Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S2 Ep7 The Cost of a Bad Hire_ Why Hiring the Right People Matters
86 Plays1 year ago
Today will discuss the challenges of finding good sales hires, the importance of marketing in sales, creating a supportive organizational environment, understanding belief systems in hiring, using psychographics in hiring, the impact of sincerity on employee churn, reevaluating hiring filters, the negative consequences of mishiring, hiring for fit, balancing data and intuition in hiring, being a good buyer, aligning goals in marketing, understanding beliefs and perspectives, teaching effective conversations, the advancements in AI technology, the potential benefits of AI in medical diagnosis and treatment, open conversations and resistance to change, computer modeling and AI in medicine, and the future of AI.
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Dial It In Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations. All right, I'm going to ask you an easy question, Dave, with an obvious answer. Who I like those. What was the best hire you've ever made?
Dave Meyer on Importance of Sales Hires
00:00:33
Speaker
Wow. So now you're getting into a tough question disguised as an easy question. Well, obvious answer is me. Yeah. I feel like that, but I can't let you off the hook that easy. So I'll have to think of somebody else, but while we do, why don't we get into the podcast?
00:00:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, the reason I mentioned it is because I'm going on 10 years at BusyWeb working in business development, which is a rare thing to have somebody be that good for that long.
00:01:04
Speaker
In this day and age, one of the things that everybody is challenged with is finding good hires, let alone finding great sales hires and figuring out what do you need to do and what really makes a good salesperson tick. So I'm honored that we were able to go completely deep into the pool and find one of the great experts in the industry about
Jonathan Porter-Whisman on Sales Team Management
00:01:25
Speaker
that. Our guest today,
00:01:27
Speaker
is Jonathan Porter-Whisman. He is the author of the book, The Sales Boss, which is the real secret to hiring, training, and managing a sales team. He is also the head of two different companies, one of which is called Who Hire, which is a data-driven analysis to finding your good hire, and also Perception Predect
00:01:51
Speaker
which is I can't even do it justice in an intro, but it's just he's doing fascinating work. So thanks for joining us, John. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And with your expertise in the marketing space, you know, when you spend time in organizations doing sales and sales consulting, there's always that question, like, what's the difference between sales and marketing? And the truth is, there's this very intricate dance that has to happen between both or neither of them work effectively. So this I'm looking forward to this conversation.
00:02:21
Speaker
That's a great place to start because as you just said that I a light bulb went off in my head and I thought oh god what is the difference between sales and marketing so.
Interplay Between Marketing and Sales
00:02:31
Speaker
How I would think about it is this and I'd be curious to get your take marketing is the effort of getting somebody from from not knowing you to saying yes I'd like to talk
00:02:43
Speaker
And then sales is the art of getting that person who says, yes, I'm interested and would like to learn more to hear some money for a good or service. Sure.
00:02:55
Speaker
I can, I can go with that definition. The, you know, the old school definition is marketing makes the phone ring and sales is what happens afterwards. But so much of sales now doesn't necessarily even require a phone. And we have to redefine that. I know when I'm working inside of an organization and they have good marketing rhythms in place, which means they're known in the community they need to be known in.
00:03:23
Speaker
It's really the level of trust that exists there that makes the job of the sales team so much easier because they're not having to convince. They're not having to drag people along. They're already positioned as the experts. So I think of it as if your company is a stage play on Broadway. Marketing is sort of the set and the lighting.
00:03:47
Speaker
and it creates the mood for the entire audience when they come in and makes you receptive to the actor and the play. If you've ever gone into, you know, sort of an off-Broadway play that has a low budget, you automatically, like your standard sort of goes down, because the sounds are great, and the lighting's not that great, and the audio quality's not that great. So that's where I think that getting that right is that it sort of sets the mood. I love that. Can I steal that?
00:04:15
Speaker
Sure. You can, you can steal it. Yeah. If you weren't going to, I was going to, cause that's, that's brilliant. And I've never heard that. And I stole it. I just remember from who? Well, thank you to whoever gave that to John. So he can give it to all of us better than cats. Yeah. You are a well-known in the industry as being an expert, as identifying good quality talent.
Hiring Strategies and Organizational Readiness
00:04:35
Speaker
So talk us through what are sort of the five indicators that people really need to look at when they're, when they're hiring somebody.
00:04:45
Speaker
Five, I picked a random number, but how do you find good people in this day and age? That's a great question. In almost every area of the business, there's metrics, right? So there's sales metrics, there's marketing metrics. If you're in the finance department, they've got accounting and you got to hit all your KPIs. But for some reason, every company goes, we need to have great people. We need to make great hires.
00:05:08
Speaker
But the cost of a bad hire and that turnover doesn't show up on anybody's P and L statement as a line item responsibility, you know, to a specific, you know, it doesn't end up under Dave's thing, even though Dave pays for it, right? As the business owner. So when you say, what are the five things? Interestingly, I think, uh, probably if I had to split it just randomly, if you chose the number five randomly, I would say three of them have nothing to do with the actual candidate.
00:05:36
Speaker
It has to do with the organization and are you equipped as an organization to really understand what do you need and to support growth and to support somebody doing their best work because people come and stick and stay in an organization as long as they believe they can still do their best work in life doing it for you.
00:05:59
Speaker
Because people want to do good work. They want to thrive. They don't want to be on a treadmill. So you can fix.
00:06:07
Speaker
a lot of your turnover and a lot of your performance problems just by fixing sort of your company. I remember going into an organization in the Midwest that had an atrocious turnover problem. And that was one of the things that they wanted me to help them with. And I flew in to just go through as a candidate their process.
