Have you ever wondered what it takes to build and scale a high-performing sales team? On today’s Conquer Local Podcast, we’re excited to welcome Kevin “KG” Gaither, a sales leader with an exceptional track record.

As the CRO and Founder of Inside Sales Expert, Kevin brings over 25 years of tech industry experience. He’s scaled teams from 30 to 550 salespeople and driven massive growth. Kevin’s book, “It Happened on the Sales Floor,” reveals lessons from navigating eight startups and achieving three liquidity events.

Kevin’s insights come from real-world experience, not just theory. Tune in to hear his success stories and learn from the mistakes that shaped his career. Kevin has also provided valuable free resources, including 10 Free Sales Leadership Guides and his “Diamonds in the Rough” hiring course, to help you elevate your sales game.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from one of the industry’s most seasoned experts!

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Are you an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer? Then, keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

How Scaring Off Salespeople Creates a Stronger Sales Force

Introduction

Jeff Tomlin: I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Kevin Gaither.

Kevin is a sales leader with an amazing track record of building and scaling high-performing sales teams. He’s the CRO and Founder of Inside Sales Expert and with over 25 years in the tech industry, he’s led teams from 30 to 550 salespeople, generating massive growth. 

Kevin has successfully navigated multiple startups to liquidity events and shares his hard-earned wisdom in his book, “It Happened on the Sales Floor.” 

Get ready Conquerors for Kevin Gaither coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

Learning from Mistakes Makes us Better Sales Leaders.

Jeff Tomlin: Kevin Gaither, welcome to the show, CRO and founder of Inside Sales Expert. The name of the book is called, It Happened on the Sales Floor. Welcome to the Conquer Local podcast, man.

Kevin Gaither: Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate you having me on and can’t wait to share all my mistakes and learnings.

Jeff Tomlin: Hey, it is funny when I was reading the About You on your website, you have some of your accomplishments there at the very bottom you said, “And I made a lot of mistakes,” and I had a chuckle and said, “Isn’t it awfully refreshing at this stage in our careers that we can be brutally honest and it just adds credibility to what we do?”

Kevin Gaither: Oh my gosh, yes, absolutely. In fact, I’ve got this angry Tweet that I typically publish that sounds something like, “Those that think they know everything about sales leadership need to start going and make more mistakes and stop spouting off about what they think that they know,” because our learnings come mostly from the mistakes that we make. And then the learnings that come from those mistakes and the changes in our behaviours. So it’s like, look, go make mistakes, go make mistakes. And that’s when you’re going to get better.

Build a Winning Sales Culture: Hire, Onboard, Coach, and Manage Performance.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, 100%, and the learnings always just keep coming and keep coming. Hopefully, you lessen the mistakes a little bit, but you never stop making them and because all the situations are different. So let me jump into the co nversation here, that as you get more and more things in your plate, one of the things that I’ve found refreshing and very, very helpful is to have a mental model about things, to compartmentalize more complex things that you’re overseeing, and distill it down into a few of its core components so that you can rattle it off the top of your head. And so if you’re thinking about sales culture, you’re stepping into a new role at a new organization or someone’s hiring at an organization and they’re looking for someone to step into the role, how do you think about starting to build a winning sales culture? What are the components of a great sales organization?

