Building A Freight Sales Team | Episode 327

SPEAKER_00: 0:19

Welcome back. It's another episode of the Freight 360 podcast. We're going to talk building a sales team today and what success looks like there. But first, make sure to subscribe, share us with your friends in the industry, leave us a review, comment, comment on the YouTube video if you're on there. Check out the Freight Broker Basics course on our website if you're looking for some good training material for your team. And this episode is brought to you by Ascend TMS, the recommended TMS for new brokers. So make sure to check that out. You can get 90 days of their pro pro plan absolutely free. No credit card needed. Just make sure you use the referral code down in our show notes. And uh, Ben, let's get into it, man. What's uh what's happening lately? I know but now that both of our teams are officially out of the uh NFL playoffs, we can focus on our things, but what's going on?

SPEAKER_01: 1:09

Well, honestly, the only thing in the news, really, and I think also super relevant to the industry is like do you hear about the huge storm coming in? Like, I pulled this up literally to read this. It's been for the past 24 hours or something, I've been seeing it. But this is the one I just pulled up. Historic ice storm coming, a destructive and potentially catastrophic ice storm to impact the South this weekend. I'm but from what I've read, it looks like Friday through Sunday, like maybe late Friday, widespread ice will cripple travel, cause major power outages, and down trees. This is a rare high impact event, potentially the worst in decades since the great ice storm of 94. Computer models calling for ice accumulations over two inches in some areas, stress that people living or shipping, or customers, or drivers, right? Dallas, Texas, Shreveport, Louisiana, Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte and North Carolina should prepare like a hurricane is coming.

SPEAKER_00: 2:07

Yeah, Stock Cry controller's post on LinkedIn. Um it's massive. And we just like anyone who's in the Northeast, uh, maybe it's just Buffalo. I don't know. I feel like we could target it here. We just had a nasty, nasty storm this week that just wrapped up. I think we got we had like two days straight of of um lake effects snow where it was like white out, schools are canceled, and um, you know, great timing. The the winch on my Polaris Ranger um stopped working, so I can't lift or lower my plow blade, plow blade, so I'm just pushing snow around, but I was able to get my driveway cleared. But it's at you're absolutely right because when that kind of weather comes through, and especially when it's widespread, like a storm like this, it's going to impact shipping, right? You have highways that you know either trucks can't drive on.

SPEAKER_01: 2:56

It's a hundred-car pileup from your storm. Did you see that on the news? The storm that hit you there where it was, but it was significant.

SPEAKER_00: 3:03

Um I think it was I-90. So which is common. That's our main like throughway that comes through Buffalo. Um, but yeah, I mean, you get drivers that aren't comfortable driving in that in those conditions. You get states where they'll shut down the highways for empty vehicles, like Kathy Hokel very often will, if it gets too windy, she'll say no empty, there's an empty trailer ban on our interstates. Um, you obviously customer expectations on pickups, transit times, delivery appointments, all that stuff, right? This is going to impact a, you know, the the regional markets that'll be uh affected by the storm the same way that a hurricane would, but on a much larger scale because of how big. If you just look at a map of this storm that's coming in, it is like from Texas up through Maine. Like it's a giant wave all the way up.

SPEAKER_01: 3:54

So yeah, you're gonna see rates pushed up, you're gonna see service delays everywhere. But the other thing, like, I used to do a lot of work out of Chicago for years, and like the other thing that happens is trucks don't start, which is for people in the south, don't really think about, but like when those big freezeovers would come through Chicago, like I had a couple like really large carriers I worked with every day, and like that have 150 trucks, and more than half like wouldn't start in the morning. Like they would literally start their day at like four in the morning to try to get all the trucks warmed up and running before the drivers came in. And like I remember so many times being on the phone with them, and then just like, dude, like half our trucks, we still can't get started and can't get them defrosted yet. So, like, you're gonna see issues on the road, but you're also gonna see issues where like drivers just aren't able to get where they need to because like the trucks just aren't starting because it's that cold. So, yep, I mean, this is gonna be significant, and it will likely, if this comes in over the weekend, like you'll see issues heading into the weekend, but you will certainly see them Monday. You'll see capacity tighten up, you'll see a larger volume of loads that need to get moved, and usually a fewer number of carriers, at least, probably even Monday, able to get where they're supposed to be. So a lot to prepare for, creates a lot of opportunities, which is good news for the prospecting. Really good opportunity for these companies you've been talking to to be able to help out with a one-off load here or there, because their typical carriers that are running these loads aren't able to make it there in time. So, a lot of these things, like again, I don't want to say like they're good for the industry because like anytime the roads get dangerous and anything, like I hesitate to use the word like positively. However, like when problems happen, that creates a lot of opportunities for us as brokers to be able to help. Yep. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 5:40

Yeah, I just pulled up the like the dense uh uh impacts looks like Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, um, Tennessee. So you got like that whole southern, south central, and southeastern part. It looks like you'll be fine in Florida, no worries. Um, but this is big. Like there, those are made, there's major highways and um traffic arteries that'll be impacted.

SPEAKER_01: 6:13

So that and regular people that live in the south, like those areas like shut down when there's a dusting of snow. Like I grew up by you, not as not as cold, or I didn't get as much snow as you, but like I spent a lot of weekends driving in the mountains and going skiing. So, like to me, it never really made sense. But like, even if you're in like Georgia and stuff and I have friends and colleagues that work up there, like if there's even a dusting of snow, people just like don't leave their house. So, like, you're not only gonna see issues with you know truck drivers, but you're gonna see issues with just like typical traffic and people having issues, yeah, not having winter tires, obviously, or all season tires. People are gonna have super large issues when they have rear-world drive. All the stuff we don't think like you take for granted living in the north and having all-wheel drive and like winter tires, like people in the south and in Tennessee and Georgia and for sure Louisiana, like just don't even have those on their vehicles.

