Podcast Transcript:

[00:02:59] Sean Steele: G'day everybody, and welcome back to the ScaleHQ Podcast. If you are a regular listener, we massively value you tuning in every week. And if you are joining us for the first time, well, welcome. We are thrilled to have you. My guest this week is Talila Kroy, Co-Founder and Director of Emple, business that helps Australian companies build scalable sales engines, which just gets me all kinds of excited, even just saying the words. Talila, and that means for you guys, when you think scalable sales engine, you're thinking like people and process and technology and strategy and performance and all of that, right?

[00:03:32] Talila Kroy: Wrapped into one thing that's scalable. That's repeatable. That's right. Sean. Exactly.

[00:03:38] Sean Steele: Scalable and repeatable sales. No one wants that, do they? 

[00:03:42] Talila Kroy: Absolutely not. Like, who would want to have the money flowing in so you could actually focus on realising your vision?

[00:03:51] Sean Steele: That's classic. Well, look, we came across each other, just for context for the audience, came across each other when your Co-Founder and I connected, and part of the reason for the connectivity was very often that ScaleHQ clients who are typically seven-figure Founders wanting to scale to eight-figures plus. I get to somewhere around, in my experience. 4 million to 9 million in revenue off the back of great work, great Founder reputation, good delivery, Founder-led sales, referrals, word of mouth, but to break into eight-figures, you must, and I repeat, must have a scalable inbound or outbound or both, ideally, sales system that gives you predictability and levers that you can pull to amplify and scale your sales. Otherwise, you plateau and the business just stops growing. Would you agree with that?

[00:04:45] Talila Kroy: Absolutely, Sean. And from the conversations we've had, I know you have quite a lot of knowledge in this area already. Like, you've seen this and you've been involved in these implementations. So that will make our conversation all the more interesting, I think.

[00:04:59] Sean Steele: That's it. Well, look, you know, word of mouth only gets you so far. It's an incredible way to build a business. And it tells me that you've got a quality business. If you can get to that stage and you've got no sales function, awesome. Like you're doing a great job, pat yourself on the back. That's incredible. You're just not going to continue growing at the same rate until you've got something that's actually predictable. And that means it needs to have structure and it needs to have other people. And it's not, if only it was as simple, as just going out and hiring some salespeople and they would just bring sales process and sales management and sales systems and…

[00:05:32] Talila Kroy: Exactly. And unfortunately…

[00:05:33] Sean Steele: Sorry, that is actually the Founder's…

[00:05:36] Talila Kroy: Sean, that's what people think it is. Many business Founders who do hire for the first time do have quite unrealistic expectations of what the sales person is going to bring. They do believe that if I could get this far and I'm not a salesperson, then if I hire a salesperson, they're going to do a far better job than I ever did. So, wow, my sales are going to go up. I'm hiring a professional. And then they find that.

[00:06:00] Sean Steele: And I know there are so many people listening to this today who are hearing themselves in this conversation already going; ‘Well, surely if I've never been trained in sales and I hire a professional sales person at like 120 grand or 150 grand or something like that, they are going to bring sales process and stuff.’ No, they are not going to do that. I don't care how experienced they are. They may have worked in all sorts of other peoples. Sales infrastructure and sales process and all the rest, but it doesn't mean they bring it to you. It doesn't mean they know how to design it. That doesn't mean they know how to design it in a way that suits your organisation. They are not the best salesperson for your organisation, and they actually need to have a whole bunch of other things in place for them to succeed. Otherwise, you are going to spend a lot of time and a lot of frustration watching them have conversations and it not going anywhere. And you're going to think hiring salespeople was the wrong strategy as opposed to going; I did not set these people up for success. And there's two parts of this, right? Like the conversation today that I want to have with you was, and you know, we were having a little chat offline. I think what we've decided is there probably needs to be two episodes, not one, because the setup for this was, Talila, I want you to tell our audience the secrets of how to hire good salespeople, which is the front end of that process.

[00:07:15] Talila Kroy: Yes, very true.

[00:07:16] Sean Steele: The recruiting of the salespeople, what do you look for? How do you test for the right fit and your skills and all the other stuff? But what I've seen many times over, and I know you've seen countless more times is people hire a salesperson, but actually when they land, there is nothing set up for them. And that means that person will fail. No question. They are going to fail. So, we actually decided the context is still the same. It's, how do you recruit the right salespeople? But what we're going to start with is, what do you need on the other side of that as an organisation to ensure that when they land, you can actually get them to succeed before you worry about going and finding the right ones? Because you're not going to find a magic unicorn who brings all the stuff.

[00:07:56] Talila Kroy: That is spot on. Absolutely spot on.

[00:08:01] Sean Steele: Rocking. Well, let's just get into it. Like you talked to maybe could you just give us a little, you know, quick summary of just the bits that Emple does, because I know you also… and the thing I like about your organisation is that you came out of sales recruitment first, and that was your job and you were doing sales recruitment before you then started thinking about, hang on, these salespeople are getting to people's organisations and then failing. Why? Not because the salesperson is wrong, because the organisation doesn't have the stuff set up yet. So, talk to me just quick sort of summary of Emple and what you do. And then let's talk about what have I got to have on the other side of this before they hire the salesperson?

