Bonus Episode: Are Salespeople Built or Born?

Introduction:

It used to be that best practices in sales were pretty standard across the board. But since the pandemic and with the advent of artificial intelligence, says Lance Tyson, founder of the Tyson Group sales consultancy, it’s like the Wild West out there. Suddenly, everyone’s playing by different rules, and the best sales approach can vary, depending on the seller, the target, the industry, the region of the country. The keys, Tyson says in this week’s bonus episode, are to pay attention and stay flexible. Along the way, he also addresses a host of hot topics: How important is it to see a prospect face-to-face? Is cold-calling dead? Will A.I. replace sales trainers? What’s the right balance between base and commission? How do you handle the salesperson who can’t or won’t be a team player? How do you get salespeople to take maintaining their CRM seriously?

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Lance Tyson is founder and CEO of the Tyson Group.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Lance. It’s great to have you here. Tell us a little about your business. What do you do?

Lance Tyson:
Thanks for asking. Tyson Group is in the business of working with sales leaders and their teams to help them compete in a complex world, essentially. Our direct customer is usually the leader in a small to midsize business, that can be the CEO, that can be the president of a company, the founder. In a midsize business, that can be a VP of sales, a chief sales officer.

It’s really anything that is relatable to sales, too. So, if you think of cousins to sales—so service is a cousin to sales, account management is a cousin to sales. That sales leader, if you think about it, really there are several factors that they have underneath their purview, or their architecture. It’s how they lead, what’s the culture of sales they have in an organization, or how they manage, which is how they measure KPIs. Then you have things like what kind of sales process is being applied from something very simple to complex. Methodologies are in there. Then you have effectiveness. Enablement right now is really big. I mean, there are a lot of industries that are trying to apply this fast-moving sled of A.I. into how they manage accounts. And then the last thing, the age old question is: getting the right talent. And then the bottom line is: Are salespeople built or are they born?

Loren Feldman:
You got a quick answer to that one?

Lance Tyson:
I do. It is my firm opinion that it’s statistically improbable for a salesperson these days to be good at everything you would need to be good at in sales. So I think they’re built. I think you’ve got to decide: Do you have a salesperson who is really good with the people side of it? And then you have a salesperson who can be really good at the process side. And the key is that the people side of it would be more art. The process side would be more science.

And I think you’re looking for an architect, so nothing’s built to scale. So sales is half art and half science. I still think it’s statistically improbable for somebody to be good at everything. Yes, I would concur that there are some people that are just really good at dealing with people. And we gravitate to that. But that doesn’t always make the best salesperson, though. That makes us somebody good with human relations.

Loren Feldman:
There’s so many things I want to dive into with you, but I want to hear a little more about Tyson Group. You have a focus on sports, don’t you?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, actually, I would say it’s where we cut our teeth. I would say the sexy part of our business is everybody likes to talk about sports. And you know, you and I are pretty much Philly guys. So you started off our conversation talking about Philly sports, and you said, “Hey, Lance, who do you cheer for?” And I would say: whoever’s the bigger customer, at this point. I think today we have a [sales] trainer in Minnesota. We have one in Dallas with one of the Dallas teams. We have somebody with the Los Angeles Dodgers in sales—not a salesperson, a trainer—one with the Calgary Flames—amongst another nine projects that are outside of sports.

But sports tends to be interesting. And what do you train sports people on? Well, like anything else, they have multiple products. If you’re a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, they have media naming rights to sell. People aren’t lining up to buy that stuff. That all has to be sold, right? You have premium seats that are sold B2B, if you are the Philadelphia Phillies. And I’m just bringing up those teams right now because they’re in the metro that you and I have in common. But they have the same challenges as everybody else does. They have talent challenges. They have product challenges. They have marketplace challenges. They have post-COVID challenges.

Loren Feldman:
How did you develop that expertise? Did you seek sports teams to specialize in, or did it just happen?

Lance Tyson:
I cut my teeth in the training industry. I was really into personal development back in the day. So I remember reading Stephen Covey’s book when I was really young, entering in business. I was an Anthony Robbins fan. And then a buddy of mine said, “Hey, if you really want to be good at anything in life, including business, you’ve got to read this book by Dale Carnegie called, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’”

I remember going to the King of Prussia Mall. I bought the book. And then I was like: I want to be in that industry. I actually started my career with Dale Carnegie Training in Philadelphia. And I literally kind of rose up through the ranks here in the Philly area. I learned how to train and sell training. And we had a deal going with the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce that was co-sponsoring a Dale Carnegie class. And I got a trade with the Philadelphia Eagles, actually, ironically enough, that we would train all their salespeople. And we would do sales training for them for tickets, access to tickets.

At the time, the vice president of sales was a gentleman named Len Komoroski, and he put everybody through. And then I had left the Dale Carnegie operation in Philly and bought an investment in the one in Cleveland. And Len then became the acting president of the Cleveland Cavaliers. And from there, that kicked off a domino effect of relationships. Now, we probably own 40 percent of the market share in pro sports, just as it relates to training and consulting. But that’s not the only thing we do.

