Coffee Break with Jake

Do I hire an installer first or a salesperson first, right? Because I can't afford to do both. Oftentimes, what I hear from dealers is that the reason they haven't hired a salesperson is because they haven't figured out how to clone themselves yet.

I mean, you're going to invest all this money in somebody, bring them in, whether they have experience in our industry or not. You're going to invest time, you're going to invest money, you're going to have to pay the person. And the first thing is, can I do that?

He's been the salesman that's been there for the longest, or he's been the salesman that sells the most. And then you make that guy the sales manager. And like, it's the worst.

Like, maybe it's not, but so many times it is, right? You're failing right away because you're going to assume that this person is going to self-motivate. They're going to go find what you want them to find and all these other things.

All right Well good morning and welcome to Coffee Break with Jake For those of you that are new to the call we have this call every Friday at 11 a And the purpose of the call is to bring together folks from all over the industry to share best practices, to learn about opportunities, to talk about some of the challenges that we're facing. And in full disclosure, I host this call every week selfishly because I want to pick your brains. The most important things I know I've learned from other people.

And so I love to take the opportunity to pick your brains and to pick the brains of some of our guests, of our experts that join us. And this week, I'm especially excited to be joined by my friend and well-known industry consultant, Robert Few. I will give a little intro for those of you that don't know Robert.

And then, Robert, I'll have you tell us a little bit about yourself as well. Robert Few is the managing partner of the Connection Exchange, TCX, a boutique consulting firm that helps security, fire, AV, and low integration companies grow profitably and operate more efficiently With a career built on turning around underperforming operations and building scalable high teams Robert brings practical been insight to every engagement Before founding TCX, Robert designed and rolled out the operational playbook for one of the largest cable MSOs, transforming retention, customer experience, and regulatory response processes. There's big words in here.

I'm struggling. Prior to his role at Time Warner Cable, now Charter Communications, Robert founded Legacy Security Services alongside his brother. Earlier, he served as vice president of Criticom International, now CMS.

I was just there actually yesterday. He led three monitoring centers, grew the dealer base from 350,000 to over 800,000 accounts, and consistently raised service level standards while managing more than 350 team Thank you under 40 and receive the Electronic Security Association 2018 Sarah E Jackson Memorial Award When he not helping integrators build better businesses you find Robert connecting people and ideas because he genuinely believes the right relationships change everything. I also want to let you guys know I've personally worked with Robert for several years and really happy to say that during that time we grew tremendously and Robert not only worked very closely with me, but also with my team.

And so, Robert, I want to thank you for that. I do want to point out, though, that the Robert that I've just described is not the same Robert that's in my texting group. That Robert seems a lot less serious.

So, Robert, tell us a little bit about yourself before we kick things off and start talking about sales. Well, first rule of a text chat is we don't talk about text chat. Second coolest thing is you mentioned the Sarah Jackson Award, and I don't know who wrote that intro, but awesome.

Great. I got to put that in print. But so cool.

Angela White's here. She is the person who handed me that trophy. Still one of the greatest honors of my life.

So Angela, thanks for joining today. Yeah, I grew up in this industry. I am the son of an alarm installer who turned to be a monster guy.

And I've worked with, through monitoring and other things, hundreds, if not thousands of dealers. You know, for any of the monitoring people that are on this call, and I see a bunch of you, you all know, like, it's hard to get an integrator to switch central stations. But if we can work with everyone that we have to get them to get bigger, faster, and stronger, we grow.

So, you know, we grow, you grow, kind of thing. I always say that distribution is hard, but if I die and go to hell, I'll be a central station monitor, like a sales rep selling for a central station because I know we've got some on the call, guys. You've got the hardest job in this.

Absolutely. So, you know, kudos to you. So, yeah, I mean, but thanks for the intro, Jake.

It's been a pleasure to learn from you, to work with you, to work with your team. So thank you for that. Awesome.

Well, we're glad to have you here. Guys, those of you that know me, I'm the son of a door-to-door alarm salesman who now owns an alarm company. And so sales has always been very near and dear to my heart.

And one of the things I found is that there are folks in this business that start in this business that are generally either technicians or salespeople And then in order to scale they have to kind of put on this third hat which is manager. And that's where things get a little bit dicey, right? There's probably some folks on this call that are the owner and the primary salesperson for their company.

And they may have great success with that. But then where they struggle is, it's really hard to build out their sales team and to scale it from there. So I brought Robert on.

Not only has Robert worked with me, but he's also worked with a number of our mutual dealer partners, specifically as it relates to sales, creating programs and accountability. So, Robert, first of all, today is about building a sales strategy. My goal is that the folks that are on this call are going to build a strategy for going out and creating a sales program for their company, right?

