Speaker 1: 0:19

Thank you. Meet Evan Poland, the president of Poland Performance Group. A master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience, evan is not just a consultant. He's a force in sales, focusing on mindset planning and skill development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services, the Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency, an expert in growth marketing. Beholder Agency an expert in growth marketing With 20 years under his belt, craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed.

Speaker 2: 1:11

And welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. I'm Craig Andrews, partner in crime Evan Poland. How are you?

Speaker 3: 1:17

doing today, evan, I'm doing great, and for those of you watching on YouTube, you'll see that Craig screwed it up again. But that's okay. I'm not here to point out flaws.

Speaker 2: 1:28

That's all right.

Speaker 3: 1:29

Craig, great to see you.

Speaker 2: 1:31

You too. So do you know why we call this the playbook Evan, the sales and marketing playbook?

Speaker 3: 1:36

I've still been trying to figure it out, so go ahead, craig.

Speaker 2: 1:40

We call it the playbook, because what we try to do is literally give you the information that you need to be successful in your business, and a lot of times that's not just the sales piece of things or the marketing details, but it's also the different things that goes around it to make sure that those two entities are flowing together very well, right, and so we have a guest today who actually has something that's a good tie between the both of us, because in every business there's business development. Do you know of a single business that doesn't have business development?

Speaker 3: 2:11

Not one that's successful.

Speaker 2: 2:13

Not one that's successful, right? So, ultimately, we have a guy here who has something that is near and dear to your heart, which is accountability, which you challenge me on all the time, right? And you do that for all your clients, correct?

Speaker 3: 2:28

Absolutely, and I'm really excited to introduce our guest for today. His name is Darren Webster. He started a company called Golster. It's a company that I've been working closely with over the last seven or eight months. His tool is a tool that I put all of my clients on. And as we get into it, craig, I know you work on marketing strategy with all of your clients. I work on sales strategy with all of my clients. We can give people the best strategies in the world. If they don't execute on it, then it doesn't matter what kind of strategies we give them. And I don't know about you, but all a lot of the organizations that I talked to. Accountability is a key issue, a key challenge. They don't know what their people are doing. They don't know why they're getting results, um, and I think that our guest is going to be able to have a solution. Uh, that's going to help a lot of the people listening to this podcast, uh, with some of those challenges. So why don't we bring?

Speaker 4: 3:32

on Darren onto the stage.

Speaker 3: 3:34

There he is. Hey, thanks for having us today, guys. I appreciate it. So, darren, before we really jump in, do you want to?

Speaker 4: 3:39

kind of just take a minute or two to introduce yourself. Yeah, thank you again for giving me the time today. My name is Darren Webster. I'm the founder of Golster. I'm Australian, as you can tell from my accent, so I moved to the US about 2004, and I started working at Verizon, as I had a 15-year career with the company. Prior to that, I was an Australian representative in kayaking or sprint kayaking, so I was on the national team for Australia, part of the Australian Institute of Sport, and then in my career I had a fairly accelerated career through Verizon, no-transcript, on more people, through a platform that drove those right behaviours, those good processes and helped people stay accountable to them. So basically, golster became everything that I had experienced in my life as an athlete, as an executive and as an individual contributor, but also as a coach, and so we kind of brought it all together in one place and it's exciting.

Speaker 3: 4:50

That's awesome. So you've mentioned the word accountability several times and we'll dive a little bit more into the app in a little bit. But you've worked with large organizations. Now you're working with both large and small organizations. What kinds of challenge do you see companies run into when they don't really have accountability at all or there's not really a good way to attract the accountability for their people?

Speaker 4: 5:14

Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of companies and I'll speak to my Verizon experience first. I led teams of 10 people all the way up to 1,500. And so one of the challenges is ensuring that A there's clarity on exactly what we're going after, the goals that everyone is connected to, what their role in those goals are, and the best practices, the processes that if we just executed them, we're going to end up achieving all the goals that we want to.

Speaker 4: 5:39

But the challenge is that oftentimes companies and organizations only have the lag indicators, so you've got the result after a while. Challenge is that oftentimes companies and organizations only have the lag indicators, so you've got the result after a while. And you'd know this in sales, evan, that the work that you do upfront may take a little bit of time to materialize results. And same thing on the marketing side, craig. But if you're executing the processes consistently, if you're constantly executing best practice and it's served up to you in a way that you can keep yourself accountable, almost like you're putting yourself on a path to get exactly where you want to go but unfortunately, a lot of times there's not a lot of visibility into where you are on the path, who's actually executing, who's not, and even just the ability to distribute best practices in a way that someone can just immediately execute is difficult in organizations.

