Real stories. Proven strategies. Better leadership.

Welcome to The Exceptional Sales Leader Podcast with Darren Mitchell. If you’re a sales leader looking to take your leadership to a whole new level, then this is the podcast for you. We’ll be exploring tips, techniques, and strategies to help you take your leadership to the exceptional level, and allow you to enjoy more money, more meaning, and better sales results.

Welcome back to The Exceptional Sales Leader Podcast, and welcome to a man coming in in the evening. In the evening, and this is being recorded, this is in the first week of July. It’s actually at his dinner, so he’s looking very splendid, and he’s beautiful pink.

Is that a, that’s a polo shirt, right?

It is, yes, it’s a polo shirt.

Coming in from Philadelphia, Mr. Keith Willis, welcome to The Exceptional Sales Leader Podcast.

Thank you, Darren, really excited to be here. I’m glad I was able to make it today. I know we had some challenges there coming from dinner, but after listening to a few episodes, just happy to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

“Yeah, thank you. And I do apologize because there was, I think we were talking just before you pressed record, you were talking about having a virtual assistant that has been relieved of their duties, making some decisions because I got a decline, they got an acceptance and then I got an email overnight. So yeah, I’m ready to go.

And so we made this happen really quickly. So greatly appreciate it. Hey, you’re the founder and president of Core Management Training.

You’ve got a lot of experience around leadership, farmer sales, but also interestingly, a military background as well. I’m really looking forward to this conversation because I could go anywhere, but I think just based on a little preamble before you press record, there’s some really cool points that people listening to this can really bring home to Roos and help them in their sales leadership journey. Now, before we jump into it, I’d love to always get a bit of a sense of my guess background in terms of what you’ve done and what’s led you to now do, what you do with Core Management Training.

Well, yeah, Darren, I started out as a ROTC cadet. I got four years of college and graduated with a regular army commission. The same day I graduated from college, I got my commission all on the same day.

Went to my officer basic course and landed in Germany. So I was in Germany for three years, did a variety of roles. Probably one of the most important roles is a young lieutenant as a platoon leader.

So I had two different platoon leader roles. I was in a ordnance unit. A lot of people don’t realize when we think of ordnance, we think of explosive bombs and all of those things.

At least in the States, that’s the smallest part of the ordnance core. So you have missile management, you have automotive management, and then you have explosive ordnance. Now, obviously this was before the Gulf War.

So that may have changed now, but when I was in, there was automotive maintenance. So we had responsibility for fixing vehicles. I was automotive platoon leader as well as at one point in time, what they call the E&E electronic and engineering platoon.

And then eventually, I became what they call the shop officer. So just think in terms of you’re going to get your car fixed, and you drop your car off to the shop. My team had responsibility for getting those vehicles fixed.

And then those vehicles weren’t fixed. There were issues, obviously, because units needed to have a certain percentage of the vehicles ready to roll, so that they could be mission capable. So I did that.

And then I came back stateside. Around that time, the first Gulf War, so I had responsibility for making sure, seeing all the vehicles painted that went off to the desert, and then eventually became what they call the S1. So think in terms of the S1 is the administrator officer or HR, for all practical purposes.

We had about 900 soldiers in our battalion. We had some of the last couple of units coming back from Southwest Asia and then we had a unit relocating from Germany. So I had a responsibility for whether it be pay, officer evaluations, NCO evaluations, anything to do with any type of HR type of issues, I had a responsibility for.

And then decided that I was going to get out. So I worked through a junior military recruiter and ended up in sales. And so it was interesting because like a lot of people, I had never thought I was going to be a salesperson.

But in fact, I had never even seen or even heard of a pharmaceutical rep. And I had a couple of interviews. And back in the day when you interviewed for a pharmaceutical job, you used to have the opportunity to spend the day in the field with the sales representative.

I didn’t have that opportunity. And my first day in the field was the first time I got a sense of, oh, this is what a rep does. I don’t know if I would have signed up for it then.

But I was fortunate. I had some good mentors and some folks that helped me out. So I would say that the guy that interviewed me did a good job of selling me because he equated being in pharmaceutical sales like being in the military.

So he talked about sales forces as in units, putting promotional messaging against certain products and those types of things. So I got that analogy and so that was how I ended up in pharmaceutical sales, moving from the military. So big jump, big change.

And I love to explore because you mentioned before, you never thought you’d be in sales and it’s interesting. The vast majority of people I speak to will be on this podcast or just generally in business. It’s almost none of them have actually woken up one day and said, yeah, I reckon I’ll be in sales.

I reckon that’s a good career to proceed with. Well, I kind of fell into that or in some people, people say, that’s the only role I could get.

