The Agency Hour
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The Agency Hour
Building a Sales Team
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The vision is where you're going. The mission is why you're going where you're going. And the vision or the values is how you're going to interact with each other as a unit on the journey of going where you're going.
SPEAKER_00If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, brought to you by Agency Mavericks.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to the Agency Hour. I'm Johnny Flash. I am not Troy Dean. I'm filling in for Troy. Troy is uh in the United States, believe it or not. We're about to have our Mavcon uh event in person. I'm so excited about this because we've had way too many virtual events over the last two years. Um, and so we are gonna be in person in San Diego with all of our uh Mavericks uh doing just some awesome uh sessions and content and just kind of helping everyone grow their agency. So it's gonna be amazing. Troy is super jet lagged though, having just arrived in uh California. I think he's uh in LA and he's headed down to San Diego where we're having our event uh next week, which is super exciting. Uh so today though, um we do have a special guest for you. Um, and I'm particularly uh excited about this because um this is probably like one of the last pieces in my own agency that I need to figure out is building out the sales team because I've pretty much handed off everything else except for I'm still kind of the sales guy. And so uh I'm super excited to have uh Cole Gordon joining us here in just a moment. Uh before we have Cole come out though, um why don't you guys drop in the chat if you're watching on Facebook, let us know where you're watching from. Uh say hello. I want to make sure we've got all the technology working here uh before we get Cole out here, because I know you guys are gonna want to interact with him. Uh so let's see. Uh we have got Max from Melbourne. Max is running behind the scenes. Max, thank you. I'm glad that uh everything is working for you. Who else do we have on here? Go ahead and uh drop that into the chat here just for a moment. Uh, where in the world are you? Thank you. Look at that. All these graphics. The team, Max, you're amazing. Thank you. Um awesome. Okay, so while you guys are putting that in the chat, because I know that it run the feed runs about 30 seconds behind. Um today we have a special guest. His name is Cole Gordon. He has built a sales team, not only for himself, but for many, many, many other businesses. Um, you're gonna get to hear a little bit about his story, and we're just gonna have a conversation about building a sales team. So uh I'm super excited to welcome to the stage uh Cole Gordon. All right, happy to be here, man. Awesome. Cole, so glad to have you, man. Um so why don't you give a little introduction? I'm not gonna try to I I I know who you are and and stuff, but uh, why don't you give an introduction of yourself and kind of a little just a little bit of your journey of where where you were and where you are now?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, you know, the the the super brief version is that I uh I was you know set off to go to medical school, dropped out of that, then I ended up starting an agency after you know multiple failed attempts at other things. So I do resonate a lot with the agency owners and what you guys are doing out there. So uh started an agency, got to about $30,000 a month in revenue, but I found that that level of revenue that essentially uh I wasn't making any money. I mean, I just didn't know, you know, I I was really young, I was making all these mistakes. So between contractors and ads expense and fixed cost and all this stuff, I wasn't making any money at all. And so after that, I kind of realized that I was good at sales. And I sort of like, you know, I was in this agency coaching program that I don't think it's around anymore, but at the time it was like a popular program for agencies, and all these women in this program, uh, it was all women, and it was like a couple guys. So I was one of the and all these women were very, very much like, Cole, you're just so good at sales, you're just such a natural salesperson. And realistically, I sucked, uh, but I think they also really sucked, and they saw me having success. So that was kind of how they ascribed my success to. So essentially, you know, I'm doing this and uh I'm kind of really, really new. I don't know who I am in the entrepreneurial world. So I'm kind of asking this question of who am I? And I sort of cling on to the sales thing. I'm like, okay, I'm like, I got I got something going on with this sales. So after I sort of uh, you know, just kind of got burned out with my agency, I was just losing money and I was doing all this dumb stuff. I just had no skills, I wasn't good at getting results for clients or any of this stuff. I uh gave away all my clients and I started to get into high to get sales. So once I just started to do that, you know, I even though I thought I was good, I went like one for 30 in my first 30 calls, I was terrible. Um, and it took me a while. I mean, it wasn't like, oh, you know, then the second month I did good. Like it was like I sucked for a while. And it took me about six months to get like good. And granted, you know, sure, like if I would have had, I mean, I'm not you know, dogging on my coaches or anything. I had good coaches back then, but you know, if I think if I would have had a little bit of better, better direction, I could have probably gotten there faster because I was overthinking a lot of stuff. But yeah, it took me like six months to like actually get like respectable. And then from there, though, I really started to take off, became the best person on that team, the best person on the next team I was on, the best person on the final team I was on, then eventually started a kind of a sales coaching offer that slowly evolved into a sales kind of recruiting company, which is what we do now.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. And give give everyone an idea how many people are on your team, how many clients are you serving? Give us, give us, give everyone who's not familiar, just yeah, I mean, that's a great question.