[00:08:34] Talila Kroy: Okay. Excellent. So, we started our business. We were called Epic Sales Hire and then we moulded in to Epic Sales Group, and then we rebranded as Emple. Our purpose was to free Founders by hiring those really great sales people that would take those Founders to the next level, basically enable them to get out of client facing interactions and into strategy and make the money that they needed. And we spent a couple of years just hiring really good salespeople and doing nothing else through a process that we'll talk about later, Sean, which other people can use, which is really sifting out the wheat from the chaff for your organisation, which is very important. What we found though, again and again, was that a one plus one didn't equal two with hiring salespeople. In other words, we could put one salesperson into a financial services company over here and another one into a financial services company over there, both of good quality, similar resumes who passed the assessments correctly and done similar things. And one would struggle flounder and have a very stressful ramp up and maybe fail. And the other one would just get in and just do it, you know, and they'd be running up and running in weeks. And that was a real light bulb moment for us. I think the biggest example of that for us came in year two, where we were actually hiring, or year three I think it was, we were hiring for a Queensland company that did floor coverings, timber floor coverings, quite unique, sort of quick together, highest quality. But their competitors were like Bunnings, things like that. They were probably five to seven times the price. And we'd hired two BDMs for this company and the BDMs just weren't able to sell the way the Founder could. And a few months in the Founder was saying, neither of them are closing deals. They're opening all these invoices. They're speaking to all these people. They're filling up my system with quotes and invoices, but nothing is selling. And what we ended up doing with that Founder was saying; you know what? You don't have all of these things in place. And he became like a guinea pig for us. We created him a what we call a sales environment and sales playbook and the transformation was unbelievable. He actually got rid of those two BDMs because they were burned by then and he and his admin lady and his logistics guy, basically, we pulled out of his head everything that worked and set up the system for success and they were making ridiculous sales. And they smashed it that September, October, November, December, January. Every month they exceeded their sales targets and that's when we realised you can try your hardest to get a really, really good person, but if you don't give them a really, really good system, you will never get the results you want. And on the converse, if you have a really, really good system, even an average person will probably get you the results you want - Light bulb moment for us.

[00:11:26] Sean Steele: You’ll get somewhere. Yeah. It’s so true in so many ways, even as a professional sales manager, which I was kind of going through my career, I'd spent my whole life in sales, which is why, to your earlier point, I do know a bit about this area. I'm not the expert because I don't spend my time all in sales anymore. But I had a contact centre, a 70 seat contact centre in Brisbane, and I'd been focusing on integrating multiple brands of sales people into a centralised sales area. So, we're recruiting some new people, we'll bring some other people in and all the rest. What I didn't have was any, good quality training on boarding process, whatever. So, like we were bringing salespeople in and I was assuming that we had these good sales managers and they'd sort of get them up to speed and the average time to competency and competency for us was like getting them to about 27 a month. That's what we needed them to get to for everything to work. And it would take them about six months to get to that low. And I was like… Six months is so long. And sometimes I get to month five and we go; no, this person's not going to make it. And we've burnt five months, we've burnt two months or two to three months in recruitment and then five months of salaries. And then we get let them go. And I was like, this model does not work. And so, I built a sales university, got a learning management system. I get like an instructional designer. I designed all the content, work with the sales managers. We put it all together. And all of a sudden, we got the speed to competency from six months to four weeks. And by week three, we knew whether people were going to succeed or not. And by week three, they were gone. If they were not going to work, they had left. And so massive improvement. Why? Because all of the stuff was there, the onboarding, teaching what success looks like, bringing up the competency, like we designed the system and the system worked. And so, yeah, I'm all aboard. So, let's talk about what is this magical stuff that needs to be on the other side of this sales recruitment that Founders probably don't know about when they've just grown a business off the back of word-of-mouth referrals, the Founder's charisma and…

