SPEAKER_00: 0:12

Welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed, the premier podcast for innovative growth strategies, hosted by two seasoned experts. 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. 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_01: 1:11

And welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook. Welcome, listeners, viewers, and people who love sales and marketing alignment. The crowds are, I can't believe we packed an arena for this. Exactly. I mean, we're just we're just loaded with people here. And you know why? Because today's episode is focused on the best sales marketing training or the best practices within a sales and coaching, sales coaching practice. Um, and that's just down your expertise. Amazing.

SPEAKER_03: 1:40

Yeah, I I I think it it's probably we should have probably recorded this episode a long time ago. Um, a lot of times when you and I are talking about some of what I do, what we we focus on the sales training and the sales coaching.

SPEAKER_02: 1:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:56

The problem for firms for larger companies is if the, and again, I'm talking about those small to mid-sized companies, companies that don't have a VPS sales, companies that don't have a sales manager, but either the managing partner or the owner is kind of acting as the sales manager. We can have people who are really well set up for success. But if the owner, if the managing partner is not working with their people in the right way, if they haven't developed the skills to really know how to manage folks who are responsible for business development, whether it's full-time salespeople or whether it is an associated firm who should maybe just be spending four or five hours a week doing business development. If we don't get the right oversight from that managing partner, from that owner, then there is a really good chance that that attorney, that that salesperson is going to fail. And a lot of times it's not really their fault if they're not given the right tools, if they're not given the right oversight by whoever's at the head of the firm at the head of their company. So we thought today we'd spend a little bit of time talking about okay, you as the business owner, you as the managing partner, what tools should you be putting in place? What should you be doing to give yourself the best chance of getting success out of your folks? And how maybe sometimes from time to time outside coaching can give you some of the tools. Because if you've never overseen people before who are supposed to be generating business, who are supposed to be selling, then you don't have the tools that you need. And these are skills that you can learn and tools that you can adopt. But if nobody's ever shared those things with you before, really hard to intuitively know, okay, this is like brushing my teeth. This is what I should be doing. If you've never learned how to do it before.

SPEAKER_01: 4:03

And I would say is that, you know, as the business owner side of things of us, you know, the thing to keep in mind is a lot of times, you know, I think I think you said it's kind of like an alphabet soup, or it's kind of like a word play that goes on. So why don't we start with, even for me, who have been through your training several times, the difference between sales training and sales coaching, if you can just define that for our audience.

SPEAKER_03: 4:24

Great. And the third thing that I'll throw in there is um is sales management training and management training. So sales coaching is really working more with individuals, looking at helping them practice through role playing, through going through exercise. Sales coaching is helping to strategize specific opportunities, work with the individual people on their individual sales cookbooks, and sales cookbook is something that you'll hear several times throughout today's today's workshop, but it's really looking at the individual, the upcoming opportunities they have, the you know, goals that they have, and specifically for that person, helping them with what they should be doing. So I'll give you an example. I just had a client call, falls into the non-selling professional. He's a he's a consultant who does great work for his clients and is just starting to get into business development role. Yeah, he called me. Geez, somebody reached out to us on the website. You know, I want to get back to them, I want to set up a first call. What should I do? That sales coaching individually walking him through that particular opportunity. Um, I just last week started working with an executive recruiting firm. With that executive recruiting firm on a kickoff call, I had eight of their people in a training session, and with their eight people, we worked on okay, as a group, what should our goals be? What is our ideal client look like on a small, mid-size, and large client as a firm? What should we be doing to get in front of them? And then we started to work on a couple of techniques firm-wide, what should we be doing as an elevator pitch to make sure that people understand the problems that we solve? How do we differentiate ourselves from the three giants in the marketplace? Doing that with eight people in a session, teaching them some of the skills, some foundational things that they'll be able to take and apply over and over again. That sales training. And then the third piece, sales management training, um, is really working with the business owner, the managing partner, the sales manager, and giving them the right tools and teaching them how to get their most out of their people. So it might be working with them on things like, okay, what's the best practice when you're running a one-on-one with your folks so that you do better than getting weather reports? Hey, I I think our pipeline looks partly sunny. I I think it looks partly cloudy. I think there might and really getting down to, okay, what's in the pipeline? What's got a chance to close this week, next week, next month? What activities are you doing? Teaching them the skills, okay, if you're working with your salespeople or you're working with your attorneys, how do you kind of work backwards from the company's goals or the firm's goals to kind of identify what you need out of each individual and then help them with what that plan looks like? The sales management training again is working with the managing partners, the owners, to teach them first how to do that for themselves so that then they can turn around and work those through those things with their people so that they can set their people up for success, have accountability, have consistency. And those are the kinds of things that we're working on when it comes to that sales management training.

