Compete. Win. Lead. | Ep 55

Justin: 00:00:00

Welcome back to Logistics and Leadership. Today we're going to discuss the importance of competition and why it matters on an individual level, but also as a team.

Brian, former collegiate baseball player. You competitive at all?

Brian: 00:00:23

Yeah, I like to compete, man. I think that's the fun part about some of that stuff.

I had an old coach tell me talk two things that you're going to miss when you leave the game are number one, competing and number two, the camaraderie within the clubhouse. And he was right. Those are two things that you miss because I think it's just the nature of the game.

Especially in any sport, you have to compete to win. And I think the cool thing about logistics sales in our industry is we get to compete on a daily basis.

There is a scoreboard and you know, I love that side of it. What about you, man? What are some things that come to mind when you think about competition or you think about competing?

Justin: 00:00:58

It's got myself in a little bit of trouble here and there outside of work. But also I would say in work I come from a.

Brian: 00:01:05

Elaborate on that. Hold on, hold on. You can't get away that quick outside of work.

Justin: 00:01:09

Beer pong.

Brian: 00:01:10

Okay.

Justin: 00:01:11

College. I think my buddy and I won. It was like 20 something games in a row.

Brian: 00:01:15

Nice. Wow, that's impressive.

Justin: 00:01:17

Made sure everyone at the party knew.

Brian: 00:01:18

Yeah.

Justin: 00:01:19

Ended up getting a couple beers thrown at me. There are some other things that happened, but I won't go down that path.

Brian: 00:01:25

All right, fair enough.

Justin: 00:01:26

But no, just my family's uber competitive. Always been competitive. Myself, I'm absolutely competitive, like externally against whoever I'm competing against.

But also I would say I'm equally competitive with myself where I'll beat myself up if. If I'm taking losses or, or not pushing myself to my potential. But as a company, I've worked in less competitive work atmospheres.

Brian: 00:01:49

Sure.

Justin: 00:01:49

TQL definitely being the most competitive.

Brian: 00:01:52

Yeah.

Justin: 00:01:52

I can't imagine. As much as I like competition, I can't imagine not having that in work now. It's like you and I on a team competing against our own team.

More on an individual level, but as a team, it's been a bigger focus for us because we want to see who wants it. We want to see who wants to compete not only with themselves but against others.

Brian: 00:02:15

I think it pushes other people to perform at their best. I think if you know somebody is on your tail, I mean, it's any race that's out there.

Anything in life, if you know somebody's right behind you, you're going to push a little Bit harder to succeed, I think in our industry. I think the competitive nature, the competitive culture is awesome.

I love the fact that to see when you have like an internal sales competition and seeing that banter back and forth where you have this person saying, you know, hey, I'm going to crush you this week or hey, you have no shot. Like I love that part of it. And I think that's probably from our background and playing sports growing up, that's ingrained in us.

Justin: 00:02:51

I would also say the transparency, whether you hear the chatter or not, having transparency within the company, you have to have transparency as a sales company. People need to know where they stand. People naturally do not want to be at the bottom.

When you expose that, whether they say it or not, they are going to be competing with themselves and others to make sure that they're not on the bottom. The ones that concern me are the ones that like to hang out in the middle.

Those are the ones that they just hang there and they're not pushing themselves because you see the actions will back it up. If they're not pushing themselves to rise in the ranks, it's a red flag to me.

But also the people at the top, you have the people that are pretty humble and stay at the top. But I would say humble isn't something that I really possessed early in my career. I was definitely the shit talker.

But I want people to know I'm at the top and no one's going to bring me down from the top.

Brian: 00:03:48

Yeah.

Justin: 00:03:48

I knew if I could get other people, my teammates, other, you know, co workers, I knew if I could elevate them and want to compete with me.

Brian: 00:03:55

Yeah.

Justin: 00:03:56

Naturally the bar would get raised, makes everybody. So I had an underlying incentive to do that.

Brian: 00:04:00

Yeah.

Justin: 00:04:01

But I wanted everyone to kind of step up their game.

Brian: 00:04:03

What do you think's like the balance of that? Right. Like uber competitive, trying to be the highest in far as rank as well as what kind of balance?

Because I do think that there's a level of salesperson, individual contributor where like you want to achieve be the top every single week. And if you're in second place, I would hope somebody would fire them up. Yeah, there'd be a fire in their belly to get back to that top spot.

If there's not, then probably a different conversation that we need to have. But how do you take it from like individual contributor to that leader where you're not necessarily.

You don't have control over every single attribute and you can't really go out and talk to a customer and get three, four loads on a Friday to achieve that. Mark, how do you do that? Or how's that balance between like, individual contributor and like, leader? How do you still, like, foster that?

