The Unlocking Growth Show
Welcome to The Unlocking Growth Show, where we unlock the secrets to scaling your business and reaching new heights of success. We bring you the world's BEST strategies, tactics, and playbooks from some of the top entrepreneurs in the game. Whether you're just starting out or looking to take your business to the next level, this is the podcast for you. Tune in and unlock the next level of growth in your business today!
The Unlocking Growth Show
5 Strategies to Scale Your Business and Elevate Your Sales Team
In this insightful conversation, Mike Montague, Host of the How to Succeed Podcast and Head of Franchise Strategy at Sandler—the world’s largest sales training organization—shares powerful lessons on scaling a business by "making yourself irrelevant" as a leader.
Mike discusses the keys to global growth, Sandler's success in sales and leadership training, and the critical mindset leaders need to build scalable systems and processes.
Learn how to:
☘️ Grow your business with low turnover and the right hiring strategy
🚀 Scale effectively by focusing on leadership, systems, and processes
🚀 Apply a proven framework of attitude, behavior, and technique for sustainable success
Mike also discusses the future of work, the role of AI in business development, and key lessons from hosting over 800 episodes of the How to Succeed podcast.
📌 Tune in for actionable advice on scaling your business and leading with purpose, designed for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business leaders looking to elevate their impact.
Go to usewhale.io for more
For more great resources on all things scaling up and team training go to usewhale.io/blog/
I am Mike Montague, head of franchise strategy at Sandler. We're the world's largest sales training organization. We do leadership training customer success as well at over 200 franchise locations in 27 countries and about 17 languages.
Speaker 2:Wow, okay, so that sounds like a lot. I'm going to start with the second question, in that case. And how did you get there? How did you guys grow so far? How did you scale?
Speaker 1:Well, I should add that it wasn't fast. Sandler has been around for over 50 years now. So our founder, david Sandler, started in the late 60s with sort of the pop psychology movement and positive psychology movement with all the people that you would probably know if you're in business. You know the, the Tony Robbins, the Zig Ziglar's, people like that. He recognized that we needed long-term reinforcement, that just hearing a celebrity trainer come into town once a year or twice a year wasn't enough. So in all the places that he regularly visits he set up satellite locations where you could go to a weekly class. It was called President's Club at the time.
Speaker 1:We now call it our sales development series, but he set up these satellite offices and franchised them in the 80s. So after about 20 years of being a traveling speaker, set up these local offices and then the franchise grew pretty fast. In the 90s we got up over 100 and 2000s up to about 275 locations before the pandemic and all pretty standard growth. Like you would expect, a lot of hand-to-hand combat, a lot of really good salespeople in our organization, talking to people and recruiting franchises and making sure we keep them. That was one of our biggest keys to growth too is you can't turn over 80% of your franchises and expect to grow very fast, so we have very, very low turnover in the people that we do bring on board.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. So you found a winning process and then you kind of stuck with it. Yeah, absolutely In your opinion, because you are also the host how to succeed? In your opinion, because you are also the host of how to Succeed, what is the biggest reason that businesses don't scale?
Speaker 1:I have a two-part answer to this question, because I think I've interviewed, I don't know, over 600 people on the how to Succeed podcast, and I see a lot of similar things, especially when it comes to leaders, and I think the biggest challenge is to make yourself irrelevant as a leader. But the biggest mistake people make is that they try to hire or replicate someone like them, and so if, especially early on, if you hire someone like yourself now, you have two people who don't like to do the things that you don't like to do, so your initial hire needs to be someone who's the opposite of you, to do things that you're not willing to do and to balance out a team. But as soon as you get to that point, you need to start putting systems, processes, people in place to make yourself irrelevant so that the team can operate without you. And so if it's especially a service-based business whether it's sales, training or a plumbing company or a roofing company you need to get off the roof and start working on the business instead of in the business. So, first thing, you have to replace yourself as the technician, as the person who does the work.
Speaker 1:Even in web design, I did a ton of web design, I have to stop doing web design before I can start working on scaling the business. Same thing then happens when you get to management. You go okay, I have five employees now and I'm spending 100% of my time managing. I'm not working in the business anymore, but now I need to hire a manager to get me out of that position so I can start looking at other channels or developing business opportunities or finding strategic partners. And it just continues that all the way through the growth process. So even CEOs at Fortune 500 companies who'd be working on making sure the business is run so well that they don't have to get involved and I see a lot of leaders make the mistake of being chief firefighter and trying to solve all the problems and thinking they're the reason the business is holding together, and that's a really, really tough way to scale it scale it so okay.
Speaker 2:So let's say you overcome that challenge of actually finding the right person who is not like you, and you guys have done this, obviously in your franchises. How do you get them up to scale as soon as possible?
