How a 30 Million Dollar Per Year Sales Team was Built in 2 Years with Cole Thomas Gordon: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:02John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how a$30 million per year sales team was built in two years. And to drop these vibe bombs, I brought Cole Thomas Gordon into EO Fire Studios. Cole grew his consulting company to eight figures in one and a half years and now trains sales teams of hundreds of seven and eight-figure companies through closers.io. And today we talk about how making a misheir can be one of the highest costs in a business, how a team or a company can only perform to the level that it has led and owe so much more.

0:39John Lee Dumas:And a big thing for sponsoring today's episode goes to Cole and our sponsors. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product service, or offer in just 50 focused days. Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more.

1:22John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Cole, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, man? I'm happy to be here. Here's what I'll say. I think that a lot of people who want to get into success, especially in the business world want to start a business, I actually think they should get a job. And I think if you read Robert Greene's Mastery is a great example of number one, finding an industry that you're passionate about, and then working for a rocket ship company within that industry to where you can build specialized knowledge or a certain set of skills that will allow you to provide much more value to the marketplace than you could otherwise, especially starting from scratch.

2:07So a lot of people don't like to hear when I give that advice to get a job, especially in the early phases. But I know for me, that was one of the biggest things that tremendously helped.

2:17John Lee Dumas:Just because you might not want to hear it doesn't mean you need to hear it, Fire Nation. And today we're talking about how a$30 million per year sales team was built in two years. And Cole, you've created a process, seven steps to go from zero to$30 million a year. Let's break that process down. For sure. We can go into it. So the first stage will be validating the offer. So a lot of people listening to this probably have that, but essentially it's finding out kind of like what you're selling and sort of how are you selling it. Okay. And so it's setting the right foundation from the start. So you need to, you know, typically in our world, it's like we're doing high ticket coaching, high ticket consulting.

3:00So typically people are like, they need to sell something a dozen, a couple dozen times and figure out at what price point, et cetera. So that's a pretty basic like phase one. Phase two is developing what's called your optimal selling system. Okay. So that's a term that is coined by Mark Ford. And he wrote the book Ready, Fire, Aim. He's a co-founder or co-owner now, I suppose, of Agora Financial, which is a$1.5 billion company. And essentially that's figuring out sort of a scalable acquisition system you're going to use. And the key word there is system because your inputs have to be correlated or equal to your outputs.

3:37So there's two parts of an optimal selling system when it comes to high ticket sales or really building any sort of sales team. Is number one, a consistent repeatable way to generate interest. So in other words, consistable, repeatable, scalable way to generate sales calls. Then the other one is a consistent repeatable way to convert those sales calls into clients. Okay. So what does that actually look like? Well, one of my friends, Alex Robosey, says there's six ways to generate customers or generate leads, which is own media, earned media, affiliates, cold outbound, word of mouth referrals and paid media.

4:15In my world, which is sort of the info marketing, high ticket sales, coaches, consultants, course creators, agencies, 99 % of my clients, we've already had over 700 clients, is paid media. Okay, so they figure out a way to generate basically a consistent repeatable scalable amount of sales calls through a paid media Channel and so what we need is we need both of those two things to be in place To essentially create kind of the conveyor belt to where essentially at this point Where we have a validated offer we have a consistent or repeatable way to generate the sales calls and then the founder Whoever's the kind of the like typically most companies will either the founder will be the salesperson starting off or what happens is they have a sales related founder.

5:01Okay. So they have basically somebody who is a business partner, but mainly handles the sales, the sales team, et cetera. Sometimes the sales, you end the marketing, and then you have an operations kind of integrator partner on the other side. And so the second part is obviously a way to convert those sales calls. So the sales founder or the sales integrator, the founder, whoever's taking the calls initially is they need to figure out a way, a consistable, repeatable way to generate the, or convert the sales calls into clients in a way that eliminates founder syndrome so founder syndrome is like the thing where uh only i can sell my offer only you know it's so unique that only i can sell it right and in the same way as any doctor can prescribe or sorry diagnose and prescribe a certain disease any sales person can diagnose prescribe a certain problem and a certain solution okay but we need to have the conveyor belt in place to where we're generating a lead from the same context, the same way, consistently, repeatedly every single day.

6:00So we're creating that conveyor belt and then they only always show up with the same couple of problems. Does that make sense? So that's the second stage. Cool. The third stage is delegating the sales calls. So once the founder's at a place where there's a consistent repeatable way to generate sales calls, he's converting those or she's converting those consistently and the offer is validated, they're at a point where they can offload those calls to a sales rep. Now, the biggest thing I'll say about this stage is what's called the rule of two. So you always want to hire two. And the reason for that is the human brain can only understand the differences between things utilizing comparison, right?

