Even though sales are mainly about driving revenue and putting up the right numbers, one element must not be forgotten: the needs and interests of the customers themselves. Executive coach Lisa McLeod is here to discuss why businesses should embrace the noble purpose of providing a positive impact to everyone. Sitting down with Mark Cox, she explains why they should never see their target market as mere statistics but aim to make a real difference in their lives. Lisa also explains how a client-first mindset requires taking intentional action and showcasing your authentic self.
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The Noble Purpose Of Sales With Lisa McLeod
Is sales a noble profession? It’s a conversation we are going to have. We believe it is. We think it’s the most important business discipline there is out there. We are chatting with Lisa McLeod, and she’s the author of Selling With Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud. She co-authored this book with Elizabeth Lotardo originally back in 2012, and then they did a second edition in 2020.
It was an enormously popular book, hence the second edition. The core idea is that sales teams with a noble purpose bigger than money, whose aim is to improve the life of their customers and prospects, outsell transactional salespeople that are trying to get deals done. We all intuitively know in this day and age that’s the case. I love the way that these ladies package this message and information so that we can engage our sales teams with this noble purpose.
One of the data points that’s pretty powerful comes out. It says organizations with a purpose bigger than money outperform their competitors. A ten-year study of more than 50,000 brands around the world said that the firms that put improving people’s lives at the center of all they do outperform the market by huge margins. They say they have a 3X growth trajectory versus their competitors.
It’s pretty interesting. We talk about what that noble purpose selling is. We also talk about a couple of questions that you might want to think about reading this show to find your noble purpose as a salesperson or sales team. The first question, how do you make a difference to your customers? Connect emotionally with the stories of what you’ve done for your customers and how you’ve improved their lives, both at the corporate level for that customer and at the individual buyer level.
The second question, how do you differentiate? We spend a lot of time on this with our training. What is unique and different about you, given that customer’s other options in the marketplace? The third question to think about and then collaborate on is, on your best day, what do you love about your job? Thinking about that, a lot of this is a mindset shift that enables your market to believe that you want to help them, and that starts by wanting to help them to improve their lives. That’s going to make you feel better about what you do. We talk a little bit about the brain science associated with this, that there are two big human needs we all have. One is belonging, and the second is significance.
We know purpose helps with drive. We learned that from Daniel Pink’s great work and all of that good stuff. We have a deep conversation on this topic, Selling with Noble Purpose. Lisa has authored four other books, Leading with Noble Purpose, The Triangle of Truth, Forget Perfect, and Finding Grace. I enjoyed my conversation with Lisa. I hope you do, too. If you do, please, folks, like and subscribe to the show, and tell your friends. When you like and subscribe or leave a rating for us, that helps us get great guests like Lisa, so thanks for doing so. Folks. here’s Lisa McLeod.
Lisa, welcome to the show. It’s so great to meet you face to face.
It is great to be here, Mark.
I was excited for this, and as always, everybody who reads the show knows we pick authors. We read somebody’s book and then we love it, then we chase them down. I did that with you. I hounded you until we got you on the show, but I was wondering how it took me so long because you’ve got five great books out. We are talking about Selling With Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud, and you co-wrote that with Elizabeth Lotardo originally back in 2012. It was so popular and did so well, you did a reprinting, or second printing in 2020.
Introducing Lisa McLeod And The Concept of Noble Purpose
You’ve also written Selling With Noble Purpose, Leading with Noble Purpose, The Triangle of Truth, Forget Perfect, and Finding Grace. We’ll focus on Selling with Noble Purpose. Before we do, maybe a little bit of the short story. You’ve had a great background. You are a sales trainer with P&G, but tell the audience a little bit about your journey that got you to where we are.
Selling with Noble Purpose is my most popular book, and it represents my own journey. I was, as you said, an ex-sales trainer. I was a former VP of Sales. I ran a sales training company, and like a lot of people that run sales organizations, I had a lot of pressure to deliver numbers. Also, like a lot of people who have seen a lot of sales calls, I was always curious as to what was that magic thing that the top performers had.