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, so I’ve done this quite a bit. I’ve either built the teams or taken over teams and as we just alluded to, made tons of mistakes. And I’ve come up with these four areas, it’s not unique, but just like you said, it’s these four areas that I’m making sure to check off when I’m building, fixing, or growing a sales team. And the first area is in hiring, recruiting, and interviewing. And some people hear me say that and they think, oh, that’s all the same thing. It’s not. Recruiting, interviewing, and hiring, those are three distinct groups, but it’s all in this sort of same bucket of, how are you finding great talent? And on the recruiting side, of course, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me, maybe not, and I would love to get into a debate on this topic. I feel like my number one job is to be constantly networking and recruiting for great talent for my company and for my team. And sales leaders that defer that responsibility to a recruiter, internal or worse, a recruiter external, they’re kind of missing the point. And then interviewing being something completely different from that, having a structured, intentional interview process. Not too short, not too long, thorough and designed to help us identify high quality candidates. And I can talk for 45 minutes just about that sliver in and of itself because I think it’s critically important. And then the hiring component and that is part of, how are you displaying your company? How are you being transparent about the good, the bad, and the ugly to these candidates? How are you negotiating offers with these candidates? So it’s all under this, the first column of hiring, interviewing, recruiting. That’s the first thing that I’ll assess when I’m going into a company, either building it myself or advising another company. And stop me if you want to just go down a rabbit hole, because I could do it very easily. But the second piece is the onboarding process. The quote from the great Trish Bertuzzi from the Bridge Group sounds like this, “You make this strategic decision to make the hire, but then you screw it all up with a poor onboarding process.” So you go through this, so maybe you’ve got this hiring, interviewing, and recruiting piece down, but then you bring them onboard and you put a bunch of boxes on their desk and a manual and some videos and go, “Hey, welcome to my company and here’s some swag by the way too. That’s cool.” And then you expect them to be on the phone in four days and be productive. You’ve got to have this very thorough and intentional onboarding process. And I’ll give you an example by what I mean by that. By the hour, Jeff, by the hour, from the moment they start at your company through the entire training process, like the classroom training process, you delineate their schedule by the hour. And why? Because you do not want a scenario where you’ve got, you’ve hired some high-quality salespeople that are now twiddling their thumbs during your onboarding process. And now they’re thinking, gosh, where do I go? What do I do? Did I make the right decision coming to this company? So that’s the second area, onboarding. 

Jeff Tomlin: I’ve seen this movie, I feel like I’ve seen this movie. You’re not getting any pushback from me.

Kevin Gaither: Oh yeah, and look, everybody can make the excuses. We can make the excuses, and we have made the excuses. I’m too busy for it, I don’t have the resources, I don’t have the help. I’m talking about the sales leader if you don’t have a bunch of resources, you’re literally booking the conference rooms if it’s in-person training. You’re booking the people that are going to come in and do some of the training. You’re getting hands-on and getting involved. Most companies don’t have the benefit of a really fleshed-out training and enablement team. So then the third component, which is going to sound so trite and your listeners are going to roll their eyes and go, uh-huh, uh-huh, it’s kind of like when the dentist says you need to floss your teeth, but then you don’t. Coaching. The third piece is coaching. I published a poll last week on LinkedIn or two weeks ago, about whether… If everyone thinks that coaching is so important, should the VP of sales hold their leaders, and their managers accountable to a certain amount of coaching on a certain week? And of course, the answer is, it depends. There’s no black and white to this. It depends, but you’d better have the VP of sales or even the CEO, whoever’s leading sales, they better have a coaching construct, a coaching… There’s the training, but then there’s the coaching and what does the coaching entail? And then the fourth piece, the fourth column that I like to think about is performance management. Most people think about performance management with negative connotations. It’s not just that, okay? So the performance management component delineates expectations, so my expectations of behaviour look like this. Okay? This is what good looks like. Exceptional performance looks like this, like President’s Club winning performance, looks like this. Quota-hitting performance looks like this. And demotion level, and termination level performance looks like this. And you put it in writing. I’m too busy for that, or they should know what good looks like. Trust me, I’ve been burned by this 1,000 times. So what I’m advocating for within the performance management conversation is a program that delineates how you get promoted and how you get demoted or fired. And that sounds so inflammatory. Really trust me, when you go and ask your sales team, and I would challenge any of your listeners, all of your listeners, to go do this right now. You think you know what it takes to get fired at your company but go ask your salespeople if they know what it takes to get fired. And it’s such an uncomfortable conversation, but what you’ll learn is that is it 99% to goal? Like you’re right below goal? Is it 80% to goal? Is it missed once, missed six times? How many times do you have to miss quota? How many times do you have to be below minimum? Delineate those things. So let me stop. Those four columns, if any sales leader listening to this can shore up just those four areas, they’ll be miles and miles ahead of their competition. And their sales team is on the right track for high performance when you can shore up hiring, interviewing, recruiting, onboarding, coaching, and performance management. You put all those four things together, and you’re cooking with gas, Jeff.

