The Rep's Journey

[GEORGE GARCIA]: Ultimately it comes down to being able to create a process, with growth in mind, obviously, because there's always a limit to how many questions you can answer over the phone, right? The whole objective for me was: How can I multiply myself in a way where I can hold the rep, as if I was there, with my hand, and just hold their hand every step of the way? Just like a customer, right? Man, I realized that my conversion to installation for instance, was so much better when I was constantly communicating with my customer...

[JASON KELSKE]: That was George Garcia talking about the onboarding process that he implements at LGCY Power. LGCY Power is a solar company up in Lehi, Utah, and George is the Director of Sales Performance for them. So in this episode of The Rep's Journey, Stephen Rhyne, the CEO of ConveYour, and myself, interviewed George, and we asked him why he maps out a journey in the onboarding process for their sales reps. We also asked him to talk about advice that he would give to directors of sales. We asked him to talk about things that he wish he knew when he first started. And if you're a director of sales, he's talking directly to you. So there's a lot of great meat here. But if you're a sales rep and you're looking for promotion, George also has some advice for you.He'll talk to you about ways that you can enhance your skills so you can grow in this industry.

The Rep's Journey exists to help sales teams recruit, train, and retain their sales reps. So stick around!

[STEPHEN]: I'm here with George. George is the director of sales performance with LGCY Power, in Lehi, Utah, and has been with LGCY since 2015. He's a sales manager, he has supervised inside sales teams, and he's managed his own district, out of Fresno, right?

[GEORGE]: That's right.

[STEPHEN]: The first time I met George, I was just really impressed. He obviously has a deep understanding of the residential solar industry and he knows what it takes to onboard, recruit, train, and retain reps. I was really eager to have George on the podcast because I think that every CRO, every director of sales, every person that's in charge of the rep experience, should be thinking about the rep’s journey or how to onboard reps, how to keep reps the way George is thinking about it. The first thing that jumped out for me, George, when we met, was you pulled up this whiteboard. You pulled up this lucid chart of what you envisioned or what you are working on for your onboarding journey. My question for you is, what got you to the point where you were doing that? What got you to the point where you said, ‘You know what? I really need to- I don't want to put words in your mouth but- not react to this and be more proactive.’ Walk me through that journey for you, the journey in your mind where maybe you didn't do that in the past and now you're thinking about it this way and you're being proactive and you're designing the rep journey like that.

[GEORGE]: Sure! So, when it comes to the journey, I realized that it was a lot more complex than I thought at first. One, I had to just write it down to better understand it. Coming from the field, being a rep, seeing it from that perspective, I started realizing the importance of that experience from that perspective. I kind of had to play this interesting role in my mind where I was not only the rep but was also the company and I was also the trainer and I'm also the communicator and the cell support agent. I'm all these things at once and so being able to put it on paper and kind of create those complexities to be a little simpler for the representative was really the objective right of that vision and, obviously, what we've implemented here at LGCY to help streamline that process. Everything that's happening in the background, we don't want the rep to know. So, that's why it's important to know this triggers that, that triggers the other on our end but then from the rep experience being able to say, ‘Okay, what do they need to see?’ How can we facilitate those trainings because 95% of the time we would create content, create literature, would have somebody go out there and knock with these guys and get them all pumped and ready and we don't know anything that's actually being you know retained? We don't know the retention of that rep we don't know what's being consumed. It's just such a huge disconnect so being able to somewhat conceptualize that and then putting it onto paper was super helpful for me.

[STEPHEN]: There are a lot of metaphors around the theater and around making a movie. If you think about whiteboarding every stage of a presentation or a film for a rep and then the idea that what the rep sees, in terms of the film or the theater, it's way more dialed in than all the complexity behind the curtain. All of the scaffolding, stagehands, and people running around, moving props around, we don't want the rep to see those things but they do need to be organized. I always think about sequencing. If you were doing a play, for example, you have all these props in the right order otherwise you wouldn't be able to get one out in time. I think about that in terms of whiteboarding and if can you get the right sequencing in place and that's what helps so much with the lucid chart, the whiteboard.