SPEAKER_04Like I know team-wise, we're probably around 80. And then um, you know, in terms of B2B clients, which is what people know me for, you know, we have several hundred. I would say probably what 240 three, you know, probably 340 active clients. Let's just kind of throw that number out there. It's somewhere around that, I think is pretty it. I mean, it could be more, to be honest, but that's pretty conservative. And then um, you know, we also have a B2C side where we actually train salespeople and help them go out there and get positions. And um, you know, that one has probably three or four thousand clients in it that are all like high-ticket type of stuff. So, you know, that one has a lot of people in there, and and we we do place out of that group sometimes if they're good, but we we really try to educate them on how to go out there and you know, kind of create their own brand and essentially go get a position and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01And you guys are doing several million dollars a month in in revenue between all the stuff that you're doing, right?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you know, we've been plateaued at like two and a half million a month for probably about 10 months. Uh what's been interesting is that you know, we've we fluctuated between, I think probably three million a month was probably our best month that we've ever had. And then uh, you know, probably 2.2 is the lowest we've done in a year, 2.1 maybe. So, you know, a lot of my videos I always say like two and a half million a month cash because that's just kind of been the the steady pace the entire year. But there's some things going on right now that I feel like we're going to explode way past the Q4, hopefully, you know. I don't know if you know how Q4 ads are, but it can be kind of a bloodbath. Uh so timing might not be on our side, but I know strategically we've made the right decisions. So yeah, and and you know, to be candid too, like we've we've had a lot of growth, you know, our B2B has grown a lot and is is is also the product has gotten better. There's a lot of great things going on with that, and then the B2C has been sort of had this huge explosion of growth, and then it kind of we had to scale things back and rebuild a little bit, and I it's about to go on another big explosion. So pretty cool.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's awesome, dude. It's amazing. Well, I know uh the way that we got connected with you, and I know Troy told this story uh a few months ago at MavCon, but um as agency Mavericks, we have been you know, we have spent a lot of money uh on your sales team. I think um, and when Troy first got connected with your company, um, I think it we, you know, he had just messaged you a few times through Facebook Messenger, but had never actually been on a Zoom call with you or anything. And your team was you know helping us get the right salespeople in place uh and everything. And Damien, who came from um, I believe your company's connection, uh, our our sales guy, he has been on a tear. I mean, um, I think we added 10 new Mavericks just in August in terms of like uh new people into the program. And this is obviously a high-ticket program that we run for agency mavericks, and so uh your methods work, your your people are amazing. Like I know Troy just raves about like the stuff that you guys have helped us do as agency mavericks, and so um thank you. And and I'm just excited to get to talk with you through this. 100%, yeah. So there's a lot of agencies out there that I'm coaching that are listening to this, that will see this, you know, later today, tomorrow, whatever. Um and I think as agency owners, it can be kind of scary, especially if it's like a small team. Uh, I have a team of 16, but a lot of the people in the program maybe have just a few freelancers, a few contractors, a few team members, and they're doing all the sales themselves. And it can be scary to kind of think about handing off some or all of the sales, you know, to somebody else. Because just like, how can someone know all the knowledge that I know and and and handle all these different things? We're selling websites, we're selling SEO, we're doing this and that. So walk me through like what what's your how can an agency owner begin to kind of like simplify that overwhelming amount of knowledge and other things that are needed in order to kind of start to build a sales team.
SPEAKER_04Right. So, I mean there there's several steps, right? The first step is gonna be getting the right foundations in place, which is a couple of things. Number one, it's like you gotta have a validated offer, right? So uh you guys are probably teaching your people already to do this, but you know, you can't really build a sales team, and at least if this is your first business that you're starting, you can't really build one until you've at least sold the thing yourself, you know, a couple dozen times and you know what it is, how you're selling it, you know who you're selling it to, you kind of know what pain points hit, you have a good way to explain it on the phone every single time, you have a like a fulfillment model that's built in. So like the expectations and how it's fulfilled is being the same every time. So it has to, you kind of have to build this conveyor belt to start off, right? You have to have a validated offer. You also have to have, and this is really what the conveyor belt is, you have to have what's called an optimal selling system. So an optimal selling system is two things. It's number one, a consistent, repeatable, uh, consistent, repeatable, predictable way to generate interest. Number two, a consistent, repeatable, predictable way to convert that interest into customers, right? Now, in a phone sales model, right, that's like a way to pull the lever and get more sales calls coming in, and a way that's a predictable diagnostic and prescription process to convert those sales calls into clients, right? So a couple things with the interest with the demand gen, right? So with the generating sales calls, there's really six ways that you can generate leads, period. And I got this from Alex Ramosy. He said that there's word of mouth, word of mouth referrals, there's affiliates, there's earn media, um media, paid media, and cold outbound, right? Now, what I have found, you know, with agencies and you know other surface type businesses is typically paid is usually the best for somebody just starting off. You know, sure if you have a really crazy affiliate partnership, or you have a huge YouTube channel, or um, you know, you build a cold outbound sales team, all that stuff can work as your optimal selling system as well of how you get demand. But if I can tell you just straight up, like all my agency clients that have gotten to eight figures, multiple