Strategies For Success: How To Build A High-Performing Sales Team With Claire Chandler [Episode 112]

Strategies For Success: How To Build A High-Performing Sales Team With Claire Chandler

I’ve got a great guest for you. Her name is Claire Chandler. She’s at ClaireChandler.net. She’s going to tell you what she does at the beginning of this, but we are talking about how to align a high-performing sales team, how you can create one, what you should and shouldn’t do, and how you link strategy, clarity, process, and application to this. without further ado, let’s go talk to Claire.

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Claire, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

It’s great to be here, Doug. Thanks for having me.

I’m so happy to have you here because we’re doing something on one of my favorite subjects about how to build an aligned high-performance sales team. You’re an expert at doing this by linking leadership strategy and people to it. Why don’t we jump right in? Before we go, why don’t you tell people what you do so everybody is set and informed?

I call myself a leadership therapist. I’m not a licensed therapist, although I play one in Corporate America. I spent the majority of my earlier career in corporate. Now I serve as executive leadership at two companies and two executives in startup and growing companies, as well as in established mature organizations, primarily through an HR lens. I do have a background in HR from my corporate days but through that higher lens of getting leaders and their teams to work together more effectively in less time and with less cultural resistance so that they accelerate their growth journey.

Thank you. She can be found at ClaireChandler.net. Those of you who planned on having some business therapy and paying for it, thank goodness you don’t have to because you’re tuning into this. Everyone seems to have their own definition of what is a high-performing sales team. A high-performing team in general, but high-performing sales teams. I’ll talk to some owners and they’re like, “These people can close like a freight train.” They’ll then talk to others that are like, “These people can prospect or they are an army going into battle.” There are all of these things. What’s your definition of a high-performing sales team?

For me, the key term there is team. I’m going to pick on sales folks for a second because I know that they’re tuning in so perk up your ears. The problem with a lot of organizations that either hire a sales force or are built primarily to be a sales force is they go out and they recruit the rockstars. Probably people are thinking, “Isn’t that what we want? We want these individual rockstars.” The problem is if they can’t work together with either their fellow sales folks or God forbid, the people who have to implement and deliver on what they have sold, then they are set up for failure.

I’ve seen a lot of companies, especially the smaller ones for reasons that I can go into, who make the mistake of saying, “I’ve got to get the salesforce right, so I’m going to go out and hire rockstars, the ones who can close deals and prospect like nothing.” It’s all those different definitions you touched upon. They bring them into their organization and not only do they fail, but they bring the organization to their knees because they don’t know how to work as a team. To me, the number one metric is whether they can bring in deals that are aligned with what the team can deliver and are aligned with where the company is trying to grow.

If not, we’re going to see a lot of traumatic events happen within that organization. That’s what I’m hearing.

It’s hugely traumatic, especially in smaller organizations. It’s been my experience that the ripple effect of a bad hire, a bad decision, a bad investment, or even a delayed decision is greater in a smaller organization than in a large one. I’m sure you intuitively get that. The bigger organizations are built to have a little bit of that and they can absorb a one-off bad hire, bad decision, or a bad investment. For a smaller company or a startup, somebody who is hiring their very first person, their very first sales team, etc., it is so mission critical that they get that right because getting it wrong can literally knock you out of business.

I’m going to go on the other side of this and say that it’s not always the salesperson, but it actually is the leadership of the company who made the bad hire. I experienced this recently when somebody hired a sales team. I told them I don’t think they were ready for a sales team. They weren’t set up for a sales team, but they went forth and did it anyways. It’s a smaller company as you’re talking about, and it created so much disruption and infighting within the business.

They’ve got to pull the sales team out of there because it isn’t going to work but the executive team isn’t showing up. They’re not training the team and not giving the team what they need. By nature, high-performing salespeople and certainly sales teams, if they don’t have the answers, they want to make money. They’re going to make it up as they go along if they don’t have the information given to them or at all in this case. I’d love to hear your response on that one. Is it always the sales team or is it also the leadership?

