Podcast Ep 69 | Topgrading Virtual Bench

This week on The Growth Whis­per­ers, we talk about the Top­grad­ing vir­tu­al bench, a recruit­ing tac­tic for exec­u­tives who need a bet­ter way to find addi­tion­al lead­ers or key team members.

The Top­grad­ing vir­tu­al bench is impor­tant because it builds a list of vet­ted, pre-qual­i­fied can­di­dates for a job open­ing that you can draw upon when you need to.

In the episode, we explain why it’s impor­tant and pro­vide a sim­ple role-play on how you can cold call poten­tial can­di­dates to put them onto your vir­tu­al bench.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Wel­come to the growth Whis­per­er is where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, com­pa­nies that will last com­pa­nies that will have a mean­ing­ful impact com­pa­nies that you care about. That’s what we’re about. As always, today, I’m joined by with my co host, Kevin Lawrence. Good, Kevin, how are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:35

I am doing awe­some Brad, I’m excit­ed to be here. I just love doing these shows, because it gives a good chance to think about some of the things that we work on all the time and learn as we’re doing the work. And then we get to kind of, you know, mash our brains togeth­er and come up with even bet­ter ideas. So yeah, I enjoy it. And I’m, you know, as we’re at Episode 69, we’re, you know, past two thirds of the way to 100. And for some­thing that start­ed off as a Hey, let’s try this for a few weeks and see what hap­pens. It’s been pret­ty cool.

Brad Giles 01:06

Yeah, I’m enjoy­ing it, too. It’s good. It’s good fun. I remem­ber, in the first few episodes, we were say­ing, Yeah, we’ll give it a few. And we’ll see how it goes. But no, no, it is going very, very good. Well, as always, today, we like to start with a word or phrase, as we advo­cate peo­ple do in their meet­ings just to break the ice for one of a bet­ter term. So Kevin, tell me, what is your word or phrase for the day? Mine is grog­gy. I had my sec­ond shot of the vac­ci­na­tion the day that we’re record­ing the show, and it’s start­ing to kick in a lit­tle bit. You know, it’s fun­ny, last time I got my first shot. My arm was a bit sore. That has­n’t hap­pened yet, although I’m sure it will. But yeah, I just feel a lit­tle bit grog­gy, a lit­tle tired. And, but I feel awe­some. Know­ing that I’m done. And soon, I’ll be able to trav­el. And I’ll be able to poten­tial­ly come to your coun­try or oth­er great coun­tries that I’m used to going to. So I would say I’m, I’m grog­gy and grate­ful is it would be the you know, has the tag a sec­ond word on there. How about your­self run? Mine? Is it human nature? Human nature? Okay, two words. I don’t think I’ve ever said one word, but that’s okay. I don’t think you’ve ever said one word you’re gen­er­al­ly have a cou­ple. Yes, yeah. So human nature. And the rea­son is, we are enjoy­ing the dance in Aus­tralia, we’ve had quite a few lock downs. And a lot of peo­ple are point­ing fin­gers at each oth­er. about why and you know, it’s get­ting a bit tire­some, but I guess I’m just think­ing, do you know what it this is just human nature. When we look at what hap­pened in India, where there was a big surge, a sec­ond wave that was just hor­ri­ble and ter­ri­ble. I think that a lot of these things are caused just by human nature, peo­ple get tired of things, they get com­pla­cent. They want to go back to nor­mal, they don’t want to have to do the things that they need to do to play safe. And that’s kind of what hap­pened, you know, in the 1918. Flu as well. So I’m a bit off track here. But my point being, I think it’s human nature and know­ing that human nature is a part of the neg­a­tive con­se­quences, some­times of things that hap­pen that can actu­al­ly be applied to busi­ness as well. Some­times peo­ple do things, it’s just human nature. And you just got to deal with it and move on, or try to active­ly be con­scious of it.

Kevin Lawrence 03:45

Yes, it seems like it’s human nature, to have a lack of discipline.

Brad Giles 03:51

Yes.

