Most remodelers start as the sole salesperson for their companies. Stepping out of that role is arguably one of the hardest things you can do — but you have to if you’re going to grow your company. Hiring, training, and managing a sales team is a challenge.
Normandy Design Build Remodeling has a sales staff of 22, and all have design or architecture backgrounds. This is more important to the company than having pure sales experience.
In this episode, Andy Wells talks to Victoria and Mark about hiring and training superstars at Normandy, where he’s the president and owner. Normandy has been in business for 40 years and does additions, kitchens, and whole-house remodeling throughout the Chicagoland area. Andy has been with Normandy for 21 years.
Expanding and growing your company takes sales, and more sales, says Andy. His newer salespeople are selling $600,000 per year; some with more experience are doing $2 million, topping out at around $4 million sold by one salesperson. Andy talks about hiring and training the Normandy way, with information you can use to build your own sales staff, including:
- Why passion is the most important thing
- How to be a Sherpa for your clients
- The importance of being nimble
- Clicking with the customer
- Training in the culture
- The value of ride-alongs for sales
- Scaling the commissions and compensation
- Moving from salary to commission
- Meetings — what to cover and how often to hold them
- Why sales managers can’t do all their own selling
- And more…
So much more, in fact, that we ran out of time. Since we didn’t even get to the management part, we’ll be bringing Andy back soon!
Episode Transcript
Mark: Today on PowerTips Unscripted. We talked to Andy Wells, president and owner of Normandy Design Build Remodeling in Chicago, Illinois. Most Remodelers start out as a sole salesperson of their remodeling company. Stepping out of that role as arguably one of the most difficult tasks you will face. But it’s critical to growing a successful company. Today, Andy will share his insights on how to get people selling for your company and how to manage a sales team.
Mark: We’ll hear all about it in just a second.
Andy: Come up. When you buy a house like this so much, you get a free bowl of super. Oh, it looks good on you. You just.
Victoria: Hi, I’m Victoria Downing and welcome to PowerTips Unscripted where we talk about tips, tactics and techniques to help you build a strong, profitable remodeling company. And I’m here with my co-host, Mark Harari. Yes you are. So this is a great topic because, you know, you can watch these. You know, we work with so many remodelers, right? We’re able to watch their journey, their progress as they’re building these companies and making this move to hiring outside salesperson sales people, as you mentioned, is a challenge.
Mark: Horrifying.
Victoria: Yeah. But, you know, it’s so important. Yeah. You know, there’s only so much you as an individual owner slash salesperson can do. So if you want to grow your business, you pretty much got to hire salespeople, I think.
Mark: Absolutely. And if you want balanced life and as far as I’m concerned, I mean, because do you want to be spending Saturdays and Thursday nights and whenever the homeowner is able to meet up with you? Do you want to live that life for the entirety of your tenure at this company?
Victoria: You know, the cool thing about this particular interview is that Normandy has a pile of salespeople. So and he’s been building up this team for years. And so I think we’re going to get some fabulous insights from him. So it’s great to have him. So let’s hear from Dive in. So we’re delighted today to have with us Andy Wills.
Victoria: He’s the president and owner of Normandy Design Build Remodeling. And they have been in business for 40 years. They do additions, kitchens and whole house remodeling throughout the Chicagoland area. Andy’s been with the company Normandy for over 21 years. Welcome, Andy.
Andy: Hi, guys. Good to be here.
Victoria: Thank you so much, Andy. You know, you’ve been, such a great member of round tables for lots of years. So I’ve gotten to know a little bit about your business and visited your, your operation, and, you got a lot of exciting stuff going on there right now, don’t you?
Andy: We really do. We’re trying to expand and grow and do more. And all that takes sales growth. That’s why this fits well for me, too, because, you know, I love the sales team, and I love how, you know, they interact with the public and we’re just trying to do more of what we do. Well.
Victoria: And you do it very well. Lots of awards, lots of cool stuff. I love to follow your marketing efforts on some of the social media, because you’re very creative about it and always have something go on to keep those leads being generated.
