Process Can't Save a Broken Culture

Chuck Thokey has been inside more sales organizations than most people have had sales jobs. As CEO of Top Rep, he and his team have worked with over 9,000 businesses across home improvement, home services, and the trades. What he's found is both obvious and consistently ignored.

The Biggest Problem Isn't Your Sales Process

When Chuck walks into a struggling sales organization, leadership usually expects him to fix their pitch. He rarely starts there. "The biggest issue we find is culture. And when I say culture, the biggest issue inside of culture is communication."

Chuck prioritizes communication: how often the sales leader connects with their team, how responsive they are when a rep needs them, and whether people in the organization actually trust each other.

He's used an assessment partner called Propel to audit organizations where everyone appeared to get along. The findings are often the opposite: sales and production don't just have friction, they've developed genuine antipathy — not from personal differences, but from years of not knowing how to communicate.

"Most of these people come to us for sales process. What they left with is a whole different culture and understanding."

Your Sales Leader Makes or Breaks that Culture

If culture is the biggest lever, the sales leader is the hand on that lever.

The most common way a sales leader fails isn't incompetence — it's losing coachability. Chuck calls it stepping onto the pedestal: the point at which a leader stops learning and starts performing. It's gradual, and it's fatal to the team underneath them.

The practical test is simple. Take the sales leader to a training. A leader who spends the time signaling they already know the material has revealed the problem. The value of any session lives in the one applicable idea that only surfaces if you're actually paying attention.

For business owners diagnosing from the outside, the more accessible signal is this: listen to what the sales team says about their leader. Do reps feel protected? Is there room to grow? The answers are usually more honest than anything you'd get from the leader directly.

Your Best Rep Is Probably Your Worst Hire for Manager

The most repeated hiring mistake Chuck sees: promoting the top-producing rep into management on the assumption they'll replicate their performance across the team. It almost never works: "All you did was take your stallion and put him in the stable."

Top reps are often exceptional because they're self-focused, and that tunnel vision is an asset in the field and a liability in a leadership role.

The right profile is someone who derives genuine satisfaction from other people's success. Chuck looks for people who light up talking about a rep they developed. That orientation is hard to fake in an interview and nearly impossible to manufacture on the job.

He uses three questions to surface it: tell me about your favorite rep, then your least favorite rep, and finally your top rep. The answer that reveals the most is the last one. A manager worth hiring almost never describes the same person in all three.

Why You Should Always Have One More Rep Than You Can Feed

Companies staff up just enough to handle current lead volume, then wonder why they've stopped growing. Chuck's prescription is deliberate over-hiring, by bringing on reps ahead of capacity, then pressuring marketing to close the gap. Full staffing creates equilibrium, and equilibrium creates a ceiling.

He draws one important distinction: flooding the floor (hiring so many reps they compete with each other) creates friction and undermines cohesion. Strategic over-hiring is different. One or two reps ahead of capacity, with the leader openly invested in making sure they succeed.

What Great Training Actually Looks Like

Chuck has seen every version of a sales meeting. Most of them fail for the same reason: the manager is talking, and nobody is listening.

"You can look into the sales reps' faces. Maybe 1 out of 20 of them are even listening. The sales manager is up there preaching and nobody's listening…they're thinking about their follow-ups."

His prescription is structured, tested, repeatable training built around consistency. A few principles from what he's built at Top Rep:

1. Two hours, not one. An hour-long sales meeting is “worthless." Two hours gives you enough time to actually train, test, and train again.
2. Lead with wins. Never open a sales meeting by talking about losses. Ask a rep who had a win yesterday to walk the room through how they got it. Now you're talking about what works instead of building a room full of excuses.
3. Print an agenda. Hand it to reps at the start. They write on it. The agenda should include what you're covering and what success in this meeting looks like.
4. Training-to-information ratio. 98% training, 2% housekeeping and numbers. Not the other way around.
5. Test what you train. If you train emotional intelligence, you can't role-play it, but you can discuss it, challenge the room, make sure comprehension is actually there. Training that isn't tested is performance, not education.

