The game of sales isn’t just about closing deals—it’s about guiding informed buyers to make confident decisions. In this episode, Victor Antonio reveals his journey from electrical engineering to sales and explores how today’s sales landscape has evolved. With buyers now more knowledgeable than ever, the role of a salesperson has shifted from pitching products to providing expertise and clarity in complex decisions. Victor breaks down how the commoditization of markets has made the how more important than the what, highlighting the need for industry insight and consultative selling. Whether navigating indecisive buyers or mastering the balance between automation and human touch, this conversation dives deep into the nuances of sales dynamics, leadership styles, and staying resilient in ever-changing markets.
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Navigating The Evolving World Of Sales: Insights From The Field With Victor Antonio
Welcome. We’ve got a great show for you on the show. We’ve got one of the top sales thought leaders in the world because Victor Antonio is on the show. Victor is the Founder and CEO of the Sellinger Group. He’s the author of sixteen books on professional sales, leadership, and personal growth. His first book on AI came out in 2017. He was ahead of the curve on that one. We discuss that book in this episode.
I originally came across Victor when I was traveling in the US. One night in a hotel room, my wife and I were getting ready to grow out, and on the television was a show called Life or Debt. We had the TV playing while we were getting ready to go for dinner. That was Victor’s show he was on. It’s on the Paramount Network, I believe, Spike TV, and Amazon. It’s called Life or Debt. He hosted that show and ran that show for a few years.
This conversation is about professional sales and leadership. We get into sales management. We get into the top trends in B2B selling and B2C selling. We talk a little bit about the impact AI is going to have on professional selling. Victor’s got some pretty bold predictions in terms of what may happen to some sales roles.
He’s a spectacular individual. We talk about sales leadership and what’s required to truly allow the teams that we manage and run to grow to their full potential. Part of that is allowing them to do things their way so that they can grow and learn and giving them the time and space to do that. He’s got a forward-thinking approach to leading people. We talk a little bit about what buyers are going through. Victor sees a lot of this with the teams he trains and the organizations that he’s working with.
We also learn a little bit about how somebody who’s at this level of sales thought leadership continues to invest in his own personal learning and growth. We find out a few of the sources that he likes to go to to stay current with what’s happening in professional B2B sales. I learned a lot from Victor. I’m sure you will too. He’s a spectacular guy. You’re going to enjoy this conversation. If you do, please like and subscribe to the show because that’s exactly how we get great guests like Victor Antonio. Thank you for doing so. Team, here’s Victor Antonio.
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Victor, welcome to the show. What a pleasure to meet you.
Thank you for finally having me on your show.
I’m so glad to finally get you on the show. One of the things that is helpful for our audience is they’d be interested to know the short version of your journey in professional sales, specifically, how a mechanical engineer with an MBA ends up becoming one of the top sales thought leaders in the world. What’s the short story on that amazing journey?
Small correction, electrical engineering with an MBA.
It’s electrical. Pardon me.
No worries. We’re in the same family. I was working for a wireless company designing wireless systems, to do the short story. I remember I designed a big system, I was always traveling with a salesperson. His name was Ken Cook. We won the deal and Ken took me out to a great lunch, and then I found out that on the first phase of the actual design that I designed, he would probably make about $50,000. $50,000 versus this $50 lunch, I said, “I’d rather be on that side of the fence.”
World Of Selling Now
That’s a good start. Here we are, X number of years later. Amazingly, you’ve written sixteen books. You’ve been in front of some of the largest crowds in the world. You’re a student. I’ve certainly studied a little bit before this episode. I’ve heard you on so many other podcasts. Not only do you have thought leadership but you’re also a student of research and facts, but an open-ended one. With your depth and professional selling, how are we doing as a business discipline?
I zoom out. I looked at the world of selling. I’m probably a little older than you and most people who are probably reading this. I’ve seen sales from when you were carrying everything with you from projector to displays. You really had to carry the bag back in the day. There was no software. There was no type of CRM. You had to work the customer base. You had to work your territory. Fast forward, we got all kinds of tools to make us more efficient at sales.
This is a data point that blows my mind that people don’t think about. No matter how many tools we provide salespeople, they're still only spending about 1/3 of their time selling. We’ve gone beyond sales enablement, and yet we’re not selling as much. It’s almost like something’s stunting the actual sales process. When I talk to salespeople, they hide behind their emails a lot. They don’t like to do cold calling. They’re afraid to reach out and talk to customers. I get it. It’s generational differences. Some people want to communicate via text or whatever it may be. What I find that's changed is not so much selling. It’s the buyer that’s changed. That’s the real mind-blower.
Depending on whose study you believe, buyers are more into the buying journey or the buying process. In other words, they’re smarter. They know more. What we have is a different buying animal, one that’s done the research that says, “I’m 90% into the buying cycle already. I need you to clarify certain things, confirm certain things, or give me the confidence that this is the right decision.” To me, the biggest change is not so much on the sales side because a lot of these sales processes are still the same. I don’t care what flavor or book you put out there. A lot of the processes are still the same, but the buyer’s mindset where they are in the buying journey is what we have to pay attention to.
You reference a couple of things in that buyer’s journey. Folks of this show are pretty familiar with the spaghetti diagram from Gardner from 2017 and the stages of that buying process that has been made famous in lots of different places. They’re going through that journey. We’ve always heard, “There are lots of people involved in the purchasing decision,” all the way back to Miller Heiman.
