I know a guy who built a hyper successful software sales team.
He took a tech company from £5 Million (in Annual Recurring Revenue) to £500 Million in a decade.
Then he hit the fuck-it button and moved to Portugal to spend his retirement surfing in the sun.
We had a chat about the most important lessons he learned during his time running a sales team at ZogCorp.
Here’s a summary of the five most memorable things he said:
1. “One great hire is more valuable than 10 good ones”
“Every brilliant employee had to be specifically targeted and poached from a competitor.”
“It often takes twelve months to hire one exceptional person, but if you treat them well, they will stay with you for a long time and grow with the company.”
“They’re brilliance rubs off on everyone else. Without even trying, they improve the performance of the people around them.”
“Average employees need to be replaced regularly, they lack the ability to adjust quickly enough as the company scales.”
He’s very pro firing people in general.
He believes that you can’t train an employee to be significantly better in a timely way.
So you should just fire them and pay top dollar to hire the finished product.
Makes sense and makes cents.
2. “Mediocrity can only see mediocrity”
He insisted on interviewing every single new potential hire himself because:
“HR overlooks quality people out of blind incompetence and prioritises average people out of irreverence to their long term performance.”
He was particularly wary of people who come across too well in interviews as: “There has to be a reason why they’ve had so much practice at moving jobs.”
And he absolutely refused to hire anyone with a single figure handicap.
3. High performers deserve much more leniency, autonomy and respect than low performers
The job of a leader is to categorise your employees correctly and then treat them accordingly.
In SaaS sales, he said there are only three types of sales people:
- Chancers
- Lone Wolves
- Team Sellers
The Chancers (75% of the sales team)
The Chancers are hit and miss.
One year they’ll do well and the next they wont.
Most of the time, their performance just about OK.
They lack a deep understanding of what makes them successful, and so they can’t repeat key actions
They should be low stress employees who get replaced regularly.
The Lone Wolves (20% of the sales team)
These guys are naturally gifted individuals who’s behaviours are dictated by their personality.
They despise micromanagers and have no interest in tedious admin.
They’re desire to work alone means they refuse to involve the wider team in their projects.
This results in them failing to reach their full potential (even though they’re still often the teams best performer)
The role of the sales team leader is to leave them the hell alone.
The Team Sellers (5% of the sales team)
These guys are they KINGS of your sales team.
They could comfortably be one of the top performers for ten years straight.
They possess a ruthlessly strategic manager mindset, which enables them to outsource most projects to SDRs, partners and executives.
This means their team does all the work while they sit back and collect the cash.
“They usually retire by 40, so the aim is to find them when they’re 30.”
4. “You can’t expect people who are extraordinary, to behave in a way that is ordinary.”
The top performers in every company are always one straw away from breaking the camels back and getting fired.
Their PERFORMANCE is different, because the way they THINK is different.
Just accept it.
There’s nothing you can do to change it.
The top sales guy will be an egotistical, selfish, capricious iconoclast.
The only way to win as a sales leader… is to resist the insatiable urge to fire him.
5. “Sales guys don’t care about the sales team, the company culture or the product roadmap. Only their commission plan.”
The carrot works better than the stick when it comes to incentivising salesmen.
In order to get the best out of them, you need to provide:
- Achievable quotas
- Big SPIFFs or stock bonuses that vest over a 3 year period
- Attractive SDRs
This keeps everyone in the team happy and out of jail.
These five sales lessons come from an old school guy.
Dude’s a real killer.
The type of bloke you actually WANT to work for.
Which is so hard to find nowadays.
You can learn more listening to him talk for 30 minutes a week.
Than you could in a decade of reading self-help books.
He was at the top of his game, then one day decided to check out and spend the rest of his life eating tapas in a village by the sea.