SPEAKER_01: 8:07

And you're really making my ears ring here, right? Because my marketing ears are kicking in because we're going to my line, right? Data, data, data. You know, the beautiful thing about those buckets that you referenced is that they always lead to some sort of statistical statistical outcome. Correct. And if we if we broaden it a little bit to try to not be so specific, even though we were the playbook and we're trying to give you the plays, you know, one of the things that companies or firms and so forth are looking for are things like higher close rate. Hey, how what's the percentage of closing of the work that you guys are talking to, so that we're not just doing those sunny skies type of uh uh projections? Uh shorten the sales cycle. Don't we all want that? Absolutely, right? Um, and in terms of referrals, referrals and pipeline quality, you know, we've talked about this in past shows, the the the um the running engine that's not moving, right? Doing busy work for busy work's sake is not exactly what anybody's looking for. So the value of the training and the coaching and the sales management management training, which is I think a little bit more important, is now it puts everybody on the same page. So when guys like me come along and go, tell me about what you got coming in now so that I can improve it or make it better or take you on a whole different road, those valuable data becomes important, which is why sales training and sales coaching and sales leadership training is so important.

SPEAKER_03: 9:33

Right. And what I find with without the sales management training, without the leadership training, it's like herding cats. You're gonna have all of your people running in a million different directions, really hard to kind of corral them all, make sure that everybody's going in the same direction. But and again, with the herding cats and LG, we'll go a little bit further. If you've got a strong leader in place, again, whether it's the owner, the managing partner, a practice group leader, uh, a sales manager, that is more like um a cattle rancher who's got all of their cattle going in the same direction. They know where they're starting, they know where the final destination is, if people are if the cattle are going astray, that that that rancher is going and pulling them and putting them back into the herd.

SPEAKER_02: 10:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 10:23

Yeah, it if yeah, if from a sales perspective, somebody's not following along through the program. Well, if we've got a good program in place, yeah, then that business owner, that manager can make decisions more quickly in terms of whether or not we've got the right people pulling us in the right direction. But if there's that not that structure in place, how can we know why why we're not hitting the goals that we want to hit? So that's why making sure that the leader is really involved, the owner is really involved, the managing partner, to make sure that they are setting the course for everyone else to follow. And you and I talk all the time about the importance of sales and marketing working together.

SPEAKER_02: 11:05

That's right.

SPEAKER_03: 11:05

If there's not that leader setting the course, then again, it's gonna go back to well, we're not closing business because we got crappy leads, we've got bad marketing, marketing saying you guys stink delete. That's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_02: 11:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_03: 11:20

If you don't have someone over the top managing the direction and overseeing everything.

SPEAKER_01: 11:25

And I love every bit of that because we go, this is part of the theme of the playbook. So that let's get a little bit more granular, okay? Tell me some of the features and and stuff that a sales manager really should have before they go managing the whole cattle, if you will, the sales rancher. What are some of the traits that they should have in that process?