6:36We only know what is day if we know what night is. We only know what light is if we know what dark is, black is if we know what white is, good versus bad, et cetera, right? So if you hire two, it's much, much easier to essentially know which one is going to be the better one. And to be candid, if they both don't work out, it's usually your fault, whether you didn't train them enough, you hired the wrong people in the first place, the systems are not there, the leads aren't there. If one of them works out, that's kind of natural sales churn. If they both work out great, now you have two good sales people.

7:07John Lee Dumas:Here's a question on this though, is have you ever done this thing where you do the rule of two and you kind of use it as an averaging up technique where there's one obvious winner, you keep that person, but then you always bring on another person. So you're always at this too, where, hey, maybe this other person you brought on is now even better than the other person. So now you're kind of averaging up as you go, always improving that sales team. In a sense, you can do that. A lot of people can't do that because of the lead flow and they can't like increase their lead flow that fast, that steadily.

7:38The other thing to consider is if a salesperson is converting into KPI, which let's say it's 25 % for that company. If they're doing that, that means you need to think of that salesperson as a singular business unit. So what that means is if that salesperson is profitable, let's say your minimum you need on return on ad spend is 4X. That's what works in your P &L. Well, if that salesperson, if you think of them as their own P &L, if they're hitting that 4X, we want to keep them there. And we want to focus on building another business unit, which is AKA another salesperson. So yes and no, in a sense, but it's not something to where we're constantly trying to recruit somebody to find these incremental improvements.

8:24Like if our goal was to only have one salesperson, we're not constantly trying to recruit new people and trying to get these incremental improvements and have one beat the other, beat the other, because over time that's going to have drastic diminishing returns. And then also what's going to happen is because of the ramp time, which is the time it takes a salesperson to learn an offer and go from zero to KPI, the loss you're going to get from the ramp time would mitigate any improvements you would get by doing that. Does that make sense?

8:48John Lee Dumas:Yes. Cool. So stage three was delegating the sales calls. Okay. Now we move on to stage four, which essentially stage four is the entrepreneur or whoever is the sales-related founder, stepping in to being a sales manager. So what happens is what I call the pendulum swing. So what happens is you're a high-ticket entrepreneur. You went through this whole phase where you were taking the calls every day. You were doing the calls all day, every day, and you're exhausted. You're so sick of sales calls. And when you finally get your sales team in place, you're like, oh, my God, I never want to even look at a sales call again.

9:24You do a whole pendulum swing. So once the sales team person starts to convert it or starts to converting, they essentially look the other way and they're like, thank God I'm done with that. When in reality, what they need to do is they need to instead of, okay, they just left being a salesperson, but now they have to step into and embrace and really build the skill of sales management. Okay. And so what does sales management look like as a quick primer? It's really a couple of things. Obviously, it's the first part is just kind of the administrative parts. So making sure the calendars are full, communicating with marketing, making sure the sales people are doing their admin, very basic stuff like that, making sure the tracking is up to date.

10:04And you can outsource that to an admin pretty quickly, which we'll talk about in a second. The next part is the training and coaching. So a sales manager, really, at the end of the day, they are like the football coach of business in a lot of ways. And so they're constantly reviewing calls, training the salespeople, doing role plays, doing one-on-ones. it's essentially really a ton of QC which is a ton of sales call review film review okay people drastically underestimate how much reviewing a film which is reviewing of the sales calls the sales manager needs to do and I think a great example of the importance of this is like when I played college football I essentially one of the things we reviewed film more than we even practiced That was like the main thing we do.

10:55And if you're reading Intergame of Tennis, one of the things that talks about is the quickest way we can learn behavior is through modeling. And I don't mean like Tony Robbins modeling like, okay, get a mentor and find out what they did, which is kind of that. But I mean like physically looking and seeing either somebody doing what you're trying to do or having somebody critique exactly what you're doing through film. And that book talks a lot about how the quickest way to get good at any sport and sports performance is by film review or actually watching film of another person. Do it. Right. So the last part, there's three parts of sales management.

11:31The last part is the leadership and the management aspect of it. It's really the leadership and the inspiration. So this is who's running the sales team daily meetings. How are they communicating the vision, mission and values on that sales meeting? and finally doing one-on-ones with all the sales team to make sure they're growing, make sure they're hitting their goals, et cetera. Just because the same way that we sell a prospect and when we sell the prospect, we want to essentially make our offer the bridge between their current desired situation of the prospect. We want to make our employment opportunity the bridge between the current desired situation of our team member.

12:07That's what's going to keep them growing, wanting to be a part of our company for a long time. It's going to help our retention. So that's stage four, which is essentially embracing sales management. Does that make sense?

