How to Compensate Business to Business Sales People (As Opposed to Business to Consumer Sales People)

Audio Transcription

Grabbed the duct tape and mentally prepare yourself for yet another mind expanding knowledge bong from America’s number one business coach. Clay Clark.

Yes. Yes, yes. Andy. Yes. Thrive nation. On today’s show we have an incredible cast. I believe his name is Stewart Cole. Uh, or it could be Stewart Weikel but I believe it’s pronounced Stewart Weikel. Uh, and he has a question for us. So Stuart’s

all right. Uh, this is Stuart Waco with accolade

steers were a window installer and dealer and uh, I’m, I’m wanting to understand better how to compensate, uh, salespeople for effort involved in cultivating B2B relationships, uh, in, in the construction industry versus the retail side to homeowners. But we are more customarily doing

Z. Okay. I went ahead and took the Liberty of writing down the 10 steps for success and I thought that you could break them down, um, and give them a lot of detail. Okay. First of all, yes. This potential question yes. Has the potential yes. Of making me crazy. This potential question has the potential of making you crazy. Well, it is a question. So it’s not a potential question, but it potentially has the ability to make me crazy. Let’s work off the assumption right now that I have somehow baited our listener to ask a question that would potentially make you potentially crazy. Hypothetically. I am not surprised by that one bit by the way. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna, I’m gonna read the steps one by one and at any point if you disagree with the steps, you can freak out. I, you know, I have a feeling you and I are going to get into a cage fight before this question has been answered.

I had that. I’m just letting you know right now. I have no idea what your 10 things are. You know, I, I you have no idea what I’m thinking through my head, right? These are the rules to the game. These are steps and you a point can freak out. All right. These are the kinds of things owning a business, these types of questions have led to me just having these, you know, out of body experiences in and not a good way. Okay, here we go. We’ll see. We’ll see if that happened. I don’t know. I don’t know. Five nation rules are this. You can freak out when you want to freak out. All right, so step one Stuart is you want to clearly define who your sales representative should be calling on. Who’s your, who your sales reps should be calling on. Um, Z. Do you agree with that?

Yes. We call it and we teach it in our conferences and in our thrive nation package, uh, we call it the dream 100 dream 100 you got bro. If you have a dream 100 you should have a top 10 I always referred to it, I like dream 100 by the way, but I always used to refer to it as your, your top draft picks. You know, who are the ones you are, if you could go out there and pick you at pick and who’s your first or second and your third and fourth and have them in order. And that way you can devise kind of a plan of attack. If it’s okay. If I would like to do is first off, give credit where credit is due. The ultimate sales machine is where I pulled the idea, the altar of the dream 100 from, I was reading the book, the ultimate sales machine by the late great business coach by the name of Chet Holmes and he called it the dream 100 but I would like to give this a little bit of context because I think the listeners out there and what let’s, let’s give them a little bit of a um example.

Okay, let’s go with a Z 66 aa.com okay. Your auto auction. By the way, listeners, if you love today’s show, go to [inaudible] dot com it boosts doctors, Eleanor’s rank in Google. And what better way to say I love you to my going directly to a guy’s website. Well that’s, that’s very nice cause it takes you zero almost zero time. No money. Just go to [inaudible] dot com so we go there and we’re at your website and you guys, I explain how the roughly how the business model of the auto auction works so someone can understand what we’re talking about when we’re saying that the Z 66 AB does B2B or business to business sales. Well we are a customer service driven company. We don’t own the products that are sold at our place of business, but we offer all the services to pick up the cars, to deliver the cars in order to pick them up and deliver them means we have to get the cars or get the commitment for people to send the cars to us to sale for them.

So the idea is we go out to dealerships and we go out to use car guys, you have to be, have a dealer’s license to, to use to come in and buy cars from us. And so the business to business is where the business going out there. You know, we’re not just advertising to the general public, it’s not open to the public. So therefore the idea that someone can just walk off the street, can buy a car at the auction unless you have a used dealer’s license, that’s not possible. So that’s the business to business. So there’s about, you know, a thousand car guys in our demographic area that we target either buyers or sellers. And then you know, from that we make our dream 100 list and I, and in all fairness, all three have to, since you came clean with where you got dream 100, I came up with my draft pick list from the NFL draft from the NFL draft.

