The Truth About Building a Sales Team: A Behind the Scenes Look

24:54We start much slower than we had anticipated. And so we start with a very, very, very small launch to our wait list. I'm going to share a little bit about what that conversation was about. And then what I'll do is I will pop over and explain a little bit more about the exact timeline and what's needed. Because we just were trying to do conversion numbers. at a 70 % show up rate to a warm audience. If I'm closing at 60%, my right hand is closing at 60 % and we're onboarding closers and they're closing at 20%, how many calls do each of us need to do in order to hit our benchmarks and our goals? And how much time would we need to make that happen?

25:33So we're gonna do some math. We're gonna use quant. We're gonna approach us with as much strategy as possible and then give ourselves the runway that we need. I wanna make sure that when we onboard our closers, they understand our core values. They understand that we operate from excellence, that excellence is our baseline. I want them to know that we play like Olympic champions and we play to win. There's a few things that need to be in place. And if we have to do that slower to do it right, then that's the decision that we're making. So before I show you how we debuted this program, I need to explain a few things.

26:05Okay, because this video, I was like, oh, do I include this video? And I am. But four things to take into consideration. Number one, so I schedule outward facing meetings three times a week. So two of my five working days, I'm not wearing any makeup and I don't plan on wearing makeup. I'm just not, I know I'm my most successful when I am sitting in sweatpants and my hair is in a messy bun and I'm going down into like a deep work day. Those are when I'm most successful. So I only do outward facing meeting days. The second thing you need to know about the video I'm about to show you is that I recorded this next video on a day that was not an outward facing day.

26:42I might have team meetings where I don't need to wear makeup that was one of those days. The third thing to take into consideration is while I was in this meeting, our COO got a really important email from a potential partner. And we had been trying to schedule a meeting with that potential partner for a while, and it was a pretty significant deal for us. And so while she got this email and we're in this meeting, she paused the meeting and she said, Jasmine, do you think that you can take a call today with that potential partner? Which leads me to point number four, because I wanted to lock in the contract, I accepted the meeting, but then I told the team that I was on the call with, I said, you guys, I'm going to do my makeup while we're in this call so that I have makeup on when I do that partnership meeting.

27:27So another thing that I do not do is I don't do my makeup on team calls. Nothing's wrong with it. It's just something I never do. So please, when I show you this video and I'm doing my makeup to explain what's going on, please don't think that this is a normal thing. Even though the team was sitting there being like, I cannot believe that you're literally doing your makeup. And I said, listen, it's a business call and it's also a makeup tutorial. Haters. Let's get into that video now. Okay. So, oh my God, are you guys really going to roll your eyes? Are you guys serious right now? Oh my God. I am out here doing my dang job and you guys are going to roll your eyes at me?

28:00Y 'all, you are tripping. Next. Okay, Katie, break it down. Break it down. Let's see. Okay, let's go. Week one, it's July 14th. We released half the wait list. We make the funnel located to 18 months. Halfway through week one, so let's say July 16th or 17th, you can make that call. We released the second half of the wait list. Jasmine and I are prepared to take a full slate of calls, July 14th and July 21st, although the last three days of that week Jasmine can't so it will really only be 12 calls the week of July 20th no 12 calls from Jasmine the week of July 21st 30 calls from me next week of July the week of July 28th Jasmine and I are available for calls but we don't expect a full slate of calls that week but we'll keep on scheduled open the week of August 4th there will be no calls from anyone and we will bring in the two new closers their onboarding day will be that day we could onboard them have a great call with them that morning and they'll be focused that week on the training we've assigned and watching calls i love you oh my gosh darling i love you want to say hi miss katie and miss jk hi miss oh i mean she is just a whole look she's got a scarf she's got her sweater.

29:29I should have the Duchess of Newport has arrived. There you go, baby. I love you. I love you. I love you. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Love you. Goodbye, dude. Okay. Bye. Okay. Drama. Drama queen. Drama queen, like her mom. The whisperer, yes. She's like demure. Very demure. Okay. The week of August 11 is all systems go. We release to social. We release to Jasmine. men's full list. And Jasmine and I, the week of August 11th through August 18th, we take as many calls as we can, kind of given our calendars. Jasmine already has some things. I'm going to have to see what my capacity is in terms of doing all the other things, but we take as many calls as we can.

