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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to the Sales Hunter Podcast. My name's Mark Hunter. And hey, let's talk something. How are you doing in terms of hiring salespeople? Let me tell you something. That process is broken with me today. Alice Hyman, now she is. She's got a front seat in the C suite dealing with CEOs all over the country, especially in the tech space. She's going to help me unpack the issue. And the show begins right now.
- [00:26]
B
You're listening to the Sales Hunter podcast with Mark Hunter, where the focus is to help you as a sales community, sell with confidence and integrity. And now, here's your host.
- [00:40]
A
Alice Hyman is my guest today. She has this, the seat right in the C suite with so many CEOs. Welcome, Alice.
- [00:48]
B
Oh, thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm really excited.
- [00:52]
A
It's a shame we just started recording now because we were having a great conversation in the green room. Right, right. Okay.
- [00:57]
B
Yeah, our green room conversation would blow everybody's mind.
- [01:01]
A
We may have to. We may have to edit a few pieces, but it is very, very good. Okay, let's start unpacking this for the audience because the sales hiring process is absolutely broken. You've got some very interesting views on it, and you have a perspective because you talk to so many CEOs. Startup, enterprise level, all the way through. Okay, the floor is yours. What's broken? How do we fix it?
- [01:25]
B
Well, what's broken is just about everything. But, you know, the question comes to me is like, why are these salespeople not succeeding? Right. That's really where it starts. Like, okay, I got a team of salespeople, and yeah, some of them can do their job, and actually some of them do it really well. Right. But some of them are really not doing it very well, and we probably should let them go. But they want me to make sure. Right. Check in with me, check them with an expert. Should we let these people go? All right, so what's wrong? Well, the landscape out there has changed. The customer journey has changed. And the type of person that a customer, your customer wants to interact with. Mark. Is a different type of customer, but we're still hiring the same type of sellers.
- [02:13]
A
Okay, Yeah, I agree. Sales. The sales process is broken. The hiring is broken. So what should we be looking for?
- [02:20]
B
Yeah, well, I think we have to back up a little bit. Right. So as a CEO, I'm looking at my organization and what is my positioning in the marketplace and how do I improve that? So that means I need to, one, keep the customers that I have and keep them supremely happy. Right. So they stay and they buy more and they refer other people to me. And two, I have to. In this landscape of lack of trust that we have these days. Right. I've got to get new customers to want to come and have a conversation and hear what we have to say to see if it's a fit. And their customer journey has changed. Like we were talking about in the green room right before we started. People are finding me now on AI Gemini. AI told a CEO to talk to Alice Hyman. Wow. Fantastic. So you know that your customers are doing the same thing. And so we have a customer taking a different journey, and we're totally ignoring that and existing in our 1980s selling ways. Okay, maybe 90s, maybe even early 2000s. Not working, Marc. Not working. So we have to say to ourselves, all right, what is the journey that our customer takes? It's going to be different for B2B, B2C. Different for tech, different for manufacturing. Not completely different, but there will be differences. How are your customers finding you? How are they getting information around the topic? That is your topic. It's your area, it's your expertise. Where are they getting that from? And thinking about who is your customer? These days we talk about customer Personas. Is the person who's going to buy this a CEO, a cfo, a vp? Is it a team of people who are going to buy it? Like, in my world, in your world of the complex sale, there's a team always that's going to buy it. Now, once I understand that better, now I can start looking at who should I hire? Who should I hire that my customers would actually want to talk to that could have the level of conversation with any of those buyer Personas that is needed to get them into a great conversation and help guide them through to a purchase? Right. And if we are talking to really senior people as our Personas that are going to make the decision, and we're hiring really young people who don't have a lot of experience, don't know the industry well, don't know what it's like to be a CEO or a vp, it's going to be very hard for them to relate no matter how much training we give them. So we have to start by thinking, who are we hiring to address our customer?
- [05:22]
A
So you really have to understand who your customer is and back. Back into it. Because I really feel that we have to be hiring peers to our customers.
- [05:29]
B
Yeah.
- [05:30]
A
And that's one of the things. That's one of the first things that we have to look at too many organization, just hire that entry level person and somehow they're gonna suddenly become magical.