[00:13:25] Talila Kroy: Yes, very, very good. And a great example. What you said, it's a great example. And we found the same things. You could take out all the risk. Go from six months to several weeks, you could even get people started before they sign up. You could use parts of that training to help recruit and help sort the wheat from the chaff. And so when they land on site, they send me locked and loaded. Yeah. So, let's look at some of those parts as you say, Sean. So, there's a few different elements to this and let me break them down because they all work together. There's the training, like you said, which is, what do you say and why do you say it, and how do you say it? And understanding of who are our buyers? Where do we sit in the marketplace? What are our deepest value that our solutions offer and why? And equipping them with assets, resources, stories, statistics, everything that you as the Founder, you know, your best key salesperson have known for years, because otherwise, if we expect a salesperson to absorb that by osmosis, it's a hit and miss process and it will literally take them months and they will have to be very good at listening and picking things up. And also from a brand experience, if you're giving the client one experience and the other salesperson is giving them, you know, you've got two people there maybe that this new person is trying to practice on, they might learn two different ways and there's different brand experiences, confusion for them. And we see it all the time as teams grow and grow. So really that training element of, wo are our buyers? What do we say? How do we hold sales conversations? How do we qualify? What are the key tells that we need to provide the buyer? What are the light bulb moments? How do we move the sale from stage to stage? That's really, really important stuff. But then there's lots of other structural pieces too. So, let's have a little bit of a look at those. And I've made a couple of notes for myself. Firstly, one of the things that I think business owners struggle with is, how do I remunerate the salesperson? And that's a really important one. You know, they overpay or they underpay, or sometimes they give commission from the first dollar. Sometimes they pay for things that might come anyway, or it wasn't really clear what the salesperson did. Other times the salesperson might have to do a lot of work for very little remuneration. So, it's really important that your remuneration framework pays the salesperson just enough for their base to be competitive, gives them a really rewarding commission structure and that the commission structure is tied to and aligned to the amount of effort, the amount of skill and where you want the revenue to come from. This is really, really important. And if you get that right, about three years ago, we had to hire a BDM for a new rent role for a company in the Gold Coast and they were building, they were investment homes type of thing. They were building a rent role on the side and literally that's hard work. They didn't have anyone coming in. It was really outbound. This person had to go out and do it. And they needed someone really, really good. And they wanted to pay a 60K base. It's a few years ago. And you know, the people of that quality were 80-90 plus base. And so, what we did was we worked with them for a really, really good commission structure that rewarded really well based on performance and we showed how that would work like we reverse engineered the pipeline. I'll talk about that in a minute. And we were able to get them someone amazing from Brisbane. She took a step down from her 85-base to 65, which is what we negotiated and she smashed it. And within about nine months, they'd had to hire extra people. She was at more than double what we'd expected her to get. Everyone was smiles and everyone was very, very happy. And that's the power of a good remuneration framework.

[00:17:21] Sean Steele: I have got so many stories about compensation design fails that I have personally made and ones that I've done that have been incredible successes. And I mean, that's a whole episode of just compensation design and getting it right. It's because it's an art and a science, right? But fundamentally you can create incredibly lazy sales. To your point, one of the first, I don't even know if this is legal anymore and it probably never was. But anyway, I always used to ask people, what is the minimum amount that you need just to run your life, you know, to your cost, forget investments and savings and all the rest, but like the minimum amount per year that you need to just pay the bills, kept the lights on? And people would always actually give you a really honest answer, which I always found really interesting and fabulous. But all of a sudden someone says, you know, I remember that I had a job that was a $75,000 base and they said to me $42,000 and I was thinking the base itself is for them $30,000 more than they need. How motivated are they going to be by any commission.

[00:18:23] Talila Kroy: That's really true.

[00:18:24] Sean Steele: Zero. And big surprise, they were not. But anyway, let's not get too tight into that one, but there's a whole big dialogue for us around that. Okay. So, what's so compensate? So, the training, all the assets and everything that go with the right sales conversation, then the compensation plan, the remuneration model.

[00:18:40] Talila Kroy: I'll say one more thing on the remuneration model before we go from that. A really powerful way of remunerating a lot of industries where you can do it, is to provide a trail on income. So that every year as they grow their book of clients and renewals, et cetera, that doesn't fit every model, but often it does. They actually pay themselves more money. And this is incredibly rewarding for a salesperson, particularly an enterprising one, because they can envisage their future and they can build something for themselves. And as you know, great salespeople tend to leave after a couple of years, if they're bored and if there's no way to move up the ladder. And in small businesses, there isn't often a way to move up the ladder, except maybe to the sales manager of a team, but this way they can actually give themselves a raise, if that makes sense. And that's exciting. So, I wanted to mention that. So, another thing that we really, really, really need is to get our quotas right and to have measurable metrics that we can use when we're managing the salesperson. Because particularly business Founders, they're not necessarily trained in managing a salesperson. It's a very new area for them. It's a very new hat to put on. And I've seen lots of different styles. One of them is; here's the stuff, abdicate and run kind of approach really doesn't work. Other one is leaning over their shoulder and micromanaging them because you're anxious, which also is really, really not good, and a large variety of things in between. But the biggest problem that business owners have is calling out the salesperson when they're off track, and congratulating them when they're on track and having really objective conversations about how they're doing all the time so that they can adjust course and be aligned on getting to the goal of ramp up. And that's tricky and you need metrics for it. And I think that's really important.

[00:20:30] Sean Steele: Yeah. And because, fundamentally what a lot of people end up doing is focusing on the outputs only and not focusing on the inputs. And it's like, if you're not focused on the parts of the process that are going to produce outcomes, and you're just focused on outcomes, then the salesperson is feeling terrible all the time until there's a deal. You're thinking there's something wrong with them until there's some massive number and no one's focused on actually the things they should be doing that will produce in time if they do them consistently. Some outcome later on, and that's where that weekly dialogue. Like, the calls they're doing and the meetings they're doing and the quality of that deal and what's happening…

[00:21:04] Talila Kroy: And really, if that salesperson is confident, they will perform much better. If they're stressed, we all know that our stress levels actually cause our intelligence to drop. And in many environments, salespeople are very stressed for the first six months because it's a make or break. And it's not like hiring a dentist or something like that. You know, you went to dentist school, you know how to do stuff. You're in a new environment, but the tools are basically the same, and the chances of you being kicked out up to six months are low. So, with a salesperson, they're looking at you. Are you going to make it? And if we could take that stress away by giving clear metrics and clear guidance, the salesperson will flourish and they love the visibility of how they're doing. So, when are the metrics come from is the question. So, the first thing is the quota itself.

