How We Built Our 75+ Person Sales Team

Are you in the process of building out your sales team? For me, this was the hardest part about building my agency. I have always been good at lead generation and fulfillment and fairly good at sales personally, but building out a sales team was a big obstacle for me while scaling up

We currently have a 75 person USA-based sales team, and book about 600 calls per week.

In this post, I am going to teach you:

To start, let’s break down structure and make-up of the sales team, and include one of the three big lessons while we do it

One of the three big lessons that I learned is that for every closer, you are going to need two setters. Whether these are outbound setters or inbound setters in going to be primarily if your main traffic source is paid ads and content or cold outreach. If your main source is cold outreach, they should be outbound setters that cold email, cold DM, cold call, and so on.

If your main source is either paid ads or content, they should be inbound setters whose main job is to answer the phone, confirm appointments, and call old leads in the pipeline who either did not book or did not show. If they have gone through all of their inbound leads on a given day, they should begin outbound setting. I like to have these types of setters do one-hour of prospecting to start their day no matter what.

So, if you can do basic math, you will quickly be able to decipher that with this setup, we have about 25 full-time closers, and about 50 full-time setters. This is two setters for every one closer. We primarily use paid ads as our traffic source, then outreach is the second bigger, and then content. Our content is used more so to nurture leads who already know about us, and although our content probably gets us more inbound leads than 99% of agencies and businesses, it makes up less than 1% of our total lead volume, just because we book so many calls from paid ads and outreach.

I aim to have every closer take five calls per business day, with the ability to get up to 8. The reason for this is that if you book more than this, you are too reliant on each closer and are scrambling if they quit, and if they have too many calls, they become tired and stop talking each call as seriously.

Luckily, these calls are for very high LTV services, so my closers get high commissions on just a few closes and don’t want or require 50+ calls per week.

So, how do you build a sales team of your own? What does the process look like?

It sounds easy enough when it is spelled out in front of you, but I don’t think most people do a good job of utilizing their setters or closers correctly. This brings me to the second biggest lesson of the three. We are getting two of them out of the way early, and then the final one will be talked about near the end.

The second lesson is that you have to figure out how to set on every platform, and close both inbound and outbound sales calls before you ever hire a setter or a closer to do it for you.

No one is going to figure it out for you. How could they? It is an extremely unrealistic expectation, yet almost everyone does it. Why would the setter than you pay $500 per month and then $100 per call be able to figure out your entire sales process for you? You hear that kind of crap all the time in every type of business? 

I heard this exact example for someone who paid me for a consulting call recently. It went something like this:

“Oh yea, we had a marketing girl as our intern. She couldn’t even figure out paid ads.”

Why would a 22-year old (presumably) girl straight out of university be able to figure out the paid advertising strategy for a $40 million manufacturing company?

Unfortunately, people do this all the time with their sales team, so here is what to do:

The keyword there is “YOU.” Not someone else. Not your employee. YOU. The founder (or the CMO in some cases).

You have to do this yourself (yes, manually), and then keep doing it and keep improving it until you are able to book consistent meetings. The process you use for each platform may be slightly different, but they are all more or less the same. Figure out one, and then replicate it to other platforms and tailor it if needed.

Then, you record a Loom of yourself doing it. 

Then, you transcribe that Loom.

Then, you do it for an hour on Zoom in front of your setter.

Then, your setter does it for an hour on Zoom in front of you.

If they are able to do it properly, congratulations, you have just trained an outbound setter. You can then replicate this process over and over and scale to more and more setters, and eventually, you may even have a head of setters who recruit and train new ones.

So, that takes care of outbound setting, but what about inbound setting?

The nice thing about learning to do this is that outbound setting is infinitely harder than inbound setting. When you are inbound setting, they are coming to you. They know who you are, they have indicated that they are interested by filling out a form, or booking a call, or whatever other action you wanted them to take. This is much different than outbound setting because when you are outbound setting, they have no idea who you are and are not interested in any way. It takes a lot more skill.

One of the key differences is that when you are outbound setting, you will have a bunch of people working some of independently. It is good if you can export a huge list, and then break it up between them so there is no overlap, but even if you get this perfect, there still isn’t much coordination or cohesion between your outbound team.

This is the opposite with your inbound team. With your inbound team, you SHOULD completely centralize it:

The process here is a bit different, but we will go through that as part of the overall sales process in a couple minutes.

Before we do that, we must focus on the third of the three lessons, and this one might be the most important of all.

3.  Do not try to make each sales rep 50% better. Focus all that time on effort and making it 50% easier to sell by having a better nurture system.

