The Sales Transformation Toolbox: Essential Tools For Sales Success With Collin Mitchell

The sales landscape is changing at breakneck speed. Sales transformation isn't a luxury; it's a necessity. This isn't just about buzzwords; it's about arming your sales team for success in the modern market. Join host Mark Cox as he unpacks the secrets of sales success with industry veteran Collin Mitchell. Collin talks about how his extensive experience and passion in professional sales translate into success by sharing insights into his journey. From refining team coaching methods to reimagining conventional sales quotas, he unlocks the secrets to thriving in today's dynamic sales environment. Tune in as he shares the key behind his enduring enthusiasm for the world of sales.

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The Sales Transformation Toolbox: Essential Tools For Sales Success With Collin Mitchell

Before we get started, we've got a special offer for you as a reader of the show. We launched the next generation of our In The Funnel Sales Academy, the leading online training platform and B2B sales community that helps companies optimize their sales and generate ongoing, predictable revenue growth. For readers, we're offering 50% off your first month for any of our subscription plans. Go to SellingWell.com/Podcast and then use the promo code PODCAST, and you'll get 50% off your first month. We're looking forward to working with you. Now, onto the show.

We've got a great show for you. Our guest is Collin Mitchell. He's the Managing Partner of Leadium, a B2B lead generation agency. You'll learn from this discussion that he's been with lots of different organizations over the years in professional sales, almost every two years, investing in or running a different sales organization.

Collin is probably best known for being the host of the Sales Transformation Podcast, which is one of the top 1% of all the podcasts out there. He has an amazingly large subscriber base on that podcast and he's had about 300 different conversations with great sales leaders. In fact, I even got to be on that show with him and enjoyed the conversation, and because of that breadth of discussions, I got into a conversation with Collin where I'm very interested and understand what he has gleaned from all of those conversations.

How does he take everything he learned from those 300 conversations into a playbook for the next sales organization he takes over? We talk a lot about people and the attributes that he hires on and that we hire on and how we get through an interviewing process to try and uncover those attributes because we all know it's tough to interview salespeople these days. Collin's got a very controversial approach to quota.

They don't have them at Leadium, so we have a great conversation about how he manages a team to perform without quotas. As always, we're interested in people's journeys to this point. Collin is an amazingly successful business professional who's gone through lots of adversity along that journey in life, as many of us have. Frankly, it's an inspiring journey. I enjoyed my conversation with Collin. I think you will, too. If you do, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends. Here's Collin Mitchell.

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Collin, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to it. I know we've been looking to make it happen. You did such a great job on my show. I'll do my best to try to return the favor.

Every once in a while, you get a little nervous before one of these shows. I'm a little nervous because your podcast is one of the top sales podcasts out there. You're one of the top 1%. The amount of downloads is absolutely flabbergasting. As we go through this, and I'm growth-oriented, please feel free to coach me in real time on how to do these things better.

I think you'll do fine. You showed up and rocked the mic like a pro when you came on my show.

Thanks for that. There are lots of changes in your life. We were chatting about it offline. Tell us what's going on.

One thing is I joined Leadium as their VP of Sales and then became a Managing Partner there. I’ve been doing some great work and a great team. The funny story is I used to be a Leadium customer. Maybe we'll get into it, but I've had four startups. I sold three of them. Two of those businesses, Leadium, helped me scale. I was a Leadium customer before I joined Kevin and Sergey over there, and then they acquired my podcast. Sales Transformation is in its third season now. We're at almost 800 episodes. I honestly couldn't be happier with where the show is and the quality of the content that we're putting out these days.

Professional Sales Journey

You've got such a great model for this show. I enjoyed being on it and you run it well. Readers, please go check out the Sales Transformation Podcast. You're very likely already doing so, but there are small bite-sized chunks, massive amounts of content, information and value. It's a great model. I enjoyed being on the show and learning from you from that one. You did talk about little bit about your background. I think you've got an amazing background with your 15 or 16 years as a professional sales hacker and all the rest of it. Tell our readers a little bit about your journey in professional sales.

I didn't go to college. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do with my life, to be honest. I was not the most responsible young adult. My first job was moving around furniture. Prior to that, I grew up poor. I was raised by a single mom. I’m 1 of 4 boys. She did the best she could, but we struggled more often than not. I didn't know what I wanted to do other than I didn't want to be poor. Sales seemed a great way to not be poor. When I got that first sales job, I never looked back. I took it very seriously. I was the first one in the office every single day. I was the last one to leave every single day. I'm not promoting hustle culture or anything like that, but that's what it took.

I was willing to put in that hard work like some people are these days and some people aren't. That's what it took for me. That worked my way up to the top very quickly as one of the top full-cycle AEs. After that, I got my first leadership position and did that and learned a lot more new skills. I made a lot of mistakes and learned a little bit more business acumen and experience. After that, I started my first company with my wife. We grew that from $0 to $5 million in 26 months. After that, I started a few more companies, had a couple of exits, and now here I am at Leadium.

What an amazing story and an amazing journey. Thanks for sharing that and being open about it. For everyone reading, it's never a bad idea to work hard. I know at certain periods of time, we have our natural ebbs and flows. Those of you who are fans of Peloton, I'm a huge fan of the Peloton, they'll tell you no matter who you are, your fitness level is not on an upward slope all the time. You keep testing, but things go up and down. You keep working through it, but overall, it starts moving up.

We can't go at ten all the time, but I think there are certain times of year when you have to increase your activities, your energy, the hard work, put up a little bit of elbow grease. As we recorded this on October 11, 2023, we're starting Q4. For those of us in technology, this is a busy time of the year, the next 45 business days and a disproportionate amount of business gets closed in these next 45 business days. It's a good time now to put in some elbow grease.

There are different phases. When my wife and I started our first business, we had very low expenses. We had no kids. Our first office was our living room. It’s very easy to throw ourselves into work saying, “We're going to put in this hard work now for planning for our long-term future.” The thing is, with Q4 for every seller, which is obviously top of mind and relevant, hopefully, you're not now shifting gears of putting that work in because the work you do in this quarter doesn't always pay off in this quarter. Hopefully, you've been preparing in Q3 to close out Q4 strong.

Transferring Learnings To Startups

If you happen to be one of those folks who's looking a little light in Q4, this is a time where you go hard with the hope again for Q1, Q2 2024, give yourself reasonable goals and expectations, but Q1 and Q2 give position yourself for great things in Q1 and Q2. Collin, 800 podcasts talking to sales thought leaders, first of all, flabbergasting. Second of all, what a joy to meet many sales thought leaders. You've been involved in many businesses. I'm interested to know how you have taken all of the learning from those conversations and how that breaks down for you when you walk into that next startup. I know you're a powering strength at taking companies from $1 million to $10 million in revenue.

When you come in and do an assessment of where a company is at $1 million. How have you taken all that learning and built it into this methodology? I bet you have a repeatable methodology you apply the next time you're looking at that startup or you're looking at investing in it. What filters do you use to look at a business like that? If you were going in and taking over the sales organization, what's your approach, methodology or playbook?

It's a tricky question because there is no simple answer. Every organization is different to some extent. There are some basic principles of a sound go-to-market strategy. I think where a lot of people get stuck is thinking about what worked in the last startup that's going to work in the next startup, and that's not always the case. That could be as simple as what your sales team looks like.

Do you break out the SDR function and have AEs? Do you not have an SDR function and have full-cycle AEs? Do you outsource the SDR function? Do you do it in-house? These are all critical things to building a sound foundation for your sales team and then even getting more into the lower ACV. Is there more of an emphasis on marketing versus sales where are you going to put the budget and allocate?

Are you bootstrapped? Have you raised money? These are all things that you have to look at in order to decide what the best possible strategy is. At the core, a lot of it comes down to, “How do we get to product-market fit? How do we get to product messaging fit?”Those are the essential things. If you can figure those out, then everything else tends to work itself out for the most part to a certain extent. The more you grow, then the more you have different challenges and problems. The other thing that I think a lot of people make mistakes early on is, 1) Hiring sales leadership too soon and 2) Investing in an expensive tech too quickly. There's a common misconception that a lot of people want all the fancy tools, all the shiny bells and whistles.

Ultimately, below $1 million in revenue, even up to a few million in revenue, you don't need a lot of that stuff.  As long as you have a good CRM, good data and good dialing technology, those are the essentials. Investing in all this conversational intelligence, sales enablement, coaching tools, cold email tools and you name it. A lot of those things can wait because technology isn't going to fix a lot of your core foundational problems. A lot of that stuff needs to be worked out. Technology can enable you to accelerate or be more efficient, but a lot of times, it can be a distraction if you haven't figured out some of the core basics.

Technology isn't going to fix a lot of your core foundational problems. A lot of that stuff needs to be worked out. Technology can enable you to accelerate or be more efficient, but a lot of times it can be a distraction if you haven't figured out some of the core basics.

You mentioned, “Think about when you bring in sales leadership.” A big challenge for a lot of founders is they want to absolve themselves of the responsibility of sales because they don't have that core competency. They're great people who started an application development, got good, built a product, or even in the manufacturing business, and it's an engineer who was in some other manufacturing business, but rarely is a founder, somebody who grew up with a professional sales background.

To many, it still seems a little bit like this dark art, then they go back to the concepts from many years ago, which was, “Hire somebody who's mature and experienced, and so on and so forth. They're going to be a rainmaker.” That rarely happens because the rainmaker was a rainmaker at SAP or Oracle and then they come down to the $1 million startup and they go, “Where's my marketing? Where are my sell sheets? You're not knocking on my door to go to our annual conference in Orlando?” It’s a very good council there.

Another thing to add to that, let's assume you're maybe raised, had a good round of funding. Lots of times, people hire too quickly. They're like, “We've got money. We got to spend it.” They get into this cycle of playing the numbers game at the expense of people. This is very common in sales. People, at their core, believe sales is a numbers game, which is numbers are important. You and I get that, and I don't even know if you agree or disagree with this, but sales is not just a numbers game. What happens when you're playing it is a numbers game? You're throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what will stick. What that looks like is more emails, more phone calls and very little strategy, if any.

They take it all the way to the extreme of people, “Let's hire more people. Let's keep hiring more people and then eventually, we will hit the revenue goals at all costs.” That's another mistake that a lot of people tend to make. I know that you were recently on Andy's podcast. I love the new podcast. I've been a little bit obsessed with WIN since he's gone down that train. It's a very important initiative that he's focused on because it's laughable that tech and SaaS companies think winning 20% of the time is good or even great.

You think of the days when you and your wife were running your business on your couch. The truth is, and certainly in the early days of in the funnel, your win rate was probably 60% or 70%. You couldn't afford to invest a ton of time in working lots of deals. Your ability to qualify and move on was tight because you didn't have the bandwidth to waste time with deals that weren't real. There was this, “You're a mature salesperson. You know what you're doing.” There's a qualification that takes place. I think you're right. We might be leaving this era and I'm interested in your opinion where, again, let's go back in time a few years ago.

There'd been seven years of VC money going into tech companies just exploding sales organizations, and then the world became polluted with garbage emails. A whole group of people is turning LinkedIn into the world's biggest spam engine and all these kinds of things. At the core of these poor folks, they were hoping technology could absolve them of the need to be able to have an engaging conversation, showcasing business acumen, industry acumen and sales acumen. They didn't have it. As soon as we have that first live conversation, all I'm going to do as quickly as I can try is punch you into a demo where we're going to talk to you during a demo as well. This is where these conversion rates become minuscule.

It’s a very accurate description of the problem or the monster that's been created. Sometimes, I can be a little bit jaded because I'm in B2B Tech and SaaS. If you look outside of that then things are a little bit different. The thing is that if you look at what the core of the problem is, it's reps putting stuff in their pipe that never should be there in the first place. They've got managers breathing down their neck about their activity and pipeline creation quota, then you get everybody thinking, “We need more leads, so we need more people. We need to spend more money,” or whatever the case is. When really, they probably have more than enough leads. They're just not focusing on the right ones or disqualifying enough of the leads.

For example, at Leadium, we're a service business but we disqualify it on average 62% of our deals that we engage with on our first call never get to opportunity. The ones that get to stage 2 opportunity, we close 87% of the time. We are very selective and fortunate that we can pick and choose who we want to work with based on criteria that we know what's important and things that we look for that make a great customer for us.

Sales Team Management

First of all, those two numbers are staggering. I hope they came out in Andy's podcast. I bet they did because they're so important. Let me ask you this because it's such a great thing to bring up. How do you coach your team so that they're on that first call and they disqualify 62% of the folks on the other end of the call? What are they doing or how are they mirroring against an ideal client profile? How do you help them with that disqualification? How do you coach them to be good at disqualifying somebody?

There are two parts to it. One part you might hate and a lot of your readers are going to hate. The other part I think people will understand. When we go on our first call, which is a 30-minute call, 25 minutes of that call is us asking lots of questions, and then we say five minutes to pitch if we feel that it's a good fit. In that, we are uncovering, “Is this a company worth partnering with? Is this somebody we would want to work with? Do they have something unique about the problem they solve or the niche they work in?”

There are all of these things that we look for that we know make a successful customer. If it's a successful customer, we've been doing this for a long time. We've helped companies raise over $7 billion in funding. We've had 80 companies be acquired and we've had 6 companies IPO as a result of the work we've done for them. We know very well if we want to work with them, we can do good work. That's part one, which I think a lot of people will understand. The second part, a lot of people are absolutely going to hate and probably may not work for your business and that's fine. We don't have quotas.

There's something to unpack. Your team must have reasonable levels of business and industry acumen to be able to get people to respond to 20 or 25 minutes of questions before they get frustrated. You have to earn the right, as you know, for every one of those questions. They must be great questions that get people engaged. I love this thought about the no quota. Tell me about why you have no quota and what you think that does in terms of helping the organization grow faster.

In full context, this does not work for every business. It may or may not work for your business. A large organization, you might be like, “This guy's a whack job.” We understand our business extremely well as far as, “Pay people well, they do a good job,” and what it looks like from a profitability standpoint. That's because we are bootstrap. We understand from a profitability standpoint what the expectation is of what a rep should be closing in order for it to be profitable for the business as a whole, which is important for every business.

It's a loose like, “We expect you to do this between this.” Surprisingly enough, they always hit within that range cons consistently. Consistently, we hit within that range of the loose expectation. It's not this, “Just close whatever. If you don't close anything, that's fine too.” It's not that. There's an expectation of like, “Based on your role, segment, market or whatever, this is what we expect,” and that's what it is. There's this number constantly changing and all of that.

For some people, that's a little scary. I get it. It probably wouldn't work for your business, but for us, it works great. Some organizations are moving in more of a direction like, “Maybe we don't have this crazy pipe quota. Maybe we don't have this crazy activity quota that we're constantly demanding.” You see some things changing in that direction, but there's even this whole thought of something that I used to be totally against. Kevin Dorsey opened my eyes to it as like, “Not every salesperson is money motivated either.” Every comp plan out there is mostly built for money-motivated people, which is only a small percentage of your sales of your sellers or those people that are money-motivated. Most people are motivated by many other things. Most people want low stress. They want to do good work. They want to be around, work with good people, and be compensated well. That is the majority of people.

In his book, Seth Godin said he surveyed 10,000 people and said, “Tell us about the attributes of the best job you've ever had.” The five top ones that came back, none of them had anything to do with money. It was about, “I did my best work. We were doing meaningful work. I was well respected. I didn't mean it was easy. I loved that job because I accomplished something significant. It had nothing to do with the largest paycheck I've ever had.” I should have done this earlier, but for our readers, because you said it's not right for everybody's business. Tell us exactly what the business of Leadium is.

We're a service business. We work in the B2B space, mostly service businesses or a lot with tech and SaaS. We help them with their top-of-funnel challenges through services. That could be done for you go-to-market outbound. That could be inbound lead management or a combination. We have US-based sales development reps in our Virginia and Las Vegas offices. We are their SDR function.

Outsource the SDR function. The name of the book is The Song of Significance, meaning, “People want to feel significant.” I'll throw out one other thought. Management consultants, lawyers or professional services firms, generally have goals, but they don't have quotas. They're not managing the quarter on a quarterly basis, but those people, of course, have to bring in new business. There's a world where I think all those people, most of those people very clearly feel the need to help grow the business. They're focused on business development but not tracking monthly quotas of activities and so forth. Coincidentally, we had Dan Pink on the show, the author of my favorite sales book almost ever called The Sell Is Human and eight other New York Times bestsellers.

He loves sales. At the end of it, I said, “What do you see happening?” In his final comment, he said, “ A low-end, tactical sales are going to go the way of the dinosaur with technology. Sales today is management consulting,” which is why I made that analogy to those professional services firms. He talked about how salespeople must be intellectual, curious, problem solvers, super sharp, smart, engaging and exceptional at discovery. He said that's management consulting. Those worlds don't have quotas. What an interesting idea. There's our clickbait for this epispode, no quotas. How big is your sales team?

We have in total, including SDRCD work for clients, which I help with that team, about 35 people.

Hiring Practices

We got everybody out there reading, lots of CEOs of SMBs you guys are fundamentally an outsourced top-of-funnel generation firm with a big team. I bet everybody would love your opinion on what you look for when hiring these people. It sounds like you have some great people as part of that team. If you're hiring somebody in professional sales, SDR, BDR, and account executive. I'm sure there are some differences, but tell us a little bit about what you look for given your experience doing this when you're hiring these people.

There are some basics, but hiring is tough for everybody. Everybody struggles with hiring, has ever been in a leadership position, has never felt like they've fully figured it out because as soon as you figure it out, there's that one that you took a chance on and you're like, “Why did I do that?” I hate to say that.

It's the truth. I had the same conversation with Frank Cespedes from Harvard, who you probably know. He is probably been on your show three times. I said, “I did the math. I think I've interviewed maybe 1,200 people. I probably hired a couple of hundred people in my career. I thought I was pretty good at this. If I'm honest, I got a 65%.”

Sixty-five percent is great.

He came back and he said, “I've been doing this for 35 years. I've been running Harvard's sales program. This assessment is at best. It's a flip of a coin.” He said in the ‘90s, he started pontificating to people, saying, “It's such a flip of the coin that if you see somebody on paper, there's almost no point to interview them because it's only going to be a 50/50 chance anyway. Don't bother interviewing.” He said he started talking about that and preaching that for a few years until the world wouldn't accept it. He went back. I appreciate your honesty. We get a lot of people saying, “I'm an expert at this and all of this stuff.” I'm with you. This is hard.

There are a couple of things that I do that may be a little bit different. 1) I don't look at their resume at first at all. LinkedIn is the go-to, and frankly, if you're a salesperson and you haven't figured out LinkedIn, then sorry, you're going to get passed over. That's the hard truth that maybe nobody's going to tell you. If you're in sales and when you don't have a job, your job is selling you, optimize your profile. I don't know if you've had Kevin KG on your show. He's got a lot of good insights around hiring.

The hard truth is this: if you're in sales and you don't have a job, your job is selling you. So, optimize your profile.

I'll have to go and get him after this, though.

He scaled ZipRecruiter before it went public. Lots of hiring and they were a platform that helped people hire. He has a lot of good insights about this, then my good friend Nigel Green has a whole course for hiring that's not your guru bogus course, but legit tactical great information for sales managers. The first thing is I'm a big fan of personality tests. Having them pick personality tests. I’m a big fan of that. That’s the Step 1. Step 2 is after the initial call.

The first call is very not what they expect. Typically, candidates come on a first call expecting, “We're going to talk about my job experience and go through my resume. You're going to try to poke some holes in it and ask some questions and all that good stuff like every other hiring manager does.” The first call is more rapid-fire questions, 15 or 20 minutes tops. I'm asking them a bunch of questions. Some that have to do with professionals, some that don't because I'm hiring for the person, not the role, not the skills. None of that. That stuff's important, but it's way less important. What's more important is the type of person you're hiring.

You're looking for certain things about the person as a person, not necessarily as a seller. In that call, you can ask them certain questions like, “What's the most difficult thing you've had to overcome professionally? What was it? How'd you work through it? What'd you learn from it?” Personally, same question. There are a couple of things you're looking for. 1) How they handle themselves under pressure, getting questions like that. 2) One big thing that I'm looking for is, “Are they giving me honest answers or are they feeding me what I want to hear?

Sales Transformation: The role and the skills are important, but they’re way less important. What's more important is the type of person you're hiring. You're looking for certain things about the person as a person not necessarily as a seller.

Authenticity.

The easy way to point that out is if they're being vulnerable, honest, and maybe telling you things that you probably wouldn't want to hear. I love that. If they're like, “I don't know.” They're looking off. Reading their body language is very important. Those are some things that you look for. You're looking for things around work ethic, if they're hungry and humble, “Tell me a time when your manager gave you some feedback that you didn't agree with. How'd you deal with it?” Things like that, then some wild things like, “If you had a boat, what would you name it? Why?” You want to see if they're creative and things like that. I’m looking to see if they're confident.

Those are the things I'm looking for. I'm hiring for the person. I care less about their job experience at this point because this is way more important. They get past that. The next step is a written assessment and personality test and if they get past all that, then it's a more deep-dive interview around job experience, poking holes. Go get a reference. Don't take the reference they give you. Go to the one they didn't give you. If they have five jobs, they give you their most recent job and two jobs ago, I want to know what happened in the middle. I get it. Sometimes, people get put in bad situations and they don't perform, but everybody should at least leave on good terms, which is important.

Readers, these are great stuff here that we can apply for in our business. I love the end of the day, you came up with the attributes you look for, humble, hungry and smart. We like those. There are different ways of calling those things, but we like those, too. Those go back to Pat Lencioni and he is a fantastic guy, but all of the stuff that he came up with, The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team and everything else, humble, hungry, smart. We love passion and optimism. In this day and age, if you've had 5 jobs, you've had 1 or 2 bad sales leaders.

I'm with you. I don't think there's a problem if somebody comes back and says, “I'm not going to give you that second person as a leader because I had a bad sales manager. They were new. They weren't trained. We didn't get along that well because of it. I felt a bit frustrated.” They were about them. Not the team, but the one I had is fantastic. Even the way they share that, I think, points a little bit to that authenticity. You don't want the veneer. Hiring the person is spectacular. It's no different than a sports team. They don't just go for the person with the stats and the speed. They meet these people because they want to know what they're like as people.

One thing I would add to that is if we've all had bad sales managers, get it. You do want to look at how they describe that. You described it in a very straightforward, cordial way. If they badmouth and, “He was an a-hole and the worst boss ever,” if they get into that, pass them over. Something else that I would say stands out if they say something more along the lines of, “That last job I had, like I took a chance, it was a startup, first-time sales manager, top producer, I had a lot of issues. Here's what I was responsible for. Here's what I could have done differently. Here's what I wish I had done. Here's what I learned from it,” you got an Ace.

You always want people who take responsibility. We all make mistakes, but if they're more of a, “I'm going to point the finger and it's all the sales manager,” we're all human beings. We've all had bad bosses. We get it. I'm not a big fan of the people who do nothing but complain about it and don't take responsibility for their actions or what they could have done differently, or at least come out on the other end feeling like, “I made a bad call here. Here's what I could have done differently. Here's what I wish I would've known and here's what I'll do differently next time.” The key difference in the type of person of how they would explain that.

It's a huge difference. I love the idea of you saying, “What did you learn from that?” and then being able to share, “I realized something about me. This is what I need to be successful.” The other question I always love is, “What do you need to learn now?” You think about that growth orientation. For us, humility is growth orientation. I might be confident, but I'm humble enough to know I don't know anything. I'm humble enough to know there's lots for me to learn. Let's put it that way. It's one of the reasons I love this show so much. I love talking to people like you because I've been doing this many years and there's the world of what I don't know. 10X is what I know and it's changing all the time. I love that question to somebody to say, “What's the next thing you need to learn? What are you reading right now? Tell me about the favorite sales book you've ever read. Tell me about it.”

That's one of my questions, “What's the last book you read?” If you're like, “Uh,” not anything very recent because you want people who are committed to investing in themselves and constantly learning. I’m not a huge book reader, but I'm an audiobook person. I'm big on podcasts and audiobooks. I don't read many physical books. It's not my jam. If somebody said like, “I don't read books, but I listen to these podcasts, here's the last episode. Here's what I learned. Here's the last audiobook and here's what I learned.” It's good enough for me.

It doesn't matter how you learn. One of the things we find a lot and then an opportunity for people is we say, “Tell us about your favorite sales book.” They'll go,” “The Challenger Sale.” We'll go, “That's fantastic. We love Matt Dixon. He's been on our show three times. The guy is great. The next question is, what'd you get from it? What did you take from that book?” You'll get people going, “I'm not sure. The Challenger Sale in every chapter references the same three things. Teach, tailor and take control.” “Great book. You remember. It's well written, teach, tailor and take control.”

Readers, when you're out there, you're reading these shows and learning, take some time to pull out your phone, dictate and pull out the things you like. Capture them so you can go back to them. Teach, tailor and take control. You could even do it in the car. Be safe. You don't have to be highlighting and taking notes, but you do want to make sure you don't expect yourself to remember something super well on one read because not many of us do that.

The interesting thing is, depending on how they answer that question, it tells you either 1 of 2 things. They didn't read the book, which is not good or they don't retain things very well, also not good. Reading 52 books a year is not something you want to wear as a badge of honor. If you read three books a year and you take a lot from them and put them into practice, that says a lot more about who you are than, “I've read 52 books this year, but I've put nothing into action remember very little.”

If you read three books a year, take a lot from them, and put them into practice, that says a lot more about who you are than someone who has read 52 books this year but has put nothing into action and remembers very little.

Passion For Professional Sales

It's the same analogy as the numbers in sales. We have 100 approach calls this quarter and 3 progress into the next stage. Probably be better if I had 10 approach calls where 3 progress to the next stage. I had 10 approach calls and 4 went to the next stage. It’s not just the number. It's, “What did I get from the effort?” This will be my last question. I know you're busy. Your energy and enthusiasm for talking about this is absolutely contagious all I'm thinking about on this side of the mic is going, “This guy's had 800 conversations with people. Isn't he sick to death of this topic yet?” Tell me why you love professional sales so much because it's clear that you do. Why is it you love this whole discipline so much?

I'll give a little context first and then I'll answer the question. To be fair, it's not 800 conversations. It's 800 episodes. The iteration of the podcast has changed, but I've probably had a lot, 300 conversations, if not more. I've also probably guessed it on close to 200 shows. There are lots of conversations, but with the podcast, we've done a lot of different things over the years. When we did solo episodes, we did long form and chopped them up into five-minute episodes. What we do is we typically drop a 10 to 15-minute episode with a guest on a tactical topic. Nonetheless, I love it for a couple of reasons.

1) We didn't get too much into my past, but to shed a little bit more color there, I grew up dirt poor. I didn't go to college. My dad was never around. We grew up on food stamps. We lived out of motels. I had nothing. When I got my first sales job, it was my only way out. Within 12 months, I was making 6 figures and I never looked back.

I learned some bad habits early on. Your typical sleazy, commissioned breath salesperson, that was me. I had to unlearn a lot of those things. I didn't have a lot of mentors. I was not the type of person at that stage of my life who was willing to invest in coaching or something like that. The only way that I could learn was by following people on social media, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, and reading books. That's how I learned. I had a lot of mentors from afar.

Now, I have a life that I couldn't even have dreamed of. I live in a beautiful place and have things and four kids and a beautiful wife and you name it. That's all because of sales. The podcast has always been my way of giving back to the sales community for someone like me who comes from nothing and has somewhere they can count on that's reliable. We drop almost daily content on the podcast, on LinkedIn and weekly newsletter, all for free. It's my way of giving back to the sales community for the person like me who doesn't have resources, money, didn't go to school and could have a life beyond their wildest dreams.

First of all, I am sorry for the hardship you encountered and amazed at the success that you've earned for yourself, your wife and your team. It's amazing on this show, when we talk to all of these incredibly successful people, the amount of challenge they have gone through to get to where they are. It's never this linear path and this slope of acceleration. It's always ups and downs and challenges then they showcase resilience. It is such a pleasure having you on our show. Thank you for joining today. It was great to connect with you. Could you remind our readers how they get to leverage you as a mentor like you leveraged others? What resources are out there for them to engage you?

I can give you links, but to keep it super simple. It takes a lot of hard work to put on a good quality show like this. The first thing that you can do is give the show a rating and write it a review. It's the best way you can show your gratitude to Mark. Share the show with your friends, then if you love podcasts like I do, you can check out Sales Transformation on any and every podcast platform. We drop almost daily content there. From there you can pretty much find everything else, whether it's LinkedIn, website, or newsletter. It's all there.

Thank you so much for the gracious comments. I'm going to encourage everybody to go to the Sales Transformation Podcast immediately. That was ranked as one of the top 1% of podcasts in the world. We want to go and check that out. I want a special thanks to Collin Mitchell. What a wonderful guest. It is so great to spend this time with you. Readers, thank you for joining.

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As Collin mentioned, we run this show to improve the professionalism and performance of B2B sales. In doing so, we think we're helping improve the lives of professional salespeople. We want to hear from you. If you think there's another way that we can run this to add even more value to you, please let me know and we love constructive criticism. My personal email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We respond to every single person who gives us feedback and we're very appreciative of it. Thanks, everybody. Great selling and we'll see you next time.

Important Links

• Leadium

• Sales Transformation Podcast

• The Song of Significance

• Dan Pink - Past Episode

• The Sell Is Human

• Frank Cespedes - Past Episode

• The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team

• The Challenger Sale

• Matt Dixon - Past Episode

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

• Collin@Leadium.io

About Collin Mitchell

Collin has over fifteen years of sales experience and is passionate about driving revenue growth for sales teams with top of funnel services. He is currently a Managing Partner at Leadium, having previously been VP of Sales, where he helps B2B SaaS companies generate qualified leads and appointments. He also hosts the Sales Transformation Podcast that delivers daily insights and tips on how to sell better and faster. Additionally, he is an investor and advisor to several organizations, drawing on his three successful exits as a founder and co-founder.

Getting Some Room To Grow With Tammy Gillis

Can professional B2B be outsourced? Mark Cox says yes, and he sits down with the person to prove it: Tammy Gillis, author of the book Room To Grow. Tammy explains how she developed a unique approach to mend the gap of B2B outsourcing, making it more targeted in addressing the client’s needs in the most efficient ways possible. They discuss why sales are more than just transactions and sales talk, but meeting people wherever they are. Tammy also presents the ideal attributes every great salesperson should have and the best approaches to building a well-rounded sales team.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Getting Some Room To Grow With Tammy Gillis

Can professional B2B sales be outsourced? Good question. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show over the years. Most of the time, the answer was no, in my view anyway. Finally, we found a model that works. That’s why you can find this episode so interesting because we’re talking with Tammy Gillis. Tammy is the author of Room to Grow: Not Leaving Sales to Chance.

Tammy is also the Founder and CEO of Gillis Consulting and Training. They’re an outsourced sales provider to the hospitality industry and a very large one. What’s unique about their model is the one gap on most outsourced sales models is that the outsourcing firm does not understand the industry and the client as well as the actual host company. Tammy’s model fixes that because they have only got experts working on their sales team. They know more than many of their clients about how to sell professionally at the B2B level for hospitality. That’s the interesting part of this model we’re going to get into.

The other thing that’s interesting is although Room to Grow, Tammy’s book, is focused on the hospitality industry. It addresses most challenges and opportunities in professional B2B sales. One thing that struck me so much was how applicable this is to every industry in B2B sales. Not just hospitality. It’s a very well-written book. It’s concise but powerful.

We talk about everything Tammy and I, from the book to the outsourcing model to the importance of being relentless about understanding how to help your clients and prospects achieve better business outcomes. Our conversation was amazingly interesting to me, folks. I certainly learned a few new things. I hope you will too. If you like this episode, please like and subscribe to the show because that matters to us. It helps us get great guests like Tammy. Here she is, Tammy Gillis.

Tammy, welcome to the show. It’s so great to see you again.

Thank you so much. I’m a big fan of the show. Thank you for having me on.

Thanks for saying that. It’s such a pleasure to speak with you. I got to say I was super excited to chat with you for two reasons. First of all, I’m a huge fan of the book. Those who read frequently know, Tam, the way we do this show is I read almost everything out there. When I read these amazing books, I go after the author to see if I can get them to join the show and coerce them into the show.

One of the amazing things, the book we’re going to be talking about is Room to Grow: Not Leaving Sales to Chance by Tammy Gillis. Fantastic book. It just hit me. You are a perfect example of the reverse of the Mark Twain quote. I wrote you a long letter. If I had more time, I would have written you a short letter. You took the time and wrote the short letter, but it’s so well put together and so concise.

One of the things that’s very interesting, this isn’t a book just about selling in the hospitality industry. Although Tammy, I know that’s what you wrote. It’s a book about selling because the one thing that became so clear to me every time you identified an issue or a challenge or what’s happening in sales and we’ll get into it. You talked about it being applicable in the hospitality industry. We know with all of our clients, it’s applicable everywhere in sales.

It is. Any B2B sales for sure.

Looking Back

Tam, by the way, I’m not the only one who loved this book. “Filled with tons of rock-solid strategies and practical advice.” An amazing testimonial on the cover of the book, Joe Conrath. One of the biggest names in our industry gave a wonderful testimonial. The second thing we’re going to talk about, which is interesting. We talked about that a lot on this show, Tammy, is outsourced sales models. That’s what your business is. It’s outsourced sales within the hospitality industry and a very big flourishing business adding huge value to the clients you work with. We’ll talk about that as well. Maybe to start, what’s the short story on your journey? How did we get here?

First of all, thank you for that lovely introduction. When you’ve been doing it as long as we have, I don’t know if there’s a short version. I will say that I’m one of those accidental salespeople and I talk about it in the book. I didn’t grow up saying, “I want to be a salesperson.” Rarely does anybody even know what that is and what that looks like.

I went to school for hospitality but I still didn’t know what sales meant. I was out at a college, finished a contract position at UFT, and helped them in their events department. My professor said, “The Hilton Toronto Airport is looking for a corporate sales manager. I threw your name in the ring.” I was like, “I don’t even know what that means, but sure.” Talk about faking it until you make it.

I showed up and I got the job. Many years later, I’m still in sales. I can’t imagine any other profession and the reason I’m still here is because there’s a better way to do it versus when I was on-boarded 30-some years ago. I’m dedicated to the profession. I love it. It’s about people. It’s a skilled trade, but it’s not treated like a skilled trade and a professional trade. That’s why I love your show is because you bring on smart people who are dedicated to elevating the profession. I’ve been so fortunate. It was the greatest accident professionally to ever happen to me. I hope to be doing it to the end of my career.

You brought us so many things, Tammy, that are worth unpacking a little bit. Let’s go down a bit of a tangent, the profession. I came on Andy Paul’s show and he was saying he was looking for big ideas in sales. The question was, if we could start it all over, what would you do? He listed a bunch of things not working very well in professional sales. He said, “If you could start it over, what would you do?” I didn’t know the question was coming. It hit me and I went, “I’d make it a profession. You have to get certified and you need ongoing training like an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, a real estate agent, or a project manager. How is this any different?” What are your thoughts on that?

In the hospitality industry, and I don’t think other verticals are any different. Unless it’s big complex B2B stuff. They might treat it differently. Basically, are you a good talker? Are you good with people? Do you know your product or service? You’ll make a great salesperson. Those are all the wrong things to look for because we need to do more listening than talking. It is not about our product or service. It’s what our product or service enables the customers to do.

That’s what gets missed. Adnauseam salespeople are told whether it was many years ago or current state, to know your product, your service, and your competitors as opposed to what you’re buying or what the client is buying is and what you’re selling so go figure that out. It still perplexes me to this day that we think about transactional sales and we think we’re selling a product or service. It’s all about the mindset and how we onboard sellers and how I was onboarded with Hilton many years ago.

With Hilton, they were the best ten years of my professional career but it was about rates, dates and space, and transactional selling. Not much has changed sadly. It should be a profession because it is an art and a science. Especially with the availability of technology and data and all of these tools that should be together strategically with the fundamentals that never go away. It’s this convergence of technology and fundamentals that we rarely see that’s missing from sales.

It’s so interesting. There’s a perfect example. In the book, Tam, you say, “In hospitality, it’s about a personality, being able to talk and knowing your product.” We have SaaS people reading. We have manufacturing businesses and services businesses reading. We see the same problem everywhere in professional sales. You’re a CEO. Their version of it is you get blasted with emails that know nothing about you. They’re pitching a product and all they’re trying to do is push for a demo. In hospitality, we’re going to do a tour. We’re going to walk around and do a site tour. In technology, if they’re pushing for a demo and it’s talk and me. The worst first date ever.

There won’t be a second date. I can tell you that I get a lot of those emails from some of these technology companies. I use them. Respectively, I lock out the name and the company, but I use those in our training with our team to say, “This is how you don’t prospect. This is how you don’t rise above all the noise.” Who’s the connector in the translator between what they’re selling and how it’s going to help me? We need to be translators to translate the value proposition. There is such a tremendous disconnect that it gives salespeople a bad name.

Salespeople need to be good translators of value proposition. There is currently a tremendous disconnect here, and it gives salespeople a bad name.

You’re right. By the way, jokingly, I don’t do it either. I can’t do it, but I’d love to. We get hit three times a week by another sales training company trying to sell us sales training. We’re sales training. Our website’s not fantastic, but it screams we’re sales trainers. Somebody just looked at the website. Sell us anything else. Stop trying to sell us what we sell. That’s a perfect example.

By the way, this is one of the reasons I love the book. The book, although I’m not in the hospitality industry. In every concept, every principle that you share every idea, it’s so universal for professional sales in general. The other thing that’s so important is it’s so clearly laid out. This is one of the things that it’s the magic of this book. There’s so much on professional sales, whether it’s internet platitudes and ideas or there’s hundreds of books that are great on professional sales.

Many of them are very are either strategic or tactical or they’re very tactical on one idea. To help somebody who’s getting into the profession or somebody who’s in the profession that wants to recharge a little bit. Your book has done a nice job of giving a general overview of the things we need to think about that could have a dramatic impact on what we’re doing. There’s no question in my mind. Anybody in professional sales who wants to read Room to Grow, you’re going to pull something from this that you can apply to you in your business, in your industry.

Thank you so much. It was a labor of love. That’s for sure. Common sense, as you know, does not equal common practice. I will often hear, “It was such a great reminder of the fundamentals.” It goes to show that our mindset, if we’re not intentional about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We quickly go back to that. I call it Pitch Slapping. We’re pitch slapping. It’s a habit. It’s a formed habit that we have to exercise and fight against that current to feature dump.

Common sense does not equal common practice.

You lead to this so nicely in. By the way, your book is one of the easier more enjoyable books to read. The hardest book I’ve ever read, Tam, it’s a must read, but the most difficult book, you referenced Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. You talked about those habits, the 150 cognitive biases. That’s one of the things that’s so hard for behavioral change. I love the way you say that common sense isn’t common practice because human beings are hardwired to save energy and not think about what we’re doing.

We’re hardwired to keep doing what we’re doing. It’s Kahneman and Tversky. I always forget Tversky. It’s Kahneman and Tversky’s Nobel Prize-winning, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that take a pause. You talk about this in the Strategy Before Tactics, chapter four, saying, “Think about what you’re doing, then think about how to do it.”

We all default to just jumping in and that’s where we left this show, Tam. If nothing else, take a pause every once in a while when you read this and say, “Do a little start, stop, and continue for yourself. What’s working, we’re going to continue doing. What isn’t working, but it’s become a habit for us. Maybe we’ll take a pause and stop.”

What’s something we hear about on this show, if you’re going to invest the 45 minutes in reading, just take 1 or 2 things. Go, “I wasn’t doing that. I should start, stop, continue to try and break those cognitive biases that are so tough.” Tammy, before we get to the outsourced model, the structure of the book is a great chapter, A perfect storm. It’s written in 2021, right in the heart of COVID. Are you selling like it’s 1990-love it? Becoming a modern seller. Chapter 4, Strategy Before Tactics. Please, thank you.

It’s the why you’re doing it and not the what. Number five, the Sales Reality. We’ll talk about a few things there in a minute. Number six, Executing your Sales Plan. Number seven, All the Sales Leaders Out There, business leaders, and entrepreneurs, know what good looks like. You touched on that beginning in terms of hiring. What are we hiring on? What skills and capabilities? You do reference our friend Daniel Pink a couple of times in the book. We love everything from Daniel Pink. Final chapter of the book, chapter eight, Everybody’s in Sales.

It is the why of your business that matters, not the what.

As everybody knows, we reference Daniel Pink on the show all the time. One in nine people in a professional sales job or probably more than of the 8 and 9 who aren’t in a professional sales job, what percentage of their day is spent persuading somebody else to their point of view? Forty percent of their day.

Influencing internally and externally.

Hospitality And Travel

Let’s get into the timing. Tammy, given up all the industries out there, hospitality has to be the industry that got most significantly hit during the pandemic. It has to be.

It was devastating.

What was the timing? It was released in 2021. Were you starting this before COVID or did you get on it and use some of the time during COVID? Tell me about the timing of putting it together and then releasing it.

It’s so crazy. It feels like ten years ago because so much has happened over that four-year period. For people in hospitality and travel, airlines, event management, hotels, but rental cars, and travel agencies.

Ninety percent of the world stopped traveling the week of March 16th, 2020. Was that tattoo to my brain or what? It impacted us not only because we exclusively support the hospitality industry, but we lost 70% of our clients in ten days because they no longer needed us to sell for them because nobody was traveling.

Some clients were shutting their doors. They had a mass exodus. We’re losing millions of dollars a day in canceled bookings and future bookings. When they were going down their list and their P&L, they were saying, “What contracts can I cancel?” We lost 70% of our business in ten days and had to quickly say, “A good percentage, 90% of our business is in the US.”

The US did not shut down the same way Canada did. Thank goodness because that kept the lights on for us. We have clients in Texas and different states that still have travel. We had to quickly say who is traveling. How can we offer a level of service? There were traveling nurses, government organizations, and medical organizations traveling because of the pandemic. We had to let half our team go.

Fortunately, within four months, everybody was brought back with care. It was the most devastating, on one end, we’re letting half our team go knowing the impact it’s going to have on them. While trying to still find business for the hotels that remained in our program. It was an insane time. I thought about as we stabilized back half of 2020, everybody thought that this COVID thing was going to be six months and not two years or three years.

I started because I had time, although I was in the weeds and managing the day-to-day and trying to hang on to the business. I started thinking about how is our industry going to recover? Management companies and hotels let all their salespeople go. Big brands let 70% of their sales organization go. What is that going to look like when travelers start traveling again? Who are they going to reach out to?

There were a lot of things. That’s why the first chapter, the Perfect Storm, was so important because we were getting away with a lot as an industry. Prior to the pandemic because for ten years, we were making a lot of money. There were international conventions. Every Fortune 500 company had travelers, tour groups were coming in, and sports tournaments. Sellers on property didn’t have to look too far to find business.

They had a lot of incoming inquiries and they were very transactional. They were using different muscles. They got away with being transactional because there was more business than they could manage. When the world stops traveling and there’s no business. You have to go from farming to hunting and going after business from market segments that you’re not experienced in. That was a heavy lift for a lot of people.

I knew all of these bad habits because part of our company also trains people. Even when times were good before COVID, I was getting in front of people saying, “You’re transactional. It’s going to catch up. You’re getting away with it.” For me, writing the book and the timing, there was more of a sense of urgency for me to get this out, to help the industry recover. I spent a year putting it together. In fact, I thought, will it come out in time?

In 2021, we were still in the throes of COVID. 2022 was the year that revenge travel came back and here’s what happened. Travel came back before hotels had their teams in place. The travel came back and hotels weren’t ready for the big league. They weren’t ready for it. They didn’t have the people. People left the industry. Millions left the industry and decided, “This isn’t recession-proof. I can go make more money somewhere else and not be treated the way that I was treated over COVID.”

This, to me, was a recovery toolkit to help hotels get back on their feet. We’re still trying to get back on our feet. That’s the crazy part. We’re getting there, but sales teams are very much still smiling and dialing. I hadn’t planned on it, but it became very crystal clear to me in 2020 that something had to be done and I had the time to dedicate to it. I made the time.

Again, when you talk about that environment, that high-level, broad environment, and economic environment for hospitality. There are a lot of industries today, Tammy, experiencing the exact same thing. In the SaaS industry, for example, you say we’ve been getting away with it. The SaaS industry had venture capital and private equity money flooding their organizations with sales and marketing personnel.

Turn rates skyrocket. No one’s hitting sales productivity. No one’s hitting quote is anywhere close to it. Customers are feeling this impact because we have unskilled and overconfident people reaching out and wasting the time of buyers. Now the buyer is coming back and going, “I rather do most of this online.” A good portion of buyers say, “I prefer never to speak to a salesperson.”

They’re thinking of a root canal that engages with a salesperson.

This is this interesting thing where this question I was asked on another show seemed relevant, which is, “There are a few metrics that keep screaming at us. We’re not getting better.” Are we plugging holes or is there a way of looking at this in a different way so fewer people can become accidental salespeople? We have a different industry if you couldn’t fall into the job because you have a pulse and I need to fill a body on my inside sales team. Would it be different if I had to go through a course for a year or two and have some certifications? Do some ongoing training to maintain that certification.

Good Salesperson

Over time, not overnight, with the buying community starting to see us as truly the consultants, we need to be B2B successful. That’s two different things. It might end up in a different way but let’s keep on with the book because I want to get to the outsourced model again. Let’s take another one. We’ve run through the different chapters here, folks, but knowing what good looks like is still an important thing for everybody.

Whether you’re a salesperson reading, and thank you for doing so. When we talk about what good looks like, that’s what we all have to try and attain as lifelong learners. If we’re going to be in this profession, we can talk about what a great salesperson looks like. Tammy, you identified some great examples, by the way, in the book of what good isn’t and what happens in interviews.

What I loved about the book was you laid out amazing questions for an interview. Folks, grab those questions, whatever industry you’re in, and use them. They’re going to be helpful. Tell me about the attributes of a great salesperson in your mind. I met your sales team and your sales leader. They are great.

Thank you.

What do you look for when you go through building out your team?

For any organization looking to build a sales team, they have to be clear on what is the role profile. In our world, are they managing incoming inquiries? Again, this is very specific to hotels. Are they order takers and managing incoming inquiries? That requires a different mindset and a different skill set. Are they having to grow existing accounts? Are you hiring someone to do business development?

Business development, which is when you’re hunting for business. You need to be strategic. You’re looking at the comp set, where the business is currently sitting, what business you have, and what business you don’t have. How are you going to get to those decision-makers? That’s a very different skill set. For us, because we are a 100% remote team, clients are hiring us to do their sales and to outsource their sales to us.

We are not managing incoming inquiries. They can take care of that. They are not paying us and our skilled people to make a wedding booking. In fact, when they’re talking to us to say, “What can Gillis do?” I’m saying we’re not talking to brides. I’m not booking hockey teams. Let us go after the B2B decision makers that you may not have the experience or time to go after because it requires research, a business conversation, and an understanding of the value proposition. It could take twelve attempts to get on their calendar.

First of all, for those reading, what role and profile are you looking for? What do you need them to do? What do you not need them to do? Part of the challenge in our industry is if a general manager at a hotel, most of them have a heavy operations background. The seller reports to them. They don’t know what to look for and they think all salespeople are good at all things. They’re not. We’re not good at all things.

I have certain strengths when it comes to selling. Cold calling was never one of my favorite things. I’m great at other things. You have to be clear that you’re not getting a unicorn who’s going to be all things to all people. At Gillis, we need to have people who love the hunt, scrappy, resilient, and good investigators. They are following the clues. Putting the pieces of the puzzle together to say, “Why would this prospect benefit from hearing from me now? What’s going on in their industry?”

Jill Conrath calls it trigger events. What’s going on in their company that might be triggering travel? Is there a shutdown? Are they redesigning a new line for Toyota? There’s a bunch of vendors coming in. Are they hiring? Are they firing? What’s going on to cause travel? Those are trigger events. There has to be some sleuthing that’s going on as opposed to that transactional seller. That’s what we look for. We screen about 500 resumes a month.

Two full-time people in HR and with all due respect, when we first started many years ago, if someone applied and talk about knowing what good looks like. We have a good idea ten years later. If we thought, “If you were an on-property seller, you’re great. You can hide. You can hide being on property or you could hide being in a big organization.”

If your leader doesn’t know what good looks like, not being observed, not being coached, or you don’t have the right KPIs, it is crazy the transformation when people who make it on our team and we call it the 1%. They sometimes have fifteen years of experience and still, we are rewiring their brain to sell the way we need them to sell and to think the way we need them to think. Everyone on our team will say, “They have never been more trained and supported or they’ve never been forced and challenged to think about sales the way we think about sales,” which is a testament to our business model.

If it was easy and if anyone could do it, our hotels wouldn’t need to outsource it. That’s a long answer to your question. There’s so much to unpack there but knowing what good looks like, it depends. Everybody has to take the time to say, “What is the role profile? Are they scrappy? Are they competitive?” Here’s a question when we’re talking to folks. We’ll say, “Are you competitive? No. What part of sales do you love? I love relationships.”

How are you going to do that to people you don’t have relationships with? How are you going to get to that point? Tell me you’re a 12 at a 10 on the competitive scale and you like to win and you don’t like to lose. You’re not given up and not easily discouraged. Now, we’re talking about someone who isn’t going to be afraid of rejection when they make twenty calls and they get a hold of two people out of the 20. That’s a long answer. A lot of times, it’s gut. There’s a bit of science, but there are some gut checks that are usually pretty accurate.