Clear Expectations Reduce Anxiety, Boosting Sales Team Performance and Security.

Jeff Tomlin: By the way, on your last point, I can see, I think a lot of organizations punt on that, delineating what exactly the different levels of performance look like. And I can see it in people when they’re waffling in no man’s land and they don’t know exactly how they’re doing toward expectations, and it’s a bad place to be, eh?

Kevin Gaither: Yes, and look, I’m not like a psychologist or a philosopher or anything like that, but I’ve done a little study on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. And in your mind’s eye for the listener, there’s this pyramid, if you look up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. You look up this pyramid and down at the base of the pyramid, it’s sort of like food, water, air. Just secure, just the basic things that you need. But very closely right above that is security. In order to get to the pinnacle of your highest level of performance, the highest, best you, security is one of those things. And it sounds so strange to say this, but when you delineate the conditions under which your salespeople get fired, they breathe a sigh of relief and go, “I know where the line is,” as opposed to the waffling that you’re talking about that, I don’t know. It’s sort of like when you go into the haunted house and you’re not sure where that zombie is going to jump out at you. You’re walking through the haunted house tense the entire time. You don’t want your salespeople feeling like that because they’ll never get to the highest levels of performance. So when you delineate the conditions under which it takes to get fired, then they go, “I know where the zombie is, I know where it’s coming from, and now I can move on to other things as opposed to be worrying about the jump scare.”

Brutal Honesty in Hiring Sets Expectations, Improves Retention, and Boosts Team Culture.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, so I love the mental model, makes perfect sense to me. So I want to dig into some of it then. Let’s start right at the beginning of hiring and retaining. So just like you said, you spend all this money to go through a process to bring someone on board. Your job definitely has to be retaining them. Maybe talk a little bit about some of your strategies through the hiring process to build your team. And by the way, and you mentioned one of your top jobs should be constant recruiting. That totally resonates with me because you have natural turnover in an organization. You’re hopefully growing an organization, and in order to scale and have a repeatable model, you have to build a pipeline just like you are with your actual sales and your customers, and it feeds itself. And someone you talk to this week, they might not jump on board this week, maybe not even next month or next quarter, could be next year, next two years, all of a sudden there’s a fit. So that resonates a lot. So tell me a little bit about some of your strategies on the hiring front and how you retain people on your teams.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, so those obviously being two different things, of course. So oftentimes people are leaving their companies because of miss set expectations. And so there’s in fact, I learned this lesson because I realized that the people that I were talking to, I’d ask them, “So why are you leaving or looking to leave your company?” And they would tell me all these things. And many times what would come up was, “They told me this when I was hired, but then it turned into that. They told me this, but then it turned into that.” Oftentimes it was about comp, quotas, territories, things like that. And so again, this is me just learning from frigging mistakes, honestly. I actually like an interview process where I am so brutally honest that I’m actually trying to talk the candidate out of the job. Okay? I am trying to talk, and I’ll give you an example. A salesperson that says, “So what’s it going to take for me to get promoted?” Let’s just say I didn’t have a promotion path or something like that. I’m not going to give some BS example. This is a real story, by the way. When I was building at ZipRecruiter salespeople would say, “So what’s my promotion path? How do I get into management?” I’m like, you don’t understand. Let me just stop right now. There is no promotion path to management. Okay? I’m not going to tell you this like, “Well, if you perform well, you could and blah, blah, blah.” The candidate will take that as a promise. So I’m going to say, “If you’re looking for a structured promotion path into the next level of sales or a structured promotion path into management, then maybe you need to go work at Enterprise Rental Car because this is not going to be the place for you.” So I’m trying to, as much as I can, Jeff, trying to talk the candidate out of the job. And that of course, in turn, helps retain my salespeople, retain my salespeople. Now, I also have a very odd belief on salesperson retention. The fact of the matter is, is that we’re not going to be able to hold on to 100% or 90% of our salespeople forever. The reality is, is that we’re going to get maybe two to three years at best, out of our salespeople. On average, the vast majority of salespeople are going to stay with me for two to three years. And I think that’s a good thing because I am actually looking for the scenario where they come into my system, I teach them boatloads of things, and their skill level goes through the roof to where they come to me and go, “KG, I got an offer at another company with a bigger title, bigger base salary, bigger compensation, more stock options, yada, yada, yada.” And you know what I say to that, Jeff? “Bring it in. Let me give you a big old hug. I love you, man. Thank you for doing so great with me.” And so I’m not precisely and specifically focused on retention in the way that most people think about it. Okay? There’s regrettable attrition and non-regrettable attrition. So what I want to do is I want to reduce the amount of regrettable attrition as much as I can. Expectation setting and delineating what’s really, really clear. Sorry, delineating clearly what good looks like is going to help your retention rates as much as possible. And I’ll give you one bonus, if you’ve got a sales manager reporting up into you that isn’t buying into your culture, get rid of that person immediately. Don’t even, don’t put them on a 90-day plan. Don’t go 100. Don’t give them warnings. Get rid of that person immediately because their behaviour is not going to change very, very easily, Jeff. And that can poison an entire team of 10, 12, 15 sales reps. You don’t want to be in that position. You’ve got to have your leaders that are underneath you also buying into your entire sales culture.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, no, I like the way you’re setting the expectation there. And some of the things that I’ve found that also helps that, is for people to really understand in their career path progression that there’s players and there’s coaches. And you don’t have to be a coach to make a lot of money and be wildly successful. Just because Wayne Gretzky was the all-time leading scorer and the greatest player that ever lived, didn’t mean that he should be behind the bench coaching. You want them out in the ice, and people-