Andy: So that’s right. You got to be the beast.
Victoria: Well, so talk to me a little bit about how you got in. This isn’t your background. And like, weren’t you a CPA or an accounting major or something?
Andy: Both. Guilty. Yes. So I went to school, got an accounting degree to pass the CPA exam, worked in public accounting, and, for about six years. So I had a really good business background. My father in law and a partner started in Normandy in March of 79. And I joined I, you know, got to be good friends with my father in law and he wanted, he talked me into coming and working for the business.
Andy: So that was 1997. And my first job in here was sales for three years.
Victoria: Oh, really? Okay.
Andy: Yeah. I, that’s where I started, because it’s pretty much the driver of the engine. In in our organization, that that role has definitely evolved in 20 years. I mean, the role of salesperson. So, you know, now, I haven’t sold anything. I don’t even remember the last project they sold. It’s got to be ten years or more.
Andy: Oh, really? I couldn’t, I can’t remember. I might have sold something with somebody in training, but I don’t really even do that anymore, so. Wow. So we definitely are well versed in sales people. We have 22 of them. So you know I, I let’s, I do want to say this, my passion really is to have the company be a place where passionate design people can sell and do what they’re good at and not have to worry about the rest of running a business, which is my job.
Andy: So I want to make it a spot where people can thrive. And you know, they have that as their passion is design and sales.
Victoria: Now, right now. Are you the sales manager or do you have a sales manager that works in that role?
Andy: We have two sales managers who just promoted another one. Beginning of this year. So we have to split the team kind of in half because with 22 salespeople, one person can’t really manage them all.
Victoria: Yeah, that’s a lot of people. Not enough. Even even two for 22 salespeople is a lot. Reporting to an individual it really. So let’s back up because you’re you’re like light years ahead of most of our listeners in terms of building the sales team. In fact, I don’t know anybody else who has 22 salespeople. So let’s think back when you were a salesperson, how many were there at that time?
Andy: I would guess around 8 or 9.
Victoria: So already had pretty well established.
Andy: Yeah. In 1981, we hired our first salesperson. Okay. That wasn’t a week because I wasn’t here, but. Right. They started pretty, pretty early in, building a sales team, I’d say in the second year of business, but not hiring people. Okay. So we’ve. Yeah, we’ve been in that in that mode for a long, long time.
Victoria: So tell us about, how you go about finding and hiring salespeople. And right after that, I want you to talk a little bit about the responsibilities of your salespeople, because it seems like every company does that differently as well.
Andy: That’s a good point. Yeah, I was actually going to start by describing the role of the salesperson here. Great. And then maybe it into how we hire, how we train and how we manage to. Perfect. Okay. So the sales role at Normandy, the salesperson is really the face of the company. They meet with the client, the first appointment and, subsequent appointments throughout the development of the project and then even beyond, when it gets into the field, they’re kind of a still a liaison and a Sherpa, as we like to say, for the customer to lead them on this journey.
Andy: I like that. Well, yeah, I mean, we’re there’s we’re kind of serving them. Right. And, that’s kind of how we train for it. So our salespeople meet with the client. They’ll take some pictures of measurements and then they will actually do the design work. Okay. So they will lay out. So most of our salespeople are design folks.
Andy: They will estimate it. So we have a cost book. We’ve been developing over all these years. And they they do their own estimating. So they’re selling what they’ve priced up. And then they also meet with the with the clients to do selections. So they got a, they got a lot of hats they wear. So it’s a very tough job to get really proficient at in a hurry.
Andy: It takes about three years for somebody to become great. And then but I don’t know how many to build their referral base and they become really great.
Victoria: Well so.
Andy: That’s that’s kind of the job.
Victoria: You know. Why did you choose to go that route versus I know a lot of companies. They will have their salespeople focusing on the selling. They might design an estimate, but they wouldn’t then hand off selections or sometimes and hand off estimating a selections or or all of it. Why did you choose to have them do so much?
