Summary

Lucas Price interviews Dan Dionne, VP of Sales at Review Wave, on building elite sales teams. Dan shares insights from his journey, including his time at CarGurus during its hypergrowth phase. They chat about hiring 'A' players, the balance of fun and accountability in team culture, and the importance of continuous training with real-time call reviews and live battle cards. Dan emphasizes maintaining high energy and clear performance expectations to keep teams motivated and productive. Discover actionable strategies for developing a successful, high-performing sales environment.

Take Aways

• Hire with a Plan: It's crucial to meticulously define the attributes of an 'A' player and stick to this blueprint to avoid bad hires that can impede team performance.
• Celebrate Wins: Keeping morale high through celebrating small and large victories fosters a productive and engaging work environment.
• Structured Training: Continuous training and the use of tools like live battle cards are essential for maintaining high performance and adaptability in sales.
• Maintaining Balance: While promoting a fun and energetic culture is important, maintaining accountability and performance metrics is key to success.
• Adaptability in Sales: The ability to push through objections and continue probing for solutions is a critical skill for sales success.

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BEST Snippet Intro

BEST Snippet Outro

And was there during hyper growth all the way to IPO in five years, he went from an individual contributor to director of us acquisition. Dan's currently the VP of sales at review wave, where he's grown the team from 10 to 40 people in nine months. Dan, thanks for being here today.

[00:00:50] Lucas Price: To start off, can you tell me. In your experience as a sales leader, what are some of the key points that have been most important to you in terms of how to build an elite [00:01:00] team?

I think a lot of people just go to the market and say Hey, I need 50 people this year. And you just start hiring everybody, which sounds great in theory. But if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, you're going to make some bad hires and we've all done it.

Don't bend on who to bring in because you do that. You're going to make bad decisions. You're going to bring in people that maybe fill a seat to fill a quota, but aren't perfect, and you have that mindset of. I'll make it work. Don't do that. Find those A players, stick to your individual personality plans.

Don't bend on that because you're going to end up, and I did it this year we had to come out with a really hot hiring plan. I'm like, I got to start putting people in seats. And I think the first six people we brought in, it was like, nope.

[00:02:02] Lucas Price: We chatted before your environment is a relatively transactional sale. So some of the advice that you give is I think relevant across lots of different sales disciplines, but maybe it's helpful for people to understand in the context of the environment you're in right now.

Is between one and three days. I'm looking for specific people that can not only keep up with that high transactional atmosphere, but you have to have the, you have to have that next level, you have to have that, that next drive level to be able to come in every single day and we are very phone heavy organization.

Music's blasting all the time. We talked about different levels of success and celebrating that. We have A restaurant bell for demos booked. We don't celebrate every connection, you get a demo book jobs 30 percent of the way there. So we have a little restaurant bell and actually we've been booking so many demos recently.

Anytime I go to a restaurant and hear the bell, when the food's ready, I sit there and just start clapping because we've been booking so many demos, but we have that. Then we have a big cowbell for when deals get done. And then when someone hits their goal or when someone gets promoted, we have this.

It's honestly like a five foot gong in the office that people go up on stage and ring it. So we celebrate all levels to just keep it getting fun and keep keep the energy going because in a, in an environment like ours where, you have three or four different power hours throughout the day to keep people focused, you can break that focus pretty easily and, you can really hit a lull and so you got you as a leadership team, you got to keep it moving.

[00:04:02] Dan Dionne: I'm a big believer in, it's kind of cliche, but work hard, play hard. You come in when I expect you to come in the door, expect nothing but focus, and I expect you to do your job. But I also want to have fun during that day. Work should be fun. That's what we do.

You don't want to go to an environment where, it's not fun. Like you walk in, it's gray walls, no music. They block off the, they block off the doors. They block off the windows, like an old school call, call farm.

That's not fun. So you want people to come back every day and really want to come to the office every day to do the job. And like I said, it's a difficult job, especially the SDR role, making cold calls all day. It's a difficult job. It's a thankless job until you get all those demos booked and all those deals done.

So you might try to make this fun as possible. You can have the fun, but it's also culture building to people want to come in and want to go to work and see their friends, make their calls, do their job when you have all this music going and all the celebration happening all day long.

That's the point of the culture we're trying to build, not just. A high functioning sales team.

[00:05:17] Dan Dionne: When you become too much of a bud and not much of a boss, you still have to hit your numbers. You still have to hold everybody accountable. You can really go down the slippery slope where. No, don't worry. Again, we'll get them tomorrow. No you have to go in and you have your fun.

You build your culture, but you still have to demand for production performance and hold everyone accountable to their job. Or else you lose the team. And you lose the team is you can lose respect as a. Leader pretty quickly. If you just become that fun boss that doesn't hold anybody accountable because we're too busy, doing a happy hour too busy going bowling or too busy doing other things.

And it's like you still going to demand that performance. You're gonna have that work hard, play hard type mentality where, yeah, we're gonna have some fun, but we get their numbers first.

[00:06:02] Dan Dionne: I love that question because yeah. Sales has such a bad rap when it comes to training where people like, here's your desk, here's your phone. Good luck. And that's not how it should be. If you want to have the most successful teams, you have to dedicate the time to train people the way you want them operating on the phones, the way you want them conducting business, you have to spend the time.

I just bought a piece of software that I'm could not be more excited about. It's live battle cards to actually help people with some of the very nuanced technical aspects of the industry that we sell into. That's the hardest thing. So I'm looking to solve that. So I bought a bunch of licenses for all my new people that they hear a certain term, it's going to pop up.

Here's the three things you've got to say to get around that. So I'm really excited about that, but so we have a very short training cycle. When you join, everybody signs up on, they get their offer, they get their contract, they start on a Tuesday by the following Monday.

After that, it's we do daily call reviews. The entire team does daily call reviews in the morning to start the day, 15 minutes, Monday, Wednesday, Friday is listening to your own calls, Tuesdays and Thursdays is listening to a team call and you grade each other and pass that back and forth.

We have a call review slack channel where people can drop in calls and ask for constant help. All the managers in there, all the leaders are in there.

All the leaders do four hours of isolated call coaching every single day, as well as Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have very specific team wide training throughout our training calendar that we do. From a training standpoint, but from new hires, they have those four first four days, and then they have a full week of an hour and a half to two hours daily boot camp with myself where it's really going over, asking the right pain questions, doing script script training as well as product overview and things like that.

[00:08:03] Lucas Price: Some of the sellers that I've seen who have become the highest performers, one of the skills that they've had that I don't have. Is the ability to give them instruction, when you get this objection, say this, and they can do it right away.

And then there's other people like me. Who I need to get the instruction and then I need to practice one or two times, and then I can do it the right way in front of a prospective customer. Are you doing a lot of practice sessions for people like me?

And I'd say that. Is the hardest thing to teach. That's why you have to do it constantly. Great example. And it's really hard for the new people to understand where, they're getting told that first, no, and they ask a few more questions and then they're still getting that known okay, cool.

Like you've got to know when to ask those 4th, 5th, 6th layers of questions and get past those 2nd and 3rd note to try to find the yes to get them to realize, yes, I've got to solve that problem. Thank you for keep asking me questions. That's the hardest thing to teach because there's just getting comfortable on the phones or just getting comfortable with these conversations.

So it takes that constant training and review to get them there.