Dave Cain: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award-winning financial services and business advisory podcast that challenges your old school business practices and their traditional business suit culture. Our guests are industry professionals and experts who will challenge you to think beyond the suit and tie, while offering you meaningful modern solutions to help you enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host, Dave Cain.
Dave: Are you looking for a silver bullet that will magically transform your sales staff into a team that wins nearly every opportunity and proposal? Unfortunately, I didn’t come prepared today with any specific magic words, secret potion, pipeline strategies, genies in lamps, or leprechauns. But what I do have might be better. Today, I’m joined by a very special guest who’s going to help us how to discover, with a little hard work, accountability, and perseverance, you can increase sales and drive rapid growth.
Dave: As an accomplished sales performance expert, author of the Collecting WINS sales platform, and founder of the Growth Multiplier Movement, and the Floriss Group, James Rores is here today to help CPAs and sales leaders transform their sales and customer facing teams so they are capable of doubling or tripling their sales over a short period of time. Welcome to unsuitable, James!
James Rores: Pleasure to be here.
Dave: Probably got to go back and read that stuff again. They make it very hard to read …
James: I’d like a copy of that for my website, please.
Dave: You can. Speaking of your website, I jumped on your website yesterday, very, very impressive website-
James: Thank you.
Dave: Can you give the audience the website address?
James: Sure. It’s FlorissGroup.com. F-L-O-R-I-S-S. Floriss is a derivative of a French word which means to flourish. We’re a group of people that help organizations drive significant growth. Do things they didn’t think were possible.
Dave: I jumped on there and listened to a couple of videos you have on there, and that’s pretty good. I thought, okay, I’ll listen and get ready for today, take care of a few emails while I’m listening. And then you said the magic phrase on the video. I stopped and I listened to the rest of the video. I quit doing email. That’s how impressive that video is.
James: What got your attention? What was the phrase?
Dave: It was the one that, Shit hits the wall, or something like that. That’s your phrase, not mine. That’s in my contract. I can’t use that language. Uh-oh, this could be my last one here.
James: I’m sure the listeners have said worse.
Dave: Yeah. Anyway, for our listeners, very, very impressive website. A lot of great content, and some testimonials on there were just outstanding.
James: Thank you.
Dave: Today we wanted to talk about, I guess sales transformation, building a sales team, kind of a pretty wide topic, but let’s break it down a little bit. You’re a speaker around Columbus, state of Ohio, around the nation, you’ve written books, you write blogs, you got a lot of stuff going on. You’re a growth expert. I want to put that in play in my company. Where do I start?
James: Right. And I appreciate the kind words. I come to this from the perspective of a business owner, of a CEO, of an executive. I’m fourth generation in my own family business. I grew up in Buffalo. I got my education in Boston, then took my skills to Boston, and was involved in a number of venture-backed startups. I quickly learned, or taught myself, how to sell things that people had never heard of before, to solve problems they didn’t know they had. That was my job. What I was able to do was take that experience, that belly-to-belly experience with the customer, and my experience driving businesses and growing businesses in my youth, and put it together. Now I’m here in Columbus, and I’ve been doing this now since 2006.
James: When I say I have the perspective of the business owner or the CEO, what it means is that it’s not just about the transaction, getting a sale. It’s about building a business, driving growth, creating sustainability, building value. Everything you do has to translate to something of value to the company. A great customer relationship driving the numbers. But it’s a holistic approach to what we do, where many people get involved in this job, and they really take that very tactical narrow view, and that’s what causes so many problems for so many businesses.
Dave: When you say narrow, can you expand on that? Maybe an example, a story. I know you’ve got tons of stories, but that sounds like that’s not the right way to go, but let’s have a story. We love stories.
James: Well, the best story I can tell you is one of my own stories, and this is a little self-deprecating, but when I was… Part of my passion that I bring to the business comes from the mistakes I’ve made in my own career, and I was that classical sales person that viewed sales as a zero sum game. That if I lost a sale, I was a loser, and if I won a sale, I was a winner. The effort was all about me, it wasn’t about building something bigger, it was about getting the deal. What’s really interesting is that the people that I worked for encouraged me to think that way. For all the business owners listening right now, think about this, as you walk through your plant, or your facility, what words are on the wall? Words like integrity, customer-centric, we care, etc. right.