seven figures, uh our company, I mean, really all my clients, like 98% of them really scale and have a successful sales team, they do it because they have paid media dialed in. So there's other ways you can do it. I'm just saying, like, by and large, paid media is what I've observed to be uh the best. So just reporting that to you. And I shouldn't even say the best. Obviously, if you had a freaking YouTube channel and you had a million subscribers, that would be far, far better. Or if you had a huge email list and you had a bunch of buyers, obviously that's far, far better. But most of us are stuck with either paid media or usually cold append. So, anyways, you're gonna have method in. And then when I say a diagnostic and prescriptive process, you know, the same way, you know, the doctor who discovered, let's say, Lyme disease or something, right? Like he can't be the only person in the world that can diagnose and prescribe that disease. Like there has to be a consistent, repeatable diagnostic and prescriptive process for that ailment, right? And so uh, same thing with your sales calls, you know, typically a prospect will have anywhere from two to three very, very common problems and kind of buckets they fall into. And then after, you know, the depending on which bucket they kind of fall into, you essentially can discern what the conversational track need to look like to get them to the point to where they're ready to accept and willing to be suggestible to whatever your offer is, right? So the same way, you know, I always use the doctor example that's very common in sales, but the same way you're, you know, diagnostic and prescripting, there's a consistent repeatable process for that, you need that same thing for your sales calls, you know. When you don't have that, and you think you're the only person who can sell what you're selling, or you're the only person who can um, you know, uh be able to take the sales calls and make the sales or whatever, right? It all depends on you. When that's the case, then essentially what we call that is founder syndrome, right? Where like you think it's only like you can sell your thing because it's you and it's the charisma or whatever it is, right? And generally that just means you don't have that diagnostic and prescriptive process in place. The other key thing, too, in terms of your offer, is that you need to make sure, especially with agencies are really suspect of this, that you're not just like everything to everybody. Okay. So if you're everything to everybody, you're nobody to anybody. And especially it becomes problematic because if you're a full service agency, it becomes, and let's let's say you do Google ads, Facebook ads, TikTok ads, you do websites, you do SEO, like you do all you do all of it, graphic, you do a bunch of stuff. And every deal is different. Well, it's very hard like to put a salesperson into that and then expect them to know what to prescribe certain people and like all these different packages and proposals. I mean, you could certainly do it with the two-called close process, but it's a little bit tough. So that's why I really recommend having a productized offer that at least is your lead-in offer to acquire customers from a cold medium. And then you can upsell them everything and anything that you want to, full service kind of model. Like that's fine. But you sort of have to have that specific problem, specific person, specific way, productized offer that's easy to sell, that's in high-end demand, that really works on cold traffic or whole outbound or whatever it is, it's gonna be the same no matter what the media is. You really gotta have that first. Um, I would say as well, because it's gonna really help you create that conveyor belt. And then once the conveyor belt's built, it's like you take yourself out and you put two salespeople in. Hopefully that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. And I'm just thinking, so if we were to use an example of like, let's say, an agency that's primarily serving, let's say, like home service connectors, so they're doing like the quarter million dollar kitchens or the you know $200,000 backyard landscaped outdoor space or whatever, right? That's like their niche. Um get walk me through like how how would they think about like what that offer would look like.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, they're already like halfway 75% of the way there, right? So they have the who, which is home service, right? They have uh I'm sure I'm assuming what they're doing is they're generating leads. So the problem is leads, the who is the home service builders. So the really only other question is the specific way, right? When I say specific way, what I really mean is like, why is what you're doing unique, different, superior than the other similar or alternative options they have out there to achieve the same result, right? Indirect and direct competition. So really you have two out of the three criteria right there. I mean, like that being a lead gen agency for home service contractors, I mean, that that definitely works, right? Like the big thing you want to focus on your marketing is why you. You know, that could be because you have a bigger promise, a better guarantee. That could be because uh you have a specific way of doing things, but you really need to answer that question of why you. It's very, very so yeah, I don't think that one's very far off. It just is is it's understanding why and and you know, making yourself stand out a little bit so they know, okay, this is why I'm gonna pick this person opposed to everybody else. And there's frameworks to be able to do this if you want to talk about that. Uh the main thing I see with agencies is where they're just like, well, I do everything, you know, like then how do you build a campaign around that? Like you can't you can't, right? Well, we work with everybody. What do you do? Well, we anything digital. It's like, okay, well, like you're we're gonna run into some issues here. You know, it's like how do you market that? You you don't, you know, yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's like the uh jack of all trades, master of none kind of uh uh thing, right? If you're trying to do all the services for all the people, then you're probably okay, but you're probably not like super amazing at any one of those things, and it's hard to stand out among all the other options, right? Yep, yeah, yeah. Cool. Okay, so if they've got their specific offer and their, you know, the specific audience that they're trying to help and that solves a specific problem, then they kind of sell that themselves, right? As the founder or whatever, try to kind of prove that that works, they have the the traffic coming in, then what what do they do next in terms of like trying to hand off some of the sales?