[00:21:54] Sean Steele: And sorry, just one point on that. You know, your onboarding plan needs to build both their competence and their confidence, which is why, if I've got an 8-week onboarding plan or a 12-week onboarding plan, you know, in weeks two and three, they're calling. They're doing previous customers, they're doing customer service calls. They're doing ride alongs. And it's like, those things are all metric and you know, five calls of this type, you know, 16 customer mystery calls so that they can get to the end of the week, tick that they've done 16 and feel excited, like feel confident because they've done something that they can tick off the plan. Not just, you need to get me a million dollars somewhere in the next 12 months, go. And then all of a sudden it's all failure until that is a tick.

[00:22:36] Talila Kroy: And not only failure, they don't know what levers to pull because they're brand new. So, they will literally get scattered brained and their energy will go all over the place trying to figure out what to do.

[00:22:46] Sean Steele: All over the place, yeah.

[00:22:47] Talila Kroy: So, giving them the levers to pull, and the onboarding plan itself, the ramp up plan is a part of these, right? So, just moving back to the targets for a minute, there's two sets of targets. There's the quota, which is basically a rear-view mirror. Yes, you sold this much. Very good. Well done. And then there's, as you say, the KPIs or the leading indica. The drivers, the key drivers, those are the ones that are the inputs and both of those we need to have measured. So, to create quotas, and a lot of businesses don't do this, they'll just set up an arbitrary number like; ‘Well, last year I sold 500,000. So, you're a salesperson. You're going to do it full time. I expect you to sell a million.’ That's nice. What we need is the same approach to sales as marketing people have, which is a funnel, and the stages and, you know, a million dollars in sales is usually a hundred of our products or a hundred small ones, 50 big ones, and 25 medium offerings. And that's aligned with what we usually get, something like that, historical data shows this. So you've got to do a little bit of work, but it's not a lot and it will give you an enormous amount of insight. So, you need to look at who you're selling to, what's your average sale value. And then look at what are the stages of your sales process? Like, what are you actually doing? How many conversations do you have to have in order to create that sale and how many meetings and how many, you know, whatever it is that happens, sale is not one thing, usually in B2B it's a series of steps, and those steps have names and those steps have conversion metrics. So, a lot of our clients will start with an initial conversation, which might be a very short chat just to either spark interest or identify it. And then they might go on to a longer conversation where they're gathering a lot of data from the client whilst answering questions to make sure this is a fit and they can present a customised solution. And then they'll have a meeting and say, this is what you need. This is what we propose, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then post the meeting, they might send a quote, proposal, invoice. And then there's an onboarding phase. Those are all the phases of a journey. And from those, there's conversion metrics, and the stronger your sales process, the better conversions will go. So, the initial chats will more often last, go into the deep dives, which will more often go into the presentations and more people will say, yes, that process, if it's built and documented, forms the training that you set, but it also provides the metrics. Because if you've got a pipeline, you've got a CRM, you know, historically what you do, and you don't have to say, ‘I expect you to sell a million dollars’ worth.’ You can say, ‘I expect you to sell a million dollars’ worth, and it's based on the fact that our conversion rate is this, our lead sources are that, and our average sale value is that, and this is not something new. This is a proven model.’ And that gives the salesperson huge…

[00:25:48] Sean Steele: Expecting you to do10 meetings a week, which should result in five proposals of probably about this amount of value. And those five proposals probably turn into three deals and those three deals will be worth this much. And that's how we actually get to this number. So, the sales person's also going; oh, okay, well that makes sense. Like that builds their confidence in the target. And they're thinking, I just need to do the10 meetings and follow the bouncing ball that you've given me and then apply my personality and skillset to it because I've actually got a model of success.

[00:26:17] Talila Kroy: They now can allocate their time. They now can see success long before the sale. They can build a pipeline successfully, a forecastable pipeline, and that's really important. More than that, you can see whether they're doing the activities, and you can also see whether they're converting at the right rate. The activities is quantity. Conversion is quality, and if they're failing at any of those, you can say; ‘Well, you converted all right, but you only had five calls. That's not enough. You're going to need to have 10.’ Or 'You did 10 calls, but you didn't get five of them to the next step. What's going on here? Let's give you a bit of training.’ And that becomes the model by which the onboarding framework runs. So, that's where you get your reverse engineered pipeline, your activity and your conversion KPIs and your remuneration structure, giving them everything they need on a metric basis to understand what success looks like for you and for them, not just at the end of ramp up, but at all stages in between.

[00:28:25] Sean Steele: And can I say the, as a sales leader, one of the things that I would always say to people, you know, I always had this formula up on the board, activity times conversion equals results. But if you don't do the activity consistently, then we have such a big variable. Like to your point, I'm not going to come rushing in to help you unless I know you're actually managing the activity. So, manage the activity first. And then we can talk about support on the quality side on the conversion component. Like I can get in and help you with the skillsets, but if you're not making the calls, then I'm not helping you in conversion. Like, you know, you need to manage the input part of that process, make the phone calls. And then if you're making the phone calls, but they're not getting to the meetings, cool, then I'll come and help you on the phone calls, at least I know you're doing the requisite amount to make the pipeline work. So, when you have those stages planned out, cause you actually tested them and building yourself, then you're able to know how much it should take, and know where to apply your effort…

[00:29:23] Talila Kroy: 100 percent.