You’re absolutely correct. It starts with leadership. For those of your audience, and I know for me personally, I do my own sales and marketing. In times when I am not crystal clear on who it is that I want to work with or what it is that I want to help them solve, I find that my sales suffer from that. I’m not having as dialed-in on conversations, my marketing is off target, or I’m attracting good payers but bad clients. When you amplify that and you say, “I’m going to build a sales team around me,” you’re 100% clear.

If the leadership that brings that team in is not crystal clear on what they want them to sell, how they want them to sell, what good and successful looks like, what’s the ideal client, what’s the ideal deal terms, how are we going to bring that in, and how are we going to execute what we’ve promised, it absolutely starts with leadership. I like to blame the leader because they have the most power to change what they’re doing and to be more directly involved in clarifying expectations.

I’ll go back now to the sales team itself because there are situations where people are hired. They’re hiring the wrong person or they’re hiring a team of people and you know that one person on the team isn’t in sync with the other people, and it’s havoc. The worst I’ve ever seen was they had one salesperson that was taking down the company on the team. He’s the best friend of the CEO. It is a $50 million company. I went to the CEO and I said, “You got to remove this person.” He absolutely refused.

Isn’t that a fun conversation when you have to be the guy to go tell him that you got to fire your buddy? That’s fun times.

He had an 82% turnover of his employee base every year and the majority of people said, “It’s this guy. That’s why I left.” I think it’s coming. I can only imagine the hate mail or the hate post I’m going to get off this conversation. The reality is when we have a bad seed in any part of a sales team, we got to remove that seed or the rest of the crop is not going to grow up healthy. It’s just the way it is.

What I’ve seen, and Claire maybe you’ve seen this too, is when we get somebody in there like the person who will never pass the ball or never pass the puck in hockey to the other players, what ends up happening is the other team members cut back on working. They’ll isolate themselves so they’ll isolate this whole process and then they go to the minimum acceptable performance. What ends up happening is the overall sales of the organization suffer. Now they’ve got some other money troubles that are going through forward.

You mentioned hockey. I come from a hockey family and I’m a big fan of the movie Miracle, which you know the story of the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team. There’s a line in there from Kurt Russell who plays the legendary coach Herb Brooks. When he is looking at the players, he wants to assemble onto this team in pursuit of the Olympic gold. He said, “I’m not looking for the best players. I’m looking for the right ones.”

That always stuck with me and I draw upon that quite a bit when I work with leadership teams and just teams in general. It’s not about assembling the individual rockstars and putting them on the same team, and then being shocked when they don’t get along, don’t collaborate, don’t know how to pass the puck, how to share the victory, and also share the accountability when the numbers aren’t good. That’s such an important mantra for leaders of any function, especially for sales teams.

We’ve established that doesn’t work by doing that. How do we go about the next step of that? How do we link strategy with that? Let’s say that we agree we’re not going to do that. We now need to link strategy and process to that. What’s the next step?

The first one is to have a strategy. That feels obvious, but there are a lot of organizations that say, “We need to grow. We need to scale. Therefore, we’re going to have a sales team.” They’re going to go out and they’re going to get a sales team. I’m sure that has been your experience even more than mine, when you do that and you, pardon me, go off half-cocked and you assemble a team for the wrong reasons or at least you don’t clarify what their focus needs to be, you are setting your money on fire and not in a good way. You’re not blazing the trail. You’re burning the house down.

The very first thing is even before you build out your strategy, it is getting clear what it is that you’re going to be all about. This is as true for you adding a sales team or adding a salesperson as it is for any leader of any company. If you are not crystal clear about what you are in business to accomplish, you’re not going to be able to envision or map out a strategy that is going to get you closer to that goal. The strategy piece is absolutely imperative, but before you even go to that step, you’ve got to be crystal clear on what it is you were trying to accomplish in the first place.

The other thing too goes back to your point, and I’m agreeing with you. It’s that from the highest leadership levels, there has to be that clarity. If there is a leadership team, there has to be alignment across the board. Another pet peeve of mine is when companies all have executives call me up and say, “I can’t get my team, my sales team, my leadership team, and my operations team to collaborate.” I always say the same thing. I say, “How do you incentivize them?” They say, “What do you mean?” I say, “Are you incentivizing them based on their achievement of shared goals or individual targets?” There’s always that silence right after I ask the question because they know the answer to that.

