Are Salespeople Built or Born?

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Podcast Transcript

Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Lance. It’s great to have you here. Tell us a little about your business. What do you do?

Lance Tyson:
Thanks for asking. Tyson Group is in the business of working with sales leaders and their teams to help them compete in a complex world, essentially. Our direct customer is usually the leader in a small to midsize business, that can be the CEO, that can be the president of a company, the founder. In a midsize business, that can be a VP of sales, a chief sales officer.

It’s really anything that is relatable to sales, too. So, if you think of cousins to sales—so service is a cousin to sales, account management is a cousin to sales. That sales leader, if you think about it, really there are several factors that they have underneath their purview, or their architecture. It’s how they lead, what’s the culture of sales they have in an organization, or how they manage, which is how they measure KPIs. Then you have things like what kind of sales process is being applied from something very simple to complex. Methodologies are in there. Then you have effectiveness. Enablement right now is really big. I mean, there are a lot of industries that are trying to apply this fast-moving sled of A.I. into how they manage accounts. And then the last thing, the age old question is: getting the right talent. And then the bottom line is: Are salespeople built or are they born?

Loren Feldman:
You got a quick answer to that one?

Lance Tyson:
I do. It is my firm opinion that it’s statistically improbable for a salesperson these days to be good at everything you would need to be good at in sales. So I think they’re built. I think you’ve got to decide: Do you have a salesperson who is really good with the people side of it? And then you have a salesperson who can be really good at the process side. And the key is that the people side of it would be more art. The process side would be more science.

And I think you’re looking for an architect, so nothing’s built to scale. So sales is half art and half science. I still think it’s statistically improbable for somebody to be good at everything. Yes, I would concur that there are some people that are just really good at dealing with people. And we gravitate to that. But that doesn’t always make the best salesperson, though. That makes us somebody good with human relations.

Loren Feldman:
There’s so many things I want to dive into with you, but I want to hear a little more about Tyson Group. You have a focus on sports, don’t you?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, actually, I would say it’s where we cut our teeth. I would say the sexy part of our business is everybody likes to talk about sports. And you know, you and I are pretty much Philly guys. So you started off our conversation talking about Philly sports, and you said, “Hey, Lance, who do you cheer for?” And I would say: whoever’s the bigger customer, at this point. I think today we have a [sales] trainer in Minnesota. We have one in Dallas with one of the Dallas teams. We have somebody with the Los Angeles Dodgers in sales—not a salesperson, a trainer—one with the Calgary Flames—amongst another nine projects that are outside of sports.

But sports tends to be interesting. And what do you train sports people on? Well, like anything else, they have multiple products. If you’re a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, they have media naming rights to sell. People aren’t lining up to buy that stuff. That all has to be sold, right? You have premium seats that are sold B2B, if you are the Philadelphia Phillies. And I’m just bringing up those teams right now because they’re in the metro that you and I have in common. But they have the same challenges as everybody else does. They have talent challenges. They have product challenges. They have marketplace challenges. They have post-COVID challenges.

Loren Feldman:
How did you develop that expertise? Did you seek sports teams to specialize in, or did it just happen?

Lance Tyson:
I cut my teeth in the training industry. I was really into personal development back in the day. So I remember reading Stephen Covey’s book when I was really young, entering in business. I was an Anthony Robbins fan. And then a buddy of mine said, “Hey, if you really want to be good at anything in life, including business, you’ve got to read this book by Dale Carnegie called, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’”

I remember going to the King of Prussia Mall. I bought the book. And then I was like: I want to be in that industry. I actually started my career with Dale Carnegie Training in Philadelphia. And I literally kind of rose up through the ranks here in the Philly area. I learned how to train and sell training. And we had a deal going with the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce that was co-sponsoring a Dale Carnegie class. And I got a trade with the Philadelphia Eagles, actually, ironically enough, that we would train all their salespeople. And we would do sales training for them for tickets, access to tickets.