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So I mean, like with a home services agency that does lead gen and has a good unique mechanism or good unique selling proposition, you know, typically what I would see is that person, okay, they get their pricing right, they get their packaging right, their delivery is scalable, okay, great. They're also um they're they're working on some ads, so they got like some consistent lead gen coming in. Really, ask to get to work for a company like that is not that hard, in my experience. If you do so you have all that rock, and I mean your calendar's full, then really you got to make sure you're closing, you know, 20 or 30% or whatever, right? Just at least a decent rate, like you're validating the funnel, so to speak. And then you take yourself out and you put two sales reps in. Okay. Now, before I talk about why too, look, did you does a founder have to validate the offer every single time? No, I don't want to make sure I'm taught not talking in absolutes. But generally, 99% of the time, especially if this is your first business or first couple of businesses and you've never built a sales team, you really want to do it yourself. Even if you have built a sales team, it's a lot of times good to at least take the first couple calls yourself just to get in a good rhythm of like how to sell this thing. So, anyways, as an assignment. But going back to it, um, you take yourself out, you put two sales reps in. Why do you do that? It's because the rule two, okay? Especially if this is your first sales team you ever built, which keep in mind, when I say first sales team, like think about a sales team specifically for this, right? A high-ticket, service-based business type sales team that's that's selling online. So if you build a customer service team or a real estate team, that's very different, okay? So just make sure, especially if this is the first time you're building a sales team like this, you've you've you validated the offer, you've actually done it yourself, and you hire two in the beginning because you're not gonna know what you don't know, right? And you probably are gonna be a little bit surprised on like who is a good salesperson, who's not a good salesperson. And your hiring ability is not gonna be that great at first. So we want to hire two because it gives us comparison. We can compare this person from that person and kind of see, okay, is this person solid? Is this person not solid? And if both work out, you know, okay, everything's good. If both don't work out, you know you might have messed something up. Maybe the leads aren't good, maybe your training wasn't good enough, maybe you didn't support them or onboard them the right way, or maybe you just got really unlucky. If one works out and one uh doesn't work out, then you know that, okay, that one probably wasn't good, this guy's good, right? And you're left with one. So that's why I always like to hire two, just because the you know the human brain only can make sense of stuff through comparison, right? You only understand what night is if you know what day is, et cetera, right? So we hire two. After we hire two, essentially what we want to do is you want to go through really a 30-day ramping process. So I'll break that down. The first seven days, essentially, what we're doing is we're downloading um all of you know what we know into them, right? They're just like drinking from the fire hose. All right. So what that's gonna look like is essentially you're gonna teach them your company-specific SOPs and your role-specific SOPs. So your company-specific SOPs is essentially the stuff that just anybody and everybody in your company needs to know, right? Like they might just go through some videos, they're getting access to Slack, like it's just the basic stuff. But you know, mission, vision, and values, and just really ain't like it's the same stuff that like no matter what position, everybody goes through. So typically it's like some product education, uh, mission, vision, and values. Uh, there's probably some other stuff I can't think of on the top of my head. But then there's so there's company specific, then there's role specific. Okay. Role specific is obviously the SOP specific to that role. Okay. Now for sales, whether you're a setter or a closer, outbound or inbound, really any position in sales, there's only uh four main types of SOPs. There's general, which is like what software you got to access, how to use the software, uh, certain product knowledge things uh similar to company specific, but product knowledge, testimonials, like what we sell, why we sell it, how we sell it, you know, the purpose of the company, all that stuff. But then there's beginning a day, middle of day, end of day SOPs. Okay. Now I set this up this way in a very, you know, just because it's so linear and easy to understand. All right. So beginning of day SOPs is how to attend the sales meeting, how to like report your data at the sales meeting, how to interact in the sales meeting, because if you're especially a part of my company or one of the clients that we have, you know, we teach our sales meetings in a very specific cadence in a very specific way. Right. And so someone has to go through some training to even understand how to show up to the meeting. So that's the first thing. And the beginning of the SOP is really, you know, teach the salesperson how to start their day properly and how to plan for success. Then the middle of the SOP. Is essentially covering two things.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_04There's only two things a sales rep can be doing during the day in the middle of their uh call like in the field time, right? They could be trying to generate calls, aka prospecting, or they can be trying to do calls, aka like closing.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_04It's only two things they can do. If they're a setter, then they only do one. It's like literally I'm gonna generate calls or do triage calls.
SPEAKER_02You know, that's it.
SPEAKER_04So if we know that to be true, then there's really only two SOPs we need to teach them. We need to teach them all the best standard practices for uh, you know, setting. So whether that's, you know, and it just depends on what you're doing. Maybe you're setting on LinkedIn, maybe you're setting on uh Facebook groups, maybe you're setting on uh outbound calls, like it, you know, whatever it is, right? You gotta teach them all the best practices for that. Then you gotta teach them all the best practices for actually closing the calls, which means having like 20 recordings of you actually doing it and you breaking down what you're doing while you're doing it, right? Uh also having a training on your script or your sales process. I mean, I think you get the point, right? You just gotta map all that stuff out and download it into them. Then you have end-to-day SOPs. End-of-day SOPs is really just how they cap off their day. Uh, what I teach salespeople is to wait to do all their admin till they're exhausted at the very end of the day. So opposed to like trying to like pre uh what's it called? Uh preemptively do their admin so they can like leave right at five. You want them to create a half hour block where they don't do any admin at all during the day, then they just batch it all all at once. That actually makes it more likely for them to get it done and it makes them less likely to get bogged down through admin. Because if they're kind of here and there doing it all through the day, it really drains their time. So you want them to have an end-of-day checklist where they're like, boom, they just batch the entire admin. They also submit a qualitative end-of-day report that details every single consult they had, what happened, what was great, what are the next steps, what could have been improved, et cetera. What was the results? How many, you know, what did they project that day, how many closes did they get? What was the revenue? You know, it's a whole end-to-day report they send to us in Slack. And so that also gives you a qualitative uh measurement at the very end of the day, as a sales manager, what actually happened that day, right? So first week, you got to teach them all that stuff. And the easiest way to do it when you first hire those two is it's almost like a group coaching program. So you see, you essentially just kind of set a schedule of like, okay, you know, day one, day two, day, three, day, four, day five. We're gonna cover this, this, this, this, and this. And you map it all on on a Google Doc. You get you get all the the two hires or how many hires on Zoom, and you just teach them every single day. I mean, you could probably do it more than once a day. Maybe you meet, you know, two, three hours a day, and you assign them some homework, two, three hours the next day, homework, et cetera, right? Like I think you get the point. But then you record that, you have it all recorded, and then you're good to go. You could just have your people watch that um for the next hire. Does it make sense? So that's the easiest way to do it. I mean, and and I'm kind of going off the top of the uh top of my head here, so there might be a thing here or two I miss. And then you move into the next seven days, right? Which is their first seven days on the phone. So I know I've been going on for about 15 minutes. Um, you're good. You're good.