And so fast forwarding to that, we’ll talk about what you’ve learned through your career in sales and now what you do now. But love to know, making that transition from the military where it was very structured and you’re looking after all of those people in terms of all the administration, the HR related stuff. Making that transition into private enterprise and into a sales role, where you’re now responsible.

What were some of the key lessons from, I guess, your leadership background within the military that helped you make that transition? Presupposing, of course, it was a relatively smooth transition. I’m sure there would have been some bumps in the road.

Looking back in that transition, what are some of the key lessons that helped you transition into a sales and then eventually into the leadership roles?

I think the big thing is that in the military, as an officer, you have a great deal of responsibility. I mean, when I got out of the military, I was, what, 28, maybe, after six years. So even at 21 or 22 years old, my first platoon had, I think, 70 soldiers, and then the automotive platoon had 40 soldiers, and then responsibility for running a shop with close to 200 soldiers, seven or eight direct reports.

So you go from being, I wouldn’t say king of the hill, but all of a sudden, you’re just responsible for yourself. And I do think the first rule of leadership is you have to lead yourself ultimately. And so I had learned a lot of those lessons in the military, because not only do you have responsibility for soldiers, you also have responsibility for yourself.

And things like, you’re doing PT two or three times a week, you pass the PT test, you have to carry yourself in a certain way. Being overseas in Germany, you stand out because you’re American relatively to being in Germany. And so a lot of eyes are on you, and you’re working with other allies, other units, you have customers.

I had customers, we called them customers, and when we fixed vehicles, those types of things. So you had customer units, and you treated them as such. You go from that to all of a sudden, you’re just you as a salesperson, you just have to get up and you have to figure out, how do I sell?

What is the selling thing that I need to learn how to do? You go from fixing vehicles or managing a deadline list to, how do I learn this product? How do I sell that?

And so there’s a level of study, and you have to swallow your pride, because in the pharmaceutical industry, the sales rep position is entry level. Now, for some people, they spend a career as sales representative, but even their CEOs, a lot of CEOs carried a bag as a sales representative back in the day. So, it is a great training ground, and ultimately, it comes down to learning how to manage yourself, manage your emotions.

As an officer, you’re standing in front of soldiers, and at times, things aren’t going great. You have to learn how to control your emotions and those types of things. And when I was younger, my emotional intelligence probably wasn’t that great.

And over years, as you get older and wiser and more mature, you get better at doing those things. But as a sales representative, when you’re going in to see physicians, you’re talking to nurses, you’re talking to staff every day, ultimately, it’s the relationships that you develop in these offices. And you have a rotation, so you may have anywhere from 100 to 120 doctors that you’re seeing from every four to six weeks.

So that relationship and your selling skills make the difference between getting your product written and not written. So, a lot of lessons there. And part of it’s, you know, swallowing your pride and knowing how to ask for help.

And thanks for sharing that. It’s interesting, as you’re talking, I was just reflecting on some of my own clients that I’ve worked with as a mentor and as a coach who have been in the pharmaceutical industry or the medical industry where it’s very specialized knowledge. And particularly when you’ve got clients who are doctors, physicians, cardiovascular surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, et cetera, the expectations they have on a person who is coming in to sell them a solution to a problem is really, really high.

You also mentioned the importance of mentors as well in your journey. From a person coming from a military background and, for want of a better term, being thrust into pharmaceutical sales, how was the, I guess, the onboarding process with you? You mentioned you had a cycle of physicians to talk to over a period of, say, six weeks or so.

How did you go about building credibility in the eyes of those physicians to the point where they would even start to contemplate the solutions that you were providing them? Because this is a really interesting point because you’ve got to establish credibility as a sales leader and you’ve got to establish credibility as a sales person or sales professional before the customers even contemplate thinking about your solution. Is there anything specific that you did?

I think ultimately you have to show up. I think that’s part of the piece. I spent my first couple of years, I was fortunate to work.

We kind of worked in a team perspective. You had your own territory, we crossed over products and there were a couple of people that were on my team that they won sales awards almost every year. In fact, one of my first district managers, he had been a rep for over 20 years when he became a district manager.

He was a new district manager and even now was probably one of the best district managers that I had. He intuitively knew what you needed to do. I remember you got a diamond, so he had this shamrock ring and he had four diamonds and a ruby and that was representative of all the awards that he had won.

I remember I used to always say, I want to get one of those awards and wear one of those rings. And he was a no-nonsense, pretty straightforward. I remember my car looking like a disaster and him telling me, the next time I ride with you, your car looks like that, there are going to be some consequences.

And he gave me the reason why. We’re professional, you don’t know who’s going to see your car, you’re representing the organization and those types of things. So I appreciated his straightforward demeanor.