James: And then what do you encourage your sales people to do every day? Go get ’em. Win the battle. Take no prisoners. We build battle cards, we go to war, and we use the carrot and the stick to motivate people. The core values that we bring to our business apply to everybody else except for the sales team, and I adopted that with great fervor, and I was very successful at it, until a time when I couldn’t take it anymore and it really affected my health, and I transformed my life. When I transformed my life, I realized that every CEO and sales leader I had ever worked with needed the same perspective.
James: What we do is, instead of fielding a team of people who are assassins, who go out and take deals down, we actually help people see how you can drive growth leveraging a holistic, value-centric approach that’s totally aligned with the values of the CEO, the core values of the organization, the values of being customer-centric, and we actually built a methodology, and one of my principle requirements for the methodology was I would be proud to share how I sell with every one of my customers. Not hiding anything, no psychological tricks, no manipulation, just straight up win-win scenarios. We call them servant-leader centric scenarios.
Dave: What you do, and again, being aware of your organization around Columbus, well respected, you have that winning attitude. You must have played sports somewhere along the line.
James: I’m very competitive.
Dave: You got to win, don’t you?
James: And my kids are competitive, and I have no idea where they get that from. It’s crazy.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like what you do is build a operating system within an organization to have that sales culture.
James: That’s a really, really good way of putting it. Many organizations start with expertise and core competencies around what they build, and what they deliver. And they build intellectual property around that deliverable. And they’ll invest a ton of money, millions in their plant, in their facility, and the operating system that makes the business money from a part delivery or service delivery perspective, and they only invest in the operating system on the sales side when they have to. They throw shit against the wall for years, see if it sticks, when it does, they replicate it, but after a while it doesn’t work.
James: Yes, if a business owner wants to succeed beyond the ceiling they’ve built for themselves, they have to think of sales differently, as an operating system. What we encourage people to do is think about building intellectual property around how you sell, similar to the intellectual property you’ve built around the services and products you build. You have to make a balanced investment in order to have a balanced business, and go to market strategy, and to drive balanced growth.
James: We do build an operating system, in that we start with the numbers. It’s a data-centric effort, not a by feel or intuitive effort.
Dave: So the numbers tell a story in your business and in ours. When you mentioned that off-mic, I thought, how are we going to do that. Well, what kind of numbers are you looking at? What’s that look like? I’m a numbers guy, I got to know this.
James: I love numbers, and many women in my business hate numbers. They don’t want to be accountable, they want to be brilliant. They want to impress you with their brilliance, and if you question them, they don’t like it, and they immediately get defensive and put you off, and they treat their students that way too. Anybody who’s going through their training class. We walk the talk. We’re all about accountability. We guarantee our work. We’ll even let our clients write the guarantee. Why? We really don’t care about them holding us accountable. We know our stuff works, and so we’re willing to walk arm-in-arm with them along that path.
James: The reason we know it works is because the numbers that we choose to focus on are very simple. They are four metrics that have an exponential relationship to each other, we track where you are with each of those metrics, and we have found ways to turn small incremental improvements, five or ten percent improvements into 30, 47 or 60 percent improvements in revenue. If we can adjust your behaviors, and find small incremental improvements in areas that are related to each other, have exponential relationships, we can drive double-digit growth. Even in businesses that don’t believe it’s possible. And we’ll take the challenge, if we’ve done the analysis, and believe it’s possible.
Dave: You mentioned even in businesses where they don’t believe, and we’ve both been affiliated with a whole bunch of businesses like that that think, My ways better.
James: Or, It’s never worked for me, so how could it possibly work for you?
Dave: If I was putting together a strategic plan for my business, do I carve out a pretty big section for my sales team?
