I break down how to build a sales team that truly runs itself by implementing fundamental systems that eliminate the daily firefighting and micromanagement that drains most MSP owners.

I share my 20 years of experience showing how the right systems - from lead distribution to compensation plans - can free you from constantly making subjective decisions and dealing with team conflicts, allowing you to focus on proactive growth strategies instead.

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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.

About Ray:

→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.

→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.

→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com

→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.

→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com

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Speaker 1

The thing that is going to make your MSP sales team right itself isn't some management hack, and it's not about hiring some magical salesperson that can somehow operate without any guidance whatsoever. And as much as I would love to, to stand here and tell you that because it would make my life and my job a hell of a lot easier, it's just not the reality.

Speaker 1

Speaker 1

Let's dive in. What do I mean by a self running sales team? I don't mean a team in which you don't do anything as a sales manager, and that's whether your title is sales manager or you're a business owner that just has a salesperson reporting to you. When we're talking about self running, there are still things that you need to do, but they are just vastly different than what you're doing.

Speaker 1

If you aren't running a self running sales team. Now, let me break this down. When you are not leading a self running sales team, there's a pretty good chance that you are bogged down in bullshit all day. Frankly, like you were fighting fires all day long. You're getting questions from reps that are like, oh, hey boss, can I get can I get commission on this one?

Speaker 1

Or hey, can I get credit to this one? Hey, can I get this moved over to this or hey, this is a special case. Like could we do x, y, z, like whatever that is, or you have things coming in the door, you're like, oh, hey, that was my lead. No, that was my lead. No, that was I actually did that one.

Speaker 1

And you know like and so you got people, you know, fighting over, over leads. You've got the role of making sure people are doing their job. So if you're not leading a self running sales team, chances are you are either figuratively or in some cases literally standing over people shoulders like, hey, you got to make more calls. You know, like we're we're only getting X number of calls we should be hitting.

Speaker 1

Why? Like why are we getting there? And then you're having all of these conversations and then they're giving you all of these excuses and you're looking at it, you're saying, okay, why are we here and why are we here? And then here you're dealing with performance issues and you're like, hey, we're we're not at this certain level. Well, sure.

Speaker 1

I put this person a warning. Should I not put this person on a warning? Like, okay, how many warnings should they get? Like, should they should they still be here after a certain point? Like, is that goal actually achievable? And then you're having conversations with reps and they're telling you like, well, you know the lead suck. And you're like, okay is like what's it's like, these are the things that you're dealing with when you're leading a team that can't run itself, you're dealing with, well, one of my friends calls naps, right?

Speaker 1

Like you're getting to the end of the day. You're like, damn. Like, I'm just. I'm just not gonna wash and I'm. And you get to the end of the day and you're like, yeah, I've got a decision fatigue. I've had, you know, 72 conversations. I've done XYZ, but have I actually done anything to move the needle in terms of sales and that effectively means when you're firefighting you're purely in a reactive mode.

Speaker 1

And that is not the highest value that a sales leader can bring to an MSP. The highest value that a good sales leader can bring to an MSP is building the right strategies to grow over a period of time. It's building the right systems to make sure that that happens. It's looking at the goals and making sure that you've got a good plan to achieve them.

Speaker 1

It's looking at the environment, right, that your team is operating in, or even just the one person. If you've got a, you know, just one sales person, like looking at that and saying, hey, are there some, some tools, other, some tech, are there some activities that we could do? Are there some, you know, high quality trainings that we could do?

Speaker 1

You're adding way more value when you are proactively pushing things forward in your business. That is the benefit of having a team that can actually run itself. You're not swatting gnats all day, right? Like you're not fighting fires all day. In fact, you're building fire prevention systems like you were focusing more time on how do I continue to build this high performance environment and grow sales that, at the end of the day, is why we're here.

Speaker 1

It's why you're watching this video. How do we grow with less chaos? And so here's how you flip that around and start to build a team that's capable of running itself, to put you in the position of proactively moving certain priorities and certain strategies. And a good environment forward is based on systems, because when you have the right systems in place, whether those are lead distribution systems, whether those are comp systems, whether those are people hiring systems, one of those are training systems, whatever they are, when you've got the right systems in place, the systems make most of the decisions for you.

Speaker 1

If you've designed it the right way, then the lead distribution system is not only predictable, it's transparent. If you've designed it the right way. The comp system not only helps people earn more money, but it tells them very clearly what to do and very clearly what they're going to be incentivized for. And certain things are going to be incentivized more for.

Speaker 1

Right. Like those decisions are being made with systems, and you can't build those systems if you are constantly fighting fires. And what's worse is when you're fighting those fires all day, like I. And believe me, I've been there. I have turned around sales teams. I've walked into the environment and been like, oh shit, like, we are going to have to systematize the hell out of this.