They incentivize them based on their vertical, function, region, division, sales pipeline, or whatever. While that’s important for simplicity’s sake, you can’t then turn around and wonder why they’re not going to collaborate. If you don’t incentivize them to collaborate, they’re going to focus on what gets rewarded. If you truly want them to collaborate, and back to being granular about the sales team, or you want them to function better, you have to incentivize them around shared goals.

I love that. Shared goals or shared compensation on some level doesn’t mean we can’t have individuals.

On some level. It doesn’t have to be 100%.

Before you get into the strategy side, you talked about getting crystal clear on the outcomes of what we want. I have found that in organizations and businesses, sometimes it’s okay. What’s the truthful place we want to go versus, “We want to double sales this quarter” or whatever. What’s a step or process so somebody can get clarity in the vision, but be truthful versus honest? Honest being subjected and truthful being objective.

I love that you went there because this is another pitfall of a lot of organizations. They have these ambitious visions, objectives, and outcomes they want to achieve over the next five years. Pre-COVID, everybody was doing twenty-year strategic plans. That was unrealistic before we had a global pandemic and now it’s completely not foreseeable. Now they’re doing five-year plans and that’s great. I appreciate your distinction between being honest and being truthful. I do think truthfully that honesty is subjective. It’s a good call out there, but they have to be truthful about their starting point and current state. When I work with organizations, there are some diagnostics that we can use to capture what is truly current state based on several different dimensions.

You’ve got to set the vision and be crystal clear about what you’re in business to accomplish. You have to start to buy what success looks like on that longer-term horizon. Before you take your first step, you have to know what your foundation is. You have to know where you are starting from. I was hired to come in and do a strategic planning session with a team not too long ago. By the time we got together in a room, their starting point had backslid. They had booked me for about three months before that. I got in there and they had lost a key account.

Before you take your first step, you have to know what your foundation is. Click To Tweet

Now their five-year outcomes hadn’t changed but their starting point had. Everybody wants to start with the fun stuff. What are we going to do when we get there? Slow down, hotshot. First, you have to understand where you’re starting from because you have to build in near-term priorities that are going to get you closer. Everybody wants to celebrate getting to Mars and be a part of that celebration. Not everybody is prepared to do the work it requires to build up the discipline, the systems, and processes, and to assemble the right team to get you there.

I call them strategic objectives. They don’t build in plan A, plan B, or plan C, and their clarity as well. Let’s say we want to go to Mars, but we get thrown off the gravitational force or whatever throws us this way. Where’s the nearest planet we could land and still be doing pretty well, that type of thing?

It’s why these near-term missions are about setting up a base camp on the moon because the moon is something like 1,000 times closer to Earth than Mars. It has a very similar environment. It’s not about going back to the moon just to say, “It’s been a while since we’ve been on the moon. Let’s go see if anything’s changed.” It’s because people and smart scientists know that the environment is similar enough that they can try, fail, innovate, and evolve faster and less expensively on the moon than taking their shot to Mars.

That makes total sense. For you CEOs, business owners, and even your salespeople who are sales oriented only, when you’re building out a plan, have some strategic objectives in there. Have some top goals and mid goals. If these type of goals happens, make sure that you’re hitting your numbers. I see so many people not doing that and then they panic. Claire, what they typically do when they panic is they start changing personnel.

It’s funny going back to that point you made. I’ve written a few books but the first one I wrote is called The Whirlpool Effect. It talks about the notion that if there are a lot of turnovers. You mentioned this one person who had an 82% turnover. A lot of executives keep their heads in the sand and say, “Clearly, we’re not hiring the right people.” It’s not necessarily that you’ve hired the wrong people, but you may be hiring them in the wrong way if you’re not looking at the leadership impact on that.

It’s the reason you do exit surveys and you look at your turnover metrics to say, “Is this a system-wide problem or is this an isolated area that we can fine-tune?” If you’re not looking at leadership and if leadership is not taking ownership for their contribution or lack thereof to the retention of the right people, you got to fix that.

