2 Things to Evaluate When You're Not Hitting Your Sales Goals

Michael Murray: Hey, Jon. We recently talked about goal setting for the year. Really exciting this time of year - a lot of optimism. I'd love to talk a little bit about how do we evaluate ourselves throughout the year? How do we check in? How do we keep tabs on whether or not we're on track to our goals? And then what do we do if we're not on track?

Jon Bryant: Yeah man, let's do it. That sounds fun to me.

Michael Murray: What's the first thing that comes to mind for you and how you guys do things to keep track of your goals and make sure that you're hitting them as you go?

Jon Bryant: The subject's interesting to me because sales drive the business. Without a sale, there really is no business. So we try to take this stuff pretty seriously. We're watching it on a high frequency. We're evaluating our reps' performance, behavior, we're looking at outside factors. We're always trying to tweak and evaluate what's going on. I think it's really such a relevant conversation we had about goal setting because it ties right back into that, helps us achieve our goals. As you and I have talked about before, we hit our goals. That's what we do. We're going to do everything we can in order to do that.

You've talked a little bit about your timeline with me before, but maybe for those listening, if you want to just go over how you do things at Textbook Painting to make sure you guys are on track.

Michael Murray: Sure. Yeah, and then I want to circle back. You mentioned high frequency. So I want to dive into that, what specifically you mean by that. But yeah, happy to chat about a little bit of how we look at things, specifically on the sales side.

We have weekly sales meetings where we're going to meet with the reps as a team. This is a group meeting where we're looking at - we will look at individual rep performance here, but we're really focused on the company-wide performance. Where are we at as a team to the company sales goal that we hit? We do either weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one meetings with each sales rep where we're really diving into their individual performance. So slightly different there.

Then I would say looking at the weekly numbers is important. We're looking at the last week, how did we do? And we're looking ahead to the next week to predict how many quotes are we expecting to get an answer on? What are we expecting to get closure on? Hopefully win in the next week, as well as what new appointments do we have scheduled for the week? How's the estimate calendar looking? How full are we? Things like that.

Try not to make dramatic changes to things on a weekly basis, meaning if we maybe have a bad week, I wouldn't want to go into the next week thinking, "Hey, let's make some dramatic changes." But when it comes to the months, to the point you mentioned a minute ago, we don't want to miss those goals. We hit our monthly goals. It's okay. I think the weeks are kind of like waypoints, check-ins a little bit. Are we on pace? And if we're not, then we can just make some small corrections and get back on track.

If we're not hitting monthly goals, that's a problem. That's where we're going to get into some of the more detailed coaching, perhaps, you know, eventually performance improvement plans with individual reps and different things like that.

Jon Bryant: Cool. So the data that you're talking about - what are you actually weekly talking about and then what are you monitoring monthly? What are those key metrics you're looking at?

Michael Murray: We look at some marketing stuff. I know that's part of certainly any sales conversation - how many leads we have and things. I'm going to set that aside because I kind of think of that from more of a marketing meeting rather than a sales meeting. I think we're really just focused on the sales part here.

We're going to look at how many - what percentage, how many estimates did we do? How many estimates do we have scheduled? Back and forward. Of the estimates that we did, where do they stand? Are they still open or pending? Are they closed won, closed lost? Things like that. How much did we sell? We're going to look at average job size. Trying to think about some of the other stuff that we look at. I think that's the main stuff. Is there something that you guys think of that I'm missing?

Jon Bryant: We just did this recently with the team. We're pulling stats from PaintScout and looking at those stats. Those are pretty important. Typically, on a weekly basis we're looking at trailing 60 days - how's your performance really going?

We're looking at win rate. Obviously win rate's huge. It really indicates whether a rep is having success. We're looking at dollars closed as well. We want to see close to a 50-50 on those - 50% win rate, 50% dollar closed. Sometimes dollars closed is a little bit less depending on the size of jobs you're bidding, but we're looking at those numbers to make sure they're tracking properly. I think 60 days is a good enough window to see what performance is really like, and we're trying to make that coaching that you're talking about, which we're going to get into, relevant to their situation.