Speaker 4: 6:25

Sometimes the best practices aren't known or they're sort of held by a couple of people. But what we wanted, or what I wanted to build, was something that basically we could take everything that really works, put it into an organized fashion and all people need to do that is just execute and just be accountable for doing the things that they need to do to get to where they want to go. And really there's no secret to succeeding in anything. It's just really those who succeed are the ones that kept pushing, they kept executing and they kept improving those best practices. And for companies, they either don't have the visibility or it's very difficult to share those and get everyone on the same page quickly, and that's one of the reasons why if they've got the visibility and their people aren't executing, then they can execute their people and find other people who will execute there is.

Speaker 4: 7:16

There is the execute or execute concept there, but but I think I think, more than anything else, you want I wanted this to be a very positive force. Um, you know, accountability has a negative connotation to it. People you know it's. It's like even coaching. Sometimes it certainly in an organization coaching can have this sort of negative connotation. I'm going to be coached. That's what we want. Is accountability is really. I believe so much in what I'm doing here and I'm prepared and committed to execute these things because the goal really matters. And if we could align people around goals, give them easy ways to be able to execute those best practices and make it really hard for them to not, and if we can positively recognize the progress along the way, people will definitely adopt more readily. But oftentimes if you don't have the visibility, if you don't have the plan, if you don't have those best practices or a means with which to even track it and follow through, you're just kind of hoping that people do stuff, and that's hope, isn't a strategy.

Speaker 3: 8:14

So hope is definitely not. I'm sorry, Craig, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 8:17

So question I have for you the accountability and everything sounds great. Tell me some of the industries that you kind of focus on when you're talking about using this accountability app. We know everyone uses it in the sales space, but what about where you're focusing?

Speaker 4: 8:30

So we have a number of customers in different industries. It's interesting about Goalster because goals could be anything you could put someone on the moon or you could just beat next quarter's numbers. But we have companies that use Goalster for developmental plans for their employees. So how do we make sure that people are following through on their developmental programs and paths? How do coaches and consultants ensure that they get better follow-up and execution from the training, better retention of the knowledge that they're sharing with their clients and more readily turn that into action?

Speaker 4: 9:01

And even just this week we've got a customer who's going to be coming on board with us, and when they first introduced themselves to me, all they said was we need to make sure that our whole team has goals and that they're really dialed in on making sure they're doing what's required. And so there's a need out there to get alignment and clarity. And where we find the most success is when there are really tangible outcomes, as opposed to maybe mindset coaching and things like that less tangible. We really focus on real outcomes. For us to get to this number, we're going to have to execute these processes or these initiatives, and in order for those initiatives to be followed through on, we've got to have some clarity on that, but most companies don't need project management tools and things like that, and so what I wanted was a very simple, user-focused approach to if I just executed what's in front of me, I'm going to get to where I want to go, and if we can make that clear, we'll be in a much better spot.

Speaker 3: 9:55

So, darren, I want to jump back to something that you said a couple of minutes ago because I think it's really, really important and something that your app does really well, something that I find that a lot of companies don't do well. There is a difference between leading indicator activities that people could be doing and lagging indicator activities. You know a lot of companies are just looking at the end results how much revenue did you bring in? You know how many proposals that went out. But what's really important is the predictable factors that lead to those kinds of things In sales. How many phone calls, how many emails? How many times are we asking for referrals or introductions? How many networking events are we going to?

Speaker 3: 10:39

Those are things that are really important and I find that in general for my clients, if all of a sudden they're not hitting their goals, I ask them to look back 60 days, 90 days. What prospecting things were you doing two, three, four months ago? And I typically find that there's a direct correlation between the amount of activity that people were doing, I would say, 60 to 120 days ago and what their results look like right now. So it's really cool, at least the way that I've got the app set up for my clients is. I've got them broken into leading indicator things.