- [05:39]
B
Right, right. And appear, Mark. Exactly. And that's expensive, right? CEO thinks, well, that's going to be expensive. But here's the thing. Five really experienced, knowledgeable salespeople who know your audience will do better than 15 people who have little experience, little knowledge, little time on this planet. Right? So really, what are you trading? You know, you're going to have a lot more closed deals with the right people and you won't need as many sellers because you'll have the right sellers.
- [06:23]
A
Okay, now you just said something valuable there. It's like as if we are trying to short circuit. I'm going to go cheap, I'm going to go cheap on who I'm going to hire. So I'm just going to be able to hire more of them. But then all I do is flood the marketplace and they quit on me because again, the turnover in sales is absolutely huge.
- [06:41]
B
It's horrible, Mark. I mean, the churn for most companies with salespeople is it's ridiculous. And the cost of replacing them is ridiculous. And the other issue is when we have 15 or 20 or 5,000, whatever. I mean, most of the companies I work with don't have more than, you know, 50 salespeople. But when, when you look at this vast amount of salespeople and what they're able to do and how many leads you're able to generate for them, which is never enough, right. The cost of that is enormous to keep those people in their seats and not hit their quota. And sometimes I'm just like, hey, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, let me look at these salespeople. Let's assess them. All right? Like, get rid of these five and redistribute these leads and let them go in and close the deals. Because see, what these CEOs don't actually realize is they think, well, it doesn't hurt anything. We just give, you know, we just need more volume and we'll just have all these salespeople. Well, yes, it does hurt something. Every time a salesperson goes in and can't have a decent conversation or, or every time they go in and lose a deal, that just hurt your company. So don't think for one second that it doesn't hurt because it does hurt.
- [07:54]
A
It does hurt because the marketplace talks. And you said something very right up front. That customer had done some background search to find you. And no customer engages any Salesperson without doing an investigation on the salesperson and the company. Yeah, right.
- [08:10]
B
We don't start at, oh, I know nothing. Can you tell me something? We don't start there as buyers.
- [08:17]
A
Yeah, I've got a phrase that information has been democratized. Okay. Everybody's got access to everything. And many times we as sellers have to kind of de. Educate the customer because they've educated themselves in the wrong manner. Now, I don't know if you agree with that, I don't know if you disagree with that, but how do we find more cap. I'm not saying more in terms of more of them, but how do we find a better capable salesperson than we've been finding in the past?
- [08:45]
B
Yeah, yeah, I do agree with you. I think buyers are overwhelmed. I think they have filled theirselves full of information that was available, but that's not always the information needed to make a good decision. Because, I mean, look, you go to a lot of people's websites, you can't even figure out what they do. You can't see a demo. You can't even look at the product. So how could you possibly know? But buyers are convinced they've run it through AI and come up with the best, you know, choices, the short list. Right. They're. They're convinced that these five companies are the ones they need to look at. And you know what's scary about that is that as sellers, if we don't know and understand what they came with, right. We're not going to be able to guide them in the right direction. And they are overwhelmed with information, some of it incorrect. And I always say, I mean, I just said this earlier today, when what you sell is not really that unique. It's so similar to the other products that the buyers can't discern really which one is better. I mean, well, but when that's the case, then how you sell really matters. Now, if you have a completely unique and interesting product, that's great. It's completely different. People can figure it out on their own. But how that's so rare. Most things are very similar to something else. Right? And so how do I know what the difference is? So then it really matters how you sell, and that matters then who you hire to sell.
- [10:26]
A
And I believe that how I sell very much determines the price because the value proposition changes based on how I sell and the information I'm able to glean from you. So now let's, let's back up the bus here because I want to get your opinion. Is the sales process broken in terms of that, that SDR BDR AE model, we just, we just flood the marketplace with these low level people making calls, trying to set meetings. You know that the AE is going to all come in and make this. Oh, wait a minute, you know, where is that whole model going?
- [11:02]
B
In my opinion, yes, it's broken. It's been broken for a long time. It hasn't been working for a very long time. Look at, just look at your own cost of, of sale, right? When you have people call them what you will, sitting, you know, in banks, just dialing or writing emails and sending them out at tremendous volume, hoping, right? I mean, we now know that most SDR sales development reps who are dialing for dollars or emailing for dollars cannot even book one meeting a day anymore. We're lucky if they can book one meeting a week. What? How much does that cost? That's just crazy. Now we have AI and AI, when trained well, you know, you can build agents that can go out and find your ideal customer and can message them properly. But what we're doing now with those who still have SDRs is just automating crap, right?