How I landed on Selling with Noble Purpose was through my work as a consultant, where I did a study for a big biotech company to identify what differentiated the top performers. I’m a curious person. I’m curious about what makes people tick. It probably comes from unpacking my own dysfunctional background, and we can get into that. One of the things that I determined, and it was a team that I worked with, was that the differentiator between the good performers and the exceptional, the top of the top. The thing that the top of the top had that was different was they had a different internal compass.
Instead of focusing on closing the deal, their true north, their higher purpose, was improving life for customers, and the numbers were a trailing indicator. When I discovered that, it was like one of those scenes in a movie where the person realizes their spouse is having an affair, and they flash back to like one hundred different scenes and go, “There was that.”
It was a moment when one sales rep said to me. She was in biotech sales, and said, “She’s my higher purpose.” It was this grandmother, and she had this visual imagery of the end game for her sales, this patient. When she said that to me, I flashed back to a hundred other situations where I went, “That was the difference.” I also went to my own personal self and thought, “When was I at the top of my game?” It’s when I was that true believer.
It’s a pretty compelling story at the beginning of the book. Correct me if I’m wrong, at some point, you were at a board table with that same client. They had some data in front of them that you didn’t have, and they asked your opinion. After interviewing or spending time with the reps, you called out five people you thought were the top reps. That seemed to be client-first selling with purpose. They said, that’s an amazing trick because they are our top reps, and then they asked why. You explained why you had come to that conclusion.
The other thing is the timing. We are doing this in 2025. This was several years ago as this was coming up. There’s been such a movement to say, “Get away from this idea of closing the deal or getting the metric. In my conversation, I want to end up with one more qualified opportunity.” Get away from all of that and this idea of trying to help somebody is the means to the end, so get away from the outcome.
Companies that prioritize their clients saw their revenue grow and their deal size sold at a higher margin.
I like to think that I was one of the people both inspired by and propelling this conversation around moving the emotional center of sales. What’s interesting is that I have been doing this for a long time. I was a sales trainer when I was 24 years old. I was a field sales trainer for P&G. I was a sales manager for my college paper. I have been thinking, writing, and reading about sales for a long time.
There’s a nuanced difference I want to draw people’s attention to. I know a lot of sales leaders read your blog, as well as CEOs of companies. The nuanced difference I want to highlight is this, here’s what we know. That hunch I had back then has later been proven true, proven true by academically vetted research.
Here’s the truth and the nuance I want to draw your attention to. The truth is that salespeople with a purpose bigger than money, salespeople who truly want to improve the lives of their customers, outperform salespeople focused on the numbers. The nuance is this, we have been trying to get salespeople to be customer-focused for many years. We have said, “Focus on the customer.”
The nuanced difference is going beyond focusing on the customer and instead instilling within the seller a deep purpose. Your job is to improve this customer’s situation. That’s very different from than if I was with a student. It was focusing on the student, but instead, I went to the student and said, “You need to improve their abilities.” That’s a completely different situation. That’s what was missing in a lot of the previous conversations. It was just focus on the customer generally, rather than, how are you going to improve this customer’s condition?
It’s an interesting nuance to call out because a lot of the past may have been more tactical. Maybe there was good intent there, but it might have been a bit more tactical, where they go, “Focus on the customer so you can sell them something.” It’s quite different from having this relentless focus on making their situation better. Along that journey, good things are going to happen to you, but that also means, as you understand their world and have the business acumen and industry acumen to help them achieve a better future, it may or may not mean something for you immediately.
That’s what people worry about, but what if it’s not best to buy from me? I can tell you that the companies that have employed this methodology grew their revenues, grew their deal sizes, sold at a higher margin, and cemented long-term customer relationships. They were able to lift out of that transactional sale.
That’s the challenge. If you are a sales leader, you have to hit a number. That’s not some loosey-goosey. Maybe if it’s right for the customer, or maybe if it’s not. The challenge with coaching to the numbers is that it’s like a track coach trying to coach to times. I could sit there and say, “Mark, your time’s ten seconds. You’ve got to get it to nine.” I could shout at you all day, but that’s not coaching you. That’s not behavioral. It’s measuring the past. As a sales leader, I will give you an example.