SPEAKER_03: 11:43

First, going back to one of your favorite words, they should have data. They should be able to go back and look over years past. You know, what what does our ICP look like? Yeah, what what is a good client? What's a bad client? What's a good referral source? What's a bad referral source? What's our average client worth? You know, what are high margin kinds of things that we're selling? What are low margin kinds of things? Where has our business come from? Again, working with the marketing team. Are we driving our business through referrals? Are we driving it through inbound leads? Are we driving it through different professional associations? But if they've got those big picture pieces, they can then provide that information to the sales team. A good leader should be able to tell a new person coming in, okay, Craig, one out of every five people that you talk to is going to be a qualified prospect. Once you talk to a qualified prospect, one out of every three of them will be qualified enough where they get to the end of the process. And once they get to the end of the process, we're closing about 50%. And by the way, our average client is worth about$10,000. Therefore, now we know based on data, and then from there, extrapolating out okay, how much growth do we want to see?

SPEAKER_02: 13:00

Yep.

SPEAKER_03: 13:01

Now we can start to put together the plan. If you're a managing partner from an accounting firm or a law firm, that you've got multiple practice groups, really sitting down looking to see what has each practice group done. Where's the opportunity for cross-selling, upselling? Again, having a strong leader, share with the members of the firm. This is an expectation. We need you to be working together. This is what we're driving towards in terms of how many different practice areas we want someone working with. Yeah, I'm I just started working with the bank. Okay, we want to go from our average client using two and a half of our products to four and a half of our products. Again, the individual banker doesn't know that unless they're being told by the leader.

SPEAKER_02: 13:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 13:48

And the leader needs to start with the data, then look at where we need to get the business to be, and then again, back into the plan for what that looks like. And again, some companies, as they're growing, I'm working with a sales leader right now for a manufacturing company, and they need to identify everything from what is the inside sales team going to take care of, what is the outside sales team going to take care of. We had two salespeople, we're adding a third, but our territories are all over the place. How are we going to go at this in a more systematic way? So then again, our people aren't spinning our wheels and they're not in the southeast one week, the northeast the next week, out in the Midwest. But but now we can have our people concentrate in different areas.

SPEAKER_02: 14:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 14:32

But again, if the leader isn't putting that forth, that's not just going to organically happen. And again, oftentimes business owners started their business because they had a great idea or they provided a really good service.

SPEAKER_02: 14:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 14:49

And oftentimes they get really successful, which means they need to start bringing in people. And the skills that you need to run a team is different than the skills that you need as an individual contributor or as a business owner.

SPEAKER_01: 15:03

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03: 15:04

And it's ridiculous to think that people are just going to naturally pick it up, or that even okay, I'm just going to read this in a book and apply it. Oftentimes it takes meeting with an outside trainer, an outside coach, getting the skills, running through what's happening real time, real world in your business because your business is different than everybody else's business. That's right. To figure out what's going to work for you.

SPEAKER_01: 15:28

And you touched upon the ICPs in there, and you touched upon one of the things I'm going to move into, which is a cookbook. You touched upon the understanding that you may not have the skill because that's not exactly what you opened the business for. All of those are valuable points as the importance of having sales training from on any level, to be honest with you. But to be able to, and I'm talking a lot from the marketing perspective, to be able to go in there and have that type of information and then that training allows me to branch out and said, hey, from a marketing perspective, you're trying to hit a specific ICP who makes a certain amount of money, who's in this type of demographic, allows me to really filter into who's in that space. The answer in a marketing space could be 3,000 different options. But the point behind it is that the more focused that that leader is in understanding that information allows somebody like me from a marketing perspective to help gain more perspective for you versus me trying to invent it from the beginning. One of my old professors years ago told me it's always easy to edit than it is to create. And that's the same concept.

SPEAKER_03: 16:34

Absolutely. And then that's when we can have really good internal meetings. Okay, now that we're on the same page, let's see what's what what leads are coming in from a marketing perspective. Let's see how we're doing in terms of converting those leads. Let's go back and look at the numbers, see if we're doing better or worse, see what we need to tweak. And if you've got a leader or leaders driving that process, it's much easier for the small iterations versus again having 12 different people doing 12 different things. And then as the leader trying to wonder why we're not getting the end result that we're getting and having it be next to impossible to manage all that.