[GEORGE]: That's exactly right. The whole objective is to make it as simple as possible but sometimes we forget, from an operation standpoint, how complex some of our processes are. We think, ‘Why are they doing it this way? I don't understand why are they not doing them this way’. It's a constant ‘oh my gosh’ it should have been done this way. It's ongoing and sure, we try to nip it in the bud by trying to communicate that and over-communicate it through zoom calls. Ultimately, it comes down to being able to create a process with growth in mind, obviously, because there's always a limit to how many questions you can answer over the phone. There's always a limit to how many Zoom calls you can create. The whole objective for me was, how can I multiply myself in a way where I can hold the rep as if I was there with my hand and just hold their hand every step of the way just like a customer doing sales for five-plus years. I realized that my conversion to insulation, for instance, was so much better when I was constantly communicating with my customer, when I would go there and give them cookies, and when I would go there and explain something new to them. Especially in the solar industry, there's so much complexity that we just want to create this ease of mind, not only from the onboarding perspective, for a rep but all the way to the first sale and hopefully all the way to their installation.

[STEPHEN]: When you say holding their hand, it's so true. In the online course industry, where you're purchasing courses, it's really gone from ‘Hey, we have a course, we have a lot of content. We threw it all to you and you can't say it wasn't valuable.’ to ‘We should really try to get some level of transformation for our customer because otherwise, they're not going to come back and they're not going to talk about the experience’.

[GEORGE]: Those bother me so much. It's like ‘here's the hook, here's like this thing that we think you should be doing’. In sales, you see it all the time. ‘Hey come do this thing, come work for us, come knock doors, come do this, that, the other’ but how?

[STEPHEN]: It's a very front-loaded experience but then there isn't that holding the hand through the process. Simplicity for the rep can be complex. It takes a lot of work. When you first started that whiteboard was it at all as high fidelity it is now? Did it start simple and then get more high fidelity?

[GEORGE]: Yeah. Me, I’m in a box, then there’s sales support, management. Then I say, ‘Okay I'm the rep. What do I want, right?’

[STEPHEN]: What do I want? Yes. What do you want as a rep? What's in it for me?

[GEORGE]: Yes, exactly. What's in it for me? What are the incentives? In the sales world, it's all about incentives. It's all about what is it for me. Being able to put myself in that perspective continuously allowed me to kind of get more complex. Like ‘oh man, how cool would it be if...?’ and then my creative juices started flowing.

[STEPHEN]: The juices come as a result of the starting of the work because I see a lot they try to go from zero to everything versus if you just start laying out some of the building blocks it gets more thought. It gets more nuanced in terms of the journey.

[GEORGE]: That's right and then you build it and you're like ‘Holy! What is this?’, right?

[STEPHEN]: You get it all in place. A lot of companies, as they scale, of course, you're going to try to simplify departments. So they go in the direction of simplifying departments so they make HR do the onboarding and they optimize for that. Then they have trainers do the training and they optimize for that, and each one of the departments is optimizing separately but it's actually making a more complex process for the rep.

[GEORGE]: That's right!

[STEPHEN]: It's a reverse scale. It's not actually helping you scale the number of reps that you can recruit, train, onboard, and retain. It's making it so that your departments are more optimized.

[GEORGE]: Definitely.

[STEPHEN]: When we were talking about different integrations and things like that, there's a thick process, in terms of who gets what and when it gets done versus, putting the rep first, ‘what's in it for me?’, and then designing around that constraint. I love that. So, I asked you the question, ‘What do you wish you had known when you first started out your director's sales performance role’?