At the time, the vice president of sales was a gentleman named Len Komoroski, and he put everybody through. And then I had left the Dale Carnegie operation in Philly and bought an investment in the one in Cleveland. And Len then became the acting president of the Cleveland Cavaliers. And from there, that kicked off a domino effect of relationships. Now, we probably own 40 percent of the market share in pro sports, just as it relates to training and consulting. But that’s not the only thing we do.

Loren Feldman:
What percentage would you say of your business is the sports side?

Lance Tyson:
In 2018, we launched Tyson Group. And under that, we quickly went after pro sports as a go-to-market strategy. I had a good name, the system had a good name. So that, at one point, was almost 90 percent of our business. And right now, I would say it’s about 60 percent of our business. We have a good strong foothold there, I would say, very good relationships there in different markets. But we do business with all kinds of different manufacturers, different supply companies, all kinds of businesses. So there are tech companies, medical supply companies, two pretty large pharmaceuticals we work with.

What our customers all have in common, Loren, is there is an opportunity or a challenge or a problem in how they’re trying to do business through sales. And we literally do a gap analysis. We look at what needs to be adjusted the most. And we help them develop a new strategy towards it. That’s our goal.

Loren Feldman:
Can you give us a sense of how big the business is?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, we’re about 25 employees. We’re north of about $5 million. And we’re growing at about 35-40 percent a year. I think we have employees in 15 different states. Loren, we are truly a remote organization. We’re based in Columbus, Ohio—Dublin, Ohio, actually. I think we have two people in Dublin, Ohio, three people in Ohio proper. We are in every time zone in the U.S. at this point. And one of our marketing people is moving back to India, so we will be in a different time zone. Actually, one of our associates on our social media team lives in France. He plays some pro hockey over there, but also works about 30 hours a week. So we’re truly a very geographically diverse organization.

Loren Feldman:
Was that true before COVID?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, it was. COVID, not being in the office, didn’t affect us negatively, how we manage the organization. Just about any version of what our company was, like, we were in Dale Carnegie in 2005, I can remember we had four different offices from Cleveland to Indianapolis. And I can remember then being on Yahoo Messenger, almost using it like a Slack at that point. So we’ve never been really challenged. We have a certain etiquette, a certain process, that we run our internal meetings on.

We’re very KPI-driven. We have a very simple formula with how we run the business. People need to be able to communicate why their job exists, what the major goal of their job is. Everybody has multiple goals in their job. What are the KPIs or performance standards needed to get the job done? And we’re very transparent about that.

Being extremely transparent helps with being so remote. Everybody knows what the number is. We have about seven “isms” in the company, and one of the number one isms—Tysonisms, or whatever you want to call them, or value statements—is, “You can’t win if you don’t score.” Everybody knows what the score is at Tyson Group. They know what our growth numbers are. They know what our profitability numbers are. They’re tied into those things.

Loren Feldman:
Did demand for your services increase with the pandemic?

Lance Tyson:
No, we panicked, like everybody else. Everybody has their version of tragedy in the uphill battle and slaying the dragon. I was at Madison Square Garden. I was there that day, and they were having the Big East tournament. And I kind of remember it like I remember 9/11. And I had hurt my back and I was leaving early, because my back was really sore. And they were canceling the Big East tournament. They started to cancel some games. I think Marquette was playing. I remember leaving the hotel and parents just being pissed off. By the time I landed in Columbus, I got a text from one of my staff members that said they just canceled the NBA season. I go, “Come on.” I couldn’t even believe it.

Loren Feldman:
I remember that day.

Lance Tyson:
So at that point in the pandemic—my board’s always challenged me, “Hey, you never want to have one client that’s too big. You never want all eggs in one basket.” And we had started to diversify a little bit in different verticals, but a lot of our business was tied up in sports, and sports just literally—other than the NFL, there were no fans there—it shut down. So we hit the panic switch. We went down to a very, very low number. Good news is we had decent cash reserves. I wouldn’t say we were pandemic-proof, but we’d made good decisions before that. But immediately, like everybody else did, we made adjustments to staff very quickly. We insulated up.