Speaker 1

And it's going to be it's going to be some work. Like I've walked into it. When you were fighting fires all day, you were draining your energy. You are massively distracted. You are not creating like any source of real value in the business. That is not what's going to make you money. It's not what's going to make your business more money.

Speaker 1

And whether they know it or not, it's not what's going to make good sales reps on your team. More money. Here's a guy who is turning around a sales team, and this particular sales team actually sold various types of things, right? So they had some new client acquisition stuff. They had some project based stuff, and then they had some, renewal based stuff.

Speaker 1

Right. So they were they were selling a variety of things every month was like this, you know, it was like it was sweat. It was like a whac-a-mole situation because every month we had the same discussions. It was so and so got the big lead and I had more sales. But yeah, he had more sales. But you know, he has the better territory and you know he has the better territory.

Speaker 1

But you know they have more renewals. And so his sales are this type and this. And did it did it. Oh my god. Like it. When it was. It was predictable. Like you could put it on a calendar. Now one choice is well you know I just get really good at making these decisions and I just like to roll up my sleeves.

Speaker 1

And every month I just get ready for all of these things. And we're going to have this, this whac-a-mole conversation. And that, frankly, drains my energy and distracts me and moves me away from doing the things that actually add value and ruins the environment. Right? Because when you're having all of these discussions over and over, like people are walking away, they're going to be disappointed and they're going to be disappointed with you because they're perceiving it as you are constantly making these decisions so that you hold all the power.

Speaker 1

What we did was, I basically absolved myself of the power to make the decisions by building a proper lead distribution system. And so we went into this and we said, you know, okay, let's look at the different types of sales, new client acquisition. We've got the project based stuff. We've got the renewal stuff. And the fourth one is actually, lapsed people.

Speaker 1

Right. So we had four different types of sales that we had to look at. Now, what's the difficulty of these, of these sales or new client acquisitions? Clearly going to be a hell of a lot harder than, you know, renewals. And so we we kind of ranked them in terms of difficulty and then we looked at it and said, all right, what's the value to the business?

Speaker 1

Because as a team, as an organization, we uncertain goals. There was one overarching goal. And then that goal was made up of subgoals, right. Like we had to hit certain goals with new client acquisition, for example. Okay. So we actually we broke it down. We said, all right, so there's some there's some difficulty component and there's the value that it brings to the actual goal.

Speaker 1

Because in order to hit the goal, like if you if you did twice as much new client acquisition and fell short on the renewal piece, based on all the plan and the strategy that we had in place, that was by far rewarding at a higher level than the reverse, right of a double renewal and, you know, fall short on new client acquisition.

Speaker 1

And then we just built a weighting system, okay. Like we built a weighting system within the lead distribution. And every time somebody made sales it basically racked up a score. Right. So every renewal sale, every dollar that came in under renewals catered for a certain amount of points. And every rejoin that came in and labs person came in a certain amount of points, every new client certain amount of points.

Speaker 1

And at the end of the month, the the sales report came in, the numbers were tallied, and the score was the score. The score was dictated the ranking of who was going to get the the leads in each category the following month. Right. So the numbers came in, said, you ranked first in this category, you're going to get the best lead in that category, because we had kind of weighted it down and we scored it out.

Speaker 1

Now it took like 2 or 3 months for us to really get that dialed in. But when we got that dialed in, I never had a conversation again about who got what leads and whether this person deserved this and this person deserve that, and this person deserved that. What I did have was conversations about the system. I did have conversations that said, hey, you know, I think we could make an improvement because an observation that we had about the scoring is when this happens, this happens.

Speaker 1

And we would have rational, diplomatic, normal conversations about this instead of highly emotional, very, you know, like really charged conversations because people feel like they're being wrong on this now. And we just like slowly iterated this lean distribution system. And we perfected it. We perfected it down to a point where I never had a conversation. It was predictable, like you could see who was going to get the leads based on the score.

Speaker 1

And it's just like in a basketball game or a football game or a cricket, whatever. Like the score is the score. Now, if you want to change how the scoring system works, we can have that conversation. But the system is going to make these decisions for me. And that was a perfect example of something where I immediately got half of a day back.

Speaker 1

I immediately boosted morale of the team because I gave transparency and insight into the decision making process, and it wasn't subjective anymore. And I immediately made more money because what we started doing was manipulating the lead system so that we could maximize our goals. We proactively made changes to the system to reduce the number of decisions that I had to make on an ongoing basis, and got us closer to hitting our goal.

Speaker 1

That's building fire prevention systems instead of fighting fires all day. So this is just an example of how you can think about this and more importantly, think, damn, you know what? If I'm fighting fires all day and I never have the time to stare out the window and think, how do I build a system that can do this?