We worked with a big consulting firm and did an exercise where we divided the room in two. We said, “This room needs to sell a $1 million deal. This room needs to deliver $10 million in value to clients. You have five minutes, go.” In five minutes, the people who were focused on trying to sell a $1 million deal were like, “We’d go here. We’d go there.” The people who were focused on trying to deliver $10 million to their clients were like, “What if we came up with this? What if we did that? What if we helped them with this?” At the end of the day, you ask, “Who’s going to be more successful?”
The other thing I loved about reading this was when you shared that exercise, the excitement with which one side of the room was engaged because you triggered that emotional reaction. There’s something far less emotionally engaging about thinking, what’s in it for me and how do I hit my number? For those reading out there, this is where you are going to hear things from your sales team. When you are managing and somebody comes in and says, “How’s it going? How’s the week been?” They go, “What a grind.”
If you are out there picking up the phone or knocking on doors or continuing to try and pull people along to a deal, there’s a lack of that sense of purpose, but if you are saying, “My role here is to improve the lives of the people I’m working with and try to help them run better businesses. I have this higher purpose. I feel better.”
Focusing On Improving Customers’ Lives
We used to articulate this a lot in our training, but I never captured it as well. I don’t know how I never came across your book, but I hadn’t captured it as well the way you’ve got this captured, and a data point that’s worthy of taking a listen-to-team. In the book, you write that, “Organizations with a purpose bigger than money outperform their competitors.”
A ten-year growth study of more than 50,000 brands around the world said that, “Firms that put improving people’s lives at the center of all they do outperform the market by a huge margin.” The study was done with Jim Stengel, former chief marketing officer for P&G, who said those clients who center their business on improving people’s lives have grown at triple the rate of their competitors.
The research is there, and I will translate it into a scenario everyone can relate to. Imagine you have one company or sales team in a room saying, “How can we grow? How can we make more money? Who can we call on? How can we close bigger deals?” There’s nothing wrong with that. I have led a sales team, but imagine you have another team, their competitor across town. They are saying, “How can we improve life for our customers? How can we find more customers that we can improve? How can we help them improve in bigger, bolder ways?”
That second team, even if the products are exactly the same, the second team, if they have some malleability, they are going to be more innovative. Even if the offerings are exactly the same. We work with a metals company. They are not going to invent a new metal. What happened is when we sat with them and said, “How can we improve our customer’s lives in better ways?” We could go to some other divisions. We could help them with this. We could help them with that.
This company exponentially grew their revenue and beat their competition because, instead of sitting in a room talking about themselves, they were sitting in a room talking about how to improve customers. That nuanced difference, you can tell in that grinded-out company, customers are talked about as an object, a thing to get from. You can tell by the language, the way they talk about the customers. In that noble purpose company, they talk about customers with specificity, “We helped so-and-so with this.” They are talked about as someone that they are having an impact on.
There are so many things to unpack there and so many things to call out. Anyone reading this, first of all, you have to be respectful to those who are absent. If you are in a sales meeting, not speaking about a client or a prospect with the utmost respect, that bleeds through. That’s a culture thing. That’s a value thing. If you are selling for a company doing that, find another job. There’s a whole lot of other detail behind that, but the short answer is you have to find another place to work.
The second thing to touch on there a little bit is, you talked about even if they have a similar product. We know the product almost doesn’t matter outside of a minimum threshold of capability. The research you’ve published at HBR, Harvard Business Review, another study in Harvard Business Review around the time you wrote this book in 2012, they published the research that Charlie did that said that 39% of the time, a B2B purchasing decision favors the company that sold better versus the company that had the best price for quality or service features. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, and my belief is always this, the company that I feel buyers will go forward with is the organization that they believe understands them best.
Yes, and it’s reflected in the way you sell.
Taking Action With Intent And Authentic Curiosity
This is why there’s such a powerful mindset. We are going to get to how we start to apply this mindset to our company with three key questions to ask ourselves, but this mindset, this client-first mindset, this noble approach, helping-people mindset, is so important. You probably know him, but I’m interviewing Dr. Nick Morgan, who’s written 9 or 10 books on mindset speaking. He teaches the folks at Harvard as well. It is a great book. It’s called Can You Hear Me? and Power Cues is another one.
What he speaks to is, there are conscious and unconscious triggers when we are communicating with somebody, and they are picking up on the conscious triggers and the unconscious triggers. We have this almost sixth sense of sensing somebody’s intent. That’s why this noble selling purpose is so important to me. You’ve nailed it here because you’ve had that experience. You meet somebody at a cocktail party, and you connect with them.
