All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal, focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes. I'm your host, Lydia, and joining us today is Dan Fantasia, President and CEO of Treeline. Welcome, Dan, and thank you for joining us.
Dan: Hi, Lydia. Thanks for having me.
The Secrets Behind Treeline’s Success
Lydia: Great. So, I understand that Treeline has been running successfully for more than 20 years now. What are some key takeaways you've had during this time?
Dan: There are a lot of takeaways, but I think the biggest, most important thing to our organization is our core values and culture. We have been recognized as one of the best places to work in the United States and Boston for years.
I think the key to our success through the highs and the lows, because we all know, the recruiting space is very challenging, but it is having a positive culture, a positive team, and people that live the same core values so we can continue to work and row all in the same direction, working hard together to make sure that we always find success and grow the organization.
Lydia: The point of culture would also mean you have to look into how to sustain that culture. So, what might be some key points, in order to maintain or evolve that culture to make it high-performance?
Dan: We have to listen to the team. We’ve been in business for 22 years, and on a quarterly basis, we do something called ‘Start, Stop, Keep,’ where we ask the team, the employees, what they think we should stop doing, start doing, and keep doing.
Unless you understand what is important to the team and the employees, you really can’t build a culture of success.
Because sometimes you get caught up in your own head, and the things that are important to you aren’t necessarily important for the remainder of the company and as a result, if you’re not listening to the entire team, genuinely listening to them, you really struggle to build a positive culture.
Lydia: I also understand that Treeline is currently fully remote in its operation. How does it work in terms of keeping this kind of culture and maintaining the performance?
Dan: We went virtual when COVID hit, and then we decided as a team that we were going to stay as a virtual company. I will tell you, the transition was rough. We had been in an office with a big bullpen and a lot of energy, and it was a really fun environment where everyone could pick each other up when they were having a bad day.
But when COVID hit, we went virtual, and then we had to figure out everything [such as] how to do our meetings, what technology we were going to use, and etc. We learned that some people liked being remote, and some people didn’t. Some people were good at it, and some people weren’t. So, it took us six months to a year to restructure the organization and pivot to a virtual environment.
Once we stabilized, we started to scale and grow. I’ll tell you, it’s a way better environment than working in the office. It really changed and revolutionized our business.
The Challenges of Recruiting a Sales Professional
Lydia: You have teams all over the US and they all currently work remotely, and you also specialize in sales recruitment, as I understand it, right?
Dan: You’re exactly right. We are a niche player that helps companies hire top sales talent. It’s so hard. Most companies really struggle. They can hire salespeople, but they struggle to top producers. It’s really tough for them to figure that out.
Lydia: So, what are some unique challenges that businesses tend to face when it comes to recruiting great sales professionals?
Dan: The first thing that tends to happen is that a lot of companies think that if you go to the market and recruit a top salesperson, or what you think is a top salesperson, and put them into place, they will become a top salesperson. So, I think that’s the biggest challenge for companies. You think you hire a top producer, and they become a top producer.
But in actuality, there’s much more going on. You really want to align the culture and the selling style of the individual to the selling style of your organization, and that includes a bunch of key characteristics that you really need to look out for to make sure you find the right fit for your company.
Strategy for Finding and Training Sales Talent Who Fit Your Culture and Goals
Lydia: How does your firm help these businesses to identify or maybe just bridge that gap in terms of onboarding a new sales professional and getting them in line with the role and the culture?
Dan: For every new company that we meet, we spend a few calls with a free consultation, understanding the sales model, the environment, the culture, what they’re selling, the size of their sales, their sales cycle, and their quotas. We walk through everything with the company so that we can understand exactly what their model looks like.
Once we understand what their model looks like, we can give them some direction on what we should all be looking for, at least what we would do, what our strategy would be to recruit talented sales professionals. Whether they choose to work with us or not is up to them. But at least they have an opportunity to consult with us and wrap their heads around what our strategy would be and maybe a different perspective as to how they need to hire talented individuals.