First of all, so much again to unpack there. We’re going to get into it, but I love that Dr. Nick Morgan's book, Can You Hear Me? Apparently, we make impressions in milliseconds. Particularly, in an interview, we’ll make our impression of somebody in like 90 seconds or less. The rest of the hour, we spend finding data. That gut is your emotional decision on somebody and we can’t make decisions without the emotional part of our brain. A lot of it’s emotional.

In fact, unfortunately, there are some studies done with people who have had brain injuries that have damaged the emotional center of their brain, where the logical portion of their brain is still working perfectly. If the emotional center of the brain has been damaged, they need 24/7 care because they can’t make a single decision without that working. They can’t get dressed in the morning. I forgot where I read that.

I found that so interesting when we think of how people make decisions. Circling back here, you talked about a couple of things that were so important there. One was, Tammy, you talked about how we have to have a business conversation and not a sales conversation. That leads to your chapter, which I love, Are You Selling Like It’s 1999 but industry business acumen.

Forget what my product is. What’s going on with the business of the person I’m reaching out to? We did a great exercise with a training client where they were targeting a large organization. We’re going after the CEO there. We spent six minutes. We asked the individual, what are you going to do? They said, “I’m going to reach out.” We said, “What point of interest do you have?” They shared one.

We had about nine people in a room spend six minutes each finding data that they could leverage. We went around the room and said, “Name two things you found that we could leverage to get through the door.” It’s unbelievable what we found in six minutes. Not an hour. Not an hour and a half. It’s not one of my economic papers of trying to get into university cramming. In six minutes, we can find a point of interest that plays on that theory of reciprocity and they understand it’s about them.

You reference Dale Carnegie in the book again. All your references, we love. Dale Carnegie, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to make people interested in you.” A beautiful point that you raise in the book. When we come back to this.

The other thing is, Tam, this is an important one. We have been in markets where you could hide in professional sales. You sold for Salesforce in the early 2000s. You were doing high-end order-taking. If you sold for HubSpot after 2012, you were doing high-end order-taking. God bless. I’m glad everybody had a good time.

The challenge you have now though, you may be unskilled, overconfident, and tough. It’s like me in the kitchen. I have no idea what I’m doing, but for some reason, I believe I’m a master chef. It’s hard to teach someone like me. I don’t think I need to learn. I’m dropping pans, breaking things, and flipping stuff that’s not supposed to be flipped. I have no idea why I’m like that.

The pizza delivery guy’s on his way just in case.

Outsourcing Sales

He’s on speed dial all the time but these are important things for us as an industry. These are the things in the aggregate that start to lead to the fact that the buyers have this impression of us. This is what we’ve got all of us got to improve the performance and the professionalism of what we do. Tammy, it is a nice pivot into your core business model. I’ll be honest, we’ve talked about outsourcing sales a couple of times on the show.

Until I came to your business and understood your business, I wasn’t a fan of it at all because for the most part, the market’s made up of the major outsourcing of a sales function is outsourcing of SDR work, sales development work but it’s in the tech sector. What happens is the organization builds a farm of individuals doing this, but they’re not your model.

That model is they get a client. It could be anything in technology, then they hire new feet on the street. They try and ramp them up with industry and business acumen but it’s never as fast as if the company did it themselves. There’s frequently a lunchbox let down is what we’ve seen. Now there are always exceptions. You crack the code the opposite way because you found industry hospitality that can never be outside of the top tier largest organizations. They can’t build a scalable core competency for doing this in-house.

Instead of having 1 or 2 people do it off the side of the desk, you went and found industry professionals who go through a rigorous interviewing process because they’re experts. Not only do you deliver the function to the client, but you’re also delivering expertise and knowledge because they have no idea how to do this in some cases properly because they don’t have the size and scale to get there. Was that intentional? Did you spot this intentionally, or was it the passion of what you grew up doing?

Many years ago, I spent time at BlackBerry. I left the industry. I said, “I’m burning out in hospitality. I need a break. I’m going to join a high-tech company. I’m going to slow down.” The joke was on me because this was 2007. I spent seven years at BlackBerry, left and came back, and knew I wanted to get back into hospitality.

The first year and a half, I was training. We still do training. I went back to my roots and reached out to clients I had worked with. I spent a year and a half training for a large brand to franchise model. They would bring me to the regional meetings and their annual conference. I built out three sales certification programs for the front desk, sales folks, and their general managers. I was embedded with that organization, which was amazing.

Every time I went out to train a general manager or an owner, they were a limited-service hotel brand. Limited service, meaning 80 rooms or less, no restaurant for the most part, and no meeting space. It was for that transient guest. Eighty percent of those hotels did not have property sales people going after B2B business. A lot of people say, “What are you selling in a hotel?” For your audience to know, what’s not a build it and you will come model.

There’s Expedia, Trivago, and all of those what we call OTAs third-party sites. That can fill rooms but that B2B business is Sunday to Thursday if you’ve got a construction project in the backyard. If Toyota’s there or a major company is there. There is something at that location that manages travel that you need to negotiate their travel program with.

I went to our client and said, “You keep paying me, which is wonderful to come and train your owners, but they can’t execute when they go back on the property. They don’t have the time and the expertise.” I’ve worked on this model. This was imagined many years ago. It was still to this day, some owners and hotel GMs say, “You have to be in the market. You have to get a desk at a hotel. You can’t sell remotely,” but then COVID happened. We proved to the world that you can sell anywhere.

COVID-19 proved to the world that you can sell anywhere.

I took this model to Best Western. That was my big client at the time. They have 2,400 hotels in North America, over 4,000. I said, “If they’re not making money, you’re not making money. You can only use programs, but they’re not activating it.” They gave us eight of their underperforming hotels as a pilot and six months later, we had 8X or 10x, the ROI, and improved the model. That’s how it started.

We were building the plane while we were flying it if that makes sense. We’re like, “We better get a CRM. We better bring on a director of ops to start building out all these SOPs.” It didn’t start out strategic. I was in the weeds every day managing the business until we got to a point where you got to bring in the directors of sales, the BI people, and the sales ops people on the team. Now here we are many years later with what I feel is a best-in-class sales model because we’ve got incredible leaders whom you’ve met who oversee the execution of our sales folks.

We’ve got the sales operations people like Nikki and her team who are making sure we’ve got the reporting, processes, tools, and accountability. HR to make sure that we’re constantly filling our funnel with good candidates. It’s been an incredible year of continuing to get better and prove this business model. It started out, “I hope this can work,” to us having over 220 hotels in our program and having a strong, great, I’m trying to sound modest, some brand recognition in the industry that I’m proud of.

Everything’s about the result you provide for a client, 8X to 10X a result for a client. That’s the only way a business is going to succeed. We have to provide results. First of all, no need to sound modest. I’ve met you at a leadership team. They’re dynamite. It’s just fantastic, but this is where this outsourced small because this comes up a lot. There’s nothing but entrepreneurs out there.

Most entrepreneurs don’t grow up in sales. They’re going to swap if their application developers, they create code, want to productize it and sell it or they’re an engineer, come up with a product, have a manufacturing firm, and want to sell it. No one grows up as an entrepreneur in sales. They go through years of what the hospitality industry goes through, where they’re churning through salespeople. They don’t understand why, but they’re the avatars you reference in chapter two, if you build it, they will come.

That applies to a hotel. It also applies to most CEOs of technology companies because they love their product. They’re flabbergasted that not everybody buys their product because they know the nine reasons it’s better than the next one. The best product never wins or rarely wins. It’s the best sales organization wins.

This model where you’ve cracked the code by saying, “We found this niche where they can rarely do they get scale. They need the help so we can outsource it but we understand their customer.” We already grew up knowing their product but we know their customer. That’s what these outsource SDR farms never get to. They start to learn the product a little bit but they’re new into business.

They don’t understand the corporate client. They don’t have that business acumen. They can’t be viewed as a consultant reaching out. They never get to that level of trusted advisor. It’s too hard. It’s a lot of churn and it never had seemed to worry about this. it’s the first time I’ve seen it, but obviously you folks are killing it and power to you.

Thank you for that. I would say we are exclusive to hospitality. This is all we know. We’ve been approached throughout the year by other companies saying, “Will you do outsource sales?” There’s enough business and hospitality. That’s my passion. If I’ve never sold for another industry, I don’t want to go and get distracted from a pure financial point of view.

We live and breathe hospitality and I can relate to it as the CEO. I know what good looks like. I don’t know what good looks like for other industries. The people that we attract are best in class. Part of the scale that you talk about is one of the value propositions. It’s at 8X to 10X. We’re a team of 55 people. The infrastructure is also what our clients are buying into. It’s not that one seller who’s giving fractional sale support.

They’re getting my time. They’re getting our senior director’s time, getting access to tools, and analytics, an entire system that would be so cost prohibitive. This model allows them to run their business, take care of their employees, and take care of their clients while we keep their sales funnel flowing with new accounts coming in.

We take that responsibility very seriously. I couldn’t fake it by selling for another industry. There’s no other industry that would light me up as much or motivate me as much. That’s why we have this real niche business model because we know who we are. We know why we do it and who we do it for, which is critical.

By the way, the other thing that firm gets is they’re getting to the collaboration of 54 other people on the team. I’ve been in the room with your leaders. They’re highly collaborative. We believe in the power of teamwork and collaboration. If managed and facilitated well, the power of the experience, the insight, the market knowledge, the understanding of the trends in the industry, bringing that to each and every client. Shocking. Frankly, that’s why people pay McKinsey or Monitor or Boston Consulting Group. Whatever strategic advisory firm is. They’re paying for that market knowledge and insight.

It’s true.

You bring it to bear with insight in terms of what’s going on with 250 hotels. That’s a lot of knowledge.

It’s a lot of knowledge in terms of here’s who’s traveling, what they’re saying, and the future trends that we share. Also, all of those accounts, all of those prospects when a client, let’s say in Peterborough, Ontario is we’re onboarding a hotel there. They have ABC accounts in their backyard. Chances are, unless they’re one-off accounts that only reside in that market. We are working with that account across our portfolio.

We know the decision makers. We’re shortening the sales cycle and we’re doing all the stuff that they don’t want to do. One thing I’m so proud of, we are going through our quarterly business reviews. Our directors of sales and our leaders who you’ve met, they have individual pods. That’s how we’re structured. They have up to ten area sales managers and 60 hotels they manage. For our clients that have multiple hotels, we have QBRs.

I am blown away. We have prep calls for the QBRs. I attend as many QBRs as possible. The value and insights that our directors of sales are bringing to the QBRs, the level of care and accountability that our team brings to say, “We’re protecting your investment.” It is something that doesn’t exist. I beam with pride because this is over and above their day-to-day job. Our DOSs are putting in a ton of time, but I see the retention. Our client retention continues to increase because they trust us with their investment. They see the results and they see the care and the communication.

The lesson learned for me and for everybody reading is what are we all doing to take care of our clients with this level of unnatural focus and intensity because all of our businesses exist only because of our clients. If we’re not as focused and relentless to bring that much value to our clients every day in every conversation, somebody else will.

Someone else will. That’s my healthy paranoia. I say, it’s healthy paranoia. I don’t know if my husband would agree.

That’s right.

I have healthy paranoia about, don’t change for the sake of it but we need to be constantly elevating and making sure that we’re bringing the best to the business every single day.

Closing Words

I love the quote ar the beginning of your chapters, by the way. You quote Mark Cuban, “The one thing in life you can control is effort.”

I love Mark Cuban.

I love that quote. When we started to think of everything we talked about, having forbidden the pandemic and all these different things. First of all, you so much have that entrepreneur’s mindset where something happens, it doesn’t matter what happened. You’re about the future. There’s always this opportunity. Every crisis is an opportunity and even in the heart of it, you were going, “We’re going to come out of this and these people are going to be understaffed and this is an opportunity.”

Tam, when we think of what we’re doing every day as professional salespeople, there’s a massive opportunity. The opportunity is to stand out. We can stand out if we go that extra effort to understand, even take from now, business acumen. What are we watching? What are we reading? Which shows do we listen to elevate?

Room to Grow is the book to read. What are we reading and learning so that we have more insight and knowledge that we can bring to our clients and prospects so that they can run better businesses? Good things will happen for us if we can do that. That might be a key thing, Tam, to leave in the show notes. The one thing in life you can control is effort. We’re coming to the top of the hour, so thank you so much for joining.

This was so much fun. We could talk for hours, as we always do. I have about twenty books I have to read, thanks to you and your show because you bring on great guests and so many good recommendations. Thank you for all your work in elevating this profession. I learned from you every day.

Great guests like the one we have now. Thank you so much, Tammy. By the way, Tammy, how do people learn more about Killis and you?

I’m on LinkedIn and that is the one social that I dedicate time to simply because our product is an Instagram and Snapchat. All that good stuff. I’m an active contributor there and GillisSales.com if you want to learn more about what we do. I love to write. I love to write articles and do shows and use LinkedIn to develop best practices to share because we still have a long way to go. We still have a long way to go as a profession and as an industry. One show at a time, we can start to change the mindset of people and hopefully, turn around the reputation that the profession has, unfortunately.

Room To Grow: We still have a long way to go as a profession and as an industry. One podcast at a time, we can change the mindset of people and hopefully turn around the reputation of the profession.

Beautifully said, Tammy. Thank you again for joining. Thank you so much for joining the show. We do this podcast to increase the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. Our belief is that if we can do that, we’ll improve the lives of professional salespeople. That’s our mission with the show. This show is super fun, but it needs to be of value to you and you’re the folks who can let us know if it is.

Please send your comments about this episode and all of them to me. I’m MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That’s my personal email that I check. We love constructive criticism. Let us know what we can do to make this more valuable for you. We will respond to each and every suggestion we get. Thanks for making them. If you liked this episode and love this conversation as much as I did, like and subscribe to the show. Please tell your friends because that’s how we get great guests like Tammy Gillis. Until next time, thanks everybody for joining. We’ll see you next time on the show.

Important Links

• Room to Grow: Not Leaving Sales to Chance

• Gillis Consulting and Training

• Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Can You Hear Me?

• BlackBerry

• Best Western

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Tammy Gillis

Tammy is a recognized leader in the hospitality industry in sales and sales leadership and the founder and CEO of Gillis Sales. She disrupted the traditional hotel sales model in 2014 and launched a Dynamic Sales Solution providing remote sales support for hotels.

Tammy launched her sales career 30 years ago and has led high performing teams with Hilton Hotels, Blackberry and her current team of 45 sales professionals who provide sales support to over 200 hotels across North America.

She has trained thousands of sales professionals, hotel owners, general managers, and front-line associates, earning her a Training Excellence Award from the Institute for Performance & Learning and recognized as One of the Top 100 Most Inspirational People in Global Hospitality & Travel.

She has a passion for improving not only the skill set but also the mindset of sales professionals to succeed in this digital age of selling to modern buyers. Believing that sales is the life blood for all organizations, her mission is to make sales accessible and achievable for all hotel owners.

Tammy’s engaging and genuine approach helps her clients break ineffective sales behaviors to become trusted advisors with a client centric approach to selling that drives results and differentiates them from the competition.

The Curiosity Code: Unlock Your Sales Superpower With Dr. Diane Hamilton

Struggling to capture attention in a world overflowing with information? This episode dives deep into the transformative power of curiosity in sales and beyond. Our guest, Dr. Diane Hamilton, the author of the acclaimed book "Cracking the Curiosity Code," joins us to shed light on why curiosity is a superpower for salespeople and individuals alike. Dr. Hamilton dives deep into her insightful FATE model, which identifies the four key factors that can stifle curiosity: Fear, Assumptions, Technology, and Environment. We'll learn how these elements can hold us back from asking insightful questions, and how to overcome them to unlock our full potential. Dr. Hamilton goes beyond identifying the roadblocks, offering practical strategies to cultivate curiosity. You'll discover how curiosity acts as the spark that ignites innovation, propels motivation, and enhances emotional intelligence – all essential qualities for success in sales and personal growth. So, get ready to ditch the script and embrace the power of curiosity!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Curiosity Code: Unlock Your Sales Superpower With Dr. Diane Hamilton

Is curiosity important in professional sales? Is it important in life? Of course, it is. You’ve read a hundred times on this show that curiosity is the key component during discovery, where the client or prospect will feel literally that we care about them achieving a better outcome for their business. It turns out curiosity makes us feel good. It releases the enzyme dopamine, which is the pleasure enzyme. It makes us feel great when we eat a wonderful meal or even enjoy sex. Curiosity is good for us.

Curiosity is a critical success factor in business. In fact, a quote from a book that we’re going to review, “Next to integrity and trust is my curiosity and willingness to encourage my colleagues to challenge the status quo was one of the most critical characteristics that held us to whatever success we were fortunate enough to experience.” That quote came from Keith Krach, who wrote the forward to this book.

Keith is the Founder of DocuSign and Ariba. Ariba ended up with a $40 billion market cap. Whatever success, we were fortunate enough to enjoy. Keith enjoyed a lot of success. Keith was writing about Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlo by Dr. Diane Hamilton and Diane’s our guest for this episode. An amazing conversation about curiosity.

We learned that as infants or children, curiosity is everything. We have an abundance of it. That’s how we learn and grow and develop. Over time, things get away and there are barriers preventing our curiosity. It’s so important for personal and professional success. Diane shares with us the four factors that get in the way, fear, assumptions, technology, either overuse of technology or underuse and even the environment, the messages we hear and the stories we’re told.

Diane is an expert on this. In fact, she’s a sought-after expert in curiosity, perception, emotional intelligence, and behavioral science. She’s got four decades of real-world experience and she’s written five books and we’re talking about one of those books. She’s amazingly recognized in this field. She was named to the Global Leader Today’s list of top leaders.

Other people on that list is Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Cheryl Sandberg. What company? She was also listed as one of the 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership and in the top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR. I enjoyed my conversation with Diane. I’m sure you will, too. By the way, Cracking the Curiosity Code should be required when reading in professional sales and maybe in business. If you like this episode as much as I do, please like and subscribe to the Selling Well Show because it matters to us. That’s how we get great guests like Dr. Diane Hamilton and here she is.

Diane, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.

I’m super excited to be here, Mark. Thanks for having me.

I’m super excited to chat with you. We’re going to be talking about Cracking the C. Diane, the folks who read our episodes knows me go on and add in fun item about the importance of curiosity and authentic curiosity in professional sales. It’s not about us. It’s always about the person we’re speaking to and having that authentic curiosity. You’ve got an amazing background. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind sharing the short story of your journey, your professional journey that led you to writing this book.

Diane’s Professional Journey

I come from a sales background for sure. Decades of sales. I’ve sold everything from computers, software to mortgage loans. You name it. I was in pharmaceutical sales for a long time. There’s so much that you do that is impacted by your sales background, which is wonderful. When I worked in pharmaceuticals, I worked for AstraZeneca. I worked in their AgChem division for almost 4 or 5 years, then they’re another 15 years in their pharmaceutical sales.

I learned a lot from that experience. One of the things I got out of it was they paid for my Master’s, which was wonderful. I never wanted a Master’s. I never thought about it. I never occurred to me to even go back, but I’m thinking, “If they’re going to pay for it, I’ll certainly get one.” I loved education and learning new things. I went back to see how hard it would be to get a PhD. That was my whole goal, just to see how the challenge behind.

I fell in love with online education in the process because I did my entire Bachelor’s at night. You work for 8:00 to 4:00 or 5:00, then you go to a school from 7:00 to 10:00 at night. You want to shoot yourself. I loved online education. I wanted to teach in that realm because I thought I want to help other people not have to do what I do to do. That got me into online education. I’ve been in that coming on many years. I don’t even know. I’ve taught thousands of online courses because I love it so much.

I ended up as the MBA Program Chair at the Forbes School of Business, which is out in the University of Arizona. It was a great experience but when I left, I thought I wanted to try to do some. I still work for them part-time. I teach for a bunch of different universities that have online departments. I’ve taught thousands of courses and I love it.

I wanted to develop my consulting and speaking business. When I went out of my own, I did so many different boards. I work on a lot of different boards from DocuSign. I was on their board advisors and different companies like RadiusAI and technology companies. Many wonderful things. What I do is I learn things and I share what I learn. That’s what I do for a living.

My main thing is, I have my consulting and media business and like you, I had a show like this that’s on hiatus because I’m doing shows for some other people. Mostly, I work with organizations to help them build curiosity. I created the Curiosity Code Index and wrote the book that you held up that goes along with that. It’s the first assessment that determines the factors that inhibit curiosity, which is pretty exciting because you have to know what stops you to get better.

It’s the first assessment that determines the factors that inhibit curiosity, which is pretty exciting because you have to know what stops you to get better.

How interesting in terms of the journey. The journeys on this show are fantastic and I’m sure you experienced the same thing. The list of the guests you had on your show is flabbergasting, as is the list of the testimonials for the book. Everybody’s provided an amazing testimonial, but you mentioned being on the board of DocuSign with Keith Krach who did the forward to the book. He’s such a fan of yours as well.

I’m a friend of his.

The interesting thing about that journey that I liked, Diane, and a little bit of alignment. I as well did an executive MBA. I’d been in my career for a while. I’d had a little bit of some modest success. I thought in my own mind I wanted to become a CEO. I thought I had a bit of a gap in terms of financial acumen. I ended up doing an executive MBA, which is evenings and weekends. You go and spend some time into a wall while working.

Reading your book, the one thing that jumps out at me is it was that experience for me that I’d say, reinvigorated my curiosity. Up to that point in time, up into my low 30s had some success. I thought I was having success because of my inherent capabilities almost Carol Dweck, a fixed mindset, saying, “I’m pretty good at this,” but it’s because of my inherent capabilities.

Cracking The Curiosity Code

I went to the MBA school to try and come back. Maybe become a CEO then I realized all I want to do is sales. It’s the only thing that’s important in a business. It’s the most important thing but it triggered this lifelong learning and this desire to keep growing. The fact, I love doing this show. It’s speaking to people like you to continually learn. Let’s zip around to the book, Cracking the Curiosity Code.

Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential

A couple of things that are interesting. At the beginning of the book, you’re trying to pursue this topic to understand, where do people fit on this spectrum of curiosity? Can being more curious make you a better leader or more successful, or help you address your fears? All these things that we should unpack as part of this discussion, but maybe the starting point is, how do we define curiosity? What is curiosity?

It’s funny, because I gave a big talk for Coaching.com. The very first thing I made everybody do was define a couple of words. What how do you feel? What was the definition for curiosity for you at work, especially? It’s fun to see everybody’s answers. A lot of it is exploring new things, asking questions, and doing things you haven’t done in the past. Those have come up a lot.

When I wrote the book, I always saw myself as a very curious person. I wanted to know why other people weren’t curious. I wanted to just delve into that a little bit more because I had all these people like Steve Orbs and billionaires on my show. Everybody’s super curious, wonderful, and interesting. I would teach some of my classes and some of my students maybe not as interested in looking. You’d want them to give them the fish instead of teach them to fish.

I wanted them to want that. I looked at curiosity like everybody else. It’s the desire to learn new things and all that. As I started to work with organizations and give them my Curiosity Code Index and find out what was slowing them down and talk to them about all these things. I see it so much as getting out of status quo thinking in organizations because blockbusters and the codex and the companies, Blackberry, that was a great movie. I watched how they all failed because they stuck with the status quo way of doing things.

If it worked great in the past, we don’t need to explore and look into new ways because we like those blackberry thumb buttons that we but then Steve Jobs ate their lunch. We have to realize that just because something worked in the past, it’s not going to necessarily work in the future. Having a strong sales background, I saw the importance of asking questions and all those aspects of curiosity. It encompasses all those words that everybody typed into the box.

We have to realize that just because something worked in the past, it’s not going to necessarily work in the future.

What an amazingly consistent theme out there, which is what worked in the past won’t always work in the future. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to take in some of the positives of the past or we’re changing everything. I do believe that in professional sales, particularly over the last 15 or 20 years, there have been significant meaningful changes that we have to respond and react to.

That’s a real challenge in professional sales because you’ve got well established mature folks who have a bit of that Kodak thinking. I was at Kodak at that time. It was interesting time I got hired into Kodak as my first job selling photocopiers back in the early ‘90s. It was quite interesting because they had this photocopy division that had a professional sales school and competed with Xerox. They had some technologies that did compete quite successfully with Xerox.

You could see that mentality if they didn’t want to disrupt their cash cow. It was always this discussion about the film business. As you aptly point out, they had the patent on digital photography and they would literally joke about companies like Sony and Agfa and some of these other competitors because they were so minor league in traditional film compared to Kodak then they ate their lunch.

I know. It’s crazy. I’ve had Jeff Hayzlett on the show. I’ve talked to him. He was the CMO of Kodak. It’s a common thing that a lot of companies have had. They’ve had such great success. You couldn’t walk into a Kodak store without getting a bunch of Kodak film landing on your head because it was so packed everywhere. It’s the thing that it’s hard to foresee the future of what’s going to change. What I found was interesting in sales that has changed so much is the teams are much more popular. When I was at the pharmaceutical rep, I started to see a little bit of that when I was leaving. This is more than twenty years ago than when I was doing that.

I loved having my own territory. I had nobody to bother me. I could do my own thing, then they go, “If one person calling on this doctor is getting such great results, let’s have two do it.” They would have me do it instead of every four weeks calling on somebody. My counterpart would go every two weeks and we would split it up. “That works so well. Let’s have four people.” By the time I left, there was eight of us calling on this guy or gal. It was a lot.

They got overwhelmed by it. It was interesting to see. My daughter is a big director of marketing sales for a company called Split and she’s been in sales forever. I get to see what they do and some of these teams. When I was selling loans, they threw you the phone books, “Here, dial for dollars.” Now, they’ve got this person gets the lead, that person closes the deal, and this person does this. That’s what I think is the biggest change in sales since I did it.

You’re right, that’s a huge change in sales. That came about with Salesforce. There was a guy named Aaron Ross, who helped grow Salesforce in the early days. He came to the conclusion that established sales reps wouldn’t do what’s called demand generation or what they used to call cold calling many years ago.

He came up with something, the specialist model where we have people who do demand generation. They passed the opportunity over to the more mature account executive because that person’s never going to do demand generation. I don’t agree with that, but they’re never going to do demand generation. A very famous book called Predictable Reve.

That triggered this specialist model. Part of this is damaged the sales community. That’s a different episode for a different time but that idea is interesting. That idea of this isolation as a salesperson as well. Curiosity comes into play there a little bit too and to a certain extent. extent. One of the things that we’re always surprised by in our training is that people get benefit from being a part of the community, even people who sell for companies in different divisions, different industries, and selling different products. There’s an amazing amount of consistency in terms of challenges or opportunities or the importance of the mindset.

They get real value understanding what different people do. You talked about, “I enjoyed being alone and being on my own,” then suddenly there’s eight people calling on that poor physician. Diane, in the book, you make these great connections. The book is such a great read. It’s so incredibly interesting because you make these great connections between curiosity and motivation, curiosity and leadership, engagement and emotional intelligence. All these things we want it success and we want to know about.

One of the most fascinating points you bring up that’s validated by the research is that and correct me if I’ve got this wrong, that children or babies are all about curiosity. By the time they’re three, they’re asking about 100 questions a day. Survival is based on curiosity and they’ve got this going for them. By the time they’re 12 or 13, that’s cut by 75% and they’re asking very few questions. It’s almost like the environments are bleeding the curiosity out of these kids as they grow up.

Emotional Intelligence

You bring up something that comes up in the Curiosity Code Index. The environment was one of the factors that inhibits curiosity. What was interesting to me was you mentioned emotional intelligence and some of these other things that we’re trying to develop at work. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the impact of emotional intelligence on sales performance. That’s what got me into the interest of emotional intelligence, which I fell into randomly. I hadn’t even heard of emotional intelligence at that time. It was a long time ago.

I thought, “This is a cool and interesting topic.” I had no idea how big this thing flowed. As I was writing this, I’m thinking, “I like all this assessment stuff,” because I thought it was fascinating. I got certified in emotional intelligence tests and Myers-Briggs. Whatever was popular at the time. What I learned was emotional intelligence and motivation and all those things you mentioned are all the things people hire me to speak.

They’d say, “Can you speak about soft skills or whatever they call the different things?” As I started to look at some of these things, I realized that to fix any of those things, you’d have to fix curiosity first. Curiosity is the spark. I liken it to baking a cake. You want cake as your outcome. If you’re baking a cake, that’s your goal. You’ve got ingredients like flour, oil and eggs. You’re mixing them together and you put it in a pan. You put it in the oven and you want cake.

In the business environment, our cake is money and productivity. We want that. These are the ingredients, emotional intelligence, motivation, communication, engagement, and innovation. Everybody’s working on these things but nobody’s realized that they’ve put it in the oven. The oven’s not on. You got to have it on the oven with a spark of curiosity to get cake. That’s how it all ties together. That’s why I broke those things out into different chapters for that reason.

FATE

Let’s talk about the spark. We’ve got folks out there reading that might say and almost like Carol Dweck with growth mindset, “In one area of my life, I’ve got a real growth mindset. I’m a musician. I love learning, and watching online videos for drumming. I love getting better. I love improving. When I’m not playing well, I don’t see it as a scarlet letter. I go, this is part of my journey to getting better. I’m going to get better. Yet in business, I might have this fixed mindset and I’m not open to coaching. I don’t want to learn and develop.”

In Carol’s book at one point in time, she says, “One of the main ways of changing or triggering that growth mindset is understanding the difference between a fixed and growth mindset then looking at some part of your life where you have that growth mindset.” If people are reading and they say, “Maybe I have plateaued a little bit or regarding my curiosity, maybe it has diminished.” How do we re-trigger curiosity?

I use Carol Dweck’s work, George Lanky and Sir Ken Robinson. The last two have some great TED talks if you haven’t seen them. If you look at some of this stuff, in George Lanz’ work with NASA, he looked at creativity, which mimics exactly what we see with curiosity. It goes up about age five then tanks. In our 30s, we have very little left.

What he said is, “We come up with these great ideas, but at the same time, we over-criticize them.” It’s like putting on the gas and the brakes at the same time. You don’t go very far. How do we know if I’m a musician and I love that but I told myself in my head what you were saying, “In business setting, I’m not this.” That’s our assumptions that we have. That’s our voice in our head.

When I studied for the Curiosity Code Index, that’s my main thing that I work with organizations with. I give this assessment. The reason this assessment got so much attention is because there was nothing that determined these things that hold us back. We already talked a little bit about environment, but there’s four factors that you can figure out what’s holding you back from curiosity.

If you know these things, that’s how, as you said, awareness for from Carol Dweck. If you recognize these things, then you can move forward. I spent years studying thousands of people and this is all peer reviewed scholarly research that I had published because I wanted to not come up with an assessment that’s cute for my website. I wanted something that’s going to fix this. The four factors that inhibit curiosity are the acronym is FATE.

You have to recognize how fear, the F. A is the assumptions, which is that voice in your head. T is technology, which is over and under-utilization of it and environment is E, which is everybody with whom you’ve had contact who’s told you, “You shouldn’t like this or family all does that or I don’t have time to answer this.” All these can overlap a little bit. You talk about environment.

If maybe somebody has said or maybe your sibling said, “That’s a stupid thing to do.” You get all these people in your life. Your boss, “Don’t come to me with problems unless you have solutions,” or somebody said, “That’s a great question. I’ll make you the head of that committee and I’m not going to pay you to do it but here’s more work.” All these things have this voice in our head going, “I don’t like that or I’m not going to do that again.” That leads to fear.

We’re in the meetings and going, “I’m not going to suggest anything. The last time, they made me the head of that, or I don’t want to look stupid.” There’s all these things. It was so interesting to me to get it in writing like, “This is what holds you back under fear. Here’s what holds you back under assumptions, technology, and environment.” As you said, you know where you stand but as in an emotional intelligence test or an engagement test. You then can create a personal swat, look at your weaknesses and threats, then create smart goals to overcome them. That’s basically the process I go through within organizations with people.

That’s the process you go through. By the way, if we go online and we do the Curiosity Code Index, is there a tool online that we can self-assess and do these things?

Yes, it’s CuriosityCode.com.

Those links will be in the episode. Everybody should take a look and take that on. The acronym was FATE, fear, assumptions, technology, and environment. You start to think and all of these are cognitive biases. Many of these, anyway, at least environment cognitive biases. A lot of them apply, by the way, to sales. I think that environment and these voices you hear in your head, certainly when I started I’m not sure about you. I wasn’t very proud to be in a professional sales role when I started.

All my friends, looking back, had the worst jobs in the universe. They were MBAs who were the lowest level in terms of the financial community and investment banking, where they get abused for years. We had lawyers who were articling and miserable existence. I’m selling photocopiers into businesses all the time, dealing with people and learning about business, but it had a real self-esteem issue likely because of this perception in the universe of what sales is. The stereotype from many years ago like Gil from the Simpsons. It wasn’t very good. By the way, there’s still a little bit of that out there.

A long time ago. It was Willie Lohman and death of a salesman.

There you go.

I watch Glenn Gary and Glenn Ross. You watch these things and you go, “It sounds awful.” I believe that every should have a sales background to some extent. It’s the most helpful thing. I had Barry Ryan on my show. He teaches curiosity and sales at Stanford. Some of this stuff is fascinating to see how much sales helps you.

For me, the biggest thing that helped me in sales was questioning to develop my empathy, which is a big part of emotional intelligence. What was interesting, when I worked for AstraZeneca. They rated us on our concern for impact. This was like 1980 when I took the first assessment with them. They were way ahead of their time. How I came across to other people was huge for them.

I thought, “That’s such an important part.” Emotional intelligence is your ability to understand yourself and others and those emotions and react appropriately. In sales, if you don’t know how you’re coming across to other people, that’s a problem. It’s also in sales, you need to develop this empathy to be able to know what your customers even need. It’s so complicated. Even though sales has got that Willy Loman thing to some people.

In sales, you need to develop empathy to be able to know what your customers need.

To me, you’re bringing in all the money for the company. You’re the heart of everything. People are starting to see that this is so important that we need to have people trained and have them understand. I have a sales story. I share this more than one as a pharmaceutical rep. I’m young doing this. I was just out of college. I had never sold anything.

I went through their intense training program. I’ve never had better training in anything in my life. They’re like, “You’re going to say this. You’re going to do that. It’s going to be this order. You’re going to talk about this product.” I went through all that training. It was years of training in some respects, but my first call or so, I’m in a building. It’s like a three-story building. I get up there and I’m in the waiting room. You’ve got to wait for these, it was a guy at that time that I had to call on.

You had to wait for him a long time and you’re all nervous going, “I’m going to say this. I got to talk about this product and that product.” I got in front of him finally and they told me, “You don’t know how much they say. This guy’s got five seconds. He’s not going to want to talk to you. You’re going to have to do what your best. Chase him down the hallway. Whatever you have to do.” For some reason, I was able to sit in an office with him, which was unusual. I got through three of the products. All three, that was the goal. No one gets through three. I got through this one and that one. I walked out of that office. I was so proud of myself like I had just done the most amazing presentation.

You just pitched.

It was wonderful. I closed him. I did everything you’re supposed to do, but I had to go get my samples. I go down and get in the elevator to go down to my car. As the door’s closing, a guy gets on the elevator with me. I’m such an extrovert, I can’t go three floors without talking. I look at him and I go, “Sir, do you work in the building?” He looks at me, so mortified. He goes, “You just sold me your products.” That’s the same guy.

You never looked up.

I look at him.

Fantastic.

The worst thing. I died. Wouldn’t you? It was the worst sales call you could ever have. I didn’t ask him any questions. I often think about if you hadn’t gotten the elevator, you don’t know how bad you are sometimes.

First of all, what a tough lesson to learn and how spectacular to learn it on your first call for the rest of your existence.

It helped me.

Change In Professional Sales

By the way, Daine, what you described is the biggest change in professional sales in the last 30 years. There was a time where that person on the other side of the table needed you to explain what products were out there. The difference now is everybody knows everything. They don’t need you to explain what products and services. This is a problem. Most people still want to pitch but the reality of it is, this is where curiosity comes in. What they want to know is, how can you help me run a better business?

Whatever it is you do, can you help us run a better business somehow or help me achieve the goals and objectives of my division? If I’m a doctor, help me run a better practice. That’s where the shift where you interviewed at the end of our show. Sales is management and consulting now. He said, “Used to be pitching and all that but all that’s going to get taken care of online by AI.” By the way, thanks for sharing that story. We’ve all got them.

You get a real groan from the audience when you share that one in a sales group because it’s just awful.

We’ve all got them and you’ve got those things where you were so nervous. You did what you’d been taught, “Better know my product. Better pitch. Get better. Keep going.” This is why it’s lifelong learning doing this. This is a hard thing to do.

It’s a funny aspect to look at how things have changed, as you said that because a lot of people don’t ask the questions that they need to ask. Back then, you would ask different questions. Again, we’re getting on a status quo. You have to know the kinds of things to find out how to help them with their practice. I can remember a doctor I called on.

I got better and started asking him questions. I start painting the picture they used to teach us to paint the picture. I’d say, “If you use my migraine drug when your patients come in and they have this horrible headache. They call you in the middle of the night and wake you up because you have to send them to the ER. It’s all this money it’s going to cost them. They’re going to have all this.” I painted this big picture. The guy says to me, “I don’t care. That comes out of somebody else’s budget.” I’m like, “First of all, it might be not to go to you.”

You don’t care about your patients.

Sometimes painting the picture helps bring out the questions. That’s another way to explore what their pain points are.

Sometimes, painting the picture helps bring out the questions. That’s another way to explore what their pain points are.

I had this experience where we have a networking touch point with somebody. They’re extraordinarily successful individual. We had a great conversation, but somebody thought we should chat. At the end, they went, “I’m thinking about this. Why don’t you let us know what you do there?” I thought to myself, “I’m not going to give too much data here. I don’t know anything about your company. I’m not going to go too deep.” I sent this note over and I literally got this email with probably 35 points attacking what I’d sent over. I sent a quick email back going, “Fantastic thoughts. Let’s chat live about it.” As soon as you start pitching anything. It’s very easy for somebody to come back and go, “I don’t like this.”

You don’t know what they even want.

We have no idea what they want. My email back was going to go, “I agree with all your points. What problem you think you’re trying to solve?” You asked for this but if you don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve, then I can’t help. Your book would be so important for everybody reading. There’s a difference between a line of questioning that is meant to trigger an answer that leads to the problem I solve and me pitching again.

By the way, through Dr. Morgan’s work, the book’s called Can You Hear Me? People are always sensing the intent of someone else. Consciously and subconsciously, we can tell their intent. The second these they start to think that we’ve got commission breath, a wall goes up. You’ve come across those people that have that authentic interest in you and your business or what’s going on. That’s the skill to try and cultivate, which is have a unique interest. Try and understand what’s going on.

Do your research to earn the right to understand. understand. The outcome down the road might be an opportunity for you. If you’re constantly focusing on trying to figure out how to add value to somebody else or some other business or a buyer, things will work out for you down the road. Even if it’s not an immediate sale for you. That’s one of these key lessons that is also new in sales. I don’t think people get that.

We learned a lot from the focus on culture and perception and some of the things I wrote about after my Curiosity book. I wrote a book on perception because I thought it was so important what you’re talking about to recognize this. The power perception and the perception power index is all based on recognizing that perception is a combination of IQ, EQ, emotional quotient, CQ for curiosity quotient and for cultural quotient.

As you look at all these aspects, sometimes you can put yourself in somebody else’s shoes a lot more easily when you recognize perception is a process. My acronym for that is EPIC. It’s evaluate, predict, interpret, and correlate to come up with conclusions. There’s so much of our backgrounds and culture. It doesn’t matter if it’s religious or female or male. All these different factors of how we were raised can impact so much of what we think the other person’s thinking.

Again, it comes back to the assumptions and the curiosity thing. We assume that this is their problem. We assume all these things without asking. It all comes back to asking questions and building that empathy and our perspective. We all sit on this world in a different spot. I see you’re selling the Selling Well show from this angle but somebody sitting here might see it from here. When we think about that, it’s so easy for us to assume everybody else is thinking the same thing we’re thinking and they could be on completely different plane.

It’s such a great point. By the way, because of the forgetting curve with Herman Ebbinghaus, we constantly have to reinforce this or reengage this or recommunicate it, frankly. Whatever conversation we’re having because we’re also busy. What might resonate and stick to one person at one point in time. Particularly, he says, “You come and see them three weeks later.” You think they understand your value proposition to the market in your company and your product. They don’t even remember your name.

Curiosity And Leadership

You think, “We’ve already been through this.” I’m going to tell a very short story because it leads to curiosity and leadership. On chapter four in the book, curiosity and leadership but everybody in this podcast has heard very quickly. I was the worst sales manager ever in the year 2000. Pretty sure in the history of time, there was nobody worse because I’d been this very strong superstar salesperson, who gets promoted into being a sales manager.

I thought it would be Shangri-La. Now I’m responsible for eight people. All I want to do is tell them exactly what to do all the time. I want them to do it as I used to do it. They can’t do that, so I’m miserable. They don’t want to do that, so they’re miserable. In big companies, when you perform badly, you keep getting promoted. Within about a year, I got promoted to run a division that I knew about whatsoever.

I’m managing a team and every time I’m working with them, they say, “Here’s my situation, what should I do?” All I can do is go, “I don’t know. What do you think you should do?” Suddenly, management became easy. They were happy and engaged. They felt empowered and I started to slowly learn the business. Tell me a little bit about the chapter curiosity and leadership, some of the connections of these great leaders. What did you found there?

Leadership was such an interesting thing. When I had Francesca Gino on my show, who’s a big Harvard professor, who did the case study for curiosity in HBR article, which I love. Everybody should read that. We talked about how leaders think that they encourage curiosity if you research them, a lot of them. when you interview the people who work for them, they think, “Not so much.”

There’s a disconnect in leadership. What leaders want to know about curiosity when I work with them is how does it impact the bottom line? They want to know a lot of that data when I’m talking from their perspective. What is interesting now that ChatGPT is such a hot topic. If you type into chat and ask you know how does this help leaders? How does this promote the bottom line to have curiosity? It almost tells you like, “It’s intuitive, dummy.” When it comes back what it says to you it’s funny.

It helps with communication and emotional intelligence and emotional stuff. There’s not a lot of data out there, which I love that Francesca had some for leaders that we’re seeing some of this. I work with big companies like Novartis, Verizon, and LinkedIn. I speak and go around the world and talk to these companies and give this assessment. I get to talk to a lot of leaders and they all have a different way of promoting curiosity within the workplace.

At Verizon, they sent me back and I created these videos. These small little teaser videos that they play in their onboarding sessions. They can share the value of curiosity in a couple of minutes from me talking. They’d have an employee who was super successful and they give their story of how they became successful based on their curiosity. They create these little videos. They play them all throughout all the stores and all their onboarding sessions.

They’re sharing the culture of curiosity. That’s Verizon’s way of doing it. Novartis pays 100 hours of education a year to their employees. They all have different things that they do. It’s emulating what you want to see if you’re a leader. You have to ask the stupid questions. You mentioned Keith Krach and I’m on a lot of boards with him. I’m at the Krach Institute at Purdue. It’s a technology awareness company that he’s created and Global Mentor Network. He grade him on that one.

What I loved about Keith is his leadership style. That’s why I asked him to write the forward of the book. Whether he was the CEO at DocuSign or undersecretary in Washington, he’s stayed very humble. He doesn’t say he knows everything. He gets these giant boards. When I was at the board at DocuSign, there was like 250 of us. I’m with sharks and McDonald’s. I’m like, “What am I doing here?” In a way.

He gets media people, scientists, and technology. He gets all these people together and he doesn’t say he knows everything that everybody knows. He knows a lot more than he pretends because this guy’s the smartest guy I’ve ever met. He’ll be very humble about it and say, “I hire these people around me that know all this, who all are all knowledgeable in these areas.” Leaders need to recognize you can’t know everything and you don’t know what you don’t know and that comes up a lot. If you surround yourself with great mentorship, you can build your curiosity and utilize everybody else’s curiosity, your advantage.

What resonated with me about the chapter, Diane, was all of the amazing leaders Keith and others that you’ve interviewed. When they talk about some of the most important traits on leaders, curiosity ends up being one of the biggest ones. They’re not in meetings telling everybody what to do. As you know and I know now, but it’s a hard learning curve. Nobody capable wants to be told what to do. Generally, capable people want autonomy to grow themselves, to achieve, be creative, and have flexibility.

No one wants to be told what to do even in your earliest days selling for AstraZeneca. You wanted to be left alone. That’s how you phrased it. One of the important things, the best leaders are, they ask the right questions to challenge the team and elevate the team. They do have that core capability, experience and intelligence to assess to a certain degree what’s coming back because at some point in time, we want to be curious. We want to get facts, but eventually we have to make a decision and you raise that in the book as well. We can’t get paralyzed by curiosity where it’s analysis paralysis.

When I was speaking to that group, you reminded me. I had shared a story of Doug Connect and how he turned around Campbell Soup by asking. I teach so many courses where they have that case study in there. It’s because he took engagement and drastically improved it. Everybody was walking dead going to work. What he did was ask people about themselves and learn about them. He wrote them handwritten notes. He wrote 30,000 of them in his time there.

You should see his face when he talks about it. It was more than he expected but it completely turned around the culture. You can’t assume you know the answers to what motivates people. I’ve had more people offer me tickets to basketball games or dinners at night as a reward for my sales output. I want to go bed at 8:00. That’s not rewarding to me. When you’re talking to motivate people, you got to find out what they care about.

By the way, we’re cut from the same cloth. The early the bed, early raises the thing. It’s interesting you talk about something like that note what motivates people, even that note. We’ve done maybe 100 of these episode and wonderful people. Every conversation is great like this one. I had Stephen Covey booked for six weeks out or eight weeks out or something. First of all, I get his book in the mail. He sends me his book in advance. There’s a nice little inscription on the front and I thought, “That’s nice.”

Amazon doesn’t have to come to the house this week. The next thing, a week later, a letter comes in the mail. He said, “I’ve been watching what you’ve been doing. You’re knocking the ball out of the park. I can’t wait to have a great conversation.” I still have that. I kept that letter somewhere but it’s just this meaningful impact. It’s funny in this world, you bring it up quite a bit that gratitude matters so much to Millennials and so on and so forth. I’m not getting rid of that letter in the short term. That was such a nice thing. You can be darn sure I was as prepared as you can ever be for that episode.

I understand what you’re saying. I’ve had like Tom Hopkins and different people. When I was a kid here in Arizona, Tom Hopkins was like. I wasn’t even a kid. I was in college and whatever but he was so big. It’s so fun to see the Zig Ziglar type people and what their little things that they do. We can learn from so many of these sales gurus out there.

I attend a lot. I think a lot of salespeople don’t attend enough training. I’ve gone to Tony Robin’s things or whatever things. You go to a different things and you get bits and pieces because you can find, “This piece works for me. Maybe that works for this person.” That’s one thing I liked at pharmaceutical sales. Before they hired you, they made you ride in the car with 3 or 4 different salespeople. You spent three different days to decide if this is the job for you.

I remember the first person. She was like, “This is the worst job watching her.” I thought, “I’m never taking this job.” The second person, I’m like, “This is the best job ever,” because I hated the way she did things. It was like, “This is not how I could do this.” She was inefficient. It was awful watching her but I could take a couple things that she did. I could take a couple things that this guy did. You take them and you go, “This makes it right for me so that I’m most effective.”

All those folks you talked about, by the way, I love the testimonial from Tom Hopkins. Tom Hopkin is a total legend in professional sales with those same people from 30 to 40 years ago, but amazing things. One consistent theme from all of them become a lifelong learner. No one’s a know-it-all. You’ve got to be a learn-it-all. This is why the book is so important. Everybody’s heard me chat about books, but when we’re on the show and the joy the show is I have to read these books to prepare for the episode.

Sometimes I’m delighted. I got to call it out with Cracking the Curiosity Code. This is a fantastic book, folks. We didn’t have time to get into everything but Diane makes this very detailed fact-based and research-based connections between curiosity, motivation, leadership, engagement, intelligence, creativity, innovation, age, or maintaining health. What’s that connection? What holds you back from being curious? We start as infants where we’re nothing but curious.

Suddenly over time, it diminishes, how do we retrigger it, curiosity, and technology. In chapter seventeen, that’s where we talk about the Curiosity Code Index. An interesting thing to go through. We’ll have the links in this episode so you can go find it. This is a great book, folks. Diane, thank you the show. What a pleasure speaking with you.

Thank you, Mark. This has been so much fun. I love talking to salespeople. This is so important for everybody. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience here.

Thank you so much. How do people learn more about you? What’s the easiest way to connect with you?

The easiest way you can find me on social media is at Dr. Diane Hamilton. My website is DrDianeHamilton.com. For curiosity, you can go to CuriositCode.com, which is part of my main website. If you go to DrDianeHamilton.com, you can get there that way as well. The most important thing on the site is to start with the Curiosity Code Index because it goes along with the book. That’s the most important aspect of how you can develop your curiosity is the Curiosity Code Index. I hope they check that out.

Thank you, Diane.

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As always, the intention of the show is to increase the performance in the professionalism of B2B sales and improve the lives of professional salespeople in doing so. I know the conversation with Diane would have helped you in that regard. I also know I can get better at running this show and you’re the folks who can tell me how to do it.