30:16The week of August 11th, our closers are taking two calls per day, so 10 calls a week each. Same thing for the week of August 18th, provided that they're doing a great job. They can have a full calendar starting the week of August 25th and Jasmine and I can hopefully be on no calls to very few calls. So that was the plan. And even though it was not what I expected or I wanted, I chose to believe a mantra I repeat to myself again and again. Everything is happening for me. Everything is happening for me. So we'll pause and side note, that meeting that I had with that potential partner, it went really well.

30:57And we secured a content partnership. So I'm going to have a separate podcast about that arm of the business. So I don't talk too much about that arm of my business. But essentially what I, I don't think I've ever talked about it on the podcast. I definitely have never talked about it on social media. So a separate arm of the business that has been solely word of mouth and we book it by organizations and large scale companies, they will come to me and they will ask if I will be able to create educational content. Sometimes I'm creating it for their clients. Sometimes I'm creating it for their employees.

31:31Sometimes I'm creating it for specific departments. And so they'll bring me in and I speak about marketing to their marketing department, or I'll speak about sales and branding to perhaps their sales team. oftentimes it would be an organization to say, hey, we have a group of social sellers. Can you create content on social marketing? And it will be on behalf of our business. So they hire me, they take my IP, I turn over those recordings to them and then they distribute it to their sales teams, their clients or whoever is in the organization. So that content partnership thing, I'm gonna have a separate podcast describing what that is for my business and how we've leveraged it.

32:07But for anybody who has questions, that was going on, that was that partner meeting. Okay, now we're back to building out the sales team. So I want to go back to Consistent 10K and setting up this new arm of the business and our sales team. And this video was taken just a few days before my very first sales call. It's July 9th. And this Monday, the 14th, we begin sales calls. Now, here's the thing. We're actually going to roll it out to the wait list. Maybe some people will book on that day. I think there's a higher likelihood of us booking calls on the 15th. But either way, we're going to be ready on the 14th.

32:45So this week, we are finalizing all of our SOPs, our standard operating procedures. We have created a decision map. We are fully prepped to onboard our closers. And just this morning, we got our very first candidate from our recruiting process. Now, we believe that she's so qualified and very much in line with what we want that we are going to bypass group interviews with her. So she is going to be interviewing with our COO tomorrow. And if that goes well, I will be interviewing her on Friday. Now, this is a little bit in advance of when we wanted to recruit, but we wanted to make her a considerable offer if she was in alignment.

33:27So maybe by the end of the week, we're going to have our first closer locked in. That's pretty exciting. I think that everything's happening for us. And today had a call with my mastermind. And I outlined all of the things that we have in process as we build this department. And I think it's only when I had this opportunity to pause and reflect on the work that we've done given this short amount of time, it really does make me proud. Do I think it's perfect? No. Do I think things are going to have to change or we're going to modify based on what we've learned? Yes, absolutely. But I still feel very proud of this team.

34:04I feel excited. And at this point, I think that the only thing that we can do is to get started. I want to practice more sales calls. I want to get better is what that what I do. I want to perfect it. And I don't think that there's any which way of perfecting it until you're actually doing it, which makes me very nervous and also excited. And I just want to hit the ground running. I understand though, the best thing for us right now is to start slow, modify, tweak, get better, and then take this thing public in August. So cheers. I'm very excited. So now let's take a look at the very first day of our beta launch, which also happened to be the very first day of my sales call.

34:51Yes, we sent an email to a very, very, very small list of people. And on that same day, somebody booked a call. They happened on the same day. If I had laser horns, if I was a DJ, that's what I would we doing right now. Today is July 14th. We sent an email to a waitlist, a very small waitlist this morning at 6am. We started getting sales calls scheduled for later this week. And then today I got a sales call scheduled on the first day. I was not expecting that. So had my sales call. The sales calls were scheduled. Like we think they're going to be around 40 or 45 minutes, but we planned them to be an hour.

