What does it take to build a sales team that consistently crushes its goals? This episode dives deep into that question with Hamish Knox, a sales expert and top Sandler franchisee. With a proven track record of helping entrepreneurs achieve massive success, Hamish shares his secrets to scaling sales and building a high-performing team. As a recipient of Sandler’s highest honour and a multi-book author, Hamish brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table.

Join us as we explore strategies for scaling sales teams, fostering strong sales cultures, and practical advice for sales leaders looking to elevate their game. Don’t miss this episode packed with actionable insights!

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Creating a Winning Sales Culture

Introduction

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

Hamish is a leading sales expert and the only Canadian recipient of the prestigious David H. Sandler Award.  As a top Sandler franchisee, he empowers sales leaders to build high-performing teams and achieve sustainable growth. With a focus on accountability and change management, Hamish provides practical strategies to optimize sales funnels and drive exceptional results.

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

Sales Culture is Defined by Approved and Unapproved Behaviour.

Jeff Tomlin: Hamish Knox, welcome to the Conquer Local Podcast. How are you doing today?

Hamish Knox: I am pretty fantastic, Jeff. Thanks for hosting me today.

Jeff Tomlin: Hey, well, I’m so glad that you could take time out of your busy day to join us in the podcast, and I’m pumped to dig into all things sales-related when it comes to foundations. I mean, I love it when we’ve got the rare opportunity to have a real sales expert on the call. Because no matter what kind of business you’re in, everybody’s selling, and you can’t get enough exposure to great ways to do things when you’re talking about sales. I want to talk a little bit about sales culture off the bat, and this is something that you talk about. And if you were to put it in a tidy little box, what are the things that contribute to a great winning sales culture? What does winning look like in that sense?

Hamish Knox: I appreciate you asking about that. Here’s the tidy little box on culture. It is the behaviour that is approved implicitly and explicitly. That’s it. So whatever behaviour is approved implicitly or explicitly, that is your corporate culture. So if top performers can come into meetings late or leave their cameras off if it’s a video call or they don’t have to submit reports on time or whatever that might be, that’s your culture. And on the flip side, if individuals are praised for disqualifying bad fit opportunities, for being accountable to their monthly proactive activity plans, that is your corporate culture. That’s it.

Sales Leaders Focus on Team Success, not Personal Glory.

Jeff Tomlin: That is a great way of thinking about things. And by the way, we’re big on the podcast here thinking about mental models, and that is a great concise model when you’re thinking about a sales culture and what matters. I wanted to ask you about leadership and developing people for the future because, at the end of the day, the leaders are the ones that make your organization a scalable and predictable system. In your opinion and from your experience what you see, what are the qualities that make exceptional sales leaders?

Hamish Knox: So I’ve been asked this question by a number of clients over the years who are the top seller. And as often happens, the top seller gets tapped on the shoulder and said, “Hey, guess what? We want you to be the sales manager or the sales leader, et cetera, et cetera.” And they call me up and go, “Hey, I need some coaching from you.” And I ask them this one question and it has two answers or it’s two questions, you have to pick an answer. Do you want to create success through yourself or success through others? Both are okay, but you have to pick one. And ultimately a sales leader is someone who creates success through others. So we want to find individuals who are genuinely interested in creating success through others, not being as my friend Pete calls them, the super rep with a title of sales leader.

Define Clear Next Steps and Remove Stalled Deals.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. I find all too often in sales organizations, you find people that have been elevated to the position of manager when it’s not necessarily the right role for them, but they want to be there because they think that it’s a natural career progression. And in order to get ahead, I’ve got to get into management. And it’s a thing that people in an organization have to understand, and it’s up to the organization to make sure that there’s a path for people to be very successful as an individual contributor or in management. And that expectation needs to be created, right?

Hamish Knox: Mm-hmm, totally.

Jeff Tomlin: Tell me a little bit about your approach to optimizing the sales funnel. At the end of the day, we’re trying to create efficient sales organizations, and one of those aspects is moving deals through a pipeline. So talk to me about how you think about deconstructing the sales funnel and removing bottlenecks. And then from that, how do you go about optimizing the sales cycle and deal size, and things like that?

