How to Manage a Sales Team

Episode 895: How to Manage a Sales Team, with Adam Honig

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How to manage a sales team? Listen and learn from Adam Honig on the best ways on how to manage a sales team.

Adam Honig (HOE-nig) is the founder and CEO of Spiro (SPEAR-oh) Technologies, a CRM company focused on breathing new life into sales technology to help salespeople reach new heights. Adam has worked in the tech industry for over 25 years, building companies that deliver enterprise software and solutions, as well as developing award-winning teams across the globe. Together with Spiros founding team, Adam has developed tech solutions for over 300,000 salespeople in the past 10 years.

He’s learned invaluable lessons throughout his career, and today he shares his expertise on how to manage a sales team across the globe, empowering them to achieve success through targeted relationship-building, proven sales tactics, and inspired technologies.

how-to-manage-a-sales-team

What you will learn in this episode about how to manage a sales team:

How the movie “Her” inspired Adam to create Spiro
How Spiro helps business owners as it relates to how to manage a sales team then let it become more helpful and effective
The problem organizations encounter when it comes to having a sales team record all of the data for their leads and the process that leads to the sale
Ways that Spiro’s CRM eliminates the gaps in the sales team’s work with data to make them more effective
The gaps that Spiro has seen with the sales team’s communication with prospects and how Spiro solves them
What Adam believes is the best way that organizations can improve sales
The importance of collecting data and seeing how it can be used to elevate the sales team’s performance and achieve goals
How collecting all the data within your sales team can help you make better predictions for your business
Why it is important to make sure your customer service is a priority in your business and how it can create opportunities down the road
The skills a business owner needs to become an expert on how to manage a sales team
Why the tech industry has been leaning on creating specialized sales teams and how that is helping them grow their business
Ways Spiro helps in creating alerts for communicating with leads
Why connecting with leads on LinkedIn can be helping when creating and nurturing relationships with leads

Resources:

Website: spiro.ai
Resource for listeners: spiro.ai/onwardnation
Check out this advice from Spiro on how to manage a sales team

Additional Resources:

Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
Read more about how to manage a sales team and the 4 pillars that defines it

How to Manage a Sales Team: Full Episode Transcript

Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and how they scaled their business. In fact, my team at Predictive ROI, where we recently rebuilt our free resources section on PredictiveROI.com.

We’re continuing to rebuild and update and expand this resources library so you can download free practical and tactical guides. You know, we love to get tactical for everything from search engine optimization. How to use LinkedIn to generate leads and other success strategies that we have compiled from the incredible insights shared by our brilliant guests. So just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources, and whatever you request, we’ll send it right to your inbox.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Adam Honig’s Introduction

Now before we welcome today’s guest, Adam Honig, I want to share some additional context as to why I was so excited when Adam said yes and he accepted my invitation to join us here because Adam and his team are working on problems and solutions that we as business owners are dealing with every single day. How effective is our sales team?

I don’t know how many calls they are making. I don’t know. What are the metrics? What are the data points? What’s the rhythm? What’s the scorecard? What’s the dashboard that we should be using to evaluate effectiveness? I don’t know. What are some of the other pressing problems that business owners are facing? How to help our sales team become that much more effective.

That’s where Adam’s expertise lies. Like deep expertise. So when and then we’re in, this becomes really critical when we build and scale our company Onward Nation. And maybe today you are the point person for biz dev. But as your company grows and skills, and you add more team members, are you still going to be that active touchpoint every single day?

Maybe. Or do you need and maybe it’s not an either or, but do you need a system in place to make sure that those quality touchpoints are scaled appropriately? So your customers still have that same great experience that they used to have when the company was smaller, but they should still have, and they deserve to have as the company has grown and scaled.

So again, that’s why I was so excited when Adam said yes, so that we can talk about sales, so we can talk about automation. So we can talk about building and scaling. So we can talk about evaluating the sales team and expectations and standards and so forth. So without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Adam.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Adam’s Path and Journey

Thanks to you and super excited to be here.