Kevin Gaither: that’s right.

Jeff Tomlin: … need to understand that, that there’s different paths and one path that isn’t necessarily better than the other.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, 1,000%. Oh, yes and you, by saying that we specifically designed our compensation plans at Zip Recruiter as such that top salespeople would make far more than their bosses. And Any boss that would give me a hard time about that, I’d say, “Fine, strap on a headset, man. If you’ve got a problem with that, strap on a headset. If that’s what’s driving you, sales leadership is a vocation, it’s a calling. Yes, you can make a great amount of money, but if you have a problem with the individual contributors reporting to you making more than you, then this is not for you. This is not a thing for you. Go strap on a headset.”

Jeff Tomlin: Strap on a headset. It’s a different life.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right. 

Ensure Team Readiness Across all Departments before Moving Upmarket or Changing Sales Motions.

Jeff Tomlin: By the way, you talked a little bit about structure there. I have the question in the back of my mind constantly about inside and outside sales. And because that changes your culture too, having very different types of motions. As you’re building an organization, where’s that demarcation where you say, “We’re at one stage and we need to add a different type of motion,” whether it’s you start with inside sales and go to outside, or you’re an outside sales organization, you need to bring some of it inside. How do you think about that?

Kevin Gaither: I’m laughing because I’ve been through this, I’ve been through this, I’ve been through the successes and through the failures. At ZipRecruiter early on, we wanted to go upmarket and so the CEO was like, “Let’s go hire a bunch of people from Indeed, these mean mama-jama’s that know all these logos and all this kind of stuff there.” And long story short, that initiative failed miserably. And what I understood, how I learned that it failed, was because especially in enterprise sales, the quote goes like this, with enterprise sales especially. “You win as a team, you lose as a team.” Okay? And what we didn’t have in place to go upmarket, and gosh, there’s so many companies these days that are like, they’ve got their seed money and the board is like, “So maybe you can get bigger deals if you go upmarket.” Okay, well make sure you’ve got several things in place. Okay? First of all, and this is going to sound so freaking obvious, the product. Do you have, is your product enterprise ready? Have you talked to enterprise customers to understand what they need in your product and does this offering that you’ve been offering to SMBs, does that fit the bill? And that was one of the main failures that we had back in whatever it was, 2015 or something like that in ZipRecruiter, where it’s like that product just wasn’t ready for enterprise. But compounding that, compounding that, we didn’t have legal resources available because enterprise customers aren’t going to put a credit card into the system. 