Because I think it's very important, but you have less control than you would in that individual contributor mark.

Justin: 00:05:00

Yeah.

Brian: 00:05:00

Like you pressing down on your team, are you doing it yourself? Are you? I don't know. Yeah, I was just thinking, like, for the audience perspective, like, how do we get. Because I think that's a common trait.

Justin: 00:05:10

No, for sure.

Brian: 00:05:11

A high level individual contributor. You, you go to sales leader. Now you're like, you know, you don't know where, you know, Like, I think it's hard.

Justin: 00:05:20

Yeah. I think that's a great concept and I'm sure that's something a lot of competitive leaders deal with. But for me, there's one number.

It's our number at the bottom. That's the number that internally I'm competing with. I know where we were last year. I know where we were the previous week.

I know where we were the previous month. So I want to compete as a team against ourselves. Because if we're not growing, there's like, what are we doing?

We have to be growing or there's no sense in doing what we're doing.

Brian: 00:05:47

Agreed.

Justin: 00:05:47

So knowing the numbers, empowering your team and motivating your team and making sure that you're sharing that competitive spirit with them and doing the small things that you can if you're not contributing to motivate them and step up, whether that's, you know, we've seen it where guys have, you know, late afternoon shipments or weekend loads. And I want to compete. We're competing as a team. Like, give me those. I'll do the check costs.

Brian: 00:06:11

Yeah.

Justin: 00:06:11

Or send me your list. I'll make some call outs.

Brian: 00:06:13

Sure.

Justin: 00:06:13

I'll book trucks.

Brian: 00:06:15

I think, like, constantly setting the bar I think is extremely important, especially for the group and understanding, like, why we're doing that. And I think, like, if you have a leader that, that focuses on that, like, how are we beating the number from last week? Because I do think that.

I think you see a lot on, like, social media today, and I think you see a lot of these scenarios where it's like you're competing with yourself. And I question, I'm like, okay, well, what does that mean? How do we, like, break this down?

And I think it is like, okay, was I better than I was yesterday or was our team better than we were last month? Just like you said.

And I think a lot of Groups and organizations need to focus on that as opposed to just letting things slide or, you know, we're pretty good or we're good enough, Right? Like, to me, those are. That's the loser language right there. Yeah, that's good enough, right?

Justin: 00:07:16

Well, yeah, mediocrity is good my entire life. But no, I think you and I know this and we see with the team, but I'm sure others can relate.

Where you have those shit talkers, and this is where you want to avoid the cancerous actions of, like, shit talking, where you have the shit talkers that. That are chirping at the guy in second place or the guy that's coasting in the middle of the pack.

But at the end of the day, it's our job as leaders to make sure that there's still one number.

Brian: 00:07:44

Well, I don't think that's a bad thing, though. I don't think trash talking is a bad thing.

Justin: 00:07:48

No. As long as there's the right intentions.

Brian: 00:07:50

With it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Justin: 00:07:51

It's a motivator, for sure. People that would.

Michael Jordan, greatest of all time, would create these fictitious scenarios where someone in the media on the Pistons was running his mouth saying that he was going to hold Jordan to under 10 points. He would make those up because he's competing with himself, but also against that guy.

At the end of the day, like, you want your culture to be competitive and you want people to compete with each other, but we're winning together. At the end of the day, we're still winning together.

Brian: 00:08:19

Well, and I think that, like, we've talked about it a handful of times, and I think that's why the hiring process is so important. Hard to figure out, but very important.

And I think that's, you know, a lot of it when you're interviewing these people, you're like, man, like, you know, some. Some sales leaders out there. Oh, man, my sales team is just not that competitive. Well, maybe you hire the wrong person.

And I think that's where there might be a fault. To some sales manager, hiring manager out there. It's like, oh, man, I don't like my team today. Well, it's probably your fault for hiring them.

There's a old baseball coach who was at Mississippi State for the longest time. His name's Ron Polk. Went to several different college World Series. I think he's a little bit older now. I think he's 75, 80 years old.

But one thing that he always used to say was, if you don't like your team, get new players. It's like, oh, shit. Well, you're right. Right. It's like, easier said than done. But if you don't like your team, get new players.

It's like, okay, that's great because now we can go back and if you don't like the team that you have or you've built, you can always go back and hire different people and go through that process. But yeah, so let's break this down real quick.

So as far as, like, the best ways to measure competitiveness, is there a way to do that as a sales manager, as a sales leader that you can share with the audience?

