The Best Sales Leaders Don't Need More Authority

Improving sales when you're not in the room is the challenge for every field sales leader. Sam Armstrong has been solving that problem at scale. As VP of Sales for North America at Five Star Bath, he's responsible for the performance of over 100 franchisees and roughly 350 reps spread across the country. He joins Siro CEO Jake Cronin on the Tactics podcast to break down how he moves rep behavior anyway, and the system he's built to coach the room he's never in.

Mastering the Art of Influence

When you buy a Five Star Bath franchise, you buy a system: a name, a process, a set of playbooks. But you run your own business. Corporate can advise, model, and coach, but what happens in the field belongs entirely to the franchisee. Sam can't tell an owner who to hire or fire. He can't force a rep to run the process. The levers most sales leaders reach for aren't available to him.

That constraint has produced something most leaders never develop: a discipline around influence that doesn't depend on authority. When Jake asked Sam how he's driven sales effectiveness through that growth, his answer wasn't about accountability systems or performance reviews. It was about building channels, habits, and a culture consistent enough that reps improve without being forced to.

Most home services leaders have more formal authority than Sam does. But the core problem is the same. Your reps are alone in the room. The question is how you shape what they do there.

Why Sam Sends a Coaching Email Every Single Day

Sam's primary tool is consistent, high-quality contact. The centerpiece is Sales Coffee, a daily email that goes out at 8:00 AM Eastern, Monday through Saturday, to every rep and franchisee in the network. It's not a metrics update or a motivational blast. Each email is a focused coaching point, often paired with a piece of media, a song, or an excerpt from one of Sam's own recent appointments. He maps the week's topics on Sunday, works through ideas with ChatGPT, writes all six emails, and schedules them to send automatically.

The goal is connection. Sam described it to Jake as giving reps "somebody that's on a ride along with them,” a daily signal that someone is paying attention and that they're part of something larger than their territory.

He layers on top of that two weekly national sales calls, one covering fundamentals on a six-week cycle and one he runs himself called Closers Only, where topics are open and discussion-driven rather than lecture-based. The combination creates multiple touchpoints across the week without requiring any individual franchisee to do much at all.

The Attendance Signal That Predicts Franchise Performance

Sam pays attention to owner attendance at his national calls more than rep attendance. The correlation between franchise performance and owner participation is stronger than the correlation with rep participation. His read is that it's less about the content of the calls and more about what showing up actually signals: the owner values the sales process, and that value filters down to their reps.

It's a leading indicator hiding in plain sight. Training reps directly matters, but getting owners bought in may matter more.

When it comes to rep performance specifically, Sam's leading indicator is just as concrete. The first 15 to 20 minutes of any Five Star Bath appointment should involve no selling in either direction — no positive selling, no negative selling, just curiosity about the customer. If a rep is doing that phase right, Sam knows the back half of the appointment has a chance. If they're not, that's the coaching conversation. He doesn't need to wait for the closing rate to tell him something is wrong.

The Difference Between Managing Sales Teams and Leading Them

Sam is direct about his philosophy. "I don't believe in sales management," he told Jake. "The problem with management is that it's really focused on activity and not on intent. And I think that the best sales is born in the intent of the person."

That's not a rejection of accountability. It's a rejection of the idea that tracking activity produces the thing you actually want. A rep who hits their call count but doesn't know how to stay curious in the opening phase isn't going to close. The metric is satisfied but growth isn’t guaranteed.

Instead of just tracking KPIs that only measures past performance, Sam values trajectory. A rep who converts 5% in month one and 30% in month three might not look great on a quarterly dashboard, but it signals exactly the right investment to Sam. Progress is the real value, and the KPI is just confirmation of something he already knew.

This is where he uses Siro most deliberately. He'll pull a specific moment from a recording, get the rep on a Google Meet, play it back together, and ask how they think it landed with the customer. Then they find the same type of moment a week later and look again. It's a tight feedback loop that lives entirely at the behavior level, not the outcome level.

Winning the Wrong Way Is a Coaching Problem

One of the sharper things Sam said is that Five Star Bath is not a scripts-based organization. "Sales is too human for that," he told Jake. "People see right through it when you're just trying to get the opportunity to say the canned thing." What he builds instead are word tracks: a framework that tells reps what moment calls for what kind of move, without locking them into specific language. He used the metaphor of scaffolding: it’s the structure that puts workers where they need to be to do the job. It doesn't do the job for them.