35:35This call went an hour and 13 minutes. I think she was really surprised that she had a sales call with yours truly. She's like, I was expecting it to be somebody on your sales team. And I'm like, I know, this is how we're starting it. So we talked in depth about her business. She said yes on the call. She wanted to process it with her partner. And she said, send me the link. I want to invest tomorrow. So all in all, it was great. It was great. It was great. I followed the script. I would say I probably stayed to the script. I went out of order a little bit, but I felt like I got the components of understanding like what was the pressure point?

36:15Is she ready for this type of course? I wanted to make sure that this was coming from her, that she was ready. It's a 90-day program. So I want to make sure that when you're in for the 90 days, we're going to do this 90 days. Like, is it in alignment? And so I'm really excited. I'm really, I feel, I feel proud. I feel like I'm sweaty. I'm like super, I'm literally sweaty. I was sweating on the call. I got off that call and I was like, I literally need to go like take a cold shower. But I'm very proud. I'm very excited. Lots of good things. Okay, one thing to note. I forgot this in all of the excitement.

36:46This morning, we sent the newsletter to a very small portion of the list. I think we sent it to about 150 people. We did this to gauge what the response would be. and I sent a voice message to the team and I said, hey, because this is new and we don't know how to gauge it, the last thing I want is to send it to too many people and the response becomes like overwhelming and people can't book a call for, you know, like a week. That's not a good experience. And so we started off with a very small portion and we saw a pretty good uptake of people booking calls. And we noticed that because there's just two of us doing it right now, there's very limited availability.

37:25We thought we were going to send another batch of emails on Wednesday to like another 150 people, but we decided we were going to wait towards the end of the week to send the next wave or next round of emails just to ensure that we are building a cadence that if somebody wanted to book a sales call, they would be able to do that in the next like day or three. Anything beyond that, it's just not that great of experience. So what I'm asking for is to lead with data and analytics. So what does this mean? I said, okay, of the 150 emails that we sent, how many people booked a call in the first 24 hours?

37:59In the first 48 hours? In the first 72 hours? So we are going to be doing this and we're going to be sending it to a very segmented list who is very warm. Now, when we send it to our big newsletter, we're going to be doing it again in segments. Will we do it in small segments of 150 people? No, because the newsletter is going to be a lot colder. We've been nurturing this wait list for about two months, like letting them know that something's coming, letting them know that there's going to be an offer around consistent 10K months, things of that nature. So we will be rolling it out in waves, not as small.

38:32We'll be going wider. We'll be going more to like my colder list. And then we're going to see here again, we're going to be tracking data and analytics. When we send it to, let's say 300 people or 500 people on my list, how many people book to call in 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours? Because we're thinking that if people are responding as positively as they have been, which has been amazing and like a big, big sigh of relief, is that it's going to be a slower rollout than we anticipated. So here again, we're just learning lessons. I'm documenting them with you and talking about the importance of data, analytics, slow rolls, and then keeping track.

39:06Should we ever decide to make another offer like this again? How do we unroll it? How do we unroll it, unfold it, unveil it, whatever. How do we earn the offer to an audience in a way that we're prepared for on the back end? Another thing I forgot. Oh my gosh, you guys, Monday, let's go Monday. I had an interview with a potential closer for the team. I really liked her. She had an interview with current president. She had an interview with our COO. And then lastly, she had an interview with me. I thought she killed her interview. I thought she was extraordinarily well-spoken. I think she comes with so much experience that I actually spoke to her and I said, I actually think you might be overqualified for where we are.

39:47This is a new offer. I don't know how our pipeline is built out. I actually don't know how we're converting on it. I actually don't have our sales scripts and every objection that we'll be facing dialed in. And she said, I know. She was like, I'm very familiar with this type of business. I'm familiar with you and I want to be part of this team. I was very excited. I think I was like, I was kind of taken aback. I sat there and I told her, hey, this call is as much for you as it is for me. I have no doubt. I literally told her, I have no doubt we are going to work together. But I am here to tell you that the experience that you have, the other sales organizations you've been a part of, they are so built out.

