In this revelatory episode, Ben Wright, Director of Stronger Sales Teams, shares why relying on one superstar sales rep can put your entire business at risk. If you’re in stage 4 feeling dangerously dependent on a top performer, worried about what happens if they leave or burn out, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What multi-layer customer relationships look like to protect key accounts
– Why depending on a single high-performing sales rep creates massive vulnerability for your company
– How to build simple, repeatable processes so your sales engine runs without any one person
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a founder. I’m your host, Scott Retheimer, and today’s topic is for those of you who either want, or maybe even worse, already have an amazing sales rep. Sounds like such a problem, doesn’t it, because it just might not be all that it’s cracked up to be, and most founders don’t even realize how exposed they are until that top rep leaves, burns out, or something else happens, and here to help us out, here to not only figure out what’s wrong with having a great sales rep, or what could be wrong with it, but to also find a better way forward is the one and only Ben Wright, who is a seasoned sales team builder, strategist, coach, and an avid believer that the best sales leaders must constantly sharpen their tools to maintain a competitive edge.
He’s built high-performing sales teams from the ground up across the corporate world, fast with startups and mature businesses alike. Notably, his last venture was recognized as an Australian growth company award winner for two consecutive years, scaling from $0 to 40 million in annual receiving or annual recurring revenue in just over seven years. Defined by grit, Ben is a leader who truly thrives when stepping up to a challenge, Ben’s a published contributor to HubSpot and LinkedIn, who brings immense energy to everything that he does. He’s here with us today. Ben, welcome to the show. I’m really excited about this conversation, because, as I mentioned coming in, I’ve got several clients who are dealing with this very thing right now, super successful founders doing 10 million plus a year and dangerously close to peril at every single moment of that, because they’ve got this great sales rep that they’ve written on the back of for years now, and they’re starting to feel the cracks. What’s going on here? Why is having a great sales rep potentially such a problem?
Ben Wright
Well, first of all, Scott, thanks very much for having me on today. And we talk about grit in that intro and problems. We’ve had the trifecta this morning. We have first of all, we have my deep, heavy Australian accent, which I get asked all the time to, ‘Hey, Ben, slow down. I love your accent, but it’s so deep, so I’ll do my best to do that today. I also have one great big black eye, and for those not watching on video, jump onto video on this one, because you’ll see a man who has a six year old daughter who has managed to break his nose, displace his nose, slit his eye, and give him concussion with one smooth move of a surfboard, and then the third one is we had some connectivity issues jumping on because we are, we are that far apart in the world, so we’ve had a beautiful start to this morning, but from adversity often comes great results.
So, I’m so, thank you for having me on, and certainly my job today is to try and help, particularly those founders we speak about, who have one high performing rep, both a blessing and a curse. We’ll try and think of a couple of ideas that they can have that are going to help them move the dial immediately to keep their business growing, but also protect them. So that’s my job, I see, for the next 15 minutes or so with you. But if we look at a founder who has managed to move their sales team from just them, right, they’re out there, they’re carrying the bag, they’re doing all the hard work into having one person who’s running their sales and doing, let’s say, in this, in this instance, a terrific job. The first thing I’m going to say is, well done. To be able to move from founder-led sales to a team of selling is one of the most difficult steps you can have in any business. It’s like going from being an individual contributor in an organization, to a leader of people, super difficult steps.
