HL Conf Call October 2,12

The speaker talks about the importance of accountability and leading in management. They emphasize the value of evaluating performance based on concrete results and how Primerica provides numbers and metrics to assess performance. They discuss the need to hold people accountable for results and how the speaker personally held their team members accountable. They mention that leaders should not feel hypocritical about holding others accountable if they are doing the same. They emphasize the importance of training and teaching people the necessary skills before holding them accountable. The speaker believes that it is unfair to allow people to fail without providing proper training and tools for success. They emphasize the role of leaders in providing opportunities and support for their team members to succeed. Hey, good morning everybody. Hey listen, I got another, this is the second part of that other last week's message on accountability. This time, you know, it's called accountability and leading in it for the notes of sales manager or regional managers or RVPs or SVPs or SNSDs, right? Look, in management, we prefer to evaluate performance based on factual concrete results. That's one of the great things about our leaders, both of them that come out and how you look on PLL, your numbers, you can see exactly what everybody's actually doing no matter what they're telling you. The numbers just don't lie. They're there for everybody to see and that's one of the greatest things about Primerica is that we can base, you know, our value and our performance based on exactly what's happened, not what we'd like to have happened, but what actually did happen. Everything can be captured or reported is the data provides an endless array of metrics for management to pull over, review, and assess. There's all kinds of stuff that you can look at on those, right? We look at those every day. Most of the metrics are an autopsy. They're lagging indicators about which absolutely nothing whatsoever may be done, right? So in other words, they're all, all those numbers on PLL are all about numbers that have already happened. You can't do anything about those numbers. You can only do something about the numbers going forward from here. You can only act on that information and say, okay, I see a deficit here. I see we need work here. I see we need to focus on recruiting and we need to focus on teaching people how to close. We need to focus on teaching people how to get better appointments or more appointments, a lot of prospect, et cetera, but you can't really do anything about the numbers that have already passed. The good leaders hold their people accountable for results. This is one of the, one of the things that I think I've done a really good job of in my career, especially when I was building it. I was, you know, the accountability king, if you will, man, I was all over everybody who was serious. I didn't do this with every person in my business, but everybody who told me they're serious, everybody was committed, every, especially full-time people, everybody that was, you know, that said they were wanting to be RVPs and wanted to make big money, right? I held them super ultra accountable, calling them, asking them where they're at all the time. Where are you at? Where are your numbers? How many people you've got coming to the meeting, you know, the op meeting this week? How many people coming to the Saturday training? How many people coming to the fast start school? How many people coming to the retreat we have coming up? How many, what are you doing? How many appointments do you have tomorrow? What happened tonight? What happened with that appointment? Well, if nothing happened, what are you doing to follow up? When are you going to get back with them? What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? How about your, you know, you got the, you have, you mastered the seven fundamentals yet. You have, you may have, you mastered how to prospect, how to set appointments, you know, how to do a great presentation. Do you know everything about the products? Do you know how to overcome all the most common objections that come up? Do you know what to do to recruit somebody at the kitchen table? Do you know how to get them in the field and get them trained? Do you know what you're doing? Do you know what you're doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? What did you do yesterday? What are you doing tomorrow? What do you got going this week? How many appointments do you have this week? I was asking questions all the time. Tons and tons of accountability, right? All over people. One of the reasons that people don't do this, by the way, is because the leaders are, because they're not working in also, okay? So, they're not doing the things that they're asking people to do. So, they feel hypocritical to ask people to do things. They feel hypocritical to ask, you know, to hold people highly accountable to a very high standard. When you're on it, when you're the leaders doing what they're supposed to be doing, right? You should have no compunction, no hesitation, no reservation about holding people ultra accountable. If somebody tells me that they're serious about winning, they want to be successful, they want to do something big, then I'm going to hold them highly accountable until they tell me something different. If they get perturbed that I'm holding them accountable, I'm going to say, hey, wait, wait, wait a second. You told me you wanted to be an RVP. You told me you want to make $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 a year. You told me you want to be successful. And this is part of being successful is being held accountable to a high standard because if you're not held, you know, accountable to a high standard, you're not going to make it, right? You're not going to be able to succeed. So, you