In my view, if you did big deals, you and I aren’t that different in age. When I started and did large deals, there was always a large buying committee on large outsourcing deals in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. There’s a big group. Major things. That was always the case. Going back to the salesperson or our business discipline, we had Dan Pink on the show a little while back.
I love Daniel Pink.
I love his writing. I love the fact that he wrote To Sell is Human and he wasn’t even in professional sales. There was this interesting divide between everybody he knew in professional sales who were intellectually curious, problem-solvers, and business people with business acumen and this 40 or 50-year-old stereotype, so he wrote a book about it.
The line that got me was, “What science is telling us is one thing. What business does is another thing.” It was a great line. It talks about the gap between science and actual practicality.
You’re right. There’s a little bit of that in Drive. I’m not sure you’re familiar with Drive.
I don’t want to make this a Pink episode, but I read Drive and To Sell is Human. I forgot about the one about Johnny Bravo or whatever. He’s also got a sleeper called When which a lot of people have not read. It’s a great book. When I say I’m a fan, I’m not saying that to be nice to the guy.
With When, here’s the message to everybody reading. If you get a medical procedure, make sure you get it done in the morning.
If you don’t know what we’re talking about, read the book.
Do your driving in the morning. Coming back to what we do, I always like the stat from To Sell is Human, 1 in 9 people in a professional sales job. When we had Frank Cespedes on the show a little while back, he said, “If you graduate college or university today,” like you with electrical engineering and MBA, “You’ve got a 50% chance now in your career that you’re going to be in a dedicated professional sales role.” It’s so much different. 1 in 2 people are going to be doing this.
If you listen to the noise, it does seem that sales performance may be declining. You’re always seeing the stats of the percentage of quota achieves going down or the percentage of buyers who enjoy interacting with the professional salespeople going down. They’re trying to avoid it in some cases. I’m not sure I agree with all of these stats. Sometimes, they’re a little bit hyped up. What’s your view on the profession? You’re in front of lots of groups of folks. You’re training lots of different teams. I’m sure you’re brought in when leaders are trying to turn around underperforming organizations. How do you think we’re doing as an overall business profession or discipline?
I don’t want to be that old guy in the room like, “Back in the day, we used to,” that whole thing and talk about declining performance. The way to look at this market is it depends on what segment we’re looking at. For example, I like to look at things on the spectrum, like simple to complex sale or transactional to complex. When we look at transactional sales, we can see how the salesperson is being attrition doubt eliminated because people want to make their own buying decisions. That’s where you see some of these numbers.
When someone says, “76% of B2B buyers don’t want to engage with a salesperson,” it lacks a lot of context. I’m like, “In what context?” You came from a technology background. I came from one. If it’s a complex system, I want to talk to a salesperson, especially a salesperson who has experience and has done this. When I look at the spectrum from simple to complex, it’s almost like Pacman. It’s eating all the transactional stuff up. In other words, it’s going to be like, for example, AI and auto. We don’t need people. They can make their own buying decisions. That is the consumer.
As we get more complex and it becomes difficult, we’re going to see a return to Mack Hanan’s approach to consultative selling where the decisions are going to get so complex that that’s where really good salespeople are going to rise to the top. Those are the experts, the best of the best. If I’m in sales and I’m looking at these data points, I always ask, “What’s the context?” When we talk about lack of performance, what’s the context?
We’ve thrown in a new curve ball, which is virtual selling. We don’t have anything to compare that to, so how do we know how people are doing? If I were to summarize this, it all depends on what we’re talking about. For complex sales, you’ll still need great salespeople who are subject matter experts. I can also see how people want to get away from talking to salespeople.
I always use this simple example. Think about how you and I would buy a car many years ago versus how we would buy it now. Now, we do all the research and get all the information. We know what the price should be. When we walk onto the dealer lot, we want a transaction. We don’t want a relationship. That’s one of the biggest shifts because we’ve done the research. I go back to we've enabled the buyer so much so that in many cases, they don’t want to deal with salespeople.
It's an interesting example of a car. Certain people will go online and do the research if they’re high fact finders if you believe in Kolbe and all that. We still buy through a broker. Our cars over the last couple of years, I want to make sure that I’m making a good investment but I want to go to somebody who’s an expert who can help me cut through all the noise. I want to spend my time researching this. I don’t want to research cars and I don’t want to be researching my sports equipment and all that. I go to folks who know these things. I want to use them. It always depends on the individual you’re working with.
We think the difference in a lot of companies is how well they sell. There’s this world where things get commoditized so quickly through lots of different reasons but eventually, things get commoditized unless you’re Apple, Amazon, or somebody like that. The way you sell as an organization is what differentiates your company. Sales is management consulting. That’s always about the client, the better future, how you can get them there, helping with trust, earning their trust and credibility, but being able to help them achieve a better future, get them to that better future, and understand what that better future is with industry acumen and business acumen.
I don’t know if there was a question in there. That seemed more like a statement. I’ll try to add this flavor to it. Since there are so many options out there, a lot of buyers are confused. It’s the whole, “I don’t know which way to go, left to right.” Many books have been written about this, including The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect with Matt Dixon about making this decision.
In Robert Child’s book, Influence, there was always that example. It was the study by Mann-Mouth University where he talked about the 24 flavors of jams on 1 table and then there were 6 flavors on another table. They want to see which table sold the most. The one with 24 flavors only sold 3%. The other one with only 6 flavors sold 30%. A confused mind will never make a decision.