If you like this show, please like and subscribe to it. That matters to us but if there’s things that we can be doing to make this show even more effective for you, please let me know. My email is MarkCox@inthefunnel.com. That’s my personal email that I checked. We love constructive criticism. Send us a note and give us some ideas on how to improve the show. Everyone who sends some ideas to us, get a response from me directly and thank you for doing that. In the meantime, I hope everybody continues to have a great time and good luck selling.

Important links

• DocuSign

• Ariba

• Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential

• Selling Well Show

• AstraZeneca

• RadiusAI

• Coaching.com

• Kodak

• Xerox

• Sony

• Agfa

• Jeff Hayzlett

• Salesforce

• Predictable Revenue

• CuriosityCode.com

• Can You Hear Me?

• Novartis

• Verizon

• LinkedIn

• DrDianeHamilton.com

• MarkCox@inthefunnel.com

• Facebook – Dr. Diane Hamilton

• Twitter – Dr. Diane Hamilton

• YouTube – Dr. Diane Hamilton

• LinkedIn – Dr. Diane Hamilton

About Diane Hamilton

Dr. Diane Hamilton is the Founder and CEO of Tonerra, which is a consulting and media-based business. She is a nationally syndicated radio host, keynote speaker, and the former MBA Program Chair at the Forbes School of Business. She has authored multiple books including Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential, and The Power of Perception: Eliminating Boundaries to Create Successful Global Leaders. She is the creator of the Curiosity Code Index® assessment, which is the first and only assessment that determines the factors that inhibit curiosity and the Perception Power Index, which determines the factors that impact the perception process.

Her groundbreaking work helps organizations improve innovation, engagement, and productivity. Thinkers50 Radar, considered the Academy Awards for Leadership, chose her as one of the top minds in management and leadership. She was named to Global Leaders Today's list of top leaders along with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Sheryl Sandberg, LeadersHum included her on their list of 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership and in the Top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR.

The Negativity Fast: Science-Backed Strategies For A Positive You With Anthony Iannarino

Feeling overwhelmed by negativity? Sales trainer and author Anthony Iannarino joins the show to discuss his book, The Negativity Fast. He reveals a surprising secret: he started this negativity detox way back in the 90s! Discover why we, as human beings, are wired for negativity and how to reframe past traumas for growth. Dive into the science behind gratitude, how to navigate the perils of social media, and practical tips to overcome negativity bias and cultivate a more positive mindset. This episode is a must-listen for anyone facing negativity in their personal or professional life, and especially helpful for salespeople facing constant rejection.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Negativity Fast: Science-Backed Strategies For A Positive You With Anthony Iannarino

Team, we've got a fantastic podcast for you today because we've got Anthony Iannarino. Anthony has got 20 years of experience selling and leading sales forces in the staffing industry. You know him because he's the writer and publisher of TheSalesBlog.com, an enormously popular sales blog. Anthony is a keynote speaker. He's a sales trainer, and author of four great books. More coming, by the way, we're talking about his latest great book, The Negativity Fast.

Talk about an important topic, the negativity fast. In our conversation, we get into why we as human beings are wired to be negative. It's biological in certain ways. We talk about the fact many of us have been through some form of trauma in our life and how we reframe those events so it's not a negative experience, but we can pull some positive things from it.

We talk about the awesome power of gratitude. We talk a little bit about wanting and the perils of social media. Understanding we get somewhere between 17,000 and 50,000 thoughts a day. We've got to be mindful about mindfulness to figure out how we process all of these thoughts and make sure we focus on those things that benefit us. We have a great conversation about how important gratitude is to all of us, and the actual physical and mental health benefits of gratitude.

Team, we discussed all of this and more in the podcast with Anthony. He's a super interesting fellow. He is one of the top minds in professional sales today by far. Just a great conversation, which I enjoyed. I hope you do too. If you do, please like and subscribe to The Selling Well podcast. That matters to us. That's how we get great guests like Anthony Iannarino. Enjoy the show.

Origin Of The Negativity Fast

Anthony, welcome back to the show. It's great to see you again. I shared this offline, Anthony, but I couldn't be more excited to talk to you about your latest book. I know you've got something about AI coming out with Jeb Blount in the not-too-distant future, but I was so excited to talk to you about the Negativity Fast, Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear, and Boost Success.

Such a need for this in professional sales, but what an incredible need for this in society in general. In the book, you talk a little bit about your background. One of the things I was just amazed to pick up on was that you were negative. Given the sales career that you had, or you saw yourself as that way, this amazing career that you've had, everything you've done. First of all, welcome to the show, but tell me a little bit about that journey for you and that with the amazing success you've had, you may have been a little bit negative along that journey as well.

I was world-class. I had two brain surgeries, one on Friday, and one on Saturday. They took a piece of my skull out and then they removed something called an arterial venous malformation. After that, they gave me several drugs to take so I wouldn't have seizures. I only ever had one seizure and it was a surprise to find out that they cut a piece of my brain off only after they recovered me after the second surgery.

I didn't know that there was any possibility of losing part of my brain. I didn't know that at the beginning and they didn't either. They just had to open up and see what was in there. After I woke up, they said, “We had to remove part of your brain because it was bruised and it would mean you would have seizures for the rest of your life. We got rid of it.”

I wasn't prepared for that and then Phenobarbital, that's a drug that will prevent you from having seizures but it's also used to tranquilize elephants. That's what they use to do that because it's so strong. Between the drugs and having my head cut open, I started to become angry. Angry enough that I was trying to pull into an apartment complex and a guy was coming towards me and he was being a little aggressive.

I got out of the car and I started walking towards him and he got back in his car. I'm not a great fighter. I was involved with those but I'm not a good fighter, I was just angry. Over time, in your 20s, you want the world to look like what you think it should look like. It takes a little while for you to get past that and understand that the world's been here for about 4.8 billion years, and it's a lot older than you.

It's been burning and churning for a long time, and it's not going to change because you want it to change. That's a very hard thing to do, to change the whole world, but few people have been able to do that. I got angrier and angrier and angrier. I was in law school, very political. I was political. I had a great mentor. His name was Mike Distelhorst.

I went and got coffee every time we had class. He taught contracts. We would go get coffee and one day he said, you're angry and you need to stop being angry. He said, “You're so wrapped up in politics and global politics and all these things.” At that time, you're in Toronto, so this won't make any sense to you. We had Bill Clinton pass a law that said, “You guys didn't pay enough taxes in the past. We're going to retroactively give you a bill for what you still owe.” Even though we paid.

I was mad about that and he said, “Look, you can't do anything about those things. You have no power to do that. And you worry about the government and politics and all that stuff. No one is going to have a better impact on your children than you. It has nothing to do with that. Go and outrun them, get the money that you want so that you can take care of your family, and don't worry about anything else.”

No one is going to have a better impact on your children than you.

Now, I wish I would have taken his advice immediately. I did not, it took me about six months and then I remembered that conversation one day and I thought, “Could I get rid of all the politics?” “I can get rid of everything.” So I got rid of all the political magazines, and newspapers. I got rid of all my political books. I got rid of everything.

Is this when you were 20? You did all of this because you went back to university as a more mature student. You were 26 or 28 when everybody else was younger, but you did this back in those days. Wow.

Yes, and then I decided I'm going to get rid of every negative thing or person in my life and I'm going to clean up what's going on up here. I decided to do that and I decided to call it, I was going on a negativity fast. What I did is I got rid of all of the sources including television. I've not watched any kind of political news show since the early ‘90s.

I don't watch anything. I know now that Fox is for conservatives and MSNBC is for liberals. I know that they're like warring tribes now, and I think that's horrible for a society like ours. I don't think that it should be that way. I just ignore it. I describe myself as post-political. I can't do anything about it and look, if you read The Stoics, you'll find out If anything is out of your ability to do something about it, you just leave it alone.

Just leave it alone, don't worry about any of that, you can't do anything about it, nobody can probably do it, but so you just let it go. I did this for 30 days and at the end of 30 days, I felt better, so much better that I did it again. I did it the second time and I felt even better because I was just only paying attention to things that I could do something about.

After the second time I did that, I realized you've still got all that stuff in there, you got to blast it out. I was imagining a fire hose and trying to just like get it to blow out, get all of that out. I just listened to Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Brian Tracy, all the people who are positive and I just only took in positivity and I realized that I should have done that the first time. I should have just started taking in all the positivity but I figured it out on the third try.

From that point forward, every day driving to work, driving to college, driving to law school, I was listening to something positive and future-oriented and I felt a lot better. Then I decided, “Why would you stop this?” “What would be your reason?” What would you decide that would say, “I need to go back and try to be angry again?” It doesn't work. You just stay and you feel better.

You know what? Of course, you do if you go through it. We've had a couple of guests on the show, Anthony talked about things and we're going to get into everything in the Negativity Fast, but they've talked about things like, “Why don't you assess how you feel after you just spend 45 minutes looking at your phone or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok?” Assess how you feel before you start and then assess how you feel afterward. You always feel worse.

I'm sorry, maybe I didn't pick this up in my research, but what I didn't grasp so much was that you were doing this back in the early '90s. That's the amazing thing to me because everything we're talking about seems hyper-relevant in today's world but the fact you got such an early jump on it and just cut it all out, like cutting out the news and nobody was doing that back in the mid-90s, it's interesting that you got such an early jump.

The Power Of Gratitude

I'd like to help the team as you know, the people who read this blog run businesses. They run large sales teams, primarily sales-focused, but business-focused, with lots of entrepreneurs. You've broken the negativity fast into 12 chapters, Why We're Negative, Talking Yourself Into a Negative State very relevant for me, Empathy and How to Lie To Yourself, and How to Stop Complaining. It's a chapter I loved, but not as much as this one. The Awesome Power of Gratitude.

I love to do a deep dive there. The awesome power of gratitude, Reframing Negative Events, and certainly you just shared a very negative event with your two surgeries. How To Live Happily with Political Divisiveness, Wanting, and The Perils of Social Media Like The Hedonic Adaptation Point, really resonated with me. How To Change Your State, Minding Mindfulness, How to Forget Your Problems and Concerns, and The Negativity Fast itself. By the way, team, this is absolutely a must-read, not for everybody in professional sales, but just for everybody. I also like the scientific research and how we got there. I wonder if we could jump in a little bit and skip the power of gratitude is just shocking.

I'm a wide reader. I read a lot of things. I'm always listening to an audible book at the same time like in the shower, my wife puts a little dope thing up so that I can put my phone there and I can listen. I'm always taking in content and trying to find good strategies and things that I think are helpful. When I started looking at gratitude, I knew some things about gratitude, but I'm finishing chapters and I'm sending the chapter to the editor.

I said gratitude is just overblown. You can't understand how much gratitude does. You can't imagine. It will give you better cognitive function. It will reduce your chances of having a heart attack. It will increase your immunity system. The list just keeps going on and on, sleep, lower blood pressure. All of these things, less inflammation in your body.

You see this and you're like, nobody's going to believe this. Nobody's going to believe that gratitude does all these things. My editor said, “You should cite that.” Then I said, “I can cite that. I've read a bunch of things as I was doing this and I have the citations.” I started putting citations in. As I started going through the rest of it, she said, “Why don't you just cite everything?” I said, “Okay, I'll cite everything.”

I went and cited every single thing that I said here because I don't want people to think this is my opinion or my perspective about any of these things. This is all from science. All of these things have been looked at for a very long time except for post-traumatic growth syndrome. There are only maybe two big papers on that. There's not very much yet, but it is starting to have people paying attention to it.

That one is also amazingly interesting where something terrible happens or something challenging happens can have a positive effect. We'll talk about the definition of that term. I learned so many terms speaking about this, but I'll just circle back on science around gratitude.

Team, this is chapter five, around pages 94 and 95 but you talk about theories from Xixi, Zen, Emens, McCulloch, Fra, and Bono. I apologize if I'm catching any of those names wrong and then the positive outcomes from gratitude, are just shocking. You touched on all of them. Maybe the other one just frankly increased self-esteem.

I brought something, just an artifact here today again because this book resonated so much with me. I've got a little gratitude journal for the folks out there and what happened, I think humans have this amazing way of trying to survive. For me, after being in the corporate world running large sales organizations for 15 years, when I started as an entrepreneur from zero, it was really important to start every day and just think about some great things that had happened.

The three blessings we bring up in the book were just writing them down and then I got into this habit weekly of loving a coffee on a Sunday morning, taking a pause and just pulling on my gratitude journal and thinking, “What about all the great things that have happened this week?” It was surprising to me how long the list was. When you take a little bit of that time and just go through writing things down, and there's something that happens when you write something down versus typing versus dictating, at least for me, I'm looking at it. It just gives you such a platform to build on. It's just amazing.

Suddenly you've got a book, three or four years later, I had this book that's 80 pages long of all the great things that have happened. The odd time there's going to be a little bit of a dip. It's nice to go back to this and just think of all the blessings and all the great things that one has in somebody's life. It's amazing the difference it makes in your future.

Yes, there's a book called Hope Circuit by Marty Seligman, and the three blessings were in that book. I liked to do the gratitude journal in the morning and then after I started practicing it the other way. When you write three things that were good throughout the day and why, it's 30 days. Go look at this and you're going to realize, “My life's really good. It's really good. I should be grateful for this.”

If you do it in the morning, you don't have any experience yet. You're going to go say, “I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my business.” You'll just be repeating over and over again. When it's something that happens each day and you have to find three things that were good and why, it changes this. Now you have to do it at night before you go to bed because you need that time to figure out what those three things were. I think if people would do this and put it in a journal like yours, and then go back after a month. Go back and look at each day and say, “It's really good here.”

Boy, it is really good here. I love the reference in the book Keeping Up with the Joneses and the hedonic adaptation. I've noticed hedonic adaptation from the time I was 25 onward. You're buying suits, you like going to the store, you get a nice new suit. Suddenly some good things happen to you so you start buying suits that are three times the cost. Then you're coming home thinking, “I don't feel any different.” Hedonic adaptation is when you buy things and think, “I'm going to get a new car, it's going to change my life.” It doesn't, you just revert back to the same baseline level of happiness.

I'm doing this right now, Mark. When I needed to buy a new car, it was in COVID. There was one car available to me at the Mercedes dealer. It's an S580. The most expensive car. That was the only car. I didn't buy it. I said I'm going to lease it and right now I think, “This car is amazing but I don't want to keep it. I don't want this kind of car.”

It was just the only car I had available to me and I'd leased it but I also gave back the car that I had before that and I said this car's problem. I live in Ohio, so it's like Toronto. There's snow, there's potholes. Every time I hit a pothole, I would lose not only the tire, I would have to get another wheel because it would break the wheels.

I walked into my sales manager there and I said, “What are we going to do about this car?” First I said, “Do you think I'm a good client?” He said, “You're a great client.” I said, “Do you know how many cars I bought from you?” He goes, “I know exactly how many.” I said, “Good. Okay. What are we going to do about this?” He said, “I'm going to buy it back from you.”

I said, “For how much?” He said, “For what you paid.” I said, “How are you going to do that?” He said, “I'm going to sell that car for more than you paid for it. There are no cars here. I'm going to sell it for more money than I'm going to.” Then I was able to put a lot of money down on this very expensive car, I love the car, but I don't need that car. It was just the only thing that I could have.

This is the beauty of the book. You get into the science, you have a beautiful way of writing, Anthony, so that complex ideas become very simple. Martin Seligman, a leader in psychology, and one of the first people to say, “Psychology is a little less about eliminating misery and a little more on focusing what's good in life.”

Yes, flourishing is what he calls it

Why Are We Negative

You reference a couple of great things throughout the book and maybe I skipped this at the beginning, but I do think it's interesting to think about for everybody reading. Why is the default mechanism for so many people negativity? Why are we negative? Why do we become negative by nature?

It is our nature and it is because we have something called the negativity bias. Most of the time, while you have all these thoughts over and over and over again, and they're mostly all negative, 80% of them tend to be negative and you keep repeating them. You just keep burning in the negativity bias and it's just because of how humans evolved on this planet. That's how it went.

If you were optimistic, probably a dangerous world, it's still a dangerous world really, but you have to do something to beat that back. For me, it was getting rid of the negativity. Not that I don't have a bad day occasionally. Of course, you do. Some of it I think is also just because your chemicals and you have all this stuff going on in the human body and sometimes it's just out of whack. You could probably get yourself into a bad attitude just by eating wrong or drinking, whatever you do. It can turn that for you.

By the way, those who do enjoy a little bit of TV, they'll remember those Snickers commercials. I'm not sure sugar is the best cure for this, but there were Snickers commercials about somebody being in a bad state and they would be some other person, some other actor, and being very chippy. It was very, very funny, and say, this Snickers will fix that. I'm not sure sugar is always the answer.

It works perfectly at the beginning, but then an hour, it's not the same.

I can't remember where I picked this up, but in the amygdala, the fact that through evolution, we were always, as you say, being a little scared and worried and careful. Five times a second, even today, our biology is set up so that we're scanning the universe for things that could be harmful to us, five times a second. That comes into play a lot in our sales training. I know you're one of the world's top sales trainers.

When we're in a room for the first time training some sales leaders or salespeople, they're worried and they walk into an event going, I wonder if this is a sales training event where they're going to pull me up at the front and make me do a role play and make me feel uncomfortable. We go through very intentional processes to talk about how this is a safe space and nobody ever looks silly in a workshop except us.

I can physically see the change in people when we say that. There's this wall and then as soon as we say, don't worry, we're not going to do that. You're not going to feel silly. We're going to look silly. It changes everything. Everybody's worried about this negativity bias, it's also the same reason none of us or few of us are very good investors because the concept of losing $10 is so much more painful than the concept of making $10.

Maybe from an investment perspective, we take it a little bit safe and that's certainly a wealth management issue for all those financial planners out there trying to help people break through that bias to be negative. I think there are lots of things, there's biology that causes us to feel negative. There are events. You and I are the same age.

People live through things. You had a traumatic event in your life with double brain surgeries and the story of waking up being abducted and trying to break out of being abducted until you realized you're actually in an ambulance. Very impactful when you read that and then you were negative after the surgeries where they removed part of your brain, you didn't know that was going to be part of the AVM treatment. I think, Anthony, everybody's got events they could view as negative in their life. Anybody would view them as negative.

I think that the data on that is it's about 98% of people. That's a very high number.

Post-Traumatic Growth

In chapter six, you share about research. How do we reframe those negative events in our lives? We talked a little bit about Freud, and we talked a little bit about Adler, but one of the most interesting points that came out of that reading was the post-traumatic growth concept. The idea is that these terrible things that might happen to us are challenging things that can have a positive outcome. Let's talk a little bit about that.

Adler is interesting because he was on the opposite side of Freud. Freud thought that if you have some traumatic event that happens to you, that will go with you for the rest of your life. Adler's like, “That's the past, that past can't come and get you now because you're already out of this.” That's it and that was what he contributed to this.

We know, that there's not very much science yet on post-traumatic growth syndrome, what it does say is if you can find meaning in that suffering that you had. When you have trauma, I'm reading a guy from Toronto, Gabor Maté. It's called Myth of Normal and the book is all about trauma. It's a very good book. It's a helpful book if you've had those traumas.

If you can find meaning in it, you can move forward with post-traumatic growth syndrome because you gained something from this terrible trauma that you've had. That is, and I'm reading that book right now, it's a giant book, maybe 600 pages. Very good book, very good writing, very science again. If you can find the meaning in it and turn it into something.

My favorite philosopher is Nicolas Taleb. He wrote Anti-Fragile, The Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness. Those are his main books. His thinking about fragility, robustness, and anti-fragile is if you are fragile and if something happens to you, you break. If you're robust, you're the phoenix. You burn down but then you just come right back the same way you were before but his Greek reading, you want to be a hydra. You cut off a hydra's head, it grows two more.

“Go ahead, keep cutting my head off because all you're doing is making me stronger and stronger and stronger.” I think that that's true for some of us if we can get through the trauma. I want to say something about trauma. If you've had trauma, I'm not downplaying that. If you had that, you had that and you were right to feel how you felt when you had that.

I've had probably more trauma than a lot of people just because of the life that I've had early. I think that you have to pay attention to trauma in this book, The Myth of Normal. If you've had a lot, it'd be a good book for you to read and try to get some perspective on that and see if you can change that from something that Freud would say would hold you back and move to try to get the growth part of this, because it is part of growth.

First of all, great reference to a book. We'll put that in the show notes folks. Thank you for that and then, you talked about some of the philosophers, you referenced Nietzsche's, “That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.” When I read your books, Anthony, I like physical books. I always buy books and physical books, but they're dog-eared. There are notes all over them. We've all had trauma.

Assessments

I won't share the details of mine given our time here, but I thought about some of those things and then it was helpful to write down and ask, “What did that do?” “How did that help me?” There were very good things that came from it that changed the rest of my life and put it in a different place. The other thing this book caused me to do was to go back into some assessments.

I was wondering why this resonated so much with me. We read hundreds of books a year because of the podcast. I went back and teamed into something called a Clifton Strength Assessment. There are different assessments you can do, but I like that our team has to go through the Clifton Strengths if you work through the funnel. It comes up with these top five things about you. My top five are learner, input, achiever, and election and number five is positivity.

Just by having this conversation that we've had several times, I would have said number one was sexual charisma for you at the beginning.

Thank you for that.

That's what I thought would be number one. I would say stunning personality. Is that fair?

You know what? I think it's fair if the only person rating is my wife and on a good day. It's one of those things in my life. I've always had almost a bit of an allergic reaction to negativity. I'm an entrepreneur like you're an entrepreneur and we have these visions and ideas and growth. Thankfully, a lot of times somebody has to pull us back a little bit to reality, but I have difficulty with that.

This idea of, “No.” I can't have that be the first reaction to everything. The other thing was surrounding yourself with positive people. That's almost been a bit of a survival mechanism for me my whole life. It's just ended up working at great people. You might come across somebody who's super funny in short bursts. They have value to contribute to the world. If they're organically negative, suddenly they don't come into those five or six people in the group.

Have you ever have you ever done an Enneagram? It's a very old structure that puts people into nine different categories. I happen to be what's called an eight, which is a challenger or a protector. Everything from my childhood made me negative. Everything did. My dad left, like all these things that happened to me throughout my childhood.

A lot of violence, all kinds of bad things but I think if you would do an Enneagram, you probably would be a three, which is somebody who's chasing success. They tend to be more positive about all those things. I have an adaptation because I'm an eight, I'm a protector. It's very hard to take advantage of me. Just from my childhood, I have to do a lot of work to be positive.

You are probably just naturally positive, I'm naturally negative. I have to do a lot of work to not be negative. There are only three real angers in an enneagram. If you are a perfectionist, you're the most angry. If you were the second, you would be my wife. My wife is a nine, which is a peacemaker. That's another anger. I'm an eight, anger. I know those and I can almost tell people what they are just by looking at them and having a short conversation, I can pick it up very quickly.

The Perils Of Social Media

Chapter eight, it's so obvious, but still such an issue, Wanting and The Perils of Social Media. Team, this is just shocking. Anthony earlier talked about the number of thoughts and ideas we have and in the book, he references that in a given day, between 17,000 and 50,000 thoughts go through our minds. Many of them get repeated.

The other stat that just floored me was the fact that many of us on average, pick up our phones 52 times a day, and it goes up to 132 times high users pick up their phones 132 times a day. Then we're jumping into social media. There's an author named Morgan Housel. He wrote a book called Psychology of Money.

It's all about your emotions about money if you're an investor. His second book is called Same As Ever. In that book, if you were to ask my dad, probably my mom, they would say the ‘50s was the best time in America. They will say that that was the best time. He explains why that was true. Everybody was just about in the same place. There was not this disparity of 1% that owns like 50% of this. You have a house and you have one parent that stays home and one is working. Everybody's got a car. It's just a parody. Everything's parody.

Everybody's got a job. The world economies were exploding. The baby boomers needed everything. It wasn't too crowded. You could progress if you did the right things.

The disparity now is, there's so much disparity. It's causing us to have more problems than we probably should.

There's so much disparity. It's causing us to have more problems than we probably should.

Yet in the book, you bring up the fact that 99% of the world makes less than 33k US a year.

If you're in that range, you're in the top 1% of the world.

That's not something that most of us would ever think about or put front of mind when our neighbor just bought the same Mercedes you bought during COVID. That comes in and you suddenly got a little bit of a desire for this and a little bit of a desire for that. I've got maybe a little bit of a pet peeve on this one, but I do try with social media, just a trick for us.

Being an entrepreneur, again, I come up with these tricks where I get to recharge. I'm an extrovert, but I absolutely have to recharge. I can be the life of the party, but I can't be the life of the party seven days a week, I need to recharge. On Saturdays, what I typically do is go device-free. I'll have it in my car turned off in the event there's an emergency or I'm by the side of the road and I get a flat.

I'm driving in Ohio and I hit a pothole but I just feel that everything seems a little simpler when I'm not trying to stay up with anything else except enjoying that particular day, doing the three or four things I want to do in that day and making sure I show love to the people I care about. By the way, great tip in the book gang. At the end of each chapter, this book is so beautifully laid out. It gives you easy exercises to start moving in the right direction or continue the positive momentum. One is just to tell the people you love that you love them.

That's one of the things that people always comment about my family. We never say goodbye without saying I love you to everybody, every single time. Every single day. Every time I call my mom, every time I call my dad, every time I talk to any of my children, any of my family members, and if anything happens, that would be the last thing they heard from me. We do that and people always comment on that when they see us. Even my son and my two daughters, do it all the time with all their friends around. It's just how they grew up and people comment and they think it's noble but I think you should just do that anyway. Make sure that they hear it.

Never say goodbye without saying I love you.

How To Get Rid Of Negativity

I think the other thing is maybe they think it's noble, I bet it's also contagious. That's the beautiful thing about a positive dynamic, it can be contagious. For those folks reading this, Anthony, let's get into some tactics. There were so many great tactics. There are strategies here, but then we get into some tactics of how to get rid of that negativity. How do we continue to do this? So many good ideas. We talk about exercise, we talk about food, we talk about empathy, we talk about helping others.

I just picked this book up. I want to say something about this because I don't often say this, but what I can tell you what I was doing here is I did so much reading that I realized that in all of these first 11 chapters is the fact that you are making yourself negative and you can stop it. Then I thought that if I didn’t provide all of this proof you are making yourself negative. I don't know that the negativity fast would work as well as it does.

I get all kinds of notes from people who just tell me, “I feel a lot better.” Mostly, it starts with the political thing, “I gave up politics.” “I'm not watching TV.” “I feel way better.” Yes, that's because you're not eating poison every day. They're poisoning you against your neighbors and your family and it doesn't make any sense to do that. You're here for 4,000 weeks. Don't spend it like that. Don't eat poison every day. Don't ingest that. It will harm you. It does harm you.

You know what? It's so interesting it's chapter seven, How To Live Happily With Political Divisiveness. There was a time, you pointed out, we're Canadian. I live in Toronto where Canadians up hear. In our formative years, our politics was shockingly boring. It's just so boring and everybody's the same. Everybody's nice, all these things. I used to love watching Meet the Press on a Sunday morning because I have always been such a fan of the US and spent lots of time there.

It was entertaining at one point in time. I'd enjoy it on a Sunday morning watching Meet the Press over coffee and bagel with Donna. Then over the last, again, I didn't get a jump like you did, but I'd say over the last 10 years, I used to pop in at night, coming home from work and off our living room, there'd be a TV with CNN on. Eventually, we decided that we had to turn it off. It cannot be on because it seemed to go in a different direction for us when I said, “It's just negative.” “I can't have this.” “I can't get pummeled by this negativity.”

As soon as I come into the place, I'm happiest to be in the world. There's no place for that anymore. Again, controlling these 17 to 50,000 thoughts that go through our head and all these images, somehow we've got to control what's going on in there. You talked about the 11 chapters saying this is about us making ourselves negative. I could have done this wrong.

Been a long time but I believe the early books of Tony Robbins talked about your state. Whether you're feeling great or whether you're feeling terrible, it's the same effort to put yourself in that state. It's hard to stay negative and to be in a miserable mood and all those kinds of things. It takes effort to do that. If you're mindful of it, you can just make an effort to be in a positive state.

I defy you to stay in a negative state while you're running. You can't stay negative. Your body is getting too much air in it and now you're breathing and once you start breathing, the negativity starts to wane and all you have to do is lift heavy weights if you're allowed to lift. I'm not allowed to do that but if you can, that'll change your physiology, your biology, it will change everything for you. All you have to do is run or work out. That'll do it.

I share again, I'm no perfect example of anything, but I share. I am a junkie for working out. I've always been an athlete. I've always continued that on. You have periods of up and down. I tell people I've never left a gym feeling worse than when I came in. For me, it's the sprint training where I go, “You've got to gun it as fast as you can.”

Minding Mindfulness

Your brain saying, “I'm not getting enough oxygen.”It's telling you that while you're doing it, you're looking at this clock but if you can get yourself there, you just feel so much better. You're being in a room with other people who are doing it, everybody feels better. Before we get to the negativity fast itself, let's touch a little bit on minding mindfulness.

I meditated for a very long time. No, let me rephrase that. I thought I was meditating for a very long time. I was not meditating. What I was doing was something called Samadhi which is the preparation for meditation and mindfulness. I have studied with two Zen masters, Goshen Roshi and Gempo Roshi, two very different guys. One of them has this thing that can get you into a state very fast.

He did it to me and it lasted for maybe 24 hours. It was amazing. When I started talking to them about what I was doing, they were explaining to me that that's Samadhi. What you're doing is getting ready to do meditation and mindfulness. I figured out how to do that because I was working with these two Zen masters.

Genpo said, “Don't ever sit on a mat for 40 years. You don't have to do that. All you need to do is to sit down. Then he asked, “Do you wake up in the middle of the night? “Yes.” He said, “Sit in a chair, put a blanket on, just meditate and then you'll feel like you slept eight hours anyway.” That was very helpful for me but what I learned to do is to just be aware of what's going on. That's it.

Just like a bird is chirping out my window right there and you don't focus on it, you just go, “There's a bird.” I got some sort of a crick in my back and you just notice and you keep doing it over and over again. Just breathe and that's it and then everything starts to settle. Now, if you're not a Zen Buddhist and maybe you're not even religious, but if you could do any contemplative prayer, same exact thing. It works the same way, it lets everything fall to the bottom. It's worth learning how to do that and to practice it.

Just notice and notice and notice. Keep doing it over and over again and just breathe. Then everything starts to settle.

I have not done transcendental meditation which takes training. I've done, I'm not sure what is, but cheap and cheerful meditation. Frankly, it's the Peloton meditation I do every day and listening and going through it. Even that completely changes my outlook on a day where some days I'll wake up, team, and feel like, “I got a lot of work to do today.” I've got all these things and all of these meetings and there's a certain perspective on that.

I'll find if I meditate even for 10 or 15 minutes, take a little bit of calm. I come out of that thinking, it's not work. I get to do this. I get to have this amazing conversation with somebody I respect, Anthony Iannarino. I get to work with clients, to help them achieve some meaningful business outcomes or train amazing people. That's what I want to do.

Feeling The Gratitude

I get to hug and kiss my wife before I go out who I love very much. I get to text my family members who I love. Just understanding what we have again, and sometimes it's just turning everything off and then realizing it is intentional and then it leads to everything else in the book, feeling the gratitude. I want to say one quick thank you for touching me when you want to feel better, be generous, or help others in need.

I've felt that team. If you're ever feeling a little down, help somebody else out. I just like to spread this idea. My wife, whenever we are out or we travel to different countries, but even in downtown Toronto, there are a lot of homeless people in downtown Toronto. There are a lot of homeless people in every US city we go to.

Her whole life, she's been that person who will go up to the homeless person, and have a quick chat. Maybe give them some money, get them a meal or a coffee. Admittedly, in my heart, I was always thinking, “Don't do that.” or, “Let's just move on.” or, “It doesn't have to be every time.” I was almost put off a little bit because I had to reframe the way we look at this type of thing. Now that I understand most of those folks are going through a mental health issue, I've taken Anthony's tip as a great one. In this day and age, nobody carries money. You don't need to.

Carry money now because Anthony's tip was, “See how you feel if you just give them 20 bucks or 50 bucks.” or, “Give some, and see the impact.” Help somebody else. That's a great one. I love to spread the word on that through this podcast so everybody just helps some of those people most in need. I think everybody in their sphere of influence has someone in need and boy, do you feel good if you can help somebody else, gets you out of your own head into helping them.

I'd say it's just a shift just like that. I was in Austin doing a keynote and I was walking down the street and overtook a guy who was in a bad situation. I could just see I was looking at it and I only had a 50 but I chased him down and I gave him the 50. I've done this a whole bunch of times. I had a guy with me when I was in San Francisco and there's a very old lady who looked like maybe 100, and she's got this cart.

We were on our way to an event, and I said, “Listen, you can either run with me because I'm going to run and chase her down and I'm going to give her some money or you can just go and I'll meet you there.” He's like, “Nope, I'll run with you.” I said, “I'm not going to let her keep going.” She was stuck over something like a hose, she couldn't get her thing up and I was like, “I just have to go do something.” Why wouldn't you?

Stop Complaining

It would have helped you also right before that event. Anthony, I know how busy you are. We've got to wrap things up here a little bit. I've got to ask you questions or ask you to share with us. What are you recommending with the negativity fast to the people reading this? What are you suggesting they do for the next 30, 60, or 90 days?

The next 30, 60, or 90 days may be if you do this. Maybe forever you leave a whole bunch of these things behind. I do want to tell you one thing that I found only after I wrote the book. If you are a chronic complainer like I was for a long period in my 20s, you are shrinking your hippocampus. You're shrinking it. It starts shrinking.

I always want to tell people that because I want to scare them into stopping complaining. It's horrible for you. It also has an impact on your mental health and your physical health. You just have to let things go. The stoics are worth paying attention to. Just let everything go. If you can't do anything about it, move on with your life, don't even worry about it. That will make you a lot less susceptible to negativity.

You list out the things that people complain about most and the vast majority of them are things we have no control over. The weather, traffic, politics, noise, public transportation. Here's a gray one. I do this all the time. Internet connectivity. Internet, because it could impact this. We have a regulated telco industry in Canada, I'm always complaining we pay too much for too little. Inflation, waiting in line.

There are other things we do control. Our relationships, lack of time, and lack of money but like all of these things, if you can't control it, why waste any space on it? Improve your life, improve the lives of those around you. Focus on the things we can do. The amazing power of positivity is in my view, it's just contagious and it's exponential.

Everybody, of course, Anthony, they're going to enjoy this conversation. First of all, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us again. It's great to have you back on the Selling Well podcast. I can't wait to have you back again after your next book coming out with Jeb Blount on AI. Everybody get on the pre-order for that one, please, and thank you. How do people learn more about you or where should we point them outside of the link to buy the book on Amazon? Team, please do that. Outside of that, how do they find out about you?

Two places. One great place to connect is LinkedIn. I do a small post on LinkedIn every day. I write a thousand words at four o'clock in the morning but then I take Gemini now and I have it break it down into something easier for people to read in a short post. That's one place. The second place is TheSalesBlog.com. If you go there, you should sign up for the VIP newsletter. Those are two places.

The Negativity Fast: Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear, and Boost Success

Thank you. All those links team are in the podcast notes. A special thank you to Anthony Iannarino. Fantastic book, The Negativity Fast. Highly recommend it and a thank you to all of you. Team, we run this podcast because we want to help improve the lives of salespeople. We hope this episode was helpful and you enjoyed it as much as I did.

We're growth-oriented and we love constructive criticism. If there are other ways that we can keep improving this podcast so it's of more value to you, please email me directly, at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. I respond to that email and I respond to everybody who gives us an idea and thank you for doing that. If you liked this episode, please like and subscribe to the Selling Well podcast. That's helpful to us and actually, it helps us get amazing guests like Anthony. Thank you again, Anthony. We look forward to seeing you soon. Good selling to everybody.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Anthony Iannarino - LinkedIn

• The Negativity Fast

• TheSalesBlog.com

• The Stoics

• Hope Circuit

• Keeping Up with the Joneses

• Myth of Normal

• Anti-Fragile

• The Black Swan

• Fooled by Randomness

• Psychology of Money

• Same As Ever

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

Kevin Cashman: Embracing Leadership From The Inside Out

Sales leadership is a critical factor in the success – or failure – of any sales organization. If a leader wants to secure desirable outcomes for their team, they must learn how to lead from the inside out. In this episode, Mark Cox sits down with a global co-leader, Kevin Cashman of Korn Ferry. He explains how leadership must embrace authenticity, courage, critical thinking, and inclusivity in order to become truly effective and impactful. Kevin also emphasizes the importance of a leader’s self-awareness, deep emotional intelligence, and the duty to be always ready to take care of their team.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Kevin Cashman: Embracing Leadership From The Inside Out

We got a great show for you because that was Kevin Cashman. Kevin's the author of a fantastic book called Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life. That's the book we talk about here. Kevin's written five other books, including The Pause Principle: Step Back to Lead Forward and Awakening the Leader Within. Kevin is a bestselling author. He is a global thought leader and CEO coach.

He pioneered the grow the whole person to grow the whole leader approach to transformative leadership. He was the Founder of LeaderSource Ltd. and the Chief Executive Institute. In 2006, LeaderSource was acquired by Korn Ferry, where Kevin is now the Global Co-leader of CEO and Enterprise Leaders Development. He ends up running 130 offices globally.

In the book we discussed in this episode, Leadership From The Inside Out, we talk about these eight pathways to achieving that leadership from the inside out. Also, their forms of mastery we've got to get to, whether it's Personal mastery, Story mastery, or Purpose mastery with a great quote from Mark Twain. “The two most important days of your life are the day you're born and the day you find out why. That’s Purpose mastery.

We get into Interpersonal mastery, Change mastery, Resilience mastery, Being mastery, and Coaching mastery. We talk about this leadership journey from serving the I as a direct contributor to serving the we, where you're leading the team, and how important it is to have a balance of both. Kevin has amazing experience and a shocking track record.

When his firm was acquired by Korn Ferry, there were about 900 million in search and 10 million in consulting and now, there are a billion in both. It's been an amazing growth journey at Korn Ferry. I love Kevin's approach to purpose and meaning in developing the person. He's also got some great stories about coaching NHL players, NFL players, and some of the top-performance athletes in the world. I enjoyed my conversation with Kevin Cashman. I'm sure you will too. If you enjoy this episode, please like and subscribe to the show because that helps us to get other great guests like Kevin. Here's Kevin Cashman.

Kevin, thank you so much for joining the show. It's so great to meet you.

It’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation and thanks for letting me add to your well and wellness of selling.

What a great way of putting it. Kevin, I was extremely excited and slightly embarrassed to run the show because as a matter of course, we'll do the reading on some of the great guests that we have and I chose to do a deep dive on a book that is amazing to me. I hadn't read it before. Your book, Leadership From The Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life is one of those very unique books and for the folks reading, this is in the third edition.

It’s the third edition. It’s probably twenty printings.

For those who aren't experts in publishing like me, when you do research into this, you'll never get a second edition unless it's a runaway bestseller but to have a third edition is shocking.

It's shocking to do it too because you get these markers of what you've learned in between the editions and it's quite shocking in a very positive way. The third edition is 70% different than the first edition. The principles held up but the research, the stories, the emphasis, and the writing got much better. All sorts of things changed. It's not a superficial thing.

I had heard some of my other research, Kevin, that in between the second edition and the third edition, you changed 40% of it. It’s a massive amount of change.

I don't know how all of that math works, but sometimes somehow it did change that much in each edition.

Looking Back

I'm reading the third edition and so fundamental in terms of this connection between leadership and personal growth. As you aptly point out, these are themes we've seen quite a bit between your first edition and now, that length of period of time other people have published great works referencing this connection. Before we do a deep dive and jump in, Kevin, you've got a very interesting background. Having been an entrepreneur and then having your business LeadSource Ltd acquired by Korn Ferry in 2006, tell us a little bit about that professional journey that you've been on.

I'm glad you find it interesting. I don't know if I can call it interesting, but it's surely been a fulfilling journey, I have to say. I think if there's anything I've done well, and it's not easy to say that as your first speaking, but with humility, I think if I've done anything well. I've organized my life around purpose and what is important. To me, elevating the growth of people, I call it growing beyond. It means we all can grow beyond wherever we are right now. That's what learning is all about. I bet it's about what selling well is all about too. I've been true to that journey. I've been very fortunate to organize my business around the purpose of helping people grow beyond.

It started off early. I got a Psychology degree because I was interested in human development. I was going to go for a PhD in Psychology, but then started using psychology to coach professional athletes, NHL players, National Football League players, and Olympic athletes. I was helping them do a counterintuitive thing and that is relax before they compete and stay as relaxed as they possibly could at their peak effort. It's counterintuitive, but it translated well. Do you remember the Purple People leaders?

Yes.

Way, way back, they were in the Super Bowl and these four massive guys sitting with them in a conference room and teaching them how to meditate, relax, and all of that. I wish I had a video of it because it's this little consultant and these gigantic guys but it really helped. That was my entree into applying psychology and mindsets to performance.

From there, I started helping executives. Part of my psychology background was in career and vocational psychology. It was natural for me then to start coaching executives in transition. Also, not just get another job, but what would be most fulfilling and purposeful was the real hidden opportunity for them. It wasn't about getting a job. It was about being fulfilled in that job in their life.

We did that. We built that up. We transitioned that company because I finally learned from a CEO, he was the Godfather’s Pizza CEO. After we helped him transition, he said, “Do you know what business you're in?” I said, “Yeah. I know what business I'm in.” He said, “I don't think you do.” You're in the business helping leaders develop and not just transition. This has been the best development experience of my life. The light bulbs went on and we started taking the methodologies we had learned, transitioning around purpose, leadership, teamwork, culture, and so on.

They then started applying it explicitly to developing senior people. We also developed these institutes called the Enterprise Leader Institute, and the Executive to Leader Institute. Long story short or maybe long story shorter is we grew that and went from local to national and international. It became too much for us to manage multiple locations. We then started looking for a partner and eventually, after almost two years, Korn Ferry convinced us to join them when they were $10 million in consulting and they're about 900 million in search. The end of the story from a sales standpoint. Now, search and consulting is a billion. It's been quite a ride.

Now, Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong. You're the Global Co-leader of the CEO and Enterprise Leader Development group within Korn Ferry. You're working with up to 130 different offices globally.

Yeah. That's right. Korn Ferry decided to be all things talent. Instead of being the largest executive search firm in the world, which they still are, they decided to be the largest talent management firm in the world. Also, not only acquire people, but how do you develop them, compensate them, and structure organizations and strategies. That long title means that our group develops CEOs and CEO successors. We develop enterprise leadership. It's a very different kind of leadership at the very top of the house and cascades down into the organization.

Korn Ferry acquired Miller Heiman so Miller Heiman, still to this day, their core fundamental methodology originally created around '88, '91, or around there that is still one of the most foundational sales methodologies for a complex sale now. Also, about 60% of most sales books refer back to that core methodology of multiple people influencing the sale, personal win, professional win, red flags, strengths, and weaknesses. It’s fantastic stuff. Alice Heiman is a frequent guest on this show, by the way.

That's fantastic. I assume there is a connection, but I did not know that. It also is interesting that Korn Ferry does nineteen evaluations of firms for every firm they acquire. The due diligence is high. In our track record, we've had 24 or 25 acquisitions over the last few years. Korn Ferry's ability not to just pick the premier thought leader, process leader, and program leader, but the right people too. It's been quite amazing what's been done.

It's also been such an amazing and interesting journey for you. I do want to double-click a little bit on this purpose-driven. You talked about this being one of these fundamental principles for you and your entire life. You've been very purpose-driven. I love the quote from Mark Twain that the two most important days of your life are the day when you're born and the day you find out why. That's in the early going of the book, if my memory serves but I stole that quote. I'm going to use that quote quite frequently. I love that quote.

We're commonly accused of saying that sales leadership is the X factor of professional sales now in our view, Kevin. It’s an interesting statistic for our industry. There's $70 billion spent annually on training professional salespeople. In the US, it's about $5,000 per person. On average, a company spends 20% more training salespeople than any other business function. The amount of money spent training sales leaders is so small that they don't chart it. It's a very interesting dynamic because sales leaders are quite comfortable sending their team out or having people like us come in to train the team because they'll say, “The team needs training.”

They're far less comfortable putting up their hand and saying, “I need help.” As a result of which, whether you're a Chief Revenue Officer or a VP of Sales, the average tenure for that title right now is shockingly short. It’s almost under two years, if you believe recent Gardner research and some of it is McKinsey research as well.

CEOs are as low as 4 to 5 years now.

Pathways To Mastering Leadership

It's a very challenging environment. Let's get into the book a little bit where we talk about the pathways to mastering leadership. I have so many questions. What's changed over the three editions was at the core we talk or you write about these eight pathways to mastering leadership, Personal, Story mastery, Purpose mastery, Interpersonal, Change mastery, Resilience mastery, Being mastery, and then Coaching mastery. Do you mind if we unpack a couple of these, Kevin? Tell us how you came up with this framework.

That would be great. If I could back up and piggyback on your introduction, then we'll go to the eight mastery because you provoke something. Sometimes we say leadership changes everything. Now, it might be it changes everything for better or worse but it changes everything. If great leadership changes everything, great sales leadership changes leadership. It does because what happens if any leader is not influential enough, serving enough, or understanding needs enough? You could make a case, which I'm sure you wouldn't mind, that sales leadership changes everything if you think of it in the broadest sense.

Great leadership changes everything, and great sales leadership changes leadership itself.

I completely agree and we see it in practice. As you, with your experience, and one of the things you write about one of the many benefits of joining Korn Ferry was your reach. The 100,000 executives that you're working with annually or monthly that you end up touching. You have a research based on seven million executives. There are assessments done to a shocking scale that validate the research.

At a much smaller level, Kevin, we're working with these mid-size companies when we either bring in, help them find the right sales leader, and properly onboard that sales leader, we can see the change in a year. It's absolutely amazing. We've seen the other examples as well where something is running smoothly. There's a change made and the amount of time for a negative impact to take place is so crazy quick. It's shockingly quick.

Sometimes keeping the wind in the sails, if you've got a leader who believes in the potential of the team and they believe their job is to uncover that potential, all these great things happen. You coached hockey players, the Wayne Gretzky effect, where the best salesperson who comes in becomes a leader, but their joy isn't developing people. Their joy is doing deals. They see everybody else as a tool to help them hit a bigger number. It’s a completely different environment.

This is where sales leadership and enterprise leadership come together because typically, we're developed as an executive leader, sales executive leaders, or any other kind of leader. We come up through a silo and we get reinforced for producing results.

We get in the bad habit of, “I produce results,” and we are a bit of an afterthought. It's the same thing in enterprise leadership. We come up with a function. We get skilled at running up and down stairs vertical and we develop a certain fitness, musculature, or aerobic capacity for a certain sport. Suddenly, whether it's the marketplace or our own awareness, some mentor, or advisor says, “Wait. That sport, you still need to do once in a while, but now you're in a lateral sport.”

Now, you have to go across. You have to think across, collaborate across, innovate across, share resources across, coach across, and help your colleagues across. That juncture of the I to the we is the most difficult juncture in development for executive to enterprise leaders and I bet for sales leaders too serving the I or serving the bigger we.

Without going to other folk’s research, there are volumes of research on this. I'll share my own experience of making that transition. Back in 2000, I was that person who'd been a successful salesperson and was promoted to leader. Within a 90-day period of time, not only was everybody who reported to me was reporting to me miserable, but I was miserable.

It felt like the worst job of my life because it was still about me, the I, and now, I was frustrated because I was responsible for the performance of five other people. Also, for the life of me back then, I couldn't understand why they couldn't do everything exactly the same way I did it. It didn't make any sense to me.

Then you'd have to do it for them.

I was happy to tell them exactly what to do and I was so surprised when they didn't want to hear it. Kevin, it's so funny with large org companies. Even though I was terrible at the role and I was thinking of leaving, I ended up getting promoted again. What I got promoted to was a different division, a different side of the business, leading a different group of people in a business I knew nothing about.

When every interaction with someone, they'd come in and say, “Here's what's going on. What should I do?” My knee jerk was, “I have no idea. What do you think you should do?” Suddenly, they started to enjoy the process and I started to enjoy the process. They were getting elevated and I realized that is the true joy. It's one of the main reasons we run our training company. We love seeing people develop.

As you mentioned, there's so much research on this. One piece of research from Zenger and Folkman in the book The Extraordinary Leader is they took a look at people who were mainly about getting results. A little more the I to impact kind of leader. They were known for getting results. Another group was known for teaming and people skills. Those two groups produced about equivalent outcomes but there was a third group that got results and connected with people. They were 67% more. It’s a huge amount more effective. That's the principle. It's not I or we. It's I and we to produce more impact.

Connecting With People And Authentic Leadership

Tell us a little more about connecting with people. What do we mean by that?

It basically gets into emotional intelligence. It’s Goldman's work, Yale's work, CCLS’s work, and Korn Ferry's work too. Normally, we think about connection I think a little superficially. We have a little chat and we use a little humor, which believe it or not, I love, even though a CEO told me, “You say you love humor, but you're not very funny.” Sometimes we think of it in terms of that kind of banter. It's important that it is a connection but there are two things that are coming together.

Deep self-awareness, authenticity, and understanding of what I have and what I don't have. Also, being real about that and being real and revealing about it because that builds a lot of trust. Not trying to always look better than we are. Be who we are, be honest about what we have, what we know, and what we don't know. That builds a tremendous amount of trust in us.