SPEAKER_00: 7:06

The other thing, too, is the um what I remember living in Virginia and getting like basically a dusting of snow, and people freak out because one, they don't know how to drive in it, but two, the equipment to clear this to the snow and to pre-treat the roads for ice, they don't have the volume of equipment that we have in you know the the winter prone states and areas. So um, yep, get ahead of this stuff, talk to your customers and set expectations ahead of time. Um, other uh sports already breezed through it, but the Bills lost in overtime um to Denver, the Denver Broncos. Did you see that Bo Nicks ended up breaking his ankle to or his foot, and he's out for the season? So they win.

SPEAKER_01: 7:55

It's like the first time since like the 60s or the 70s that like they're bringing in a second string quarterback in the playoffs. I think in the playoffs at all, for sure this deep in the playoffs.

SPEAKER_00: 8:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the playoffs for sure. I was gonna say back to the the Eagles in like 2018 or whatever it was, they had um I think it was Carson Wentz got hurt during the season, and they brought a backup in and went they won the Super Bowl. But that was that was during the season. But yeah, for sure, definitely um interesting. The Seattle Seahawks, man, I don't I don't know if anyone can beat that team. Um they're playing the Rams this weekend. Um I'm kind of I don't know why. I'm just kind of like picking the Rams as like my team to to go the distance. I think the Patriots will be in the Super Bowl because they're playing a backup quarterback against you know in Denver at home in uh Foxboro. But I don't know. I think I think the NFC will win and kind of just rooting for the Rams. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. Bills fired Sean McDermott head coach, so we're gonna have some new leadership next year. And so I mean the Bills and the Steelers. Well, there's like 10 teams that are gonna have new coaches.

SPEAKER_01: 9:03

And the Dolphins. Yeah, a lot of them.

SPEAKER_00: 9:05

Yeah, Dolphins just hired a coach. Um, the Giants hired Harbaugh. Hey, you never know. Sean McDermott might end up in Pittsburgh, Mike Tomlin could end up in Buffalo. Who knows, man? You could have all kinds of stuff going on. We'll see. All right, let's talk building a uh sales team. So we were kind of talking um off air beforehand about some stuff, and we've we've like talked through this in a lot of our content, but I I want to break it down um in detail on today's episode because I've seen we've we've experienced it when people, when we've coached companies and business leaders, um, we've experienced it ourselves in companies that we've worked for when um the the direction and methods of which building the sales team either don't exist or are done incorrectly. Um, and what I'm talking about here is if your goal is, hey, I want to take my small operation and I want to grow it by creating a uh sales SOP and putting bodies in seats and having them properly trained and setting goals and metrics and executing on that and holding people accountable to the things that we teach, right? Like, you know, things such as how are you generating your leads, what tools are you using? Um, is there a requirement for what your pipeline needs to look like at a certain point in time? And what I've always really loved about some of the most successful and largest brokerages is that their method of doing this is pretty tested and true. Like I'm talking about like the TQLs and the CH Robinsons and the you know the other large ones out there is you you know usually fairly quickly if someone is gonna make it or not. So can you can you talk through before we kind of dig into like the the structure of it all, but when you started off, um how generally speaking, how did they how did they rate a new broker on their like their weekly numbers or monthly numbers, or what kind of metrics and stats were they looking at? And if you can give any kind of timelines too.

SPEAKER_01: 11:15

Yeah, so the first thing is the reason that W-2s tend to end up in some ways more profitable than agents, or just like let's just think of like some basic examples. I mean, as an agent model, right? Like an agent's gonna get 70% of that commission, right? Now, the difference is like if you're going to work for a well-known reputable agency, like you've got to bring a book of business. Now, that does two really important things. One, it gives you a proven track record, so you like don't have the training cost or need to pay for additional training or pay somebody while they're being trained, which are all expenses to a business and risk.

SPEAKER_00: 11:59

Salaries, all the things.

SPEAKER_01: 12:01

And then the upside is like they're bringing in cash immediately with their book of business, so they're immediately profitable at a lower percentage, but it's immediate, right? And a lot of that risk isn't there. Now, on the flip side, just a standard.

SPEAKER_00: 12:15

I'll also add they're they're harder to it's harder to find someone to bring in that way, but it's got a higher rate of success.

SPEAKER_01: 12:24

Lower risk when you hit it.

SPEAKER_00: 12:25

When you hit it, yeah. But you retain less profit as a company in exchange for all of that.

SPEAKER_01: 12:31

Well, flip side, a cradle to the grave model, right? For like round numbers, you're probably like 20, 25% commission for everything you move that is invoiced and paid by your customer, meaning like you don't earn commission until your customer pays that invoice, right? So if you're at 25% on that number, right, the company keeps 75%, which at first seems like, well, that makes way more sense. Like I'm gonna keep more money. However, you have one, a much larger longer timeline and training cost because the person doesn't know the industry at all. They come in day one, don't know anything. So your first four to six months, you're just working under another broker, doing check calls, track and trace, learning TMS, learning the industry, covering loads mostly. Then little by little, probably around like your third, fourth month, maybe you're handling a few small customers for your broker. You're handing a little bit more communication to the customer as well as the carrier. And you spend most of that time, honestly, like covering loads and living on the carrier side to really understand and experience because there's a big difference between reading something, knowing it, right, and then learning it, and doing it long enough that you can just do it without thinking, right? Like those are very important.

SPEAKER_00: 13:47

And I can I add a note to that too. So in this scenario that you're giving, there already needs to be a brokerage operation happening before you can build a team around it, right? We oftentimes see people that they just want to start a company and hire salespeople and have them go do it. But a new sales rep can't come in and learn the business to your point unless they can do it alongside somebody else who's already doing it. So if that's you and you are the sole broker, they're gonna be learning from you. If it's if it's a larger company, you've got, you know, or say if it's an established company that's got a, you know, maybe a couple brokers in there, that's okay too, because you have some, you know, something already there and it that's existing that they can learn from. So you want to make sure before you even go down this road of growing the team that there's already some brokerage business happening. Otherwise, they have nothing to learn from and you know, no one to ask questions, you know, et cetera. So, but continue on.