Hamish Knox: Yeah. Great, I love this topic. So the first thing to share with the audience today is an acronym B-A-M-F-A-M, BAMFAM, book a meeting from a meeting. So my sales manager, his name is Gord, he was the guy who introduced me to Sandler. His rule of thumb was, if you, the individual contributor didn’t have a mutually agreed next step in your calendar with your buyer. So that didn’t mean, hey, I’m going to call Jeff in two weeks. It’s hey, Jeff and I have a meeting invite in Jeff’s calendar and my calendar for 2:30 PM next Tuesday, and here’s what we’re going to talk about. That opportunity was excised from the funnel. So when we have a funnel that maybe looks like a stomach and an antacid commercial, it’s all bloated in the middle, a quick razor for slimming that funnel down is to have all the sellers go out to their buyers and say, hey, Jeff, I forgot to get a clear next step in the calendar last time we met, when do you want to connect in the next 30 days to talk about are we going to continue moving forward or not? And the response or lack thereof from the buyer gives us all the information that we need. If the buyer doesn’t say, yeah, that sounds good, or they don’t get back to us within a few days, it’s probably a dead opportunity. Punt it from the funnel for now. It can always go back into the funnel when that buyer eventually reconnects.

Define Clear Sales Stages and Gather Critical Information.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Oftentimes, when I talk to experts about how do you efficiently move people through the pipeline. A lot of times when you dig into their processes, sometimes there’s a gray line between stages for them. And what you’re describing to me sounds like customer-verifiable outcomes. And you can verify, hey, was the meeting booked or not booked? And it’s a concrete thing that can be measured that, hey, I’ve taken this to the next step.

Hamish Knox: Absolutely. And then further to that is leaders giving their sellers a real process. So a process is what information do we need to gather at each stage, which is non-negotiable by the way, in order to move the opportunity down to the next layer of the funnel. So as an example, when I’m doing a speaking engagement, I’m sharing a generic type funnel, the five questions that I encourage all leaders to have their sellers answer the first time they speak with a buyer. Now, this might take a couple of conversations. The questions are: Why? So why do you want to talk to us about our services? Why now? So why are you contacting us now? Why us? As in, are we on your approved vendor list? Do we have an MSA or did you just Google us and we happen to show up? Do you have any money set aside to solve this problem? It’s not a how much, it’s a, do you have it yes or no? Either way is fine. I just want to understand is there money available or not. And then the last question, which is really key is, when do you need a solution implemented? Not when are you going to make a decision because that’s one of the worst questions that a seller can ask a buyer. It’s when do you need a solution implemented so that we can figure out if can we even deliver? Because when I sold SaaS, I would say, “Hey, Jeff, when are you going to make a decision? Tomorrow. When do you need it implemented? Yesterday. Okay, that’s a bit of a problem.” So those five questions before we move down to the next step. And I actually had one of my clients make checkboxes in their CRM at every stage. So when a seller entered an opportunity, they couldn’t move the opportunity to the next stage in the funnel until all those boxes were checked. Now, someone once said to me, “So Hamish still, wouldn’t the salespeople just check the boxes?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ve been in sales since I was 19. I’ve lied to my sales manager before. However, at some point, the data is going to bear out. And if I’ve got a whole bunch of opportunities bloating in the middle of my funnel, you’re going to be saying to me in a sales funnel review meeting, Hamish, how did you get all these opportunities down to the proposal presentation stage? Tell me all the information that you gathered. Walk me through that.” And then, of course, the truth comes out. And, well, I didn’t actually do it, I just wanted to make you think that I was moving things through the funnel.

Drive Buyer Action and Gather Qualifying Information.

Jeff Tomlin: I really liked the way that you described the questions too, because the questions themselves naturally move the person on the other end of the phone or the call toward action. Because all too often when you get someone on the other end of a sales discussion, people are predetermined to remain in a status quo because it’s safe. I know what I’m doing right now, it’s not killing me, but this thing over here, it could kill me and I need to be moved along. And the way that you phrased the question seemed to me to naturally move people toward taking action.

Hamish Knox: Absolutely. And also something that’s come up a lot recently with our clients is whatever comes out of the buyer’s mouth is the right answer. Now, we might not like the answer. That’s a completely separate thing. However, if a buyer is unwilling to respond to those initial questions, we teach our clients that real prospects will put skin in the game. And all I’m asking for early on is time skin. Give me some time to answer these questions to make sure that we might be a good fit. You may choose not to work with us, that’s fine. However, in order for us to figure out if we’re a good fit, I need to gather information because professional sellers get paid on the information gathered, not the information given. And sales leaders who are intentionally or unintentionally telling their sellers, send out as many quotes, do as many proposals as you can, are going to end up with a funnel that looks more like a stomach and an antacid commercial than an actual funnel that is consistent and predictable.