[GEORGE]: #1 Going back to that department piece. I have to be the guy- I'm the center mid. If anybody plays sports, the center mid, for soccer, is the guy who slows everyone down and communicates x to this person, y to that person, in order to try to score the goal. I didn't realize how much of that I would be in this role. It's like, ‘Oh man. I got to go talk to HR about their onboarding process. Is it gonna be completely different than what I'm thinking for my training, is that aligned?’ Then after that, ‘Okay go and talk to my national trainer.’ The national trainer has to be in line because our communication has to be done. All of a sudden, I'm talking to data and I'm talking to the kpi team and I'm looking at the engineering team that builds our applications. I'm saying how do we make sure we align and communicate the things that you think are important? But really what the rep thinks is important too and how do we align those two things? There's a level organization as this position has kind of molded that I wish I knew from the get-go because I would have saved a lot of time. Then another thing was the level of creativity you require. It's not just all math, like 1 + 2 + 3 = a perfect rep. It's like 1 + 7.5 from this department + 0.2 of this department will end up being what we want. It's being able to determine what are those things and being creative enough to be able to put those pieces together that I wish I knew too. But it has been super enjoyable going through the process.

[STEPHEN]: The creativity of ‘What are the constraints I have and how can I work around those?’, ‘What needs to come first?’ I like your playing field analogy because you're in a position on the field where you can see a lot going on. That's your job, to have the visual. The person that holds the context and you're an advocate for the rep but you're holding the context of all of it in your head.

[GEORGE]: Yeah, that’s right.

[STEPHEN]: Yeah because they're optimized for their role and they're working to do their thing but you're the advocate that comes around. ‘Actually, this has this puzzle piece that you're working on. Great puzzle piece but it's got to fit in here, in this specific way’.

[GEORGE]: Exactly. I got to go back to the charts. Knowing that process, really getting down to the nitty-gritty, will help facilitate a plan for when I have contacts to go and talk to somebody in a different department, I can show them something too. Look, this is the vision. So, can we align together? How can we get things together so that we're both working very proactively?

[STEPHEN]: Quick question about that. In a way you're like a product manager, right?

[GEORGE]: Yeah.

[STEPHEN]: In software, it's very much product management except the product is the perfectly onboarded rep and that's the product. What are some things that you could tell people listening around how to work with other departments where they also have their ‘what's in it for me too’? A trainer or somebody actually putting content together, like an instructional designer, is going to have their own preconceived notions around what content should look like. To be honest, this came up this week. We are a platform that's helping a lot of direct sales companies recruit, train, retain, and onboard reps and we happen to be a great microlearning training platform but oftentimes companies in your space will hire instructional designers that used to work in an employee-based environment. They approach training in a different way than maybe the training that you create for a rep who is independent, can ‘nope out’ at any time, don’t have to work here if he doesn't want to. It's a little different. What are some ways that you help them understand how this might be different or just not conventional, the way they're used to seeing it?

[GEORGE]: Yeah. A lot of departments think that way. They think, ‘Why are they not doing this or that or the other?’ Well 1, you guys are completely different, like they're their own little business and you are a W2 employee. Which is great, there's nothing wrong with that but it's just the way you think is completely different. Honestly, it's helpful that I have been in the field and I've sold right. I'm an advocate because I was there, I sold for five years. I managed for three of those five. Being able to see from that perspective was really helpful. So really, it's sales. I go to these departments and I'm selling them. It's these soft skills that I've picked up throughout the years and being able to say ‘here's my proposal’. ‘This is what I think and this is how it's going to benefit you. This is how easy your job is going to become because of this.’ So, it's tactfully, in a sales way depending on who you're talking to, realizing what the value you're going to be bringing to them will be with your vision, with your process. Then selling them on it and getting them excited about it because sometimes you have somebody come, who's been in the industry for a very long time, they've been in this very small niche of understanding, maybe the hr process or the onboarding process, and they do not want to change. Then what happens is they see a bunch of problems, they get really mad and then this is an opportunity for me to be able to push them my product or my service. Going back to a product manager, I'm going to say ‘Hey look this is going to help you here, here, here, and here. You in?’ They're gonna be like ‘Yeah sure, why not.’

[STEPHEN]: Yeah. It starts with actually letting them voice their opinions and then aligning. It's just good sales, right? You diagnose, you ask questions. ‘Hey, what do you not like about this?’ Then align that back with ‘well actually if we do this...’ Otherwise, if you just start out with what I'm saying, if you just tell them without listening, aligning, and bringing it back to what they care about.