SPEAKER_01This is, I mean, I'm just taking notes. This is I'm eating it up, man. I think our audience is too, because I think this is, you know, if when you break it down like you're breaking it down, then it makes it feel a lot more doable, at least for someone like me, of like, okay, I can see how someone would come in and start to do some of the sales in our agency, you know. And I think uh part of what you said of like niching down in terms of like being really clear of who the audience is, what we're selling them, and having those, you know, uh recorded calls where it's already been shown, like, hey, here's how I sold it to this person, here's how I sold it to that person, uh, then it then it makes it seem like it's a lot more doable versus like, hey, sell all of these things to all these different clients is just it's just too much, right? Sure. Sure.
SPEAKER_04So uh second seven days, which is their first seven days on the phone. Essentially, if it's a setter, we just cut them loose, we say, okay, hey, just go out there, hit it, you know. If it's a closer, especially if it's inbound leads, um, because those leads are valuable, we give them about half volume and we keep a very tight feedback loop with them. So, you know, during this time, and this is really gonna happen, uh, some of this will happen essentially throughout the entirety of your sales team, but obviously they're gonna start attending the daily meetings, okay? They're also, I recommend at least three to four one-on-ones with that new salesperson uh in the first week, okay, if you can do it. Um, and that goes for both of the sales people. So three to four one-on-ones, uh, attending the daily sales meeting. And then beyond that, just doing, you know, if they have three calls a day, I'd at least QC two of them a day. You know, when I say QC quality control, what that means is not necessarily doing a formal call review that's gonna take two hours of you recording your screen and breaking it down play by play by play, but just like listening to the calls at two and a half, three X speed, and sometimes even just listening to the first 10 minutes of the call and the last 10 minutes of the call and just kind of getting a dial of like how this guy's doing. And uh that's it's boring, but you gotta do it. I mean, that's how you coach your computer get good. So you gotta keep a tied feedback loop with the person in that first week, just give them a lot of coaching, really get them up to speed. And then the second week is where we kind of just revert back to more of the ongoing cadence. That's a daily meeting, a one-weekly one-on-one. And then typically we aim for like uh, you know, we review if we review a call on every single daily meeting, but we want to QC at least five calls per closer each week ongoing, no matter what. Right. And again, like we can QC five calls on one closer in potentially an hour, depending on how the call goes, maybe two hours. So if you're a full-time sales manager, I mean that's not that much. If you're an entrepreneur, like you just might have to, and you're you know, you're wearing some other hats, you just might kind of have to figure out like, how do I sort of maybe I can't do five per closer if I have a team of four right now and I'm managing the sales team, but I can I know I can do two or three, right? Or whatever, right? And and you're surprised, like if you just block off a Saturday for like three or four hours every once in a while, and you just binge a ton of calls, it doesn't take that long on on high speed, and you get a very clear idea of like, here's what's happened on the phones, here's where we're weak, here's what we need to change, and you can start to coach on that in the sales meeting.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so that's what I was gonna ask is where the where the feedback loop comes in. Is it is it a boxer message to them? Is it covered on the sales call? Right.
SPEAKER_04Well, you're gonna have your one-on-ones, right? Obviously, yeah, like Voxer, Telegram, Slack, whatever. I mean, that works. You could just pick up the phone and call them and just tell them, you know, right then and there if they're free. And we do training daily on every single sales meeting, no matter what. So it's always gonna happen on the sales meeting because we're kind of it's like every single sales meeting is like a group training.
SPEAKER_02Love it, love it.
SPEAKER_01Cool. So um, so they've got their two closers, maybe one rises to the top of the of the cream, then maybe, maybe they both work out depending on. Um, I like the I like the approach of having two. We uh we hired two developers, or actually three developers at a similar time, and it's interesting to even see, even though it's not sales, how it's very clear which ones have like risen to the top, which ones are struggling, and you know, which ones are are almost there. Um so I I like that. I like that approach. Talk a little bit about um this is shifting gears a little bit, but I think it's relevant because um, and I know you appreciate this, which is why I'm trying to throw you a softball pitch here, but I was talking to I was coaching uh another agency owner earlier today, and they were saying, Oh man, I just don't understand the reason. We we have these uh onboarding things for like, you know, what's your North Star, where are you headed, what's your vision, what are your values, all that kind of like can feel a little bit like blue sky kind of thing, right? And when you're a when you're a one-person agency owner or a small couple, you know, few contractors, whatever, it can feel like why do I this is it can feel like a waste of time or not like very valuable, but I can also see that go up from for someone like you who's gone from like you know, starting your business to a team of 80, like if you don't have that kind of compass and direction of where you're going, then when you're trying to like get salespeople to have buy-in and you're trying to get everyone to move in the same direction, it can start to like unwind pretty quickly. And so, could you speak to that a little bit in terms of like why how that fits into this, what we're talking about?