The best sales organizations Chuck has seen share one trait: they're training organizations that happen to sell.

Transcript

Chuck Thokey:

The moment that sales leader wants to show me their ego, I really got to pull them back. I really got to help them to understand that you may know a lot, but you definitely don't know everything. But the moment that a teacher comes in and you want to teach and train the teacher, you're done. You don't want to learn, you just want to show them how much you know. And I got news for you, they don't care how much you know because their job is to pour into you, not you to pour into them.

Jake Cronin:

Hey everyone. I'm Jake Cronin, the founder and CEO of Siro, the AI platform for in person sales teams. And this is Tactics, the show that dives deep with sales leaders across industries to uncover what top producing sales organizations do differently. Today's guest is Jason Fulton. Jason first had a 15-year career in music before getting into sales and today he runs national sales for American Standard, overseeing 90 reps across 38 markets with just three managers. That's a 30 to 1 ratio. We get into exactly how he makes it work from the three reports he reads every morning to being surgical with where he spends his time in the field. Let's get into it.

Chuck Thokey:

I took the opportunity to take the interview and this organization is called Able and Mr. Roof out of Columbus, Ohio, came in and really did some great things with them. By the time I left there, they were at 220 million, which at that time was the largest residential roofer in the United States. Now, since the PE or private equity have come in, I mean, now these companies are so big. Top Rep formed five years ago. So I've been coaching professionally now for about nine and a half years, but I got together with a fellow coach and mentor by the name of Jim Johnson. He owned Contractor Coach Pro and he really helped me to understand what coaching was and how to keep your sanity within it.

I worked with one of the godfathers of coaching a long time ago when I was still at Bath Fitter and that's Keith Rosen. I mean, he is the godfather of coaching, but working with Jim has really helped me to understand it. And so him and I decided at that point that we wanted to form this entity called Top Rep. And once we formed Top Rep, I mean, it took off. And then about two years ago we decided that I would take over Top Rep. So I bought out Jim, and Jim is still a big part of what we do, but bought out Jim and we tripled in size year over year over the last two years.

Jake Cronin:

Who had more influence in the name Top Rep?

Chuck Thokey:

It's actually one of our coaches, Nathan Tebedo because we kept going back and forth what we wanted to call it and it was every cliche name you could think of is what him and I kept going back and forth. And it was Nathan Tebedo that came up with the name Top Rep. Also inside of Top Rep, the bootcamp, we have these things called dog fights. Well, we've been doing this and it was nothing but more than just role plays. And we're like, "Man, we need to come up with something a little bit more fun." And so he says, "Why don't we just call them dog fights?" And that has taken off too. Now since we've fought the opportunity to make it even more cliche and so we kind of stay away from the aviation names right now, but it's just enough that really makes it fun and interesting.

Jake Cronin:

So give me a sense of the texture of the types of businesses you work with now. What's the variety and the types of businesses, the variety and the scale, variety and geography?

Chuck Thokey:

We get this all the time is that I can't come to Top Rep because I'm not big enough and that's nonsense. We have some that are just startups. I mean, literally they have no sales. It really doesn't matter. As long as you have a drive and a passion for what you do, we can really show you the roadmap of what it would look like. And when we look at the trades that we enter into, we're not like a lot of these what I like to call generalists. These are people that when you're trying to learn from them, half the time they're teaching you something in the finance trade and you're trying to figure out like, "How would I take that and put it into my own organization?" And so what we want to do is stay inside of home improvement and home services. So home improvement being roofing, siding, windows, baths, kitchens, that's where we started.

Well, this year we have brought in and we have really searched for this individual. His name is Brian Simpson, but we've brought this guy in and he has been coaching the services, meaning HVAC, plumbing, the electrical trades and so many others that we now ... Because we want to really focus in. When you bring your organization to us, we don't want to teach you how to sell insurance. We want to teach you how to sell inside of your trade and we want it to be specific to you. And so we are one of the only organizations that has ... We have really gone through so many different trades. We can really pinpoint very easily how fast you want to scale as well as what that looks like and the path to do it.

Jake Cronin:

How many businesses have you worked with at this point? What's the order of magnitude?

