You're Getting Paid Like a Pro. Are You Training Like One?

Kurtis Kammerer has spent over 15 years helping build Thrasher Group from a regional contractor into a $500 million empire spanning 13 brands and a network of over 100 companies. That kind of growth doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen without a very specific philosophy about what separates salespeople who are just earning a paycheck from those who are actually worth it.

Kurtis joins Jake this week to walk through the frameworks that have defined Thrasher's sales culture: a pro athlete model for daily habits, a mindset and beliefs system that's been their bedrock for 15 years, a blueprint for running sales meetings that actually make reps better, and a questioning technique that flips who's doing the selling.

The Pro Athlete Test Every Salesperson Should Take

Kurtis opens almost every sales training the same way. He asks the room: are you a pro?

The number one difference between a professional and an amateur, as Jake and Kurtis agreed on the show, is that the pro gets paid. And since everyone in the room is getting paid, that raises a harder follow-up question: are you actually behaving like one?

Kurtis runs through five attributes he believes define elite athletes, then asks whether salespeople are mirroring them.

1. Get coaching and be coachable. Getting coaching isn't enough on its own. A lot of reps absorb early training and never revisit it. John Wooden put it well, Kurtis noted: it's what you learn after you know it all that counts.

2. Practice. Not playing the game. Actual practice. Kurtis' analogy: playing three rounds of golf a week won't get you to the top of the game. Taking the seven iron and hitting it a hundred times in a row will. The distinction he keeps coming back to is pickup basketball versus the gym. People don't pay to watch pickup basketball.

3. Warm up before the action. For in-home sales reps, that means the night before: reviewing who you're meeting, saying their name out loud, making sure your materials are clean and ready, and getting your mindset right before you knock on the door, not after.

4. Make halftime adjustments. Every appointment has a natural break, a moment before you present solutions, where you can pause and assess. Kurtis says two questions matter here: do I have the customer's "why" (more on that below), and what objection have I already heard that's coming when we get to the close? He narrows the field: there are really only four objections in any sale. Money, think about it, getting bids, and needing to talk to someone else. He calls it MTBT. If you've heard signals for any of them in the first half, you should already know your adjustment.

5. Get in the film room. Before you leave after every appointment, write down one thing. Either something that went well that you want to keep doing, or something that felt rough that you want to work on. Two appointments a day, five days a week, give you ten data points by Friday. That's your coaching plan for the following week.

Why Sales Has a Professionalism Problem

Sales has almost no barrier to entry. There's no degree required, no certification, no rigorous qualification process, the way there is for law, medicine, or accounting. That means the talent pool is wide open in both directions.

The reps who aren't taking it seriously aren't just underperforming. They're actively training customers to be defensive. Every bad sales experience teaches a buyer to have their guard up before the next one. "We're just looking." "We're not moving forward today." Those aren't random responses; they're conditioned reflexes built up from being sold by people who didn't care.

As Jake put it on the show: everyone's had a bad sales experience. The professionals in the room have to overcome the reputation that the amateurs built.

The Mindset and Beliefs System Behind Thrasher's Culture

Thrasher has been teaching something they call Mindset and Beliefs for almost 15 years. It's the foundation of every training they run, not as an add-on but as the bedrock.

Mindset, as Kurtis defines it, is how you see your customers. Beliefs are what you genuinely think about the products and solutions you're selling.

Most companies try to solve the mindset problem with a poster. A list of values. Words like empathy, honesty, eye contact. Kurtis has a different take. You already know what excellence looks like; you don't need a poster to tell you. What you need is to put it somewhere useful.

His method: visualization. Before every appointment, picture the person you care about most in the world needing your services. For Kurtis, it's his grandmother Edith.

The result isn't a list of behaviors to remember. It's a completely different internal state that produces those behaviors automatically.

Beliefs work the same way but in the other direction. If you truly care about every customer, it becomes critically important that you believe in what you're selling. For Thrasher's reps, that means four core beliefs: customers should fix the problem, they should fix it now, they should fix it right, and they should fix it with us. If a rep can't honestly hold all four, Kurtis says that's a conversation worth having before they're in front of another homeowner.

What a Sales Meeting Should Actually Look Like

Kurtis travels to contractors across the country and says it's rare to find a well-run sales meeting. The typical agenda: some chit-chat, a pump-up moment, KPI review, war stories from the field, and then the meeting's over. Nobody got better.

His version runs in the opposite order of priority.

Start with practice. Not pump-up, not numbers. The first thing on the agenda is: "Remember what we trained last week? Who's first to come up and role play it?" This is showtime, not a recap. Show me you practiced.

Then train something new. Fresh content or a revisit of something important. Knowledge transfer is everywhere now; behavior change is the hard part, and behavior change only happens through repetition.

Then company information. Updates, product changes, anything operational they need to know.

Then KPIs, if there's time. Kurtis said he could go two months without covering KPIs in a meeting and it wouldn't hurt performance. Reps already know where they stand.

