Summary:

In this episode, Dr. Jim interviews Chip Neal, a sales leader with 20 years of experience, on how to build elite teams. Chip emphasizes the importance of finding exceptional talent and not settling for mediocre candidates. He shares his insights on the hiring process, including being tough on resumes and asking well-thought-out interview questions. Chip also highlights the value of diversity in a team and the need to challenge the status quo. He concludes by stressing the importance of ongoing dialogue and continuous improvement to sustain a high-performance organization.

Key Takeaways:

1. Challenge your hiring standards and be tough on the process.
2. Look for unique talent that brings diverse perspectives to the team.
3. Great salespeople can come from various backgrounds and skill sets.
4. Continuously evaluate and replace the bottom 10% of your team to maintain excellence.
5. Foster a culture of collaboration and support to create a winning team.

Timestamp

0:02:51

Exceptional talent is needed to build a high-performance team

0:03:55

Importance of finding unique sales talent, not just looking for pedigree

0:06:06

Importance of being tough on the hiring process and not settling

0:08:06

Framework for a disciplined hiring process

0:10:04

Building a team with diverse talents, not clones of the leader

0:11:46

The importance of passion, caring for clients and teammates

0:13:05

The importance of ongoing dialogue in building high performing teams

0:16:48

Top things to consider when building high performing teams

0:18:22

Importance of challenging team members to excel

0:19:01

Recap of key takeaways from the conversation

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And the person that's going to take us through that learning is a 20 year veteran in sales leadership. He's done product environment, services environment, solutions environment in large and small companies.

He's currently on the advisory board for open sky health. He's also an advisor. For the independent Presbyterian church. And currently he is the VP of sales for Abacus technologies. Chip Neal, welcome to the show.

Chip Neal: Thank you very much, Jim. Glad to be here.

Chip Neal: I think first and foremost, you need to know that I'm a hashtag girl dad. I am very proud to say that I have three adult daughters that my wife, Beth and I have raised and they are all professional independent women and are excelling in different areas. I'm also.

Very excited to say that I've had the opportunity throughout my years and hopefully you'll learn that today learn a lot through my sales career, not only internally, but externally throughout all the different businesses that I've worked for. When I'm not. working. I love to play golf.

I love to travel and I enjoy staying active and exercise. And so recently my wife and I picked up pickleball and what a joy that has been to add to just the armamentarium of fun things to do when I'm not working.

Chip Neal: The beautiful thing about pickleball is my wife's a tennis player and I'm a golfer, so this gives us the ability to play something together because she will tell you just how poorly I am at tennis. So it's fun. It's fun to have a sport we can play together.

Dr. Jim: What we're trying to do in these conversations that we have with senior leaders across HR, it and sales is build frameworks for Our listeners and practitioners out there to build high performing teams and elite organizations. So when you think about your career both as an individual contributor and, more so as a people leader, what was the game changing realization that you uncovered or discovered that really amplified your ability to build a high performance organization?

And that's an interesting concept because I always try to hire people that while work me. That are smarter than me and that are more talented that could potentially step into my chair. And some sales leaders are intimidated by that, Jim they feel they're, they don't have that confidence to understand that it's okay to have exceptional, very talented people on your team, because that's only going to make you better.

Some advice that I was given and this sounds Probably pretty tough, but you make and you create this great team. And then as a young sales manager, I had a leader come to me and he said, Chip you built a great team, but every year great sales teams have to look at turning that bottom percent that.

bottom 10% of the team and replacing it with better talent. So that attitude of the weakest link really steps into play. And you know what I found was great salespeople truly want to be associated with great teams and around great other great salespeople. So they appreciate that pace that you're setting and frankly don't want to be the bottom 10% .

And you talked a little bit about. You know what that looks like. I'd like you to expand on that and share a little bit about why sales leaders today might be getting in their own way in terms of finding that exceptional talent. What are some of those pitfalls that you've seen that keeps sales leaders from finding that talent?

Chip Neal: In the society that we're living in today, in the business world that we're living in today, I think we all admit that it's harder to find great talent.

You need to move. On to another candidate, or if they still have not answered and really met what you're looking for, you need to bring them back in for another interview. And let me tell you, as a sales leader, the worst thing you can do is hire the right person for the wrong job.

Because you're only going to set them up for failure and ultimately set you and your team up for failure. That's the challenge right now is that you have to be tough on the process. You got to stay to what brought you into the position that you're in and really seek hard the individual that's going to fill that void within your team.

Dr. Jim: So let's talk a little bit about being tough on the process. What does that look like? I'd like you to spell that out or build a framework around what a disciplined hiring process looks like from the lens of building a high performance team.

We're fortunate that you get a lot of resumes right off the bat. You got to be tough on the resume. You got to be really, you got to look through the details and really find the individual that steps out. It's easy to be successful in your last role, but what does success really mean? And does that success kind of level into what you're looking for and what you feel the success is going to.

Have to be in order to be successful on your team. So right off the bat, taking a hard look at the resume. Secondly, really getting prepared for the questions that you're going to ask this individual so that you have their well thought through that they're going to meet. The central cog in your wheel that you're looking for on that team that you set the questions up that they're not softballs.

If you don't prepare. For that interview and that preparation could mean the difference in you settling for a candidate that answered a question that frankly was just not a well thought out question that you were asking him in order to get to the answers that you were looking for that are going to be the right people to put on your team.

