Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: School was really never my thing. College was not going to be for me. Came in at a company was very much a remote sales without ever meeting anybody physically. We had such an unfair advantage because we were already used to running in a very effective and lean up operation virtually. Typically the skill set stuff is easy to teach. The hard part is managing the mindset and that is the difference maker. No matter how good AI gets, you will not be able to replace the value of a human being with the human motivation and empathy that ties in.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Welcome to the Entrepreneurs Logbook podcast where we uncover the strategies and insights driving external business growth. Today we're joined by Matthew Uber, founder and CEO of Spin Wheel, a strategic consulting firm specializing in trading, business development and business management solutions. Matthew brings over 15 years of sales of experience to the table, having founded Spin wheel Consulting in 2020 after identifying a crucial gap in the market for personalized sale coaching and strategic business support. His company provides elite staff sales staffing, strategic consulting and custom training program designed to help businesses unlock their full potential and achieve sustainable growth. Matthew, thank you so much for joining the show.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Nice to have you. Thanks man, thanks.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Cool. Well, I guess like the first thing I'd love to start off with, and I'd like to start this way with every guest that comes on the show is I'd love to hear a bit about yourself, your background. You obviously. We obviously started the conversation. You were telling me that you've been in sales like pretty much like your entire life since like high school. So I guess that's probably a good starting point there.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I've always been that guy, even when I was in school who school was really never my thing. I, I knew at an earlier age that college was not going to be for me. I was raised by an educator. My mom always implanted in me that education, as important as it is to her and her career, it was not for me, just based off of, you know, what guided my interests. I was always a guy that when I was interested in something I could run full steam ahead at it. But if I was not, you couldn't get me to sit down and pay attention to it. So yeah, sales was always kind of in my future. As soon as I got out of high school I kind of went straight into the workforce and found success in the workforce pretty much immediately. I started off in collections and then made a transition over to more retail based sales and then kind of more into more of a software service based sales, you know, for the past 10 years.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: I love thoughts you basically have Tried like every like sales component. I'm just. Have you ever done like door to door as well or.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: I did sell direct TV in a retail space where I would be that guy sitting at the front door and if somebody's walking in, I'm pitching everybody. To me, it's basically the same thing except I get to stay in the air conditioned instead of having to go knock on doors. But same experience, high volume of rejection, very low wins on that. But that was probably the foundation to everything I've done since then. I would pretty much give anybody the advice in their young and early in their career to go through a door to door slash hardcore sales experience because it tells you whether you can deal with the volume of rejection that comes with sales. And I think sales, one of the biggest differentiators for sales is not how smooth a talker you are, it's really how well you can deal with rejection and how well you can maintain confidence through the ups and downs that come with a day and a week and a month, years, those things.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah. And I feel like I've spoken to like a lot of people and anytime they've they're in like sales, they all have like the same like career path. Like they've started door knocking sale door to door and they just like work their way up. So I feel that's probably the best way to start. Like you get to like, get really like the dirt, like do like the work that not everyone wants to do. And then you obviously get to like work your way up from there. But I guess like one thing I'd really be curious here is like, obviously you've gone through a lot of like roles in like sales throughout like your entire career. And I'd love to hear perhaps what you feel has changed since you first got into like the sales space to like now where there's like AI, there's like a lot of like automation like all over the place. And everyone has different perspectives on that.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Recently made myself aware that I've kind of become one of the old men in the room. I was always kind of the young guy in the room and kind of the youngest leader in a lot of organizations. And now I'm kind of made that transition where I've got a lot of younger people that I've got on my team today that kind of help me keep abreast of those new upcoming things. I would say for me in my career, the biggest massive change that happened is the shift from in office to primarily remote. And I was lucky and I came in at A company called Dealer on and that company was very much a remote sales. The first job I ever got where I got hired in a sales role without ever meeting anybody physically. And then I got placed into a training role, did all my training, virtually got put into my live role. And it was almost a year and a half before I ever met anybody from the company, before I ever had a chance to meet them. This was in 2018, so it was before even Covid.