Close with what he calls the mindset and beliefs minute. A quote, a story, a keystone phrase. Something to walk out the door with. He's built up 10 to 15 of these keystones over time, each one loaded with backstory that's been built up in prior sessions. One phrase carries the weight of a whole conversation.

His example: "The harder I work, the luckier I get," attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, the G in MGM. Whenever a rep starts complaining about lead quality or blaming luck for a slow week, Kurtis doesn't need a speech. He just says, "Well, if you remember, the harder you work, the luckier you get."

The Technique That Flips Who's Doing the Selling

Kurtis' favorite sales tactic isn't a close or a script. It's a question. Specifically: "Why do you want this now?"

He walks through three levels of selling. Amateurs talk features. Average reps connect features to benefits. Professionals go deeper and find the customer's specific, individual, emotional "why."

His example: he walked into a store looking for a lighter, but what he actually wanted was a Zippo he could use on the back porch while smoking his late grandfather's pipe. A rep who leads with features might hand him a pack of BICs. A rep who understands the why takes him to the $75 Zippo with a flame that doesn't blow out in the wind and an angle built for pipe tobacco.

The question "why now?" does two things at once. It flips the script so the customer is selling you on why they need the solution, not the other way around. And it forces them to articulate something they may have never said out loud. As Kurtis put it, quoting Stuart Smalley of all people: the most powerful message a human being can hear is the one out of their own mouth into their own ear.

Wrapping up

Every rep in your organization is getting paid. The question Kurtis keeps asking is whether they're earning it like a professional or skating through it like a pickup basketball player at the Y.

The answer shows up in whether they warm up before appointments, whether they do film room after, whether they know their customers' why before they start presenting, and whether the meetings you're running are sharpening them or just filling time.

The tools exist. The only thing left is whether your team is willing to use them.

Transcript

Jake:

Hey guys, I'm Jake Cronin, the founder and CEO of Siro, the AI platform for in person sales teams, and we're back with episode two of Tactics, the show that dives deep with sales leaders across industries to uncover what top performing sales organizations do differently. 

Our guest is Kurtis Kammerer, VP of sales, strategy and technology at Supportworks. And he's been a part of Thrasher Group for over 15 years, seeing them through most of their growth to getting to over $500 million in annual revenue. Thrasher includes 13 brands, including the Hello Garage franchise and a network of a hundred additional companies making Thrasher a bit of an empire.

This growth does not happen by accident and we'll get into some of the day-to-day tactics that led to their success with Kurtis. Check out our conversation and be sure to like and comment. First, I want to talk a bit about how you train in sales. So, one of the things that you talk about is talking to people about being a pro athlete.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Yeah. There are a lot of athletic references that you can have when you're talking to salespeople or training sales. Athletics seems to come up a lot. I start out by asking sales reps. I say, are you a pro? What defines a pro? Like what's the difference between a pro and an amateur? The number one thing, Jake?

Jake:

Getting paid.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Yes, they get paid. And so, I look at these salespeople in front of me and they're all getting paid, some of them handsomely, right? And I say, so if you're a professional athlete, what are the attributes of the best athletes? And do we mirror those? People that are at the height of their game, they do have certain attributes. And so, I go through five of them. The first one is that a great athlete, the best. They are still coachable and they get coaching. So, it's very important. You can just get coaching, but if you dismiss a lot of it, and we know how salespeople are wired.

So, you have to get coaching, continue to get coaching, and be coachable. All right. John Wooden once said, the great coach of UCLA basketball back in the '70s, he once said that it's what you learn after you know it all that counts. We have to keep learning. It's incredible. A lot of salespeople, they aren't. They aren't continuing to be coached. They learned a process or a way or they learned about their products early on in their role at a company, and they never really go back to it to say, "How do I keep getting better?" Once you do that, the second attribute of a pro athlete is they all practice.

I think that a lot of salespeople, they count playing the game as getting better. But no one would think about going and playing, say, three rounds of golf a week and anticipate really getting to the height of that game. Practice is grabbing the seven iron and hitting it a hundred times in a row to correct things and fix things. Another analogy I use there is, are you going to the YMCA and just playing pickup basketball and walking in over the lunch hour and bang, hit the court? Or are you a pro and you practice? So, salespeople should be practicing. And if you think about a pro athlete, they practice really every day. Every day do something for practice. All right, you with me? Ready for number three?

Jake:

Let's bring it.

Kurtis Kammerer:

All right. Number three is every pro athlete, they warm up before the action. I think a lot of salespeople, I see them, especially we're an in home sales and I know CIRO works with a lot of in home salespeople. And it's on the way there, maybe that they're taking a look at their maps and seeing, am I headed in the right direction? Is there traffic? Did I remember to clean up my bag from yesterday with all my tools or my presentation materials for the homeowner? Starting the night before with looking at the people you're going to be talking to and saying their name out loud so it's locked in your brain.