00:06:30
Speaker
And i flew in and went into the got into the airport and they had booked me in the worst hotel in town. Oh no. And then in the morning i find my way over to the HR office and the doors still locked.
00:06:50
Speaker
About 10 minutes later, the HR manager comes in fumbling around keys in the lock gets in asked me to sit outside their office and the office has magazines that are a year old, it's sort of dusty, like right away. And I just share that as an example of, you know, your your applicants are already making judgments about you. So in my book, the sales boss, I talk about that in
00:07:16
Speaker
I'll go back to the idea I used for marketing. It's a stage play, in this case put on by a psychologist. You have to really think about your people you're bringing into your organization. I would argue this also includes your employees even more so. You need to be answering the question, what do I need them to think? What do I want them to feel? What do I want them to do as a result? When they walk through your office, what do you want them thinking?
00:07:46
Speaker
What do you want that feeling to be? And that's visual, it's kinesthetic, it's how does it smell,
Impact of Company Environment on Hiring
00:07:53
Speaker
it's all of those sort of things to get there. And the problem is when we live in a building every single day, we start just looking past the roughness of it. I remember when I moved into the house I'm in, it really bothered me. There's a piece of tile right inside our front area and the grout is gone and it bugged me every day and now I don't even notice it.
00:08:16
Speaker
And so those would be the, I would just bunch a bunch of things into those sort of three buckets. And then the other two really get into being up close and personal with understanding what is the belief system of the person that you're hiring. And what I mean by that is things are only good or bad by comparison.
00:08:43
Speaker
Think about when you think something's great in life, you're always comparing it to something you experienced in the past. I remember my first car, right? I thought it was a
00:08:51
Speaker
It was an okay car, but when I would rent a car, I always thought it was an awesome vehicle because it was better than the car I drove. And then time passes and there's not many rental cars that I like to rent now because it's just standards have changed. And so when you're hiring somebody and this goes outside of sales into any role is you really need to uncover how do they define great.
00:09:19
Speaker
because if you can define how they came to their definition of great, all of a sudden you're in a position A to influence that if you need to, but you really want to hire people whose definition of great is as close to yours as possible or as close to what you need in that role, right? So even just think about compensation.
00:09:44
Speaker
Great compensation for you as the business owner is different than an entry-level person, but you have to know how do they define great. Right. And plug into that.
Building Trust in Virtual Interactions
00:09:55
Speaker
What does it allow them to accomplish in their life?
00:09:59
Speaker
I love that. As we go through, Jonathan, I think the example that you shared about walking into an office and the magazines are dusty and the customer experience is a little off, it got really weird in the past couple of years because almost everything has gone at least partially virtual.
00:10:21
Speaker
So one of the things that we're seeing with our customers I think is that there's a lot more weight placed on the digital experience for a customer and maybe the interactions that come in. So are there ways or are there things that you're doing when you're connecting with your customers that
00:10:41
Speaker
help to instill that trust and confidence and lower the barriers from a digital perspective. Yeah. Well, you play in this space all the time, right? So your, your front door is your website and your, your marketing. So you, the nice thing is you can sort of craft that, but I would say they still get dusty over time.
00:11:00
Speaker
How do we keep it fresh how do we keep it interesting even and i write about this in my book even the email communication i give to an incoming candidate leaving an impression about who we are as a company so word choice and language is very important.
00:11:17
Speaker
some placing all of those things on the business side of it where i'm really excited with the work that i'm doing with perception predict and who hires just a product of perception predict just for a minor clarity
Perception Predict's Role in Hiring Process
00:11:31
Speaker
there. What we're doing at perception is we're doing large scale data models that blend this whole world of i o psychology and psycho graphics.
00:11:41
Speaker
There's a massive amount of well researched what makes people operate how do they think how do they experience stress and we've created an inventory of about four hundred and fifty items that we can reliably measure.
00:11:56
Speaker
And so we go into an organization or an industry and we literally assess thousands and thousands of people. So we get this really intricate picture of what makes them up. And science says that about 70% of performance is baked into us. It's just the way we are
00:12:15
Speaker
structured and you would know that's true when you look at a star athlete or a star musician there is something fundamentally wired differently right about somebody that can do that so we're getting that rich psychographics but on the other side we're ingesting actual performance data so if it was sales you know how many deals are they closing what's their clothes what's what is the clothes right how many new opportunities
00:12:39
Speaker
And we're feeding that into a machine learning engine. So we're narrowing down that pool of psychographics to say, Hey, these are really the only thing, 18 things or 20 things that matter for your company, for that role, for that individual. We call it a performance fingerprint. So you can deploy it on the front end of the hiring process. Candidate takes 10 minute assessment, roughly maybe 20, if it's depending on the role.
00:13:03
Speaker
And we output a prediction. They're going to sell 275 a quarter or they're going to last in your company for 18 months. Wow. One of the things that I know Perception Predict really works well in is identifying great people in automotive sales. So what are some of those psychographics that fit that model for... And I know everybody, there's so many different variables on that, but what are some of the standards?
00:13:32
Speaker
Yeah, so it's not just automotive sales. It's really any kind of role in any organization because you're only looking at two things. Human data, like what makes us tick, who we are, right? You think about our abstract reasoning, our emotional resilience, our curiosity, our coping skills, our interpersonal versatility. Those are all psychographics. And then some sort of data, like what's the output the employer needs?
00:14:01
Speaker
And we're just meshing those together. So when you talk about in automotive, we're able to predict how many car sales somebody will sell pre-hire. But interestingly, it's different brand to brand, company to company. So somebody that does really well selling a luxury brand has sort of a different psychographic profile than somebody that's selling maybe an entry-level brand.