Andy: I think it’s a couple of things. One is because we’ve always done it that way. Okay. You know, that’s a that’s the easy answer. The other thing is we have had so many different kinds of people selling. It just turns out the folks who tend to really excel and who really last a long time. We’ve got salespeople here over 20 years.
Andy: Nice. Those folks are people who love the design part of it. So there are, you know, kitchen designers here that you couldn’t take away the selections from. And that’s the fun part of their job. Okay. You know, and so because they love it so much, that passion flows through with the customer really, really, you know, gets to their their personal invested in this job and the design and all the little details that go into it.
Andy: And that’s what makes it fun for them. So taking that away would change the kind of person we’d be hiring. And what we found is just for us. I don’t know about anybody else, but when we hire sales people who aren’t designed folks and they don’t necessarily love maybe what we’re doing. And so it’s a sales job.
Andy: And they can tend to go out and get you know it’s a hard job. So you know maybe if you go sell something different that’s easier. And to them it’s the selling part right. So our trick is to get design people who love design to be able to sell their work. Yeah. And versus salespeople who sell design work.
Mark: That’s what I was just about to ask you, because it seems that you would put design as the number one requisite for for hiring the, the employee. And then do you find are you just finding people that are also good at sales, or do you have like a sales training program, or how does that work for you?
Andy: There are some people who are more naturally gifted at sales just because of their personality. But, we definitely we’re in training mode all the time.
Mark: Does it, do you, do you, is it like an in-house training or do you do something like a Sandler or something. Do you send them to sales.
Andy: No. We do it all in-house. Okay. Sandler’s got a lot of good stuff. We just feel like we know our system works. We’ve we’ve laid out our sales process. And we train on that constantly.
Victoria: You know, it seems like when people are going to hire that you’ve you’ve chosen a more difficult path because because there is that, that philosophy that people who are seriously creative with the design are not necessarily good salespeople and vice versa. So they so, so many remodeling companies will hire the salespeople who know how to sell. They don’t necessarily know how to design.
Victoria: Seems like what you’re doing is more difficult from the get.
Andy: I would agree with you, but what you said at the back end, if somebody survives here the first year with worse year, I mean it’s tough. Then you got somebody who’s really got this, you know, inside passion for what we’re doing. And they love it. And that just flows through to every all points of their interaction with the customer.
Andy: And the other thing is one of the things I feel like with having a separate sales and separate design person is that at some point in the customer’s eyes, won’t, you know, why is the salesperson even involved if it gets handed off to a design person? Because kind of like extra baggage in my. Well, okay. So I mean, they’re basically just a connector, which is fine.
Andy: And that’s again how a lot of people do it and that works. But you know, we we choose to put in the effort because I think and the real thing is the retention that that comes from people who really love doing this. Right.
Mark: So and it seems I mean, they design, they estimate, they do the selections, they sell the job, they all that stuff. That’s it’s it sounds like an incredibly time consuming responsibility per client. So and of course the leads that that do fall through. So is that kind of why there’s 22 salespeople? It seems like you almost. Yes. Yes.
Mark: I mean, how much how much is like an individual sales person? Kind of doing a responsible for as far as.
Andy: Work, you know, new or new people might have a goal of 600,000 for the year. And then that goes up from there. But I’d say our, our, our somewhat seasoned kitchen and bath people sell around a million and a half. And, you know, addition people can really get up in the 2 to 3 million in one guy usually does about three and a half to four.
Victoria: Nice.
Andy: So, yeah, that’s why we have so many salespeople and, you know, the number of leads, appointments that we give them. Fresh is about 65 to 70 a year per person.
Mark: Wow.
Andy: So they’re not running 300 leads to get $1 million in sales. So we really work on our closing average and you know getting the most from all of our leads that we can get.
Mark: And are they is it not. Not that they’re off on their own alone because I’m sure they have a lot of support. But do do they have or do some of them have assistance or direct reports to help them manage this?