SPEAKER_04Well, you're talking about mission, vision, and values, right? So yeah, here's how to think about this. Like, and I and I agree, like you know, when I first started, I kind of thought, oh, this stuff's kind of woo-woo, moopla, uh, corporate E BS, right? And look, like I will say, you know, look, there might be a time and there's nothing wrong when you're zero to 10 employees or zero to five employees just focusing on freaking making money, you know, like I there's there's no nothing wrong with that, you know. So if you're like, oh my God, I don't really know what my mission, vision, and values are, I don't really have, I mean, look, just be patient because it's it's gonna it's gonna come. But it does make a difference when you have it, and people, it does affect people. So, anyways, here's how to kind of explain it, right? The vision is where you're going, the mission is why you're going where you're going, and the vision or the values is how you're gonna interact with each other as a unit on the journey of going where you're going. So if you imagine like we're we're all getting on the old school 1700s, you know, boats sailing across the ocean, you know, to the promised land. Um, the vision is the challenging destination we're heading towards. The mission is why we're headed towards that destination. And the uh values is how we're gonna interact with each other uh during the journey, right? During the uh the you know, whatever, the bow ride.
SPEAKER_03The trip.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, the trip. Yeah. And so the the values is really important because as you grow a bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger team, having set standards essentially of how people interact with each other is very important because as you grow, it creates a lot of entropy, which entropy is a natural force of trying to essentially over time bring everything to disorder, you know, and so because of entropy, which happens with everything, uh, as your you know, company gets bigger, right? We have 80 people for us, right? So as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, you have more kind of like chaos and like more uh entropy that naturally happens, essentially. And so, how do you combat that? Well, the only way you can combat that is through your values, okay? So your values is essentially the easiest way to like underscribe it is like as you have more people on the boat, people start rowing in this direction, start rowing in this direction, like this direction, one guy's sleeping, one guy's like whatever, right? And when people are aligned with the right values, they're all kind of rowing in the same direction and synchronicity. Does that make sense? Right? So it's like limiting that entropy, and it's just kind of like helping the unit work together as a unit, which is what you want.
SPEAKER_01And and what do you say to the this is kind of along the same lines, and and this is really good because I think it's uh I like the way that you break that down in terms of you know the visions where we're going, the missions why we're going there, and the core values is how the team's gonna interact, you know, on the way there. I think that's that's huge. And I love the boat analogy. Um, talk talk to the agency owner who thinks, man, that sounds like a lot of work, and I just want to kind of go on the trip by myself, but at the same time, they're saying I want to go on the trip by myself, but I also want to build this thing. And so maybe I could just, you know, outsource everything and rather than like building a team and everything, I'll just, you know, I'll hire this company over here to do the design, I'll hire this company over here to do this, and I'll just kind of like white label everything and and try to do that. And and maybe, maybe there's a way to do that where it works. But um I could imagine if someone, you know, if you're talking to a client and they say, hey, we just want to outsource all our sales, we don't want to have to deal with it in-house and deal with all that, like talk talk to talk a little bit about that in terms of like um it feels like there's gonna be some work required, right? Regardless of how you go about this.
SPEAKER_04Right. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, if you if you want to create a great product, um, I don't like I I'm sure there's some stuff you can white label. Like I know companies that are scaled pretty big as a as an agency that have done some white labeling, but you know, I think generally a lot of people bring it in-house, um, or they just have a really good relationship with their white label partner, almost so much so to where like their communication cadence is equal to as if they were in-house, you know, and obviously it apparently works with their economics. So that's what I kind of think about in terms of that. I mean, in terms of sales, you know, having an in-house, it just sales is a little bit different. I mean, first of all, like there is outsource agencies that are decent. Um, the problem is they charge really high fees, which they have to, that's their business model, right? So they might charge 25 or 30 percent is typically off top line. So I mean, that's a huge just like cut into your revenue, especially if, like, again, like let me clarify, if the high-ticket sale, like if the phone sale is the main way you make money, does that make sense? If it's the main way you make money, then like giving that the main way you make money to somebody else that's outside of your control, and then giving them 30%, I mean, that's pretty risky and pretty expensive. Yeah. Now, if you have like a huge brand and you know, like one of my buddies uh does agency work for Ryan Sirhant. Well, Ryan Sirhant has like a real estate company, he has probably a million different different other things, he's speaking, and like the high-ticket program is just like a little profit center for him. Yeah, by all means, if that's you, like outsource. Okay, I don't care. You know, I mean, you can also probably pretty easily build in-house because you have such good leads, but whatever, just outsource. Like that that's yeah, that's different. But if you're an agency owner and the main way you make money is through sales calls, I mean, I'd be kind of wary of outsourcing, number one, because of that, and then because it's outside of your control. And then number two, you're also just giving away so much money. And economics eventually won't allow you to scale as advertising spend gets higher and higher and higher, or your labor gets higher and higher and higher, and or both, right? The other big issue with agency or uh sales agencies, uh, and again, mine's a we were a recruitment agency, right? So we staff, but we help you build the team internally. I'm talking about people who want to like outsource it all completely done for you. Well, if you're an agency, the other the other issue with this is that you know, typically you're not gonna be doing a massive amount of sales volume, like you're probably not gonna be doing right out of the gate several million a month. And so, because of that, like these agencies that are actually good, because I know some people who are decent, but the thing is, is they focus like their business is made off the guy who either has a crazy ad campaign or a huge brand, and right out of the gate, they'd be doing a couple million a month because that account's gonna mean several hundred thousand dollars a month to them. So that's gonna, you know, that account's gonna get all their best people, it's gonna get all their focus. If you're just some dude with leads and you need one sales guy or two sales guys, you know, you're you're gonna be bottom. Like, not only are you gonna be one of their lowest grossing clients, you're not gonna get any attention, you're gonna get the worst people, and you're gonna get any 30. So you see what I mean? So, like, yeah, yeah. And again, like I think the examples where it makes sense is if you're a guy like like Ryan Sir Hunt, like I just gave you the example, and you know, it's a it's a profit center of your business, uh, it's not your main business, and you have great leads, it's just like, and you can really generate leads and skill quickly. And so you need somebody with a lot of salespeople really fast. Okay, that's fine. But you know, for 99% of people, they should build a house.