Super excited to have you here, my friend. And so what you and your company are doing, Spiro Technologies is amazing. So before we dive into the questions I’d like to ask you to actually take us behind the curtain and tell us more about you. Tell us more about your company, your path and journey, and then we’ll dive in.

Sure. Sounds great. So Spiro, takes its name from the Latin words Ferrari and Ferrari means to breathe. And we’re attempting to breathe new life into a software category called CRM, which, frankly, people just really hate. And we want to make it better. Actually, we want to make it so much better. It disappears and turns into something else entirely.

And I can tell you a little bit about that. But this is my third company. One of the companies I started, we had a lot of success with another company, you know, that I started that actually didn’t turn out that well. And you know, I kind of learned the lessons from those companies to really start to start.

Spiro and the inspiration for Spiro literally came from the movies, if you will. And I can tell you a little bit about that if you think Onward Nation would like to know the origin a little bit. Sure. Love origin stories. Yes. So a big thing for me in my career has always been how do you, when you’re running a business and you’re the proprietor, you’re so focused on all the things that need to happen all of the time.

How do you get that time to kind of step away and get some perspective on things? So for me, going to the movies has always been super helpful for that. And so, after I sold my last business, it was a 150 person CRM consulting firm. I saw a movie called Her and it literally changed my life because it showed a vision of the future.

I don’t know if people know this movie anymore, but Joaquin Phoenix downloads the voice of Scarlett Johansson on his phone, and she helps him through his day and all this kind of stuff, and it’s super cool. Scarlett Johansson is not in the movie, just her voice. But while Queen Phoenix falls in love with her and whatnot.

And I got this inspiration about the future of CRM from this movie that showed that, you know, there was no data entry, there was no typing. You know, we could understand things without, you know, people having to write up long notes about it and stuff like that. And that’s kind of how the inspiration of Spiro came to me.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Solving Problems For Business Owners

Love it. And what I also love about why you built the business, why you’re so excited about where the business is going is because, like you and I talked about, in our pre-interview chat is that you’re focused on you and your team are focused on solving these pressing problems for business owners. And I think if I captured it correctly in my notes, you summed it up as, you know, being able to really, truly understand for a business owner to really, truly understand what he or she, what their sales team is doing, and then how they can be more helpful to the sales team, how they can be more helpful to help the sales team become more effective.

I think if I understood those two core problems, right, those pressing problems, is that right? Absolutely. I mean, I was talking with a business owner of a manufacturing company the other day, and I said to him, well, you know, how many calls is your sales team making today? Like, how do we make sure we improve that?

He said, you know, I just don’t know, you know, I’d like to know. But I can’t tell right now because they were, you know, their sales team was doing well, but he didn’t know what he could do to make it perform even better. And that’s the kind of problem that, you know, we’re really going after. So.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Gathering Information on How Business Owners Manage Their Sales

Okay, give us a and I say give us a guess here because I’m sure it’s a very educated guess. Or you probably even have the exact numbers, but like how often when you sit down with a business owner and his or her team, maybe the sales team themselves, like how often does that company actually have baselines?

Whether that’s numbers of calls, whether that’s closure rate, whether that’s proposal rate or acceptance rate, like how often do they actually have that type of data? Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. So, you know, we live in a world of this digital economy. And when we actually stop to look at, you know, what kind of metrics the companies capture about sales, it’s often very little.

So, half of our customers before they started working with Spiro had literally been using Microsoft Excel to manage their sales. And the information in Microsoft Excel was practically only the forecast with almost no other information there. So it’s not not uncommon for it to be very little. Okay. So why, aside from the lack of working with a company like yourselves, but like, why is that?

Why is there such poor capturing of that type of data? Well, if you think about it, you think about a typical company that’s born in the proprietary world selling, you know, her products and services and growing the business to the point where maybe they have additional sales people helping them. And so they can’t keep everything, you know, in their own head.

And now it’s time to maybe put a system in place to help manage all of that. Traditionally, the software that does that, this CRM technology, you know, it requires salespeople to literally type in what they’re doing. And every time they make a call, make a note of it. And you know what? What tends to happen in these kinds of situations is that either the salespeople become very good at taking notes, but not very good at selling, or they do continue to sell really well, but they have no idea what the process is that led to that sale.