Andy: We do have a department that helps them, make the the drawings that we use in the sales process. So they will actually create the design, chief architect or 2020, that’s what, 60% involved. And then the other department will make it beautiful. So the other department is really making sales drawings that look good. And they’re not really making the design itself that’s thought of by the salesperson.
Mark: The pretty makers.
Andy:
Victoria: So where do you find these phenomenal people?
Andy: Okay. So, we’re going to talk hire train training, man. And so just to give you a perspective, we have 22 salespeople. Eight of them are men and 14 of them are women. 13 of those people are in the kitchen department and eight are in the admission department. Okay. So that’s the mix of our people, and it kind of crosses over a little bit.
Andy: But, you know, we do have a lot of architects that sell additions because they went to school for that. We have a lot of kitchen people who are interior designers because they went to school for that. Okay. So when we’re hiring we look for people with a design background and that’s their passion. They went to school for it.
Andy: Generally they’ve had jobs in the field. They might have sold before. That’s a plus. If they have they need to have computer experience for sure. That you know it’s a plus if they’re working on the software that we use and they need to be nimble. So somebody, you know, that job is a quick, fast paced, urgent job.
Andy: And if somebody can’t get things turned around and changed around fast, they won’t survive. So that’s kind of the the kind of people we’re looking for. In many cases they might have had their own business. So we have one gal here just comes to mind. She had her own interior design business, and she didn’t. She love the design part of it, but it was she was getting overwhelmed with having to market herself in her own leads or social media, and finding trades and billing.
Andy: And it just, you know, doing everything as a one person shop is tough. So she, you know, she applied for jobs. We heard she’d been here for quite a while and so she had to be selling because it was her own business. Right. So she’s already experienced in bringing in clients. Another guy we just hired this year.
Andy: He’s an architect, licensed architect, had his own design build company for ten years and decided it’s too much work for him. And he came here, and I think he’s going to be a real, superstar as well. So a lot of them have already been in the business. We just promoted three people from inside of that design development department.
Andy: I was talking about, you know, that are helping the sales staff. So they were they were hired here like five years ago, and they worked in that department, and now they worked with salespeople for so much. We’ve promoted them as kitchen vendor. So those were kind of home grown nice. We we place ads on LinkedIn. We, we we look all over the place.
Andy: So, you know, just looking for help people.
Victoria: Well, somebody I mean, some of the things you mentioned, you know, they’ve they’ve studied design, they’ve possibly have sold, yada yada, all of those things are measurable. How do you measure nimble.
Andy: If they come in and say, I draw all my stuff by hand.
Victoria: Then that’s a sign they’re not nimble.
Andy: Yeah, it’s not gonna work. You know, if you’re in middle of a sale and you need to change four things to make it, to be able to get sold, you have to be able to walk upstairs and do that and get back down there and sell the job that let people walk away. Yeah. Okay. Turning things around quickly, just being just using the computer as we should today.
Andy: There’s some people who, you know, don’t know AutoCAD even, not going to work here too fast.
Victoria: Right okay. All right.
Andy: So you just that attitude of of urgency.
Victoria: So again to me so is that the way they speak the way they move, the way the quickness in which they get back to you when you’re giving them homework as they’re applying for the job, that sort of thing.
Andy: Yeah. It’s just in conversation, even in the interviews, if, if you can feel like, you know, we were talking to somebody and he just talked about how other people did all this work for him. And I’m like, well, you got to be the one doing the work here. We’re not, you know, we don’t do this so that we can just support you in the way that your old company was working.
Andy: And one of my litmus tests is, would my wife like to buy from this person? Okay. You know, it’s a good.
Victoria: Is your wife pretty nice?
Andy: Yeah. My wife collects friends. She loves everybody. And if she would, you know, if I think she would get a weird vibe from somebody. You know, I just kind of think. Yeah. It’s not going to work. Yeah. Okay. Do you have a normal.
Mark: I don’t know if I could get 22 salespeople with my wife from.
Victoria: To in like that.
Andy: We have a sales test, but it’s not a good predictor of success. No, like you we have is like, you have to answer every question the most competitively. And then it says you’ll be good in sales. A lot of the folks we have selling would not be the most aggressive, competitive person. But they’re fabulous at selling because they click with the customer so well.