Kevin Lawrence 03:53

I watched on on July 1, in Cana­da, Cana­da Day, are in our province for sure. They announced you no longer had to wear masks. And like whoosh, they fell off every­one’s face that was up in a small­er town. But if they fell off every­one’s face, like almost imme­di­ate­ly, like peo­ple like let’s move on. Peo­ple want to have par­ties. Peo­ple want to do stuff. And I hope that because of the lev­el of vac­ci­na­tions that we have, that it’ll stick and, you know, we’re past this thing. Yes. Because human nature is like, we just want to social­ize. You know, I had friends come over tonight. My par­ents are with me. mov­ing house, par­ents are here we’re doing some pack­ing and some friends came by to drop off a car and, and they’re there. They’re giv­ing my par­ents a hug because they’ve known my par­ents for years. But that’s just human nature. We want to hug peo­ple and we want to be close to peo­ple and all this wear a mask and stay apart. You know, it kind of grinds on peo­ple or did it grind on peo­ple and hope­ful­ly, that’s most­ly behind us. Awe­some. Well, let’s, let’s dig into the show today. So what are we talk­ing about? We’re not you know, we’re talk­ing lit­er­al­ly human nature comes into play. Being grog­gy could be an excuse for not doing what we’re going to talk about today. And hope­ful­ly by the end, peo­ple are grate­ful for what you’ve done the show. Let’s hope but so so what’s the name of the game today, Brad?

Brad Giles 05:14

Yeah, the name of the game is what is a top grad­ing vir­tu­al bench and why you need one. So many peo­ple talk about the vir­tu­al bench. The vir­tu­al bench is a con­cept that comes from top grad­ing by bread smart, and hir­ing is a prob­lem. Back in the 1920s, around the Great Depres­sion, there was­n’t real­ly a prob­lem with hir­ing because it was unskilled labor gen­er­al­ly, for a lot of roles. And there was no short­age of peo­ple to fill those unskilled roles. So it was­n’t real­ly that com­plex. As we’ve moved into a knowl­edge econ­o­my, the war for tal­ent has become more and more of a prob­lem. Or oppor­tu­ni­ty, depend­ing on how you look at it. And what that now means is that there’s no sub­sti­tute for hav­ing the best peo­ple, we call those peo­ple, a play­er’s a play­er is defined as some­one who’s in the top 10% of avail­able can­di­dates at the pay rate that you pro­vide. So this isn’t pay­ing a lot more, this is the pay rate that you pro­vide. So it’s a top 10%. And so they are that is a top grad­ing con­cept that you and I both work with. But the vir­tu­al bench is anoth­er con­cept in that area, to ensure that you can actu­al­ly fill vacant roles. It’s a tac­tic, because many peo­ple just put an adver­tise­ment on an online job board, and then get real­ly sur­prised when they don’t get amaz­ing can­di­dates turn up,

Kevin Lawrence 07:02

right, and they’ve got this posi­tion that they need to fill, and they get kind of des­per­ate. So imag­ine, imag­ine, you know, a bas­ket­ball game, they will have the Nation­al Bas­ket­ball League NBA, which is most­ly based in the US they play odd. Some­times they played some oth­er place, but most of us league. And imag­ine you’re out there in a very impor­tant game,

Brad Giles 07:27

and one of your key play­ers gets hurt. Well, if you don’t have any oth­er play­ers, you now have a prob­lem, you’re going to pan­ic, you’ll pull some­one out of the stands if you have to, ah, but the sports teams are smart, they have this thing called a bench on the side of the court, and they’ve got oth­er play­ers warmed up ready to go at all times. So one so they can trade off. So peo­ple don’t run out of ener­gy, too, they can replace an injured play­er instan­ta­neous­ly. Now, that bench get­ting those sec­ond line play­ers in some cas­es, some­times they rotat­ing, but they put a lot of work into get­ting that bench that’s right there to have addi­tion­al play­ers ready to go. That’s how they oper­ate in sports, they have to now bless them, they have oth­er vir­tu­al bench­es of the feed­er teams, you know that are play­ing in dif­fer­ent low­er lev­el leagues that feed into that high­er lev­el NBA league. And it’s like that way in most sports.