Speaker 3: 11:15

So what front end activities do you need to be successful? And then lagging indicators, ok. What kinds of results should we be seeing if you're doing those activities? And, quite frankly, sales it's really easy for. But even if somebody is a career coach and they're looking to try to coach their clients in terms of getting new clients, it's you know how many resumes are you sending out, you know how many people are you reaching out to, and that's going to lead to getting the interviews, getting the jobs, getting the offers, those kinds of things. So, again, I think that's a really key point that I just wanted to make sure that we didn't gloss over.

Speaker 4: 11:50

Oh, I think you hit it really well and ultimately, no matter what you're trying to do, if you know, as a former athlete, I could have watched all the videos on kayaking that I could have ever watched, but unless I was out on the water or in the gym every day for years, I was never going to get to where I wanted to go and I think you could apply the same principles to any objective that an employee or a business owner is getting after.

Speaker 4: 12:14

And our former CEO or chairman of Verizon, lowell McAdam, said something that I think has really certainly hit home with me. He said you don't manage the results. You manage the process that delivers the results. And so when you think about the process that delivers results for a sales team, it's all that front loaded activity, and if that's not done, then you end up having these troughs and peaks that you see in a funnel. If we're talking about a job seeker and I think you just mentioned resumes, a job seeker for our program that we have for them that we recently launched there are certain activities that, if you really want to get a job, watching videos or tweaking your resume ain't going to get you there.

Speaker 4: 12:53

You have to network, you have to have certain activities and certain performance standards that you hold yourself to every single week and consistently if you want to get to that result. And that same principle applies to if I want to sell, if I want to develop, if I want to get better at something, build new skills. It doesn't happen by watching a video. It happens through disciplined effort over a sustained period of time. But that's hard and not everyone's wired like that. So having something like Goldstone, where it's sort of keeping you driving towards that next step where you can actually see progress, you know you were doing the things that were required to get the result further along and you can feel good about that at the end of the week, that's the way that I envisage that.

Speaker 2: 13:30

So I see it from a marketing perspective, because it is the sales and marketing, not all that business development stuff.

Speaker 4: 13:37

It's not just all about the salespeople.

Speaker 2: 13:39

Exactly. But even from a marketing perspective, a lot of the things that we do is very habitual. So I understand your goal setting and so forth, but it might be something. A lot of times the clients that we're dealing with is more along the lines of hey, did I get the information I need from you, from your end of the business, so that I can market it appropriately? I've had situations where clients have created new products and said, hey, we got this new product we're selling now and I said, great, who knows about it? Right, nobody.

Speaker 2: 14:09

So even something like your accountability app is also works for us on our side to make sure that, hey, are you guys reporting to us in terms of marketing, the things that we need to have in place to be able to do our job effectively? Now, a lot of times, what happens is is that marketing blames sales and sales blames marketing, and a lot of it comes down to the accountability piece of things. Who's in charge of what? I thought you did this. You didn't give me that PowerPoint, that type of thing. The accountability would put all that into place and give us all, to use your analogy, using the same path to get to the goal we're trying to achieve together.

Speaker 3: 14:51

And Craig, a question for you on the marketing side of things, does consistency matter in terms of companies seeing results from their marketing efforts?

Speaker 2: 15:00

So let me say this that is the main thing and the only thing that matters, because a lot of times, as we've talked about many times before, we're looking at data to make sure we're moving in the right direction and in the consistency you'll come to find that so much things happen in consistency that making sure that you're posting every day, making sure that you're reaching out from a marketing perspective in an email, making sure that you're staying consistent with your content on social media, all of those things applies to consistency.

Speaker 2: 15:30

But again back to Darren's point, is the app, excuse me. The accountability app allows us to stay on the right track so that we make sure that we be consistent, because it's very easy to fall off of that consistency train from a marketing perspective, without a doubt, because there's so many things involved in marketing. So I love the concept of the app. Evan has me on it because I'm going to be on this. So he said you're going to be on this buddy, I'm going to make sure you're doing what you're supposed to do and I can follow along.

Speaker 4: 16:01

You hit on a really good point with them. Not everyone has the sort of constant motivation and the desire to go constantly 100%. There's also things that are going to happen in our lives. The nature of the business is going to get in the way. We're going to have things that just sort of hit us from the side, but it is whether we can stay true to what we need to do to drive that over a sustained period of time that it becomes that real grounding in this is really important, and I've got to do this, no matter what else is happening. If I just stay true to this, I'll start to flatten out that curve of peaks and troughs when it comes to that.