Speaker 1:I think that goes to really great onboarding and really great systems and processes. So at Sandler we pride ourselves in doing this for salespeople, sales leaders and customer success agents, because it's a wishy-washy thing A lot of times. These are soft skills and people think of them as non-transferable. Well, the leader was a really great, charismatic salesperson, but we can't replicate that. We don't know how to do it. But David Sandler, our founder, figured out in the 60s that you can do that, that there are ways to teach people communication skills and a system for selling so that they can be replicatable and reproducible across markets and other things. So having a sales process and a methodology is huge for that. But if we zoom out, it's really about creating an onboarding process that shows everyone the way that the company does it and defining like stages of things, skills we need to learn and then the attitudes for the culture. So at Sandler we have what we call the success triangles, which are those three things attitude, behavior and technique. And again on the how to Succeed podcast, those are those three things attitude, behavior and technique. And again on the how to Succeed podcast, those are the three questions I ask every guest. So I've done over 800 episodes with those three things and it works for everything.
Speaker 1:So if you're talking about goal setting, there's usually some sort of misconception or myth around goal setting that people are getting wrong, and then there's an ideal attitude on how to approach goal setting effectively. Then there's the behaviors, like the goals, plans and actions. Am I doing the right thing at the right time? It might not be the right goal, or it might not be at the right time, or it might be too big or too small so that it's not motivating. Then we get to the third triangle, which is techniques, and these are the skills, the strategies, the tactics that we need to develop and train our teams to be able to do.
Speaker 1:This is sort of the how we're doing things, and that includes tools, tech and everything else that they need in order to be successful, and I love those three buckets that they need in order to be successful and I love those three buckets. It's worked for over 25 years for me and over 50 years for Sandler is no matter what role you're looking at. Look for what are the attitudes, the cultural beliefs and practices in developing a successful person. Then look at their behavioral marks of what do they need to do, what are they trying to accomplish? And then how good are they at that skill? And if you work on those three buckets you can really scale people up fast.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I love that process. Okay, let's talk about. I mean, you guys and yourself have been super successful. Let's talk about the future the super boring, because everyone's talking about it subject of the future of work and the future of business. It's not so much the future of work, it's like the future of business and the way we work. How is that going to change in your perspectives?
Speaker 1:none of us really know what's going to happen here right, especially with AI, but I think Sandler is looking at this in a couple of different terms. When we look at the business development side, we're looking at AI tools that enhance the salesperson, not replace them. So I think it'll still be a while it may not. It may be that we have AI salespeople that can have a genuine a while it may not. It may be that we have AI salespeople that can have a genuine, emotionally relevant conversation with someone in the near future. I think it's still important, though, when doing emotional work, to have a human with empathy, ask those questions, listen, be present with somebody, help them overcome challenges and build consensus within a team that we're not seeing AI do that currently. Now, a lot of transactional salespeople and businesses may be able to be replaced. If you're just talking about repeat orders and looking at part numbers for a nut or a bolt in the warehouse, that's not going to change. It doesn't require a lot of stuff. It's already spec'd in. But at Sandler, we kind of focus on those things that are really big, they're complicated, they're expensive, people aren't unsure about. Maybe the whole team's not on board or you have to build a budget for. I don't think those things are going away, and if we use that as an example I think that's true in every industry there are probably things that we can automate or we can use AI to help and enhance what we're doing, but there are also probably higher level things, just like I was talking about with the leader that if we make ourself irrelevant, then what does that free us up to do at the next level up that AI can't do, and I think that'll be the challenges for businesses for the near future, the next 10, 20, 30 years. I do want to say one more thing, though, which is we're leaning into technology in order to help us do our job better, so we use a lot of psychological profiles to help determine gaps in the training.
Speaker 1:We can use call recording to see if people are using the techniques that we're trying to teach gaps in the training. We can use call recording to see if people are using the techniques that we're trying to teach them in the calls. We can use AI intelligence on our sales pipelines to see if we're bringing in as much as we're leaving or if there's a bottleneck in our sales process. That was like well, we're doing a ton of proposals but we're not closing any. Or we're doing a lot of first meetings but we never get to proposals. There's a lot of insight that AI and big data can give us that we're not seeing as human beings. It's really hard for us to track, especially at scale across teams of thousands of salespeople that we work with. It's really hard to see those types of trends. So there is value in working together with AI and human machines. We kind of call it the art and sales of business development. That I think will be really interesting for the near future 100%.
Speaker 2:I saw a great article the other day that said AI plus HI is the way to go.
Speaker 1:I think for the short term, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. Okay, thank you for that. Has your vision for the business changed, and how is that set to change from now going forward?
Speaker 1:Sandler has had many evolutions over its 50-year career, had many evolutions over its 50-year career. So I mentioned, you know, the founder started as a solopreneur kind of public speaker traveling around. Then it became a franchise in the 80s and then he passed away from a brain tumor in the 90s. So the second generation leader, david Mattson, took over then and from there he really created a cohesive network out of the pieces that we had and we moved away from sales training to more of coaching and consulting and business development, adding in leadership and customer care and expanding sort of wider than deeper. Then we also expanded into verticals, where we went from being these local offices working with small and medium-sized businesses in the markets to an enterprise team, which Dave Mattson founded as well, and we work with some of the largest companies on the planet like LinkedIn, microsoft, salesforce, companies like that. On a higher end.
Speaker 1:We've also looked at different verticals and ways of training. So we developed I developed the online platform for Sandler where we started training online Obviously the pandemic. We moved to virtual At one point. We expanded internationally and stuff. So we found a lot of different ways to grow and continue to evolve and the next one that's happening right now is.