We do a weekly sales meeting as well. We've got our goal sheet up. We also have the results on a separate column from that goal of how you're actually performing. We're watching that thing like crazy because our company, like yours, is all employees. So we care deeply about keeping our team employed and hitting those goals, and sales drives everything.

Michael Murray: That meeting is basically - who's in that meeting? Let's start there. I have a good idea, but maybe just answer.

Jon Bryant: It's going to be the reps themselves. We include our marketing manager in that meeting and whoever's managing the sales team. I've been opting out of that. So sales manager has been looking after that. They have an agenda. They go over the activity that they've been doing, their results, talk about process, dig into some jobs they're having a hard time with, that kind of thing. But we're doing that weekly.

Michael Murray: When did you guys do that meeting? Is that Mondays or Fridays? Or when, what does that look like?

Jon Bryant: We do it Wednesdays, Wednesday afternoons. Yeah. It's been kind of random, just when it works for everybody. There's no reason. When do you run yours?

Michael Murray: Typically Monday mornings. I think we've tried different things and I don't know that there's a perfect answer. The idea behind it is we can get our data from the last week. So it's not usually first thing, but it's pretty early on Monday morning. Then we still have got the whole week ahead. It just seems like it's a natural - how'd we do last week? What's going on this week?

I've debated often doing it maybe on a Friday because I think sometimes sales reps might be downshifting on Fridays anyway, so it might be a good day for meetings. I don't know.

Jon Bryant: Michael, nobody does anything on Fridays anyways. We had a rep telling me that one time. He's like, "No one does anything on Mondays and no one does anything on Fridays. Nobody really works before 11 and no one really works after two. Everyone's just getting going or shutting down." And I was like, "So you have like, what, is that six hours a week to sell?" Unfortunately not.

Michael Murray: Is this a younger person by any chance? Interesting.

Jon Bryant: Cool. So you're running the meetings, getting the data. Once you've gotten a situation where things aren't going as well as you hoped, what happens? How do you identify it?

Michael Murray: So first thing that we do is I get out the Nerf gun and we start shooting everybody. No. We do have the Nerf gun handy. That's in case of emergency.

Jon Bryant: That might be considered abuse, so you better be careful.

Michael Murray: All right. So what do we do when we're not hitting goals or maybe we're not on track to hit the goals? I think it depends on is this a pattern of behavior? Is this a one-off? Is this - are we trending in the wrong direction or is this maybe just a blip?

I would say the big thing I want to look at is we're going to have - I'm going to have a conversation with the rep. I'm going to speak to the individual here. I want to drill down. So when I say we're not hitting our goals, I want to drill down. I think that's the first thing that I want to know - what part of our goal are we not - where's the actual problem?

I think the actual dollar sold is the end result of activities and math. We talked about last episode of how many estimates are we doing, what's the average job size, what percentage of those are we winning? We can use that math equation and that's going to tell us how much we are selling. We set specific goals and targets for each of those so that we have a benchmark to go back to and say, "Okay, our total sales are less than what they were supposed to be for the month of January, let's just say. Okay, well, that's not good. Let's figure out why."

Is it because we didn't do enough estimates? Is it because we didn't win a high enough percentage of the jobs? Or is it because, no, we did enough estimates and we won as many jobs as we were supposed to, but they're all small and so they just didn't add up to the right number there? Whatever it might be is going to determine what we do next.

Jon Bryant: So let me ask you this - we talked about this last episode too, about when we're doing goal setting. What are your numbers? What percentages? I know we talked about that, but maybe just to recap, when you're in these meetings and you're seeing what you consider to be poor performance, what is that? What do you consider poor performance?