Speaker 3: 16:37

So yeah, yeah, the other thing I find that this does is if someone is doing everything that they're supposed to be doing consistently and not seeing the results, then we can go, okay, let's take a step back.

Speaker 3: 16:51

We may need to tweak the behaviors, the activities, whether it's on a marketing side, whether it's a sales side, whether it's a job seeker and go, okay, we can catch earlier that this plan's not working. Yep, let's go and make tweaks and make the tweaks and then track over the next 60 days to see if the tweaks in the plan give us better results. But the other thing that I find, and what I find really frustrating I'll talk to a company October November. They're really frustrated because they're only at 40 or 50 percent of their goals for the year, but they haven't tracked anything. So they have no idea why they're short of their goals. They have no idea what they should do to change. But if we are tracking these things, this can help us with okay, what's working, what's not working, let's throw out what's not working, let's keep what's working, and can we do even more of that. But if we don't have that going back to Craig's point if we don't have that data really tough to make those adjustments.

Speaker 4: 17:47

Absolutely. Yeah, part of going through the process is you're constantly looking for feedback in some way, and that feedback is I'm doing these things, but I'm not getting the results necessarily that I would have expected. Obviously we need to tweak the things, but if it's simply a matter of I'm not consistently executing the thing that I should be doing and that's why I'm getting the results, it really becomes a discipline issue. So if we've got if, no matter what the results are, our results are going to equal the quality of the behaviors that we execute or the processes that we execute, multiplied by the consistency with which we execute them. So if you've got a great process that you are executing all the time and you're consistent and accountable to it, you're probably going to have pretty consistent results.

Speaker 4: 18:30

But if you're inconsistent or you have a mediocre process and you don't have that real-time feedback into whether it's actually working until maybe a month later, it makes it very hard to make the pivots that are required to improve. So the ideal state, I think, is you've got a clear path that you can now measure yourself against progress, pivot if you need to, and constantly you're getting feedback as to am I at the right level? Am I doing what I need to do to get to where I want to go, and if you don't have that feedback, it's like looking at the results but not really understanding what's driving it, and you really can't go anywhere from that. So part of instituting this sort of accountability is creating visibility and transparency too.

Speaker 2: 19:12

So this is why I said this is the playbook. You're preaching to the choir here, dane, we both have been in this situation where we're saying what's happened, I don't know, I don't know how I got to here, right? So that's why we're good at what we do, and now we're putting in yourself to kind of tie the whole piece, the whole pie, together. Um, real quick question can you give us a real world case of a client who came to you and said I need to get something into place here?

Speaker 4: 19:38

uh, but I don't know what you know, you know what I mean, like something of that fashion well, I think, I think I think a lot of clients, a lot of our coaching clients, um, clients, they're either just starting their business and they're sort of wanting to really get a good plan and a strategy together. They don't necessarily know what the outcomes are, but what they need is just a little bit more guidance on what are the fundamentals that I need to establish. So, as an example, if I was a new coach, there's got to be certain sales and marketing efforts that I need to go through. I need to have certain products or services ready, I need to have a sort of a disciplined approach to client success. And so those are all goals, but they're all processes at the same time so we can create those based on, you know, just the single data point of what's my objective.

Speaker 4: 20:22

It could be a revenue number, it could be a certain outcome, and then you sort of back into OK, what needs to be true for all this to happen? And then, by the way, what are going to be the biggest drivers of that? And so you go from having even a smart goal, which might be really good, but not smart enough, I'll say. But then, all of a sudden, you translate that into an actionable plan that you can hold yourself accountable to, that you can connect the dots between where you are now and where you wanted to be in the future, and so a lot of customers don't know what that looks like. But then you've got others who, as I mentioned the other day our most recent customer very clear we want to get to 25 million.

Speaker 4: 20:59

We've got 40 sales reps that need to be part of this. None of them have goals right now. We manage some of their stuff through Salesforce, but we need a sort of more comprehensive sort of view of the business so that the CEO can be able to see what's happening in real time as opposed to waiting for the numbers to show up. So that's some. There's a few different alternatives, but whether you have no goals and you're wanting to start them, or whether you have already very clearly established goals and you just want to have that path put in front of you, that's sort of how we approach things.

Speaker 3: 21:30

So, and Darren, with those larger teams, what do you find are the biggest barriers to accountability and is there a way that technology is able to help those organizations out that have a lot of people with that accountability?