The danger he's most focused on is the opposite of over-scripting. A rep who improvises, accidentally closes, and concludes the improvisation caused the win is more dangerous than one who fails. That incorrect feedback loop pulls reps out of the system and into a tailspin. Keeping them in the process consistently, even when they get lucky outside of it, is one of the harder coaching problems in home services.

The Bottom Line

Sam Armstrong has created a communication infrastructure that keeps reps connected, a set of leading indicators that tell him where performance is heading before the numbers confirm it, and a philosophy about intent that keeps him focused on the right level of the problem.

For any leader in home services or home improvement, the structural lesson is this: your reps are alone in the room whether you like it or not. The question is whether you've built something that shapes what they do there.

Transcript

Sam Armstrong:

I think sales is helping people along their own journey, recognizing where you're at, and then leading you into where you want to go and making it your story. And I think that that's how you influence people too, is you recognize, for me, the end user would be the sales rep that's going out to the house. Recognizing that that sales rep, he has a life, he has goals, or she has things they're trying to achieve. And if I can try and speak to that, find the common layer there, and then show them a way to get what they want, that's how you lead by influence.

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. When you're the boss, you have a lot of control. The salespeople on your team need to follow your directives. But when it comes to franchises or any situation where you don't have direct control, it becomes a bit more complicated. Today, we're talking scaling through influence, not authority, with Sam Armstrong, the VP of sales for North America at Five Star Bath. Since Sam has been at Five Star Bath, they've grown the franchise pool from fewer than 40 to over 100. We talk about how he has driven sales effectiveness through that growth.

You guys have scaled rapidly the last three years, but you have this interesting franchise model where you don't have direct influence over who people are hiring, firing, exactly what they do. How have you managed to scale through influence?

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, so it's about recognizing that leadership draws leadership. So using different meetings that we have, different playbooks that we have, trying to model a successful leadership through helping the really already successful franchisees to be excellent and be models for everyone else. And then it's also getting on calls, getting on interviews and modeling good interviewing for the franchisee with prospective salespeople or helping them understand what's happening by looking at CROs with them and things like that.

Jake Cronin:

What's the hardest thing about that scaling journey as a franchisor?

Sam Armstrong:

It does require some real investment by the franchisee. Sometimes what can happen is the franchisee will try to blame the leads rather than taking the owner-

Jake Cronin:

It's always the leads.

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, taking the ownership on their own execution. And so, helping them to realize that a home advisor or a Google lead in Tallahassee is pretty much the same as one in Iowa. And yet if they're more successful in Iowa than Tallahassee, it's probably the execution layer that needs help. So that's the challenge [inaudible 00:02:51]

Jake Cronin:

Having people that see that execution as the problem. So getting people into learning mindsets perhaps.

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, getting them in a learning mindset, getting them in an execution mindset. When people buy a franchise, they feel like they're buying something that should run itself sometimes.

Jake Cronin:

How do you develop your style to be able to rule by influence? Is it something that you've worked with or for before, books you read?

Sam Armstrong:

I just work from the same way that I sell. I think sales is helping people along their own journey, recognizing where you're at, and then leading you into where you want to go and making it your story. And I think that that's how you influence people too, is you recognize, for me, the end user would be the sales rep that's going out to the house. Recognizing that that sales rep, he has a life, he has goals, or she has things they're trying to achieve. And if I can try and speak to that, find the common layer there and then show them a way to get what they want. And then also being a person who can do what they do, I think is important as well.

Jake Cronin:

Why do you have to lead by influence? What's the Five Star Bath model and what type of responsibilities is each franchisee responsible for, and what do they rely on you for?

Sam Armstrong:

So when you buy a franchise, you buy a system. You buy a series of playbooks, you buy a name, you buy a process, you buy a team. And you don't even really buy a franchise, you're awarded a franchise. As a franchisor, I can't tell... If you were a franchisee, I couldn't tell you who to hire. I couldn't tell you to fire somebody. I couldn't tell you what to do. You're your own independent franchise. We have some different rules and guidelines we have to go by, but that layer can cause chaos for us at the top, because one person sees the business as being this way while another person sees it being this way. And we're not McDonald's. I mean, we do more than build a burger, we build a bathroom. It's more complex. And as far as I know, McDonald's doesn't have a $15,000 hamburger yet. Inflation might get us there.

