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Welcome to Scale-It Lab. Today, we're diving deep into the world of sales mastery and business transformation with Kayvon Kay, the mastermind behind the Sales Connection. Kayvon has revolutionized the sales hiring process, turning it into a science that consistently produces top performers. Kayvon doesn't pull any punches when discussing the challenges of building a high-performance sales team. He's seen it all, from misaligned tech stacks to companies hemorrhaging money on bad hires.
But through it all, he's developed an eight-step hiring process that's nothing short of revolutionary. You'll discover Kayvon's proprietary assessment tool that examines 62 different traits of successful salespeople. He'll walk you through his unique video review technique that eliminates bias and uncovers hidden gems. And you'll learn why his approach has a staggering 97.6% success rate.
Kayvon's focus isn't just on hiring, it's on creating entire business ecosystems that thrive. He'll share his insights on breaking down silos between marketing, sales, and operations, and why this holistic approach is crucial for sustainable growth.
Whether you're struggling with high turnover in your sales team, looking to scale your business, or simply want to understand the psychology behind top performers, Kavon's got the blueprint. So if you're ready to transform your hiring process, create a sales team that consistently outperforms, and build a business that's greater than the sum of its parts, this is the episode for you.
Kaven is about to unveil the strategies that have helped countless businesses go from struggling to scaling, all through the power of strategic hiring and ecosystem thinking. The Lab starts now. Welcome to Scale It Lab. This is the podcast where we uncover the secrets behind the success stories of entrepreneurs who have taken their businesses to new heights and have them share the exact steps they took to skyrocket their businesses to seven, eight, and even nine figures. This is Scale It Lab.
All right. Welcome back to the show. I am ecstatic to be with this person. This person has multiple two comma club awards. He's going to show us some things that, and teach us some things that I'm just going to be blown away with. Thank you so much for joining the show, man. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.
So you've done some stuff that most people haven't, and you've done it for clients for a really long time. And we've talked about this off camera that there is the huge difference between a sales director and a sales rep. We're going to talk a little bit here about how you hire those individuals effectively because so many of us screw up on the hires and it costs us a fortune. So what are some of the things as you're walking into scale that you do? Yeah. So that's a loaded question there, but I love it is I, at first I always tell people know what you're actually hiring for.
So people, I meet a lot of businesses and for instance, they think they need a sales rep, but you just said it. They actually might need a sales leader or a sales director or a sales manager or a sales coach or a sales trainer.
And those are all very different types of roles in a sales organization. Now you could say, well, can one person be all of those? You find that unicorn. Let's bring them in. Let's do some studies on them. Let's test that person. And let's figure out how we can multiply them. The reality is you can't, right? The biggest three in the leadership role when it comes to a sales team is you got your sales manager, you got a sales coach, and you got a sales trainer.
Now, there are some unicorns out there that are all three. I myself, I know very quickly which one I am. And I am a really, really good sales trainer. And I'm a good sales coach. I'm a horrible salesman. And I tell people that. It's not my thing. Because as a sales manager, you're heard in the crowd, right? You're doing the day-to-day management of the sales team. That doesn't mean that you're a great sales person.
You can actually be a really bad salesperson and be a phenomenal sales manager. And I have one of those in my company. And she is my number one sales manager. Why? Because I'm the sales trainer. So if we have issues with sales training, right, we need training of sales.
come in or one of my trainers will come in. If we need a sales coaching, which is coaching is more one-on-one, right? Is getting them past their own limitations. We have coach Terry, go see coach Terry, right? So we've set up our organization for the right butts in the right seats. Uh, in terms of, well, how, how do you find them? That's a,
Anyway, so that's a loaded question. We've actually over the last three years, last year alone, we've had over 5,000 sales reps, managers, you know, apply to work for our company.
And we've done that. And what we've built was actually an eight-step profiling system. So what does that actually mean? We've taken traditional HR and I've kind of flipped it upside down. I said, I don't need to build out a bunch of administrators in an HR department who are going to have interviews all day with a bunch of people who we shouldn't even have interviews with.
What a waste of time for everybody. Truly, what a waste of time for everybody, not just my team, but even the people that are going through that interview. So the first thing we've done is we actually put a stop block kind of an assessment in the first thing that someone does. Someone wants to apply for me, they got to fill out an application like most places. But my application is set up in a certain way. It tells us right away if we want to work with them or not, i.e. some of the questions we ask, how many years in sales have you been?
