree to tolerate and so fundamentally Sales Management is a skill of Tolerance is the person who tolerates the most is the one who has the weakest team you can tell the difference between the winning teams and losing teams usually by the coach how can you have one coach go from a losing team in the NFL to almost undefeated team in one year because of the leadership because of the culture because of the Mojo because we say we no longer tolerate these things like if you want to be here this is a world-class sales organization and if you are on this team it means that you're agreeing to them there was a time a few years back where our sales team got a little bit bloated got a little bit fat and so I ended up cutting more than half the team and then I had a meeting with everybody afterwards and I wanted to reset the tone and I was like guys if you're here it's because a we value and we think that you're solid but B is because we think that you're going to buy into the vision of what we will have for the future which is we want to build a world-class sales organization and if you want to stay on this team then it means that you're agreeing to that and I don't want to say that you're inherently agreeing to that I want to let you guys sleep on it because tomorrow if you want to quit that's fine you just let me know in the morning no harm to foul I'd rather you just tell me because what we're going going to go through is going to be a significant change and so if you're a sales manager coming into an organization you say these are the new standards of what we will do I expect you to all attend our 5 a.m training for an hour where we drill together I expect you to show up on time to every single call I expect you to clean your pipelines every single day and that you put the call notes in the CRM as required if you do not do those things even if you're the best closer on the team I will fire you are we clear and the reason I do that is because I want the culture of this team to be one of excellence in everything we do because if it's worth doing it's worth doing well and so you have to set that tone on the team to get them to want to raise up and that's where the leadership of sales manager is so important as a side note I have rarely found that the best salesperson is the best sales manager sales managers tend to be more giving in general and more stable as people there's less emotional highs and lows they are more even they need to be the rock of the team that people look up to no one respects a sales manager who says do all these things and doesn't do it themselves and so they have to emulate or exemplify what work ethic looks like what following through looks like which finishing your checklist every day looks like being first to show up for the meeting in the morning before everyone else does like you have to lead by example the last piece I want to hit on here is the Cadence which is what frequency are we talking to our sales people the first 14 days you're going to be talking to that person once or twice a day when they're getting onboarded once they get out of that training wheels period which is the half week if they meet the quota which is the minimum allowable close rate or whatever metric you want to use then they can get a full schedule once on the full schedule they're still kept on that and everyone understands that if you drop below kpi for two weeks you go on a pip which is a performance Improvement plan which means you go basically regress back to being a trainee which means I now have to train you the way we were and I'm going to take even more attention to fixing your calls and getting you back on track if after the next two weeks you still haven't improved you're all that's the name now when you hire people you also set that expectation this is how this works this is a dangerous place to work we do that because we expect Excellence you want them to be fired up they'll be like let's go the Cadence after you've graduated someone from trainee to full time is you would meet with them on a weekly basis and then maybe after a year every other week if they're just killing it but most times most sales people meet on every basis just to clean the engine check in on things give them a couple of tidbits hear them out Etc the structure of those calls already outlined in terms of how you give feedback that same feedback structure applies to all of the existing guys too which is an hour per guy per week is for the sales management and so you take 60 to here maybe two calls because you can listen to it on faster rate and then you can have your written feedback and after you have the call with them you want to message them or email them the Salient blocks and if you're an organized person which I recommend you be if you're a manager I like having a tab of all my sales guys and having the things that I want them to work on each week so that I can just date it and say like last Monday I said these two things come back this Monday and so when I'm reviewing it the next week I'm saying this is the two things I tell them to work on did they improve it yes no cool when I come back to that call I'm like hey we said these two things did you do it did it results in you making more deals awesome cool big meeting Cadence you've got your weeklies you've got your monthlies you've got your one-on-ones that happen on a weekly basis or more frequently if they're on a performance plan or a trainee and then you have as a team daily huddle end of day huddle the end of day is a short just like hey how's everyone doing checking in cool awesome make sure you clean your pipelines Etc the early morning one is a training if you want you can make it optional and if you're on a performance plan or you're a trainee it's mandatory with the right culture teams most guys always attend that's the overarching structure for scaling a sales team in an organization the only other thing that can happen is that they will lose conviction that's when sales can get cold the things that keep people motivated are the competitions because that keeps things fresh because it's a very repetitive job but also reading testimonials of clients they recently sold and the results that they're experiencing and you do that so that they feel like they're good guys because a lot of times sales can feel very hunt and kill but you want to sell from a place of empathy genuine empathy not nice guy but like I really want to help you which means you need to make a decision and that's what like I'm not going to let you hide in your excuses again because I really am trying to help you not say I am because I've seen guys just like you change their lives by doing this and I know you're just putting up and you're afraid and that's okay because we're going to help you you have to have somebody who who's willing to push through the know because they believe in the product and the transformation the other person is going to experience not because they have their ego tied into it and they want to close the sale to be number one you get there backwards and you do that by having people who were clients hop on a sales call and talk about their experience the second best thing is to watch videos of testimonials with the team before you start the day in the early morning huddle and then the third is just just read them out loud yourself and ideally what you want is if you're going to read them out loud have the guy who sold the person read the testimonial because then it'll double down on their conviction