[00:29:24] Sean Steele: Or skill set gap they might have.

[00:29:26] Talila Kroy: And we've had so many examples like the one you said, Sean, we had back in 2019 - 2020, we had a national company selling architecturally designed kit homes, which was only one or two salespeople would ever hit quota each year. They were basically carrying the company nationally and by doing what we said here, they were able to get everyone to hit quota, including all the existing people. More than that, when we hired for them, they were able to get those people up and running in several weeks, where it used to take months and months and months and they were making their initial sales, what we call bridge sales within two weeks and selling full houses, even on zoom and even through COVID within four to six and that's, you need the system.

[00:30:10] Sean Steele: It's the value of the…

[00:30:11] Talila Kroy: That's right. Okay. So now we've got our metrics, we've got our remuneration structure, we've got our activity and conversion KPIs and our quotas all sorted out. So, we've got the basics for visibility. It's important that visibility is also reflected in dashboards and for that we need to ensure that there's a bit of data compliance, so we have to make sure that part of the training part includes data compliance of how you enter data into your CRM, etc. So, putting that aside, another thing that we really need. Is we need a performance measurement agreement. Now, this one is a little bit like a job description, but it's got measurables for every single element of the role because the metrics cover a lot, but they don't cover everything. We don't want our sales people to be only focused on sales. We also want them to be focused on client experience. You know, being good people, gathering the data we want, stuff like that. So that's all got to be in there so that in one page, a salesperson can see this is the role. That is a tool for management, which means that every week in the ramp up, you can go. Yes, you did that. Yes, you did that. Yes, you did that. Yes, you did that. Right across the whole board of the salesperson's frameworks. So performance measurement agreement is really important. Another thing is that we need… Sorry, what was that, Sean?

[00:31:33] Sean Steele: I like that. Yeah, absolutely. And to your point, it gives you the qualitative stuff that maybe also is not as easy in numbers, like the kind of the attitude. So, like the way that they approach the role to your point, the way they talk about their issues, how they're engaging in the team. Like, you know, you've got the ability to load in the …

[00:31:53] Talila Kroy: Behavioural stuff is key.

[00:31:54] Sean Steele: Not just hard numbers because we've all, if you've ever been in a larger organisation, you'll find there's some top level salespeople who are just…

[00:32:01] Talila Kroy: I was about to say that. We've all had those sales people who are a pain in the arse. And what do you do with them when they're making good money? But if you keep them…

[00:32:09] Sean Steele: It's so hard. Yeah, they affect everybody negatively and everyone hates them. And like you, you've got to have those other elements that are non-numeric, just quantitative numbers stuff. That's not enough. It's obviously important and it's a key outcome, but it can't just be done at all costs.

[00:32:29] Talila Kroy: Like the big companies like Google and Facebook and all of those have proven how important culture is. You can't have anything eroding your culture. And I think the problem with those sorts of a-hole salespeople is that they then start to infect everyone, and they also do things that just don't align with the brand value and there's nothing more important than the brand and the value and the company, what it stands for. So, everyone has got to represent that. And so, yeah, really, really important stuff. And we have the sales directors in our team are superb at this. Like, it's certainly not my area, but they're superb at negotiating with the salesperson that they're aligned to culture and vision. You know, we had a company that has a European and an Australian arm, and their sales team were kind of had a bit of an attitude, shall I say, they didn't fit in with the rest of all the team and there was a bit of an us and them kind of feeling in there and one of our sales directors really worked on changing that and that meant bringing in those elements that were non-money based, non-metric based, and using those as performance tools. So, focusing on that, having that ready, it'll be one of the best things you ever do. And it's not just for salespeople, everyone should have this for every role, but for salespeople specifically. Then you touched on the next piece and that's the ramp up plan itself. So really ramp up for a salesperson is like getting a plane off the ground. You know, they literally have to. There is a pre-flight checklist you need to tick it all off and get them in the air. And there's a few elements of that. There's everything from the actual conversations and the client interactions to the use of assets and tools, templates. Maybe they have to use presentation decks, ROI calculators, whatever it is they have to do, all the touch points that they have to do. There are also things like data compliance, making sure they fill in the data that helps you as a business leader to have a data driven environment for your marketing, for your productization, all of that stuff, as well as that there is training elements that are a bit more intangible and nebulous, and things like, you know, understanding the different personas that your company works with and how they think and feel differently. Because you may very, very well present the same solution to people wearing three different hats. And what John and Mary want from the same solution are completely different and being able to understand and relate to them is really important. So that kind of detail, it should all be part of the onboarding ramp up. So, the way that we build an onboarding ramp up and would recommend anyone to do is to have three sections, which is training, actions and success outcomes. And each of those is in specific timeframes. So, first 14 days, the first month, the first, second month, the third month, that's usually enough. Sometimes the fourth month depends how complex your sales environment is. Could go up to six or more, but that's usually enough. And they really have to learn a little piece about each of these areas in the right timeframe. And if you think about it, to make a salesperson financially viable, they need to start taking load off as soon as possible from the Founders of the current business owners. The easiest way to do that is to train them in the easiest steps first, which is often the front end steps, like connecting and qualify and get them to own that step and then to own the next step and then to own the next step. So, the onboarding plan kind of follows the pipeline of a sales person in training and focus. And the idea is let's make them independent, shall we say in each one and give them the tick of approval, but yes, you are at the level of quality that we need to let you approach our clients and speak to our precious, precious clients. And again, what's the cost of a single client? We had recently worked with a financial services company in Sydney, and one of the things we did was we said, let's look at the value of a single lead. And we just did that for them, and they realised that it was $5,000 for the smallest possible outcome, you know, and that they were capable of converting it at a certain rate. And then they were like, do you really want anyone who's not trained to speak to any one of these ever?