Do we start by looking at a crystal clear end goal for that too? This is how we want and this is the type of people that we’re going to hire and here’s what we’re going to hire for versus let’s throw a warm body in there.

It’s harder to do right now because it feels like good talent is hard to find and even available talent is hard to find. To your point a moment ago about people panicking and starting to make reactive decisions versus taking one step back and saying, “It’s not what’s the fastest decision to put out the fire, but what’s the right one to move as closer to our goal.” Organizations, leaders, sales leaders, etc. have to start from that point of clarity of what are we in business to accomplish. What’s the strategy that’s going to get us there? What’s our five-year outcome so we know success when we see it? What are we going to tolerate? I know a lot of people think, “Claire is going to start talking about what’s our value set and that’s all this squishy stuff that’s not real and not tangible.”

If you aren’t clear about not just what you want to accomplish but how you believe is the right way to get there, not just in terms of performance metrics but in terms of how we will behave, how we will show up, work together, and represent our brand. You’re not going to know the right talent from the wrong one when you meet it. It’s as important to have that clarity, not just around the mission but around what is the DNA. What is the stuff behaviorally, performance-wise, experience-wise, and skillset-wise of the best performers in our culture? Not the rockstars of the industry, but the ones who have been successful here. What does that look like? Let’s replicate that.

If you aren't clear about what you want to accomplish, you will not know the right talent from the wrong one when you meet it. Click To Tweet

Light bulb moment for me and I hope for other people too. I’m coming back to this point of tolerate to Claire. I want to make a little distinction for people because sometimes people don’t realize the difference between honesty and truthfulness. I look at it this way with a little story. Two brothers have a fight. The youngest one started the fight, “He hit me first,” It’s that type of thing. The parents are like, “Why did you hit him?”

He goes, “He took my stuff.” It turns out the older brother has been taking the little kid’s stuff and the little kid had enough and he retaliated. What the oldest brother says is honest, “My little brother started the fight.” The truthful part is the older brother started the fight because the little one was defending himself to get his stuff back. I want to go into this tolerate part because this is a part I see people miss all the time. All of you tuning in who are going to write hate mail into me, that’s okay.

At least you know they’re tuning in.

Exactly. Here’s the thing. This is hard to do if you don’t know how to do it especially. I see people and everything is in real-time. I know I’ve made hiring errors in the past and I’ll probably make some in the future but I agree with you wholeheartedly that we don’t just look at the good side of this, but we also look at the tolerate side, I’ll call it that. How do you want people to behave within your organization?

It’s because that is the representation that touches the senses of the buyer, your consistent buyers, your repeat buyers, and everything that touches the brand when it comes down to it. I’ll illustrate it by saying we’ve all gone to an airline that we go, “That was an amazing flight because the person was so good to us on the plane.” We’ve also been on an airline where TSA and working people on the plane think it’s a military academy or something and they can become drill sergeants. They know they can get away with it because where are you going to go? You’re on the plane.

I’m laughing because I flew not long ago and I had that experience. I was saying, “Does anyone at TSA like their job or like dealing with people?”

Now you are going to get hate mail from the TSA.

I know. It’s fine.

It’s so important. Jay Conrad Levinson wrote a book series called The Guerrilla Marketing. They’re still out there. He once told me something. I asked him, “Jay, what is marketing really?” He says, “Everything that touches the senses of your potential buyer.” I took that to heart to think about the clothing I wear, how I do my hair, and all of those things in addition to my personality, the process, and everything. How do we begin to understand how we want people to behave?

I’ve seen people just miss this and they’ve got the greatest product out there. I called customer service. They installed something in my home and I was so happy with it. I called their customer service for one small point. I was like, “Can I have somebody give me a call? They pretty much hung up on me. They’re grumpy. I’m questioning, “Did I go to the right place?” How do we go about picking the toleration points and how people behave, etc?

Here’s where they get it wrong. A lot of companies, and I’m sure a lot of your audience tuning into this and saying, “We got that covered because we have a set of core values. We’ve got our mission. We know where we want to be in five years.” The first time you allow someone to violate your value system and you don’t call it out, it sends a message to your workforce, prospects, and clients. Every single person in your organization is an expression of your brand. Especially the smaller companies that can’t afford the impact of one bad hire, one bad investment, or one delayed decision. Every single person out there, especially your sales team, is often the only ambassador of your brand that they come into contact with or at least are the first one.