Do you have a fresh shirt on? Do you look nice? So, what are we doing the night before and on the way to the appointment to get our mindset right and to warm up so we're ready to perform and not just knocking on the door going, "Oh, okay." So, the next one is that there is some sort of a halftime adjustment. So, what does a pro do at halftime? Well, at halftime, what do you think? What is a team doing at halftime?

Jake:

Let's see. So, if I think back to, I'll do some soccer days. At halftime, maybe we have to get the team's mind right. Morale's looking a little rough in the field. Then you're trying to make something, it's a little more pump up speech.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Yeah.

Jake:

If you're seeing a tactical thing going wrong, the other team is crushing us on the right side. We need to actually adjust formation. We're having a little powwow about tactics.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Make adjustments.

Jake:

A little bit of the game's going. Yeah. That's soccer halftime. What is sales halftime?

Kurtis Kammerer:

Sales halftime. And there's usually a point in the appointment where you have some time where maybe you're putting something back in the car or it's a break in the action of maybe inspecting a home. Let's say, in our world, I have to inspect home, see what's wrong. And then before I present solutions, there's this little break, right? And in halftime, it's really very simple, but there's two things I think you should look for. And we'll talk in a little bit about something I call the customer why, but to briefly explain, it's just why does the customer want what it is they called me about or what it is I'm selling.

So, I should be saying to myself, do I have that customer why? Do I know what it is? Did I ask about it? Then did I prompt with continuing questions? So, I truly know why the customer wants what it is I'm offering. Why do they want the car, the TV, their home fix, the new gutters, whatever it might be. The second thing that I want to do is say, what have I heard in the first half that I think is probably going to be an objection when we get to the end of the second half? What is my adjustment? So, have I heard things like, "Well, we're just getting bids right now."

So, it's going to be a bids objection. Have I heard things like, "We're not sure what this sort of thing costs. We're just seeing so we can prepare. So, money's going to be an objection," which almost always is anyway. And so, if you've heard those things, are you prepared then with your responses? We know exactly what to say for what I call the four big objections. There's really only four in any sale. It's money, think, bids and talk, MTBT. It's going to be money a lot of times. They have to think about it, which really means you haven't shown me the value, but people don't speak like that.

They don't say, "Well, I just don't see the value yet." When they don't see the value, they say, "Well, we're going to think about it." Next one is, "I got to get bids." And the last one is got to talk to somebody else. It's a multi-decision maker, we call it. One-legger is the term. We like to use professional terms. It's a multi-decision maker.

Jake:

And this is not the first time we're going to be talking about, you need to talk to your wife, et cetera, et cetera.

Kurtis Kammerer:

So, we went over getting coaching and being coachable. We went over practice. Do you practice or do you just play the game? And so, many guys, I catch them right there. So, many, I'm like, "Well, you're just a pickup basketball player at the Y." And people don't pay to go watch pickup basketball. So, I don't feel like paying you to be a salesperson.

Jake:

And the pickup basketball players are not getting paid.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Right, right. If you're a pro, which you are, because I'm paying you, I need you to practice pretty much daily something. So, we talked about getting coaching, being coachable. We talked about practice. We talked about warming up and we talked about having some sort of halftime that's meaningful. What are your adjustments? And the last one is this, film room. Every pro in really any arena goes back and says, "How did I do?" And of course in athletics, they actually watch film. So, what does film room look like? We have salespeople out in homes and so someone could apply this to their situation.

Here's all I ask them because you just can't give salespeople too many things to focus on at once. That should be simple. So, in the old days, I would say have a yellow sticky pad, which can still work there on the console of your car. And before you put the key in your car, which again is an old school, now you just push the button. So, before you push the button to start the car, or if you have a Tesla, you just hop in and it goes. Before you pull away, I want you to write down one thing either that really went well and you want to make sure and practice and keep doing, or one thing where it just didn't go as smooth and you want to work on it.

You simply write it down. So, today it could be pull your phone out, put it in your notes, app on your phone. One thing, then you can hit the car and go. Let's say you have two appointments a day, five days a week, got 10 appointments. By the time I get to the end of my week, I've got 10 things that I wrote down. That is my game plan for, that is my coaching. That is where I'm going to seek out who could help me be better at that or what do I need to read or what do I just need to practice to get better at that? What presentation in my software am I not good at? And I'm going to give that presentation to my spouse two or three times tonight over dinner to get my wording right. That's what a pro would do.

Jake:

When do you talk about being a pro athlete? Do you see this idea during training, or is it when you're having some sort of performance conversation with someone who's underperforming and you're telling them this analogy for the first time, how does this topic, this idea make its way into your sales rep's minds?

Kurtis Kammerer:

Hmm, that's interesting. I've moved on to mostly sales training is what I've done for several years after being in sales and managing some salespeople. And I do a lot of sales training. So, when I come in with that, I think it can apply at any level. But I think early on in someone's career in sales, I've mentioned to you how sales is an interesting thing. I don't need to get a degree to do sales.