I’d like to use Brent Adamson’s words. We almost have to be like a sales Sherpa, which is to guide the buyer to what we know they want. It’s like, “I’ve listened to you. We’ve done the discovery phase. I understand what you want. I understand your pain points. I understand the impact you want. As you pointed out, I’m futurecasting where you want to go. Therefore, may I suggest we do this?” That’s what customers are looking for.
I alluded to this earlier. They want clarification. They’re like, “Help me understand what’s this versus that.” They want confirmation so they’re like, “It can do that.” The third one is the most important component, which is confidence. They’re like, “Give me the confidence. I want you, the salesperson, to give me the confidence that this is the right decision for me to make.” They want clarification, confirmation, and then the confidence that you give them because you know your subject matter. They go, “I trust you. Let’s go with that one. Even if I have to pay a higher price, let’s go with that one.”
You mentioned both Matt and Brent, the authors of The Challenger Sale.
I love their work also.
Matt wrote with Ted McKenna The JOLT Effect, which talked about that no decision. Tying into that confidence, which is relevant to your model, they said a buyer makes a decision when they’re in pain. They say, “I want a solution.” Once they’ve made a decision, there’s a second decision that says, “Is this the right thing to do? I’m almost getting advanced buyer’s remorse, or, “Am I better missing out versus messing up?” That’s this idea that 60% of deals, if not more, go to no decision where my main competitor isn’t somebody else doing sales training. The organization decides not to move forward at all.
There’s a subtlety in what you said that was put in that data, right?
Yeah.
If I remember, you got an average of 60%. Of that 60%, 20% go to your competitor and 40% go to no decision. I would argue that maybe of that 40%, 10% go because of pricing. It still leaves you with 30% no decision, which implicitly means this. Your real competitor isn’t your competitor, which is only 20% of the business loss. Your real competitor is indecision.
What you’ve said is very important. I don’t want people to skip over that because you said something very important that’s highlighted in the book. “You create enough pain where you’re beyond the status quo,” is how they phrased it. In other words, “You don’t need to convince me I need to change. I know I need to change.”
The second part of the problem, part B of the problem, is, “I don’t want to mess up,” which is what’s highlighted in the book. I thought that was a very interesting way to slice that that some people were beyond they know they need to change but they’re afraid to make the change for fear of messing up. In other words, it's the buyer's regret. I thought that was powerful in the book.
People know they need to change but they're afraid to make the change for fear of messing up. In other words, it's the buyer's regret.
Sell Cycle
I know you’ve got a great background doing large corporate deals in large enterprises. With our business, there’s a lot of work where we’re doing with medium-sized enterprises. I find in a large corporate enterprise the fear of making a decision or putting your head up and being a leader. A lot of large corporate enterprises are about risk management as an employee. You’re not getting the zealots who want to get out there and make a difference.
Well said.
Bureaucratic might be the wrong word, but in some cases, moving the needle is so hard. They’re managing and maintaining. Whereas the joy of working, a lot of times with medium-sized enterprises, you’re going to get to a CEO. What do they want to do? Grow their business. What do they want to do? Increase the enterprise value of their business. By nature, they’re entrepreneurs, so they might be a little bit more courageous that way to a certain extent. They make decisions. As you aptly pointed out at the beginning, it’s a much different type of sales cycle.
Can I add one more layer to that? What I’m seeing in the market is very fascinating. We talked about where the salesperson is going to be in the future and where they will play. This is very interesting. I do a lot of residential business, like contractors, whether it’s HVAC, plumbing, or pools. A big customer base of mine, like Window World and Orkin Pest Control Company. They’re not going to be AI-ed out soon. That’s a fascinating segment also because we never think about contractors that way.
That’s an interesting market because they’re, in my opinion, still pure sales. In other words, if we don’t look at the top of the funnel, which could be AI-ed out, but once you get into the funnel, that’s pure sales because you still have to get to the house, walk the house, and have the conversation. I almost want to say that the last bastion when the sales process is found is very pure.
You’ve struck a chord as close to my heart. I started running a painting company when I was in university.
You are impressive.
I’m not sure about that. I’ve got a number of people who would debate you on that, for sure. One of the things that was so great about the organization was it was a franchise painting company. One of the guys who had started it came from IBM. I’m not different in age from you. This is in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s while I’m going to university.
It was the identify the need and develop the need. You’re walking around a house and somebody says, “Why are we here? They say, “The windows are peeling and I’m worried about it.” You’d come back and say, “We’ll make them look better, for sure. This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to prime them and paint them. The issue here is if you don’t do something, it’s going to rain. Water’s going to get into the wood. It’s going to expand. Instead of painting, you’re going to have to replace a window.”
I loved it because, first of all, you were helping. It was all truthful. It was ethics-based. By the same token, everything in sales we try to do in these long sell cycles over time, you’re doing in a very short period of time with a one-hour visit with somebody selling. This triggered my love of this business discipline and profession.
I wanted to highlight what’s interesting about this market segment. Let’s call it the residential contracting business. I made a statement earlier that simple sales or transactional sales will be AI-ed out. In other words, the buyer will buy on their own. This is a simple sale, and yet, it’s one that cannot be automated out. The thing is you still need that consultative piece.
That’s why I find residential sales a very interesting market. Whether it’s you own your own small company or contractor or you’re a franchise, that’s not going to go away. What we’re going to see in the future is that’s going to be a more robust market for salespeople. We’re going to see a lot more salespeople jump into that market because that’s where sales training is really needed.
We're going to see a lot more sales people jump into the residential sales market because that's where sales training is really needed.
