How to Keep Your Sales Team Sharp and Motivated by Building a Continuous Improvement Culture

Lucas Price: Welcome to another episode of building elite sales teams we're going to be talking today with Dan Dion. We're going to be talking about the importance of building a team of a players, how training needs to be part of every day and how building a culture is celebrating the small wins and the big wins. Dan joined car gurus when it was still operating out of a garage.

And was there during hyper growth all the way to IPO in five years, he went from an individual contributor to director of us acquisition. Dan's currently the VP of sales at review wave, where he's grown the team from 10 to 40 people in nine months. Dan, thanks for being here today.

Dan Dionne: Of course, happy to do it. It's it's been my life for the last, five or six years in these different organizations. So excited to share my experience is what I've learned over the last few years. Appreciate you having me. It's gonna be fun.

rms of how to build an elite [: 00:01:00

Dan Dionne: I think a lot of people just go to the market and say Hey, I need 50 people this year. And you just start hiring everybody, which sounds great in theory. But if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, you're going to make some bad hires and we've all done it.

It's going to happen. And I say bad hires, like you, you fall in love with people on an interview and they come in and they're a different person, or you're strapped up against a number and you just got to start putting people in seats and you're forced into a bad decision. Trust me. Take your time, build out your perfect a player and stick to it.

Don't bend on who to bring in because you do that. You're going to make bad decisions. You're going to bring in people that maybe fill a seat to fill a quota, but aren't perfect, and you have that mindset of. I'll make it work. Don't do that. Find those A players, stick to your individual personality plans.

Don't bend on that because you're going to end up, and I did it this year we had to come out with a really hot hiring plan. I'm like, I got to start putting people in seats. And I think the first six people we brought in, it was like, nope.

go find six more people. So [: 00:02:00

Lucas Price: That's some great advice. One of the things that that I really believe in, and I'm curious to get your response to, is that when you're thinking about who that A player is or who that ideal customer profile is, oftentimes companies over index on the specific experience they want from that person and under index on the traits that are going to lead to success.

Dan Dionne: You see so many roles out there that are posted looking for, A plus colleges or A level colleges, elite colleges, things like that. Already thinking about it incorrectly, I think the number one and number two things you got to look for. And this was the second part of what I want to talk about this question is personality, style and culture fit.

If you don't have that, you're already off to the wrong foot in terms of building the right sales team. I can tell you in previous roles, college is the last thing I looked at. He was a previous experience was. Third thing I looked at, maybe it's all about the people the level of person and personality you bring in and the culture fit over, over anything else.

ody. And we're doing it here [: 00:03:00

Not every person is going to walk in the door is going to have a Warren Buffett type atmosphere or Warren Buffett type you're not going to find those people. Stop. Stop looking for them. They'll come through, but it's not going to build you the right team,

find the best people for your role.

Lucas Price: One of the other for sales roles, like common profiles, where they're looking for a specific experience instead of the trait is they'll say. Hey, I want the former college athlete. There's a lot of great things about former college athletes, including they have a track record of doing something at a high level, caring about being internally motivated, they care about it.

history of high achievement, [: 00:04:00

It could be from being great at the band or, getting great grades in school, so you are looking for that history of excellence and that internal motivation is important, but you don't want to get too specific on the places that can come from.

Dan Dionne: I love hiring ex college athletes, ex professional athletes. They have a different drive level. They have a different level of competition where they look at the scoreboard and they get upset when they're not number one.

I want those people, but even more so to that point you just made, which is probably the most important thing is someone's why. If someone doesn't have the right motivation for doing a very difficult sales job and make no mistake, any sales job is a difficult job. You're under constant pressure numbers.

phone calls to get those [: 00:05:00

What's your motivation to do that? So professional and college athletes are fantastic because they have the ultimate competitive spirit, but the motivation of why you come in every day is even more

important.

Lucas Price: We chatted before your environment is a relatively transactional sale. So some of the advice that you give is I think relevant across lots of different sales disciplines, but maybe it's helpful for people to understand in the context of the environment you're in right now.

Dan Dionne: This is definitely not enterprise sales car gurus and review it very similar in that where in review wave, I'll talk about that first, where obviously, cause it's a team of building right now, our sales cycle is anywhere between one and three days. And I mean that from cold call from the SDR to booking a demo, to doing the followup, confirming the demo and closing the deal.