Victoria: Right. All right. So you get this this group. And how many people do you think you interview for everyone you hire.
Andy: Oh. Phone interviews first and then those who pass that come in for an interview and talk to our sales managers, those that they want to recommend that we hire, they come to me. So I would say 4 or 5 probably per hire. Okay. Get an actual interview here.
Mark: So two sales just to step back a second, what’s what exactly is your role.
Andy: I don’t even know.
Victoria: It’s fantastic. When did you say that you were like the Culture King. You did that one fabulous presentation for us. Oh.
Andy: Yeah. I’m the culture cheerleader here now. I had my role is I manage the five managers we have. Yep. And do the high level, you know, visionary thinking. But I do run and I’ll get to it in our training session. I do run one of the sales, two of the sales meetings per month. So so let’s go let’s go into training.
Andy: So, somebody is hired. We have this onboarding. It’s two weeks of a couple hours every day to go over, you know, Normandy and our culture. When people are new, I talk to them about the history and the culture of the company, teach them how our contracts work. We have a sales process that’s a four page document that we go over and train on.
Andy: But clearly, I mean, in two weeks, you don’t know everything about the job. It’s just a it’s just getting introduced to stuff. Then we have them shadow other designers. So we call our salespeople designers for salespeople. You know, you become salespeople. And so they go out and just follow up and just hear the conversations and see how things work.
Andy: So that’s that’s been pretty good. So you hook them up with people you think would be a good example for them. Then we team. So with them, like our sales managers will go out with them and what we end up doing with that is they’ll probably the manager, but do most of the talking in the first several of these meetings and then come back shop here and then the new hire will do all the legwork, and then they’ll get reviewed on that, and we’ll make sure, you know, case design looks right and then review their estimate.
Andy: And then the sales manager would probably sell it at the next meeting. You know, whatever the salesman, the meeting happens to sell it. And then kind of pass off the customer for selections to the new person after maybe the first or second sale. Okay. And for that so compensation wise, we give them half the credit for the commission.
Andy: And then once they have run a few of those and maybe got a few customers in-house, we put them on some solo, easier job type leads and, you know, then they still have lots of review and advice from the sales managers on them. So it’s kind of a, you know, you kind of jump in a little bit, but we’re not going to throw a brand new person on a $500,000 big huge edition, right?
Victoria: Okay.
Andy: Now there we have those meetings. So if there’s let’s say there’s four Wednesdays in a month, two of those Wednesdays, a the whole group where I run that meeting still and I will, I will recap sales from the last time we met and go over anything in front of the whole group, anything that was kind of different on that sale.
Andy: So everybody can hear that, you know, how they overcame an objection or how they got the sale. So everybody can learn from other people’s trials and tribulations. Right? I will review issues. You know, if I don’t know if there’s something going on, you know, apron front things. We need this kind of cabinet. Don’t do that kind of cabinet.
Andy: Well. So we’ll just deal field problems that we have. And I you know, I’ll go over there with the sales team so that they know you’re here’s some things to avoid or other department issues. And then we’ll usually train on a selling topic. You know, we’ll go over trial closes or how to sell financing or dealing with a one leg or so.
Andy: We’ll go over that kind of stuff and you know, how to do a great agenda. So, you know, there’s a lot of times you go out and you meet with one person and we so we, you know, how do you react to that and what do you do now.
Victoria: So that’s well before you before you go into the management part. I mean you’ve started a little bit of that. Would you mind sharing as much as you feel comfortable with on the format, the how you compensate, especially during you said the first year takes them like a year and then a three years to be really good. I mean, how do you how do you get somebody up and running and then, you know, pay them?
Andy: So we pay a salary and we just keep track of what would it have been. Commission. And when if they get to a point where the amount they would have earned on commission exceeds what they’ve been paid on salary, we’ll just pay them the difference and say, hey, you can go and commission them and you’ll make more money.