Whether that's what they're existing folks and turning them into salespeople or whether that's with hiring new folks. And so I just like to understand in working with your clients what are some of the biggest challenges that you find that holding dealers back from hiring salespeople or after hiring salespeople from retaining them You know, I mean, actually, the first thing is just fear, right? I mean, you're going to invest all this money in somebody, bring them in, whether they have experience in our industry or not.

You're going to invest time and invest money. You're going to have to pay the person. And the first thing is, can I do that?

You know, the biggest question that we hear a lot of is, do I hire an installer first or a salesperson first, right? Because I can't afford to do both. You know, I always leave with sales because, you know, there's enough support in this industry that if you get behind on scheduling, you can help.

But I would say fear. You know, you're looking at, you know, probably a minimum of, you know, $75,000 for a sales guy, you know, between his base and, you know, a loaded employee cost. And that's a lot of money if there's no production coming in.

Hey I want to stop you right there And folks that are on the call if that resonates with you this idea of being fearful of hiring a salesperson whether you not done it before and this would be the first time or whether you done it before and had a bad experience If you would throw into the chat the thing that scares you the most about hiring your next salesperson and Robert and I continue on with this conversation. Yeah. Because it'd be great to hear from you guys where your choking point is.

On that said, once they're hired, so many people that I've talked to, we're a very caring industry. when we get people that we like, we want to keep them hired. We don't always hold them accountable, right? So the biggest takeaway from bringing on a sales team or even working with your existing sales team today should be setting the right expectations and holding people accountable.

That'll be the kind of the, that's always the mantra in my head when I'm talking to different companies. I want to, I want to expand on that because we talk about setting expectations and then holding people accountable. And then oftentimes what I hear from dealers is that the reason they haven't hired a salesperson is because they haven't figured out how to clone themselves yet.

And I think that's I think what it speaks to is kind of the easy button of I don't want to outline. I don't want to outline what my expectations are. And and I don't want to create systems for accountability.

I just want another me that can operate independently without being managed and can just do whatever they want to do. And when they do it, it's going to be right. Right.

And so, you know, how do you how do you what do you recommend to dealers that maybe they hired somebody and they didn't do things the way that they wanted it to be done? And how do you kind of set that up from the start to be successful? So that like, you know, what do you recommend they do to set these expectations?

I mean, pricing schedules, you know, an actual defined sales. What do you recommend to them to make sure it's successful from the start? You know, that's usually their biggest failure too, right?

We want to clone ourselves. I mean, that's impossible, right? They don't have the same background.

They don't have the same upbringing. They don't have the same work ethic. At the end of the day, they don't have the same responsibility in the P&L.

So as far as expectations goes you got to set them up for success You know they they don know what you sell right away even if they come from a competitor So you have to take that time to train them to talk to them about what you are selling what those look like, building out packages, right? You don't have to have kits that you sell, although many of you do, but you have to show them how to do it. I was just speaking with a sales guy this week.

He says, well, I spend so much time trying to build out my own packages. That will make him successful going forward and shorten the lead time. but as the business owners, you have to do that ahead of time or work with them to do that. As far as the next thing goes is once they know your price and they know the products, that's a piece of the puzzle.

The next is they need to know how much they need to sell every month, right? So on average, the people I'm working with, the quota for a residential SMB sales guy is typically about $30,000 a month in upfront sales and somewhere around $400 to $600 in RMR. Once they know that, they can start backing into that and say, well, if I have an average sale of this is how many I have to hit The other side that we always fall down not always but that often falls down is and Shannon on this call and she disagrees with me all the time is you have to at least in the beginning Oh she right Just for the record I know she right Yeah Yeah Everybody disregard what I'm about to say.

And that is you have to help them manage that pipeline, right? For new salespeople, they've got to get out and do the work. If they're not out there knocking indoors, um, joining, uh, networking groups and so forth, they're never going to get the chance to sell.

You're only going to generate so many leads off your, your reputation, your marketing and whatever else. So you have to do that. And for a lot of people, they haven't always been held to that task.

So you have, it's a teachable event, um, that you just have a quick cuddle, you know, twice a week, 15 minutes, tell me what you're working on. What do you got booked out? Where you're going, those types of things.

And we can talk about meetings, you know, after this, but you have to set them up for success. A lot of us in that whole mentality of, I just want to clone myself you failing right away because you going to assume that this person going to self They going to go find what you want them to find and all these other things And it just like an installer or an operations person inside You have to go in zero assumptions and teach from the bottom up. I think that it's a combination.

So I'm going to say that you and Shannon are both right on this, right? You do have to have salespeople that can be responsible for and manage their pipeline, right? They build pipeline, they manage their pipeline, they're held accountable on it.