And then what we did in the pandemic is we just literally, to all our clients, offered free training and coaching, whether they were under contract or not. And we just gave. And we were going from noon to night, and there are some markets that didn’t even participate in a pandemic. And I’m not being sarcastic. Every marketplace had a different view, like Arizona had a different view than Texas, than Florida, than Pennsylvania, than New York. So we just tried to accommodate as much as possible.

And it was right in the middle of the pandemic. Madison Square Garden teed up, because it was starting to show life. They were getting ready. And we signed a contract right in that summer. It was a sizable enough contract. I would say, that that gave us a little breathing room. But since then, it’s slowly grinded back up. But it’s different now. We really started to do a hell of a lot more consulting and coaching than more of a purely training solution.

Loren Feldman:
So much has changed because of the pandemic, and I think that’s true with sales—the most obvious thing being the Zoom-versus-travel issue. Tell me about that. Have things really changed? Or are we back where we were before the pandemic?

Lance Tyson:
No, I think it’s different. It’s just different. I think that how people do business, that’s changed dramatically. I remember not very long ago, maybe six months, I was on the phone with a manufacturing company. And the president of this manufacturing firm really kind of got into it with me. And he suggested, and I’ll paraphrase: “Lance, if you’re trying to sell us this hybrid selling model, it’s not going to work. We don’t need that. I don’t want that.” And I said—his name was Jeff—“Jeff, with all due respect, it doesn’t really matter what you want. It’s what your prospects are asking for. Based off of the conversations we’ve had with your salespeople, with looking at different data points, you might think you need to be face-to-face with everybody, but your prospects and your buyers are saying no. So that’s fine. You can keep pushing this, ‘You’ve got to be face-to-face,’ but it’s not what everybody else is telling you.”

And then we kind of had a longer conversation and I said, “Why does this whole concept get you so fired up?” And he went on to say that he felt the age of his seller couldn’t accommodate these conversations that we’re having in a hybrid way, and that hybrid way is not face-to-face. If you think about it now, one of the biggest challenges in sales is fragmentation. Because you’re having conversations with people over text, over email, over voice note, over voicemail, face-to-face, and it’s this combo of things. And he just didn’t think that his salespeople were going to be able to move the needle on some of these manufactured products.

Loren Feldman:
He has older salespeople who might not handle the technology well?

Lance Tyson:
Yeah. And I said, “Look, your problem is not the technology. Your problem is talent. And you can teach an old dog a new idea. You can, if that’s what it comes down to, and then you’re gonna have to hold these folks accountable, and then slowly deal with this. But you can’t keep sending them out. People don’t want to be out. Part of your sales process is going to be hybrid.”

And I think what’s happened for most is sales leaders, decision makers, have to make a decision about whether to address the marketplace. So their sales process methodology and people are gonna have to be adaptive or pliable. Now, there’s a secondary factor to that, too. There’s an expectation of employees—and this is anywhere. People have learned there’s another side of life. I can get my job done from my house. I don’t need…

Loren Feldman:
To commute.

Lance Tyson:
Yeah, I don’t need to be there. And that’s affected negatively, in some cases, especially around sales, culture. And some leaders don’t know how to deal with culture if people aren’t right there with them. Look, you can’t argue that—you know, these people aren’t control freaks. There’s a method to having a huddle room and just bouncing ideas off each other. There’s a lot of synergy there. There’s a methodology to managing by walking around. Not everybody’s built to hold people accountable to a goal or to a performance standard. And some businesses are different. So that’s affected the culture piece. And so we spend a lot of time there also. So I think it’s both from the sales leadership and motivation standpoint to also the methodology and process.

Loren Feldman:
Do you think salespeople can be as effective virtually as they are in person?

Lance Tyson:
Listen, if I were going to put money towards it, if you’re going to ask me if I was going to bet, look, it’s a hell of a lot more forgiving if you and I are face-to-face with each other having a cup of coffee. There’s a 360 element there.Let me say it this way: Your EQ goes up dramatically if all your senses are being addressed. I’m a few feet from you. There’s synergy. There’s smells, there’s sights, there’s different sounds. And it’s way more forgiving. I can make way more mistakes.

