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High Performing Sellers Move Fast, with Dan Fantasia

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There are currently 1.2 open jobs for every person in North America. If you think the top sales talent is sitting around waiting to hear from you, you are going to be disappointed.

Dan Fantasia has been in the field of sales recruiting since 1997 and founded Treeline in 2001. His exclusive focus on helping companies build world-class, elite sales teams has helped to change the lives of over 3,300 sales professionals. Dan has built a deep knowledge of what it takes to build and grow a top-producing business. As a proven sales leader and innovator, Dan has created a positively charged culture that promotes the good in every person, resulting in a team that has developed best-in-practice methodologies and technology that continues to revolutionize the industry.

This week Dan shares knowledge and insight into how to attract, and land the top performing sales people for your organization, and what to do with them once they are onboard.

What you’ll learn:

  • What you will need to build out a positive culture.
  • How to address those who are afraid of transparency.
  • What is a Start / Stop / Keep, and why you need to do it.
  • How a great culture will help you find and maintain great clients.
  • How great sales people find their next selling opportunity.
  • How to structure your organization to find - and keep - the best sales people.
  • What resources you will need as a sales leader to bring on top candidates.
  • Why "Hire Slow, Fire Fast" might not work in sales.
  • What to do with your top sales people once they come on board.

And, if you need help building a culture that will ensure you get - and keep - top performers, then it's time to Give us a call

Resources

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self - by Michael Easter

Key Person of Influence: The Five-Step Method to Become One of the Most Highly Valued and Highly Paid People in Your Industry - by Daniel Priestley

 

When you need to hire top sales professionals, turn to a recruiting partner that speaks sales. Alaant Workforce Solutions. Learn more and book a discovery call at www.fullfunnelfreedom.com/alaant

The perfect CRM system, streamlined business processes and happier customers – Eligeo CRM Inc can make it happen for your business. Go to www.fullfunnelfreedom.com/eligeo for more info

 

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099 High Performing Sellers Move Fast, with Dan Fantasia

2023, Hamish Knox
Full Funnel Freedom

Copyright 2023, Hamish Knox, Production assistance by Clawson Solutions Group. Find them on the web at csolgroup.com

Transcript


[0:00] They need to have a team in place that's going to recruit for them. Number one, they should make it a top priority. Most individuals say it's a top priority until they, take three days to respond to a top candidate. If it's not a priority, like meeting your quota, then don't expect to have great success.
This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects.
I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Funnel Freedom.
Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox.
Today, we will be getting ideas and insights from Dan Fantasia, the founder of Treeline, who has been advancing sales professionals' careers since 2001.
Let's hear from one of our affiliate partners.
The perfect CRM system, streamlined business processes, and happier customers.
Allegio CRM Inc can make it happen for your business. Go to www.fullfunnelfreedom.com slash Allegio for more details. That's www.fullfunnelfreedom.com slash E-L-I-G-E-O.

[1:22] So my guest today, Dan Fantasia, founded Treeline. His exclusive focus is on helping companies build world-class elite sales teams, and he has changed the lives of over 3,300 sales professionals. Dan has built a deep knowledge of what it takes to build and grow top-producing businesses. As a proven sales leader and innovator, Dan has created positively charged cultures at Treeline. Dan has been a contributor to Fox News. His firm has won numerous awards, including Best Best Places to Work, Inc Magazine, Fastest Growing Companies, Fast 50 in Boston, and so much more.
Dan, welcome to Full Funnel Freedom.
Yeah, Mitch, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
You're very welcome. So I've given the audience, you know, the 30,000 foot view of who you are and where you're at today.

[2:10] Take us down a level, tell us the story about Dan. What prompted you to start Treeline and all the good things that you've been doing since you launched that company?
That sounds good, that's fair. I graduated from UMass Amherst.
I actually studied environmental design with a concentration in architecture.
Had no idea what I wanted to do. I spent my senior year in Denmark.
And then the following year, I spent in a van with a good friend of mine traveling the United States.
We ended up in Wyoming, became a ski bum for Jacksonville Ski Corps, and it was just a wonderful experience.
When I got back, I had to figure out what my options were. So I was trying to leverage my architectural environmental design degree.
I started at a company working nights, just working the night shift until I moved up to the general manager.
And basically that required me to sell. That's where I really learned that I was pretty good at sales and should be in it.
After a few years, I realized it was time to advance my career.
I went to a search firm, a recruiting firm.