So having those types of conversations with managers is really important. And when I was a rep, training was pretty rigorous. The company that I worked, there was, I can’t remember, but I think it was like a four-week training cycle.

And you spent a lot more time in training then than you did now. And you had to pass exams. And I think two years in, they have what they call a medical review exam.

And that exam was 200 questions. And if you didn’t, if you passed the exam, the good news was you got a 10% raise. They don’t give 10% raises anymore.

If you didn’t pass the exam, you probably should put your resume together and start looking for a job. But they had vetted that with physicians. And what the feedback was is that that exam was on the level of what a medical student would get.

And so you build up your product knowledge, and then when you go in, you can answer questions, you talk to the physician, you build relationships. I always think of the trust equation. So you mentioned the credibility piece, which is one part of that.

Do you do what you say you’re going to do? Do you show up? Then there’s the competency piece.

Then it’s the intimacy, which comes back to the relationship divided by your self-orientation. And interesting enough, the more self-orientation that you have, the less trust that you have in the office. So I often like to think in terms of when you think about building trust in any, whether it’s with customers, internally, even with family, to think about the trust equation.

So if you have all of those components, as you build trust, it gives you a lot more autonomy, it builds your credibility, it gives you the opportunity to be able to serve your customers.

It’s huge, and I often use the trust equation in my workshops for leaders, and I do a little trust game afterwards, and it’s interesting how competitive people get and how self-orientation comes to the surface. Even though they’re in tech, they intellectualize, yeah, it’s not about us, it’s all about serving the team until there’s a competition. I’ve got to win.

I’ve got to win. So you then made the leap after a few years into a district manager role and a sales leadership role. Love your experience on reflection, moving from being an individual contributor to a sales leader, and how easy or difficult was that for you?

The truth of the matter was I was not a great district manager by any stretch of the imagination. And it was interesting going from, because in the military, there’s an assumption. So there clearly is structural structure.

I remember my commander used to say, you have hours like a banker. I mean, as an officer, you do run your mission. There’s expectation of you saw problems, you don’t bring problems to me.

And so there’s far more autonomy as an officer than people realize. And I probably talked about this whole emotional immaturity. Younger, the stuff you just do, stupid stuff, I think back on.

You lose your temper, you yell at people and things like that. And you can kind of get away with that in military, even though on reflection, the better leaders were those that were calm, cool, and collected. The people that were respected the most were the leaders that didn’t need to raise their voice, that listen to problems, that help people do things.

And over time, as you get older, at least for me, I can’t speak for everybody, as I matured, I began to realize there are some things that I needed to do more effectively. But as a district manager, you know, the first couple of years were tough. And looking back at it, I would say that I should have waited longer.

I had been a sales representative at that point with two different companies. The first company I ended up leaving because of downsizing and those types of things. And when I went over to the next company, I won two district rep of the year.

I finished three out of 640 sales representatives. So I had street cred from the standpoint of being able to sell effectively. And we had a good development program as far as preparing people to be managers.

But you can train people all day long, but until you do the job, you know, I joke with people that don’t want to be a manager. And I say, you’ll learn. It’s one of the most developmental jobs that you get.

All of the lessons and things that you need to learn, you’ll learn as a district manager. If you have a gap, that’s going to be the thing that you have an opportunity to work on as a manager. So that was my experience.

And on the back end of it, I did better. So there were some reps I managed well. I had great relationships with.

And then there are reps that I struggled with. I would say they were middle performers. Middle performers in that they weren’t looking to get promoted.

They would tell you they wanted to get promoted, but they weren’t looking to get promoted because when I look back, when I look at them now, some of them are still in the industry, still in sales. And interesting enough, a lot of them put up great numbers. They would be way over goal.

It wasn’t a matter of that. It’s just they’re not raising their hand to volunteer. They’re not trying to do anything extra.

And they would be a pain in your backside. You might call them on a Friday afternoon and it’s like they’re there in office doing expense reports because they’re trying to get down to the shore. And I was one of those people.

My expectation is you should be out working. And I had to learn, look, if you’re putting up the numbers, you get a little bit more autonomy versus if you’re not. And it was all of those things learning how to work through.

And interesting enough, it wasn’t until I left and I went to another organization that had a very, very strong leadership development program. And it wasn’t that the company that I was at before didn’t. It was just the way that the guy that ran the program, he was a guru.

There was no debate whether you’re first or second line leader. You were coming to his training. And then there were two levels.

So as a second line leader, there would be coaching or they would listen to sessions where you coached your first line leader and there would be feedback on the coaching. And then there would be feedback for the first line leader who was coaching their representative. So up the chain, there was an opportunity to see.

And because I was in training and then as a part of the cadre and going through all the different rotations and training the classes, you begin to learn how to be more effective as a leader. And then running training teams internally, I became a much better leader. So I think it’s a combination of time.