We're looking for a certain number there. Like in some organizations, like I have one organization where it doesn't matter if you're a brand new salesperson, they have so many leads. It's a crazy, great, uh, creates a place for growth. Awesome. Others, while you're paying $500 a book call, I can't wait. I can't do that to my client. Right? So we need to ask these questions. I need to ask how many hours are they willing to work?
You'd be surprised even as a salesperson, even if you're only willing to work 10 hours a week, why would you lie? Like, why are you lying? It's at least saying 40. You know what I mean? Like, do you think anyone's going to hire you to work 10 hours a week? So we, these are like dummy proof tests, right? Another one for us is location.
Uh, most of all of our clients are North America. We got a couple in Europe that we specifically hire for then, but like, I can't have someone in Australia time working on American time, even though, even though they say they can, even though they, they will, they're willing to wake up. Well, I've done that. You know what? That only happened. That only works for so long. They burn out. It's not healthy for them. And it's, and it's just,
Culturally, it's not there. It doesn't work. So that's step one. That just tells us, do we even want to have a conversation with this person? Step two, which is one of our secret sauces, is we have created a sales assessment that looks at 62 different characteristic traits of a salesperson, of a sales manager, of a sales director.
They fill the assessment out and I will know exactly what they are as a salesperson, how they think, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are. I will know if they're comfortable discussing money. I will know if they have the will to sell, if they're committed. I will know if they lie to me on the test and try to fake it. I will
I don't know how many times they started, stop, start. All of that is what I call is we're looking for aptitude. I'm actually looking to see what type of salesperson this is. And do they have the ability to have consultative selling? Do they have a sales process? Are they committed to the win? Do they have a mindset issue? All of that. If they pass that, they then go to step three, which step three for us, that's where your typical, most people start. Send me a loom again, right?
If you don't know what a loom is, send me a video. You know, one of those video, hey, here I am, Kayvon. We do it, I do it on purpose where I don't tell them exactly what I want them to say. I just say, tell me about yourself because I want to see how they create. I want to see how they think. When I'm watching those videos, when they get sent to me, I don't even look at, I make sure I close my eyes because we can make judgment on the way people look. So the first thing I'm looking for is I'm listening to their tone.
And I'm listening to their conviction of their voice. And if I'm not convinced when I open up my eyes, I can't have it. They're a phone sales team. It doesn't matter. You know what I mean? That's why it looks, again, the looks don't matter. Now, the second thing I'll do is I will look at the loom, but I'm not looking at them. I'm looking at what's behind them.
Were they smart enough to do it in a clean place? Were they smart enough to do it to not give away exactly who they are? Like we have kids, I call them kids. They're not, they're 25, 30 year old guys that are doing their looms with the beer cans beside their bed, beside their controller. You know what I mean? So it's like, even though they did really well in a sales assessment, is that the type of person that I want to put on with my clients? There are some clients that that might work.
Not really, but there's others that for sure it's not. So we look at that. So then what happens is now, if you can imagine, I've qualified them their time. I qualified how many hours they want to work. I've qualified if they're even the right kind of the culture for us. Then I looked at their aptitude to actually see, do they have what it takes to actually be a salesperson? This assessment, we've had over 4 million salespeople take it.
Jesus. Okay. And we know this. I tell you this. We have a 97.6% efficacy. Meaning...
If someone comes through our system and that assessment and it comes as recommended, if I put them into your company and you have the right systems and tools in place, there's a 97.8% chance that they'll be successful. Now, why, Kayvon, is that important? Because we just jumped into this and we didn't really talk about what the importance of hiring the right salesperson.
Because the cost of one mishire in sales could be five to six X their annual salary. And you've got the opportunity cost. 97% effect as you read. That's wild that you've got it to that, to that point. Yes. How long did it take when you go through that process? How long did it take you to be able to get to the point where you could test it? And you're like, got to tweak it here and there. And the times where it does fail, what are the things that you're running into? What are the things? So, so,
we have another assessment we do we're not that was just we're not even there yet but there's more yeah so because i wanted before i answer that right so they look at that assessment and that's more the aptitude assessment then we do the video then we then we at that point we have what is called human intervention up into this point up until the steps one to three there's no human intervention the system's all set up automatically it is now when they send me the loom
and they send me and we have their their their assessment we have we have we've trained our you know we trained our our our people to look at it to see what we need and then if they feel like they hit there's a criteria if they hit it they move on to the final assessment which is the this was is called intermetrics and this is something we look at this looks at their disc it's
So if you're familiar with the disc assessment, but it also looks at their values and then it looks at their inner balance and it looks at what, you know, what their, the greatest their values are. And it's called the inner balance. So kind of their empathy, are they, are they kinesthetic, whatever that might be. So now we have two assessments. And the reason I love that is, is they shouldn't, they shouldn't match in a certain way. And if they're all, if they're all, those are off,
Then you kind of go, okay, there's something here. Or we know when, if we like them, we go, when we go into interviewing, think of the arsenal we have now, like think of the questions we can ask, the information we can ask. Do you think I can ask effective questions that are not your typical HR questions, which do not help you in sales at all? Like none of that. Tell me a time when any good salesperson with their, with their further, you know, worth their salt can do a good interview.
