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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's really dangerous to write sales books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 50th Law by 50 Cent and Robert Greene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Important Links

• Tony Hughes – Past Episode

• Tech-Powered Sales: Achieve Superhuman Sales Skill

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

• Justin Michael – LinkedIn

• Fanatical Prospecting

• SPIN Selling

• Strategic Selling

• The Science of Selling

• The Transparency Sales

• The Sales History Podcast

• David Hoffeld – Past Episode

• Psycho-Cybernetics

• The 48 laws of Power

• The Go-Giver

• The Greatest Salesman in the World

• How I Raised Myself

• Mastering the Complex Sale

• The New Power Base Selling

• Reinventing Virtual Events

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Justin Michael

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

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

Tiffani, how are you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great timing, by the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, thank you. We appreciate the Canadian references.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was siloed groups and breaking down those silos. There was a lack of integration between tools. Hopping between multiple tools. It was a lack of career development. “I want you to invest in me. I care and I want you to care. I want to work here. I love this company. I love who I work for, but I don't want to do the same thing every day for five years. I want opportunity.”

This is where leaders have to listen better. As leaders, we have to be willing to have a beginner's mind as well and go develop ourselves so that we can show up and help mentor, coach, lift up, identify, train, and skill the next generation even if it's to take your job. If they take your job, then you're moving on. If you're a good manager, you're going to keep moving up. In sales, unfortunately, it tends to be revenue-based that triggers that they should be promoted, versus they're a great manager, mentor, coach, or leader. People rally and they're engaged in their business with their customers. There's a lot more. As classic hardcore sellers, it's a very different mindset to flip the switch from, “I'm a competitive individual,” to “We're competitive as a team.”

There are also high-performing salespeople who are spectacular teammates. There are super high-performing salespeople who are not good teammates, no different than athletics. The Gretzky analogy, everybody here plays hockey. Of course, we all did. You knew those superstars that were in the league, but I don't want them on my team. There's a difference there. Can I backtrack? I'd like to double-click on something so important that you've touched on and this floored me in the book. This was another stat.

High-performing salespeople can be spectacular teammates or not good teammates, just like in athletics.

One of the things I love so much about The Experience Mindset is it’s not opinion but facts. Data matters in professional sales today and everything we're talking about here, there's great research and background, but it's that employee engagement. I may get the numbers wrong. I don't have right it in front of me here. Let's say ballpark 33% of employees are engaged, 17% were actively disengaged, or something of that nature. Almost 1 in 5 is actively disengaged. The definition is scary, but did it lead to a cost to business? Was it annually $17 billion? Do I have that number right? I don't want to put you on the spot.

I don't remember the exact number, but it was mind-boggling.

I was flabbergasted.

There's another one which is the amount of time that we as humans spend mentally switching when we switch applications. The enterprise has an average of a little more than 1,000 unique applications internally and only 27% of them are integrated. Who bears the brunt of that lack of integration? If you remember my comment, we've never asked customers to go and click through five applications, yet we ask our employees to do it every day all day.

If you go from one tab in Google to another tab in Google, or you go from Slack to Salesforce and you're going between those two applications, even though your eyes see that you've switched applications, it takes a couple of milliseconds for your brain to catch up. Over the course of a week, in a given day, how many times do you switch between applications? It's like 400 or 500 times you're switching between applications.

To go to Google, start a Zoom, get on LinkedIn, or whatever you're going to do, the switching is a little less than four hours a week in that just millisecond switching. Integration has implications. All of these things, which is why in The Experience Mindset, I broke it down to people, which is organizational training, career development, and all the things we've been talking about. The second is process. What is the process of doing something? Quote to cash, how many steps?

There's a company in Toronto I was working with, a very large retailer there and it was twenty minutes for a return for a call center agent. Do you think they wake up every day and go, “I'm so excited, I'm going to do 30 returns. I can't wait.” How do we reduce the steps and the broken processes? The next is tech, which we talked about. They don't think it's working effectively, the switching time, and all the things we mentioned. The fourth was culture. PPT is a very famous framework. It was the leave it diamond many decades ago in the 1960s. I added C for culture, so it's PPTC. I broke it down. Any leader that's tuning in to this would be like, “Do I have the right people?”

To your point, I can't have all high performers. I can't have all low performers. There was a great article that I read that was a very high trade in the NBA or the US National Basketball Association from the championship team, from the Denver team to another team. He wasn't a star scorer. He was a great bench player and he was a great collaborator. He was a great passer. He was a great teammate. Highly valuable. He’s not the top performer, but the one who made the team click. They paid a lot of money for that person. Not a well-known name, but a critical part of their winning story.