And so you’re caught in this dilemma that, you know, are you going to try to take, you know, the salespeople who, you know, are somewhat challenging individuals by themselves? I’m a salesperson. So I can say that, you know, and try to fit them into a process. Or are you going to just let them do their thing?

And up until, you know, we created Spiro, there was really no way for a business owner to understand what was going on with their sales team, especially a field based sales team. Automatically without, you know, without them having to do the effort of logging the activity. And this is such a big thing. So, that’s really the core of the technology solution that we crack to kind of make Spiro work.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Making Big Strategy Decisions That Will Fix the Gaps

So, we’re just kind of the friction point because I know you guys are in these trenches every single day like where is that or why is there a friction point between, you know, a salesperson documenting, you know, their activity in the relationship and all of that and notes and then or completely going off the rails and sort of like going rogue and there’s no documentation like, why is that such a struggle?

And a friction point. Yeah. So I’m sure some, you know, members of Onward Nation or former salespeople and but for those who aren’t, you know, salespeople, you know, we’re often very independent and we get into sales because we like doing our own thing and like entering acting with customers and, you know, really kind of figuring out what the thing is that motivates them and seeing if our solution can kind of fit up with them.

And so that’s very different from the kind of person who likes to document things and keep things organized. And salespeople tend to be more on the creative spectrum that way. And so it’s just like a genetic thing that salespeople are not good at. You know, because we’re so focused on being in the moment, talking with you, Stephen, that we’re not taking a lot of notes.

It’s just, you know, it’s not our thing. So then to ask them and to say, hey, we want you to do something that’s counterculture roll. Their response might be, hey, I’m not good at it. It might be. Are you trying to control me? Do you think I’m not doing a good job? You know, why are you asking me these questions?

Like, suddenly now you got like, you know, this very paranoid salesperson sitting here looking at you across the table, and it’s not a lot of fun. I’m guilty of all of this, I think. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve said each of those throughout my career at one point or another. Absolutely, absolutely. So I think, from a Spiro perspective, the trick that, you know, we’ve tried to do is create a sales platform that doesn’t require the salesperson to do any of that.

You know, when they make a call, it makes a note of it for them. It writes up a little summary of what happened. It connects to their emails and can, like, automatically populate updates in Spiro, its own system, based upon what they’re doing. You know, they can have a voice conversation with it because it kind of acts like an assistant for them.

And so, you know, it’s often success in business, in my view, is made up of like big strategy decisions, but then filled in by like very small things and if we can eliminate a lot of these very small friction points that stop salespeople from, you know, showing what they’ve done, then that’s really a big win for the business owner.

And then if we can use the data to make the salespeople more effective by showing them the gaps in the things that they might not have done, then if we can make them more effective. And that’s, you know, bringing the two of those together is really the secret.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Friction Points

Okay. So let’s go down that path as well. I feel like I have just so many questions, like spinning out of control in my head to be able to to ask you, let’s talk about friction points.

Let’s also talk about some of the gaps, because, you know, my guess is whether a business owner is, you know, using a system or not using a system. They’re experiencing those friction points. So based on your experience, what are some of those? And I think maybe we talked about a couple of those, but are there other friction points that a sales team is either experiencing that a business owner ought to try to remove?

Well, let me ask you, you know, the audience, this hypothetical question which is, you know, how many times have you said to your salesperson, hey, did you follow up with staples? What’s going on with those guys? Like, this is like, as a sales leader, I ran a large sales organization. I felt like every day I was asking people to remember, remind them to follow up on the things that should be super obvious for them.

Right. And so one of the things that Spiro does automatically is, you know, based upon all the prospects that a salesperson is working with, it’s looking to see that they’ve done that follow up. And if it hasn’t, it nudges them and it says, hey, might be time to follow up with Staples. Here’s the guy’s phone number.

Let’s give him a call. You know, and literally like reminding people about the gaps in communication that they should be taking and it does a lot of things like after a meeting like, let’s say, you know, after this meeting, Stephen, that you and I are having, Spiro will send me an email and say, hey, how’d it go with Stephen?