Once they learn how to hire them, then the question is around onboarding and sustainability. What are the key performance indicators that are going to help you identify if this salesperson is going to be a top producer? You should understand your metrics and really hold the individual accountable for the job that needs to be done.
The Key Qualities of Top Salespeople and How to Spot Them
Lydia: And the sales roles itself can vary vastly from one industry to the other. So, how does your firm adapt the approach to recruiting salespeople from different industries and segments?
Dan: We don’t. The thing is, when you’re recruiting salespeople, the industry doesn’t matter to us. Although I would say, we do not work in the business-to-consumer or retail market. But in the business-to-business market, it is irrelevant. What we are good at is finding top sales talent, regardless of the industry. We know how to do it, we know how to search, we know how to get candidates excited.
What happens for many companies is they have a really talented HR team. Most of the time we partner with those teams because while they handle all of the other roles in the organization, the sales role tends to be their biggest challenge, and because it becomes their biggest challenge, it creates the most amount of headwinds. So, when they’re working on sales roles, and they realize they can’t find the talent they want, they typically use us for assistance.
Then that comes down to your ability to find a top sales producer, who is maybe the number one salesperson in their organization, who is 200% of their quota. We have the ability to reach out to that individual, get them excited, gain interest, and then educate them on new opportunities that may be able to advance their career, or at least educate them on opportunities that we think could really add value to their current career and situation.
Lydia: These top salespeople must have some key qualities or skills and be fundamentally present in sales itself. So, what traits do they have in common?
Dan: To find a top producer, and there’s always controversy when I say this, but to find a top producer, they are the hardest workers. They work whether they like the job itself or not, they are driven by work, accountability, and accomplishments. So, what you’ll find is that it’s not just sales, it could be every role in an organization. But those that are the most driven, and you can ask questions around this based on their early childhood all the way up to where they are today, what have they done throughout their life? What are their accomplishments? Because you want those individuals who love the work, they outproduce the entire team typically. So, that’s number one.
Number two, some of the soft skills that are going to be important are dependent upon your environment and the sales type. Some environments are incredibly technical, and an incredibly technical person can be a really hard worker. A lot of times, people think of a salesperson, and they say, “What do you want in a salesperson?” They say, “I want someone that’s driven, motivated, hungry, energized.” You can have an incredibly hard worker who doesn’t display a lot of those same characteristics but is technical, talented, can speak with confidence and conviction, is knowledgeable, and will outwork the competition. So, there’s so much to unravel when you’re talking about organizations, cultures, and sales models to make sure that you can find the right fit for your organization.
Belief and Competition: The Secrets to Motivating Salespeople
Lydia: Interesting because the drive to produce results is inherent in all salespeople and in anyone who's driven by and motivated by goals and results. What does it take to keep a salesperson motivated in his or her role within the company?
Dan: I think a lot of it has to be internal. There has to be accountability, and someone has to be motivated. There are a few things. One is, it’s building belief in what they’re selling, in what they’re doing, in what they can do, and once they build belief, then they have to take action. They have to reach out to companies, they have to contact individuals. Once they take action, they start to see results. When they see their results, and they start closing business, then they become more motivated, and as they become more motivated, they believe more.
So, if you’re not building a culture where there is belief, and they can do the job, and they are accountable, then you can’t sustain it.
But if they continue to find belief, and they find success, and they continue to succeed, they will become more motivated, and when you build that type of environment, it becomes very contagious, and not only does it become contagious, but it also spreads to the rest of the organization. So that’s number one.
Number two, healthy competition. Make it fun, compete with each other, and work together. It could be team spiffs, it could be individual spiffs. But the point is, make it fun for the organization. Because work doesn’t have to be miserable. No matter what the work is, you can make it fun. You just have to choose if you’re going to have fun with it or not. So, have competitions and spiffs and giveaways and make it fun, make it dynamic. Because we all know the job in sales is very difficult and if you can do that, you can really sustain and motivate a really positive and talented team.