I mean, and that's where a lot of businesses go wrong. They get a great interview. They get a good sales person who can talk the stuff. Oh, and then they think, okay, boom, let's get him in. Let's get him in. Let's get him in. And they fail. And they wonder why you didn't assess them properly. You didn't like,
And I guarantee you're not onboarding them properly. You're not training them properly. And most of the businesses we work with are hiring a salesperson to fix a different problem they have in their business. They don't realize that. So that's a little deeper. We can go down that a little different story there. I was about to jump in on that one. So there's all these assessments and we're getting there. I want to just bring up one point that you brought up on a previous call. There's a huge difference between someone who's a sales guy and someone who's a systems guy. There's a huge, they're completely different. And when you go in and you work with clients, you were telling me one that you work with this client
And they're amazing. They've got this amazing sales situation. And you're like, yeah, but that's not your problem. The problem is operations. We got to go fix systems. Knowing which one you are is important because I'm a systems guy. I'm a scaling guy. I'm an ops guy. You asked me to sell anything. I could not sell ice to people in the desert. I'm horrible. So that's where I bring someone else in. So I wouldn't pass any of these exams. So when people are doing this, a lot of the people are going to be watching this. They're trying to scale their operators.
Just because you're an operator and you've decided to put on every hat on the planet, doesn't mean you're a sales guy. Be honest with yourself. Hire someone, outsource your weaknesses on that one. Okay. A hundred percent. Yeah. I would say, yeah. If you're talking about now business owners who are operators trying to sell, like, Oh God. Yeah. I don't even words. Like you got me speechless. Just the thought of it gets me speechless. So,
So I'll tell you this, I'll tell you this matrix. Cause, and, and, you know, we're going to give this to your people too, but I got this matrix. I think it's really important. Right? So at the end of the day, we look at it and we say, okay, if they have the values, they
They have the behavior. They have the culture, meaning they are culturally in line with your culture. Right. And by the way, for those of you that don't have culture, that is your culture. Yes. Very important to know that you have the right incentives. You have aptitude. You have you have what we call equals successful hire. You're missing values. You get conflict.
You're missing behavior, you get frustration. You're missing culture, you get chaos. You're missing the incentives, you'll get resistance. You'll get resistance all around. They'll get internal resistance with themselves, external resistance with customers, and not good. And if you're missing aptitude, you just get time wasted. Because we have trained it, we have timed it to actually acquire a salesperson, meaning I'm going to go out to the marketplace and I'm going to recruit, I'm going to hunt.
Then I'm going to put them through our system. Then I'm going to onboard them. Then I'm going to train them. And then I'm going to get them into the sales position where they got to start understanding the sales process, the language of the industry, the nuance of the industry, get the confidence. And then they start to ramp up is over 300 hours.
And you've wasted 300 hours, your sales director, your sales manager, most likely you as the business owner, doing all that work on top of what we said at the beginning of the call here, five to six X for a mishire. That's $500,000 to $600,000 you're leaving on the table. And I think so many business owners, especially when you're an operator, will then try not to scale. They're like, well, no one can do it as good as I did. Well, you didn't.
build all your infrastructure. You didn't build a foundation, you schmuck. You got to put all these things in line first and then go out. Because if you don't have all those things in line, we talked about this before. If I come into a company and say, congratulations, I just got you a million sales and your fulfillment center can't fulfill it, then what are we doing? Why are we here? It has to be the entire ecosystem. It has to be the entire ecosystem. And again, now we're going to some really good stuff here. You cannot expect to hire a salesperson to fix your marketing problem.
And just like you can't expect a marketing person to fix the sales problem. Those are very two different things. And that's why there's always this marketing and sales. They're always against each other. And I'm like, they should never be against each other. They should be working with each other. If I, if I ever, I always said this, I will never, because I'm not interested in this, but if I ever had an actual office in person office where everyone was coming in the same place, I would make sure marketing and sales were sitting right next to each other.