So if I were going to put $1,000 tonight on if you said, “Lance, do you think somebody’s going to get a sale more because they’re on a Zoom call or more because they’re face to-face?” Give it to the face-to-face. But you’re going to have to be agile, and you might not be able to do that. So then, I’d take a Zoom call over a phone call any day of the week and twice on Sundays. It’s hard to imagine that back in 2019, we were still on conference calls. I can’t even imagine a conference call at this point. I was literally calling people today, and it still feels weird. You’re usually on Zoom. You can see people.

But the thing that has to be addressed, if you’re gonna go into this hybrid selling or any kind of business—even if you were negotiating with a vendor, it wouldn’t really much matter— face-to-face would be better in a negotiation than in writing or over technology. The skill-set, though, through a Zoom call, the onus becomes more on verbal economy with your ability to really facilitate the conversation. Because you’ve got to really facilitate, if you’re on this. You don’t have the time. You can see them. You don’t know if they’re paying attention.

And then your ability to ask check-in questions, or evaluative questions, like, “Hey, what are your thoughts on that?” or opinion-seeking questions. You’ve got to be really good at that to move the conversation on, because I can’t tell if I’m on a Zoom with somebody, training them, trying to sell them something, I can’t tell if they’re really paying attention. I mean, they could be watching YouTube, for all I know. You know what I mean? And when somebody blurs their background, you can’t even see them. I mean, there’s all kinds of weird stuff that goes on, and you’ve just got to be really alert.

Loren Feldman:
You mentioned before that when you take on a client, they come to you because they have a problem. And you do an analysis to see what you need to do to address that problem. Are there one or two most common problems that you see?

Lance Tyson:
So one thing that our clients have in common is they’re trying to improve the productivity of something. So they’re trying to increase sales to either hit a budget or to meet growth initiatives, so there’s an increase in productivity. Or the secondary problem is to reduce something. So we were doing some business with a company that was competing against Nielsen ratings. And it was a technology solution. And their technology was better than the way Nielsen did business. And I’m still under a nondisclosure to even kind of bring up who it is, but a very well thought out company. But the amount of time it was taking them to make a sale was probably three times as long, because they lacked credibility. So they had to kind of solve it in the sales process, because that sales cycle time was driving costs up.

So they’re usually the two primary things: something around an increase in productivity or a reduction in the amount of time it takes to do something. And then the last thing, usually kind of that lagger is, to increase the quality of something, like the quality of the relationship or the quality of the individual. But usually, the two outcomes have to do with productivity or time or cost base.

Loren Feldman:
Those sound like pretty fundamental issues. If I’d asked you this question before the pandemic, would you have given me pretty much the same answer?

Lance Tyson:
Absolutely. I would say it’s not as much about what’s different. It’s more about what’s the same. What was acceptable with how we did business was pretty standard. So if you took a semi-complex to complex B2B sales process where things are pretty standard, there are certain times that you’d have a conference call, but there are bigger parts of the sales process that you would do in person. Now, it’s the Wild West. I mean, it can be anything. It goes back to the manufacturing example: “We need to be-face to-face.” Well, what you need and what your clients and customers want and prospects want might be something different. So what you need to be is pliable.

Loren Feldman:
Could you have done as much over Zoom before the pandemic as is being done now if you’d thought to try it? Or were people just not ready for it back then?

Lance Tyson:
I mean, there were so many conversations. One thing for our business is doing hybrid learning and coaching on Zoom, smaller sessions, shorter, more focused sessions—it’s driven our profitability. It’s helped dramatically. Sometimes, innovation comes out of just necessity. We figured it out in record time. I’m sure a lot of other companies did, too. So I don’t think by any chance we found the cure. But for our own business, we did. And we did because we had to. And the technology was there. It wasn’t like it wasn’t there.