Technology Empowers Human Interaction, not Replaces it.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. By the way, so when you’re looking at funnels and you’re looking at sales cycles and things, we rely on technology to do that. And I wanted to make sure that I got your perspective on this. I see all too often that any type of organization, not just a sales organization, but we end up with technology that is underutilized. Over time people leave an organization they might necessarily have been the champion of a particular piece. I know that there are systems that are either underutilized or they’re not used at all, but we continue to pay for them. And so when you’re thinking about your sales technology stack and you’re trying to deconstruct, hey, what do we need, what do we not need, and should we be looking at other things, what do you want your technology to do at the end of the day?

Hamish Knox: I really want my technology to enable my sellers to have more effective human-to-human interactions. And so is that a technology that allows them to very quickly prepare for a meeting, pre-call plan for an interaction with a buyer? Is it something that will allow them to very quickly create prospect lists or to research buyers and what they might’ve been saying on social media or what may be said about them in traditional media or somewhere online so that they can better formulate their questions so that again, they can gather more information? What I am really terrified of is technology that a seller can essentially outsource their brain to. There’s been a phrase for a little while now that frustrates me about, you’re not going to be replaced by AI, you’re going to be replaced by a human using AI. And my comment is, “Well, if we’re all using AI, who’s going to get replaced?” But what happens I find with people who overuse AI is they abdicate a hundred percent to the AI. And what I see right now is AI is really good for about 80%. It’s going to get you 80% of the way there, and the magic is in that 20% of the human brain leveraging whatever the AI brings us to format it to that unique selling situation. So if my sellers are coming to me saying, “Hey, boss, we’d really like this cool calling tool, or we’d really like this cool tool that automatically does emails to a bunch of our buyers.” That terrifies me because what that’s telling me in codewords is, hey, boss, we don’t want to go through the effort of actually qualifying, we just want to have magic opportunities pop into our pipeline that we will then passively touch and try to move through, but they’ve already been put off because our initial communication didn’t sound like it came from a real human being. And to this day, we’re still selling to humans, and people are buying from humans, not machines.

Technology Improves Customer Experience through Focus and Implementation.

Jeff Tomlin: That makes a lot of sense to me. And boy, I sure like the idea that we want technology in order to create better customer experiences with our team and better interactions. Because I could look at any type of really productive technology or useful one that we’re using and frame the question around the customer experience at the end of the day rather than what it’s doing for us because it gets everybody thinking about the customer obsession and putting the customers first. So I’m thinking through it. You want to have a pipeline visualization tool. Well, why do you want it? Some people might say, “Well, because I want to be able to visualize the pipeline.” Well, no, you don’t. You want to do it so that you can deconstruct where people are getting stuck and ensure that we coach so that we’re having a productive experience with our customers. So I really like that. That’s a great mental model in thinking about how to… Well, how to think about your technology. What you buy, what you don’t buy, and why you want to use it at the end of the day makes a lot of sense to me.

Hamish Knox: Yeah, I appreciate that. The other thing I would encourage all sales leaders to do when they are rolling out a new initiative, and my second book was on the human side of change is make it law. One of my friend says, “The quickest way to kill any new initiative with a sales team is to say, we’re going to try this,” because to the sales team, that sounds like, oh, this is a flavour of the month. It does not matter what we say, it matters what the other person hears. So when I say, “Hey group, we’re going to try this new AI technology,” they’re like, “Oh, great. Hamish went to a conference. He saw a guy speak, he got all pumped and excited. He dumped a bunch of money into it, and this too shall pass.” Whereas if we say, “Hey, group, we are now using this AI technology for our pre-call planning because of this reason, this reason, this reason. We’re going to support you with training and coaching and all those good things. We expect you to use it. Here’s the payoff to you. Here’s the payoff to the business. Go use it.”