So, the first thing I’ll say is, well done. The second thing I’ll say is, the challenge is only just beginning, because exactly as you say, when we have one sales person in our team, we can become really heavily reliant on them, and without the right processes behind them, and that word is so important, it can, of course, elicit a bit of fear into people. Process, what’s process? What am I going to do here? Processes get really complex. Do I need to use AI? Do I need to have it written down? How many people have got to be involved in the process? Right, it can get that prefrontal cortex running a little bit hard for people, but at the same time, process can be so simple. So, without the right process, and I’m going to say the words simple process behind anyone in your sales team, whether you have one or 21 people, like we had in our business at the height of our business, having that great process behind these salespeople is just so important to be able to build that growth. So we might dive into that today to give your founders and your entrepreneurs some tips around how they can manage a team of one or a team of two,
Scott Ritzheimer
that’s so great. I couldn’t agree more on a couple points. One, I forgot to mention this earlier, but this is now available in both Apple Podcasts and Spotify on video, so we’ve definitely got you covered, so. Everyone can see the effects of your six year old, but yeah, in either those platforms, jump on the video, it’s a great feature in both, but no, to the point of today’s episode, I think that it’s so wonderful when you can solve for the being the only salesperson that, like, you’ll take anything, and when that anything happens to be a fantastic individual that can actually like outsell what you did, which happens sometimes, like I most founders at that level just can’t think of anything better, you know, and so I think one of the things that’s so difficult is just kind of mentally how we get stuck in this space of maybe you can speak to this for us, but one of the challenges that I see is it’s really tough to find another one of those and to bring them on, and so even if they try and hire out a team, the expectations are just so outsized that that they end up just keep falling back to this one person, and you can feel trapped if it’s all down to one person.
Ben Wright
Yeah, absolutely. Agree. So, what I might do is put to side, for the moment, the piece around how you can retain that person. It’s so critical, and no doubt you’ve spoken about that in your podcast, but there’s ways we can retain people through not just salary, through through learning, through cultural benefits, through flexibility, through lots of different things. Here we probably won’t go down those. I won’t go down that area today. I might look at more around what do we do to protect the business, so that if that person either stops performing, and I have seen many elite sales people stop performing overnight for various reasons, or if that person decides to leave. What you do to make sure that your business doesn’t go from a screaming success into one that you know creates a bundle of nerves for you as the owner. And I think if we’re looking at this, let’s take a drive, you know, drive down down memory lane for me, where I’ve had businesses which have two types of sales funnels.
So the first time with that high performing salesperson is a business where I’d call it your job in so you’re winning deal, completing deal on to next deal, winning deal, completing deal on to next deal. So that’s very much that hunting style business versus businesses where you have fewer accounts, but they’re bigger and they stay with you, and you provide to those accounts again and again and again, and this example also works when you’re, when you have smaller accounts, but lots of them, but they’re repeat customers, and they’re two very different streams of sales. One requires the ability to make relationships quickly, build confidence, trust, you know, show your knowledge very quickly, help your customers out, and then win deals, and the other one requires you to maintain and foster relationships, so if we look at the situation where you are a business owner and you are looking to win new deals again and again and again, and you have one salesperson that’s out there, they’re hunting, they’re knocking down doors, they’re calling inbound leads quickly, they build those great relationships, and they’re closing deals.
In that instance, for me, where I see leaders have some reassurance that if that salesperson is going to move on is where they’ve built a very – and this is so important – a very simple process behind it, and that process, in our experience, normally comes down to a framework that we call the core three model, or the core three framework, which is all about speed, value, and process, and if we can build a very simple sales process that focuses on speed to lead, so how quickly we’re engaging with our customers, and that’s very much, and we don’t have lots of time to dive into this today, but it’s very much around making sure your energy levels in how you contact your customer match theirs, so if we can build a process around speed, we can build a process that has ingrained into how you contact a customer, qualify your customer, get to site, complete your site audit, and if it’s on the phone or video, that’s okay too. Very similar process, right? Close out that site visit, quote, follow up, win, lose, review that deal where you have a very simple process in there. My experience is that it’s far easier to bring in sales people to then move into, or to repeat that process outside of your gun, right?
Ben Wright
You’re one expert, but I think the piece that gets missed by most entrepreneurs and most founders is that they rely on that gun salesperson to do whatever they want, so what you end up doing is you get their model of selling rather than the business’s model of selling, and that’s when you’re at risk, because whilst you don’t lose relationships when they leave the business, you might lose an active pipeline, but that’s okay, most businesses are turning over their pipeline 10 to 12 times a year, so you might lose that active pipeline, and okay, but you have to step in as the founder and close that and work that, and you have a short sprint where you need to recover, but where you’ve built that process into something that’s simple and repeatable, it’s far easier to replace that with a salesperson that will get the job done, so that is without doubt my number one recommendation is you must simplify into a simple process where you have. Hunting style mentality, when we look at the second option, which is, sorry, Scott, over there. Yeah, let
Scott Ritzheimer
me, let me follow up on that, because one of the things you say, simplify, and I think that’s really, really smart, and I really like this idea of the business’s process, not the salesperson’s one of the, one of the things I’ve found complicates that, and this just might be my shallow experience. So, feel free to speak into it, but is sometimes you just, you don’t have a wealth of that same level of performance sitting around, right? So, if one person’s bringing those all in and they do 5 million, and you bring in another person and they do two, it feels like the end of the world, but it’s still 2 million in revenue created. How do you know? Like, is there a, is there a simplifying of expectations? Is there a level setting of expectations that have to come with that process? How do they assess whether or not that $2 million performer is worth it.