James: That’s a great one. What’s really interesting is, the younger version of me would say, Yes. The experienced version of me would say, You know what, my experience tells me that there are businesses that exist today that do not require world class sales people to be successful. There are a lot of businesses where their top performers actually have very low sales competencies. To answer your question, do I have to make a big investment in sales people? No. I don’t. I just have to know which competencies drive the transactions, drive customer relationships, drive revenue, drive margins. If I know those competencies, I can identify people that have those competencies, or are willing and able to learn those competencies.
James: This goes back to being data-centric. Do the analysis, understand the behaviors that your people have that really move the needle, and then go out and find those same capabilities, behaviors, that same DNA, and replicate. It’s not about feel, it’s not about hiring who you like, or who impresses you in an interview. It’s about understanding people at a data-centric level.
Dave: We talked early on, right out of the chute about where do you get started, and it just occurred to me as you were talking about these sales competencies. Do you come into my organization, and maybe give me one of those tests? Those ugly tests that we all have to take from time-to-time. Is that part of the process?
James: Well, I’ll tell you what-
Dave: Or you just coach the dickens out of me? Maybe that’s a better way to start.
James: Which would you prefer?
Dave: I want to coach hard. Coach me hard. I don’t want to take another test.
James: I love it.
Dave: I don’t want to take a test.
James: You must have been an athlete then? Maybe you still are.
Dave: Let’s get right to it. Let’s get right to it. Coach me hard. That’s what you guys do.
James: Well it’s a great, great point. We like to respond to what matters most to our clients. The coaching paradigm is the most powerful paradigm. The coaching paradigm says that the coach comes into the relationship knowing that they are not an expert on you, you are an expert on you. My job as a coach is to create self-awareness for you, my client. And it’s not about giving you advice, it’s about helping you come to the conclusions that you need to get to where you want to go. As a coach, I’m empowering you 100% as a client. There are very few clients out there who are willing to accept that level of responsibility for their own success. Just like an athlete, most executives out there would hire me, and say, James, fix them. Fix them. Fix my system.
Dave: Fix the offensive line, by golly.
James: They’re looking for consulting, and it’s somebody else’s problem. I applaud you for that, but whatever is most comfortable for the client, we will deliver for them, only if we believe it will get the results that they expect. But, yes, coaching is a great place to be because at the end of the day, all the systems and processes don’t matter if you cannot, or you will not, execute. The most powerful thing that we do as an organization is not come in and be brilliant, and share with your amazing servant-leader centric process, and the core values that we bring to the table. The most amazing thing we do is we identify what will move someone to change, and we can activate that, and then actually walk the steps they must take to change because at the end of the day, growth, growth is the mastery of change. I cannot deliver growth for an organization unless there is change that occurs in that organization.
James: We really are people that have understood how to help an organization make those changes in a comfortable way. That won’t put them out of business while they’re waiting for those results to come.
Dave: I know we have a lot of CEOs that listen to this, and there’s a couple that come to mind. I know what they’re thinking, and I’m going to try to ask the question that they’re thinking, and this is for you Austin. I’m going to ask James this question for you only. All right, I’m going to write my own guarantee of the program. I want to get the sales, growth very quickly. Can you get me there in six months?
James: Yeah. We actually have a testimony on our website. A client grew their sales by 150% in six months. What do we have to explore for us to see, first off, is it possible? The first question I ask almost every client that I sit down with is what is your capacity? What is your capacity for new business right now without any investment in plant, without any investment in facility? That usually identifies the initial goal that we should shoot for. Why? Because if you’re covering your fixed cost today, every incremental dollar I make for you, has a significant margin lift on it. And now we’ve identified some real money that we can create for your organization. And then we start thinking about, okay, great, what will you do with that money once we generate it?
Dave: You sure you’re not a CPA? You’re thinking like a CPA now.
James: I had some great financial teachers in my-
Dave: I mean, that’s studying the data. I know.
James: Exactly. And it’s being realistic. It’s not coming in with vibrato or ego. It’s being realistic, and treating your business the way I would treat my own.
Dave: We never get off the question where do we start? We may never get off that question today, but one of the things is you can help me understand my data.