SPEAKER_01: 14:46

There's this quote, right, that I think really kind of encompasses this. It's like, tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn, right? And like that's what we're talking about is like if I'm moving freight and you don't know the job at all, I can involve you and then I can teach you, but you're gonna actually learn it and be able to apply it once you go stand on your own. If I have no loads, even if I'm a great teacher, I don't have the opportunity for you to practice enough, right? So it just takes longer. I mean, theoretically it's still doable, but you've got to do the thing long enough to get good at it, right? Now, the other big risk is that like hiring salespeople is very risky, very expensive, even when you're really good at it, right? Like, take a large brokerage that's been doing this for over two decades that has thousands of employees, right? They are expecting to hire 10 people and maybe have one or two out of each of those 10 people make it beyond a year. Most of those people will be let go in three months or six months or eight months for a number of reasons, right?

SPEAKER_00: 15:50

Either they just give you uh a little homework assignment, right? If you guys want to, if you want proof of this, do a resume search on Indeed or something and just look up like a TQL or another one of the larger brokerages. The most of the people that have a resume up there that has TQL on it, they were there for like five months, five and a half months. They got to that point where TQL told them you don't make the cut.

SPEAKER_01: 17:06

Yes. Yep. So that's why it's way, it's way riskier to do the W-2, but it's always risk versus return. It's the same thing in any investment, right? Whether it's a company investing or a person investing in crypto versus a blue chip company that grows slowly like a railroad, right? Like you're gonna have less risk that the price of what you invest in it goes down. The more risk, the more likely it will go down, but also the more likely it will go up a lot, right? So there's always that risk return. And that's why those numbers are what they are. The company's investing in 10 people, and it's gonna pay them for five to six months and expect very little in return. Like the first two or three months, it's just money out the door. So the big companies will pay just for round numbers, like four grand a month, right? Maybe a little more now, but just for ballpark, you can call it five a month. So, like that's 15 grand invested in every one of those 10 people, and you're really getting almost nothing back in return yet. Maybe they're covering some loads, maybe they're doing some track and trace, so they're helpful, but you could get that overseas, for example, for like 25% of that cost. You could be paying$1,500 or two grand a month for track and trace support immediately. Your three people or 10 people you bring in, you're paying them each 15 grand, right? For three months, not really getting much in return. That's 15 grand times 10 people. That's a hundred and fifty thousand dollar investment and no expectation of return, just table stakes if you started with 10 people, right? Yep. So now once you're rounding, call it three, four months, you've been covering loads, you've been tracking and tracing, and like you're actually being able to provide enough value that the company is getting something in return for that money. Not profit, but reduced expenses to hire other people to go help this broker. Now, what they're gonna do is, and I want to say it's somewhere around four months, it might be five, I can't really remember exactly the time frame, but give or take, around there, that's when they typically will move people into what they'll call like the they called it a TQL, they call it the pit, or at least in our office they did, which is like you are going to sit in the corner of the office, meaning like, I don't know, if it's a big open floor, there's four big long benches with computers on each side, like one corner of that office is just the training sales piece. And the reason they do that is so like they're gonna move a whole training class, anywhere from 10 to 15 people in there with some of the people that are still in there from the last one. And your only job now is you are not covering loads, you're not tracking and tracing, you are doing nothing but making cold calls all day long, right? That's when you get into the accountability piece.

SPEAKER_00: 19:41

So once you move there, and there's a lot of tell me timeline wise, how how where is this? Let's say day one you're hired, how how long until you're in a situation like that?

SPEAKER_01: 19:50

I'd say probably four months, like three or four months, somewhere around there. And again, it's a little subjective, depending on like how many loads you're moving and how quickly these people are learning. But like they do it pretty standardized at the big companies, but it's probably around four months. Um, so now you're into the like literally just sales, just cold calling. So your first month, the expectations are solely on activity. Like, think of that other quote, like you miss a hundred sh you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. The most important fundamental aspect of succeeding in sales is first making enough calls. Because even if you're really good and you make five calls a day and somebody's really bad at this and they make a hundred a day, the person making a hundred a day will succeed far quicker than the person making five that is very skilled, right? So you really just focus on are you making a hundred calls a day for round numbers? Some companies are 80, some expectations are 120, but 100's kind of like in that sweet spot of like averaging that. And you want to do it like over a week, meaning, like, I I back it off a little bit for people that are new. And I think like, if my expectation is a hundred calls a day, you should be averaging 400 per week. Meaning, like, you got one day of lead generation that gets mixed through. The other days. And your average over that week should end up around 400. And your top performers will hit closer to five. The people that will end up getting let go sooner are usually not even hitting 50 or 60, right? So that's your first indicator. Like, is the person willing to do the thing that makes everybody uncomfortable, which is cold calling all day long and getting rejected? Can this person sustain this? Because that's your first hurdle, right? And some people will just go after a week or two, like, this isn't for me. I thought it was. I don't really enjoy this. I'm going to go do something else. Okay. So first activity. So your first, and I'm going to say it's a maybe one month, but it might be two, where the expectation is just phone calls. But right around like your second or third month, now you're starting to look at like call time. And like to be honest, like I'd say about in six weeks, you start looking at their call time. And here's what that tells you, which is a little different than just making phone calls. So if you are working a group of leads, oh, and this is a third thing that really helps this is you have like a finite number of companies that you can work in your name at any given time. And at first, when I was there, I was like, that's terrible. And that makes this so much harder. But what I've learned since is when you are only able to have call it 150 active companies in your name, like there's a whole bucket of leads you can just cold call. But if you are gonna add one to your name, meaning like you are gonna work that company and keep following up, you have to give one up, which does a few things. One, it forces you to follow up more with companies to actually get somebody to talk to you, know you, and trust you before you decide this is a company I'm really gonna pursue or let go. And it creates scarcity because if I can only have a hundred or 150 leads, I'm really thinking about the companies I'm trying to prospect. I'm really paying attention to them, who I'm trying to reach there, other people I'm trying to reach there. And if I find another company in the bucket of other leads that people just aren't working, I need to make a decision. Is there anybody that I want to let go in order to add this one? And when you're really forced, because you've got to at some point make profit, which we'll get to in a minute, but like you really start looking at the leads you're working and they become more valuable to you because they're finite, like because you have a limit on it. If you're working a thousand leads, what ends up happening is people call a bunch of them one time, never follow up, and end up working like a small group, and then like nobody's working those leads. So it really does something I think that is valuable, which is a mindset shift in how you approach what questions you ask and when you decide they're qualified versus unqualified.