This is very interesting. We’ve never had this kind of conversation on the show before, so thank you. I left the painting company and I went into corporate sales. I’m of a similar age. The first big technology sales were selling big photocopiers. It was harder to extract $5,000 out of a homeowner for a paint job than it was to get a hundred thousand dollars out of a corporation for a new photocopier. It’s not easy to do that. When you’re doing that, they’re making that assessment, trust, and credibility. They’re going through the phases of, “Do I have a problem? I’d rather miss out than mess up.”
That pure idea of sales being a last bastion, I completely agree. We go through it all the time. I always find there’s this interesting gap with the folks we train where we ask the question, “How do you like to buy? What’s important to you?” You start to ask them, “How are you selling today?” There’s a gap. There’s a difference.
Salesperson Versus Management
There should be no gap. How you buy is how you sell. I want to go off on a small tangent because we don’t talk about this enough. It is sales-related. It’s managers and how we train salespeople. What I’m seeing is that there’s something called Polanyi’s paradox. Polanyi’s paradox is that you know it but you can’t explain it.
In other words, we all had managers who go, “Go do it that way.” You go, “Why?” They’re like, “It’s because it works.” They think that sales training. What I’m seeing is that a lot of managers are still doing what we’ve done for many years or decades, which is to throw people into the fire and say, “Figure it out,” type of thing. They’re like, “Deepen the pool. Swim. Figure it out.”
A lot of managers are still doing what we've done for many decades now, which is to throw people into the fire and say, “figure it out.”
I would love your opinion on this because I came up with a simple way of looking at managers versus salespeople. Tell me if you agree with this analogy or this visual. I was trying to find a way to explain why management styles are misaligned without making it too complicated. I came up with a tortoise and the hare mindset. Allow me to explain. You’ll enjoy this.
We’re both familiar with Theory X and Theory Y management styles. Theory X is command and control, which is, “Do what I tell you. Go left. Go right Block here. Squat there. Do this. That’s how you sell.” Theory Y is more delegation. It’s like, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. If you have any questions, come see me.” In other words, Theory X is command and control. Theory Y is, “If you have trouble, come to me. Other than that, figure it out.”
When I look at salespeople, I put them in the tortoise and the hare. What I’ve realized is that a tortoise loves instructions. You have to tell the salesperson what to do. You have to choreograph the steps. A hare or a rabbit likes to run. Give them an end goal and they’ll run. Here’s what I find interesting. If you have a Theory X command and control person, if that’s your personality, then you’ll do well with a tortoise who loves instructions and loves to be choreographed. You’ll struggle with the hare because these are people who want to do it their way and have their own personality. The inverse is true. If I’m Theory Y, I’m very delegative, if that’s a word. In other words, rabbits love me because they’re like, “He says, “Do it my way.” Tortoises need instructions.
Here’s my point. A lot of salespeople who are promoted because they’re very good started out as a hare. When they’re promoted, they’re Theory Y. They’re like, “Go do it.” When they come across a tortoise and a tortoise is like, “How do you do that?” You’re like, “It’s easy. Go figure it out.” I bring that up because I see this misalignment sometimes in management style versus the actual sales salesperson. I want managers to be aware that their selling style could be in conflict with how a salesperson wants to be talked to.
It’s spot on. There are a couple of challenges with sales leaders. For the most part, what we do is we promote the hare. A lot of times, the hare, the top performer, or the Wayne Gretzky, if you will, is not a good coach.
That’s a good analogy.
While he was playing, he kept saying, “I would never be a good coach.” He told everybody, but then he bought into the Coyotes and had to coach. They were miserable. He was miserable. The second thing is there may even be one in between that tortoise and hare. I don’t know what the animal analogy is, but outside of the command and control, there’s Stephen Covey’s Trust & Inspire. It’s not the command and control anymore but there is active coaching. You see this in professional sports.
I played hockey to a certain level, not professionally. In high school, we would have people throwing garbage cans around in the hockey dress room. That was command and control. Hockey players were not the sharpest tools in the shed, so they had to make a point. They were making points that way. There’s a lot of talk that you have to be a player’s type of coach. The way that players make ten times what the coach makes and all these types of things, you have to get the best out of them differently.
Maybe there’s this different world in terms of leadership. You probably had them. I certainly had them, but not all the time. It didn’t mean they were soft and cuddly or super warm all the time, but I did have a sense that they had our best interest at heart or their own. It wasn’t just about making them look good. It was about helping me develop as a person and a professional. To me, that’s one of the things we see missing in leadership. I’m with you. One of the X factors of professional sales is sales leadership. The other thing is I find we are very busy training professional salespeople and the leaders are quick to put their teams in our training.
They’re like, “Train them for me. Make them sit up and roll over and then give them back to me.”
That’s right. They’re not quick to put themselves in training. We have sales leadership training. No one signs themselves up for it. The CEO signs up the sales leader to go into the training. It’s an interesting thing with leaders saying, “They need to work, develop, and continually learn, but I’m not sure I do.” Do you see that?
I see that. That’s almost like a broken record. There’s nothing in there I could disagree with. My greatest management lesson in managing people has come from my daughter. My daughter works for me. She’s a younger generation. I remember I was applying my old management style. I was complaining to my wife. I said, “There are a couple of things I need her to do. She’s not doing this.” My wife’s like, “Did you talk to her about it?” I said, “I did.”
One of the things that don’t offer the younger generation or students that are coming out of college or new salespeople is that we don’t give them enough runway to learn. We want them to be binary. By that, I mean go from 0 to 1 quickly. My wife said something that shook me to my core. She said, “That’s the problem with working in Corporate America today. They don’t give them the time to develop. This is your daughter. Your job is to give her the time.”