00:14:29
Speaker
And that becomes a nice insight for organizations because many auto dealers have multiple brands under their umbrella. And so they already have incoming candidates to be able to place them in the role that makes sense for them. And we find that in also enterprise companies where they might have a variety of roles from an enterprise sales to sort of commercial sales to customer success. They might have somebody come in and apply in one role and they say, you know what,
00:14:57
Speaker
this person actually is less fit for this role, but we have a great place for them over here where they're really thrive. Sure. Sure. Well, I suppose that could be in like instead of even just different kinds of brands or different luxury levels for auto sales for like a B2B services company that like BusyWeb serves, it might be different stages in the buyer's journey when people are either just researching and having connections or when they're ready to make decisions or
00:15:26
Speaker
engaging with different levels of executives as we get closer to the purchase decision, right? Yeah. So we do a lot of sales roles, a lot of customer success roles, leadership roles within organizations. But how we really differ what the sort of the next evolution is, there's been personality assessments out there for decades. Yeah.
00:15:50
Speaker
the PI, which really focuses on the big five personality traits. It's sort of introversion, extroversion, and some sort of cognitive.
00:16:00
Speaker
but it's sort of limiting. Let's say you went into a really nice restaurant and you had the perfect meal. You just had this dish. If you tried to go home and recreate that, would you rather have three ingredients, personality and introversion, extroversion, cognitive, or would you rather have this 550 ingredients where you could really dial it in, you're probably gonna have more success doing that.
00:16:29
Speaker
Furthermore, the way you sort of amp that up is to not only have those ingredients, but have data tell you which of them are important. And I have some great stories about insights from those kinds of studies that we've done that have been really surprising to people.
Data Insights in Hiring and Unexpected Findings
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah, please tell me more. The ability to model out
00:16:52
Speaker
Performance I think is such a unique concept that I want to give us something give us one of those examples of how you were surprised Here's a here's a controversial statement if somebody's sincere They're going to churn out of your organization faster than an insincere person. Oh What now? Yeah, and you're interviewing somebody and they sit across from you and they're really sincere. What do you think? Oh
00:17:19
Speaker
These are great. I love this. I want somebody who's going to shoot me straight. They feel like you want to go out and have a beer with them. I'm going to back up. That statement is only true for cleaning companies, for the cleaner. So again, remember, every job, every role is different.
00:17:36
Speaker
We did a really deep research study, the largest that's been done on the planet for cleaning companies. And your cleaning technician, the more sincere they are, the faster they churn out of the organization.
00:17:52
Speaker
Now, curiosity gets ahold of you. You're like, I wonder why that's the case. And the truth is it doesn't really matter why it's true. It just matters that the data says it's true. Now, there's all sorts of reasons. When we talk to owners of cleaning companies, they say, well, that sort of makes sense if they're in the home and the homeowners having a bad day, they have a really hard time putting on a smiley face and sort of faking it with the homeowner, but that's actually what's required. And when they're really sincere, they tend to take things personal.
00:18:22
Speaker
Oh, sure. But that's really just an intellectual exercise to say, why does this data point make sense? And the truth is it doesn't have to make sense in order to give you really good results. And so when we work with cleaning organizations for a technician, we now have a fingerprint that predicts how are they going to do in the cleaning role from a technical can do the job, we'll get good customer reviews, but also what's their flight risk.
00:18:51
Speaker
And one of the things that feeds into that, it's not just sincerity, there's a whole host of other entrepreneurial intent and other things that we're measuring, but those are the kinds of things that you find really fascinating. We were doing a retail store, I won't mention the name of the company here, just I don't like to air people's laundry, but they think of people selling cell phones or digital products.
00:19:18
Speaker
in a retail setting. And they had a 50% churn problem within the first 60 days. So people would come in and 50% of their hires walk right out the door within 50 days. And half of the people they kept were missing their quota by more than 50%. So a massive problem for them.
00:19:36
Speaker
they were super experienced at hiring and they had a really well-defined hiring process and it centered sort of around and think these are really probably your early career roles, right? Somebody selling cell phones is not, you don't have a lot of job history to go off of. But so they would look at two things. One was customer orientation. So how are they going to treat the customer? Do they have a customer mindset? And the second was do they love technology?
00:19:58
Speaker
And if they love technology and they're going to treat the customer right, we have great training program, we can teach them the rest of it. So every stage of their interview process was really about scoring and getting insights into that. And so we assess thousands of those retail agents doing that against our psychographics, against their performance data. And lo and behold, we discover zero correlation between customer orientation and success in the role.
00:20:28
Speaker
So where they spent all their energy didn't actually move the needle for them. Now it doesn't mean you're not going to hire people to treat your customers right, but as a filter, it was the wrong filter. And then more disturbing for the executives was we found a negative correlation between love of technology and success in the role, meaning the more they love technology, the worse they did. And they had it completely backwards. But they're selling technology.
00:20:58
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah. So again, you go curious, like, I wonder why that's the case. And, you know, you could make some supposition about why that might be the case. You might say, Hey, you know, they love technology so much they overwhelm them with features and benefits and the, you know, the customer leaves more confused than when they came in the door or they're so comfortable with technology. They talk over the prospect's heads. The reality is it just doesn't matter.
00:21:22
Speaker
It just matters that the data tells you that so i think in the what i'm really excited about is.