Speaker 1:We were bought by a parent company called Trilliad, like mega, offering for CROs and huge Fortune 500 companies training. If you buy a recruiting company and a AI company or a CRM customization company and you put all of those together, well, now we can do four times the stuff that we could do before, and that's really the exciting growth for us, as well as what I talked about with the AI and metrics and adding in more data at scale from what we do, because we train 50,000 people a year and work with companies and across so many industries that we have some really interesting feedback that we think we can leverage and use to bring more value to companies going forward that other people can't just because they don't have our longevity and scale.
Speaker 2:It's a very simplistic question in response to what you just told me, because what you've just given me is a lot of complexity and time.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I don't think you can reduce complexity and time to one sentence, but if you have to deduct a specific mindset or a specific value that's enables you guys to pivot so frequently and yet maintain traction, what would you put it down to?
Speaker 1:Sure, all of that is easier said than done. A hundred percent. I think the core value of Sandler is that we're for salespeople. That David Sandler in his founding documents and programs talked about that.
Speaker 1:The life of a salesperson is hard, there's a lot of rejection, it's messy, it can be extremely rewarding, but it's tough.
Speaker 1:But no kid grows up dressing up as a salesperson for Halloween or like dreaming about becoming a salesperson. They want to be an astronaut or you know something like that a fighter pilot. They don't want to be a salesperson. So everybody has this sort of head trash and cultural stereotypes around it. So I think in all of our growth it's around how can we help the most salespeople possible and help people in this profession grow to be respected but also become successful so that they can stay in the position and be happy with it and lift the overall just spirits and performance of salespeople in general. And sometimes that includes working with companies to understand the value of salespeople, that they try to automate it or try to outsource it or they think marketing is the answer and if we just spend enough on Google ads, we won't need a salesperson. And a lot of times we find that that just doesn't work, especially with those industries that are messy, complicated, hard to understand, new markets or expensive.
Speaker 2:People aren't going to click on a pay-per-click ad and buy a $100,000 piece of medical equipment because it looked good, right, yeah, I know 100%, 100%, and I can tell you, from having worked in marketing for a long time now, that it is not the same as sales. It sounds like what you said throughout this conversation is really about like continuing to deliver on a specific purpose and then finding a process and a way to scale that and make that happen. It's the two points I am picking up, as I said, very simplistically, but I love that you mentioned delivering on that purpose. That's super cool. Okay, my final question you get to. There's a hundred scaling companies, CEOs picking up the phone and they want to ask you Mike, please give me the three fundamentals I need to put in place to scale.
Speaker 1:Look, I'm going gonna go back to what's gotten me to where I am and, I think, what's gotten sandler to where it is, which is the attitude, the behavior and the, the technique. So if you're looking to grow, you first have to believe that it's even possible, right? If you don't think you can grow, or you can't hire, or it's too tough, or it's going to be a lot of work, yeah, all of that is true. If you believe that you can find the answers and the solutions to those things, then those things are true too. Those things are true too.
Speaker 1:I think it was Steve Jobs that said like the whole world is made up of people and things that were essentially no smarter than you. So we have the capabilities to do that if we really believe in ourselves and the mission and our company. A good why can overcome, anyhow is another great quote there, and we talk about that a lot with salespeople because, like that's the grit that helps you keep moving when you get a bunch of nose in a row or you run into some roadblocks and in your deal or in scaling your business. The behavior part, again, is setting aside the goals, plans and actions. I think about this like a GPS for success. If you are going to use a GPS system, you need two pieces of information where you are now and where you want to go. After that, you can recalculate the plan at any time. You can add a pit stop. If you got to stop for gas or something to eat, you can add a detour and then get back on. Or you can decide you want to take the scenic route instead of the expressway, and you can make a lot of decisions as long as you know where you are and where you want to go. So I think clearly defining in as much detail as possible your vision of what the future looks like and how big you want to grow this thing and what your lifestyle is like when you get there is critical.
Speaker 1:And then really understanding yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses, your team, your product fit in the market, and doing a complete 360 evaluation of where you are now allows you to identify those gaps and close them. And then, with technique, the tip is really all of these can change and you can get better at them. So your strategy and your tactic may change over time. If you don't have a skill, you may have to spend time hiring someone that has it, or learning that skill, or finding a partner or somebody else to fill that gap, or can you acquire a company that does this better than you? And I think you do have to spend significant time making sure that what you're delivering is at the quality level that you want.
Speaker 1:But I think most people do these backwards. They start with technique and they're like oh, I'm just going to make the best product in the world and then the rest will take care of itself, but you forgot that you have to sell, you have to plan this out, you need some strategies involved and you have to have the right attitude. If you go, I'm going to make this best product in the world, but I'm a misunderstood genius and nobody's going to get it, you're not going to get very far right. So putting all three of those together in the right order and the right, equal weight on each one, I think, is the key to scaling success.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you, mike. I suggest, if you have not checked out the how to Succeed podcast, you do so. Some great conversations there. So thank you, mike, for your time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me, that was awesome.