But in that role was probably the role that changed my career in regards to the success more than anything. Because when I got really good at that, I elevated into a regional leader, then elevated into, eventually elevated into running the sales organization, taking it from a 10 man team to an over 60 person team. And we did it fully virtual. And when we went into Covid, we had such an unfair advantage over all of our competition because we were already used to running in a very effective and lean up operation.
Virtually the space I work in and have come from, which is the automotive space, has always been a face to face handshake based business. And we were able to operate successfully, virtually one of the first companies to be able to do that successfully. And we went into that Covid period. That's when we were a rocket ship in that regard because we already were comfortable being in that virtual space. So for me the biggest difference in change I've seen, which is that shift to virtual in my organization now is fully virtual and has been since the beginning.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Yeah, and I feel a lot of people have, I mean obviously taking that shift, they were kind of like forced to like go remote. But I've seen some people even like before then and it really has create like an advantage where like if you, if you got used to doing it like remote, you've gone through the pandemic where like a lot of organization were just starting to get used to like the entire concept. You're already rock and rolling, you know how you're working everything like that. But it's interesting that you mentioned that because yeah, sales is really like face to face. It's all about like relationship especially. I mean if you're in the automotive space, it's probably like a bit hard when you, when you start off trying to sell something like virtually, it's really like in person, you're in the dealership, you run after the customer, shake their hand, trying to obviously like introduce yourself, et cetera. So obviously going virtual, that's definitely like a big one. Was there like any like challenges like when you guys like started making that.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Shift or I was dumb enough to not know the difference at that point in my career. Like, I came there, and I was still kind of very much entry level in the account executive game of the space. I had not experienced much success yet.
That was my launching spot. So I came in with a fresh mind. I've always been an aggressive salesperson in regards to effort. I think success in sales kind of like my foundation thing when I teach, coach, train, and when I was an individual contributor myself, which is success in sales is either due to your pitch, your pace, or your attitude. So either we can improve the words you say, you can increase the volume of calls you make or touches you do, or you can fix the overall mindset around your confidence, your energy, your enthusiasm, and those things. So for me, that core concept that I established back when I was doing that directv transitioned really well in that aspect. But right now, to your point, I would say a lot of companies still don't know how to do it. And a lot of the consulting I do is solving for that. Is, we know we need to get better at virtual selling. We know we need to get better at presenting over a screen and making an impact over a screen. We need your help. And so either they bring me in to teach them how to do that, or they bring me in to bring in a team to help them do that. A lot of. A lot. I'd say 90% of our clients, that's what we're helping solve for. Because the other big thing that I realized in the virtual opportunity is when you were landlocked to a physical office, you were limited to the options of staff you had available to you. And the thing I loved about when we were at Dealer 1, we were hiring. I had access to people all over the country. I could hire people in a country town in Mississippi. And it meant the same as that big city guy that was in my office here in Dallas. Right. It didn't change. I had the opportunity to give an opportunity to people who didn't have those things. And one of the other things that I've noticed over the past five years is as I've kind of done this, which is the entitlement that some people have, especially here in America. And I've over the past five years, utilize not just American talent. I've got quite a few of American employees, but I also have quite a few people that I utilize overseas in the access to people who are hungry, whether that be outside of the big city or whether that be outside of the country. The change in mindset and the change in a hunger is drastic compared to some of the entitlement I think us Americans have.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's really helpful when it comes to sales as well because you're looking for people that are like hungry, they want to work, they want to compete here. So I think you found that sweet spot. And yeah, I mean, I agree. Like we've started hiring people in like Eastern, like Europe and stuff like that. And if you have those people as well, like they're really good at what they do and sometimes you just have to give those people opportunities. On going back to what you were saying with the clients you work with, something that I'd really be like, really curious is like when you start like working with a client, is there typically a few things that you look at really understand their sales process, how it perhaps might be failing, breaking down and like, how do you actually go about making those tweaks and like fixes? In a way?