A company will exponentially grow its revenue and beat its competition if they are always talking about how to improve its customers.
It feels like this great connection. The same things happen, you’ve met somebody who are saying the right things, but there’s something about you that says, “I’m not into this person.” You are almost a little bit repulsed by them. Something’s happening with the subconscious. You are picking up on triggers that go, “Danger. I don’t know about this person.” This mental intent is so important.
It is, and it shows up in the language of the seller and in some little unconscious qualifiers that people do. I want to go back to something you said. When you said if you are working for a company that only thinks of the customer as a number. A lot of people in that situation reached out to me. What I would say is if you are working for a company where they say, “We care about a customer if they give us money and they are awful.” You need to go work somewhere else.
If you are working somewhere that’s more like your normal company, where the VP of sales is saying, “We got to hit these targets. Can you get this customer this month?” Don’t make assumptions. We had one situation that ended up being our absolute biggest global client, where one sales team read the book. They were in that meeting. The sales leader was in the meeting with all the other sales leaders, where the head of sales was saying, “We got to get these numbers in.”
They said, “We are going to get our numbers in, but one thing I always like to remind myself of is these are human beings, and every one of these numbers represents someone. Someone that has had a great experience because of us.” It was a travel company. They said that in the meeting, and the whole emotional center shifted. Everyone went, “That’s right.” No matter who your boss is, and if you are the boss, it’s going to be more powerful, but you have the power to look at those numbers and say every one of these represents someone whose life we improved.
When you talk about intent, I will give you an example. I taught spin selling for years, which everyone’s pretty much from Dr. Neil Rackham. I was a spin trainer. It’s part of the arsenal of experiences that I drew on, where I would watch people use the same question and go, “It sounds better coming from them,” and I realized it was intentional.
There’s that age-old sales question, “What keeps you up at night?” I can ask that question in that icky sales way, or I could say, “If I could show you a way to do it better, faster, and cheaper, would you do it?” I can ask that same question at the end of an intentional discovery, where I said, “It seems like this and this are your biggest challenges and you are dealing with this. As you look across the landscape of all those things, what are the ones that keep you up at night?”
That exact same question now feels different. If I ponder and go, “If I could show you a way to solve that map, would that be helpful to you?” You are reading. If you are watching this, you can see it better, but even if you are reading, you can know my intent because the question is in the service of improving your condition, and you can feel it. The thing about salespeople is they already know you are in sales. They already know you want to sell something. That’s already the framework for operating. You don’t need to be the one pushing it too early in the call.
It’s such a great example because we get engaged by a lot of folks, Lisa, which would be mid-sized organizations, significant-sized companies, but they are mid-size, where in many cases the biggest deals still need to be sold by the founder. They come to us because they go, “We still can’t somehow translate what the founder’s doing to the majority of the sales team.”
When you travel around, and you do a lot of this when you are traveling around with people in the field, and see what goes on, it’s that intent. That’s the difference. When the founder is in the room with the potential buyers or the other client, the prospect, and they are asking questions. They are truly authentic questions. The other side believes they are authentic because they are going, “The founder doesn’t need one more deal. The founder’s already fine. He’s interested.”
Whereas, the intent of the salesperson sometimes, that same question feels like manipulation, because it feels like you are getting drawn down this path. Whereas, if I say yes then suddenly, I’m going to get hit with something, instead of this authentic curiosity. Diane Hamilton is somebody you should probably know. Maybe you do, but a great thought leader on this topic of authentic curiosity with intent.
As a leader, you have to focus on driving the numbers and the sense of pride.
We have worked with a lot of founder-led companies that tried to scale. One of them, a very public example, is a Canadian company. I should also tell people I’m not a three-pack-a-day smoker. I’m recovering from COVID so my voice is raspy.
Thanks so much for coming. I appreciate you.
I feel better but my voice is raspy, but I will give an example. We worked with Hootsuite, who’s a Canadian-based. A Hoover-based company that became a unicorn, billion-dollar valuation, and they were a founder-led company. The founder has that deep belief because you don’t found a company because you were looking around going, “That’d be interesting.” Companies are founded because the founder saw a need in the market, and they went, “Someone should be doing that. It’s me.”