08:22

But we don’t do that in busi­ness. Gen­er­al­ly, we have our play­ers that are on the court play­ing. And we don’t gen­er­al­ly have back­ups. So if some­thing hap­pens, we gen­er­al­ly end up being des­per­ate, which makes us more like­ly to pull some­body out of the stands and have them come play who’s not the most qual­i­fied, not even a great fit. But man, we just need some­one on the court,

Brad Giles 08:45

any­body and any any­one, please. So so. And we make a lot of bud­get, nev­er­mind that we make a bad choice. But we are also in a pinch. And some­times for the right peo­ple, it takes 369 months to recruit these high lev­el capa­ble peo­ple. So the idea of the vir­tu­al batch is that you have your own group of peo­ple who are warmed up, ready to join, you are ready for a more seri­ous con­ver­sa­tion to join you. So that if there is an oppor­tu­ni­ty, you’re not start­ing from zero, you know, it’s like they’re already warmed up to six or sev­en or eight vers­es start­ing at zero and hav­ing none and you’re much more like­ly to have great can­di­dates because yeah, that’s the whole idea is you’ve got peo­ple warmed up who you already know are amaz­ing. Peo­ple are what we would call a play­ers. So you’re not des­per­ate and cross­ing your fin­gers and hop­ing because that’s the real prob­lem, isn’t it? that many peo­ple they only think about it when a per­son resigns. There’s no suc­ces­sion plan. There’s no, not a week. How are we going to main­tain a high qual­i­ty team. It’s just a case of, Oh well, some­one’s resigned. Let’s Go to HR and let’s put an advert on the job board on the online job board to try to find some­one and then we’ll see what comes in. And then they say, well, the mar­ket isn’t that good at the moment? Of course not. But

10:13

imag­ine it’s actu­al­ly insane. Brad, imag­ine if our sales­peo­ple did that, you know, when they lost a cus­tomer, they start­ed to prospect and look for a new one. We would nev­er grow. No, but our sales­peo­ple get it, and our sales teams get it. But we as exec­u­tives and lead­ers don’t nor­mal­ly, and our sales­peo­ple know, they have to put time into prospect­ing and qual­i­fy­ing and woo­ing and lunch­ing and cough­ing, and all of these things, to build rela­tion­ships. And some­times it takes years. And the truth is, as lead­ers and exec­u­tives, we need to do the same. And we are often not, I’ve got some CEOs I work with that are amaz­ing. They nev­er stop, lit­er­al­ly nev­er stop.

Brad Giles 10:57

But it’s a dis­ci­plined effort that lead­ers need to have. So any­way, we’re very pas­sion­ate about this. We’ve got some great exam­ples we’ll get into but the first point I want to get into is that real­ly the high­est per­form­ing peo­ple rarely or almost nev­er apply for jobs.

11:14

Because the amaz­ing a play­ers are very well tak­en care of. Yeah, the com­pa­nies know that they’re great. They take very good care of them. And when they do decide that, enough of this, some­thing has pissed them off, and they’ve had enough. Gen­er­al­ly, they have a chat with a cou­ple of peo­ple. And they instant­ly get an inter­view and get hired. They don’t even make it to the mar­ket­place. Yeah, they don’t make it because they talk to some rela­tion­ships, who already know them, love them, and prob­a­bly have been court­ing them along the way. And then the way they go, and then most are not head­hunt­ed. That’s what anoth­er word for they can be head­hunt­ed. And in those in those vul­ner­a­ble moments. Exact­ly. But they’re not. They’re rarely ever get­ting to the point when they’re apply­ing. Yeah, yeah. Because they don’t have to, because they’re being pulled out all the freakin time.