12:20John Lee Dumas:Yes. Stage five is promoting your sales coordinator. So remember, there's three responsibilities, right? So there's the admin aspect, there's the training and the coaching, and then there's the leadership. Well, if you're an entrepreneur, most entrepreneurs will tell you, man, I don't have time to be a sales manager. What I'd say is to really cultivate a sales manager the right way, you need to do it with this framework. So the first thing you get rid of is the administrative. And you do that by hiring a sales coordinator. So that's essentially a$40 ,000 to$60 ,000 a year position that manages the calendar, makes sure they do all their admin, does all the tracking.

12:59Pretty simple. Okay. Stage six is essentially promoting what's called a sales lead, right? So remember, there was admin, training and coaching, and then leadership. So we got rid of the admin because we hired a sales coordinator. Now what we need to do is we need to promote a sales lead to take over the training and the coaching. So that leaves us with just the leadership, the inspiration, and running the sales meetings and doing the one-on-ones, which really at that point, it's boiling down our time, quote-unquote, as a sales manager down to about 60 minutes a day. So how do we promote the sales lead?

13:35Well, typically what happens is when you get a team of about three to four people, somewhere around that number, essentially, one of them is going to start to stand out as the superstar. And what you want that person to do is now start to help you in the sales meetings, review calls, start to review calls and their downtime of the other closers and help you train them and give them a very, very, very small override as a player coach. The biggest mistake when it comes to this is people putting too much stock of basically how much work their player coach is going to do. Because the problem with sales is selling is selfish.

14:11And I don't mean selfish like you're taking the prospect's money and you're not serving them. What I mean is to really be an amazing salesperson, you have to be totally tunnel vision on your goals. right like how many you know making cold calls making your dials taking inbounds making sure you're making offers hitting your pipeline like you got to be totally focused on your projections it's sort of a selfish type of role in a sense i don't mean that in a bad way i mean it in like you got to focus on your thing sales management is selfless so essentially sales management you're you're basically taking all of the recognition putting it on to the sales team putting it on the individual sales reps and you're putting your own needs aside to support them so they can win.

14:53So because of that, there's something that's called the fallacy of the player coach, that it's very, very, very difficult for a player coach to succeed because you're basically asking them to balance the selfish and selfless activities, right? So you're like, okay, that makes sense. Well, why are you telling me to do a player coach? Because essentially when you're the founder, you need to basically get your sales manager kind of in training and get him or her essentially ready to take over the team. And you do need help on those training and coaching responsibilities. However, you still need them to do their personal production.

15:30And you don't want to overpay them for coaching when in reality, they need to be still selling. Okay, because what happens is people will overpay the sales lead. And what they find is the sales lead essentially just still focuses on their own personal production. and then they just make a ton of override for basically doing nothing. So we're talking, you know,$1 ,000,$2 ,500 a month, very, very small override, very, very small percentage of their income. They'll spend 80 % of their time still selling and then 20 % of their time essentially helping you with call reviews, helping you do a little bit of coaching, etc.

16:04Stage seven is when you finally have cultivated that lead into a sales manager. And this is a truthfully, I mean, I call this the seven steps to automatic selling. And once you have a sales manager in place, it's kind of the holy grail. It's kind of sales nirvana. Because now you're finally in this place to where your sales team runs on autopilot each day, day after day, without any input from you, without you having to do anything. But keep in mind, while it is possible, well, like for me, for instance, we do two and a half billion a month every single month cash. And we have a big sales team.

16:40And I don't train the sales team. I don't talk to the sales people. I don't even recruit or staff or any of that, even though that's my core skill set. I don't do any of that anymore because I've built up these leaders and I've worked this seven-step process. So that's how you really get it to where it's running on its own. However, you have to embrace, number one, the skill of selling because you can't teach somebody else to sell unless you've learned to sell yourself. Number two, you've got to embrace and learn and cultivate the skill of sales management because no great sales team is – Imagine a great sports team that has no coach.

17:14It's kind of silly, but people want a sales team, but they don't want to lead the sales team. So you have to cultivate and build the skill of sales management so that, number one, your sales team succeeds. But number two, you can transfer that skill to eventually your sales manager. And then you have it on autopilot.

17:36John Lee Dumas:I mean, Fire Nation, I hope you were taking notes because that was value bomb after value bomb. I mean, we could go through all seven of those steps right again, but I'll tell you the two that stood out to me a lot was delegating sales calls. Like I loved that rule of two, the hiring of two reps, because how can you compare black and white if you don't know white or you don't know black? So that was so cool. The rule of two. And then the fallacy of the player coach, like that really opened my eyes up. I mean, the balancing of the selfish with the self less, that really made me think. Now we have the three keys to managing a high performance sales team and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

18:14John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, if you've ever thought, I know I'm capable of more, but you're not sure where to start, I've created something for you. It's called 50 Days to Something. Not 50 Days to Perfection, not 50 Days to Overnight Millions, just 50 Focus Days to Build Something That Matters. Maybe a product, a service, a course, a coaching offer, something real, and something that will generate real revenue. 50 days to something is my passion project. Each video is short, is tactical, and it's designed for you to take one meaningful step forward each day. Picture this, in just 50 days, you will have built an asset.