Speaker 4: 21:44

I think I can certainly speak to. First my example at Verizon. So I had a team of 1500 people at one point in multiple states and you know you're relying the larger the team, the more you're relying on people in between to help facilitate the outcomes that you want. And so if you can have that clarity at an organizational level around the goals but then visibility into, okay, this team is going to be working on this component of it. If that doesn't exist right now and with some parts of the organization that are not so metric related, you know it's very hard to understand sort of how you measure success of different people, how you measure those outcomes and what they're driving every day to get to those goals. Salespeople it's easy, there's their metrics.

Speaker 4: 22:27

But if you wanted to get everyone in the business aligned around a big strategic objective, you want to make sure that everyone's role is very clear, that they're connected to it, they're engaged in it, and where I think a lot of this happens right now is you're relying on leaders to do it and all of them are at different standards. There's generally not a good mechanism out there. Certainly Verizon with all its money and resources didn't have it was a way to be able to really organize and align people around those objectives and almost put action plans in place, and so these are all fundamental to the accountability and the good strategy, but they're either reliant on individuals or there's not clarity or not structure around what we're actually wanting to do, and so you can't, by definition, have accountability if you really don't have a good, solid grounding in that.

Speaker 2: 23:17

So this is one of the things that we do is, as we start to wrap up the show here, give us three tips, three tips that people should know about Golster, how to use Golster. Whatever you want to use your three tips for, and while you think about it, evan, you know where to find us right LinkedIn, youtube, facebook all the Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you find your most popular and best podcasts.

Speaker 2: 23:44

That's right, and you can find us at smplaybookunleashedcom If you're not sure. All the links and everything are there for you to catch us and catch Darren and all of his wisdom. So you ready, Darren?

Speaker 4: 23:56

I think so. So if I was going to close and just give the audience just a couple of things to think about when it comes to goals and accountability, first thing is set just a few of them. Don't have lots of goals. Have maybe three goals that are really, really important to you. So for a salesperson it might be obviously their quotas and things like that, but then their daily activities and weekly activities, establishing that right process.

Speaker 4: 24:20

But if you have too many goals, everything can get lost in the shuffle. By definition, you've got to have some real focused priorities. The second part of that is you've got to identify what are the big drivers of success in each of these goals. So, for example, if we were going to drive $25 million in revenue, there's going to be some serious initiatives that we can sort of pull the lever on that are going to help us get there. And then, underneath that, now that we've got focus on how we're going to do it, what needs to actually happen and who needs to own it then becomes a pretty easy thing to put in there.

Speaker 4: 24:51

And so really for us, it's about connecting just to a few big goals, making sure that you're clearing the clutter and the hundred things that you could do, and just focusing on the half a dozen things that you must do to be able to get there. And if you've then got a plan where the goal is clear, the drivers are there and your action plan is right below it, the only thing that will stop you is if you do not go and execute. And then, if you do, though, you'll start to get that real-time feedback, you'll start to know whether you need to adjust, and you're going to be a lot more successful because of having that framework. But that's the way that I set goals. That's why I encourage our customers to set goals. Keep it simple, keep it focused on the important stuff and make sure you execute Awesome.

Speaker 2: 25:36

Go ahead Evan.

Speaker 3: 25:38

Darren, how can people find you? How can people find Goalster?

Speaker 4: 25:42

Oh, we're out on the World Wide Web. We're on LinkedIn. I'm very active there. We actually just launched a new product related to job seekers the other day. So basically, if anyone wants to follow us on LinkedIn, that would be great. Goalstercom is a great place to see more about the application and the platform and, yeah, we'd love to hear from you, but no, I appreciate having the chance to come talk to you guys today.

Speaker 2: 26:10

Awesome. So, as we told you, we are the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. We're giving you the answers to grow your business year after year after year after year. And here's all the experts right here in front of you I'm Craig Andrews, in my opinion that's Evan Poland, and next to him is Darren Webster. We'll talk to you guys next time. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1: 26:32

Thank you for joining us on this exhilarating journey through the world of sales and marketing. Remember, the playbook is in your hands and the possibilities are limitless. Keep exploring, experimenting and innovating, and watch as your business reaches unprecedented levels of success. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed on all major podcast platforms and follow us on YouTube, facebook and LinkedIn for even more exclusive content. Until next time, keep hustling and keep winning.