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, look, every, every client's different based off of where they are within their business. I've got some clients that I'm working with that are been in business for 20 years. They've got three to 400 clients, but it's just been organic growth. It's been word of mouth, it's not ever been anything. They've been able to press the button and truly accelerate. So that client's far different than a startup company who's got a new software but doesn't know how to get it out there. A lot of what I do is I do show the value of cold calling and appointment setting teams. And that's kind of in general for me. Most of the teams I manage are foundationally growth from within organizations. At the end of the day, Zach, what I would say is my business and what I am is yes, I do consulting, but I do it from a foundation of I'm a trainer and a mentor and a coach. That's kind of my passion. The thing I've received the most reward from as a leader in my past is not just the things I've done individually and I've accomplished quite a bit as an individual, but the thing that's filled my cup more is the opportunity to develop the future age.
And I'm proud to say I've got over over a dozen people in the automotive space that are in executive level leadership roles in different companies.
And the company I created originally was a sales academy that I did while I still was in the corporate world. And I didn't have enough opportunity to make a Difference on younger salespeople. And so my strategy has always been in every company I've gone to is hire from the ground floor, develop people to go up. For me, I don't really care about a resume. I look for individual personality traits. I look for people who are hungry. I look for you who have a student mentality, who have thick skin, who are self aware. Those people are the people I look for more than somebody with a glamorous resume. Because for me, in my history of people with the resume, I end up have to unteach a lot of bad habits they've learned along the way. Instead of if I bring somebody in young, hungry, with the right personality traits, I can instill the right things in them from the beginning, grow them organically, teach them. The foundation for me foundation in sales is cold calling, appointment setting. When they know how to do that, they always are in control of their own destiny. When they can do that, then I can teach them how to present, close and manage a book of business. They do that, then I can elevate them into a leadership role where they have an opportunity to teach, train and develop other people. And that's how my organization over the past four years has grown from two or three people when we first started to where we have over 75 people. In my organization, everybody starts at the ground and only people that move up into leadership roles. And in my organization I have over 12 leaders who started at the ground in the past four years that have moved up into leadership roles. They only do that through merit. Nobody does it because I like them more because they're nice to me or any of that. They have to first be able to set the pace, set in appointments, then they've got to be able to present in close and then they've got to be able to make other people around them better. And through that they have an opportunity to grow, to be leaders within my team.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: I love thoughts and I love the way that you framed it where you're not looking at like the resume, trying to like find people that have been taught like certainly like you're looking for someone open minded somewhat going back to like what you were saying. Like when you started you said I really somewhat dumb enough in a way where you just learn like everything like all at once when it came to like virtually. But you're somewhat looking for the same type of people with, for your team. They're open minded, they're trying to learn to like hunger as opposed to someone that learned it a certain way because you're gonna have to reteach them like everything and try to like break certain beliefs that they have about certain things that they're doing here. So I think it's probably the best approach to do it. It's probably a bit easier to train people that haven't been trained like a certain way here. And from like what I can understand like you have the, the sales and staffing somewhat hiring component. Like there's some like merged like together. Like obviously like you're looking for good talent but you're also like helping train, coach, consult and everything like that. How do you see those like two sides of like the business, someone like work together. And do you find like clients often like need like both of those components?
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, they feed each other. I mean really like the consulting side of the businesses. I mean there's some clients that come in and I just, I'm teaching that founder how to be a better seller and he's not necessarily the point where he's ready to hire staff.
Sometimes he's like, man, I've tried to hire X sales guy, Y sales guy and they never work. And I'm like, because you don't know how to manage and hire salespeople.