- [12:03]
A
So here, that is a technical term, automating crap. I love that. Thank you.
- [12:12]
B
Crappy emails out. Let's spam LinkedIn some more, right? You don't even know what I do. You've got no clue. We're just having the AI write what we think is a highly customized message. It's just full of crap. I'm sorry, I've seen too many. I'm like, are you kidding me? So this is great. This is what AI is doing for our salespeople. That's not helping, right? I think that in the world of volume, right, and scaling, then we have to think about, yeah, let's go for quality, not quantity. Because 10 closed deals is worth a thousand dials that go nowhere. No, it's worth 50 times more than a thousand dials that go nowhere. It. You know, this whole STR thing got us measuring the wrong things. How many dials, how many emails, how many LinkedIn connects, who cares? I want to know how many buyers who can buy from me got on the phone with a seller today that conversations is the only thing you should be measuring. I don't care what effort it took to get that conversation. Where is my conversation now? I say that, but then I back up and go, yeah, I do care what effort it took because if I had to dial a thousand times to get one conversation, something is broken. So when you say, what about SDR BDR AE am customer success. This whole thing we've built, right, this whole thing. Well, go back to the customer. What would be best for the customer? To have someone who knows what a day in the life of a VP of operations is like, someone who knows the industry, someone who can have a smart conversation before trying to sell, sell something. Would it be better for that buyer to have that person call them or would it be better to have a, you know, basically fresh out of college or, you know, 25 to 28 year old person who knows none of those things. Just trying to set an appointment. I don't know. Which one do you think will work better?
- [14:24]
A
Mark, would you like door number A or door number B? Yeah. Okay. You, you just dropped a lot of wisdom there in the last 2 minutes and 14 seconds. And I, I, you were saying, and so much of it, incredibly valuable. There's a couple pieces I want to jump back to though, and that is you made this comment in terms of measuring. Just because it's easy to measure doesn't mean it should be measured. And I think this was the whole thing. We're going to Measure how many LinkedIn, how many LinkedIn invites you send out a day and how many. I don't care. Comes down to conversation. I was having that, this exact same conversation with the founder of a company, this was a few weeks ago, and he pushed back, Mark, I have to know how many emails are going out. I have to know, I have to know all that. I, yeah, but at the end of the day it's the conversations, you know, And I said, okay, we'll, we'll automate it. In the background you can see how many emails are going out. But ultimately from a KPI standpoint, it's, it's conversations. But trying to get that, trying to get the conversation is hard.
- [15:25]
B
Well, and the CEO has to understand, right? What actually gets a conversation. An introduction can get you a conversation. A, a person who's very knowledgeable that I want to talk to because I could learn something can get you a conversation. Like what can get you a conversation? A great trade show booth where you can attract people to come in and learn something new can get you a conversation. Like what can get you a conversation. But I, I have two things to say to the CEOs who want to measure number of emails and number of LinkedIn connections, etc. How many cold emails and cold calls do you answer per day?
- [16:08]
A
Oh, and, and I bet they, I bet they say zero, right?
- [16:13]
B
They say zero. And then I say, and have you read the emails that your salespeople are sending lately and they are appalled when I show them what the salespeople are sending out. No one in their right mind would answer those emails. They're an instant delete. And yet you want them to send more. Do you recognize that your company brand is being diminished with every email that gets deleted?
- [16:41]
A
Oh, wow, that's got. How do CEOs respond when you share that type of information? Ask them those questions.