Because they work with each other. They don't work against each other. They must work with each other, right? And then it's very important as a business owner or as the person who's running the operator, understanding the entire sales process, the difference between an MQL and an SQL, the MQL, marketing qualified lead, someone who's actually just kind of raised their hand versus someone who's raised their hand, they're problem aware, they know you are the solution, they're looking at you as a solution, which is what we call a sales qualified lead. Those are very different things.
If you're feeding all your salespeople just MQLs and expecting a great result or thinking your sales team sucks, that's a marketing problem. It's a marketing problem. If your main objection is I don't have the money,
Okay. Well, that's a sales problem, right? So depending on, and most people can't understand the difference in the outputs because they don't actually map it out. They don't actually look at the constraints of where it's breaking the actual sales process. So when we were talking, you mentioned with the one company that I was talking about, they hired us to come and consult. And in consulting, we look at it all. It's
It's training, me coming in, training the sales team. We always do assessment on your sales team to make sure they're properly culturally aligned, all the things that we talked about. And we look at the process. We look at the tools. We look at everything, the systems. We look at the data. We look at the reporting. We look at the KPIs. We look at the entire process. And we come in, and I told you, they were all wanting me to help them. Like, oh, the sales training is going to make a world of difference. I came in. I looked at the scripts.
a minor tweak here or there, listening to the calls. I was thoroughly impressed. And then next thing you know, my team comes into operations. They're like, oh my God, it's a mess. Most business owners don't realize what their mess is.
I just had a call today with someone, which was a very interesting call because I know them very well. And they're telling me in one hand, they want to bring me in to help them. They need a salesperson. And then I'm telling them on the other hand, no, you don't right now. You need to fix the marketing. Ensure that if I gave you a salesperson,
They have a place to actually be onboarding and stay and want to stay. Right. And she and they should say she or him. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, I don't want to be on the call or I don't want to be the one building it. And I'm like, that's your problem right there is you're expecting someone else to do all that work for you.
You got to go do the work or hire someone to do that work for you. Set up marketing. And then I even said, and if you really want the honest truth, owners don't want to hear this, depending on the owner. I want to be very clear on this, depending on the type of owner. You need to take the first couple of calls.
Because if you, on average, on average, I know there's the LRs, on average, if you can't sell it, how can you ever expect a salesperson to sell? Because nobody's going to sell the product better than you. And you don't even mean to be good at sales. You have all the authority. They want to work with you. You're the face of the company. And that's different. Please keep in mind, in my world, right? Internet marketing. Different industries and everything, right? So I want to put that out there. And so I'm telling her this, and they...
No, I can't be stuck on the calls. I never said you were stuck on the calls. I said, take three or four calls, take three or four calls, prove the process. And again, no, I need a salesperson to do that. Well, I can't help you because I know the type of salespeople I'm going to bring you. Unless you're going to pay them to do that, totally different story. They're not going to do that for free because you're being lazy.
right higher for culture when it comes into for owners and we talked about this before the biggest problem whenever we come into it nine times out of ten it's the owner it's it nine times out of ten the owners just it's in the way it's ego it's laziness it's whatever is going on you know if you built it i always did the example of tarzan
If you're swinging through the vines and you're holding onto one vine and then you grab another vine, you got to let go of the other one. If not, your momentum immediately stops. And so many owners, they're like, hey, I'm a great systems guy or I'm a great marketing guy or I'm a great sales guy. I'm a goal. You're probably not all of those. You're probably one or the other. So do me a favor and get out of my way. Let me use you when I need you so I can fire you to get you to the goal you really want, which is residual income. That's what you really want me to do. You want me to scale you. And most people, their ego is in the way.
Their ego. I was just talking to someone the other day. There's four of them, but there was ego, greed, fear, and I forget there's one more is all the reasons why. Partnerships.
uh, breakup, uh, businesses fail. Um, uh, and I'll just summarize what you said. Cause I, I mean, I've been through it myself personally, you know, I'm putting the mirror in myself is you are a direct reflection of the results you get. You are direct reflection of your business. Like, especially if you're a leader, you got to take a hundred percent, you know, a hundred percent responsibility and realize your business failed because of you. Facts.
Absolutely. And, you know, there's a quote about, hey, there's my people. I need to go find out where to go, where they're going so I can go lead them. That's not leadership. You need to jump in there and take the phone calls, do the three or four phone calls, go into operations, go and do those things. We have a shopping plaza down here, a company that's called Publix. And they do, there are supermarkets everywhere.