And a lot of times I can say I can sit with you and I can do interviews with you, I can show you how to do your job post, I can teach you to fish in a sense which is great. Or if you want I can bring the fish right to your front door. And I've got a whole infrastructure that says I can bring in the sales reps, I can bring in the closers, I can bring in the appointment setters. And by the way, I can give you an option to buy that staff once it's proven to bring into your team. So you can do it risk free. I'll bring the team in, we'll implant them on your team. We can either do a flat fee structure where you can pay for that time or we can do a performance only structure. I'm comfortable in teaching my team how to sell perform for your business. Now if we go performance it's going to be far more expensive for you because I'm going to take the risk. But if you want to do that, we can do that. And then I'll give you the option to then buy that staff at an incredibly high premium. But at least you know that staff works. You've seen the success and if you want to bring them into your team, you can. So I've got a lot of different options for them. They I bring in Staff, leadership, coaching team. And I'm involved in the big picture coaching of the leader or the organization to be able to either do that themselves or to manage the team that I can install in there for them. So it generally feeds each other. I, I lead conversation with a consulting discussion. But in most cases, instead of people wanting to do all the hard work themselves, they'd rather say, well, I believe in you, I think you could probably do it. Yeah, why don't you just bring your team? It works that way most of the time.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's head to hand. I mean if you're looking at like people, I mean sales and people are literally like the exact same thing. Like you need people to be able to like sell here. So, so basically start with a consulting approach. You basically figure out what they're lacking of, where they need support, and oftentimes that ends up being having like either better people are just having people trained better to be able to perform at like a higher rate essentially. Sure, I love that. And I think like one of the questions I'd be curious about is I always like to ask these type of questions, but do you have like a situation that you remember where like you work with a client and it was like a challenging situation perhaps, and you were able to like turn it around like completely help them grow their company like a bit more heavily. Whether it's a limiting belief that they had a misunderstanding, they had, they wanted to be able to get that next level, they just couldn't do it. And you somewhat stepped in and we're able to like support that.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: To be honest with you, a lot of the companies that I ended up leading the sales organization within the corporate world, when I introduced the idea of building a SDR team, they were like, no, Matt, we've tried it. It doesn't work in this business. We've done it two or three different ways. It doesn't work. And I say, look man, you didn't do it with me. Let me show you, what do you have to lose? So the first organization I did that was with that dealer owned company. And I had had a lot of individual success. I said, just give me single person, I'll bring somebody over from the support team. Let me interview three or four people that you think are good. I'll pick the best person. Let's proof the concept. If it doesn't work in a month, we'll know and we'll go back to where we are. And we proved that concept when less than two weeks, I trained them, taught him how to do it. And the reason why I did that there is because I was, I was running a region and I had a lot of veteran people who were very highly paid and very experienced. And I was beating my head against the wall every day to get them to pick up the phone and cold call. And they just wouldn't do it. And they didn't need to do it because they were making enough money without doing that. Just dealing with referrals and inbound leads that the company was bringing in. They weren't taking that thing to the next level with the cold calling. So I said, let me try it. Within two weeks, we proofed the concept, we added it to other regions, and then two years later we had over 40 SDRs. And that was the foundational aspect of our sales organization. And like I do with my team, nobody from the day I built the SDR team, nobody ever got brought in as an account executive any longer. Everybody got brought in as an sdr. And I think it was about one third the cost that we paid AES. I had a development program that within 90 to 120 days somebody could get promoted. And in the first 12 months of us doing that, we were able to develop seven people into AES. And 100% of them hit quota as an AE, as a homegrown person. And when they got promoted, their salary never went up, their variable went up through their compensation structure. So we ended up hardly increasing the cost of the staff, doubling the size of the AES, drastically increasing the results, and our cost per employee went down by about 25%.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: Like when we know around the table, to put it like really simply.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: So when we proved that concept, then I took that concept once I left dealer on and I installed that concept at a variety of different software companies in the corporate world as a sales leader prior to me leaving the industry.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: And just with like that examples. Something I'd love to expand on like really briefly here is there seems to be like a lot of companies you work with and correct me if I'm wrong here, there's a lot of like limiting belief like, hey, that this won't work for us. Like we, we've tried it before, this doesn't work. Is that like a common, like pattern, like occurrence ac with companies that you work, like when you like engage the.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: Conversation or Yeah, I mean I would say every company is slightly different in that. But I do think that there is human nature that people like to create the excuse for themselves that that didn't work. Not they didn't make it work.