And all I need to do is reply to that email and it’ll, you know, there the notes. There’s no like logging in or finding the right record or you know, whatever you need to do in a lot of software platforms. And so we try to make everything very conversational with the salesperson and we try to make the system proactively help them with all of those things really smartly.

Okay. So you just identified a few gaps in communication to whether that’s proactive in the follow up or you know, post meeting and whether that’s follow up or immediately after. What are some of the other gaps that you’re seeing in the sales process that either business owners and or their sales team are missing?

Well, so we always start the conversation with data collection because what I’ve learned in sales is that the only really way to improve sales for a company, make it better, make it stronger is to know what the benchmark is and to try to improve from there. And so one of the things that Spiro does right off the bat is it automatically captures the interactions, the phone calls, the emails, the appointments that salespeople have.

And then, you know, in our reporting package, you can literally chart that out against the team. And you can see, you know, if you have one sales person on the team, you can say, well, if they’re doing, you know, ten phone calls a day, you know what? What would it take them to get to 12 to 15 to 20, you know?

And so for me it’s about collecting the data not for its own sake, but how do we then use that to elevate performance. And if if, you know, in this hypothetical example, if a salesperson is kind of plateauing out at, you know, 25 calls per day, maybe that’s the time to start thinking about bringing on another salesperson, you know, and getting them up to the 25 point where, you know, they’re going to be super productive and you know, from running a business, of course, you know, what you need to do is you need to be always balancing off the opportunity ahead of you with the cost that you’re spending on it.

Right. And a lot of the businesses that we work with want to strike the right balance there and the data is the way to find it. Yeah, that really makes a lot of sense, especially if you’re collecting the right data. Going back to your example of if one salesperson is making 25 phone calls a day, you know that’s certainly obviously one metric.

And then being able to have the system downstream of realizing that 25 phone calls. And I’m making some assumptions here because obviously every industry is a little bit different. But, you know, 25 phone calls equals x number of appointments and or presentations maybe. And then maybe downstream from that it’s a presentation turned into an RFQ or RFP or perhaps a proposal.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Customer Success is the Goal

You know, whatever the next step might be. And then an acceptance rate and all of that. So, then being able to understand it obviously is not nice and clean and neat. As far as this cascading waterfall, there’s obviously chaos, you know, throughout that stream. But if 25 phone calls equals X or maybe a hundred phone calls equals x, then being able to put some sort of predictability into that, and then you know what the profitability is of that person and whether or not you can afford to scale the sales team.

Right. Absolutely. And then, you know, just taking it one step further, that should then give you visibility into future hiring. You know, if you’re in a services business and you know how many people you need to bring on to service your clients, it’ll give you a view into that. You know, we have a lot of manufacturing clients who, you know, build to their forecast, you know, and so it makes the forecast that much more accurate.

So it can go in a whole bunch of different ways. And I know we’re kind of talking about increasing sales or increases in sales productivity. But it’s the same thing for customer satisfaction. And this is something that’s, you know, super important to me. And I know, you know, a lot of business owners are, you know, making sure that, you know, the team is responding to people, you know, again, not not just for sales, but for customer success and making sure that, you know, the referral base of business.

A lot of companies have kind of fed into those sales teams because the sales teams are trusted and known to be, you know, able to get back to people based upon whatever the situation is. And I was telling you, you know, a little bit before we got going on one of our customers is an alarm company and they service alarms, all around the greater Boston area, which is where I live.

And, you know, this business owner, his number one goal is customer satisfaction, even before sales or anything else, because he knows that if he serves the customers really well, the business will keep growing based upon the word of mouth referrals. And so that’s his thing. And an alarm company meaning like home security, that kind of thing.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Retaining Customers

Yeah, exactly. Okay. And so so there, you know, customer retention I mean, it’s always important, especially in like a monthly recurring revenue model where, you know, if you can maintain the customer retention rate, then that’s going to be a solid, book of business or solid revenue stream that you can build upon after that. Right. But if there’s holes in the boat, that becomes a very problematic business model, right?