Dr. Jim: It's really good stuff, and I'm already taking some notes on the framework that we're going to build together, but there was one other element that you mentioned in the first bit of the conversation, which was sometimes as sales leaders and hiring managers were looking for pedigree, what's the drawback in taking that view, looking for pedigree?

And I say this all the time, as I said earlier, Great salespeople come in a lot of different forms. It's not just, hey, they went through sales and marketing in college or they were the student body president or they get along great with people or so and so forth. I've had great salespeople that were accountants.

I've had great salespeople that were psychology majors. I've had great salespeople that actually were introverted. But because they had that attention to detail and the wherewithal to understand what that process looked like in order to solve a certain problem for a client, they were exceptional at it.

You got to really take a look hard at what you're looking for. You got to evaluate the person that's in front of you and all their facets of life. And that's the other thing. I love going back to the beginning and having that candidate really walked me through who they are. The decisions they've made, why they made those decisions and some of the things that they've done to get to where we are now, that's when you really start understanding the foundation and peeling the onion back, so to speak, on that individual to know that this person is truly who they say they are and they truly can do the job that we're looking for them to feel.

Why is that

important?

Chip Neal: We all love ourselves, right? We all think that that we are the best of the best at what we do. But that's, that doesn't necessarily make a great team. Great teams are made up with very unique individuals that have special talents and can challenge the status quo, if you will, of a team.

Some of the greatest sales teams that I've had, Jim, were ones that were made up of a lot of different individuals, but they just gelled because they had a common passion that passion was revolved around success, not only personally, but as a team, that's the other thing I, that I think is extremely unique about a great sales.

Has an amazing character, has the ability to truly care about not only their clients and their business, but the people that are surrounding them that make up a team, you have a very special organization and I've been fortunate over the years to have some of those folks that they, yeah, they wanted to win every award.

Dr. Jim: Let's switch gears a little bit and bring it to what we opened the conversation with. We've spent some time talking about what you should be looking at from a hiring perspective. Now they're on the team. And one of the things that I mentioned early on in the conversation was the concept of an ongoing dialogue.

Right player, right role, right team. Why is that important if your goal is to build a high performing team ?

Chip Neal: I think it's important for many reasons. Number one, sustainability. If you don't create and build the right foundation, yeah, you may be, you may have a successful team for this year, but you're not going to have the sustainability of a successful team for the next 5 10 years. And I think you owe it first off to the candidate that you hire to hire them for a career, not a job.

What you're looking for and how you're presenting the job in the first place.

Dr. Jim: There's something really interesting about what you just said. You want to hire people for a career versus hiring them for a job. And that's an interesting philosophy. And maybe this is just limited to the circles that I run in, but I'm in B2B tech.

And the B2B tech space is flooded with people that are just constantly talking about scale. And it seems like your philosophy of hiring for a career versus hiring for a job is in conflict with the idea of scale and growth at all costs. Am I on the right track?

You want to be happy in what you're doing. And some people get their energy from new opportunities and moving on. And this is not about that at all. Some people are simply just chasing the mighty dollar. And this is not about that at all. What this is about is The opportunity to feel like you're truly making a difference on a daily basis.

You're truly growing as an individual and as a talented sales organization and as a salesperson. But on top of this, I think everybody wants to be a part of a winning team. And yeah, you can do that and move to the next situation. But I just have a passion about me that feels hey, I got a really good thing going here.

But what I am telling you is that I've been in sales for a lot of years and what I've seen is that it feels a lot better being part of a truly great team with somebody who cares about me and is mentoring me, not only as a professional, but on a personal level. And that's what I try to do.

Dr. Jim: Before we wind down, let's let's put some work into the framework that we've built in this conversation. So if we're thinking about building elite teams, and you take everything that you've said, what are the, top things that the listeners need to pay attention to when they're looking at building their own teams?

High performing team.

It's easy to settle. If it takes seven interviews to find the right candidate, do it. Do not allow yourself to fall in love with a candidate just because they have your qualifications. I'm telling you, there's a lot of amazing people out there that don't necessarily have qualifications. Exactly what you have.

So look for that uniqueness in those individuals and seek it out. Seek that unique talent out so that you can bring that to your team and that you can appreciate and they can appreciate the Position that they're feeling and how they're going to be able to excel in that position. And then remember this great salespeople are everywhere.

They know it. And remember. Great salespeople want to be associated with other great salespeople, and they want to be associated with great teams. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to your team members to make sure that you're always challenging them to be better .

And it's up to you as the coach and the mentor to continue to coach them up so that they can excel in the position you hired them to be in.

Dr. Jim: Last thing before I wind down, where can people find you?

Chip Neal: You

can find me on LinkedIn I'm Chip Neal, and then we're at abacustechnologies.

Dr. Jim: Thanks for hanging out with us and and sharing your insights.

Here's the stuff that I pulled out of the conversation. And if you're building a framework around it, first step is to identify the motivation of the people that you're looking to hire.

Next step is to define the success that you're looking for within the role, align your questions to the outcomes and goals that you're trying to achieve, ignore things like pedigree and cliches in your hiring process, and then be disciplined across all of those things for every candidate. And then you will have the right.

People in the right roles in the right seats go in the right direction. Chip learned a lot in the conversation. I hope the listeners will pick up as much as I did. Looking forward to getting feedback for those of you who have listened to the conversation. If you liked where it went, leave us a review.

Tell a friend and tune in next time where we'll have another leader sharing with us how to build high performing teams.