The Full Desk Experience

Tom Erb [00:00:00]:
So when people ask me, what is the difference between success and failure in sales, we have to have some foundational stuff we call, you know, our emotional quotient. And what I have found is that in order to be successful, we need to have a basic foundation of being likable and sociable, credible and coachable. If we have those things, we're going to have a much better chance of being successful. I would much rather take somebody that's likable, credible, coachable and sociable over somebody that has 15 years of staffing sales experience but doesn't have these characteristics. So that's the foundation that we have. We have that we're in good shape. It's a good start.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:39]:
Hey, guys. Kortney Harmon, host of fde. We're bringing you a special series of episodes called fde. Those are going to be highlights from our recent virtual conference where hundreds of you joined us for an incredible event focused on boosting revenue for 2025. Each of these sessions is packed with valuable insights, expert discussions and actionable strategies to help you drive growth in your business. Whether you missed the live event or want to revisit each session, we've got you covered. We're going to drop each of these 10 live events to wrap up our year and kick off the new year. Right.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:21]:
So let's dive into today's session and uncover the key takeaways that will propel your success in the coming year. Stay tuned and let's dive in. Thank you all for coming. My name is Kortney Harmon, Director of Industry Relations here at Crelate and this is FDE Plus. This is something new we've never done. We like to call it our full desk experience, like our podcast plus so much more. Our first virtual conference. We're so excited to have you.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:51]:
I am so thrilled to welcome Tom Erb. He is truly a distinguished expert in our industry. He has over 25 years of experience. Tom has become one of the most sought after speakers in our field. He's the president of Talent Resources where he provides consulting, training, coaching services. I think this is his first of three talks just today. He's also an author of the Winning the Staffing Sales Game. If you haven't read it, you must.

Kortney Harmon [00:02:20]:
And in today's session, he's going to be talking about driving recruiting success with four sales mindsets. So I'm super excited to listen into Tom and his insights with what he knows in our industry and I can't wait. So, Tom, without further ado, I'm going to be quiet. I'm going to Pull myself off stage, and I am going to add your screen. And I will only come on if anybody has any questions at the end. Okay?

Tom Erb [00:02:44]:
Okay. Thank you.

Kortney Harmon [00:02:45]:
Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Tom Erb [00:02:48]:
Thanks, Kortney. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Curl for having me. And thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to listen to me. So what we're going to talk about today is a topic I'm extremely fond of. It is something I think is absolutely critical to success, and that's really thinking about what our mindset is. And when we really look at mindset, we're looking at multiple different types of mindsets. And what I find is I work with sales teams all the time.

Tom Erb [00:03:16]:
I work. I just got off a call with a sales team just a couple minutes ago. And the difference between success and failure, particularly when we're in a softer economy like we are right now, is do we have the right mindsets going into this? Are we approaching our role the way that we should be? And so let's just go ahead and dive into this. So when people ask me, what is the difference between success and failure in sales, I come up with an acronym. Because if you've ever listened to anything I talk about, I talk about acronyms and I talk about analogies. So this is my acronym for today, at least the first one. It's mvp. But before we even get to that acronym, we have to have some foundational stuff we call, you know, our emotional quotient.

Tom Erb [00:03:59]:
And what I have found is that in order to be successful, we need to have a basic foundation of being likable and sociable, credible and coachable. If we have those things, we're going to have a much better chance of being successful. I would much rather take somebody that's likable, credible, coachable, and sociable over somebody that has 15 years of staffing sales experience but doesn't have these characteristics. So that's the foundation that we have. We have that we're in good shape. It's a good start. The next level is messaging. Do we have the right type of messaging? It's about our value proposition.

Tom Erb [00:04:36]:
It is about what makes us different. It is about believing in what makes us different. And that's a big distinction. And it's about our ability to articulate it to people via emails, voicemails, live cold calls, networking events, every different way we can possibly think of. We need to be able to articulate that effectively. Most sales reps really struggle with this. They either have absolutely nothing that distinguishes them. It's just a Me too, kind of sales or, and, or when they do get somebody live on the phone, they have no idea what to say.