What does the team look like? How do I improve the process? That's an area. You could ask that one question. Give yourself the time and space in the process. In technology, it's hard for an individual contributor to fix the tech stack. We don't have much control over that. As a leader and a manager, it's also difficult for you. If you are a senior leader, then I'd get with your IT team and be like, “We have to simplify this stack. Let's do it together.” Pull in sales ops, marketing ops, rev ops, or whatever you have. The fourth one is culture. How does your organization view its employees? Are they a cost center or is it value? Is that something that's set at the top and then accountable all the way through the organization?

It's also the way that people will say, “It might not be great right now, but I trust it will get better.” That is a way I have found. I can't digest all of it at one time. I'd be caught in that seller's dilemma. It's too much to navigate. If I can deconstruct it into categories, then I can focus on a few things over time. A year from now, the people, the process, the tech, and the culture will look very different.

That’s great coaching and counsel for those first steps. In each of those categories, how do we move the needle the most without feeling overwhelmed or paralyzed by the paradox of choice? Tiffani, I found a stat in my notes that is going to knock both of us off our socks. The percentage of employees that have been engaged in companies has not changed, according to your research, since 2007.

That was Gallup's research.

Thank you. Since 2007, 32%. It stays the same.

Fairly flat, yes.

What's climbing is the percent that is actively disengaged, 17%, and it costs the global economy $7.8 trillion annually. Just shocking.

If you're tuning in to this, you're going to be like, “I can't show up to my manager or my leader and be like, ‘This is costing us $7.2 trillion. I read this book.’” It has to be something very tactical. That's where you can say, “Do you know what I did?” Once again, to the audience of sellers, unfortunately, there's only one thing a salesperson can control. We may think we have more control. We don't. We don't control our compensation plan, the products we sell, the prices, or the tools we use. We have very little control. What we can control is how we show up. That we can control. If you could take it upon yourself to say, “I'm going to track over the course of the week where I'm spending my time.”

On your next one-on-one go, “I'm trying to become more productive. I want to hit the quota. I want to go to the club. I want to be better. I identified these three things. Could you help me with these three things?” Instead of waiting for your manager to come and show up and ask you or waiting for your manager to fix it, be proactive and say, “Here are three things I could use some help on.”

Let's do it across people, processes, tech, and maybe culture. Culture might be a little too far out of the realm on this one. Let's even focus on process and tech. Let's not talk about people unless people for you are, “I want to be trained,” or “I want to go to a class,” or “I want to do something to improve my performance. Would the company invest in me doing that?” Now you show up. Now you've asked. Now let's hypothetically say your leader goes, “Thank you. This is so fantastic. Let's put together a quarter plan.”

“Let's do a career plan this quarter. Let's give you some time back to plan this quarter. Every week when we meet, we're going to talk about the plan. In the last ten minutes, we'll talk about the deals we're working on. For the first twenty minutes, we're going to talk about your plan.” What a beautiful thing. You could be proactive and take ownership of that. Let's say you do that to your manager and they have no interest in doing it, which is going to happen to some of you. They have no interest in doing it. Now what? Now you may find yourself falling into the quiet quitting. You might fall into the, “I'm going to leave.” You then might fall into the, “Now what do I do? I listened to Tiffani. I took this advice. I did it and boom, it didn't happen.” Do you just give up?

That's where salespeople are fantastic because we have grit. We're resilient. We will keep trying. We will find different ways. You might say, “If you are not going to help me.” Maybe those aren't the words you use but, “If they're not going to help me, would you mind if I went to sales ops and I work with them? Do you mind if I go and ask to be coached over here?”

If they're not willing to do it, can you find another answer? If it's flat-out no, that's where you have to make your own decision of, “Is this still right for me?” That's that reflection. Some people, it's unfortunate with the economy and everything going on, they have to keep working. They don't have the luxury of leaving and quitting and looking for something else. If you do and you can, maybe that's a signal to you that you want more out of where you work and who you work for.

I think people always have to make a smart decision there. I would go back to those questions you suggested. If the manager comes back and says no, then there's this reasonable question about why. Did I ask for something that we can't get into the budget this term or this quarter? Are there good and logical reasons for what's taking place? Are they diminishing this idea or it doesn't make sense now because we've already got these three technology projects underway and so on and so forth?