Justin: 00:09:37

I think competition is goal driven. You played baseball, you played other sports growing up? I played sports. Most people in sales played sports.

Brian: 00:09:47

Yeah.

Justin: 00:09:48

So there's always a goal tied to competition. The goal is to win. And whether you're playing a different team, an individual, it doesn't really matter. The goal is to win.

Brian: 00:09:58

Right.

Justin: 00:09:58

You know, it's what we get. There's jokes about, like, the participation trophies these days.

Brian: 00:10:02

Yeah, yeah.

Justin: 00:10:03

For the league. You just get it. You get an award.

Brian: 00:10:04

Yeah, I hate them.

Justin: 00:10:05

Yeah. We don't do participation trophies. You have a winner and then the rest of the people are losing. But the goal is to win and build confidence.

If the competition is focused on. For us, it might be new client setups or total shipments or new deals where you're setting up a virtual call.

Whatever it is, there's a goal and it has to be tied to something else.

The goal for us is whether it's individual wins we're trying to drive tied to a metric, or as a team, if we're trying to hit a certain metric as a team, there's always going to be a goal tied to it. So one thing I love that we do, sometimes Fridays, people start to coast a little bit off the gas or whatever the hell they're doing.

After work, we have a wins chat where everyone's in the chat from the entire company. It's called wins.

And we identified wins as you have a really good conversation, you get a new lane, you set up a new client, you set up a virtual call.

Brian: 00:11:03

Needle movers.

Justin: 00:11:04

Yes, yes. If it moves a needle, it's a win. So Friday, let's say 2 o'clock, we tell a team, hey, 20 wins between three and four will cut you loose early.

20 wins between two and three and four. We'll do a beard drop or have whatever it is.

Brian: 00:11:19

Sure.

Justin: 00:11:19

So people go out and compete as a team with the same goal to move the needle.

Brian: 00:11:25

Love it.

Justin: 00:11:25

Where it's activity. We're driving that activity. So people jump on the phone and we'll look at the reports.

It'll be like little kind of a roller coaster wave where like call activity throughout the day as a team and then you send it out loud and I love it. You'll see 3 to 4pm Holy shit, Spike, you got Mount Everest in the middle of the report. It's because people buy into competing together as a team.

Brian: 00:11:47

Yeah, I think you mentioned it a couple times during this episode, but I think it's the team goal. It's one goal, one team. How do you create that competitiveness where we're all, you know, rowing in the same direction? And I love that.

I do think there's some value in competing against other folks or other brokerages in our. In kind of like the same headcount revenue number within the area. I think, you know, a couple of them come to mind.

But I think it is good to, if those companies are doing 100 million or 150 million, set your sights on that. And okay, how do we reverse engineer that side of it and compete with those companies that are out there?

So I think there is some value in that especially, you know, and I think that it's like a fine line. Right. Because you don't always want to be consumed with other people and how they're doing and what they're trying to do.

But I think taking like little snippets of other companies and using that internally as competition, I think is very healthy. Any last takeaways that you want to leave our listeners with? Far as competition, why it's important. What do you got there?

Justin: 00:12:45

Yeah, I think it does start in the interview process, like we've discussed. You have people that will say, like, oh, I'm a 10 out of 10 in competitiveness. I played sports and I refuse to lose.

In Tic Tac, you had the cliche answers. But how do you figure out if they're actually competitive?

And when you talk about real stories or let's say they have a history of working at sales companies.

Brian: 00:13:08

Sure.

Justin: 00:13:09

And they were number two or number five in their tenure and asking them specific questions.

Brian: 00:13:16

Yeah.

Justin: 00:13:16

On who was number one.

Brian: 00:13:17

Yeah.

Justin: 00:13:17

Where'd you finish? Who's ahead of you?

Brian: 00:13:20

How many in your group? I finished third. Third out of three, Right? Yes.

Justin: 00:13:24

Correct. Yeah. You can uncover whether or not they're really competitive.

Brian: 00:13:28

Yeah.

Justin: 00:13:28

Or, you know, tell a story on why you were kind of too competitive. And, you know, I think of my, my father in law flipping a table at a Catholic euchre tournament because he. He lost this, like, charity event.

It's like, I'd say that's pretty competitive.

Brian: 00:13:43

Yeah.

Justin: 00:13:43

So my point saying all that is there are ways to figure out whether or not someone is competitive before you hire them.

And I would strongly encourage you to figure those out and uncover those, because if you can start there and they have a pretty clean track record or history of, like, success.

Brian: 00:13:59

Sure.

Justin: 00:14:00

You got a killer on your hands and you invest in them.

Brian: 00:14:02

Yeah. Love it, man.