Tom Erb [00:05:08]:
The next one is volume. There is V, volume and variety. So I cheat a little bit on this. There's two V's. We need to have enough volume to give ourselves a chance to have success. And then we need to have enough variety of types of activities, types of communications because we don't know how that prospect communicates the best. So V and then the last one is P. Persistence.

Tom Erb [00:05:32]:
Not only do we have enough volume, which is reaching out to enough people, casting a wide enough debt, but we have to go deep enough as well. We have to reach out to them enough times to give them a chance to get used to us for our messaging to sink in. They're not going to see every message that we send or every voicemail that we leave them or every communication that we have. So we need to be persistent in reaching out to them enough. So if we do this stuff, this gives us a much better chance. But this is really just kind of the beginning of it. What we're going to talk about today are what are the four different sales mindsets that we need to possess and we need to approach our position from this standpoint. And the first one is performance.

Tom Erb [00:06:15]:
Do we have a performance mindset? I want to talk about each of these in more detail. Value. Are we approaching our activities with the fact that we provide value and that they are better off knowing us than not knowing us? It's a critical piece to this. The third is the long game. Are we just looking at this transactionally on a daily basis? Are we just kind of going through the motions or are we looking at this as I'm going to be doing this for a while. What I'm doing today should also be making it easier for me tomorrow. Three months, six months, a year, five years from now? And then lastly is mastery. How do I keep getting better and better and better at what I'm doing? So those are the four areas that we're going to talk about here today.

Tom Erb [00:06:58]:
Let's talk about the performance mindset first. So question is, why is performance management important to me now? I bring up this question because a lot of times when we think about performance management, I realize we've got all different people that are on this call. We've got your dedicated sales reps. We've got the probably account managers and recruiters, managers, owners of companies, leaders, all different positions. When we talk about performance management, a lot of times we just think of that as Kind of a management thing. And it has the word management in it. But the reality of it is, is that as professionals, individual professionals, we should find that performance management is extremely important to our success. And there's a lot of different reasons why.

Tom Erb [00:07:39]:
The first one is, is that metrics create a path to success. So if we know what are the metrics we should be tracking, that will tell us if we are on track to get to where we want to. And I'll go into more detail here in just a minute. It increases job satisfaction. It's more fun to keep score than it is to practice, although you do have to practice still. But if we know how we're doing, it actually makes our job more fulfilling. It builds professional expertise. The more that we manage our performance, the better that we get, the more value that we are providing for ourself, which means the more valuable that we become in our careers.

Tom Erb [00:08:21]:
And over the course of time, that builds on itself. But you have to be purposeful about it. Otherwise, it's the whole adage of, do I have 10 years of experience or do I have one year of experience? 10 times. We need to be building on that and getting better and better so that we're adding to our own personal value, which then, of course, financially rewards us. It increases efficiency. We're not talking about saying, hey, listen, I need to do twice as much, so I'm going to work twice as many hours, we're talking about being twice as efficient with the same amount of time. Better that we get at things, the more efficient we are, and the better production we're going to have with the same, or even in some cases, less effort than we were putting in before. It recognizes our efforts and results.

Tom Erb [00:09:03]:
It's nice to be recognized. Most of us enjoy being recognized, some to different levels than others. But if there are two people and I'm doing really well and my counterpart is not doing well, but neither of us are getting recognized for that. That's not as fulfilling as if somebody is recognizing that, hey, listen, you're going above and beyond visibility and focus. Increase performance. And what I mean by this, we have seen this over and over again. I've gone into sales organizations, and I'll ask salespeople. I go, okay, how many phone calls do you make a week? And the number one answer I get is, oh, at least 100.

Tom Erb [00:09:37]:
And then when we start to get in the data, the data is closer to actually 30 or 40 activities. They don't know because they just have a feel. It feels like a hundred. But then when we start to track that data and we start to show it to them. Guess what? The activity increases. And then if we're putting together specific numbers, goals that we're trying to hit, the activity increases again. If we have stretch goals, the activity increases again. If there's incentives, the activity increases again.