Brad Giles 12:06

And then we won­der if a play­er’s rarely apply for jobs. We won­der why we don’t get a play­er’s through the online job board sys­tem. It’s it’s log­i­cal, like peo­ple don’t go there, they’re not going to say, I’m going to go and try to find a job because they’ve already got mul­ti­ple inquiries inbound on a reg­u­lar basis. Cor­rect. I would make one dis­tinc­tion, though, there is a lev­el of role where that is true and where it’s not true. So what’s inter­est­ing that we found in our work is that, you know, if we’re look­ing at sort of a play­er, admin­is­tra­tive peo­ple, some­times even like exec­u­tive assis­tants and admin­is­tra­tive peo­ple, they’re often not as con­nect­ed as say, your direc­tor of sales, your direc­tor of oper­a­tions, your direc­tor of social respon­si­bil­i­ty and things like that. So we I would say some­times at a man­ag­er lev­el or a direc­tor lev­el and up for sure every­thing we’re talk­ing about is true. And there are some posi­tions clos­er to the front line. That that it’s not as true, there is some clos­er to the front­line where they might apply for jobs, but it’s it’s almost like a dif­fer­ent part of the mar­ket. Yeah. So we’re talk­ing about man­agers, direc­tors, exec­u­tives, all that kind of stuff. You know, that’s that’s kind of what we’re talk­ing about today. Yeah, yeah. And so the sec­ond point, it’s like sports and sales. So we gave the exam­ple of the NBL. Before, but But what we’re, what we’re say­ing is, you’ve got to have some kind of fun­nel, you’ve got to have some kind of think­ing beyond the reac­tion. So you need to be proac­tive in this area to Yes, have an exam­ple. I’ll give you an exam­ple. I worked with a cus­tomer in the home­build­ing space. They were one of the large home builders in our area, and I walked into the one of the senior man­agers office and he proud­ly pulled out his draw­er on his desk. And he showed me, he said, I’ve got every sin­gle sales per­son­’s busi­ness card in our indus­try. And I’ve got notes about them. So if I need to fill a role, I know exact­ly the three or four peo­ple that I’m going to go and have a chat with now, maybe it’s not the right time for them, but maybe it is the right time for them. So he said, I nev­er adver­tised for jobs because in my role as a leader, we spoke about this a few weeks ago, the ambas­sador role. Yes, my job as a leader. I’m out there and I’m always under­stand­ing and build­ing my vir­tu­al bench. I know exact­ly who is where and who. actu­al­ly even unhap­py. And for the ones that are crap­py, you know, it puts sim­ply, he just does­n’t com­mu­ni­cate with them any­more. But he is very good at iden­ti­fy­ing who are the bet­ter ones, and then main­tain­ing a dia­logue with them. Anoth­er one of my clients had a list of sim­i­lar­ly, every top sales per­son in their indus­try in West­ern Cana­da, and he would do cof­fee with them all the time. And I remem­ber, there’s one guy we recruit­ed, who had a non com­pete, so we had to work some legal things to make it all legit. And give this guy a guar­an­tee for a cou­ple of years. I think the one guy alone was mag­ic, I love the guy still keep in con­tact with them. Over a 10 year peri­od, prob­a­bly put five to $10 mil­lion dol­lars of prof­it into the com­pa­ny, one freak­ing guy that he pur­sued for more than two years, cof­fees, chats, all of these oth­er things, and it was a beau­ti­ful decade, an amaz­ing decade. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a proac­tive activ­i­ty that’s real­ly, real­ly required. And a lot of peo­ple just don’t do it. And then when it kind of takes us to the next ones, like whose respon­si­bil­i­ty is that peo­ple think hrs role is to hire peo­ple. Well, if your HR peo­ple are in charge of all of this, you’re gen­er­al­ly going to be behind the eight ball, because they’re won­der­ful sup­port. We love the HR teams. But it’s the exec­u­tives with their net­works and their rela­tion­ships, which we’ll talk about next. And the man­agers and the direc­tors who can real­ly be out there because they know lots of peo­ple. And spend­ing time doing this, unfor­tu­nate­ly, peo­ple get too stuck doing their tac­ti­cal day job. And don’t spend enough time doing this stuff. But it’s not hrs respon­si­bil­i­ty to do the recruit­ing, their sup­port, they’re here to make sure that we do it well, that we fil­ter well that we onboard, well, all of those oth­er things. But it’s in a response.