Jake:

It's the beautiful thing about it. Successful to anyone. Almost no barrier to entry.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Almost no barrier to entry. Good and bad. If I want to be an accountant, I have to get some sort of a degree, right? And if I want to be a doctor, if I want to be a lawyer. So, when you know then when you go to a doctor or a lawyer or accountant, at least they've done something to be qualified for this.

Jake:

The education, the certification, this rigorous interview process, et cetera.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Right. What you have with sales is there's a lot of money to be made and no requirements to get into it. So, those two things combined are a wonderful thing for people that are wired for it and are good at it. It can be a bad thing for the industry as a whole. So, people like yourself and me and the people on your team and on my team who are sales professionals, they have to overcome that there are some people out there setting a worldview that isn't always positive in customers' minds. So, when you and I walk in and we're in a sales experience, we're being sold, let's say, assisted in a sale, and that person is maybe not that great at.

Their number one thing is simply their commission. They're not that well-trained. They don't take it serious. They're doing no training. Whatever it might be. They don't have somebody using sero to give them feedback, let's say. Exactly. Then they're training society in a bad way. They're training society to say, "Hey, you can smell, hear, see a salesperson, this is how they act and you better have your defenses up and know how to deal with them." Yeah.

Jake:

Everyone's had a bad sales experience.

Kurtis Kammerer:

If you're of any age at all, you know how to deal, you know the, "Hey, well, I'm just looking. We're just thinking about it. I'm not moving forward today." Those are defense mechanisms and they kick in early when you spot that, "Oh, I'm dealing with a salesperson here because you're trying to protect yourself." Well, so we need to overcome those. And so, I think by getting to these salespeople early and letting them know if you're going to be in this role, we expect professional sales and professional sales goes through these things. And I'm amazed sometimes.

I mean, there are salespeople that are actually good, well-meaning people that simply haven't had that mindset of, I never practice. I just play the game. I never get further coaching. When's the last time I got any coaching? When's the last time I read a book? Any book, right? When's the last time I went to a sales conference or any just personal development conference that needed to be sales? What am I doing to become a person that is a superstar at helping other people?

Jake:

It's incredible. You have so many people who even go through at least high school sports, it's an analogy, because a ton of people go through high school sports one time or another, and they know what it's like to have a coach to push you, do the daily routines. You actually learn a lot of what you said about being a professional athlete. A lot of that, the seeds get planted in if you play sports early on or if you're in band or whatnot, you need to practice, you have to be intentional about it, you have to practice the right way. And then a lot of that gets lost as people go into sales. They just don't connect the dots.

To be great at sales, you also have to do those things. The five. Can you rattle them off one more time?

Kurtis Kammerer:

I absolutely can. Get coaching and be coachable. Practice. Warm up before the action. Have a halftime that's meaningful, make adjustments and get in the film room.

Jake:

Do you remember a conversation about any sales reps who just unlocked something for them?

Kurtis Kammerer:

Well, I think most of the time I could be arrogant in my skill level or not. I could have a blind spot, but I seem to see light bulbs go on with this conversation. I think that if anyone's watching this and they manage salespeople, that if they could go execute that conversation at some sort of level, you really do get eyes open that I am getting paid for this. I am not an amateur that is just has... And we need salespeople at different levels, but if you're in professional sales, but you don't act like a professional, you really do need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself, do you truly care about... Let's start with your customers.

I would say no. I would say you're not really concerned whether they buy or not. Am I really concerned about my company? And then am I really concerned with myself? Do I just want to be the best at whatever I do? I think most salespeople are fairly competitive. I personally want to be the best at whatever I set my mind to. I realize that you can't always be in life, but you certainly can do the things that the best do and try to reach that point. And so...

Jake:

Set yourself up for success.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Yes. And it really boils down to how much do you care about customers? Do you think in your mind that if they don't buy from you, that if you're not good enough to convince them to do something that you know they need, and by the way, they probably called you about it and wanted, but they're just the money and all that. And if you're not good enough to get them over that hump, there's really only two things that are going to happen. Only two. One, they're not going to do the thing. They're not going to fix the problem or get the thing that would improve their life, whatever it is. They're just going to do nothing.

That's not good. Or they're going to do that with another company. And if you really think your company is the best at what they do, that's not going to sit well with you either because their experience is likely to be something lesser. I don't want that for the people that I care about in life, which gets us to a concept of mindset and beliefs that we can address at some point.

Jake:

Let's get into that. What are the mindset and beliefs that have made Brasher Sales so successful?

Kurtis Kammerer:

Yeah. We started teaching something called Mindset and Beliefs over a decade ago, almost 15 years ago, really. And it's the bedrock, if you will, of all our trainings, no matter what kind of training we're doing. But for sales specifically, it looks like this. What it says is mindset... Let's define it first. Mindset is, how do I see my customers? And beliefs, there's a definition in the dictionary, but what I'm talking about when I say beliefs, what do I believe about the solutions, the products, the services we provide? What do I really believe about them? Are they good? Are they needed? That sort of thing.