SPEAKER_01And how do you recommend? I'm just kind of curious, and if this is part of the secret sauce, like by all means, that's fine. But I'm just kind of curious like, do you have some kind of guideline, especially as we're thinking of agency owners, in terms of like is there something that you recommend in terms of like how does the the base pay work versus the commission? And what what kind of things do you see agency owners doing? Like, how does that kind of play out in terms of like this?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, it all it all varies. Typically for outbound, you're looking for five to eight grand a month, is where the on track earnings need to be. And for closers, it could be anywhere from like seven to like 15, I'd say maybe 18 tops for agencies. But I'd probably say seven to fifteen is probably a good range for a lot of agency owners, maybe up to upwards of 18 to 20. If uh, and you know, more is more is more the merrier. Like if you can pay more, that's great. You're gonna get better people, but uh yeah, I mean that that's fine. So that's kind of the pay ranges you want to fall into. And so what you want to do is you want to look at the range you want to create and then reverse engineer the comp structure that works. Now, typically some people will do like foreclosures, like 10%, you know, but you gotta kind of like play with it, right? Like if you're a recurring model, you know, you can do, I wouldn't do 10% of the deal lifetime, I would do uh in certain percentage of the deal as collected in the first 60 days, right? Because you don't want the salespeople paying annuities because they get lazy. Doesn't it? Right, right. Yeah, so you have that to consider, right? And then on the flip side, um for setters, you know, what we see a lot is like $1,500 a month plus 3%. Um but you know, for us, like we have one, one of our companies pays, I think, 3%, no base. The other one pays, I think 1,500 or 1,000 and 5%. But it's just because we gotta we kind of got to get people to the same place, and there's just different economics and different stuff. So you sort of have to think for yourself a little bit. I mean, that's part of what we help clients do, is like yeah, how to actually create this for themselves.
SPEAKER_01Love it, love it. So good. Um, cool. Uh, tell us in the chat what you found most helpful so far. If you've got any questions for Cole, we've got about uh five or ten minutes here before we wrap up. And so let us know if you've got any questions uh about building your sales team or kind of increasing sales. Um this is so good, Cole. Man, I mean I could I could just keep because I'm I'm thinking about it for in terms of our own agency, because I'm right now like the sales guy. That's like the one hat I haven't gotten rid of. And um, you know, I'm just thinking about like this is kind of that next uh mountain I need to climb or hurdle I need to get over to kind of you know more fully kind of not be doing the business counting on me to run. And so I'm I'm thinking about it from my own perspective. I'm thinking about it from the agencies that I'm coaching in terms of the hurdles that they have. So um any any other things that you think would be helpful in terms of kind of uh agency owners like me and the people in our program overcoming?
SPEAKER_04I mean, the big thing is that product as offer, right? Because it makes it easier for your person to sell, right? A product as offer is again, specific problem, specific person, specific way. It doesn't have to be the only thing you have to sell, just something front-end that you lead with, right? And it's just so important, it makes lead gen easier. It also just makes the sales process way easier, and you really create a machine, right? And it's just easier for the salesperson to work within the machine. So that is the biggest thing I see with agency owners. Other than that, I mean, once they have that dialed, like usually ads is not too too hard for them. I would say the other thing, and you know, uh this is something that we we work with ours on is just you know having a good product and getting good retention. You know, it's like lots of you know, if your churn stinks, you're gonna be in a in a rough business. So really having good, yeah, I think really having good uh retention is is very key as well.
SPEAKER_01Okay, cool. We got a few questions coming in here. I'm gonna rattle them off to you. Um, how do you know when you're ready to hire sales team members?
SPEAKER_04Well, if you if you go to the very beginning of this, I mean I kind of talked about having the right foundations, which is a validated offer in the optimal selling system. And there's two parts of the optimal selling system there's generating a consistent way to generate interest, consistent predictable way to generate that or convert that interest into sales calls. So I would just go review that part.
SPEAKER_03Okay, cool, cool. That's good.
SPEAKER_01Um, what about um so so but taking it to just to kind of piggyback on that, because I think maybe what they're wondering is like how many leads are yeah, is there certain leads per day or revenue per yeah?