There’s always a time element. There’s a maturity element. There are parts of us that maybe from a business perspective, you may be very strong, but you may not have the emotional maturity.

For some people, they’re emotionally mature very early. Maybe the business acumen is not that good. So we all have stuff to work on.

But I would say that that was my journey. And I was fortunate because I was in organizations where training, there was a lot of leadership training. And unfortunately, I would say that in the pharma industry, that’s not as consistent now as it has been in the past.

And part of it is because there are more downsizing, there are more cutbacks, there are more companies that are being bought. So all of those things, it becomes difficult to justify how do we sustain a leadership development program if the people that go through the program aren’t going to get promoted.

Yeah, true, true. So would you say that that’s one of the key challenges facing a lot of organizations now, particularly in the life sciences and pharma industry?

I definitely would say that that’s a challenge. How do you get the next group of people ready to get promoted? And I think it goes, I think this is probably every industry.

I don’t think it’s unique to pharma. You know, pharma, we joke and we say we’ve, the industry’s gotten old. It hasn’t, it hasn’t.

There’s a life cycle. You know, you know, when I started, I was in my late 20s. A lot of us were the same age.

A lot of people I know now are retiring. Some of them are CEO. Some of them have done extremely well in the career.

And, you know, it used to be you had to hire people that didn’t have a lot of sales experience. And now, because you have a lot more specialty drugs, more specialty products, there’s a tendency to hire representatives that have experience. So it’s harder for people to break in.

And the other part of that is that when you’re trying to figure out, how do I create a developmental pipeline? What’s that going to look like? I will often hear, well, we’re not expanding.

We’re not going to have new promotions. And so how do I train people? How do I get them ready to step into these roles?

So it’s not unheard of where you talk to leadership and people feel like people aren’t ready. And I even talk to second line leaders that have had training. And they’ll say, I don’t know that I’m as prepared as I need to be to how to coach my first line leader or how to coach their people, provide feedback.

So I think it’s a challenge in budgets, money, time. I don’t know if you remember back in the day when I was a rep, we used to get mail once a week. And you’d wait for the mail to come in and you’d go through the mail.

Now you get that much mail in 15 minutes on your computer. So the temple is so much faster now and the expectations are so much higher now than they were 20 years ago.

They are, which we kind of, as you were talking about the second level leaders and even the first line leaders there, my experience is a lot of leaders are thrust into a leadership position because they’ve been a great individual contributor. And that seems to be the catalyst or the trigger for them to be given the opportunity. And I know you talk a little bit about heroic leaders to servant leaders and I’m big on servant leadership in terms of what that, particularly in sales, which might sound a little bit counterintuitive.

What do you see in the industry right now in relation to organizations where there’s a lot of changes, there’s a lot of maybe downsizing, changing in terms of company structures, buyouts and stuff like that. Is there still a focus on the importance of leadership and getting the right people for the future of the business? Or is it more a case of we just got to get the number because we’re going to make sure that we are surviving firstly and then potentially thriving so that we can be bought out by a bigger company.

We used to joke, a friend of mine, that we were surprised our companies would run because it was more inertia, and things would get going and they would just run. I think it’s a combination of both. I think everybody acknowledges that there’s a need for leadership.

The question is, how do we get people ready for leadership? And then I think there’s a split because you have companies that have been around for a while, but what happens is that product goes generic, something happens, they get rid of the entire commercial team. And some companies take a different approach.

They move that talent around to other business units. You have to learn the product, but ultimately business is business. You can figure that out.

And then I think that there’s just not enough or there are sections of time. Last year, I went to a conference and I can’t remember the numbers. And it wasn’t just pharma, but a lot of organizations, there was a ratio where they had cut the leadership development trainers to leaders significantly.

And it’ll be interesting because the conference is coming up in a couple of weeks to see where they are. But companies that had established the leadership development programs and they were presenting what they had done with cohorts and everything where most of the team had disappeared. So now you have one or two trainers responsible.

And so that speaks volumes oftentimes about where a company, what a company really thinks about leadership. So even though they say the right thing, they don’t necessarily believe the right thing. Or I’ll have conversations with organizations and everybody’s doing the same thing.

The Grow Model. Okay, so the Grow Model is not that it’s not effective, but everybody’s doing it. Situational leadership, SBI.

I mean, there’s all this stuff. And then you ask the question, okay, so what problem are you trying to solve? So they’ll do a whole overhaul of leadership development, but they don’t answer the question of, well, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve?

What is it the program wasn’t giving us that we’re looking for today? And so there’s all of this stuff. And I at times think and feel like that people feel like the leadership development that they’re getting isn’t helping them with the day to day.