That's part of the equation is deep personal authenticity and awareness that builds trust. The other thing is deep awareness of others and deep care of others. Wanting to know what your needs are, and what your goals are, and not doing it as a consultative selling technique which by the way is great by doing consultative selling with a heart and with care that wants to help. When all of that is happening at the same time for both people, it's electric. Time stops and we have a great conversation and we want to work together. That's the magic. It's a magic born out of authenticity, curiosity, and real care.

It makes so much sense and everybody reading this will have examples in their career where they knew they were reporting to or working with a boss like that. They felt it. That boss didn't have to be warm and coddling all the time. They might give significant challenges or hold you accountable with love or even a coach. You talked about athletics at the beginning. I had many coaches like that but if you believe their intent was making you better, it changes everything.

Now, sometimes you have to discover their intent later, and sometimes that's too late but underneath that intent, the thing that works is presence. We know when somebody's there for us and with us. That's the foundation. You can't fake it. You are either really present or not and people have a radar for it. I'm doing all these old sports stories.

You cannot fake it all the time. You are either present or not. People have a radar for authenticity.

We love sports on this show.

Maybe I'm overdoing it.

No. We love it.

There's a Vince Lombardi story that came to me firsthand and I had the good fortune early in my career. I had this athletic connection and so on. I had two CEOs who were on Vince Lombardi's World Champion first Super Bowl and second Super Bowl. They were both players. Now, this was 25 years after their Super Bowl. It's not that long ago, but it's still quite a ways. I get this laboratory where I'm meeting with each of them and I can't tell the other one that I'm working with this other one.

They say, “I talked to such and such,” “Okay, fine.” They divulge it. I had this laboratory of these two independent situations. What am I interested in asking them as a punchline? What was it like with Lombardi? What impacted you?” I knew it had an impact, but I couldn't say it in the beginning. I had to build trust and then I was going to ask them and get the real deep answer.

What was interesting is they both used the same word, which was shocking to describe Lombardi. We all know Lombardi is the tough, win-at-all-costs kind of person. They both said the same word. They both said, “I've never been so loved by anybody in my career. Maybe my family, I've been loved as much or more, but in my career, I've never been loved by a human being like Lombardi.”

Here was his hidden success formula. They knew he was in it with them and for them no matter what. He earned the right to push them to no end because they knew he loved them. That's real leadership and I’m inspired thinking about it right now. It's so foundational but he didn't have to do a lot of speeches and sales talks. No. He would have them over to his house and cook dinner. He'd love them like a family so they'd do anything for him.

Love is such a strong and powerful world. You use the same example in the book with Shaq and his college coach Dale.

He's an amazing mentor of generations of talent.

I was a hockey player and was a goalie. When I was playing prep school hockey, which was okay. For Canada, there are much higher levels but it was pretty good. Our coach had been a former professional goalie and I knew that he cared. He could be direct. There were some tough things but he was a great guy and I knew he cared. Even for a young person, 17, 18, I knew his intent was to make me better and help me get through certain plateaus or ceilings of complexity for what we're doing. You're right. You do anything for them.

The thing that got sparked, I'm thinking, “You're not wide enough to be a goalie.” You must have been fast.

I'm also not that tall. I'm only six feet tall. In this day’s game, it's much different. You block the net but in my day, you had to give a little piece of net to somebody and then take it away.

These principles we were talking about hold up. When you get down to it, whether it's athletics, business, or selling, it's how we employ who we are, how we know who we are, and how we employ who we are to make a difference. The venue doesn't matter but becoming a leader for life is what's important. Getting the next million-dollar sale is important. Going home and influencing our family. Selling is not popular at home but influencing towards something that's important is universally applicable.

When you talk about authenticity, we’ve got a couple of things with some of the teams we work with. Not always leaders, but certainly with younger generations as they're coming up, we are encouraging them to be their real selves, but they're not comfortable. Part of it is we all have those things. Somebody thinks a young person's a little bit in debt or they went out and partied a little bit too much two weekends ago and they feel bad. They feel like they have to keep those things in some ways hidden away. They're not comfortable understanding that we all have that stuff.

Understanding Authenticity

With the younger folks, we just try and be yourself. Nobody wants a marketing automaton in sales. With more of the leaders that we manage, we talk about authenticity but let's talk about this. Also, you bring this up a little bit in the book. Most leaders either think they're being authentic or they don't think there's an issue with authenticity because whatever state they're in is what they're showing. If somebody out there is reading this Kevin, can we unpack that a little bit and say, “What do we mean by authenticity and how do you assess whether you are authentic in front of your team?”

Let's just get the assessment part out of the way because there's a very valid and valuable way to do it. In companies that use 360 methodology where the person ranks themselves with different behaviors and characteristics, and then other people above, across, and below get to do a similar ranking. If those tools are valid and the interpretation is good. We get to reconcile with how we see ourselves versus how others see us.

Now, the interpretation of this is science, but it's real art too because sometimes we see things in ourselves, that others don't see, and then our developmental challenge reveals more. People can experience who we are or at other times people see things in us that need to be developed that we don't see and then can we be open to that and learn and grow and so on.

It's a great process. It needs great coaching and interpretation to know what to do because sometimes we get feedback from others and we go, “That's what we should do.” Maybe you should do it, but maybe you should do it differently based on who you are, your life story, and so on. It's this reconciliation of individuality and social constructs and we're somewhere in between in terms of our authenticity.

Authenticity is important throughout all of business. Our products are services that authentically create value. If they're not, you are in the wrong company and they're in the wrong business. Those are tough decisions and that's not a reactive decision. That's an important thing. We could go on and on. What is an authentic product or service? It's probably a product or service that has a real purpose that's enhancing the lives of the people it touches. It’s probably more authentic when it does that.

If it destroys more value than it creates, what certain products do, you have to challenge yourself to be there. However, the key thing with authenticity is not, “Kill me. This is who I am.” You live with it. It's like, “I love my dog, but I probably wouldn't take it to a board meeting at Johnson & Johnson. It might be authentic for me, but it doesn't create value for others. Authenticity ultimately has to reconcile with what's real and important for me. What creates value for the audience that I'm serving? Also, finding that sweet spot is where our authenticity will create value in who we're serving.

Again, the reconciliation of the I and the we. If authenticity is all in the I, then it's, “Kill me. I'm this. You have to accept that and the heck with you.” No, it's both, and. Authentic in the I, connected in the we creating value. That's what real authenticity is and this is not leadership in a hierarchy. This is leadership in the hierarchy and in life. We define it as the authentic influence that creates enduring value. That gives you a sense of authenticity across the I, the we, and the enterprise.

I’m creating value, which leads a little bit to the way you dedicated the book to those value-creating leaders with the courage to commit to authentic personal transformation and the passion to serve the world on purpose.

That sounds good. I hadn't heard of that in a long time.

It does. I thought so too. That's why I pulled it out.

That's exactly the point. Whoever wrote that, good on them.

I'm talking to the guy who wrote that. That's why I'm so excited. You wrote that.

Those are great principles.

Embracing Courage

One of the ones we haven't talked about, we've talked about purpose. We've talked about this being authentic. We'll talk a little more about transformation but let's speak to courage because that's a constant theme throughout the book. How do we define it and is this a muscle that we can develop?

We could take 60 minutes on this question. We just finished a three-year research study on enterprise leadership to not only figure out in this day's world what are their capabilities, which were not that shocking, but what are their capabilities. What are underneath their capabilities? What are underneath the clusters of competencies and skills? The five mindsets became clear. These mindsets are deeper than the behaviors or capabilities.

Two of these mindsets we've already touched on. It’s purpose and courage. We can talk about the other three too because they're all equally important and have a certain dynamic between them. For instance, when you have purpose and courage, these two are mindsets that if they dance together are more powerful. For instance, if you have high courage and low purpose, you can do a lot of damage in the world. We've seen that.

If you have courage but low purpose, you can do a lot of damage in the world. 

The history of leadership has a hell of a lot of damage and diminishing life in it when you look at the whole history. There's a lot of courage and not a lot of service and purpose. That's a literally lethal combination. Now, on the other hand, if you have a purpose without courage, important things don't happen. It's a nice aspiration, but nothing moves.

This dance between the mindset of purpose, meaning how can I bring myself, and my organization to others in a way that touches and changes their life? It’s because purpose is not purposeful as you know. It's not real until it touches the lives of others. That's the measure of purpose. Are we impacting lives or not? You've got a mindset around service and impacting people's lives. Also, an openness to it. Not a closeness.

We can talk about what that means in psychological terms if you want but then the second thing is courage. Courage is this openness to go for something new, different, or challenging, feel, fear, and still go for it because it's important. Hopefully, it's important to others more or courage can go wrong. If courage takes on things that are important and even scary, we go for it.

Courage is the openness to go for something new, different, or challenging. It is about going for something despite feeling fear.

This is where purpose helps courage. We go for it because it's important to us and to all of us. Those two are particularly powerful. I think if you only had two mindsets that you worked on, those would be the two. We studied, as you have said, it used to be seven million, then now it's 28 million data sets of assessment. I heard it's going up to 50. It's going to hit 100 before too long.

AI helps with all this, right?

Yeah. It's growing exponentially. The people we get to assess and help but we studied courage across five industries. Our hypothesis was, “Is it going to be important in all of them? Is it going to be important in none of them? Are there certain industries where it's more important?” What was shocking to us was that courage was the only mindset or capability because it happens to be both that showed up in all five industries. Of about 80 to 100 possibilities, it was the only one that showed up in all industries. It's foundational to leadership and to selling too.

We will talk about that openness, Kevin, but what are the other three mindsets?

Integrative Thinking And Inclusion

The other three mindsets after purpose and courage are integrative thinking. This is not just seeing the dots, but synthesizing the dots into new realities. I am constantly trying to find the new dot that will change everything again. That's this unending synthesis of thinking that's endlessly curious to find the new synthesis. It's a lot more than strategy. You better have it if you're going to do strategy, but you better have it if you're going to innovate too. It's a key thing.

Another one is inclusion. This is important for diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI, it's important to it. It's a mindset that supports that openness to difference but we're looking at inclusion on more of a fundamental level. The connecting, the including, the ideas, and different perspectives of different people. This one feeds integrative thinking. These two are different, but they dance well together. I can see your light bulbs already going on. I don't have to describe that more. The last one, which could be seen to be the basis of the other four two pairs that are dancing together but a common denominator underneath all of them is the mindset of self-awareness and awareness of others which is emotional intelligence that we talked about because without that, nothing else works.

I love the idea of these mindsets dancing together. That's an interesting thing for all of us to think about in the importance of them. There are many interesting things to think about here. Just a reminder to everybody, we're talking about Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life. This is one of six books by Kevin, many of which have become bestsellers or identified as top sales.

Two have but it sounds better how you said it.

Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life

The Awakening the Leader Within is one of the other top-selling. Also, The Pause Principle: Step Back to Lead Forward was recognized as one of the business books of the year.

That's the other bestseller and it gets into the counterintuitive idea that sometimes to accelerate, we have to step back in order to go forward more powerfully.

Kevin, first and foremost, thank you so much for joining us in this episode. I have one or two other quick questions because I have to be so cognizant of your time and you're so right, we could be on this topic for hours.

I'll come back if you want.

Currency And Leadership

We'd be delighted if you would come back. Please, and thank you. As we talk about these core concepts and principles, if I think of the last 10 or 15 years, I've seen a number of things over the last few years. These are things that haven't changed dramatically in 5, 10, 20 years. They haven't changed that much, the need for many of these things but when you created the second edition and third edition of the book, between the first and third, you changed 70% of the content. I know you added a different pathway, which was storytelling but has leadership really changed that much, or has most of the change in the book really come from more research, more facts, and more referenceable stories exemplifying these core concepts?

How I view it is there are two ends to thought leadership. One has to do with currency and relevance now. That's where research emerges and says, “We're seeing these correlations.” To me, that's one end of thought leadership that's always evolving towards the future but what's interesting to me is that the principles go back thousands of years in thought leadership, not 10, 20 years. What fascinates me is these enduring principles of life like trust, love, connection, and purpose. They are not new. They're part of the human experience. They go back literally a millennia.

What research does ultimately is to discover what's there. It’s physics and all of physics doesn't discover what's not there. It discovers what's there. It reveals. To me, that's where thought leadership gets interesting is it's current and it has endured through human existence. That's real thought leadership. It's both, and.

Closing Words

Kevin, first of all, thank you so much for joining us. What a pleasure meeting you and a real pleasure reading the book as preparation for now. A couple of the other books we're going to take a run at before you come back and join us next time. How do the folks reading this learn more outside of buying the book, which they're going to buy, Leadership from the Inside Out? How do they learn more about you and what you're doing with Korn Ferry?

There are two websites. One is to take a look at the Korn Ferry website and see all the capabilities that run across Korn Ferry. You've touched on Miller Heiman and executive development. There's a compensation group. It goes on and on. That's one thing that might interest people as a resource. There are a lot of articles and research. We view the website at Korn Ferry as a very giving kind of website. I have a website too that connects to Korn Ferry, but it's CashmanLeadership.com. You can go there and I'm highlighted. My articles, videos, thought leadership, and books are there but you can also connect to Korn Ferry and its capabilities as well. Those two websites would be, if you're interested, places to go.

Kevin, thank you again for joining us. Folks, thank you so much for joining the show. As always, we do this to try and improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales and in doing so, improve the lives of professional salespeople. If you liked this episode, please share and like the show, if you enjoyed it. That matters to us.

If there's something we can do to make these even more valuable to you, please let us know. You can email me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com directly. That's my personal email. We love constructive criticism. The show is a result of you folks helping us try to make this better and better. Every note I get, I will respond to. That's me personally responding and thank you in advance for doing so. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.

Important Links

• Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life

• The Pause Principle: Step Back to Lead Forward

• Awakening the Leader Within

• Kevin Cashman

• The Extraordinary Leader

• CashmanLeadership.com

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Kevin Cashman

Kevin Cashman is a best-selling author, global thought leader and CEO coaching expert, keynote speaker and pioneer of the ‘grow the whole person to grow the whole leader’ approach to CEO coaching and transformative enterprise leadership. He is the founder of LeaderSource Ltd, and the Chief Executive Institute®, recognized as one of the top three enterprise leadership development programs globally. In 2006, LeaderSource was acquired by Korn Ferry, where Kevin is now Global Co-Leader of CEO and Enterprise Leader Development across 130 offices internationally that touch the lives of 100,000+ leaders monthly.

Kevin has advised thousands of CEOs, senior executives and senior teams in more than 80 countries worldwide. He is an accomplished thought leader on topics of personal, team and organizational transformation. He has written six books including Awakening the Leader Within and Leadership from the Inside Out, named the #1 best-selling business book of 2000 by CEO-READ and now used at over 150 universities globally.

Kevin has written scores of articles on enterprise leadership and CEO coaching. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive, Human Resource Executive, Inc., Fast Company, Strategy & Leadership, Directors & Boards Magazine, and is a leadership columnist for Forbes.com and HuffPost/Thrive Global. For several years he has been named as one of the Top Global Thought Leaders by Leadership Excellence and one of the Top Global Executive Coaches by GlobalGurus.org. 

Understanding Heartificial Empathy With Minter Dial

Many businesses employ cutting-edge technology to hit their biggest goals. However, one important factor in achieving business success is often neglected – empathy. In this conversation, Mark Cox sits down with Minter Dial to discuss how empathy is the key competitive advantage in the 21st-century marketplace. Minter breaks down the two styles of emphatic understanding and the two things that hinder empathy from growing in workplaces. Minter also explores how artificial intelligence can be employed to help people render more emphatic messaging and build more inclusive teams.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Understanding Heartificial Empathy With Minter Dial

Thanks for joining us on The Selling Well podcast. Before we get started, we’ve got a really special offer for you as a listener of the show. We’ve launched the next generation of our In The Funnel Sales Academy. The leading online training platform and B2B sales community that helps companies optimize their sales and generate unpredictable revenue growth. For the show’s listeners, we’re offering 50% off your first month for any of our subscription plans. Just go to SellingWell.com/podcast and then use the promo code PODCAST. That’s Sellingwell.com/podcast, promo code PODCAST and you get 50% off your first month. Looking forward to working with you. Now, on to the show.

Because some people say there's only one formula altogether. Others say it must be attached to compassion. For me, compassion and other styles of output are distinct from the notion of empathy which is discreetly about your ability to understand. What you do without understanding can be compassion, sympathy, or other things but it should be detached. That's the important piece because in business what I tend to preach and promote is thinking about how to improve your cognitive empathy. Teach somebody to have emotional empathy. I don't know if that's really possible, and it's certainly impossible for a machine.

I’ve always said that salespeople are bleeders. We’re almost like independent businesses at times managing or entrepreneurs managing our territories. Today’s show, it’s really relevant to us because we’ve got Minter Dial on the show. Minter is a professional speaker. He’s a storyteller and author, and he’s a consultant who specializes in leadership, branding, and transformation. In his court career, he enjoyed 16 years spent at L’Oreal including being managing director Worldwide at Redken. He’d authored four books.

The Last Ring Home: A POW’s Lasting Legacy of Courage, Love, and Honor in World War II, Futureproof: How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption, Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence, and then the book that we’re going to talk to him about, which is You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader, features weekly podcast on leadership and branding. He’s got over 436 episodes. He’s a great guy and he’s a deadhead. We’re going to talk to him a little bit about that is the love of a grateful dad. I hope you enjoyed today’s show with Minter. I certainly did. If you do, please like and subscribe The Selling Well podcast. Enjoy.

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Minter, welcome to the show again. It's great to see you.

Mr. Cox, it's great to have you in my line of vision.

How's the pickleball? I've been noticing a lot of involvement with pickleball online with you.

Pickle less paddle more. My Sport is paddle tennis. Both of them are greatly ascending sports in the United States. Paddled behind pickle for now, but I was just on the phone with the commissioner, the professional paddle league and he says watch out.

What were you doing on the phone with the commissioner of the professional League? Are you a professional player?

No. I'm 60 years old, so that isn't possible anymore. Of course, I play maybe in the veterans, but I know let's say a deep long-rooted aficionado pal. I've been playing since 1974. Spreading the word about the sport that came of age in the last 10 years was helped in part by the pandemic and a lot of well-known football and soccer players who have come inside. This is the sport of the future.

Thank you. I'll do a deeper dive into that.

I'll send you a link to some hot dog points. It is so entertaining to watch and the beauty of the paddle. I've just started the podcast called The Joy of Paddle Podcast. The beauty of the sport is that it's a deeply social sport. Easy to start therefore easy for beginners to wail and hoot and have fun on a pedal court right from the get-go. Then as you get better, you have to learn new tricks and trades and it gets all sorts of sophisticated and nuanced. Anyway, that's my thing these days.

Yes, I will take a look into it. I was an avid tennis player. I played a lot of table tennis. That was something we did a lot of growing up. Love racket sports. By the way, Minter, one of the reasons I was so excited to chat with you, outside of the fact that I enjoyed Heartificial Empathy, the book we're going to be talking about today. Of course, you've been on the show previously when we talked about your prior book You Lead.

Having this conversation, you strike me as over in North America here we have a commercial about Dos Equis beer. There's this interview with the world's most interesting man. You always strike me when I read your books and we have these conversations. You strike me as a real Renaissance man, the world's most interesting man. I know our discussion today is going to go in lots of different areas. Hey, thanks so much for joining again.

My great pleasure, and I'm guessing and embarrassed by the idea of the greatest Renaissance man. Definitely like lots of topics though. I can say that.

Writing The Book

Today's topic a Heartificial Empathy putting hard into business and artificial intelligence. As we jump in and do a little deep-diving, do you want to read a couple of the testimonials of this book? Right off the top, we hear in our Heartificial Empathy, Minter Dial, masterfully makes the case for why empathy is not only learnable but a requirement for success in business and life that came from Charlene Li bestselling author and founder of Altimeter. Another one empathy will be the key competitive advantage of the 21st Century.

Dial captures the full essence of that one special quality that makes us truly human. Nell Watson, AI and Robotics faculty at Singularity University. We talk about singularity a lot on this show. Then a third one, they're all over the book but a third one, I jumped out at me and in a texture-driven society empathy is an increasingly rare and valuable skill. That came from Dorie Clark author of Entrepreneurial You and Stand Out.

Artificial empathy lays out this business case and a path for putting more heart and heart and empathy into business and machines for a healthier and more profitable future. Given the diversity of some of the other books you've written. I think there's some tie of course into You Lead. What prompted you, Minter, to go down the path of this topic? Of course, we're on the second printing of the book. I think the first printing was in 2018, if I'm not mistaken.

That's correct. There's the let's say nominal reason which I will more often than not talk about which is that my observation was having worked in business working with lots of people and this is pre-pandemic that there was a constant failing in businesses with regards to the humanity of management. It was a great focus on productivity, efficiencies, effectiveness, and all that at the cost of how you speak to each other, and how you listen.

That's the nominal reason. The actual reason which is much more personal was that my best friend killed himself. At that time, I was writing another book, it became my therapy to figure out because I accompanied him through the last six weeks about empathy and how it can be also extremely pertinent, practical, and important in person not just in work.

I'm so sorry about your friend. You said you accompanied him in the last six weeks.

On the phone mostly. I mean obviously in person as well in interspersed, but that was it.

Wow. What an experience that must have been. Hopefully from something like that, when we read this book some great good can come from it. Minter, I really enjoy your writing style. I find it so engaging and so interesting. Frankly, it's just so smart being someone who's writing a book right now and having a pretty tough time of it. At some point in time in the first chapter, you say, “Continue reading if.”

If you think satisfying customers is important or you think you want employees to be more engaged or if you're contemplating or implementing an AI strategy or you want to improve your innovation pipeline or design a new product website or office space? You go five or six other things here?

Defining Empathy

Anybody listening to this show should maybe turn up the volume because frankly, you identify at the beginning of this book this ideal client profile for the book, which is virtually everybody in the universe. I can't believe there's anybody in business technically today small, medium, or large enterprise who doesn't want to do some of these things. Let's start with the core of this topic empathy. All of us hear about sympathy and we hear about emotional intelligence and we hear about compassion and all these different things. Let's define empathy. What is empathy?

Right, so there are lots of misconceptions and certainly there's no single definition because in the empathy activist world, there's lots of jiggling and realigning as to what what empathy really might be. For me, the way I define empathy is the ability to understand what someone else is thinking, feeling, or experiencing. It breaks down into two styles of understanding. The first is cognitive where I understand what your situation is. I see where you are and I hear what you're saying. I observe your feelings.

The second type is emotional or affective empathy and that's when you feel what the other person's feeling. You have absolutely can feel the sadness of the other person when they're feeling sad, and this is an important distinction because some people say there's only one formula altogether. Others say it must be attached to compassion. For me, compassion and other styles of output really are distinct from the notion of empathy which is discreetly about your ability to understand.

What you do without understanding compassion, sympathy, and other things but it should be detached. That's the important piece because in business what I tend to preach and promote is thinking about how to improve your cognitive empathy. Teach somebody to have emotional empathy. I don't know if that's really possible and it's certainly impossible for a machine.

Which we’ll get to and I think it's a good example instead of clarifying you just shared this unfortunate personal story of your pal. Automatically, I would default to this cognitive empathy or almost sympathy where I don't know what that feels like, but I do have sadness or concern for you having gone through it. Is that cognitive empathy or is that sympathy?

If you feel sadness, that is affective empathy. Where you're reflecting or mirroring my sadness which is deep. Of course, it's now been six years but every time I talk about the book. It is an opportunity for me to think about Philip and I love the idea of giving pause to be present in the moment even with some past figure. I'm writing a new book about conversation and one of the amazing conversations I had was with a Native American Indian who had the presence to speak to her ancestor seven generations ago. That's where my monkey brain just took me. The idea is being present with conversation you can do with trees, you can do with ancestors. In this case of my dead pal.

To whom you dedicated the book.

Yes. Actually, the second edition, I also dedicated it to a lovely fellow empathy activist who unfortunately died of cancer Jackie Atro. She was just a light in my life. Unfortunately, she expired too early.

Learning Empathy

Circling back now to empathy, we've defined it. Then you did talk about. Hey, I think maybe we can develop and learn cognitive empathy. I'm not sure that we can do the same for emotional empathy. When you were talking about, can it be learned in the book? Being a sales trainer and a consultant, I immediately aligned with this thought that you can't teach anybody anything if they don't want to learn it. There's nothing worse than running a sales workshop where there's 10% of the class just doesn't want to be there. We always try to make them optional when clients engage in our services because we just don't want that person in the room. How do we learn it?

Like you say, you need to want to learn it. Once you have that appetite, then there are various ways you can improve your empathy. The key point is what willingness and curiosity to learn about the other person. If you don't have that, in other words, you might be looking from above who pooing certain status of people. Then it becomes difficult to be believable in terms of the empathy from the receiver. I have an example of just talking to strangers, complete strangers not someone you have a common link with but a cashier, a bus driver, and talk to them.

We're not looking for you to have a sort of deep philosophical conversation because generally they don't have the time either but try to observe and completely understand what the other person says. Stay with them. Don't just bring it back to you. Stay with them and keep ties to their lives. Obviously, not in a way to exploit their privacy but this idea or the second great way is to read great fiction. The important part of this is great fiction.

What I mean by that is well-written dialogues, and developed characters such that if you are a man, you could read Madame Bovary by Flaubert or whatever so you can learn about the psyche and the things that happen, the thoughts in a woman's mind. Obviously, there's a little bit of a generational gap there, but in general, the idea is reading good fiction. The last piece is really just to make sure you make the time.

This is perhaps the more practical element when you want to have empathy you need to have time. It must be a time when you are able to evacuate all your other concerns and worries and be fully present with the others. If you don't do that, then you need to start with the basics, which is who are you and who you want to be, and help you to understand why this is important to you. If you don't have a why underneath it, it becomes like, I really want to learn another language.

What language? Italian. Why? Because it sounds nice. Not enough. You need to have a stronger route. My grandfather spoke to me in Italian and I never knew how to understand him. That's why I want to speak to Italian. Okay, that sounds a bit more plausible same goes for this idea of learning to be more empathic. If you can attach it to a reason, in other words, the type of person you want to be maybe in your legacy or the type of manager you want to be in your company, then that will help you to sort of find the time, the energy to read, talk to strangers, give the time to your companions and so on.

By the way, the reason I asked the question, I thought the reading fiction really jumped out at me when I was reading the book. Hey, that's a way of developing empathy and it was part of these five items you listed how do I build that muscle? You covered a couple of them. Listening actively, exploring differences, reading fiction particularly classic fiction, doing mindfulness, and knowing and going to the why and so many roads end up leading to this why in life and in business really these days.

Empathy In Business

If you do come back a number of times in the book, Minter, and say, “It's so important for business.” We're going to have lots of CEOs listening to this show mostly of mid-size enterprises or we have sales leaders of large enterprises, so they're running big teams. Why is empathy such an important thing to make sure is front of mind for management at the executive team and really a driving force in terms of how we run our businesses today? Why does it matter so much?

First of all, this is merely an opinion, which is that I'm convinced will help drive your business. There are various studies that show with varying degrees of strength that empathy increases shareholder return in spades. The challenge with those studies and to be real is that it's very different to measure empathy and to isolate the specific skill of empathy as the real reason why my share price might be going up.

That's to be real with the story because I'm a businessman after all and I don't think it's about being idealistic. The key point here for me is that empathy doesn't need to be applied everywhere all the time with everybody. What you need to do as a business is to think about strategically what's important for you. Where are your strategic apps? This is really relevant when you're a mid-tier manager.

Empathy doesn’t need to be applied everywhere all the time with everybody. What you need to do as a business is to strategically think about what’s important for you.

When you want to bring in the idea of empathy maybe hire a coach to help your team be more empathic, if you can link it to what the CEO has dictated as the strategic imperatives of the next year or two, then it's an easier sell. This is what we're doing we're hiring a coach who's going to help satisfy this need which might be higher productivity which might be more innovation, which might be greater motivation. Whatever that issue is has been identified at a corporate level.

You want to participate in that and if you can lean in on empathy in that specific area that will help you to focus on when you need to really listen. It'll give you a reason why everybody should want to improve their skills. The last thing I'm going to say is that one shouldn't just think of empathy as a skill towards the outside. The real juice happens when you have congruency within your organization and the way you are dealing with your customers. Don't expect your salespeople to treat your customers with golden gloves if you don't do the same with them.

Interesting one. I want to come back to that I made a note on Amazon. Just back to the coaching on empathy. Not all roads in this show lead to sales. We talked about so many broad topics. I will say this idea of having empathy for the buyer today is so critically important having that skill of empathy. Where we understand what they're going through because what we're seeing folks the direct causal connection here is the percentage of deals that go to no decision right now is skyrocketing.

Somebody investigates something, multiple different vendors pull in resources to fulfill an RFP or some review and at the end of the day what's happening is the buyer is doing nothing. Somewhere between 40%, and 60% of the time they just go. I'd rather miss out than mess up. One of the things I think we're having a difficult time is truly putting ourselves in the shoes of the buyer. Then understanding this. I'd rather miss out than mess up. After they've decided they've found an opportunity, we've earned that right to have a positive business case.

They then literally just get cold feet. If I move forward with this, I'm putting my neck on the line. There may be some benefit to my company, but I'm really concerned that if it fails I'm going to look terrible and I could lose my job. There's this real switch. Again, Matthew Dixon who wrote The Challenger Sale articulates this in his new book called The JOLT Effect but there's this switch. We have to stay close to our buyers and understand what stage are they at. The empathetic understand what they're going through and that's a real risk, by the way, if you sell anything material enterprise software of any time, the chances the project tanks are surprisingly high and the stakes are pretty high.

It's frankly it's just good business as a seller. If we can understand our client, their business, the environment, the trends in their Industries, the pressures they're under, and how that changed its month to month or quarter to quarter. The more we understand them and then can truly understand how to try and get them to a better future somehow professionally maybe even personally, the better our chances of being successful. The skill of empathy is so critical.

Two things to respond to that. One is to reference a friend of mine Guillermo Di Bisotto who talked about the fact that a buyer is also a salesman because the buyer needs to then sell this project, this whole time and that's really an interesting perspective to take as you're selling into. If you can recognize how you can help this person not necessarily assuage their fears because that's going to be hard to do but at least give them all the knowledge, the tools, and the information class in a way that satisfies their company's strategy.

The second piece mark is around really the upscale of the up funnel piece which is trust. Empathy is maybe a conduit to trust but really what you need to have is trust upstream because that's kind of allow you to have the data to understand the situation for this person. They might tell you we don't need any business or I like this product about its offering. What is it that's not for me? Having them explain the objections if you will or lay out what their personal fears are or maybe look under the hood of actually how the business is going. What can they or can't they afford and what's happening within? Getting that information is gold. In order to get it, you need to have their trust.

Empathy is a conduit to trust. But what you need to have is trust upstream. This will allow you to gather the data to fully understand every situation and individual.

You do. You need to have their trust and you have to have credibility in their eyes. You're earning that this whole way along. Frankly, your number one point on developing the muscle a lot of that comes from actively listening after being able to ask great questions where you're proving to them. You actually already know a little bit about their world. When we're having this discussion, we have context here. I don't know you specifically but I know 50 people who run businesses exactly like you this is what they've been experiencing suddenly that you're going to go.

Dealing With Disengaged Teams

This the buyer goes, “I think this person gets.” It actually understands my issues, my challenges, my opportunities, and you're earning the right to get them to open up and to build that relationship. Let's go back to the importance before we get outside of the business. Minter, you spend a great deal of time, but the first 4 or 5 chapters on inside the business and I really appreciate the fact it's hard to measure how empathetic a company is but of course, you’d be increasing employee engagement, you'd be reducing churn, unwanted churn if you've got an empathetic organization.

I have this really interesting experience right now because I often deal with CEOs who are not empathetic. Lots of good and logical reasons that a technology CEO in a mid-sized firm is just insanely driven and not highly empathetic. I've had this really unique experience with a client recently where the CEO is very empathetic. Anything we're doing from a consulting perspective they're very cautious of how is this going to be perceived by the sales team. What are they going through? These are the kinds of things, the fears they have, and all of these kinds of things.

It's really interesting. I think there's this balance but we had Tiffany Bova. You might know Tiffany Bova from Salesforce. Her recent book is called The Experience Mindset. She was on the show a month ago, let's say. There were two stats that just blew me away. I should know this, maybe you do but her research had proven that both 70 where she pulled from research that said 17% of employees today are actively disengaged, so 33% are engaged. A whole bunch are disengaged but 17% are actively disengaged. I said what's the definition of that?

They actively want their company to fail. They'll do things in sabotage, which blows your mind because you go, you're working for the company don't you know, you're going to be impacted. They don't make the connection. They just want bad things to happen to the company, 17%. Then she pulled a stat that'll just make both of us fall off our chairs. The cost to businesses of actively disengaged employees globally, is $7 trillion annually, $7 trillion annually. Huge issue obviously. Just a massive problem.

Even if we could do anything with a quarter of a percent feels to me that in the environments I've been most comfortable with, I think I'm reasonably empathetic. I think I relate better to leaders who are still tough but empathetic. Are there any stats or comments there for the folks listening? I think what we try and figure out is outside of the business, a lot of the CEOs who might be listening to this are going, “Why would I do this?” You bring up a good stat in some of the research you did that said 77% of CEOs feel that if they're too empathetic they'll be seen as weak or ineffective. I forget the exact quote.

It is 77% fear that they will lose respect if they are more or too empathic. That is a good starting point for commenting because at the end of the day it reflects on the one hand a misunderstanding of what empathy is and two, it spells out something that I have seen in other statistics, which is that CEOs that are successful tend to struggle to change because they are successful. That's how they got where they are. If you are successful and wealthy, tall and male there are other studies that have shown that those are also other things that hurt you in your empathy development.

This is a misunderstanding. The key point here is to at least think that being empathic can also be a tremendous driver of the business when applied and done with authenticity. There are two of the things that need to be made aware of in terms of reasons why we still suffer from a lack of empathy in business and you talked about the lack of motivation of everybody. There are a lot of things that go into that but there are two things that specifically are troublesome with regard to the development of empathy in a business and a culture. The first is a lack of time.

The number of times that I go and see or talk to a CEO and their agenda is 100 booked up, 100% booked up. That's absolutely posse. To give you a specific antidote to that. What I did when our CEO is that I had 50% of my day barred off free and that was work that I would do with my assistant in order for me to make sure that I had the time and it might be to go listen to a client, walk down the aisle, listen to an upset or some challenge that an employee has in my team. By having the time, then you are enabling the ability.

If you don't have the time, you're never going to really develop it. The second thing is also very relevant in the context of economics, like you're saying the long decision times or the no decision times are that we are in a very sketchy economic situation here. When we are stressed for business, stressed for performance, stressed for our career, are we going to get fired? All the stress levels will not be a good factor for developing empathy.

When we are stressed about business performance, we cannot develop empathy.

Right. Well, bring up the details and reference you being a CEO, that was when you were CEO of L'Oreal and Redken. A lot of that by the way folks documented discussed in You Lead of being yourself makes you a better leader and I'd encourage you, you'll see the link here, but we have a great show with Minter from maybe your goal where we discussed it. I enjoyed that. I've gone back and listened to that one a couple of times. That's where we learned that Minter was a deadhead, by the way. That was the original clue that Minter was a deadhead.

Empathic Bot

We think we understand what empathy is. We understand thinking about it for our business. We absolutely know why it's important to treat our clients and prospects with empathy to improve the customer experience. The cases made that unless we have an organization that's empathetic, it's very difficult to actually have your brand be after that or your customer experience the empathy from us have a great customer experience. A good half of the book is dedicated to artificial intelligence and empathy and artificial intelligence and you were one of 500 people that participated in the empathetic future experience. Tell us a little bit about that one.

That was a gorgeous opportunity. It's an organization based out of Germany Berlin that wanted to see how human beings would interact with an AI that was empathic. They went about creating a path over five days where you were 24/7 in touch with an empathic bot. The notion was to sort of evaluate the emotional frequency resonancy of each of these 500 people about 1/3 of whom were German, the others were English-speaking and then there was a larger proportion of men than there was women but I did get a chance to talk to the team afterward.

In any event, the thing was this living experience. What's it like? How does that make you feel? What does it make you think when you are talking to a bot that appears to really understand me? By gum, that was the feeling that I got. By the third day, I had generated an attachment to this spot. It became a figure in my mind and it struck me about how much we are thirsting for someone to listen to you. In this case, it was me wanting to be listened to and the bot had endless time was totally there for me the way I felt it and it was a wake-up call to think that actually it's not so difficult to start that feeling for a bot.

Just like in the very first rendition of Eliza back in the ‘60s where they had the primitive AI. All the engineers completely fell in love with already put another way. We're deeply engaged with Eliza for many hours despite them having lots of other things to do and only because the bot had a rogerian type of Eliza, had a rogerian style of answer that made you just continue to dig into your what you're thinking. Why do you feel that? How's that important to you? And so on, next thing, you're just spewing out your guts.

Alexa and Siri engage voices in some cases and so you start to get used to speaking to somebody and maybe even forget what's taking place. You make some great references to where chat GPT is and all of those things but this is so relevant folks because all of us, are bots on her website and many of us are migrating the leveraging AI for some data analytics or for responding to basic inbound customer queries. Where are we today with those technologies showcasing empathy? How much did you like the Dead Song that Chad GPT wrote for you when you asked Chat GPT to write a song? I think that was unbelievable, too.

Right now, we're in the stage where empathic AI does not exist. The real stage rat is, huh, how can we identify empathy within certain actions and words expressed by machines? Which essentially means that we certainly can't go deep and we can't go wide either because we haven't developed the sophistication to have a long string of conversations where empathy is being imbued. There are a couple of really important points. First, another way of looking at empathy is thinking about it as the emitter and the receiver.

Let's say you and I are having a conversation and I am trying to be empathic with you. I am trying to emit empathy and understanding what you're saying and formulating back, observing your emotions, and then you are the receiver and you may or may not be receiving and feeling that there's empathy and the other side. Typically, we measure empathy from the feeling sign, the receiver side. In the case of business in particular, but in many cases, empathy may not be so obvious. Empathy may not be observable. Therefore you won't be getting any receiver bonus points.

As you look at the emission of empathy, there are many ways that machines could help people. To render more empathic their messaging so in the emission version. It doesn't mean that when Mark receives my email he's going to say, “Minter is so empathic,” but he might open it. He might click on it because underneath that is empathy. If you went back I said, “How empathic do you think Minter was Mark?” Again, back to the measurement thing.

The last piece is that when you are looking at embedding AI and even more empathic AI into business, the key thing is to think about where you are already. What level of honesty do you have about empathy in your culture? Because you're not going to try to delegate to your AI. A behavior that doesn't reflect who you are internally. In other words, you be really empathic Mr. AI because we don't care about that. We don't think it's important. This notion of honesty with regard to where you are in the culture.

The ambition really should only be to be more empathic than that which brings up the idea of how you measure it before and then that there in the future. Having that discussion about how you want to measure where you are today as a culture is a victory because rarely is this topic ever discussed in boardrooms. As may be tactically speaking, oftentimes when I'm talking with teams who are developing AI and I talk about going in with empathy with it, what is empathy? For you, how do you categorize that?

What you're going to have to do ultimately with your large learning model and your data set is to be able to tag and rank if you will, what type of phrases you believe in your culture, in your organization with your clients, for example, or your employees is empathic? That ability to tag within your data set, your personalized data set, that would say reflect all of your emails, all of your websites, all the things the company have been doing and interacting with as a way to understand what is actually your particular culture your version of empathy.

Folks keep nodding and frankly my slow wheels, but the wheels are just churning internally so much. There are these fundamental messages that come across we all want to feel like we're understood. Actually, we and the funnel are no different than anybody else. I want somebody to land on our website. Within milliseconds or seconds, they go these guys actually get it. They understand what I'm going through. We have coaches and partners, one of them's called Strategic Coach, and they're the largest entrepreneurial coaching program in the world.

In about 25,000 of them, most successful entrepreneurs have been through their program. Every time I go to a quarterly workshop, I'm sitting there going they know nothing about sales training. They know nothing about my consulting business. Sitting beside me was somebody and a manufacturing business two seats over. We all sit there and go these people understand the life experience of an entrepreneur. They know what we're going through. Suddenly, there's this exactly what you've talked about this trusting immediate connection and you're right. That is what's going to get somebody to click through or to engage with you or you're making it about them and you understand them.

If I could Mark, there's nothing like the experience. If you've had the experience of being an entrepreneur, it's not very difficult to imagine what it's like to be an entrepreneur at that level. You are finding shared experiences and that is a beautiful way to connect with people. When I was running at Redken, actually, and all my life at the professional hairdressing division of L'Oreal, there's an incredibly important piece within the mix which is education. These are the best versions of them.

Finding shared experiences is a beautiful way to connect with people.

We're training hairdressers how to use the products from hairdressers. Hairdressers teaching hairdressers makes so much more sense. The interesting thing is not the credibility goes up to the extent that they're not employees. When they individually contract with you to be independent contractors as hairdressers to talk in your name, then it is literally the best word of mouth you can create.

Testimonials, right? It's the same thing as a testimonial with somebody says, “I'm likely one of the best salespeople for Strategic Coach,” would do humility to the team at Strategic Coach who's listening today, but when they'll have me speak some people considering the program, let's just say talk to Mark to see what he went through. Of course, I'm unbiased. I'm a third party.

You don't have to say what you're saying.

Upcoming Book

I don't have to say what I'm saying. The person on the other end of the Zoom call knows my intent is only to tell the truth. I'll tell the truth and by the way, I'm validating the truth with my own checkbook or with my own money because I'm a member of it. Excellent. While I'm on it before I lose it you said your next book is about conversations. If you're comfortable, without hurting rollout or anything, tell us a little bit about that book, Minter. What is the book about and where are you with it?

It absolutely comes on the heels of the book about empathy and leadership because at the end of the day, what I would have observed is societally, we are in deep due. The ability for us to have free easy and strenuous debate where we can disagree and learn to disagree and learn to be civil in that manner. The ability to listen and so on is deeply failing. From a societal standpoint, from a personal standpoint, and from a business standpoint, while I largely talked about empathy in the same way, I think we need to relearn how to have stimulating conversations.

That means freedom to use words that we feel are appropriate and not be so worried about the speech that we're using. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be attentive. It just means we need to come back a little bit to reality. My new book I can talk about all the more, Mark, because I did something really crazy. I set myself the task of writing it in the manner of Charles Dickens.

We need to relearn how to have stimulating conversations. We have to embrace the freedom to use words and not be worried about the speech we are using.

Seven months. Yeah, for my punishment watch this. Nine weeks on Thursday at 5:00 PM, I published a chapter so between one and 10,000 words. I have a corpus of 400,000 words through those 79 weeks and I'm now in the process, and I published them and I would have conversations around conversations, online, offline, and that participated in the wiggly waggly room because I moved down my 79 weeks.

I'm sorry. Explained to me, Minter, because how Charles Dickens wrote his books, he actually published a chapter at a time.

This is called serial publishing and it was made popular at the end of the 18th century entering the beginning of the 19th century. In many countries, Charles Dickens is the one who's most credited for it, but it happened before he started writing. It happened in America. It was actually a cheaper way to publish a book if you will and to test it out. What they would do typically those days, is that they would publish it as a chapter in a newspaper, and that was a weekly newspaper. It became the serial chapterization and people would read it week after week and really stick with it and Dickens's most well known for doing that. I don't think he wrote every book like that but he wrote many books like that.

I think I get smarter every time you are on the podcast. There are a number of people on my team who would have encouraged me to speak to you every two weeks.

Thank you.

Where did you publish your 79 chapters and 400,000 words? Is this on your website? Is this on a blog somewhere?

In my inevitable fashion just like when I started podcasting in 2010, blogging in 2006. I wanted to use a new platform. It's called a substack if you haven't come across it. It's a place where they encourage freer speech and it's really a writer's platform that helps you to create subscribers paying or free. I ended up with something like 700 subscribers. About a tenth of them were paying subscribers so gave me a little bit of a stipend for writing. I'll call it an advance.

Closing Words

By the way, I think after this publishes, maybe we should be targeting more than a thousand subscribers on that when Cisco's live. A couple of things we've identified there. Those will obviously be in the show links. Minter, how else can our listeners today connect with you and learn more about what you're doing?

One of my mantras is to provide valuable content every day and I do it in very different manners. That would consider my podcast a one-way Minter Dialogue. It's in English and French. I have The Joy of Padel a new podcast that talks about the joy of playing my sport paddle tennis. That all is on my main portal site, MinterDial.com so you can find my books, my film, my documentary film, and anything. Also, I'm out there on social.

One particular thing I like to say is I don't accept people just randomly connecting with me on LinkedIn. I think it's important to spell out the reason which is I'm not interested in a large number because if my connections don't reply to me, I don't know them. I don't know them and I don't trust them. It's not that I should take it personally, but I just don't accept because it doesn't serve a real network.

Everybody should be reading Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence. By the way, everybody should check out You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader. I enjoyed both of these books enormously. This is one of the true joys of doing this show. It actually forces me to read the books of the guests, and so we therefore only pick guests that we actually want to talk to. Minter, thank you again for joining us. It's always such as pleasure speaking with you.

My delicious delight. Thank you very much for having me on and promoting my work and the friendship that we're developing.

Thank you for listening today. The reason we run In The Funnel in the show is we want to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. What elevates to the profession it truly is? In doing so, we believe we're improving the lives of professional salespeople or anyone in sales. We run this podcast to help give you tools, processes, topics, and best practices ideas that you can apply immediately. We know we can get better at this.

You're such a great source at this, so if there's something we can do to make The Selling Well podcast even more effective for you, please let us know. You can reach out to me personally at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. I check that email personally and we respond to everybody who gives us a nice piece of constructive criticism and we love constructive criticism. Thank you for the feedback you've already given us. If you enjoyed today's show, please like and subscribe to The Selling Well podcast. That means a lot to us as well. That helps us get great guests like Minter. We'll see you next time.

Important Links

• Minter Dial on LinkedIn 

• In The Funnel Sales Academy

• SellingWell.com/podcast

• The Last Ring Home: A POW’s Lasting Legacy of Courage, Love, and Honor in World War II

• Futureproof: How To Get Your Business Ready For The Next Disruption

• Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence

• You Lead: How Being Yourself Makes You a Better Leader

• The Joy of Padel

• MinterDial.com

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Minter Dial

Minter Dial is an international professional speaker, elevator and a multiple award-winning author. Minter's core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was a member of the Worldwide Executive Committee for the Professional Products Division (PPD), in charge of Digital, Communications, Education, the Eco-Salon and Business Development. Previously, he was MD of L'Oréal PPD Canada and CEO Worldwide for Redken.

He's the author of the WWII biography and documentary film, The Last Ring Home (2016) and three business books, Futureproof (FT Press 2017), You Lead (Kogan Page 2021), both of which won heralded Business Book Awards, and Heartificial Empathy, 2nd edition (Digitalproof Press 2023). He also runs three podcasts, Minter Dialogue in English and French, and The Joy of Padel. www.minterdial.com @mdial 

The Justin Michael Method: Leveraging Your Sales Superpowers For Your B2B Sales Game

Improve your sales skills by accessing your Sales Superpowers, combining ancient wisdom with modern strategies. Get ready to learn about “Justin Michael Method” as we have Justin Michael himself for today’s episode. Justin shares his game-changing outbound strategy that has turned sales professionals into true superheroes. Drawing gold nuggets from his book, “"Sales Superpowers: A New Outbound Operating System to Drive Explosive Pipeline Growth”, Justin breaks down the barriers to explosive pipeline growth and unleashing your sales superpowers. It's time to embrace your inner superhero and revolutionize the way you sell. Tune in now!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Justin Michael Method: Leveraging Your Sales Superpowers For Your B2B Sales Game

We got a great episode for you because we're talking with Justin Michael. He's been on the show before because along with Tony Hughes, he authored an amazing book called Tech-Powered Sales: Achieve Superhuman Sales Skill. This book is a bible for the sales tech stack that you need to contemplate to have the right conversation with the right person at the right time. It’s a great read, a great book. Both have been guests on the show.

We're talking about Justin's book called Sales Superpowers: A New Outbound Operating System to Drive Explosive Pipeline Growth. I have talked to a lot of thought leaders in the SDR and BDR space, filling the top of the funnel. I also consider myself a thought leader in that space. We trained hundreds if not thousands, of SDRs.

I always learn something from Justin in this book. It requires reading if you are in that SDR space. Justin is a world record-breaking outbound sales maven who's arguably built the deepest client acquisition model of all time. It's called the Justin Michael Method. We're gonna get into that Justin Michael Method. We're going to talk a lot about mindset, coaching, and approaches to email, voicemail, and telephone. The telephone works. We're going to talk a little bit about sequencing, leadership, and how you get yourself into a position of growth orientation.

It’s an interesting conversation with Justin. He's got lots of communities and sources of value to help you elevate performance. We align with our value system, which is trying to increase the performance and professionalism of B2B sales while improving the lives of salespeople. I enjoyed my chat with Justin. You will too. If you do, please like and subscribe. Here's Justin Michael.

Justin, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you.

It's a pleasure to be back. I'm sitting in my Zen garden. I have a lot of matrix references in my book. I like to beam in from Tokyo in the multiverse.