Michael Murray: I would say on an individual rep basis, we're looking at about 10 to 15 estimates a week, depending on seasonality and time of year. We're looking for a 40 to 45% win rate depending on time of year as well as the experience of the rep. A brand new rep, we set the baseline a little bit lower than that just to be clear, but that's just for their first couple of months.

Jon Bryant: Okay, minimum.

Michael Murray: And an average job size - that one generally doesn't change as dramatically throughout the year. It certainly might for other companies, but for us, we see that it doesn't too much. We find that exterior projects typically have a higher job size. So that tends to give us a bump up in that time of year. For us, it's usually in the $5,000 to $5,500 range is what we find.

Jon Bryant: What are you seeing average job size being right now?

Jon Bryant: Yeah. Funny enough, that is very close to the standard of PaintScout users, that $5,000 mark. It's funny, inflation hasn't changed as much as I thought it would have. So hoping to see some changes there. Everybody can start raising their prices. That's the goal.

Michael Murray: I think so. Unfortunately, I feel like - I don't want to get us onto a different topic, but I feel like in the painting industry, we operate with such a scarcity mindset too often that we are often too slow in raising our prices. I know for us, we got the fun call from our Sherwin Williams rep recently to say, "Hey, by the way, you're getting a price increase in January or February or whenever it is." I think most of us in the industry had that happen in the last month or two here.

It's like, okay, at that same time, it's the winter, it's a slower time of year, maybe we're discounting. But to raise prices this time of year seems crazy. I'm already having a hard time selling. If I raise my prices, it's going to be even harder. I would just put an opinion on that - I disagree. I think there's never a bad time to raise the prices. You need to raise your prices when you need to raise your prices.

Often the beginning of the year is a time when our vendors are charging us more, like Sherwin Williams, or you're giving out employee raises - pretty common. So this is a really good time of year to reflect on that and raise your rates. I think for most painting contractors could raise their prices by 10 or 15% and not see significant decline in how many jobs they actually sell.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, totally agree on that. Maybe that's a topic for other times. I think we say raise your price, but how do you raise your price? What does it mean? So we'll get into that another time.

I think we talked a little bit about digging into the process. You've identified the data. By the way, ours is very similar in what data we look for. You found somebody that isn't achieving and you've identified that. Let's call it midway through the month. What is your first step with that person?

Michael Murray: I think the first thing is we're going to have just that part of that one-on-one conversation and just ask them, "Hey, what's going on? Notice that we're not on track here. Tell me how do you feel like things are going? What are you feeling? What are you thinking?" I just want to hear from them.

They might be like, "Hey, I was really sick the last week, just wasn't on my A game, feeling much better, confident, going to have a great week." It's like, "Okay, sounds good." Got to give them the benefit of the doubt and check in after the next week or so and see that actually took place. Or they might say something else.

I would say the big thing I'm looking for is what I call avoiding a blame shift. I don't want somebody to externalize. So what I mean by that is I don't want them to say, "Oh, nobody wants to buy or our prices are just too high or the economy or the politicians or the weather or whatever," just BS that we don't have any control over.

I'm a big believer in the psychology behind that, which is when the problem is caused by something outside of my control, my brain does not need to spend time fixing it. I cannot fix the economy. So if it's the economy, nothing I can do. I'm not going to make any changes. That sucks. That is a loser mentality. So if I hear that from a sales rep who's struggling, I am going to call it out immediately.

If it's a newer rep, we're going to have a nice little teaching moment on that concept. If it's something that we've talked about a lot, eventually we're going to have conversations about them not being a core values fit. So it kind of depends on how often we've been doing that. What I'm really looking for is them telling me what are the behaviors, what are the actions that they're taking to get back on track.

Jon Bryant: So what's the right answer?

Michael Murray: I think it's - I like it when they know their own numbers, when they can say, "Yeah, my sales success rate's really down here. But what I've noticed is I haven't been doing a really good job with my follow up calls and haven't been as good with the CRM and setting activities for the next time I'm going to call customers. So I've already gone in, set up next steps with all of the quotes I did last week, and I'm already back on track here."