It’s not helping them with some of the challenges, issues, and problems that they’re having with their teams. How do I get even the A performer today can easily be a B performer tomorrow or even a C performer. When we talk about things like AI, different types of the new CRM platforms, different things that expectations that people have, it can change so quickly.

So how do you get people through that? How do you enable them? How do you upskill them?

And so I don’t know that anybody has a good answer. And I don’t know that a lot of organizations spend enough time figuring that out. And then I think, ultimately, how do you measure what you’re doing and that it’s having impact?

How do you really know that a sales leader that went through a curriculum and got developed is doing a good job? What does that look like?

Yeah, it’s difficult because a lot of my clients, they’re always talking about what’s the return on investment. And it’s almost like the answer to that is, well, how long is a piece of string? You can say, well, okay, we take you through a curriculum and we should see an uptake in customer retention, customer engagement, bottom line, top line revenue, profitability, et cetera, et cetera.

But often it’s the observable behaviors that’s the real return on investment. Because if you see a sales leader having a conversation or having a conversation with maybe a sales director, if they can be observed, that’s the real return on investment because you can see the behavioral change. What’s the challenge there is it’s really difficult to put a tangible number against that because it’s hard to look at a scoreboard from that.

Well, what does that actually mean? It’s difficult, right? But it’s and I think a lot of companies now are trying too hard to try to put some numbers against some things that perhaps it’s hard to put numbers against.

And that’s my challenge that I’m sort of grappling with with a lot of companies in Australia right now. So you mentioned something there also around the A’s, the B’s and the C’s performers. As you know, Australia, for most companies in Australia, we’ve just come off the end of the financial year.

So June 30 in Australia, for many companies, is the end of the financial year. So I know up until Monday this week, there were companies all over Australia just pounding the pavements trying to get as many sales in as possible and bringing things in from the first quarter of 2026 to this one. And now we’re in the new financial year and then we’re thinking, oh, now what?

What are we going to do now? I wanted to talk about the three tiers of performers, the low performers, top performers, but also this core middle performers, because I know you do a lot of work in this middle performance part. What’s your thoughts around the way that organizations and sales leaders in particular treat those three categories?

And what are some opportunities that perhaps they might be missing? By ignoring the middle performers?

Yeah, let’s start with what the opportunity is in the middle. When you look at the middle, they represent anywhere from 60 to 70 percent of the sales force.

Yeah.

When you look at the top 10 percent, how much more are you going to get out of them? Probably not much more. The bottom 10, 15 percent, managers trying to get rid of them.

You got a limited amount of time. In most organizations, particularly in pharma, everybody gets generally the same amount of time in the field. Yeah.

If a manager spends 100, 120 days in the field of representatives, and he or she has 10 representatives, that’s about 10 days. And when you think about field input teams, special assignments, you’re going to help with a sales meeting, your top performers are the ones that are usually tapped on the shoulder. And there’s some equity and there’s some learning that goes from being able to prepare for sales meeting.

You’re leading a discussion. You’re leading. You’re having an opportunity to get some exposure to marketing, sales leadership.

You have an opportunity to give your input into what’s going on. So you get development that way. If you’re on the bottom, you’re getting attention just because your sales stink and everybody’s trying to get rid of you as quickly as possible.

If you have an extra day, where’s the manager going to spend it? They might spend it with a top representative. They’re probably not going to spend it with a middle representative.

So the middle representative gets no feedback. No one’s cheering for them, and they’re just there. And so if you haven’t said, an interesting thing is in some cases, these middle performers may be pretty solid sales representatives.

They may be north of 100 percent. When we talk about goal attainment, a lot of it is around behaviors and some of the things, I mean, I think part of it is you got to agree as an organization. When we say B, what does that mean?

And if you’re in that category of Bs, you get treated as such. And there’s three degregations of that. There’s the top middle, the top part of the Bs, and then there’s the middle Bs, and then those Bs that are closer to Cs, and you’re wondering in the back of your mind, should I be starting to think about taking some action on them?

So when you think about it from that perspective, it’s your greatest opportunity. I was in a region where the regional manager ultimately was fired and brought in a new regional director, and we would do this thing. She called it Blue Skies, and the way she said, well, we had 80 territories, and it was the cutoff, it was a number of territories that would take the hit goal.

So in other words, if let’s say if it were 30 territories, that it was 30 territories, and then the rest of the region would make goals. So initially when I was a district manager, I used to think in terms of this was kind of the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule where my manager would look at, do we have a A, B, or C performer? And if we don’t have the right person, do we need to remove that person?

But the piece that I missed is that the entire management team would go down to a district, and the whole team would spend the entire day with a sales team. So every representative would ride with a sales manager or a regional training manager. And depending on how we were geographically dispersed, we would have a best practices dinner.