Mindset Shift Drives Behaviour Change and Team Success.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, I like that. Talk to me a little bit about mindset. And I heard that it’s something that you talk about. And in order to have a real winning organization and successful individuals working inside of that organization, mindset is really critical. So talk about a winning mindset in the sales world, and then number two, how can the leaders that are in that organization coach to develop that type of mindset?

Hamish Knox: Yeah, I love talking about mindset, and one of the mindsets that we coach all of our clients to have is you win or you learn. So there’s no losing, you’re winning or learning. Now, the key part of that is you have to implement your learning. So we can’t just say, well, what did you learn? Well, I learned this. Okay, what are you going to do differently next time? Nothing. Okay, that’s not winner learn mindset, that’s comfort zoning. Something you brought up earlier Jeff is, the brain’s like, “Well, this isn’t killing me,” and our brain is wired to keep us safe, which often means stuck. So when we’re adjusting mindset, what actually has to change is our activities. So as an example, if I don’t feel like I can challenge my spouse. Let’s just use that as an example—so interpersonal, human-to-human communication. My spouse has a behaviour or a habit that I don’t really like and I want to address it with them, but I don’t believe I can. Well, that means I’m never going to do it. So the way that I change that belief is by adjusting my behaviour. And so then I would say ask them a question instead of making a statement. So I wanted to understand where that habit or where that behavior is coming from, and then I can start sharing how I feel about that behaviour and how it affects me. Same thing with a sales leader is if they’re noticing that their sellers are or seller or individual is not doing or saying or is doing or saying something that the sales leader feels is holding that seller back from realizing their personal goals, then they can go chat with them about, “Hey, help me understand this a bit. I keep hearing that you’re getting stuck at the gatekeeper. You’re not getting passed on to the decision-maker. Help me understand what’s going on there.” And then we can start to unpack the underlying beliefs that are keeping that seller stuck and then coach them to adjust their behaviours in small ways. All we want to do is be 1% different and better every single day, because after a while that compounding pays off. So we can’t change mindsets overnight. Humans aren’t light switches. And we can’t sit around going, I love cold calls, I love cold calls, I love cold calls, and hoping that our mindset about cold calls changes. We have to go out and make cold calls and start to get new data sets that say, oh, cold calls actually work. And because we’re going to fall off the wagon because we’re human, we need a support person or support people like a sales leader to say, “you know what, Hamish? You had a bad day. That’s okay. Go home, have a great evening, come back, and tomorrow is a new day. Let’s go back and do it again. I’m here to support you.”

Sales Success Requires Mindset Shift and Coaching for Behaviour Change.

Jeff Tomlin: And that’s a great way of thinking about things in any type of aspect of your life, just want to be 1% better every single day. I really appreciate that. I could talk about this stuff all day long because as an organization, we’re constantly looking not only for ways to improve our performance but also ways to think about things that make it easier for us to make really good decisions especially the way that you unpacked a few things at the beginning and then talking about how you think about technology. If people wanted to continue the conversation with you, how do they get in touch with you?

Connecting with Hamish Knox 

Hamish Knox: So I am literally the world’s number one Google result for Hamish Knox. So very easy. Google Hamish Knox and you’ll probably come across me. LinkedIn, I’m easy to find, and then if they want to check out my podcast, they can go to fullfunnelfreedom.com. Or if they want to connect with me to support them in sustainably scaling their sales, they can go to go.sandler.com/hamish, which is H-A-M-I-S-H.

Jeff Tomlin: Hamish, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the Conquer Local Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us and share some of your wisdom. Hope to see you back some time so we can continue the conversation. I bid you a fantastic day and a great week.

Hamish Knox: Thank you, Jeff. You too.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: Real sales expert there, I love chats with the sales experts. The first takeaway is Sales Culture and Process. A strong sales culture is built on clear expectations and behaviours. Implementing a structured sales process with defined stages and qualifying questions is essential for driving results. In the end, leaders play the crucial role in fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

Another takeaway is about the Human Element in Sales. While AI can be a valuable tool, human connection and effective communication remain crucial in sales. Focus on building relationships, understanding buyer needs, and overcoming internal obstacles through mindset shifts and consistent improvement.

If you’ve enjoyed Hamish’s episode on Transforming Sales Culture and Performance Through Process and Mindset, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 707: Exposing Strategies to 10x Your Sales Growth with Joe Ingram or Episode 704: Unleashing the Secrets of Sales Success with Doug C. Brown.

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