Those types of self-coaching and self-correcting are, I would say, next level. It's certainly not necessarily a newer rep maybe is going to be at that level yet. But things along those lines are, to me, the ideal answer.

Jon Bryant: I would also say too - we've talked so much here about reps and coaching reps. I think that's really important. That's the area that we operate in. But I would say if you're listening and you run your own business and you do the sales, these things are all tangible to you as well. It's going to take more self evaluation, but that winter mindset that you're talking about, figuring out the plan forward when things are going wrong - these things really apply so much to sales.

Sales is really - can be really emotional. It's hard to take the nos. Hard to say, "So what? That didn't matter that much." So always looking to the future is just so important. If you're listening today and you're in that position, hopefully this is helpful as well. If you're looking to add a rep, these are things that you'll have to be willing to coach on, I think. When I first got into this, I didn't quite realize how much coaching I had to do for adults to stay positive and have a plan. I thought people could figure this out for themselves, but a lot of times - I even need help. We all need help.

With that said, you have a rep, you're coaching them. You have a process at Textbook, you guys have a process, and we do too. We've developed sales process. So maybe for those who don't have a sales process, do you want to just do a quick 10,000 foot view here of what that looks like? And then we'll kind of dig into how to evaluate it.

Michael Murray: I think a really brief overview of a sales process might look something like - sales rep calls the homeowner beforehand, a day or two before, or day of, or something, confirm the appointment, introduce themselves. When they get to the home, how do they introduce themselves? Some of the maybe initial questions and trying to understand what is it that the customer is looking for, what are their current pain points or problems that they're trying to solve for, and evaluate is this a quote that makes sense? Is this one of our type of a customer? Again, there's a lot that goes into that.

But from there, we're doing the estimating part, where we're putting together all the numbers into PaintScout. We're using the measuring tools, all that kind of fun stuff. Then we're going to get back together with the customer and we're going to go over the price. We always want to give price on the spot. I would say we do that about 99% of the time. We go over, using the iPad, sit at the kitchen table, whatever that looks like - front porch, whatever - go over that, ask for the sale, seek out those objections.

If we aren't getting a decision on the spot, we're going to schedule a time for a follow-up call. I've also done some times where we'll go back to the house afterwards instead of a call to follow up. Schedule a time I can stop by and talk in person. That can get impractical just depending on how busy you are and how far apart things might be. That's kind of, again, broad strokes, what an in-home sales process type of a system might look like. What else would you add or change to that?

Jon Bryant: I think that in order to run a successful sales team, you need a sales process. I don't think there's anything I can add to it. It really comes down to how you want to treat it at your company. Ours is very similar to yours. We're both using a system based off of Sandler sales system. We try to train on that system, but we have a formula to this.

It's not random - show up, guess the price, stand at the person's front door, say "great shirt" and leave. We want to facilitate a really positive experience for the customer. In having a process, that allows us also to reflect on the process and work with our reps. If you don't have that process, this is a non-starter. You can't evaluate something that's random. "Oh, you didn't make a sale? Couldn't tell you why." But in this particular conversation, because we have a process, we're going to now meet with the individual when they're not performing, and we're going to be able to talk about process.

Maybe you want to start just talking a little bit about what that looks like for you guys, and then I'll jump in.

Michael Murray: Sure. The first thing that comes to mind when you bring that up is the ride alongs. We do a lot of ride alongs with our new reps as part of their initial training. I would say something that I've been guilty of in the past and recent past even is getting too busy and not doing enough ride alongs with our somewhat experienced sales reps. Once they get up to speed, doing pretty well, maybe they're starting to struggle a little bit - I probably need to do more ride alongs and earlier.