Andy: Oh, the way to make more money here is to go on commission. Okay.
Victoria: All right. How long does it take till people feel comfortable doing that? Do you think?
Andy: Depends on the person. Some people come firing up the gate and they’re six months. They’re doing that, and some people might be a year and a half. Okay. All right. Cool. I don’t want somebody on salary forever, though. That means they’re not outpacing their salary with their earnings.
Victoria: Right.
Andy:
Victoria: Okay. All right. So then you’ve got the two sales manager. So one of the meetings is all the year two of the meetings you run every month. And the other two are split into two teams.
Andy: Yeah. Well actually each team has a meeting every two weeks. So those are about an hour. So they review what needs to be done to advance, you know, jobs. So they’ll go through their pipelines in front of everybody else that’s in the meeting just to maybe get advice. What would you guys do here or talk about your top prospect and, you know, brainstorm ideas?
Andy: I’m getting it. So, then again, it’s kind of in a group setting so other people can learn from the advice being given in the room. And so they just they also kind of go through the jobs that are sold that aren’t in the field yet, and any hang ups are obstacles to getting that done so that we can, you know, move forward, move jobs forward.
Andy: So they’re getting that, every two weeks.
Victoria: Okay. Okay.
Mark: Any back on the on the to follow up on Victoria’s question about salary commission. How about the sales managers. Are they paid on the performance of their teams as well.
Andy: Not formally. Okay. That’s, that’s a real that’s a real difficult one because, you know, I just hate to have things I can blow up incorrectly or or reinforce wrong behavior. So the two people that we have in that role are just really superstars, and they’re on salary in based on how the company does, they’ll get a bonus.
Victoria: Gotcha. And did those salespeople sell at all?
Mark: You mean managers?
Victoria: The sales managers?
Andy: They do. They do. Most of their selling is split sales with newer people.
Victoria: Okay.
Andy: So yeah, they’re out and they’re out in the field writing contracts. But usually it’s with other people. Even if it’s an old referral of theirs or past customer, they might split it with somebody. It’s bad when they go out to sell a job on their own, okay. Then they have an agent and run it and they don’t have time for that, right?
Victoria: Right. Was it difficult to take a superstar salesperson and turn them into a sales manager? Was that a little risky?
Andy: Yeah. The bad part of it is you lose that super right sales number. But the good part of it is if they can spread that around to more people, it’s but getting results through others. So, you know, hope that you’re kind of making some clones here. And those are best practice for so, you know, I definitely had to be people from within the organization.
Andy: We try to once with somebody outside of the organization. It was a disaster. These folks have been here a long time, and they know the process up and down inside. No.
Victoria: Okay. I’ve got one last question for you. Something that comes up a lot in conversations with other remodelers who are getting salespeople into place are thinking about it. Are you sure you mentioned something earlier? It takes about three years to be really, really good getting referrals. And so on. Is there a point at which your salespeople are expected to deliver their own leads without taking them from the company?
Andy: No. So, you know, that’s a big topic for everybody, but they have so much on their plate that they don’t do anything like that. All right. And there are some people who aren’t even or who aren’t in a position to get leads. We do have somebody here who joined a country club, and she’s gotten a tremendous amount of work from people in the country club, which only behooves her.
Andy: But, no, it’s not it’s not required. Okay? That’s why we have a big marketing department.
Victoria: Okay, great. Thank you.
Mark: Andy, I have one last question for you. Are you ready for the lightning round?
Andy: Oh, boy. I didn’t even get my management part in, but that’s okay.
Victoria: You know what? Can we save that for another one?
Mark: Another one of these? Yeah. Let’s do a part two on this one.
Victoria: Could we?
Andy: What? Sounds good to me. I got my notes here.
Victoria: All right. Could you hang on to them?
Andy: And now here’s the reminders. Advantage lightning round. It’s a dry.
Mark: Let’s put 60s on the clock. Here we go. What’s your favorite business book and why?
