[00:00:16] Jason S. Bradshaw: Today's guest is Christopher Goff. Now he is a multi-time bestselling author. He holds multiple certifications in the areas of sales and compensation, and is also a senior director at LabCorp.

[00:00:31] Christopher Goff: Thank you very much. Appreciate you having me.

[00:00:50] Christopher Goff: Yeah. Thank you for that. It does make sense. I figure I stick in the niche area that I have some expertise. What I really do is sales operations, and compensation. And a lot of my focus is where those where like HR and sales come together. And so I've written a number of books on compensating salespeople. My background growing up on sales operations, supporting commercial organizations, naturally translated into familiarizing myself with how to compensate salespeople. When I moved to broad based compensation, I carried some of that business knowledge with me. So I've just been doing that for, ooh about almost 19 years now.

[00:01:36] Jason S. Bradshaw: Your latest book, if I'm not mistaken, is Hiring for Sales, the Essential Guide to Navigating the Sales Talent Acquisition Process.

[00:02:05] Christopher Goff: So a lot of it starts with like pre-work. I would say there's a lot of organizations that struggle in this process of identifying a person or saying, I just need someone, right? To get in there and sell. And the problem is not enough time has been spent on finding what is the real gap that you have internally to be able to find the right type of person that fits culturally, that fits in like the growth cycle that you're in and that you can genuinely afford. Because sustainability is a big part of this especially when you think about revenue being like the lifeblood of your organization and you're trying to genuinely bring on a function like , a person or a sales job that is gonna be your business partner. They're gonna be the ones who will give you that avenue to scale, to grow, to really improve on revenue and financial outcomes. And so you need to find the right person who thinks about how they can assist you in that next cycle, right? Because you're not gonna be looking for a salesperson because you wanna stay the same, you want to change and ideally change exponentially. So you need to be able to have that right person at the right time. And so I think it's really doing the pre-work to know thyself in terms of your organization and to be able to select the right person.

[00:03:36] Jason S. Bradshaw: When I was in corporate, I would always have this conversation with HR around their desire for me to have a 55 page or certainly felt like a 55 page description of what the person's gonna do, how many times each day they're gonna scratch their nose and in some organizations, they wanted it to be quite granular. And in other organizations it was more conceptual and I'm wondering, how important is it to really define the job that you're hiring someone for?

[00:04:37] Christopher Goff: Obviously, you have to get into some of the nuances of, is it field-based or inside based? Are they gonna be traveling? So that you get a lot of the job classification stuff worked out with HR. And pay levels, of course, right? So we can pay competitively. So you do need some of those things, but that would mostly be a page of bullet points. That's about it. I think you can accomplish most everything by having a very clear understanding. If you could describe what is this person gonna broadly do and how every Monday morning they get up and can clearly know how to execute or what they have to accomplish that day. Then you've got most of it covered in my opinion.

[00:05:42] Jason S. Bradshaw: You've mentioned compensation a couple of times and I think back to my corporate days, being employed in corporate, I should say, that there was always this great divide shall we say, and it didn't really matter whether where you worked in the organization or what industry the organization was at. There was always the great divide of the salespeople and not the salespeople. And you would see the salespeople, having these things called incentive trips- a week in Hawaii or the National Sales Conference, that just happened to be at some ritzy resort and lots of free flowing adult drinks and, all in the name of good business and generating a great year, right? Or celebrating a great year. And then you'd have the other part of the organization going that's all well and good for them but we're the ones that take the calls at 1:00 AM in the morning when something they've promised hasn't been delivered. And why don't we get the parties? So it always does seem that there is this divide between the compensation package, what it looks like for someone's in sales versus someone in other parts of the business who, from a pure financial point of view, maybe the totals are the same, but the visible compensation packages seem very different.