[3:10] And they sat me down and said, I was looking for a software sales opportunity at the time, but they sat me down and said, we know that you have a bunch of offers on the table our clients, but why not consider this company?" And I said, well, tell me more about it. I had no, idea what I was getting into. So I happened to join that company and I was horrible at it.
I just wasn't good at recruiting. I was naive and I had no leadership. But after about six months, my CEO sat me down and said, you've got to figure this out. And so the next year I began the number three producer the next year was the number one producer nationally.

[3:44] Grew a team, became the youngest managing partner. And while I had a tremendous amount of success and loved what I was doing, I think all of the travel and the experience I had really helped me with adversity and to understand people. But one thing that happened at this company I was at was that it became really cutthroat and the environment was changing.
So I decided to leave and that's when I started Treeline in March of 2001, six months before September 11th. At the time, branding Treeline as an executive search firm was not a wonderful idea.
I mean, no one knew what the heck we did, but fighting through it, getting it done, making it happen, the company continued to grow.
And the idea behind Treeline was something bigger than all of us and bigger than any one of the employees and a company that had an unbelievable culture, totally driven on success and positive attitude and support. And it became a contagiously positive environment.
And we just continued to grow. And until today, we've been in business for 22 years, exclusively working with companies to help them find top talented sales professionals.

[5:02] And also helping sales individuals advance their careers, both professionally as well as financially, finding opportunities they really can't find on their own, and helping them to, like I said, advance their careers. That's amazing. And I love to hear more about the culture.

[5:19] There's a podcast recently that we did on corporate culture, and you've obviously got a great one because you've won best places to work and things like that. So from your perspective, how did you go about or how did you go about building out that culture? And what lessons could we take from what you've done to.
Build out our own positive cultures in our sales teams? I think it all comes from the top. It's a belief system that we all have. It's about transparency.

[5:48] Open, honest dialogue, which I think many times people struggle with. As a matter of fact, I think we even have to train our teammates on open dialogue, what that means. Because that means that if you disagree with someone or something, you have to speak your mind. You're not getting and let go. We just want to hear opinions. We want to hear ideas. We want to hear creativity and no one should be bashful. And so the company knows exactly where we are all the time, every day, every week, every quarter. We're constantly communicating with the entire team so that everyone knows exactly where we are as an organization financially, where we are revenue, where they are from a revenue perspective. I mean, everything, it's so transparent, there's no place to hide. And as a result, because of that, everyone has a hand on an oar and everyone's rolling in the same direction. And everyone feels really good about what we've accomplished, what we're doing. And they feel really good about, you know, helping people advance their careers. It's really, really great. That's amazing. But it also, it can sound scary.
You know, I imagine a few people who are listening right now, like, oh, wow. Like, I mean, you let everybody know all of that stuff. So when you bring someone onto the team, like you shared earlier, you almost got to train your team members on this, on being transparent.

[7:06] What have you experienced in terms of bringing someone on who kind of got scared by that level of transparency in your organization?
Oh, I think everyone's scared. Fair. Fair. You know, like when everyone gets started, the transparency is I think it's uncomfortable for most people because they're just not used to it.
They're just not used to open dialogue like they're, they think they've come from an environment where everyone is open.

[7:34] But it is not, it's not the case. I mean, when I say open dialogue, I mean, if it's on your mind, let's talk about it.
We do something that helps with this on a quarterly basis.
We do something called a, we call it a start, stop, keep. You may have heard of this before.
Basically what does the company need to start doing?
What does the company need to stop doing? What does the company need to keep doing?
We do it anonymously, but we bring that up at the end of our quarter and we talk through those start stop keeps because it's helpful for, to get new ideas, to understand it's anonymous, so we're just trying to figure out what are your thoughts, what are you thinking?
What ideas are out there? And some ideas are horrible.
So you have to feel comfortable realizing that the ideas aren't great, but no one feels silly about throwing on an idea, right? It's perfect.
It's all about creativity and the business world is moving so fast.
If your team is not contributing with new ideas and trying new things, then you just can't move the company forward. If you can't move the company forward, then you're basically dying.