Tom Erb [00:10:03]:
So the more that we have visibility and the more that we focus on it, the better the performance is going to be. And you see the picture in the back of the person working out and the personal trainer. Think of performance management as having a personal trainer. If you hired a personal trainer to help you get in better shape and that person goes, oh, you know what, we'll just kind of see what happens. I'm not going to track the number of, of activities that you do. Well, pretty soon we go, okay, I'm not getting the value out of this that I should be. But if I've got that personal trainer that is pushing me to do more and believes in me that I can do more, I'm going to do more and I'm going to get in better shape. This is just a quick sample 10 year performance comparison between a low performer, an average performer and a high performer.

Tom Erb [00:10:46]:
And this is residual ongoing value. This is a simple measurement that, hey, if I land a deal in year one, we still are realizing revenue in year 10. So it's not taking into consideration anything complex like attrition, you know, client attrition, all that. But if we take a look at this is the low performer here, this is the average performer and this is the high performer over the course of 10 years. The difference from what they do is $11 million in gross profit from the high performer to the average performer. And 24 million in gross profit over the course of 10 years for a high performer and a low performer, which, let's be honest, that's probably a series of low performers. Because if you're low performing, you're probably not going to be in the job as long either by choice or because you just don't make it. So there's a huge difference.

Tom Erb [00:11:35]:
And by the way, these people are essentially doing the same job. They're essentially working the same hours. Maybe the high performers working a few more hours, but the high performer is getting a lot more out of the time that they have than the average and the low performer. So when we talk about performance management, I really look at three different levels. And most organizations do okay with the first level, most don't do great at the second level, and almost nobody does really well at the third level. First level Is visibility. Do we know what things we should be looking at? Do we know what metrics we should be looking at? And do we have the ability to actually look at those? The second level is responsibility. Does everybody know what they're responsible for? Do they have goals? Do they have KPIs metrics? And are we tracking that? And then the third level, the most important piece of this, this is where the personal trainer comes in, is accountability.

Tom Erb [00:12:27]:
Is somebody holding us accountable to it? Are we talking about it on a regular basis? Are we getting pushed to make sure that we're hitting those numbers and achieving our goals? And ultimately if we're not doing it, is there some level of accountability that is causing us or that is making us hit those numbers? So we need to have all three levels in order to have success. Visibility, responsibility, accountability. And if you're an individual producer, if you're a salesperson or a recruiter or whatever position that you're in, you can have self accountability, you can do this on your own, you can have others that you're having help hold accountable. And obviously management can help you with that as well. When we take a look at sales success, I talked about the path to success. The performance management creates a path to success. There really are four key sales metrics and they are a combination of what we call leading indicators and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are predicting future results.

Tom Erb [00:13:23]:
If we do this, we're going to have success. Lagging indicators are looking back and going, did we hit our goals? And I look at four key sales metrics and there are lots of other metrics we can look at and we should look at. But there are four key ones that are the path to success. That is sales activities, appointments, pipeline, dollars. So how much is in our funnel or in our pipeline? What opportunities do we have? And then gross profit dollars built. If we have enough activities, we'll get enough appointments. If we have enough appointments, we'll get enough in our pipeline. If we have enough in our pipeline, we'll close enough deals to get us the gross profit dollars that we need to for our goal.

Tom Erb [00:14:00]:
So that's the process there. Those are the four key sales metrics. If we track nothing else, this is going to give us a really good idea of whether or not we're on track and we're going to hit our numbers. Okay, here's what a sales activity isn't. And I get lots and lots of pushback on this. But I'm sorry, we've got lots of data that we know what a sales activity isn't. The simplest way to say what a sales activity isn't is that if it can be done by somebody else or if it can be automated done by a program, then it is not an activity. That means emails, mailings, social media outreach, research, phone calls without a voicemail, all of that stuff can be done by somebody else.

