2036 – Transforming Your Business with Tailored Sales Solutions with The Sales Connection’s Kayvon Kay

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

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1:05With us right now, it's Kayvon Kay. Kayvon, you are a business growth consultant. You are the founder and CEO of The Sales Connection, and your website is thesalesconnection.com. Kayvon Kay, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Well, Kayvon, tell us a little bit about The Sales Connection, who you serve, and what your impact is in the world. Yeah, so with the sales connection we help coaches consultant business owners uh optimize manage and have their sales teams thrive so whether it's us coming in and building out the entire sales department to sometimes we work with the business owner themselves and remove them from the phone so they can get their time back to managing a full sales team so whatever the business needs uh we like to call ourselves more of a boutique agency we come and learn the problems learn uh learn what's working, what's not, we'll come in, we'll offer the solution and help fix them.

2:01Yeah, well, all right, Kayvon, how do we get from point A to point B? Because I think that there are likely a lot of folks that are listening, they're founder led company, probably still way involved in sales, which is good. It's great. I mean, you know, founders have a lot of founder magic, but I think most people in that situation probably see or have a vision or a goal for a day when they have to do less of that? Yeah. So number one is like, I see so many founders think, Hey, if I just bring in a salesperson, my problems will go away. That's actually not true. You're going to cause more problems if you do it the wrong way.

2:35Yeah. We'll come in and we, again, we have to first do what we do as an audit. We assess the business, see where the business is that what's the business capable of, and then understand, okay, what's the sales process. There's a huge difference between a sales process and a sales person, right? And the sales process needs to support the sales person. So what we'll do is we'll come in and we'll do an audit. We'll look at the business. We'll see what's going on. We'll go underneath the hood and then we'll come up with a plan. And usually what's going to happen is we're going to have to either build out or optimize their CRM.

3:04uh if we go even a step before the crm all that we talk about hiring onboarding training acquiring uh recruiting the right sales people so we have an eight-step profile that we put them through uh needless to say 97.8 efficacy meaning if they get through my my eight-step profiler by the end of it there's a 98.7 chance that they will be successful if the business has all those things set up again the onboarding is done properly so we teach or we'll build the onboarding process then they then they have to obviously the crm what's going on in the crm the reporting the tracking all of those things in order for our sales department to work you know properly the challenges a lot of business owners we see is they don't know what they you know we don't know what we don't know we think it's good it's usually not that great and then we bring in some hot shot salesperson we say here's the script here's a recording and go and then they wonder why they fail.

4:01And then what happens is the business owner gets into fear thinking, oh, I can't find a salesperson. They get stuck on the calls themselves and they didn't get the business to be on the sales calls. They got in the business to actually make the impact and work on the business, not in it. So we'll come in and we've done this now with over 150 different businesses. We've closed $375 million in sales in the last five years. Yeah. Wow. Well, you came on, what are some of the biggest errors that founders make when they say, all right, I'm going to hire myself a salesperson and they're going to be able to, I'm just going to be able to pass the baton to them.

4:38They're going to come in, build, you know, you know, cause it's, it's interesting when we think about how founders typically sell and it may not be super structured, but yet you can't expect someone to come in without that structure. Otherwise you're setting them up to fail. So So I could see where this would be a major, um, unforced error that founders do because they're just not being realistic about, um, you know, what it takes to hand the baton to someone. That, that, well, that's, you just said that, right. Founders think that sales people are going to sell like them. And again, that's just not the case.

5:17But one of the biggest mistakes I see founders make when it comes to sales departments, especially is one of the biggest ones actually is they try to get a salesperson to fix a marketing problem which is a massive issue in itself another one is they literally try to get a salesperson they think hey just they give them the the baton we talked about that and they expect them to fix everything and like that they're going to thrive and salespeople are a unique breed and they they need structure they need a platform they need onboard and they need a system to actually thrive in. And what most founders think is their system and their CRM and or onboarding isn't actually the right onboarding for, you know, for the right salesperson.

