Building Teams That Win

Welcome to the Toilet Paper Salesman Podcast. My name's Mike Meraki and I'm thrilled you're with us today. Today we're going to be talking about how to build great teams. The college football playoffs are going on, and Indiana is the story of the day.

Indiana had arguably one of the most terrible football programs in NCAA for a long time. They decided to hire an unknown coach, Kirk Signetti, and he turned the program around in two years to the point where they're playing in a national championship game. It's an incredible story of someone who has overlooked his entire coaching career and came in and was able to build a program in such a short time. And so we're going to talk about what it is about a great coach and a great manager because technically they're the same thing.

And we're going to talk about how to recruit the right people on your team. What are the attributes of salespeople that I look for in building my team? So let's talk about the coach first because the coach matters, obviously. Another great example of this is Kale Sanderson.

I don't know if you follow wrestling, but if you follow wrestling and you Google Penn State Wrestling, you're going to see Kale Sanderson was an incredible wrestler, went, I believe, 149-0, and then was at Iowa State and was coaching and having some success and decided to come over to Penn State. Now Penn State sits right in the middle of arguably the best wrestling state in the country, which is Pennsylvania. But the team had been mediocre for years. I think the last championship they won was was in the 50s.

Mediocre, meh, they'd get to the national championship, they'd take a couple of people, but really didn't do much. They weren't considered a powerhouse. Cale Sanderson comes in there, changes the culture, brings in the right people, and now all of a sudden they've won the last 12 out of 13 national championships. It's just an incredible feat.

Well, what did they do? How do they do that? And so when you think about coaches and managers, because you can have the best salespeople in the world, but if you don't have a good manager, they're not going to perform. Because I think a lot of businesses and owners look at their team and they go, Well, my team's not performing.

Okay, well, it could be your team, it could be the individual players. There's a lot of factors that go into it. But I would look at the coach first. I would look at the manager first.

Who's managing these people and how are they managing them? And are they getting the most out of their people? And so what is it about a good coach? Good coaches work from the bottom up.

We talk about an upside-down pyramid. Great coaches are at the bottom of the pyramid. And their job is to help and support their team members. Great coaches break down barriers to help their people be successful.

As a manager, my job is to break down all the barriers I can so that my salespeople can be successful. If I'm doing that, that helps them a lot. And it helps them psychologically, it helps them in many other ways to drive success. Great coaches don't micromanage, they allow them to be themselves and work the way they work.

As long as it's effective, as long as they're gaining results. There's no need for a manager or a coach to micromanage their employees. Give them the task, let them do it. If there's issues that need to be addressed, if they're not doing something correctly or they need to make adjustments, great.

Help them. Great coaches fight for their team. They go to bat for them. They're their advocate.

It's a big deal because to know you're supported by your manager, to know they're going to go to the wall for you helps you to go and do what you need to do to be successful. Great managers make it fun. They add in elements to make it fun. If you talk to Cale Sanderson's wrestlers, these guys are national champions, they're the world champions, he's got the best of the best in there.

They all say one thing, it's fun. They're having fun. If you can make it fun, the work becomes easy. If your salespeople don't dread coming to work every day, if you make it light and fun, then they're going to give you their best.

Great coaches get their hands dirty. They're willing to dig in. When the times get tough, they dig in and they go to work and they're willing to stand side by side with you and work as hard as they can to help you to get the results you need. Great coaches put their people in places to succeed.

In other words, they look at their team members' sales abilities and skills and put them in a position to succeed. You not everybody is the same. You have to assess the strengths of each person and put them in a position to succeed. Bill Pelichek was famous for this.

Put somebody in a place to succeed and have them do their job. And if they do their job and they do the things they love to do and they're really good at it, then they're going to have success. You can have an all-pro center, and if you put them at running back, they're not going to be very successful. Even if they're an all-pro center.

But if you put them at center, now you get the most out of them. And that's really what you need to do in looking at your team. You need to take your team members and put them in the best place to succeed. You need to ultimately help them get from point A to point B, both personally and professionally, whatever that means from them.

You need to help them to continue to grow as a person and grow as a business person. Finally, you have to teach them how to be winners. I remember when I was on a wrestling team in seventh grade, I was on a junior high school wrestling team and we didn't win a match all year. And then we moved and I got a different coach.

And we had a scrimmage and we won the scrimmage. And the coach came over to me after the match and he said, How does that feel? And I said, How does what feel? And he goes, How does it feel to be a winner?

Just that statement alone changed my whole mindset is now, oh, I'm a winner. Instead of losing every match instead of being a loser, now he's already planting seeds in my head that I'm a winner. Great managers teach their salespeople how to be winners, how to win, and how to celebrate those wins. They celebrate with them, they celebrate those victories.