The issue is trying to get some consistency in culture, I think is one of the keys. The challenge is getting people to actually follow the playbook when it gets hard. The challenge can be getting franchisees to see that the problem is their execution, not the system sometimes too, if they're having trouble. Within the playbook, they can vary what they do. But we use different points of contact with the end users. I send out a daily email. I actually leverage AI for that, some kind of media as well, just to keep it interesting for them. And to give the sales rep that's out there something to grab onto.

Jake Cronin:

These are things to the sales reps or to the franchisees? Or-

Sam Armstrong:

It's both. It's both. And I actually send one at the beginning of the week to the franchisees to tell them what we're going to be doing and how it's important and how they can help their reps through it. And then I send a daily nugget to the reps as well that is also sent to the franchisees. Because some of our franchisees sell.

Jake Cronin:

Really?

Sam Armstrong:

Oh, yeah.

Jake Cronin:

The franchisee themselves, the owner?

Sam Armstrong:

The owner. Yeah, sometimes you get maybe in a smaller territory or something like that where an owner just finds that they love our system. They love selling. We don't discourage that. I mean, if you want to sell, that's great. It just means you've got to job out some of the leadership portions of your role. So I do take a few appointments here and there. I just sold one on Saturday.

Jake Cronin:

That's good. Stay sharp. Do you ever share your recordings of your conversations with the team?

Sam Armstrong:

All the time. In fact, that was one of my... Now, this week actually is, we call it Sales Coffee, the daily emails, I segmented down that sales set from Saturday and brought some excerpts of it to the sales reps, and that was the media that I put with what I was writing.

Jake Cronin:

When you record yourself, do you ever... Or I guess before you send that out, do you ever feel embarrassed like, "I'm supposed to be perfect," and maybe you're not perfect, perfect?

Sam Armstrong:

I mean, I think that would be a problem if we were really a scripts-based company, but that's one thing that I'm not going to do. I'm not going to develop a scripts-based company. Sales is too human for that. People see right through it when you're just trying to get the opportunity to say the can thing. I think that you should have word tracks, especially for new people so that they know in what moment what to say. But I think of it more as like an architecture. I was walking down from the hotel to come here to your offices and I saw the Flatiron Building and I sent a picture to my son and he's like, "Oh, that scaffolding." That scaffolding is there so that the workers can be where they need to be to do what they need to do. And that's how I see a sales system.

Jake Cronin:

So what are some of the other things that you do to coach and influence your franchisees even though you don't have the power to hire, fire, and mandate? What are the other rituals that you have to influence them to success?

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, so another ritual that I have that's on the whole other end of the spectrum, is having grown from 40 franchisees to over 100, we've got a lot of newer franchisees and a lot of them are coming over from other industries. And so, they need help with some of the simple tasks. So I will jump onto a Zoom interview with an owner. And again, I can't hire their employees, but I can coach them in how to interview by interviewing prospective employees with them present and then advise them as well.

Jake Cronin:

Them sort of shadowing you in interviews?

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, exactly, and showing them how to do it. So that's one of the ways that I can have influence. We also have two weekly sales meetings that are national. They're both 10:00 AM Eastern, so that we make our California brothers get up at seven o'clock, but I couldn't do it any earlier. And we have one that's fundamentals and it rolls through a six-week cycle of the basics of our path and what we've chosen. And then another one, I have one of my trainers that runs that one, and I have another one that I run called Closures Only, where we talk about topics. There's more of a correlation to successful franchises, the owner coming to these meetings, than there is to the individual rep coming, which is really rather interesting to me. I think it might be less about how brilliant the meetings are and more about the willingness of the owner to make himself available, the value they place on the sales process.

Jake Cronin:

The correlation, causation sort of thing, a little more of the correlation.