Loren Feldman:
What percentage would you say of your business is the sports side?

Lance Tyson:
In 2018, we launched Tyson Group. And under that, we quickly went after pro sports as a go-to-market strategy. I had a good name, the system had a good name. So that, at one point, was almost 90 percent of our business. And right now, I would say it’s about 60 percent of our business. We have a good strong foothold there, I would say, very good relationships there in different markets. But we do business with all kinds of different manufacturers, different supply companies, all kinds of businesses. So there are tech companies, medical supply companies, two pretty large pharmaceuticals we work with.

What our customers all have in common, Loren, is there is an opportunity or a challenge or a problem in how they’re trying to do business through sales. And we literally do a gap analysis. We look at what needs to be adjusted the most. And we help them develop a new strategy towards it. That’s our goal.

Loren Feldman:
Can you give us a sense of how big the business is?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, we’re about 25 employees. We’re north of about $5 million. And we’re growing at about 35-40 percent a year. I think we have employees in 15 different states. Loren, we are truly a remote organization. We’re based in Columbus, Ohio—Dublin, Ohio, actually. I think we have two people in Dublin, Ohio, three people in Ohio proper. We are in every time zone in the U.S. at this point. And one of our marketing people is moving back to India, so we will be in a different time zone. Actually, one of our associates on our social media team lives in France. He plays some pro hockey over there, but also works about 30 hours a week. So we’re truly a very geographically diverse organization.

Loren Feldman:
Was that true before COVID?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, it was. COVID, not being in the office, didn’t affect us negatively, how we manage the organization. Just about any version of what our company was, like, we were in Dale Carnegie in 2005, I can remember we had four different offices from Cleveland to Indianapolis. And I can remember then being on Yahoo Messenger, almost using it like a Slack at that point. So we’ve never been really challenged. We have a certain etiquette, a certain process, that we run our internal meetings on.

We’re very KPI-driven. We have a very simple formula with how we run the business. People need to be able to communicate why their job exists, what the major goal of their job is. Everybody has multiple goals in their job. What are the KPIs or performance standards needed to get the job done? And we’re very transparent about that.

Being extremely transparent helps with being so remote. Everybody knows what the number is. We have about seven “isms” in the company, and one of the number one isms—Tysonisms, or whatever you want to call them, or value statements—is, “You can’t win if you don’t score.” Everybody knows what the score is at Tyson Group. They know what our growth numbers are. They know what our profitability numbers are. They’re tied into those things.

Loren Feldman:
Did demand for your services increase with the pandemic?

Lance Tyson:
No, we panicked, like everybody else. Everybody has their version of tragedy in the uphill battle and slaying the dragon. I was at Madison Square Garden. I was there that day, and they were having the Big East tournament. And I kind of remember it like I remember 9/11. And I had hurt my back and I was leaving early, because my back was really sore. And they were canceling the Big East tournament. They started to cancel some games. I think Marquette was playing. I remember leaving the hotel and parents just being pissed off. By the time I landed in Columbus, I got a text from one of my staff members that said they just canceled the NBA season. I go, “Come on.” I couldn’t even believe it.

Loren Feldman:
I remember that day.

Lance Tyson:
So at that point in the pandemic—my board’s always challenged me, “Hey, you never want to have one client that’s too big. You never want all eggs in one basket.” And we had started to diversify a little bit in different verticals, but a lot of our business was tied up in sports, and sports just literally—other than the NFL, there were no fans there—it shut down. So we hit the panic switch. We went down to a very, very low number. Good news is we had decent cash reserves. I wouldn’t say we were pandemic-proof, but we’d made good decisions before that. But immediately, like everybody else did, we made adjustments to staff very quickly. We insulated up.

And then what we did in the pandemic is we just literally, to all our clients, offered free training and coaching, whether they were under contract or not. And we just gave. And we were going from noon to night, and there are some markets that didn’t even participate in a pandemic. And I’m not being sarcastic. Every marketplace had a different view, like Arizona had a different view than Texas, than Florida, than Pennsylvania, than New York. So we just tried to accommodate as much as possible.

And it was right in the middle of the pandemic. Madison Square Garden teed up, because it was starting to show life. They were getting ready. And we signed a contract right in that summer. It was a sizable enough contract. I would say, that that gave us a little breathing room. But since then, it’s slowly grinded back up. But it’s different now. We really started to do a hell of a lot more consulting and coaching than more of a purely training solution.

Loren Feldman:
So much has changed because of the pandemic, and I think that’s true with sales—the most obvious thing being the Zoom-versus-travel issue. Tell me about that. Have things really changed? Or are we back where we were before the pandemic?