SPEAKER_00: 23:56

I want to add something in here, too, is that in order for all of this to happen up to this point, you have to have tools that your folks can use to be successful. Now, think about this everything from well, you know, we already talked through the initial like onboarding, training, et cetera. You know, so you've got to have the ability for them to learn the basics of the industry. But when it comes time for them to start prospecting, they have to have tools like lead generation. And it's not just the actual tool, it's it's being taught how to do this, this task, right? So knowing where to look, what tools to use, what sorts of companies, how should I segment my leads? How do I know if a lead is someone that's qualified for me to prospect, right? Then you've got how do I organize all of this and actually um log my notes and my calls with a CRM? And I would highly encourage you to have some sort of unified method across the um across the board in your office so that, you know, if you got three new people, they're not on three different CRMs or three different lead gen platforms. They're all doing the same thing and they can help and learn and grow from each other so that when you compare them against one another, the playing field's level. They're all being given access to the exact same training, the exact same leadership, the exact same tools, etc. Um, so they all have the same opportunity. And this is where I really think also having your regularly scheduled one-on-ones with leadership is really, really important to get feedback. And early on, those one-on-ones could be like two or three times a week. You might do like a Monday, um, a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, for example. Or, you know, as time goes on, maybe it's just once a week. Um, but it is very important when somebody is new and learning that they have a regular um scheduled time to meet with leadership to get feedback and to ask questions and to have those conversations. Because if you just say like, yeah, I'll meet with you once a week, um, we'll just kind of do it on the fly. It's very easy to get busy and be like, ah, we'll skip this week and we'll just do next week. And you're doing a disservice to your team, your new team members, if you do that. But I just wanted to point out there that they've got to have access to the correct tools. And again, there's money and cost involved and the tools on top of paying these folks.

SPEAKER_01: 26:09

I'd say CRM table stakes. Everybody in your company and your sales team needs to be working out of the CRM. They need to be logging notes when they're speaking to somebody, and they need to be recording those things. And like establishing that habit is so important because most people think it slows them down. It's really just the investment of time to get used to the tool. Because once you've used it for a week or two and you're really doing this with every call, like it doesn't slow you down. Like I can use a CRM and log every note from every call and make more calls than most people just because I'm used to using it and I've done it enough, right? Just like anything else. The more you do it, the faster you get at it and the more effective you're at. Because like it is absolutely impossible to work even 150 leads without writing notes and being able to see them in one place for previous conversations and emails. That all needs to be in there. And from a management perspective or like a coaching perspective, like I can't really help somebody get a get a prospect to like closing and turning them into a customer if I can't see what was happening and when it was happening, what was said on the phone calls, what we know about them, what emails were going back and forth, how and what we're saying on those calls, all of that stuff is incredibly valuable from a management or training perspective or coaching perspective to be able to get somebody new and to be able to help them properly, right?

SPEAKER_00: 27:35

Now, I want to I want to add in there too, like on a CRM to your point. So this is where if you're gonna do a one-on-one, right? And I'll just use HubSpot, for example, because I've used it, you've used it, uh, and there's other ones out there. But if you're logging notes, if you're logging calls, if you're logging emails, you can easily run a report and show over the past, we'll say seven days, right? How many emails did I log, how many new contacts or companies did I add in, how many phone calls did I log, right? And then if you're gonna look at also your if you're gonna have your calls recorded, I want a uh a report of the call logs. And it's gonna show like every call, when it was, what number it went to, and how long the talk time was, and then you should have a like a summary at the bottom. You know, sales rep John Doe yesterday made 56 phone calls and had three hours of talk time. And then Jane Doe, right next to him, um, you know, maybe made a hundred calls, but had, you know, an hour and 20 minutes of talk time because it was just a bunch of voicemails. Or you might have someone that only had 12 phone calls, but they had two and a half hours of talk time because it was like really good calls. And those are the things you want to be able to talk about and and dissect in a one-on-one and get feedback from your leadership. Um, and this, if you're building a team, I'm giving you this as prescribed guidance. Um, you as a leader should be doing this and giving that feedback and talking to your reps and figuring out what does this objective um stat that I'm being that's being reported, what does it mean? And why does it look one way for one person and different for another?