Tom Erb [00:14:41]:
That is not the skill that it takes for sales. And even in today's world where people tend to communicate via email and text and social media and all those other things, empirically we have data that shows over and over and over again that there is a direct correlation between having contact with people, between phone calls, in person, meetings, networking events, even drop in cold calls. If you do that, there are direct correlations between that type of activity and success. We're not going to email our way to success. And as AI becomes more and more and more prolific and makes it easier to make great emails and automate them and mass email amount email is going to become even less and less effective of a tool. So we can argue about that all day. Feel free to post your comments in the chat, but that's what we see over and over. All right, let's go to the second mindset, which is value.

Tom Erb [00:15:37]:
Our value mindset. Here's one of the things that I hear over and over again. Sorry to bother you. I know you're busy. I won't waste your time. I just wanted to see if there were any positions we can fill. These are the things that I hear when I listen to recorded cold calls, which I get all the time because of the sales teams that I work with. We're able to listen to those.

Tom Erb [00:15:57]:
What is that basically saying, what's the problem with this? Well, there's a lot of problems with it. Actually, the biggest problem is sounds like we're desperate. The number one thing is that we are immediately telling them, I am calling you to bother you because I am not going to offer you something of value. I'm going to ask you for something. I'm going to ask you to do something. So we're coming in showing that we have no value. It's putting us at this subservient level. So here's the prospect and we're coming in here.

Tom Erb [00:16:30]:
Oh, just give me a chance. I'm so sorry to bother you. So it's a real issue that we have and unfortunately that's how most of us approach sales. And we don't even really realize we do it where we think we're being polite, but what we're really doing is positioning ourselves as Bothering them rather than providing a solution. So the number one thing we want to do is stop apologizing, don't apologize anymore, take it out of your vernacular. Instead, we want to really be focused on the value that we provide. And there are two different ways to sell. There's your traditional sales, which is the I am subservient to you.

Tom Erb [00:17:07]:
Just give me a chance, Give me your toughest order. We've heard all sorts of those different types of things. It's about being at this lower level. Here's the problem with that, is that when we sell that way, one, we attract people, attract clients that like that. And two, when we come back and go, why don't they look at us as a partner? Or why don't they look at us as an advisor when they become a client, it's because we sold them as if we were subservient. And so that's what their expectation is. Conversely, consultative sales is about selling with value. It's about being able to go in and say, you're going to be better off working with us than you are now.

Tom Erb [00:17:49]:
And you don't say it that way, obviously, but that's the approach that we're taking, is that we're providing value. You're better off knowing me than not knowing me. If we can offer them something that we truly believe will make them better off, why would we apologize for picking up the phone and talking to them? We want them to know about what we have to offer and how they can be better off. That comes down to our value proposition and the value proposition, which we've all talked about before. We've all heard value propositions thrown around a lot. It's the unique value that a business offers to its customers. And you'll notice there are two words there that are in italics. There's unique and there's value.

Tom Erb [00:18:29]:
In order for you to have a value proposition, particularly a compelling value proposition, you need to have both of these words. It needs to be unique. It doesn't mean it has to be exclusive. You're the only one that does it. It just means that most of your competitors do not do this. And there has to be perceived value on the part of the prospect. It can't just be we find value in it. We think you should find value.

Tom Erb [00:18:51]:
There has to be perceived value from the customer. Does the customer understand what the value to them and the benefit is to them? So we think about what is your value proposition and what is the value proposition? We ask ourselves questions, is what is it we do different? What Is it we do better? Why would that matter to the prospect? What do our clients say about what we do that they appreciate? Why is it that our clients work with us? What is the value that they see? Go ask your clients about those. And then how do we quickly articulate that? In 10, 15, 20 seconds, we get somebody live on the phone when we're leaving a voicemail, when we are sending an email, when we're sending a letter, which I also have as part of my process, or when we're talking to them at some sort of a networking event. So instead of apologizing, here's some alternative ways that you can reach out to somebody, get them on the phone. You can say, hi, this is Tom with ABC Company. I'm reaching out to you because I wanted to get on your radar, wanted to let you know that we exist. I know we're both busy. So instead of going, hey, I know you're busy, which is polite, but is also inferring that their time is more valuable than ours, we can instead say, I know we're both busy.