Cold calling has always worked. It's always worked, it always will work. No matter how good AI gets, no matter how good technology and software gets, you will not be able to replace the value of a human being with the human motivation and empathy that ties into doing what you need to do. It's just a question of did you know how to hire them? Did you know how to coach them? Did you know how to motivate them? A lot of clients also say, can I bring you in to train? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you can bring me in a train. I'm a trainer. But a training program is only as good as the coach that follows it. So if you don't know how to then take somebody out of training and then coach them. For me, the most under thought of thing with salespeople, which is managing the mindset, typically the skill set stuff is easy to teach. I could teach somebody an elevator pitch and how to overcome objections in less than a week. That's not a hard thing to do. The, the hard part is managing the mindset, managing the confidence, the rejection and those things. And that is the difference maker.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I know that, yeah, sales, it's all mindset. Like if you can get like rid of that, you can get above that. I mean you're going to crush in sales like no matter what. I think that's like what a good salesperson here. And for like any like entrepreneur founders like watching, is there any, I guess maybe like two, three pointers they could give? Like hey, like we're trying to like restructure, adjust, improve our sales process, how we go about like sales like as a whole, is there any like two, three actions that they could take, say in the next like month or so that directly would drastically like improve their performance on like what their growth?
[00:21:51] Speaker A: I would ask you, how much of a student are you?
For me, I've had a decent amount of success in this industry, but I still am watching podcasts, I'm still reading books, I'm still listening to other perspectives and I think the best sellers are the people who are the best borrowers of information and learn how to apply that information themselves. So you know, I like you have created a podcast and my podcast is around interviewing other leaders and entrepreneurs just to be able to ask them questions to learn more from them. So for me, I think a student mentality is the most important thing anybody can have. The other piece of advice I'd give to any entrepreneur, which is never get so married to your idea that you're unwilling to make adjustments. If you would have listened to, if you would have had this interview with me in 2020 with what my idea of what my business was versus what it has evolved, shifted, changed, turned to up, down this it has changed a hundred plus times.
And so I am a person that I believe in fast, intuitive, gut based decisions but not being willing to stay too firm on those decisions that I get stuck in a rut. Being willing to adjust, move, ask questions, be humble enough to make adjustments and admit I'm not a know it all who knows everything at all times. I can make mistakes, other people make mistakes in that sense. So that would be things that I see a lot of entrepreneurs make a mistake of is they come up with an original idea, it's a great idea at the time and they get too bullish on that idea to be willing to be agile.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean again like I think the overall concept that I really got from her conversation is really being open minded. I mean that seems to be a core theme and not just about like learning new themes, but learning new things. It's also about being able to like adjust like adjust your trajectory based on information that you're getting. Like sure, you, you might be implementing a sales process. It works for the first like six months slowly starts to die down. Maybe you want to adjust it. Even if it worked for the first six months, maybe something change, you want to adjust it, you want to keep like being ed. Like the, the market to make. You're always improving there. So yeah, I love that. And I guess like just touching back to like we talked about like really briefly like AI because I know like a lot of salespeople, they all have the same perspective. AI is not going to affect us.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: It's probably going to. I do not have that perspective. I. Okay, it's a.
How fast is it going to affect us? Now here's my business partner and I, we actually sat down with a AI company who does AI calling in December and we were very close to acquiring that to add it to our business model. The reason why we didn't today is the cost per minute of AI doing calling was just outrageous. It was not cost effective in comparison to where we do. But the company who built the software and built it that we were considering buying from said, let me explain to you why somebody like you, Matt, is still so vital in AI. Because you still have to teach it the way to do it. Just because it does it doesn't mean it's going to do it correctly. If you've got a Bad salesperson, teaching it the things, then it will be bad at sales. But if you have your own trained process that has worked for individuals, then it is still there. I think it's inevitable that it replaces us. I still think there's a place where all of society will build new jobs and new things around AI. I think AI will be a tool, but I definitely think it'll affect us. But I think that, and I've seen this in the automotive space just to draw a correlation. For the past 10 years, every car dealership has wanted to say the next software is virtual buying a car because Amazon's so good at selling products virtually without people having to go into a storefront. Car dealers have said I want to make that transition. But the problem is car dealers have had a 50 year problem of convincing the consumer the best way to get the deal. The best way to get the best price is by coming in and haggling with the price. And so that the. Even though the industry has pushed the idea of virtual buying, the consumer has not been willing to do that. I think that what you will find is consumers will still prefer to meet in a face to face environment, whether that is virtually or whether that is in a face to face handshaking environment.