How to Align Sales Professionals with Your Core Values and Culture
Lydia: I know you mentioned this earlier about culture being critical when it comes to retaining talent in specific organizations or in different businesses. So, let's go back and focus on that. How important is cultural fit when it comes to hiring sales professionals?
Dan: It is critical because if your team does not live the same core values that the corporation lives, it can easily become negative. Once it becomes negative, then it’s like cancer that can spread quickly. So, when they have a top producer who is not as positive as the rest of the organization, that is where companies struggle because now you have a talented person who is selling well, but they are actually on the back end, destroying the culture and environment. So, for executives, that’s always a challenging thing to figure out.
What we do is we use our talent assessments. When we talk to and work with our consultants, the ultimate goal is to coach them up. So, how do we coach them up? We have to figure out where they need to be coached. Is it around productivity, or maybe it’s not productivity? Maybe they are crushing it in productivity. How do they live their core values? Do they share the same belief system? If you find that they are not living the same core values, you either coach them up or, unfortunately, you have to coach them out. And that is something that took us a long time to figure out.
For example, one of our core values is to compete to win. I mean, just have urgency. When I say compete to win, compete with yourself, compete with your peers, and compete with other firms that you are not familiar with. Just have urgency and motivation, and move quickly because that’s what’s required. If you have a person who can’t compete to win or doesn’t have that urgency and motivation, then you have to find out, as a manager, why? What is it about them? What are they missing? Why don’t they have the urgency? Is there something hampering their growth, or what is holding them back?
As a result, what we try to do is we try to figure out if they are high on production but low on core values, we need to help them elevate themselves in core values. If they can’t elevate themselves in core values and they continue to live different core values, then unfortunately, they are not a great fit for our organization. But our goal is to coach them up both culturally and from a productivity standpoint, when you get both of those moving up to an A-player, then your entire team will continue to be coached up.
Lydia: It’s interesting, especially now that you also mentioned that your team is also decentralized, it’s remote work, and everything is virtual. So in terms of hiring sales professionals who are fully remote, for instance, or virtual sales teams, what is the key or what are some tips for keeping that motivation alive, and also making sure that you’re constantly checking in and all those tips that you just gave like keeping it fun, alive, competitive, exciting and hungry? So, how do you keep that going?
Dan: It can be challenging. For example, in a lot of companies that are field-based, their sales teams are often remote as it is. But what we found is that the remote environment is even more effective because of all the technology that we use. We have a standing meeting every single morning and, in some cases, a 15-minute meeting. In some cases, it’s even longer. The idea is, while we’re not in the office together, we are still doing video calls like this all the time, like group calls, and individual calls. We use video like we’re sitting next to each other at the office. The only downside is, you don’t have the camaraderie of the entire office at one time. No one’s exactly going out for lunch together. Those things aren’t happening. But we do trips and club trips, and company trips, and all kinds of things to try to get the team together. But video like]Zoom, Google Meet, and all these things have made it so easy to communicate and meet each other. It’s just like you said, virtual.
The Benefits of Building Custom Software for Sales Recruitment
Lydia: In terms of adapting or adopting technologies, especially Artificial Intelligence that you see today, and all of the different tools that are available. How does your firm embrace these different tools and technological changes around recruitment specifically?
Dan: We test and try all kinds of AI. I can’t say we’re experts yet. I don’t know if the technology is completely there for us. But we do brainstorm, especially in our monthly meetings, about what technology, what’s changing, what should we try, and what should we use. So far this year, we’ve tried so many different applications to improve our business, and we’ve found nothing that’s really knocked it out of the park for us, but we’re going to continue to try. We’ve also built our own software. We had to build our own software because we’ve been doing this for 22 years with an exclusive focus on sales recruiting, and the reason why we built that is because we wanted to offer our clients full transparency.
So, when they work with our firm, when we deliver a candidate to them, it’s a three-dimensional candidate. Basically, it’s their contact information, their photo, their compensation requirements, that’s base salary and on-target earnings. It’s their average deal size. It’s their sales cycle. It’s the audience they’re selling to. It’s their percentage of the quota. In a quick snapshot, you can see who a candidate is, you can see why we think they’re a good fit, you can see all of the notes that we’ve included, you can see their availability, you can see everything.