I mean, we were using some call-enablement tool, ClearSlide, which we still use, which had a component of being able to deliver a deck or proposal through a virtual way. And we still use portions of that software. But I would say, we could have. We just didn’t. That’s actually probably made us, as a business, more alert to technology options. That’s why we are so on this A.I. kick right now. We’re already in development ready to launch a tool that would take all of our IP, and you’d be able to talk to it, and it would coach you just based off of our content or philosophy. We’re already invested. It’s another company, but we’ve invested a bit, because we want to be in front of it as much as possible.

Loren Feldman:
So tell me about that. You’ve taken the things you’ve learned, the things you’ve been training salespeople, sales teams, on for years, and you’ve partnered with another company to create an A.I. solution that will somehow—

Lance Tyson:
It’s learned all of our IP. So essentially, it’s learned our foundational book, Selling Is an Away Game. It’s ingested all that. So this can be launched from a learning-experience platform. They could ask specific questions like, “How do you resolve an objection?” And it would actually come back with our methodology and coach it live.

What does that do to our trainers? I still don’t think it does anything to our trainers. I still think people are gonna want to engage with humans. I think the more A.I. gets out there, the more we’re going to kind of question a little bit. And I think it’s going to be a blended experience. But we’re way in front of that, where before… I don’t know. I don’t know that I would have had so much speed to put that investment toward it. I mean, we put some serious money behind it. And it’s something we’re probably gonna launch to other training companies through this other party. It hasn’t been fully launched, but it’s go-to-market in the next two months. It’s moving at the speed of light.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have a sense what your profit margins will be for the A.I. product versus a human product?

Lance Tyson:
I sense our net profit on that would probably be 60 percent. We’re pretty disciplined with our net profit, but it would be probably twice as much as what our normal stuff would be. And it’s repeatable, scalable, and sellable.

Loren Feldman:
Wow. Are your employees nervous?

Lance Tyson:
No, because at some level, they’re involved in acknowledging how it needs to be done. I mean, we’ve fully integrated the use of A.I. And I mean, think about it this way. I’m not here selling A.I.

Loren Feldman:
Oh, I understand.

Lance Tyson:
I’m literally telling everybody on here: Don’t be the last of the buggy-whip salespeople. I mean, I’m assuming when the calculator came out, everybody panicked who was an accountant. So I don’t think there’s a reason to panic at all. And I think if you’re watching the news—and depending on what news you watch, or all of them—they’re gonna cause some kind of panic. Let me put this in perspective. ChatGPT 3 has an IQ of 155. Einstein had an IQ of 160. ChatGPT 4 will probably be three to five times that, and it’s probably three months away.

So it’s not as easy as just plugging something in. You actually have to know what you’re talking about to ask it a good question, to get the answer you’re searching for. And then nine times out of 10, the business we’re in, you’re still going to have to deliver the information anyway. So it can give you guidelines. So that’s like having a person who writes copy for you. So what? I can have somebody help me with the copy on one of my books, but I still gotta go out and figure out how to sell it, get it to the market, blah, blah, blah, and talk about it. All right, fair enough.

Loren Feldman:
You also have to read that copy before you publish it.

Lance Tyson:
Exactly.

Loren Feldman:
How did you dive into this, Lance? What got you started down the A.I. road?

Lance Tyson:
First of all, I’m like anybody else. You’re watching things happen. I think what got me onto it so quickly is I have been fascinated—and there’s a book called… I will think of it before this is over. There’s a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and he wrote a book and he was dying. And he wrote this book—

Loren Feldman:
Was it The Last Lecture?

Lance Tyseon
Yes. I can remember that he was talking about gamification of learning. I’ve watched my kids for years play Call of Duty and all these things. And so I’ve always been fascinated with how we integrate that into learning, whether it be a sim or something like that. So once A.I. hit, I’m like, “Oh, this is perfect.” I don’t think it’s gonna revolutionize. I’m not a believer it’s going to put things out of business, people out of business.

I was at the front-end of the internet, like email. I started a business when we started to use email, and then websites and stuff like that, and it was gonna put learning out of business and training out of business for years. And it’s done nothing but grow it. So I can’t foresee that happening. But my fascination probably started with the gamification of things, because I think A.I. kind of enhances all that.

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