You have to have both these things to be a superstar. So, let's go to mindset. How do I lock in mindset? I ask salespeople, I say, "If you're questioning, I don't know what does it take to be a superstar? What's it look like?" I say, "Well, let's stop for a second. Think about the last time you had a sales experience or a customer service experience will also do that was outstanding." Somebody just really, really Made my life better. Yes. Yeah. Lock that in your brain. Think about that. Now just throw out some terms, right? Let's do a word picture of terms. What are things that you would say? The attributes of that person.

Jake:

Yeah. Say they were empathetic. They probably listened-

Kurtis Kammerer:

Listened.

Jake:

... knowledgeable, competent.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Competent.

Jake:

And the last one, I'd probably put a... I don't know what the word would be, but have my best interest in mind. That's how I feel coming out of any great sales or support or success interaction.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Yeah. Those are great words. Then there could be ones like just smile, eye contact, honest, honesty. All these kind of go with your, "Okay, so we can put all these words down." And I say, "Why don't we just write those words, we make this cool word poster and everything." And I said, "We can make a poster. You guys can hang that in the office. We'll make little stickers. You can put them on the dash of your car, or maybe on your bag that you carry. Well, these stickers with those words. You can glance at it, you can see these words everywhere and you'll remember." I said, "We could do that, but there's a better way."

I said, "First of all, I just taught you that you absolutely know what excellence is. It's not a secret." So, then I switched gears and I say, "Well, what if?" I said, "Think again, back to athletics. Somewhere in the late '80s, early '90s, something started in athletics that transcended the physical nature of athletics. And it was called sports psychology." And I said, "One of the tools that they use in that is a thing called visualization." So, they might take an athlete, they might say, "You're struggling to hit your free throws. It's killing us in games."

Have the doctor look at them, "Is there something wrong with his shoulder? What's going on? Does he have his eyes checked? Has his eyesight gotten better?" They check on, "No, everything's fine physically. It's right here." And so, they will sit the person down like you and I are now and they might say, "Hey, tonight I want you to shoot a hundred free throws, but I want you to just do it in a chair with your eyes closed and I want you to do everything perfectly. I want you to bounce that ball twice like you bounce it every time. I want you to bring the ball up, elbow in. I want you to stroke that shot.

And every single one of those hundred does what in your mind? Swish." And they will do that and that's called sports psychology and that you visualize it. And I say, "What if we visualize something on every appointment?" So, our appointments, I have to get in a car, drive to somebody's house to help them with their foundation repair. But whatever it is that you're doing, what I do is I say to the people, I say, "Tell me, think now about the favorite person in the world to you, the person you care about the most needing your services."

I say, "You got that person? You got them locked in your mind. Can you see their face in front of yours?" Now, I want to ask you, when you're with them, do you need that poster with those words on it to guide your actions? Do you have to think cognitively? Be honest, be nice, care about them, smile. Do you?

Jake:

No, it's how you behave is obvious. It's actually probably easier to figure out how to behave than it is to think of words.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Exactly, because it's coming from a different place. Well, what if we could look at our customers that way? What if we could just visualize our favorite person's face on our customer? Now, it's a simple concept. It's not easy until you practice it, until you do it a lot. But here's how it would look. I'll be in my car. For me, it's my grandmother. My dear grandmother's not with us anymore, of course, at this point, but Edith, my grandmother on my dad's side, she lived in her home until her final days.

If she had a problem, I say to myself, if she had a foundation problem, crack some foundation, home is settling, windows don't work, doors don't work, and she called a company and they send some guy out. How would I want that person to treat my grandma? Let's visualize our favorite person as if they need our product and that is establishing your mindset. It's locking your mindset in so you visualize that person. So, I walk up, I knock on the door, a 300-pound hairy gorilla of a guy comes up in a teddy T-shirt, I see grandma. Treat him just like grandma. Give him a kiss on the cheek. We start our day. Yeah.

Jake:

So, every person who's going through thrasher training is being trained on mindset this way.

Kurtis Kammerer:

On mindset. Yes.

Jake:

And it's not, here's a list of how you treat customers. These are the values. It's treat customers the way you would your favorite person.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Think of grandma or whoever it is for you. And how would you be prepared? What kind of a pro would you be? It all ties together, doesn't it?

Jake:

Does this ever come in conflict with getting the close?

Kurtis Kammerer:

Let's go there, should we? Because that's the second half. Beliefs. All right? That's beliefs. And I love that you asked that because people usually think of closing. In fact, when we train the closing part of the process, because you have to close. We actually call it, and we have for years now, we call it counseling, a different C word that has a much better connotation. Because if you really think about it, you're counseling somebody. Let me come back to that in a second. But the beliefs side of this is this.