need to tell me, okay, if this is bugging you that I'm holding you accountable, if you're bothered by the fact that I'm holding you accountable, right? Just tell me you're not serious anymore. You don't want to be held accountable. You just want to be like everybody else. You don't want to really be successful. You want to just be like the masses of mediocre people and I'll stop bugging you. You just tell me what you want to do. But if you tell me that you want to win, that you want to be successful, that you want to be big, that you want to make big money, then you need to accept the fact that I'm going to hold you to a high degree of accountability because that's the way you're going to get there. I'm your coach. I'm not your boss. I don't want to be your boss. I'm going to be your coach. And a coach tells their players what they need to do, right? I'm not looking for employees, right? I know I don't pay you. But look, if you tell me you want to win, my job is to get you to do the right things. And the right things are setting appointments, prospecting, going on those points, closing sales, bringing people to meetings, bringing people to opt-ins, to the Fast Start school, to the Saturday trains. All those things are part of it. Now, if you don't want to be held accountable, just let me know. I'll stop today. No worries. I won't even talk to you about it anymore. I'll just say, hey, how are you, John? How's your wife, Mary? How are things going? And that'll be the end of it. But if you want to win, then you're going to be held accountable. End of story, okay? So you just need to let me know. I don't care what you decide. Either way doesn't matter to me, right? Because I'm not looking to motivate people. I'm looking for motivated people that want to do what it takes to win, even if it's uncomfortable. Because let's face it, everything you have to do in Prime America is uncomfortable in the beginning. Everything, okay? Everything for me was. But you know what? The bottom line is you've got to do it. Look, the best leaders know that it's unfair to hold people accountable for the indicators that prove that they failed, right, without first holding them accountable for producing the results that are captured by those indicators, right? So, you know, first of all, one of the things that I just want to say here, because this is a perfect time to say this, I want to make sure that as a leader, right, as a trainer, as a developer of people, you have an obligation to train people at the highest level, to hold them accountable to getting trained properly, to master those seven fundamentals, to make sure they know what they're doing. You have a responsibility to teach them how to succeed before you hold them highly accountable. If those people haven't mastered how to prospect, how to set appointments, how to do a great presentation, how to overcome all the most common objections, they don't know how the product is, they don't know how to recruit somebody at the kitchen table, and they don't know how to get somebody field trained, well, holding them accountable is not fair, because you haven't taught them the tools that can allow them to have the kind of results that you expect of somebody that you hold highly accountable, okay? So, the first thing is you've got to get them mastering all those things, folks. That's critical. Warning light. Look, it isn't right or fair to allow people that you've hired, you know, to recruit it, to fail. It's not fair. Look, that's why training is so important. When you don't train people correctly, you don't train people thoroughly, you don't train people how to succeed and how to win, look, all you're doing is setting them up for failure, folks, and that isn't fair. It's not fair to that new person to tell them they could make big money here, be super successful, be an RVP and get wealthy, but then not teach them the very tools they need to have in order to do that. That's why I have such a hard time with this motivation, mumbo-jumbo crap, if you will, and you need to teach people how to do the business. People leave Primerica because they don't make money and they don't make money because they don't know what they're doing. Or sometimes when they know what they're doing, they don't work, they're just lazy, but nine times out of ten it's because they don't know how to do it professionally. Well, you have an obligation to turn every person that's serious and motivated into a professional at the kitchen table, and if you don't do that, you're just doing something that's wrong. It's totally wrong. You're a fraud. Look, as a leader, right, you have to make sure that they're giving every opportunity to succeed, including investments of your time, the training they need to succeed, the technologies that help them to be effective, and your coaching. You owe that to those people. You owe that to those people. Everybody comes on board. They're saying, okay, I trust you. You told me I can succeed. You're recruiting me. Tell me how great this Primerica thing is. Now, do your part. Show me how to win at this thing. Don't motivate me. Show me how to win. Show me what to, you know, what to do, how to say it, how to do it, how to do an F&A, you know, how to destroy cash value, how to do a great presentation, how to set up an appointment, how to prospect somebody, you know, how all the products work, how to recruit somebody, how to get them field trained. Show me how to do that. You know how few people in Primerica actually do that? It's a small number, folks. If you start focusing on that, you'll blow by your competition like they're standing still. A big part of effectively holding people accountable for results that shows up as a lighting indicator requires that you first hold them accountable for activities that show up as leading indicators. In other words, the prospecting. Are they prospecting? How many people