Everyone they hire is forced to work every level of it from bad boys to cashiers to you've got to be able to do that. And when I work with owners and I'm sure you do as well, as you just said, you got to do the sales calls. Go in there and listen to the sales calls. Once a month, you're doing the sales calls with me that, or you're going to accept a huge profit loss, which is fine. Get out of my way and I'll build you your team and we'll do it. And it sounds like what most people, when they come to you, they're like, Hey, you've got all this expertise. You're brilliant with sales. You're brilliant with marketing.
But they're not expecting you to say, yeah, well, you're also hurting on ops. You're also hurting on fulfillment. Yeah, you're right. And, you know, I always say to our detriment, because we could come in and just build a system and kind of and then move away. But like we don't we we always kind of use the, you know, the camping terminology, leave it better than you last and then you found it.
Right. And that's what we kind of, and that's kind of the philosophy we live. Right. So when we see that we go, okay, well, it's kind of three parts, you know, it's, it's, it's lead, you know, lead generation marketing, it's sales, it's fulfillment, and then operations in between all of that. Right. And if, if any of those things are broken, the company is going to break. If you have the best salespeople, you said it, but your fulfillment is broken. You're going to get refunds. You're going to get unhappy customers. Your sales team is going to leave.
It's like not good, right? If you have the best sales team, you have the best fulfillment ready to go. You wouldn't even know if it's the best, right? At this point, but your marketing leads are off.
I, you're, you're again, can't help it. It's, it's, and it's about moving all those. And that's why business isn't easy as you know, but it's, it's, we look at the whole, we like to look at the whole ecosystem for sure, just to ensure that we can give the best value. Cause we know a lot of people, a lot of our competitors will just say, here's the system go. And then they wonder why the system doesn't work or works for a little bit, but then it breaks down. It's,
It has to all integrate together. And you know that. And any business owner really knows that it needs to all work together. And it's not easy. And that's why you do get experts to come in and help you and help you achieve the goal.
We talk about like key questions or kind of leading indicators that when someone asks certain things, you're like, oh, or you ask questions on the interviews. For me, it's always when someone comes to say, what is the one strategy that's going to make me a million dollars? I'm like, okay, we're done talking. Goodbye now. Because if you're just asking me a single strategy, you're not in it. It doesn't work like that. You have no business experience. So when you're hiring people,
what are the questions that when you do and that you've got they've gone through the test they've gone through all of this what are some of the questions that you normally go you know what i need to ask this of this individual let me what i mean obviously why did you put beer cans behind you you goober probably is not going to get yeah yeah some of the questions will come more kind of like from uh their results so in some cases uh like commitment
So commitment is one of the biggest ones we look at. And that means commitment to see the sale through. So that means they will do the follow up. As soon as the prospect gives a little resistance, they quit. So we'll ask questions around that in terms of that commitment. And we'll ask them, well, what happens if? So say you're talking to a prospect, been in the pipeline for two months.
You finally get them on the call. You have a great conversations. They say to you, yeah, send me the, the, sorry, the, the proposal. You send the proposal. They say, yeah, send me, send me the final agreement. And then it gets to the agreement and all of a sudden they're not signing it. What do you do?
continue to engage. Right. Well, you ask them, right. And you see what they do. Right. And then depending on their answers, you ask them. Yeah. Do you ask me the questions? Right. These are, these are some of the questions, you know, we ask. One of the, one of the number ones, the question you're asking is who, who,
Who best do you know that can do the job? That's one of our key questions. Who's best do you know that can do the job? And the only answer should be them. Yeah. I don't know anybody that can do what I do, regrettably. It should be them. They should say me. And if they say me, we go, we know we got someone who understands it, right? If they go, ah, I don't know. We just go, ooh. So you think there's someone better out there? Can you introduce us to them?
We'd like to interview them. So that's a key question. Who best do you know that can do the job better than you? One of the things, and we talked about this before, Chet Holmes and Amanda Holmes, they wrote a book called Ultimate Sales Machine. It's a great book. Yeah, love it. Completely stole one of the tactics, which was I would bring someone in I thought was amazing for sales.
And I was like, you know what? You're great on paper and all that, but you're just not the guy. Sorry. You're just not the guy. And watch them just, I want to see if they fight back. And I was like, let's see what you got. Every time I've used that every time, like clockwork.
