The Sales Focus Podcast: Episode 1 Introduction

The Sales Focus Podcast: Episode 1 – Transcription

Intro: You’re listening to the Sales Focus Podcast. Your go-to for developing high-performing teams, next level sales skills, and real results. It’s time to get focused.

Welcome to the Sales Focus Podcast. My name is Tony Horwath. I’m the Founder and CEO of Sales Focus Inc. I started this podcast for one simple reason: how can we get you to focus on success? How can we get you, your business, your organization to improve your sales performance, to manage it, to monitor it, to make it repeatable, to make it progressive. How can we give you the tools that will allow you to grow. Today, I’m really going to focus on the history of the company, a little bit about my background, and then I’ll talk a little bit about what we do as an organization. Going forward in future podcasts, we’re really going to get into the tips and tricks that can you more successful. So, I hope you join us in future podcasts. You can learn some things that can be implemented your daily sales activity to make you more successful and achieve the goals you want to achieve.

So, let me start quite a few years ago, out of school, my background was in technology. I was a computer engineer, and I was fortunate enough to work with an organization that was very leading in technology. We were implementing routing technology really in the early to mid-80s. I always like to kid around that it was actually Al Gore and myself who really started the internet. The technology we were implementing was token ring routing technology in the academia world which really was the start of transmission of information between academia and the beginning of the internet.

What I discovered very early in my career is I really didn’t have a love or a passion for the technology. What I also discovered is I saw the guys across the street who were wearing better suits, driving nicer cars, and had a much lower handicap than I did. Those were the salespeople. I really wanted to find out if I could be successful in sales because I always heard that technologists and engineers didn’t make good sales people. I wanted to prove that wasn’t accurate, and I’m always up for a challenge.

So, fast forward 28 years forward or more than that now, I’ve become what I’d consider a sales expert, and I love to pass on tips and tools and techniques to people who are still learning the trade. Sales is a skill. It’s not just something you do. I always here this old adage, “you could sell ice to an Eskimo” or that person could sell anything to anyone. Well, that’s not really the case. Just because you talk a lot, doesn’t make you’re a good salesperson. Just because you’re an extrovert, doesn’t mean you’re a good salesperson. Just because you are comfortable talking in any situation, may mean you’re not a good listener. It may mean that certain people you’re selling to don’t appreciate that you talk tomuch. So being a good salesperson takes a lot of skill. It’stakes a lot of different techniques, and now, we’re going to go through that in some of the future podcasts.

