Lucas Price sits down with Chip Neal, VP of Sales at Abacus Technology, to explore the art of building elite sales teams. With 35 years of sales leadership experience, Chip emphasizes the importance of identifying exceptional talent, training them to meet high standards, and fostering an environment where they can thrive. Discover how emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in sales and why talent is irreplaceable. Gain insights into Chip's interview strategies and learn from his experiences on recognizing the right person for the right job.
Take Aways
Finding the Right Talent: Focus on hiring individuals who possess exceptional skills and fill gaps within the team, rather than just mirroring your qualities.
Training and Accountability: Provide clear expectations and continuous support to develop a well-rounded and accountable team.
Emotional Intelligence: Evaluate candidates’ emotional intelligence through scenario-based questions and role-playing exercises to gauge their ability to handle stress and maintain integrity.
Self-awareness in Leadership: Successful leaders must be self-aware, hiring individuals who complement their weaknesses and have the potential to take over their roles.
Talent Over Tools: While sales tools and products are important, the innate and learned talents of individuals are paramount in building an elite team.
Tip has been married to his wife, Beth, for 29 years and he has three adult daughters. He currently serves on the advisory board. For open sky health and on an advisory board for independent Presbyterian churches, golf, travel, and exercise are his hobbies. Chip, is there anything that I missed there that you'd like to add?
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[00:00:46] Lucas Price: Yeah. Thanks for being here as well. We're here to talk about. Building elite sales teams. Can you tell me what's your key advice? What's some of your key insights around the most important parts of building an elite sales team?
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And I'm very distinct in exactly what I'm looking for when I'm looking for talent. 1st thing you want to do is find great exceptional talent. 2nd is you want to train them to. Your expectations and hold that accountability once you find that elite talent and have trained them up. And then I think the 3rd thing that's more important is you need to get out of the way and you got to let them do what you brought them on to do is to go find those opportunities, close those opportunities and help continue to build and drive your organization to the next level.
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You want somebody that's going to not only work hard, that has the character integrity that you want to have, but someone that ultimately Lucas can sit in your chair and take over in case that opportunity arises. And hopefully you are looking for that person that. Can work you out of a job because all great successful leaders want somebody that's going to continue to push them challenge, not only themselves, but the team that's around them in order to help you [00:03:00] get to the next level that you want to go, but also build the team that ultimately you want to have and be surrounded by.
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[00:03:20] Chip Neal: Absolutely. Emotional intelligence is extremely important in the world of sales. So if you know when to do certain things, what to do in certain situations and how to accomplish it, you've gotten probably 85 percent of sales out of the way. And. I think so many times when you're evaluating sales talent, people forget to look at emotional intelligence.
ent through throughout their [:
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What they're going to do in certain situations that they give out, role playing is a lot of sales. People don't like to role play. I love to role play. I think role playing is helping you. It's practice. It's making you get better before the game. And if you have that same situation, when you set that up in an interview process and put them into a role play.
Scenario, [:
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[00:05:18] Chip Neal: Yeah I have a number of them, I think, what do they do in a situation where the candidate or the person that they're talking to is challenging their character or their integrity because of a situation that maybe has occurred, whether it's the sales process that they're going through, maybe it's some information that they provided for him, whether it's analytics or something else they challenge that, that individual and sometimes when that challenge, comes forth before somebody, they don't react in the way that they need to. And so I think anytime somebody challenges your character, your integrity, it really [00:06:00] questions how they're going to react to that challenge. And based on how they react, a lot of times will tell me if this is an individual that I want on my team.
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So you're looking for, are they perceiving how other people are responding to them emotionally and then what do they do about it? How do they change the perception and how do they go about building relationships with those people? That's a question I like to use. Part of emotional intelligence is understanding your own emotions and the emotions in other people, and then coming up with a game plan around how to change the emotions when necessary.
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[00:06:58] Lucas Price: . A lot of the key [00:07:00] advice that you gave us when we went back to the very first question, maybe all of it was related to the talent side of the equation. why is the talent side important, you could have mentioned like having the right sales tools or representing the right product or, all of these external things, but you pointed internally to, the person themselves in terms of what's important about building an elite sales team.
Why is that the most important item or one of the most important items? And how did you discover that was the thing that mattered?
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There is nothing that can take away from somebody's pure talent. I love the [00:08:00] stories like Rudy. I love people that go above and beyond their talent. And I'm not saying by any means that those folks aren't out there, but I think when you're talking to individuals. What are they looking for?
Whether it's a coach or a leader in a business situation, they're looking for the most talented individual. And that talent sometimes is God given. Sometimes it's not, maybe it's talent because of the trials and tribulations that they've gone through that have allowed them to get more talented in their field because of the things that they've gone through.
So I think it's extremely important to have talent. And I think ultimately, when when you're trying to build your sales teams, you want the best individuals that are the most well rounded from a talent perspective as you can get on your team.
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[00:08:58] Chip Neal: I like to tell folks [00:09:00] because I've been in sales leadership for sales or sales leadership for 35 years, I'd like to say that I've never made a mistake, but I've probably made more mistakes than I would want anybody to make. And unfortunately, 1 of the mistakes I made is I allowed the interview process to touch.
My heart strings with certain situations . I saw that individual had so much desire and they wanted to. Be successful, and I've really wanted to be there for them and I've tried in multiple cases and some people, yes, I've been able to coach up, but I don't think you can ever take away from if the individual has the right foundation.
imes to Lucas is we have the [:
And we owe it to the candidate as much as we owe it to our team, as much as we owe it to ourselves to help that individual find what's best for them. Because we ultimately want what's best for anybody that we have the honor to, to interview on any given day. Unfortunately I've had situations where I hired because I felt so strongly about an individual just because I liked them so much, but I was not doing them justice by putting them in a role that unfortunately they were going to fail in .
