The day when everything changed for me...

i remember i was driving back home and i got this text and it said hey we closed two sales today and there had been four people who had walked into the business and i had to pull over to the side of the road because i was i got so emotional i got teary because it was the first time that someone else had ever sold something besides me and so that was the first moment when i realized that like this could become a business that did not require me and if you don't know who i am my name is alex ramose i own acquisition. com it's a portfolio of companies that now does about 85 million a year and the reason for this video is i want to walk you through one of the most important steps which is how do you hire excellent sales people and how do you recognize great sales people and so now i've built i can't tell you the amount of team like sales teams that we've now built up but i can tell you this video is going to be specifically about recognizing talent and so um a couple quick frameworks that i want to go through number one when i started in this business i took every single sale and it was because i was so afraid that somebody would waste the opportunity so if you have that fear i understand where you're coming from second when i had my first sale that was not me i just had this emotional breakdown so i was like oh my god this could actually happen and i promise you if you haven't had it happen yet you will when it does because you realize that this business can actually work without you and other people can make it rain too right and then i'll tell you a quick story that illustrate the next point that would make so as i you know hired some sales people now that first sales person were they exception don't know but they were able to get the job done later on i had my first kind of like killer and his name was mauro negreti and he uh he came in i don't know a year or two into the business a year into the business and he so quickly was able to assume the sales role and to show you how laughable this is he started and i was about to start training him and some lady walked in the door and i was like hey man like i can take it he's like no i'm good he's like go do your thing he's like fitness nutrition accountability okay i'll figure it out and he ended up closing this first lady who walked in the door for a paid and full and i remember walking in like completely dumbstruck i was like he didn't even know what the pitch was but she walked out giggling happy so excited to start and what that moment taught me was that it is good to train sales people but it's better to take great sales people and then just point them in a direction and so this has informed a lot of the thinking that i have around talent in general and i'll tell you a couple of frameworks that have informed this but like if you look at harvard doesn't produce the smartest people they select the smartest people and then they put smart uh professors in front of them but like the base level of intelligence of everyone who's at harvard is already exceptionally high and so like even if the teachers at harvard were not exceptional the students are and they would be successful independent of that because their selection is so ridiculous right and so if we can think about our own companies that way and especially if you're in the service business like look at the biggest service companies out there like look at mckinsey look at bain look at bcg look at basically a lot of the finance world is our service-based businesses a lot of times right and they're able to do that because they create such a pool to select from that they are able to skim for the best talent right i heard this uh quote from uh estrella kathy who's the founder of chick-fil-a you win the championship in the draft and so it was such a belief that they had about picking the right people even more so than training and i would say that i have moved in that direction of a little bit more nature than nurture when it comes to roles specifically sales especially there are certain characteristics about building rapport about having certain you know dynamics or energy whatever you want to say that like mario negrete when he walked in he had all of these things and he didn't even know the pitch but he won that sale off of just pure rapport and so if i'm going to allocate the same level of time to training somebody i might as well start with somebody who has a much higher base because i could spend 10 hours to take someone from a two to a four and a half or i could spend the same 10 hours taking someone from a six to a nine and the thing is i'm also going to get more bang for my buck in terms of my hours of training with somebody who has a natural proclivity for selling compared to somebody who does not what's interesting about this and this is just like my observation is that you just have to be willing to talk to more people in the uh recruiting process i will say like from a recruiting standpoint there's two kind of things to look out for if you're if you cannot pay super handsomely based on your price points which you need to maybe fix later but like if you can't pay super well for the sales person then you need to look harder and you'll need to interview more people probably run ads and use your network if you can pay well the best sales people are already employed and so it comes down to recruiting those sales people from other sales jobs ideally from companies just like yours so that they already know a lot of the things coming into it so it decreases the ramp up time for them because all we're really doing is