Tom Erb [00:20:02]:
Hey, it won't take up much of your time. Only take two minutes. I know we're both busy. And then we can say, I want to make sure it's time well spent for both of us. This is a great line to use when you're saying, can I ask you a couple of questions just to see if it makes sense for us to have further conversation? I want to make sure that it's time well spent for both of us. These are going from here up to here. They are more consultative, they're more value, they're more confident, and you're going to get better results from that, particularly from the types of clients that you want. They're going to appreciate that, and that's going to resonate with them.

Tom Erb [00:20:33]:
All right, let's go to the long game mindset. So when we talk about long game, what we're really talking about are things like, this is my profession not just a job. Is this something that I plan on doing for the next year, year and a half, two years? Most salespeople move around about every year and a half for two years that we've seen. You know, the average tenure in the United States is only three years. And so if we're looking at this and saying, this is actually my profession, not just a job, we're going to have a different approach to it. And for me, I certainly look at this as a profession. I've been in the industry for 30 years, and for me, it is Much more fulfilling to have a profession than just a series of unrelated jobs. So if that isn't of interest to you, that's fine.

Tom Erb [00:21:22]:
But you're probably not on these virtual conference if you don't look at this more as a profession and is wanting to get better. So this is my profession, not just a job. Sales is easy if I know everyone. Makes sense, right? Yet very, very few salespeople actually take this approach and go, what am I going to do about it? We have a finite number of anything in this world when it comes to sales. We have a finite number of prospects to go after. And so what we should do is say, okay, how do I reach out to all of them? How do I get in front of every single one of them? Because if I know everybody, then I am going to have more success. It's going to be much, much easier for me, especially if they know me, right? So it's not just that I know everybody, it's that they also know me. I never hear no.

Tom Erb [00:22:11]:
I just hear not now. And this is a significant approach that you take when we do hear no's, because we do hear no's all the time. If you put opportunities in your pipeline, you're going to lose 80% of them. 20% win rate in a pipeline is good. That's not even taken into consideration. All the ones that never made it into the pipeline. We hear lots of no's. But if we think about it as this isn't a no, this is just not now.

Tom Erb [00:22:37]:
I'm going to keep talking to you. This isn't the end of our relationship. This is just the beginning of our relationship. We take a totally different approach. If we hear no, what most salespeople do, they stop reaching out to that person. Or maybe they reach out to them every six months or every year or something like that. If we think about it as this is not now, then we think about, I'm just building this relationship and the next time I have an opportunity, whether it's at the company that you're at now or it's the next company that you're at, I'm going to work with you. I'm looking forward to working with you in the future.

Tom Erb [00:23:06]:
Even though right now the timing wasn't right, I'm building a reputation and a presence. Think about how we can build on our own personal brand that complements our company brand. But we want to build our own reputation and build our own presence which then obviously supports the company brand that we have as well. It's the whole concept That I talk about of own your market. I want to be the go to person in my market, whether that is a geographic market, whether it's a national market within a certain vertical or specialization. I want that own your market concept. When people talk about this, I want them to think about us. My ultimate goal is to not have to cold call.

Tom Erb [00:23:50]:
That's right. So people say to me, they go, well, you know what, Tom? I know, I know you're big into cold calling. No, I'm not. I wrote a book about cold calling. That's part of the process. Because the reality of it is if I don't know anybody, then I have to cold call people. But if I can get to the point where I know everybody in the market or I know pretty much everybody in the market, then I can leverage those over and over again. It is much more effective to call a prospect that you have a relationship than it is to call a suspect that you've never talked to before.

Tom Erb [00:24:17]:
And it's a complete cold call. And so our goal is to get to the point of not having to cold call. That needs to be what we do. But until that time, we're going to have to do a lot of cold calls. So don't go back and say tom said, don't cold call. What I'm saying is you need to build up your presence in that market to get to the point where you don't have to cold call or you don't have to cold call that much. There's always going to always going to be a few people that you're not going. No, because people are churning all the time.