00:21:30
Speaker
one, drastically reducing that turnover rate for organizations. But I think more importantly, as a company, you're doing a disservice when you bring somebody in. At least this is the way I've been in every one of my businesses. And I suspect you guys are the same from my previous conversations with you. That's your family that you're bringing in, really. They're not your blood family. And I don't mean to enlighten that. But
00:21:55
Speaker
You have a social contract with that person. They're going to provide value to your company. And in return, you're going to provide value to their life in whatever way they do that. That might be monetarily, it might be being able to inspire them so they can be better mothers and fathers and givers in their community. And when we mishire somebody,
00:22:18
Speaker
We break that when we have to let somebody go or when they quit because the stress of the job doesn't allow them to thrive. We've stolen a piece of their life from them that they can never get back. And I don't think business owners take that seriously. If you waste three years of somebody's life,
00:22:38
Speaker
Plus, look at the damage you've done to your business and your customers when you turn out of that role. Right. So I think we're providing sort of a short circuit to that. Yes, we're excluding people out of some roles.
00:22:51
Speaker
But it's good for them and it's good for the company. And we're also at the same time identifying people that could be a fit for the role that they might have never considered before because they didn't, you know, they didn't play sports or they didn't look this, you know, whatever the bias is the hiring manager has that they're putting into the hiring process. And we're sort of fixing that.
00:23:12
Speaker
I think what you just talked about, there's something that was sort of revelatory in my mind, but also really hard to wrap my mind around, which is you don't have to understand why the data is the way that it is to know that the data is. Yeah. Do you run into that in your marketing for people?
Challenges of Data-Driven Decisions
00:23:30
Speaker
Sometimes you test something and you're like, that's the one I least thought would work. Color, word choice, layout.
00:23:40
Speaker
It doesn't matter if it works, it works. And I try and be truthful with people like, do you know why that happened? No, I don't, but it did. That's why we measure. I think the immediate follow up that if I were in that hypothetical cell phone seller and you came to me and said that
00:24:00
Speaker
Here is the data that's showing that the two things that you are really looking for in yourselves, people aren't fundamentally what you need to be looking for. I think my first impulse would be to deny the data. No, you're right. So what? What is it? It is amazing at how revolted people are by data. Sometimes they, they,
00:24:27
Speaker
really trust their gut. They think they are excellent. And this has to do with something called recency bias. Right. We tend to think we're like when we hire somebody and they do well, we pat ourselves on the back. We made a great choice. Right. We got it exactly right. We forget the bodies we left behind that turned out. And there's always another reason they, you know, they were lazy. They, you know,
00:24:54
Speaker
There's something. We don't check the boxes and say, no, we really sucked at that hiring decision. People tend to think that they're better judge of fit than they are. Sometimes you can give people lots and lots of data.
00:25:15
Speaker
They just sort of argue with, and we've had plenty of clients where, as an example, I'll share one recently. Again, I'm not going to front the company out because it was pretty personal, but they use us to hire many of the roles in their organization. And they had this one particular gal come in.
00:25:34
Speaker
and all the executive leadership team interviewed her, it's best candidate ever. And our score said like a 7% fit for the role. I have never seen a 7%, like that's really bad. Wow. And so they called me up, well, something's got to be broken in your system. And it's true, it's data. It's not a game of perfect. You're just predicting trends, right? And the idea is that you're going to place better bets more often, more accurately.
00:26:03
Speaker
And, you know, so we had discussion back and forth and we said, we'll stand by that rating, but make your own decision. Like you've, you're all convinced that this is the role. She was, she was out of the organization within 60 days. Ouch. Yeah. And here's the thing. It wasn't that she, that she wasn't the best person to do that job.
00:26:23
Speaker
I believe she was, she had done it for many organizations. The problem was there was such a mismatch between her and the way they operated that she was never going to thrive. It's like if you took a plant that needed a tropical environment and you stuck it out in the middle of Minnesota in the winter. It doesn't matter, that plant could be a great plant, it's just not going to thrive.
00:26:49
Speaker
What's interesting is if you think about company environments, there are people that thrive
00:26:57
Speaker
in dysfunction. You could have a completely dysfunctional company and they'd love it. And there will be a certain amount of people that are A players in that environment. It is something about it drives them. So what we really need to do is just find people that are comfortable in a dysfunctional environment and can thrive. Others do really well when the boss never calls and they're sort of completely independent and there's no, you know, guardrails, no, no coaching happening.
00:27:24
Speaker
That's the magic of really understanding your company and why wouldn't you, when people turn out of your organization, since it's possible to have this really rich psychographic data and you already have performance data,
00:27:43
Speaker
why wouldn't you be, you know, banking that knowledge and that data and having an almost like intellectual property, you know, like an asset for your organization, the fact that they turned out of your organization, if it didn't teach you anything, then you really lost. But if you've turned through a hundred people, you should at least be a hundred times smarter about that role. Yeah, absolutely.
00:28:06
Speaker
So what role does somebody's gut really play in the hiring process? Should people trust their gut?
Balancing Data and Intuition in Hiring
00:28:13
Speaker
Or should it be a combination of gut and data? Yeah. I actually write about that in my book. You don't want to be known in your company as the data head.
00:28:24
Speaker
Nobody loves a datahead. You got to be human. So it's really a balance. I can't be data adverse. I have to love data. I have to be fluent in the data, but I equally have to be able to take the human element and my gut and intuition and people. And I've got to be able to blend that. So when the data is telling me my gut's wrong, I can't take offense.
00:28:51
Speaker
It should make me buckle down, study harder, think harder, and at least know what risk I'm taking. Because sometimes you take a risk, right? I remember one of my early business mentors said, don't ever offend lawyers and accountants. But they said, never ask your lawyer or your accountant how you should run your business because they don't run one. Most of them are solo entrepreneurs. Their job is to tell you what the risk is.