If I see everyone and I truly care about them and I want the best for grandma, now it becomes incredibly important that I truly believe in what it is I'm doing. I need to believe that our product, our solution, everything that my company does at my company and how we'll stand behind this truly is the best. And in our world, those beliefs are, there's kind of four of them. It's like we need to believe that people should fix these kinds of problems that they have with their phone, their home. They should fix it. They should fix it now. They shouldn't wait. We need to believe that, that it's only going to get worse.

It's only going to cost more. We should believe that they should fix it right, that doing patchwork and patching drywall, but not addressing the real foundation problem, that's just going to be money, good money down the drain, time down the drain. The last one is that they should fix it with us. That my team, my company is going to be the best at doing this work. If I don't believe those, I really do need to have a conversation with someone in my company to say, "I have a problem with this area in believing." You have to believe and you need it more so when your mindset is strong.

If you really don't care about your customers, you can probably sell anything because what's your goal? Make commission, make a check, right? But if you really care about making your society a better place, making your community a better place, helping people, helping redefine an industry, helping to redefine sales as we know it, and showing people that a sales experience can be a remarkable experience if you are that kind of person. Mindset and beliefs go together. They don't replace some sort of process. You have to have a core process to practice and execute.

The way to look at it is you can be relatively successful if you nail your process, you do all the pro athlete things, you practice it, and you execute some sort of process that you have, sales process. But if you'll wrap that in mindset and beliefs, it's more of a wrapper, that's where you get superstar level.

Jake:

I want to do a slight pivot and talk about sales meetings. So, a lot of folks watching this either run sales teams or run sales organizations. Sales meetings are incredibly expensive for your business because you're getting your revenue generating folks in a room, not generating revenue. How do you make that time useful? How do you run a sales meeting?

Kurtis Kammerer:

Right. Man, so many things. Unfortunately, I think that there are a lot of... I'm in a lot of these sales groups. I'll go and I'll travel to our contractors that we help support. And I've been to them all across the country and everywhere, and it's sometimes hard to find a well-run sales meeting. Let me tell you what's typical. Typical is we come in, we spend the first few minutes just kind of chit-chatting or doing something fun. And sometimes, there's kind of a pump up thing. I don't know. I see that a lot.

And then we might right away, we're going to hit the numbers, talk about the KPIs, who was best the last week, quarter, month, whatever it is we're doing, which by the way, we're talking about how often these should happen. I think they should happen once a week, but whatever your cadence is. "Oh, let's go through the KPIs and all that sort of thing. "Any stories from the road or any... People love to tell their stories. "Oh, I was talking to this person and that." And what salespeople are doing, if you think all those things, which can eat up sometimes 50% to 100% of the meeting because salespeople, that's easy for them to look at the KPIs. None of them want to role play or actually practice.

If you were to ask them, unless you have to establish that culture. So, they got to burn up all this time. We get to the end, did anything from those things, are they going to make that person better? I could even argue, even if they heard the best story about how an objection was overcome or something, they didn't practice it and they didn't bother right and they're just going to try and remember it and maybe they'll do it.

Jake:

It's kind of like a conference speaker who pumps you up and makes you feel good.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Right, right. Not bad, but unless you do something with it. So, I call it, there's a big difference between knowledge transfer, which is available all over the place. I could ask you right now, I could say something you know nothing about. I could say, "Hey, do you know anything about the Planet Jupiter?"

Jake:

Not much.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Not really. It's the largest one. Okay. And I would say, "I'll give you five minutes to become an expert on it and you could with ChatGPT or Google or anything and you could come back and go, here's a bunch of stuff." Knowledge transfer is simple. Behavior change is where we have lost it. So, your sales meeting should look like this. Number one thing we come in, trust me, all these guys were standing out eating the donuts, having coffee, they were chit-chatting. They're warm. They don't need some pump up thing. They've all been talking.

When we sit down for our sales meeting, first thing we do is say, "Hey, remember the thing that we trained last week, let's say. Who's the first to come up and role play that? Who's the first to deliver that presentation? Let's have a customer experience where we actually act it out. We get to practice." And really the practice hopefully happened prior. This is almost more like showtime. Show me that you practiced. Okay, so good. So, we spend our time, we get that important stuff. I know that they're going to leave better. They're going to do better in their next appointment because we practiced some key component of the sales process.

Next thing we do is if they do good on their practice, we can learn something else. So, now I train something else. Doesn't matter what it is, maybe we've trained it before, maybe it's a brand new thing, whatever, training is next. I could go two months without ever talking about a KPI. What's your average dollar per sale, or what's your closing rate or anything like that? They don't need that information on the regular. And trust me, they probably know it anyway. They know where they are. So, the next thing that we do is any company information delineating out information that they need. Maybe they'll say, this product, we're not going to get it from that company anymore, so we're changing whatever.