Kevin Lawrence 17:04

If I had it my way, and some com­pa­nies we do do this, every exec­u­tive would have a KPI that relat­ed to their recruit­ing activ­i­ties. Because they’re respon­si­ble for build­ing the teams now and the best ones do the best ones absolute­ly are proac­tive in recruit­ing and do this. And and and some of the ones who are great don’t and it’s just because they don’t think of it. It’s not because they’re bad. It’s, it’s hard. It’s hard to think about and but when peo­ple do, it’s amaz­ing. Amaz­ing what hap­pens, oh, hrs job is to sup­port it. But not do it. Because it What can HR do? While they can top their net­work a lit­tle bit. They won’t have the same net­work as a lot of exec­u­tives and direc­tors. And then two, they can hire, they can hire recruiters. That’s about it. Yeah. Where we have a lot of oth­er things that we can do, because we’re doing oth­er activ­i­ties and have oth­er rela­tion­ships we can lever­age. Yeah, the I think that the what mat­ters with the vir­tu­al bench is that it’s work­ing on the busi­ness not work­ing in the busi­ness to pick up on your point. So if we do Stephen Cov­ey’s Sev­en Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Peo­ple, what we’re say­ing is that the vir­tu­al bench is it’s impor­tant and not urgent. Okay. It’s impor­tant and not urgent. And that means that peo­ple so often get sucked into the impor­tant and urgent and then when, when they’re doing that, okay, it means they’re not ded­i­cat­ing that time. So many times I’ve seen exec­u­tives put an item on the action item list that they want to build a vir­tu­al badge. And they know it’s a great con­cept and they know what works, but they nev­er actu­al­ly because it always sucked back into you use the word tac­ti­cal, I’ll use the word work­ing in the busi­ness ver­sus on the Absolute­ly, yeah, absolute­ly. And, and that’s where it falls over as a con­cept. So you’ve got to ded­i­cate the pri­or­i­ty to it, you’ve got to know that this is impor­tant. There was a team that I worked with, we’re going through a bit of a skills short­age in many places around the world. Cer­tain­ly we are here. And so we actu­al­ly run a ses­sion with the lead­er­ship team on the vir­tu­al bench. And we said every sin­gle per­son had to come with five peo­ple who could who were most like­ly in a play­er as home­work, and we need­ed to flesh them out so that we had basi­cal­ly I think it was like eight peo­ple insane. So 40 poten­tial peo­ple to come and work in the busi­ness. Now some of them weren’t suit­able and so forth. But the it was real­ly the first time that that lead­er­ship team had spent time think­ing about a vir­tu­al bench for many of them, and we got some crack­ing names. We got some real Real­ly good names on that bench that we can now work with and begin to build rela­tion­ships with. So yeah, it real­ly is work­ing on the busi­ness, not in the business.

20:11

Yeah, it’s investing

Brad Giles 20:11

in your future. It’s invest­ing ener­gy today that pays div­i­dends in the future, because one amaz­ing per­son added to the team makes a mas­sive dif­fer­ence. So we, we talked about this a lot, Brad, one of my favorite times when we brought this to life. Because some peo­ple are real­ly good at this nat­u­ral­ly. Or we’re down in Orlan­do, Flori­da, doing a quar­ter­ly meet­ing for one of my clients, one of my Amer­i­can clients. And I was talk­ing to the CEO, when I’m going look, we’re grow­ing like crazy. We need some oth­er key peo­ple at this table. And at the direc­tor slash leader table, and it was his idea. His name is actu­al­ly Angela Mora, CEO of medx. staffing down in the US, he’s like,

Kevin Lawrence 20:52

okay, we’re gonna do it right now. So he goes, guys, stop, open your lap­tops, go to LinkedIn. we’re recruit­ing, oth­er recruit­ing com­pa­ny, so they know how to do it. Yeah, it was a way to go in your net­work, who do you know, who do you know, that’s