SPEAKER_01: 30:27

So, yes, and I'll give you two examples that are extreme. One person is calling a thousand leads over 10 days, and every one of those hundred calls every 10 days is the first call to that company. The other person is working 150 leads and they're following up, right, literally 10 times as often as the person with 10 times more leads, right? Call it 15, you know, 1,500 leads versus 150, right? You're forced to keep calling the company back in a shorter time frame and reach other people there to get somebody on the phone. And what you want is you want somebody to be making more attempts at the same company, not one attempt to lots of companies. Because one, you need follow-ups and you need to speak to somebody many times for them to know you at all, to trust you to build any rapport before you're going to be able to get to any details about working with them. And second of all, like what that also does is once I spoke to you once, when I speak to you the second time, even if it takes me four phone calls to you and you pick up on the fifth, I speak to you, we talk for two or three minutes. Then I call you again, sixth call, no answer. But then I call you the seventh time and you answer again my second conversation. That conversation is probably gonna go from two minutes to like maybe five minutes or eight minutes. Then the third time I speak to you, maybe two weeks later, three weeks later, or one week later, that call might be 15, 20 minutes because we know each other. We've got a little bit of familiarity, we've talked a little bit on how we could help each other. You trust me a bit to share me some details on lanes, we're talking a little bit more on how we might actually work together. That call might be 20, 25 minutes. So as you speak to somebody more frequently or in higher number, the calls get longer. And what that matters is like that's why you go from just number of phone calls made and you transition into number of calls made and call time. Because once you're in your second and third month, you should be able to make the same amount of calls, like 100 a day, but you're now reaching that company your fourth or fifth time in some cases, and you'll have 15, 20 minute calls. And if you do that with a good group of leads, meaning like a finite number, somewhere from 150 to 200, I would say 250, right? Like your call time in your second to third month and in your third month, you'll start hitting 45 minutes to an hour to an hour and a half on some days, and you'll average around an hour a little more if you're doing that well. Because that means you're actually connecting with people, you're learning about that company, and you're determining like, are they qualified, unqualified, and are we a fit to work together? Because that's your first, not your first accountability, but like that's your transition from like just taking shots on goal to like, are I taking the right shots over and over again? Because now that you're talking to like a group of 200 companies, you're probably really speaking to like 20, 25 of them, 15 to 25, like enough that you know about that company. And now you can start to sit with your manager like once a week, like you said, and go like, these are my hot leads or my warm leads. Like these 25 companies, I'm actively speaking to somebody there. These are their load volumes. This is the kind of freight they move. This is how many lanes they move, give or take. And like now we're gonna start quoting some of them and trying to feel whether or not we're fit to like actually get onboarded and maybe start moving loads. That's where you're gonna transition into your next stage. So you got activity, then activity and time. Now your third one is gonna be like, I think the benchmark was like you needed to move, it was like a handful of loads, maybe like two or three loads a month in like your fourth month. Like, have you onboard at least one or two companies or three, and have you moved at least a few loads? Because once you've moved a few loads, and it that's a little subjective. This is why you're meeting with your manager, because like maybe I'm talking to five companies and I haven't moved a load, but I'm really close to onboarding a good number of that five. Maybe you made it really far with one company and they gave you loads faster. So you've got more literal loads moving and some money coming in the door, but I'm not necessarily behind you because like I just ended up a little more successful with more companies and haven't gotten any of them to the finish line. You got to the finish line with one, and we're pretty apples to apples in regards to like expectations and what we should be doing.

SPEAKER_00: 34:45

I want to, so I want to give this to you. I know we've talked about how long it takes to convert a customer and all that. And a lot of it comes down to learning how to prospect, how to generate leads, et cetera. Um, I'll give you a real a real case scenario. We had a guy start with us just a couple weeks ago, experienced broker. He worked at uh TQL for a number of years, took time out of the industry, and um waited out his his non-compete, non-solicit, et cetera. Gets back in, gets right to prospecting. He's calling, emailing, following up, etc. In um less than two weeks, he converted two new customers and was already within his first week and a half, his first customer was quoting and looking to book his first load. So it is possible to do this quickly if you put the call volume in once you've got the knowledge and experience of how to prospect. So if I think what you'll find as a leader, if if you've got a new rep and you this will happen, that is not converting early on and they've gone through all the training and they've gotten, you know, they have all the tools, I would highly encourage you to look at their activity and then further look at the quality of their activity and what they're doing. So if you see that they're not making phone calls, or that maybe they're making phone calls, but if you dig deeper into it, you realize that they're not calling the right person, right? You'll typically find that that's what the issue is is you know, they're either not doing the the right amount of reps or they're doing the wrong types of reps. Like someone who wants to send out 50 emails a day instead of making 50 phone calls. Well, emails don't get responded to. Just point blank. We had someone that I did like a uh a review with them after they did a massive email campaign to like 20,000 customers. They had zero responses. Zero. No one even replied and told them to F off. They just no one just didn't get a response. And that's why I kind of laugh when people are like, oh, I'm just gonna do a big email campaign. No, it's the wrong kind of activity. You've got to pick up the phone and make phone calls. Um, so it can be done. Like I said, this guy's in his third week now, and he's he's already like, you know, looking at setting up more and more customers because he knows the kinds of companies to call. It's not like it's an old customer of his from the past. This is just, hey, I know the types of companies to call, I know the the types of people at these companies to call. I have the right tools to do research and find the job title and the phone number for these people, etc. So there's gonna come a point in time where you've got to make a decision on some of these reps, and you'll find out, like, for some, they may just not be a fit for your company at all. And it's time to let them go. And you should have that expectation from day one that here's what we're going to expect out of you after, you know, this certain period of time. And there may be others that you're like, hey, you well, there's a whole spectrum. You could have on the other end, like, hey, you're you're gonna graduate training early because you're already you're surpassing what our expectation is ahead of schedule. And then you might find others that um are slower and need more help, or you might find some that they were really good on the carrier sales side in in operations and track and trace and booking trucks, but just not at selling to customers. So maybe you've then identified if your business model supports it, we want to keep this person, but we're gonna have them assign to another broker to help that broker with their book of business for the long term. And then it's gonna be a very different comp package on how they're paid, how they're commissioned, et cetera. But you've got to have, in my opinion, you've got to have expectations up front. So someone's not just surprised after five or six months that they're either being let go or told that they're not performing to standard or that their jobs are gonna change, et cetera.