But I also think, you know, as a sales manager, you need to take time to actually go through and review that pipeline with them and understand what they're working on, what might be slowing things down. I will tell you this, I find that one of the biggest paths or one of the biggest challenges to hiring salespeople for for most of our dealers is that they don't have clear pricing structure. You know, that that if somebody wants to quote Miss Jones on smoke detectors in her house, that they have to call the boss to get pricing for this, that they don't even and have a price book in place.

Guys, if you have a price book, and I use price book because, you know, I guess I'm old school in that respect. Like I'm thinking actual pricing in a book where you could go through and look at it. If you have a price book, would you just raise your hand for us and let me know that your salespeople have a price book that they can go to and they can find it.

And then I would ask for a lot of you to ask yourself, how many times you as the owner are getting the call for approvals and concessions and deviations from that price book. And you don't have to raise your hands. You could lower them.

I know that a lot of you, whether you think that you have pricing in place or not, you do still have bottlenecks to where salespeople are calling and asking for approval for concessions, whether it's to match a competitor or to get to a target budget for your customer. Robert what we ended up having to do and maybe you could kind of speak to this we have standardized pricing schedules And then we have a really streamlined process for deviating from those prices so that we are watching margin and we got guardrails in place. But I pay my salespeople on gross dollars because I know we have those guardrails in place to keep the margin where it needs to be.

Can you speak to, if we could just go right into the nuts and bolts of pricing. How do you recommend, you're talking about packages, where should dealers start with putting together these packages and these pricing schedules and what data do you recommend that they look at to make sure that that pricing is rational? Sure.

I mean, what you want to try to avoid is the trip to the car dealership, right? We go in a car, we say, we have four or five trips back to the finance manager to get the price that you walk out the door with. It loses confidence in the sales guy.

It loses confidence in your buying experience. So it's your point about guardrails If you selling a retail package which has got a couple cameras a door lock and some points of contact say that a package to the client The salesperson that selling that needs to know that they got grace on either side If they feel like they can get $55,000, $6,000 for it, they can push it. If the customer is really pushing back hard, there's a percentage on the bottom side that they can pull off of that.

And the same thing with the RMR, right? I mean, if we go out there and we say we want our average RMR to be $60, you know, on average, that's what they should be hitting a month. You have to, you, the business owner, the sales manager have to set that guardrail ahead of time.

What you don't want to do is hold on, let me call my manager and see if I can get that. Right. That might be a tactic for some old school salespeople on here.

I think I saw Tom Kamara out there, you know, where he calls and says, just pretend to be on the phone, but he already knows the guardrail. just so it feels like you're getting a higher touch on the customer side, but it shouldn't be your default, right? So if I'm going in to sell something, I want to be able to be confident enough that if I need to cut the price and skim off the bottom a little bit I know where I can go And as a sales manager you have to be okay with that to a point But if you say you can discount 15 in every sale is that discount 15%? That's a salesperson issue, not a customer issue.

So you have to watch that. Yeah. I think that human nature is to go the path of least resistance, right?

And so it's the same reason why we see some sales reps just sell basic packages every single time, right? Because they know I can close a $300 system, you know, nine times out of 10. But as soon as I start adding additional devices, my close rate is a little bit different.

I get a little bit nervous about it. And so I think that's an important point. I want to go real quick to one of the questions on here from Zach and guys, I'll try to get to some of these questions throughout the call.

But Zach asks about thoughts on letting salespeople have liberty to set prices, but earning commission based on profit. I want to I want to throw some my quick thought on this, but then I want your expert opinion and Guys, disclaimer, I bring really smart people on this call because my advice to you is is not is. Well, I'm not Robert, but I want to give you my thoughts on this anyways.

Zachary, I think that the challenge sometimes is that you might have salespeople that are primarily focused only on their commission. And and as a business, pricing is a lever. It's not pricing is a lever that you that you use to increase how much business you have or to decrease how much business you have.

And I think that a lot of times we had a really great John Tanner was on the call a while back. We're talking about, you know, kind of using pricing as a lever. You just want to be careful because if you have somebody, you know, a sales rep that's independently pulling that lever any which way they want, you know, that's that could cause challenges. for your schedule and your workload.

And Robert I let you maybe give us some more insightful thoughts on giving salespeople liberty to kind of set pricing where they want Yeah I think that first of all when you if you even thinking about that you hopefully have a seasoned salesperson that's been with you and has delivered for you in a while, knows your company, knows your, your, your, you know, kind of your financials. And it's probably more in a, in a specific area. You know, if you're, if you've got your regular sales reps that are out there are selling what you sell, right?

So whether that's intrusion, access, video, or fire, or hopefully all commercial and residential, but you have this person who kind of sits on top and he sells the enterprise. Probably he's, he's got more, he or she have more insight in the voice in that than somebody who's just hitting the street selling, you know, you know, a strip mall or, you know, this neighborhood. So really you got to qualify that salesperson first.

