Episode 338 | The Profit Answer Man | Steve Heroux
You’ve fired the driver three times now. New salesperson, new energy, a good first quarter, and then the same slow fade back into the exact same problem you had before. You’ve started to wonder if it’s you. If you keep picking wrong. If there’s some skill you’re supposed to have for spotting talent that everyone else seems to have and you don’t.
It’s not that. It was never that.
The Problem
Steve Heroux, founder of The Sales Collective and creator of the System of Selling, was in a room recently with the entire leadership team of a construction company doing $500 million in revenue. Three hours in, he asked a simple question. Who runs sales? Silence. Who’s responsible for onboarding? Silence. Who’s responsible for coaching and development? Silence again. At the end of the session he thanked the CEO, and when the CEO asked why, Steve told him straight. Because you’ve just filled me with confidence, because you have no idea what you’re doing, and you’re at 500 million. That’s chaos.
The room laughed. They agreed. Steve’s point wasn’t that this company was uniquely bad at sales. It’s that this is what most companies look like underneath the revenue number, at five million or five hundred million. There’s no owner of the sales function. There’s no defined process. There are no entrance and exit criteria for moving a prospect from one stage to the next. Salespeople are handed a number, told to go hit it, and left to figure out the how on their own. That’s not a strategy. That’s hope wearing a quota.
The Wrong Path
Of course you went looking for a better salesperson. Every advisor, every hiring consultant, every sales book on the shelf told you the fix was finding the right person. That advice wasn’t wrong exactly. A good salesperson does matter. It was just incomplete, because it skipped the part where the environment that person walks into determines almost everything about whether they succeed.
Steve puts it in terms anyone who follows racing understands. In Formula One or NASCAR, all the money and all the time goes into building the car. Nobody’s running driver clinics over the weekend. You can put an average driver in a great car and give them a real shot at winning. Put a world class driver in a car that’s falling apart and it doesn’t matter how good they are, they’re not winning. Most companies do the opposite. They keep swapping drivers and never touch the car.
The One Number Your Sales Team Isn’t Tracking
Every business owner knows the scoreboard number. Runs scored. Deals closed. What almost nobody tracks is the thing that actually produces the scoreboard number.
Steve teaches what he calls the quality at-bat, or QAB. In baseball, a hitter can go 0 for 4 and still have had four genuinely good at-bats, working the pitcher into a full count, moving a runner over, drawing a walk instead of chasing a bad pitch. None of that shows up in the box score. The player who does all of it right and still goes hitless gets asked if he’s considered tennis. Meanwhile the guy who swings at the first pitch and gets lucky gets a high five.
That’s precisely what happens on sales teams. A rep can make a genuinely excellent prospecting call, prepared, on message, professional, and simply not get an appointment because the prospect wasn’t ready that day. A different rep can stumble through a terrible pitch and stumble into a sale because they happened to be talking to someone who already wanted exactly what they had. If you’re only grading the second rep as the good one, you’re training your entire team to chase lucky outcomes instead of repeating good process. You cannot control outcomes. You can only control the inputs, and the inputs are the only thing worth measuring.
The Comp Plan You Built 13 Years Ago Is Costing You Your Best People
Here’s the belief crack most owners have never confronted. Steve’s numbers show that almost 90 percent of top performing salespeople are driven intrinsically, by mastery, pride, and the satisfaction of doing the work well, not by the size of the commission check. Meanwhile roughly 80 percent of your bottom performers are driven mostly by money. If your comp plan is built entirely around dangling bigger dollar carrots, you’re not motivating your best people. You’re speaking a language they don’t care about, and you’re accidentally rewarding the exact behavior, sandbagging, overpromising, pressuring, that your worst performers already lean toward. The fix isn’t a bigger bonus structure. It’s knowing the math on your own margins well enough to design a plan, and letting the person choose the structure that fits how they’re actually wired.
You Can’t Train Will
The hardest thing Steve teaches isn’t a system, it’s a filter. You can train someone the mechanics of a good discovery call. You cannot train someone to want to get up at five in the morning and prepare for it. He calls it the will to sell, and it either exists in a person or it doesn’t. His analogy is a horse that doesn’t want to move. You can pull on it, you can get behind it and push, and all you’ll get is kicked or worse. The better move is looking for the horse that’s already thirsty. That’s a hiring discipline most owners have never built, because most owners are still reading resumes that, as Steve points out, were probably written by AI anyway.
Rocky’s Perspective
Here’s what I see when I sit down with an owner who’s convinced their sales problem is a people problem. The numbers usually tell a different story. Revenue is inconsistent not because the last three hires were bad, but because nobody ever built the system those hires were supposed to run inside of. You can’t manage cash flow off a sales process that changes depending on who’s making the call that week. Margins, timing of when money actually lands in the bank, what you promised the client versus what it costs you to deliver, all of that traces straight back to whether your sales motion is a repeatable process or a collection of individual improvisations. Fix the car. The driver was never really the problem.
The One Thing
This week, ask every salesperson on your team one question. What does a good discovery call look like? Not what they did on their last call. What good actually looks like, step by step. If they can’t answer it clearly, you don’t have a training problem. You have a definition problem, and until you define what good looks like, you have no way to coach toward it, measure it, or know if it’s even happening. Write the answer down. That’s the first page of the system you haven’t built yet.
You didn’t hire the wrong three people. You built the wrong car and kept changing drivers instead. That’s fixable, and it starts with one page, not one more resume.
About Steve Heroux
Steve Heroux is the founder of The Sales Collective, author of The Sales Contrarian, and the creator of the System of Selling, an operating system built for sales that helps companies replace inconsistent, hope-based selling with a structured, repeatable process that drives predictable revenue. His core belief is that most companies do not have a salesperson problem. They have a system problem. And until that system gets fixed, no amount of training, hiring, or motivation will move the needle. He’s also the founder of The Million Veteran Mission; a nonprofit committed to teaching one million veterans how to sell the right way as they transition into new careers, and all veterans get access to Steve’s content for free, for life.
Links
The System of Selling Website: https://www.thesystemofselling.com/
The System of Selling Overview: https://proposals.thesalescollective.com/The-System-of-Selling-Engagement-Overview-D9uGscqqTHCO
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveheroux1/
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Music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast
Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.