Brad Giles 21:07

an A play­er that you would love to add to our team in the next three to five years? And who do you know, that knows, a play­er’s like, every time we need an exec­u­tive, Andrew would come up with some­body, he would always be dig­ging out and doing some awe­some recruit­ing. Now, the team needs to fil­ter because you know, some­times, you know, he would, he would get them to the table, but we need to make sure that they were good. And because the ones he brought some­times are good, some­times more, but that’s okay. He brought them on our job was to fil­ter them. So we had every­one make their list of the key peo­ple. And we got a cou­ple of great hires that have just that 30 min­utes that we spent on LinkedIn, because you were going into your cur­rent net­work of peo­ple, you know, and say­ing, hey, let’s pull them over. Yeah, they were also dig­ging back. And we said, Look, look back with peo­ple you haven’t talked to for 10 years go into your dor­mant net­work, which is some­times more pow­er­ful, because those are peo­ple who don’t run in the same cir­cle. They run in dif­fer­ent cir­cles, so their cir­cle of friends or peo­ple you don’t even know. Yeah, so we worked our active net­work, looked at our dor­mant net­work, and just made a list of peo­ple that peo­ple con­tin­ue to fol­low up with, again, and it pro­duced some great results. But the point of it is, every­one has LinkedIn, as an exam­ple, every­one has these con­texts, but not every­one was doing any­thing about it. So it was a sim­ple it was 30 min­utes in a meet­ing, and it worked beau­ti­ful­ly. Yeah, yeah, it can be as that’s what I did, that can be as sim­ple as that it makes it, it makes a dif­fer­ence, because that is a proac­tive activ­i­ty, rather than reac­tive, which is let’s put an advert out there and see what comes in. And then sub­se­quent­ly, as I said ear­li­er, com­plain about the mar­ket. Okay, so let’s move on. Where do we look, we’ve said LinkedIn was there was a very good exam­ple. So where

Kevin Lawrence 23:00

else LinkedIn, in your net­work of peo­ple, you know, went to col­lege with Yes, yeah. All that stuff. The peo­ple that you know, and your dorm it nev­er we haven’t talked? For sure over that.

Brad Giles 23:10

Yeah. So So Where else? A cou­ple of oth­er exam­ples where you could look to build your vir­tu­al bench might be sup­pli­ers. So you could bring up a sup­pli­er and say, we’re hir­ing at the moment, who is the best pos­si­ble can­di­date that you think might pos­si­bly work for us? Who’s the best per­son in our indus­try that you know, of who just con­sis­tent­ly cre­ates results? And a sup­pli­er? You know, they might say, Oh, I don’t know. But equal­ly, it’s worth the ques­tion. Because they might come up with two or three can­di­dates. That could be fantastic.

Kevin Lawrence 23:47

Yeah, anoth­er one’s trade shows, which hope­ful­ly will be hap­pen­ing, again, is the prac­tice, you get to see peo­ple in action, and you get to net­work and schmooze and build rela­tion­ships. Like, you know, one of my clients trade shows was his num­ber one recruit­ment source. Well, keep in mind, those of you that go to trade shows that your peo­ple could be get­ting recruit­ed, but that because they could have social time and get to know them. And some peo­ple go there look­ing for clients. He went there look­ing for employ­ees, that was his, his strategy.

Brad Giles 24:21

Yeah, and look, the oth­er one is cus­tomers, you could bring up your cus­tomers who prob­a­bly know your com­peti­tors pret­ty well and just say, look, we’re look­ing for an amaz­ing per­son who do you know, that might be an amaz­ing per­son that that could work for us? That’s not an unrea­son­able ques­tion to ask a

Kevin Lawrence 24:41

cus­tomer or who do you know that is like the best sales per­son that you deal with for any­thing? Yeah, but you love deal­ing with and then Okay, well, then then we can we can chat with them for sure.

Brad Giles 24:54

And so then the next point is how do you reach out so so this is a cold call, so sit­u­a­tion. So let’s role­play that I’ll be the employ­er if you like. And then let’s see how this goes more like you it. Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ring. Hel­lo, Kevin. Is it, Kevin? it this is Kevin, Who the hell is this? Hi, this is Brad, how you doing today? Look, you know, I work at ABC Corp. Maybe you’ve heard of us? Maybe you haven’t. But you know what? Your name just keeps pop­ping up? And I don’t know, I just thought I’d reach out to you because so many peo­ple have men­tioned that you’re a bit of a star in your indus­try that you’re doing real­ly well. Now. We don’t actu­al­ly have any jobs at the moment. Okay, I’ll just caveat that. But I just thought I could­n’t help but reach out because you’re obvi­ous­ly doing some amaz­ing things, and won­dered if per­haps you’d like to catch up for cof­fee. Now. Maybe we could work togeth­er one day, maybe we could­n’t. I’m not say­ing as I said, there’s noth­ing on the table. But I won­der if you’d be open for a cof­fee or cof­fee some­time in the next cou­ple of months? Sure. That sounds inter­est­ing. That’s how you do, right. Yeah. Let’s book a date. And research says and you know, dif­fer­ent scripts, dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions, about 70 to 80% of can­di­dates that are qual­i­fied for the role you have, will have a con­ver­sa­tion. Yeah. Will the top­ic peo­ple will lis­ten, because, you know, it’s like, every­one wants to be invit­ed, although, whether it’s men or women, they want to be sex­ist. Every­one wants to be invit­ed to the prom or go to the prom, ie peo­ple want to be asked peo­ple take plea­sure in being asked. It’s affirm­ing and makes peo­ple feel good. Right? And whether or not they have any inter­est. It’s just it’s Yeah, it’s ter­rain asked.