[8:36] So you need that input. You don't know it all.
You need the team on board with you, at least in my opinion.
Very fair. If the entrepreneur or the owner is the smartest person in the room, that company's probably got a ceiling in terms of growth.
So you've got this great core culture at Treeline and you're working with these organizations to find the right professional sellers.
So how does that culture translate to when you're going out to market and you're prospecting, qualifying, keeping clients long-term? Help us understand that a bit more.

[9:12] So one of our core values is doing the right thing. Do what's right.
Right? And so for 22 years, while we've seen a tremendous amount of growth, we are a niche player.
Focus only on hiring or helping our clients hire talented sales professionals. So there's one thing we can't do. We can't burn our brand. I mean, it is super important. So that means that when we're calling on our candidates or job seekers for new opportunities, we really become trusted advisors.
We want to understand what they've done in their career. We want to understand what their strengths are. We want to understand what they're looking for from a compensation standpoint, from an industry standpoint, so on and so forth. And then when we highly recommend a new opportunity to them, we have to make sure it's a great opportunity. If it's not the right fit for them, just tell us, because that open dialogue goes both ways, right? It's not just in the company, it's around the company, it is with our candidates, with our clients. So if we don't think it's a good fit and we're worried, then we'll tell you. Because the last thing we want to do is help somebody find an opportunity or help a company hire an individual that's not a good fit, because after three months or six months, if it doesn't work out.

[10:21] Guess what? Now the candidate's mad, the client's pissed, you feel horrible. And so what we don't want is we don't want that pit. If you ever helped someone find an opportunity that didn't work out, you get this really empty pit in your stomach. And it's a horrible feeling, because now you've disrupted their career, they're looking again, it's just an absolute mess. And so for us, it's more important to help our clients find the right fit, both candidate and client, so they can sustain a career and success. And when they sustain a career and they're successful in the organization and the company is successful with this person, they keep coming to us, they refer us. And so while that is a slow way to grow business, it is a wonderful way to grow brand, to build your brand, right? To have that brand equity, because now you have the candidates that have great experience. If you look at our reviews, we've got a million five-star reviews. So you have the candidates love you, the clients love you, you do the right thing. And as a result, we have very little fallout, very little turnover.
Like I think we had two people last year of the hundreds of people we helped find opportunities to fell out. And that's because something changed at the company.

[11:31] Sure. Either the manager changed or the company got acquired or something changed.
Wow. So then when you are looking for opportunities, right? So what makes a great fit if you're, say, putting, we'll do both sides. You want to find a candidate, a great fit. What have you seen over your career that makes a great fit landing spot for a professional salesperson?

[11:57] Time. Meaning when people come to us because something changes and they're in a rush, Now, they're desperate.
Now it's emotional. Now, they're just taking something to take it.
They want a job. They want to make it fit no matter what. If they have concerns as they're going through the interview process, they kind of ignore them or brush them off because they want a new job.
If you're happy where you are, and maybe you're just a little bit uncertain, or you're a top producer and you're crushing it, you are crazy not to be talking to someone at our company.
Because when you talk to a recruiter, it doesn't mean that you're actively looking for a new job. It doesn't mean you have to leave today, but you want someone, you want to talk to someone about your strengths and what you're looking for financially, what base salary you want, or what base salary range you want, what on target earnings you want, where you want to be, what kind of software company or hardware, whatever it is, whatever you want to be part of, right, whatever industry.