Ben Wright
Yeah, look, it is a great question, and without doubt, such as life, that we will have different levels of performance in any function in our business, operations, customer service, legal, finance, whatever it may be, and sometimes you do get star performers, and sometimes those star performers leave, and I always see that as as an opportunity to learn when we get that star performer in to make our business better, but when it comes to expectations, the simplest that I have in terms of whether or not you have a profit generating, not a revenue generating, but a profit generating salesperson, is that they are driving 10 times their salary into their business. For most businesses, that’s a very basic benchmark. If you get someone that’s going over that, well, then they are over performing, and that’s when how you retain that person becomes really important, as well as, of course, building that sales process, but if you have a $200,000 a year headcount generating $2 million a year in revenue for most businesses, that’s a profitable sales person.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, that’s really helpful, and, and I like that it, it simplifies it to what’s necessary for the organization to succeed, because oftentimes there’s just a lot of emotion in the process as a whole, and so I think it’s just a really helpful rule. So, all right, we’ve got the hunter, that person’s got to rapidly create those connections, and we’ve got that side equation. Let’s talk a little bit about more account-based sales or recurring revenues, what happens with the elite performer on that side of things?
Ben Wright
So, when we have that elite performer who’s built those relationships, that’s where I see founders get really nervous, and I certainly had that in my business. We had a team of 21 but off that 21 we had three salespeople that were generating around about half our revenue, so we had 18 salespeople generating 50% and three salespeople generating 50% Now, the good news for us was that if one of those people left, we were able to farm out some of their work across those 18, but that’s not always the case when you’re running your own businesses. The strongest recommendation I have here, and hopefully, as leaders and founders listening, you’ve heard this before, but it comes down to your execution of it, is making sure that you have multi-layer connections across those customers, and what that means is that in any business that’s key account driven, it’s never just driven with one relationship, because any single point of contact in anything in this world, we have four wheels on the road. We have two legs when we walk along, right? We could go on examples here forever, but anytime in this world you have a single point of contact.
If that fails, well, then the relationship is broken. So, it’s really important that you, I mean, let’s, and let’s have a look at larger accounts. If you have larger key accounts, generally it’s the founders of the business that will step in and also have a relationship with with more than one contact in that business, so we end up going from a one to one connection to a symbiotic, and on video you can see my hands moving in some really, really weird way here, right, but we have multiple layers of connections where you have 234, people in your business, or two at a bare minimum, contacting 234, people in your customer’s business, when you have a smaller business, so if you’re a founder that’s doing transactions that are lots of $1,000 $5,000 $10,000 transactions, where it’s really not feasible for you to also have a relationship with 100 customers, well, where you then have your customer service team, or your operations team, your delivery teams having relationships that support your key salesperson, then what we’re doing then is, if that sales person leaves, is we are buying ourselves time, because that’s the key game here.
Good key accounts where you have multiple relationships, where they lose one contact. If your service is good and your product is good, they won’t leave. However, you still need to be able to replace that front-end service in a reasonable amount of time, so I really like the approach around multi layering and multi contacts across these customers as ones that you see as an insurance policy to buy you time if and when, and the answer is generally when your top performing salespeople leave. It happens, it’s life, it’s cyclical. So, there’s a couple of ideas in there that can help you. Start to generate some stability and stop you having that moment at home when you’re eating dinner and your kids are around and you’re not present, so we’ve all been there.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s so good. Two more questions. One’s one of my favorites, and the other is a nice easy softball for you. But the first question here is one that asks all my guests, and it is, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish every founder watching or listening today knew?
