Hiring an Agency Sales Rep with John Shea

John Shea is the owner and CEO of Alignment Group, director of sales training at Inbound Sales Academy, director of sales enablement at Quintain Marketing, and host of The Funnel, a sales and marketing podcast. Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode, number 29 of Inbound Agency Journey, with Andrew Dymski introducing it and joining for the debrief. The conversation is about why agencies can’t hand leads to sales and hope, and what the Academy’s first course, on hiring a sales rep, teaches.

Inbound brings the lead. Someone still has to close it.

John started as a sales rep out of college and worked up to VP of sales at a company in Baltimore that had a strong sales engine and no marketing. He talked the owner into letting him hire a marketing manager, Lindsay, then spent six months moving her office across the building until she sat in the middle of the sales bullpen. The two later founded Alignment Group together, and years of arguing about where sales fits left him uneasy about how agencies treated inbound.

The vibe was that you could probably skip or ignore a good portion of what sales does and get right to, “Here’s a lead, buy the product or service.” And I was feeling uneasy about that. I felt like there was a lot of gaps in there. Inbound is a wonderful way to engage with clients and it’s a wonderful way to bring the right people to you, but somebody has to personally and physically engage with them one-on-one to help them with that decision-making process and move that to its end, and that’s a deal.

(Listen at 09:50)

The Academy started because a client fired its agency

John Booth and Kathleen of Quintain Marketing, a HubSpot partner about an hour from John, had been listening to his podcast. They asked him to drive to Annapolis and fed back the same argument he’d been making to Lindsay for years. What prompted it was losing a client.

They had this really great client. They did everything they were supposed to. They drove leads, the website traffic was up, and they were good quality leads, but the client didn’t close any leads… We can’t just stop at the wall and say that’s not our problem. If your sales reps aren’t selling, it is our problem, and we need to deal with it.

(Listen at 11:46)

The three of them formed Inbound Sales Academy earlier in 2015 as a separate company to train agencies, their clients’ sales teams, and reps who want to sell the inbound way. Gray asked whether agencies would hesitate to send clients to a program run by two other HubSpot partners. John said they should take the courses themselves first: an owner’s hustle hits a ceiling eventually, and you can’t hire and manage a rep well without understanding the job yourself. Agencies that bring clients through later get a cut of what those clients pay.

Learn to hire before you learn to train

Gray asked what the program looks like. The founders’ first instinct was a sales training course. John pushed back.

I felt like we need to learn how to hire salespeople before we can train them. And so the first offering for us out of Inbound Sales Academy is a seminar on how to hire a sales rep.

(Listen at 18:05)

Agencies kept telling him they’d never hired a salesperson and didn’t know where to start, and John’s point is that it’s unlike hiring anyone else. Dan Pink’s keynote at INBOUND had just backed with data what John had seen for years: extroverts don’t make the best reps. The people who succeed sit in the middle.

All too often people go into the interview. They see a resume. They’re dressed nice, they’re personable, they’re outgoing. “Oh boy, I can hire them.” And they fail and they can’t understand why.

(Listen at 21:12)

Eight weeks, ten people, 90 minutes a week

The format is built for retention, with homework between live sessions.

We limit the classes to 10 participants… We want small class size because we want people to interact with me, we want them to interact together. You get 20, 30 people, it’s impossible to do that. We have 10 people. We tell them, look, this is not a two-day seminar, fire-hose training… They retain what they’ve learned when they take it over a longer period of time and they have time to implement it as they’re going through it.

(Listen at 18:42)

The course runs eight weeks at no more than 90 minutes a session and covers sourcing candidates, the interview process, reading a resume, and asking the right questions. Participants learn the same OMG assessment HubSpot uses and get a license to assess their first hire. The first class filled, and the second was starting September 30, with a 10 to 12 module sales training course due in October and management classes after that.

Most companies don’t know how to hire salespeople

Why start with hiring? Because John sees the same gap at nearly every client he walks into.

Most sales organizations don’t know how to hire salespeople. That’s why turnover is a problem. That’s why they think they’re getting a superstar and the person fails and they can’t figure out why… Companies spend millions on training their salespeople. They spend very little on management and teaching management how to hire the right salespeople… It’s amazing to me how often I walk into clients and they have no idea how to hire salespeople. So we start a lot of times with clients. That’s where I start, teaching them how to hire people. It’s like, this isn’t gonna work until we can hire the right people.

(Listen at 24:17)

Gray tied it to Jim Collins: right people on the bus first. John said his whole philosophy is built on that book.