Jeff Tomlin: I wish they would.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, we wish they would, they just don’t. It’s procurement, it’s red lines. And I knew that we were failing in this area as well because our clients, the big-name brands that we were negotiating with, were complaining about how long our legal team was taking. Usually, it goes the other way. Usually, the vendor complains about how long their legal team is taking. The opposite was true in this sense, and I’m like, we don’t have the legal resources to handle and process all these red lines and contract negotiations. 

Jeff Tomlin: That’s when you have to name your legal team the revenue prevention team.

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, exactly. And look, they’re there for a reason, and I totally get it, but when they’re not there as a part of a team to help get it done, then that’s a problem. And then a third major area. Now SOC2 compliance is such a huge issue now, back then it wasn’t as much when I was building an enterprise team there, but we would have companies like Bank of America want to do security checks on us. And our engineering team was like, “We don’t have time for that. We’re not doing that.” Okay, well then we’re not ready as a team to go upmarket. I can hire great salespeople from competitors to go sell into these logos, but if the product isn’t ready, the marketing team isn’t ready, the legal team isn’t ready, our engineering or IT team isn’t ready, you win as a team and you lose as a team. So that’s one mistake when you’re going upmarket, and again, this is all learning lessons. I had to shut that and I had to lay that entire enterprise team off because I learned that we were not ready as a company to go upmarket and sell into enterprise. And when we rebooted that, Jeff, several years later, because the board was like, “How are we going to get additional growth? Maybe we should go upmarket.” I went around to every member of my team and I said, “You’re responsible for this. Are you ready? You’re responsible for this. I’m not hiring one single salesperson until I get your commitment.” Marketing, CFO, CMO, legal. I went down the line and said, “You are on the hook for this. Are you ready for this? Because we win as a team and we lose as a team.” So that is a huge mistake. You’ll know when you’re ready when everyone is ready to commit to specific items in going upmarket or in going a more transactional model into inside sales or selling to the SMB. Look, if you’re used to doing it, if you’re going upmarket, you’re already upmarket and just trying to go downmarket, and you’re going to make the owner of a pizza shop go through a 20-page red-line contract back and forth, you’re missing the point entirely. They got to take out the trash, cover a shift, open up the mail, and now you’re sending them a 20-page contract to review and red line. Your deal just isn’t going to get done.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, and I can see how there’s a whole can of worms around this because as an organization, you have to come to an agreement on, yeah, these are the non-negotiables that we really need in place. So this is probably a lot of back and forth with that, but-

Kevin Gaither: Oh, for sure, for sure.

Jeff Tomlin: Good thoughts on that. But I’m bouncing around your model and messing up the-

Kevin Gaither: Great.

Focus on Coaching Inputs, Defining Expectations, and Consistent Feedback for Success.

Jeff Tomlin: … order I wanted to go in, but I do want to talk a little bit about coaching and the process around that. As an organization, we have to create predictable, repeatable machines. And things like quota attainment, trying to get some consistency through that. Super, super important. And so when it comes to developing your organization and coaching and creating consistency, how do you stay on top of that?