Lance Tyson:
No, I think it’s different. It’s just different. I think that how people do business, that’s changed dramatically. I remember not very long ago, maybe six months, I was on the phone with a manufacturing company. And the president of this manufacturing firm really kind of got into it with me. And he suggested, and I’ll paraphrase: “Lance, if you’re trying to sell us this hybrid selling model, it’s not going to work. We don’t need that. I don’t want that.” And I said—his name was Jeff—“Jeff, with all due respect, it doesn’t really matter what you want. It’s what your prospects are asking for. Based off of the conversations we’ve had with your salespeople, with looking at different data points, you might think you need to be face-to-face with everybody, but your prospects and your buyers are saying no. So that’s fine. You can keep pushing this, ‘You’ve got to be face-to-face,’ but it’s not what everybody else is telling you.”

And then we kind of had a longer conversation and I said, “Why does this whole concept get you so fired up?” And he went on to say that he felt the age of his seller couldn’t accommodate these conversations that we’re having in a hybrid way, and that hybrid way is not face-to-face. If you think about it now, one of the biggest challenges in sales is fragmentation. Because you’re having conversations with people over text, over email, over voice note, over voicemail, face-to-face, and it’s this combo of things. And he just didn’t think that his salespeople were going to be able to move the needle on some of these manufactured products.

Loren Feldman:
He has older salespeople who might not handle the technology well?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah. And I said, “Look, your problem is not the technology. Your problem is talent. And you can teach an old dog a new idea. You can, if that’s what it comes down to, and then you’re gonna have to hold these folks accountable, and then slowly deal with this. But you can’t keep sending them out. People don’t want to be out. Part of your sales process is going to be hybrid.”

And I think what’s happened for most is sales leaders, decision makers, have to make a decision about whether to address the marketplace. So their sales process methodology and people are gonna have to be adaptive or pliable. Now, there’s a secondary factor to that, too. There’s an expectation of employees—and this is anywhere. People have learned there’s another side of life. I can get my job done from my house. I don’t need…

Loren Feldman:
To commute.

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, I don’t need to be there. And that’s affected negatively, in some cases, especially around sales, culture. And some leaders don’t know how to deal with culture if people aren’t right there with them. Look, you can’t argue that—you know, these people aren’t control freaks. There’s a method to having a huddle room and just bouncing ideas off each other. There’s a lot of synergy there. There’s a methodology to managing by walking around. Not everybody’s built to hold people accountable to a goal or to a performance standard. And some businesses are different. So that’s affected the culture piece. And so we spend a lot of time there also. So I think it’s both from the sales leadership and motivation standpoint to also the methodology and process.

Loren Feldman:
Do you think salespeople can be as effective virtually as they are in person?

Lance Tyson:
Listen, if I were going to put money towards it, if you’re going to ask me if I was going to bet, look, it’s a hell of a lot more forgiving if you and I are face-to-face with each other having a cup of coffee. There’s a 360 element there.Let me say it this way: Your EQ goes up dramatically if all your senses are being addressed. I’m a few feet from you. There’s synergy. There’s smells, there’s sights, there’s different sounds. And it’s way more forgiving. I can make way more mistakes.

So if I were going to put $1,000 tonight on if you said, “Lance, do you think somebody’s going to get a sale more because they’re on a Zoom call or more because they’re face to-face?” Give it to the face-to-face. But you’re going to have to be agile, and you might not be able to do that. So then, I’d take a Zoom call over a phone call any day of the week and twice on Sundays. It’s hard to imagine that back in 2019, we were still on conference calls. I can’t even imagine a conference call at this point. I was literally calling people today, and it still feels weird. You’re usually on Zoom. You can see people.

But the thing that has to be addressed, if you’re gonna go into this hybrid selling or any kind of business—even if you were negotiating with a vendor, it wouldn’t really much matter— face-to-face would be better in a negotiation than in writing or over technology. The skill-set, though, through a Zoom call, the onus becomes more on verbal economy with your ability to really facilitate the conversation. Because you’ve got to really facilitate, if you’re on this. You don’t have the time. You can see them. You don’t know if they’re paying attention.

And then your ability to ask check-in questions, or evaluative questions, like, “Hey, what are your thoughts on that?” or opinion-seeking questions. You’ve got to be really good at that to move the conversation on, because I can’t tell if I’m on a Zoom with somebody, training them, trying to sell them something, I can’t tell if they’re really paying attention. I mean, they could be watching YouTube, for all I know. You know what I mean? And when somebody blurs their background, you can’t even see them. I mean, there’s all kinds of weird stuff that goes on, and you’ve just got to be really alert.

Loren Feldman:
You mentioned before that when you take on a client, they come to you because they have a problem. And you do an analysis to see what you need to do to address that problem. Are there one or two most common problems that you see?

Lance Tyson:
So one thing that our clients have in common is they’re trying to improve the productivity of something. So they’re trying to increase sales to either hit a budget or to meet growth initiatives, so there’s an increase in productivity. Or the secondary problem is to reduce something. So we were doing some business with a company that was competing against Nielsen ratings. And it was a technology solution. And their technology was better than the way Nielsen did business. And I’m still under a nondisclosure to even kind of bring up who it is, but a very well thought out company. But the amount of time it was taking them to make a sale was probably three times as long, because they lacked credibility. So they had to kind of solve it in the sales process, because that sales cycle time was driving costs up.