We do have a coaching sheet for ride alongs where it goes back to that sales process and it explains each step of the process in a very detailed, more broken down way than I just explained it. There's specific things that I'm looking for. Are we asking these types of questions? How do we greet the homeowner when we first arrive? Things like that. I can evaluate them on - we basically just use a simple one to five or zero to five scale.

Then afterwards - so literally I'm on the ride along. I've got a clipboard with that document. I'm hanging out in the background. Obviously I'm introduced and part of some of the conversations, but I'm letting the rep really do their thing. I'm focused on that piece of paper on my clipboard and just evaluating, how are they doing? They got a four for this, they got a five for that, they got a two for this, writing down comments - great job with this, forgot to do this, whatever.

Jon Bryant: Mustard on your shirt. What does that get? One, two, four on five? Mustard on the shirt. What are you...

Michael Murray: If it's a yellow shirt, we could probably go with a four. That doesn't really fit our brand color, so we're probably going to go with a two.

Jon Bryant: Okay. Yeah, so they wore a yellow, like Daytona shirt or something. Okay, yeah, that says like negative two. Great. So the process - you do a ride along. That in my head is like, my goodness, that makes so much sense. We need to do that more too. The thing we've done is the sheet. It's a bit of a self-evaluation sheet. So making sure you hit the points necessary. But in addition to what you're saying, one thing that's been really valuable to us over the years has been doing a secret shopper.

Jon Bryant: In addition to those self-evaluation forms that we're doing, we've done a secret shopper in the past. Sometimes I think when you're with somebody, Michael, they don't have an audience. So they might not behave the way they actually do. They're more cognizant of it. Sometimes it actually affects the sales process of that job too because the customer's like, "Great, I'm in the middle of someone being tested."

So the self-evaluation form is helpful, but we've done secret shopper experiments before where we will find a client who's willing to - find a client or just a friend or somebody in our network who's willing to have a paint job estimate on their home and have our estimator come out and a couple other sales reps, or just that estimator, and see whether they're following the process. What actually happened during the time, what questions were asked, what was the length of the meeting? Give us all the details. In exchange we'll send them out for dinner or something like that.

That's been really effective for us to see how our reps are acting when we're not there. We've had reps who have performed really poorly on these secret shoppers. We'll have a few companies out and we finished last. It's like, "Okay, well, this is not good." But now we have data to work off of. Why were we unlikable? Why did we come off like we were arrogant? Why did we not ask about price? Why would you send the estimate three days after you said you would? These are bad things, but...

Michael Murray: But they're real.

Jon Bryant: They're real. And when you lose, you really get to see why and how versus just guessing. So I think the next part of the process here is, once we've identified what's going on - you have a process, you're looking at process, like, "Hey, how did you do? What's missing?" - we can start to work on the person.

Michael Murray: Have you heard of this AI tool called - I think it's pronounced RILLA Voice? It's R-I-L-A. It's essentially - I've never used it. So I'm just curious if you're familiar with it. But my understanding is that it's essentially, I think you're using your iPhone or whatever, and it's recording the sales appointment and then using AI tools to summarize and provide some coaching and feedback. Have you heard about this? Used it? Any thoughts?

Jon Bryant: I've heard of it, but we've not put it into place. I've always had questions about privacy law, that kind of thing with it. But what's your - would you want to try this thing? You want to give it a shot?

Michael Murray: I want to try it. I mean, first of all, if it's software or AI tools, I'm a pretty easy sale. I'm just so curious. Sign me up. What does it cost? But I think it's a huge opportunity. I don't know how I sound. Anybody listening to this probably thinks not good. But it's like in a sales appointment, I have my thoughts as how I'm coming across and I feel like I asked those questions. But to be able to go back and listen and even just to self-coach, let alone have somebody else coach me or using AI to do that, I think that would be pretty cool.

Jon Bryant: Well, maybe we make it a mission to try it out, get back to everybody and see how it actually works. Because that could have some really huge impacts if it does. I'd like to know more about just privacy and how that works with letting clients know about that. So let's check back in on that.