I took that to heart. It sat there for a while. This is how my filter interpreted what she was saying and I executed on. One, be patient. Two, let them do it their way. Provide guidance, but in the end, let them do it their way. Let them stub their toe, so to speak, and let them learn that way. Give them room to make mistakes, which she did. They weren’t horrendous, but there were some that were a little costly.
At the end of the day, she’s my ultimate demon marketer. She runs all my marketing stuff. As they say, as the plane was taking off, it was quite wobbly getting up there. Once she got going, I gave her that space to make her own decisions but to do it her way. I shut down my own brain and say, “Let’s do it your way. Maybe you see something I don’t.” It requires a certain level of humility to say that, tucking your ego in your back pocket, which a lot of managers don’t want to do, and then letting them do it their way.
You have to ride out the turbulence of learning with them. Once you get past that turbulence, it’s clear sailing. The problem is a lot of people in Corporate America don’t allow for that turbulence of learning to happen, and then they’re very disappointed. They’re not happy because they’re not doing it their way. They’re not growing. They don’t sense they’re not growing. You are not happy as a manager because they’re not performing, which is why you probably have a lot of attrition amongst young people, a high attrition in terms of job turnover.
Bravo. What’s your daughter’s name?
Camille.
Shout out to Camille. It’s tough to work for your dad. I’m sure it’s super fun but tough. Shout out to Camille tuning in to the episode.
She loves it now, but early on, she’d be like, “Ugh.”
Way to go, Camille. You’re on such an important point for everybody tuning in to the show, which is allowing the appropriate time. You and I see the same stats from Gardner, McKinsey, and everybody else talking about an eighteen-month tenure on a sales leader. It’s the same tenure for an SDR and BDR, which is an entry-level job in professional sales.
Some of the largest technology companies in the world, which we’ve done some work with, still have outdated approaches of, “Let’s hire 30 people. We’ll do group interviews.” That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen ever. They’re like, “Four weeks after we hire 30 people, maybe 12 or 13 of them are still here.” Can you imagine the impact on a new professional?
The next Victor Antonio graduates with electrical engineering as an MBA. He takes his first job with a name-brand technology company and tells all of his friends and family. They’re so proud, and then four weeks later, they’re out of a job. The devastation and the self-esteem. To the folks reading out there, get better at interviewing. Hire the right person. You have to give them a formal onboarding plan and a reasonable period of time to be successful.
The turbulence period is important. I want to tell you this quick story. This was the biggest learning moment for me from a management standpoint. For my first job out of college, I was working for Honeywell. I worked for this guy. We’ll call him Joe. Joe was very Theory X, command and control. He was like, “Do it my way.” I would put together a $50,000 proposal and take it to his office for signature. He would take out his red felt pen, bleed all over the proposal, and say, “Go ahead and fix that. Bring it back and I’ll sign it.” I would fix it and bring it back. He’d bleed over it a little less, but he’d bleed on it nonetheless.
This went on for 3 or 4 iterations. When I finally got it right, he signed it. That goes on for a while. By the 10th proposal or the 20th proposal, I don’t want to put in a lot of work because I know he’s going to change it. My willingness to do any work goes down. He’s looking at me like, “You’re not getting any better because these things still keep coming in bad.” I’m like, “That’s because I’m not putting in a lot of work because you keep editing it.” It’s a vicious cycle of negativity.
Not surprisingly, I leave the company. I then go to another company. This is where I met Ken Cook, the sales guy. In this case, I’m still an engineer. I walk in on my first day. My manager’s name is Tom. I give him the proposal. It’s a $1.5 million proposal, not $50,000. It’s a binder. I hand it to him and I’m thinking, “Here it comes.” I see the pen. It’s not red, but I see the pen come out of his pocket.
I remember he opens it up, looks at the executive summary, and goes all the way to the back. You’ve seen those big deals where it’s 200 pages. He looks at the materials list, looks at the pricing and the profit margin, and closes it. He looks at me and asks me this one question. He goes, “Is it all there is?” I go, “What?” He goes, “Is it all there?” I go, “It’s all there like that.” He signs it.
I walk out of the office and you would think I would be euphoric. The first thing that hits me is pure panic, like, “He signed it. I hope everything’s right.” I’m hyper-panicking. I go to the senior engineer. His name is Roy. He says, “What’s wrong? Is the house burning? What’s wrong?” I said, “I went into Tom’s office with my first proposal.” He says, “Yeah.” I said, “It was 1.5 minutes.” He goes, “Yeah.” I go, “I went in there and he signed it. He didn’t look at it. He signed it.” He said, “What?” I go, “He signed it. He didn’t look at it.” Roy looks at me and says, “That’s your job, not his,” and walks away.
Tom was Theory Y. He hired you for your skills. He was like, “Figure it out. I’m not there to micromanage you.” I thought those were two interesting management styles. Theory X is, “Do what I tell you. Do it how I do it,” and zero motivation. Tom remains one of the best bosses I’ve ever worked for because he’d let you run. He let the rabbit run, so to speak.
It’s easier on Tom. He’s training you to do the job that you’re there for. Instead of him trying to redo the work you did and do the work, his job is to continue to elevate you so you can achieve your full potential.
This is what they don’t understand. For example, Camille comes up with stuff, like content marketing strategies, that I could never have conceived. She was given room to grow and run. She’s coming up with stuff that I can’t even think of. To your point, it makes my job easier. It would make Tom’s job easier if he let people run. Joe never figured that out. We have a lot of Joes in this world.