[12:51] Deliver that message to a partner, a recruiter, what have you, and then have them look for you.
As jobs come up, we will let you know when something that meets your criteria comes up.
If you have nobody looking for you, you'll never hear about those jobs. So guess what happens?
You have no runway when something does change at your company. Now you're forced to look and now you're in a rush. But if you get to us early enough and say, you know what, Dan, let me consider opportunities that meet these criteria. If you can meet these criteria and I can help you find a job that's a better technology, more compensation or a higher income level, don't you want to hear about it? You don't have to say yes to it. You don't have to take an interview. You don't have to accept an offer, but don't you want to hear about those companies that are looking? So my advice would be give yourself plenty of runway, establish the relationship early on so that you're you're not stuck.
I love that. And I appreciate it could be hard. Like I have a loyalty script, right?
I grew up in a rural area on a farm. So I've got that loyalty script and it could be really hard.
But like you just said, you're asking to see a menu.
You're not ordering.

[13:57] That's exactly right. I love that. I love that. So doing that as a high performer, you do end up in that right fit. Cause you're right.
Anytime we move too quickly, it's like a rebound relationship.
And I get sometimes rebound relationships work out. Please don't message me and say, I got into a rebound relationship and everything was wonderful and we've been together for decades.
Fine, I get it, you're a unicorn. But if we have that opportunity to really sit back and consider we make better choices.
So now let's flip the script. So now I'm a sales leader.
I'm coming to you and your team going, hey Dan, I wanna be on the lookout for really awesome sellers to add to my team.
What would you be coaching me to do to make sure that I'm supporting you and your team find the best people for me. Love it. All right.
So the first thing I'd want to do is just consult with you and understand the culture, the environment, what your top performers look like.
The second thing I'd want to understand is the hard and soft skills.
What are the soft skills of those top performers and what are the hard skills of those top performers?
Meaning those top performers in your sales environment, what's your average deal size, what's your quota, what is your sales cycle? Are they transactional? Are they strategic?
You know, there's a million things that I want to talk to, because what I want to understand is, if you have a transactional sales environment.
Then we need to be finding transactional salespeople. If your average deal size is $30,000.

[15:21] And your average sales cycle is three to six months or one to three months, great.

[15:26] And your quota is $650,000, great. We'll find you a person that meets that criteria. What we don't want to do is have that type of environment and then introduce you to a enterprise sales representative that sounds spectacular. They sit down with you, they do this awesome presentation.
You decide that you're going to hire them and you've misjudged their selling characteristics and how they misalign with your selling environment. So now you have a transactional sales environment, but an enterprise salesperson, you love them, you hire them, they quit after three months or six months because they're not built for a transactional environment. They can't keep up with the metrics that you require for them to be successful.
So now you're frustrated, they're frustrated, and it doesn't work out. We sit down and we want to consult with the company to understand all of those hard skills and the soft skills to make sure that when we go to market, we're looking for the right individuals for your company. We'll talk about competitors or industries that really work well in your field.
We'll go after those markets, we'll hunt these people down, we'll fully interview them and qualify them to make sure that they meet those hard skills and the soft skills, and then we'll introduce them to you. The challenge for most companies, they don't typically understand this.
So then they go to market, they just look for like a salesperson. And if they do understand it, which is awesome. Those are the best companies to work for. If they do understand them, then their challenge usually is they can't build like a people funnel. They don't know how to recruit.

[16:53] They've never built it as a leadership skill for the VP of the CRO for the enterprise. And so they end up getting only a few candidates and they end up hiring the best of the worst.

[17:05] And that's where the challenges tend to happen. So it's understanding those hard and soft skills.
And then it's having the resources required to bring top talent to your organization.
If you don't do that, you end up hiring crappy candidates and the rest is history. Yeah. Fair enough.
Double-click on resources for a second. When you talk about resources to bring on those high level A players, what specifically should a sales leader be planning to do from your experience?
They need to have a team in place that's going to recruit for them.
Number one, they should make it a top priority.
Most individuals say it's a top priority until they take three days to respond to a top candidate, right?
If it's not a priority, like meeting your quota, then don't expect to have great success.

[17:56] So you need to make sure it's a top priority. And in order to be a top priority, you need to have the resources to recruit for you.
Now, the downside is if you have internal HR team recruiting, they typically have a lot of different roles that they're trying to fill.