SPEAKER_01: 38:23

Well, that's and again, that's where like you should be meeting with them weekly at the very longest, every other week, and going through what your expectations are, how they're doing, and asking them what you can do to support them. And then from their point of view, they should be able to tell you which companies they're making progress with, what questions they have for you, and what they what you can do to help them to close some more of them faster, right? So like now you're in like accountability results land where like activity still matters, call time still matters, but now you got to book, say, twelve hundred dollars in margin a month. Like that's your first benchmark. Like, and that's gonna be like probably your fourth or fifth month, right? Or maybe those two months, that's the expectation. And if somebody's close to it and they're hitting like 900 or 1,000 or 800 and one, you're gonna help coach them along to get them over it. If the person has been now at like the six month mark where they've been doing nothing but sales for three months and they've onboarded nobody, they can't tell you anything about any of the leads they're working. They have not built rapport with anybody there. Like you're gonna start having the conversation about like maybe this isn't the right fit for you, because like now we're starting to expect actual results, right? So now you're probably gonna start working them out or putting them on like a performance improvement plan where it's like, hey, you get another 45 days. Here's my expectation of you in 45 days. You got to bring on one customer and move one load, maybe, right? And you can try to work with them, right? So this is where it gets a little subjective, but there are objective numbers. So it'll be like a thousand or twelve hundred right around month five. Then in month six and seven, like the expectation is gonna go to like 2,500 now on a monthly basis. Now, if you're hitting those numbers and you got a bunch of warm leads, you're about to close, right? Like now you're gonna be working your way, graduating out of the pit. And then the next benchmark that or target is probably in like your six to eight month mark, is like your expectation is now like you've been selling for a significant amount of time. And the expectation from the company's perspective is like you've got to hit four grand a week in GP. Yep. Now it's good round numbers for some bigger companies because four grand, right? 25% commission, you're getting four grand in salary. You don't earn any commission until you make more than four grand a week. Because 25% of four grand a week is a thousand times four weeks in a month. That's your four grand. You're basically you got to cover your salary and then some before you're in commission. So it's both the incentive from the company's perspective that like they need you to get to a place where you're at least covering what they're paying you, and they've got to make back what they paid to train you, which the company's still in the hole for. But from your perspective as a salesperson, you want to get over that number as fast as you can because like you didn't take the job to make four grand a month. You took the job to make six figures. So, like both of you are working towards the same objective of getting over that four grand a week as fast as possible so you can actually start earning commission, which is why you took the job in the first place.

SPEAKER_00: 41:25

Yeah. Yep, exactly. Um, I'll give you some some general, like what I've seen timeline-wise. I'm like myself, I remember the first when I and I came from trucking before I went to brokerage. Um, so it was a little bit, it's it's it's very different. So it's a same industry, but it's different parts of it. Um, I remember like six weeks in being like, I might, I think I actually did. I think I went and like interviewed for another job because I was like, I don't know if this is for me. And my boss like encouraged me. He's like, no, he's like, you're he's like, you have like you have I don't it wasn't he didn't say like the gift of gab, but he had basically you have the personality to do this if you could just continue to put the reps in, et cetera. And I think I was like three months, like two and a half, three months in is where I really started to like get traction, start to convert. And within like six months, it was like boom, like let's off to the races. But I have seen people that by their own accord within like a month are very aware that like I This is not for me. Right. And it's very good for someone to be self-aware. And if they're not self-aware, this is where your leadership needs to be having those regular meetings about, you know, how do you feel about the high, the high-paced um, you know, environment of this job? Um, how do you feel about it being in a loud office where people are constantly making calls and, you know, getting frustrated when they get hung up on, et cetera? Um so you've got to have that. But I've seen people that, you know, if you gotta tell them it's not working out, it's usually within like four to six months. If they're putting in some activity, um, you're gonna know if the results aren't coming. And that's why, like your four grand, four grand a week example, you can adjust those numbers depending on what that comp plan is. Like if someone, I've seen offices where they um have a lesser, uh, maybe a higher salary or a lower commission or you know, some variety of those, you can adjust what your break even is, knowing like if so, if someone does let's say you're at a 10% commission and they do$2K in a week, well, now the company is retaining 90% of that$2K. Um, so you might make a different decision versus if you're paying 25% and you're only retaining 75% of that of that profit. So there's there's there's not like a right number. Um, different companies have different, you know, comp plans based on what's being provided for the rep, et cetera. But um, those are some real things. You don't want to go a whole year and someone's like not they're they're costing you money, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01: 44:02

So the thing that I I wanted to kind of go through too is like commissions related to like support because 25% is a decent commission if for the company and the broker, if you're not providing additional people to help that broker move loads, right? So, what has become way more common over the past few years are pod models, or it used to be called the Chicago model, where like you're the broker, you've now grown beyond your ability to manage, cover, and track all of your customers' loads. And like that number ends up being like 25 a week. Like 25 loads a week, you're making like 200 bucks a load, you're probably around like four grand a week. And like you really can't cover and recover fallouts, track and trace and prospect when you're moving about five, six loads a day. You kind of run out of hours and time. So, what a larger company will do is like, okay, they'll do it on like a trailing average. So it's not like Nate, you hit 4K this week, I give you an assistant. What they do is they go, you need to have a three-month average of$4,000 a week. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 45:11

So they look at your last 12 weeks.

SPEAKER_01: 45:13

Yep. Correct. And that does two things. One, it allows the company to keep more of the money while you're ramping up, which pays for your training. The second thing it does is it shows that your customers and you doing business with them is stable enough that it makes sense for me to add somebody to your team. At which point in time, you would then pay 25% of that support person's salary. So if I give you somebody at four grand a month, you're gonna pay$1,000 for that person out of your commission.