Chuck Thokey:

The number of businesses inside of our CRM are over 9,000.

Jake Cronin:

Incredible sample size. And you don't just know these businesses, you are getting deep into the guts of their sales organization. What is consistent across these businesses? If you were to walk in, what can you almost guarantee they've got going wrong? Is there a commonality where 80% of folks have this one thing?

Chuck Thokey:

The biggest issue we find is culture. And when I say culture, the biggest issue inside of culture is communication. When you get a sales manager that is either good or could be better, meaning not so good, but it's all about the communication that they have with their team. What kind of communication, how often do they communicate? And when a sales rep really needs them, how long does it take for that sales leader to get back in touch with that individual? So there's a lot. That's what we center it on is that communication. And then we take a look at ... So we have another organization that we partnered with that is called Propel.

And Propel will do an assessment within the organization so that we understand what type of culture they have. And we've had many, many organizations that we have found where the people inside of it, they seem to like each other. And what we have found is that they absolutely hate each other. And what I'm saying here is like with sales and production, it's like they literally hate each other. And the reason why they hate each other isn't because there's differences, it's because they don't know how to communicate.

And most of these people came to us for sales process and what they left with is a whole different culture and understanding of how to have a different culture. Success does not come from your sales process. It doesn't. It comes from how everybody works together. It's like when you have an NFL team, success doesn't come because of the talent on the team. It comes from how those individuals work together. Then we add that strategy.

Jake Cronin:

What's the role that the VP of sales, the sales leader plays in facilitating that?

Chuck Thokey:

That is the $50 million question because the sales leader sets the tone for the sales team. Well, the sales team sets the tone for the rest of the organization. I love how these business owners are like, "Well, I set the tone." No, you don't. You are the least significant person in that company. The most significant person is your sales leader. I don't care what anybody says. We have been inside of so many organizations, big and small, that that sales leader, if the sales leader does something, that it sends a ripple throughout the rest of the company.

Jake Cronin:

How long does it take you when you show up in a new business or you meet them, however you do, to diagnose the quality of the sales leader?

Chuck Thokey:

It doesn't take long. So what I'm looking for in a sales leader and there is a book ... One of my favorite authors is Patrick Lencioni. And so within this book that it's called The Ideal Team Player, that's the first one you want to read, but when we sit down with a sales leader, I'm looking for a humble, hungry and smart, but that number one thing for a sales leader is how coachable is the sales leader. That sales leader would not have that position unless they were smart, they were intelligent enough to understand their position. But most sales leaders feel like they're protecting their ego, like defending themselves every time somebody talks to them.

Jake Cronin:

Why is coachability important? Aren't I hiring the sales leader to figure it out?

Chuck Thokey:

Here's the thing is the moment a sales leader takes their step onto the pedestal, we preach across the industry, stay off the pedestal, both the sales leader and the sales reps, stay off that pedestal. The moment that sales leader wants to show me their ego, I really got to pull them back. I really got to help them to understand that you may know a lot, but you definitely don't know everything. But the moment that a teacher comes in and you want to teach and train the teacher, you're done. You don't want to learn. You just want to show them how much you know. And I got news for you, they don't care how much you know, because their job is to pour into you, not you to pour into them.

Jake Cronin:

So if I'm a business owner and I've got problems, probably the first question to ask the most upstream is if I've got sales problems, is my sales leader staying a student? And then if I'm a sales leader myself and if I'm doing well or doing poorly, should be asking myself, am I staying a student? What does it look like for someone ... Of the sales leaders you know, the ones who are excellent students of the game, what does that look like in practice? What can you observe?

Chuck Thokey:

If you want to know if your sales manager is still a student, if your sales manager is the right fit, listen to what your sales team is saying about them. If the sales team doesn't feel like they feel protected by the sales leader, if they don't feel that way, because they should feel that way. They should feel that the sales leader is a buffer between them and ownership, that their voice can be heard. Does the sales team ... Are they growing? Is the sales team, do they feel like they have that opportunity to learn or is it always just managing the herd?