It does. Matter of fact, the biggest hole in this business is the boat, is when people move, right? Oh, sure. You know, I never I wouldn’t have thought that in the Massachusetts area, about 7% of people seem to move every year. And so that’s an automatic, you know, gap, if you will, in their business.

Now, you know, one of the things that, you know, they were able to identify by really mapping out the data is to say, well, when somebody moves, it actually creates two business opportunities for us, right? There’s obviously the new person who’s moving into the house and then there’s the person, the new house that they’re going to be buying or, you know, some people move out of state or what have you.

But, you know, how do we so based upon that data once they knew that was 7%, they said, let’s put a referral in place for the homeowner who’s moving out to help the new homeowner get everything set up because they’re going to be, you know, a great point of contact for those new people that everything that’s going on within that home, etc..

And that turned out to be, you know, very, very successful for this company. And that’s not an Excel sheet, right? No. Right. No, that’s a really smart, predictable system. You know, when you’re looking at 7% of our customers are going to be moving. Obviously you don’t know, at the beginning of the year, which 7% that is.

But being able to build strategy around that, whether that’s through the referral program or whatever, it’s just really smart to be able to do that. Right. And again, you know, like a lot of these things that help businesses grow, you know, just looking at the data and coming up with solutions and testing them out, you know, and if you have a way of measuring the success of the tests that you do, you know, then you can know where to invest more money. Love that. That is so very good.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Mastering Skills for Managing a Sales Team

Okay. So let’s think about this. Let’s come at this from a skills perspective like a business owner skills perspective. And as far as managing a sales team. So let’s say that, Onward Nation business owners, they’ve got a sales team, maybe a sales person or two, or maybe it’s four or 5 or 6.

So from a skills perspective, for the owner, is there a particular skill based on your experience that you think business owners need to master in order to properly manage a sales team? It’s really interesting what you have said and actually, I think you kind of gave the same answer that I would a couple minutes ago, but I think I understand the sales. People think about sales is like, oh, it’s something where we go convince somebody of something because we’ve that spinny pinwheel thing that we bring out and close the deal.

Right. Like, but it’s not like that at all. Like sales. It’s more like math, you know, it’s like you want some sales amount at the end of the day, let’s, you know, and it’s X, right. And so you know exactly what you said. If you want to have sales in X, you probably need to put out a multiple of X in proposals or quotes or whatever the form of that is that you give to the customer.

Right. And so tracking the number of proposals, the success rate of those proposals, how many meetings or calls does it take us to get to a proposal. So you can have a model of how that’s going to work, and then measure against the model? I think that’s the key to sales. Its sales is not about, you know, at the business owner level.

It’s not about convincing somebody of something. It’s understanding what the process is and fixing the gaps in the process. And if you have a salesperson who’s really great at one part of it, but not in another part, that’s fine. You just need to know where people’s strengths and weaknesses are so you can supplement that.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Delegating The Specialization of Sales to Your Team

One of the things that’s going on right now in the tech industry, which I think is very interesting and very applicable to lots of different businesses, is the specialization of sales.

So you have one group of people who are really good at creating opportunities for the business. And then you’ve got another group of people who are really good at understanding the right solution for that opportunity. And they’re the people who are going to, you know, close the deal and buy, you know, understanding, you know, with your team what they’re really good and bad at.

Based upon the numbers, you can kind of put them into the right buckets to make everything work really well. Okay. So that’s interesting. I’ve not heard of that model before. And so let’s go a little bit deeper there. So let me give this back to you to make sure that I’m understanding correctly. So it sounds like there’s a team of people.

So sales team as a whole, but there is a couple of specialists within the team who are like demand gen lead gen, like they kick all the stones, they find the opportunity and then once that’s identified, then there’s a different team that actually like uncovers the solution, maybe presents it kind of maybe carries it across the goal line.

Am I tracking with you? Absolutely. Absolutely. See, one of the other classic problems in sales, which is directly related to this is that, you know, we often feel like, oh, sales is really great. And then, oh, sales are really bad. And great. And the reason why is because you’re not consistently generating leads at the top of the funnel.