So it might be one dinner, it could be two or three dinners, and then we would get all of the different best practices and those type of things. So the piece that I missed was that it really was focused on the middle performer, because when you look at the entire region or if you look at a district, you probably had no more than three top performers. You had a core group of people that were in the middle and they got individual time.

So what happened at the end of the year when we do performance management, we spent not only time with my people, I had spent time with other people’s people and had some very, had an idea of from a rating perspective, is this number this number? We could talk about what do we need to do to move this person forward? So we were in a region that was, I think at the time we were seven out of seven and we ended up moving, we ended up being two out of seven.

Part of that was because of the focus on the middle performer with sales, their performance, I can’t tell you how many five-page business plans we would do on a regular basis and critically looking at each individual person, what their previous three years of performance was, what you needed or what you thought that you needed to do to move that person to the next level. Then my manager would dig into your field coaching reports to see if what you said was what you had written in a field coaching reports to see if there was alignment.

Yeah.

So when we talk about that level of focus, those are the things that more so did more to moving a region to two of seven than spending time with top performers. Everybody got some love. And so I think that that’s the opportunity.

Oftentimes, the difference in coaching is that with an A, you can say, do acts, do more programs, or do this close differently, or say this, and they get it. With B, you have to be more explicit during that conversation and that coaching to say exactly what you mean and describe what that means. I believe it’s, I think it’s McKinsey, there’s a McKinsey article and it talks about coaching, about coaching two best practices within an organization.

So that’s the piece that managers oftentimes will miss. Here are things that other teams or other folks are doing within a team that are moving and then coaching to that, but also coaching specifically to what that person needs. And my philosophy as a manager has always been, my role as a manager is help you be the best version of you possibly.

So you might be very, very different than I am. You might be, you know, let’s say you’re highly analytical. My goal is help you be more analytical.

If the other person on teams are high, my goal is to help you be more effective in that way. Now, are there some other things you still got to be able to do analytics and some other things? Do you have to mitigate some weaknesses?

Sure. But you have to help, you have to help people leverage those enhanced strengths instead of the, instead of trying to make them a mini me. As I always say, if I had a team of me’s, we’d be in big trouble.

Well, that’s another lesson as well, because so many sales leaders build teams very much similar to themselves, and they wonder why they’re not generating extraordinary results. So when you think about 60 to 70% of the sales force being in the mid-tier, my experience is often the sales leader doesn’t necessarily know how to unlock the potential of those. So you mentioned before, you might have some who are highly analytical, you might have some who are high-eyes.

For those in the disk, that’s the influencer on the disk profile. So very high-level, very entrepreneurial thinkers, pioneer type people. How do we unlock the potential of these people?

So if you think about it, it represents a large part of the sales opportunity and the revenue base. Because sometimes sales leaders might look at it and say, well, as you said before, a core performer might be actually on target, but if not above target, and they think, well, I’m not sure there’s much else I can help them with, right? How do we help to unlock this?

Because that is probably the difference could make all the difference in terms of how a whole territory achieves and sets them up for long-term sustainable success.

I think the first thing is it starts with the leader themselves. They have to think about how they’re approaching people. There’s a whole story around Pigmalion.

I don’t know if you heard the story about a teacher. They had all these numbers. They told the teacher that these were the people’s IQs.

At the end of the year, these students had all performed very well and somebody came and said, wow, how did these students have never performed this high? The teacher said, well, gave me all of these students with these high IQs and found out that the IQs were actually their locker numbers.

So, part of it is people respond to how you treat them. So, if you treat them in such a way that that’s really what they do. I was talking to a manager, we were having a conversation and they were trying to get this representative to increase the number of calls that they were making a day.

So, they made a comment and they said, the representative had a really good week last week. I asked the manager, I said, well, did you say anything to the representative about it? And they stopped and they looked at me like I was crazy.

And it’s like, yeah, you want them to do acts, you want them to see more physicians during the week, they had a good week, why don’t you reinforce that with positive reinforcement? A lot of times, some of the obvious things managers just don’t do. The other part of that is the conversation that the manager thinks they’re having, they don’t have.

They have challenges and issues with the representative. And then you ask the question, well, does the rep know? And the manager assumes that they know or during the coaching or if you role play a situation with a manager about one of the direct reports or somebody on their team and everybody’s listening, and then you ask everybody else on the team and you say, well, are you clear about what’s being coached?

And everybody shakes their head up and down and says, well, no. So one of the things is that in any conversation, that any coaching conversation that you’re having, A, you need to anchor that conversation. In other words, here’s what we’re going to talk about.

And then at some point, you’ve got to, you and that representative need to agree that it’s an issue. Because if you can’t agree to that it’s an issue, there’s no way you’re going to be able to solve it. What a lot of managers do is they jump to action and they try to get the representative to do something that they’re not even sure why we’re even having a conversation, let alone to what even the problem is.