So they’re usually the two primary things: something around an increase in productivity or a reduction in the amount of time it takes to do something. And then the last thing, usually kind of that lagger is, to increase the quality of something, like the quality of the relationship or the quality of the individual. But usually, the two outcomes have to do with productivity or time or cost base.

Loren Feldman:
Those sound like pretty fundamental issues. If I’d asked you this question before the pandemic, would you have given me pretty much the same answer?

Lance Tyson:
Absolutely. I would say it’s not as much about what’s different. It’s more about what’s the same. What was acceptable with how we did business was pretty standard. So if you took a semi-complex to complex B2B sales process where things are pretty standard, there are certain times that you’d have a conference call, but there are bigger parts of the sales process that you would do in person. Now, it’s the Wild West. I mean, it can be anything. It goes back to the manufacturing example: “We need to be-face to-face.” Well, what you need and what your clients and customers want and prospects want might be something different. So what you need to be is pliable.

Loren Feldman:
Could you have done as much over Zoom before the pandemic as is being done now if you’d thought to try it? Or were people just not ready for it back then?

Lance Tyson:
I mean, there were so many conversations. One thing for our business is doing hybrid learning and coaching on Zoom, smaller sessions, shorter, more focused sessions—it’s driven our profitability. It’s helped dramatically. Sometimes, innovation comes out of just necessity. We figured it out in record time. I’m sure a lot of other companies did, too. So I don’t think by any chance we found the cure. But for our own business, we did. And we did because we had to. And the technology was there. It wasn’t like it wasn’t there.

I mean, we were using some call-enablement tool, ClearSlide, which we still use, which had a component of being able to deliver a deck or proposal through a virtual way. And we still use portions of that software. But I would say, we could have. We just didn’t. That’s actually probably made us, as a business, more alert to technology options. That’s why we are so on this A.I. kick right now. We’re already in development ready to launch a tool that would take all of our IP, and you’d be able to talk to it, and it would coach you just based off of our content or philosophy. We’re already invested. It’s another company, but we’ve invested a bit, because we want to be in front of it as much as possible.

Loren Feldman:
So tell me about that. You’ve taken the things you’ve learned, the things you’ve been training salespeople, sales teams, on for years, and you’ve partnered with another company to create an A.I. solution that will somehow—

Lance Tyson:
It’s learned all of our IP. So essentially, it’s learned our foundational book, Selling Is an Away Game. It’s ingested all that. So this can be launched from a learning-experience platform. They could ask specific questions like, “How do you resolve an objection?” And it would actually come back with our methodology and coach it live.

What does that do to our trainers? I still don’t think it does anything to our trainers. I still think people are gonna want to engage with humans. I think the more A.I. gets out there, the more we’re going to kind of question a little bit. And I think it’s going to be a blended experience. But we’re way in front of that, where before… I don’t know. I don’t know that I would have had so much speed to put that investment toward it. I mean, we put some serious money behind it. And it’s something we’re probably gonna launch to other training companies through this other party. It hasn’t been fully launched, but it’s go-to-market in the next two months. It’s moving at the speed of light.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have a sense what your profit margins will be for the A.I. product versus a human product?

Lance Tyson:
I sense our net profit on that would probably be 60 percent. We’re pretty disciplined with our net profit, but it would be probably twice as much as what our normal stuff would be. And it’s repeatable, scalable, and sellable.

Loren Feldman:
Wow. Are your employees nervous?

Lance Tyson:
No, because at some level, they’re involved in acknowledging how it needs to be done. I mean, we’ve fully integrated the use of A.I. And I mean, think about it this way. I’m not here selling A.I.

Loren Feldman:
Oh, I understand.

Lance Tyson:
I’m literally telling everybody on here: Don’t be the last of the buggy-whip salespeople. I mean, I’m assuming when the calculator came out, everybody panicked who was an accountant. So I don’t think there’s a reason to panic at all. And I think if you’re watching the news—and depending on what news you watch, or all of them—they’re gonna cause some kind of panic. Let me put this in perspective. ChatGPT 3 has an IQ of 155. Einstein had an IQ of 160. ChatGPT 4 will probably be three to five times that, and it’s probably three months away.

So it’s not as easy as just plugging something in. You actually have to know what you’re talking about to ask it a good question, to get the answer you’re searching for. And then nine times out of 10, the business we’re in, you’re still going to have to deliver the information anyway. So it can give you guidelines. So that’s like having a person who writes copy for you. So what? I can have somebody help me with the copy on one of my books, but I still gotta go out and figure out how to sell it, get it to the market, blah, blah, blah, and talk about it. All right, fair enough.

Loren Feldman:
You also have to read that copy before you publish it.

Lance Tyson:
Exactly.

Loren Feldman:
How did you dive into this, Lance? What got you started down the A.I. road?

Lance Tyson:
First of all, I’m like anybody else. You’re watching things happen. I think what got me onto it so quickly is I have been fascinated—and there’s a book called… I will think of it before this is over. There’s a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and he wrote a book and he was dying. And he wrote this book—

Loren Feldman:
Was it The Last Lecture?