swapping products and the actual sales cycle the type of sale is it a transactional sales a long software sale is it a coaching program set whatever it is right there's so few variables that were changing that they can immediately jump and go which also allows you to make a judgment on their proficiency faster and so as a quick side note to this because this is something that i've given a lot of thought if you look at the top sales people and sales trainers and this is going to drive point drive home the point that i was making earlier about it being much of it being born all right is that if you look at the top people who are in the space you look at jordan belfort right you look at bradley you look at um and some people would say me in term from a selling perspective all the guys that i know who have taught sales were exceptional salespeople day one bradley started selling cars when he was 18 years old was the top salesman at 18 years old when he started and he was like i just found something i was really good at jordan belford talks about how he didn't know how to train anybody in his book and then all of a sudden he for the first time ever wrote out a framework to explain the straight line sale system which became his book and all that kind of stuff but he up to that point it was just what he naturally did right and i can tell you in my instance as well i'd already closed thousands of deals before i even consumed my first sales training and so like i do think that if we are selecting sales people i think it's much more about selection than it's about training the training is to remind them how good they are not necessarily to make them good all right and this is something that has shifted over time for me specifically now if you're like well i suck at sales you can absolutely put way more time into yourself than a business would reasonably put into an employee all right like you have you all the time so you can train you in all your off hours and you're spending your own time to invest in yourself but from a return on investment perspective it's the cost of finding a good sales person compared to the cost of training a bad or mediocre salesperson is significantly lower it's much easier to find the right people than it is to take somebody and then make such a crazy extensive training unless your entire model is we just take on every single person who walks in the door like 24-hour fitness has this model they take on anybody who has a pulse and then they put them through a ridiculous culling process and then 10 of people make it in the first 90 days and may the arms be ever in your favor right that's their process and then those people know how to sell and so they just make ridiculous requirements that almost no one can meet except for exceptional sales people and they let that they have obviously training systems and whatnot but for the most part it's teaching them about their process and just having old sales people explain to new sales people some of the tips and tricks that have just like made them better rather than teaching the fundamentals of selling and so back to you if you're somebody who's not good at sales that's okay you get there through practice and repetition but in terms of like you have to get good at it because it is like it is core to running a business especially a small business is learning how to close right and so if you take time to learn it it's okay it's a skill that you're going to add in your arsenal and then it'll allow you to recognize good sales people in the future but you can't spend a year trying to train somebody who's not good you can spend a year trying to train you right and that's the difference when we're selecting for exceptional sales people which is what i'm saying if you pay less you have to talk to more people to find them and then you have to have low tolerance in terms of how quickly they make a sale and i would say for us if somebody doesn't close a deal in the first sales cycle meaning like depending on the length of the transaction uh like some people you know there's all transactional sales some people might be a two-week sales cycler or a one-month sales cycle depending what you're selling if someone has done a full sale cycle and they haven't closed the deal i already know that they're not a killer because every single killer i've ever had closes deals in their first cycle just like mario getty like i said earlier the killers come in and start killing and then they just get better at killing with the tweaks in the trainings that we have the guys who don't do that are the ones that are like no give me another shot i like i just got to learn like you know blah blah and the thing is it's like it just drags on an inevitable consequence and so right now if you have somebody on your team and you've been in that dragging it on and they're like just barely good enough to stay on the team and every single quarter you're like are we gonna let go of this guy i don't know he's not like a winner but like i guess we kind of need him to keep putting some numbers up if you get rid of the people who are dragging the team down the culture of the team will improve and i promise you whenever you cut the bottom the top moves up right and then it also will set the new bar for the person who comes in it's like this is how a world-class team operates are you up for this and the thing is the tighter and the higher that team is the faster they'll point the person out if they don't fit or they'll immediately accept and glob in the person they'll become part of the unit so if you're looking for sales people and you're looking to scale the sales team the best sales people are born in my opinion not made we can select for those people either through recruiting them directly from people who have very similar businesses to us or we have to interview many more people and the feeling you get in that tingle when you're like oh god i really have to have this guy that's when you hire not when you're like i mean i guess this guy could do the job can't do that it's not gonna work and then on the flip side once that person is in if they haven't

closed the deal on that first cycle the longer i've been doing business the shorter my tolerance for somebody not being exceptional is because every person that has been exceptional i know immediately and so i just have less and less time where i think maybe they'll turn it around maybe some more training we'll get them there when it's when a lot of times you win the draft on the pick and so thank you guys appreciate it if you're new to mozy nation welcome and i'll see you guys in the next video bye