[00:06:57] Christopher Goff: It's an excellent question. When it all comes down to it, when we look at this almost philosophically. Why do we compensate sales the way we compensate sales? And some of it is a cultural expectation. When someone gets into sales and when executives pay for sales functions, there tends to be an expectation of a trip and recognition. And then usually a considerable amount of upside. So if they're high performers, they get paid very well. In many cases it does create a cultural divide especially as I think these sales organizations get bigger and bigger. Like it's a sales versus ops type of or services or like you, as you said, they've made a bunch of promises we can't deliver on it, always a conflict. Naturally that does occur. The other thing is that when it all boils down to it, there is a different type of person generally that is interested in pursuing a type of job that has a considerable higher percentage of pay at risk. And that they are comfortable with being told "No" very often, that they have to have challenge themselves with the discipline of going and pursuing new business in places where people may not like them. They close the door in their face. They have really terrible experiences. There is a little bit of, historically terminology used that would say a sales pay per or coin operated. You may or may not have heard of that but the concept there is we throw enough money and perks at them and make them feel good because it's a tough job.

[00:09:16] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. I think also it, at least for me, it always begs the question, just because you do it for sales doesn't mean you can't do it for others, right? You should be celebrating success and a achievement in the organization as a whole, not just sales. And it's also part of that risk reward conversation. A lot of salespeople's base compensation. People in ops may not wake up for. So it's about, what are you willing to put on your line as well.

[00:09:51] Jason S. Bradshaw: And you talk about the first 90 days. What, why is the first 90 days of a new sales person's job so important?

[00:11:40] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. So what are some of the things that that you can do to really help set up that success window? Because, I'd imagine on the flip side, you also don't want to hand them just a pre-done deal, right? Then they feel like it's not really their hard work that led to the success.

[00:11:59] Christopher Goff: It depends on the organization, the sales organization, but I would say a lot of it is being able to have like ridealongs and coaching opportunities. And so like the ridealongs would be, depending on how experienced or inexperienced the individual is to the function of the sales process that exists within this organization. It is observing and taking the opportunity to say, okay, that's how it's done. This is what I wanna replicate, or this is how I want to interact with potential customers in the decision making process or influencing or speaking to prospects in a particular way. That's like a big part right there. Coaching for management to help guide through the process of, again, replication because a lot of this is I identifying the opportunities and being able to execute.

[00:12:47] Christopher Goff: When it all boils down to it.

[00:12:59] Christopher Goff: I ideally not. I would say a lot of organizations essentially do that. It's okay, we'll throw you into the deep end. If you survive, great. You learned. But it doesn't mean that you've picked up on any best practices.

[00:13:37] Christopher Goff: This is how we do business. And like many companies, the bigger you are, the more complicated and more difficult you are to do business with. And guess what? You're probably selling to somebody who's just as complicated to do business with and you need to know how to make those things happen.

[00:13:58] Christopher Goff: Always

[00:14:08] Jason S. Bradshaw: So what is that hierarchy of needs that a salesperson needs to be able to retain them?

[00:14:46] Christopher Goff: Ideally, this is where what a true and a long-term professional salesperson shifts from needing to pay rent to enjoin the act, right? The profession of, and the mastery associated with the exercise of selling. And so it's an act and the proficiency for its own sake. And greater, higher levels of enlightenment and fulfillment that come along with that; that sort of level of proficiency and mastery is then acting on something greater than yourself. And so I think it also naturally lines up with the maturity of a person in their job that when they stop being, let's say, afraid of losing their job and shifting more towards a focus on being excellent in their profession. Not the job in being a salesperson and they have a higher calling, they also are collecting the money, the commissions or the incentives to do things that are extend beyond themselves and that at that point of maturity also may be more of you're doing stuff for your grandkids, you're doing stuff for retirement, you're doing stuff that's a different story, that having to simply fulfill the needs of living paycheck to paycheck. So I think these two things are not independent. They just naturally also progress through the profession and that pursuit of meeting the needs in work and a mindset related to how you think about work and the fulfillment you receive from the act of pursuing that sort of profession.

[00:16:36] Christopher Goff: I would say that the first one probably is just naturally the case. And that one's called Starting Simple Sales Compensation. Because how I wrote it was simply a introduction for the layman. So if you need to hire a salesperson in your organization and you know nothing about sales comp, that's book for you. That's the one where it's really just a high level overview. It tells you about the basics for understanding why sales comp? What do you need to know? How do you need to prepare? And my emphasis is, in the first couple chapters is about culture. It's about affordability. And then I get into the nitty gritty of the nuances of pay curve and the performance measures and setting quotas and all of that sort of stuff. But a lot of it is heavily emphasizing whether or not the time is right and that what you may think is really tested and checked. So that's why I like that one probably the most.