SPEAKER_01: 17:14

So I want I want to dip a little bit, just to dip a little toe into the cookbook. Okay. I think the cookbook is a huge tool. We use it internally for beholder, and I think it's a huge tool because it puts everybody in the same plane of understanding the direction. Can you describe the cookbook in your term from a sales manager or sales coach or sales coach training?

SPEAKER_03: 17:36

Sure, from the sales manager, and quite frankly, the sales manager is typically doing this on a big level, and then each individual is driving into it. But what we want to do is, and you've heard me say this before, wishing, hoping, praying, those aren't really good sales strategies, probably not going to get us the end result. So, what we want to do is start with the end in mind and then work backwards to figure out what we need to do on a regular basis. So we want to start with okay, how much overall revenue do we want to bring in? Then let's look at what is our average client worth. Then we can do simple math. Okay, well, if I need to bring in a million dollars in revenue and my average client is worth$50,000, okay, let me do quick math. Okay, that's 20 new clients that we need. Then if you're really good at data, data data and tracking, okay, if we need 20 new clients, how many proposals, how many quotes need to go out? What is our closing percentage? If our closing percentage is one out of three and I need 50 new clients, okay, well, that's 150 quotes that need to go out. Then we want to back it up again. Not everybody we have a first meeting with is going to be qualified to get that quote, get that engagement letter, get that final presentation. So if it's one out of four, then we might need 2,000 first meetings.

SPEAKER_02: 19:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 19:04

And then not everybody you talk to, excuse me, is going to be qualified enough to even have a first meeting. So if we need to have, okay, well, geez, we need to touch 2,000 people to back into what our end goal is. For those of you who provide multiple services or have multiple-sized clients, you may also break it down further. And you know, Craig, you and I, you know, I share a tool that we use to be able to do that. And you might say, okay, well, for me, a large client's worth$100,000, mid-size clients worth$50,000, small clients worth$10,000. Okay, what percentage of I my business do I want in each bucket? And then let's build out three different cookbooks for those three different client sizes. Because for most people that we work with, what you need to do to get in front of a really large opportunity. Is different from how the smaller opportunities come in. So now we can create plans in different areas. And now, you know, you may get six months into the year before realizing a salesperson is just not going to make it because if you're not tracking those kinds of things, you're just waiting for the results to come in.

SPEAKER_02: 20:18

That's right.

SPEAKER_03: 20:19

But if you create a cookbook, then you might identify daily behavior. Okay, somebody needs to do 50 outreaches a day. So guess what? If two or three weeks go by and they're not making 250 outreaches a week, guess what? We know based on the numbers and based on the math, this person's probably not going to be on track to hit their goals.

SPEAKER_01: 20:42

That's right.

SPEAKER_03: 20:43

And let's figure that out after three or four weeks, then six months into the year, realizing we've got a problem, letting somebody go, it taking another month or two to hire someone else. And now we've got no shot at hitting our numbers for the year. But if we're tracking that closely on a regular basis, we can make adjustments more quickly.

SPEAKER_01: 21:03

And just I know we're overwhelming you, and this is done on purpose. But the thing I also want you to consider, because it's the playbook, we're giving you the answers, it's just it takes you time to get it. I get it. But the thing that Evan brought up with the cookbook and something to consider what he said earlier was imagine having several different departments within your or sorry, products, services, whatever, disciplines within your own firm or business. And then each one has their own cookbook responsibility, right? And so that's how you can use several cookbooks to help build your overall gross number that you're trying to obtain in a business perspective.

SPEAKER_03: 21:36

And then going back to where we started today was talking about, you know, working with the owners, managing partners, you know, sales leaders. If you've got that, it's now way easier to hold the members of your team accountable. And now you're not getting the weather reports, but it was like, okay, this is the activity that you said you were going to do this week. Did you do what you said you were going to do? If you didn't, why not? And what tweaks do we need to make to get you back on track?

SPEAKER_01: 22:05

That's right.

SPEAKER_03: 22:05

You can't really do that if you don't have the cookbook and you don't have the data.