But yeah, we live in this strange world where we have representatives going out to homes and we really have no clue what's going on. That's probably the most blind part of our business. How does that actually look? We can check on crews. You can't check on sales process as easily.

Going back to our theme today, which is when sales aren't going well as expected, we're into the people problem. You've got processes and people. I've heard it said before, "Systems run the business, people run the systems." We've now found an individual on our team that's not following systems. I've heard it said before when there's behavior that's an issue - either the person can't, they won't, or they don't know how. Any thoughts there?

Michael Murray: Say that again - can't, what was it?

Jon Bryant: Can't, won't, and don't know how.

Michael Murray: I've not heard that to be honest with you. So I want you to elaborate on that. I'll say just to give a thought - it reminds me in EOS, there's a concept called GWC, which we would use to evaluate anybody in any role, which stands for gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to do it. Do they get the job? Understand it. Do they want it? And then capacity - do they have the skills? Do they have the time? Do they have maybe the experience and knowledge that it's going to take?

Depending on if somebody's not performing, which of those is it? Which of the GWC is the actual problem? That's really going to determine whether or not this is something we can coach and fix or whether or not we might just need to replace this person. Sounds kind of similar to what you described, but I'd love for you to elaborate.

Jon Bryant: Yeah, I think it's very similar. I think it comes down to the desire to do it, the ability to do it, and then trainability - what resources they need. So can't, won't - so desire, ability, and then trainability. When I dig into that, I think about to myself, okay, with the issue being low close rate - can't means maybe there's external factors. Didn't get enough estimates. That's a hard one. I guess we talked more about dollars closed in that case. So dollars closed, did you get enough estimates? "Well, we didn't really get enough estimates." So maybe they couldn't actually reach the target without the estimates needed.

Won't, for me, is they're being asked to do something and they just refuse. So in the process, can they ask for the sale? They've just decided, "I don't want to do that, it's not worth my time." That to me is really more of a removal. Those two are kind of borderline - we need to talk about removal.

Doesn't know how comes back to that process. So when you do the evaluation, it's like, "Oh, we were trying to look at getting the right questions to the customer to understand their issue. You just didn't understand that part of the process. So let's work on that." Is that similar to EOS, the way you describe it?

Michael Murray: Yeah, I would think it is. So what I hear you saying, just to reiterate it, make sure I understand - let's go with asking for the sale. A new rep might not know that they're supposed to. Maybe they think, "Oh, I'm just going to give you the quote. Then the customer says give us a call in a week or two and then I call them in a week or two." Seems like a good way of doing it. What could go wrong?

Then we maybe coach them and say, "Well, actually we're going to ask them while we're here. Is this something you guys want to do? Give me some feedback on our price. What are we thinking here?" However you might do that. So that's a training and a competency type of a thing. That goes back to the "don't" - they don't know how to do that. It could also just mean they need some word tracks on the right way to do that. Not be overly aggressive, but not overly passive either.

If they can't, it might be more of a personality issue. It might be not that they're physically can't form the words, but it's just in that moment it's just not their personality. They're so averse to conflict. They are so people pleasing by their nature that as soon as they get any sort of hint of resistance from the client, they're going to back down and avoid that asking for the sale part. Or maybe they're just so afraid of hearing no, which is certainly a challenge in a sales role.

Then I think the other one is where they won't do it - it's more of a conscious choice issue or they're blatantly saying, "I disagree. I'm actually just going to send the quotes and people that want to book are going to book and you're wrong. You should never ask for the sale." I have a feeling that person already went on their last appointment for Jon's company.

Jon Bryant: Right, absolutely.

Michael Murray: I like that. I follow that. Yeah, I think it's very similar for sure.

Jon Bryant: So we identify these things. You mentioned performance improvement plans. What's the next steps here? So just so everybody's following, we've got - we figured out that we're evaluating the process and the data, so timelines, doing it frequently. We're looking - if you have a process, great. We're now evaluating our process internally or with our reps. If we're not getting the results we're looking for though, we've got a framework now of why that might be the case with the person. How do we improve it?