[GEORGE]: One of the biggest things that I've seen, going back to wishing I knew a little bit more or what I wish I knew, was I wish I knew how impactful that was. Going into every department because of the way I did things. I realized how, whatever the impact it would make, it was going into each department, everybody. Even if I had nothing to do with them, ‘Hey, how's it going? What's your problem? What's your biggest problem? What are your top three problems?’

[STEPHEN]: This is exactly what your role and these roles are. Different companies have a head of hr, head of learning, even if you're just a trainer, head of training. You can choose to spend your career just reacting to people telling you to build this training and that training or you can be super valuable by being the person. You could sit in a room with a CEO and tell them exactly what the problems of every department are and how you, your group, are going to connect and help solve some of those problems through training or through onboarding. He who owns the problem, the best, just like who is closest to the customer wins. He who is closest to the department wins. That's the way I think about it and that's what makes you a leader. If you can understand the problems, understand what truth looks like, what done looks like and I'm going to help them. I'm going to be an advocate for them.

[GEORGE]: Yeah definitely. Obviously, it's for the sake of the growth of the company. Always.

[STEPHEN]: Question for you, what's something you've changed either you've added or removed from your onboarding training experience that either had a terrific or terrible result?

[GEORGE]: Our onboarding process at first hadn't changed for a very long time. There have been some things that we've implemented that have gone a long way, like training videos and content. One thing that we took away, that I didn't realize and sometimes it goes the other way, you think you're being proactive but you're actually not being proactive because you didn't listen. Maybe you didn't ask the right question to a manager. We took away videos for these managers because we thought they aren't even watching these things. We just took them away. We looked at the stats and the way they were utilizing was different right. They were getting these videos. They were maybe going into ConveYour, grabbing the link, and then sending it to all the reps because it was easy for them. We didn't know that behavior. So through failure, essentially, we understood we need a way to be able to share videos, make it easier, or maybe eliminate some of these people who we think don't watch it, add the managers to it so that they can have flexibility there. So that's one thing that I felt like crap. I should have been more proactive about it because we got blown up. ‘Hey, where are these videos going?’ and, ‘This new rep wants his videos.’, ‘I've been watching it so and so times’. And it's like, ‘Oh man, we should have been a little bit more proactive about that’ Does that answer your question?

[STEPHEN]: Yeah, it does. You mentioned there's listening to your people and listening to your managers because sometimes there are things you don't realize they are using or they need but you didn't get it out there. If you could give/share one concept tip, idea, to sales directors, CROs, and rep trainers, what would that be? What's a concept that’s helped you a lot?

[GEORGE]: Yeah. Here, at LGCY, it's been really helpful to be able to see- I started right when the company started. I was able to see it from inception pretty much. We were in a two little room place. I was recruited by this random old guy who was just part-time. They had this vision and so I've seen it from the very beginning all the way to now. We're in 32 states. We're huge. The number one piece of advice that I'll give you or really anybody, would be to listen to the rep. They'll tell you what they need and sometimes the representative will be the one who tells you the best idea. I remember, I think it was 2016, we were thinking through some canvas. We're like, ‘Let's open it up’. Canvas is our application here at LGCY that allows us to knock and prospect. We're getting feedback and we're like, ‘Let's start implementing a lot of these things’ and the moment canvas start doing that, when they first started, it was a game-changer. It was a game-changer because they were listening to what the managers, what the reps were saying and what they wanted. At the very beginning that's okay. That's what you're supposed to do and that's okay. In 2017, 2019 we started maturing a little bit more. We started getting more resources. We blew up. Okay now, what resources can we facilitate to these individuals to help accelerate this? Now we're at a stage where we're huge. We should definitely be investing a little more time and resources, some value differentiators, to these experiences to help facilitate even more scale. Listen to the rep at the stage in the company that you're in, because everybody's stage is different, take that input. Then as you start learning and writing these things down, you're going to start being able to predict what the future is going to hold and in an industry like solar, things change every day, but typically the sales experience doesn't. That's the one thing. The way you sell, that's almost universal. I mean sure, the content, the process is universal but the content, what you're saying changes constantly. So try to hold on to what you can control. That's what I've always done. Control what you can control and then adapt as you grow and become better at it. Just be patient with your process. Be patient with your time frame in the company. Then as you grow and scale, I say start thinking more of how do I become more proactive, proactive, proactive rather than reactive.