Is between one and three days. I'm looking for specific people that can not only keep up with that high transactional atmosphere, but you have to have the, you have to have that next level, you have to have that, that next drive level to be able to come in every single day and we are very phone heavy organization.

ing small businesses all day [: 00:06:00

Music's blasting all the time. We talked about different levels of success and celebrating that. We have A restaurant bell for demos booked. We don't celebrate every connection, you get a demo book jobs 30 percent of the way there. So we have a little restaurant bell and actually we've been booking so many demos recently.

Anytime I go to a restaurant and hear the bell, when the food's ready, I sit there and just start clapping because we've been booking so many demos, but we have that. Then we have a big cowbell for when deals get done. And then when someone hits their goal or when someone gets promoted, we have this.

you got you as a leadership [: 00:07:00

Lucas Price: You mentioned a lot of things that you do to keep the energy up, keep it fun which in your environment makes a lot of sense, how'd you discover that was important and what were some of the things that you thought about when implementing that?

Dan Dionne: I'm a big believer in, it's kind of cliche, but work hard, play hard. You come in when I expect you to come in the door, expect nothing but focus, and I expect you to do your job. But I also want to have fun during that day. Work should be fun. That's what we do.

You don't want to go to an environment where, it's not fun. Like you walk in, it's gray walls, no music. They block off the, they block off the doors. They block off the windows, like an old school call, call farm.

That's not fun. So you want people to come back every day and really want to come to the office every day to do the job. And like I said, it's a difficult job, especially the SDR role, making cold calls all day. It's a difficult job. It's a thankless job until you get all those demos booked and all those deals done.

So you might try to make this fun as possible. You can have the fun, but it's also culture building to people want to come in and want to go to work and see their friends, make their calls, do their job when you have all this music going and all the celebration happening all day long.

It's especially[: 00:08:00

That's the point of the culture we're trying to build, not just. A high functioning sales team.

Lucas Price: When you're building that that culture. With the energy and with the fun and with the focus that you talked about, what are the things that you have to watch out for? What are, mistakes that could be made

Dan Dionne: When you become too much of a bud and not much of a boss, you still have to hit your numbers. You still have to hold everybody accountable. You can really go down the slippery slope where. No, don't worry. Again, we'll get them tomorrow. No you have to go in and you have your fun.

You build your culture, but you still have to demand for production performance and hold everyone accountable to their job. Or else you lose the team. And you lose the team is you can lose respect as a. Leader pretty quickly. If you just become that fun boss that doesn't hold anybody accountable because we're too busy, doing a happy hour too busy going bowling or too busy doing other things.

And it's like you [: 00:09:00

Lucas Price: That makes sense. Tell me about how you think of. Training and keeping the the saw sharpened, so to speak .

Dan Dionne: I love that question because yeah. Sales has such a bad rap when it comes to training where people like, here's your desk, here's your phone. Good luck. And that's not how it should be. If you want to have the most successful teams, you have to dedicate the time to train people the way you want them operating on the phones, the way you want them conducting business, you have to spend the time.

I just bought a piece of software that I'm could not be more excited about. It's live battle cards to actually help people with some of the very nuanced technical aspects of the industry that we sell into. That's the hardest thing. So I'm looking to solve that. So I bought a bunch of licenses for all my new people that they hear a certain term, it's going to pop up.

ey start on a Tuesday by the [: 00:10:00

They're graduating. And this is the SDR role AE is a little bit different. But from the SDR side, they start on Tuesday. They graduate on a Monday. They have H. R. On Tuesday. And then it's three very intense days of shadowing, call coaching, mock calls, script adherences. And then by Monday, they're expected to graduate.

After that, it's we do daily call reviews. The entire team does daily call reviews in the morning to start the day, 15 minutes, Monday, Wednesday, Friday is listening to your own calls, Tuesdays and Thursdays is listening to a team call and you grade each other and pass that back and forth.

We have a call review slack channel where people can drop in calls and ask for constant help. All the managers in there, all the leaders are in there.

training as well as product [: 00:11:00

I call it listen, learn and then practice. It's, about a 30 minutes of me going up and talking and then, we always do some call coaching and that we always listen to calls, what to do, what not to do. And then we always practice. So training never stops.

Lucas Price: You mentioned scripts a few times. How strictly do you expect an SDR to adhere to the script? How much do they get to insert their own personality into it? And does that change over time?