And so if it’s the person who’s generating the leads and also closing the deals, then she is essentially running from one side of the boat to the other all the time. And no wonder why it’s always out of whack. And so if you just had one person generally and one person, you know, seeing the deals through success, then that would be a much better way to organize things.

And two people doing the full cycle. Well, that makes so much sense. As you were saying that like, I literally got a picture in my head of a person running from one side of the boat, kind of essentially trying to pail water out of the boat, because sometimes that’s what it feels like, is that you’re trying to get water out of the boat because the boat is leaking and taking on water.

It’s like trying to do too many things. And the reality is we just do everything bad, right? Right. And then, you know, what’s super related to this is it’s very, there’s very good evidence to suggest that the quicker that you respond to a lead that comes to you, the higher the odds of you’re being successful with it.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Technologies That Help With Automation

I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it’s something like 50% of leads, that come in like whoever calls the lead first, you know, wins 50% of the time or something like that. And a lot of it has to do with nobody ever. They don’t actually get more than one call back when they’re researching buying something. So just being there, you know, I think was it Woody Allen who said, like, a lot of life is just being there or something like that?

Anyway, it’s kind of like that kind of thing. But at any rate, you know, imagine, you know, your lead is going to go to somebody who’s busy trying to, you know, finalize a big deal with a customer. I mean, they might get back to that lead in two days or something like that. But if there was a dedicated person who is responsible for responding to any sort of inbound leads that were coming and finding new opportunities, you can guarantee that the rate of those kinds of things is going to be much steadier than if you’re giving it to the lady who’s responsible for closing the deal.

Well, so this statistic, you know, really just kind of makes me clench my stomach a little bit because, you know, I’ve spent so much time with business owners who will say things. And I know, and I’m, I know you’ve heard things like this too, where it’s like, oh, we went to that trade show and oh, we got a big bucket of leads and oh, we got all this and it’s like, oh, okay.

Well, how productive was that? Yeah, I don’t know. We didn’t do anything with it. It’s like what I mean it’s like mining gold and then just throwing it away. But it happens all the time, doesn’t it? And it’s really unfortunate. Now we know this is not like a Spiro only thing, but one of the things that Spiro the product does is can help you respond faster by setting up some automations, both to respond literally, respond faster, and also to remind the sales team that they need to respond.

And you know, so no matter what kind of technology people are using to help with their sales processes. So I highly recommend that when a lead comes in, it creates an alert, you know, sends up a flag. I don’t know what it would do in other technologies, but in Spiro it would create an alert and say, hey, this person needs to be gotten back to, you know, and if you’ve got business cards, I sure hope you’ve got a product like Spiro that would scan them, you know, right at that point and make sure that you remember to follow up with all of them.

So that’s, you know, you don’t need Spiro to do that, but that’s definitely something that we do right out of the box. Yeah. Which makes so much sense. Right. Yeah, I like to call it the campfire effect. You know, whether you’re at an event or, whether it’s a trade show or a conference or something.

And there’s all these great conversations going on, and people are looking for resources and new ways to get to next levels. And they’ve invested a lot of time and effort and sometimes money to be at those types of things. And that’s where that is such a great environment for deals to be done. And then to drop all those balls afterwards is like, oh my gosh.

It’s like, why? Why even go? I mean, it’s such a missed opportunity. Not to not follow up and develop relationships, right? Absolutely. So, you know, at a minimum, you should be connecting with people on LinkedIn. Of course. You know, I find LinkedIn to be incredibly effective for staying in touch with people, you know, and that, you know, gives you a lot of view into like, what they’re interested in professionally as well as, you know, how you might be able to help them based upon what they’re doing there.

How to Manage a Sales Team: Most Influential Lesson from a Mentor

So let’s turn the spotlight onto, onto you. So sort of with an asterisk here though, because really it’s about a lesson that you learn from one of your mentors. So if you were to to think about the most influential lesson that you ever learned from one of your mentors, and that is still paying dividends today and still impactful to you today, what would that lesson be?