Sam Armstrong:

It's not just, I'm going to sit here and dictate what the system says about the initial survey with the customer. I'm going to ask you guys what you're doing. We're going to do a little bit of role play. We're going to talk through it again. We're going to refresh. I think the problem is that salespeople get snapped out of it. One of the worst things I always say that can happen to a sales rep is if they go way off script, are doing it actually poorly, and then they get success by a customer purchasing. They really [inaudible 00:09:52]

Jake Cronin:

The wrong behaviors.

Sam Armstrong:

Yes. And again, it's correlation, causation. They think that that bad behavior causes success and it ends up getting them into a tail spin. So they need to be kept locked into the system to have that consistency. And people miss consistency and how important that is. So Sales Coffee was born out of the idea that these sales reps are alone. And I think that's some of the origin of Siro, I would think too. And the idea is where Siro is trying to capture what's happening, help coach them in the moment, for me, my Sales Coffee is about helping them feel tied into the company a little bit more, helping them feel like they've got somebody that's on a ride along with them where they can read what I said, listen to the... I often will drop a song that's related to it, like a YouTube video of The Killers or something crazy like that, just to give it a little bit of texture and try to have some kind of a pithy point that is about the sales process and stretching it out.

So usually towards the end of this week, so probably tonight and tomorrow, I'll start thinking about, "Okay, what do we need to talk about next week?" And then over the weekend, I'll start talking to ChatGPT about it and just start talking through the ideas and then I'll write them all out. I do six. So I'll do Monday through Saturday, because my sales reps don't take Saturdays off, so I'm going to not take Saturdays off either. And then I'll draft all the emails and put them into automatic send.

Jake Cronin:

Send later.

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, I think at eight o'clock Eastern every morning.

Jake Cronin:

Every Sunday night you're carving out an hour or five hours. How long does this take you?

Sam Armstrong:

A few hours.

Jake Cronin:

A few hours?

Sam Armstrong:

Depends.

Jake Cronin:

It's hard to make time.

Sam Armstrong:

You can ask my wife how long it takes. I don't know. "What do you do in Sales Coffee?" Ah.

Jake Cronin:

Do you look forward to it or is this one of those chores that you've just got to do because you've got to be consistent?

Sam Armstrong:

Yes.

Jake Cronin:

Okay. Yeah.

Sam Armstrong:

It's both. It can be a chore, especially when the idea is not flowing as well. But I live in this space, I get the privilege of living in this space of, I have some people, great people that work for me that teach our system and help people to understand it. And so, I get the space to sit back a little bit and say, "What's working, what's not? What other angles can we use to describe it to people? How can I build culture with a company that's so scattered a little bit to try to draw us together a little bit?"

Jake Cronin:

You have these franchisees you need to coach and you can't mandate anything. Also, you don't have a layer of sales management generally, because you have all these franchisees. So you are really a one to 1,000 sort of a sales manager.

Sam Armstrong:

I think it's like 350. Yes.

Jake Cronin:

One to 350 sales manager.

Sam Armstrong:

But I don't manage. Actually, I don't believe in sales management. I think sales management, the problem with management is that it's really focused on activity and not on intent. And I think that the best sales is born in the intent of the person. I think that the Bible says, "Out of the heart, the mouth speaks." If we can speak to the heart of a salesperson, if we can get them to understand what it is that they're trying to achieve and understand how they can achieve that and the person that they're looking at, we can get much better results than any script or any management could get.

There's a necessity to manage the operational aspect of sales, but I think our franchisees, even as they're focused on different things, are more than capable of handling that. That's the low-hanging fruit of putting people in the field, making sure they have a polo, making sure they have an iPad, making sure they show up on time, if they've brushed their teeth. I mean, there are more complicated operations, type of things like that, but when we're talking about successful sales, we're talking about consistent connection, having people bring people into the right spaces in the right timeframe, that's more about leadership than management.

Jake Cronin:

What does your corporate sales team look like?

Sam Armstrong:

I have two excellent trainers. I have Brian Huff, a former pastor and actor, and then I have Kaylee Schiller, who is a Barracuda sales girl, and she's really great.

Jake Cronin:

For a lot of folks who are sales leaders, management isn't that hard, because everyone has a number. So every location, every region has a number and you know if they're producing or not. And then you can get some leading indicators about, are they doing the process right? So that lets you manage from a distance pretty easily. But in your case, these folks are trainers. How do you know if they are doing their job really well or not?