James: That’s correct. What we want to do, we want to, and I know this may sound terrible, but we want to reduce the things that are the most obscure to a business owner down to data. The first most obscure thing that an employer has are people. Figure them out. Go ahead, try to figure them out. Do we figure them out based on their personality? Do we figure them out based on their behaviors? Do we figure them out based on their operational DNA? Do we figure them out based on their job fit? Think about it. Every business owner out there has hired a smart person and changed their job description five times, because they’re smart, they’ll figure it out. That doesn’t fly. That’s not scalable. Of course anybody who loves a company and loves their employer is going to do what they can to be successful in that role, but you can’t keep hiring people and changing their job description. You have to optimize job fit.
James: Yes, we will leverage the right assessments. We only choose assessments that are predictive, validated, predictive. Meaning that the conclusion that the assessment makes has been validated by a third-party Ph.D. that says, Yes, this recommendation is predictive success. We’ll make sure we do that for our clients, but we’ll leverage that information, and then help them apply it in a way that makes sense. At the end of the day, the data helps us make decisions that allow us then to take actions to get the outcomes that we care about. That’s what we want for our clients.
Dave: Okay James, story time. Story time.
James: Yeah, set me up. What do you want to hear?
Dave: Okay. I’m sure you’ve had this conversation. Okay, you go in, you assess, you’re teaching, coaching, you got to go back to the CEO and say, You know what? Your guy just ain’t the guy. He’s not the guy to… He’s not accountable, doesn’t have the winning attitude. You ever have those conversations?
James: Yeah. They’re tough conversations. One of the things that we do when we analyze a workforce is that we ask the owner to make a commitment that he or she will not fire anybody that we assess based on their assessment. That’s the first thing. Now, believe it or not, very few… owners can be… they can talk big, but they really don’t want to let anybody go. They really love all of their employees. And it’s really sad for them to hear that somebody isn’t going to make it. But that’s the first thing we do is we have an agreement that we’ll do this for you, but you can’t fire anybody until after we’ve given them the chance to make the change that we expect, that we want them to make.
Dave: You ever have the discussion after going through that you go back to the CEO, and say, Hey guess what, Mr. CEO, you’re the problem, not your team. Starts at the top.
James: That sounds like a question based on your own experience. I’m very astute. Well, you’ve just identified one of the key requirements for any qualified client for us. One of my favorite questions to ask somebody is, What is your sales problem? And then we eventually get to the point, Well how much of that problem is you? Now, if a client is coachable, they will be thoughtful about their answer. If they are not coachable, then we’ll recognize that right away, and I’ll really be able to ask the question if they’re not coachable, Is now really the time for you to take on this initiative to drive such major change in your organization? And let them opt-out of the process.
James: It does us no good to take someone’s money in advance, only to realize later that they’re not going to be successful. We really want to do everything we can in as non-defensive, and as kind of way as we can to figure out if this is really going to be successful. Because it’s not just about what we want, it’s about what we’re willing to do to get there. And everybody has to be on that page, and at the end of the day accountability comes from leadership, and leadership is going to come from that commitment to the change that we want to achieve.
Dave: Let’s talk a little bit before we close up shop here, about the type of clients that you work with. Any specific industry, or wide range of industry?
James: Great question. The types of sales environments that require our help tend to be those where a business is trying to sell what they offer at a premium, so where price pressure is influencing the organization. Maybe they’re selling something that the market thinks is a commodity, or maybe all their competition sells commodity, they sell premium product, and everybody still wants to treat them like the commodity. So how do I train my sales people to differentiate what we do in the marketplace? Oftentimes organizations that are breaking new markets, so the path to growth, we’ve been doing this for 50 years, the path to growth is to diversify our product line just a little bit, and then open up new markets.
James: How do I break new markets? Oftentimes breaking new markets requires a brand new mindset in the organization. How do I establish that mindset? It takes a new way of thinking. And then oftentimes as well, we have the things that worked aren’t working today, and you need an outside person oftentimes to have the objective mind, and the objective eyes to help you see what has shifted so you can easily make the transition.
Dave: You do one-on-one coaching?