I've never read a book with the amount of references you've got. You've got matrix references, Dale Carnegie references, and a reference to Chuck Woolery. For those of you who are not 40, Chuck Woolery was a game show host in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. He was dynamite. I have never seen many quick references unless you've read dozens and hundreds of sales books. You never pick up everything. I love those references.

My mentality is being a synthesizer, and it's dangerous to write sales books if you read a lot and you've done a lot of sales because it's easy to fall into a derivation of Sandler, Challenger, or Spin. Like the Elon Musk story, he goes to the government and says, “I want to build rockets.” They said, “Okay.” After several years, he goes, “Where can I get some Molab denim? Where's a mine where I can get some iron?” He starts to deconstruct the rocket, soup the nuts, and build the thing.

It's really dangerous to write sales books.

What I isolated is when you look in the pantheon of sales books, and there are many great ones, the majority, like 98%, assumes there's a customer or a client. We have this, “Let's progress a deal. Let's qualify progress. Close the deal.” When we get to the top of the funnel up here, it gets quiet, and you see things like Jeb Blount’s Fanatical Prospecting, which is a great foundation. You see Grant Cardone’s 10X. You see Jordan Belfort. You see a lot of these confidence volumes and traditional approaches.

Sandler has some great adaptations and methodologies for opening calls and prospecting. I've done some Sandler training in the past. What I wanted to do was embrace the technology revolution at the top funnel because I found that as a technology rep in SaaS companies, my day was sat down in sales navigator. I go into ZoomInfo and look for the phone number and email. I try to dial and catch someone. I try to sequence email and personalize it. I set up the calendars and record my call. It was all this tech stack stuff because I needed to get the customer. The opening is the new closing.

I used to work for LinkedIn, the Empire State Building, and as a sales navigator. There was a day when people were thinking, “Should I pay for that?” Now, it's the Bloomberg terminal. When I write, I put 2,000 people into five documents. I spent about 300 hours over several months. I took a lot of feedback. I had hundreds of coaching sessions during that time because I do executive coaching. Every time someone asked me a question, I put it in there. I got a couple of editors in England to lower the Flesch-Kincade because everyone said, “Tech-powered sales were hard to read.” I made the reading level similar to college or high school.

I found, in my base of 50,000 people, the top three people who understand GPT prompting. This whole ChatGPT engineering of prompting it and stack prompting it and all these different shop prompts. They have blurbs and segments in there. I challenged them. I said, “I don't want this to be technical for now. I want you to write about ChatGPT and LLMs as if we're at GPT-10. What are the universal principles for prompting a machine so it can think like a human, spit out B2B verbiage, and start thinking?” That's the GPT lab that flows through the book, which was Greg Meyer. That was great.

We're going to get established as a bit of a foundation here. Justin mentioned tech-powered sales that he wrote with Tony Hughes. Tony Hughes has been on the show before. He was great, like Justin was. We interviewed both of them to talk about Tech-Powered Sales, a book I loved because there are 6,000 different technologies to help us have the right conversation with the right person at the right time. It's overwhelming even if you dedicated your life to this.

What I found with Tech-Powered Sales was that it was great for categorizing the things I need to think about, and it gave top lists of technologies that we could go and leverage so we don't get overwhelmed by the tech stack. When we talk about Sales Superpowers, let me call it out before we get in here deeply late. The joy of doing our show is we don't have 1,500 episodes. We have 100. I read the books of the people who are on our show. I go after them to join the show. They don't come to us. I go, reach out, and ask them because I'm a fan of their books. I am a fan of this book, Sales Superpower.

If you are an SDR, BDR, or an account executive where you have to fill your own top-of-the-funnel, which is everybody in the business, you need to read this book. One of the things that's unique about this book is about filling the top of the funnel outside of the depth and experience that Justin had. If you know what you're talking about, you know where his depth and experience came from. I do like the fact, Justin, that you respect some of those core foundational business models and books like Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling and Miller-Heiman’s Strategic Selling. You talk about Sandler.

The truth of it is, and we read 100 sales books a year, 60% of many sales books come back from one of those foundational models. They came from a lot of Dale Carnegie several years before that. That came from ancient Greek wisdom in certain periods of time. In terms of interacting with a human being, it hasn't changed dramatically over time, but you need to capture this with a voice for a new generation. In terms of figuring out what to do, once you understand those things and you can have a great conversation, there's nothing better than this book for an SDR or BDR.

I'm honored by that because I started to realize there are seven areas that humanity uses to develop business. There are 400 million small businesses worldwide that are the engine of the backbone of the global economy. There are a million SDRs in SaaS and tech and eleven million sales reps in software technology.

No one has questioned the call opener for the first 3 to 7 seconds. I have this idea of heuristics. If you take linguistics, which is the syntax, the words, and the way we talk and communicate. Heuristics are shortcuts over the top. I've seen that in David Hoffeld’s book, The Science of Selling. It's a term taken from computer engineering. My brother is an engineer at Google.

What I'm talking about is rather than memorizing a script, a template, or a pattern, you look at the meta of what it means. You tell the joke that's a humor heuristic. You compare another company that's a social-proof heuristic. You could have pain or fear, emotional resonance. You could have brevity. By stitching together the bounding box around communication, it changes the way you communicate. You can take a 22-year-old, and now they can communicate to a 54-year-old exec making seven figures. Now, we have conversational parody. It's a fast way to upskill and get on the same wavelength.

Sales Superpowers: By stitching together the bounding box around communication, it changes the way you communicate.

The way that phone openers have been for several years is the same. It's permission-based. I call you and ask for permission. What I argue in the book and what I did in my methodology is it lowers your status if you ask permission, like, “Could I get 27 seconds of your time?” It works with tone. If you're selling a seven-figure product, you can't tell it in 30 seconds.

Another popular one now is, “You don't know me. I'm reminding you I'm soliciting.” The most famous one is, “Did I catch you at a bad time?” Aaron Ross, who's a friend and mentor, created this. It's popular. It's been fatigued and saturated. They've heard it a lot. It has a Chris Voss mechanic because it's a negative question in that, “Did I catch you at a bad time?” They say, “No.” You're asking for a no rather than a yes, which is a pattern interrupt in a way that comes from Sandler.

I'm quick to attribute everything, but I love Todd Caponi, who did The Transparency Sales and was my first boot camp trainer at Salesforce in Indianapolis when it was ExactTarget. He goes back on his show, The Sales History Podcast, to the origins of Calvin Coolidge having a sales kickoff in 1910. We're constantly exchanging 3% of the markets in the buying window chat homes. Where does that come from? He is like, “People were talking about the small piece of the market in 1890.”

What I've done on the phone with my techniques has been divergent over the last several years. I believe what I've done in email and in one-to-one DMs is post-1993. I have created a Napoleonic asymmetric warfare or pattern interrupt where I'm doing something different from a neuroscience perspective that stands out to the prospect.

Editor's note here for those reading The Science of Selling by David Hoffeld, he's been on the show. If you want to take a look at past episodes, he's been on the show. One of the things you referenced well is we can't take the LinkedIn platitude of an opener and say, “I'm going to apply this across my entire team through automation. It's going to work.” In LinkedIn platitude, you get what you pay for. Secondly, it changes if it works.

If it works well, people scale it and automate it, and it stops working. You have to be nimble enough no different than any super high-end athlete who comes up with a different way of approaching the sport and somebody can defend against it. If they treat it differently, you have to be able to acknowledge, assess, adapt, and change along principles.

That's another thing that I like about your books, Justin. You've been through the wars a little bit, but you do get back to this mindset and principles in terms of we've got to make sure we can add value. We've got to understand business acumen and industry acumen. Get away from pitching. The pitching came from venture capital going into SaaS and scaling up sales teams so fast. They didn't invest in training or the person training. The team had been doing it for several months. Not everybody's sales force can spend that money on it. People got lousy training, and they became bad. Whatever their bad boss was coaching them on, that's what they did. That's why we've got so much churn in professional sales.

In your book, we'll get into some of the detail here, and I want to talk about all these things, email calls, text, and objection handling, but at a higher level again, it seemed like your book this time had a slightly different tone than some of the other ones I've read with you. You are starting with the mindset and you spent quite a bit of time on coaching. You are a coach, but tell me why it had more of a focus on that and where you've got to in that space.

It's metaphysical, but as I've gone on a journey from being stuck at $45,000 per year to buying 31 without a college degree, earning over $100,000, and finally getting to Salesforce and LinkedIn after many rejections and the pursuit of happiness story. I’m making the most calls and taking the toughest gigs like working in call centers in Costa Rica. It's a great country, but where I was managing wasn't the safest location there. I wasn't out on the beaches. It always sounds a lot more glamorous, but I would always take the hardest jobs.

I worked my way up to Salesforce and LinkedIn by dint of experience and merit. I'm self-made and self-taught. What was happening inside my mentality, my mind, and my self-talk rapidly and dramatically changed. We know that your head is trash. What's in your head, whether that's Tony Robbins, Sandler, or any system, “We think I can't do this big deal.” I'm sitting in front of you, trying to close a seven-figure deal with a CFO. It’s not going to happen. They're going to sense it. At a deep level, your identity needs to shift.

One of the big ways that reps can shift is by starting to serve and feeling the service and the joy of transforming a customer's business. I had a lot of signposts. There was this guy at Salesforce, Tom Randall, who was a former NFL player. I sat with him in a blizzard in Chicago during a challenger sales simulation on a break. I said, “What are your favorite books?” He said, “You're overcomplicating it with all the books.” He looked at me and said, “Justin, sit down, look them in the eyes, and say, ‘I'm going to transform your business.”

The reason I emphasize coaching is that you have to coach yourself until you're coached. If you're in this racket for long enough, you'll be coaching teams. You're going to have to motivate others. I've trained and managed hundreds of reps. I've coached a thousand reps and advised 200 teams.” We can go even crazier to Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, and 5% of your waking reality is your conscious mind, and 95% is subconscious. Some are 80/20. Eighty percent of your success in life is the inner game, and 20% is the outer game.

I'm huge when I coach people on figuring out what's inside the head of my client, what they are thinking, and what the repetition is. We have 70,000 thoughts per day. We're not our thoughts, minds, and bodies. We're the consciousness behind it. From being, we shift identity that changes thinking and that changes doing. We have this ego, and what it does is it create sabotage and holds us in homeostasis at an exact income level. We're making $95,000, and we get promoted to a $150,000 job. Everything goes wrong perfectly. We can be comfortable again. We can never get enough of what we don't need. Our comfort zone brings us back, and we subconsciously self-sabotage us.

People come to me trying to 2 to 5X their income, trying to blow it out, hit President's Club, and make their number. You see this cyclical manifestation. That's why I got into the mindset, positive mental attitude, John Wooten, all the law of attraction, and neo-transcendental stuff. It's medicine for the heart and mind for these kids that are lost, and they're getting rejected all day, and they might quit.

It’s their view of what success is sometimes. That's something a bit of a challenge for the younger generation. I notice many themes in the reading that resonate because all of us battle with this. All of us have some degree of imposter syndrome. No matter what we're doing, we're going to feel it at some point. Justin was referencing. He has this great Venn diagram where he thinks about doing, being, and thinking within the book.

That's an important thing to get this abundance mindset where the universe isn't trying to get you. The universe is providing opportunities for you. Take a pause. It's a bit of meditation or mental preparation. Enjoy what you're doing. That idea of every interaction with a client, a prospect, or a guest on the show. You're of service.

First of all, be curious. Always trying to learn and develop. It sounds like you've read every book out there. Nick Morgan from Harvard talked about us being able to sense somebody else's intent in milliseconds upon meeting them. Having the intent of service, like, “I do want to help you achieve a better business outcome. I do want to help you be successful in your business. I have value that I can add to this conversation. I'm not going to pitch my product. I'm gonna talk about some insight, value, best practices or trends.”

In a genetic sense, you want to know what other clients like you who are running call centers are doing now. I'm not going to tell you specific things, but I'm going to give you some ideas here so you can stay ahead of the curve. That mindset is such a critical one starting off what we do. It's tough to sell. There’s a lot of rejection. We need some mental fortitude. We'll talk about your honey badger, but it's an important one, Justin. I'm glad you started with that in the book, and it's important.

The 50th Law by 50 Cent and Robert Greene

Take paranoia, and there's this funny word called pronoia, which is to flip it. The universe is plotting to do me good. Take the rapper 50 Cent. He takes nine shots to the face, and he lives. He sees himself, and he goes, “This is a miracle he lives life from that place of a miracle.” Look what he accomplished. He invested in vitamin water from Glaceau and made a fortune. He is a strong businessman. He wrote a book with Robert Green. It's fantastic. It's a street hustler's interpretation of The 48 laws of Power. I love it.

All your weaknesses are your strengths. It's a double-edged sword. I have no college degree, and I've moved up into the top 1% of this industry repeatedly in regards to shedding the profit motive like a skin. We're all taught money focus. I hired him. He's money-focused. That's the goal of the salesperson. The top rep at Salesforce said, “Read The Go-Giver by Bob Burg.” I know Bob. We've all read some of the great books. It's a parable. It's like Og Mandino and The Greatest Salesman in the World or Frank Bettger and How I Raised Myself. You read it, and it's all about paying it forward. The minute I finally got on calls and I didn't want to close the person, the floodgates opened because that little dot, that nanoparticle of blood to the great white shark, was always there. You can't coach people like that. I can't close my coaching clients. I take on the burden of their case. I have to help this person shatter their income ceiling, locate their unique genius, and find shortcuts. I’m like, “I want to get results. I want them to reach a better future in a far better state.”

If you create your future from your past, you're forever a victim of your experience. If you create your future from your future, it's a powerful and infinite possibility. That's a quote by Werner Earhart, and I love it. You read pronoia and future from the future over and over in the three books. I'm hammering it into your psyche purposely because I want you to shift from fear and worry and all the external like, “What are the tactics? What are the hacks? Is it Sandler Miller, Heiman, challenger, or SPIN? I'm like, “It's in your head. The fact you're looking outwardly to solve your sales problem is step one.”
  let's get into the rest now. You want to underscore that.

Let's jump into a couple of things. This show is not something that's a replacement for buying and reading the book. Buy and read the book. You'll come back to me and thank me for suggesting you do this. Many of our clients who always read these blogs go and do it. It aligns perfectly with many of the things we teach.

Let's do a bit of a quick round table, Justin, so people get some value out of it in addition to everything else we've covered here. Let's talk about a couple of things. Let's start with the telephone. I can't tell you how often we get brought in to coach organizations where someone's pulled a platitude from LinkedIn that says, “The telephone is dead.” With love, I'll show them why that's not the case. We might do a couple of days worth of telephone prospecting in front of a group of people to show them that it's not dead. Let's talk about some of your approaches on the phone. We're going to talk about email and sequences.

I was greatly honored that Art Sobczak from Smart Calling read this. He gave it a positive review, and He didn't even have to. Thank you, Art, for reading. I'm never saying that what you're doing on the phone won't work. If you have tonality and a strong frame to quote, you can crush it on the phone with almost any script. The issue is a lot of the models are quite predictable.

In 2024, you should be prioritizing the telephone as the tent pole to your strategy. I was part of that research and combo prospecting with Tony Hughes, where if you get an email, call. If someone views your profile, call. If someone comments on something on LinkedIn, call and invest, and you're a manager out there in data, not ZoomInfo, but hitting that against a VA operation to clean the list or working with LeadIQ, there are many different ones because what you want to do is get phone numbers that ring.

In 2024, you should be prioritizing the telephone as the tent poles your strategy.

Connect and sell. Looked at about 10 million phone numbers, and they found that 50% of the meetings were from fully navigated dials. What does that mean? It means that direct sales are not the holy grail. A lot of these folks are still about leaving a voicemail through the switchboard, getting through a gatekeeper, and dialing in through a phone tree. You need to get masterful calling gatekeepers because you need to go to power.

In an organization, it's pyramidal. You go top down, bottom up, and middle out at the same time. Why? It’s because if you call the C levels, they'll freeze you and say, “Leave it with me.” They'll delegate it down to who you sound like. If you try to get groundswell and call low, some small fiefdom will catch you and block you from going up to the CRO.

Sales Superpowers: You need to get masterful calling gatekeepers because you need to go to power in an organization.

What I do is I call up and down the org chart. I gain intel at various levels and take that intel with me up and down until someone stops the cakewalk like the music stops and says, “I'll get an email and say, ‘This is Jane's team. Call off your dog. Stop calling the whole company. Stop sending Venn diagrams to everyone.” That's the why behind calling and the techniques we could get into.

Let's call out while you're on it because you talked about the pyramid, top-down, bottom-up, and flanking. I love this idea of reaching out to salespeople to take calls. If you're trying to get some intel and insight, they'll respond, take an inbound call, and share. There's a karma about that. They're doing down-demand generation. They're willing to lend a hand.

The other great tip, which I didn't know, is when you're on LinkedIn and you see somebody you're reaching out to, on the right-hand side that people also looked for because it may not be somebody you would've logically gone to or flanked in that organization or another organization. Tell us a little bit about that tip. That's an interesting one.

I'm glad that you caught that. That's such a small nuance. It's made companies that I've worked for millions of dollars. Two office giants merged, and I needed to get the chief digital officer. I went to LinkedIn and put people who were also viewed. There was a VP of financial planning and analysis. At that time, I wasn't as smart as now. I thought, “For some reason, it was a hack that whoever knows the person, even if it's a different company, the water cooler is people also viewed now.”

I know that's true because people are turning that off. I called him, and I got through to his cell phone. He picked up and gave the value prop. He's like, “Here's the cell phone. Give him a call.” I called the chief digital officer of a Fortune 100. On his cell, that wasn't available in any database. It was a private cell. I talked to Vern. He didn't respond. I went to my own CEO. She sent a message on LinkedIn and the combination. We ended up on-site in Boca Raton, flying in. This became a multi-hundred thousand dollar deal and was successful.

Another great phone story is that I tried to get to the chief marketing officer of Marriott. It’s not easy. I was reading an article in Wired Magazine, and there was a quote in it. I call this Hyper P in the book Hyper-Personalization. I read about these new apps where you can open your hotel door with the app. We had a geo-fencing technology that was accurate. You could serve different offers at the pool, front desk, and golf course.

I called her phone. I dialed DiscoverOrg, which is now ZoomInfo. It is Friday afternoon, 4:00 PM. I leave a voicemail like, “I saw your quote in Wired to have this technology.” I'm doing a combination of calling voicemail and email. I left a voicemail and sent an email. I put your quote in Wired as the subject line. Within fifteen minutes, she responds, and the loops in London. The next week, I called London. I explain the whole scenario, what the tech is, and how I got to the CMO. I get transferred to Plano, Texas. Within a few weeks, we're on a plane going to Plano, Texas. I'm sitting here using the Justin Michael Method, making this stuff happen. I hadn't codified the method back then. It was routing, multithreading, and doing what it takes to smartly use the phone. 

This is the beauty of it. People who achieve a certain level of proficiency in anything have an open mind to a lot of different things. The top hockey players and trial lawyers in the world are always looking to learn and understand what other people are doing. There are no real absolutes, “Never do this. Don't do this.”

People who achieved a certain level of proficiency in anything have this open mind to a lot of different things.

What I love about that is when you think of your sequences in some sense, you say, “In certain areas and levels, we can use some automation with some basic personalization, but at certain levels, it's got to be hyper-personalization.” As soon as you leverage somebody's quote, they're going to respond. I always call this out, Justin. I'm not cold call. I get a lot of email spam because although I don't do anything in the funnel, I'm listed as a CEO. The hard work gets done by other people, but I'm listed as CEO. I get pounded.

It's easy to get my attention. All you have to do is say, “Mark, when you were talking about value proposition in the second minute of that video, I loved when you said this.” If you say that, “I'm morally obligated to take your call.” It's easy. All I get is, “I get five times a week. We're a sales training company five times a week. I'm going to get an email blasted by another sales training company.” That's what happened.

They don't even look at a website. They have no idea what we do. They've taken a list and are blind. That's the noise that it's easy to stand out from these people if you do some of the things in Sales Superpowers because it's a dynamite book. Let's jump over to email. You talk a lot about, “Let's get away from text. Let's get to images like the Justin Method and Venn diagram.” Tell us a little bit about that.

The whole idea of the Justin Michael method is there's the David Sandler Method, but at the end of the book, I say, “It's the Mark Cox Method.” The goal is to make it your own, disassemble it, and make it a steel alloy without you already using it. I almost called my method the Venn Diagram Selling. I was kicking around 2016 and 2017 in a company called Tune.

There was a chief revenue officer. This guy is Ralph Hurt. He had this 350-page sales kickoff document. I was onboarding. I was like, “This is impressive. This is MBA-level stuff.” Inside it, he has these market breakdowns, full Deloitte style of all these different Venn diagrams. I was taken with them. I thought, “I'm going to send these in emails.” I took one of them. I sent it to the Chief Digital Officer of McDonald's out of my Gmail, and I booked a meeting on the first cent. I was like, “That's crazy.” He immediately looped someone in and had a call.

I sent it to the VP of Home Depot. My cell phone rang, and the guy said, “Pitch me.” He called the phone number in my signature. In several years of prospecting, no one had ever called me back, even off my phone messages. That was the Doc Brown flux capacitor falling and hitting my head on the toilet and inventing time travel. I thought, “Maybe there is something to do with it.”

Over the last several years, I've helped people build thousands of Venn diagrams. I don't know if I can divulge this, but there's this company with about $1 billion in revenue. They have this extremely sophisticated Venn diagram that looks like close encounters of the third kind. I wish I could show it to you. It has these wheels. It looks like a crop circle. They've set 60 opportunities in the enterprise, driving tens of millions in funnel by sending this diagram.

Here's the reason why. Images process 60,000 times faster than words. Ninety percent of what the brain retains is visual. Words don't exist. I thought, “Here's the tombstone. You're going to one of these big cemeteries and there I am.” On the tombstone, it says, “Email is visual. The phone is power transfer.” Email is not about templates because it's about heuristics and images in their mind that are the connotations of the words. If you think of Starbucks, you think of coffee. If you think of the ultimate drawing machine, you think of BMW.

What you're trying to do with words is put an image in their mind. We all know that people hate to be sold and they love to buy. They are triggered emotionally, but they rationalize with logic to close. Those are different sectors of the brain. There are all these, like complicated brain diagrams and books. Oren Klaff has great stuff on the crock brain.

Here's the idea. You have an old brain like the lizard brain, and you've got the neocortex. The problem is, between phone and email, we use the brain wrong. Here's what I mean. When you interrupt a human on the phone, it’s old brain, fight or flight. You need to calm down. That person says their full name. Let them talk, make them safe, and validate them. That's not the reason for my call, not combative, not rebuttals, because they're going to be uninterested. I'm not interested because the old brain is reacting, and the front brain is catching up.

When you email people, you need to trigger the old brain because if you send them all this stuff to the front of their brain that's logical and happy, it never triggers the emotion for them to have a visceral response. Humans are loss-averse and risk-averse. They're not pleasure-seeking. You have to be a merchant of fear.

You have all this reverse engineering. It's like, “Is this even ethical? You play with people's minds, Justin.” I say, “If you sell a product and service that is a 3X our why and you transform their business, and it's good for them, you have to move them out of their comfort zone so they can change. That's the most ethical thing you can do. If you have to use a tactic to get them out of their own way, no one else is going to do it. Help them help themselves.

The way theories of persuasion have been out there for thousands of years. We're all victims of this. We have our mobiles, and 80% of everything we do comes through our mobile. Who doesn't miss the dopamine of scrolling through our mobile? There are smart people who have figured out how we do this they get us connected.

I have a couple of thoughts to throw out, folks. I've referenced this before. I love The Old Lizard Brain, New Brain, Emotion Fact, System One, System Two Thinking, by Daniel Kahneman. We've talked about that book on this show every third episode. It’s the hardest read I've ever read. That's the most difficult book to read I've ever come across. It's hard to capture the 135 cognitive biases because every time you look at one, you think you've got it. How many books do you read a week? You must be reading 3 or 4 books a week. This is insane stuff.

It's funny because when I first got on the phone with Mark Berry, she was like, “Are you an encyclopedia?” I was talking fast, like Mark Andreessen. I've been experimenting with not taking caffeine because David Goggins doesn't take caffeine. I've been doing experiments between the beta-focused state of the brain, states like Theta and Alpha, and the impact of geometrically sacred music like Solfeggio frequencies on the brain to relax and focus on the beats. I've been doing a lot of this stuff.

There was a time when I was on the road for several years when I digested this stuff like candy. I did like what Alex Hormozi said. I would get a pile of books. If it didn't grip me in the first couple of chapters, I abandoned or read a blink of summary.” Stuff like Mastering the Complex Sale by Jeff Thull or The New Power Base Selling, I've read some of these books five times.

I've gone and contacted every single author who would talk to me. These days, I spend more time editing my own writing than even writing. If you look at it with the Justin Michael Method Series, you've got 150,000 words there. I have put out 500,000 words of published writings in the past several years, and I've gotten faster. I also did a book with my co-founder, Julia Nimchinski, called Reinventing Virtual Events, which is a go-to-market book. I don't know if you're aware of it.

Reinventing Virtual Events: How To Turn Ghost Webinars Into Hybrid Go-To-Market Simulations That Drive Explosive Attendance

I'm not, thank you.

That's a cool one if you want to check out my thoughts on marketing.

I know how busy you are and we're going to wrap this up. I got to call out a couple of things. First of all, I'm happy to reconnect with you again. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us. I do love the book Sales Superpowers: A New Outbound Operating System to Drive Explosive Pipeline Growth. It's fantastic content and an interesting read for those of us who enjoy understanding, developing, and trying to take it to the next level. If you've got a growth orientation, this is for you. If you're starting in sales development or business development, this is for you. All of Justin's links will be in the blog. Justin, we have to stay in touch. Thank you so much for joining. It's been such a pleasure having you.

Thanks for having me. I put out some free guides called the Codex Guides. They were put on Reddit by 25,000 people who got them. If you reach out, I'll share them with you. They're immediate heuristics, formulas, and frameworks that you can apply to emails, calls, social selling, visual prospecting, and video.

I'm coaching some amazing teams and individuals and incubating new writings. I was on a call with Aaron Ross. That was great to catch up. I've had a lot of support from the entire writing community. I’m grateful to see how well this book's been doing. The book is selling at the pace of gap selling. I've put out five books, but this one is the one for Sales Superpowers.

Tech Powered Sales is like Iron Man and Jarvis Suit. They interviewed Stan Lee about the Spider-Man character, and it was the most successful even after Superman because it was a real human being that becomes supernatural or extra sensory and gets these superpowers. If you feel average or you're not that good at sales, I get it because I was average. I was making $45,000 at 31 with several years of experience. I managed a 1,000-person team. This is a book for you. You can turn your life around with what's in that book. I would be honored if you leave a review.

Sales Superpowers: A New Outbound Operating System To Drive Explosive Pipeline Growth (Justin Michael Method)

What's the best way to get ahold of you?

I'm accessible over LinkedIn. Follow Justin Michael. I try to answer everyone if I can and be helpful.

Thank you again, Justin. This is now going to be the last time we are going to talk. Team, thank you so much for joining the show. We run this show because we're intellectually curious about people like Justin and the great work they're doing. We want to increase the performance and professionalism of B2B sales because we believe, that by doing that, we improve the lives of professional salespeople like you.

We also know we're not perfect at running this show. Please send your comments on how we can make this more valuable to you. Keep sending them to me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We respond to each and every piece of constructive criticism we get. We love constructive criticism. That's how we improve this. You've given us some great ideas. Keep it coming. Other authors you'd like to see on board and other methodologies you'd like to talk about other formats. In the meantime, we're recording this in 2024 in January. I wish everybody an amazing 2024, where you're happy, healthy, and prosperous. You're giving back to the universe that love it shows you. Thanks, everybody.

Important Links

• Tony Hughes – Past Episode

• Tech-Powered Sales: Achieve Superhuman Sales Skill

• Sales Superpowers: A New Outbound Operating System to Drive Explosive Pipeline Growth

• Justin Michael – LinkedIn

• Fanatical Prospecting

• SPIN Selling

• Strategic Selling

• The Science of Selling

• The Transparency Sales

• The Sales History Podcast

• David Hoffeld – Past Episode

• Psycho-Cybernetics

• The 48 laws of Power

• The Go-Giver

• The Greatest Salesman in the World

• How I Raised Myself

• Mastering the Complex Sale

• The New Power Base Selling

• Reinventing Virtual Events

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Justin Michael

Justin Michael is a world-record-breaking, outbound sales maven who has arguably built the deepest client acquisition methodology of all time: the Justin Michael Method (JMM™).

It's driven over $1 billion in pipeline for 200+ startups he's advised and over 25,000 reps, 1,000 of which he's personally coached.

With 20+ years in sales, ex-Salesforce, and LinkedIn, Justin is the global authority on AI-based outbound prospecting alongside legends like Aaron Ross, Josh Braun, and Mark Roberge.

His counterintuitive, mobile-responsive, neuroscience-backed visual prospecting methodology made him a million-dollar earner and helped countless startups scale past $10 million ARR.

His clients frequently 2-5X their pipeline and income, consistently getting promoted within six months. Justin is the bestselling author of "Sales Superpowers" and "Tech-Powered Sales," which proved that over 75% of top funnel can be automated by raising your technology quotient (TQ). He lives in Los Angeles, California, advising top SaaS technology CROs and teams on bleeding-edge revenue models.

The Experience Mindset: Mastering The New Battleground For Sales Leaders With Tiffani Bova

We have known for quite some time that employee experience and customer experience are closely interlinked, and the data is quite unequivocal about it. In this insightful episode, Tiffani Bova, a renowned growth and innovation evangelist, delves into the intricacies of The Experience Mindset. Co-author of the bestselling book, Growth IQ, Tiffani shares invaluable perspectives on how organizations can strike a balance between customer and employee experiences to drive sustainable growth. Drawing on her extensive experience, she discusses the profound impact of employee engagement on customer satisfaction, shedding light on the key elements that contribute to a positive employee experience and its ripple effect on overall business success. Join us as we navigate the realms of leadership, technology, and culture with Tiffani, offering listeners actionable insights for fostering an environment where both employees and customers thrive.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Experience Mindset: Mastering The New Battleground For Sales Leaders With Tiffani Bova

Tiffani, how are you?

I'm good. How are you? Thanks for having me.

First of all, it’s so nice to have you. Thank you so much for joining. Such an exciting topic we're going to have. We’re talking about The Experience Mindset, a book I super enjoyed. I also enjoyed Growth IQ, which was Tiffani's prior book from a couple of years back. They are both fantastic books. Tiffani, let's do a proper introduction for you. I’ll take a look at your bio here. There are so many reasons I love my job and this interview is a perfect example of one of them. Getting to chat with folks like Tiffani, when you look through the bio, it's mind-boggling.

Tiffani is the Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. Over the past two decades, Tiffani has led large revenue-producing organizations at businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500. She's been a research fellow at Gartner, where some of her cutting-edge insights helped Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, HP, IBM, and Oracle.

She is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the first book I showcased, Growth IQ. We had a wonderful chat with Tiffani maybe a year ago about that book. All of her ideas have been published in outlets from Harvard Business Review, which we always love on this show, all the way through to Fast Company. Here's the wild one. She's been named a Top 50 Business Thinker in the world twice. We've had a number of guests from the Thinkers50 group. We're always so delighted they do it. Tiffani's been on that list twice, like a few of our other pals.

She's also the host of the podcast What's Next with Tiffani Bova. Also, fantastic podcast. That's one to check out. We'll go through all those links. We'll talk about all those things as well at the end of the show. We're going to do a real deep dive into The Experience Mindset. That took a lot of effort. Tiffani, welcome to the show. If you do any more stuff, we can't have you on the show. The bio is too long. We can't get it in.

Thank you for the kind introduction. There's a lot to the bio. It depends on who the audience is. I think the part you might have left out is I am a recovering seller. I sold technology for a number of years, so my heart lies in the selling community.

Everybody on the show is going to love you for that one. I know you've spoken to him multiple times, but we always love Dan Pink's book To Sell is Human. We're all in sales, so everybody is selling in some capacity. There's no apology or bad word with the term selling. It's management consulting these days.

Let's jump into the book. Here's one of those things when you read great books. First of all, I got to call it out very tactically. Both of your books are so beautifully designed. I read hundreds of books for the guests on the show in a given year. It does jump out at me the way the book is designed. It's such a friendly read and that's an important thing because you also have real depth of research.

It's a bit of a bibliography for a masterclass. We're going through writing our first book, so I'm always checking these things out. It's a beautiful-looking book. The stat that hits you, folks, in the first couple of pages, companies with high customer experience and employee experience exhibit three-year compound annual growth rates. Their CAGR is almost double that of those with lower customer and employee experiences.

The group with high customer experience and employee experience, 8.5 CAGR, Compounded Annual Growth Rate, those with low, 4.3. That's the showcasing stat upon all this data and the rest of the book starts to explain why. Did you have this point of view beforehand or was this an epiphany for you when you went through the two years of research?

Let me start by going back to the comment about the feel of the book. It is one of the things that I hear most often like, “That was amazing. I never thought about that.” People will literally say like, “I loved the entire feel of the book.” It's approachable, easy, and light if you will. I spent a lot of time on that because being a salesperson, we have a short attention span. We want to get into whatever it is we need to get to so we can move on. We don't have a lot of time. If it's too long-winded and repetitive, you start to lose people. I was given some amazing advice when I was first writing my first book, Growth IQ. It was write the book you would want to read.

I read a ton of books from Dan Pink and Seth Godin and others that I follow. I'd say, “What did I like? What captured me? What captivated me? What kept me engaged? I want to do that. What lost me a little bit or what wasn't as approachable?” I'm a visual learner, so I write stories in the book, but I had them sketched so that people like me who are visual learners could see the story. I underlined it because you may not read the whole page. I won't be offended, but you'll go to what's important. At the end of the chapter, I’ve told you what I’ve told you and I’ve given you some questions, so you might not read the whole chapter. I’ve tried to give the multitude of ways people enjoy, learn, and read access to the book. Thank you for saying that because I worked hard at it

Onto the question about the research. For those of you who read Growth IQ, it was ten paths to growth and it was a culmination of being in sales, marketing, and customer service or customer success for almost fifteen years. Individual quota-bearing sales rep, all the way up to running a division of a Fortune 500 company. I went the gamut and I was very early in the cloud. I spent ten years at Gartner. During that time, my area of coverage was sales transformation. Again, my love of sales. During the 25 years that that was of me being a practitioner and then an academic, I landed in these ten paths.

Sixty thousand words in that book. The very first path was customer experience. It's the True North. It's where you have to focus, be customer-centric, be customer-obsessed, and all those statements. I might've mentioned employee a handful of times in the 60,000 words, maybe 150 words, maybe. I'm giving myself probably a little more credit than is due.

I would then say to you that it was a miss. Fast forward, I'm working here at Salesforce. I'm standing on stage in Canada at an event. I said, “I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce is a great place to work globally, one of the most innovative companies in the world, and the fastest-growing enterprise software company.” Once it left my mouth, let me be clear, I'm not the first to say it.

Happy employee, happy customer. You get that right, you grow greater. I'm not the first to say it, but could I prove it? That was the first research we did. It’s with Forbes Insight. It was US-based only. We looked at publicly traded companies and the stat that came out is what you identified. We looked across Glassdoor ratings, S and P growth rates, CAGRs over three years, NPS scores and ENPS scores, attrition rates and retention rates, and all those things. We then said, “What does it tell us?” Sure enough, those companies that have both high C and high E had faster growth rates.

Happy employee, happy customer. You get that right, you grow greater.

As you mentioned, if you don't have both, you're still growing. It was something like 427 or 487, something like that. If you had low E or low C and high C and high E, you were in a mixed category, but if one of them was low, you were still growing. This is not if you're not doing both, you're not growing. The statement here is if you do both and you do both well, you get a flywheel effect or the ripple effect of the goodness of both employee and customer experience. That's where we saw those accelerated growth rates.

This flywheel is an interesting concept. Beautifully explained, by the way. I will go back to that design response. Before we jump into the flywheel, when you look at those images, what's dawning on me is it's a good way of trying to communicate when you're in a meeting instead of PowerPoint, which is destroying everything. When you're communicating with a client, you might want to the book and look at how Tiffani summarizes what happened at Zappos, IBM, or Starbucks.

There's this picture that captures everything in a very nice way. You can almost imagine capturing your value proposition or the ROI or the impact on your solution to that business. There's the financials and the Excel, but the story to those visual learners who are looking for a better future, I love the idea of having somebody on the team who can do that. Maybe doing it on a whiteboard in real-time would be spectacular.

We've all seen it. Someone’s speaking and then capturing it in images on the side. It's a great way. Storytelling is an art. I can read an article about let's say a case study, but if I have a conversation with the executive, and let's say it's the exact same story and they add no more color, I will always remember the conversation much longer than I remember what I’ve read. It's that listening and visual learning. I think that that's all of us, but salespeople in particular. Writing a long email or responding to an RFP is a very flat medium. It's up for interpretation.

It might be too verbose, too short, or misinterpreted, but if you can have a conversation, you can pick up on those cues. A conversation, if you get the opportunity, is always better. The images are also a way for it to be remembered. It's about retaining, remembering, and being able to then share back what you've heard because that executive that you are pitching to, giving a sales call to, or whatever it might be, is going to eventually have to tell what you've told them to somebody else.

If they then misrepresent it or if they say, “He or she gave me this great story of how a client did this then that resonated with me. I wanted to learn more.” She set up a call and then I spoke to that client. Now all of a sudden, it's memorable versus your competitor who just answered in an email. We don't always get that opportunity. I get it. We have to follow our customers' leads, but if you get that opportunity, always jump on it because some people prefer email communication, and that's their mode of communication. You respect that. If you find somebody where they're more engaging and engaged in a human conversation, a story, or a customer in front of them, take advantage of it.

Tiffani, let's talk through a couple of the different chapters here and talk about the mindset, the model that takes us through the people, process, technology, culture, and all those kinds of good things. This is the culmination of the flywheel of customer experience and employee experience. You start in chapter one with the customer experience, and you talk about these characteristics. You summarize these characteristics of a superior customer experience. It's efficient, personalized, predictive, proactive, flexible, responsive, and value-based.

Let's talk about some of the key insights from this. We don't ignore the customer experience. It's critically important and you reference people like Zappos, Best Buy, and a few others. Tell us a little bit about the importance of the customer experience before we do that deeper dive into this less-discussed topic of the importance of employee experience along with it.

As I mentioned, I was very early in the cloud.

Great timing, by the way.

It was the World Wide Web back then and let's call it 1999 to 2004. I was early. The very first domain name I ever sold to a company was in 1997. I bought my first domain in 1998. I’ve been on this journey for a hot minute. I would say that we have spent decades. I can remember in the early 2000s, I was Eloqua’s beta client. I was a constant contact beta client. Back then, what we were trying to solve was moving people from the Yellow Pages, radio, print ads, and mailers to this digital thing on a computer. People moved and shifted a brochure from offline to online. They're like, “I'm done.”

People realized, “I can sell things online?” When we first started doing commerce online, it was like ten clicks to buy something. We worked very hard to reduce the effort for the customer to increase their experience. Ten clicks to nine clicks to eight clicks. Eventually, we got to three clicks. That was the golden rule. Fast forward, let's call it maybe 17 or 18 years, then it was one click with a very large online retailer. Now it’s almost no click. You can voice order from a device. It was always about reducing friction, personalization, and predictive. All of the words and terms you used that I identified in the book.

That was the remit of marketing. It was about journey mapping and customer advisory boards and how we anticipate what our customers may want next from us. How do we build so that when they show up, we're waiting for them with whatever it is that they may need? They don't even know what they need. It’s very Steve Jobs. We're watching what they need as analytics and data become more prevalent. Whatever it might be, we were analyzing, deconstructing, and journey mapping everything about that customer to reduce effort, remove friction, make it seamless, and all those words we use in order to improve the experience. If we improve the experience, we would all say, “If you improve the experience, you will grow.”

Net promoter score goes up, and we see the recency of purchase go up. Net promoter score goes up, and we see basket sizes go up. We see the NPS score go up, and we see lifetime value go up. Whatever your metrics are, we started to get smarter about that. About 2008, when I was at Gartner, we made the prediction that the chief marketing officer was going to spend more on technology than the chief information officer. This was 2008. People thought we were a little nuts, but it wasn't about the technology. It wasn't about search engine optimization or digital advertising. It was real tech.

They were building their own tech stacks. They were hiring UI designers and application developers, and they were buying servers, storage, and networking. They were investing in tech because they wanted to control and have a better experience for the customer. It wasn't about tech. It was about the experience layer because we believed the experience was going to be that next battleground for brands to fight instead of price, which the race to zero is never a good strategy.

Experience Mindset: Experience a better battleground for brands to fight instead of price. The race to zero is never a good strategy.

From 2008 to 2016, I joined Salesforce to hone in on the power of CX and everything that was focused on that. We advocated for getting the CMO at the C-suite. We advocated for having the voice of the customer. We advocated investing in technology around things that are experience-based. That was a very successful activity set. That led me to that comment and that led me to the journey that I went on that then required me to think, I think I have “an 11th path.” That was the employee experience, which I know we'll talk about next, but customer experience is important. We have to focus on it. It's critical. Always keep the customer in mind. It is a good strategy for customer centricity, customer focus, or whatever terms you want to use. However, there is an and that I dug into in The Experience Mindset.

Two thoughts there. One of these epiphanies comes to you when you're on stage. I think it was in Vancouver. You mentioned it in the book. I'm in Toronto and one of the things about Canadians is they get a good taste of both because we have very large regulated industries that don't allow you folks to come in and compete.

Telco and banking. There is one type of experience there and there isn't a focus on CX with love, but they have a regulated industry. They're not worried about market share. They've got the market share. They're worried about risk. There's one experience there. Canadians buy everything online in the US, and now we have those experiences as well. We buy lots of things. We vacation, go through, and understand these things.

You see the importance of that experience. Particularly in protected industries or regulated industries, they understand it isn't a priority one. However, those regulated industries, do care about number two, which is the employee experience, chapter two. You start this chapter off with a quote from one of our pals from this show.

Roger Martin has been on the show once, if not twice. Also a Canadian. Thank you. He says, “Your top employees aren't simply doing a job for you. They create outcomes that wouldn't be possible if they disappeared.” You let that sink in a little bit. We hear all of these great stories of great organizations that put huge value on their employees. The Enderman research reveals that 74% of institutional investors agreed that a company's ability to win the best talent is more important in gaining investors' trust than the ability of that company to attract new customers or increase valuation multiples.

That's an interesting one. How many clients have you and I both worked with that care about nothing but increasing that valuation multiple? This is where the meat of this experience mindset is. We're now talking about the employee experience, and you've got your perspective on The Great Resignation. Let's talk about some of the great findings there.

I'm not a fan of the term The Great Resignation. I call it in the book The Great Reflection. I like that better. I think people didn't just sit back and resign to what was happening or resign, “I'm giving up.” It was more of a reflection of, “I don't want to do this anymore. I have no joy. I'm not getting paid enough. I don't like the place I work. I don't like the people I work with. I don't like the commute. I want to start my own business.” Whatever the reason, I feel like it's more positive for the employee. Maybe not great for the employer but for all intents and purposes, people are taking a little bit more control when they could.

I want to be clear here. A caveat to all this is I am not a people expert nor am I a culture expert. This experience mindset is focused on the intersection at the moment that matters when a customer and an employee interact. That interaction might be in person. It might be digital or it might be with no person. What I mean by that is it might be the UI design on the website or the app. That is an interaction between a brand and a customer that a human-designed.

If the human didn't design it well and it's still ten clicks or it's clunky, you got to find your way through something. If it's not intuitive, that has a negative impact on the customer experience. Why did that employee design that UI poorly? Were they rushed? Were they not managed properly? Did they not know the expectations? Were they dissatisfied with work and frustrated, so it showed Itself in the design? Is it they weren't willing to do the work or go the extra mile? What was the reason?

There's a reason it was not designed properly or there's a reason the call center rep is short on the phone. Maybe they're having a bad day. Let's put those aside. Are they short because this is the 75th time today they've had to answer this one question and they've been telling their managers like, “If we could put FAQs up on the website, it would cut off 50% of these calls I get every day because it's simple, basic questions but there’s no other way for our customers to get that information?” That call center rep tells their manager, and their manager does nothing. That call center rep is taking the calls day after day monotony. There's no creativity, no value, and no critical thinking. “I'm bored out of my mind. I'm collecting a paycheck,” i.e., quiet quitting.

What is the reason that something is happening? That's where you can uncover how you can improve the employee experience. That moment that matters. While things like compensation, equity, and inclusion are very important, it’s not covered in this book. It is at the intersection of what are the things that keep employees engaged, satisfied, willing to do the work, feel like they're getting invested in, their managers are supporting them, have career development, and their psychological safety.

It’s whatever terms you feel in that employee bubble that so when they show up, they show up not only with their best selves but also doing their best work. You've inspired them to do that because of the mindset you have around the importance of that employee. They're not just an asset or a line item that if they leave, you'll just replace.

I think over the last few years, we've realized that's not a great strategy either because good talent is hard to recruit and retain. Ultimately, you needed to make sure that you put the same level of effort and rigor behind what you do for employees that we have done for decades for customers. That is this whole concept when you make a decision for a customer, what is the intended or unintended consequence to an employee?

As we reduced effort for customers and increased the experience, what ended up happening or the unintended consequence was the effort for the employee went up. Let me pick sellers as an example. In a million years, would we ever ask our customers to jump through five tabs on their website, mobile phone, or tablet to order something from us? One tab to find the product, one tab to order, one tab to enter payment information, one tab to enter shipping information, and one tab to track the order. Would we ever do that?

Of course not. Too long. We'll lose them. They'll get fatigued from the journey and away they go.

Unfortunately, how many salespeople have to jump between multiple applications to do their job? Find the customer information. The CRM system might be different from the quote-to-cash system, which might be different from the lead management system, which might differ from others. It's not lost on me. I work at Salesforce. I understand. We could do it all in one app on one UI.

It's not that technology can't do it. It's that someone made a decision somewhere that they thought it was a better strategy to have multiple. It's not about one provider or one vendor, or a customer 360 in our world where it's a single source of truth powered by us. There is an integration that you can do where that single pane of glass may be fed from multiple vendor applications.

To the seller, it's one interface. The amount of time that sellers spend selling is still 28% of their time spent in selling. We are overwhelming our people with things that are not what we're paying them to do. It's administrative, tactical, and repetitive. It could be improved so significantly if sales leaders had the time and space to reimagine those processes with the seller in mind, not just the metrics.

What a beautiful example but we won't go down this path too far because now you get me on my soapbox. If sales leaders had the time and space, which they don't, with an eighteen-month tenure before they get taken out of their job. They're also highly confused with 6,000 different platforms in the sales tech stack. They're always hoping for the next silver bullet that makes all of this easy. The truth of it is you have to be better at live conversation to make this easy.

Yes and no. I agree with having a live conversation. I don't want to negate that, but in Growth IQ, I had a chapter on sales optimization. I coined a term called the Seller's Dilemma. It was a play on Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. That was intentional. The seller's dilemma is as a leader, how do I manage the business day to day? If I don't, I won't have a job. What are my numbers right now versus how do I optimize my business? How do I transform some of these things by eliminating multiple applications? How do I do integration? How do I innovate at the same time? If I don't hit numbers, to your point, it's an eighteen-month tenure, I won't have my job.

I'm working on something that I will never get the fruits from that labor. I'm going to keep my head down and keep doing what I'm doing. That's the space in time. This is where in The Experience Mindset, I challenge leaders. I don't care if you're a team manager of 2 or 5 people, a director, or a chief revenue or head of sales. I don't care how many people you have, but if you could ask one question, what one thing could I do to give you time back and reduce the effort in your job so that you could spend more time doing what I’ve hired you to do? i.e., let's say selling. If you ask that question as a leader, you have to be willing to listen and then act.

If all of a sudden, you ask everybody in their one-on-ones one question and then you take that back and then your job is don't we always say like, “My job, I'm here for you to remove obstacles.” That's what we say. Remove the obstacles. Pick one. Don't try to fix everything. The next week, ask them a process problem like, “Is there a process that you think is broken or no longer necessary? Can we eliminate that process?” One by one, it's one thing. The second thing I'd say is, and this is specific to CRM, we have asked our sellers to enter information. This is part of this employee experience. You have to enter information. Not that Salesforce doesn't count that kind of thing or that kind of approach.

It's your one-on-one time. You're sitting down with your seller. I sit in front of you and I'm like, “Mark, tell me about this account.” In my head, I'm like, “I stayed late last night and entered everything into Salesforce. He asked me the question, which meant he didn't look. Why am I entering all this information?” Versus taking the information and as a manager, looking at it and spending your time coaching and mentoring and looking for ways to improve versus the administrative tactical. If you don't think that's a true statement and you think you're doing it, there's a Bain study that shows that the majority of time is spent on administration and not on coaching and mentoring. That gives the employee experience a negative hit.

Now I'm like, “They don't care enough to look at what I'm entering into the CRM system. Why am I spending time doing it?” It's this dissatisfaction. “No one cares, I'm just grinding. I'm wasting my time.” We get into that bad habit. When a seller is on the phone with a customer, it's not a great experience for anybody. I'm short. I'm like, “Yeah, whatever. It doesn't matter.” Customer's like, “Sales rep doesn't care. If they don't care, I don't care. I'm going to go with someone else.” Those small little things have huge impacts. The time and space is a behavior change for managers.