18:49John Lee Dumas:And the best part, it's completely free and it's on my YouTube channel right now. If you are ready to create something that matters, visit eofire.com slash YouTube. That's eofire.com slash YouTube and start your 50-day journey today. 50 days will pass in the blink of an eye. The question is, will you have something to show for it? Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting.

19:31John Lee Dumas:Everything works together seamlessly. Plus, award-winning 24-7 support so you are never stuck. And when you go through my link at highlevelfire.com, you unlock my full bonus stack, a 30-day free trial of High Level with full access, a private 50-minute coaching call with me, weekly live office hours with me, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something execution roadmap, and more. Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com. and start building your something today. Cole, we're back, and you broke down the seven steps to go from zero to$30 million a year when it came to a sales team.

20:16John Lee Dumas:What are the three keys to managing a high-performance sales team? For sure, so pretty simple, recruiting, ramping, and managing. So nothing rocket science there, but let's break those down. So the recruiting, essentially what we wanna do is we want to find people who have three qualities. Number one is specialized knowledge. So they'd have to have done the thing that we want them to do, right? Neville Robin Constant, specialized knowledge is the knowledge you can get only from doing, right? So do they have a track record? Do they have experience? Number two is we want them to have industry acumen.

20:50So essentially what that means is every single industry speaks a specific language. And so in internet marketing, for instance, we have jargon. In car sales, they have jargon. In real estate, they have jargon. You want somebody as a salesperson who's going to either easily develop the jargon or already knows the jargon because then they're perceived as inside of the tribe and they're perceived as a salesperson who gets it opposed to I'm sure you've been on a call with a salesperson who's like, this guy doesn't get it. It's because you probably didn't know how to speak the language of your industry and what the problem was.

21:22The third thing is buy-ins. We want people who are bought in to our mission, our vision, our values, the product, and the market. right they have to resonate with the market because they're gonna be talking to the market all day they have to resonate with the product and have conviction in the product because that's what they're selling and conviction is really at the end of the day the most important thing a salesperson can have they have to have resonance with the vision which is where we're going the mission which is why we're going where we're going and the vet values which is how the team is going to interact on the journey of going where we're going so we want those three qualities now the now that we know who we're looking for where do we actually find the person?

21:57Well, there's a lot of different avenues you could find salespeople. The number one thing I want people to remember is that good salespeople know other good salespeople, okay? Because typically a salesperson performs in a team. So if you have a salesperson who's been on three or four teams across their career, they probably know anywhere from a dozen to 30 or 40 salespeople. And they're going to know the good ones that are from the bad ones, especially if they're good, right? Because then they were probably on a team with all of the A players. So the first sales team I was on was built by a guy who was the top sales rep at Southwestern, which is a bookstore door company.

22:29And it was built, I was like the straggler that kind of came out of nowhere. But everybody else on the team was from Southwestern. It was also really good at selling books. Why? Because good salespeople know other good salespeople. The way I started my company is I was a pretty accomplished, very well known high ticket sales person who had a lot of success. And I kind of had a little bit of following because I was a lot of high ticket closers favor high ticket closer. And because of that, I would get asked by entrepreneurs all the time, where can I find good salespeople? Do you know where I can find good salespeople?

22:59And I started just naturally connecting good salespeople I knew with entrepreneurs. And eventually I turned that into a business. And it's still a day where we get most of our recruits. We get most of them through utilizing our network. So the number one place to look is find good salespeople and ask them, who do you know? Do you know any good salespeople? Pay them$2 ,500 or$5 ,000 even if the person sticks past 60 days or 90 days, whatever you're comfortable with. The next thing is you can outbound. So you can essentially go to existing salespeople with a role that resonates essentially with whatever you're selling.

23:34So if you're in solar, do it with solar. If you're in coaching, do it with coaching. You can basically reach out to people and offer them a better offer than what they have, right? So coaching, that obviously works. You can leverage your audience. You can leverage your list. You can leverage referrals. You know, pretty simple stuff there. And then after that, you can obviously use paid media and job boards, which isn't the most effective. But if you really do a lot of it, and you do a massive amount of volume, you can find good people. And typically, what I find is it's very, very hard for individual entrepreneurs and very small teams to do that because you need a recruiting department.