[00:37:13] Sean Steele: And this is, to go back to my earlier point, this is why you have to build confidence and competence, to your point, across these people. You have to almost build it like a... almost like a brick wall, you know, like you're having to lay the foundations from the bottom all the way up and they can't just start at the top, and you are setting them up for failure if you put them in situations with expectations that are unrealistic where they're not yet confident enough, or they're not yet competent enough to do that well, you'd need them to succeed along the way. So, they build more and more confidence, like a snowball as they go through, because that, you know, unfortunately, to your earlier point, the confidence matters a hell of a lot, you know, there are emotional beings generally, and they need confidence, and that comes from little… and that can just be ticking off the small things. And that's having those check in points to your point – Okay, if I've just taught them seven things this week, where's my opportunity for them to play back what they've learned from those seven things, so I can actually check in that I haven't just assumed that it's happened. And that also builds their confidence. It's built their confidence, but it's also built their confidence because they played it back to me and I've gone, Hey, great job. That's excellent. You've got that. Now let's work on the next thing. Their confidence just went up. So, I really like that idea of that, I agree with you, like three months is probably about the right onboarding plan period, you just can't expect them to…that doesn't mean they won't produce any results in the first three months…

[00:38:45] Talila Kroy: And that's why, you know, the success metrics for month 1 and month 2 and month 3 are different and 4 etc. We give them a period of time to ramp up to KPIs. And we focus on different KPIs for each month and we different conversion metrics too, as we're rising through the months. And as you say, not only do they build confidence, but they immediately contribute financially, which is a really big deal. So, you don't have to wait till they've made the sale, because if they're taking some load off the existing performers immediately, there's already a financial benefit. And the worst thing that could happen, and I've seen this is people will go up to six months with a sales person, not sure whether they're doing well or not. Not only have they paid for the recruitment and paid for the wages, they've also paid a huge internal cost for the ad-hoc training of all their sales managers and buddy up systems and all that. They've also burned, probably five times that in leads, and that's by far the biggest cost in a hidden one, and we have a calculator for that. It's terrifying how much money a salesperson can lose you if you do this incorrectly. So, don't go there. Absolutely train them in the ramped up, ramp them up step by step. And the beauty of this is if you build it once, you can use it a hundred times. And that's a really important thing for a scaling business because very few businesses will hire one salesperson, as they grow, they'll want a second one and a third one and a fourth one and a fifth one, and all of the system, which provides training, guidance and visibility is the system that will do it for them. We have a national promotional merchandise company that we've hired them 20 people, and they just got like a plug and play system that we all know works. You know, you just plug them in and it works and they wrap up. So, that's what you need.

[00:40:41] Sean Steele: And so are there any other missing pieces, we’ve covered all that, what you'd consider kind of like the core elements that the business has got to have ready before they start going out and going out and hiring?

[00:40:52] Talila Kroy: If we have the basic documentation of what happens at each stage, along with training resources, including recordings, you know, dot pointed recordings, things that they can train themselves on. That takes a lot of pressure off the sales manager to train them up. Then, as I said, with the dashboard visibility, I think there's a few other areas that we need to work on, but that's more, ‘we're ready to go to hire.' And what we do there is we don't want to just go in, we need a plan to hire and we need clarity on, and the PMA helps with that - Performance Measurement and Agreement. Who is the person that's right for this role and how are we going to assess their skills? And how are we going to make sure that they're a fit across all the different areas? So, one of the things that we want to have set up, and this is separate to the hiring, which I know we're going to talk about later, is a practical assessment layer. And I find that the practical assessment layer is the best and easiest way to be able to tell whether someone's a good fit or not, than any other way that I've ever found. And we've tried a lot of different ways, believe me. And so...