I encourage the proactivity of saying, “How can I help my leaders help me?” Certainly, the coaching I would've given my younger self 15 or 20 years ago is other people have other things on their plate as well. I understand why is it you don't agree that this would be helpful or is it given the other things on our plate or the SG&A cost or whatever we're doing right now, we have to be a bit cautious. “The economy’s a bit funny. We’re letting people go. We have to be a bit careful about making major capital investments in things, at least for a quarter or two.” You go, “I got it. That seems reasonable to me and logical.” Making sure it's an ongoing discourse. I love the idea of the proactive approach.

That requires managers to be better communicators on the why. That's all we want. I don't want just a flat-out no. You walk away from me and I'm like, “Is this something I did? Are you not interested in me? Is it a budget? Is it too many projects? Are you having a bad day? Just tell me why.” We may not like the answer, but at least now we're not wondering what it is.

This requires managers to hone their communication skills. They're dealing with conflict. Kim Scott’s Radical Candor is a great book on how to give constructive criticism and constructive advice, as well as guide and coach in a way that may be uncomfortable to the person giving it and the person receiving it, but it is necessary.

This goes into that employee experience. I give a suggestion that it goes into a black hole. Let's call it employee surveys. If you're surveying your employees and they care enough to answer the survey, we found in the research that the majority of companies capture employee data and don't know what to do with it. They don't know what to do with it so they do nothing with it. The next time the company surveys the employees, what's the employee going to do? They didn't do anything the last time. Why am I going to answer this time? Those little things go a long way and play a part. That's a culture comment. We survey and do nothing with it as a culture problem.

If you're surveying your employees and they care enough to answer the survey, and you do nothing with it, that is a culture problem.

We survey, we understand and uncover where the problems are, and then we don't ever say what we're doing or we don't ever give readouts of what we've done, what's working, what was adjusted, or to your point, where we started this whole conversation. In highly regulated industries, you have very different sets of rules than industries that are not regulated. As an employee, you may not know the regulations, so you think what you're doing is stupid. Unfortunately, it's necessary.

If I go, “Ah,” it's because I work in telco or financial services, that's why it is the way that it is. If you're flat-out frustrated, don't work in highly regulated industries. Go sell somewhere else. I think that the feedback loop was one of the findings in the study that has an impact on the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of employees.

That’s an amazing place to stop. First of all, Tiffani, we could keep talking about this for hours. I'm sure you're talking about this for hours every day with other podcasts and interviewers. On behalf of our team and everybody in the show, thank you so much for joining us today. We exist with the show because we're about trying to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales and in doing so, we improve the lives of professional salespeople.

The Experience Mindset talks about making sure organizations and leaders balance that flywheel between customer experience and employee experience moves in that direction. The leaders tuning in to this are going to glean a lot. I think that the salespeople tuning in are going to have hope that doing this is smart for business and drives better results.

We talked about the CAGR at 1.8 times better over a three-year period of time. We'll have all the links, Tiffani, but how do people learn more about you? Team, there is going to be learning more about Tiffani after you go and get The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth by Tiffani Bova. How else do they follow what you are doing outside of the book and the What's Next podcast?

Those two are great. Of course, I appreciate anybody deciding to go pick up the book. That would be amazing. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I’ve got no more connections, so you only can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active. I'm also active on Twitter and Instagram. I’m starting to get more active on Threads. I am also interested in feedback.

If there’s something that resonated with you today, or more importantly, you did not agree with, drop me a direct message on LinkedIn. Those are great because you'll be like, “I heard what you said. I tried it, but it didn't work. This is what happened,” because I learn from you. As I speak and give examples, I get new examples from you, but I also course correct. Things are changing. I wrote this book over a year ago and it doesn't mean things haven't changed. Ultimately, I'm always trying to keep it fresh and I get that from you. Any feedback, I'm always open.

We always close the show with a similar comment, Tiffani. Folks, thank you for tuning in. We thank Tiffani Bova again. Folks, you know why we run this show and we want to get better. We'd love to know if there are things we can do to improve the value you get from this discussion. My personal email that I check is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism and we respond to every email and all the feedback we get. First of all, thank you for sending your notes and please keep them coming and we'll see everybody next time. Tiffani, thank you so much. We'll see you again soon.

Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Mark, for having me back. I appreciate the support.

You're welcome.

Important Links

• Tiffani Bova

• The Experience Mindset

• Growth IQ

• What's Next with Tiffani Bova

• To Sell is Human

• Roger Martin – Past Episode

• The Song of Significance

• Radical Candor

• LinkedIn – Tiffani Bova

• Twitter – Tiffani Bova

• Instagram – Tiffani Bova

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Tiffani Bova

Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue-producing divisions at businesses ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500. As a Research Fellow at Gartner, her cutting-edge insights helped Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, and other prominent companies expand their market share and grow their revenues. She has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 twice. She is also the host of the podcast What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova.