Dan Dionne: I'm rewriting them right now actually, but I have a symbol, so it's like a, it's like an S shape and then an arrow through it. And that's the script. You expect the script to go linear exactly how I've written it out, but it always goes this way. It's the only part of the script I really need them to learn by word is the opening.

Because the first 10 seconds of that cold call is the most important time. Not one call out of the 6, 000 we make every single day is going to follow that script. And I teach, we teach that every single day. So I need you to nail the opening and then know the rest of it. So you can pivot and you can go with the conversation depending on how it goes.

But if you teach your team to just read off a script and learn that script, that's what it's going to sound like.

Lucas Price: [: 00:12:00

And then there's other people like me. Who I need to get the instruction and then I need to practice one or two times, and then I can do it the right way in front of a prospective customer. Are you doing a lot of practice sessions for people like me?

Dan Dionne: I do small team call reviews Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays with different segments of the team. And it's a sign up sheet. It's not mandatory, but I've always got 4 or 5 people every morning in my office wanting to do call reviews, which is great because you get to see different aspects.

And I'd say that. Is the hardest thing to teach. That's why you have to do it constantly. Great example. And it's really hard for the new people to understand where, they're getting told that first, no, and they ask a few more questions and then they're still getting that known okay, cool.

ay, cool. Sounds like you're [: 00:13:00

Like you've got to know when to ask those 4th, 5th, 6th layers of questions and get past those 2nd and 3rd note to try to find the yes to get them to realize, yes, I've got to solve that problem. Thank you for keep asking me questions. That's the hardest thing to teach because there's just getting comfortable on the phones or just getting comfortable with these conversations.

So it takes that constant training and review to get them there.

Lucas Price: When you think about training and the way that you've described your training program to us. Are there things that happened in your career that helped you understand both the importance of it and how you implemented it? Or where did this, where did these things come from?

Dan Dionne: I've always been a more of a coaching type leader. I'm a certified coach and Olympic weightlifting and I coached for three years. So it's like. There's part of me in there. And then part of me from experience, I can go all the way back to my very first sales job, which actually made me realize I don't want to be in sales.

walk in, they give you your [: 00:14:00

And then, even at Carter is my training and granted, this is one of your 40 people. So totally different training. My first couple of days were like desks over there. You gotta go build it. Computer is in the in the mail. You'll have it the next couple of days and there's a phone somewhere.

Go find one and go put it together. And then it's like, all right, just shadow them for the next couple of weeks. You'll be ready. So I got to figure it out. Got it. Sales is a very much sink or swim mentality, even at some of the best organizations. And I'm not saying anything bad about Cargur's in my training, cause it really taught me to learn from my peers and that's how, that's really how I build all of my training is.

It's rep led. I don't sit in a room unless I'm doing my boot camp for short periods of time. All the training is rep led training. You gotta learn from people doing the job, not from someone doing a PowerPoint. But it's gotta be constant. If you're not doing it constantly, you're never, I believe in continuous improvement.

tter every single day if I'm [: 00:15:00

But in my mind it's a team game. You have to all get better at the same time. And you can only do that through this continuous improvement mentality with training.

Lucas Price: You have a lot of people who are receiving the training and everyone, in the room has received it, but people have internalized it at different rates. hOw do you evaluate like when someone's gotten it or when it's time to move on, from this item?

Dan Dionne: It's part of that continuous improvement, like just the repetitions. Like Olympic weightlifting or playing football or baseball. It's repetitions. so Even if you got it once, you don't let it say good, you're good there. And then move on to another top note.

ose good things that they're [: 00:16:00

They're going to get sloppy. You gotta continue to refine that. And even if they sound good at one call or two calls, don't stop listening to those parts of calls. Like a great example for my AEs, we do weekly call review. We do a scorecard weekly call review. I mainly focus on their discovery and their close.

The demo, it's a walkthrough. You can, anybody can do the demo. That's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in how you're uncovering pain. Uncovering the reason why someone needs to buy and then tailoring the demo towards what you've uncovered and I focus on those first 7 to 10 minutes. And then after that, again, the demo is the demo, but I focus on those first 7 to 10 minutes and I'll take the full hour just on those first 7 minutes.

those demos of I've done this: 1000

Lucas Price: Have you ever experienced where you had relatively high performers who thought they don't need the feedback. They don't need the training. They know what they're doing.