Lance Tyseon
Yes. I can remember that he was talking about gamification of learning. I’ve watched my kids for years play Call of Duty and all these things. And so I’ve always been fascinated with how we integrate that into learning, whether it be a sim or something like that. So once A.I. hit, I’m like, “Oh, this is perfect.” I don’t think it’s gonna revolutionize. I’m not a believer it’s going to put things out of business, people out of business.

I was at the front-end of the internet, like email. I started a business when we started to use email, and then websites and stuff like that, and it was gonna put learning out of business and training out of business for years. And it’s done nothing but grow it. So I can’t foresee that happening. But my fascination probably started with the gamification of things, because I think A.I. kind of enhances all that.

Loren Feldman:
Is there still a place for cold calling?

Lance Tyson:
Oh, yeah. One of our good customers is Fleming’s Private Dining. Great customer of ours. So it’s these folks who sell private dining experiences for big meetings and board meetings and stuff like that. And Fleming’s is a great place to have steak. Well, they cold call. And I would say to the most complex media companies that we deal with, those people cold call. Now, the vehicle in which you get in touch with people changes. So I would say nine out of 10 of our customers that are semi-complex to a complex B2B sales process, their salespeople have a KPI for cold calling.

Now, if you’re thinking of cold calling like it’s walking out the door and knocking on doors, I’m not saying that’s it. But I counted this summer, we’ve had nine different residential service people knock on our door to either sell painting, extermination, lawn cutting, or whatever. I don’t think it’s died. I don’t think it’s any less than any other time. I think how you communicate, whether it’s your cadence has changed a little bit, you’re still cold calling, reaching out, calling people who aren’t expecting a contact from you, whether that be through LinkedIn, a phone call, email, all the above.

Loren Feldman:
I personally haven’t answered a phone call from a phone number that I didn’t recognize in years. Am I alone in that? Are there still people who pick up the phone for whoever calls?

Lance Tyson:
I called an executive today, just about three hours before our call, from an NFL team that I’d never met before, who did not have my number. And he picked it up, maybe out of curiosity or whatever. And within three seconds, I was able to get his attention. So he picked up. Has the number gone down? Yes. Now, if you’re thinking about it from a residential standpoint, I think there’s a difference between a business-to-business call or a residential call.

But I think you don’t think of the activity as isolated down just to a phone call. I think you’ve got to kind of soften it up. So I think there’s a cadence to things, having a reason to call. So maybe that’s coming through with some marketing, emailing, or a note, or an offer. Then there’s B2B. You can be hitting people up on LinkedIn. There could be a text in there. But I would say the phone is still being used. I’ve yet to see with any of our clients—and we have some sophisticated clients—where people aren’t on the phone. Now, some of their marketing has gotten better. Some of their lead gen has gotten better. Or they’re doing more of other stuff, but it’s still a piece of it.

Loren Feldman:
I think every business owner thinks that he or she sells better than any salesperson they could ever possibly hire. And they’re probably right about that, I’m guessing.

Lance Tyson:
Well, so there’s something to be said to the entrepreneurial soul. So I would say: You gave birth to this product or service or this business. There’s nobody who’s going to sell it with your passion, vigor, perseverance that you do. I think the problem starts when the founder, president, owner tries to hire salespeople who are similar to them. I think that is where the mistakes are made.

Loren Feldman:
Oh, interesting. Similar to them in what way?

Lance Tyson:
Nobody is as passionate about Tyson Group as I am. My name is on it. It’s my signature that’s on it. It’s an organism to me. It’s living, breathing, and that’s kind of that entrepreneurial mindset or that entrepreneurial soul. So I think it’s hard to hire people who would have that kind of passion.

Now, could I hire somebody who was good at qualifying a lead? Yeah. Could I hire somebody who’s good at asking questions? Yeah. Could I hire somebody who was a kick-ass presenter? Yeah. Could I hire somebody who was dauntless when it came to negotiating? Yes. But to put them up against me is not fair to the individual. It’s not. So I’ve gotta look for ways to hire that person.

There’s another entrepreneur, though, who thinks that salespeople are born. So, they’re on this mission to find this person who is just perfect. And then when they hire that person who’s really just a naturally good salesperson, then they kind of get held hostage by that person, too. So they kowtow to them a little bit, they cater to them. So I think you’ve got to be careful with that.

And I think if you’re in a business that has to be sold, where you have to sell contracts, or you have to convince somebody what’s different between your product or service versus somebody else’s other than the price, I think that’s when you have to go into that growth mode and start thinking of that. You have to duplicate your efforts, where if you brought in a half million, how can I find somebody who can bring in 250 million?

Now remember, if the founder brought in half million dollars in new business, you’re gonna be hard pressed to find somebody that’s going to be selling with your passion, so you can’t stick him exactly at the goal you are. Because you’re gonna do things and act different ways that somebody you hire is never going to be able to do.