Tom Erb [00:24:44]:
So what we want to do is we want to take this holistic approach to sales. And prospecting is only one piece of this. So I have a process. Kortney mentioned my book Winning the staffing sales game. We talk a lot about the 10 week sale, 10 week prospecting process. That's just one part of the sales piece here. Recruiting is complex. Sometimes you just need a hand, someone beside you to give you that nudge to keep you on course.

Tom Erb [00:25:15]:
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Tom Erb [00:25:49]:
Because recruiting isn't just about filling roles, it's about building relationships. And crelate copilot is the partner you've been waiting for. Check us out and crelate the future of recruiting. Other pieces are live networking. Are you getting out in front of potential prospects or people who can refer you business? What we found is ever since COVID that networking salespeople are not getting into networking nearly like they used to. There's opportunity there, and I talk to salespeople all the time. That either started during the COVID years and didn't know that networking was really even something that was an option, or people who have said, yeah, you know what, I used to do a lot of networking, but I got out of the habit during COVID And Covid, I mean, started four years ago. So we should be getting back to networking.

Tom Erb [00:26:45]:
Our prospects are getting back to networking. So we need to be involved in as many relevant organizations as possible. Social media, having a presence on social media. I know a lot of people are going to be talking about that throughout this virtual conference, but it needs to complement that networking. It needs to complement that getting to know everybody out there. And then personal branding, which compliments the social media and all the different aspects. So things like getting out and speaking in front of organizations, just posting things on social media, maybe doing some videos, writing articles, all sorts of different things that we can do that enhance our personal brand and complement everything that we're talking about, everything that we're doing. So I ask people all the time, what's your number one goal on a live call? And I know I can't ask the audience here because it's virtual, but the most common answers are build rapport, get an appointment, get an order, find out information about the company.

Tom Erb [00:27:44]:
All of those are great. All of those are important, but it's not the most important thing. The most important thing we need to do when we finally get that suspect or prospect on the phone for a live call is to make that our last time we cold call them. And here's what I mean by that. I listen to a lot of recorded live calls, and I listen to ones where sales reps are following up on somebody they talked to two or three months earlier. This is how it goes almost every single time. Hi, Jim, this is Tom with abc staffing. I don't know if you remember me.

Tom Erb [00:28:16]:
I called you a couple months ago and you didn't have Any needs now then, but you told me to call back now, so I'm just calling and wanted to see if you had anything you needed help with. We're cold calling them again. What we need to be doing is saying this is the last time that I cold call this person. What am I going to do about it? So a couple of things we want to do. One is try and build as much rapport as possible. If we can build some rapport, some credibility, connect with them any way that we can. We don't have to get an appointment, we don't have to get an order. Odds are we're not going to get any of those things because otherwise we're just hoping that we get lucky and we just time things well.

Tom Erb [00:28:54]:
It's great if we do and we want to get appointments and we want to get orders and all that stuff. But all of those times when we don't have an opportunity to do that, we need to walk away with some credibility, some rapport, maybe some initial demand or interest on what we do. And then what we do is we follow up with them, connect with them on LinkedIn, send them a follow up email that day or the next day, thanking them for their time, trying to relate back to maybe something we talked about and providing them with some additional information about our business, what makes us different, whatever it is that we need to share with them. But we don't stop there. Then what we do is we create a task for one week out where we're going to reach out to them again about something that has nothing to do with our company but has something to do with their business and provides value to them. So a week out I'm going to go and research on Google or whatever, something about the industry that they're in a lot of times about the economic outlook for that industry, talent trends, anything that I can find that would be of relevance and of value to them. And I reach out and say, hey, I ran across this article and I immediately thought of you. Here's my thoughts on it.

Tom Erb [00:30:05]:
Hope things are well. Look forward to talking to you soon. And then we want to start to have those over the course of the next few months until we finally pick up the phone and call them again. And then we're not calling and saying, hey, I don't know if you remember me. Instead we're going, hey, Jim, it's Tom from abc. How are things going? Hey, did you have a chance to read that article that I sent you? What did you think of that? And now we're having A different conversation with them. By the way, thanks for connecting on LinkedIn. So that's what we need to take that approach.