The founder has that deep understanding of how important the offering is and how the offering improves life for customers. It was based on their experience, research, and this need they saw. A lot of companies are founded based on a bad experience, like, “It shouldn’t be done that way. It should be done this way.” That founder has that deep belief. What’s hard is to scale it. What often gets muddied when you scale is that deep belief on how we make a difference uniquely. It’s nobody’s fault. It doesn’t happen by design. It happens by default.
I will give you an example. With Hootsuite, we wrote an HBR piece on How to Scale Your Sales Team Quickly. One of the techniques we used was customer impact stories. We took all these people who would say, “We are a bunch of hockey players.” They were working at their headquarters. That was their description, not mine. We turned them into storytellers because stories are what see and deep belief. Not stories of how we closed the big deal, but stories of how we made a difference to customers. Those stories spread the belief, and they are different from those antiseptic case studies that people put on their websites.
Turning Your Noble Purpose Into Practice
I’m Canadian, we are all hockey players. For anybody under twenty who didn’t grow up playing hockey, very rare. We also know Hootsuite very well. We know the sales leadership of that team very well, but it’s such a great segue into how we put this into practice. For everybody out there reading, this is an excellent read. That’s why we asked Lisa to join us.
Everybody should be picking up Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud with Lisa and Elizabeth Lotardo. Read the book because it’s a great book, but you led to the first one here. There are three key questions you suggest asking yourself as you try to create that noble purpose. The first one was, “How do you make a difference to your customers?”
How do you make a difference in quantitative and qualitative ways? That’s important. What I want to draw people’s attention to is the subtitle of the book, How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud. It’s those two things as a leader that you are always trying to drive the numbers and the sense of pride and meaning. Those two are directly related. The sense of pride and meaning drives the numbers.
When you ask your team, “How do we make a difference to customers?” Ask it of yourself and ask it of your team. The challenge is, the way most people initially answer it is this very antiseptic value prop. “We provide organization.” What you want to say is, “Give me an example.” We had one company that was an IT company, and they did IT for small businesses. Everybody knows small businesses.
A hundred thousand companies like that exist. There’s nothing more common than one of those companies.
Noble Purpose : A lot of companies are founded based on a bad experience.
Nothing is differentiated. They are not going to sell, “We are better IT people.” We said, “How do you make a difference?” They said, “We take away their IT headaches.” They all say that, too. I said, “Give me some examples,” and they started telling stories. This one customer said they didn’t get calls at 1:00 in the morning from their data center. Another customer said that they could finally focus on their business. It’s in that qualitative description that fuels the deep belief in the team. Not the concrete, “We improve efficiency by 5%.”
That’s the first thing that new hires should be taught. In the old world, what was the first thing they were taught? Products and features. That led us to ten years of pointing somebody to a demo and terrible conversion rates. You have no idea why somebody doesn’t buy after a demo. It’s because nobody cares about technology. They care about what it does for them.
Connected the dots. There are two ways you can connect the dots. The first way is what the company needs to do, which is deep intelligence about your customers. When you are rolling out a new piece of technology, you say, “Here’s our typical customer. Here’s what their day looks like. Here’s what their challenges are. Here’s what they spend time on that they hate. Here’s what they wish they could do. Here’s why we developed this piece of software, to help them with that.” It’s in the service of that. That’s what the company needs to do.
As an individual seller, when I’m making calls, I want to be saying, “A lot of people in your position are worried about this and this. How is that affecting you?” I want to get specific so that when I go back and present, instead of doing a demo, I say, “Here are the three things you told me were the most important. Let’s talk about how to handle those.” I can always tell, people send me their pitch decks, and I can always tell based on the order.” If it leads with the product, I say, “I bet you have a low conversion rate.” “Funny you should mention that. That’s why we called.”
The first one, how do you make a difference to your customers? It’s being able to articulate, understand, live that, and then communicate it. The second way of rolling this out, or thinking about it for your firm if you are reading, we do so much work with clients on this, how do you differentiate from your competitors? Remember, doing nothing is probably your biggest competitor.