Obviously everybody that's on this call has the liberty to do whatever they want to take any of this advice or not, because it's different for every company. But that's a tough one. I mean when you hand over the reins like that you the one that going to have to eat it if it comes out under I mean when you add the labor or you know one of the biggest things you know we always talk about the sales operations dynamic and sales guy goes in and says, all right, here it is.

It should take you four hours. Installer goes in and says, all these vols are concrete. It's a two day job.

Right. And you just stripped all the margin out of it. So you got to be careful in how you set that up.

And I want to just talk about the other side of the other side of the equation here, because we talk about pricing to customers and pricing with customers impacts whether or not they buy. Right. But then compensation to salespeople on the back end.

Right. So so sometimes we see salespeople selling things that the company is not as focused on. Right.

Like maybe the company is focused on building RMR or maybe the The company is focused on adding these specific type of products or services to accounts. Can you talk about you know as you setting expectations with salespeople what about incentives to get them to do the thing that you want them to do maybe in the form of SPFs or commission structure That's a great point that you make because there are newer companies out there where it's all about bringing in installation revenue. They don't have enough accounts.

They don't have that security blanket of RMR yet. So they're very focused on getting that job. And that job then needs to cover all their costs and then make money on top of that.

As you mature as a business and you start saying, well, you know, you go from maybe, you know, a lot of companies on here have gone from I'm a contractor, subcontractor. Now I start keeping a few accounts. Now I start swinging that percentage over.

We start building. It's hard to say we're RMR focused from day one. But if you are in that beginning stage, obviously the biggest advice that anybody on this call is going to give you is you need to build your own RMR, right?

I mean, even if it's work at night, if you're subcontracting by day because you need to pay the light bill, that's a Southern thing, by the way, they say light bill, then you've got to focus on it that, right? So if, but what you need to do is start picking up a few jobs, you know, at night, on weekends, you have to figure that out because if you're just going to subcontract for the rest of your life, I've got a very good friend. That's what he does.

I've had a hundred conversations with him and that's when he eventually retires, it'll be anything he saved because there'll be nothing to sell. And that's the magic of the RMR, right? So as your company matures, you start being more RMR.

Back to your question, Jake, you know, selling, you know, kind of a basic commission program that I've heard and have talked about and whatever else is, you know, very simple. Always keep it as simple as possible. The commission, if the salesperson has to figure out what their commission is going to be and can't do it quickly, they're not going to sell it.

So, you know, a good starting point is, you know, a 10% on the upfront revenue and 3X RMR, right? It kind of promotes both sides of that. As you get into much larger sales and you get into service agreements and all those other wonderful things that might change a little bit But that a great place to start especially on where you selling the equipment customers buying it It encourages that salesperson to sell it for as much as they can sell it for, not to always cut it down.

And it preserves that RMR rate. I want to mention here, you know, Gage in the chat is talking about commercial projects. And a lot of times what we see is that on larger commercial projects, the sales reps are compensated based on the profit on the job, right?

Like they do job costing and figure out like, hey, how profitable is this job? And they make their money on the profit. One of the classic conflicts between salespeople and techs is, well, the salesperson undersold this.

And the salesperson says, well, you know, that technician is lazy, right? And he's not wanting to do what needs to get done. And if, you know, gosh, you know, I'll get up there and run that wire where it needs to go.

I don think any salesperson has ever actually said that part But but the the animosity is there And on a previous call we discussed about aligning incentives right So that salespeople know number one how much to estimate for labor because a company looks at the data to understand how long it typically takes to do that type of thing, right? So like if we're going to install this thing, this is how many labor hours are associated with it as a standard. And then they true up consistently, right?

Like, is this holding true over and over again? And then incentivizing their technicians to stay within labor budget, right? So it's like, hey, the tech has an incentive to get it done within budget.

How do you navigate bringing on new salespeople that don't have the benefit of having been in the industry for a long time, don't have a deep understanding of exactly what it means for you to get a camera here and a camera there and access control on this door how do you suggest managers or owners get that person up to speed so that they can quote those jobs correctly and not create you know lots and lots of tension or at least avoid some tension with the technicians You know, and the first part, how do you get them up to speed? training, right? So if you're hiring a salesperson on a commercial and even a regular residential, they got to go walk a few jobs with the installation manager and really learn what, how your company's doing that.

I have a great client. They're up in the Northeast. A couple of years ago brought me in and what we're talking about right this second is exactly the problem.

You had the sales team and the installation team just, you know, at each other's roads. What we built out there was, you know, a commission model based on a minimum gross margin, right? So if you fell below that, you had zero commission.