40:28Like they have sales teams of 200 or 250 people. We have a sales team of two. Like, are you okay with that? And I said, it's okay. I'm not going to be offended if now is not the right time for you. And she just sat across the screen and said, I want to build. I want to build this from the ground up. I want to lead this department. Like she was very clear. And I was like, oh, okay, this is great. So we're going to be making her an offer. And I'm very excited. She might be the very first closer that we had. So all in all, a good day. I'm very tired. I'm very tired. I'm also very excited. So after another interview call and a mock sales call, we decided not to move forward with that candidate.

41:10And we began to hone our focus and get specifically on who we wanted. Like we didn't need somebody just to sell an offer. We needed somebody that was going to embody our brand values, was going to understand who they're speaking to and understand that we wanted them to lead, guide these calls with empathy and also clear action. So it was about a week or so that had passed before I recorded the video that I'm about to show you right now. So one thing that I want to be very clear with is that I shouldn't create a video in the moment. I know that about myself. When I am going too fast, I share reactions.

41:51And what I need to do is share a response. So this video was a reaction and not a response. And so I debated sharing it. But what was happening on that day was I had so many things back to back to back to back planned that I knew that if I didn't record that video right there and then, I wouldn't record that video at all. And I was leaving on a trip. So I recorded that video and I'm sharing this video now to explain that it was a reaction and it was not a response. And if I could record it over again, I would be a lot more thoughtful with my words. I was just in the moment and I was trying just to say exactly how I felt.

42:28And so it is the full version of me. And one of the things that I debated is I looked at the video and I said, oh, you're sharing a lot of your opinion. and to create helpful educational content, my opinion matters less than dealing with the facts. A bunch of people on the internet have a bunch of opinions. I actually have learned that opinions don't mean anything. What I wanna do is I wanted to use this to show a series of facts and the decisions we made on those facts. I think that this video is a little bit too opinionated, but I'm sharing it here, understanding that I'm gonna be taking the facts from my opinion piece and making a decision from that.

43:02it's been about a week since I last checked in and in that week we finally have some data and feedback that means that we're going on week two of our closing and I am currently sitting at a 50 % close rate ideally I would want a 60 % but I'm learning how to get better and yesterday and it hadn't happened before, but yesterday, not one, but two people joined on the sales call. And I was so excited because I was able to celebrate with them and I was able to, it showed a marked difference of my progress at being able to position value for the offer and speak to what they deeply want from it. So that felt really good.

43:52That felt like a win. Our other closing team member is closing at 43%. So we're only two weeks in. We have so much more room to grow, but we're excited because we're setting benchmarks for what we believe are the closers that we hire will start hitting. Because the closers we're hiring, we are not hiring anybody without experience. So we're looking for experience closers. They have to come with previous experience. and we think that if we are closing between 40 and 50 percent that that will be a benchmark for them somewhere in like that two to three week mark and so that's exciting. On the front of hiring we were very close to extending an offer for a closer who came with a lot of experience and was a very liable option to a lot of people and I did some research.

44:48Listen people careful what you put out online because it follows you. And it just culturally, it was not a fit for the type of student, the type of coaching student, the type of environment. It wasn't a culture fit for our team. So it was good. We didn't extend the offer. We kindly and respectfully declined. I just got off of an interview for somebody who I thought was going to be a very good fit. I actually, I want to hire her for my business. Unfortunately, she wants to get into high ticket sales. And so it's not a good fit. But I'm like, oh man, I would love to hire her. I think she's phenomenal.

45:29I don't know if she's a fit for the type of closer that we're looking for. Okay. Okay, I'm just gonna be honest. I'm just gonna be honest. Like, I need to say what I need to say. The business owners that we are coaching are very, oh my gosh, this gets cheesy. It gets cheesy. This is cheesy. It's just my truth. I deeply, deeply care about the people in this program. I deeply care about the experience that somebody will get coming on a call. I deeply want to protect and I value and I respect somebody's time when they come on a sales call. And I also think that a sales call is a division of a brand.