SPEAKER_04So for a setter, for a setter will be what you generally need is about it, it depends on lead source, okay? But if you're if you're getting kind of a somewhat cold lead source, anywhere from 400 usually to 800 leads per month per setter. And it that's a range, it really depends. Like, I mean, if the lead is a buyer who bought a 1k course, it's gonna be less than that. If it's somebody who's really, really cold, you might need more than that. I don't know, right? I I typically see 400, 800 per setter per month, and then uh for a closer, typically I want to see a minimum of three calls a day.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Got it. That's good. Thank you.
SPEAKER_04Or the ability to generate three calls a day, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, okay. Um, at what point do you employ a sales manager to manage the sales team?
SPEAKER_04Uh, you know, it depends, right? Like there's no right or wrong answer. I mean, you could do it right in the beginning. Now, is the success rate of that really high? No. I'm just telling you how to observation. But if I had to go over and start another company, I could probably put a manager in there like almost immediately. You know, like I just have that skill set. Why do I have that skill set? It's because I manage the sales team myself. Right. And now I know how to transfer that skill set to somebody else. Does that make sense? So that's very, very key. It's like I made like I know how to do it. Like, I love Learn the same way you got to learn to sell your product and you teach your salespeople to sell your product. Well, you got to learn to manage a sales team, then you teach your best salesperson to manage the sales team. You know, okay, so in a predictable way, it usually goes down. And so um, you know, to give you some general, like usually what happens is, you know, the entrepreneurs managing the sales team themselves, and this is granted, especially if it's their first time doing it, right? Entrepreneurs managing the sales team themselves, they're kind of doing everything. They they kind of identify, okay, here's my my superstar who has potential leadership abilities, usually not rocket science. You kind of start grooving that person, you maybe pay them a thousand to two thousand dollars a month to start taking some stuff on the side. Usually this is around the time where you have like four salespeople, including this person, and you're looking to scale a little bit further. Okay. Um, and you know, maybe the other, you know, maybe it's or or like three setters, three closers. You know, once you get it's you know, once you get past four direct reports as the entrepreneur on your sales team, and that could be two setters, two closers, three and three, you know, you know, once once you start getting past that a little bit, it starts to get very uh, you know, you're you're you're looking into needing one pretty quick because you're just not gonna be able to serve the team very well. I think three and three, if you're doing the setter closer model is probably a good number, or uh if you just have straight four closers, so somewhere between that four and six mark. Okay, uh, yeah. I mean, you kind of want to identify that like that superstar, make them a lead, which is like a trial position. You pay them $1,500 a month. You just they have they help you out with some little tiny things, and then you kind of move them into a full-time manager and you really gotta stay on them and you really gotta help coach them. You know, like you can't just trust that they're gonna be able to do it and just be like, all right, peace. Like you really gotta like still do the meetings, but they do everything else. And like just it's like uh the analogy I always use is it's uh it's a volume knob, not a light switch. So it's like it's not like you promote the person, all right, see ya, this is your team, okay, bye. You know, could work, but statistically it doesn't work as well most of the time. Uh what generally works a little bit better is it's like you you you slowly kind of give a little bit away, a little bit away, a little bit away, a little bit away, and you kind of you really stay on the person and coach them and coach them and coach them and coach them. And uh typically what I recommend too is you have setters and closers when you do hire that sales manager, have them manage all of them and train all of them. And then eventually they'll go over and probably just do the closures and you'll bring up a setter manager once your team gets big enough. But some people will never even get a team that big.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love it. This is so good. Uh, they said thanks so much, super helpful. Um, Cole, like I said, man, this this I could just pick your brain all day because um this is just so relevant for me, and I think for so many of our agency owners, but I do want to be considerate uh of your time and we do need to wrap up. So um kind of final parting words or anything that you want to instill or anything that we didn't cover here, um, and please let us know how uh folks can connect with you as well. Um, if there's a social media or website or whatever, the best way to connect with you as well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, you you can hit me up at closers.io is where our company's at, and that's probably gonna be the easiest way to uh connect. And I just appreciate you guys having me on. Cool, awesome.
SPEAKER_01Ladies and gentlemen, please show your love to uh Cole in the chat and uh Cole Gordon, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us, and uh hope we can catch up again soon. Absolutely, man. Thank you. Awesome. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, um, this has been the agency hour. I'm Johnny Flash. I'm filling in for Troy Dean, uh, who is in the United States right now, getting ready for our MavCon event. We're super excited. We're gonna be live in San Diego uh with our uh event happening next week. Um I think the agency hour probably I'm looking for a cue from uh Max here in the chat to see, but um I think um I think we don't have the agency hour next week, if I'm if I'm correct. So we will have we will be skipping one week while we are all I'm headed to San Diego uh here in a few days. We will all be there. And um so we're gonna be there next week, and then we'll be back. We've got some great guests lined up for uh the rest of this month and for next month, and so uh stay tuned, uh spread the love on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to podcasts, and um be sure to like and subscribe, and we will talk to you guys soon.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Cards, Audible, and wherever you like to listen. You can catch all of the Agency Hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash agency mavericks. Or you can get involved, check out our free digital mavericks Facebook group, where we broadcast these episodes live throughout the news every week, along with our free channel with you there.