How To Influence Buyers And Changemakers Through Social Selling With Timothy Hughes

People first thought social media was just about taking pictures of your lunch. But now, it has evolved into something bigger, making social selling the norm of business marketing. If you don’t have a strong online presence, you are missing a huge opportunity. Mark Cox sits down with Timothy Hughes, co-founder and CEO of DLAignite, to discuss how to effectively generate revenue and get back to a growth trajectory through social selling techniques. Tim explains how to use LinkedIn and other social media platforms not to mindlessly promote your business but to build influence, make genuine connections, and start meaningful conversations. He also talks about the role of a changemaker in an organization and their role achieving collective success.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

How To Influence Buyers And Changemakers Through Social Selling With Timothy Hughes

How many of us are leveraging social media effectively for B2B sales growth? Frankly, not enough. If I look at the funnel, we're not doing enough. We're not doing it effectively. I'm excited to speak to our guest, Tim Hughes. Tim is ranked number one by Analytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, LinkedIn said he was one of the top sales experts globally. Brand24 announced that he's the sixteenth most influential person in marketing globally based on measured social media influence and huge credentials in social.

He's also the Cofounder and CEO of DLAignite. He is the co-author of the book we're going to be discussing called Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. It's a great book. Candidly, somehow I missed this one when you think of all the episodes we have done. This book was released in 2016. It hit my radar because the second edition was released a couple of years ago. It was so insanely successful. It's a fantastic book.

I'll throw in a couple of things that jumped out at me reading this book. There was a different approach taken with social where social has to be an overall business strategy. It has to be a social strategy at the most senior levels in the company, not just posting. We have always been very good at posting within the funnel but having this is part of a strategy.

The second thing that was news to me was to focus on social listening, not just talking. You think of social as being social, meaning, what would happen if we were at a physical cocktail party? We wouldn't talk about us and post things. We would be listening and engaging with people. I also like the learning point for me that LinkedIn is about 30% social. For our company, it's probably 85% of what we do.

Tim talks a lot about having a LinkedIn strategy. Twitter and Instagram are the two other channels that have a significant impact. He talked about the five measures of digital organization. It's thinking about not just sales but, 1.) Visibility and recognition in the marketplace. 2.) Your digital strategy enables you to have trusted advisor status. 3.) You should be able to build a measurable pipeline socially. 4.) Access to the best talent and skills because of that social media presence, and then employee engagement, keeping your team more engaged because of your social strategy.

These are three things we get into when we talk about exactly what we do to get out of the gate. We have to think about, number one, a buyer-centric profile on LinkedIn. Do we have a recruiting profile so that if a recruiter comes to us, we look attractive? Do we have a buyer-centric profile where if a buyer takes a look at us, they can see that we can add value and insight to them? We have to think about those digital territories and talk about LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter or X as it's called now. Finally, content. What is it we're posting? How are we engaging?

We had an interesting conversation. Tim is a believer that you should be able to measure the return on investment of almost any keystroke associated with social, doing this with a focus on return on investment. He's a very interesting fellow. There's a lot of learning for me in this. I hope there are lots of learning for you in this. If you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends. Here's Tim Hughes with Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers.

Tim, welcome. It's great to meet you.

Thanks, Mark. I'm excited to be here and talk about some things to do with sales.

I'm super excited to have you here because I have finished Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I'll be honest with you. I'm a little embarrassed to say I've only recently read this book because everybody on the show knows how many of these books I read. This one is spectacular but it was originally written in 2015 and published in 2016. It was so enormously popular. We're on the second edition.

The one with the white cover was published in 2016. This one was published in 2022.

Thank you so much, Tim. It's a critically important topic for all of us. I don't know if there's a CEO reading who isn't going to get a new LinkedIn connection from a financial planner. As soon as they accept it, they're going to get pitched financial planning services. If I allowed email to be open during an episode, I'm pretty sure it would happen to me during this episode.

There's this massive opportunity to understand social selling. Although we have been running our business for many years, we have had lots of compliments on our stuff. I learned a ton from this book. There were lots of things we were not doing correctly. Tell me a little bit about your journey of initially writing the book and the need for it. What have you seen that has been changing over the last few years since the first edition?

Thank you for asking me. I appreciate what you said about the book. I have to admit that a lot of people say it to me. A number of people have come to me and said I've changed their lives because they have been doing all the old-school things like cold calling and sending spam emails that don't work anymore. They know that the buyers have moved onto social media.