Loren Feldman:
You keep mentioning passion. Is that the most important thing you look for when you’re hiring a salesperson?

Lance Tyson:
No. It’s coachability. I think it’s somebody who’s coachable. We have an “ism” internally. We believe you can’t lead or be led if you’re not willing to be coached. I just think sales is so dynamic right now. My vice president of sales, Gina, I have a call right after this with her. And she is the most coachable person. Now, she’ll debate with me and she will disagree with me. But at the end of the day, she’s coachable. And how I would measure somebody being coachable is: Did they make the adjustment?

I have three sons Zach, Jared, and Cooper. My son Zach, Loren, if you talk to him, he’s a great listener. But he’s a donkey. You would think he’d be coachable. And it makes him successful, and it’s his thing, but you would confuse his listening skills with his ability to be coached. And ultimately, he will make a change, but he digs in. Now if you met my middle son, Jared, he would give you all the nonverbals that he was horrible at being coached. He’d make faces. He’d rub his head. I’ll tell you what: He’ll make the change quicker than Zach will. So there’s a huge difference between being coachable and listening. It’s the coachability. It’s coachable to execution. I would look for that more than anything in sales. Passion? It’s hard to measure.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have any advice for someone who’s trying to decide if it’s the right time to hire their first salesperson?

Lance Tyson:
Yes, I do. I would say whatever the highest goal you have for them, while you’re bringing them on, chop a third off of it. Because the expectation is high. Two, I would say: Are you able to train them in a way that gets them to understand the business, the product, or service? And you’re gonna have to acknowledge: Are you hiring them to close deals or are you hiring them to bring opportunities to the top of the funnel? You’ve got to kind of decide there.

And the last thing I would do is: Everybody puts their best act on when they interview. Not everybody who’s a great interview is a great hire. I would look for some kind of assessment that would measure personality traits. There’s a lot there. I mean, there are two types of assessments you can do. You can do a descriptive index, which is kind of like, look at personality traits. You’ve got your Myers-Briggs, your DISCs, and stuff like that. Or you have a predictive index.

One that we actually sell is Chally, which looks at sales skills. Either or both. I think if you’re going to hire somebody, you want to kind of get to know them, especially for sales. What are you dealing with, right? Because the sales job is different from any job. It’s not your controller. It’s not your operations person. And very rarely can people do both. If you’re hiring a salesperson, have them focus on sales, all the activities around sales.

Loren Feldman:
Some of the skills you’re looking for in a salesperson, I think, have changed in recent years. And the way you go about finding people and hiring people has changed with new technologies. How do you find a good salesperson today?

Lance Tyson:
There’s so many ways to unpack that one. I think if I’m recommending—and I’m thinking about my own business here, of course—I’m looking to bring them in young, and bringing them up through the system. That’s kind of our way. And we’re always looking. I mean, in our business, we look at servers all the time, because we actually believe servers have probably everything you want.

Loren Feldman:
You’re talking about restaurant servers?

Lance Tyson:
Servers in restaurants, yeah. Are they able to facilitate the conversation? Are they able to be in the conversation without dominating the conversation and being the center of attention? Do they demonstrate good listening skills and stuff like that? They say that servers and air traffic controllers have the two most stressful jobs on the planet. And I actually believe that. So we’re looking all over.

I’m typically looking at three factors: Do they have a level of EQ where they’re trying to connect with you and understand you? Are they good at building rapport—not relationships, rapport, the people skills? And do they present themselves, whatever they do, as a credible source? And so we’re looking all over the place at all times. We’re always trying to recruit.

Loren Feldman:
Have you actually had a good restaurant meal and turned to the server and said, “Would you be interested in a sales job?”

Lance Tyson:
I just literally recruited. Down in Dallas last week, we’re sitting at a table having some drinks at this restaurant at a boutique hotel. And she was our server slash—there’s a bar, so she served food and drinks, too. I literally offered her a job.

Loren Feldman:
Where are you standing these days, in terms of salary versus commission?

Lance Tyson:
I think you’ve got to be careful that commission is no greater than 40% of the total take. I think the expectation with this younger group is: Is there some certainty there? Because there’s so much uncertainty.

Loren Feldman:
Or the opposite. I know very smart people who don’t believe in commission.

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, and I struggle with that, too. I think your expectation is different. I think it should be a split. I think there should be upside, because most people are hiring to grow. So you want somebody with a growth mindset. So I think you’ve got to be careful. I think there’s a 70/30 split: 70 percent is base, 30 percent commission. But I like to see a little heavier on base these days, just because of the market.

Loren Feldman:
I think the people who talk about eliminating commission and just paying salary are convinced that that’s the way to hire team players who will fit in well with the company culture, and not cause resentment among other people.

Lance Tyson:
See, but the challenge there is, this is where from a sales leadership standpoint, Loren, I think sales leaders get it wrong. I asked 150 people last week: Do you sales lead your team more as a football team, basketball team, a track team, or a wrestling team? And I got a bunch of whys. And a lot of people were like, “Yeah, it’s like a football team.” And I’m like, “No, it’s actually not. You need salespeople to behave more like a wrestling team, that they’re actually more concerned about their weight class, their own KPIs, their own territory, their own product that they’re selling, and let them take care of that.”