I’m an entrepreneur. You’re an entrepreneur. A lot of things with entrepreneurs, at some point in time, when we start, we like to be busy. You start to feel, “The more I do, I’m getting things done.” You start to realize, “Did I do the accounting for the business? Did I run through a P&L? Why don’t I pay this fellow to do that or this lady to do that? Maybe I should be selling new deals for In The Funnel.” There’s this busy addiction, to a certain extent. We feel like we’re making a contribution.
When you come to those folks who are great leaders, they understand their job is to elevate everybody who’s working with them. That’s how you 10x, 50x, or 100x a business. I understand the theory. When things get a little stressful around here and maybe I didn’t get my coffee, and I haven’t eaten enough on that given day, I’m sure I default to those things when I’m not in my best self. It’s a great example.
It means you’re human. That’s all it is.
Thank you.
We all do that. We have to have this awareness though that if we’re thinking long-term, we have to let people underneath us grow and give them an opportunity to grow. I hope if managers read this and they have young salespeople or anybody, even young employees, you got to let them run a little bit. Let them grow a little bit. Feel like they’re contributing something and they’re making it their own.
We have to have this awareness that if we're thinking long term, we have to give people underneath us an opportunity to grow.
The Greatest Gift
I’m going to shift gears a little bit. You have such a plethora of work that we could go into on all of the key topics in life, business, and professional sales. I’m really looking forward to continuing the work in terms of researching everything you’ve done. I’d love to chat briefly about one of your books, The Greatest Gift: Five Gifts That Will Dramatically Change Your Life
You found that one. That is a gem.
The five gifts that will dramatically change your life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you talk about self-discipline, mindset shift, personal responsibility, focus on giving and continuous learning. Have I got the five right?
They’re in there somewhere, but you had to get the greatest gift. The greatest gift is this. Everybody will enjoy this because this is the essence of the book. When I wrote The Greatest Gift, it was written, if you know who Og Mandino is, in the style of Og Mandino.
I don’t.
Og Mandino wrote The Greatest Salesman in the World and The Greatest Miracle in the World. He is one of the greatest writers of the ‘70s and the ‘80s. It was written in a conversational style. It’s me at a coffee shop speaking to an old guy named Simon. In that conversation, I’m speaking as a young person to a guy named Simon who’s 70-plus years old, my elder. It’s a great conversation.
Somebody needs to know this. At the age of 50, I gave myself the greatest gift. Here’s what I mean by this. The greatest gift is the gift of forgiveness. It allows you to move forward. I’m not making this up. I truly did this. At the age of 50, I said to myself, “From this point on, visualize that you write all your screw-ups on a board.” Imagine this board in front of you and you say, “Remember the time I lied about that? I shouldn’t have lied about that.” Everything you could imagine that’s stupid or wrong. You bent this. You did that. All the things.
Imagine you’re looking at the board. You got everything. You threw up on that board. Everything is on there. What you do is you then erase the board. You say to yourself, “From this moment on, I will no longer recall those thoughts as part of my identity.” When I find myself thinking about something, I say, “Remember that one time I did this? Was that before I was 50? You can’t count that anymore.”
It’s almost like a mindset mental reset. You don’t carry the past. You don’t bring the past into the future anymore. If I can simplify it, that is the greatest gift. You say to yourself, “From this point on, we’re starting from zero. We’ll reset and erase the board. No longer will the past be brought into the future or the present of any decision I’ll make.” You’ll take the experience, but you won’t castigate yourself, like, “The last time I did that, that didn’t go well.”
That’s exactly right.
That is the greatest gift that you can give yourself.
100%, I’m going to do that. The truth of it is I’m going to need 2 or 3 whiteboards.
It’s a big board for all of us.
For the things that I’ve messed up, I’m going to need 2 or 3 of those. What a great exercise, that concept of letting it go, forgiving, and moving forward.
We’re too hard on ourselves sometimes. Life is hard enough. You mentioned Stephen Covey. Do you remember that whole circle of control, circle of influence, and circle of concern?
Yes.
Focus on the things you can control. That’s part of the whole attitude and mindset thing. Stop castigating yourself. You did stupid things in the past. Let's leave them in the past and start moving forward. Let’s look at all the great things we’ve done since then.
It’s a great exercise for the leaders and the CEOs out there for your next meeting with the team. One of the things that we all are challenged by is keeping people in a positive mental state or a healthy mental state. We’ve got a couple of episodes coming out about mental health and professional sales where we’re talking to different people.
This is such a wonderful exercise to protect your confidence and protect your mindset. I’m going to do that. I appreciate that very much. I do love all of the gifts that will dramatically change your life. They’re indisputable. Something like the focus on giving or helping somebody else out makes you feel better. Not all of us learn that soon enough.
Resources
One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about this interview, and also, I had a chance to listen to you on a couple of other folks’ podcasts, is you’re extremely well-read. You’re also up on facts, data, and research in professional sales, which, in some cases, is a little lacking. For the folks who are reading, what are the sources of information for you? How do you stay current on what’s happening in professional B2B sales and B2C sales? What are the sources of information that you used to stay current in business?
I’m all over the place. I read a lot. I try to do at least one book a month. That’s me. One book a month. Anybody who is known, if Matt Dixon, Brett Adamson, or Tim Riesterer over at Corporate Vision puts something out, I buy books. There are certain people whose books I buy. If Daniel Pink puts it up, I’m buying it. Simon Sinek, I’m buying it. Adam Grant, I’m buying it. There are certain people that you go, “I know they have research in there.” You have to curate who you want to listen to, in many cases.