[00:42:02] Sean Steele: So, the practical assessment layer is something that you'll, so once you've sort of designed this stuff on the, essentially the sales sort of infrastructure, the sales foundations, you're saying you then create an assessment model that you then pull up to the front of the recruitment process so that you can essentially test for people's likelihood of succeeding…

[00:42:23] Talila Kroy: Correct. We had a website design company where the Founder was really concerned about leaving his sales role because he realised how important and critical it was and what we did, this was one of our 1st playbooks to was, we recorded the, the initial discovery call, you know, really well with dot points in a framework. It was part of the training and we got the finalists, shall we say, the shortlist to do it. And one guy stood out, he sounded better than the boss, and he just got there, and he'd absorbed it. He could express it. He's still there. He's made the millions. The point is, you're taking so much risk out because what do you learn in that? The one that we use now, it contains a portion of the process, but also contains an admin element and a thinking element, and what we see from that is we get rid of a lot of red flags. Do they learn? Do they listen? Can they express themselves well? Are they going to be good at the book work and the paperwork? Like there's all those elements, so many problems that can occur, can just be wiped out by that practical assessment.

[00:43:32] Sean Steele: Well, maybe what I'm wondering if we just, we've got it for a remaining few minutes. If we can grab that and move that into next episode where we talk about the recruitment process and we'll talk about that assessment model, maybe you can give us an example of one of those kind of like a live one so that people can kind of hear that in detail, that'd be awesome. But I guess, back onto the foundations, if you've just listened to this and you've gone; geez, I have none of that, and I'm massively overwhelmed because I've never done any of those things before. I don't want people listening to think that the only solution is to get a company like Emple. Clearly, that's what they do for a living. They're very good at it, and they know how to do that. But I think one of the things that you said to me up front, Talila, was even if Founders had half of that stuff, which they can do, they'd have a massively higher chance of a salesperson succeeding than if they do none of it. So, I don't want anyone listening to go, it's like all or nothing. Like, I have to do all of that perfectly, or I should do nothing, or I have to get an external company to help me. Yes, the reality is there is a lot of art and science when it comes to sales, but you know, doing well with salespeople, no question. That's why you have professional sales leaders and that's why it's a whole thing. However, the Founder needs to get conscious about, and if you don't know how to get … the whole point, and you know, you gave us some examples earlier where it's like, you're using what success is already happening to unpack the framework, but kind of make it conscious, right? Like to bring it to the surface. I think about, I did this with a company last or probably the year before last, they were going to hire salespeople. I was like, great, you are going to record or this is the Founder. You're going to record the next seven, eight, nine sales calls. I want to say these stages of the process. I want you to give them all to me, all the recordings. And then I just literally pulled out all the common elements. I turned it into a system. I listen to more just to validate. That's the way it was happening. I built them a sales training model around it. I built an assessment framework around it. And I taught that to the new salespeople that came in, and lo and behold, those salespeople have been incredibly successful. Why not? Because I'm a genius because I was just modelling the Founder. I was taking her excellence, and teaching it to the new people that came in. There are definitely parts they probably still don't have and may have needed, but that alone was like, you're already doing something that's working. Get somebody from your organisation or do it yourself, like record what it is that you're doing because you're probably doing a whole bunch of it virtually and figure out a way to unpack it at least as a starting point. Because if you don't… I always think it's almost like Apple, you know, Apple's model of the world is, if you're a product business, you have to make the person who buys your product feel like a hero using your product. So, you have to help them succeed. If you don't give them a training manual, if you don't… Apples, you know, why do they have those little mini tutorials to get you started feeling successful, so you don't look at the thing and just hit overwhelm. It's like a little thing to make you succeed in doing it. Now I've got a bit more confidence. Now I'll go and do more and I'll enjoy the product. You have to do the same thing with salespeople. You have to build their ability to feel like they can do this, and you throw them in the deep end or you think they're going to come with it all, they just don't come with it. So, please don't listen to this and be overwhelmed. Just think about at least the most basic elements, which if I just boil some of those ones that you've talked down at a bare ass minimum, Getting the actual calls and the call structure and sequence of the, you know, if you've got a discovery call and then a presentation call, like getting all of that unpacked and sort of documented in the key bits, probably making sure that the compensation plan, you have to think about that carefully because essentially, what you have to do is you have to think about second and third tier consequences. You know, whatever you put in place is going to drive a behaviour towards or away from something. And salespeople are masters at looking for, how you get around that thing and still achieve the goal.

[00:47:41] Talila Kroy: That's right.

[00:47:42] Sean Steele: They're just sort of built that way. So, if you incentivise them purely around revenue and you haven't thought about discounting or margin or anything like that, and they've got discounting control, well, all of a sudden you might find they discount 50 percent because they've just been given a revenue target. Great. But if actually margins really important to you, then you need to put some controls. Maybe the incentive is based on gross margin. It's not based on revenue. So, think about the compensation plan with some level of granularity and detail. Think about what it is setting them up to do. Is it going to make them lazy? Is it going to make them hungry? Is it going to, what is it going to make them want to, how will it make them act? And even if you only had those two basics, you're way ahead of people who haven't thought about it. And if I had a salesperson and hoped for best.

[00:48:24] Talila Kroy: Yes, and I would add to that too, think about what you're paying them, think about the cost of having them, the cost of seat and figure out how you're going to recoup that. Before you start paying them extra. So, there's a threshold point at which you can afford to start becoming very generous with your salesperson. But before that threshold point, you really need to be able to protect the cost of having them there so that they're paying you back before you're sharing revenue.