Now just to kind of sit through on the NFL draft, I know you made yourself available for this year’s draft. Well [inaudible] go after undrafted guys would react. But did you get drafted? I didn’t. I heard, I heard I called Jacoby Meyers who I don’t know, but I thought, well he wasn’t drafted. Maybe I have a shot. Maybe you have a shot shots. You know, he, he called, uh, a lot. A lot of people, really, a lot of undrafted guys over the years. A lot of, did you get a call? Listen, let’s not get to the point and we’ll of course not. I have not been called yet. I was just going to give what I am. I’m, I’m available. Gunner Olszewski got a call from division to Bemidji state. So I figured at any point I could get a call right now bill bell chick is winning with a bunch of random juice. They Bemidji state division two did but but did you say but MSI? Bemidji. Yeah, but mid G. yeah. Is that a thing? Have you seen this? Let me, let me show this to you over here. Go over here real quick. I want to show you real quick. This will blow your mind. So this is gunner. Oh Shefsky this is him. A gun or no? Shefsky and this is him doing here. This is when he announced or we was talking about being in a Patriot. So good to know. Shefsky from Bemidji state division.

The roller coaster must have been a little bit kind of weird at first. I was 13 years old. Look at this guy, listen to this and end on up. So that’s, I’m happy to be here in this professional way. I look at it. What was that second phone call where you finally, where they were like, okay, you know, what’s the best phone call my life, man. It was, it was awesome. It was awesome. It put a smile on my face and I was just happy to know I had a job and I’m ready to go to work.

Punt returner. He says, has it sunk in and they say, I’m here, man. It’s sunk in as thinking, I’ve got to go practice. I got a job to do that. So they replaced the receivers. You guys got out of my face. I got to go pray. Well, I mean look at this. Look at this. Go watch this. Watch this guy. Watch this guy. Watch this. This will blow your mind.

Yeah, he can’t see. He’s got the ball here. Pretty good. Catch calyx. Westwell Curry. Let’s look at another one here. When awic in van Noy and that. What’s this one? But standup defense watch as we will demonstrate his leaping ability defensive back in college. Who’s now Weidner Seaver on the Patriot Stevens event. That’s the fifth now wide receiver. Watch this one. Watch this. See? Watch this one. Zohan rumbling. Bumbling. Stumped out. Come on now baby. Lowers the shoulder. One more young. Watch a little more play buddy. One more play. This one’s great little left funder is this rocket? We will walk. Watch them one more. He did die for the extra yards. You’re gonna love this one. I taught 60 times. Even back in college by the way, do not play receiver in college. Right down the middle. Come on here. Oh,

Patriots baby, but mid. What is, what was it? College. Doomadgee state, but Michie’s division too. It’s a Minnesota, Minnesota tip. Of course it is. Yeah, division. So it was your homeboys there. He is one of my homeboys. Now the next, the next step, we agree on the next step. You want to clearly define how often they should be calling on these businesses. Do you agree with that? So far, you haven’t freaked out yet. Do you believe that we should clearly define as the owner or leadership how often these people should be calling on these businesses? Like you know, once a month, once a week, minimum a minimum and sometimes you know, the account requires a little extra. Let’s go to your office. If it’s on your heart, if it’s on your draft list, you’re number one draft, pick a list, your top 10 draft pick list.

Are we talking every month, every week, every, every, every weekend. If it’s on your draft low, that means you haven’t acquired them yet. They require more love and they require more attention. I love this. Um, and then once you get them gathered up, you know, depends on the account and depends on the individual. Some, some guys are more needy than others. Once a very Frank with you. And so sometimes you know, once a month you could maybe go back to once a month cause now you’re going to see them once a week at the auction is the most amount of time that you’ve doggedly pursued a used car dealer to, to earn their business. 15 years, Stuart, write this down baby that he did get him. I met this guy at your birthday years ago on live. Okay. Now step three, you clearly define what they should be saying to these businesses.

I’m going to sit down, have some sort of plan, right? You don’t have to just show up and say, right, and what would I give my guys at the auto auction for example, is there’s a range they can negotiate within this range. In other words, everybody wants to know where, where, okay, if I send you cars, what lane are they going to be in? Because we have different lanes running every, you know, every at the same time. Okay, so what position within the lane am I going to be? And then also what is my sales fee going to be? So there’s, these are the kind of basic questions that they ask cause they’re kind of getting to know you and whatnot. Um, and that’s the game. And that’s back in the day, what we would do is we’d get the competitors list and if a guy was running in the back of one of the lanes, we would approach him and say, Hey, that’s a bad positioning.

Come to us. You know, we need to be in the back of the lane. Well let’s say for example, we’re selling a thousand cars. Got it. Okay. And we’re going to run six lanes. All right? So that’s approximately about 160, 170 cars per lane. If you’re doing math, if you’re into math or that kind of thing, that’s not your thing. Then you can do whatever number you want. So basically in theory, the B lane will look at the beeline B as in boy, so it’ll have boy B one B, two B three all the way to B one 70. Got it. Got it, got it. And so as those cars go through and they get bought, guys didn’t run out of money there. A lot of the guys will show up and say, Hey, I need 10 cars and I have $100,000 to spend the day. How many cars are you going to sell on a Friday?