If I've done all the other homework in advance, if the culture and operations and fulfillment and marketing and UX and all that's working, that's always led me in. Cause I didn't have the resources you have. I didn't have the test and the disc. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was, that was, that's a, that's a sniff test for sure. It's a great sniff test. And I read it in the book and I actually highlight it in the book and it's, and we, and you know, in all honesty, we'll, we'll use that too. But I, I,
We don't use that all the time, but we'll use that when needed. And again, it all depends on the type of person, right? And the type of role. So, and again, we're talking with different roles too. Are you hiring a one call closer? Are you hiring a relationship builder? Are you hiring an SDR? Are you hiring someone who's a little bit more nurturing, consultive selling? Do you hire someone who has a sales process? So in our assessment, it tells us,
Do they have a sales process? Are they closing? So sometimes you'll see their closing is like 10%. And then I'll send it to the client. Client's like, they suck at closing. I'm not hiring them. I'm like, no, look at the next line. Their sales process is what? 100%. What does that actually mean in this assessment? It means that they sell throughout the entire process properly, that they don't actually need to be closers at the end.
So they don't need to do hardcore selling and push people because they're selling the whole way through that people at the end of their sales process say yes. Where you'll see people 100% closer, 5% sales process. Where you're like, oh man, this person is going to be like a nightmare in the CRM. They're going to be a nightmare in the follow-up. So then you ask yourself, that's okay. Because I know I have all the automated systems set up and I already have the people in place to offset that. Okay, great.
Or, I know my CRM's, we have one of our clients, the CRM, just the way it is, their tech stack's so complicated that we could never, I think we sometimes have to say no to great closers over there because we know they're not going to be able to do the work post-sale that's going to keep my client happy, and thus, it's not worth it.
I don't care how many more sales he can make. It's not worth the headache. It's not worth the drama. It's not worth all the times I'm going to have to yell at him. And he's not going to do it. You know, they, they, people can change. Yes, people can change, but not enough. It takes time. You also have to have the system. And as we talked about before, it's the entire ecosystem.
It's looking at everything that comes in, being able to grasp all of it, being able to connect to all of it, being able to walk someone through it and have some of these really ugly conversations that people aren't ready for. Business owners just aren't ready for it. They're like, hey, just give me a salesperson that works. I'm like, no, that's cute. We're not talking to you.
Let's talk about the whole thing. So what are the tools and some of the resources that you found that if someone needs to rebuild and you run into them and, you know, maybe their sales is good or maybe their marketing is good, but what are some of the steps and the tools that you sit down with? Okay, here's how you start fixing some of the most common issues that you run into. Here's some ideas because I guarantee you anybody who's listening to this just went, boom.
Because they're just like, yeah, my whole ecosystem isn't solid. Yeah. So in terms of the selling and the eight step process we use, as you know, I'm going to give you guys a document that actually lays this out for you. And if you even implement half that, you'll have success. So you're going to get that. Now, are you talking, now you're asking the systems we use or how do we identify the systems?
No, I'm asking. So you go into companies and very similar to me, you go in there, you're brought in for one thing and it's kind of, it's the rope. They want this, but what they really want is this. Yeah. Going through that process. Yeah. What are some of the things that when you run into those situations, when you're talking to people at very high levels, you're not talking to people who are just low end. These are very high level. These are high end business owners that you run into on a regular occasion that they're like,
Oh man, we need to sit down and have this conversation. I know you hired me to do sales. I know you hired me to marketing. That's adorable. Let's have a real conversation. What are some of the common things that you run? Cause I know what I run into all the time. What are the common things you like? The common things that we'll, we'll all run into is their, their, their CRM is not set up properly. 100%. We've never ever found somewhere where the CRM is set up. So, so great that it's efficient.
Other ones, big ones, reporting. They think they have the numbers that they have, but they're not the real number. And then another key one outside of the hiring and actual sales training is what does your onboarding look like? I'll say, do you have a playbook? And they'll go, well, we like an SOP. They fog over.
No, I'm talking about a sales specific playbook. I'm talking about a playbook that tells salespeople that one place for salespeople to go, which is like, I used to call it the Bible.
My partner didn't like that. So we changed it back to the, we changed it to the play. He thought it was a little controversial, but it was, it's like, it's literally the sales Bible as a salesperson. I want one click of a button. I know I'm a salesperson. So everything I do is always around how salespeople think. Right. And I know as a salesperson, I just want one click of a button that takes me to everywhere. Everything I need to know everything.
Do you have that built out? Oh, kind of. Where is it? On a Word doc? It's in 20 different places. No, no. It's in my head. So we ask these questions to identify, okay, even the tech stack will ask questions like, oh, what tech stack are you on? So if someone goes, oh, I'm on Salesforce. Oh, wow. So you got integrators then. You got some devs on your team. No, no. You're using Salesforce? No.