Speaker 1

Then what you're effectively doing is you're just running on a treadmill. It's going to cost to leave you in this environment where you are babysitting. And again, I don't know about you, but like, that wasn't the role that I wanted to do, right? Like I wanted to hit the goals and make more money. But I also didn't want, like, you know, to piss people off all day and be making subjective, opinion based decisions that, like all the I wasn't even 100% sure that I was right all the time.

Speaker 1

So this is how you use system to do it. And you've got systems. And in the lead distribution you've got lead scoring systems for, you know, leads that are coming in the door. You've got your commission systems, your compensation system is probably the highest leverage system that you can actually integrate into your company. And what that means is you want to take a step back and you want to actually be strategic about it, right?

Speaker 1

Like it's one thing to just like Google, like, hey, what's what's the on target earnings for, you know, an mSRP sales rep in such and such area or for an SDR or BTR and say, okay, there's your there's your number and we're going to give you like a flat rate or something like that. But if you want to really excel and blow sales up in a good way, then dial in the comp plan, like get really strategic with that because it's your best friend.

Speaker 1

We are around like we called the invisible manager, right? Because your comp plan is going to guide that behavior that they're that they're executing the actions that they're taking, the things that they're focused on, how they're selling, what they're selling. It's going to do all of those things when you're not necessarily looking. So it's one of the fastest ways to stop having to micromanage things.

Speaker 1

As you put the comp plan in place, you make it incredibly clear. You make it incredibly transparent. And by the way, make an incredibly simple to understand because of do you any good. If the comp plan is so complex, nobody understands it, right? Because if they don't understand it, then they can't change the behaviors to act accordingly the way that you want them to.

Speaker 1

So it's not going to necessarily work. So if you get that dialed in though, you're basically communicating with your sales team or with your salesperson every single day without it requiring more of your time. And this is another example of how systems work. They work to make decisions for you, to do the communications for you, because you've invested the time to build that thing the right way and invest time into perfecting it so that you individually aren't having to have all of those conversations and make all those decisions on your own.

Speaker 1

Now, there's one caveat to this, and it is system building, right? Like if you're going to design a comp plan or your design lead distribution system, you're going to design, you know, anything that you've got like from a, from bleed, scoring all that stuff, almost never a one and done thing. I think this is one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they take the advice, they install the system and they say, cool, we're done.

Speaker 1

And the best systems, particularly when it comes to sales, are things that you're going to iterate for a period of time to perfect, right? Like the lead distribution system. I told you it took a couple rounds for us to go. I didn't see that. I didn't see that. Let's adjust for these, sales that were kind of outliers.

Speaker 1

Okay, let's let's dial those things in. So it took a couple of months to get it right, but then, like I said, it went on into perpetuity making that those decisions for me. So investing a little bit of time into the feedback loop because a system is basically you've got inputs processes and outputs. Okay. And then there's a feedback loop.

Speaker 1

And that feedback loop is where informs you on do we need to make any changes to this. Do we need to make any changes to this. Right. Are we getting the output that we want? Are we getting the reps to change the behavior that we want? Well, then it's possible. We need to we need to make some changes, right?

Speaker 1

We need to tweak a few things. And as your business grows, the systems are going to need to change anyway. Right. Like the the systems that you put in place to have one rep are going to be significantly different than the systems that you need with ten reps. You know, there's going to be more sophistication. There's going to be a little bit more complexity.

Speaker 1

There's going to be other factors that you have to consider. And as you grow, it's really imperative that you constantly take a step back and just make sure is this fire prevention system working the way that I want still. And one of the best symptoms that it's not is the fires start to pop up. Right. You're like, oh, hold on.

Speaker 1

Like, this smells like smoke. Like I've been here before. So you go back and you make adjustments to the system and that constant iteration, that constant optimizations. What's going to get you to a fully self-sustained self running sales table? Now there's one big difference between a team that runs itself and a team that doesn't. And it's the players that are on that team.

Speaker 1

You're not going to go hire people that don't need any management, right? Like I said at the beginning, this isn't about hiring a magical person that just has like no need for guidance whatsoever. What you are going to have to hire, though, is somebody that is relatively self-sufficient when the right systems are in place and the general hiring process is something that you want to take into consideration with in any way, because one person can come in and try to wreck your system.

Speaker 1

So if I'm hiring for somebody in a place that I've already started to optimize and I've already started to systematize, one thing that I'm going to look at is obviously you do you have real solid, actual, quantifiable past performance, right. Like, I'm, I'm, I hire a players like I want I want killers, I want people that are badass of their job.

Speaker 1

I don't want, you know, just just anybody. I don't want asses in chairs. So I'm looking at the past history. Can you prove that you've done really well, been a high performer and actually prove it right? Can you show me former sales reports? Can you direct me to a former manager? What can you do to demonstrate that you've done this?