00:29:21
Speaker
Right. And what the opportunity is. And then you take that risk, right? Should you write off the fur coat that you call, you know, you're hanging in the background as often. And people make various risk decision. I think that's the role data has to play is an indicator of risk. When I hire this person for this role, what's the risk I'm taking? And I might decide the risk is worth it, right? Because they have a, they have a lot of connections. They have,
00:29:48
Speaker
industry experience, you know, there's a whole host of reasons that I might still make that choice. To me, in selling in 2023, what I've sort of come to as a conclusion is that money doesn't matter nearly as much as risk tolerance. Because I might be in a position where I'm in a buying
00:30:12
Speaker
Place but it's not necessarily my money. It's the company money. It's you know, my owners money something like that but my main Motivation isn't necessarily to get the best price. It's to make sure that I am a Not at risk for making this decision and that be that bet that you talked about is gonna pay off for the company and
00:30:38
Speaker
You're saying from a buyer's perspective. Yeah. They're looking at making sure that if they make this decision, it's not going to come back and haunt them in any way.
00:30:47
Speaker
And I tend to say sometimes people are better buyers than we are sellers. Have you ever dealt with a salesperson? It's just miserable, but you need that service or product enough you buy anyway. And I hate it when I do that because I'm like, that salesperson is going around like, yeah, I rock. I'm a great salesperson. I've sort of reinforced that. I want to just be like, hey buddy, I bought in spite of you, not because of you.
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah i just had that was something that i bought where i felt like i realized i was running over the very nice kid who was i kept asking what about this what about this he's just like well this is his voice would almost correct was i told you serve the first time i'm like alright so yeah i'm i'm too much too much and i'm so.
00:31:32
Speaker
Straying back to the point, what are some... Do you run into the same thing? I don't want to hijack the conversation, but on a hiring... I spend a lot of time in the hiring realm and the sales realm also, but in the marketing side, do you find people also have an aversion to data or how do your customers usually respond to data? Do you do for them?
00:31:59
Speaker
I think the big thing that people in our experience, when we're working with our clients at Busy Web and we're doing B2B sales, it's highly relationship based.
00:32:11
Speaker
Data can be disproved or counterpointed very easily, so you have to be very careful with the kinds of data that you present. So if I say something that's an outlandish claim, our product is 80% better than X product, then people start saying, well, that smells funny, right? So that kind of data, where it's this versus that, tends to be counterproductive.
00:32:36
Speaker
And instead, what we find often is the service of removing barriers to entry
00:32:47
Speaker
is the kind of information, not necessarily data, but the feels like information is the content that people respond best to. And this is over A-B testing and using our data to prove to the client in the backend that can actually flip it. So I agree that data can be
00:33:08
Speaker
Sometimes if you try to if you try to bury it with with data or if you try to just go like nobody cares how many years your company's been in business they care about if you can solve the problem and so getting to those points as quickly as possible at least in b2b seems to be the answer.
00:33:26
Speaker
One of the most illuminating lessons of my life that I had, I learned at BusyWeb where we were doing lead generation marketing for a promotions company. And I'm not going to say who it is. And about six months into the program, which all intents and purposes from a data standpoint was working like gangbusters. We were getting these folks 10, 20, 30 leads a month that were fantastic. We got fired.
00:33:55
Speaker
I said, it's not working out. None of this is working. We're not making any money. And so the person who was running the program was a very nice woman who works at Busy Reb named Michelle. She was crushed because she just didn't know what happened. And so finally,
00:34:10
Speaker
It was driving me nuts because I didn't understand how that data was working either because we were getting all these leads and then as a result, what happened? Finally, I went back and called the guy and said, can you tell me what happened? He said, yeah, you were giving us all these leads, but they weren't converting. I said, well, what were you doing to convert the leads?
00:34:32
Speaker
He said, well, every time somebody filled out a form on our website and said that they were really interested in working with us, anything that came from your marketing efforts, we immediately mailed them a brochure. And then they never called back. Well, okay. So as a result, then what I've tried to change when we talk to people is an alignment of what success means to you.
00:35:01
Speaker
So if you hire us to get you leads for your business, B2B service leads, okay, great. What does that lead look like? What are the elements that go into that? Because if I give you my mother-in-law's name, did I do my job? Well, on the one hand, yes, I gave you a lead, a phone number, and an email address of somebody to call. However, on the other hand, very much no, because she should not be buying anything.
00:35:30
Speaker
Finding the right fit and the right leads is something that I think people are much more interested in and that's how we use data to align in that respect.
00:35:40
Speaker
I'm curious, did I hear you say you had Prince as a client at one point? Yeah, we did. You don't have to break client confidentiality, although he'll probably forgive you at this point. But I'm curious, were you behind the marketing study that caused him to say the artist formerly known as? I'm seeing Dave sitting there saying, no Prince, this is really a good move. Just go with artist.
00:36:09
Speaker
I wish it was, but we built a website because we built the last website before he passed away. He was well after that, but he was trying to remove iTunes as the middleman and sell direct to consumer. We built a website to sell his latest album, Direct.
00:36:30
Speaker
And so it was very interesting and lots of lots of weird and enlightening conversations over over walls because at that point he wasn't speaking with anyone except for one person. So it was always a game of telephone over the phone. But lots of lots of very interesting stuff. It's like you didn't get a private concert out of the deal.
00:36:52
Speaker
No, no. And it was, it was a very, very fun and it was a great story, but you know, that talk about a person who kind of leads and, and interacts with the world differently than you would expect. Um, very much so. Yeah. You know, the, in my book, I, in a section of it, I talk about the importance of understanding how people got their beliefs and
00:37:19
Speaker
I think when you're exposed to people like Prince or that you live a very different lifestyle than maybe you've been exposed to, it might even be the first time you travel to a foreign country and you're exposed to a different culture. You start recognizing like how much of somebody's reality is shaped by the environment they grew up in and their belief system. And I think the most powerful beliefs that people have are the ones that they don't even identify as a belief.