At least if you can agree that it’s a problem and it needs to be fixed, and then you can begin to establish how to go about fixing that. And so one of the challenges just gets down to the whole coaching conversation. And I referenced the grow model earlier.

Managers have been trained to ask a lot of questions. Well, questions are important, just like they are in sales, they’re important in coaching. But if you’ve been around, you have a lot of experience, you have a point of view, you have an observation, and you’re working with a lot of representatives in the field, so you see things.

And so you give your point of view, you provide the data, you provide the information that says, here’s why I think that. And then they ask, hey, what do you think? And then you get their point of view, and then you can have a discussion.

At least you’re moving forward. And then understanding that coaching may not happen all in one session. It may take you a couple of sessions to get them to agree that this is a challenge, this is an issue, this is something that we need to solve.

But oftentimes, what happens is because the manager jumps to action. Let’s say, for example, they think the representative needs to close. They haven’t given them any data or any information or anything that leads the representatives to even know or understand.

And they may not even be clear, because it may sound like I need to ask more effective probing questions or whatever that is. And then the next time the next field ride comes along, nothing’s changed, nothing’s happened. There’s been no check-in, there’s been no accountability call.

So that happens on a regular basis. And oh, by the way, when the leaderboard comes, no one’s cheering for me because all my stuff’s in the middle. Yeah, I had more calls than I had last week.

No one reinforces that behavior. All the people that are getting a love are at the top. And then if I’m at the bottom, I’m probably getting a nasty phone call and says, hey, what’s going on?

I looked at your numbers and I really stink. Yeah, and so I’m left to my own devices. So I think of managers would think more positively.

And one other thing, Darren, because I saw this, we were doing this with another group of managers. It was a different, it wasn’t a sales team, but it was a similar type of situation where we were talking about, we had done case studies, and you would have thought we were talking about C performers.

Yeah.

Because the senior manager kind of made a statement of, well, we need to try to get rid of this person. And it was, well, with most of the physicians that they’re working with, they’re doing a good job. There’s a couple that they struggle with, but you’ve deemed that maybe you should get rid of them.

Now, ironically, this person ended up leaving the company. So I think about the time that takes you to train somebody up and all of those things, this is a solid citizen and this is a solid performer. So when I talk about Pigmalion, their managers, they look at their B performers like they’re Cs.

Yeah.

And then they wonder why they are not getting as much out of them because ultimately, it’s, you really don’t care about me. You just are concerned about me hitting that number. If I don’t hit that number, you can get rid of me as soon as I can.

And there’s a lack of trust there. And so those are all the things that go into that impact the middle performer and why middle performers oftentimes don’t thrive within organizations.

And there’s an important point you made just before, Keith, you’re saying that we’ve got to be really clear on the problem. And I just wanted to, I guess, clarify that a little bit because sometimes when people hear that, they think, oh, it presupposed there’s something wrong. Well, the problem is you might have a middle performer that is on or above target.

But we look at them and say probably they have more potential they can be giving, right? How do I extract that extra 5, 10% out of them to take them to potentially an A performer? So it’s not that they’re doing things wrong.

We’re just looking at them and saying they’ve got more than they could be doing, right? So that’s the problem part that we need to be looking at. And the other part with all that is we’ve got to, as leaders, spend more time with the middle performers because if that represents 60 to 70% of our sales team in terms of our performance, if we just make a quick 5 to 10% improvement, then that can have a huge impact on our end of year performance, not to mention the level of engagement that those mid performers have, because all of a sudden, we’re now measuring them on behaviors and checking in on those behaviors, not just looking at their results.

And so if we just look at the results, and it’s easy to do because at the end of the quarter it tells us where we sit on the scoreboard, right? We have to look beyond that and say, well, how can I help this person? Because if I see this person who’s a middle performer, a B performer as an A, and I start to treat them as an A, then funnily enough, at some point in the near, not too distant future, they’ll start to become an A, if they take on board the coaching and all that sort of stuff.

So I just wanted to clarify that because there might be people listening to this, oh, I’ve got to find a problem with people. No, no.

Yeah, some of it’s just being more of a cheerleader for your middle performers, and just acknowledging the work and effort that they’re putting in. It’s knowing that somebody cares. And I think part of it also is Darren is having real conversation.

I remember I had a representative that wasn’t closing. And I remember saying to him, I said, you’ve been doing this job for a long time. I know you know how to close.

Why don’t you close? And so he explains to me that he likes to know. It was a congruency issue because in his mind, he said, I like to know more about things.

I don’t like to be closed when I go somewhere and I’m going to. And so he said that I like to know more about what somebody is trying to sell me than they do. So I can come to another decision on my own.