[00:17:50] Christopher Goff: Yeah. And I see that all the time with different leaders who said, oh, this person was good where I worked before. Just like they do the same thing with the, oh, we had an old comp plan, that was from like a company tour ago or we used this seven or eight years ago. The compensation plan itself also has to fit your culture, your strategy at this moment in time, and the underlying mechanics of what's most important for your organization right now. So one of the things, just like the people, this is what I teach in those books, is understanding that little piece of paper that you let you end up with, needs to fit for right now where your company currently is, and it's never intended to be something that lasts forever. It's not a set it and forget it, approach. It is something that is intended to fit with this particular lifecycle that you're currently in of growth and strategy and alignment. And when you grow out of that, the things that we're saying is, we're positively incentivizing the salesperson to act right on your behalf for the organization and execute on a specific strategy. As soon as the strategy changes, you don't want to be paying them for them to do the wrong thing inadvertently because you kept it the same. Those are the things that need to be revisited regularly.

[00:19:27] Jason S. Bradshaw: And my argument is always do we want the average result of the industry or do we wanna achieve what we've set out to do?

[00:19:44] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah we might not get them as well it, it's a slippery slope.

[00:20:10] Christopher Goff: Yeah so that particular book is a response to legislation that is really popular internationally and specifically actions that the state of California and New York City took. But it's also similarly being pushed by the EU directives, is essentially making sure that there is greater transparency of pay when people request pay activity. Certain things that you can't ask of people in the interview process, kind of what have you historically made and a lot of other components that an organization has to ready themselves for what is culturally coming our way, regardless of whether we like it or not.

[00:21:16] Christopher Goff: Now to your question more specifically, I think that culturally we are seeing an expectation of greater visibility and transparency, which is a double-edged sword in my opinion, in terms of privacy and personal negotiation capabilities for your own pay, but also that of the organization's capability of actually positively rewarding people for performance. And so I think there are some genuine challenges that, that we're gonna have to live through probably over the next decade to work our way through it.

[00:22:28] Christopher Goff: Yeah, there and there is, I would say some of it's generational. It's an expectation of having greater transparency. In comp, I always say it's the worst kept secret, is everybody, for whatever reason, this is why I say it's generational. Some people, and I think a growing number of people like to talk about comp amongst their peers, but I would say, I would imagine that's mostly 'cause I'm not one of those people. I would imagine that's really just a zero-sum sort of experience. No one feels good about it when they're done talking about it, but for some reason they wanna talk about it.

[00:23:00] Christopher Goff: It's gonna happen. So how is an organization gonna defend itself against claims of pay equity and or pay disparity problems.

[00:23:13] Christopher Goff: Yes, this is true.

[00:23:27] Jason S. Bradshaw: And it doesn't have to be something big, but what should they start doing as soon as they finish listening to this episode?

[00:24:19] Christopher Goff: Now, I believe that my resources, and you can find a lot of my books on amazon.com but I believe that they help people understand those sorts of things. But of course I'm biased. But I think it's also a really good opportunity for you to get more in tune with the way your business, what it does, and that you have a better appreciation for the execution and the alignment of staff to support and execute in very optimal ways for like better business outcomes.

[00:24:57] Jason S. Bradshaw: Christopher, it's been absolutely great having you share your thoughts with us today and helping our listeners transform the experience that they have for their team members when it comes to sales and their sales attraction, retention and compensation.

[00:25:12] Christopher Goff: Thank you very much. Appreciate it very much.

[00:25:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: Hey, just quickly, I wanted to reach out and say thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode of Chats with Jason. I'd really appreciate a five star review on your favorite podcasting app, or if you're watching along on YouTube, give me a thumbs up and show that you like this video and be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out on the awesome content and the great guests that we've got coming up for you.