The thing is I also listen to different podcasts. One of my favorite podcasts is Steven Bartklett’s The Diary of a CEO. He has some of the best interviews. I also follow Gartner, CSO Insights, and all these research companies. I sign up for everybody’s newsletters. Salesforce is another great site. They have a lot of content. I’m always trying to figure out what’s going on and what the data’s showing.
I also go to LinkedIn and scroll a lot through a lot of the sales leaders. You have yourself there and other people. I’m like, “What are they saying? What’s their perspective?” It’s interesting to see what everybody’s take on sales is. I try to humble myself by saying, “I’m 1 degree of 360. There are 359 other opinions. What are they?” You can agree and disagree with some of them, but I try to consume content.
We often talk about the internet sometimes in a very pejorative way because of what it does to your attention, focus, and increased distraction. I also think there’s a positive side of social media that you learn stuff and discover people you wouldn’t have discovered. I remember the days, like you, when you had to go to the library and look at your Dewey Decimal system index cards to figure out if there was a book. When you ran to the shelf, the book wasn’t there. That was a blown trip.
We have access to all this information, whether there are different podcasts, videos, shorts, and reels. To me, I find it enriching. It’s not the tool. It’s how you use the tool. I like to listen to different people, thought leaders, on what they’re doing. I’m listening to Mo Gawdat. He’s a thought leader in leadership, health, and technology. I’m like, “I can listen to this guy all day, “and then I jump onto somebody else and so forth. I’m constantly listening and learning. That’s how I use social media.
It's not the tool. It's how you use the tool.
First of all, most of the people tuning in to a podcast like this one are growth-oriented. These are sales professionals or CEOs looking to take their businesses to the next level. Think of somebody who’s so deep in our space. You’ve written sixteen books. You’ve been in front of some of the largest crowds in the world. You’ve worked for some of the largest companies in the world and run an enormously successful business in addition to being a TV star.
The first time I came across you, I remember it vividly. I was in Boston. My wife and I were down for a visit. I was doing some visiting with clients. When I came back, the TV was on and you were on the Spike TV Show, Life or Debt, which was awesome. It was really great. Think of an individual like this who’s also a lifelong learner. Once a month, another new book, being open to other ideas and other opinions.
AI And Sales
There’s something you can pull from everybody. This is why we love doing this show so much. It gets us in front of other thought leaders and learning about their unique abilities and their approach. I know your time’s tight. We’re going to let you go soon. It’s a huge topic, but tell us a little bit about your recent work with AI or your thoughts on AI.
I started AI back in the late ‘80s when I was working with Honeywell on their torpedo system. At that time, it was an expert system because it was rule-based, not like what we have now. Fast forward, to make a long story short, I went to Korea. I saw that they were already using natural language processing in 2016 to analyze calls. At that point, I said, “AI’s back.”
I started doing research. That’s when I wrote the book with my co-author, Dr. James Anderson, Sales Ex Machina. Sales Ex Machina means sales from the machine. In other words, I believe that CRM is no longer the correct phrase. I like Gong.io’s phrase, a revenue intelligence platform. What we’re doing is we’re enriching the database with not just customer information, but it could be inventory information, manufacturing information operations, marketing, legion, and all this stuff. We need a better phrase than CRM. That’s an old phrase.
When I saw this, I wrote the book. When I wrote the book, everybody was like, “What are you talking about?” The subtitle is How AI is Transforming the World of Sales. I wrote it in 217. In 2018, I published it. Hardly anybody read the book because at that time, nobody even knew and really thought about AI. It wasn’t until a few years ago that ChatGPT came on the scene.
The best way of looking at this, and Mo Gawdat gave you the best analogy, is the internet has been around for many years. It wasn’t until Netscape, the browser, came out that you went, “There’s the internet.” AI has been around, but ChatGPT gave it a browser that made it user-friendly. In other words, direct-to-consumer.
What I’m seeing is an acceleration. I’ve had debates, almost arguments, with people who say, “AI will not replace salespeople.” I’m like, “You will be replaced in many cases.” The residential industry is probably one that’s protected a bit, but a lot of jobs will be attritioned out. What you’re going to start seeing is the rise of AI agents. AI agents are things that will do things for you on your behalf. Nobody’s talking about that or at least very few people are talking about it.
Everybody thinks AI is all about ChatGPT, creating something on Midjourney, beautiful graphics, and all that stuff. It’s beyond that. The real power of AI in the future for sales lies in these agents. Imagine being able to do the following. You’re like, “I want to buy X product. I want to do this with the outcome being this and that.” The agent goes out there and interacts with other agents or information bots, finds your information, comes back, and says, “Here. I found the best solution for you.”
I’ve had people argue with me, “A bot can’t be as creative as a salesperson.” I said, “It can. A bot can also probably have more content than you can have in your brain.” For example, to keep it simple, if you have 100 skews in your inventory and sell 100 different products and we have to add another 1, we have to train people. With a bot, you don’t have to do that. You have to give it the information and it’s trained. What we’re going to see is AI start taking out a lot of sales jobs, whether it’s SDRs or BDRs. All these are going to go away over time. Most people don’t believe that’s going to happen. I truly believe it will happen.
You and I can have another conversation on AI. We should bring it back for that after we’ve done a deep dive into the book. We have a marketing intern here. When we released our book in July 2024, he came back and said, “I can get your audiobook done for you with AI.” He circulated to my wife the first chapter of our book done by an AI tool that took about five minutes. She said, “That’s Mark’s voice.” One of the key things is, can you leverage the tool as an expert in prompting AI to maximize productivity and leverage quantum computing with big data? These two things start to have a flywheel effect on the things you can do.