James: One of my favorite things to do is executive coaching. Typically, executive and leadership level coaching, one-on-one, and then we’ll do group coaching as well. Coaching is critical. For the listeners out there, coaching today is like consulting was back in the 90s. It’s one of those words that can mean a million different things. I’d like people just to think about coaching in this context. If you train somebody to do something, and they have an amazing experience, we get four-and-a-half, five stars when we do our training. Big deal. It only matters if it has impact on the company. How does it have impact? It must be reinforced. Coaching is an outstanding tool for taking a lesson and applying it to the unique world of the practitioner, the person who’s trying to apply it. I teach great stuff, but you know what, when someone’s trying to apply that knowledge to a unique sales situation for a unique product and a unique environment, they must have someone to bounce that off of.
Dave: Sure.
James: We’ll teach our clients, we’ll train them to do it, but we’ll also do it for them. Model the effort. That’s another way that we hold ourselves accountable for the execution that we promise our clients were going to get them.
Dave: Great. Great. We talked about certainly how to figure out where to start, and that’s the key, one of the keys. And we talked about certainly organizing your effort in a roundabout way, and with some good examples. I want to finish up with common barriers to success. Some of them we’ve already hit on, like CEO’s not into it, maybe the team just… maybe they need to make some new hires, but what are some other common barriers that you see?
James: What I would recommend people think about is we have this belief in developing winning habits, and winning habits are built on three things, mindset, skillset, tool set. Mindset, skillset, tool set. I just had a meeting with an executive at a well established company here in town who has built a strategy, and the strategy commands that people in his organization achieve a certain objective. Well what are the barriers to achieving that objective? I have the wrong mindset, in other words, I don’t believe it’s going to work, or I’ve never done it before, so I can’t even see it working. I don’t have the skills. Even if I believe it, I don’t have the skills to execute. And oh, by the way, none of the tools that I need to be successful are in this organization yet. Go do it. It’s like strategy, now go do.
James: And so barriers right, what’s really interesting is think of mindset, skillset, tool set in reverse. If I give you a tool, and I don’t train you to use it, is the tool any good? If I give you training, but your mindset says it won’t work, is that any good?
James: What we have to think about is, we have to think about the path to execution. Most of our clients have amazing strategy. And they look at me and say… I’ve had people say, James, no sales people on the planet exist that can sell my stuff. It’s not about your business, everyone thinks that by the way, it’s not about your business, it’s about how you execute it. You tried figuring it out yourself, you tried throwing shit against the wall to see if it’d stick, and you know what, you ran out of money, and you ran out of time, and ran out of patience. How about calling an expert, and forcing that expert to validate that they can actually help you.
Dave: Listeners, I wish you were in the room with us here. This guy, this guy is full of energy. I got a feeling you go talk to somebody, and they want to say, Look, help my team go eight and eight. That situations not for you. You want to go twelve and four. You’re a winner.
James: It’s a nice goal. Thank you for saying that, by the way, but we believe strongly in this idea of reaching and redefining our potential. What I never want to do is promise somebody I can help them get someplace they can’t get. So the first step is, what is your potential? Let’s see if we can get there. Once we reach it, now let’s redefine the next level.
Dave: I … long closure that I got to read, but I’m not going to read it. Our guest today is James Rores from Floriss Company, here in Columbus. James, why don’t you give us your website one more time, and I’m sure we’re going to get some hits on that.
James: That’d be great. I’ll give you my website and my email address.
Dave: You go right ahead.
James: The website is FlorissGroup.com. F-L-O-R-I-S-S Group.com. And you can reach me at james@florissgroup.com, and you can also find me one… hit me up on LinkedIn, and I’d be happy to connect with you. I also offer anybody who wants to pick my brain for a half-an-hour, a chance to jump on my calendar, so that’s available to all your listeners if they’d like to take advantage of it.
Dave: Listeners, if you’d like to hear more from James and the Floriss Group, send us an email, contact us at ReaCPA.com and let us know. If you really enjoyed today’s episode like I did, share it with your professional network. And if you haven’t already checked us out, go Rea’s YouTube channel to see videos of today’s episode. You’ll see a lot of hands flying in the air, and a lot of emotion in the room. You certainly won’t be disappointed. Until next time, I’m Dave Cain encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.
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