SPEAKER_00: 45:45

That's interesting how that works. But those are things that all have to be considered. Because if you think about it, if you don't do it that way, and let's say you're just gonna keep paying 25% commission, but you've got two or three salaries supporting that, now the company is not turning the profit that it would otherwise. So I think that's that's a really good thing to point out there is to look at overall what is the profitability of this group or this team, if you want to look at it that way. And that's why one of the things that we've done in the past with like a branch, um, not you know, we're talking about not an agent, but a branch where maybe there's um a sales team leader and two people working with them, that they're commissioned off of the branch's net. So we're looking at um their salary, the salaries of, and maybe even commissions. Maybe they're paying a small commission to a carrier sales rep in some cases. So you got to take all of that and then look at the net income, and you'll get commissioned off of that. Because now, as you're adding costs, expenses, licenses for stuff, your true company profit is not that gross top level. It is after all the expenses, it's that net profits. And I think you made a good point too with the different models. You have to, you have to really identify and establish what your identity is. What kind of you know, business model are we? And I would recommend that you stay consistent across the board. So if everyone's cradle to grave, everyone's cradle to grave. If you've got the Chicago model where you've got account reps that are doing sales, and you've got carrier sales reps that are booking trucks and building care relationships, you can do it that way across the board. What you probably don't want to have is two guys that sit next to each other, one guy is cradle to grave, and the guy next to him is something totally different. Because then they're not gonna learn from each other, be able to grow alongside one another. Having that consistency is gonna help you long term. That's my thought on that.

SPEAKER_01: 47:44

The other thing I think that it's really helpful that it does is it forces you to get better. So, for example, like my first large customer, I got probably like my it was like right around like my second month in sales, maybe a little longer. And I kind of blew up pretty quick. Like I was doing about 10K a week, like right out of the gate, moving like 30 loads a week, just myself. So, one, I had to do that for four or five weeks until my 12-week average hit 4K to get an assistant. So, what you end up having to do is like you've got to get really good at covering freight, getting better at the job, using the TMS, talking to your customer, minimizing, getting more effective, more efficient at everything. So it forces you to get better and to work at a higher work level, faster with less help. And then once you get that person, you end up actually being able to do more and do more faster.

SPEAKER_00: 48:42

Yeah, 100%. So to kind of to recap and put a bow on a lot of this, if you're gonna grow the if you're gonna try and grow a sales team, I want to kind of reiterate a couple things here. Number one, you can't grow it from scratch and just expect everyone else to become your revenue and profit generation center, right? Before you do any of this, you if it's just you as a broker right now, um, you should have an established book of business. Or if it's a small company, you need to have some sort of brokerage operation happening that's sizable enough that other people can come in and learn from it. If it's not sizable enough yet, you're not ready to grow that team to the next level. You're just gonna be adding more and more expenses. So, like, for example, if you have, let's say, one or two brokers in the office and they're not yet covering their own costs, they're still in that phase, it is not time for you to add more people in there because there's just not enough business happening. Um, that's why, you know, slow and steady is what's gonna help you out here. And again, there's an investment that comes with this, right? If if you're gonna add, let's say, let's say you got like five brokers in an office and they're producing good, right? And they're all covering their costs and company's making money, everyone's making money. If you're gonna bring three new people in to train and you know, you're hoping that maybe one of them is there, you know, six to twelve months later, and and unless you've got some sort of like, you know, rock star recruiting method that brings in folks that you know succeed at a higher rate than than the national average, but you're gonna expect to be not getting a return on your investment for on some of them ever. And then on the ones that do make it, it's gonna be a while. So you might be talking, you know, nine or twelve months before you actually start to see real results from this. And in the meantime, it's gonna take your team and your leadership extra time in your day for training, mentoring, coaching, giving them feedback, the one-on-ones, all the things. So it's it's a it's a big lift to do all this. And again, you've got to have the right tools in place for these folks. If you don't teach them how to make calls, the questions to ask, what kinds of freight to go after, what times of year are good for certain commodities or equipment types, how the geography in certain markets of the US are different than others. If you don't teach them this stuff and give them the tools to prospect to make the calls and track their activity, you're setting them up for failure. So this is where I think really you might have a rock star broker and you think, oh, I want to make him like the the manager and have him train. He might suck at training and managing, right? And that's where identifying that right person, it's not always your top sales guy. It's very rarely your top sales guy. It's usually someone that that knows the business, has done the job, but is really, really good at teaching others the methodology and holding them accountable and truly leading an organization.

SPEAKER_01: 51:36

Yeah, and like I for sure, like, and even use the word like it's an investment. I don't even think that's the right word. I think gamble is a better word for it because like that's what it is. Like it's very risky. Like, if you're gonna be wrong nine times out of 10, right? Like, that's not really an investment. Well, I mean, I guess technically you could invest in very risky stocks and call it an investment, but it's really more like you're going to a casino, right? Like right 10% of the time. I think blackjack, you win 49% or 48%. Like you literally have better odds playing blackjack than you do recruiting and paying salaries. And it's a bigger number. Like you're going to the casino and gonna go, well, I'm gonna bet 15 grand on the three months for this person. Like that's and with worse odds than blackjack, right? Yep. Now, that's why I think what you said really matters is like you start slow. You start with one or two, at most three. You need one person doing well, not necessarily to train the other people you'll eventually bring in, but like you need a leader. You need somebody doing the thing that everybody can see this is the example and the standards that's set, right? Then you build around that person. That person might not ultimately be a manager or a trainer, to your point, but you need somebody there that is doing the job to the expectation the other people can see. Because seeing somebody doing a job and you telling me how to do a job are very, very different things. And every day when I show up and I'm demoralized because I just keep getting rejected for the past three weeks, I hear you get success today. It gives me hope and keeps me pushing because now I know and I can see it's possible. Not just a boss or a company telling me I should be able to do it. I can see you doing it, doing the same things I'm doing, maybe a little bit of difference, and then I get better just by doing it next to you.