00:37:48
Speaker
meaning they there's they grew up in an environment where that was truth, right? Like we sort of accept that the sky is blue. The reality is how do we know the sky is blue? It's only because everybody around us has always told us the sky is blue. It could be red, right? Like we've just put a label on it and that that's it. I do a thought experiment of saying, what if I grew up in a small town and everybody said the sky is red.
00:38:13
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, it's a beautiful red sky. And, you know, Dave, you have beautiful red eyes. You just sort of like you wouldn't think of that as a belief, right? You would think of it as truth. And maybe, you know, eventually you grow up and you got to leave small town and you travel and you get in a cafe and the waitress comes up and says, man, the sky is really blue today. And your eyes gave her strikingly blue. You'd say, well, that waitress has lost her mind. She's the crazy one. Uh-huh.
00:38:40
Speaker
And it would probably take a lot of people banging you over the head, calling the sky blue and your eyes blue for you to finally go, maybe I'm the crazy one. And I think everyone walks through life with a set of fundamental beliefs that they don't even zero chance they recognize it as a belief. And so many automated actions happen from that core belief that are just fundamentally wrong.
00:39:07
Speaker
And I think that's powerful work we can do as leaders in organizations, but also with people that, you know, in our community or in our companies that we interact with is to really authentically have the mindset of I believe you believe that. And that could sound really sarcastic, like I believe you believe that. But I actually mean that in a really authentic way. If I can get up next to somebody close enough where I can
00:39:33
Speaker
legitimately say, I believe you believe that in the sense that if I had grown up this way you had experienced what you had, you know, done the things you had been around the people you've been around, I would have also believed exactly the same thing. Now I can remove any sort of judgment. And when people, when people feel judged, then they have to just sort of defend their point of view. You see that on politics all the time, right? Like,
00:39:57
Speaker
You just get a label as one party or the other anymore and somebody judges the entirety of your moral fabric and how you see society and that's also not true. I think that's super powerful as a leader is understanding where do people get their beliefs from and then accepting that it's true. In my book, I write about five truths about humans and I won't bore you with all of them.
00:40:22
Speaker
but one of them is that people are giving you a hundred percent of what they're capable of, or they have what they believe is a valid reason for not doing so. Okay. It doesn't matter that it's not true. Maybe it's that they believe this, right? And you can't argue with that, but you hear a lot of owners and companies
00:40:46
Speaker
somehow believing that their employees are sandbagging or don't want to work hard or they, you know, it's never that they just don't want to work hard for you for some reason that they believes valid. You don't care enough. You don't recognize work. You don't pay it. Like insert whatever the belief is. And it could be a completely false belief, but by the way, as long as it's true and you resist it being true, you'll never get past that with them.
Influence of Belief Systems on Performance
00:41:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:17
Speaker
That's, that's, that's super interesting because I think the thing that I've always kind of latched onto is like, especially if things aren't working out the way that you would plans never attribute malice.
00:41:32
Speaker
where simple incompetence is the actual answer. And, you know, incompetence is probably too strong of a word, but maybe that person isn't performing the way you wanted to because they just don't have the skill set. It's not that they're trying to be mean or they hate you or anything. It's just they don't know how to do it. Or their definition of what grade is is different.
00:41:55
Speaker
Bingo. I'll give you a real example. I'll just go back to the cleaning industry. I tend to go back to that because my very first business I started was a clean business. We have clients in cleaning, by the way. This is fantastic. Couldn't be more separate from the technology I do today. But imagine you grow up and we've all went in a house where it's almost a hoarding situation. It's just dirty, filthy, whatever. If you're hiring somebody that grew up in that environment and you're bringing them onto your cleaning team,
00:42:25
Speaker
They might be the cleanest person they know and the dirtiest person you know.
00:42:31
Speaker
Yeah. Their belief structure is different. So when you're saying, why can't you do quality work? They believe they are doing quality work. Like they're doing better quality work than anybody they've ever seen, right? Like their mom was a hoarder. Their dad was a hoarder. Their neighbors were hoarders. And I'm being extreme, but you sort of like take that out of the like cleaning into almost every other facet. When you say, here's how we treat a customer.
00:42:57
Speaker
Like as an owner, we have a very distinct, like what is great customer service? How did they get their definition? So sometimes it's not the skill or even the will, it's just their standard of grade is different. And I believe that they're giving you a hundred percent of what they're capable of.
00:43:19
Speaker
Or they have a valid reason for not doing so. They may not be capable of doing more today because they've already viewed, they already view it as top performance. And when we feel like we're giving top performance, we quit paying attention to that as a deficit. We move on. But I think if you examine your own life, like if there was an area where you were astutely aware that you were behind your peers in a skill level or a standard,
00:43:47
Speaker
you'd work on it, like your subconscious would work on it. So I always maintain that the employee is either not aware of it, just cause it, you know, I remember the first time I walked into a home that was greater than 5,000 square feet, I was like, people live like this.
00:44:06
Speaker
Can I stay in the pantry? And it's just good or bad by comparison. And everybody in life's going that. But what we end up doing is we end up believing that the world sees it plus or minus 10% of how we see it. I guarantee you, Prince, if we go back to that side, 100% different than you did. Lens, right? Just because where it came from, the experiences. But somehow we tend to
00:44:32
Speaker
have sort of a really narrow range of normal. So we can hire somebody in a customer success role, and we believe there's a 10% difference. There might be a really wide difference in how they see customer service. And your goal in the hiring process, one, use data to make sure they have the fundamental makeup to do well in that position. But then secondly, where would their standard of great come from? Like I remember sitting talking to my son,
00:45:02
Speaker
who was super smart, but wasn't a great conversationalist until you got him going. And I remember having to teach him how to have a conversation. I was like, you know, I've just thrown the ball to you now. You got to throw it back to me because I'm not going to keep throwing you balls. We physically would go through that and eventually became a great conversationalist.