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, it’s easier with smaller teams than it is with larger teams, or I should just say it’s just different. It’s just different at larger large teams. Let me start with a commander’s intent, that anybody listening, anybody who’s a manager or a VP of sales should be thinking about. Inputs matter to the outputs. Okay? So if you’re just paying attention to the outputs and you’re either patting yourself on the back or you’re going, “Whoa is me, because the results aren’t there,” you’re missing out on the inputs. And there’s a fine line between micromanagement and setting expectations on inputs. Okay? And holding your team accountable to a certain behaviour on either inside sales or enterprise sales, it doesn’t matter, but paying attention to those inputs. So you’re defining what good looks like, you train on what good looks like, and then the coaching helps to support the training and the expectation setting. So as an example, the first thing you have to figure out is, do they know the thing that they should be doing? If you’re a great coach, you have to figure out… I hate the sports analogy because it alienates certain people there, but if somebody on your sports team, whatever, everyone agreed on this one position, this one player was supposed to go left, but then they went, right. Okay? It doesn’t matter what sport it is, whatever, pickleball, whatever. They were supposed to go left, but then they went right. Okay, the first thing a great coach has to figure out is, did they know they were supposed to go right instead of left? Did they know that the play was this first, okay? And if they don’t know that play, then you need to go back into training mode. Okay, let’s repeat, let’s talk about what this is. So there’s a baseline that a great coach has to identify. Okay, great, so now you know what good looks like. Good looks like this, we’ve trained on this. You know this, yes. Okay, great. Now you get them out into the wild and again, see if they do that particular thing. Now, if they go left when they should have gone right again, now you know have a coaching problem. Now you know that they know what to do, and now you have to figure out why they’re not doing the thing, and this requires a sales manager, a frontline sales manager that actually cares and gives a rip about that particular person. Help me understand. And getting on those calls with them is a critical component to that. Sales managers can’t be on every single call. So I’ve got a free guide on my site that’s the manager’s guide to a model week. And part of that is spending an hour a day listening to calls on your favourite conversation intelligence tool, Gong or whatever it is, and coaching through a scorecard. And the scorecard delineates, should delineate what good looks like. Okay? And helping the rep understand what good looks like from there. So let me stop. You want to keep diving in on coaching?

Predictable Outputs Stem from Consistent Inputs; Coach and Manage Accordingly.

Jeff Tomlin: No, I mean, I’d like you to finish your thought on that, but it’s exactly right. It’s probably… It comes up to the top of my mind more often than a lot of the other elements, because creating consistency is so important. As you’re scaling an organization, it’s expected that we’re able to tell the future and be able to indicate what’s going to happen. And to me, this type of thing is really the backbone of a successful, repeatable, predictable organization.

Kevin Gaither: Yes, but yes, yes, and let me just say it again. I’m going to go back to the commander’s intent, Jeff. You create predictable outputs by creating predictable inputs. Okay? You don’t have a Toyota coming off the manufacturing line with random people going, “Well, maybe the windshield should go on now and the steering wheel should go now.” People don’t particularly like that example because they’re like, “Well, we’re dealing with people.” Yes, but we need to have predictable inputs. I talk about this, there’s only four types of salespeople, and if you can imagine in your mind’s eye, there’s this grid of salespeople with the vertical access is quota attainment, and the horizontal access is following the playbook, what good looks like. If you’ve got somebody that’s obviously in this bottom left-hand quadrant that doesn’t follow the playbook and isn’t consistently hitting their quota, you dispose of that person as quickly as possible. And when I say dispose, I want you to get pissed off. I want you to think, I want you to be like, “Oh, that’s awful.” Yeah, it’s awful that you would allow somebody on your team that doesn’t hit their number and doesn’t follow the playbook. You get rid of those people ASAP. On the opposite side of that quadrant though, you’ve got the Eagles. The Eagles are the ones that consistently not, sorry, not the opposite side, but right above that, you’ve got the people that are consistently hitting their quota, but they’re not following the playbook. Okay? You put them in a corner, I call them the Eagles. You just put them in the corner, you let them fly, and you don’t let any sales rep hang around them whatsoever. They are not examples that you want to show off to other people. You pay them their fat stacks and you just let them do what they do, until such point that they’re not hitting quota, and now they’re falling into this not following the playbook, not hitting quota. But you let those… you know, everybody’s got them one or two people on their team where like, geez, they never follow the playbook, but they always hit goal. Just put them in a corner, and let them do what they do. Then the final two are the ones that are trying, really, I call them the try-hards. They’re following the playbook, but they’re just not getting there and they’re not hitting their quotas. This is where great coaching can help turn the corner with them. Retraining, retraining, showing them what good looks like by getting on a call, taking over a call, role-playing and working with those people. But you work with them for 90 to 120 days, depending on your sales cycle, and if they can’t turn the corner into hitting goal, then you got to get rid of them. And that’s heartbreaking because you hope. They’re trying so hard, they’re following the playbook, they’re doing what you say, but they’re just not making it happen. You got to get rid of them. And then, of course, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of the organizations are hitting quota and following the playbook. These are the examples, these are the repeatables. This is what you want, and so now let’s bring it back into this holistic component. When you’re hiring, okay, you’re looking for the characteristics that those people possess. And oftentimes it’s not one, it’s not linear in sequence, by the way. You can delineate and find those people or find those people and then delineate thereafter, what you’re looking for. You train on that. So you’ll have a whole library of calls from the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the way that they handle their openers, the way they handle their meetings, setting meetings, the way that they do demos, the way they close for next steps. All these very, you’ll have a whole library of calls from the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Not from the Eagles, not from the Eagles, because somehow they make it happen. You train on those and then you’re coaching to that. And the coaching to that is the scorecard. And the scorecard is literally, and there’s… I get into big arguments with lots of people about this. I do not like the one-to-five scale or the one-to-10 scale. I like the binary, did you do it or not? Did you do this particular opener? Did you close for the next steps? Yes or no? Not on a scale of one to 10, because then the brutal feedback, the radical candour kind of falls through the crack. And now it’s like, well, I want to be nice, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. So I would normally give them a two, but I’m going to give them a six just because I don’t want to really hurt their feelings. It’s like, no, binary. Did you observe them closing for the next steps or did you not? Period, end of story. And when you can coach to a scorecard, once they know what they should do, once they’ve been trained and you know that they’ve been trained on this, then you’re coaching on what good looks like and that’s your scorecard. And yes, that’s managing to the inputs that helped create the consistent outputs.