Because there will be the idea that an AI computer will outsmart them, will not give them the best deal. So I think there will continue to be from the consumer side, hesitancy I see, from the product side, the company side, I see a lot more integration and wanting to involve AI because from a business owner perspective, as a business owner, if I can do this more effectively, efficiently, if I can have people cold calling from sunup to sundown and nobody has a sick day, nobody has a bad day, nobody. Yeah. Then yeah, of course there's a value there as a business owner, but I'm not so sure the consumer will want to interact with that as well.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: I love the way that you framed it though, because I didn't really see it that way. And you're completely true because again there's like that belief like if you're in like auto sales, like you want to come in, you want to be able to get a lower price. But if you're buying your product at a store, you're not going to be able to haggle the price down unless you're getting something on Facebook Marketplace, which you're probably not doing. So again, a little bit on like that belief, but I think you're spot on where it's going to more amplify like what we do. It's going to open up, like, new jobs for us that can manage AIs and everything like that.
But another thing that I think I saw on like, Twitter, X whatever you want to call it, a few days ago was like someone was calling, like a local business and it was like an AI that picked up, like, directly. They were saying, like, hey, like, I want to speak to like a human. No one was available.
And I feel that's. That's still something a lot of people will want. They won't want to speak to an AI. A lot of people will want to have that human connection. Same thing as if you go to a dealership.
They want to speak to someone, they don't want to speak to a robot. And I feel that that's going to be a big thing where people will.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: I don't think people will be able to tell the difference on a phone call, like, within six months. I mean, that's getting good. The software I listened to just in December, like, if I sent it to like five people who had no clue, and I said, listen to this call.
Tell me how you think their sales process was. I didn't give them any indication it was anybody but an employee of mine.
And nobody picked up on the fact that it was that. Nobody picked up on the fact that it was AI because they maybe were focusing on the wrong thing. But still a consumer on the other side, if they're not factoring in, is this a person or AI, they're just factoring in the dealing of the sale. I think that that process will be indistinguishable. I think that it gets to the point, where are you going to want to buy things without physically seeing? But look, the reality is probably within a year you will be able to have a holographic version of me that will be able to then audio the version of me looking like it's me and it's not me that will be here before you know it as well. So.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Oh, no. And it's going to be crazy. I mean, I know, like, one thing I think I noticed with like, the, like the AI, if you speak to them, because it's like an AI model, sometimes it's going to take like two seconds, like, respond, like a little bit, like, longer. And that can impact, like, the conversation. If they can fix that, they can make the voice sound, like, more natural, then, yeah, it's going to be an interesting one where you won't be able to disengage, like, no matter what you do.
Perfect. Well, I really Appreciate time, Matt here. And I guess for, like, people that want to get in touch with you because I know you mentioned you have, like a podcast as well that you run and then you're active on, like, LinkedIn too, but any other, like, platform should, like, people look to find you on or.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, for me, I'm pretty open if you're interested, if you want to have a discussion. If there's anything I can help you with, you can shoot me a text message. You guys can email me. It's Matt Spinwell sales.com my email. I mean, my website is Spinwell sales.com my cell phone's 214-436-6968. I welcome all conversations. I think we only get better by having more of them and knowing more people. So don't hesitate if there's any questions I can answer for you or any way I can help you in general, whether that's business, sales, or just in general. Like I said, the thing I get the most out of life is helping people around me. And if that ends up helping me in the long run, great. But any way I can help, just let me know.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: We're gonna put that in the description. If anyone wants to reach out, click the link, etc, here. But thank you so much for joining us here today. Match.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: No problem, Zach. Appreciate it, man.