Kevin Lawrence 26:52

It’s flat­ter­ing, it is flat­ter­ing. And if any­thing comes from it, who knows? But just it’s real­ly reach­ing out. And just as you did, hey, let’s grab a cof­fee. love to chat with you. I hear amaz­ing things about you, like you said, which was all true, I’m sure in that role­play. But that’s as sim­ple as that.

Brad Giles 27:11

Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. I flat out. I’m flat­tered. I’ve said we’ve got no jobs. So there’s no, there’s no pur­chas­ing threat. When I do that. It’s not like, Hey, Kevin, I want you to come and work for us. We need some­one by Tues­day, do you reck­on you can do that, in des­per­a­tion, it just reeks and so instead, it’s like maybe one day we’ll be able to work togeth­er. We’re just build­ing a team of play­ers per team of stars. And every­thing I’ve heard about you sounds like you might be a good fit. Yep. So yeah, that’s an exam­ple of how to reach out to a cus­tomer. And then I think the oth­er thing is that you’ve got to nur­ture your leads, you’ve got to nur­ture your vir­tu­al bench. There’s no point hav­ing a cof­fee with sus­pects. Yes, if you’re going to have a cof­fee, you’re going to be pre­pared to have 14 con­ver­sa­tions. I nev­er for­get when I was in sales ear­li­er in my career, one of my clients that became the num­ber two client of the com­pa­ny I worked for that I cold called, I had 17 meet­ings with him before he signed off. 17x 17 Fol­low up sor­ry, 17, fol­low ups, com­bi­na­tion of calls, meet­ings, etc. But then he became the num­ber two clients, the com­pa­ny. And that’s what it takes. That’s how you win. But if you’re going to don’t both­er doing one if you’re not going to do 17, because it’s very unlike­ly to hap­pen with one con­ver­sa­tion. It’s like, you know, meet­ing some­one and going on a date, and then expect­ed that you’re going to get mar­ried and spend your life togeth­er by the sec­ond time you meet them. That’s not how the world works. That’s not how the world works. No, it’s not it. But but but a lot of peo­ple will not do the 17. Yeah, I’ve seen some stats. I know that was your exam­ple 17 that it takes 12 calls to make a sale in a b2b envi­ron­ment. But think about it this way. If you think about the absolute top a play­er in your indus­try, the per­son who will do three times the work will pro­duce three times the result of any­one else. How many phone calls, would you be pre­pared all cof­fees would you be pre­pared to have with that per­son in order to have that per­son work for your orga­ni­za­tion? loss should be the answer. Lots and lots. If the per­son was in sales, and they were gonna put 10 mils on the bot­tom line, how many con­ver­sa­tions would you have? Or if they were an amaz­ing a play­er that was going to make your busi­ness much bet­ter make it award win­ning, make it sus­tain­able, take pres­sure off your shoul­ders, like amaz­ing peo­ple are worth what­ev­er the heck it takes. But we don’t act in accor­dance with that we ask HR to go hire a recruiter to go and get it for us which is real­ly almost absurd. It’s almost like It’s wrong, right? It’s wrong. And I under­stand why it hap­pens because peo­ple are busy. And they got oth­er things they need to do. So it’s a great strat­e­gy that can pro­duce amaz­ing returns, both in terms of great peo­ple. And, and often you can get them quick­er on your team, you know, not, not even a few weeks ago, I was in a quar­ter­ly, off­side strate­gic meet­ing with a client. And we were talk­ing about the skills short­age again, and the CEOs there. And then the oper­a­tions man­ag­er, or the gen­er­al man­ag­er is also there. And we’re talk­ing about who could we get to fill some senior roles? And I said, I said, well, in terms of the ambas­sado­r­i­al role, they call the CEO, the can­di­date whis­per­er, right. So that’s the kind of the joke that they say, because he goes and meets with a can­di­date, and then they some­how come to work for us. But we said, Why don’t we roll out the can­di­date whis­per­er, because they’d had there been one or two con­ver­sa­tions over the past year with this per­son, they need­ed a role. And I said, Look, why don’t we just get the can­di­date whis­per­er? Why don’t we get the CEO there to go with the oper­a­tions man­ag­er, you have lunch, and then we’ll get a real­ly amaz­ing per­son. Now, that may seem so sim­ple and easy to us in this con­ver­sa­tion, but it had­n’t real­ly dawned on them. So we were say­ing, How can we strate­gi­cal­ly use the leader as an ambas­sador in this role, to get the can­di­date to come over. And so that is not only just about that indi­vid­u­al’s capa­bil­i­ty as a can­di­date whis­per­er, that is every lead­ers poten­tial to attract peo­ple on the vir­tu­al bench.