Sam Armstrong:

Well, I do drop into their training quite a bit, so I know that as well. I do speak with the franchisees. I do get a chance to speak with the sales reps, because the sales reps will communicate with me in response to the Sales Coffees that I send out, or they'll jump into my Closures Only call on Thursday mornings. So I'll get some feedback there, but I just know my people too. And we're in communication all the time about how these people are doing and how those people are doing and what have you. So I know what they're doing.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah. So it's simply just proximity, because there aren't really any metrics. Or are there any metrics that you're able to have them use as their goalposts?

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, no, I don't really manage them on metrics as much. I think you're right about that. I manage them on their throughput, on the quality of what they're doing and the impact it has on our people. And we're just talking about, we're all in this boat together. None of the people that are doing this, we could all be making more money selling. So it's not like they're in this just to punch the clock and be in the job. Both of my trainers are passionate about the success of the other people. So I think to try and run them by metrics is almost silly from a day-to-day basis. I should be seeing changes over time, which I am.

KPIs are a funny thing. I mean, the problem with KPIs or sales success metrics is that they're always looking backwards. I like to look forward. I want to see what behavior is happening. I want to understand if improvement is happening. So take a new rep at a new location, and we have certain metrics they want to hit. Say if they're new, we'd like them to hit a 20 to 25% issued closing rate. And when I say issued closing rate, that's net, like buildable business. Don't ask me about gross closing. I don't care. Just to start with.

And if I've got somebody who over their first 90 days only is hitting 15 to 18%, you might think that's bad, but maybe it was 5% in the first month and they're doing 30% in month three, should we really get rid of them? Should we hold as an anchor against them what that first month is? That's a sunk cost. So I want to see the progress of somebody. The KPI should show that, but I want to know where it's going before the KPI ever happens. And that's where Siro actually really comes in.

Jake Cronin:

Tell me more about that. What are the leading indicators that you can possibly go off of?

Sam Armstrong:

Sure. So we have a system. We have a process that we want people to move through. One of the things that is really, really axiomatic for me is in the beginning of any meeting with a customer is no selling. And what I mean by that is the first 15 or 20 minutes or whatever when we're going through some questions, trying to discover, no selling either way, no negative selling where they say, "Do you do this?" And you say, "No." No positive selling where the customer says, "Hey, do you do this?" And you say, "Yes." You redirect and you stay curious about the customer.

And so, if I find that a sales rep is doing that right, I know that the end result is going to be good, I just have to figure out where the other break is. Or if I find they aren't doing that well, we get them some instruction, small instruction, a couple little things, and we see if they change. Now, if they don't change and their numbers aren't good, then I guess what we see is what we get. But if we see progress, especially with a new business like that where the owner is also learning, that's very positive. And so, we'll try and invest a little more and give them now the next thing to learn and the next thing to learn, because you can't change your whole golf swing in one lesson.

And that's what I like. And that's where Siro really comes in, because we can jump into those moments, we can give specific coaching in those moments in Siro and help the rep to get that information, incorporate that information into what they're going to do next and try to get better. And then we go back to that same moment a week later and look. And one of my other favorite things to do with Siro is to get the rep onto a Google Meet with me and say, "Let's play this so we can listen to it together." How do you think that landed with the customer? Helping them to see it, we can really change the course of a salesperson that way. If I'm doing that, I'm always wanting the franchisee to be there as well.

KPIs can show us who to talk to. They can show us. But oftentimes you're looking at a rep who had a bad December and he's already better in January. And you can't go by the small numbers. Listen, you had 10 sits and you had no sales. I mean, that's ridiculous. Somebody who's supposed to get 30%, they could go for 10 and then go six for 10 very easily. In fact, it happens a lot. And so, that's the problem too, is we get these little windows and we want to judge people in these little windows, and that's where insight comes in.

And there's other little things, by the way, about Siro, just an aside, not necessarily about your question. Our industry is full of practices that we're built on the idea that we can't trust salespeople. The idea of making a call to the manager from the house before you leave, which really takes away the status of the salesperson when they do that. It diminishes it and it actually really hurts sales, but they have to do that, because they want to know they're still in there. In the old days, you could go show up for five minutes, say, "I don't like it."