A very popular saying is “a rising tide lifts all ships” and that is especially true when it comes to your sales team. Especially as your team grows, you will be hiring (presumably) less and less qualified closers. That is true with any role, but it is especially true when it comes to sales. The reason for that is that there are only so many A players and there are more spots than total A players. It is just supply and demand.

Instead of trying to turn B players into A players one at a time, it is better to instead focus on improving your process.

So, what does this process look like? I am going to go over this from top to bottom with what we do, and what has worked the best for us. I will just lay it out as simple as possible for you here:

Before you absorb what I am about to tell you, try to resist the urge to instantly think “well, I already have that” like you and I are enemies and you are trying to “get me” or something. Many people have many things, yes. Most people do not do them right. A toddler holding a baseball bat “has a baseball bat” but not the same way a Major League player “has a baseball bat.” This is often the case with people and their sales process and other parts of the business. How you use each tool in the sales process matters a lot, so I would recommend trying to use them the exact way I am describing.

Using them and succeeding with them will act as a better form of proof than 1,000 hours of me trying to tell you how great they are.

A lot of people just book meetings however they can. Most of their messaging and their offers are on the more beginner side (usually, unintentionally), and as such, the leads that come in are much lower intent than what they would like. Most people sense that this is happening, but they cannot quite put their finger on it, and if they can, they can’t articulate or describe this problem properly.

You should note that if you have a hidden problem in your sales process and you are doing everything right but it is still not clicking, this is probably it.

This phenomenon happens in many areas of business and in life.

The easiest way to reduce your churn rate is not to do any of the tricks or hacks, or even “improve your service.” It is to work with richer, more qualified clients that would succeed with or without you.

The easiest way to ensure you don’t get divorced is to just ensure you have a better spouse.

The easiest way to ensure you have a great community and social circle is to ensure you have better friends. 

This may sound like really stupid advice (or whatever you want to call it) to the uninitiated person who does not understand what I am saying, but it is extremely important and profound.

The easiest way to improve your sales process in this case is to attract better, higher intent leads, and you do that with your messaging.

Whether that is in paid ads, content or outreach, higher level and better messaging equals higher level and better leads that are more likely to convert.

In practice, this means video ads (primarily) talking about problems, outcomes and circumstances that your target market phases, presenting your offer as the solution, and then telling them the next step (usually, booking a call).

Between the time they book a call and the call actually happens, you should be absolutely blasting them with information on every platform. A great way to articulate it (from Jeremy Haynes) is that the reason people don’t show up to the call is because there is a “deficit of information.”

These people booked a call because they were interested. They want to get more information. If you blast them with all of the information they need before the call, they are:

So, what does this pre-call flow look like?

If you nail these five things, you will notice your show rate goes up by 50%, and more importantly, the quality of call goes up by sometimes 2-4x.

3. Pre-call research

The morning of the call, your closer should be researching each of his meetings for the day (AI can speed this up), and should be reaching out to each prospect to:

Doing 10 minutes of research will sometimes double your close rate. You will make them feel special, like you actually care, and you will be more confident. Don’t let anyone on your team skip the pre-call research process. Make them be professional.

4. A one-pager plan for the sales call

I do not believe in word-for-word scripts. They sound whack as f*ck when you are on the receiving end of it, and it sends the wrong message to your team> you are not hiring robots. You are hiring people. The difference between robots and people is that people have a soul.

Instead, everyone has a one-pager that is built based on how a successful call goes with tens of thousands of clal recordings. These are all bullet points. It becomes the closer job to stay on track. If it goes off track, they finish up the thought, then bring it back.

If you have ever heard of Jordan Belfort’s Straight Line Selling System (Wolf of Wall Street Guy), then it is kind of like that, but I have changed the rest of the process significantly over time as I have tailored it to my business.

Our one pager follows this format:

It is the closer's job to follow this plan and bring the conversation back to this as fast as possible, while fully finishing the prospect's thought or answering their question.

5. Centralized follow up

It would be nice, but I have never been able to get my closer’s to systematically follow up in a way that is 100% consistent in any of my businesses. At this point, I’ve stopped trying as I don’t believe it is possible. Instead, I have just centralized the follow up.

For follow up, I follow a specific process that I read in one of Alex Hormozi’s emails. Here how it goes:

So, how would you apply what I taught?

I think the nice thing about it is that this is a foundational system. That means that you should and could use this whether you are only at one closer, or at 25, or even at 1,000. The process is the same. You are setting them up for success.

You are plugging people into an overall system instead of running around trying to manage 25 different ways of selling.

That is the key to success if you are building a sales team. After you book about 25 calls per week for four weeks, you are in the market to hire your first closer. Then, replicate that process. At 50 calls, time for second closer, at 75, time for third, and so on. That is really all that it takes.

If you would like my help, book a call with Lead Generation Academy and I will tell you if you qualify.