The salespeople come to them when they have a victory and you celebrate together. That's huge because that helps them to understand that the winning part of it is the gravy, is the trophy, is the thing that gives you the satisfaction of the job. So, how do you find great salespeople? What is it about a salesperson that you look for or that I look for?

I look for somebody with high capacity. I like a salesperson who has a lot of things going on. They're doing a lot of things, they're involved in a lot of things, they do extracurricular activities, they can juggle a lot of balls at the same time. In our business, in the distribution business, that's really important because we have so much going on in our business at the same time.

There's so many things to handle. Someone who has high capacity, they're able to handle all of those balls at the same time. They're able to juggle a lot at the same time. When I look at a resume, I look at what their past successes are.

I don't really care about what their titles were. I don't care about anything if they were promoted or not promoted, whatever. I look at the successes. What did you do?

How much did you grow sales? How many new accounts did you open? Did you win any awards? How many, what's the growth look like?

Because someone who is a high performer is going to show stats. And that Kirk Signetti says that when he looks in the portal, Indiana has just a handful of four and five-star recruits. They're all two and three-star recruits, and they're in the national championship game. Why?

Because Kirk Signetti looks at stats. He's taking players and bringing players in from the portal who have high stats. Because if they performed at one level, if they have the physical skills, and obviously you have to look at that too, then they're going to perform at the same at the next level because they're high performers. They're used to succeeding.

Always look at past performance when you're recruiting a salesperson. They're self-motivated. They have fire in their belly. They want to succeed.

They want to achieve something. They want to go forward. They want to have goals. They have dreams.

They want to do something in their life. They have a good sense of humor. I love people with good senses of humor. I find that that's important, especially in the making it fun element.

If you guys can joke around, if you can have fun together, if you can have a jovial atmosphere, helps to cut the tension, especially when it gets tough. You can cut a good joke, and somebody with a good sense of humor, you laugh about it and you move on. Somebody with high energy, somebody who likes to go to work, likes to grind it out. You know, I love grinders.

I just love grinders. If somebody is working hard, they might not have all the skills, they might not have the degree, they might not have all of everything they need, but they can outwork somebody. They're going to be successful. Someone who's a learner, someone who wants to learn is an attribute that I really look for.

Someone who wants to grow, someone who's interested in learning more, not just about the industry, but overall, about society, about the world, about history, about anything. If they're into learning, if they're into gaining knowledge, it's important because in our business, there's so much to know. If somebody's interested in learning, they're going to naturally do what they need to do to get the knowledge that they need to gain in order to be successful. Someone who's obviously coachable.

And when you look at coachability, it's someone who is willing to be humble enough to accept the coaching that you're giving them, even if they're a veteran. And someone who is coachable, when you do have to correct them, they accept it. They might not agree with you necessarily, but they accept it gracefully. And they say, well, I'll consider that, you know, I'll think about that.

Because everybody needs to improve. And if I'm looking at someone, even though they're a veteran and they've been in the business for years, they may do some things that uh, you know, need improvement. There's always areas to improve, no matter how successful you are. Someone who is undervalued, someone who's never gotten the accolades in their life.

They've never been given the credit they deserve for the job that they do and the hard work that they do. That is a really important attribute. And again, Coach Signetti has done that. He pulls these people out of the portal, and these are people who are undervalued, these are people who have never gotten the recognition, but they know they're good enough.

For whatever reason, they just haven't had the spotlight that some of the other five, four, and five-star players have gotten. And those people are motivated because you know why? They have something to prove, and that's something else you're looking for. If you have someone who has something to prove, they're gonna have fire in their belly and they're gonna work really hard to be successful.

And finally, someone who's creative. I love creative people. You know, I'm married to an artist, uh, my kids are artists, I sell toilet paper. The creativity is huge because people come up with creative solutions on how to solve problems.

That's a creative process. You know, so someone who, for example, a musician who's a highly polished, highly successful musician, and by success I mean plays at a high level, that is someone, first of all, who's creative, but not only creative, they know what it takes to be successful, which is a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication. So when you look at people, when you look at candidates, I like to look at candidates who have done something at a different level, who have, say, played college sports, who have had success at college sports, who have maybe even in high school, they were very successful.

They were at the top of their class, they're always at the top of their field, they won awards, the cream rises to the top. And so if you have people who historically have been successful, then they're gonna be successful with you if they get the right coaching and if they get the right culture, and that's the key. You can hire the best people in the world, but if you don't put them in the right culture and you don't give them the right manager, they're not gonna succeed. The coach and the manager is the key.

Recruiting is one thing, getting the right management and coaching is the other thing. Those two pieces together build dynamic teams. That's all I have for today. Who says selling toilet paper isn't glamorous?

Thanks a lot and have a great day.