- [16:50]
B
They sort of just like, you know, they're like, yeah, you're right, I don't answer. I got. Well, think about who your salespeople are approaching. Would they answer a cold email? Would they answer a cold call? Yeah, you know, I mean, would they answer that message? Does that. I mean, sometimes. I mean, the message does matter. Some emails get through, right? It still does work, but you have to have a really, really good message. So, yeah, I mean, they do realize. And that's why I work with CEOs, because if I go in and help at the sales level and I change the messaging and I change this and I change that and I have to then go tell somebody. Look, sales are going to slow down for a minute here because what you think of as sales is there won't be as many emails, there won't be as many phone calls, there won't be as many LinkedIn. It's going to all slow way down. And now we have to go build our brand back up and do the brand awareness. Hopefully marketing is doing something to help, but many times they're not, especially the size companies I work with. And we have to build our brand back up and get somebody to want to have a conversation with us now and, and instead of just deleting our email. So that's going to take a little bit of time. And for most companies it doesn't make that big of a difference because they again, the SDRs weren't booking any appointments anyway. Right. So the other big, big thing is that companies are neglecting to use the resources they have to get introductions. So we have a whole bunch of. Unless we're brand brand new, right? Unless we're a baby startup, don't have any customers yet. We have a bank of customers who know us and love us. We probably have some that don't really like us very much and keep buying. And then we have some that are fleeing. Let's hope there's not too many of those. But we have all those people who know us and love us, who could absolutely make an introduction to one of their own customers. One of their own vendors, one of their partners, another company that they know that you know, you know, they do business within some way. Or the CEO that's in another. A group with another CEO that could say. But we're not even utilizing that path to try to get introduced to our ideal customers. Like we know who our ideal customers are. I hope CEOs please know who your ideal customers are. We can figure out who might know them, especially in the days of AI and we. And even just using LinkedIn, we can then go ask, hey, do you know this person well enough to introduce me? Here's what I want to talk to them about. Or would you talk us up a little bit since you love us so much and make an introduction? But where is that happening? I just don't see it happening. We're just going out cold and getting miserable results.
- [19:49]
A
I love what you're saying there because there again, so much value there. And it really does come down to, again, misalignment of sales KPIs. I land the customer and then I give it off to customer success and I never talk to them again. No, you do not close a sale. You open a relationship. There's so much business to be had through connections.
- [20:11]
B
And when you hire more senior people, they've learned this over time, even if nobody taught them. They know how to work their network. They know how to ask for an introduction. So you wonder, like, why are they doing so much better? It's really clear if you watch them, they're not cold. They're not going out cold. They are getting introductions. That's how every good senior salesperson I know exceeds their quota.
- [20:40]
A
Alice. Unbelievable conversation. Unbelievable. Hey, how do people get in touch with you?
- [20:47]
B
It's pretty easy if you spell my name right. Alice Hyman. H E I M A n. So it's alicehyman.com or Alice Hyman on LinkedIn. I'm on there a lot, just like you, Mark, so check my messages, and if you tell me you heard me on Mark's show, you get bonus points when you ask me to connect.
- [21:09]
A
Yeah, hey, but you know, if you recognize that last name, go ahead and drop the audience because you come from the. The ultimate sales family.
- [21:18]
B
Oh, thank you. Some of my friends call me sales royalty. I think it's kind of.
- [21:23]
A
Well, you are sales royalty. Literally, you were born into the royal family of sales because of who your father is. Yes.
- [21:29]
B
Yeah, yeah. So if you've ever heard of Miller Hyman, which is now owned by Korn Ferry, and a lot of you who are my age, you know, and even younger have taken strategic selling or conceptual selling. Both courses still really excellent in terms of helping you get positioned to close a deal and helping you conduct a great conversation that is completely customer focused. Right. So that's what my dad, Steve Hyman, was all about. And his partner, Bob Miller, who I've known since I was 3, God rest his soul. My dad's 91 and he's still doing great. So, yeah, it's pretty fun. And yeah, I use those methodologies every day in everything I do. They're just ingrained in there.
- [22:15]
A
Still just as relevant today as when we first created them. Yeah. So you truly are sales royalty. Alice Hyman has been our guest today. You've got to check her out on LinkedIn. She's out there all the time. And again, she has the seat in the C suite with so many CEOs around the country. Hey, my name is Mark Hunter, the Sales Hunter. You've been listening to the Sales Hunter podcast, two episodes like this each week. Well, one like this, where we do a deep dive with a subject matter expert. Second one is just me, where I unpack a single topic. Do yourself a favor, subscribe to the show. And hey, would you leave us a review because it really helps spread the word. And while you're at it, check out my new book, Integrity First Selling. Thank you so much for listening. And again, why we do it is to help you see and achieve what you didn't think was possible. My name is Mark Hunter, the Sales Hunter. Great selling.