46:10and right now the division is of my personal brand. These closers are gonna be a personal representation of my brand. They're gonna be an extension of this offer and I'm going to be very particular about who I want on this team. And so these people are great and phenomenal and they're good and all I know is that they're just not right for this, which sounds crazy because I'm only using a litany of my past hiring experience versus the brand that we're creating. And then trusting, and I don't even want to use the word intuition because it sounds super woo-woo. I'm gonna trust my inner knowing. I'm going to trust that my compass knows the direction we're headed and I need to spend the time.

46:56I don't care how long it takes. I need to viciously protect who this starting closing team is because we have a very warm funnel. We have a very warm pipeline. Like there are people who are waiting to get a sales call And right now, Katie and I are the only two people who are closing. We don't even have bandwidth to take the demand for the calls that are coming in. So if I am going to be putting a closer in a very, very warm pipeline, these people are excited to be a part and jump into this, then I need to make sure that from beginning, middle and end, people are well suited. I think it makes me very awkward to say that.

47:34But I also know that the person whose job it is to protect the business and is to protect our students and is to protect the brand is me. Not even protect, excuse me, uphold. It's my job to uphold the business and uphold the brand and uphold an experience. So I'm going to do everything I can to do that. And that is distinctly and cleanly choosing a team that will help us get there. Does that sound a little bit passionate? Okay, maybe. Tengo pasión. I am not, I'm not feeling any other way than more determined. I am more determined to get this right. I am more determined to build out a team. And I know that because we have a new offer that's not market proven, that very few people are going to want to come to this team.

48:21I understand it. I understand that we're playing with a short deck. I get that. But it doesn't mean that I'm going to rush this process. I want to rush this process because I want to start scaling as soon as possible, but not at the cost of the culture, experience, and the business. Okay, side note, let's get a little bit of an update on how the pipeline is going. If you can believe it, we are still using our wait list. By this time, we thought we were going to be sending it to my newsletter list, my subscriber list. We haven't done that yet because we don't have the bandwidth to even sustain the interest that we're getting just from the wait list.

49:00And so I have a newsletter list that I never really talk numbers, but here we are. I have a newsletter list that's around 300 ,000. I can't send a newsletter to 300 ,000 people to say like, hey, we have this offer and we want to hop on a call with you to talk more about it. We wouldn't even have the bandwidth. Even if we had a closing team of eight, we wouldn't be able to handle call volume. So just this past week, we decided to, yet again, push back the public launch. We are going to start segmenting my subscriber list into small pockets of people. And then we're going to use data and analytics to measure how much of the lever we can pull.

49:40So in the beginning, and I don't know if this is right or wrong, we're literally making it up as we go. I have a pretty warm newsletter list. I have a pretty significant open rate and a pretty significant click-through rate, which is awesome. But right now, I don't know how many people are going to want to watch an interest video or set up a call. So we decided to segment the list, and it's going to be very small. We're going to do it to 1 ,000 people. We're going to send an invite to 1 ,000 people on my newsletter list. That is different than the wait list. The wait list would be hot leads. The newsletter might be, depending on what it is, warm-ish.

50:13So we're going to test it for 1 ,000 people, and then we're going to see the interest level, like the open rate and the click-through rate. and within 48 hours, we're going to decide if we're gonna send it to another thousand people or we're gonna park it there due to our closing bandwidth. But here again, we have not hired a closer yet. So we're still just working with two people who are in sales calls and there's a limited time because I'm also recording podcasts and I'm also doing interviews and I'm also creating articles and content. So I'm just reminding myself that slow and steady and steady is sexy.

50:50I think I said that wrong. I'm pretty sure I said it wrong, but you want to know what? I'm just going to own it because slow is steady and steady is sexy. I don't want to scale immediately. I want to build a strong foundation. And I just need to remind myself that going slow builds the right foundation for us to scale, for us to give the level of attention and service that our students deserve and that they are expecting. And so it's like a mix of emotion. Like I felt very happy. I feel excited. And people are often like, well, Jasmine, that's a great problem to have. It is. It is. We're just in the process of figuring out how we might be able to scale it and still protect the integrity of our brand, business, offer, and experience.