00:45:25
Speaker
You've kind of got to think that through your employees. Maybe I have to teach them how to have a great customer success call. Maybe I have to train them how to ask questions on a sales call. I want to end because we're coming up on time and this has been incredibly valuable. I think one of the things that we did to launch our podcast, which was super fun, is we interviewed the chat GPT robot.
00:45:54
Speaker
so we did ask the chat gpt robot all these questions and then my cousin matt who has this great deep baritone like dave does uh performed it but what how is a you need to drop me that episode i gotta absolutely yeah it's uh dial it in podcast.com like and subscribe uh what how does ai affecting hiring
00:46:18
Speaker
It's completely transforming the hiring.
AI's Role in Modern Hiring Practices
00:46:20
Speaker
Everything from pattern recognition on the vast amount of resumes that are coming in the front door to candidates completely writing their resume cover letter by chat GPT and submitting it without actually even applying to the job.
00:46:35
Speaker
There's automation systems out there. You could sit and have a beer and have chat GPT and plugins. Chat GPT can't do that on its own. Apply to every position out there and custom write their resume, truthfully even, saying rewrite it with putting forward the skills that you want for a particular job. Write a cover letter and submit it and you don't have to do anything other than take the calls to do appointments.
00:47:05
Speaker
Recruiters are operating in that environment and I think most aren't even aware of it. Like they're sort of aware. People are doing that, but it's swinging very much in that direction. So you've created this autopilot to screen candidates and candidates respond with I've created an autopilot to just keep applying. Right. So that's a big.
00:47:27
Speaker
thing, the technology is having to unravel. Second to that, outside of just numbers and that sort of thing, the ability to analyze vast amounts of information and come to different conclusions is super important. I think the way I tend to think about AI in
00:47:49
Speaker
unique to me, but it's an idea that I've adopted is that you're not going to lose your job to an AI. You're going to lose your job to somebody using an AI. And so you really have to, and the pace of change is so fast. I used a product that's a calling product, right?
00:48:13
Speaker
You've called into a bank, right? And have the robot right? Yeah. And you know, it's always wooden and doesn't get it right. I was on a call the other day. I went a full 10 minutes before I realized I was talking to an AI. Oh, wow. Really? And
00:48:31
Speaker
it's getting better and better so i started following the technology behind that every thirty days you think you can't get any better and it's getting better i will i would place about with anyone that within six months i can have somebody call you. You can hold a full forty minute conversation with that person and you will never know it's an AI.
00:48:55
Speaker
Well, I'm glad we're actually confirming that we're talking to you over video as well as audio because I think you're much better than an AI would have been, but just for everybody's benefit, Jonathan is real. You would tend to think so, but people have remixed
00:49:14
Speaker
music and recreated the artist's voice and created hits released on that artist's voice. Arguably, there's two sides to that, like, how can you rip off this artist's work? But the other side of that is, if you really enjoyed the music and you had a good time and it had the emotional lift you wanted to and you got you, do you really care that it was created through an AID? I think we'll sort of snobbishly be, oh, yes, it's not real art. But
00:49:42
Speaker
In so many aspects of the economy, people won't care. That 10-minute conversation I had with a customer success agent, when I finally realized that, I was like, how dare they try to trick me. Actually, I had much better service than I've ever gotten from a customer success agent. I would rather have that experience every single time.
00:50:07
Speaker
So I think we look out in the future, you're going to have like, and when I say future, I'm 18 months, like it's not, it's not way out there. I think you're going to have you like, we're going to start developing where it's going to be kind of cute to have, you know, bespoke
00:50:27
Speaker
human crafted things. Like maybe you'll be reading a book that was actually written by a human. It'll be kind of cute. It's sort of like, you know, people do vintage glasses and you know, they know it's not the best, but you know, it was handcrafted. I think that almost every area of, like, why would I hire an attorney?
00:50:49
Speaker
when I can sit down and have a very human-like conversation with an AI that sounds human, has a sense of humor, asks me great questions, and then 30 seconds later gives me the advice and all the contracts I need to do that. And it's probably better than... I just think we'll go there. You think about doctors. Do you want somebody operating, planning your cancer treatment?
00:51:17
Speaker
that went to medical school a decade ago and attends one conference a year and maybe reads three papers.
00:51:26
Speaker
because they're busy, or would you rather have that diagnosis done by an AI that has looked at every single instance of cancer on the planet and can remember every single diagnosis in the outcome? I'd rather have the AI go, you know what, Jonathan, I think you got the, you're only the third case of it, but that's what you got.
00:51:48
Speaker
And that would be a doctor that's using AI. So the person using AI to help weed out all the possibilities. So is it malpractice then at some point for a doctor not to use it? Because he's withheld the best quality medicine you can get. I think he's going to change education. And I do think as a society, we're not ready for it. And there's a lot of nefarious things that will also happen. You won't stop that progress. And I think we have to have a reimagining of
00:52:21
Speaker
Especially as a guy, and probably the same to women, but especially as we get more equality in the workplace. But I don't think you could grow up as a male in our society and not within the first 10 minutes of every conversation you've had with a new person, had them ask you, what do you do for a living?
00:52:39
Speaker
Yeah, true. Like our identity is what do you do for a living? Or how do you earn a living? And I think that's sort of grotesque. Like let's change the conversation because why do I have to earn a living? Like I have a right to be alive.