Andy: And, insight selling is the last one I read. It’s it’s subtitled surprising. Research on what sales winners do differently. It spells out exactly our sales efforts and a great book and, confirms what we’re doing.
Mark: If you weren’t the owner of Normandy Design Build, what do you think you’d be doing?
Andy: I think I would own a travel agents. I love to travel, and I like being a business owner.
Victoria: And you were just in Hawaii, weren’t you?
Mark: I was what are you not very good at?
Andy: I am not patient enough to play tournament poker. Is falling too fast?
Mark: Your room, your desk or your car? Which do you clean first?
Andy: Absolutely. In my car. I keep it clean all the time. My desk. I clean once a year and my wife cleans our room, so I don’t need do that. She’s.
Mark: Do you apply the five second rule to dropped food?
Andy: For sure.
Mark: Describe the color yellow to someone that’s blind.
Andy: Normally remodeling, I don’t know light or.
Victoria: That’s good. Hey. Well, thank you so much for doing this. And we’ll definitely do a part two on the look diving look more into the management. But this has been very, enlightening. So thank you for participating.
Andy: My pleasure. I can talk about it all day obviously.
Victoria: Oh good. Because we want you to talk more. Now before you go though, we want you to share your five words of wisdom with our listening audience.
Andy: All right. This is, this kind of even goes into our theme for 2019, which is, gratitude. But be grateful for God’s blessings. You know, I think too often we all think if I only had this or had that, if only I could do more, do less, or just married or divorced and, it’s pretty amazing what we got.
Victoria: Yes it is, it’s great. Yep. That was a wonderful way to end this up. Andy, thank you so much. We are going to, oh. Would it be okay if we encourage people to take a look at your website?
Andy: That’d be fantastic.
Victoria: All right. And that is Norm.
Andy: Normandy remodeling.com.
Victoria: Okay, great. And I’ll put that in the show notes.
Mark: You certainly can.
Victoria: All right. Appreciate it. And we’re so delighted that you’re part of our roundtables community. It’s, you really set some standards for a lot of people.
Andy: Glad to be part of it, too. You guys are awesome.
Victoria: Thanks anyway. Andy. All right. We’re gonna talk to you again soon.
Andy: Yeah.
Victoria: Bye bye. What a great experience that he was able to share with us in building up the sales team. And lot of meat in this one.
Mark: Unique. I mean, trying to roll all that into one position.
Victoria: But, boy, if you could find it and some people have it. Yeah, yeah. You know, but you can see that this must have been the point of view they took from the very beginning. They were going to have people just out selling and closing deals. They wanted them to build those relationships and again, find the, the, the design part that they were so passionate about.
Mark: The, the nimbleness, had a determined almost felt like it was a, more instinctual. Yes. Based on talking to them whether they were going to have it other than the obvious stuff like I do everything on pad and.
Victoria: Paper, right? But. Right. But that that’s why I had to ask him specifically about that. Because we love nimble too, right? Especially you and I here. But we love nimble.
Mark: And that is detrimental because, hey, let’s do this new thing.
Victoria: This girl.
Andy: Shiny thing.
Victoria: I’m not sure if that’s what he meant by nimble. No, no, but, you know, that one really intrigued me is how do you sussed that out of a person? By interviewing them or talking to them. So that was great. So very informative. I think people are going to love this one.
Mark: Yeah. And, you know, my wife isn’t as bad as I made it.
Victoria: So she seems like she likes most people.
Mark: Yeah, I think it’s fine. But, I like how if would my wife hire this person? Is an interesting test. Yeah. I wonder how many people out there could use that test.
Victoria: Yeah, really? I bet more.
Mark: Than.
Victoria: Yeah. All right, well, let’s, wrap this up. It’s another great episode in the can.
Mark: Yeah, we got to get Andy back to finish talking about management. Yes.
Victoria: I’m sorry we couldn’t take get that on now, but it’s better. Another episode. Another episode. That’s right.
Mark: All right, well, thanks for being here for this episode. I’m Mark Harari.
Victoria: And I’m Victoria Downing. Thank you. And see you next week.