And if you want to know if your sales leader is a student or if they've already taken that step onto the pedestal, then go with the sales leader to a training of some sort, take them to Top Rep, take them wherever. And if the sales leader wants to complain the entire time they're there, they're done. If they want to shut up and listen, because not everything is going to be groundbreaking, but there's going to be that one thing. And if you don't just put yourself aside for just a second, you're going to miss that one nugget that you spent $5,000 to be wherever it is you're supposed to be, I mean, it's like you're closed off and you just want everybody to see you for this facade that you put on, not for what you can actually do.

Jake Cronin:

You go into a sales organization, it's a mess. The sales leader is not a student. You pull them off the pedestal or maybe you get them replaced or whatnot. Okay, great. What's the next top three things that you'll see in an organization? It's like if I'm listening to this and I'm like, "I know my company can unlock another level of growth, what question should I be asking about my sales organization?" First, is the sales leader on a pedestal or are they still a student? What are some of the other things that you see?

Chuck Thokey:

They don't have a strong bench. They have just enough sales reps to handle their current lead flow. They will never grow. You have to grow inside of your sales team. When I was at Able Roof, my marketing team would get so frustrated with me because every time that my marketing team feels like they've got it handled, I've hired another sales rep and I'm pushing them to feed that sales rep. It's like, "Hey, I just hired, you're going to love the sales rep and I need to feed them. What can we do to feed them?" And they would get so frustrated like, "Chuck, you're pushing us. We don't know if we can get you any more leads." "Find them. Find these leads and I promise you the sales rep will sell them."

As a leader, I'm also going to go back to that sales rep and say, "Look, I went to bat for you and I'm pushing the marketing team to feed you. The worst thing you can do at this point is let me down." And that sales rep, they can feel that pressure, but they also know I went to bat. My job is to make sure that you have the opportunities to be successful, not the opportunity to be successful, the opportunities because there's a lot that goes into that sales rep and that sales rep wants to know that that sales leader is in the fight with them, that they're not out on that limb by themselves.

Jake Cronin:

So if I'm interpreting this right, it's over hire your team if you want to grow.

Chuck Thokey:

Yeah.

Jake Cronin:

And that sort of, I don't know, fear of starvation will force you to grow.

Chuck Thokey:

It really will. Back in the day, we used to talk about flooding the floor. It's kind of a car term and I was big into it. I will tell you, you flood the floor and let the sales team kind of fight it out. And I've really pulled back on it. It is effective, but short term because you don't want your sales team at odds. You want your sales team to be a team. And I realized that quickly. And so I will still over hire as you'd say, but I won't flood the floor. I won't bring in so many to see what's the cream coming to the top, but I will push them. The process to get into the organization is not easy because the training that we put in place, that is our third interview. They're still not on the team yet.

Jake Cronin:

What does it take for a sales leader to succeed? How has that game changed over the last 5, 10 years?

Chuck Thokey:

I will tell you, it has dramatically changed since COVID. So organizations inside of our industry or inside of home services and home improvement has 5Xed. I mean, the companies, I mean every sales rep that have had a great year has either become a coach or now owns their own business. The opportunity for them to do that kind of thing has become possible. And so the competition has been crazy. Now the other thing that has shifted is you don't have the opportunity to bring in as many great reps. You're bringing in a lot of very fresh people and you have to know how to train them. You have to know how to mold these people into being the best that they can be. So it's not like you have the opportunity to bring in somebody that already knows what they're doing.

They have great sales bones and let's go. That's not always the case right now. So a sales leader to be successful right now, the greatest opportunity for the sales leader to be successful is understanding how to onboard sales reps, how to not only onboard them, but to keep them inside of that training mode. We build training organizations out of the companies that come to Top Rep. We build training organizations. And if you were to go to a lot of other trainers, they would not like that because they need these organizations to depend on them.

Jake Cronin:

What does training look like? You've seen tons of different systems, different processes from all sorts of different businesses, different cultures. What are the commonalities of excellent training? As tactical as you can get, how many phases? How long is this process? Who's doing it? Is it leadership driven, distributed to lower levels? Is it consistent across the organization or do managers, low level managers get to put their own flavor? What does great look like?