It's huge and the executives managing those leaders. The other thing you talked about is coaching. I firmly believe and agree that one of the main issues is the fact that they don't coach. I don't think they know how to coach because that's a different skillset. It's also a different joy. You and I were talking at the beginning. You said, “One day you'd love to be back as a professional salesperson. If that came to pass, you'd love it.” Leaders get their joy not from closing deals but from seeing other people develop. That's why we run a sales training company. That's our buzz, which is seeing somebody get better. It is different. Gretzky could never coach. He wanted to be that salesperson.

The coach has got to be somebody who gets joy out of developing somebody else, rather than seeing everybody as a cog in the wheel to increase their productivity as a sales leader. You're just somebody retiring quota. I will show a lot of love to salespeople. I’ve seen the Bain research. To sales leaders, this is a tough job. In my view, it's the hardest job on the executive team today and the scoreboard is public domain.

Nobody else around the executive team has their performance evaluation on a public scoreboard that everybody in the company can see, but sales leaders do, which is what drives that quarterly cadence all the time saying, “Instead of coaching them on one-on-one, I better default to opportunity management and tell them what to do with the deal. I better get that deal this quarter because I won't be around next quarter if it doesn't happen.”

Tiffani, before we go down, I want to finish with the rest of a couple of other key items in your book, if that's okay. Back on this employee experience rather than our chat about the sales leaders, I want to go back to that employee experience because you call out this migration of moving from B2B or B2C to going B4C and then B4E. I love all the terms in your book, too. If we say the employee experience is so important and you say you're not an expert on culture, we speak about culture in the book.

We talk about the people process, culture, and technology. You and I both love Seth Godin's stuff. You interviewed Seth on your podcast and I loved your discussion with Seth on his latest book, The Song of Significance. Right at the beginning of the book, he talks about asking 10,000 people to describe the conditions of the best job they've ever had. You could pick multiple things on that list. It's not just one, it's multiple.

The top four that came back were, “I surprised myself with what I could accomplish. I could work independently. The team built something important,” which ties into what you speak about so eloquently in terms of vision later in the book, and then “People treated me with respect.” I know you say you're not an expert on this, but I think there's this interesting tie around the employee experience.

Some folks in mid-sized companies see work with that challenge around holding people accountable, but still making sure they have a great experience. What are your thoughts on the balance or that balancing act between those two things? Two of the ones in Seth's book came back saying, “It's important that I accomplish something meaningful.” They appreciate being coached to elevate performance.

I totally understand why we don't want to get caught in the nits and nats of that sales conversation because it's about the experience mindset. I'm going to take it back to that to answer this question, because a high-performing seller, i.e., Wayne Gretzky.

Yeah, thank you. We appreciate the Canadian references.

You said it. He wasn't necessarily a great coach. Just because you're a high-performing seller doesn't mean you're going to be a great leader or a great manager. I'm going to take myself as an example. I was a high performer. I always hit quota. I got promoted. Along the way, no one invested me in coaching and mentoring me on how I can coach and mentor other people. I was almost set up to not be successful as a great manager.

Now let's go back to how I felt I could work independently. I felt I was part of a team. That requires a great manager to create that environment. Are we investing in managers as they promote? You hit this Peter principle, which is you reach the level of your incompetence, meaning you don't know how to do what you've been asked to do or promoted to do. That is the culture of the business in investing in its talent to give it the tools and capabilities the individuals need to be successful in their roles.

You don't just wake up and you're a manager. I don't know this story because we picked Wayne, but did Wayne try to coach his teammates who were playing for his team as a coach the way he was coached, or did he expect them to play as he played? Was he working with a coach to help him be a better coach and a better manager and see how to get out of that player mentality into, “I'm not a seller anymore. I'm a manager.” It is about closing those deals. You said something. You said, “The joy we get is in lifting others up.” That is a very different mentality than, “I'm out killing deals. I'm competitive. I want to win. I'm running through fire for my customers and I'm going to hit quota and I'm going to go to the club.”

That's very different than, “No. I want to create people who are going to take my job because if I do a good job, they rise up.” That is a very different mentality. Investing in people, and career development, and know that I matter and that if I get an opportunity, that is all part of the employee experience we went after. We dug into what are the attributes and elements of the employee experience that will have the greatest impact on a customer. It was things like, “Do I feel like I have the appropriate tools and systems?”

I’ll give you a stat. We'll go back to tech for a second. Fifty-two percent of the C-suite believe the technology that employees use is effective in doing their job. This is a global study. That means 48% of the C-suite don't believe that they have the right technology deployed. There are trillions of dollars spent, billions on customer experience, billions in the sales stack and martech space. This is all up not just martech, but 52% believe that it is effective.

You don't just wake up and you're a manager. You have to be willing to have a beginner's mind and develop yourself.

Only 32% of the general employee base agrees with that statement. There's already a 20% delta between what the C-suite thinks and what the general employee population thinks. Only 20% of customer-facing employees agree that the technology they've been providing allows them to be effective and collaborate with their teammates.

What do businesses do? They make stuff. They sell stuff. What do businesses want to do? Earn money and profitability. Yet those responsible or those customer-facing employees are the least satisfied with the technology that's being provided. Why is that? That has huge implications for employee satisfaction and engagement. We have incredibly high numbers of dissatisfaction. When we double-clicked underneath some of the attributes, it was seamless technology.

It was siloed groups and breaking down those silos. There was a lack of integration between tools. Hopping between multiple tools. It was a lack of career development. “I want you to invest in me. I care and I want you to care. I want to work here. I love this company. I love who I work for, but I don't want to do the same thing every day for five years. I want opportunity.”

This is where leaders have to listen better. As leaders, we have to be willing to have a beginner's mind as well and go develop ourselves so that we can show up and help mentor, coach, lift up, identify, train, and skill the next generation even if it's to take your job. If they take your job, then you're moving on. If you're a good manager, you're going to keep moving up. In sales, unfortunately, it tends to be revenue-based that triggers that they should be promoted, versus they're a great manager, mentor, coach, or leader. People rally and they're engaged in their business with their customers. There's a lot more. As classic hardcore sellers, it's a very different mindset to flip the switch from, “I'm a competitive individual,” to “We're competitive as a team.”

There are also high-performing salespeople who are spectacular teammates. There are super high-performing salespeople who are not good teammates, no different than athletics. The Gretzky analogy, everybody here plays hockey. Of course, we all did. You knew those superstars that were in the league, but I don't want them on my team. There's a difference there. Can I backtrack? I'd like to double-click on something so important that you've touched on and this floored me in the book. This was another stat.

High-performing salespeople can be spectacular teammates or not good teammates, just like in athletics.

One of the things I love so much about The Experience Mindset is it’s not opinion but facts. Data matters in professional sales today and everything we're talking about here, there's great research and background, but it's that employee engagement. I may get the numbers wrong. I don't have right it in front of me here. Let's say ballpark 33% of employees are engaged, 17% were actively disengaged, or something of that nature. Almost 1 in 5 is actively disengaged. The definition is scary, but did it lead to a cost to business? Was it annually $17 billion? Do I have that number right? I don't want to put you on the spot.

I don't remember the exact number, but it was mind-boggling.

I was flabbergasted.

There's another one which is the amount of time that we as humans spend mentally switching when we switch applications. The enterprise has an average of a little more than 1,000 unique applications internally and only 27% of them are integrated. Who bears the brunt of that lack of integration? If you remember my comment, we've never asked customers to go and click through five applications, yet we ask our employees to do it every day all day.

If you go from one tab in Google to another tab in Google, or you go from Slack to Salesforce and you're going between those two applications, even though your eyes see that you've switched applications, it takes a couple of milliseconds for your brain to catch up. Over the course of a week, in a given day, how many times do you switch between applications? It's like 400 or 500 times you're switching between applications.

To go to Google, start a Zoom, get on LinkedIn, or whatever you're going to do, the switching is a little less than four hours a week in that just millisecond switching. Integration has implications. All of these things, which is why in The Experience Mindset, I broke it down to people, which is organizational training, career development, and all the things we've been talking about. The second is process. What is the process of doing something? Quote to cash, how many steps?

There's a company in Toronto I was working with, a very large retailer there and it was twenty minutes for a return for a call center agent. Do you think they wake up every day and go, “I'm so excited, I'm going to do 30 returns. I can't wait.” How do we reduce the steps and the broken processes? The next is tech, which we talked about. They don't think it's working effectively, the switching time, and all the things we mentioned. The fourth was culture. PPT is a very famous framework. It was the leave it diamond many decades ago in the 1960s. I added C for culture, so it's PPTC. I broke it down. Any leader that's tuning in to this would be like, “Do I have the right people?”

To your point, I can't have all high performers. I can't have all low performers. There was a great article that I read that was a very high trade in the NBA or the US National Basketball Association from the championship team, from the Denver team to another team. He wasn't a star scorer. He was a great bench player and he was a great collaborator. He was a great passer. He was a great teammate. Highly valuable. He’s not the top performer, but the one who made the team click. They paid a lot of money for that person. Not a well-known name, but a critical part of their winning story.

What does the team look like? How do I improve the process? That's an area. You could ask that one question. Give yourself the time and space in the process. In technology, it's hard for an individual contributor to fix the tech stack. We don't have much control over that. As a leader and a manager, it's also difficult for you. If you are a senior leader, then I'd get with your IT team and be like, “We have to simplify this stack. Let's do it together.” Pull in sales ops, marketing ops, rev ops, or whatever you have. The fourth one is culture. How does your organization view its employees? Are they a cost center or is it value? Is that something that's set at the top and then accountable all the way through the organization?

It's also the way that people will say, “It might not be great right now, but I trust it will get better.” That is a way I have found. I can't digest all of it at one time. I'd be caught in that seller's dilemma. It's too much to navigate. If I can deconstruct it into categories, then I can focus on a few things over time. A year from now, the people, the process, the tech, and the culture will look very different.

That’s great coaching and counsel for those first steps. In each of those categories, how do we move the needle the most without feeling overwhelmed or paralyzed by the paradox of choice? Tiffani, I found a stat in my notes that is going to knock both of us off our socks. The percentage of employees that have been engaged in companies has not changed, according to your research, since 2007.

That was Gallup's research.

Thank you. Since 2007, 32%. It stays the same.

Fairly flat, yes.

What's climbing is the percent that is actively disengaged, 17%, and it costs the global economy $7.8 trillion annually. Just shocking.

If you're tuning in to this, you're going to be like, “I can't show up to my manager or my leader and be like, ‘This is costing us $7.2 trillion. I read this book.’” It has to be something very tactical. That's where you can say, “Do you know what I did?” Once again, to the audience of sellers, unfortunately, there's only one thing a salesperson can control. We may think we have more control. We don't. We don't control our compensation plan, the products we sell, the prices, or the tools we use. We have very little control. What we can control is how we show up. That we can control. If you could take it upon yourself to say, “I'm going to track over the course of the week where I'm spending my time.”

On your next one-on-one go, “I'm trying to become more productive. I want to hit the quota. I want to go to the club. I want to be better. I identified these three things. Could you help me with these three things?” Instead of waiting for your manager to come and show up and ask you or waiting for your manager to fix it, be proactive and say, “Here are three things I could use some help on.”

Let's do it across people, processes, tech, and maybe culture. Culture might be a little too far out of the realm on this one. Let's even focus on process and tech. Let's not talk about people unless people for you are, “I want to be trained,” or “I want to go to a class,” or “I want to do something to improve my performance. Would the company invest in me doing that?” Now you show up. Now you've asked. Now let's hypothetically say your leader goes, “Thank you. This is so fantastic. Let's put together a quarter plan.”

“Let's do a career plan this quarter. Let's give you some time back to plan this quarter. Every week when we meet, we're going to talk about the plan. In the last ten minutes, we'll talk about the deals we're working on. For the first twenty minutes, we're going to talk about your plan.” What a beautiful thing. You could be proactive and take ownership of that. Let's say you do that to your manager and they have no interest in doing it, which is going to happen to some of you. They have no interest in doing it. Now what? Now you may find yourself falling into the quiet quitting. You might fall into the, “I'm going to leave.” You then might fall into the, “Now what do I do? I listened to Tiffani. I took this advice. I did it and boom, it didn't happen.” Do you just give up?

That's where salespeople are fantastic because we have grit. We're resilient. We will keep trying. We will find different ways. You might say, “If you are not going to help me.” Maybe those aren't the words you use but, “If they're not going to help me, would you mind if I went to sales ops and I work with them? Do you mind if I go and ask to be coached over here?”

If they're not willing to do it, can you find another answer? If it's flat-out no, that's where you have to make your own decision of, “Is this still right for me?” That's that reflection. Some people, it's unfortunate with the economy and everything going on, they have to keep working. They don't have the luxury of leaving and quitting and looking for something else. If you do and you can, maybe that's a signal to you that you want more out of where you work and who you work for.

I think people always have to make a smart decision there. I would go back to those questions you suggested. If the manager comes back and says no, then there's this reasonable question about why. Did I ask for something that we can't get into the budget this term or this quarter? Are there good and logical reasons for what's taking place? Are they diminishing this idea or it doesn't make sense now because we've already got these three technology projects underway and so on and so forth?

I encourage the proactivity of saying, “How can I help my leaders help me?” Certainly, the coaching I would've given my younger self 15 or 20 years ago is other people have other things on their plate as well. I understand why is it you don't agree that this would be helpful or is it given the other things on our plate or the SG&A cost or whatever we're doing right now, we have to be a bit cautious. “The economy’s a bit funny. We’re letting people go. We have to be a bit careful about making major capital investments in things, at least for a quarter or two.” You go, “I got it. That seems reasonable to me and logical.” Making sure it's an ongoing discourse. I love the idea of the proactive approach.

That requires managers to be better communicators on the why. That's all we want. I don't want just a flat-out no. You walk away from me and I'm like, “Is this something I did? Are you not interested in me? Is it a budget? Is it too many projects? Are you having a bad day? Just tell me why.” We may not like the answer, but at least now we're not wondering what it is.

This requires managers to hone their communication skills. They're dealing with conflict. Kim Scott’s Radical Candor is a great book on how to give constructive criticism and constructive advice, as well as guide and coach in a way that may be uncomfortable to the person giving it and the person receiving it, but it is necessary.

This goes into that employee experience. I give a suggestion that it goes into a black hole. Let's call it employee surveys. If you're surveying your employees and they care enough to answer the survey, we found in the research that the majority of companies capture employee data and don't know what to do with it. They don't know what to do with it so they do nothing with it. The next time the company surveys the employees, what's the employee going to do? They didn't do anything the last time. Why am I going to answer this time? Those little things go a long way and play a part. That's a culture comment. We survey and do nothing with it as a culture problem.

If you're surveying your employees and they care enough to answer the survey, and you do nothing with it, that is a culture problem.

We survey, we understand and uncover where the problems are, and then we don't ever say what we're doing or we don't ever give readouts of what we've done, what's working, what was adjusted, or to your point, where we started this whole conversation. In highly regulated industries, you have very different sets of rules than industries that are not regulated. As an employee, you may not know the regulations, so you think what you're doing is stupid. Unfortunately, it's necessary.

If I go, “Ah,” it's because I work in telco or financial services, that's why it is the way that it is. If you're flat-out frustrated, don't work in highly regulated industries. Go sell somewhere else. I think that the feedback loop was one of the findings in the study that has an impact on the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of employees.

That’s an amazing place to stop. First of all, Tiffani, we could keep talking about this for hours. I'm sure you're talking about this for hours every day with other podcasts and interviewers. On behalf of our team and everybody in the show, thank you so much for joining us today. We exist with the show because we're about trying to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales and in doing so, we improve the lives of professional salespeople.

The Experience Mindset talks about making sure organizations and leaders balance that flywheel between customer experience and employee experience moves in that direction. The leaders tuning in to this are going to glean a lot. I think that the salespeople tuning in are going to have hope that doing this is smart for business and drives better results.

We talked about the CAGR at 1.8 times better over a three-year period of time. We'll have all the links, Tiffani, but how do people learn more about you? Team, there is going to be learning more about Tiffani after you go and get The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth by Tiffani Bova. How else do they follow what you are doing outside of the book and the What's Next podcast?

Those two are great. Of course, I appreciate anybody deciding to go pick up the book. That would be amazing. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I’ve got no more connections, so you only can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active. I'm also active on Twitter and Instagram. I’m starting to get more active on Threads. I am also interested in feedback.

If there’s something that resonated with you today, or more importantly, you did not agree with, drop me a direct message on LinkedIn. Those are great because you'll be like, “I heard what you said. I tried it, but it didn't work. This is what happened,” because I learn from you. As I speak and give examples, I get new examples from you, but I also course correct. Things are changing. I wrote this book over a year ago and it doesn't mean things haven't changed. Ultimately, I'm always trying to keep it fresh and I get that from you. Any feedback, I'm always open.

We always close the show with a similar comment, Tiffani. Folks, thank you for tuning in. We thank Tiffani Bova again. Folks, you know why we run this show and we want to get better. We'd love to know if there are things we can do to improve the value you get from this discussion. My personal email that I check is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism and we respond to every email and all the feedback we get. First of all, thank you for sending your notes and please keep them coming and we'll see everybody next time. Tiffani, thank you so much. We'll see you again soon.

Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Mark, for having me back. I appreciate the support.

You're welcome.

Important Links

• Tiffani Bova

• The Experience Mindset

• Growth IQ

• What's Next with Tiffani Bova

• To Sell is Human

• Roger Martin – Past Episode

• The Song of Significance

• Radical Candor

• LinkedIn – Tiffani Bova

• Twitter – Tiffani Bova

• Instagram – Tiffani Bova

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Tiffani Bova

Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue-producing divisions at businesses ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500. As a Research Fellow at Gartner, her cutting-edge insights helped Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, and other prominent companies expand their market share and grow their revenues. She has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 twice. She is also the host of the podcast What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova.

How To Influence Buyers And Changemakers Through Social Selling With Timothy Hughes

People first thought social media was just about taking pictures of your lunch. But now, it has evolved into something bigger, making social selling the norm of business marketing. If you don’t have a strong online presence, you are missing a huge opportunity. Mark Cox sits down with Timothy Hughes, co-founder and CEO of DLAignite, to discuss how to effectively generate revenue and get back to a growth trajectory through social selling techniques. Tim explains how to use LinkedIn and other social media platforms not to mindlessly promote your business but to build influence, make genuine connections, and start meaningful conversations. He also talks about the role of a changemaker in an organization and their role achieving collective success.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

How To Influence Buyers And Changemakers Through Social Selling With Timothy Hughes

How many of us are leveraging social media effectively for B2B sales growth? Frankly, not enough. If I look at the funnel, we're not doing enough. We're not doing it effectively. I'm excited to speak to our guest, Tim Hughes. Tim is ranked number one by Analytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, LinkedIn said he was one of the top sales experts globally. Brand24 announced that he's the sixteenth most influential person in marketing globally based on measured social media influence and huge credentials in social.

He's also the Cofounder and CEO of DLAignite. He is the co-author of the book we're going to be discussing called Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. It's a great book. Candidly, somehow I missed this one when you think of all the episodes we have done. This book was released in 2016. It hit my radar because the second edition was released a couple of years ago. It was so insanely successful. It's a fantastic book.

I'll throw in a couple of things that jumped out at me reading this book. There was a different approach taken with social where social has to be an overall business strategy. It has to be a social strategy at the most senior levels in the company, not just posting. We have always been very good at posting within the funnel but having this is part of a strategy.

The second thing that was news to me was to focus on social listening, not just talking. You think of social as being social, meaning, what would happen if we were at a physical cocktail party? We wouldn't talk about us and post things. We would be listening and engaging with people. I also like the learning point for me that LinkedIn is about 30% social. For our company, it's probably 85% of what we do.

Tim talks a lot about having a LinkedIn strategy. Twitter and Instagram are the two other channels that have a significant impact. He talked about the five measures of digital organization. It's thinking about not just sales but, 1.) Visibility and recognition in the marketplace. 2.) Your digital strategy enables you to have trusted advisor status. 3.) You should be able to build a measurable pipeline socially. 4.) Access to the best talent and skills because of that social media presence, and then employee engagement, keeping your team more engaged because of your social strategy.

These are three things we get into when we talk about exactly what we do to get out of the gate. We have to think about, number one, a buyer-centric profile on LinkedIn. Do we have a recruiting profile so that if a recruiter comes to us, we look attractive? Do we have a buyer-centric profile where if a buyer takes a look at us, they can see that we can add value and insight to them? We have to think about those digital territories and talk about LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter or X as it's called now. Finally, content. What is it we're posting? How are we engaging?

We had an interesting conversation. Tim is a believer that you should be able to measure the return on investment of almost any keystroke associated with social, doing this with a focus on return on investment. He's a very interesting fellow. There's a lot of learning for me in this. I hope there are lots of learning for you in this. If you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends. Here's Tim Hughes with Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers.

Tim, welcome. It's great to meet you.

Thanks, Mark. I'm excited to be here and talk about some things to do with sales.

I'm super excited to have you here because I have finished Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I'll be honest with you. I'm a little embarrassed to say I've only recently read this book because everybody on the show knows how many of these books I read. This one is spectacular but it was originally written in 2015 and published in 2016. It was so enormously popular. We're on the second edition.

The one with the white cover was published in 2016. This one was published in 2022.

Thank you so much, Tim. It's a critically important topic for all of us. I don't know if there's a CEO reading who isn't going to get a new LinkedIn connection from a financial planner. As soon as they accept it, they're going to get pitched financial planning services. If I allowed email to be open during an episode, I'm pretty sure it would happen to me during this episode.

There's this massive opportunity to understand social selling. Although we have been running our business for many years, we have had lots of compliments on our stuff. I learned a ton from this book. There were lots of things we were not doing correctly. Tell me a little bit about your journey of initially writing the book and the need for it. What have you seen that has been changing over the last few years since the first edition?

Thank you for asking me. I appreciate what you said about the book. I have to admit that a lot of people say it to me. A number of people have come to me and said I've changed their lives because they have been doing all the old-school things like cold calling and sending spam emails that don't work anymore. They know that the buyers have moved onto social media.

In terms of my background, I'm a salesperson. I've been in sales for 25 years. I worked for Oracle. I've been used to either selling to large enterprises. When I worked in the Oracle channel, I was generally selling to mid-market organizations, both big and small companies. I got involved in social media probably back in 2012 or 2013. I was involved in rolling out a very early social selling program in Oracle across about 4,000 people in Europe.

It was there that I bumped into the co-author of the first book. We got a book deal within three months. I then wrote it for another three months in 2015 and it came out in the fall of 2016. It took off. In the presale, people were falling over themselves to buy it. What happened was that during COVID, it took off again. My publisher came to me and said, "You have to do a second edition because people are interested in it."

What's changed? Social selling has become the norm. When we started our business, we were seen as niche. People laughed at us. People thought that social media was about taking pictures of your lunch. It's become mainstream. If you are not being reported at your board level about how much business you are generating through social media, you are way behind.

If you are not being reported at your board level about how much business you are generating through social media, you are way behind.

It's interesting that you started to talk about the board. That was one of the first things in the book that jumped out at me. You get away from any tactics around this initially and say, "An organization needs a social selling strategy for the business and the organization."

This is not a book about tactics, LinkedIn, or a personal brand. This is about how an organization can generate revenue and get back onto a growth trajectory by using socials strategically within the organization. That's fundamentally different from every single organization that's trying to sell you social selling materials and tactics across the whole of the world. We're the only people in the world who do this.

That was one of the things that hit me so hard because being one of these people who would have been a couple of inches deep on LinkedIn over the years, we were early into LinkedIn but in the first 50 pages, you bring up the fact that LinkedIn is only 30% of a social selling strategy. I had been so proud telling our team for so many years, "We're going to focus on LinkedIn." It jumped out. The book is filled with these facts, not just platitudes.

I'll go back to the strategy side of things. I enjoyed it at the beginning as well when you mentioned the board level. We work with a lot of mid-sized SaaS companies, larger manufacturing businesses, and some very large enterprises. We haven't heard from anybody that they're discussing the social selling or the digital organization strategy at the board level.

We're in some of those board meetings because in some cases, we're an outsourced chief revenue officer. This is an interesting thought. There are samples throughout the books but tell me the ones that are prominent for you where you've come into an organization that wasn't doing this, and you did get the right buy-in at the right level, the board level. Tell me a little bit about 1 case study or 2 of a program that worked very well when it started at that level.

We usually enter into an organization at the CRO level because the issue that we get is that they've got no pipeline and the feedback that we are getting is nobody has any pipeline. The reason for that is that they're still thinking of interruption marketing. They still think the practices that we had in the 1980s and 1990s are relevant in a digital world, and it's not.

Sixty-one percent of the world's population is on social media and is active on social media. Everybody who's on social media spends 2 hours and 23 minutes a day on social media. This is where people come to talk and have conversations. This is where your buyers, future employees, and future investors are. Everybody has moved to social and COVID accelerated that.

We know through working for years that we can grow people's revenues by 30% and shorten the sales cycle by 20%. We've got salespeople who are getting ten meetings a week by using social selling. I need to say that when someone sends you a message over social and they do a pitch lap or pitch, that's not social selling. That's spam. When you talked earlier on about the CEO getting a message saying, "I'm a wealth advisor. Can I help you," that's spam.

We have a definition of social selling, which comes across in the book. “Use your presence and behavior on social media to build influence, make connections, and grow relationships and trust, which leads to conversational and commercial interaction.” The key thing is that it doesn't matter how good your salespeople are and how much you train them on MEDDIC. They're not having conversations. Conversations create sales. It doesn't matter. You can train people to close deals but if they haven't got any deals in the first place, it's not going to help you.

From a strategic perspective, what we do is that explain to the CRO how we can increase revenue and shorten the sales cycles. All of our clients don't have a problem with the pipeline. I have this SDR who came to me and complained because he booked 25 meetings that week. He said, "I don't have enough time for the meetings I have." When you've got people cold calling and sending spam emails, they don't have that complaint.

What we're doing at a strategic level is once you go into an organization, you show them the power of creating influence online. You can take what I said, using your presence and behavior on social media to build influence and trust and make connections. You can do that in HR. What you are doing is immediately able to position yourself as the employer of choice on social media. You're able to suck up and get all the best talent.

You can do that in purchasing. You can make sure that you've got all the buyers with all the different things that are going on and the polycrisis we have with the supply chain and the differences in the supply chain. You can go out and get different suppliers at different rates. What we see suddenly is that this isn't just about selling. This is about an enterprise-wide strategy for the organization. It's about creating visibility for the organization and a better environment to work with. That's a board-level issue as much as the pipeline is. We're here to talk about sales but you did ask me about the strategy piece.

Those are the five measures of a digital organization that you touched on in the book. You talk about, 1) Visibility and recognition in the marketplace, 2) Trust or advisor status for whatever your core competency, and 3) Measurable pipeline, which we will get back to with a discussion on sales for sure. As you say with your HR, access to the best talent in the industry, and finally, employee engagement, leveraging social for employee engagement.

We have had lots of folks on the show. We have been talking about this disastrous situation of employee engagement. There are shocking numbers of people who are either disengaged or actively disengaged within businesses. Getting back to the positive on the sales side, another quote that I liked in the book that is going to keep most of the audiences quite interested is, "Every keystroke that a sales team makes can be measured against revenue and EBITDA." If that's the messaging here, I can't imagine there are too many boards or chief revenue officers out there that wouldn't perk up and say, "I would love to have a conversation about that."

We get a lot of people coming to us and saying that social media is about posting pictures of your lunch and stuff like that, and it's not. The feedback that I've got from most CEOs who have read the book is that this is the first book that shows that there's a connection between active use of social media and revenue. All the other books are about tactics. If you stand on one leg and put on a bandana, and then the algorithm does this, this is irrelevant. This is about your business. We use the term walking digital corridors and having digital conversations. LinkedIn is only 30% of your social graph, the people that you are trying to influence.

I remember going and seeing a friend of mine. I wrote an article about how you could get ten C-level meetings a week using Twitter. I wrote this years ago. It's on my LinkedIn profile. He said that the person that he was trying to get ahold of was a chief people officer. They weren't active on LinkedIn but they were active on Instagram. They were taking pictures. They were big. They had two dogs and they walked their dogs. They were sharing pictures of their dogs on Instagram. All of the skills that we have always had is the same but you need to be able to understand how to be social. It's not about how to use LinkedIn. It's about how to be social, pick that up, and take that to Instagram.

One of the things that we do in our social selling methodology is we do a lot of it on LinkedIn but we also teach people for 30 minutes how to use Twitter or what is now called X. What we're showing them is that this is about being social. We're going to go from LinkedIn to a different social platform. You're going to take all those things that you know and apply them. They go, "This is simple." This isn't about having to go to each platform and learn how to use them. It's about learning how to be social.

Social selling is not about going to each social media platform and learning how to use them. It is about learning how to be social.

We're going to talk a little bit about that. You've got the book, courses, and methodologies to teach people this but we will give them a few tips and tricks, knowing that it all starts with a strategy. One of the things that struck me, and I'll call myself the slow learner on this one, is we did spend a number of years posting. We weren't getting ten CEO meetings a week from posting. It was a fabulous credibility shield. When we were having a conversation with someone and they said, "Let's get to know in the funnel," it ended up being a very good credibility shield in the same way that a website was a good credibility shield years ago.

It wasn't wasted. We did get some inbound leads but the point we didn't grasp was being social. You make a couple of references to, "What if we jumped in the car and went to a place that had all of the best buyers for in-the-funnel?" What would you do if you walked into that cocktail party? Would you walk up dancing and pitching your product? Would you walk up and start having interesting conversations with people about them, their business, what's going on in their lives, and topics? Would you have those interesting conversations? That's what we do. We do the latter.

What we tried to do in the early days was outsource the listening part of social media. We had very junior people in our company doing the listening part of social media. God bless them. They were wonderful but they didn't understand how to respond when somebody said, "We're having this issue where we get first meetings with buyers but we never get a second meeting with buyers." Buyers are unengaged in that first discussion. They don't know what to do next. Where it started to change for us a little bit was when I took more ownership, "We're going to have those conversations." That is something that jumped out in the first half of the book to me big time.

The mistake that people make is that they think what we're going to do is do what we have always done on social media. We're going to take brochures and get the employees to push them out, "Won't that be great?" What happens is nothing because people don't come to social media to read brochures. That's what your website is for. I bet they don't read them on there either.

What people don't have is a strategy in terms of, "I've read an article that I need to post on social media." They post and then do something else. You got twenty likes on that. What did you do with them? They said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You got twenty likes on it. What did you do?" "I don't understand what you're talking about."

I said, "All those likes is a person digitally saying, 'I digitally resonate with your post.' Did you go and talk to them?" "No." "Why not? This is free business." We have been running a piece of research where we have been working out all the posts so that we know exactly what post works on social media, when to do it, and why to do it. What I mean by "works" is I don't mean it gets views or clicks. I mean that it generates revenue for the business.

To clarify, do you know the timing of the post for your business or all businesses?

It's for our business. We're doing it for two people. One of them is us. We know the type of posts that work and the type of posts that don't work. We have a client who got a $500 million deal off the back of posting something on LinkedIn. It is possible to get business by posting stuff but if you do it once, that's luck. What you want is a methodology to say, "I post something every week. Every week, I get a billion-dollar deal."

What we do is teach people to say, "For everything that you do on social media, there has to be a reason. There needs to be a methodology or a process so that you know when you are going to post something, why you're going to post it, and then how you are going to harvest the response that you get from it." For example, human posts work far better than corporate posts because most people see a brochure as corporate propaganda and won't read it.

For example, if you post a brochure, you will get little or no response at all. If you post a picture of yourself holding a brochure, that's something different because it's a human person. You may say, "I've been working for The Selling Well Podcast for six months. I love Mark. He's inspirational. He's empowered me to do these things." Everyone goes, "That's brilliant." We don't see that as selling but what you've done is put The Selling Well Podcast in front of me. What I'm able to do with my content is put that in front of people every single day. If you cold call people, how often a day can you cold call somebody?

It depends on your business and industry but you would have folks out there saying, "Let's get away from the nutty auto-dialers and generic 10 to 15 live conversations."

You couldn't cold call somebody every day or every week.

Not the same person.

You might not even be able to cold call them every month but every day, I put a piece of contract and go, "This is me. Here's the business issue. Here's another business issue. Here's the business issue that you may have." I can do that every single day. People get to know me, like me, and trust me. If I cold called you every single day, you wouldn't know, like, and trust me. You would come around to my house and probably shoot me.

Hopefully, not. You're posting every day and you get those numbers of likes. What do you do when you get the likes? I'll give you a real-world example as well. We did a post at the beginning of Q4. We talked about the importance during the Q4 sprint to recharge your batteries, take a pause, and make sure you stay balanced.

We got a few likes and a few thoughts there. Somebody came back and went, "What do you do to stay balanced?" I said, "Share what you do to keep a bit of balance." Different people were weighing in. Somebody went, "What do you do to stay balanced?" I put a post of a short video of a bar band that I play in where we were playing a gig. To your point, we have never had engagement like we had in that video. It's probably one of the top posts we have ever had.

I'm going to answer the question about content. You asked me to come up with things that your audience can implement straight away. Let me go on that and I'll talk about content. There are three things that you need to know and understand. The first thing is that you need to have a biocentric profile. What that means is that your profile on LinkedIn is a shop window to the world. LinkedIn is about to go past a billion people who are there. They walk past your profile every day. If your profile is the same as everybody else's like, "I'm a salesperson. I've been in President's Club," they're going to walk straight past.

What all buyers are looking for is an expert, someone who can help them. It's not about you or me. This is about them. What we are looking for when I talk about a biocentric profile is a profile that's going to show that you understand the business issues. It doesn't matter what age you are on this, whether you are my age, which is 1,000, or whether you are 23 or 25. You can show that you are an expert and people will stop. What we know is that most people under the age of 34 use social media to search more than they do search engines.

Social Selling: If your LinkedIn profile is the same as everybody else, people will walk straight past it. What all buyers are looking for is an expert and someone who can help them.

There's data produced by a guy called Simon Kemp who's on LinkedIn. He's a great person to follow. He produces data every quarter. It's free of charge. It shows that most people under the age of 34 use social. What we often do when we use search is we know the question to ask. When we use social media, generally, we don't know the question to ask. The problem with search is it doesn't give us the right answer. If I go onto Google and say, "What's the best CRM system in the world," you will get every single CRM vendor buying that search. It's a mess. We come to social media because we know it gives us a far better response.

It's a more authentic response.

It's about your network like the question that said, "What do you do, Mark?" The second new thing that you need is for us to have a wide and varied network. If you are not connected to the people that you are trying to influence or sell to, you are invisible. I would guarantee that if your audiences go out to their sales teams and say, "How many people that we're trying to sell to a week are we connected to," I bet they will say 1 or 2.

BMW is a partner of ours. They've got 100,000 people who work for BMW. How many people should I be connected to, 1, 10, or 100? I don't know but it's more than one. Whenever your leadership is running QBRs or Quarterly Business Reviews and account reviews, one of the questions that they need to ask is, "How many people are you connected to in the account?"

I have a section in the book about how to run QBRs in this digital world. You need to be connected. LinkedIn allows you to connect to about 200 people a week. Your sales team should be maxing that out. When I mean connect, I don't mean, "I come from The Selling Well Podcast. Here are all my wares." That is a spam. This is your ability to have a conversation.

If I could drive you to a room where all of your prospects are, and they're all standing there and holding a drink, what would you do? You wouldn't go up to them and say, "I've got a great podcast for you." You would go, "Where have you been? Have you traveled far? The weather is terrible at the moment." You would have a conversation. That is one of the things that we end up teaching salespeople outside of our social selling methodologies about how to have conversations and run those first meetings on social.

The next thing is social selling isn't about, "You have to do the whole transaction on social media." The whole point of using social media is that you get a meeting like this. I'm on this show through my use of social media. Mark has allowed me to comment here because of what I've done. You need this wide and varied network. The third thing that you need is content. This isn't about brochures, white papers, and stuff. This is about how you as an individual. This is your LinkedIn profile.

In the world of sales, people buy people. Even in the world of AI, people buy people. "I want to know that if I buy something from Mark Cox, he's going to look after me. He's the expert that I think he is. What we're looking for is content like Mark in his band because that shows that Mark is a real person. I would love to be in a band. I never played an instrument. As you can see, all I can do is play the gramophone but I would love to do that. My business partner is a guitar player. Behind him, he has loads of guitars. Funnily enough, all of the deals that he closes are with people who play the guitar."

Isn't that amazing? What we're doing is creating those connections. I'll give you an example of a piece of content that one of my teams put out. He put this piece of content out and said, "My family loves Led Zeppelin. Every Friday night, my wife puts on Led Zeppelin. When I can hear it through the door of my office, I know it's time to start the weekend. I finish whatever I'm doing. We go out and I spend the weekend with my family. What's your favorite Led Zeppelin song?"

People went, "Stairway to Heaven." Mine is Kashmir and Whole Lotta Love. When I tell this story, a lot of people say, "When the Levee Breaks." On Monday, he went to all of the people who responded that he wasn't connected to and said, "When the Levee Breaks is a great favorite of mine. Can we connect? It's a 100% connection rate. There's no connection. This is my product. This is about having a conversation." To all the people that he knew, he said, "We have an interest in Led Zeppelin. Why don't we get on a call?" They all said yes, "He's a Led Zeppelin fan. We're going to talk about Led Zeppelin."

We teach people how to run those meetings. One of my SDRs gets ten meetings. He works for an organization where they insist he makes cold calls and emails. He gets nothing from it. One morning, he will get ten meetings, which is enough for him not to be fired, and then he takes the dogs for a walk in the afternoon. I said to him, "Why didn't you get another ten meetings?" He said, "If I got twenty meetings in a day, they will think there's something wrong with me. I only get ten because that's all I need to do. I tick the boxes and pass the KPIs," which is ridiculous.

It's a great example but let's go back to the three things that Tim spoke about, buyer-centric profile, thinking about your digital territory, and then content. Let's go a little further on the buyer-centric profile because if memory serves, your profile when I took a quick look at it before I jumped on said something about, "Should have played Quidditch for England," or something of that nature. It didn't talk about being a social selling expert. What is Quidditch? My parents are British. I should probably know the answer to this question.

Quidditch is a made-up game that doesn't exist from the JK Rowling books about Harry Potter. It's a game that you play on a broomstick. If you Google your name, unless you have your website, the first thing that will probably come up is your LinkedIn profile, which will show your photo, name, and summary title. Therefore, your summary title is the most visible thing about you on the internet. What you want is someone to go, "What on Earth is that?" The click-through comes through to my LinkedIn profile because I have the professional edition of LinkedIn.

You know who did it.

I know everybody who looks at my LinkedIn profile and anybody who googles me. What most LinkedIn trainers will do is that they tell you to put what you do on that. You are self-harming yourself. People connect to me and say, "I help CEOs with their accounting." I already have an accountant, ignore. "I help CEOs with their physical fitness." I run three times a week, ignore.

This advice is fundamentally flawed and is killing businesses. Your summary title has to work for you. It has to create curiosity. Someone goes, "That person sounds interesting. I wonder what that means. I would like to talk to that person." People are walking across social media and saying, "You look interesting. We've got this problem. You can help me." That's turning into multimillion-dollar deals.

Your LinkedIn summary title has to create curiosity. If people can see your account and get you to help solve their problem, that is the start of multimillion-dollar deals.

Let's go back if we can though. You bring up that point about playing Quidditch for England. Thank you for that. We have permanently lost any of the Harry Potter fans who realized I'm not a Harry Potter fan. They're never going to be reading this again. They have clicked off.

Maybe you get some magic.

Maybe I'll get into it. We also talked about those buyers under 34 who are using social for searching. If your profile has something quirky like that, then how do they find you if they're looking for an expert on social selling?

I have social selling elsewhere in my profile but the way that Google and LinkedIn look at your profile is a string of text. I have social selling in my profile. It's in your job. It's elsewhere within your profile. Your summary title is not what's reliant on search.

We talked a little bit about LinkedIn. Give us a couple of data points as well on Twitter or Instagram. One of the things that I found very interesting in the book was you think Twitter is better for making first contact with some of your buyers than something like LinkedIn. Maybe you can explain why.

If you're selling in IT, which is what I've done, you will find that people are on Twitter or X. You've got a far more ability to have a conversation with them. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is have a conversation because the conversation creates a sale, which leads to conversations and commercial interactions.

What you need to be doing is be part of the conversation, which is retweeting and responding to the comment, "I love the interview that you did with Mark Cox. I learned a lot. I can learn from you. Thanks very much." If you say, "That's great. I've got this great platform," the first thing I'll do is block you but if you say, "That's interesting," I don't find that as scary. Andy Paul says in his book, "If you pitch to somebody, it creates a fight or flight reaction in somebody." What you don't want to do is do that.

That's exactly how I got you on this show. I heard you on Andy Paul's episode, reached out to you, and said, "We've got a show. Here are some other people who have been on it, including Andy." First, I said, "I loved you on his podcast."

You were very nice.

Thank you. For good reason, this will be a great episode for us as well. The book is Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I like the discussion as well on changemakers. Tell us a little bit about the changemaker term and who that individual is within the organization.

Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers

All of the sales methodologies MEDDIC have a term, whether it's a coach, economic buyer, or champion. We see that there's this particular person called a changemaker. This comes from research that Google did back in 2015, which is where they saw this different person. The person tended to be younger, probably less than 40. They could be now in their 40s. They're probably looking for their next promotion. They're not bothered about your solution. Most of the sponsors, coaches, or people like that usually want your solution to come into the organization.

When I was at Oracle, I used to sell to a lot of people who wanted Oracle on their CVs. Therefore, they gave you information to make sure that you were the chosen solution whereas this changemaker doesn't care. What they want is to get the promotion. If you go to a meeting and they tear you apart, it's highly likely that person is a changemaker because what they're trying to do is they're testing your solution and credibility, whether you are trustworthy, whether you lie, or that sort of stuff. They're testing you and they then take your solution into the business.

For example, the Azure people in Microsoft use this technique. They find changemakers within the organization and then say, "Here's a piece of content that you may find interesting," knowing full well that changemaker will then take it into the organization and spread it. The finance director may not be active on LinkedIn but the changemaker does the work for you.

That's early in the book. There are great definitions there. Let me add a left-of-center question. What are you reading professionally?

I am a horrendous reader of books. I've read or will have read 40 books in 2023. The book I'm reading is a book called The Mom Test. If you are starting up a company or you have a business idea, the worst person you can ask about whether it would fly is your mom because she will tell you, "It's a great idea." It goes through how you should ask questions to customers and prospects. You haven't even built a product. It's the type of question that you should ask. It's good.

Isn't that fun? What a great premise for the book.

He has been a startup person himself. He made all the mistakes and said, "This cost me $500,000." He is great at coming up with the scenarios of the questions to ask rather than saying, "Would you like a fitness app?" You would say yes even though you didn't want one. You would say, "I'm a podcaster. Therefore, I'm interested in fitness." With the fact that I asked the question and you lied to me, immediately, I'm lost.

It's Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I learned a ton reading the book and you will too.

Thank you, Mark. It means a lot.

You're very welcome, Tim. We have lots of folks on this show. Many of them are driven because when I read the book, I want to talk to the person who wrote it, not the opposite where we get a guest. Andy has been on our show a few times and I've been on his show a few times. The thing that jumped out was, "How did I miss this?" Like you, I'm a voracious reader. I was kicking myself a little bit. Once I got into it, I started enjoying it because it is a strategic approach. It does get into some tactical coaching on what to do once you understand the strategy behind it. People are going to want to learn more about you and the business. How do they do that most efficiently?

The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm Timothy or Tim Hughes. My summary title is, "Should have played Quidditch for England." They can find me on Twitter or X. I'm @Timothy_Hughes. Our website is DLAignite.com.

Tim, thanks again for joining us.

You're welcome.

It's great to meet you. Folks, thank you so much for joining. We run the show to try and elevate the performance and professionalism of B2B sales but we're trying to improve the lives of salespeople. As Tim mentions in his book, which quotes back to Daniel Pink, one of our other guests, the more mastery you have in something, the more you're going to enjoy it. We run this show for you. If there are ways that we can improve this show, I would like to know.

My email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism. We respond to everybody who gives us an idea. If there's something you like, let me know that's great but if there's something that we could do to improve this, we want to know that. Thank you for doing so. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends. We want to improve their lives too. We will see you next time.

Important Links

• DLAignite

• Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers

• Simon Kemp - LinkedIn

• Andy Paul - Previous episode

• The Mom Test

• TimTi - LinkedIn

• @Timothy_Hughes - Twitter

• Daniel Pink - Previous episode

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Timothy Hughes

Tim Hughes is universally recognised as the world leading pioneer and innovator of Social Selling. He is currently ranked Number 1 by Onalytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, LinkedIn said he was one of the top 8 sales experts globally to follow and Brand 24 announced recently he was the 16th most influential person in marketing globally, based on measured social media influence.

He is also Co-Founder and CEO of DLA Ignite and co-author of the bestselling books “Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers - 2nd edition” and “Smarketing - How To Achieve Competitive Advantage through blended Sales and Marketing”. He has recently launched a second edition of “social selling - techniques to influence buyers and change makers” which has been fully updated.

Kind Folks Finish First: Sales And Career Lessons Toward Success With Sam Jacobs

Salespeople often have a bad rep; they are seen as sleazy, manipulative, and, sometimes, intense in the way they deal with others. It is time to change that misconception. Sam Jacobs, the founder and CEO of Pavilion, imparts the message through the book of the same name: Kind Folks Finish First. You don’t have to be ruthless to get ahead; kindness will get you there faster. In this episode, Sam joins us to tell us more about the book and highlights, along the way, the top sales trends we have seen this 2023. He discusses a value-first approach to sales and business, overcoming the notion of treating relationships transactionally. Sam also gives great food for thought about the way we look at our careers: should you do what you love? Why do you need side hustles? For more sales tips and insights that will lead you to success, tune in to this conversation!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Kind Folks Finish First: Sales And Career Lessons Toward Success With Sam Jacobs

We all know that those of us who have chosen a life in professional sales chose a business discipline that's a little more tumultuous than many others. According to Gardner and others, as we all know, the tenure of somebody who's a sales leader is now less than two years the average tenure. The average tenure of a professional salesperson is also less than two years. It's a unique profession that we've dedicated our lives to.

This episode is going to be helpful to all of us because we're talking with Sam Jacobs. He is the Founder and CEO of Pavilion, a thriving community with more than 10,000 members around the world. Sam has led revenue teams at a number of different firms, including Behavox, The Muse, Livestream, Axial and Gerson Lehrman Group. He also started a very successful podcast called The Sales Hacker Podcast.

He has written a book called Kind Folks Finish First. I'd like to share a wonderful testimonial from somebody that we respect, Daniel Pink. He has been on our show. His book, To Sell Is Human, one of our favorite sales books of all time. Here's what he writes about Sam's book, Kind Folks Finish First, “This is an excellently crafted book with a badly needed message. You don't have to be an aggressive jerk to succeed in business. In fact, if you lead with generosity and fairness, your professional life will be better off and your whole world will be plain better.”

We had a great conversation with Sam Jacobs. I'm aided in the co-hosting duties by our old friend Dave Hanley, who leads sales for AdvertiseCast. Dave has led a number of startups to very successful exits, but he lived through all of the challenges, the ups and downs of being in a sales career as well. He helps me chat with Sam. We're going to be talking about some of the key elements of Kind Folks Finish First, why Sam founded Pavilion, the value people get from the community of sales professionals, how so you need to lead with a value-first approach, and what your values are as a business professional.

We got some interesting thoughts about people in sales nowadays because of that short tenure, we all need back doors. Side hacks, being critically important, we're not entirely dependent on our employers when these changes take place. I enjoyed meeting Sam. It’s a great book. I wish I read this book or had this book when I started my sales career. You should pick it up. It’s a great conversation. I enjoyed chatting with Sam. I think you're going to enjoy this show. When you do, please like and subscribe because that matters to us. Thank you for doing so. Here's Sam Jacobs.

We've got a couple of fantastic guests that I'm going to introduce in a second. We're going to be talking about Kind Folks Finish First, a spectacular book by Sam Jacobs, who is the Founder of Pavilion. It is important for professional sales. This show exists to try and improve the lives of salespeople with education. When we get mastery of what we do, we feel better. As always, we're trying to share some strategies, processes, and tools that help all of us get better. We're going to have a great conversation because Pavilion exists to do the same thing, to help salespeople achieve their potential.

I own a company called In The Funnel. We are a group of sales coaches and consultants that help companies sell better, but I'm delighted to introduce a couple of my guests here. I'm going to first start with Dave Hanley. Many of you know that Dave is a friend of In The Funnel and a longtime client for full disclosure.

Dave is the Chief Revenue Officer of AdvertiseCast, the podcast advertising division of Libsyn. Before entering the podcast industry, Dave co-founded several successful enterprise SaaS businesses in the insurance and risk management space. He was the Cofounder of AdvertiseCast back in 2017 based on his passion for consuming great podcasts. He had great timing. The company quickly became a leader in the space as the first and largest online podcast advertising marketplace. In 2021, AdvertiseCast was acquired by Libsyn. Now Dave works in with Libsyn. Dave, welcome.