Dan Dionne: Every high performer says that I had 200 percent of the goal last month. I don't need this. Every high performer

Lucas Price: How do you deal with that?

Dan Dionne: I don't care. Get in the room, give me a call, score it. I don't care. You've got to do this like everybody else. It's one of those things that I, I tell them that they're doing something wrong. eVeryone who has, even myself, you, everybody will have something, a part of a call that someone will pick apart and say, you need some improvement here. So you just don't want to lighten up on your expectations of what you want their calls to be. And.

I'm from Boston, I grew up during the decade of excellence with Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics. We had that big string. I always use the Tom Brady analogy where Tom Brady didn't win seven Super Bowls by just going to this, going in and winging it and saying, I've done this before.

I know what I'm doing. He watched more game film than anybody. I call my sessions game film reviews so that we can, get better every single time.

oach it was, but I think the [: 00:18:00

Dan Dionne: Yep. I like that. I'm a, I like the Bruce Lee one where I fear the man that's made the same kick a thousand times versus the man that's made a thousand kicks one time. So I want to make sure not only are we practicing the good behaviors, but we're perfecting them every single time.

Lucas Price: So we've talked about making sure you're hiring your ideal candidate profile, finding the right traits. We've talked about training and celebrating the wins and building the culture. Are there any other key pillars that we should talk about today?

Dan Dionne: I really stress, especially building a sales team. Not focusing on previous experience. Or not focusing on the high, education, not focusing on like this person's got went for, went to Harvard and then Salesforce who cares if they were the if they were bottom of the class at Harvard and, top bottom 10 percent at Salesforce?

That's not a high. That's not a high rep. That's not a good rep. Why would you hire them?

Lucas Price: What are the things that are really important to find on your ideal candidate profile?

that's where I'll stay right [: 00:19:00

I just asked this to my team yesterday because you This is my first year in CQ, and this is my first November. November is the worst month in my mind outside of August. Because people start logging off on November 15th because they gotta get on a flight to go to Whoever for Thanksgiving so they can beat the high plane ticket prices.

So month ends on the 15th, you've got to be done. So I asked my team, rabbi, show of hands, who's first, whose time is this? Whose first November sales month is this? I think out of the 40 people, I think 20 something people raise their hand. Every single, almost half my team comes from different walks of life.

And we're not only finding success in there, we're growing the company exponentially. Because we're finding the right people. And that's the most important thing I can tell you. I can tell you, especially from like my car gurus days, where 30 percent of my sales team was people that were on a dealership floor.

So I have about [: 00:20:00

Lucas Price: Part of what I'm getting is the specific experiences don't matter as much, but the life experiences that shaped who you are as a person have a lot to do with whether you can succeed. WhEn a salesperson fails. What are like the reasons that are most typical for why a salesperson fails?

Dan Dionne: That's obviously different for every single salesperson that does fail. That's a difficult question to ask. End of the day, for me, the number one thing that I see why I see people fail is they think they know what they're doing. I've hired people from all different walks of life, obviously, that come in, and the very first thing I tell them if you want to be successful here in this role, you know nothing.

doing. You'll be fine if you [: 00:21:00

You're going to be in for a rough ride. And I can't tell you the number of people that have hired that are either in industry or have some experience that come in with this. Attitude of I'm better than everybody because I've been doing this longer, or I've been doing this almost fail almost instantly.

You got to come in and be able to be willing to be vulnerable to say, I don't know what I'm doing. And I'm going to learn from everybody around me. I would say that's my number 1 answer. Number 2 is just unwillingness to learn. we've all seen that like people that I call them say yes and do less, they hear your feedback and they hear the coaching, but they don't listen and they don't put it into play and they just are comfortable accepting a no saying I did my job getting to my call volume or I did my job getting to my connection volume, but there's no substance to it.

Cause they didn't take the coaching seriously. They ended up burning out faster than most.

preciate you taking the time [: 00:22:00

Dan Dionne: Mainly on linkedin, hit me up on linkedin. It's just Dan Dye on D I O N E I got called out a few years back for my picture. It's for my wedding and someone's it looks like you just took a picture from your wedding. So you find me. It's got a darker background. It's my wedding photo. You can't miss me.

Lucas Price: All right. Thanks for coming with us today.

Dan Dionne: No, of course.