Nine Time CEO with Seven Exits Talks About Building Sales Teams

Sean Burke shares his knowledge of building high performance sales teams gained through nine startups, seven exits and billions of dollars in value creation.

The first rule, you can only attract the best if you can show a definitive path to hitting quota. If you can’t show the math, why would they join your team?

Next, you are building a team not a collective of individual contributors. Part of this is defining your role and the role of every part of the company in contributing to the sales team's success.

And finally, you need to build metrics around each salesperson to compare and help share best practices across the team. Why is one person’s close rate higher or time to close lower?

Sean goes on to talk about mentoring and the difficulty of getting people to take the essential first steps. If you follow his advice, you will never have to worry about getting a job or earning a living.

And these highlights only scratch the surface of the wisdom Sean shares with us.

Highlights:

20:52 If you can't share with them the math of how people get to their numbers, why would they ever join your team?

23:26 Every single salesperson on my team has those numbers in a customized dashboard.

23:37 The sales velocity formula basically tells you, "Am I going to hit my number or not?"

24:38 "Joe, here's what your close ratio is. Bill's close ratio is 10% higher. What are you guys doing differently? By the way, why is Jane's time to close 60 days shorter than yours? Why is our time to close existing business longer than new business? It should be shorter."

25:31 What does the data know that our sales leaders don't know, and what do our sales leaders know that the data doesn't know, and we can combine those two together to get a much more accurate forecast.

26:42 I will coach anybody on my sales team, but very few people will do the things that I ask them in coaching.

28:53 I can guarantee you this, anybody who takes the effort to follow my plan will never have to worry about money the rest of their life,

29:06 I do deal strategy work and I will sell, my CEO will sell, everybody sells in our organization so the sales team knows that they have an absolute support mechanism.

35:44 From the CEO down to the individual customer success representative we define how we're going to work with each customer.

About Our Guest:

Sean has devoted his career to practicing, testing, learning, measuring, failing, and triumphing in the pursuit of sales & leadership excellence. The knowledge he shares is from doing the work every day. So unlike consultants, influencers, and experts – Sean still has a number to hit and over 2,000 people across the globe who expect him to make the right leadership decisions as well as help them achieve their own life’s mission.

Connect with Sean here:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanhburke/
Website - seanburke.biz
Twitter - https://twitter.com/seanburke