You had a great working, we created a great working environment between sales and operations so that they all both understood the other's concerns. We did a bunch of training, site walks, et cetera And then on the installation manager side, we created an incentive for him and his team that every job that came in over the stated margin, they would get a share of that. So now they're getting compensated to finish the job on time, stick to the right amount of labor hours. it created this partnership where when the salesperson would go out and sell this job before the final quote, the installation manager or somebody else that was going to be on that job would walk it as well.

Check walls, check heights. Do we need a lift? Do we need this or that?

To make sure that that was all in the final quote. Today they work seamlessly, right? There's still times where they fight, I'm sure.

But you've got to do as much of that as possible to alleviate all as many of those things as possible. Yeah. Especially on a commercial job, you have to stick to that margin.

Otherwise you'll be upside down the whole time. Yeah. Yeah.

And unfortunately I think as the as those jobs get more and more complex it not a matter of eating a you know a hundred dollar mistake It a matter of like taking a significant loss as a company Um and and we see some real challenges sometimes uh when there not enough oversight on on the project, um, and not enough planning. Uh, and, and I want to, I want to speak to that because one of the fears that folks have and guys, before we get to the end of the call, we're going to talk about where do I, where do I find salespeople? What's, you know, and, and how do we, how do we get them started?

We're going to go, we're going to get to that before the end of the call. But, but I want to address this fear. Somebody mentioned in the comments, uh, reputation, you know, damage to reputation and in our Facebook group, if you're not in our Facebook group, it's burglar alarms online.

I posed a similar question, uh, earlier this week about why people were afraid of hiring their next salesperson. This very same concern came up. How do you protect the brand?

Uh, Somebody said specifically they write bad contracts. They lie to the client to get the deal done. How do you prevent that?

Listen I mean it all comes down to hiring for culture right I mean you have to hire good people You have to set them up for success and training Are you saying all salespeople aren sleazebags Robert Not all of them Not all of them Just a few But I think that then you have to hold them accountable. Like if you see that someone's constantly writing a contract, you know, that's coming in short or, you know, just it's always pushing the lines, you've got to QC that, Right. So there are great programs out there that you will qualify those sales.

It's kind of like, you know, when you go into Target or wherever else, and there's the guy selling or Best Buy, and there's somebody there selling cell phone service, right? If you've ever bought it there, you're going to go to a third party verification company that's going to verify that you understand all the parts of the agreement. I'm not saying that you have to do that on every sale if you're a five person team, but you might have to.

And there's, there could be programs out there that will verify that for you just to make sure that you're not getting into any of these tactics that we read about, like in the trade magazines that, you know, this lawsuit, that lawsuit, you know, improper sales tactics You want your salespeople going out and selling the merits of your company because your reputation supersedes everybody else Yeah And I would also point out every deal should be done clearly in writing There should be a clear estimate that is approved and signed off on by the customer. There should be a contract, an unaltered contract that is signed by the customer. And there should be somebody at the office whose responsibility it is to make sure that all of that is done.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard of an alarm company owner going to sell their accounts. And then in the due diligence, they find that there were contracts where some of the terms are just crossed out, literally just crossed out on the important clauses in the contract. And so I think that part of it, Robert, and I guess I hope you'd agree, just making sure that you have a process in place to make sure that the written deal is written up properly.

Always verify that before it gets entered and sold. What would you recommend? Some of these folks that are thinking about hiring a salesperson, they know what they want want RMR.

But what I've found is they want RMR, they want profitable jobs. But what I've found is sometimes they're hesitant to recognize what the salesperson wants, which is, hey, I want to be able to make a living, right? And that if they're new to the industry or even just new to the company, there is some ramp up period that's involved.

What do you recommend to business owners and managers looking to hire salespeople, what percentage of their commission should be salary and what percentage commission? Yeah, and that's a tough one, right? So let's talk about ramp up period, right?

Expect nothing for the first 90 days, right? At the same time, I'm not, I haven't seen where commission only sales reps work great. Right I think that sometimes commission only kind of lends itself to bad contracts you know not clear expectations and stuff because they only compensated when it closes If you're doing that and you're doing that well, I'm here to learn, too.

Right. So that brings you into a base plus. Right.

So living wage for them. Yes, you want to keep your salespeople hungry. but um you know something that where they their mortgage get paid you know that type of stuff where they're not running around trying to chase a bad deal on average you know the the clients i work with their their sales people on a regular um traditional company it's somewhere around you know 18 to 25 an hour is what they're paid as a base and then they're highly uh they're commissioned whether it's in the 10 rule we talked earlier in the 3x rmr or something like that if you want to set that person up for success, it's going to cost you a little bit more upfront. I just looked at something with Steven Hayes.