Jake Cronin:

[inaudible 00:20:29]

Sam Armstrong:

Go down to the bar and then report it an hour later. "Yeah, they didn't buy." Now, with Siro, we know, we have the recording, we know what happened.

Jake Cronin:

That accountability.

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, that accountability piece is there.

Jake Cronin:

When you're training franchisees, how important is it for you to focus on or how do you weigh the importance of training the sales folks directly and training the franchisees, kind of like a salesperson as well, just training customer interactions versus training franchisees how to train their teams? How much do you think? And then it sort of translates as a sales leader, how much are you spending coaching your sort of next layer on how to coach, train the trainer, versus how much are you trying to spend or send a sales expertise straight down to the front line?

Sam Armstrong:

I think we spend a lot more time trying to go to the frontline because that's where it's most received. I think that the struggle with our management layer, which is a franchisee, is that franchisee, as you know as a business owner, he's looking at his P&L, he's looking at his production, he's looking at his accounts receivable if he has some, he's looking at orders, he's looking at service, he's looking at everything, the whole business. And so, it can be hard to lock in and focus on those things.

So I think that we've been singing to the choir and I think we need to sort of pull back more and we are doing more of that to try and help franchisees themselves to realize it. So I put some things into place. I mean, I think when I first started, I wouldn't bring the franchisee into the coaching session with their employee. Now I insist on it. So little things like that. Modeling is probably one of the best things I feel like I can do. Because to try to get all of their attention and get them to focus on this, it's almost impossible. So just trying to model it, trying to build it into the system as best I can. We've codified it obviously in the sales management playbook, even though I don't like the word, but trying to get that layer to be acting better as sales managers is a challenge.

Jake Cronin:

What do you think might be the next learning curve for you to hit the next performance level in your role?

Sam Armstrong:

It's actually letting go of a lot of what I hold right now and giving it to my team and allowing some of the big ideas I have to be brought down to the ground less than perfect. The problem is sometimes I live in the ether, and being able to really contextualize that, make it grounded for the average sales rep to understand and operationalize what I talk about can be tricky. And so, Brian and Kaylee, letting them communicate more to the network than I do is probably the next big thing for me. Having them help me to really ground and land what I do and what I teach. We've put together some pretty big ideas with our sales system, and it's time to really operationalize those ideas more and more.

Jake Cronin:

You spoke about your twice a week national sales calls and your Sales Coffee, the daily Sales Coffee. Are there any other rituals or any other ways that you've codified and then continuously share learnings with the franchisees or their sales teams?

Sam Armstrong:

I mean, I think those are my communication channels generally. I mean, I do have one-on-one conversations that I'll have with various franchisees, depending on what kind of service or help I feel they need. I'm looking for places that are looking for my help and where it lands and I can really have some leverage there, but that's going to be different every time. Then I have the weekly, it's not Sales Coffee, we call it First Cup every morning, every Monday morning that talks about what the Sales Coffees are going to be. I'll use that as well.

Jake Cronin:

Interesting.

Sam Armstrong:

And then my trainers also talk to the franchisees.

Jake Cronin:

That's another. Yeah, and having them triples your capacity to have those one-on-one interactions.

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah, I think it more than triples it. There's leverage with people.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah.

Sam Armstrong:

It's incredible, actually.

Jake Cronin:

When you hire someone who is... By the way, someone told this to me once, which I thought was amazing, is you can actually hire people who love doing the things that you hate. And what an amazing thing, that that exists.

Sam Armstrong:

Yes, it is. Yeah, it's really amazing. It's exponential growth when you do that.

Jake Cronin:

What is the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for you in your professional life?

Sam Armstrong:

I guess I don't look for kindness. I think the thing that matters the most to me is when people surface how what I've helped build has changed their lives. To me, that's all I'm looking for. I mean, I guess somebody can open a door for me. Yeah, that's the thing that I look for. We just had our home services summit. It's our parent company, Five Star Franchising. We've got several brands and we all come together and we came together in Las Vegas. You guys were there. You were sponsors. I had one guy at HSS a year before who got an award for a franchisee of the year or small market or something like that. And he wanted to bring me back up onto the stage for a picture with him because he gave me the credit for doing it. And it's not recognition, it's just the realization that what I'm doing matters that I think means something to me. That's the kindness I'm looking for.