So my, right out of college, I worked for, MIT professor who was a crazy, brilliant guy. He got his PhD at 18, had a law degree, a PhD in engineering. Like, all this kind of crazy stuff. Super smart guy. And he was incredibly persuasive. And he was so persuasive that he couldn’t sell anything.

Because I’ll give you, you know. So we went and we were selling this project, at a very large greeting card company, if you will, and it was like a $50,000 project. We were selling them, and they were so excited, like they bought, like on the first meeting that we had. And we went back to our office and this professor said, you know what?

I think we’re selling them too low. Let’s go back at them with a half $1 million project. And I was like, oh. And we went back and we pitched them on the half million dollar project. And they were fine with it. They were still super excited. And then we went back to the office. He was like, yeah, I still think we’re selling it too short.

Oh, I’m so much bigger. And like, so we did this crazy multi-million dollar proposal. We hit them again and they said, you know what? You guys are crazy. We’re not going to be with anybody who’s as crazy as you. And we didn’t do any business with them. And I was just like, for me, it was such a crazy, like lesson to be this young person with this kind of famous academic guy trying to, like, just get.

It’s like being greedy, you know what I mean? And for me, you know, I’ve always kind of come away from that situation thinking I want to show value. I would rather sell the small deal that shows that we’re doing really well and, like, set up, you know, down the road to do more business with people. And that’s, you know, I guess I’m sort of an incrementalist, if you will, that way.

But that’s part of my personal philosophy. Well, but that actually kind of comes full circle here. When you and I first were in the green room and in preparing to start the recording, you said that to me. You said, Stephen, I like to incrementally improve things. And whether working with customers Onward Nation, whether working with your teams, I mean, removing the chaos of the situation and incrementally improving things over time, there’s always room for improvement, that’s how you build a successful business.

How to Manage a Sales Team: A Recap on the Conversation

That’s how you build successful client relationships. Right, Adam? I totally think so. I mean, it’s not like, you know, you just wake up and you’re Steve Jobs one day, right? I mean, you have to improve all of these things. And at some point that reaches a new level for sure. Yeah. This has been such a great, great conversation.

I feel like you took us behind the curtain at Spiro Technologies. Awesome. You took us into your sales philosophy. You really shined a light on this epidemic, this pervasive problem between business owners and their sales teams and how to make that incrementally better. This was super, super helpful. And you were exactly, the level of helpfulness was exactly what you and I were talking about in the green room.

So thank you very much for that. Before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, I know we covered a lot already, but any final advice? Anything you think we might have missed and then please do tell Onward Nation business owners. The best way to connect with you Adam?

How to Manage a Sales Team: Final Advice and How to Connect with Adam

Yeah, sure. So our you know, Spiro, you know, you can find information about Spiro, the company at Spiro.ai we use a lot of artificial intelligence to make the product work really well.

So that’s why we’re I. So that’s Spiro.ai. We’ve also put up a special page, Stephen, on the Spiro website for Onward Nation. So that’s, Spiro.ai/OnwardNation. And we publish a bi-weekly blog about very practical sales tips, you know, like, literally like, okay, better ways to start the phone conversation when you get on the phone with a customer or, you know, the reasons why you should always confirm your upcoming sales calls.

It’s not like highfalutin, like fancy pants kind of stuff. It’s all like very practical advice. And you can sign up for our blog. We actually wrote an ebook with our 44 best you know, pieces of sale and sales advice you can download there as well. So, you know, if that’s just, you know, some of the content that we produce to help people bridge that gap.

If you will. Awesome. Did you really just say high falutin? I love that word. It’s a great word. That is awesome. So all joking aside, thank you for the resources. Thank you for being so generous with your knowledge. And in Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and relisten to Adam’s words of wisdom.

And I sure hope that you do. The key is to take what he so generously shares with you the strategies, the tactics, the process, all of the incremental improvements. Take those and apply those into your business right away and accelerate your results. And Adam, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And thank you again for saying yes.

Thank you for coming on to the show and being our mentor and our guide to help us move our businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much, Adam. Yeah. My pleasure.

This episode is complete. So head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

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