SPEAKER_01: 22:10

And so, as I mentioned, this is a lot of information. I know it is. And this you can't learn it all within a half hour podcast. Promise you, you won't. Okay. So here's an opportunity that Evan has a 12-week training course that is phenomenal. In there, he goes through the depths of all these steps that a sales manager would be looking for in the first steps, and then you invite your staff. Evan, why don't you give them a little bit of background about your 12-week training course and we'll go from there?

SPEAKER_03: 22:38

Sure. So we've got our 12-week training program coming up. We run this on a cycle three times a year. In that training program, we are looking at everything from what mindset do you need to have? What mindset does the team need to have to be successful, to be willing to do the hard stuff on a regular basis to make sure they're accomplishing their goals? Looking at that cookbook, looking at that sales activity, how do we develop an elevator pitch to differentiate ourselves from the competition? How do we leverage our relationships? How do we utilize LinkedIn? How do we get in front of the people that we want to have the conversations with? And then the last piece that we really cover throughout the course of the 12 weeks, once we're in front of that prospect, how do we qualify or disqualify more quickly? How do we drive more urgency? How do we make sure that we've got clear next steps so that we're not spinning our wheels, wasting our time with opportunities that never had a chance to close? Um and as part of that program, there's a second tier if you want small group coaching, there's a third tier if you want one-on-one coaching and sales assessments, but it's really about having a process to drive results for you and for your people.

SPEAKER_01: 23:53

And that process gave us the greatest year we've had uh in a long time. I'll say that. And so it's valuable. And if you and what we'll do is two things within the the comments, we're within the bios and comments, we're gonna add in an act a link to the cookbook. We're gonna add a link to the 12-week training course. If you do not take advantage of it, you are already, it's January, we're already on the move, right? We're already in the move. This month is almost over. You need to start taking action now so that you can understand. And Evan's famous words don't get to the third quarter and go, oh my gosh, we're so far away from our goals. We're telling you the answer right now. Get started on this part of things so that you know a lot of times what happens here, and Evan knows it, the the actual once you're doing the activity, the sales happen. It just happens, right? Because the hardest part is getting started. The harder part is getting started. So we're telling you right now, if you want to grade 2026, get started now. Uh, Evan, any points you want to talk about before we hit the road?

SPEAKER_03: 24:52

The key is having a plan. Uh, first knowing the destination, know where you want to end up, building the plan to get you there, and then being consistent with your activity, doing what you need to do day in and day out.

SPEAKER_02: 25:06

Yep.

SPEAKER_03: 25:07

That's how you're gonna hit your goals. That's how you're gonna make sure that your people hit their goals.

SPEAKER_01: 25:11

Love it. And so let me just put it to you this way: I'm gonna leave you guys with a question, okay? Very simple question. In terms of uh the biggest challenges you're facing right now as a sales manager. What are they? Tell us in the comments. I'd love to hear them because if you guys give us ideas, we have no problem being, we're not gatekeepers. We're gonna tell you the answer. So you it's important that you guys comment and let us know. I would also suggest you if you got anything out of there that's important, subscribe. We got a lot of nuggets to give you this year. This is a year of making money for all of us, right? So subscribe. Uh and tell your friends, listen to this podcast, they're giving me real information. So, by all means, without any shadow of a doubt, please go ahead and ask us. I ain't afraid of you. Bring it on, okay? Evan, tell them where they can find us.

SPEAKER_03: 25:55

They can find us on if if again, i i i if you really want to be entertained, you can go to YouTube and see our pretty faces uh throughout the course of the podcast. You can go to Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. We post little short clips every day up on LinkedIn, so go catch us there as well. And we look forward to seeing you.

SPEAKER_01: 26:16

And we are going to bring you content like this all year long. Absolutely. Absolutely. We're coming. Whether you like it or not, we're coming because we are giving you the playbook. I'm Craig Andrews, Evan Poland, sales training extraordinaire. And until next time, we'll talk to you guys later.

SPEAKER_00: 26:36

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.