51:33So that's where we're at. So today is the day we're recording the podcast. What you just saw back there was behind the scenes of who is here and what it is that we are doing. So let's pop in to the final recap of this whole journey. So here is an update at where things stand as of today. We didn't at all think that at the time of this recording, Consistent 10K is still in a private beta launch. It means that we have too much demand and not enough people to take the one-on-one sales calls. We have hired our very first growth strategist. She's killing it. She's having a 50 % conversion within her first week.

52:21And so we have been filling up her calendar as much as possible. I am still taking sales calls behind the scenes. Like I'd mentioned in an earlier video, I'm dedicated to taking 271 sales calls. I want to earn myself out of this position. Katie is working behind the scenes at setting up our SOPs. Those were all launched. Our new sales strategist was onboarded correctly. Now she has clear KPIs. She has a clear way of documenting everything and the system that we have created. Yes, it will get better, but I am so proud of what this thing looks like. In fact, we talked to our coaches and they said, you have accomplished so much in so little time.

53:01And I decided that instead of starting our sales department with two people, we are going to start with three people. And before the end of the year, there will likely be four salespeople and a sales manager. So I changed a lot of the words that I was using. I made the intentional thing for me to say, we are not moving slow. We're moving with intentionality and a foundation. I am unafraid to say that this thing needs to get to seven or eight figures in a given amount of time. I'm saying I want to build the foundation that will create another seven and eight figure revenue stream in the business.

53:38And I'm going to do this, not just levered on my name, my personal brand, my brain, my wherewithal. No, this thing is built by the team and for the team. And when I win, everybody wins. The feedback we've got back on the program so far has blown my mind. I'm looking at these people and I'm watching them transform in real time. And I want to make sure that we have all of the systems in place so that when we start inviting more and more and more people in, they're going to be getting that same level of care and attention. And the only way we do that is with clear systems and having a support structure, not just from a sales team.

54:14We're also building out a coaching team. I could not be more proud of the coaches that are inside of this program. I couldn't be more proud with how careful and attention detailed they are. One of the things that we knew was going to make this program different is that there's no excuses allowed. We have people coming in and saying, hey, when are you going to get this done? And if you say it's going to be done on Thursday, you are going to be getting a message from a coach and saying, hey, how did it go? If you're saying that your video sales letter, if you're saying your DMs, if you're saying your marketing isn't working, then we're going to ask you, hey, upload it this, upload your content, upload it with your stuck with.

54:47and a coach is gonna come back and give you a very decent response of what needs to happen next in order for you to get a result. And then they're gonna ask you, when are you going to get it done? And if you tell us on a specific day, they follow up on that day. This is a whole theory of what was broken in online education and now us coming in and saying, if this is the thing that you want, we're gonna hold your feet to the fire. You're going to get a result and we're going to do it in 90 days. Hot dang. So lots of new things. I look forward to creating future podcast episodes about the things that we're learning, about the sales mechanisms, how I've grown as a saleswoman and how before I was dreading and so nervous getting in them.

55:23And now when I look at my calendar and I see sales calls, it's like, oh, we're going to win today. We get to serve really well. We get to make an offer that we know is changing lives and we get to see people get real results. I don't know. I'm literally so lit up by them and I'm very excited. So like always, I bring you in on this journey so that you can take these lessons and implement them in your life and business. If this behind the scenes look at how we're building a sales team, specifically if you're watching on YouTube, shout out homies for watching on video. Send me a DM on Instagram. Let me know if you like this format because maybe we start creating more of this like behind the scenes mix of video and podcasting.

56:02If you've liked this, please feel free to send it to a friend or send me a DM. Give me feedback. I'm literally making this content for you. And so you tell me how to get better. I would appreciate it greatly. Thank you for watching and listening to the Jasmine in Starshell.