[18:10] Yeah. What they don't realize is how important sales is. If you have an open territory, a $1.2 million territory, that means it generates $100,000 a month. And if that territory is empty for three months, you're down 300 grand. Talent acquisition doesn't always necessarily understand that, right? And so because they don't understand that it's maybe not their top priority and you've got to push to make sure it's their top priority because sales recruiting is tough. It is different than any other recruiting. And if they're not good at it, if they're not comfortable calling on a top producer and confident enough to convince them to spend time speaking with them, and that there was an opportunity that could change their lives, they will not get those candidates. Instead, they'll post a job, they'll get whoever applies, and they'll pass those people along to the sales manager. So you need to, if it's not a number one priority for you, it's not a number one priority for them or for the enterprise, and you just won't get the talent that you need. The second thing I would do is learn how to sell. It's going to sound insulting, but nine times out of 10, when we sit down and do an intake call with our clients, we say, why should we work? Why should a person work here? They talk about the technology of the product or what have you, but what we really want to know is the intangibles. Why are you there? What is so dynamic about the company? What makes it so exciting? Like learn how to sell transparently between two humans, why it's such a great place to be. That's how you win people over.

[19:38] Godly Number three, I'd say, assume that no one wants the opportunity, leave your ego at the door, don't have them like pushing, don't push so hard on reps that you got 10 interviews and they're jumping through hoops because really the top players aren't going to wait around for that.

[19:53] They're going to move on to find better opportunities or you're going to turn them off.
And so just make sure that while you have a rigid sales or rigid interview process, you're not turning off the best players.
And if you are, find out where you're going wrong, where things are going wrong. And then I'd say, you know what? Make sure that you move quickly, move fast. Right?
You know what I mean? If you can't hire in two weeks, you're doing something wrong.
If you find a really good candidate, you should be able to move that person along easily within two weeks. If you can't do it that fast, then it's not a priority for the entire organization and slowness would just turn people off. So those are the things that I would suggest as a company. The last thing you talked about, if you can't hire within two weeks, walk us through that. Because there's the cliche of hire slow, fire fast, right? And I get hiring top performers, they're not going to wait around. So when you talk about hiring, like hiring in within that two weeks, there's more to it than just like, oh, we've got a good candidate, make him an offer. What goes into that sort of a quick turnaround on bringing a good seller on board?
Right. If you were to say to a company, what are your challenges and weaknesses? Well, we keep losing candidates in the process. We need to move the process a little bit fast. Okay.
Have you done that? No, we haven't. Why not? Why can't you fit? If you have two weeks is 14 days.

[21:14] I'm not saying move the, you know, change the process or remove stages of it. I'm saying.

[21:20] Move it quickly. Why take a month? What's the purpose? Like why take a month? If you know someone has to do five stages, why take a month? Everyone that's involved in an interview process should be prepared and meaning everyone in the interview process should carve out one hour a day or one hour every day that is reserved for interviewing talented individuals. And as you go through the process, maybe after you do the first interview, if you like someone, you should set expectations with your team that I'm going to book a person in your calendar in the next week during this interview time that I think is really good. And by the way, if I'm going to book it in the second person's interview schedule, then the third person's interview schedule, the fourth person. And if by the way, they don't make it at any point through the process with one of these individuals, I'll delete them out of your schedule. But for now, I want this booked and ready to go because I've got a territory that is down and not producing revenue, and I need to make sure this is a priority for everyone in the organization. Absolutely. Yeah. And my experience, personally or professionally, people make time for things that are important to them.
Yeah, when people say, oh, I don't have time for that's code for it's not important to me.
It works with your kids just as well as it does with your team members.
So then if we have all of these resources laid out, right, so we've got this process, we can accelerate it because we know that we need to accelerate to get these high performers.

[22:44] So great, they've been hired. I've been in this position. It's hire and forget.
Hey, Dan, welcome aboard. Go sell stuff. Talk to you later when you're not performing.
What advice do you give to your clients in terms of actually taking that high performer from, hi, welcome aboard the company to, hey, you're our top performer at this company in this short window of time? It's amazing how often you sit down and talk to a company and you say, yeah, I just need to hire salespeople. And when I hire a salesperson, they're going to crush.