He's on here with Workhorse hiring a salesperson. Like the first three months, we're paying you full out commission, right? So we going to make you hold the first three months because we want you focused here learning understanding the business growing starting to build your pipeline all those different things As they increase, you know, you say you've got your base every with your check and then you got 10%.

If you find that person that you're really buying into and they say, I can't make it work on this. You can go to a base commission plus a draw, right? And the way the draw works is it's prepaying that commission.

They don't get paid any commission until that draw is paid for. I've got a whole schedule that I can share with people if they wanted to look at that, where it kind of ties out to their expectations. The risk with a draw is you could take a bigger loss, right?

Because you're paying them more and they could go somewhere else. That's why I said it's got to be the right person. For all the other ones, doing that type of thing on just a base in the commission, the one thing I will tell you never to do, and Shannon just left the call because she's got to go pick up a kid but every job she ever left is because you constantly move the goalposts and shorten the compensation So if you have a great salesperson keep them a great salesperson Keep incentivizing them Yes, their expectations and their quotas should go up every year because their network gets healthier and all these other things.

But you shouldn't ever draw that out. The other thing is don't cap it, right? I mean, if I'm expected to sell $30,000 a month and I'm selling $50,000 a month, give me a kicker. like incentivized me to go above and beyond.

I laugh all the time. Many people on this call know Brent Ussery. He's a very good friend of mine and a business partner at TCX when we started.

We both worked for Time Warner Cable. I handled all the operations. He handled the sales.

Time Warner Cable said, you could sell 75,000 accounts a year. By June, he's sitting by his pool and I'm working all year, right? Because he was capped out.

Not another dollar to make. We sold 75,000 accounts in the first quarter and a half every year. And then he took the rest of the year, just manage nutrition.

Don't do that to your salespeople. Keep them, keep them hungry, keep them going, um, and incentivize them properly. And I think that having a kicker on top of their expectations is the way to do that Obviously, a little float there and then incentivize the top.

I want to talk about the sales rep that sits in the office and drinks coffee and eats donuts and goes out and does paperwork on company leads. Because I think that we all have to recognize that we've met that person, right? It's the guy that's literally being fed by the phone ringing at the office. that guy might be important actually he might have been with the company a long time he might be the guy that can go out and write up the deals but how do you differentiate compensation for that guy drinking coffee and eating donuts and waiting for the phone to ring versus the guy that's out there going and hunting for deals and and and is there a place for both of them you obviously i mean hunter hunter's a tough role right it's someone who's out there they're they're They're being the payment every day.

They working all their networking groups taking every lead they can And and they incentivized for that When you got more of that account manager role the person that taking in leads working the phones that type of stuff that's very important too. Now, the upfront sales dollars on both those guys is going to be totally different. Typically, the person that's sitting in the office is getting upgrades, existing customers, that type of stuff.

So they're not going to go out and sell a $15,000 upgrade on a traditional system. But the guy out there, the hunter is, right? So his 10% is going to be a lot higher.

For inside sales, if that's where you're going, if you weren't going there, then I'll correct it. But for an inside salesperson who's kind of the farmer in that relationship, they're attending to your existing accounts, looking for opportunities to upgrade the RMR or services. We just built out a great program for somebody on looking at all your commercial clients and kind of stack ranking them by service so that an inside rep knows what to call on, they're compensated less.

Maybe that's 5% and one XRMR, right? But they've got a higher base because they in that customer relationship role more where your hunter is out there hook them up bring them in hand them over make sure the job goes well and then move on Who gets the leads Say you have multiple salespeople and the phone rings and somebody wants to buy a system. Who gets those leads?

To your point about how many salespeople you have, it can go into rotation. It can go by territory, north, south, east, west. If it's coming from a client that I sold, I want it.

If I'm the sales guy and I built this relationship and they're calling in because, or somebody's calling in and saying, hey, Mrs. Smith told me to call you, she did a great experience. I look at Mrs.

Smith, I see the salesman was Robert Few. He gets that lead. Because it's building my book.

But if there's none of that, because customers don't always say that, it's just going to the next guy. Unless you have that internal team that takes all those leads and does them. Yeah.

What about tracking? Let's say you have two sales reps and one of those sales reps is really good. He's a closer and the other sales rep is getting by.

At what point do you stop At what point do you stop sending good leads to a bad sales rep In the old days you ever had an annual review and you walk into this thing feeling like you had a great year and turns out you're terrible. You have to meet with these people, with your people, anybody in your company, you need to meet with them often. They, everybody needs to know what they're doing, how they can get better.

Bad sales reps. I mean, they got to go. I mean, the point of the accountability statement I meant early was discounted first 90 days, right?

But you can get a good feel for somebody in 90 days on how hungry they're going to be. The next three months is really where they're going to make or break it. They may not hit their goals every month.