[STEPHEN]: I hear that it's so early on. Listening to the rep is a reactive process because you really don't have a lot to go off of. What are you going to bank it off of if you don't have a ton? It's just like when you're starting a software product, you only have 10 customers. The best thing to do is just take that qualitative data that you're getting from them and say we'll implement that. We got on the roadmap. We're gonna make that happen.

[GEORGE]: So many times, you're trying to solve for a problem and we're not asking what the problem is. Let's fix onboarding. This is what I think it should look like, this is what I think it should look. You have never gone through that process. You've gone through like a completely different process. You're creating something you have no idea about and you have like 500 people or 100 people that have already gone through this process. What's keeping you from calling them and saying ‘Hey, can you hop on and call 30 minutes to tell me about this?’ You tell me.

[STEPHEN]: That’s right! It's so funny. One little story I love telling is back in world war II, the British planes would fly over into Germany and they'd come back with all these holes all over the plane. Let's patch the holes and figure out the patch pattern that's optimal. Then one guy goes ‘What about the planes that don't come back?’
Where are they getting shot? Maybe we should patch everywhere where there aren't bullet holes? So, it's an example of talking to reps. Maybe you should talk to the reps that didn't stay. Maybe you should talk to the reps you don't talk to because there's so much availability bias in how we design things. Whatever is available, either our own experiences, we use that to make choices. So, whether that be other departments pushing on us what their experience with onboarding, like you mentioned. It's not actually the experience that the person that is the person consuming your product had. I love that, just listen to the rep early on. It's very reactive but then over time, you start to hear signals that steer a more common proactive response to many disparate signals into more proactive single ones. We're gonna fix nine of these things with this one solution.

[GEORGE]: That is my favorite. It's all about efficiency. We're not running around with our heads cut off. It's all about efficiency. Let's gather information and make an educated decision. Let's verify that information. It's an experiment. This is all an experiment. Let's verify it and then look at the impact.

[STEPHEN]: Exactly. What is something you're inspired by right now? You told me about this book, Awareness (by Anthony de Mello) and I'd love to learn more about that. I've never heard of that book. What is Awareness?

[GEORGE]: I actually read it when I have time. It's actually right here. I got it from a friend and it kind of helped me on a personal level. It inspires me because it helped me better understand me. Going back to helping understand my process but through the rep. Well, what like what about me? What makes me tick? Who am I? It's helped me kind of be more introspective in a way where I can kind of better understand who I am. Sometimes in the hustle and bustle, we get so consumed in work or whatever the heck we're doing and we kind of forget, ‘why am I doing this?’

[STEPHEN]: Why am I making the decisions the way I make them? Yeah.

[GEORGE]: Exactly. Is this good for me? Does this make me happy? I've learned a lot from that and it inspired me because typically you can help anybody go through a journey or whatever it may be that you want, as long as it's aligned with their happiness. If they're happy and you help them be happy, you're doing the right thing. You're going the right way. That's what has inspired me.

[STEPHEN]: What else any other books that you love?

[GEORGE]: With the business world, there's a personal world and they all we try to keep those harmonious as we can. When it comes to like the business, Atomic Habits by James Clear. That's a really good book because it kind of goes with what ConveYour does. It's all about like these small little nudges, small little things that we're trying to do. Then in sales, it's all about that first door. It's all about being able to wake up in the morning or whatever the heck it is that these guys are going out there and doing, let's break this down. We think it's this huge problem. Let's break it down into this little thing and then say what happens if we optimize for this?

[STEPHEN]: It's the layering. It's the sequencing and the layering. I think in the book they talk about how you want to learn to be really consistent with exercise. Wake up and put your gym shorts on, little things like that. It's almost like developing habits is more important than the outcome. We're designing and sequencing toward the development of an outcome. We can't ever control whether or not they develop the habit. We can help control whether or not they're cued or the habit. Developing the habits become top of mind.