Not taking any action. How do you do it differently? Again, the traditional reaction is, “Our product is 5% cheaper.” That’s great. You were the one that invented the iPhone. Good on you. You can show the product, do the scroll on a video, and we’ll all buy it but most people don’t have that. Most people work for a construction company or a metals company or a travel company where you could search the internet.
How you do it differently is both quantitative and qualitative. We were working with one company and I mentioned them to you. They were one of our early adopters. It was G Adventures based in Toronto. I remember the founder. We were there with the leadership team, and we were getting started. The founder was like, “Where does this live in terms of a lexicon and how we do it?”
I love them. They are a no-pretense company. One of the senior leaders said, “It lives effin’ in your heart.” One of the things I like about that is, how do we do it differently? One of the ways you do it differently could be, we are more curious. We care more. It could be some factual things. One company came up with, “We care more,” then we said, “if we care more, what are the small points during the sales and delivery process that could illustrate that?” It becomes very meaningful.
We are fond of saying, Lisa, that how you sell becomes part of that competitive differentiation.
The way they are experiencing it. If you say, “We care more,” what this company said is, “It’s because we care more, we do a lot of homework before we make our first sales call.”
Sales is the only profession defined by the people who do it badly.
It shows it’s not just talk. Team, as you start to think about applying noble selling purposes for your business, the third item that we talked about first is how do you make a difference to your customers and knowing that and how do you differentiate from your customers. The third one is what I love. On your best day, what do you love most about what you do? What a great question to ask and then have a group think about.
You said the operative word there, ask and have a think about. Too often, if a marketing team took these three questions, how do we make a difference to our customers? How do we do it differently? On the best day, what do most employees love about their job? They could probably come up with an answer, and it might be inspiring. They might do a deck or do a video or something like that. That’s great, but what I need for a top-performing team is I need it internalized within the team members.
Rather than telling them, how do we make a difference? Ask them. Rather than telling them, “How do we do it differently?” Ask them, and then that last one, on your best day, what do you love about your job? I want them to internalize that because too often the whole employee engagement conversation is around what can we do for them, versus how can we tee them up to where they have the tools and they understand. That question, on your best day, what do you love about your job? I’m not asking that so I can get a list and put it out and say, “Here’s what everybody loves about working here.” I want you to internalize that.
I’m sure it’s in Leading with Noble Purpose, which I’m going to look forward to reading. We are not asking questions so we then use it as evidence to manipulate you. It’s an authentic question. That’s an important thing for everybody reading this show to think about. Why are you in this profession? It’s too easy to get in, and the problem is once we are in, sometimes we might get addicted to things like a little bit of money, or we might be working for a cool company, but we don’t like this process of helping other people this way.
What Selling with Noble Purpose taps into is the two core human needs, belonging and significance. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and we want to know that our contribution matters. Oftentimes, people will say, “Do you do work for the American Cancer Society or the nonprofits?” Sometimes, we do work with a concrete company because you might not think concrete is the sexiest product in the world, but it’s holding up half the world. I had one guy come up to me and say, “I get this noble purpose, but my wife is the one that has the noble purpose because she’s a kindergarten teacher.” I was like, “You lead 250 people. It’s the same.” If you have customers that are buying from you, you are helping them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t buy.
This is where you find somebody who’s in the right spot. I have had two great examples where you find somebody doing something in life where they know why they are doing it, they know why they love it, and they are so good at it becomes contagious. I mentioned we are based in Toronto. We got hammered with a little bit of snow. It’s all melting very quickly. We are having some flooding problems, and we thought that we need some quick replacement of some downspouts.
My lovely wife had somebody come over and said, “You need to tear these down.” This guy took a look and said, “No. This is what’s happening. There’s clogging because of your positioning.” He took them down, unclogged them, put them back up, and said, “This is no big deal at all. You don’t need anything new.” We said, “That’s wonderful. How much?” He said, “No. I’m in the area. This is no big deal. It took me fifteen minutes.” You thought to yourself, what a giving experience.