Tom Erb [00:30:31]:
That's all about the long game mindset. Another thing we can do because it takes time to get to know everybody, is we can take a shortcut to getting to know everybody. And that's by identifying who are the influencers in the profession, the market, the industry that we are targeting. Because if we get to know the influencers, then we don't need to know everybody. We just need to know the people that know everybody. They've already gone down that path and we can leverage that. Here's the great thing about engaging with influencers. The reason why they're influencers, and I'm not talking about social media influencers, digital influencers, all that stuff.

Tom Erb [00:31:07]:
I'm talking about true influencers within markets and professions and industries. The reason why they got to be influencers is because they like to network, they like to meet people, they like to expand their whole community. So they're going to be very open in most cases to talking to you. And you don't ask for a lie. You don't ask to take them out to lunch or anything like that. But what you might ask them for is, hey, can I have 10 minutes with you? Can I meet you for coffee? Those are the types of things. Kind of ease into it. Rather than saying, can I take you to dinner, Can I take you to lunch? Can I do whatever? Which is a bigger commitment for them.

Tom Erb [00:31:42]:
You can move to that ultimately. But start out with a small commitment, Start to build relationships with them. Influencers are the presidents of associations, they are board members, they are other suppliers to the industry or profession that you're in. But they've gotten farther than you have. They're the platinum sponsor at the national conference or the local state conference or whatever. They are the people that are already dialed in. And you can start to work with them to get dialed in as well. And then ultimately you become one of those influencers.

Tom Erb [00:32:17]:
Last thing we're going to talk about, and then we'll see if we have a couple minutes for questions, is the mastery mindset. So it's all about how do we keep getting better and better? And I don't know if some people on here probably do not know who Martina Navratilova is. I will controversially say she could very well make a case for the best professional tennis player ever. And before you go, wait, that's not true. It's Djokovic or it's Serena or whoever. If you even follow tennis. Here's why I say that. She's in the hall of Fame.

Tom Erb [00:32:51]:
Not a surprise. She has 59 Grand Slam titles, which is more than anybody in the modern era. Margaret Court has more, but. But she has more than anybody does. She has nine Wimbledon singles titles, and she won her last major at age 49. Think about that. Age 49, she won the US Open mixed doubles. Reason why I bring her up is because she has this great quote.

Tom Erb [00:33:10]:
The better I get, the more I realize how much better I get. Now think of how accomplished she is. And yet she realized she could keep getting better and better and better. That's the mastery mindset. The mastery mindset is we never reach perfection, but we keep trying to get better and better and better. What are ways that we can do that over and over? So some of the different ways to do that, I look at really five critical sales skills. There's lots of different critical sales skills. But if there's five that I think are the most important, that can make the most difference.

Tom Erb [00:33:42]:
Getting better at prospecting, getting better at appointment setting, having really good value proposition and getting better and better and better at being able to articulate that, making it stronger, having proof to reinforce that. Getting better at negotiating and getting better at closing. And there are lots of different ways that you can do that. You can go find training that's out there to do that. You can just practice, role play, all of those things which we'll talk about in a second. But we want to get better and better and better. We also can take a look at our ratios, and when we look at the different ratios that we have, then we can say, okay, how do I get that ratio to be better? And so the most common sales ratios we look at are how many activities does it take for me to get an appointment? If it takes me 53 activities to get one appointment, how do I get that number down? How can I get that down into the 40s, into the 30s? What are the things that I need to be better at to be able to get that ratio down? What's my appointment to opportunity ratio? Am I going on appointments that I probably shouldn't be going on? I should be pre qualifying them and determining if it's worth my time. It goes back to what we talked about earlier.

Tom Erb [00:34:46]:
Our time is just as important as their time. So we need to be pretty stingy about it. What's our opportunity to win ratio? What percentage of the opportunities in our pipeline actually convert into wins? And then what's our sales cycle? How long does it take us in an average sales cycle, the average in the in staffing is about 60 to 90 days. For larger accounts, it could be 6 months, 12 months, or even longer. Especially if you're getting into more complex stuff like RPO and managed service and that kind of stuff. So the more that we look at these sales ratios, the better we can get. And here's just a quick example of that. These are three different salespeople.