[23:15] It. That's not how it works. You could be the number one rep from a competitor and you come into a new environment with a new organization, you need onboarding, you need training, you need a functional accountability. I think as a team gets going, you need, obviously, excellent onboarding and training. However, you want to do that is up to you. Then you need functional accountability.
And something that is very helpful to get someone started if this is new for you. As you interview, as the person's finishing the interview process, do a 30, 60, 90 day plan. Have the interviewer, interviewee do a 30, 60, 90 day plan and not, you can judge the plan of course, but to understand what they want to do in their first 30, 60, 90 days so that when they start, you can edit and tweak this based on what you believe the requirement is over that 30, 60, 90, but you all have a playbook to get started with. And now you have accountability because the person that has been interviewing just told you what needs to be accomplished in the first 30 days. And if you don't agree with it, you need to tweak it or you need to explain what you do as a organization.
Same in the first 60, same in the first 90. And then that same functional accountability should hold true for the next 12 months. But part of this job is understanding how to ramp up and train the individuals on product and on sales, but also how to hold them accountable to the the activity metrics that are required to be successful in this environment.

[24:44] Absolutely. And it goes to the fact that if you're co-building, right, this kind of sounds like transparency, like what you talked about earlier, Dan, right? Let's be transparent with each other before I've come on board your team. Because as soon as I'm on board the team, now we've got legal involved and now we've got severance potentially and all that kind of mucky stuff that we want to avoid. So yeah, let's build this early so that if there are any yellow or red flags, we can either turn them green or you can possibly disqualify me. Fair?
Right. Exactly. When you're interviewing people, there's no need to oversell somebody. Be realistic. Again, transparent with them. A lot of times when we interview, we'll say, it's not an interview. We just want to try to find the right opportunity. You don't have to sell me. I'm not going to sell you. Let's just talk about if this is a good fit or not, especially when we're hiring for ourselves. You don't have to sell me. I'm going to tell you what's good and bad about this opportunity. And by doing that, we can help sustain the career of individuals that that joined the company because they know coming in what's good and bad.

[25:43] They understand it, right? I don't want to oversell you. Don't oversell me.
If you're not capable of the job, don't put yourself in that type of situation.
It's not worth it. Let's just find a good match.
Yeah, absolutely. So, as we're getting towards the end of our visit today, Dan, I've got a few questions for you, but I am curious, aside from what you've already mentioned around organizations maybe don't have, they think that people could just sell for them or other red flags.
What are some of the other yellow and red flags that you see from sales leaders who are coming to you going, I need help hiring? And as you go through this interview consulting process, you're like, oh, this is a giant house fire. We got to put these house fires out. What do you look for that makes you say, run for the hills, I don't want this business?

[26:30] When we're talking to a company. When you're talking to a company.
Yeah, yeah. So when we are consulting with an organization, any firm and most companies, most CROs or VPs, they know, they believe they know exactly what they want. And it's fine.
Will go to market.
And track every person we reach out to. We will understand what our outreach looks like. We'll talk to you about what candidates are interested and what candidates are not interested.

[26:59] For companies that can't pivot, so two things. Number one, if it's not urgent, it's not important to them, we'll fire them because we're not going to waste all this time if you don't have the urgency. Bring your great candidate and we'll lose them in three days if you're not ready to at least talk to them. So you got to be serious. And then you have to be flexible because your understanding of the market is probably inaccurate. It's only accurate if you have the data to support your conclusions. So when we go to market, we will bring you the data. We're talking to candidates. The candidates that you want to hire may be making significantly more money than you're offering, or they all have non-competes because they're working for a competitor, right? So we need to figure that out. We can't just go after your competitors if every one of them have a non-compete. So if you have no flexibility to understand the data that we're sharing with you and you're not willing to pivot, we can't help you because there's no silver bullet, there's nothing that we can do that's going to change this. Now, if you're understanding, you look at all the data and you look at all the information we give you because the Treeline resume, the same thing is very transparent. It talks about your average deal size, your sales cycle, your compensation structure. We give you all this information for every single candidate that you interview.
As a result, it's transparent, we don't waste a lot of time.
That means that when you're talking to.