5:59Another one that we see, and I'll just leave it here, is hiring the wrong salesperson. Just because you have a hotshot salesperson and he's done well over, he or she's done well over there, doesn't mean they're going to do well over here, right? So it's also hiring, again, we know about hiring on culture, but it's also hiring the right salesperson for the right job that they're going to do, for the people they're going to speak to and the product they're going to represent. Yeah. And so Kayvon, do you, I guess I would imagine you have some pretty great stories of founders that were probably working their tail off.

6:35And obviously, you know, there's a transition phase, obviously there's a building phase, there's a planning phase, strategy phase, and then there's a transition phase, or, you know, again, acquiring some talent. And this process is not going to happen overnight. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about the life cycle, what this typically looks like? I was just kind of spitballing. Yeah, no, what I would imagine is involved. It's absolutely, you're right. So it all depends on where the business is at. So if we're talking about a solopreneur, let's call that two or three people on their team, they're stuck on the phones.

7:06Usually that process would take about 90 days. We actually have a 90 day intensive that we actually offer. Well, we'll come in for 90 days, work with the founder, set the system up, set the recruit, help recruit, train the salesperson so that in 90 days, they actually remove themselves from the phone. So that's actually one of our offers is that. We've also, again, we've worked with bigger companies doing the 10s, the 15, even$100 million where they actually currently have a sales team. They have four or five guys on there already, but they have no tracking, they have no reporting, they have no optimization, they have no leadership, they have no sales director, They don't have sales coaches over there and they're wanting to scale, but they don't have the confidence to scale because they know if they scale more bookings, it doesn't mean more sales.

7:50So that's when they'll bring us in. And really that's when we come in, when we come in with the whole, the Monty, I call it, where we say, okay, let's go really underneath the hood here. And let's look at the entire marketing prod, like the marketing system. Let's look at the entire operation system. And then let's look, talk about what it is, what it's going to be to take you from four to 10 salespeople. And then when you have that, you also have to have managers in there. You have to have sales leaders in there so that we'll come in and we actually manage and do that all for you. So ideally, we end up being a sales director for companies so that the business owner doesn't even have to think about it.

8:22So we have one client in the financial publishing right now. We just did a million dollars last month on the phones for them. And he loves us and he's happy because he has one head to ring out, which is mine. You know what I mean? And we are taking the responsibility of everything else in the sales department. We have other ones that we work with where now there's only like three or four salespeople doing about$500 ,000, replace the, you know, the solopreneur, the business owner. And now they don't even go near the phones. They don't have to worry about it. They don't have to think about it. The whole thing's managed from us.

8:52Wow. They can just go do CEO stuff and evangelist stuff. Go change the world. Yeah. Go make the impact you actually really wanted to make, right? Because no one got into business to be salespeople. but we get stuck there because that's where the money is, especially when growing. And then we get tied to that money because we know how hard it is to build a business sometimes. Right? So right when we get it going, we get so attached to not screwing it up that we put this fear that nobody, I always hear this. No one could sell it. Like I can. No, you don't get a cave on. I just love talking to my client.

9:26No, you don't. You have the fear that you don't think a sales rep or a, you know, onboarding specialist has the ability to actually have the same conversation you're having, maybe even a different conversation, maybe even a better conversation because you tried it once and it, and it failed, or you heard horror stories, but you haven't heard the other stories of when it works, because when it works, it works great. And when you have the right system, it works, but there's a process. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it's not, and like you said, it's not overnight. If it was overnight, everyone would do it.

9:58uh just out of curiosity cave on um when we you know again thinking of the founders that's listening that are listening to us right now um and we think about like what it costs to hire a sales professional and you know and i think in the in the early day like i don't hear this too much anymore but you know i would hear founders go yeah i've got a great opportunity i'll tell you what if you sell something then uh we'll just rev split and and you're just getting a commission only salesperson that feels risky to me it seems like yeah well we it be honest with you we do commission only sales reps that's what our bread and butter is commission sales reps now we work with like so i have one of my biggest clients they do a salary and great we work with them salary and then we actually like you like you like if you have a salesperson and they're not on commission you don't have a salesperson you have an order taker no i'm not saying only right yeah yeah yeah Yeah, I hear that.