So, you can have your information, then we're going to do KPIs if we have time. Here's where everybody's stacking up. Here's what we're doing. So, that's the order of importance, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but I've done it for a long time. I think if you're watching this, that maybe you give it a try. Now, the last thing isn't because of importance, but the last thing is what I call the mindset and beliefs minute. So, I leave them with some sort of powerful, it might be an analogy or a story or something that I read. This can take anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes, maybe that'd be long.

And it's something to say. It could be as simple as this. Guys, let's just refresh mindset and beliefs. We don't let our circumstances dictate our day and how we're feeling and the weather and are retired and that we've locked our mindset in. It's our favorite person and we locked in our core beliefs. You got to fix it, fix it now, fix it right, fix it with us. Do we all have that? Let's all say it together. What's our beliefs? All right, guys, go get them. It could be that simple. Not because it's the least important, but it's because I want to leave them out the door with.

Jake:

It's a final piece.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Yeah. It could be a video clip of an inspiring video clip. It could be a story, but I have a whole thing of how to develop what I call a keystone, which is looking up a quote, learning about the person that said the quote, applying it to something that we do in our sales process, and then establishing some sort of phrase, right? So, one of them is I have a whole story around a quote that says, "The harder I work, the luckier I get. The harder I work, the luckier I get."

Jake:

And who said that?

Kurtis Kammerer:

That was Samuel Goldwyn, the G and MGM. So, Szmuel Gelbfisz was his original name, but his name, he changed it when he got to the United States. In the 1800s, Samuel Goldwyn went to a little town out in California called Hollywood and made the first motion picture. And the rest is history. And so, I will tell that story. And then now when people come in and, let's say, I have a sales meeting or we're having a little bit of a period of time on our sales team where the sales reps are not that happy about the leads and while my numbers were down because I this and that, and they just got lucky.

They got lucky, they got good leads or they had the right customers and I didn't have them. And I can say something to the effect of, "Well, if you remember, the harder you work, the luckier you get." I can say one phrase, a keystone phrase, right?

Jake:

It has the rest of the meeting already baked in. Everyone knows there's a shared understanding around the meaning of it, the weight of it.

Kurtis Kammerer:

And pretty soon you have 10 or 15 or 20 of these keystone phrases. My boys, when they would walk out the door every single day as a young kid going to school, I would say, "Hey, do something nice for somebody today." We had had a long conversation over time about what does that mean and what does it mean to be a bully or to not be nice to a kid or to spot somebody that needs a friend or whatever it might be. What does it mean to be a good person out there? We've had the big story, but I don't have time for that every morning. But what I do have time for is one keystone phrase, "Hey, do something nice for somebody today."

And they can replay the film, I know what that means. And that's what we do with our salespeople. So, you have these stories and you say, "So, guys, we're not going to complain about leads, right? It's not about luck. It's about execution." Now I can just say, the harder you work, the luckier you get and they know, don't complain about leads, go make the best of it.

Jake:

And that's generalized one thing about the keystones that we have at Siro and the ones that we should have at Siro. Thinking about a team meeting and the agenda you set out, how does Siro fit into that or how could Siro fit into that?

Kurtis Kammerer:

I definitely see it there. That's the place to use it. And so, being able to bring up say some appointments that were analyzed and using those as a training opportunity. So, "Hey, I had 15 of you guys out last week. We were doing this and we were selling this specific concrete protection system, let's say, with a topical coating and sealing all the joints in your concrete driveway." I And guys, our data, we can see our closing percentage on those leads has dropped by eight points. And we're not upselling the sealing the joints. Let's just take that one. That's work that we would do. And I can see that on zero.

And I went in and I listened. I analyzed, first of all, and I saw that on those appointments, the number one objection that we've been getting on that is people getting bids. They want to wait and see what the other guy's going to charge for sealing the joints. And we're all over the place on how we're handling that. I don't understand it because we have written down how we handle the bids and our price assurance guarantee. So, they can sign up today, they still have 30 days to look, but they're going to sign up today. So, we have that guy, so I think we need to practice it. And being able to show them that this isn't just some random thing, this is what's going on.

Oh, by the way, Joe has really actually been doing good at it. I want you to listen to some of the things that he says when he's been getting that. So, let's play some of that serial stuff so you could do that. It is cool to go back and actually listen like what was said, but hone in on that. This isn't just a recording device. It's to analyze, find the problems. Then you might want to listen to 30 seconds of, what are we saying there? You got the transcript, of course, but how's that sound? What's that like?

Jake:

What is your favorite sales book?

Kurtis Kammerer:

My favorite sales book. This one might shock some people. It is the book of Proverbs in the Bible. Favorite sales book. Why? Remember I talked about grandma earlier in this podcast and she's my favorite person. And she sent me a letter. I still have the letter. And she said, "Hey, the book of Proverbs, there's 31 Proverbs in that book. One for each day of the month." And she says, "So, it's a good habit to get in. Why is it great for sales? Why is it the best sales book ever written? Because it's about human beings. It was written around 930 to 980 BC, mostly by King Solomon, but a couple other kings wrote some of the proverbs.