[GEORGE]: You’re essentially given an opportunity. If somebody came and knocked on the door, today, and I had an exercise today and they said, ‘Hey, do you want to go work out’? It gives me an opportunity to say yes or no. If I say no, well maybe in a couple of hours. What happens if that happens? Chances are, I probably get a yes. It's all about optimization.

[STEPHEN]: Jason has a few questions for you. Jason, do you want to go?

[JASON]: Yeah the first one was what kind of cookies? You said you take cookies to people’s homes, what kind of cookies did you take?

[GEORGE]: When I was out there in Bakersfield, I was a district man in bakersfield and fresno, I would sell. One of the best practices I had to be able to get the customer to installation was bringing them cookies. It was chocolate chip cookies, so my wife and I would go close the account or two or three and then I'd text her, ‘hey babe, I close so-and-so. This is her name’ and she would write a little note. Then I would go pick them up and then drive them the next day. essentially say thanks for going solar with me, there's some cookies. Who's gonna say no to somebody give them cookies?

[STEPHEN]: Homemade cookies from my wife! You got to say, ‘My wife made these cookies’. How awesome is that in terms of just making a connection with somebody and not feeling like the context changes?

[GEORGE]: Right, yeah.

[STEPHEN]: That's great.

[JASON]: Lot of good takeaway right there. I think that people can learn from that absolutely but like more on a note of development and training and whatnot. I typed them out. For the person who's listening to this, who's in a director role, maybe they weren't a rep, maybe they were a rep for a different company, they do something slightly different, maybe it's been years since they've been in the field, what kind of questions could you- you talked about focusing on the reps needs. What kind of questions can somebody in that director role ask to find out what the rep needs at this moment?

[GEORGE]: Typically, it goes back to what I would ask a customer if there's an objection or there's an insecurity before even moving. What I love about sales is the objective of getting somebody from one point to another and that's the sale. How you do that, you can be tactful about it, you can be based question, you can be empathetic about it. You can be very process-based about it, like a plus b plus c equals sale. There are different ways. I say, find your strength. Find your strength in how to you help somebody get from A to B. If it's being empathetic or loving, that is within their strength. For me, it's questions. I love to ask questions and that's how I get somebody to do something, typically. I ask them what's motivating them to do xyz and I just listen. I get them to a point where they can make a decision. The advice is know yourself. Going back to self-awareness, know what kind of person you are and how you help people get to one place or another. Then be deliberate about it. Go out there and do the thing that you you think is best for the rep, for the organization. Go ask questions or go listen. That's how you're gonna get somewhere. A lot of people think that there's this overarching responsibility but no. Just go be curious. Go listen. Intake as much information as possible and then use your strengths to get somewhere.

[STEPHEN]: You said something that has stuck out a theme and that is ‘go out and do something’. Do the human thing of getting qualitative results. Go out and there and talk to individual people. Start building up an instinct around what they need and then verify with data. Verify with the questions. I have a hunch based off of five conversations that this is the problem now I'm going to go verify. I took anecdotal information. Then I can go figure out if that's actually the right direction and I can show people that this is the right direction based off of a hunch.

[GEORGE]: The hunch is important. The hunch is so important when you have numbers behind it. You can't really make a good decision if you don't have both. There has to be some emotion. There has to be some data. Typically, they'll give you an arrow to know where to go next.

[STEPHEN]: But, there are people that are super data driven and they only do it data driven.

[GEORGE]: Yeah and that could be a detriment.

[STEPHEN]: It's a detriment right because it's like setting up a survey question before you've actually had the ‘are you asking the right questions’? So you could optimize to get a local maximum, where you go out and survey 500 reps on a topic. They're like, ‘Fine. I'll answer this question but it doesn't really matter to me’ versus going out and having 10 conversations first. Then turning that into ‘Let me verify this. This is good.’ That's right.