Brad Giles 31:46

And that’s a great way to sum­ma­rize it is that real­ly, to be most effec­tive in your role, you need to build a vir­tu­al bench because you need to con­tin­u­al­ly add the right tal­ent. And you want to be able to be proac­tive­ly doing that even it might even be if a team mem­ber is fal­ter­ing, and they need to you need to move them to a dif­fer­ent part of the busi­ness or some­thing else. Being able to do this is not rock­et sci­ence, it is not a high­ly skilled activ­i­ty. It’s just a dis­ci­plined activ­i­ty. Like most things in busi­ness, and I go back to Jim Collins, it’s, you know, what, what makes com­pa­nies incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful, is relent­less exe­cu­tion of the bor­ing basics. And this is one of those. It’s a dis­ci­plined activ­i­ty, no dif­fer­ent than sales, peo­ple prospect­ing, or sports scouts scout­ing. But when you do it, you have a much bet­ter chance of build­ing a bet­ter team and know the bet­ter team. So as we talked about, real­ly, so we got like five things here today, real­ly, is that a play­er’s rarely apply for jobs, espe­cial­ly at the mid and senior lev­els. You know, like sports and sales, you got to have active ener­gy into proac­tive recruit­ment. And that’s hav­ing your most tal­ent­ed, con­nect­ed peo­ple doing it, you know, not not not del­e­gat­ing it too much. whose respon­si­bil­i­ty, it’s yours. HR is a sup­port, and they’re great sup­port. But you know, when a hired recruiter is a solu­tion that we use all the time, because peo­ple haven’t done this if peo­ple did this con­sis­tent­ly, we prob­a­bly would­n’t need to do the hard recruiters are not near as often. And where sup­pli­ers, cus­tomers, LinkedIn dor­mant net­works, trade shows every­where, any­where, your local café, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be in recruit­ment mode, like like, like you’re a com­mis­sioned salesperson,

Kevin Lawrence 33:32

then how reach out, say, Hi, tell them truth that you’ve been told great things about them, and invite them to the prom, invite them to a cof­fee, let them know that they’re impor­tant and spe­cial and to be will­ing to have a con­ver­sa­tion with them. With no strings attached. Let’s just have a chat. Know­ing that you’ll prob­a­bly have 17

Brad Giles 33:51

awe­some. Yeah, vir­tu­al bench such an impor­tant con­cept. So thank you for that. Thank you for that sum­ma­ry. Let’s move to close. Thank you for lis­ten­ing to the growth whis­pers I hope you got some val­ue today. I espe­cial­ly got val­ue out of our role­play I hope that you did too. Yeah, we should try that in the future. You can find us Kevin Lawrence is avail­able at Lawrence and koat​.com. And myself, Brad Giles avail­able at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au. And of course as always, you can catch us on YouTube. Just search the growth whis­pers and you’ll find the video ver­sion of this. Thanks for watch­ing. We hope that you have a great week.