That doesn't, I'm not the Salesforce master, but I know that, you know, one plus one doesn't equal two there. You know, oh, I'm on HubSpot. Okay, great. Are you on HubSpot? Okay. Are you on marketing too and the customer service or are you just the sales? Oh, just the sales. Oh, okay. Well, interesting. What else are you on? Oh, Confusionsoft.
Oh, so you're on Confusionsoft and HubSpot. Anything else? Oh, yeah, we got this thing called Go High Level everyone's talking about. Oh, so you're on Go High Level, Confusionsoft, and HubSpot. Is there a reason for it?
So in other words, you sat on Instagram for too long and you listened to your friend and you started buying shit. This goes to the ecosystem being cohesive and putting the salespeople and the marketing people together and having the conversations. I remember you bring a UX person in as well because you have to have the design. You have all this. If they're not in bed with sales and marketing, go ahead. The developers are done. Yeah, exactly. Or you have, again, the person who knows how to speak to developers because that's a whole different
So I mean, that's a whole different world there, you know, to understand how to speak code and know that. So they actually build you the right thing. But I was going to say overall, it comes down when, you know, speaking to these people and it's just like speaking to your clients and speaking to get sales and speaking to get contracts, speaking to build your business, a hundred millions of dollars. It all comes down to the questions you ask. The questions you ask are direct reflection of the answers you get. So if you're not getting the answers you like, it means you're not asking the right questions. Right.
And when you do answer these questions and you ask this, I'm curious because you've got sales background. How do you lead? Because these are most of the people, again, you're working with. These are big players. How do you lead them without going, hey, I'm going to force my truth on you? How do you lead them into the environment? They're like, oh, God, we need to work on all of this. I love it. Now you're talking sales stuff, which I love, right? So I'm going to give you a fundamental, some fundamentals that I have. When you say something, it means something.
When they say something, it means everything. Everything. So if I say to them, so you asked, how do I lead? So if I say to them, man, your sales process is a pile of dog poo-poo, right? It's a dog's breakfast. That means something. But if I can get them...
To say to me, oh man, this is actually pretty bad. It means everything. So how do I lead them? I lead them by asking them again. It's about leading the right questions. So what does it look like? What does it look like? Tell me about what's going on. How long has it been going on? Have you looked at any other resources? Do you know? Do you like what's going on? One of the biggest questions I always love is what does success look like?
If, you know, magic ball, like, you know, what, what, what does success look like? I usually say that because if you, you, if you're talking to a high level business person, you're like magic one, you know, draw a line between now they, they, they know that they're not idiots. So simple question, what does success look like? If we can come in and help you, what does that look like? Okay. What's stopping you from going there? Why, why, why us? Yeah. And you can use it as an identity hole.
So people don't understand this all the time. We should say, Hey, I'm going to eat healthy. It's very different than I'm a healthy person. Yeah. Because if someone says I'm a healthy person and then they say, Hey, let's go to McDonald's. I'm like, huh? Do you think that's a healthy option? Again, open-ended questions. Yeah. Yeah. Always open-ended. It's always open-ended questions. Curious. I'm curious. Love it. You know, cushion statements. I'm curious.
And it's not, it's a lot of salespeople here. The less you talk, the more you sell. I'll just say it that way. The less you talk, the more you sell.
So you lead them, right? And then you can also lead them. One way of leading people is great through his testimonials. Hey, you actually, you know, in a situation, uh, you, you kind of remind me of so-and-so we worked with, uh, they were kind of in the exact same situation. Here's what they did. Here's what we did when we came in, we did this, we saw that, uh, do you believe that that'd be something that would be beneficial for you and your business? Yep.
And using that ability. And one of the things to take that even higher, I've always just handed the phone over. I'm like, Hey, you were, you remind me of Tim and he was running the same situation. Give me a second. Do you have a second? And I'll call Tim. I'm like, Hey Tim, what are you up to? And Tim was like, Hey, what's going on? I'm like, Hey, I'm sitting here with John and John is running the same situation. I'm going to hand him the phone. I got to go pee. You guys talk about it. And you hand the phone over and you walk out the door. I used to do this all the time. That's high level in person selling. I love that. Like,
And I would always have that relationship. So I wouldn't sit down because again, when I was doing this, these are very expensive things. I would unlock my phone. I'm like, call anybody that says client in front of it. If you call the one that says mom or dad, it'll be a completely different conversation, but call anyone that says client and then the name.