Thanks. I'm happy to be here. It’s great to meet Sam. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Thanks for joining. I would like to introduce Sam Jacobs. He is the Founder and the CEO of Pavilion. Many of you already know about Pavilion. He launched Pavilion originally as a revenue collective in 2016, then he bootstrapped the company to $10 million ARR or Annual Recurring Revenue. Before working with Elephant Ventures, he took $25 million in funding in growth financing.

Before Pavilion, Sam spent fifteen years as a Senior Revenue Leader in VC-backed companies in New York, including Gerson Lehrman Group, Axial, and there’s an interesting story there, Livestream and Vimeo, The Muse, and Behavox. Sam's story and journey has been well articulated in the book we're going to discuss here Kind Folks Finish First. Sam lives in the West Village of Manhattan with his wife and two dogs, William and Oswald. We're all pet lovers here. Oftentimes, when we've got Dave Hanley, we can see out his window and his horses in the background. Sam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I'm a happy customer of Libsyn. I’m delighted to be here.

Sam, we're chatting a little bit about the book because I did enjoy this book. I probably read a sales book every couple of weeks for the show as part of the joy of doing it. This one touched and resonated with me on a number of different fronts. Let me throw it over to you and get a little bit of a shorter story of your journey and what led you to write this book.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

It’s my pleasure.

I've been in New York for many years, the second time. I came back to New York to begin working and startups in 2003. From 2003 to 2018, fifteen years, I worked as a salesperson effectively and as a revenue leader in high-growth companies. What happened to me was that, as I achieved what I thought would be greater degrees of success in my professional life, I began to realize diminishing levels of happiness, enjoyment, and job security.

I worked at this one place that was super successful, GLG, for seven and a half years, and then I worked at the places that you mentioned in the bio, Axial, for four and a half years, Live Stream for 18 months, The Muse for 9 months, and Behavox for 10 months. What was happening was that my ten years were shrinking in the opposite way that I expected because when I was growing up, I thought that as you become more senior, you'll become more secure and established. You'll achieve wealth and do all that stuff. It wasn't really happening for me.

The book is about the founding of Pavilion and it was about me coming to the epiphany that I could remove myself from the way that I had thought been taught to live my career and try to, which doesn't mean I'm perfect and I don't think I'm better than anybody, embody a different set of principles and see what would happen. The book starts on Friday, the 13th of October 2017, when I was fired from The Muse. That's another part of the journey, which is that I faced a lot of failures, terminations, and a certainly relevant in an economy like the one we're in for technology.

Kind Folks Finish First: The Considerate Path to Success in Business and Life

I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike with a dog that's now passed away, Walter, in the back seat and with my partner in the front seat. I got a message from the CEO. I was using my phone. This was before Apple CarPlay became ubiquitous in cars. I was always using my phone as a GPS and Waze. I got a little notification. I pulled over and said, “I didn't even realize you'd be out of the office. Can you come back into the office first thing on Monday?”

I remember thinking, “She's not a morning person. She's not into first thing in the morning.” I'd gotten that three-line email before and I knew immediately what was happening, which was that I was being fired. That was a moment at which I decided to embark on a different journey. That journey led me to begin to build the Pavilion in earnest. I hate to sound too cliché or too woo-woo, as my coach would say, but it was a journey of self-actualization. It was a journey that led to where I am now.

That's effectively what the book was about. Fundamentally, to cut to the chase, the book is about a different set of values that I articulate and that I would share with the audience and with people that would read it that says, “You don't have to behave in a way that you've been taught or maybe some people have been taught. It doesn't have to be a dog eat dog, ruthless competition, or zero some.”

You don't have to treat relationships transactionally. Every time you help somebody, you don't have to get an invoice back in return. You can do things for the good of helping. It's not that it'll make you feel better, but that you'll die a popper, penniless, and destitute. This is a formula for professional success. I've used this formula to build the company that I now run and to help other people do the same.

First of all, there is so much to one pack there. This is what hit me so much. You're in your car. You're driving. You think everything's okay. You've seen it many times. The chapter one's title is Fired At The Rest Stop. You've got that weekend where you're going to go through this and you know you're walking into this meeting on Monday, and then you're going to get fired. This has happened multiple times. We may have been of a generation where we thought, “The longer we do this, the more stable our roles are going to be,” and so on and so forth.

As you aptly point out in chapter two, Gardner tells us the chief revenue officer is going to last eighteen months. Now you're going to go through this whole rigmarole again. For everybody who's going to go through some tumultuous times, there is that adage that said, “It's sunny as after it's darkest. Maybe we have to go through some of these things. Any of us who've had a little more to come of success, you've had some of those challenging times as well.”

It tugged at me. I related to that so much. I had a similar type of journey in some ways somewhere. Maybe I tapped out of companies before I was going to get fired. I was pretty happy at one point in time to tell people, “If I didn't like something, I just walked out of it.” In some sense, I was thinking, “I'm not going to be successful here. I'm going to tap out before they tap out.” Going through this journey, at some point in time, you get quite frustrated and go, “There's got to be a better way,” and leading to this abundance mindset.

Start to say, “It's not about me. It's not about what I'm making. Let's figure out how we put a little kindness into the world here. The fact that abundance begets abundance.” Before this journey, I thought there was some great wisdom in here about doing something you love, and we have a little shared interest. I'm back in my bar band again after years and years. We played at a historic club in Toronto on a Friday night. We went on at 10:00 PM and finished at about 12:15.

In the middle of that show, I realized my bedtime is 10:00 PM and there's a reason for that. I'm a drummer. I could feel my coordination leaving me pretty quickly as I was going through this gig. What did you do before you went into the world? What did it teach you about finding that idea about doing something you love?

As you alluded, I've got a background in music as well. I ran a record label out of school in the late ‘90s. We set up on a horse farm in the middle of Virginia. We thought we were going to start a commune. A bunch of people would come through the commune and record. I reference a bunch of like artists' collectives that people might know about from my indie rock days. What I realized in starting that record label was that, first of all, the music industry is like a pretty bad business. Also, when people say, “Do what you love,” it's not always the most useful advice.

There are a couple of reasons for that. The first reason is I believe in the power of experience. I'm not trying to stifle anybody's fulfillment or actualization. If you're whatever age you are, if you want to go out and start your own business or do your own thing, I support you as I did. I will tell you that the first thing is that I didn't know what I loved when I was entering the workforce. It takes some reps and experience. That's thing number one.

Thing number two is I find that people miscategorize what they “love.” Sometimes they identify the mission of the organization with the jobs to be done in that organization. They conflict with those two things. They say, “I love Lululemon. I want to work for Lululemon as a senior controller.” Being a senior controller in Lululemon doesn't mean you're doing yoga all day and hobnobbing with other celebrities who also love Lululemon. It means that you're looking at financial statements.

People miscategorize what they “love” and identify the mission of the organization with the jobs to be done in that organization and conflate those two things.

The final thing and most important thing is that if we're thinking about professional success, there's a Venn diagram. There are three things that are involved in that Venn diagram. There's what people are good, what they're interested in or what they love, and most importantly, there's where the market is moving. People underestimate or undervalue where the market is moving and what they're good at. They overvalue what they're interested in. I was interested in recording music. I love recording music. I've got a bunch of albums on Spotify. That doesn't mean that I should be a professional musician. That might mean that that's a fun hobby for me.

I needed to look at the fact that I was starting a record label at the rise of Mp3.com. Maybe recorded music is coming back a little bit, but fundamentally, there were about two decades there when the entire economy in the music industry fell apart. It was not a good time to start a record label. That doesn't make me less creative or less artistic. That's the reality of the world. The last thing I'll say in my long-winded way is that people don't distill the daily activities of a function. They put a label on the broad definition of the function. They say, “I don't like finance. I don't like sales.” Let's talk about salespeople. “I like sales,” or, “I would never do sales.”

What is sales? Sales is talking to people, being curious about them, figuring out what their problems are, and then figuring out if your product-solution service might be able to help that person solve that problem. That's one part of what sales is. Another part is, “Do you like long project-based work? You shouldn't work as an SMB seller with 30 days of sales cycles. Do you like instant gratification? Do you like to know that I do something, and very soon thereafter, I see the result from it?” Sales might be a good career option for you.

I find that a long-winded way of simply saying to an early career person, “Do what you love,” is not super helpful. I find that giving people a framework for how to think about it does a couple of things. One of them is it manages their expectations a little bit because the other thing that happens that is happening now with quiet quitting and employee disengagement is that everybody's been misled about the nature of work to a certain extent. Everybody's like, “Why do I not feel like I'm at church and the pastor is singing?” Sometimes, it's just work. Sometimes, that's what it is. It's not that every moment is going to be an epiphany when all you say is, “Do what you love.” It's not super helpful, when you're thinking about, “How do I practically build a career over decades as opposed to over months?”

Your friend, Dan Pink, has been on our show. One of my favorite books of all time, in addition to yours, is To Sell Is Human. It came around at the same time that we started this business many years ago. Dan Pink didn't come from a background in sales, but on the show, I asked him, “Why'd you write this book about sales if you had no background in sales?” He said there was such a disconnect with everybody that he knew in professional sales, but the stereotype of someone in sales as a pitcher, used car salesman, and all this. Everybody knew in professional sales were some of the smartest, most intellectually curious problem-solving people he knew out there.

That book is like a masterclass or an MBA for sales because his research is thorough, but he was trying to find ou. Of the 8 and 9 people in the US who aren't in professional sales, 1 in 9 are and 8 in 9 aren't. What percentage of their day do they spend trying to persuade somebody else to their point of view? It turns out it's 39% of the day. All half of every day, they're trying to convince somebody else to their point of view. Everybody's got this default, “I'm not in sales.”

We hear that often when we're training service technicians or something of that age, “I'm not in sales. I could never sell anybody anything.” It’s something's exactly like what you said. It's helping somebody achieve a better future and business outcome. At the end, I asked Dan, “Where do you see sales going?” He netted it out as saying, “Nowadays, professional B2B sales is management consulting. Anything that isn't that will be taken care of by automation or AI, etc., but true sales is management consulting.” Any of this resonate for you, Mr. Hanley?

I'm thinking about my background and how it relates. I went to school and I thought I was going to get into Finance. I decided after my second-year Accounting course that I hated it. I stumbled into more entrepreneurship. What you realize when you want to start a business and work on a new venture is that a large percentage of what you're doing is sales.

The key is being curious. What happened to my career is if you don't know what you're doing, which I didn't, and I got into an industry that I knew nothing about, I was, by nature, asking a lot of questions because I wanted to learn and curious. That came across as, “This is a great person to talk to. They're interested in our business, and they care about how they can help us.” For the most part, I was trying to learn, but what a lot of salespeople who are new to selling don't realize is that you don't show up and pitch. You have to ask questions, solve a problem, and communicate whether or not you can help add value and solve that problem.

There's a big conference called Collision. It is a technology startup conference. There are 36,000 people in Downtown Toronto. The energy and enthusiasm of walking around a conference like that is spectacular. There are a lot of startups. They've said it up. Startups, mid-tie, and growth organizations and lots of VC. Everybody gets a seat at the table. It's an interesting setup. I probably chatted with twenty startups going through and having conversations.

Not a single person in any of those things asks me a question. The best two questions I got I was somebody said, “What brought you to the conference?” Many said, “Tell me about your business.” I'm not joking. This was the guy taking my order in the coffee truck outside of the conference. This is the only person at the conference who asked me anything.

That makes me upset.

It gave us an opportunity when we were walking around. After I'd have these conversations with these startup founders, I'd share that and say, “Here are a couple of things to do next time if you're open to it. You might want to think about this question and get someone talking to you, plus you'll enjoy it more.” I could see when they were doing their pitch for the twentieth time that day, they were tired. I thought, “Ask a question. Get involved in an engaged conversation.”

I'm going to give a shout-out to the guy taking orders from Fleet Coffee when I was getting my cappuccino. Sam, tell us about the rest stop. Now, we've had this epiphany. It leads to 2016 or 2017. You'd always had a dinner club or a networking club for other people in your role. How does that evolve into what is now, the opportunity with First Revenue Collective and Pavilion? Tell us a little bit about that journey.

The first thing I would say is it began without any sense of expectation. There was either one in Toronto that David was putting together on sales or something like that. There was one in the Chicago Sales Assembly. My point is I didn't think that this was a venture-scale business. This was not some world-dominating master plan.

This was me saying, “I'm not solving backward,” from, “I need to have dominated the world by X, Y, Z year.” It is me saying, “I'm going to check out of the Merry-Go-Round or the carousel that I'm on, and I'm going to build something that I care about and that I love. I'm not going to worry too much about anything other than Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Is there going to be a roof over my head? Can I pay rent? Can I do what I love, which is helping people and connecting people so that they can achieve their career outcome?”

I got fired. It was the fall of 2017. I've written about this on LinkedIn. I said, “I can't be dependent for all of my income on one source of revenue anymore If I'm going to work for somebody else. I need ‘side hustles.’ The world is too uncertain for me to put all of my eggs in a basket that somebody else totally controls and can decide at any moment that I'm no longer suitable for the basket. I'm going to build a consulting business. I'm going to take this dinner club, try and monetize it. I'm not trying to monetize it so that I can be on the cover of Time Magazine. I'm not trying to be Elon Musk. I'm just trying to do something that I care and am passionate about that frankly can't be taken from me.”

That was the origin of it. From there, there were 22 people then. I said, “Everybody, we're going to charge dues on January 1, 2018. Who's in?” 20 out of 22 people said, “I'm in. I’m not sure what I'm paying for, but I'm up for it,” and then we grew from there. People started hearing about what we were doing all over the world and people from other cities started reaching out now. Why did they?

One thing I think is sometimes people don't know why they're successful, but if I had to guess, there was a point of view behind the community. It wasn't networking for its own sake. It was, “What do we believe about the world? How should we align and what do we still believe about the world to this day?” We believe a couple of things. First of all, there has been a little bit of undue influence focused on CEOs and investors and not enough care is taken for the people that run and operate those companies.

As a consequence of that, we still teach people how to negotiate and what they're entitled to when it comes to executive compensation. What I want for everybody is that you don't have to be this founder or CEO to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life. There's a role for an executive operator at a company, but that role needs to be renegotiated because the old deal wasn't working very well. That was a big part of what attracted people to the community, which is that there was a latent point of view that was articulated.

You don't have to be this founder or CEO to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life.

When we do worse in our Incarnation, which is 10,000 people, it's because we're not doing enough to articulate that point of view that we're not clear enough in why we exist and what we stand for. That was one of the big reasons why people begin to come to us. We grew over the course of 2018. I worked one more place full-time, and then I got fired. I was having breakfast with a mentor and I said, “I'm going to try and work on Pavilion full-time, but if it doesn't work, I'll go back to being a CRO,” and he smiled and said, “I think we've tried that experiment at this point.” I won't say the rest was history. It's been a lot of stops and starts, mistakes, and great outcomes.

We're in the middle of our next phase of evolution, which is about getting back to our roots and re-embracing the ideas that got us here in the first place, which is a point of view that we exist for the individual operator first and foremost. We want to train that person not just to be a good employee but to be an actualized and self-realized human. That might mean consulting and advisory business like you've done. We want to teach people how to have a career. A career is not you work one place for twenty years anymore. It's a series of gigs, advisory roles, and consulting jobs. It is the combination of all of those things in the accumulation of all those experiences over time, which hopefully lead to wealth, impact, better relationships with your partners, and that whole thing.

The path there is always, “Are you enjoying what you're doing?” You talk a lot about you weren't fulfilled in many of the roles leading up to it. You have this epiphany. I've always felt the same way that, finally, when I did this, it felt like this is what I was meant to do, but I needed that corporate journey for twenty years to teach me something that was valuable. I needed that experience. I needed to do massive and smaller deals. I needed to run big teams and small teams. I needed to learn something that was valuable if I could add my own unique ability there.

We were talking that there a little bit about the side hustle and consulting. Chapter seven is Every Crisis Is An Opportunity. You do talk about this. This is very helpful for folks reading this, which is the rules of compensation. There's some great coaching in this book as to, “If you're negotiating that next deal, what should you think about?” You have five things that you're entitled to when it comes to compensation. 1) Due diligence. Do your investigation number. 2) Aligned compensation, liquidity by the way. I'm getting options, “Am I ever going to get them out?” We'll talk about double triggers a little later on.

Negotiate the severance upfront and think about that, which is one of the ways you got a little breathing space to get into this, and then consult, talking about how you build something on the side for you that no matter what, you're allowed to continue on doing. With In The Funnel, we work with a lot of people who do exactly that. They may have been a client of ours at some point, like Dave, then over time, they start to work with us because they've got their own consulting businesses on the side. It's a great model for them. It's a fantastic model for us.

Here's the other thing I love reading that chapter about negotiation. Understand what you'd like and then what you're willing to agree with. Most people don't understand how to negotiate. You underlined this a few times. Don't bluff. I don't know where we were taught to negotiate and being tough, mean, and banging at the table. At one point in time, we negotiated a $1 billion deal. I've never been scared in my life, but the one thing I knew I wasn't going to do was lie at the table. I've never been over my head ever. When we're negotiating it, the only thing I had was my character and integrity. Don't make a commitment you can't adhere to. Don't bluff. That is not a TV show. That's very good coaching for everybody out there. Comments, Mr. Hanley?

Mark and I were talking about this piece of the book before. It took me back. I've worked with Mark for many years. I don't remember how many years it has been. One of the original big learnings I had from Mark was on negotiation. You're trying to work a big deal and we said, “The price is X,” and the client is looking for Y. Trying to find that win-win and what's important.

It is asking the question saying, “We gave you a price of $100,000. You want it for $80,000. What else is important? Is it the timing? Can you wait? Do you want it now? What other levers can we pull to get something that works for both of us? Can you pay a little bit upfront as opposed to the back end?” It is asking those questions to figure out how we can negotiate and come to an agreement. We're not lying, bluffing, or throwing red herrings. It's more of asking the right questions and trying to find something that works for both parties.

Make the pie bigger. It's not about a bigger piece of the pie. It is trying to think about, “How do we make the pie bigger?” There's got be that trust and authenticity to have that conversation. I don't know if the book answers directly, but we have a conversation and it seems you are the wisest, most balanced person out there. What was happening that you were getting dismissed frequently or why, in your view, are CRO only lasting eighteen months in their job? Pavilion must see a ton of this with the on-the-bench and so on and so forth. What's going on that the tenure of this role as short?

Let's speak about me first. I don't think I'm blameless at all. I can be a difficult person to work with. When you're a C-level executive working for CEO, what you have to understand fundamentally is that it's their company. They can call it a partnership. You can call it the first team. You can read The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team by Pat Lencioni. It is their company. You work in service to them.

I always joke about where if you're in a romantic relationship with somebody else, they yell at you, but they don't get over grievances with you and they don't leave. They seem to want us to stay. That was me. That was being disgruntled and saying, “I could do it better. If I could do better, I should go do it better because it's their company.” This idea of, “If I was being frustrated with the potential of an opportunity without acknowledging the reality of it, that's my fault. That's not anybody else's problem. Those idiots won't listen to me. That's my problem and not their problem.” That's how I was. I've always felt like I was probably a better startup CEO than I was a startup employee, but I never had anything that I was working on of any size or scale. Now, thank God, I do. Lo and behold, I haven't been fired since 2016 when I got this thing off the ground. That's a great thing.

Let's speak more broadly to the tenure of a CRO. There are a lot of factors at play. I don't think that there's an enemy. There's no bad person or good person in this equation. The first thing is we're working in a world that is changing more rapidly by the day. That's true. We're talking about AI. It's not that AI was invented with ChatGPT, but this hype cycle was created in November 2022. It already feels like we've been talking about it forever. The world is changing more quickly than it used to be.

We're working in a world that is changing more rapidly by the day.

Many of us have watched Mad Men, where Don Draper goes to launch, has three martinis, and then goes to take a nap. That's fine because nothing happens that quickly. They had telephones. They didn't have pager or iPhones. The pace of business was slower. That's one thing I think. The second thing I think is if we're going to work at high-growth companies in particular, we do have to acknowledge that $2 million business that grows to $6 million or $8 million over two years, and this is true for us, we went from $4 million to $17 million over two years, the things that I need an executive to do at $4 million company are different things. It's a different company.

The only reason it's become clear to all of us is because we are choosing to work in these high-growth inorganic environments, but in the old days, that was seen as extraordinary growth. It wasn't true. Things don't grow in 200%. It was technology that enabled this. The last thing I'll say, which is part of the work frankly of Pavilion, is community unto itself is not that interesting. Community with a point of view is more interesting because there's something to rally around.

There's a point of view that founders, CEOs and investors don't know how to make money. In fact, most CRO’s don't know how to make money. What do I mean by that? This is related to what you said about the Bill of Rights about those five things. The second thing that you mentioned was the line compensation. There's this world that we've lived in for a long time, which is the senior sales leader, the chief revenue officer, and the VP of sales should be the highest-paid person at the company. That's because the salesperson brings in all the money, but that's not true.

That's not where money comes from. Money comes from the product, marketing sales, customer success, and partnerships all being in alignment. If you want to add more money, you need happy customers. You get happy customers from a good product. You get people aware of your product because you have great marketing.

This whole idea that, “We're going to hire the savior salesperson that used to work at Salesforce, Adobe, or Oracle. They're going to come in, transform our business, and we're going to pay that person $700,000 a year, but we're going to pay him $350,000 base and $350,000 commission. When that doesn't happen because it's not the senior sales leader, we're going to fire that person. We tried to hire the savior. The savior didn't work, back to the drawing board. Let's find the next savior.”

In fact, the process of building long-term sustainable businesses is alignment across the go-to-market organization, which is another perspective that Pavilion shares. That's part of the education that I'm on. Prior to this session, I was teaching the first session of Pavilion's CRO school. We were developing a theory of enterprise value. What is that about? That is about, “Let's set a foundation for how money gets made.” It's not hiring the salesperson with lots and lots of meetings and no process can still make money for the business.

The salesperson with the absolute best medic process and everything is qualified and put into Salesforce, but if there are no meetings at all, that person will get fired. That is the line on how value is created, but to the point of the eighteen months, lots of people aren't aligned on how value is created. Investors, CEOs and founders, particularly those who come from technical and product backgrounds, don't know what's supposed to happen. They think, “I hire a salesperson and money comes out a month later,” and they understand, “Not really.”

That's a great explanation. We've asked that question 50 times on this show. Does that resonate for you, Dave?

I was thinking about how it relates to what you talk about a lot. Parachute in this amazing salesperson and they can make it rain, but there has to be alignment in terms of going back to the core of what you like to talk about, which is the value proposition of the business. What problems do you solve? All that needs to be throughout every aspect of the organization. Marketing needs to talk to that. Customer service needs to know that. That needs to emanate from them as well. A lot of times, somebody, maybe like the person who's running the business, doesn't even know how to articulate their value proposition, but they expect a salesperson to come in, go out there, and make magic. That's not going to happen.

I created this stuff for the CEO and founders that I advise. I said, “You got to invest in marketing before sales. I don't mean you hire all marketing before you hire a single salesperson, but the function needs to be excellent.” They say, “I got it. I've been doing some research on marketing and I had a director of demand gen because I'm doing what you said, and nothing's happening.” I'm like, “Demand gen is FedEx, logistics, and putting a message in front of a certain group of people at a certain time so that they'll take action. What's the message? What are you putting in the container?” He is like, “What do you mean what's the message?” “Our thing is great and that everybody else is for it.”

That's features and functions.

They come out of meetings where it falls down and they go, “She didn't get it.” In front of a client, they can't articulate it. The client doesn't even understand what they're talking about. It's gibberish. They pointed the client going, “She didn't get it. She's not right for us.” The hard work is boiling the old Albert Einstein. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

If somebody works with your company, “What's unique and different about you?” “Application development shops or 100,000 different application development shops.” How do these people differentiate? It's all the same. The hard work is in capturing this to enable the sales organization to be successful or enable the marketing team. This is hard work. It's not self-evident work.

The last thing I'll say is you give that speech to them and they say, “How long does that take to create the right message?” You're like, “It takes a long time. I don't have a long time. I sold these investors on the promise of proft this year, but I think I'm going to go hire more salespeople.”

That's exactly what everybody's done with the VC money until they're worn anymore, or until you couldn't do it anymore and the prices kept going up, and the model doesn't work. I should point the finger to In The Funnel here. We're in the same boat as everybody else. We came up with value proposition messaging many years ago. It came from me, and we thought it worked, it would go through the organization, and then it became this mantra that everybody was repeating. We were teaching it in our CRO school one day.

Somebody put up their hand and said, “That's not your value proposition because it used to be, ‘We help companies sell better. Companies come to us when revenue growth is stagnated or the sales team is underperforming.’” Our first 50 clients came to us because of that, then we're in this workshop with 60 people in 15 hands go up and go, “I saw why we're here. Our sales team is killing it, but we want to keep them. Your value proposition is wrong.” They were absolutely right. We're coaching people like Dave Hanley, killing it, exiting 2 and 3 times. He's not in trouble at all. He just wants to keep getting better.

Unfortunately, not everybody has clients that'll tell them that. They'll give them that feedback.

There's not a one-time thing and you are refining it after 100 client meetings. It's an ongoing process. It's not complicated. It's not easy. None of this is an easy fix. What would you coach or counsel? We have our pal, Frank Cespedes, from Harvard. You probably know Frank. He hass written 7 or 8 books. The latest one is called Sales Management That Works. In that book, he talks about, “If you graduate college or university today, there's a 50% chance 1 in 2 of those people will have some role in professional sales in their lifetime.” That's what the stats seem to be. He's pulled up the stats.

What would you tell somebody graduating in college or university? Where would they go? When I did it, there were places to get the world's best sales education. I could go to Xerox. I did go to Kodak. That's where I started. I was in a different country at Sales University for 90 days or 4 months before I ever saw a client or IBM. What does somebody do now in your view? Where do they go? Pavilion?

I think so. The truth of the matter is that Pavilion is more an executive community than an entry-level community. You should come to Pavilion if you want to learn how to be an executive. We have this concept of associate and analyst memberships, but those memberships are focused on education. It's a hard question nowadays. If you'd asked me this before, I’d still probably give the same answer that you gave, “Go to work at Oracle, ADP, Paychex, Xerox, or a company that has the resources and infrastructure to train you.” In the same way that before you should go work for a hedge fund, you probably work at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, or Merrill Lynch so that you can get trained in the core foundations of your craft before you move on to a higher level functions.

I'd still say that, but I'm not sure that those people are hiring. The other thing I would caution is that the role of the sales development rep used to be the perfect entry-level role. There are still people who are hiring SDRs, but I do think that that role is challenged more than it has been in the past because the rote automation of all of these technologies that are creating millions of emails and trillions of text messages is diminishing people's attention span and their ability to engage.

That said, I would invest in your own education outside of a core company providing for it. That might be Pavilion, SV Academy or Sales Assembly, but it's something that gives you some exposure. Fundamentally, now more than ever, your career is your responsibility. Nobody is going to be looking out for you in the way that you might hope or expect.

Now more than ever, your career is your responsibility. Nobody is really going to be looking out for you in the way that you might hope or expect.

It's a very good advice. You've got to take control of your own career now. It’s a different one. There are lots of opportunity, but I think that's sage advice. Dave, any final questions for Sam?

Mark and I were chatting about one of the aspects of the book that we already touched on a little bit with compensation. I am wondering if you had any advice for somebody who is a founder that is leading a business and bringing in a sales function. What advice do you give to them on how they should craft a sales compensation plan for a team that aligns properly with what the organization is trying to do? I've been in that situation a few times. It's hard to find the perfect model. I’m curious about your thoughts on that.

A couple of thoughts, the first is that before you hire someone else to sell, you better have done it yourself. That's a prerequisite. It's not, “I have this great product. Go sell it.” You have to have done it. I don't care what you think about your sales capabilities. If you can't sell it, they definitely can't sell it. You have a founder and CEO on your business card or email signature and they don't. You should get between 5 to 20 clients on your own as a founder before you go out and look to invest in the sales function.

The next thing I would say is if you want to hire your first 1 or 2 salespeople, what should be their comp plan? Quota implies predictability. If you don't have predictability, then I don't think we should be talking about quotas. What we want to do is define a very generous commission structure. First, you show that you can sell it, then you need to show somebody other than you can sell it.

You're not going to be able to pay that person very much in base salary. Maybe we give them 20% of every sale. Maybe we give them a year. If they make too much money and we feel annoyed that they need so much money, let's consider that a great success. That would have been way better if they made too much money than not enough.

From there, once we have a little bit of predictability, then we can start to design some comp structure. At scale, 20% of bookings does not work. There are a lot of companies that were paying 15% or 20%. The math of that in an interest rate environment that is normalized as opposed to where there's free money does not work. The number that tends to work better than others is 10%. You need to be able to show that 10% plus base salary equals an amount of money that can pay that person's bills. The benchmarks, which many people know but are roughly 10 times base, should be the quota or 4 times OTE. If you're an account executive and your OTE or On-Target Earnings is $150,000 and that $75,000 base and $75,000 commission, then your quota should be $750,000.

Those are great metrics take away. Those are very helpful.

The main thing I would say is too many people are like, “We're building a revenue model to get to $2 million in IRR.” I'm like, “Below $2 million IRR, the revenue model is interesting, but we should be thinking about milestones the business needs to hit that work towards predictability as opposed to working backward from the spreadsheet.”

The first thing I get into would be your specific curriculum for the CRO school. I'd be very interested in that, given what we do. There are lots of great stuff to share there. We've had a good taste Of Kind Folks Finish First. One of the things that I didn't get when I started in professional sales was a sense of self-esteem or pleasure for being in professional sales. When I started, it felt like a default because at that point in time, I was done with MBA, my friends were in investment banking, and they were lawyers. It felt like I took the easy route until I realized it was the best job ever. I wish I had this book many years ago. You've got it now, Kind Folks Finish First: The Considerate Path To Success In Business And Life, Sam Jacobs with Kerri Linsenbigler. Sam, how do people learn more about you and Pavilion?

You can email me at Sam@JoinPavilion.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn, where some other people have chosen to do that. You can go to JoinPavilion.com.

Dave, how do people find you?

I'm in the podcast business, both on podcast hosting and technology, as well as advertising. The hosting company is called Libsyn.com and then the advertising side is AdvertiseCast.com. Anybody who is interested can check that out.

First of all, thank you very much for joining and taking time out of your valuable time. There's been huge value to the audience. I want to thank the readers. We run this show to try and help improve the performance and professionalism of the B2B sales team and improve the lives of professional salespeople. That's what we're trying to do here. I know there are things we can do to improve. You're the ones who tell me that. We love constructive criticism.

If you like this show, please like and subscribe. That matters to us. If there are things that we can do to elevate this show and make it more valuable to you, please let me know. My personal email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism. Please be direct. Anybody who sends us a note gets a nice note back from us. We'll respond to every piece of advice. Thank you for joining. We'll see you next episode. Sam and Dave, thank you so much for joining. We'll see both of you again soon, I hope.

Thank you so much for having me. Dave, it’s great to meet you. Take care.

Important Links

• Pavilion

• The Sales Hacker Podcast

• Kind Folks Finish First

• Daniel Pink – Past Episode

• To Sell Is Human

• AdvertiseCast

• The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team

• Sales Management That Works

• Sam@JoinPavilion.com

• LinkedIn – Sam Jacobs

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Sam Jacobs

Sam Jacobs is the Founder & CEO of Pavilion. He launched Pavilion as Revenue Collective in 2016 and bootstrapped the company to $10M in ARR before taking on a $25M growth financing round in early 2021.

His early vision of Pavilion was about more than creating a community to help salespeople excel at work. He wanted to turn centuries of so-called business wisdom on its head. Sam believed in a world where reciprocity, generosity, and kindness could be good for business—a world where self-interest was replaced with community and everyone could get ahead.

Pavilion has proven Sam’s hypothesis many times over, growing into a $200 million professional development company that helps its members get through giving. Prior to Pavilion, Sam spent 15 years as a senior revenue leader at VC-backed companies in the New York area including Gerson Lehrman Group, Axial, Livestream/Vimeo, The Muse, and Behavox.

Story Selling: Six Key Principles To Level Up Your Sales Prowess With Bernadette McClelland

All sales leaders and salespeople face three challenges: finding the right level of connection with the buyer, having the right depth of conversation with that buyer, and increasing the rate of conversion. Sales thought leader Bernadette McClelland finds the root cause of these challenges in the stories involved, whether these are the stories we tell ourselves as salespeople or the stories we tell the buyer. In this conversation, Bernadette McClelland unpacks the concept of “story-selling” and shares its six essential principles that will take your sales prowess to the next level. She also talks about the key things discussed in her latest book, SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. Prepare to take some notes as we pick the mind of one of the greatest selling wisdom purveyors anywhere!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Story Selling: Six Key Principles To Level Up Your Sales Prowess With Bernadette McClelland

Thank you very much for your great words of encouragement while we took a little bit of an extended vacation here in the summer. We did take a trip to Italy and eat way too much pizza and pasta, Donna and I, but we’re back at it now, and we’re so excited. We’ve got some wonderful shows coming your way as we lead up to the end of Q4 2023. None better, by the way, than the one that’s coming at you right now. I had a fantastic conversation with Bernadette McClelland. Bernadette is with 3 Red Folders, that’s her consulting company.

She’s written a wonderful book called SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. This is Bernadette’s sixth book and she’s had some great testimonials in her books. I enjoyed this. The core concept we get into this is talking about story selling. That’s opposed to storytelling. We’ve had, as you know, a number of guests on the show talking about storytelling, which for the most part takes us through the hero’s journey.

Bernadette differentiates with story selling, the model she came up with. She did it to actually address three key issues a lot of sales leaders and salespeople face when they’re going to market. 1) Finding the right level of connection with a buyer. 2) Having the right depth of conversation with the buyer. 3) Increasing the rate of conversion as we work through these sell cycles to get to closure. These are three challenges most sales leaders and salespeople face.

The root cause that Bernadette came up with for these challenges is the stories involved, whether these are the stories we tell ourselves as salespeople, the stories we tell the buyer or the stories we elicit from the buyer. Some of the principles of great story selling that Bernadette comes up with and we discuss in this episode are six of them. Story selling inspires change. It’s root cause-focused. It’s a strategy in pictures. It helps to de-risk decisions for the buyer. It increases collaboration and generates wisdom and meaning. It’s a great conversation with Bernadette.

One of our other books, by the way, is called, When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going. What a title. By the way, some good advice. I enjoyed speaking with Bernadette. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy this episode. When you do, please continue to like and subscribe to The Selling Well show and tell your friends because that matters to us. Thank you for doing so. Here’s Bernadette McClelland.

Bernadette, thanks so much for joining the show. It’s so great to meet you.

Same here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

I haven’t completed the whole book, but I enjoyed SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. It’s impossible for that to be a bad idea. We’re going to unpack what story selling means. I love your approach here. Bernadette, to start, let’s talk a little bit about your journey in professional sales. How’d you get here?

It’s been a journey, hasn’t it?

It always has. It always is.

Journey with lots of turn-backs, dead ends, and freeways where you go for it. I’m fortunate I was granted immediate residency to live in the United States. The reason I’m sharing that is because the way that I came over was based on immigration and the US government recognizing the fact that I am an alien. I’ve always been like an alien, but I have an exceptional ability in sales leadership. That means a lot to me because when I first wanted to go into sales in corporate Australia, I was a sales coordinator and I was doing all the commissions and doing all the orders for the sales guys back in the ‘80s. It was like, “He’s earning that much?”

SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom

I applied, but they kept knocking me back by saying that I wasn’t aggressive enough. I didn’t have what it took to be in sales, and I was too nice. I hope that I’ve dialed back the aggressive part that did come out that enabled me to get the job. My journey over the years has taken me from corporate Australia through small business in Australia owning a family business, a wholesale, retail, and importing business, and coming full circle back to running my own consultancy. That’s been the journey.

You’ve got some wonderful testimonials from some of the biggest names in the industry like Jeb Blount and Tony Robbins. Folks will certainly check out those as we move forward. What an interesting piece of feedback back to the ‘80s where somebody would get coaching that you are too nice to be in sales, not aggressive enough. Right now, we wonder why there’s this 50-year-old stereotype about a professional salesperson that’s completely wrong. Of course, it’s wrong. Those of us who know anything about sales know that stereotype is inaccurate.

In fact, it was the impetus for Dan Pink. You quote Dan Pink multiple times in SHIFT and DISRUPT, but he wrote to sell as human. He saw such a gap between that stereotype of professional sales and what he saw when he was interacting with his own personal contacts and professional sales who were intellectually curious, great at problem-solving, and creative. We had him on the show a little while back.

In the end, I asked him why he wrote the book. That’s what he told me. He said, “There was such a gap between the stereotype that didn’t apply and where we are now.” This is your sixth book. In this episode, we’re talking about SHIFT and DISRUPT. Prior to that, The Art of Commercial Conversations. The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself and 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale!. What are the two other books?

When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going.

That’s good coaching.

SMASH Through Your Sales Barrier! was my very first book.

I may get the book wrong, but I appreciated the authenticity of your story. After writing 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale! I think it was Matt Church who asked you and said, “Does this book inspire you?” You said no.

I was doing a lot of work with Matt Church. He’s the Founder of Thought Leaders Global out of Sydney, a wonderful community. He did. I worked with him. The book was The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself. It was my first attempt at moving my writing into a more thought leadership style bringing in my own IP, mental models, and all of that. Matt said to me, “Bernadette, did it inspire you?” I, hand on heart, it didn’t. What I was doing there, in my growth and in my experimentation, was writing, thinking, and bringing some form of wisdom into my writing. It was probably a little bit too much left-brained, and that’s okay. For ourselves to be inspired, there has to be a spark of something.

SHIFT and DISRUPT has brought together the rational thinking that you mentioned. There’s research in there, but there’s also a story. There’s also that inspirational component because not only us as sales professionals but our buyers need that combination as well. When we think about the fact that our oldest form of communication is story and our oldest form of commerce is selling, it made sense to bring the two together, create this portmanteau, and lean into story selling as a concept and philosophy. Not a methodology, but as a philosophy.

I did a little bit of research before I created my model. Everywhere I looked, we hear story selling, but it’s usually about marketing, presentation skills, brand management, or it’s bringing in the hero’s journey. I wanted it to be different and practical. There are some wonderful experts out there in the storytelling space. I wanted to recognize them as well, but I also wanted to bring in a flavor that took a salesperson’s or sales professional’s conversations to not just a higher level but a deeper level because that’s what our buyers are wanting now.

It’s an interesting delineation. We’ve had a number of guests on the show about storytelling and probably one of the more popular books out there is Building a StoryBrand.

Yeah, absolutely.

It always speaks of the hero’s journey. It actually makes that reference and says, “What you’re doing with your storytelling is you’re making the buyer the hero of the journey, but you’ve got to go through that process.” From the book, when you’re trying to differentiate or delineate between storytelling and story selling, which we’ll get to in a second, you actually say story selling is a philosophy that helps a business, its leadership, and its sales team shift how they think and feel about achieving their business outcomes and revenue goals while ethically supporting the buyer.

It helps them see the gaps they didn’t know existed and find puzzle pieces they never knew they were missing. The approach you’re taking here is by going at this way and taking a little bit of a different approach, not only am I helping the buyer but I’m actually helping my team. In doing so as a leader, that means I’m helping myself. Tell me a little bit about how else we differentiate storytelling from story selling.

To begin with, it is based on a model. It’s based on what I refer to as the story-selling circles. To keep it simple, what I’d like to start with is the concept that growth sits at the center of a Venn diagram. We are going to imagine that there’s a Venn diagram. Growth sits at the center. It doesn’t matter if it’s for our buyer. We want to help our buyer and their business grow. We also want our own business to grow as well. Growth is the center.

We then think, “What are the three key challenges that a sales leader faces with their sales team or a sales person faces in going to market?” Those three challenges typically are the right level of connection, to start with. If we think about a salesperson’s role is to go out there and to approach the decision maker. There’s this right level of connection. Once that happens, it’s like, “What’s the depth of conversation? How can we stop playing in the shallows? How can we take our conversations deeper?” Connection is a challenge. The depth of conversation is a challenge and then the rate of acceleration of the pipeline conversion is a challenge. Those are the three challenges that I believe a sales leader faces with their team and also a salesperson faces in going to market.

The root cause of those challenges is found at the intersections. This is where story selling comes into play because when we look at the root cause of the challenges, what’s stopping connection, conversations, and conversions is typically three stories. Those three stories are the stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer, the deal, the complaint, or whatever it may be. It’s the internal stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer. The external stories are the stories the salesperson tells their buyer. Finally, it’s the essential stories. They are the stories the salesperson must elicit from the buyer.

The outcome is growth. We’ve got the three challenges of connection, conversation, and conversion. We’ve got the three root causes. What I’ve done in the book is I’ve built it out even more. I’ve looked at those three root causes and said, “What needs to happen for that salesperson to strengthen their internal stories and elevate their connection? What needs to happen for that salesperson to tell the right stories, collaborate with the buyer, and deepen their conversations? What needs to happen for that salesperson to actually elicit the right stories so that they can accelerate their rate of conversion?” They are the nine-story modes. They are basically the core of SHIFT and DISRUPT.

Let’s unpack a little bit of this. As I’m playing along and the folks at home will, when they buy this book, we take a look at what you identified as that beta blueprint. I know you had a background in neural linguistic programming and you were actually a coach for Tony Robbins at one point in time for a certain region of the world, and he’s very big on this as well. Let’s talk about those first stories or the stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer.

There are three. You are right, I’ve got every piece of conceivable paper known to mankind and womankind.

By the way, they’re not in your office behind you.

No one has ever asked to see a copyright.

We’re going to have to do fact-checking on that after the fact. We’ve got a team who does that. It’s the same people who do research.

You did say that we are not theorists but practitioners. This is the whole thing. I look back over my self journey as well, and I think the realization hit me once I started to dig a little deeper and take my learning to a level that was based on personal leadership. I bring together personal leadership. I’ve mentioned thought leadership and sales leadership so I bring those three attributes together. In the personal leadership component of it, I’d never drunk the Kool-Aid, but I was fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to not just deepen my practical understanding by working with leaders around the world through that vehicle of coaching. I also spent eighteen months doing a diploma in all things coaching, so executive coaching, sales coaching, and business coaching.

That was in Australia and I did that separately. That was where the realization came in around being able to tap into communication at a deeper level and marry in psychology. That’s why I call the story selling circles, I shift and disrupt. The whole philosophy is pretty much based on five disciplines. It’s like a Swiss army knife. I’m bringing in disciplines of definitely story as a component. It’s very much mental models, but psychology neurolinguistics and what I refer to as a coach approach. I’m big on the fact that salespeople, when they can go to market and be able to coach their buyers rather than sell them.

Ultimately, we are there to make a sale but the vehicle to do it can shift. The three stories that fit under the internal stories, those first three that I have identified as being huge red flags, identity, how a sales professional or a sales leader views their identity, how do they show up, and are they congruent with their role. Quite often, there is this belief system that I don’t want to be perceived as a salesperson. If you are going to go into a conversation with a buyer and you have that as a belief, it’s going to play with your energy levels.

We hear this all the time. One of the core missions of our entire business is to align the concept or the verb of selling with exactly what you talked about, which is all we’re selling is helping the buyer achieve a better outcome. Selling is management consulting. The stereotype is 50 years old of selling is pedaling or cajoling, but that’s been wrong for 25 years. It’s 50 years old, but it’s been completely wrong for anybody who sold anything material in the last 25 years.

Yes, I understand the concept of serving the buyer and helping the buyer. That is our role.

It’s educating the buyer. It’s bringing the perspective of how they can run a better business with your solution or how they can run a better business with insight and knowledge.

I agree with that. There is also another component to this in my thinking. It’s all good and well. We are there to serve, to help, and all the rest of it, but we’re also there to help ourselves. This has got to be to serve the buyer and our company. It’s got to be a win-win. If you go in purely with some salespeople, with this whole servant leadership approach, or “I’m there to serve,” that may actually tap into money beliefs. Also, that may impact the ability for a salesperson to not hold margin if we are there to help them and we are being told by the buyer that, “You’re too expensive.” It may be that that salesperson defaults to discounting. It’s little nuances like that.

Serve the buyer and serve the company. It needs to be a win-win.

I do think they’re different things. We’re no different than a management consultant is in to help a client. Helping a client doesn’t mean making sure we do it at a loss or affecting margin and discount, but the reality of it is if I’m taking the right approach as a salesperson to focus on helping them, things like pricing and discounts don’t matter.

I also believe that there’s another thought process I have, which I’ve always believed in. We are playing the long game. There’s a sense of urgency. We mustn’t lose that sense of urgency. In the big scheme of things, we are playing the long game if we are to truly be that respected industry resource. I’m with you there. Identity is definitely part of it. Authority is a second-story mode that we delve into. Money is the third. They are the three key areas that I see that sales professionals probably sabotage themselves the most as far as those internal stories they’re telling themselves about the buyer or the deal

.

We mustn't lose our sense of urgency. But in the big scheme of things, we are playing the long game.

While we’re on that, before we go to the stories that we tell the buyers and the stories we elicit from the buyers, I love that part. If somebody is tuning in to this, what might be a tip or two that they can start to think about in addition to reading the book that might help in those areas? You said you’re seeing some salespeople sabotage themselves. What are some of the things you’re seeing or some of the things that our audience could maybe focus on in this category?

If I was with a salesperson now and we were having this conversation, I would go into coach mode. I would ask them to consider a couple of things. I wouldn’t necessarily tell them to do anything because you know that your audience at the moment, I would rather them contemplate a couple of thoughts. I would rather them think. The question would be, “How are you showing up in front of your buyer?”

Let’s get honest, what part of you needs to be expanded? There would be a part of you that has a belief about your role as a salesperson. Does that need to be expanded? Is there a part of you that resists prospecting? Is there a part of you that pushes back on holding margin? What is that part? How can that part maybe be reduced? There’s an exercise in the book that I’ll get people to go through, but it is looking at the different parts of us. We are almost schizophrenics. We’re made up of multiple parts.

It’s not just me.

No. I used to think it was just me, by the way. I would get them to answer themselves or think about that. Secondly, I would ask them to think about their beliefs around people in authority.

Tell us more about that.

If you were driving along the highway and you looked at your rear vision mirror and you heard a police car with lights flashing, what would you do?

Pull-over because it’s the police. I’d pull over because I’m assuming they’re coming after me.

It’s like, “What have I done wrong?” you’re pumping the brakes, looking at the seatbelt, and they just speed right past you. What is it about the fact that because they were police? We’ve grown up in an environment where we have to respect authority, whether it’s the teacher, the priest, or the police. You then grow up and there’s CEO written on a door. It doesn’t matter if that person is younger than you or not.

Nearly 25% of people have a fear of authority. You roll that out across the sales profession and we start to marry together the identity that some salespeople have that may not help them or serve them as much. Marry that with a fear of authority, and then add into that money beliefs. I think $100 is a lot of money, but I’m selling something for $100,000. How is that going to impact my ability to have those financial conversations? They are the three-story modes that I address so far as the internal stories that salespeople tell themselves. Not just salespeople, but business owners and sales leaders.

Let’s move on to the stories we tell buyers. What are the story modes we need to think of there?

There are a couple of different avenues to go here. 1) We mentioned traditional storytelling where you have your origin story, your signature story, or your connection story. It follows the hero’s journey, and there’s a method in its madness. A case study is different than a success story. A case study is all about you couched around a buyer. A success story is all about the buyer. We know that that is an important part of selling. That’s something that we also address. What I’ve done is I’ve taken it a step further and I’ve thought, “I want this book to shift and disrupt the way a salesperson thinks about telling stories.” When we think that 83% of our processing is done visually and 11% of our process is done auditorly, why don’t we try to capture a story visually?

This is thought leadership coming into it now. The ability for you to be sitting over a coffee with a prospect, listening, eliciting their stories, being able to capture, know how to capture, so this is very much a playbook as well, their story, and grab your pen and napkin. You hear that cliché all the time. “Grab a napkin and do a deal.”

We did a deal back at the napkin.

How can you do that and be able to capture and collaborate on what you are hearing? When you draw something, you are actually drawing someone in. When we think about the fact that as children, our first attempt at art was shapes, triangles, squares, and circles. Why would we not lean into that part of us as well and be able to collaborate? Charlie Munger says that you’ve got to be able to capture your ideas on a framework of mental models. What a mental model does, and we are talking here about a ladder, a 2x2 matrix, or a Venn diagram, is it helps decision-making. It simplifies the complex and it paints a picture. There’s a saying, “A picture paints a thousand words.” What I’ve done in the book, the three modes there are based around progression, tension, and integration. Let me break those down.

Progression. Every one of us wants to progress. We want growth whether it’s personal growth, professional or business growth, or whatever it may be. We’ve all seen Maslow’s hierarchy. We’ve all seen Dr. Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamic. They are examples of progression models. When you are able, you would pre-bake these so you would do your research and you would build these out beforehand because you know your target market. If you are wrong, it doesn’t matter because it’s an opportunity for discussion. You don’t have to do all three of these. You may choose to create a ladder or an aspirational hierarchical model and discuss the growth path for your buyer or for their business. Also, a ladder like Maslow’s hierarchy will always give us why change is important. That’s the why.