I worked with a sales rep for a year. It took him nine months to his goal. But man, was he awesome.

Was he trying everything? Was he doing all these different things? Was he taking classes and learning?

Heck yeah. So, and today he's awesome. The accountability side, if I know, if I have a review call every week that says, I need to hit $30,000 this month, every week I say, I go to them and I say, how many accounts did you put on this week?

Two. All right. Well, your minimum's two and a half.

So you got to make that up. How much wanted you bring in this week? I brought in $5,000.

Well, you are now at 6% to your goal and we've used 25% of the month. What are you stuck on? I have to help coach.

Can I help you close things? I got to really pour into that person. But if that's consistent and it's just a, if it's just not a laziness, but just a lack of desire to follow up on people or like, I'm a terrible salesman.

Like I'll talk to somebody and six months later, I'll call them like, so what do you think? If I'm not follow up on those leads, I'm not going to close them. Right.

Robert, don't tell everybody you're a terrible salesman. You're T-sized boss on sales. But I can manage the heck out of it.

So if it wasn't for great people like Jake and other clients, you know, I would have been out of business a long time ago. But seriously, I'm that guy, though. Right.

So if I'm that person, I'm just not following up on leads. I'm not closing them. It's time for me to go.

Thankfully, I write my own paycheck. So I think that what you're describing is really important because you could be a good salesperson and not be good. at hiring and managing sales people That right And I think that the challenge so many times we see even with our dealers they have a guy that he been the salesman that's been there for the longest, or he's been the salesman that sells the most. And then you make that guy the sales manager.

And it's the worst. Maybe it's not, but so many times it is, right? He's good at sales, but he's not good at managing people.

He's good at closing the deal, but he's not good at showing other people how to close a deal. You know, he's really he's really good at, you know, building pipeline, but he's not the guy that's going to be having, you know, constructive one on ones with his direct reports to help them kind of accelerate their pipeline and manage it. I would say that of the 78, 79 people on this call right now, raise your hand if you've taken your top salesperson, made them your sales manager, and then lost your sales team and your sales manager.

And, oh, by the way, didn't bring money yet. Some folks may be too embarrassed to admit this. But if you willing to admit it throw your hand up I see it Scott is honest Thank Thank you Scott for supporting that But yeah I think that that we always say that Well he got the most experience He crushes it.

He should be great at this. If he's crushing them, let them crush it. Like do not take that person out of their sales role.

That's his, his or his strength. Let them continue doing that. When you don't want to do is pull that person out and say, Hey, manage these three guys.

And now they're spending so much time, you know, with each of those salespeople, you know, trying to get them to do what they do, whether it's, you know, activity or, or, or, um, how they handle themselves in front of a client and they're not selling. So now you're losing revenue. They're not going to be happy in that job.

And then your other salespeople, it goes from that whole buddy, the boss thing where, Hey, we were out, you know, playing golf last week, laughing about this. And now you're telling me I can't play golf because I'm making my quota. There's that, that hesitance there.

So So all those things kind of add up to say, do you not do that? So Robert we started from I feel like we started from hey day one we going to get this sales rep some training We going to get them out in the field We going to put together a comp plan that makes sense aligns with what they need to make And it makes sense. It's something that's achievable.

We're going to give them a 90-day ramp-up period to make sure that they have some time to get their feet under them and be successful. Along the way, we're going to have check-ins with them. And we're going to keep them accountable.

But this is all assuming that we've gone out and found a sales rep to begin with. Right. And so I think some of the hesitation that we have, you know, with hiring salespeople is where do I start?

You know, somebody asked, where do I go out and find a salesperson? And I know my thoughts on this, but I'd love to hear yours. I think you'd look everywhere.

Whatever website you use to hire people, you're going to find the same people, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, whatever the others are. Really, when you put it on an ad for a salesperson, you're going to get, you know, 200 people looking for a sales job, right? You're going to discredit a bunch of those just because they don't make their appointments.

But every for a lot of you people that are locally incorporated, meaning you're not a super regional or a national company, everybody in your neighborhood is a prospect, right? The person checking out at a grocery store, the person you talk to on the phone, always be listening. I'm always listening.

I'm not hiring anybody here in Greenville. But in the past where I've met those people, I'm always giving them a business card and saying, if you're ever not happy here, if you ever want to come do this type of thing, I think you'd be great with that. And you start building that network as well.

When they're coming into you through LinkedIn or ZipRecruiter, whatever you may use, it's really just having that conversation. I'll tell you a couple things that I've learned over the last few years from people greater than me and smarter than me is don't let it just happen in your office. When you are interviewing candidates, walk them to their car.