So, 28 years ago, I started Sales Focus. The foundation was I was running the sales and marketing of an IT outsourcing company. At that time, mid-90s, this term Business Process Outsourcing started to be thrown around and started to be talked about. So instead of taking over the technology, you took over the people, the process, and the technology. Primarily was done in maybe administrative world, HR world, some call center world, but not in sales. My idea was I developed a sales outsourcing model, targeting initially technology companies because that’s what I knew and that’s where I had spent my previous years, in helping technology companies implement sales process to be more effective in managing their sales team. In my career of sales, I found that because I had the skillset of understanding the technology already, which gave me a great advantage, but I’m a very process-oriented person, I could take those skillsets and actually lead the sales team in multiple areas, in multiple divisions. So when I started Sales Focus, we were the pioneers of the sales outsourcing industry. There was no other company that did what we did. There are times today where I hear some companies say oh no, we started in ’97 or we did this and we were before Sales Focus. It’s not true. There were a couple of organizations, one no longer with us, that started right around the same time kind of in the same industry, but they were different. One was a recruiting company that someone said heycan you manage my sales team, and the other one was more of indirect sales. Our model: direct sales in the tech sector. That’s what we started with. So I started going out talking to people about sales outsourcing and this great new concept that I had come out with, and I got that head tilted to the side look. Sales outsourcing? You want me to give you my salespeople, who are my connection to my clients. I can’t do that. I’d be crazy to do that. I could never do that. This will never work. And it did take us a couple years to really get that foundation where people would say, well let’s talk about that. Let me understand it a little better. So I was very fortunate to have two companies reach out to me. One was Sprint, and one was Enron. I’ll leave the Enron story for another time. Most people know that story, but it was a great relationship for a very short period of time. But what it allowed me to do was understand that there is a major need out there for organizations that need help building and managing their sales team. What the difference was that we brought, that Sales Focus brought, is we had a process in place, a proven process that I had trademarked years before called S.O.L.D., study, organize, launch, and direct. It’s every time we launch a program we implement this process into the organization. So we can understand your business. We understand your product or service. We understand your targets or we develop them. We understand your value proposition or we develop it. We understand your differentiation and your value statement. All those things have to be implemented into every sales organization. The reason I started Sales Focus is because so many technology companies go through the same process over and over of failed sales teams. They get started, they have relationships, they can build their business to a certain level, but there comes a time where they need to hire salespeople in order to grow to the next level. And what they would do is they would go out and hire one person or two people, and they find out in six months that person wasn’t selling anything. They fire that person and hire someone else, and they get a roller coaster effect of maybe that person would close one deal but wouldn’t close anything else. The challenge wasn’t that they were hiring the wrong people, could have been, but primarily it wasn’t. The problem was they didn’t understand who to hire, how to implement process, how to help salespeople find success, where do they go, what do they say, who do they talk to, what’s the differentiator. All of those things they didn’t know how to train and implement into a salesperson. Plus, they didn’t understand sales process. Every sales process in every organization is unique to that organization and their product or service. I’ll say that again. Every sales process is unique to the client that we represent. It has to do with the product or service they represent. It has to do with the companies or clients that they’re going after and how they’re going to implement their tool or technology or solution or product or widget into that solution. So when we engage with any organization, big or small, fortune 500 or small startup company, we go through the S.O.L.D. process of setting up the process to allow us to understand from top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel, how are we going to bring clients in, how we’re going to communicate with them, how we’re going to track them and manage them, how we’re going to execute contracts, and generate revenue. So companies now, and we’ve represented and launched well over 5,000 clients, we’ve hired well over 20,000-30,000 sales agents. We’ve represented companies that all over the globe, many who want to get into the U.S. market, many U.S. companies that want to expand. Mid-size companies that don’t understand how to outreach to small-and-mediums businesses. Large organizations that need feet on the street, they need it quickly, they need to be mobile, they need to be scalable. How do they do that internally when they have so many obstacles to overcome? They utilize an organization like Sales Focus. We are fast, we are nimble, and we are focused on sales. So an organization comes to us to grow. Sometimes it’s revenue generation. Sometimes it’s information distribution. I need a team out there to get information out. Sometimes, it’s how do we educate the public, not just about the product or solution, but how it’s going to integrate into their life or business. Sales is about bringing value. It’s about bringing something that going to make your business more successful, less cost, improved performance, or an individual to improve their lifestyle, to reduce spending, to allow them to do something faster. So sales is about bringing value to an organization or a business. At Sales Focus, our job is building that process form top of the funnel to bottom of funnel to make sure that every organization has the tools and the knowledge to build and manage an effective sales team. I’ve been asked a million times in my career, “well how to do you find good salespeople?” That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make good salespeople. I’m going to teach you how to be an effective salesperson because I don’t care if you talk a lot, I don’t care if you’re an extrovert or an introvert, I don’t care. If you’re willing to work, if you’re willing to learn some new skills, you can be a great salesperson. Sales is not about luck. Sometimes, it’s about timing, but it’s not just about luck. Sales is not just about how much you can talk to someone. Sales is about understanding that product that you’re representing and providing a solution to someone, so they understand it enough to say yes. That’s the simple basics of sales. Good salespeople, what the tangibles and intangibles that I look for are very simple. First and foremost, you have to have a great work ethic. In order to be successful in sales, you have to be willing to put in the time to learn the product or solution, to understand your customers, understand the value proposition, understand the differentiation. You have to be a planner. You have to be organized. Those tools, those certain set of tools, but most importantly, the work ethic tool I can’t teach you. If you have that inside, if you have that desire to be successful, we can help you. I always tell salespeople, there’s only one door I can’t help you open, that’s your car door in the morning. Get your butt out of bed. Get to work, and get to doing your job. Planning,organizing,it’s very important in sales as well. If you’re scattered, it makes your job much more challenging. You need to have that focus. You need to be focused on success. What does that mean? What does that look like? Keep following us, and we’ll be bringing you some sales tips, tools, and techniques that will get you to that next level of growth. Whether you’re an individual sales agent, small business owner, or multi-purpose enterprise, we can help you get to the next level. Thank you. Good selling.