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:

- 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

- What multi-layer customer relationships look like to protect key accounts

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

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/

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?

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,

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Hey everyone, Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for

listening to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this

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