What are they driving How do they keep that car If you walk up to a this goes for your technicians too If you walk them to their car to say goodbye one I think you get to know people a little bit better the second you get out of the doorframe of your own office they relax a little bit. But two, if there's just like food wrappers all over the car and whatever else, expect their work to be the same way. Somebody mentioned paperwork, right?

I mean, that's going to come that way. They're less likely to have clean notes in your CRM. By the way, use a CRM.

They're more likely to be rushing all the time, right? And I know that is so judgmental, but judgmental for a reason. You want that person to take care of themselves.

Like they may all come in well-dressed, but you walk out to the car and everything is messy. Discount that if they're wearing, if they're driving the minivan, they cart their kids all over the world with, because even for me, I would prefer my kids take an Uber because they trash the car, mostly shans off. But you know so you give a discount there right Because kids do not care But do that Once you get to that final decision if you not sure because this is a big investment take that person and their spouse to dinner Just go have dinner.

Open it up that way. You really get to learn somebody. Their other half gets to learn about you, right?

When we talk about the biggest fear, some people have said, like, you pour all your heart and money into this person and they walk away because they get a better offer. start building that relationship that that whole dinner meeting and bring your spouse right bring make it make it that type of thing don't just go have it one-on-one um bring the bring the other the the spice what's the plural spouses um is that foul on mouse and mice it's not spice it's bring your spice with you and i i think that's very impactful right and you get to learn about the whole family and and that will create that that relationship going forward it'll buy you some grace as you fumble through the onboarding process, right? I would say this. I would encourage you for any important hire to do that because I can guarantee that for most of you your least reliable most problematic employee has all kinds of challenges at home And your most reliable Johnny on the spot employee has got it together at home.

And I can't, I will not hire for a key position without meeting. And look, I mean, you hire single people, whatever. And then you don't know what you're getting into.

Who knows? They meet the love of their life and they're crazy and their productivity tanks. But I would tell you in all seriousness, Robert, I think that's really good advice.

I think I was just at a session last year and Ben Cornett said something similar. He used to always meet the spouse. And I think that's no doubt some really good advice.

Guys, here's what we've talked about. I just want to kind of recap. Number one, in order to hire salespeople, we're going to go out and look for them everywhere.

We're going to look for personality because it takes the right personality to sell. We can teach products. We can teach services.

Number two, once we hire these people, we're going to set up a compensation plan that makes sense for them. They can live on it. It's achievable.

We're going to give them a ramp up period, 90 day ramp up period, as Robert describes, to make sure that they've got some time to get some on the job training, to go walk some jobs and to give you time to work with them through one-on-ones and to hold them accountable and to coach them to success. The other thing that we're going to do is we're going to put together, if you're in residential or SMB, we're going to put together packages, as Robert describes, and pricing. We're going to put guardrails in place if we're not talking about just packages and simple systems, because we want to make sure that when they sell, we're going to get this to be a profitable job and we're going to align their incentives with the goals of the company.

If we want more RMR, we're going to focus our incentives more on RMR. If we want more upfront, you know, gross profit, we're going to focus incentives there. Robert, if anybody's on the call and they want to work with you to kind of put together some of these sales, a plan for onboarding salespeople on a comp plan and even to kind of work with and coach their salespeople and hold them accountable, how should they get in touch with you?

So I will put in, thank you, Jake. I will put in the comments, my email address, a couple of other things that you touched on about training. There are great training resources in our industry to train your salespeople to qualify them et cetera If anybody in Florida the week after next is the IEF convention and they got a sales track that going So I put a link to that as well They also have the Alarm Academy, which has got a couple of things in there.

Sales training to get salespeople how to sell in our industry. Or one of the greatest stories from that was made a sales guy take the fire 101 class, went out and sold a $45,000 fire job, right? Because he knew what to look for.

I'll put those links in the chat as well. If you have questions at all, send them over to me. I'm happy to help you guys.

You want to kind of look at some of those commission plans. I'm happy to do that. And I think that, you know, just leaning on people on this call, people in your network are great ways to kind of get through some of those challenges, but I'm here to help anybody that needs it.

Awesome. Well, Robert, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for the work that you've done with me and my team.

I appreciate you sharing your insights here today. For those of you that are on this call and you do business with us, I want to thank you for the opportunity to support you as your distributor. If you're on this call and you're like, hey, who the heck is this Jake guy?

What's he talking about? Where is he from? I own SS&SI.

We're an independent distributor. We'll print your logo Go for free on the products that you install. We'll sell them to you at the very same price you pay today, and we'll ship them for free.

We'd love to talk to you about that. If you don't do business with us, you're still welcome on this call. Please come every week.

One of these days, I'll sell you on doing business with us. But in the meantime, we're glad to have you here. And I want to thank all of you for being here today.

And I hope that you all have a great weekend. Thanks so much, Robert. You bet.

Thank you. Thank you.