coming to the op night? How many of you got coming to the op night this week? How many contacts have you made today and this week? Those are the leading indicators that are going to determine what could lead to productivity, which is sales and recruits. Look, as a manager, as a leader, it's unfair to hold people accountable for results they should have produced only after the fact. The lagging indicators that report that a salesperson, that a recruit has missed their numbers means that something went wrong. When people aren't hitting their numbers, something went wrong. Either they don't know what to do, or they don't have somebody holding them accountable, or they're not focusing on the right thing, or they don't have enough information or something. Maybe the person has generated too little activity to make their number. That's usually the case. A lot of times people don't prospect because they don't feel comfortable that they know enough to answer the questions and to do things in such a way that if somebody calls them on something, they know what they're doing. Maybe they spent too much time on activities that have no chance of producing the result they needed. They're doing stuff that doesn't make any sense. They're only cold calling maybe, for example. Or they're not doing it well or whatever. Or maybe they need more help to be effective. They need more training, more hands-on training, more repetition, more practice to rehearse on how to do something. Once the number's been missed, there's no way to go back and make any improvements. If I'm there, it's an autopsy, right? Can't do anything. So you've got to make sure you're doing these things, folks. Look, developing a great team, developing great leaders takes a lot of work, takes a lot of focus, takes a lot of training, takes a lot of follow-up, takes a lot of accountability on the leader's part. Look, a representative isn't the only one that missed their number. As a manager, as a leader, your number is made up of your people's numbers. So when they miss their number, you miss your number. So if you don't hold them accountable, if you don't train them well, if you don't prepare them correctly, if you're not making sure they're focused on the right activity, right, when they miss their number, you miss your number. It's not just them missing their number, it's you. Because their collective, right, the collective numbers of all your teammates is your number as a leader. Look, the leading indicators are warning lights that something isn't working or something's gone wrong. This is one of the great values of activity, you know, metrics for managers or for leaders. The warning light allows you the opportunity to intervene before it's too late. So if you ask your people, so how many appointments do you have this week? And they go, none. Well, whoa, why not? Who can you call? Do you need some help with how to make those calls? What's going on? Well, who can you call to set up an appointment this week, right? If you ask them on Sunday, they say no appointments or one appointment. Well, that's an indicator. If there's a big problem brewing, you better make sure that they know what they're doing, sending those appointments or they have a list of people or they're prospecting to grow that list so they can set appointments this week, okay? Accountability is all along the way. No one's surprised to have missed their number, right? Nobody's surprised when they miss, oh, my God, I missed my number. Nobody's surprised. And they shouldn't be surprised by their upline's response. You know, they shouldn't be surprised to be put on a performance improvement plan, if you will, or to be required to take other actions to prove their results, right? So if they're not hitting their numbers, you need to hold them, most people, even more accountable to prospecting and making calls and following up and doing the things they need to do. If they need to be moved into another role, well, in our case, there's no other role, right? There's only one role. It's either, you know, lead or get the hell out of the way, right? So these warning lights, right, when you ask people where they're at and what they've got going the following week, those are the warning lights to see what needs to improve, where you need to work on things and help them along the way. Accountability shouldn't be a surprise. Look, it's easier to hold people accountable all along the way. It's easier if you do it every day and you pay strict attention to all your most committed motivated people all the way. If they're accountable for generating activities that show up as a leading indicator, then you need to hold them accountable, right? So you've got to hold them accountable all the time, all the way. Now, did I hold every single person in my base up accountable? No, I didn't. I didn't hold every single person, right? Only the ones who were active, the ones that were showing up, and the ones that showed me that they were really, you know, engaged in the business some way. They're showing up to the meetings. They're there. I'm going to hold them accountable, right? The ones that have teammates and stuff, I'm going to hold them even higher accountable. The ones that tell me they want to be an RVP and make big money, I'm going to hold them to a higher level of accountability. The more they say they want to accomplish, the higher the level of accountability, and I don't cut them any slack. They don't like it too damn bad, okay? You tell me you want to win, then this is what you got to do to win. I know what I did, and I'm going to expect you to do what I did to win, period, bottom of the line, right? I don't care about your feelings or whether you want to do it or don't want to do it or don't feel comfortable doing it. That doesn't enter into the equation at all for me. You want to win, this is what you do. You don't like doing that, you