Speaker 1

And by the way, if they can't sell themselves, then, you know, probably not a good sign because that's the most valuable product that they're going to have to sell their whole life. Then the next thing I look at is, hey, your top performer looks like you've got good numbers. How did you do it? Like, what made you different?

Speaker 1

Like, what were the actions that you took that were different? Like, what was it in your pitch or what was it in your process, or what was it in your strategy? What was it in your activity that led you to separate yourself from the pack? Right. Like how did you end up in the top 10% at your last sales team?

Speaker 1

And what that's going to do is it's going to give me insight into how they think. First of all, it's going to also give me insight into whether there's a real reason, right? Because sometimes you've people come from environments where the systems suck, like they've got people that are like these favoritism based things and like pay. Like I actually just got fed all the good leads, you know?

Speaker 1

So like you actually they walk me through your performance, like, what did you do? What did you do? And, they helped me understand your, your thought process and how you work. And one huge, massive red flag. And this actually came up recently, with a company we were doing a sales art for, and I went and talked to one of the sales reps, in terms of numbers, really high numbers.

Speaker 1

But I, you know, in the conversation, you know, we're we're talking so, well, you know, like, here's the thing. You know, I love the empathy math is is a great book. But, you know, the one part which is, you know, about systematizing other parts of the business. But, you know, the one thing I just completely disagree with the sales, like sales, you can't do that with.

Speaker 1

There's not a process. It's really just it's more of an art than it is a science. And he went on to tell me that, you know, it's very subjective and the process changes every time. And he's gonna, you know, treat people differently for, for different things that he perceives to be, you know, a cause for, you know, throwing the process out periodically, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1

When I hear that if I was hiring that person and they were sitting in front of me as a newbie and I because I know where I'm building, I'm building a systematized sales based system. Why? Because I want to scale up and because I want to make it repeatable. I want to make it predictable. I want to make it so that I can plug other people into it.

Speaker 1

Right. Like I want to reduce the risk. So I want to, you know, break it down into components. And more importantly, as I scale my business or as you scale your business, then what I want to do is I want to minimize the the chaos and all of the shit that comes with it. So if I'm interviewing somebody like that, I'm like, no, I'm picturing you at three x the size of of the company that we are today, because it's usually like, I want to grow aggressively and that doesn't work.

Speaker 1

Right. So those are some of the red flags for me. And if I could leave you with just one thing, it would be this measure twice cut once on this. Like when in terms of the whole sales team building and building the right systems, I'm like, I managed, a really high performance sales team for, for ten years.

Speaker 1

And it wasn't when I took it over, it was broken. They had just done a sales reorg. I was basically the last manager standing. And I said, hey, do you want the job? And I was like, I, I guess like I was young, young sales manager. It was a big step up. So I said, sure, I had a completely overhaul.

Speaker 1

That team like completely overhaul. And it required, let it go like almost half of the team. But we systematize the shit out of that. And we built what became the highest performing team of its kind in, in the business. And it we we hit goals ten years in a row, right. Like we we never missed a sales goal.

Speaker 1

And that was despite different environments. It was despite increase in goals. It was despite all of the changes that an organization's typically gonna throw at you try to say, hey, you hit a number, let's do this. You hit a number, let's do this. And I joke sometimes because my my wife the dead serious. Like when, when we, when we were dating and we were friends prior she she she said I know what he did for a living, but I don't know if it was.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Feels like a trust fund baby or something like. But his hours seem to be pretty lax, and you seem to have, you know, good money and, you know, drove a good car and, you know, good had on our shoulders like, but he like, I wasn't really sure about the work situation until we like actually started like seriously dating this was just the tail end of me having systematized a sales team, right?

Speaker 1

Like I had a lot of time my and I was able to then spend my time doing things like staring out a window to build better systems, right? To build better strategies, which didn't require me sitting in office and micromanaging people and putting out fires all day. And for you, it doesn't need to take ten years. They didn't take us ten years.

Speaker 1

But you know, it took some time to get all of these things dialed in to get it from a mess that required, a massive, you know, sales reorganization and virtually everybody in sales management and executive sales management being asked to leave to a place that highest performing in the organization, to a place where we could just calmly execute, methodically execute, and consistently hit our numbers, increasing our numbers year after year after year.

Speaker 1

So I hope that helps you. Like in terms of thinking, how am I going to build this team, especially if you're a business owner and you're managing a sales person or two? You're thinking, I don't have time to be a full blown sales manager. Like this is the answer. So if you're interested in working with us to start building a sales team that does run itself and hits those goals and moves the business forward, then check out the links in the description below.

Speaker 1

Look forward to talking with you. We've also got the The Sales Toolbox, which I offer for free, which is a bunch of sales management resources. By all means, check out all the other videos on the channel here. I hope they help you grow audios.