Kevin Gaither is Available on LinkedIn, insidesalesexpert.com; Offers Book and Resources.

Jeff Tomlin: Boatload of critical information and a boatload of wisdom in a few minutes that we had together. And I could literally talk about this all day long and unpack it, because I’m on a mission-

Kevin Gaither: Me too, me too.

Jeff Tomlin: … to create the perfect sales organization playbook, and it’s a never-ending quest. Hey, dude, I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day to join us on the podcast.

Kevin Gaither: My pleasure.

Jeff Tomlin: If people wanted to continue the conversation with you, number one, where do they find your book? Number two, how do they reach out and get in contact with you?

Kevin Gaither: Yeah, wonderful. So I’m available on LinkedIn, so you can find me at just Kevin Gaither, simple as that. My username is KevinGaither on LinkedIn, so it’s easy to find me and follow me there. But you can also find me on Insidesalesexpert.com, and that’s singular, insidesalesexpert.com. I’ve got a free sample of my book, I’ve got 10 leadership guides there. I’ve got a blog with hundreds and hundreds of articles there, and you can reach me there, but there’s a bunch of different great resources that you can find there. So free leadership downloads, free sample copy of my book. And of course, if you want to buy a copy of my book, you can find it there too. But that’s how you can get ahold of me. Thank you for having me on the show, Jeff. It’s been great.

Jeff Tomlin: Killer URL. Hey, it is an absolute pleasure having you. I hope we can come back and do this again because there’s an infinite amount of stuff that we can talk about. Hey, man, I hope you have a fantastic week, and I look forward to chatting a little bit more in the future.

Kevin Gaither: That sounds great. I’d be happy to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: What a wealth of knowledge! 

The first takeaway here is that Building a High-Performing Sales Team Requires a Holistic Approach.  

Creating a successful sales team involves more than just hiring top talent. It’s important to establish clear expectations, provide robust onboarding and coaching, and implement a structured performance management system. By focusing on these areas and creating a supportive sales culture, leaders can improve retention, boost morale, and drive overall performance.

The second takeaway is the Importance of Alignment and Teamwork. 

Success in sales often depends on the collective efforts of the entire organization. Sales leaders must ensure alignment between sales, product, marketing and other departments to achieve shared goals. Effective communication and collaboration are crucial for overcoming challenges and driving growth.

If you’ve enjoyed Kevin’s episode Building and Retaining a High-Performing Sales Team, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 715: Redefining Sales Success: From Seller’s Journey to Buyer’s Experience with Richard Harris or Episode 701: The Sales Doctor’s Prescription for $100M Success with Chet Lovegren.

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!