Tom Erb [00:35:21]:
And you've got on the right hand side, employee A has a ratio of 41 to 1 sales activities. Employee B has 73 and employee C has 67 to 1. They're all doing essentially the same stuff. But employee A is significantly more efficient. And because of that, they're having much better results with the same amount of activity. So if they were trying to get five appointments in the week, employee A would need to make 205 phone calls, employee B would have to do 365, and employee C would be 335. So one of the things we can also do is say, what's employee A doing that employee B and C aren't doing? How can we help employee B and C get better based on some of the things that employee A is doing? Well, are there things we can learn from that? Of course, that can be different variables to that. Employee could be more experienced or could have been in the market longer, whatever.

Tom Erb [00:36:12]:
Maybe they're talking to more prospects than suspects. But if all things are equal, why is employee A doing better than employee B? Employee C, we can get better. And employee A can keep getting better as well. So we have a sales goal planning worksheet if anybody wants it. By the way, if anybody wants a copy of this presentation, feel free to shoot me a email or send me a message on LinkedIn. Sales goal planning worksheet just works backwards. And what's our ultimate goal and what's it going to take for us to get there? How many activities, how many appointments? All those different things. Last thing I'll talk about is practicing.

Tom Erb [00:36:44]:
We don't practice enough as sales professionals. Most of us don't practice at all as sales professionals. So we need to practice, practice, practice. Jack Dailey, who is a famous speaker, author, sales expert, he said, if you aren't practicing, you're practicing on your prospects. And he's absolutely right. We hear it over and over and over again. Think back to the last cold call that you made, the last live connect on a cold call. On a scale of 1 to 10, give yourself a rating of how good it was and a 10 doesn't mean that you walked away with an order.

Tom Erb [00:37:18]:
10 just means I walked away. I never have to cold call that person. I had great rapport. I was able to create some demand. Maybe I did get an appointment, maybe I did get a an order. But that doesn't have to make it a 10. On a scale of 1 to 10, how did I do when I asked that question to SalesPeople? Most answer three or four. If we are consistently answering three or four and we have so few opportunities to get somebody live on the phone, what are we going to do to get that up to a six, a seven and eight, a nine.

Tom Erb [00:37:45]:
We need to work on that over and over. So real quickly before I go on that, some ways to do that role play. There's nothing better than role playing. And if you are uncomfortable role playing with another human being, with a peer or a manager or whoever, chatgpt Voice. You can do role plays with it. So if you go to ChatGPT, you download the app, there is the ability to click on it to change it to voice. So instead of typing in, it's talking to you. It's different than just pressing the microphone button and talking into it, but it still responds with text.

Tom Erb [00:38:19]:
This is actually voice where you're having back and forth conversations with it. It will role play with you, especially if you have the premium version. If you have the free version, it has a limited number of minutes to do it, but it'll actually role play with you and you can give it different scenarios, you can try different things, you can ask it for feedback. So it's a really, really cool tool to be able to use and you can do it anytime you want to. Never gets tired of roleplaying. All right, so just as a recap, focus on these four different sales mindsets. If you do that, you're going to have more success, you're going to find that the job is even more fulfilling and you're going to have better results from it. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Kortney and see if we got any questions for the last couple of minutes.

Tom Erb [00:38:59]:
There's my email if you want the presentation and the sales goal worksheet.

Kortney Harmon [00:39:02]:
I think Rebecca or someone asked what the app was, so I believe you said it was chatgpt for Voice. Correct.

Tom Erb [00:39:10]:
I can't hear you, Kortney.

Kortney Harmon [00:39:11]:
Amazing sound. Thank you. We hope you found today's session insightful and inspiring. Remember to stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as we'll be sharing all of this amazing content of our virtual conference. If you missed any part of it. Don't forget to subscribe to our show so you don't miss anything upcoming. And if you like this valuable content, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to share it with your network and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Kortney Harmon [00:39:42]:
Together, we're building a community of growth and learning. Until next time.