Michael Murray: Generally, whenever something's not working like I want it to, I want more frequent data. I'm going to be more involved, whatever it is. So I want more data more quickly. I'm going to do more ride alongs. I'm going to have more meetings and things like that. We will utilize a performance improvement plan.

So this might be, for example, maybe a rep has missed their goals two months in a row. We're getting close to the point of we're going to have to release you into the wild and let you go work somewhere else because this isn't the right fit. But before we do that, we want to be very clear. One of our rules is firing somebody should never be a surprise to that person. We want to make sure that we're giving a lot of coaching, a lot of feedback, a lot of opportunities for them to understand and make changes. Again, going back to what we just talked about, if they choose not to, then that's okay. And they've made a choice to work somewhere else.

That performance improvement plan is typically like a one-month process where I need to see very specific actions. Again, it's going to really depend on what the problem is. If they're just not working enough - okay, we need to work more. We need to do more activities. If they won't ask for sales or they haven't been, but they want to, then it's like, "Okay, well, we need that to happen," and probably going to do some check-ins.

I've not done the secret shopper thing that you described before, but what I have done is I've called homeowners after a sales rep has been at their home and just asked them how it went. Just a couple basic things like, "Did they give you the quote while they were there? Did they ask you if you wanted to work with us?" things like that. It's amazing that even without any prior questions or coaching, homeowners will usually give me all the information I need to know about how the appointment went. "Well, they showed up late and I was really frustrated because it took way too long and didn't even give me a price or whatever." It's like, "Oh, got it. Okay. I have a really good idea of what's going on now."

So those are the kind of things. That performance improvement plan is exceptionally detailed. This is kind of the problem. Here's what's lacking. Here's what we've identified as the problem. We've discussed this as the solution. I need to see exactly this by exactly this date. Otherwise, you will probably not be working here. We're going to sit down. We're both going to sign that document. I'm going to provide them with every opportunity I can to help them be successful with it. But unfortunately my experience has been that it's typically a kind of a last-ditch effort that doesn't tend to work, I guess.

Jon Bryant: It's so hard. I've yet to find a performance plan where it's actually been a long-term solution. But it's definitely - I agree with you. Don't let people go unless they know why and how to improve. But I've always wondered if it could be called something else. A performance improvement plan seems pretty serious.

Maybe, and also, as you say that, I could think about our own process and being like, maybe we do this with people who are actually good performers too. I've heard it said, we spend way too much time with our people that are challenges on our team and not enough with the top performers. I think about our reps currently. It's just the guys who are top performers get no attention. They continue to perform, but maybe there's a document you could actually create that was just "performance for next month." What's the vision, what's the issue? So it doesn't feel like this big negative. It's actually something we do all the time. So what worked, what's working for you is great. Let's keep doing that. And if it's not, well, we've got to fix it.

Michael Murray: I do think there's something to be said for having that serious conversation though, so that hopefully you can get that behavior change. Again, it's not something that, "Hey, you missed the goal for the week. We're having a performance improvement plan." It's, you know, we've been having a lot of coaching conversations and we've been missing goals and the behaviors have been off here for some amount of time. I need to be a little more direct and a little more clear here that this is not acceptable.

Jon Bryant: Do you think there's any variation of all of this if you're a sole proprietor or someone who's doing all the sales for your company?

Michael Murray: Well, I mean, I think one thing is perhaps not everybody's good at sales. Just because you're a business owner, it doesn't mean that you should be doing the sales. I think too often business owners hold onto that for too long.

It's funny, I had just literally this morning, I had breakfast with a really good friend who owns a business locally. It's not in the painting industry, but it's kind of similar, home improvement kind of thing. He came from a sales background even before he had this business. He was a really good sales rep at a manufacturing company - nothing related, but just great sales background, great networker. I would hire him in a heartbeat to come do sales for me.

He's generally done all the sales in his own company. For a while I've been encouraging him to hire a sales rep and get himself out of that seat because it is such a full role that you really are spending so much time working in the business, even though it's in a sales spot. Doing the sales is a very in-the-business kind of a role.

I had breakfast with him and he's like, "Yeah, I got this new sales rep. I hired him like two months ago. He's doing great. I don't know why I didn't listen to you and do this a long time ago. I have so much more time now to focus on the business type activities." I think you can still go do some sales. It's just that the business doesn't rely on him for sales. He's really good at it. I think there's a lot of business owners that are okay at it that would be surprised that somebody else might be able to come in and do a lot better.

I think having some real conversations with themselves and perhaps just maybe hiring a coach or hiring somebody who can hold them accountable - I think that's one of the biggest challenges in running our own businesses is having somebody else that we're accountable to is a challenge.

Jon Bryant: I think so. We have a lot of sales reps too that may tune into this as well. I think in addition to what you're saying, sales is a skill. It's a very valuable skill. Through this process, self-evaluation is so helpful because we're always wondering how to improve, how to get more sales.

Sales can be an incredibly great career if you're selling lots of work. When you're not, you start to ask yourself questions and go back through your process. This is what we coach our teams on - when things aren't going, you're not hitting your goals, internalize your process. Am I doing this well? What can you work on? What can you practice? So often we're going on bids and we're trying to just perform, but this is a performance. This is a bit of an act we're doing to facilitate a positive sales experience.

Looking back and saying, "What is my process? What are the things that I'm not doing that I should be doing? Where can I improve? What areas of improvement are there?" I think is so valuable because when it starts from inside, it makes the conversation so much easier for everybody else to contribute versus what you talked about, which is the personality where it's like, "I'm good. Thanks very much. It's all external." Start with "I" - I need to do this, start with the internal stuff.

If you're listening from that perspective, this all applies, but in terms of your own process. In terms of the calls, what's interesting is I would love to know if you're a sole proprietor, if you could somehow get somebody else to call on your behalf to see how you did to get that feedback. We're talking about our sales team, but man, when I first started, I would have loved to have known how I come off because I looked like I was 12 years old. I had no idea what I was doing and how I got any work is beyond me. But I would have loved to get feedback. So being open to feedback, getting feedback - this is critical to success in sales.

Anyways, I think that's all I got for today. Anything else in your mind here?

Michael Murray: Yeah, just the last quick thought on what you just talked about. I think for maybe a sole proprietor, one of the challenges they might have is not having a sales process. Just an estimating process, or whatever that might be, because it's just like, "I know what I'm doing, I've done it for a long time, I go out and I talk to people and I sell painting jobs, it's not that hard." Perhaps, but when things are not going well, you don't have anything else to go back on. It's very common then to externalize it.

What I would pose is create the sales process, document that for yourself. Now you'll have something that you can utilize when you are ready to make that first sales rep hire. But even if that's not what it's used for, even if you just use it to kind of self-coach yourself and to remember back to, "All right, this is the standard. Let me go back to, am I following the standard?"

We do so many quotes, and it's really easy to just get off course a little bit. Having that documented process to go back to that we talked about before, I think is great, not just if you have reps in a bigger business, but even for somebody who's a sole proprietor or just doing all their own sales.

Jon Bryant: Absolutely. Know your process. Tweak your process. Meet your goals.

Michael Murray: Yeah. Be able to break it down. I think that's the big thing. If you're not hitting a goal, break that down into the smallest piece that you can so you can focus in on where's the actual challenge and problem. Then start addressing that instead of getting caught up in, "We didn't make our top line revenue." That is way too broad to try to fix. You need to be fixing stuff that's a little bit more manageable.

Jon Bryant: Totally. I think on that note, let's wrap it up. Talk to you next time. Have a great day.

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