10:50So I think, but the first question I want to answer is you said, what's the cost of, I'll tell you the cost of one bad hire. The cost of one bad hire is five to six times their average salary. So I tell people, if you don't have a sales rep doing at least$100 ,000 a year in their own personal income, that's$500 ,000. $500 ,000 that you're leaving on the table every time you have to replace a salesperson. Someone goes, well, okay, well, how can that be? Well, it's very simple. If you think about the time it actually takes to go out to the market to find or recruit that salesperson, then to hire them, then to onboard them, and then to train them, and then for them to get the reps.

11:32Because even the best sales reps are not going to be their best out of the gate. They've got to learn the industry. They've got to learn the knowledge. They've got to learn the nuances, and they've got to learn the language. So when they finally do that too, and then if you have someone who has a one month or a two month or a six month cycle, think about all that time that's being wasted and money being left on the table because of one bad hire. It's five to six times. It's actually, it's, it's in Daniel, uh, uh, top grading, actually the book from top grading. It's a scientific fact that they've figured out.

12:01Now, the other question is, yeah, now if you go five to six times or an average salary, and now you're paying sales reps to sit there and they're not doing the job, well, think of that cost to your business as well. So that's why we love commission sales reps, if you know how to get them and acquire them properly, because true sales reps want to be commissioned, they don't want to be capped, they want to want to eat what they kill, right, and they'll work hard for it. Yeah. So, so again, I would, I would say, you know, assuming that you're just going to hire someone on their own, they're going to come in day one and they're going to, you got to have that system structure.

12:35That's where the system, the onboarding, the culture comes in place. Yeah. So if you're talking about, Hey, come here, make a sale, send you a lead, make a sale. And it's never going to work. It doesn't work. It's actually, it's a disaster. Yeah, yeah. So Kayvon, tell me a little bit more about, so your website, the sales connection.com. What is the typical, like, when you begin engagement, what does that usually look like? And, and how do you know whether or not someone is a good fit for you and you're a good fit for them? Yeah, so we obviously you got an initial book call, we learn a little bit more about them.

13:10And then depending on what they need, we'll offer them a couple solutions, you know, one of them might be, hey, we actually we got to do an audit. And that's where we'll come in. And we'll like literally peel back the onion, spend a lot of more hours than most people ever spend in their business to learn it upside down everything. And then at the end of that audit, we give them the recommendations. And then some of those recommendations are, hey, if you want you hire us, we'll do them all for you. Other cases, a couple of calls, we'll understand a couple of calls and doing our due diligence. We'll understand what they need and to make sure we offer the right solution for the right people.

13:42At the end of the day, we want to make sure, depending on the size of the business, they get the solution that's tailored for them. We're not a one size fits all. We are a, again, a boutique where we're going to understand your problems. We're going to understand what it is you're looking for. And then we're going to figure out how we get to where you want to go. Yeah. Okay. So your website is thesalesconnection.com to our friend that's listening. What would you recommend they do? And I think you also, by the way, I think you have some really good resources here. Do you mind maybe sharing if there's anything?

14:11We got lots of free. Yeah, we got lots of free resources. Yeah, yeah. Tell me about that. Yeah, yeah. So on our website right now, we got, I mean, how to hire, we basically our eight-step profiling system, we broke down step-by-step. So if you're a business owner and you want to hire a sales rep, you go to salesconnection.com and you go download the PDF on how to hire a sales rep, you'll have a step-by-step process we use. If you're right now having, you know, a big one is no shows. People showing up to calls is a big issue in the marketplace right now. We actually have our no show free guide that you can also get that increases the show up rate by almost 200%, depending on where you're at.

14:45And then we have multiple, multiple free PDF resources at the sales connection.com for you. And if you want, there's all there's opportunities there. Book a call with us. You'll be booking a call with me personally or my business partner, and we'll have conversations and make sure that we put you in the right direction. Yeah. All right. So the sales connection.com cave on K you're the founder and CEO. We've known each other for many, many, many years. It's been so great having you as a guest in this podcast gave on. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah. Thank you.

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