Chuck Thokey:

This is an easy question and the answer to that is just simple consistency. It's the hardest thing in an organization to do, which is to be consistent, but it's also understanding how easy it can be as long as you build your culture around consistency. Anything, whether it's rehash, training, I don't care what it is, production, every bit of success stands around strategy and consistency.

Jake Cronin:

If you think of, you don't have to call it the name, but like the best training system that you're aware of your clients or business you've seen the best and the worst. What got them to where they are?

Chuck Thokey:

When we get these organizations that grow very quickly, first their sales reps trust them. So trust is a big thing. And again, we keep hearing, what's the sales system? What's the training system? What's this? What's in behind that is what makes it work. And the very first piece is trust. Does your sales team or do your people within the organization trust you? But then what are some of the best organizations when it comes to training? Again, it's based on that consistency. It's not always what's being trained, it's how often that training is going. When I first started with Able, they asked me like, "Hey, we already have 85% market share inside of Columbus, Ohio. What are you going to do for us?" And my answer to them was that, "You guys have already built an organization that it's a sales and marketing organization that just happens to sell roofing."

And I says, "I'm going to take you to the next level." Which I mean all of a sudden their ears and eyes open up like, "Okay, we got to hear what this is." And I let them know I'm going to build a training organization. I'm going to train these guys. I'm going to train them again. When they're sick and tired of being trained, I'm going to train them one more time. And so when we turn that organization into a training organization that every Tuesday when these sales reps came in, we were training for two hours in our sales meeting, but when we-

Jake Cronin:

What does that look like? So I'm hearing weekly training, two hour sales meeting. What are the other rituals that you want to bolt on? Because of course you also, every time I'm putting something on the calendar, it's like, oh, here we go. More time that I'm sucking away from people's lives, more time that people are being not productive. How far have people gone that you've seen still be successful?

Chuck Thokey:

Well, so you have your sales meetings that should be 98% training. 2% of that is where you let them know like, "Here's the numbers and here's some house cleaning." But we go right into training. The other thing I see that is a detriment to most organizations is they have an hour long training or an hour long sales meeting. Hour long sales meetings are worthless, absolutely worthless. We have two hours where we train and then we test and then we train. We want to know that when we're going to train a certain subject and here's the way that I want to share this with you, when we go into some of these organizations and I see the sales manager up there and the sales manager's doing his thing or her thing, they're training.

Here's the problem is that it's nothing more than the sales manager wanting to hear themselves talk. Those sales reps, they're picking up a few pieces, but there's no testing. They don't know that the sales reps are doing ... They're thinking of, "Well, after this, I need to follow up with Bob and Mary." And then the sales manager's up there preaching it, preaching the word and nobody's listening. You can look into the sales rep's face, maybe 1 out of 20 of them are even listening.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah. It's like back in history class or something. What do your trainings look like? What's the ideal minute by minutes use of that two hour meeting?

Chuck Thokey:

So first you need an agenda and the agenda spells out what we're going to go through and the bullet points of what we want to come out of this with. What would success look like in this sales meeting needs to be on that agenda, bring them into the picture and then have-

Jake Cronin:

[inaudible 00:22:40] be super tactical. Is that like emailed or texted to folks ahead of time like, "Hey, here's what we're going to do, " or is it-

Chuck Thokey:

Just It's given to them right there.

Jake Cronin:

Okay.

Chuck Thokey:

We print it out and give it to them.

Jake Cronin:

Perfect.

Chuck Thokey:

That way they can write on it. It's not something that's in their email that they can't write on. They're writing on a separate sheet of paper. There's a lot of strategy that goes into just handing them the agenda. They also have the notes section of the presentation that's going to ... If there is a presentation. When a lot of sales managers come through us, we have what we call a sales meeting toolbox that has over 26 of my sales meetings. They can watch me give it. They have the presentation and we tell every one of them, "I do not want you to show my video. That video is for me to teach you how to give that sales meeting to your people. And you can't give that sales meeting until you know it cold so that when they hear it, they know that Bill, the sales manager, man, he's really done some research."