And so, regardless of religion, this isn't a religious promotion. This is about people and it's incredible. So, think about that. A thousand years BC approximately. So, that means we're talking 3000 years, over 3000 years ago. And what it says about how people behave, what makes for a productive relationship and what makes for a not productive, certainly there's thoughts on life and that has not changed in 3000 years. I read it and every day, I'm just blown away that here we are so sophisticated, AI tools and big cities and all this technology at our disposal. And I'm telling you, Jake, human beings haven't changed.

Jake:

What's your favorite sales tactic?

Kurtis Kammerer:

Well, customer wide for sure. And we brought that up a little bit, but my favorite sales, I guess I'll call it a tactic, but is the difference between talking about features. It would be amateur level. Okay? So, what are the features of your product? You got to know it. Okay, so car gets this much gas mileage, it's got leather seats, it's seat six and it's got 300 horsepower features. Then you move on to, well, what do those accomplish? Well, the fact that the gas mileage will save you money. The Bluetooth connectivity thing will allow you to stream podcast Kurtis because you like to do that and all that.

So, what do features accomplish? That is then kind of the second level of sales. And I would say you're going to find that skillset in most salespeople. So, let's just call that your average salesperson. So, you got an amateur that just focuses on features. Average salespeople can know what those features will accomplish for a buyer, but a true professional knows what is the person's very specific individual, by the way, emotional, customer why. And the difference in that is, I use an example where my grandfather passed away and I loved him dearly and he would always smoke a pipe. And so, when he did, I got several of his pipes.

I'd never spoke to pipe in my life. I decided I would like to have some tobacco and go smoke a pipe out on our back porch and just, I don't know, think about my grandpa. So, I needed a lighter. I don't know what happened to his lighter. I wish I had it, but I remember he had this lighter and it was like this Zippo lighter. And so, if I were to go into a store and I walk into a store and I say, I need a lighter, there's a lot of directions they could go. They could tell me all the features and everything of...

Jake:

The biggest flame, largest butane tank. Yep.

Kurtis Kammerer:

Yeah. Refillable, won't blow out in the wind. That's what Zippo hangs their hat on is some of those features. But they might point me to a BIC because they've had somebody come in and said, "I'm just looking for the lowest price." And that's too expensive. And so, they're going to show me, Kurt, Kurtis, here's a packet of 12 big lighters. It's by far the best choice for value and money and they'll work. And when it's over, you throw it away and all that. If they don't know my why, that I want to sit on my back porch with my grandfather's pipe and I want to smoke a pipe and think about him and I want to recall that lighter, they're not going to take me to the $75 Zippo.

But when I tell them that story, they're going to go, "Okay, you want something that you don't throw away that actually maybe becomes an heirloom for your grandchild and you want to do it outside. So, we need one that doesn't blow out in the wind and it's a pipe. So, the flame needs to be that one where the flame comes out at a 90 degree angle, not straight up." All these things when you understand my why, it's my favorite thing. And we started out with just the very easy question, something like, "Jake, you called me out to your home. Why do you want to fix it now?"

The brilliant thing that happens is that when I ask that question, you tell me, "Well, I'm looking for a car," and you come in and I say, "Well, why now?" You have to start selling me. If I say, "Oh, you're looking for a car. Well, let me show you what we got on sale. Let me show you the lease deals. Let me show you all that." I'm selling, selling, selling. When I stop and I say, "Jake, tell me why now." You have to sell me. You have to have all the reasons. And a lot of times customers have never actually cognitively thought a lot about really why. They certainly maybe have not articulated it verbally.

Jake:

To force the clarity.

Kurtis Kammerer:

To force the clarity. So, not only have I flipped the script and I say, "Why do you want this?" And they have to sell me on why they want it. They also have to maybe for the first time articulate it verbally. What's so interesting about that is the most powerful messages that we can hear. If you ever watch Stuart Smalley reruns from Saturday Night Live in the '80s, I'm sure you watch that all the time, Jane. Go back to the '80s, look up Stuart Smalley where he says, you do self-talk. The most powerful message that a human being can hear is the one out of their own mouth into their own ear. That's the powerful message.

So, Stuart Smalley says, "I'm good enough. I'm smart enough and I can do it." So, it's a Saturday night live skip.

Jake:

Well, let's end it there.

Kurtis Kammerer:

All right. That was so fun. And I just hope that people were able to grab something. We talked about a lot of things. Hopefully, there's a few things, what I would call tools in their toolbox, that they can actually take one of these tools and tomorrow. I would challenge them. Go take one of these things and just say, "I will try it." Because the easy thing, the sub superstar thing to do is to listen to this-

Jake:

Be amateur.

Kurtis Kammerer:

... and just do knowledge transfer, no behavior change. How about be extraordinary and take one thing and go, "I will actually try it."

Jake:

Phenomenal. 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 Jay Cronin. Until next time.