[GEORGE]: Jason, does that answer your question?

[JASON]: Yeah, very much so. It's great because the two follow-up questions, you actually touched on them. I think you answered both. I'm going to ask them anyway, just for you to elaborate or expand at all. The follow-up question, which again you answered, was what kind of sales rep, who might stumble upon this- because the podcast is kind of directed toward, hopefully, directors of sales and whatnot, but for the rep who stumbles upon it, what can they do now to develop skills for them to be able to get to a place where they're able to step into a role like yours? What can they do to learn? I think you answer that with the awareness one. Then following up with that is what is someone in your role looking for in a rep to be able to promote them? What are you looking for because they might work on something that you're not actually looking for?

[GEORGE]: As a rep, you have to be very curious and you have to be patient. The more patient, the more curious you are, the more likely you are to grow. That's from the rep’s perspective. So if there's a rep out there that stumbled on this, just be patient with your processes. Be patient with your company because they're learning right but also you make a big impact if you communicate what you think are the solutions, not the problems but the rather the solutions to those problems. That's what's going to blow you up. I see this problem I know Johnny, who also has a problem that I work closely with. I think I have a solution for this. You just became the guy telling us what to do. That's very powerful and then I think that also answers the other side of it. What are we looking for? Somebody who's constantly coming up with solutions. We're in the sales organization. The sales world, like we said, things change all the time. People who are constantly listening, people who are patient, who people are creating solutions, they are the people who are going to lead companies. Those are the leaders of the organizations that you see today. They came up with a question every CEO that saw a problem and solved it. What else?

[STEPHEN]: When reps or mid-level management complain, I think they think that that leadership has the solution and they just haven't implemented. It's actually not the case sometimes.

[GEORGE]: Almost never!

[STEPHEN]: Middle management, help us solve the problem because it's actually not solved for. It's not like we're trying to meet machiavellian and holding back some amazing solution that we don't want to give you.

[GEORGE]: People forget that we're all like kind of pretending to be out here, kind of like co-existing. Actually, you're like me.

[STEPHEN]: It's a growth mindset where they're like, ‘Okay, I can help the company have better DNA. I can be part of that’. It's the approach you take. If you start with ‘This sucks for me’ and it's about me then immediately it's hard to receive. But if it’s like, ‘Hey, I could help all managers. Here's the solution. It could help the company’ and as a byproduct, it helps me in my business. Those are the ones that are received by the upper level. You see it. We actually see inputs coming from companies and they say we talked to some of our reps and they had this really great idea about this and they explained why it's important to them and we want to implement that versus, we had four or five reps complaining about this. It's just totally different.

[GEORGE]: It's so draining. That's the draining side of all of this. If you change that culture, change that attitude into a solving culture, problem-solving culture, which I feel like LGCY has done and that's why they are where they are, it changes the dynamic of an organization drastically. It just does.

[STEPHEN]: It's not ‘us versus them’ kind of thing. That's great, man. George, we gotta do this again. You're awesome man. I'm so glad to have you on. You're like the prototype. You're like the universal soldier of the clients we want to have, just the way you think about it, think about your role, and the companies you work with. Thanks for coming on. Look forward to the next time we get a chat man.Thank you so much!

[GEORGE]: Hey, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

[STEPHEN]: Talk to you soon.

[GEORGE]: Okay we'll see ya. Bye.

[JASON]: Hey thanks for checking out The Rep's Journey, Episode 6 today. If you want to find a job in sales as a sales rep, in the description is a link to LGCY power's job listing. So if you're looking for a sales rep position, check it out. They also have a couple of other jobs and they're in Virginia, Texas, Utah, California...they're all over the United States. So check that out. It'd be a great resource for you. And then if you are looking for a solution that meets what a lot of the things that George talked about today--onboarding and speeding up that process--check out ConveYour. That's who I'm with. I'm Jason. I'm the director of customer success over there, and Stephen is the CEO, and we have great solutions for you. So check us out at ConveYour.com and you can book a demo. That link will also be in the description of this video. And uh...that's it! Thanks a lot! We'll see you next time!