SPEAKER_00: 53:24

Yeah, another thing too, these are just kind of tips for when you're hiring and trying to find a good candidate, is before you hire them, offer to have them shadow the full, like sit down for half an hour and just watch what our guys are doing here, right? This is what your job is going to look like if we decide to move forward. And also set the expectations up front. Um, you know, the average person, you know, the average uh retention rate here is X, you know, whatever, whatever it is for your company. Um, you you could that stat could be like, hey, you know, most of our people don't succeed, but those that do do very, very well. And the ones that do very, very well, here's what they're doing to succeed. Here's the kind of personality that they have, here's what they're doing on their own to better themselves. And the ones that don't make it, here's typically why. So if you're going to um if you want to do this role, we're gonna move forward with it, you're gonna have to be in this bucket of the ones that succeed and be willing to do all the work along the way. And then people oftentimes will ask, you know, I remember asking this when I was interviewing for brokerage for the first time. I was like, you know, what is like what's the average person earning with commissions? And the the boss was like, I can tell you, but it's not really a relevant answer because you're not gonna be the same as the average. Like the ad like he gave me the stats of like the average is you know, whatever the number was per month in commission. If you were to fast forward a year, we all were like double or triple that number because we had the right team all doing the right thing and all learning together. And we we set numbers that they had never seen before, and they, you know, for they had been around a dozen years. So um, you know, you can you can give a range, but you could say, like, here's what you could do in in order for this to be true, you have to do X, Y, and Z. It's gotta be this many calls, it's gotta be you in the office at this time, it's gotta be, you know, you going above and beyond what we're expecting for you to hit whatever you know, goals or benchmarks you've got for yourself. So um I always find that interesting. Like when people want to know, like, oh, how much can I make? Like, what's the average person making here? That tells me that they're not looking. They're looking at like what you know, what can I basically guarantee myself? And it's no, I want to know what is possible, not what is happening. What's the top guy making? Yeah, what's exactly? What's the top guy making? Or, hey, if I do all this, you know, what is the most you think that I can make if I'm maximizing everything? And that's a way better question to have.

SPEAKER_01: 55:52

So you know what it reminds me of. I was I was listening to this interview the other day. They were talking about the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, where they're on the boats going to storm Normandy, right? Yeah. And they were talking about the speech that the, I guess it'd be like the general, whoever's in the boat, you know, where the boats are about to land. And he's like, Look, he goes, Two out of three of you aren't gonna make it. So look to your left and look to your right and feel sorry for those two sons of bitches because they ain't gonna make it, right? Like, you need that mentality that everyone in your hiring class is probably not gonna be there in a year, and you are on track to be the top guy in that company inside of two years. Like, that's what you're looking for when you're interviewing salespeople. When you hear things like, well, what's the average guy making? What's the least I'll make? Like, to me, you've pretty much already told me everything I need to know. Just the questions you're asking me, right? Yeah. You want to know what the top guys are making and how fast they got there. To me, that's a pretty good indicator that you have the right mindset when you're approaching this job because it has a huge failure rate. All of sales does. The two highest paid positions in almost any company are the number one sales guy and the CEO, right? Everybody else usually makes less than those two positions because they're the hardest to get. They have the highest failure rate. And like you have to want that to be able to get it. Which is funny because like everybody always jokes about like the cheesy thing I say at the end of the call, but it's like whether you believe you can or believe you can't, like if you don't believe you can do this job better than everybody else, no company you're gonna cold call is gonna believe you can help them if you don't believe you can help them.

SPEAKER_00: 57:23

Yep. Exactly. Yeah, you can save yourself a lot of money by just not hiring somebody. Um, and this is also where like you might have. Um, I remember when I when I went to uh when I started with Pierce, and this is on a different role. This is in a in a leadership management role to build and develop an agent uh division of remote sales folks. I not only met with the owner slash boss, but I sat down with different people in different departments, right? And that way, and I talked with them, I kind of shadowed them. That way, like they can all then talk and discuss and say, like, yeah, I think he's a good fitter. Like one might be like, Yeah, I don't, I don't think he's gonna like click here culturally. Like, we, you know, the the way that we operate is very X, Y, and Z, and he's not that type, or she's not that type. And have those conversations ahead of time. Because if you get someone who's gonna bring friction to your organization um and and could be cancerous, that one bad egg could spoil your entire uh new group of trainees. Good discussion, though. Any uh anything you want to add in, any other points?

SPEAKER_01: 58:29

I do think it's worth noting the one thing you said is I there was another sales company that used to do this, they probably still do it, but I really like this is like they would give at the interview, they'd give you like a short script and give you five phone numbers to cold call in the interview. And the the VP would literally give, like, here's five numbers, here's what I want you to say. It's like really short script, just call these numbers, right? And he would be one of the phone numbers. So he would throw up a couple of objections and just hear how you talked. But like the real value and doing that in an interview isn't to see, like, are they really good on the phone? And can they read the script quickly? And can they handle objections in a scenario they don't understand? It's how long do they wait before they pick up the phone? Right. Because like if the person's sitting there for 15 minutes waiting to make the first call, like they probably aren't a fit to do this all day. The person that just sits down and jumps into it, like is gonna have a higher likelihood that they'll be willing to do this every day.

SPEAKER_00: 59:25

Yep. Yeah, that's a really good point. If you're if you're gonna hire, I'll just use a metric, right? If you're gonna hire three people and hope that one of them succeeds long term, well, you should be interviewing a shit ton more for each one of those people that you hire. So you might have to interview eight or ten people before you hire one. Um so you might be interviewing 30 people or 25 people before you find your three that you're gonna hire and bring it as a new class. So and again, those numbers will depending on what your goal is, the size of your company, and how much you have to to gamble with, if you want to call it that, um, on salaries and things like that. Those those numbers can definitely shift. All right. Good episode, good discussion. Final thoughts, Ben. Whether you believe you can or believe you can't. You're right. And until next time, well, the season's over, but go bills.