[00:48:51] Sean Steele: I love that. So, here's the exercise, right? The exercise is, get a P&L or basically just build your sales person as a P&L, right? They have a wage cost that is fixed that is Opex. They may have a laptop or a phone or a car or a bunch of other things. You're probably going to be feeding them leads. So, you've got some time from the marketing person. You've got the actual cost of those leads. You've got the cost of designing any collateral or, you know, whatever it like put all of those costs in. And you're going to have a number that you actually need to achieve in gross margin. Not in revenue. In gross margin, that's going to allow, because you know, the cogs in between revenue and gross margin are going to be chewed up in cogs of delivering whatever it is they've just sold. So, it's only whatever's left in gross margin. That gross profit has to cover all of those costs before they break. So how many deals, what size are you going to need to just break even? I bet you, if you've got multiple salespeople and you haven't run a P&L exercise, you've got people that are losing money everyday.

[00:49:52] Talila Kroy: Boy, that's correct. And this forms the baseline for performance and also gives you more clarity on what success looks like. So, you've got your KPIs where you want them to go, but you've also got your baseline where they can't go south of. And so that's exactly the exercise, Sean, understand the cost of seat, the salesperson's cost to you, including everything that it costs to have them in that seat and start your threshold from there and work it backwards in sales. So, there's a few elements there. We do have a tool that we use with our clients, which identifies these things before they hire with us. It's a 15-minute tool. What I'm very happy to do is for anyone who wants some help and free help, I'm very happy to run them through the tool. It will give them a bit of an insight into what they ought to do. It's not super depthy, but it is depthy enough that people will be able to read this and go, okay, these are the actions that I need to go and take before I go hiring someone. So, if anyone would like to do that, they're very welcome to.

[00:50:53] Sean Steele: Well, yes. Where would you send people to? You know, because we are out of time, Talila. And I absolutely just love this conversation. And I feel like there's probably like seven episodes in here for us, and the next one we'll do is on the recruitment front end and they'll have to see what we get to, but where would you direct people to go to get access to that tool?

[00:51:12] Talila Kroy: I'll give you a link if that's okay.

[00:51:15] Sean Steele: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. You can read it out and we'll also put it in the show notes. 

[00:51:21] Talila Kroy: Yes, so I haven't got it to read out. I apologize for that. I was going to do that. But if I give it to you and you can put it in the show notes, that will work. And we do run people through it. So, we talk them through it in 15-minutes, and then we give them a report. The report is reasonably documented. So, it's a very good starting point.

[00:51:44] Sean Steele: Well, folks, If you are a Founder, I hope we have not left you feeling overwhelmed, but actually feeling like there's some stuff that you can go and do that's actually relatively simple, which is going to improve your chances of success. If you're listening to this and you're going; jeez, I got a lot of work to do and I've got some existing salespeople and I haven't really set them up for success. Sometimes it is too late, but it's not general. I wouldn't think I wouldn't start with that thought. You know, it's probably not too late to actually help them succeed. You know, start with the modelling of success. Think about your compensation plan. Think about your input focus, what kind of conversations you might be having around the stuff that leads to outcomes as opposed to just worrying about the outcomes. And just as a starting point, you know, that might get you moving, but clearly what you've heard today is, there are a number of things that you really, if you want to get the optimal return on sales investment in a Salesforce, you have to do the work or hire someone to help you to do the work to get this stuff in place. It's just the reality. If you want to build a scalable business that has a scalable sales engine, you're going to have to do the work at some point.

[00:52:51] Talila Kroy: Yeah. And, you know, people put a lot of work into their marketing systems, so they understand that it's the same thing, but it's even more impactful. And if there's only three things that I'd suggest everyone was to do, it would be to record their best performance conversations at every stage of the way, including the way they enter data as well into the system and use those as training tools and use a part of that as an assessment for someone who we're looking to hire. We'll go into that more later, but just doing that one thing is not that hard. Record what they're doing. You know, transcribe it as well. That part will be the start of game changing the situation.

[00:53:33] Sean Steele: Model of success. That's what it is. I love that. Talila, thank you so much. Can you just direct, if people wanted to get in touch or follow along with kind of the Emple journey, we're going to have a link to the show notes to that specific tool, where else and how would you encourage them…

[00:53:51] Talila Kroy: They can email me to [email protected] or go to www.Emple.com.au. Very welcome to, we are quite passionate about helping business owners. We feel like all the good things in the world come from the creativity of entrepreneurs and Founders. We're also very big in social purpose Founders. So Founders that are trying to realise a vision, it takes a lot of passion to start a business. We're here to help and very, very willing to assist you without requirements of return, shall we say? So, we'll give you a bit of insight wherever we can. 

[00:54:28] Sean Steele: Lovely. Thank you so much Talila and I look forward to our next conversation when we go up to the front of the process and unpack your sort of assessment model, and then what do you now look for when you're going, you got this stuff in place, how do you now go out and find a salesperson to do a good job of sifting through the professional interviewers that you were going to come up against, which salespeople…

[00:54:47] Talila Kroy: Salespeople can do good talking. That's right.

[00:54:50] Sean Steele: They are good talkers and doesn't mean they can do anything afterwards. So, there's some art in here as well. Fabulous. All right. Well, I look forward to that conversation. Thanks so much for your time, Talila.

[00:55:01] Talila Kroy: My pleasure.