Go nuts. Call me on, ask him whatever you want. And so it gives you that. And this is why one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you come into environment. It's the camping idea. You always want to leave it better than you found it because then you have the ability to do these type of testimonials. You have the ability to have these honest conversations because there's so many people, as you already know, they're like, Oh, you want to take off and make a million dollars. Here's my magic funnel. It will work for you. Oh, your operations. That's not important. You don't have fulfillment. That's not important.
You've got to have the entire ecosystem. And there's rare people who, again, in your world, they actually come in and they want to help out. Because my hallucination is you run into environments where you're like, you know what? I'm not your guy. I'm not your guy. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for wanting to work with us.
I'm not your guy. I can tell you every time I've done that, it comes back tenfold. Yeah. Even just the time you and I have spoken on my authenticity has to rule in this one. Yeah. It really does. And then again, even for the business to, to, to work, right. When we first started off our business, you know, we're new, we're, we're desperate. We were saying yes to really bad, bad clients.
Then we were saying yes to slutty money, which I call slutty money, right? You're just taking the money just because you can. And we realized in order to be effective, you got to be selective. In order to be effective, you've got to be selective. And it's a very hard thing to do. And you don't get it right all the time, but you try your best. So you know who you want to work with, who you don't want to work with. So that's why one of the things when people want to engage with us, depending on the level of the engagement, we only start off with an audit.
Because if you're not willing to spend even money on an audit, you're not going to be willing to invest into what we have going on anyways. And the audit is actually, it's not for us just to look at what's going on in their company. It's also for us to see how we all work together. Do I want to go into bed with these people? Because if we decide we do want to go in bed, meaning we do want to actually build something of significance, it takes time. Some of the projects we're working on, two, three years, some two, three, four months. I'll tell you, it's not 30 days what we do.
So we want to make sure that we're doing that properly. Now, we've only ever gotten that audit, maybe hundreds of clients we have, maybe two or three by the end of time we got through it. We're like, you know, this isn't it, but here's what we're willing to do. Right. And here and we go through and all the recommendations. So then we'll give them the recommendations and we'll say, hey, we have this partner, these people that would be willing to help you. Here's what we think you should really do and leave it up to you and, you know, and come to us when these are when these things are met.
And most people aren't doing that, especially in the sales space that you live in. Most of it is slutty money. They're just trying to get from there. And it's so unbelievably toxic. So if people are going through this and they're trying to connect and they're trying to learn more about what you do and to interact with authentic people in a sales environment, which might be the biggest oxymoron I've ever said in my life, other than government intelligence, how do people track you down? How do they connect you? I know you're going to give us these resources. We're going to create the lab report. How do people find you? How do they get on your radar? Yeah.
Very, very simple. Just go to the sales, the sales connection.com. If you go to www.thesalesconnection.com, you'll see all of our services. All of our free downloads are on there for you to help you. And you'll know if it's the right fit.
And then if they want to reach out to you directly, is it just there or should they do social media or is that the best place? Yeah. If you want to reach out to me on my socials, it's cave on K K a Y V O N K a Y cave on K all my socials. You can reach out to me, DM me, put scale it up, call a podcast. So I know, you know, where you came in from and we'll see if, if we can help you out. Man, I really appreciate you coming on and I love what you're going to give us for the lab report. Thank you so much. Thank you.
As we wrap up this episode, we hope Kavan's groundbreaking approach to sales hiring and business ecosystem building has ignited a spark in you to revolutionize your own practices. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Kavan for his unfiltered insights. Your frank discussion about the pitfalls of traditional hiring methods and the power of a holistic business approach is truly priceless for leaders at every level.
To our listeners, your commitment to elevating your businesses and realizing your ambitions drives us to continue delivering these transformative conversations. We're profoundly grateful for your ongoing support.
For those eager to overhaul their hiring process and master the art of building high-performance sales teams, you won't want to miss Kayvon's in-depth lab report. It's a treasure trove of actionable strategies, including a step-by-step breakdown of his eight-step hiring process, techniques for aligning sales, marketing, and operations, and tips for scaling your business through strategic talent acquisition.
head over to our website at scaleitlab.com to access the lab report. It's your roadmap for assembling unbeatable sales teams and scaling your business to unprecedented heights. Remember, your hiring process is the foundation of your sales success. So go forth, implement this revolutionary approach and watch your business thrive. Until our next session, keep innovating, keep scaling, and never forget that your business is an ecosystem. Nurture every part of it. The journey to sales mastery starts now.