Where leaders get this wrong is they do the groundwork of clarifying their mission. They do the groundwork of identifying that this is our system of values, which are typically an expression of the founder’s personality if it’s a smaller company or a startup. They then fall down on the job when they have to address bad behavior. Too often, I have seen founders and executives of large organizations fool themselves. It’s this ostrich head in the sand mentality that, “I’ve hired adults. They’re going to figure out how to behave.” What they figure out is what’s getting rewarded and what is being tolerated.

If I’m working my butt off and I am living the values every single day and holding myself into account on days that I don’t do that, and I’m working alongside someone who is equally compensated, behaving poorly, not giving their all, misrepresenting what a company can do to a client or a prospective client, and they are not handled and addressed. I’m not talking about you having to fire somebody necessarily. If you truly care about where you’re going and what your people are doing in terms of representing your brand, then as a leader, it is incumbent upon you to call out bad behavior.

It’s been said, and I am going to forget the authors of this quote, but it has stuck with me for years, that your vision pulls you, your mission pushes you, and your values keep you from running off the road. It is so true. You can have a compelling and aspirational vision. You can have a mission that people want to come on board and contribute to, but if you allow people to run rough and shed over your values and you don’t address it as a leader, it’s a failure on you. It’s not a failure on them.

I’ve always felt adults are children in bigger bodies.

We really are. Here’s the good thing about that. You’ve used the word alignment and I know that has framed up the theme for our conversation. When you are in alignment with what you’re passionate about, what motivates you, and what comes naturally to you in terms of your core strengths, it is being back in touch with that child within you. A good friend of mine and a business mentor uses the analogy of your five-year-old self playing with crayons. When you are completely aligned with what you do well in ways that motivate you and in ways where you can see a tangible connection between your individual contribution and that shared mission, it is letting your inner child play with their crayons because it’s not work.

When you are in alignment with your passion, motivation, and core strengths, you can get in touch with your inner child. Click To Tweet

You’re in a zone, you feel good about what you do, and you feel fulfilled with the work that you put in. There’s a positive side to that image of being a child in adult clothing. It’s when those inner children or our inner teenagers act out. The thing about parenting teenagers is you’ve got to give them boundaries. You’ve got to tell them what’s allowed and what’s not. It’s the same thing if you’re masquerading as an adult. You’ve got to call them out on bad behavior, otherwise, they’re going to repeat it. The good performers and the good behaviors are going to say, “Why am I expanding all of this discretionary effort when it’s not being noticed and that guy is getting rewarded just as much as I am?”

I’ll illustrate it with a story. That company I was telling you about that had an 82% turnover, the CEO fired that person. They hired me to create a process within the company to help them grow. I said, “This person has got to go. We got to push him down the trough somewhere and put him on an island.” He wouldn’t do it. I said, “You’re going to lose your team.” He wouldn’t do it and the team started leaving. He came back to me and said, “I’m losing my top performers.”

I said, “I told you this is going to happen. I can get them back but you have to get rid of this person because he’s being indignant and rude. Your operations people are ready to storm your office and you just don’t realize it.” He said, “You fire him.” I’m like, “Okay.” I did let him go. A week later, he hires him back, so I fired him again. In less than a week later, he hires him back. I call him up and I go, “What are you doing?” He goes, “He’s my best buddy in the world.” I said, “He’s going to cause your company to fail.” I fired this man three times in three and a half months. He hired him back four times. I said, “I’m done, but I got your sales process done.”

Now they have grown from $50 million to over $60 million in this 4-month period because they had a lot of stuff they were sitting on that they could monetize. Within the 12-month period of my leaving, they were a $70-million company. Two years to the day I left, they were a $110 million company. The United States government came into that company and shut it down and fined this owner $120 million. They took every single bank account they had because this individual that I was telling you about was lying to people and taking and doing illegal things to get them to buy things, which the government caught ahold of.