And compensation drives behavior. About a little over 50 percent of the behavior is driven by how you compensate somebody. You need salespeople who go out there and get it, who are willing to kind of fight against an objection, things like that. And if you’re just paying a big base, they’re not incentivized or comped to do things you need to do.

Loren Feldman:
The response you sometimes hear to that is: Almost everybody has a story about a salesperson who is a very talented salesperson, but solely focused on their own success and didn’t necessarily care about the problems they were creating for other people, in terms of—

Lance Tyson:
That’s why you put support around them. I mean, look, I have salespeople on my team who are high maintenance, high performance. So, okay, I have trainers that are high maintenance, high performance. And at times in some of these markets, you want a catalyst. You literally want a catalyst.

Loren Feldman:
Is there a place where you draw the line? Is there something that you will not accept?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, I would draw the line at as long as whatever they’re doing is not illegal, immoral, or unethical. That’s where I would draw the line. Everything else has to be on the table, especially in sales, because it is a different job. It is just different. Say you worked at a hotel, and you’ve got somebody coming in who wants to use your hotel and your banquet services for a wedding. Well, you’re gonna deal with an emotional potential couple. You’ve got a couple of different buyers there who are gonna pay for it. You’ve got competitors that: Is this more about price? Or is this more about experiences? Is it both? Like, you’ve gotta get people to defend it. You’ve got to be able to negotiate. And you want to make sure you pay them so they fight a little bit themselves.

And let me kind of end this segment with us: I hired a CFO right before the pandemic. Her name is Laura. I said, “What I want you to do is look at the books. I want you to look at our processes and make some recommendations.” Well, she did what most good CFOs would. She told me all the areas in the company that she would address. So she immediately, Loren, goes and says, “Your salespeople are being paid too much money.” I go, “Where?” I said, “Salary or base?” She goes, “Look, we’ve got to drive better profitability. I would actually hit some of the commission service.” Okay, fair enough.

She goes, “Are you going to do it?” I go, “Well, I want you to kind of experience the sales process and see what they do before you make the recommendation.” At that point, we owned this call center, so we had invited these potential prospects to our office to look at our process. So Laura was in the meeting. My VP of sales was in the meeting, who was driving the sell, and myself. And we had about four people with us that we’re selling to, and they start to negotiate heavily, because we had kind of put some pricing in before they came to the meeting. And I turned to Laura, and I said, “Hey, Laura,” and this was an act of negotiation. I said, “What are your thoughts on this price point? And what should we take out of the deal or put in, based on what you know about the business?” Laura’s really tall and she looks very dignified, very classy, and she looked up and she paused. And she goes, “I don’t know.” And I go, “Okay.” So I jumped in. And we landed at a reasonable place, and we ended up winning the business.

So they walked out. We shook everybody’s hand, and we’re gonna get a SOW over. Laura, as they walked out of the conference room, asked my VP if she could have a moment with me. She closed the door. She called me every… she made up names I’d never heard. “I’ve never been so embarrassed. You blah, blah, blah, blah.” I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Settle down.” And I go, “Why are you so frustrated?” And she goes, “I was unprepared for that. I was uncomfortable with that. I feel like you put me on the spot.” I go, “Listen, Laura, I’ve hired you because you’re articulate, you have good business [sense].” She goes, “I just felt I was being pressured to make a decision right there.”

I go, “Oh, right. So the pressure of the situation got you.” I said, “Hey, I do want you to recognize—because I’m accepting what you did, and I probably could have prepared you—I wanted to see how you did in a moment. Our salespeople deal with that, our version of it, every single day. How do you feel now about cutting their commissions?”

Loren Feldman:
What did she say?

Lance Tyson:
So she goes, “Good point.” I mean, she still had some other points there, and we landed in a place. And she’s a great person, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But she did acknowledge that that’s different being in a pressure cooker, and having to respond in an impromptu and extemporaneous way was hard. And I said, “Is a couple of percentage points really worth it when our people are ready to go and are very ready to go situationally and have some skin in the game so they fight?” So that was kind of the point.

Loren Feldman:
You talked before about the cousins of sales. And I’m curious, I assume that when you sell your own services, you focus on the sales process, naturally. But I assume you also use other forms of marketing. I’m wondering how you think about integrating other forms of marketing with the sales process you’ve created.

Lance Tyson:
Ironically enough, we had a meeting about this earlier with our VP of marketing, Chip, and Gina, the VP. We campaign, so we’ll get a lot of our IP out there. You know, we market with books. My books are in Hudson News. And in every airport, somebody will pick it up. We enter into a company through—we call it “spider webbing.” So we typically will go at a C-suite, because C-suites are always concerned about top line and bottom line growth. So we’ll go after that, and we’ll go after a level two decision maker, whether it be the chief sales officer.