Um, you don’t want to, you know, we’ll, we’ll run a thousand we’re trying to sell. 60% is a rock star day. So if we did, you know, 600 that’s rockstar. And how many hours does it take to sell 600 cars? You only get this guy’s attention for a couple of three hours. So you got serious, you got to move them. I’ll say, wait a second. So in 180 minutes, I’ll just say you’re selling 600 cars. And we divide that by 180 minutes. Again, if we’re into math, some people are not, some people aren’t. That would mean, again, we have 180 minutes. So it means we’re going to sell 3.3 cars per minute. I’m not quite that fast. We’re probably selling to maybe 30 seconds. Okay, Shanda. So, okay, so you’ve got 170 cars and for selling, um, to a minute, right? Yep. So you dropped that in half. So that’s 178. So 85 you know, 85 minutes. So that’s an hour and a half. So you then you have the, you know, some run longer than 30 seconds, some run, you know what? And then you have this and that. And so about two, you know, two hours or so, maybe, maybe three on a busy day and some lanes we’ll get more cars in it than others just because that’s the way.

Oh, okay. Okay. So

we’re, we’re on the same page. Step one, clearly define who your sales representative should be calling on. Step two clearly define how often they should be calling on businesses. Step three, determine what they should be saying to these businesses. Step four clearly define what sales materials they need. Do you agree with that? Cause I know some businesses that they let their salespeople come back every week saying, you boss, I would’ve sold the deal, but I needed another print piece. I need to have an embroidered hat. I need more swag, I need more mugs, I need more cups, I need more. Right? I mean, don’t you define, Hey, this is what you have and this is what you have. You do. But then, then it can also change. I mean, you know, you could change. It’s kind of like, can you make coffee cups? And they’re real popular.

So you know, you try to get coffee cups out there and baseball caps and all your swag sweat. You see the sales guy that can’t sell anything that needs every possible tool. Yeah. Yeah. The reason why he’s not selling is because I’m not giving him the right tools, which is unfortunate. But tools are, you know, the, the swag and the, and the party favors if you will. That’s really the get in the door. That’s you’re hopeful. If, if, if that wins you the business, then somebody else comes in with better party favors and takes it away from you. So you know, you gotta be careful on that. So step five clearly determine what supplies or gifts they’re allowed to drop off. You know what I mean? You have to have a certain limit, right? I mean of how much swag maliciousness you can give away or do you tell a guy, buddy, you give away the farm if you have to, but you sell a car.

Well, I think within reason you do, you do have it limited on. You find the boundaries, you find the boundaries and that’s why our swag, our swag bag is locked up, right? If it’s not, it walks out the door pretty quickly. Okay. Now the next move is step six. Clearly define the outcome that you’re looking for. You know, you want somebody to come by and try out the auction. You want them to meet you for lunch. You want them to give you the golden look Z where you can meet him for dinner. You want to take him to Vegas, you want to, I mean, what are, what are the options? What kind of acts? What kind of asks? I mean, if you’re sitting down with a sales guy, is this a sales guy’s goal? To get him to come to the auction one time and try it out as it to get them to meet you for lunch.

What are we asking? Well, step one, if they’d never been to the auction, then that’s obviously a first step, whether they’re buying or selling. Okay. Just to get them to show up. Hey, we’ve got a free lunch and you show up and I’ll give you some swag, but just, just come check us out. I’m gonna step seven if you’re out there, your name is Kevin Russell Ryan with your name. It’s amazing. If your name is Kevin, step seven Orion with you, and I’d encourage you to leave us a review for that. These don’t do anything. It’s fair. If your name is Kevin and we’re talking about step seven, the initiative, leave us a review on iTunes. Absolutely. I mean serious. I think one of the chances of the self evident, isn’t it? Now you want to schedule a weekly follow up time with your team. So if, if Z, you have a sales manager or a leader of your auto auction Montes, the guy.

Correct. And does he not know who’s going where? When does he not know who’s going where? Yes, he does. He does. Okay, so step eight, determine the carrots and sticks for your sales. People know this is probably where you’re gonna freak out at some point. Determine the carrots and sticks. Like if a guide won’t go out and do his job, he comes back. A boss, I would know I was supposed to go out to 50 days. My Bostonian accident gets better the more we get into it. But sure. Boston was supposed to go out to 50 you know? And what happened was the weather was not a weather. The pressure, a lot of fear. I was dealing with feel where the pressure, my wife was calling me boss. I just didn’t go out. You know? You know what I mean? There’s this [inaudible] excuses, endless excuses. How much do you put up with, do you, are you okay with the first time, the second time?