Not only did one government agency come in, but all of them came in. This person was completely out of business after working at this company of his own for eight years to get into this place. I’m going to the extreme because I want people out there going, “It’s Claire saying this and Doug is agreeing with that.” I’ve seen it happen over and over. It is the third Law of the Universe, what you put in motion comes back, or something that. It’s the butterfly effect or something like that. That’s what happens. If you have somebody in there causing havoc over and over, then it will come back in some time somehow and bite you as the owner of your company. Claire, anything I should have asked that I didn’t ask that you were like, “He should have asked this question?”

It’s such a loaded question. There are so many rabbit holes we can go down and you exactly illustrate the point of the ripple effect of bad decisions or delayed decisions. The one that underscores is the one that I see time and time again with leaders, which is they don’t make the difficult decision whether it’s because they’ve hired their buddy and they’re emotionally attached to him or because they delude themselves into thinking, “My employees are adults and eventually, they’ll figure out to behave properly.”

Several years ago, I fired a client because no matter how many times I counseled him about how to have a difficult conversation with a couple of his employees who were veering off the right road, he would commit to having the conversation and then he would always back away from it. He never did. The company ultimately went out of business. It’s not to the scale of the one that you just described.

It is when a leader can have absolute clarity about what they’re all about and where they’re going, but they don’t make the difficult decisions or have those crucial conversations. It doesn’t matter how eloquent your mission is or how compelling it might be, your actions matter. If there’s a conflict between what you say and what you do, people are going to follow what you do.

If there's a conflict between what you say and what you do, people will follow what you do. Click To Tweet

That’s profound. Say it again, please.

There’s a disconnect between what you say you are all about, what you value, what you are in business to accomplish, and your actions day-to-day, addressing poor behavior or poor performance, or not giving clear expectations and all of that. If there is a disconnect between what you say and what you do, people are going to take notice and follow what you do because that is the more genuine expression of who you are.

It’s for those of you who are parents.

It’s very similar. I know some people go, “Let’s not start equating employees to children.” Some of those same parenting best practices apply here. You have to model the behavior you want to see repeated. You have to give them the guardrails around what is acceptable and what is not. You have to give them some level of freedom to express themselves in ways that bring them joy. Employees are not children, but those concepts are pretty universal.

I was just talking with somebody that was saying, “My son is so much his father.” I’m like, “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” “He’s so much like his father.” I’m like, “I’m not leaving this alone.” I want to ask one other question. I see this happen and I think it’s a mistake. I explained this to owners and CEOs. Leaders have to keep growing themselves in order for their organization to grow. I’m talking not only professionally but personally.

I’ve always found that the best parents in the world are the ones that challenge all the junk that had them held up their life and show their children that, “I did this. When you get there, you can do this too if you ever get there.” I find that for some reason business owners and CEOs get to a certain place on that. We hit that clarity level, but they don’t continue to keep growing beyond that. Not necessarily even on the revenue so much or the profitability of the company, but just the growth of the people within the organization because they’re not growing themselves. Do you see that as a commonplace thing? If so, how does somebody not do that? I see companies wither from the interior.

I have seen that. I’m glad that you brought that up. A lot of leaders do hit an upper limit if they don’t deal with their past baggage. I mentioned this leader who went out of business after he didn’t follow through on these difficult conversations. Part of that was because he had baggage from a previous startup company that had failed. He was extremely bitter because he had started it with partners and he felt that they did him dirty. He came into this new startup setting to prove them wrong and he reached an upper limit in terms of how well he could grow. I think so many leaders struggle with that. Now I happen to do executive coaching as part of my business, but even if I didn’t, I’m a strong advocate for working with the right coach.

I have had the good fortune of working with a couple of good business coaches that I thought I was going to them to help me with the sales side of my business. As I mentioned earlier, I do that on my own. What I got from them is working through some of that head junk that we bring into our business that we don’t know how to lay down and let go of because we don’t even realize anymore that we’re dragging it around. It’s a little bit of a long-winded answer to your question, but I very much see a lot of leaders get stunted in their growth when they don’t deal with that head junk.