The second one, which is all around tension is how do we build intensity into the sales conversation. We want our buyers to be sitting on the edge of their seat. We want them to be thinking, “What do I need to do?” If we look at any 2x2 matrix, the Eisenhower Matrix, time management, and Robert Kiyosaki’s, the labels or the quadrants have tension.

We want our buyers to be sitting on the edge of their seat. We want them to be thinking, “Okay, what do I need to do?”

We want to be able to build intensity into our sales conversations by telling and collaborating a story. A 2x2 is always a what. What do I need to do? When you get to that final top right-hand quadrant, it’s like, “That’s what I want.” In my conversion matrix in the book, it’s like, “I want to accelerate my team’s conversions. I want to build the conversions of my sales pipeline. How do I do that?” That naturally leads to a how.

A Venn diagram is always around how. A Venn diagram is all about how we integrate and how we articulate outcomes. What I’ve shared with you early on, the story selling circles, is my Venn diagram. I will sit with somebody and build it out with them because I’ve elicited their stories along the way. It’s a no-brainer. They then know, “You get me.” They are the three external stories that we tell our buyer using mental models.

You’ve got a well-identified ideal client profile and you focus as a business, you know what these are. Every time you have this conversation, you’re going to get better at it. You have more feedback and input because you’re learning every time you go through this. By the way, here’s something to double underline. Even if we’re slightly wrong with this point of view, it doesn’t matter. It’s this opportunity for discussion and engagement.

One of the tenets of true coaching is there is no right or wrong. When you can go to market with that whole belief system that, “It doesn’t matter what I put down. It doesn’t matter what I suggest. There’s no right or wrong. It’s simply my perception. The buyer will always have their own perception.” When you can collaborate, clarify, be on the same side of the table, and be comfortable and congruent in saying, “I might’ve got this wrong. Let’s talk about that.” You are going to get gold out of that because they are going to know that whole know, like, and trust component is off the charts.

It aligns with so much basic common sense. That’s where a lot of this heads. We’re in for a common sense revolution. Professional sales is coming.

I totally agree.

It leads to I’m not pitching anything except your wisdom. We have knowledge and insight where we’re going to teach them something different, perhaps they haven’t seen before or prompt that discussion. This is where you get your elevating that trust and credibility and all those kinds of good things. All of the walls drop when you’re in this conversation. It’s a different level.

It totally is. When you get it, you can play with it, you can try it on, and you’ll get blisters like a new pair of shoes, that’s okay. They will eventually become such a comfortable conversation. Another vehicle to get there is that third root cause. That is not being able to elicit their stories the correct way. Leaning into the coach approach is how you can elicit those essential stories. When you have this whole coach approach, they do all the talking because you know what you’re doing, you know the questions that you’re asking, and you know why you’re asking them. If we flip into those three-story modes, it’s about expansion, perspective, and decision.

We want to be able to build flexibility into our conversations which is, “How do we expand? What’s the expansion? How do we elicit the stories through showing that flexibility?” As a sales professional and a sales leader, we have to now even, more so than ever, to communicate with so many different levels within an organization. The choke-hold that I’m seeing with businesses out there is that we still talk about, “Don’t talk brochure talk.” You build in this fear of authority and all of this other stuff. You’re finding salespeople will take the path of least resistance, which is going to the level that they’re comfortable talking to.

What are those conversations we have that enable us to move between C-level contextual conversations, operational conceptual conversations, and user-based content conversations? It’s bringing in this flexibility. The person who is able to have the conversation with every level will own the business. I teach how to do that.

It’s great the way you’ve simplified this approach. It’s very much clean set of eyes on some things that have been age-old prophecies as you point out in the book. I think you quote Aristotle about communication. The last point you referenced when you’re dealing with different people in the organization and they have dramatically different personal and professional needs and wants. That goes back to the wonderful days when I had hair in 1991 with strategic selling, frankly. I think it’s actually earlier. It was even fifteen years before me. It was like the ‘80s. That’s where they came up with the buyers. That has not changed in 40 or 50 years. The fact that we have to understand the different folks involved.

There’s a lot of talk now about the buying groups increased. No, it hasn’t, for anything material. If you were selling a widget for $50 or $5,000, maybe there was one person. If you were doing an enterprise software deal or a large outsourcing deal, there were fifteen people involved in that. It was always multiple buyers for anything material. They always had difficulty coming to consensus. You were trying to provide thought leadership and guidance. The main difference would be they did have to take some of their information from you at phase value because they didn’t have access to the global encyclopedia of everything that’s happened up until 2021 through ChatGPT.

Yes, exactly. Even out there at the moment, within enterprise sales organizations, there are still territories that don’t necessarily sell to enterprise. That may be the component of that particular global company or a big company, but the sales team may still be selling to SMB. They still do have that one point of contact. It could be that the salesperson is dealing with the CEO of an SMB, but they’re still talking at the user level. It can be, “My salesperson who only has legal firms or small family manufacturing company, how can I take that particular salesperson and up their ability to be able to have a C-level conversation with that one particular buyer?” It goes across both enterprise sales, where you do have multiple stakeholders and the SMB space as well.

I’m trying to connect some dots and this would be opinion, not fact because I love your research-based approach to this and it certainly aligns with our approach in the funnel. One of the things we are noticing is the increase in mental health issues with professional salespeople. Generally, they’re not happy. One of the things you’ve talked about here is many professional salespeople have this comfort level dealing at certain very tactical levels like users.

For you or me selling to a user is actually at times unpleasant because they’re sitting, they’re used to a demo, they can’t say yes, they can only say no, they’re not strategic, they’re trying to get through every day and maybe worry about what went wrong yesterday. If salespeople want to default to only doing that, then they default to pitching because they’re not getting strategic conversations from typical users. This whole thing is no fun.

My mind is going from a couple of different directions here because I’m thinking, “How do they elevate their connection and make contact?” You think about email as completely spam. A voicemail is an unknown number. LinkedIn is completely spam. There are apps and stuff that you can short-circuit. How do you make contact? That is the frustrating part for all of us. You get a lot of gurus out there talking about the prospecting but they’re not doing it anyway.

How do we make contact with the right person to start with? That’s a question and it comes back to the old days when it was direct mail. Is networking making a comeback? There are all of these different avenues, but that salesperson who’s stuck with the user, their hands are tied for a couple of reasons. Their leadership team won’t bring people in to elevate the learning because in some instances, that leader doesn’t want to be show up for not knowing what to do. It’s a catch-22. I’m with you there. The salespeople need support internally and it’s got to come from all levels. It’s got to be a conversation that has to be had.

We have this conversation on this show that is great, by the way. You and I are going to talk for two hours offline from this show. How do you do that now? Our belief is the automated and the spam is garbage. It’s wasting everybody’s time. There was a time you and I will remember when you and I got 30 voicemails a day. We had days and times when our voicemail could fill out even if we were working. Now, I get 2 or 3 voicemails a day.

If you want to reach me, first of all, it’s got to be a multi-channel approach, but call me. Secondly, do ten minutes of research on me, my business, and my industry. I’m listed as the CEO of In The Funnel. Whether that’s the right or wrong thing, I am. We do get hit 30 times a week. At least five times a week, we get hit by a sales training company that says, “Do you want to improve the way your sales team is selling?” We are a sales training team. If anybody had ever gone to our website, they’d go to a video that tells them how to do demand generation.

We talk about this and all they’d have to do in a voicemail to me and say, “Let me see if your In The Funnel practices work. I noticed that you’ve got three levels of social media. We help with the fourth. This is an opportunity. I love the video you put on YouTube talking about A, B, and C.” I am morally and ethically compelled to respond to that voicemail. It’s so painfully easy. What’s happening in professional sales now is what we want to do is say, “I made 100 calls and I didn’t get any live conversations. Why don’t I try and email blast 300 people tomorrow and we keep doing more of what’s not working?”

We just keep doing more of what's not working.

That’s what I’m saying. Somebody is leading that practice.

The other point you bring on, and I have a lot of empathy for them, you talked about sales leaders aren’t feeling comfortable to bring in somebody from the outside world to coach their team. Folks who tune in to our show have heard me rant on this many a time. The best performers in the world have multiple coaches. The top performers of the world or most successful entrepreneurs in the world are part of either Strategic Coach, Gazelles, or EOS. The best athletes in the world have nine coaches.

It comes back to ego and identity. Everything swings back to the internal stories. It’s a complete circle. I’m going off on a different tangent here. It’s like as I’m going back to that final circle, I talked about building and showing flexibility where we were talking about the CEO. The next story mode, which dovetails into what we were talking about then is based on perspective. That is all about, “How do we identify criteria?” We know the cliché. We all buy unlogged emotion and we back it up with logic. We need a bit of logic before it goes into the emotional, and then it swings back to logic again.

This is using the coach approach. Being able to identify is being able to go from the shallow. If you do picture the iceberg, most salespeople and sales leaders are playing in the shallows. They’re understanding outcomes. Everybody understands outcomes and what a buyer or a sales team member needs. What is it that they don’t want? That’s another question to ask. As you go deeper under the iceberg, being able to elicit those states that are at the value of that particular buyer, their business, or your sales team.

What is important to that salesperson or what is important to that buyer at a personal level? Also, understanding what comes next further under the iceberg is, if growth or profitability is important to your buyer or if support is important to your team member or salesperson, what must have to happen in their eyes to achieve that? We all make assumptions and we think, “Someone says they want support.” “Every Monday morning, come in and have a meeting with me and I’ll go.” “The buyer wants profitability.” “We’ll do X, Y, and Z.” That’s not what they mean. We have to identify the criteria further.

The final story mode is decision. That is, land the business. When we think about decision, it’s all about, “Who makes the decision? Who else apart from yourself? When is a decision going to be made? What’s the process for the decision?” That’s all external. We need to tap into the decision drivers of our buyer. That is at a deeper level as well. Once you identify what those drivers are, then your conversation shifts again. The same applies for the sales leader with the team.

It’s so important. Frankly, if you’ve been doing this a while, it’s so obvious, but it’s not being done. I think there’s multiple reasons for it, but any sales leader tuning in to this show, in the next time you’re having a collaborative discussion with one of your teammates on a deal status and an update, deal strategy, when you say, “Tell me what’s important to this person.” Your salesperson’s response says, “Obviously, they want to do this and this. It’s not obvious unless the buyer told me it. It’s not my assumption.” What did they specifically say and why?

That’s the stories we’ve got to elicit. They are the stories that are so often missed. It’s like having a three-legged stool here. The stool has only got two legs or the stool has only got one. The third leg is what’s missing as well. That’s going to make a rock-solid deal.

One of the things we’ve found, and maybe you can confirm from your perspective, we see many salespeople are afraid to ask that question about what might get in the way of moving forward or what are you worried about. It’s because they think that if I ask the question, I’m going to give the buyer a reason not to move forward. When the reality of it is in this day and age, that buyer has got fifteen reasons for not moving forward that is literally keeping them awake at night. Why not have a conversation about that?

You mentioned Jeb Blount earlier. I spoke at OutBound Conference. I put this up on the main stage screen and used it as an example. When a buyer does give us old term or an objection, I don’t like that word, they’re sharing some concerns with us. What we do instinctively is we justify. Immediately, we go into justification mode. We try to sell. What we need to do is we need to elicit the story behind that consumer. It’s like, “We are a little bit too expensive or our delivery is not on point.” What has happened to make you think that way? That’s giving us data and it’s giving us the story behind the story. Now we can acknowledge that and we can respond with a story of another client who had a similar thought process. It expands the conversation. It’s collaborative, and then we could move on.

You’re absolutely right. However we term it, we need to understand it and that’s part of the collaboration. In fact, for those of us who used to do material deals or very significant deals, one of the things that would happen from a client’s side would be both parties would be working from one business case. At that level of deal went to a multi-hundred million dollar deal. There’s no our perspective in your perspective. There’s our collective perspective. Let’s agree on what we all think is going to happen. That’s what you’re going to use to take up the channel and so forth. Once we’re aligned and we agree, then we negotiate, “How do we split the value?” They’re not afraid to do what’s right for their business, and then I have to be comfortable doing what’s right for my business.

We’re at least aligned on what we believe the facts are. These things are difficult to come to the end game but then we’re having this real conversation about the important points. We’re not coming from two different places. In that way, we know what happens if we get to an impasse and we have this real decision to make. People aren’t going quiet on you. They don’t stop returning calls. They don’t give you a pretend reason or the political reason they didn’t move forward. They actually tell the truth. I’m not prepared to jeopardize, “We’re doing this over here.” I’m not prepared to jeopardize that with this new initiative. It’s going to take some of the same IT resources and some of the same business resources. I don’t think I’ve got the capacity to do it.

That comes back to the risk factor has nothing to do with before signing the order. It’s what happens after the order is signed. That’s where the risk factor is. In the book, I talk about the cost of inaction, the cost of the problem, and all these different costs because that has to come into the conversation as well. That’s way back in the beginning as part of your collaborative understanding. We talked discovery but it is that professional conversation that is business. It’s a business conversation.

All of these conversations are far more fun than pitching a product to a user, and then hoping that user somehow can magically sell your product because you couldn’t. Now you’re hoping they can take it up. Bernadette, I have to be very cautious of your time. I can’t believe the amount of time we’ve spent talking and how fast this has gone for me. What an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Personally, I’ve received enormous value from this conversation. I am darn sure that the people tuning in to this show have as well. First of all, thank you so much for joining.

My pleasure. It’s been fun.

If people want to learn more about you, which they inevitably will, what’s the best way to do so?

Please join me on LinkedIn and mention that you heard me on the show. That would be awesome for Mark as well. My book SHIFT and DISRUPT, it’s on Amazon now. If you are a sales leader and you have a team, go to ShiftAndDisrupt.com because there are bonuses there for sales leaders. I’m also running a webinar, so if you’re on LinkedIn with me, you’ll see the webinar coming up where I’ll be running through this. Those are a few channels.

Please make sure we’re on the list of invitees for that webinar. We’re going to share that with our network as well. They’re going to get lots of value from that.

Thank you.

When you’re thinking about your next keynotes, you’re probably planning for next year in the not-too-distant future, please check out Bernadette’s website because she’s done keynotes for some of the top organizations in the world. Some of the top thought leaders in sales have actually engaged Bernadette to come and do those keynotes. Thank you so much, Bernadette.

My pleasure. It’s been awesome.

Sure has. Thank you, team, for joining. As always, we run the show to try and elevate the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. In doing so, we want to improve the lives of professional salespeople. We hope that you’ve enjoyed this show. If you do, by the way, please like and subscribe to the show because that’s helpful to us. Thank you for that. If there are ways that we can improve this show, I’d love to hear your ideas. My email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That’s my personal email that I check. If you give us some constructive criticism, I am personally going to respond to that email. We love constructive criticism. The more direct, the better. It’s faster. We love it. Thank you for doing that. We’ll see everybody next time.

Important Links

• Bernadette McClelland

• SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom

• When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going

• The Art of Commercial Conversations

• The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself

• 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale!

• SMASH Through Your Sales Barrier!

• Thought Leaders Global

• Building a StoryBrand

• LinkedIn – Bernadette McClelland

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Bernadette McClelland

Bernadette McClelland: CEO – Sales Leaders Global LLC and Influential Speaker on Disruption and Business Growth

Australian, Female, Pragmatic, Inspirational, Compelling, Real!

Bernadette McClelland is a foremost expert in Sales Leadership and Transformation Strategy. With a dynamic career that encompasses an executive role in Corporate Australia, entrepreneurial ventures, and business ownership, she is a beacon in this new Wisdom Economy. Internationally acclaimed, she's viewed as in the top 1% of sales leaders globally by the US Government, among the Top 50 global speakers and honored as one of the Top 35 Most Influential Women in Sales.

Her accolades include coaching Harvard MBA students, mentor for Colorado’s Global Landing Pad, partnerships with industry luminaries like Anthony Robbins, and endorsements from renowned author Brian Tracey. With a legacy that spans from New York City to New Delhi, Bernadette's profound insights and practical strategies offer franchise owners and sales leaders an unmatched perspective for thriving in today's business landscape.

Personal Disruption With Whitney Johnson

Ever wonder why somebody completely disrupts themselves or changes direction even if they were successful in what they'd previously been doing? We see that happen everywhere from sports to entertainment to the world of business. This phenomenon of “personal disruption” is the specialty of Whitney Johnson, CEO of the Human Capital Consultancy Disruption Advisors. Having worked with Clay Christiansen, Whitney took his concept of product disruption and applied it to people. In this episode, you’re going to learn how we can actually disrupt ourselves and what that experience looks like for the individual. In the constantly evolving professional sales space, we need to be constantly changing and developing, so this conversation is deeply relevant to our space. Tune in!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Personal Disruption With Whitney Johnson

Do you ever wonder why somebody completely disrupts themselves or changes direction even if they were successful in what they'd previously been doing? You think of Michael Jordan, one of the best basketball players in the entire world, who retires from the game, and three years later, he is playing baseball in the minor leagues, traveling on buses.

You might think of Lady Gaga, top of the pop charts. The next album she releases is a jazz album with Tony Bennett, where she's starting over again. Sometimes, we force ourselves to disrupt and change and sometimes, events will take place that cause us to disrupt where we are. We are going to learn a lot about that in this episode because our guest is Whitney Johnson and she's the CEO of the human capital consultancy Disruption Advisors.

Thinkers50 ranked Whitney among the top 50 management thinkers in the world in 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2020. She's also a top LinkedIn voice. Whitney is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, and a frequent lecturer for the Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning Division. We are going to be talking to Whitney about her great book called Smart Growth.

The main topic here is personal disruption. We all know about product or market disruption. The Innovator's Dilemma was made famous by Clay Christensen. Whitney worked with Clay Christensen and what she does is she takes that concept of business disruption or product disruption, and she applies it to people. How do we disrupt ourselves and what causes that? Why would we do that? Is it an external factor or an internal factor? What are we going through when that happens?

Interesting conversation with Whitney. One of the things that's so interesting for those of us in professional sales is we do need to be constantly changing, evolving, and developing. Some of the thoughts and concepts in Whitney's book and this conversation will help us with that. I enjoyed speaking with Whitney. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, please like and subscribe to the show because that matters to us, and thank you for doing so. Here's Whitney Johnson.

Whitney, thank you so much for joining the show. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you for having me.

We always like to throw the floor over and ask somebody for a short version of their professional journey. Given what you have done, it's such a super interesting story. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are.

In my professional journey, I majored in music in college and I studied piano. When I graduated, I got married in college, which is pretty unusual, but I moved to New York with my husband. He was getting his PhD at Columbia, and we needed to put food on the table, so I was the designated breadwinner. I went out and interviewed for a job and discovered Wall Street. As I was a music major and because I was a female, and this was the late '80s, I started as a secretary working for a stockbroker.

I would go to work every day and see all of these young, aspiring stockbrokers, aspiring masters of the universe, saying things like, “Throw down your pom-poms and get in the game.” At first, I was offended because I was a cheerleader in high school. The more I listened to them, I realized that I needed to throw down my pom-poms.

I started taking business courses at night, accounting, finance, and economics, and that was the beginning of me disrupting myself and disrupting what I thought was possible. Especially because I had a boss who believed in me and it allowed me to move from being a secretary to an investment banker. I did investment banking for several years and then got disrupted again because my boss got fired, and they probably would have fired me, too, except that I had a good performance review and I was pregnant. That was helpful and so they moved me, but more like shoved me into equity research. I went from being a banker to doing equity research.

It turns out that became a career maker for me. I was very good at making stock calls and building these financial models. This disruption turned out to be very much a slingshot forward for me. I did that for about eight years. I became an institutional investor-ranked analyst. In my parlance, I was at the top of my S-curve and wanted to do something different.

I went to my boss. I said, “We'd like you right where you are.” I'd now read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. I thought, “Disruption might not be about products and services, but also about people,” and so I disrupted myself and thought I was leaving Wall Street forever to become an entrepreneur. It turns out I did that for a couple of years and then connected with Clay Christensen.

I was doing some nonprofit work with him through our church, and he wanted to start a fund to invest in disruptive innovation. I joined him and his oldest son, Matt, and we launched the Disruptive Innovation Fund. I did that for 5 or 6 years. There was this thread of we were using the S-curve to invest and I thought, “The S-curve applies to people, not just the product,” so you are sensing a theme.

I had an article in the Harvard Business Review called Disrupt Yourself. In 2012, I moved into this brand new world of thought leadership, and over the last several years, I have been building a business and now have a co-founder and partner, Amy Humble. It's called Disruption Advisors. We are all about helping you grow your people so that you can grow your business and we have an assessment tool that we use. We do coaching, keynotes, and workshops. Now, I'm very much in the business in many ways back to where I began, but I'm not now about the momentum of stocks. I'm about the momentum of people. That is my career journey in a few minutes.

You have taught me that I have to work on my introductions. That is fed but the most precise and interesting explanation and there are so many things to unpack. We are going to be talking about disrupting yourself. We are going to be talking about the S-curve, but I have got to throw it out and ask, you are on Wall Street in investment banking in the '80s. The egos in that building must have been shocking, and then it doesn't even matter what building you were in.

It's the late '80s, early '90s. If you saw the movie Working Girl, I was the working girl. Even big hair and all and this was the era of Liar's Poker and The Bonfire of the Vanities. I don't know that I saw the big ego piece. I thought it was exciting. I had grown up on the West Coast, and there wasn't Silicon Valley at this point. New York was the epicenter of financial services. I suppose there were big egos, but mostly, it was exciting.

What a wonderful journey. Very quickly Music Major. Did you have an ARCT and piano? Is that what you did at university? Tell us a little bit about the level of your piano studies.

I don't know what an ARCT is. Maybe that's a Canadian thing, but I do have a  Bachelor of Arts in Music, and my emphasis was in Piano, and then I minored in English. I was a classically trained pianist. I discovered a little bit of jazz along the way. I never got as good as I would like to be in jazz, but that was my emphasis. One of my pinnacle achievements was I did a senior recital when I was a senior right before I graduated. That was a great accomplishment. I also got to play in our university jazz band and we performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. It was pretty fun.

Maybe it is. The Royal Conservatory of Music is here in Canada. I also went through musical training when I was younger, and then you'd go up the ranks of the conservatory, and the accreditation was in front of a board from the conservatory. The ARCT would have been the pinnacle. Believe me. I got nowhere near it.

What do you play? What instrument?

Now I play drums, but I was playing piano then and writing musical theory as a young child. As soon as I was allowed to make a few of my own decisions when I was 14, 15, and 16, I stepped on a drum set from playing piano. No more piano. It was cooler. Being the innovator at the time, I thought being in a band would be a nice way of looking cool in front of girls. It turns out even that didn't work for me, but in theory, it was a good strategy. It was poorly executed.

A young fellow has joined a band in hopes of attracting the opposite sex.

It's the only reason you do it. It ended up paying dividends for me years later because, although she won't admit it, my beautiful wife, Donna. When we first started dating, I was on the tail end of playing in bar bands while I was starting my full-time career. I don't think it hurt because I wasn't the coolest dude, but maybe it didn't hurt that I was in those bands.

She saw you behind that drum set. I can see that. That's fantastic.

I needed all the help I could get. Let's talk about such an amazing journey and connecting. We have all heard of Clay Christensen and The Innovator's Dilemma. I love this idea of saying that innovation and progression, that innovation isn't product-centric. It's people-centric. Let's talk a little bit about disrupting yourself. This came to fruit in 2012 with one of what seems like a gazillion articles you have written for Harvard Business Review, but tell us about the concept of disrupting yourself.

To give a quick primer. Disruptive innovation is a term of art that was coined by Clay Christensen. The idea is it's a silly little thing that takes over the world. The telephone did to the telegraph. The automobile did to the horse and buggy. Netflix has done the Blockbuster and now cable TV. For me, in the emerging markets, it was the wireless was disrupting wireline.

That's what it looks like for a product or a service. The insight that I had is that companies don't disrupt. It's the people that disrupt. What does personal disruption look like? It's where you are willing to become a silly little thing to take over the world. The big difference with personal disruption is that you are the Netflix and the Blockbuster. You are the telephone and you are the telegraph because you are disrupting you.

A high-level example is if you are thinking, “What do you mean? How do you picture this?” Lady Gaga is a great example of personal disruption because in 2008 she goes straight to the top of the charts and she doesn't stay there. For an encore, she decides to go to the bottom of a new chart. She collaborates with Tony Bennett on a jazz album. She then does a Sound of Music tribute, so musical theater at the Oscars, and then she collaborates or produces a country album. She gets to the top of a curve, and then she decides to disrupt herself to become a silly little thing.

The reason that we do personal disruption, if you go back to the theory of disruptive innovation, is that when you are willing to play where you haven't played before, your odds of success are 6 times higher, and your revenue opportunity 20 times greater. That was the theory. That was the PhD dissertation that Clay wrote about in The Innovator's Dilemma, but if you want to extrapolate from that, for us as individuals, it's also going to be true if we are willing to take on the market versus competitive risk if we are willing to create something rather than compete with what is.

When you are willing to play where you haven't played before, your odds of success are six times higher and your revenue opportunity 20 times greater.

Can we go through those numbers again? If you are willing to take on that risk, tell us about those two metrics that you shared that he put in his dissertation.

What he found is he analyzed a whole array of companies. I'm fuzzy on the actual details, but here's the top line. He analyzes these companies. He looks at which ones are still in existence several years later, a decade later, versus the ones that weren't. What he found is that the ones that were creating new markets, the ones that were taking on market risk rather than competing with the incumbents, were six times more likely to succeed.

It was only 6% to 36%. There was still a 74% or 64% chance that they weren't going to survive, but 6 times greater. That's a lot. Those odds were not only better, but the revenue opportunity, again, when they were willing to go after and create new markets and new value chains, their revenue opportunity was twenty times greater.

It's 6 times more likely to succeed, and the revenue opportunity is 20 times greater. Extrapolating for us as individuals, when we are willing to take on market risk, we are more likely to succeed because we are not competing with what is. Think about your show. If you try to go do something that someone else is doing, then it's going to be a lot harder to succeed. You create something new and uniquely yours.

That's the idea of personal disruption and bringing it back to an organization. When we, inside our organizations, are thinking about how do we create and how do we take on market risk? How do we play where no one else is playing? I can bring that back to my Wall Street career if you want me to, but how do we play where no one else is playing? If we do that, our odds of success are going to be significantly higher, and we are going to create markets not only for ourselves but for our organizations.

Thank you for that clarity. When we start to hear about this as an individual, we are talking about personal disruption. First, off the bat, it starts to feel or potentially sound a little frightening or scary. “I'm going to be jumping outside my comfort zone. I'm going to be taking on something new. I'm going to be going from the top of the charts to the bottom of the charts in the country, as per Lady Gaga.” Are we hardwired for this type of change generally as human beings? Is this something that's naturally in our DNA or is this something that there's got to be an event that causes us to want to go down this path?

The answer is yes and no. When you think about moving to the top of an S-curve and this S-curve of learning is something that helps us think about what growth looks like. When you get to the top, you are sitting on top of the mountain, you have a dilemma. This is the innovator's dilemma, but in this case, it's our dilemma.

On the one hand, we like being on top of the mountain. It feels good to be the master of all we serve. You have accomplished what we have accomplished. We are at the top of the leaderboard, except that there is something inside of us and there's this deep human longing, urge, and yearning where when we are at the top of the mountain, we are not getting any dopamine, which is a chemical messenger of delight. For us to continue to get dopamine, it requires that we do something new.

That new can be something productive and can be something counterproductive, like sabotaging our peers because we are bored. We now have this dilemma of what am I going to do? Oftentimes, because it is so comfortable to be there and because we are more motivated by what we lose than by what we gain, we can stay there, but that plateau becomes a precipice.

It's always better to disrupt yourself, but frequently in life, we have all had this experience where we get disrupted. Whether or not we disrupt ourselves or whether or not we get disrupted, we are still starting over, and we get this opportunity because now we are going to have the opportunity to get dopamine to grow. A very opening sentence of my book, Smart Growth, is that growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. Sometimes, we help ourselves to grow and sometimes, the universe gives us a little bit of a nudge.

Growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. Sometimes we help ourselves to grow and sometimes the universe gives us a little bit of a nudge.

You start to think about the leaders reading this show and say, “We all have it in our DNA to grow.” They are going to give us feedback that says, “Maybe I have got some members on my team where it doesn't appear like they are growth-oriented.” You said, “Sometimes we disrupt ourselves and sometimes we get disrupted.” How do we help those people with love, caring, and so on to disrupt themselves?

Can it be something where we drive that? Does it have to come internally? I will say that it seems like the best example of something disrupting all of us was the pandemic. Right off the bat, for years and years, we came across hundreds of thousands of folks, if not millions, who said, “I can't learn new technologies.” Suddenly, everybody and their brother is fantastic at video conferencing and managing remote meetings immediately overnight. Weeks later, maybe it was the S-curve, but they are on a huge growth curve in terms of trying to interact with people differently, leverage technology differently, and manage their lives differently. Is that a reasonable example of the outside world forcing us to disrupt ourselves?

It's a terrific example because every single one of us is on this S-curve. It's an S-curve of learning where you have got the launch point, the sweet spot in mastery, and you can draw this S. I would argue that pre-pandemic, we were all at the top of an S-curve. It may have been an S-curve we liked. It may have been an S-curve we didn't like, but it was comfortable nonetheless.

What happened with the pandemic pushed all of us off the curve at the same time, which is part of why emotionally and psychologically was so challenging because there wasn't anybody else who was at the top of the curve to pull us along. We are all at the launch point together. What that meant is that whether we wanted to change or not, we now had been thrown into a sea of change and we got to make a decision.

That, in many ways, was a gift because many of us who had gotten potentially a little bit flaccid with that muscle of disrupting ourselves from doing new things, we now had the opportunity to strengthen that muscle. For many of us, that was a huge gift, which is why, as I think about the next several years, there's going to be so much growth that's going to take place because we all strengthen that muscle, that ability to disrupt ourselves. There were many difficult things about the pandemic, but one of those gifts was that it strengthened our ability to disrupt ourselves. We got better at it because the older we get, the more we can insulate ourselves from never doing anything new, which requires us to do something new.

Is that why you referenced in another HBR article where everybody talked about the Great Resignation? I think that term is a misnomer. We are talking about the Great Aspiration because people have leveraged this event to start thinking about what they want to do. Maybe acknowledging that they can change and they can evolve and things are going to be different moving forward.

I continue to stand behind that is that we were looking at it and saying. Everybody is resigning. When you think about resignation, that's like, “I'm resigned too and I'm going to give up.” Some people do give up whenever there's something difficult. There are going to be people who are going to give up. In general, what we saw were people rallying and saying, “I did this hard thing. I can do hard things, whatever it was.”

Now, when we come out of the pandemic, if someone wants me to go back and do the same thing that I was doing before, I'm like, “No,” because I can do hard things. I have realized that I'm capable and so I want to do more. If we as a leader recognize that in our people, we will harness that and know that they want to grow and develop. If we give people an opportunity to do that, we will not only be able to hire people, but we will be able to retain them because we are going to give them an opportunity to grow.

What a joy when someone hasn't had that, and then, for the first time, they understand, “I can learn. I can develop.” You point to the dopamine, but it's life-changing. It is life-altering. In a funny way, we see a lot of this in what we do, even with our limited sphere or limited line of sight within the funnel. Oftentimes, we get brought into, let's call it turnaround an underperforming sales organization or transition it to a better future. We get to do this with SaaS companies, but we also get to do this with lots of different other industries. Be it manufacturing or industrial services. I have noticed this over the last years when we will come into a manufacturing business. We will start to talk to their sales organization.

There will be an enormous amount of fear. If we can get them through that, where we take them through that chasm and teach them some new skills, they will trigger this life-changing event where people will realize where they have come from in 4, 6, or 8 months and it starts to dawn on them. They can learn anything they want.

It changes everything. I'm not sure where you align with Carol Dweck's work and growth mindset and fixed mindset, but it aligns. To see that in action and I have lived that personally as well. It’s life-altering when you start to say, “Hard work will get me through anything. I will figure this out. It's going to be uncomfortable at times.” It's always uncomfortable at times, but we are going to get there, and then what's the next thing? Then it becomes a matter of saying, “The Great Aspiration.” What do you want to do?

A couple of thoughts are coming to mind. First of all, it must be thrilling for you to be able to be a part of that process and enjoy watching people unlock their potential. I want to acknowledge that. You mentioned Carol Dweck, and then I want to come back to that question of when people are in that place that they are not sure that they want to change.

As I think about Carol Dweck's work, I have quoted her in every book I have ever written. When you think about the S-curve, what it does is you have this growth mindset, but the S-curve of learning allows you to trace the emotional arc of growth. It allows you to say, “When I'm at the launch point, I'm going to feel overwhelmed. I'm going to feel excited, but I'm also going to be afraid, and this is normal. That means I will keep growing.”

It's going to tell me that when I'm in the sweet spot on that steep part of the curve, this is exhilarating. No problem growing here, but it's also going to tell me that when I'm in mastery, this place is where I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish. It tells me I'm a little bit bored and have done it. I need to do something new. I need more dopamine. I need to give myself a challenge so I can continue to grow. I think about the S-curve of learning as a way to operationalize or trace that emotional arc of growth that we experience when we have a growth mindset.

You asked me a question. This is important. I wanted to come back to it is, “What do I do? What do you do when you have got a sales leader who's like, ‘I'm good. My numbers are good.’” You are like, “You could be better.” The way that about it is that when you are at the top of a curve, and we have been talking about dopamine, that feelgood chemical, what that means is that you figure things out. You are good at what you are doing. You have got these thick neural pathways and these comfortable routines, but you are also a little bit bored. When you are bored, your plateau can become a precipice because you start saying things like, “I have dialed this in,” and you are not learning and not growing.

What I do and suggest, and you can do this with your people, is draw this figure and give them a way to say, “Here's where you are. You are at the top of the curve. Your brain needs dopamine because learning is the oxygen of human growth.” You need to learn. Importantly, because you have these thick neural pathways, you have the latent innovative capacity.

Learning is the oxygen of human growth.

This is easy for you. We want to unlock that. The way that we are going to unlock that is to invite you to do 1 or 2 new things, navigate some launch points, get some dopamine, and get your brain with oxygen so you can continue to learn because then you are going to go from being good to even better, or in the words of Jim Collins because my business partner worked with him, from good to great.

What great coaching. Those reading, we are always looking for these things strategies, processes, or tools so we can grab them from this show and apply them today, tomorrow, and the next day. There's no question. We have got folks on our teams who have a fixed mindset or are at the plateau of the S-curve.

I love that idea of saying, “Clearly, you are fantastic at this, but you need that next challenge to stay active, engaged, innovative, and physically feel better. You get the hit of dopamine. We are going to give you 1 or 2 things that are going to take you outside your comfort zone.” This is the thing we should all remember when we are in the uncomfortable launch of the S-curve because it's okay to see it on the curve. When you are in the middle of it, it doesn't always feel great.

It feels so horrible to feel like I don't know what I'm doing. We don't like it when we are 15, but people don't like it when they are 35, 55, 65, or 75. It feels so uncomfortable and that's part of why this S-curve is so useful because then you can say to people, “You are at the launch point. It is true that you may not be good at this, but right now, we don't have enough data to know that. All we know right now is you are doing something new and you are probably not very good at doing new things because you don't do it very often. I want you to stay with us.”

We had Seth Godin on the podcast and he said, “When you feel like an imposter, what do you want to say? You want to say good. There's something fulfilling in knowing that you might mess up.” That is so powerful. This is something I was thinking about if I can riff for a second. When you are selling, you are inviting the people that you are selling to be on the launch point of a new curve. It's uncomfortable for them, too. Your job in sales is to help them navigate that new launch point. Buying something from you, working with you, or whatever that looks like, they are scared, too. How do you make it so that they can feel safe doing something new, which is buying what you are selling them?

Is that the first time you came up with that?

Yes, it is.

That is pure genius. I was looking down team while Whitney was speaking because I was writing it all down. It's a complete genius. The challenge we have is we think sometimes, as salespeople, we don't even think of that S-curve. We want to pitch because we think people are already at the peak or they are already at the top, and we want them to move forward as long as they understand what we are doing.

We don't emotionally guide them through this journey, understanding there's risk involved. We don't think of it this way because it's so relevant that you may have heard of a book called The Challenger Sale by a couple of guys, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson. Matt's latest book is something called The JOLT Effect, and what he's saying is, “Deals are going to no decision because your buyers are not making it through the S-curve.” They are launching, but you are not guiding them through it, and they are stopping. Too many companies are coming back saying, “I'd rather miss out than mess up.”

This is exactly the issue in professional sales. You and I need to write an article together for HBR on exactly this topic,n addition to the book Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company. It’s so smart. You have written other books. One is to build an A-team. As we go back to this concept of the S-curve, tell us that we are all naturally inclined to want to innovate, elevate, disrupt ourselves, and grow. How do I apply that when I'm trying to build my next team, whether it's executives or salespeople? How do I take some of those concepts and what are some of those tips for building that A-team?

We have talked about the S-curve as a way to think about personal growth. What you can then do is zoom out a little bit and you can use the S-curve to configure your team. The reason that you can do that is because people at different points along the curve have different strengths. People at the launch point of the curve have asked the question of why we do it like this.

They need training and yes, they are feeling uncomfortable, but they are also saying, why do we do it like this? Which can open the door to innovation. Whether it's people around products and it's around processes. You have people in this sweet spot who are still able to ask, “Why do we do it like this?” They are part of the way up the mountain, but they are not up. They also can execute because they have got some skills and training.

These are people who can both ask why but also answer. Then you have people who are in a master who can say, “Here's why we do it this way.” They are very much the people at the top. They have this perspective or the institutional and tribal memory. What we have used and would suggest you use as a starting point when configuring your team is to use the standard bell curve distribution and have 60% of your people in the sweet spot overall because everybody's going to have a portfolio of curves. They are not on one curve, but overall, they are in the sweet spot because they can ask and answer the questions. In the launch point, you want no more than 20% because they are able to ask, why do we do it like this? They also need training. They need support.

That can be a big tax on your people in the sweet spot in mastery, and then you don't want more than 20% of your people in mastery because, on the one hand, they are able to answer the questions of why do we do it like this? They have the institutional memory, but they are going to need a new curve. That new curve can be doing something and taking on a new role. It can be taking on a new project, but if you have got all your people and master, you are going to have a cliff.

You want 20% at the launch point, 60% in the sweet spot, and 20% in mastery. Now, depending on your team, depending on what your team is trying to accomplish, if you are a startup versus a storage company, and we have a whole bunch of detail on this in the interstitials of the book Smart Growth that may adjust. If you start with 20/60/20, that will allow you to start thinking, “How is my team configured? Am I optimized not only for innovation and growth but also for succession planning, and then you can use this for a talent development conversation.” That's how you can use it to build an A-team to zoom out a little bit and think about the configuration that way, that 20/60/20.

If I can, I will share a couple of challenges. A lot of folks reading the show or maybe dealing with it, and we can talk about how applying these concepts can help. One of the big challenges in professional sales, it's a unique field. If you are a Chief Revenue Officer, which I am, and as part of the In-the-funnel business model, you have the three most important and demanding stakeholders in the business.

You are reporting directly to clients. Ultimately, the most important bar is anyone. Secondly, I'm managing a sales team, which takes active time and effort management, and then finally, I'm reporting to my board or my executive team. Frankly, all three of those groups have very definitive black-and-white metrics by which they can measure my success.

Nobody else on the executive team has such a black-and-white scorecard of, “Are you doing a good job or not?” Also, I don't know the scorecards of everybody else on the executive team, but they know mine. “We are hitting our goals.” “We are not.” This interesting dynamic as a Chief Revenue Officer or VP of sales creates a bit of a pressure cooker.

What we have found in this pressure cooker is two things. One fact-based one. Gartner Group, McKinsey, and others will say, “The tenure of that person is eighteen months.” Think of that for a second. “The Chief Revenue Officer lasts eighteen months.” Who knows where they get on the S-curve for a new business when they take over?

They think they are in mastery. The other problem is they have to project they are in mastery because they are new in the business. They are trying to make an impact. They were brought in because something wasn't working. After all, nothing is ever working in sales. It's this interesting dynamic where my experience has been that individuals won't ask for help.

Sales is a performance art. If they are running a team of performance artists, they don't want to ask for help because it looks weak and they are new in their job. Yet the coaches of some of the best performance artists in the world have loads of help. I'm Canadian. The hockey team I love is the Toronto Maple Leafs. They have a head coach, fitness coach, speed coach, shooting coach, mindset coach, nutrition coach, and strength coach. They will bring in anybody who can help. One of the reasons we have this short tenure in sales leadership is they won't ask for help because they look weak. Maybe they think they are going to look weak if they do. Do you have any thoughts on how we might address that or help some of those people who are reading?

The challenge is that if you are good at what you do, you are getting brought in because you are a domain expert. We know you can sell. Then the question becomes and this builds on the whole conversation that we have been having as you come in new to this role, I know you can sell, but I need you to take a hot minute to figure out who you are selling to in this new role.

I need you to map the territory. Who are your clients? Who are your internal stakeholders? You need all these people internally to help you do this job, and you need the buy-in of the senior executives. What my recommendation would be is to say, “I'm on the launch point of a curve. I knew I only had eighteen months, but I probably have more time than that if I do this.” Start by saying, “I'm going to take a couple of months and I'm going to get to know everybody, but here's what I'm doing.” The challenge is that when you come into sales, you are going to only look at what they sell. You have got to give me another metric in place of that or in lieu of that.

For the first three months, I need you to not focus on this, or maybe it's a month because that will freak them out to do three months, but let's do a month. For the first month, the metric that I want you to measure me by is, “Did I talk to all of our stakeholders? Did I find out what they need?” I'm going to come back and report to you what I learned. That will be my metric for the first six weeks.

After we have done that, we have collected the data. We are at the launch point. We have explored. We have collected the data that we talked about in Smart Growth, and then I will come up with a plan for what we are going to sell, and you can measure me by that. If you bring everybody along in this process of, “Here's my hypothesis, and here's what we are going to learn. We are going to collect and build this together and get buy-in for the metrics by which you are going to be measured early on. That's going to allow you to have the runway that you need to be able to succeed.” It takes real humility and it's important because oftentimes people think that salespeople aren't humble.

That allows you to come in and be like, “Here's where we can go.” You are used to painting this future or on this vision of who and what we can be. That's the pixie dust. That's what's amazing about salespeople, but the initial part is the pixie dust. You have to know who your people are and what pixie dust they need.

What a fantastic answer on the spot. As everybody who reads this show can tell, when I host it, we don't prepare. We prepare for guests but don't prepare questions or anything of that nature. Whether you are a sales leader or a salesperson coming into that new role, the first thing is to say, “I may be at the mastery level in terms of core processes and guidelines for running a sales organization, but I'm at the launch point for running your sales organization with your clients, your industry, and your particular situation and niche.” The first thing I want to do, I'm going to get out there and I need to speak to 50 clients. I'm going to gather some data that's going to help me ramp up that curve and also interview internal stakeholders.

How interesting you landed on that answer. At the core, one of the reasons companies in the funnel exist is because so few sales leaders successfully go in and take over a new environment that after this happens 2 or 3 times, CEOs or boards come to us and go, “What are we supposed to do here?” Our answer is, “I don't know.”

We are in the mastery stage of running sales organizations, but it's the same thing. We don't know you. We don't know your business. We don't know your industry. We don't know your team. Let us come in and interview all of those people for 60 days, and then we will come back and tell you. It's almost our whole business model you came up with on the spot. Tell me a little bit about when we start to think of this S-curve and then I take a look at your vision about the Great Resignation being the great aspiration.

What can I do as a leader continually with those pressures? I have got to hit my numbers. I got to have a full team. We have got to compete and win in the marketplace, but I also want to take that time to develop my people because, for many leaders, that's where the true joy will come from and it pays dividends years from now. What would be some ideas or tactics for me to make sure that's front of mind as many of us are going into a brand new calendar year, this being January of 2023? Do you have any thoughts or ideas for the leaders and CEOs to leverage some of this learning?

For many leaders, true joy comes from developing their people.

The first thing that I would suggest is you look at your computer right now, your phone, and your calendar. Look at your list of things to do and ask yourself, “On my list of things to do, how many are tasks and how many are conversations with people? How many interactions with people? Are there any people conversations on there?” For most of us, like me, it's the task and there are no people. Now, you can keep your tasks, but make sure when you are in the conversation how you are thinking about people. The second thing that I would say is that these people's conversations don't take a ton of time.

I had one. I was on the road with a person on my team. I delivered a keynote at an insurance company. Afterward, this person on my team was having lunch and I started grilling her. Grilling her in the sense of, “Tell me what you care about. What do you like doing? What don't you like doing? Tell me about some personal goals that you have.”

For us, anyway, if we are not able to grow our people internally, then we are not authentic. If I'm telling you to grow your people and I am not growing the people on my team, then there is something seriously wrong, but I digress. Those conversations don't take a lot of time. We were together for half an hour talking about that and then, and it was very organic as part of the conversation.

Here's what I would say to you. If there are people on your team with whom you do not want to have that conversation, that is important data for you. It either means that you haven't done the work to get to know this person or maybe they are not the right person in that role. If you can't get invested enough to have that conversation, there's either something going on with you or there's something going on with them in that role and you need to figure out what that is fast because it's not fair to them, to you, and your organization.

I would look at my list and if I don't have any people on the list, I have a goal to have at least one people conversation a week. If you don't want to have a conversation with any people on your team, ask yourself why. Get curious because there's likely an action item there for you as well. Maybe you have to do some work and maybe they are not the right person in the role or need training, but there's something. There's data there, so make sure you mind for that data.

What a great canary and cold mind. You look at your actual week and there are some meetings you can't wait to walk into and there are other meetings you are not looking forward to. It's a good thing to take a pause and go why. It's funny that I tended to start to think about all of these things so much more when I became an entrepreneur because I felt like I had so much more freedom running in the funnel that I was only going to do things I wanted to do. When I was thinking in the corporate world, it felt like jail at times because there were so many things I didn't have to do, but in my waning years in the corporate world, I took the same approach anyway.

You always have much more control than you think you do.

You do. You have so much more control and you end up being so much better at what you do. The other thing that everybody reading this will resonate. There's so much joy in elevating the capabilities of your team. That wind in your sails is so important because when you feel great when that's happening, that then becomes contagious and you are passing it along and so on and so forth, and then they are building their team.

The truth is, I encourage anybody reading this, I agree with the Great Aspiration. Start with doing what you want to do, but know you can control your environment. You can make a positive impact on your environment. You are not a cog. You can influence what takes place in a positive way. You have to want to do it. You have to make it happen. The joy of this show and everybody knew I say this that I am a lifelong learner. I love learning and I love these conversations.

This conversation, both preparing for this conversation and then having it, has triggered so much for me. Next time I'm going to be doing a ridiculously deep dive into your career and what you have done in all of your books, not just Smart Growth. I'm sure the folks reading are going to want to do the same, but first I want to say thank you so much for joining. How do folks learn more about you? If everyone wants to go out and buy Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company, the title alone tells you why you want this book. In addition to that, how do people learn more about you?

You can go directly to our website, TheDisruptionAdvisors.com, which will give you lots of resources. As you said, in addition to the book, we also have a podcast. That will give you an opportunity to do a deeper dive into this material. Specifically, I would suggest podcast Episode 205, where we talk about an article that we wrote in Harvard Business Review titled Managing Your Organization as a Portfolio of Curves. That could potentially be very useful to you.

Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company

A great place to start is to read the book or go to the podcast, which will allow you to do more work on these topics. You can always email me at WJ@WhitneyJohnson.com or you can do WJ@TheDisruptionAdvisors.com. We changed our website, so I forget which website we are using, but those are probably the best ways to connect.

Folks, buy Whitney's books and have a read. These are excellent resources for you. I took a quick look at what looked like about twenty articles or artifacts at Harvard Business Review. You will want to take a look at those. Whitney and I were referencing something from 2012 and 2003, her initial article called Disrupt Yourself, of which there's a book of the same name.

Folks, take a look there for all of these amazing resources. Thank you again to Whitney for joining me. Team, thank you for reading the episode. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe to our show and tell your friends. If there's something we can do to improve the value you get from this investment in time, please tell me. You can reach me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com and we love constructive criticism. That's my email and we respond to every note we get. Thanks, keep those tips coming our way. We will continue to get better at this and we will see everybody next time on the show.

Important Links

• Disruption Advisors

• Smart Growth

• The Innovator's Dilemma

• Disrupt Yourself – Article

• Liar's Poker

• The Bonfire of the Vanities

• Seth Godin – Past episode

• The Challenger Sale

• The JOLT Effect

• Episode 205 – Past episode

• WJ@WhitneyJohnson.com

• WJ@TheDisruptionAdvisors.com

• Disrupt Yourself

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors (thedisruptionadvisors.com), a leadership development company, helping you grow your people to grow your business, and was named by Thinkers50 as one of the ten leading business thinkers in the world (2021).

A world class keynote speaker and a popular lecturer for Harvard Business Publishing’s Corporate Learning, she has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2020; her weekly podcast Disrupt Yourself, is in the top .5% globally in terms of listenership.

Whitney is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Press) which Publisher's Weekly described as "cogent...insightful...practical...inspiring."

A former award-winning Wall Street equity analyst, she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with the late Clayton Christensen and has coached alongside Marshall Goldsmith. Whitney understands how companies work, how investors think, and how the best coaches coach.

Whitney is married, has two children, and lives in Lexington, VA where her family grows strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries and enjoys making jam.

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