And what happens if a guy is supposed to go out to 50 and does not do it? Well then you, you have to, you know, in your own mind you have to figure out why he didn’t and talk to him about it. I wanted to go, I just was afraid of rejection. I can’t handle that guy in the back seat. Well you know the other thing too is they may go to one guy and then Nixon, you know, he’s the guy who’s like, Hey, well let’s let I’m off today. I just happened to be in the store. Let’s go play golf. And so you’re like boat guide that goes pin for hours playing golf with him because it’s an important client top of his list. And so we didn’t get to the other 10 or 12 that he was going to go to that day.

And that’s okay. I mean, so there’s reasons why it’s okay and there’s reasons why it’s not okay. You can’t make a blanket statement if we didn’t make all of his sales stops along the wild. His milk route for the day. Is he in trouble? What does depends. If one of our listeners got a job for you at the auto auction and they were supposed to go out to these certain accounts and they didn’t do it for whatever reason, over a how long of a period of time do you give somebody to get into the group of the sales moves? How long do you give them to get into the group? What if they don’t have, if they don’t have a good reason, then you have to really question whether they are the right material for, for for outside sales. Outside sales is a unique creature because unless you’ve got a GPS on their car, which Warren more businesses are doing, right, so you can track right, exactly where they are.

I would recommend that, but here again, that’s, you kind of get back to that. You’ve got to trust them to go do their job and it’s one of those things where they can, all of a sudden they’re stopping at the laundry mat. They’re picking up kids from school, they’re doing a two hour lunch there. Can I kill body ope? One of your top sales guys. Mr. Douglas pure neck. Yeah, former hockey player. He played professional hockey. Yeah, for the Tulsa Oilers. I believe he has the record for the most penalty minutes in the history actually been penalized. More minutes than a game was long. I’m to cue up audio of Doug appear knack. This is Doug, real audio of Doug in a game. This is from November 30th, 2004 this is Doug peer. An actor I’m talking to is the one that he got. This is where he’s encouraging Derek Parker to play nicer. Okay, let me cue this up here.

This is kind of skip through here. You’ve got a narrative. Gloves are off here. Doug is ripping off a Jersey up. Somebody here haymakers are being thrown. Oh wow. I see what they’re getting to know each other. He said fleece or play nicer. Doug is just, he’s just throwing the handbag out punches. I mean,

now let me show this. Is Doug in a different game? This is a versus Mike pain of the Huntsville. I believe this is a well Huntsville, they deserve. You get what? There’s no audio to this one, but you can see this one’s good. So you’re gonna watch this one. This is where these guys are squaring off for a while. They’re kind of getting ready to see going to happen. They’re kind of, Oh, and the reps, the reps want this to happen. This to sell tickets right here. Oh, Oh. Oh. Look at him. Look at him as he is. Is Doug on the receiving end of these punches? He is right now. He’s on the receiving end. Oh, Doug has done. Now Doug has done, he’s going to go look at Douglas O. O. Z. This is impressive. I’ll put links on today’s show notes so the listeners can can see this right here.

But I mean it takes, it’s a unique personality that will do outside. He’s a fighter. He’s a fighter. It is. And they have to be very disciplined and that’s one thing that you have to find that to have a lot of self control and be disciplined and not get into fights all the time. I mean, that is some impressive fighting for mr Canadian. What do you expect? I did Doug’s wedding. That’s my connection to all this. I’m putting a link to this real quick. The hot weather down here, it gets them all frustrated and they gotta have an outlet for that. All right, so step nine, you never stop recruiting people so people don’t get it done. You can fire him. And step 10, you call them all until they cry, buy or die. Z. Do you not call them all until they cry, buy or die?

Cry, buy or die? But you want it to go off about something. So please, cause we’ve got about four minutes until we are actually being interviewed by somebody on their podcast. How cool. So I tell you what, why don’t you pontificate about the parts of the business to business sales? Then reread the question again, please. The question from reset it for me. Okay, let me keep the audio here. This is a, let me get it here. I’m going to Dropbox right now for those stories out there that are wondering what I’m doing and I’m looking for the audio of where the, here you go. I’m Q. I’m hitting play.

Okay. All right. Uh, this is Stuart YPO with accolade exterior’s we’re window installer and dealer. And uh, I’m, I’m wanting to understand better how to compensate, uh, salespeople for effort involved in cultivating B2B relationships.