Let me be the first to tell your audience, it is the very rare evolved leader who can do that on their own. That is not an advertisement for me specifically. It’s for anybody who is not working with someone through their head junk. It is not fluffy stuff. When I worked through that with my coaches and business mentors, that’s when my business took off. It wasn’t the tactics. It was through getting clear about what was serving me and what was no longer doing that.

Well said. It’s okay if you softly promoted what you were doing. That is fine too.

It was not my intention.

On that note, how do people get ahold of you if they want to?

The fastest way is to go to my website, which you have very kindly stated a couple of times. It is ClaireChandler.net. As far as social media, LinkedIn is where I hang out quite a bit. They can reach out there and send a note and say hi.

Do you know the handle?

It has something with my name, but there’s an extension.

I always ask that question because up until about 5 or 6 weeks ago, I didn’t know my handle. Both my daughters work in the company and they’re like, “Dad, it’s @DougBrown123. You can’t remember DougBrown123?” Thanks for being here, Claire. I appreciate this because I know people got a lot out of this. I got a lot out of it myself. I love when people come here and we just play full out because that’s what this is all about. Thanks again for being here.

Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity and I loved our conversation.

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Mission, vision, values, I love that part of our conversation because it tells you where to go, where to push, and where not to push. Your values do keep you on the rails as she said. If your company is not working from a values-based place, selling on value is the quickest way to higher profitability than anything else. If your values aren’t aligned, you’re not going to be able to sell them congruently or as a team. We’re talking about team performance. I love the fact about we should compensate or at least part of the compensation should be on team performance when we’re trying to get a team to come in alignment with what we’re doing, what we want to do, where we want our values to be, where we want the activity to be.

It’s one of those things that monetary contribution normally will make people pay attention to. The old saying, “If you want somebody to pay attention, pay them when they pay attention.” When you pay, they also will pay attention as long as you have that compensation plan aligned with what you are looking to do. It’s getting massive clarity at the beginning of that. Again, it’s not honesty but truth. Honesty is subjective. This is what I think. Let’s measure truth objectively. A lot of the lessons that Claire had been conveying in this, all the lessons are applicable, but a lot of these lessons are critical to your success.

Based on what I know from running high-performance sales teams, building high-performing sales teams, and managing these high-performing sales teams over my life, there is a process of success. There is a pathway to success. If you don’t know what that is, reach out to Claire and me. That type of thing is a learned skill. I also love the fact that she brought in at the end, that as leaders and owners, we got to get rid of head baggage, the trash in our head, or the non-serving habits of the non-serving thoughts that have developed into habits because those are impedances in our own life, not only in our business, but they’ll show up in our personal life.

They’ll definitely transcend through the team. People will do what you do more than they will do what you say, especially if you’re consistently doing it over and over, but you’re saying something incongruent. They will follow what you do. With that being said, if you love this show, please go up and give it a five-star review. If you agree with the points, don’t agree with the points, share the love via email and send it to YouMatter@ceosalesstrategies.com and say, “I love this. I didn’t like that.” Give us feedback. It’s good with us. If you are an expert or you know someone who’s an expert and you have a subject matter that you want to bring forth, whether you do it or someone else does it, introduce us at the same email address.

Let us know what you’re thinking about. We respond to all incoming inquiries. In the meantime, go out and sell something. Sell a lot of it. Play win-win. That means they win, and you win. Be the first to disengage if it’s not right for them or it’s not right for you.

If you or someone you know wants to be in the top 1% of earners in selling through selling, whether you’re a business owner, an entrepreneur, you’re coach, consultant, or a trainer, whether you own a company and have a full team of people or you’re just involved in something to do with selling and you want to get better at that and get yourself to the top 1% earners, reach out to us. Reach out to me directly at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com. We are launching our 1% Academy coming up in 2023. If you’d to get on the waiting list, let us know. You can also reach out to me @DougBrown123 because I remember it now. Guys, go out, make someone happy, sell a lot of stuff, sell it profitably and to your success.

Important Links

• Claire Chandler
• The Whirlpool Effect
• The Guerrilla Marketing Series
• DougBrown123 – LinkedIn
• Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/clairechandlersphr/
• https://www.Facebook.com/talentboostllc
• https://Twitter.com/TalentBoost