[28:18] And interviewing these candidates, you can understand what their background is, what they've done, what they've accomplished, and if they are potentially a good fit for your organization.
Got it. So we say in martial arts, what doesn't bend, breaks. So very similar in your world, if you're like, listen, I need this. Awesome. Go find that somewhere else. Is that fair to say?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you have no flexibility to pivot and change, the market is going to define what you can and can't hire. If the person costs too much money based on the level of experience you want, then reduce the level of experience or increase your compensation.
But you have to change if there's, if you're very rigid and you have no flexibility around, you know, the data that we're giving to you, you're not going to get a hire because there's, there's not much more we can do. It's, it's what the market's telling us. And so if you can't pivot around that, I don't know how you're going to get your hires.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Dan, I'm curious if you could go back and coach younger Dan, right? So go back as far as you like. It could be like three months ago. It doesn't matter, but you go back and go, hey, younger Dan, you're going to be in this awesome place, you could run in this great company, you also have a lot of scar tissue and a bunch of bumps and bruises.
What would you coach younger Dan to say or do differently that would get you to the same place but with a little less scar tissue and fewer bumps and bruises?
Dan I think you need the bumps and bruises. Marshall Yeah.

[29:40] Dan Whatever advice I would give myself, I would say the bumps and bruises have helped us get here. You know, it's, I would say I would say keep a positive attitude, move forward.

[29:57] Don't give up.
Adversity is part of life and business and you're gonna have to expect to tough it out and work harder if you have to.
I love it. Great, great advice. And yeah, those bumps and bruises are also learning opportunities.
Yeah. But sometimes we'd appreciate a few or less lessons, so to speak.
I don't know, I think you need, you just need them.
That's kind of what develops you. So I think a positive attitude.
But you have to have the right mindset, right? This too shall pass, right?
You know, nothing is permanent. So when you look at your own development, because you are someone who is constantly learning and growing yourself, what are you reading, listening to, or watching for your own professional and personal development that our audience might want to check out for themselves?
You know what? I just listened to an awesome book. It was called the Comfort Crisis.
Just awesome. I loved it. I thought it was good. So I thought that was great. And I also, a matter of fact, I'm looking for, I'm just reading this book right now, Key Person of Influence. It's a pretty good book that I've got right now. I really find it interesting. So that's another good book to consider. I appreciate that. We'll put those links in the show notes. And so, Dan, final question for you. What would you like to plug, a final bit of wisdom or insight that you'd like to leave our audience with today? The floor is yours? If you're looking to build a sales team, or if you're looking for one salesperson.

[31:21] If you're struggling and confused, feel free to call me. I can't tell you how often we consult with companies at no cost, of course, just to help them figure it out. So if you're struggling, you know what? Email me, connect with me on LinkedIn, go to our contact us page on our website, which is treelineinc.com. You can email me directly fantasia at treelineinc.com and just reach out. Even if you just want to get a lay of the land or see what's happening in the market, you don't need to buy from us to get a lot of great, valuable advice.
I appreciate that. Dan, we will put all of those links in the show notes except your email, because I don't want you to all of a sudden be on a bunch of newsletter lists that you didn't subscribe to. It's been great hanging out with you. I look forward to carrying our conversation on offline. Thank you for being on Full Funnel Freedom today.
Thank you for having me.

[32:16] You've been listening to the Full Funnel of Freedom podcast. I've been your host, Hamish Knox. Today we have got some incredible ideas and insights from Dan Fantasia, founder of Treeline on how to successfully onboard and find the right sellers to grow our sales teams.
The Full Funnel of Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler Calgary. If you desire to dominate your niche and seek to scale sales sustainably, go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler to book a 15-minute initial call. Thanks for listening. Leave us a rating and review. Share this episode with a sales leader in your network you care about.
And until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.
Thank you for listening to full funnel freedom with Amish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to Full Funnel Freedom.

[33:09] Music.