I'm not the hero of this story. I just want to be the one that teaches it to you so that you can be the hero to this. And so when they go in and they're training this, that not only do they have the training, but then how are you going to test them? Sometimes it's role play, but let's say we're going to go into this as emotional intelligence. We have a whole training on emotional intelligence and you can watch me teach my sales staff emotional intelligence and inside of sales and you can't role play emotional intelligence, but you can discuss it and help make sure that they understand what self-awareness looks like in self-management, social awareness and what relationship management looks like and how to bring that into a sales call.

Jake Cronin:

How much of that, whatever, 120 minutes, let's say you've got three minutes of people walking in, get the paper, the agenda, sit down, maybe it's 5 minutes, maybe 10 minutes if it's a rowdy bunch. You've got that 110 minutes left. How much of it is spent of someone like lecture style versus role play interactive? What's that balance?

Chuck Thokey:

It can be as much as a half hour, but we do not allow it to take up more than a half hour, which is ... Now they should be in the room and ready for the meeting before our 10:00 starts. By 10:00, we're starting a meeting and several things happen in that half hour. We're going to cover the numbers because we're a team and I can get into what we call team bonuses, which is very cool, but the team really is drawn in because they want to know how we are doing, not just how they're doing. And so then from there, we're going to talk about successes. What's going good in their lives? We want to start this off on a positive.

And here's one of the biggest mistakes that we see in sales meetings is where a sales manager says, "All right, let's talk about some of your losses. Let's talk about some of the jobs that you feel you should have gotten but you didn't." Why would we want to go through and talk about how bad your team sucks? That just never made sense to me. I want to talk about, "All right, let's talk about your wins. Bill, you had a 10:00 yesterday." And I have all the notes. So I have the ones I want to talk about. Say, "Bill, you had a 10:00 yesterday and you got the sale. Congratulations. Can you share with everybody how you got that sale?"

Now we get to talk about how we win. What plays did we use that enabled us to win those jobs? Not let's talk about all the losses and how bad you suck. And there may be a few of those where the sales reps will bring it up, say, "Hey, there's a job that I feel I should have gotten and I want everybody's input on this." We'll talk about those, but I typically will not bring them up unless I feel there's one that we really should, there's something that can be learned from it, but I'm not going to talk about all the jobs that they lost because all they're going to do is come up with excuses as to why nobody could have sold that.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I'm curious as you've seen these organizations, you've seen people rising in the ranks and becoming leaders, where do the best leaders come from? If I'm a sales rep or I'm currently a manager, a first line or second line sales manager, how do you get to the next level? Because selling or doing your current job isn't usually what it takes to get to the next level and succeed there.

Chuck Thokey:

When you pick a sales leader, you need to pick them not just because they're good at sales. Most of your top talent, they really suck at leadership because they're so inner focused and so tunnel visioned and they need to stay in that sales role. A lot of these owners think that, "Hey, I'm going to take my top guy and if I make them a sales leader, they're going to clone themselves." No, all you did was take your stallion and put them in the stable. It never made any sense to me. And now I have taken a lot of top talent and made them managers, but here's the reason why, because I was one of them, it's because they enjoyed helping people gain a certain level of success that they don't think they could have ever gotten to without this help.

And that drives me more than my paycheck. When I had the opportunity, when I was in mortgage, there was a lady that was an admin. She's been an admin for many years and she was in her late 40s and at that time I was still in my 20s, but she was in her late 40s. She comes to me and she goes, "Chuck, if I don't figure out how to sell like you do, that I'm going to have to go back to being an assistant again. And I want this opportunity." Her name is Tanya. And I took her under my wing. I didn't really even know what I was doing when it comes to training her, but I wanted to show her what I did. I let her watch what I did on a daily basis and today she does exactly what I do for mortgage.

She goes across the United States training people because she ended up being one of the best in the industry and she's really focused in mortgage, but that drove me so much that I was like, "You know what? I get more out of helping people. I get more out of raising the bar inside of an organization than I do from my own paycheck." And I knew that I would make less. I knew that I would make less as a sales leader than I would as a top producing sales rep, but that was no longer a drive for me. I knew I could make a good paycheck and now a phenomenal paycheck, but I knew I could make a good paycheck as a sales leader, but still that opportunity to help.