00:52:54
Speaker
I'm alive, right? Our society has by nature created this identity around what do we do to exchange for cash, right? And I do believe in capitalism, but I think we have to rethink capitalism to be a humane capitalism for this one reason, if nothing else.
00:53:20
Speaker
there will not be enough jobs for people to work 40, 60 hours a week every week. And neither should they, right? Like, why is that a good thing? I don't see anybody going, man, I love to work in 60 hours a week. Now, maybe if you're passionate about something, you're going to do it. Like I stayed up late last night because I was on this idea that I'm working on in tech and I could have, you know, when I went to bed, I was like, man, I wish I had another 15 hours.
00:53:45
Speaker
That's totally different than somebody slaving away in a call center, dialing for dollars because they've got to put food on the table to send more money up the chain to a big corporation. And I'm not anti-corporation either. And it can sound that way. I just think we have to be able to have really open conversations without fear and people get in sort of fear-based thinking and be like,
00:54:14
Speaker
Have you ever went in and tried to install HubSpot as an example? Yep. And you have somebody in that company who is the, I don't know, choose some other software, Salesforce Expert. Right. That's their identity. They don't really care that HubSpot is going to be better. At some point, they're like, well, if we move to HubSpot, I'm not the expert anymore.
00:54:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's a takeaway from them. Yeah, I'm taking away from that person, right? And so you get the same thing when you sell people, you know, out in California. Well, it's stupid to be farming in California because you're drilling down and sucking all the water up and, you know, you can't do that anymore. Well, true from the sideline. That's easy to say. And the data would probably support that.
00:54:58
Speaker
But if you're a family that has done that for decades, and you have everything invested in that, it is completely unreasonable to think that person is just gonna voluntarily go, yep, you know what? Done it for generations, let me turn the tap off. Right, right. It's just not, and so that's a very long winded way to say, how do I think AI is gonna change hiring?
AI's Impact on Society and Future of Work
00:55:22
Speaker
I think AI is gonna change everything. Yes.
00:55:27
Speaker
That is given. I don't care what you think about AI. It is here, and it's actually always been here. AI is really just advanced mathematics. We have problems. I had as a consulting company and was helping bring to market a quantum computer, if you're not familiar with quantum computers. Super cutting edge things. It will completely transform
00:55:55
Speaker
the way we are able to solve math problems or other problems. But think about a caffeine molecule. We drink coffee every day. There's no computer on the planet right now that can model a caffeine molecule. Really? We know how to do it.
00:56:16
Speaker
We just don't have enough compute power to do it. Google has their quantum computer, IBM is also doing quantum computer, and about a year ago, they solved an equation in three minutes that would have taken the world's largest supercomputer 150 years of compute time. Yeah.
00:56:41
Speaker
the problem they were solving wasn't meaningful in any way. It's designed to be a math problem to challenge computers. But the fact that it was able to solve something that's previously been unsolvable, like why is that important? And this is, I don't think people are like, they're just whistling away at whatever they're doing in their day job, right? When you can, when we make medicine today,
00:57:08
Speaker
right? They go in, they study the genome, they study DNA, right? And they say, we think the problems here, here, here. And so they cut that, they literally go into a wet lab and they have to make a culture and they have to do all that. And then they test it and then, oh, it didn't work. So now let's narrow it down, right? And you're just sort of narrowing down to get to a problem. When you can model in a computer environment,
00:57:37
Speaker
every possible outcome, you don't have to use a wet lab. You can instantly try every possible combination to solve Alzheimer's, cancer. It's a computing problem. It's not a knowledge problem that we're constrained by. And you can think about this in sort of an archaic industry. When you're making an airplane today,
00:58:01
Speaker
There is no airplane manufacturer that builds the whole airplane and then just goes out and puts it in a wind tunnel and blows wind at it to see if the wings will come off. They do it in a computer simulation. So they can test all the wind forces and they can build a close to perfect aircraft first time in the manufacturing plant. That's just an evolution in computing power and we take it for granted now. That same thing's happening in medicine.
00:58:32
Speaker
And it will be in sales. We just, we, you know, the human genome's just been completely mapped. And already if you like Google genomic based medicine, the things that are coming in the pipeline, there's been three or four drugs approved for it. They're like revolutionary. It's not like I made you, you're blind and I made you see better. You're, you're blind and now you have 2020 vision.
00:59:01
Speaker
Completely undid that health problem. And yes, it's a very subset of macular degeneration, but when we get enough compute power and we get AI running in the background to recognize those patterns, we're going to be fixing things like that.
00:59:16
Speaker
So then the question just becomes, what do we do as a, as a human race with all this time we have, right? We used to have to go down to the river and crush our clothes on rocks to get them clean. And then, you know, now we have water piped into our houses. So we sit and watch TV.
00:59:30
Speaker
And we put them in the washing machine and that was too hard for some of us. We hired a maid to put it in the washing machine. So I just think it's fun. Let's imagine life where when you meet somebody, the phrase, what do you do to earn a living is meaningless. They look at you like you are speaking a foreign language. And the question is, what do you do to live? That's the future I'm looking forward to.
00:59:58
Speaker
Oh, I love that. And that's actually a perfect place to tap into or go to part two next time. Because I think we could have another hours long conversation. This is wonderful. You're fantastic. Jonathan, where can people find you? The book, The Sales Boss, is available on Amazon.
01:00:16
Speaker
Yeah, the sales boss. You can also email me John J.O.N., just don't put an H in it, at the sales boss, or john at whohire.com. I would give you a perception predict, but everybody spells that wrong. So who hire really easy. The sales boss is easy. Love it.