don't want to do that, then you're not serious. Then I'm going to go on to the next person. Look, the warning lights aren't only for the sales manager either. They're for the salesperson or the representative to measure themselves, right? That's what they are, such as, you know, things you have to really pay attention. What are the schedule appointments? What are the face-to-face calls that you've made, right? How many opportunities are you having in the pipeline? How many people have you prospected this week, right? How many people do you have on your list? Because the movement for these things, these opportunities, move from one stage to the next. So what do you, you know, the questions are which indicators do you spend more time with, right? The leading indicators or the lagging indicators? Do most of the reports you have contain leading indicators or lagging? They're all lagging indicators, folks. The bottom line is pay attention to your numbers. Pay attention to what your people are doing. Pay attention to what they've got in the pipeline. Pay attention to where they're going and what they've got going, okay? Pay attention. Hold them accountable. Hold them super accountable. It's critical that you do that. I know these are little shorter messages, but these are the kind of messages like this today and last week, folks. These are the things that are going to allow you to really, really be successful. The things you need to be paying attention to. If you want to get big, you want to build a big day shop, you want to build a huge hierarchy, these are the things you've got to do. So make sure you're doing them, okay? Make sure you're on it. Nothing can stop you from winning but yourself. Your thinking, your focus, your attention, you know, what you do every day, how you pay attention to your training that you do for your people, how you pay attention to the quality of that training, how you pay attention to people's progress relative to that training, right? Checking them all the time. You should be checking your people all the time to see if they've got the prospecting down, to see if they've got appointment setting down, to see if they've got their presentation down, to see if they know how to overcome those common, you know, objections. There's five to ten of them, right? To see if they have, they know how each of the products work that you're marketing. To see if they know what they're doing and how to do a quality F&A. To see if they know how to recruit somebody at the kitchen table. To see if they know how to, what's the process of once they recruit somebody, getting their list and getting them in the field. You've got to check that stuff with everybody that's serious over and over and over. What you want to do is you want to make sure they're doing all of those processes exactly the way you would do them at the highest level. The better they do each of those seven fundamentals, the better they're going to do, the more success they're going to have, the more money they're going to make, the more people they're going to be able to recruit, the more people, more important, they're going to be able to train and develop because they know what they're doing. Because you can't teach what you don't know. You can't teach what you don't know. So if you've got people that are training people, they don't know how to do all those things, then you're going to be teaching ineptitude. You're going to be teaching mediocrity. Well, you want to build a great business? You can't do that, folks. You've got to do the right things when it comes to developing your people. Let me just tell you this. There's nothing more important than I did in my career. I know the number one thing I did better than most people is I trained and developed people. It's one of the reasons I have so many really successful people within my organization making big money, right? Lots of $6 or $7 million earners, tons of $100,000 earners, tons of $200,000, $300,000, $500,000 earners. Folks, that doesn't happen by action. It happens because the focus on training and developing people, right? High standards. High standards, right? One of the things you want to be careful of, right, is these low standards. I've heard some rumors about people are going to be quoting people at doing $10,000. I think that's a mistake because you don't really have a business at $10,000. $20,000 maybe, okay? $10,000, no way. There's no way somebody knows what they're doing or is that good at doing $10,000. I can do $10,000. I did $10,000 myself month in, month out for probably from late 1984 to 1992, okay? $10,000 is a joke. You've got to teach people to develop other people, to develop other people. You notice I talk about developing and training all the time because, look, you want to win big. The way that you know you're ready for RVP, you have four, five, three, four, five, six really independent people that are able to recruit, train, and develop, quote sales, recruit people all by themselves without any help from you. You have multiple ways. You have one leg. You can't go RVP with one leg. You're going to be dead after they take replacement, okay? You've got to be able, when you RVPs, you've got to be able to take a good solid replacement and that person that goes RVP needs to be in good shape after they go RVP or it's a ridiculous promotion. I don't know how people don't get that. It's just so simple to me that you want people to be great at what they do before they go out on their own and they have all the responsibilities of being an RVP, all the obligations and all the responsibilities and all the financial obligations, right? Make sure people know how to develop other people. Make that a focus of your business and I promise you, you won't be disappointed and neither will your people. A higher percentage of people will make more money and if they make more money, you'll make more money.