And so what I'm saying and what I'm getting across here is when you're interviewing a sales leader, you need to find out are you going to spend more time fighting with them about their paycheck and the fact that their sales reps make more than they do? Or are you going to spend more time strategizing with this person and helping them help their team and developing the team so that are they coachable enough that they're willing to learn and not share how big their ego is? And I get this when I'm interviewing sales leaders, I ask three big questions. And a lot of the sales leaders that we talk to are for big companies, these large companies will hire us to come in and try to help them find sales talent or sales leadership talent. And I ask them, "So as a sales leader, can you tell me about your favorite sales rep?"

And they will give you a lot of information about a certain sales rep, but listen to what this sales rep does. This person that they liked so much, was it somebody that held them on a pedestal? Was it somebody that they loved them so much because they watched them grow? It wasn't their top rep, but it was their favorite one. It's the on that they pulled out of nowhere to help them climb up a ladder that they'd never thought they could climb. And then you ask them, "So can you tell me about your least favorite sales rep?" Now, is it going to be because that sales rep didn't like them or is it because that sales rep had such a big ego that they just wouldn't listen? What was it about that sales rep that just drove them crazy? And then here's the big one. Tell me about your top rep because it's never either of the others.

Jake Cronin:

Are you allowed to say that or is it trademarked?

Chuck Thokey:

Oh no, no. But no, you can. You can ask them, "Tell me about your top rep." And my favorite sales managers that I've hired, because I've hired hundreds, it's never one of the other two. It's never their favorite and it's obviously never their least favorite. But when you ask them about their top rep, it is typically the one that drove them crazy because top reps, they're not always consistent. They're the ones that are always on the top of the leaderboard, but they're not always the most consistent people. They can be a little tough to manage at times. You have to manage their ego sometimes. So it's fun to get that information out of them because that's never been something that that sales leader has ever been asked before. So you're going to catch them off balance.

Jake Cronin:

Well, Chuck, are you ready for the lightning round?

Chuck Thokey:

I'm ready. Let's do this.

Jake Cronin:

Alrighty. First, what is your favorite sales book?

Chuck Thokey:

It's called The War of Art. It's not The Art of War by Sun Tzu. It's the War of Art is my favorite sales book and it's not even a sales book. It's about resistance, but it's so impactful. It's going to help sales reps and sales leaders understand what really holds sales reps back. And most of that is actually for people that write books. That's written by the guy that wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance. Most of your top sales talent have read that book. And then I'll also tell you, my favorite coaching manual is actually by my coach, Keith Rosen. It's Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions.

Jake Cronin:

What are your three favorite software tools in the business world?

Chuck Thokey:

One of my favorites is called Engage. That is a presentation software and we are partnered with them. The favorite, and it's because it was one that we have been seeking out for a long time is Siro, where you have that opportunity to have game film now. There's a reason why teams in the NFL, they are so competitive is because of game film. Well, now the sales industry has access to game film and it's through SIRO, S-I-R-O. The number three software tool is probably ChatGPT. I mean, I don't know if you can even call that software, but if I get stuck and if you use ChatGPT, and I also like Genspark, which uses all the AI platforms all in one.

Jake Cronin:

Okay. Last question. What's your favorite sales tactic?

Chuck Thokey:

So my favorite sales tactic is staying calm in the house. The calmest person in the room always wins. And so if they can just stay calm and they can detach from the result, they're going to win.

Jake Cronin:

Chuck, it's been so great talking. Thank you for making the time and it's a pleasure having you on the podcast.

Chuck Thokey:

Thank you, Jake. This has been fun. It has been absolutely a pleasure to talk to you.

Jake Cronin:

And thanks for watching. We're here to help you level up as a sales leader. So please tell us what you would like to hear on the next episode. And if you do have an in person sales team, be sure to check out siro.ai. I'm Jake Cronin. Until next time.