So, when a company works with us, as we start to introduce them to candidates, they see this quick snapshot, and they’re more educated than they’ve ever been before. Instead of looking at a two-dimensional resume, they have all this data, which they can look at in probably two minutes, and decide if a candidate is a good fit or not.
More importantly, it helps them become educated. They learn about the market, they see what the candidates have accomplished, and what kind of compensation plans they’re expecting. They see who they’re selling to and their average deal size. And then they realize and learn, with all this data that we’re sharing with them, what candidates could be a good fit. As they start to interview them, and as they start to learn more, they realize, “Wow, we’ve never experienced this level of talent before, and now we understand what this level of talent costs and what it’s going to take to bring a top producer onto our organization.”
Finding Qualified Sales Candidates within Three Days or Less
Lydia: How has it benefited your team internally in terms of looking at the data and looking at the talent pool that you have the pipeline and hiring process in itself?
Dan: We have a huge network and a really strong brand, which is awesome. I’m thankful every day, and one of our core values is to do what’s right, and by doing what’s right, you just build a really strong following. So, our network is incredibly strong, which is awesome.
The reason why it’s so beneficial is because the technology that we’ve built helps our recruiters understand the candidates much better, and much easier for us to search on the key criteria that are important for our clients. So, we can search on an individual who has an average deal size of 500,000 to a million dollars, or we can search on an individual who is selling to the health care marketplace, or search on individuals who are transactional in nature or strategic in nature.
So, as a result, because we share all this data with our clients, it’s given us the ability to dissect our searches and find the talent much more quickly. For any search, no matter how difficult it is, we guarantee that we’re going to introduce you to your first qualified candidate within three days or less. That means that you’re not going to hire the person in three days or less, but you are going to see the talent that we can deliver.
The reason why we do it so quickly is because we know that hiring salespeople is the critical success factor, and every day you are down a salesperson, you’re losing revenue. So, for our clients, we commit that within three days, we’re going to find someone who matches your exact needs and is interested in your opportunity.
What we do is we help them find the talent quickly, and usually, within 30 days, they make a hire. If you work with us, it’s about speed. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We’re excellent at what we do, and we want to find you the right talent quickly.
The Secrets of Success in Sales Recruitment for Beginners
Lydia: In terms of those who are starting out today in sales recruitment, breaking into that field and trying to find their own path in this particular vertical or niche, what advice would you have for them?
Dan: I would say hang in there because it’s a tough road. It seems simple, but a lot of people say that the first five years of business is a struggle. It takes time to build a brand, and recruiting salespeople is a challenging task. We’ve just been doing it for so long. I guess I’d say you can never give up, no matter how difficult and challenging it gets.
Lydia: Going back to Treeline being a great place to work. What is the secret ingredient behind that?
Dan: It’s the people we hire. We hire people who share the same core values. So, it’s easy to be motivated and love a culture, brand, and company together. We just love the people we work with and the work we do. I think we all feel very lucky to be part of something so great.
Lydia: Thank you very much, Dan, for your time and your generous insights today. I really enjoyed this exchange. For those who are listening in, someone might want to pick up a conversation with you. So, drop us your contact details. I'm sure LinkedIn is one of them.
Dan: You can find me on LinkedIn at Dan Fantasia, or you can go to treelineinc.com, our website. If you want to click on a Contact Us form and say I'd love to chat with Dan, and you leave your contact information. I'll give you a ring, or I'll send you an email.
LinkedIn or our website, reach out I'm happy to chat. Even if you're just struggling to figure out your own sales environment, and you don't need to hire what you think you might need to hire and you just want to brainstorm. Let me know. I'm happy to jump on a call.
Lydia: Thank you, Dan. We have been in conversation with Dan Fantasia, President and CEO of Treeline. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe for more weekly episodes of All-In Recruitment.
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