Jake Cronin:

Realizing or being reminded that what you're doing matters is incredibly helpful. What do you look for leadership inspiration, the real people that you go to, books? How do you continue getting excellent?

Sam Armstrong:

I'm privileged to work for Dean Hartley. He's absolutely brilliant. And I work with Dominic, who's also on our leadership team. And so, I work with gangsters. We call each other gangsters. And so, that's really the number one source for me. But I do read some books. I don't really read sales books anymore. I mean, I've read Spin Selling, I've read Sandler. I read books on storytelling. I read books on... Storytelling is a big one for me. Psychology. I'm reading something about Descartes' Error that I think is really interesting where we tried to separate rationalization from emotion and he talks about how that's a mistake. I'm reading storytelling to understand how narrative arcs help people make decisions and feel comfortable with those decisions. All of that inspires me.

And just to give Dean credit. I mean, what really sent us on an arc was when he called me from vacation, said, "I read this book by Donald Miller called Story Brand. You have to read it." And I don't know if you've ever read Story Brand, but Story Brand talks about how companies are out there talking about themselves instead of their customers and how making the customer the hero of the story is what breeds success. And that's the heart of our sales system, is that the customer is the hero.

Jake Cronin:

What was your big break to get into this role? Remind me again how you got here, or was there another place in your career where that was your big break that sort of inflected you to get to?

Sam Armstrong:

I think this role was my big break. I do. So I was living in Berlin, working with refugees for an NGO, decided to move back to the States so my kids could go to high school in the States. And I wanted to move to the Michigan area for some reasons that had to do with that NGO. So I look for some... NGOs don't pay much. And so, I was looking for some part-time work, a little side hustle. And so, I answered an ad and met Dean Hartley and we hit it off and I started selling for him part-time and just really liked what I was doing and decided to do that full-time. I stopped working for the NGO and worked for them exclusively. And that partnership that we had early on was very inspirational to me. And I think it was my big break, because it created a channel for my ideas. I think there's a lot of people with really great ideas out there and they don't have a platform and they don't have a place to apply those ideas. And so, I feel very privileged to have that.

Jake Cronin:

I want to get into the lightning round. We'll run through each one super lightning. One, what is your favorite sales book?

Sam Armstrong:

Favorite sales book is, I think it is Story Brand. It's not a sales book, it's a marketing book, but it's my favorite.

Jake Cronin:

What's a TV show that you've enjoyed recently?

Sam Armstrong:

Pluribus.

Jake Cronin:

Pluribus?

Sam Armstrong:

Yeah. Yeah. Vince Gilligan.

Jake Cronin:

Oh, sorry. I've heard of it. Yeah.

Sam Armstrong:

It's the maker of Breaking Bad.

Jake Cronin:

Yeah. What are your three favorite software tools?

Sam Armstrong:

It's going to sound silly, but I'm going to say Siro is one of them. Okay. You like that, right? I really like the Google Suite, it's very helpful. And I use GPT a lot. I'm not an engineer or anything like that, so I have to create certain things, I don't have to get too deep into the software.

Jake Cronin:

Siro, G Suite broadly, and then ChatGPT. And then final one, what is your favorite sales tactic?

Sam Armstrong:

Favorite sales tactic would be reversing.

Jake Cronin:

Explain.

Sam Armstrong:

So reversing is where you tell me you want something and I ask you why you want it. It's simple as that. It's just not necessarily taking the bait from the customer, but instead spinning it back around on them. Customers are always trying to hand their problem to me and get me to tell them what they want, but I don't allow them to do that. So I make them tell me.

Jake Cronin:

Put the work a little bit back. It's a little bit like what therapists do. It's like you sort of want the answer and it's like, well, they're not going to give you the answer. They reverse it back.

Sam Armstrong:

I mean, so I don't really do Sandler sales anymore, but if you're familiar with Sandler at all, he said famously that, "Sales is a Broadway play performed by psychiatrists." And I think it's one of his most brilliant expressions ever, so...

Jake Cronin:

Sam, thank you so much for being here. It's been an absolute pleasure and I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of value out of what you've said today.

Sam Armstrong:

It's great to be here.

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.