So at the time, I think they were looking at getting married. And so I had a whole conversation about, I used an example when I bought my wife an anniversary ring. And I said, you know, we went to all of these stores and my wife wanted white gold.

And we looked at all of these rings and so all of the rings were pretty much the same.

Yeah.

And I said that the last salesperson, she says to me, she says, will you be taking that ring today? I stopped in my tracks. And I could not find one reason to say no, because my wife wanted that ring, the price point, it was more than I wanted to spend, but it was a good price point.

And then I, in the conversation we had is I said, what I needed from the salesperson was, I needed for them to sit with me. In other words, we weren’t sitting this way, we were sitting together and they were helping me make a decision that I wanted to make, but I needed somebody to push me over. So the conversation was around when you don’t sit next to the physician or the health care professional and help them make that decision, that they want to make that decision, then in essence, you’re actually failing them.

And so he got that. And so I could have done the standard, hey, I want you to work on your clothing or anything, but there clearly was something that went behind that. And so sometimes when we’re having conversations with people, you got to go beyond just following the model and just checking the box.

You’re not doing this, you’re not doing that, but really trying to understand what is it? Because I know you have the capability to do that. I’ve seen you do it.

You’re just not doing it. Kind of help me out here. Let’s have a conversation.

And it wasn’t something that it wasn’t negative. It was just what it was.

Yeah. And the only way you can do that is to actually spend time with them, to observe them.

You’re right.

This is the other thing. So when we’re talking about the coaching, the development, unlocking and unleashing the potential of our sales teams, the only way you can do that is to actually spend time with them in the field to see what they do, what they don’t do, to provide them feedback, provide them coaching, so they can improve, so they can get better. So they can take their performance from B to an A, A to an A+, C to a B, because the thing I want people to understand is, sales leaders are not there and not seeking to get rid of people.

What they want to do is they try to unleash the entire potential of the entire team, collectively and individually. The only way to do that is to build trusted relationships with the people where they know you’re there to serve them. You’re not there to criticize them.

But the only way to do that is to build that relationship, which is a trusted relationship, which is fine.

Amen.

So, with that, I’m conscious of time because it’s nearly 10 o’clock at night.

So, for people who want to learn more about you, Keith, and the work that you do, and maybe understand some of the programs you offer, where’s the best place for them to do that?

Go to my website, coremanagementtraining.com, and it’s all one word, Core Management Training. It’s two T’s, if you spell it out. Go to my website.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn under Keith Willis, and you’ll see my picture in Core Management Training and connect with me there. Those are the best two places to connect with me.

Brilliant. And if there was one lasting, leaving piece of counselor advice for sales leaders who perhaps, on listening to this, are reflecting on the fact that perhaps they haven’t been spending enough time with their mid-performers. What would be the piece of advice you would give to them?

Yeah, I would say that communication is key. You know, I realize that managers, sales managers, are just stretched. The amount of field time that they’re spending now is less than it’s ever been because of just the expectations, reports, and all the things that they have to do.

Pick up the phone sometimes. Having a five or ten minute conversation. You know, some sales leaders don’t do one-on-ones, at least in pharma, traditionally have, and everything’s revolved around the work session.

But just pick up the phone, talk to people, tell them you care about them. And you know, I know everybody’s not warm and fuzzy and all that other good stuff. But when you pick up the phone, it does show that you care just to check in.

And I know one of the lessons I learned as a manager is that sometimes when you pick up the phone and talk to the person that you least expect wants to talk to you, they have questions and it’s like, wow, I’m glad I spent my office day calling all my representatives just to check in. It’s just valuable. If you just did that, I think that there would be great returns for you and your team as well as your relationships.

Yeah. Love that. Love that.

And the thing is, it’s easy to do, but it’s also easy not to do when the sales leader thinks, I’ve got to get this report for myself. I’ve got to do my strategic forecast for the next quarter. Do your team a favor and plug into them and give the gift of your attention to them.

Keith, hey, thank you so much. It’s been a great conversation. I love the insights, and I think we’re both on the same page as it relates to sales leadership, irrespective of the industry, the core principles apply.

So I want to thank you for jumping on at such a late time in the evening in Philadelphia. So thanks for being a great guest on The Exceptional Sales Leader Podcast.

Thank you so much, Darren. Appreciate you having me on.

Awesome, mate.

Thank you for listening to The Exceptional Sales Leader Podcast. I trust the information in this episode has been helpful in your journey towards becoming exceptional. And remember, please take the time to rate the show, subscribe to the show so other people can find it, but also if I can help you, jump on my calendar, go to leadwithdarrin.com, and let’s have a conversation about how I can help you along your journey to being exceptional.