Who are you going to call whenever you have a gutter problem? We have an app in the US called Nextdoor, where neighbors connect. Who are you going to put? Best gutter guy ever. It’s a great story, and a sales exec or a CEO might think, “I can’t invite people running around all the time for free.” What I want to draw people’s attention to in your story is the intent. He could have said, “It’s a minimum $50 service charge,” and you would have happily paid it. It’s the intent, “I am here to help you.” When you give your team that I, they see things differently. They look differently. They are more curious. They ask better questions. They come up with better solutions. The customer reads the intent.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
Lisa, this is a conversation we could have for a couple of hours. I have a feeling at some point we’ll figure out a way of getting you in front of some of our training workshops because I love this topic. I did want to say thank you specifically before we wrap for one thing. Our belief is that professional B2B selling is a profession. I have always said without even seeing your book, “It’s a noble profession.”
One of the things, there’s this move afoot out there to try and migrate away from the term sales. We work with a lot of folks who are in account management and say, “I could never be in sales,” almost with this 70-year-old stereotype that selling’s bad. This is the most important business discipline there is. Nothing starts until we get some revenue. It is noble. We can change this, but we need it with education and training, a client-first mentality, and a noble purpose. I believe someday there’s going to be formal certification. That’s an ongoing process in my lifetime. That’s why I love this, Selling With Noble Purpose. It resonated so much for me. This is where we take this whole business discipline. Thank you. What a great book.
It is interesting, and I’m very appreciative of that. That is my wish too, and I want to state the facts. Sales is the only profession that is defined by the people who do it badly because those pushy, grabby, lying salespeople, the research tells us they are not effective. Every profession has people that aren’t effective. There are bad teachers, bad doctors, and bad priests. We all know this, but we don’t allow it to define the profession. The research tells us that the salespeople that are at the top of their profession, performing, delivering the numbers, and making the wheels of commerce move, care very deeply about their customers.
Your book, you referenced Drive by Daniel Pink. Daniel’s been a guest on our show once, if not twice, and at the end of one of them, I asked him about sales or why he wrote To Sell Is Human. He almost said exactly what you said verbatim. He said he wrote To Sell Is Human because there was a gap between the stereotype of B2B sales and what his experience was with people who were very good at B2B sales. The gap was so big that he thought he had to investigate the topic.
The title is account manager and customer. All those matters, but there’s not a company alive that if you said, “Are sales important? Is revenue important?” They’d say no. That’s the act of producing it. It ought to be one of the top prestigious jobs in the company.
What a great place to leave it. What a pleasure meeting you and speaking with you again. Thank you so much for joining. How do readers learn more about you and what you do outside of buying Selling With Noble Purpose or Leading with Noble Purpose?
Google Noble Purpose and you’ll find me. You can go to our website and follow me on LinkedIn. I put a lot of content on LinkedIn for free. Whenever I write a piece for Harvard Business Review, I post it on LinkedIn.
Thanks again for joining, Lisa.
It’s such a pleasure.
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Team, thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the show because that’s how we get great guests like Lisa McLeod when you do that. As well, we are growth-oriented. The reason we do this show is we want to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. In doing so, we believe we are improving the lives of everyone in sales.
This show is meant to help, but we know we can get better. If you’ve got some constructive criticism for us about this show or what you’d like to see to make this even more valuable to you, we’d love to hear from you. Please email me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That’s my personal email address. I answer every bit of constructive criticism we get, and I thank you for it. In the meantime, we’ll see you next time and thanks again for joining.
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About Lisa McLeod
Lisa McLeod (pronounced Mc-Loud) is the global expert on purpose-driven business and the bestselling author of Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud. She works with clients like LinkedIn, Supportworks, Roche, and Splunk and is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
Lisa McLeod is the global expert on purpose-driven business. She is the author of five books, including her bestseller: Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud.
Lisa has spent two decades helping leaders increase competitive differentiation and emotional engagement. She developed the Noble Purpose methodology after her research revealed, that salespeople who sell with Noble Purpose, outsell salespeople who focus on targets and quotas.
Lisa is a former Procter & Gamble Sales Leader who founded her own firm, McLeod & More, Inc. in 2001. She helps leaders at organizations like Cisco, Roche, Volvo, and Dave & Busters drive exponential revenue growth. Lisa has keynoted in 25 countries and authored over 2,000 articles. She has made appearances on the Today Show and the NBC Nightly News, and her firm’s work has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.
Lisa’s leadership book, Leading with Noble Purpose: How to Create a Tribe of True Believers is a breakthrough book that shows leaders how to win the hearts and minds of their teams and customers.