See, that’s part of the part that drives me crazy. And here’s what happened. Here’s, here’s what happened is that you hire a dude or a gal and you hire a person and you pay them money, right? Or you hire them for a salary, you’re paying them money and they, you sit down with them and they say, what is my job description? Just please be very clear and you say, here’s your job description. Your job description is to go and get account to go B2B to get business status. I’m giving you a credit card. Here’s your limits. You went to the top 10 things that you just said, clay, they have clear definition and they are armed and ready to go. And then what happens is month one, no connections, maybe got a couple of inroads. I haven’t booked a few lunches. I mean I’m working, working, working you. And then there the nude Joe, Kate. So there and then all of a sudden they say month three they hit a big account. But again, big accounts, huge accounts.

Come on. It was just a little Brit. So we’re going to sit a little bridge and then what always comes, or not always, but some of the times I sit down and go, so, so what do I get? There’s a party going. Oh right, what do I owe? Celebration brought you. I brought you. I brought all this big account. I’m somebody. I’m on the map. I got to chip in the game. Somebody I’m ready. I’m ready to reap the benefit. Absolutely. What I’ve just done. Absolutely. I mean they’re, they’re excited because they know it’s going to happen. Oh, giggling. Oh they know what’s going to come. They know. Calculated to the, to the, to the penny how much money you’re going to make off of their hard work. Cause they’re kind of like a running back on the Cowboys. He signs a contract, but he doesn’t like the contract he signed and now it’s time to play the season.

He says, I kind of sit out until maybe I get a better deal. Know I want to know. I want to know. I mean, you know, what do I get now and I want to look at them every time and say, your salary and what we agreed upon there it is. I mean, but it’s so funny how people are like, you’re the, you’re the first one to come in. They didn’t come in with any big accounts. You’re kind of going, okay, are you going to give me back part of your salary this month? I don’t think so. Nope. Right. Are you going to give me back all that expense report that you turned in for the lunches and the dinners and the golfing that you did trying to get these accounts? I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I now you finally, you know, got a tuna in the boat and that’s what I was paying you to do.

That’s what amazes me is that when people, people actually do their job well, come on now they look at you like, okay, what do I get? Put a bubble up and I hired you and paid you two to do it. Well, 10 steps. Okay, I’m done. But all of this is irrelevant if you don’t agree on the compensation terms before you, you have to get that nailed down. Because what happens is, is once they have a little bit of success, then that entitlement comes in. And that is so frustrating to do. I paying you money to go do that job and you did the job. Thank you. Your checks not going to bounce. Let’s go to the next month. I like to agree on a salary that’s fair with bonuses for production, but I don’t if, if somebody ever comes to me doesn’t like the terms we’ve agreed to when we started.

Uh, you’re, you’re kind of on your way out. And so I think it’s very important to their steward. I’m not sure what your budget is to hire this person, but figuring out how much you can afford to pay them. Make it fair, make it reasonable, make it a win, win and give them, you know, some carrots, if they hit, they hit the moon, then they get a maybe a a moon, moon, moon, a moon shot prize, maybe agree. Hey, you know what? I’m just making up a number. But if you bring in per deal, you gotta sell at least 10 deals to earn your salary. Let’s say 10 deals and if you earn 20 you get a little bonus. But it’s not like a, but you’ve got to figure out, cause I know there’s a lot of great furniture stores in Tulsa. They say you have to earn it.

You have to sell at least this much to earn your salary. I mean just just to justify having you around. There’s a minimum threshold and if you hit this huge number, there’s a bonus here for you. But it’s clearly defined. Don’t get in a situation where you’re being held hostage by your sales people. W when I was a senior in high school, took a job, a commissioned sales at a C R aunties, which is closing clothing department store. And I was on a 4% 4% bonus, but I had to cover my hourly rate. Got it. Before the 4% kicked in. Yeah, there it is. So I had to sell so much an hour, so much a day, anything over that I got to read the 4% it was clearly defined, clearly defined, knew what I was getting into and so that’s something needed to do. Store does it make sure it’s clearly defined up front and, and even if you think it’s self evident and even you think it’s like, well this shouldn’t even be an issue.

Assume it’s going to be an issue and address it and you know say Hey listen, if we, you know, one month you don’t anything, one month you don’t hear anything, then one month you had a big deal, don’t think you’re going to get a bonus for that. So we got to hit maybe deal whatever to get the bonus or, and here’s what that looks like. Now see we have to end it each and every show is a boom, but these new mikes are hot. I know. Are you prepared to bring the boom, but maybe a little bit further away from the mic than we’re used to? Kind of a baby boom. Okay, here we go. You ready to get prepared? What? Pull it through. The paint. Wiggling it. See, wiggle. It.