Loren Feldman:
And when you say “go after,” how are you going after them?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, so we target them, the salespeople target people. We have a strong ideal prospect profile, a certain type of organizational level person we go after. And when we prospect an organization, we don’t prospect one person, we prospect three.

Loren Feldman:
But are you doing this through email, through phone calls?

Lance Tyson:
It’s the cadences. It’s all over. It’s usually outreach with a marketing email campaign, an invite to a webinar. They visit our website, and that goes into the top of a funnel. We start funneling down. As there becomes more engagement, or the salesperson will look at a company from a referral standpoint, start prospecting directly through email, then a follow-up phone call. Everybody on here needs to know that pre-pandemic, it took six to eight touches to contact a prospect. And most businesses, since the pandemic, it’s nine to 12, according to our research partners. So your touch points have increased by almost 30 percent.

Loren Feldman:
Why do you think that is?

Lance Tyson:
I just think people are harder to get a hold of now. They’re hiding out. The good news is most corporate phone systems, because of the pandemic, go right to somebody’s cell phone. So: texting. Once you get somebody’s phone number, the chance you actually have their cell phone number—or whatever number you have goes right to their cell phone number—is significantly high.

Loren Feldman:
I never thought of that. That’s really interesting.

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, and there’s actually one little hack right now that’s really working. It’s kind of interesting. If you have an iPhone, if you want to text somebody, there are little things you can do at the bottom of a text. And there’s a blue squiggly line where you can leave a voice note and you can actually instead of sending somebody a text, you send them a voice note that gets delivered via text. And if you have an iPhone, you can tell if they actually listened to it.

Loren Feldman:
Are you active on social media?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, we are really active. I think the big thing about social media, too, if you’re in selling right now, you almost have to treat it a little bit—because you can message people—like that is part of the conversation. And that’s what fragments it. We have one salesperson on our team. He’s our senior director, and everybody at Tyson Group sells at some level. He is extremely good at having conversations with people on LinkedIn and Facebook. And then he moves the conversation to an email, so he fragments it out and really leverages that. So he’s exceptional at it.

Loren Feldman:
Have you figured out a way to get your people to actually do what they’re supposed to do in your CRM?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, first of all, as a company, our philosophy is we own the prospects. And since they’re owned by the company, they’re not owned by the individual. If you don’t have all the information filled out in CRM, you run the risk of not getting paid your full commission.

Loren Feldman:
That sounds serious.

Lance Tyson:
I mean, there’s a carrot and a stick. You’re not going to carot everybody. There’s a consequence. If you run a stop sign, there are consequences. You might get a ticket. Or if you don’t fully fill out everything that’s needed.

Loren Feldman:
Tell me if this is your experience. I hear this is a constant problem: Nobody uses their CRM to its full potential. And it’s really hard to get people to take it as seriously as they should.

Lance Tyson:
I think that’s an expectation problem. Let me give you an example. I was sitting down with a couple of executives with an NHL team. And it was a small sponsorship team. And I was having breakfast with, let’s say a guy named Ken and a guy named Brian. And they were talking about their culture and things like that.

And this actually came up: They were talking about, “Our people will not engage in CRM.” I go, “Why? I don’t understand why they wouldn’t. And what have you done to get them?” They’re like, “We literally talk to them about all the reasons why they should, how it’s good for business, how it’s good for them. We’ve had contests, we’ve incentivized. We rewarded them.” I said, “Okay, so what you’re telling me is you have five people or six people that are insubordinate. That’s what it sounds like. I mean, so, you know what they do on a ship with insubordination? They make people walk the plank.”

They go, “We’re not going to do that.” I go, “Why?” So they go, “What could we do?” I said, “Well, you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it what?” They said, “Drink.” I go, “Right, but you could put salt on the roads.” So I said, “Just make an announcement that, “Hey, here’s the expectation for CRM, that in order to have a deal, these are the absolutes. And just make an announcement that if this isn’t filled out completely—these are the parameters—that you run the risk of getting a delay in your commissions or reduction in your commission.” And they go, “HR will never buy that.” I said, “I didn’t ask you whether HR was going to buy it or not. You should just make the frickin’ announcement.” And I said, “Just trust me. Run the test. Just put it out and put it out in an email. Make an announcement.”

The next week they had 95 percent compliance. But the point is, the expectation is there. Some of your audience might be like, “Wow, Lance, you’re so hardcore. I’m actually not. Don’t judge what I’m saying on one minor thing that you don’t have high engagement. And I will tell you, even in my own company—and we have 25 people—the average length that a person has been with us, the longest has been 20 years. I’ve had four people who have been with us all the way from the time they got out of college until they’re 35 years old. I had a former VP leave to go raise her children. She says, “Hey, I think this is it.” I said, “Jess, I’m just gonna put you on sabbatical.” She’s been on sabbatical for three years. She just came back yesterday.

Loren Feldman:
I’ve really enjoyed this. My thanks to Lance Tyson, and of course to our sponsor, the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses use an open-book management system to build healthier companies. You can learn more at greatgame.com.