Ben Wright
Yeah, so look, I’ve been asked this question before, and I had a number of runner-ups, but I think with this topic that we’re talking about today, what I’d really like to encourage any founder or any entrepreneur to focus on is speed, so now I don’t know if speed’s a secret, but implementation of speed is, and too often I see sales businesses, even with their high-performing salespeople, rely on their heads, as we’ve spoken about, to get deals done. Where you have a process that prioritizes speed, it allows you to match your energy with the customer’s energy, when they’re inquiring, you’re responding, and when someone’s inquiring, at that moment you have the greatest sense of curiosity, or engagement, or excitement. All right, when you, when you quickly get out to see that customer again, you’re pairing with that, right? When you’re asking the right questions quickly, what do you need? What are you ready to buy now? Are you just looking right? What do we need to do to get this moving forward? Who’s involved? When do we want to do it by right? These great questions, when you’re asking them quickly, you have engagement from the customer and you’re building relationship naturally. So, any anyone that’s listening that is worried about that, about their key one, two single sales people having too much of the business on their shoulders, speed up that sales process, and you’ll find that you’ll be able to replace those people far easier if something goes wrong.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, fantastic. I love you. I’m glad you came back to it, because it struck me earlier, and I didn’t know if we’d get back to it. So, I love this focus on speed. I’m sitting here thinking of all the situations where I probably would have bought more if they were fast for me, and then I’m thinking of all the situations that I wasn’t fast enough when someone else was interested, so I love that. Ben, folks are listening to this, and they either find themselves in the position we talked about with that star sales rep, but unable to really scale beyond it, or worried that they might cave in without it, or they’re just trying to grow their sales, and they want someone who knows what they’re doing to come out alongside and help out. Where can they find more out about the work that you do? What resources do you have for them?
Ben Wright
Thank you, Scott. I really appreciate it. So, we do, on a really limited basis, we do quote audits for selected podcasts, and we’ve agreed to do it with the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. We’re going to put a link up into your show notes, where you can book in to have a quote audit, and that quote audit, it takes a couple of minutes to do a quick quiz there, and then we look at exactly where you’ve got some holes in your quoting process, queue right risk management, or your business, or the ability to grow quickly, so that’ll be in the show notes, and you can jump straight in if that, if you’d like some help straight away, it doesn’t cost anything. There’s no obligation. We just do it as a thank you for having us on the podcast. Or, alternatively, you can jump onto our podcast, which is it’s called Trade Sales Made Simple. So, it’s a fantastic podcast. It is generally directed at trade sales, but it applies to so many more businesses than that. And I’d probably start when we talk about speed. I’d actually start around episode 185 That is a great little 12 minutes, like yours short and chunky, around speed and how you can improve that in your business. So, that’d be the two ways. And thank you very much for giving the opportunity to do that, Scott.
Scott Ritzheimer
Brilliant. Great. Well, Ben, thanks for being here. Honor and privilege having you from the other side of the world, bright and early, beat up and all, but here with us nonetheless. We really appreciate your, your sharing with us here this morning. And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hey everyone, Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need for the level you’re in right now. If you want to discover what level you’re in, take our 10 question founders evolution quiz for free at foundersquiz.com That’s foundersquiz.com It’ll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next level in your journey as a founder. If you got something out of today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, or review. It helps us reach more founders like you, and let’s be honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible guests. So, keep starting, scaling, and succeeding, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Contact Ben Wright
Ben Wright is a seasoned sales team builder, strategist, coach, and an avid believer that the best sales leaders must constantly sharpen their tools to maintain a competitive edge. He has built high-performing sales teams from the ground up across the corporate world, fast-growth startups, and mature businesses alike. Notably, his last venture was recognized as an Australian Growth Company award winner for two consecutive years, scaling from $0 to $40M in ARR in just over seven years. Defined by grit, Ben is a leader who truly thrives when stepping up to a challenge. Ben is a published contributor to HubSpot and LinkedIn who brings immense energy to everything he does.
Want to learn more about Ben Wright’s work at COMPANY? Check out his website at http://www.strongersalesteams.com/
Connect with Ben through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachbenwright/