Ryan Groth, Hiring Sales Team

Have you had a chance to hear our recent podcast with Brandon Lewis? Listen to the audio, or enjoy the transcript below of our conversation!

Kathy Droste  
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Estimate Rocket radio. My name is Kathleen. I am the Director of Sales here at Estimate Rocket. And I am joined by my very dynamic co host Chris Shank, who is the leader of Education and Engagement here at Estimate Rocket. Hey Chris, how are you today?

Chris Shank  
Good. Always great to be on with you, Kathy.

Kathy Droste  
Thank you. So today we are so excited. We have a longtime friend with us. His name is Ryan Groff Ryan is the CEO of sales transformation group. I don't know if any of you know this. But Ryan is also an ex professional baseball player. He has now developed a renowned national coaching and sales development firm. He and his team's mission is to transform and elevate the construction and building materials industry.

Chris Shank  
We talk with Ryan about sales teams, he knows how to build a good sales team. Whether you're starting from scratch, or you already have a sales team and you're trying to grow more, or you're trying to change out your culture to attract the right kind of salespeople. He just has an idea of where you need to get to with your sales team. And I love that because not everyone can see it that way. We love picking his brain can't wait to see him at the transform conference, check out the link in our show notes.

Kathy Droste  
Hi, Ryan. It's great to have you on Estimate Rocket radio. Welcome to the studio. Thanks, Kathy.

Ryan Groth  
Thanks, Chris. Great to be with you again. 

Chris Shank  
All right, so tell us what's going on over there at STG sales transformation group, always some cool stuff. And new things are happening. What's going on with you guys?

Ryan Groth  
Yeah, so we've done a lot of great things going into the rest of this year and into next year, where events have been kind of my baby. I love seeing people you know, hanging out in person, spending time looking him in the eyes, and seeing our customers. And so we'll talk about the big event here in a little bit. But we're planning on an event specifically for salespeople called the sales athlete takeover.

So that would be like, Hey, I'm gonna send my salespeople and we're gonna go retreat and just hang out with Ryan and a day for a day. And we'll get into all things like mindset family, get them thinking about their sales career as a profession that they want to become competitive with and really take seriously and level up their life and their business and their sales careers. We have a Maui event for sales leaders and owners in February of next year. But relaunching we're doing year two of service con, which is an event for companies that want to grow their service departments, which has been awesome. Last year was a great one. 

And we'll do a few other events: a roof warrior event, which is for residential roofing contractors and owners and sales leaders and their salespeople. So I love that. And we've also launched our podcast season to growth minded contractors. So we're excited for that launch. And we are launching into paving. So we have a product called pavement accelerator, we're excited to launch paving and then we're going to really read and tweak our programs to be a bit more industry specific.

So that's on the product roadmap just to bring more specificity to our clients because we have expertise to go deeper and add more value. And yeah, there's another recent change, we're looking at adding more regular in person visits for a different service price that we would call our Platinum service but basically much more hands on sales coaching, management and sales leadership and in our clients organizations almost like an outsourced sales leadership department.

And that's something our clients are really in need of and a lot of the sales leaders we've run into or worked with, the owner is that sales leader, they don't have the time and they just don't have the expertise and they need a higher sales manager. But even that sales manager needs a lot of help. So yeah, we're excited for a lot of those changes and ways to just improve the customers we work with and their performance across the board.

Kathy Droste  
Awesome. I know that went by really quick but what a journey, what a workload on you guys to I mean, you know, that's incredible coming up with all these new plans. And I think there's a lot of value to one-on-one coaching. I like that, you know, the ability to pay more, and you can have someone fly right to your corporate office. That's pretty cool. Yep.

So we talk to a ton of companies, right? At Estimate Rocket, we have several, several 1000s. So, you know, they always talk to us about do you think it's time to expand our Salesforce? So what are some of the triggers that you can share with our Estimate Rocket community of what are the signs that it's time, it's time you need to start hiring?

Ryan Groth  
Well, think about the spectrum of like, getting a sale done. And you think about the spectrum from left to right, and you think about on this side, you have a direct sale, so they go door to door, or they find that client and they take it from cold to sold from contract to contract, right, they take that all the way. And there's a lot of things that a salesperson, the skills for that salesperson, to have to have, in order for them to do that prospecting, relationship building, you know, selling value closing, you know, all that all those skills are required to take it from cold to sold by a sales rep.

And then you have the other end of the spectrum, which is like, you know, like Apple, it's like, you walk into the store, and you already know what you're gonna buy and in somebody's shoes, and you're just buy it, and it just like an order taker, right, very, very little skill needed, right? Like, think about the other side is like, No, you're gonna burn a cell phone company, we're gonna go out and sell cell phones, and walk out into the street and sell them the iPhone, or you just have the store and the brand and the demand and the location and the price and all that you pay for that location in the mall. 

All that creates enough demand where they come in, and they're just buying, right? So you think about some contractors we work with, are probably somewhere in between this right? And where I think that you have to ask yourself as a company is do we want to be a company that really requires zero sales effort to sell deals?

And I don't have to, we don't have to do anything that remotely feels like selling? Is it just order taking? And if we want to do that, is it worth it? Right? Well, what's gonna have to happen, you're probably gonna have less sales, because of that, you'll have less margin in those sales, because you're not selling quite as much value, you're not upselling as much as well as you could. You're gonna have salespeople who are probably overpaid, because you know, that they kind of wanted to be generous.

And so then they have these overpaid on developed undisciplined, order takers. And then that's all fine and dandy until things get hard and the economy gets tough or something changes. And you don't have the sales culture, where there's some standards that we believe in, and that require that sales ability, which is kind of the other end of the spectrum, which is like highly motivated door to door, taking it from cold sold all the way. And I think there's a middle ground there where you can, you can decide, hey, we want to grow, and we need our sales competencies to improve to help us close that gap.

Because if we're just relying on shore brand leads, and essentially somebody who just takes an order, that's going to limit our growth, but you don't have to learn a whole lot, you just got to, it probably will be profitable, and the closing ratio will be high, because you're just waiting for the phone to ring or waiting for something to happen.

And I think that there's a really good balance in the middle there where you have a demand, you got a great brand, got the sign on the right street, you know, the right highway, get enough eyeballs to see the brand, it looks great, your trucks look great, you know, your reviews are good, it's all good. But you also have a salesperson who's trained and he's like a lethal weapon, a weapon at the same time where they are assertive enough to try to take things as far as they possibly can.

That's moral and ethical for the betterment of the business, and helps you land more customers and, you know, do more things in the community. So I think there's a good balance in the middle. And you gotta ask yourself, Where am I on the spectrum right now? Do we have a bunch of salespeople that can't sell anything, and they're really struggling to even pay the bills, or do we have people who are drunk on leads and they have lead after lead after lead? They don't even follow up after any lead and it's just money being left on the table. What's the middle ground we want to be living in? And that would there's a sweet spot there.

Chris Shank  
I want to find the people that are drunk on leads. I usually find the people that are starving for leads. Well, I think it's also a symptom of wanting to grow and being very ambitious, that it's never enough to say hey, this is what we have. We are in high demand for everybody's coming. Like I think at that point you're like, Okay, you want to build capacity to get to the next level like you're always playing the next level always more sales always more leads maybe. That's the next question. 

Actually, I have to ask you, okay, if you feel like I guess the preliminary would be that you feel like the growing companies are looking less for the sale? Would you call order taking salespeople in more for the edge, the salesperson as educator, as persuader, you know, as connector? Because that is the more advanced sort of salesperson? Do you feel like the growing companies are really needing more of those salespeople as educators?

Ryan Groth  
Yeah, the growing companies, our sales organizations that happen to do XYZ contracting, that's the growing ones do because they, they have the they know that they they know that they can't just coast their way, based on purely environmental conditions, they're going to need to create and make things happen with their with the best of their abilities. And you can create a culture in a team environment and attract winners and high performers into your company, when you have a vehicle to help them be successful, like a sales career.

And I think that just with the way the business world is shaping in our industry, and it's becoming more professional, there's more technology adopted, there's better best practices. You know, it's more exciting to think about having a career for an ambitious, you know, person to be successful in this career. Where, you know, in the past, it wasn't quite like that. And I think that if the owner wants to have people who aren't thinking and want to start their own business and have their own career, but to have those types of talented people in their organization, sales is going to be one of those places, but they can come in and compete. And so yeah, salespeople training developed, salespeople within a system within your culture is going to be a wonderful component and needed for you to grow. Well,

Chris Shank
I was gonna, yeah, I was gonna ask you to tie into that too. And you started talking about culture, and having maybe a recruiter, I was gonna ask you, how do you find those types of good salespeople? The more professionalized skilled or people who are ready to be trained. Are there any quick tips there? I, you know, I don't know what you think about that?

Ryan Groth  
Yeah. I'd say that training people who have not been trained, and or have a ton of experience is a better route. If you have a good system to train them in a good culture and a good standard to bring them up to there's less pushback, there's less Oh, I did this before, there's less muscle memory that they have to break down, build up. This is it, it's tough. It's the column retreads. It's like they, they've been a contracting salesperson for years, they've been around a lot of companies, a resume looks like they've been around the block with some good brands, you're like, wow, it worked for that company. Great.

And then they come in, and they just, they're expensive excuse makers, right? They're, they're not the type of person that you want in your locker room. And the way I see it is, it's better to bring in a person of character that fits your core values, that aligns with your core values, and that you're willing to be patient enough to train and invest in them when you do that. And they have been coached and trained and developed, and you have your fingerprints on them, you know, it's rewarding, but then they're also compliant with what you set up. And I think that's what you want. Because when you think about things in sports , it blends all the time. You know, if you're a freshman on the varsity team, you're not going to come in and just tell everybody how to run their team.

You're gonna look at what who will who are you looking at? The seniors? Right? What are the seniors doing? Well, the seniors are this why are they seniors? Or they've been on varsity for two, three years, right or four years if they're freshmen on varsity. Same thing with sales. You know, it's uncommon to see people have a sales career for 25 years in one place. Typically, they're bouncing around a bit. But if you see a company and then there's a salesperson who doesn't do it, the sales manager doesn't really live it out. They're not, they're not beating that drum that everybody else is trying to tell the manager is trying to be you and you're in your mind as a new salesperson, you're gonna think to yourself, What should I do? Should I do what the sales manager is asking me, because if I do that, then I'm actually outshining the sales that are in who is being expressed as the leader of the team.

So you just have these, you have these things about culture, and you want to have a standard that's being met. And then that becomes a track record for success. So in the sales managers like, Kathy, I'm telling you, Chris has been doing this for two years. And his first two months, he was like, not sure about the number of dials or the number of meetings, or the number of referrals, or the number of knocks in the neighborhood around the jobs we installed or the rehash and the follow up of our pipeline, or using this set of questions, and, you know, all that.

But when he finally got out of his comfort zone, and leveled up, he, this is why he's one of the best in the company. This is why he's a top performer. Cathy's gonna say, Okay, I'm in because Chris did it. And I think that, I think that's going to speak volumes, if, if that's how your organization is, if you can sustain that standard, and that integrity within your company. That's what creates long term success. And it's gonna help you attract, and recruit, and even retain good sales talent to keep their attention.

Kathy Droste  
Well, one of my next big questions is, you know, you've developed this great sales team, how do you keep them? And I think I know what you're going to say. But I want to ask you that.

Ryan Groth  
Yeah, I think that one thing is the integrity, the standard being there and keeping their attention, then knowing that you're serious. A couple of things that to think about that I'd love to recommend is you should have a performance improvement plan, if and when they've made more money than they've ever made before they started to slip and things started to get a little this and that, be ready to have something that makes them realize that you're serious about them staying on track.

So that would be basically as some sort of a warning type document that says, hey, take a look at this, here's what we need to do to get you back on track. Or there's a consequence, maybe it's, you know, you're no longer getting fed leads, right? Or maybe it's, you know, you're gonna have whatever it may be, right. So there's that one thing the other thing, too, would be, I think sales leaders, and this is something that you know, we help either coach you to do or do with you.

But really just keep the personal goals of that sales rep in mind, their y in mind, their numbers in mind, and meet with them monthly to review how they're doing on track. And if they're off track, and really isolating the thing that's going to make them better. And I don't care if they're the greatest. You look at I was watching the Netflix series that Peyton Manning put on the quarterback. It's called quarterback. I saw so good and well,

Chris Shank  
Because Tom and Kathy were watching mahomes Probably the whole time. You guys even tune in when his portion is over.

Kathy Droste  
They also have a documentary on Stephen Curry, which I loved as well.

Ryan Groth  
So you loved it. I didn't see that one. Oh, yeah. Yeah, watch it. It's great. Underdog or something like that? Yes. Highly recommend it. Oh, good. I saw that on Apple TVs. But I think I saw it. Okay, check it out. I want to see that. So you think about it, like Kirk Cousins got like a mental trainer, like he's got like this thing that helps our brain stay active. Because when you start to see a pattern, the same thing, your brain sleeps a little bit. So it's like, finds this way to keep them alert so that he can focus and be alert at all times.

And Pat Mahomes is working on one part of it with his trainer, some is just defense, right? Like they're just like recovering just trying to get they're not like growing an area their game. They're just trying to stay healthy. And then there's other parts where they're like, hey, we need to work on the play, and then work on this. This, this Pokeyman play they made up in one week or you know, the Pikachu play, or the Santa Claus play. I mean, they make up these plays. But then there's also the physical fitness and the skills like the jumping and the strength conditioning and the thought the throwing in the core and the torso movements. 

So you think about whether you have a rookie who's making really blatant errors, or do you have Pat Mahomes on your team? You know what, what gets Pat mahomes Fired up as winning the championship and having the big goal in mind and I think that as a leader as an owner, you can't pay your salesperson, you know, a $300 million contract but you You can put your salesperson person in a position where they know what winning looks like outside of making money.

And they know. And that's why we love what we do at SPG so much is we're having awards this year, like salesperson of the year and contractor of the year. And like there's something outside of your pond where they may be a big fish in that pond, where they can be honored amongst an industry standard and peers that gets that sales professional thinking. I work really hard. And I'm being recognized. And I think the best talent, the top performing talent performs best when there's eyeballs on that they love. They love when there's multiple eyes, like they know that someone's watching. And so they want to, they want to be a show off, they want to go crush they want to do great.

I'm that way, I'm better when there's more people watching me and evaluating me, then when I'm not, because it helps me focus because it does good accountability. So I think that those are things to help retain, you know, and you can do that and not be their best friend. And everybody knows each other's everything about everybody's life, you don't have to be best friends with everybody, you know, you could be if you want and a lot of contracting Sales Team stuff, people who are considered best friends and family on their teams. But you can still create a culture where you're fostering and channeling what they're doing for the company, which is selling well, and lining that up with their personal goals. And then coaching them makes them better and then keeping their attention beyond their paycheck with respect to what winning looks like outside of the pay. And those are things that you can do to keep people's attention.

Chris Shank  
I love the recognition part there because you kind of distinguish between recognizing somebody and say, maybe patronizing or coddling them or you don't, it's not necessarily an emotional thing. I mean, it can be. But if you have a process whereby people feel like, I know when I've reached a certain goal, I've been recognized for it. It doesn't even have to be like a strict reward system or awarding it could be. But recognition, making sure that's built in is so important, because sometimes your business has highs and lows as a whole. I mean, we, you know, we were talking about getting through economic difficulty. Brandon Lewis was talking about Kathy, I had a podcast with him. Tom had done a series of five on managing uncertain times. Everybody goes through challenging economic times, whether it's an economic downturn or whether your company is just trying to find its next level. 

But I still think in the middle of all that you could still do what you're talking about, which is having very clear goals, and very, very clear and intentional recognition of people and what their accomplishments have been no matter how you're doing as a company overall, obviously, we all want to win big as a company. But knowing you're winning big as an individual people are looking even when there were as a whole having a hard time. I think that's so important that it should never be neglected. But unfortunately, I think it's probably neglected in a lot of companies, because they're so they get dragged down by if we're winning as a company or not. What do you think of that, especially when it comes to salespeople that are motivated by recognition and revenue goals in, you know, benchmarks and things like that?

Ryan Groth  
Yeah, I mean, 67% of salespeople we evaluate, they're motivated intrinsically, which means that they want to know how they're doing. They want to feel like they're doing a great job, that they want to be challenged, they want to be developed, they want to grow. It's not just, Hey, I'm working hard so that I can be a social media influencer and, you know, walk in and out of a Lambo, like, or whatever, you know, there's the extrinsic money, motivator, that just that's all they care about. There's the hey, I want to, I want to know how I'm doing and I want to be the best that I can be. I want to be number one. Yeah, two thirds of people are more bent toward they want to be successful, and they want to feel that everyone recognized I shower analogies better and something that's, that's recognized. So yeah.

Chris Shank  
It's an important message, especially for sales teams. I mean, Cathy, your thoughts on this being the Sales Director at Estimate Rocket? I mean, what do you think,

Kathy Droste  
Oh, I love hearing all this because it's so important to have skills and talents. Because as we as the world and the economy ebbs and flows, you need to be able to pivot really quickly, with your skill set to still keep at a certain level closing deals. And that's why it's so important not to have just order takers. Because in our world, Ryan disruption is part of our world, you know, you look over your shoulder every month now, every 30 days before it was you could be on in the marketplace for a year, and you didn't have another competitor Come on. Now it's every month, some VC company has written a program and you have another competitor in the marketplace. So having a certain sharpness to your skill set, makes it easy to overcome obstacles and pivot when needed. So to your point, it's really important to have those skills honed in well. Yeah,

Ryan Groth  
For sure, it's like Myles was erring on the side of we're always getting better. And we're always gonna get you might as well just go there and your minds because, well guess what, if things are good, and you've made the right changes, and you're crushed, you're crushing it and you're just cleaning house. Great. Because if you didn't have that, and you look back and you said Man, we could have done you'd regret it right? And then it's and then there's the we're running into a situation where it's a challenging time. And we don't have the skills and we're much lower in our revenue than we were versus a slight difference. So yeah, you hit the nail on the head. And I think that that's just this continuous improvement mindset. When done well and you don't over change too much too fast too often. But you can implement the right changes and create habits and the organization. I think it could be fantastic.

Chris Shank  
Well, I know that the upcoming transform conference is going to be covering a lot of these topics. I know you just mentioned earlier, we have an event coming up. As you know, a part of a lot of things you guys are doing. We're excited to be there. Estimate Rocket was there last year and gonna be there again this year. Do you wanna tell people about that and how they can learn more?

Ryan Groth  
Yeah, thank you. I'm super excited for your support and your involvement. So thanks for coming back. Yeah, yeah, so the conference is the number one event for growth minded contractors. We say this because we want owners, sales leaders, service department leaders and top salespeople to come. So if you're, we want you to come together, bring your A team, and we're going to cover things on leadership business, we're gonna talk about marketing, we're going to talk about personal growth. The unique thing about our event is we bring a lot of business content industry experts, panelists, tech companies, that's all going to happen. And we're gonna be just discussing industry specific topics, but we do care about the personal growth side, because we believe that you're growing personally. And it's going to impact you professionally. But this isn't a life coaching event. We're not going straight into it. This isn't like a Tony Robbins event or anything. Some calls in the middle of the hotel, but

Chris Shank  
Counselors are on standby. Can I just mention real quick? You mentioned personal growth. Not a lot of people talk about that. I love that you guys do that. Because I see a lot of people mentioning professional growth, but there's no foundation for the integrity and character that you're talking about. You kind of have to try to hire for it. But how do you help people grow in that way? I love that you guys deal with that? I just love it. It's very unique, in my opinion.

Ryan Groth  
Yeah, I think I'm learning how much I want to deal with it as a company? Like, how much do I want to do or not? But it's a core part of who we are. One of our core values is we're a greater purpose company. Like, we're not just in business to make businesses more money. And for us to make money. I do. I do want to see, you know, generational curses broken and people get out of bad thinking and, you know, have a healthy, healthy existence. And I think that looks like great relationships and, you know, financially solid and great health and just glowing every day, you know, and going through challenges with a good attitude and making yourself stronger. You know, I want to see people win in life and great, great marriages and all the things right. So I really have a passion for that type of stuff. And it's just how do I fit that into the world of business and contracting? Well, the way we do it is we just talk about it a little bit. So

Chris Shank  
Yeah, totally just just you guys address it and you guys have breakouts there. You guys have very inspiring big sessions. You guys have some neat tools representing different tools. I hate saying vendors, but I know that you guys sound like you guys are more focused on the few people that you feel like are really providing really helpful tools and resources for contractors, and I feel like that focus is really unique this year. too. So I think it's people that you guys stand behind that you see a lot of people using. So we're excited to be part of that crew. I don't know. I think it's just great. It's a great conference that people need to check out. So how can they find out more about that?

Ryan Groth  
Yeah, you can go to transformconference.com And that'll take you to our page. It has our agenda, our speaker lineup, our sponsors and our partners and all the information of the ticket prices and hotel information, all that so, yeah.

Chris Shank  
We'll put a link in the show notes as well. So we're excited about it. Thank you so much, Ryan. It's been great to talk to you. I can't wait to see you soon.