Once you start talking about quantum computing, it’s a new game. You get it because you understand it. A lot of people don’t understand how fast this is coming. We have a lot of Luddites who don’t think that AI is going to take their jobs. For example, on the audio for your book, ChatGPT can do it with only fifteen seconds of your audio. By sampling fifteen seconds or something, it can duplicate your voice.
I hear a lot of people say, “You can still tell it’s a robot sometimes.” I say, “You’re right, but in 5 or 10 years, you have to think of the iterations or the process. This is an exponential. This is not a linear improvement technology. This is an exponential improvement technology, which means that in a couple of years, you won’t be able to tell.”
I’m no expert, for sure, but one of the things I’m a big believer in is to get in and try these things. Try it out. Young people start in sales. They don’t have a deep level of business acumen. They’re reaching out to a VP of HR or a VP of IT. They have no idea what that person does for a job. Go to ChatGPT and ask for a job description for either. Ask, “What are their top priorities? What are the trends affecting the industry who are thought leaders in the industry?” Suddenly, you can increase your level of acumen in the afternoon.
If I could provide a hack that most people don’t really think about.
Please. We’d love those.
They’re going to love you for this hack if they haven’t thought about it. If I’m going after a company and I want to interview for a certain company, I would do everything you said. It’s perfect. I got the information and the content. I then would enter something like, “What are the ten reasons they wouldn’t hire me or push back on hiring me given this experience?” It would give you the objections they’re going to bring up.
Here comes the true hack. Most people don’t realize that you can have ChatGPT role-play itself. In other words, I can say, “I’m a new hire trying to get a job at blank corporation that sells blank product. This is my background. I’m going to be speaking to a VP of blank. What I want you to do is role-play a scenario where I’m trying to get a job.” It’s like, “Here are the 5 reasons or 5 objections they’re going to give me.” Respond appropriately. You can say, “Do this for 5 or 10 minutes,” and it will role-play itself for 5 or 10 minutes. Most people don’t know you could do this. It will role-play both positions. It’s the coolest thing.
Is it prompts?
Yeah.
It’s about the prompts.
It’s all about prompt engineering. You got the prompts right, but you can have it role-play itself. If you want to practice, you can say to ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic, or Claude, “You play this person or this role VP. I’ll play the person and try to get the job. Give me a chance to respond to every tough question you ask me.” You can practice. Isn’t that wild?
Contact Victor
A fantastic client of ours is using something called CoPilot, which is doing that to train SDRs and BDRs. It’s specific to their business. Their industry gets smarter. Ramping up with the whole sales conversation is still developing. It’s not perfect, but what a great hack, great idea, and great example everybody can leverage. First of all, I have to say thank you. Thank you for joining.
You’re welcome.
What a pleasure chatting with you. The time has flown by. I really appreciate your time. Everybody tuning in to this is going to want to learn more about you. How should they get in contact with you?
You go into the search engine and type in Victor Antonio. You should find me. You can also go to VictorAntonio.com. You could find out about my books, my speeches, and my keynotes. If you want to see the show, Life for Debt, you can get it on Amazon. I don’t get a commission for this or royalty. It’s a great show on how to manage your finances.
They found me and said, “We want you to work with families and teach them how to run their families like a business.” I always recommend this show for people who are struggling or know somebody who’s struggling, trying to get their numbers together and get them right.” Watch the show Life or Debt on Amazon or Hulu off the Paramount Network. Go to VictorAntonio.com.
Thank you. I watched Life or Debt. I love it.
Thank you.
It was a great show. It’s really interesting. If we’re not in that situation as you go through life, I was in that situation in my twenties, for sure.
It could also be that we know people who are in those situations. The nicest compliment I’ve gotten about that show is from couples who say, “We watched your show. It was almost like a mediator. It gave us an opportunity to talk about our finances as a family. That’s what we loved about your show.” I thought it was cool.
That’s a great idea because it’s so emotional sometimes. It’s great to meet you. Thank you.
Same here.
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Thank you for joining. The reason we run the show is because we want to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. That’s because in doing that, we think we’re improving the lives of everybody in professional sales. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends because that’s how we get great guests like Victor.
We’re also growth-oriented. We know we can make this show even better. Please keep your advice coming to us. We love constructive criticism. You can email your thoughts on this episode or any episode to MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That’s my personal email. We respond to every piece of advice we get. We love constructive criticism. The way we run the show is a function of some of the feedback you’ve already provided, so thanks for doing that. We’ll see everybody next time on the show.
Important Links
How to Sell in a World that Never Stops Changing with Frank Cespedes
The Greatest Gift: Five Gifts That Will Dramatically Change Your Life
About Victor Antonio
Victor Antonio is a globally sought after sales speaker, trainer, author & sales consultant. He has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, an MBA, and has built a 25-year career as a top sales executive and then CEO of a high-tech company.
He has delivered sales motivation keynotes and conducted sales workshops in Europe, Asia, Latin America, UAE, Australia, South Africa, and the Middle East.
Victor has shared the big stage with some of the top business speakers in the nation including John Maxwell, Paul Otellini (CEO of Intel), John May (CEO of FedEx Kinkos), Daymond John (Shark Tank), and many other top business speakers. He's the author of 13 books on sales and motivation and recently released his Seminars On Selling course with 300+ sales training videos.