In terms of my background, I'm a salesperson. I've been in sales for 25 years. I worked for Oracle. I've been used to either selling to large enterprises. When I worked in the Oracle channel, I was generally selling to mid-market organizations, both big and small companies. I got involved in social media probably back in 2012 or 2013. I was involved in rolling out a very early social selling program in Oracle across about 4,000 people in Europe.

It was there that I bumped into the co-author of the first book. We got a book deal within three months. I then wrote it for another three months in 2015 and it came out in the fall of 2016. It took off. In the presale, people were falling over themselves to buy it. What happened was that during COVID, it took off again. My publisher came to me and said, "You have to do a second edition because people are interested in it."

What's changed? Social selling has become the norm. When we started our business, we were seen as niche. People laughed at us. People thought that social media was about taking pictures of your lunch. It's become mainstream. If you are not being reported at your board level about how much business you are generating through social media, you are way behind.

If you are not being reported at your board level about how much business you are generating through social media, you are way behind.

It's interesting that you started to talk about the board. That was one of the first things in the book that jumped out at me. You get away from any tactics around this initially and say, "An organization needs a social selling strategy for the business and the organization."

This is not a book about tactics, LinkedIn, or a personal brand. This is about how an organization can generate revenue and get back onto a growth trajectory by using socials strategically within the organization. That's fundamentally different from every single organization that's trying to sell you social selling materials and tactics across the whole of the world. We're the only people in the world who do this.

That was one of the things that hit me so hard because being one of these people who would have been a couple of inches deep on LinkedIn over the years, we were early into LinkedIn but in the first 50 pages, you bring up the fact that LinkedIn is only 30% of a social selling strategy. I had been so proud telling our team for so many years, "We're going to focus on LinkedIn." It jumped out. The book is filled with these facts, not just platitudes.

I'll go back to the strategy side of things. I enjoyed it at the beginning as well when you mentioned the board level. We work with a lot of mid-sized SaaS companies, larger manufacturing businesses, and some very large enterprises. We haven't heard from anybody that they're discussing the social selling or the digital organization strategy at the board level.

We're in some of those board meetings because in some cases, we're an outsourced chief revenue officer. This is an interesting thought. There are samples throughout the books but tell me the ones that are prominent for you where you've come into an organization that wasn't doing this, and you did get the right buy-in at the right level, the board level. Tell me a little bit about 1 case study or 2 of a program that worked very well when it started at that level.

We usually enter into an organization at the CRO level because the issue that we get is that they've got no pipeline and the feedback that we are getting is nobody has any pipeline. The reason for that is that they're still thinking of interruption marketing. They still think the practices that we had in the 1980s and 1990s are relevant in a digital world, and it's not.

Sixty-one percent of the world's population is on social media and is active on social media. Everybody who's on social media spends 2 hours and 23 minutes a day on social media. This is where people come to talk and have conversations. This is where your buyers, future employees, and future investors are. Everybody has moved to social and COVID accelerated that.

We know through working for years that we can grow people's revenues by 30% and shorten the sales cycle by 20%. We've got salespeople who are getting ten meetings a week by using social selling. I need to say that when someone sends you a message over social and they do a pitch lap or pitch, that's not social selling. That's spam. When you talked earlier on about the CEO getting a message saying, "I'm a wealth advisor. Can I help you," that's spam.

We have a definition of social selling, which comes across in the book. “Use your presence and behavior on social media to build influence, make connections, and grow relationships and trust, which leads to conversational and commercial interaction.” The key thing is that it doesn't matter how good your salespeople are and how much you train them on MEDDIC. They're not having conversations. Conversations create sales. It doesn't matter. You can train people to close deals but if they haven't got any deals in the first place, it's not going to help you.

From a strategic perspective, what we do is that explain to the CRO how we can increase revenue and shorten the sales cycles. All of our clients don't have a problem with the pipeline. I have this SDR who came to me and complained because he booked 25 meetings that week. He said, "I don't have enough time for the meetings I have." When you've got people cold calling and sending spam emails, they don't have that complaint.

What we're doing at a strategic level is once you go into an organization, you show them the power of creating influence online. You can take what I said, using your presence and behavior on social media to build influence and trust and make connections. You can do that in HR. What you are doing is immediately able to position yourself as the employer of choice on social media. You're able to suck up and get all the best talent.

You can do that in purchasing. You can make sure that you've got all the buyers with all the different things that are going on and the polycrisis we have with the supply chain and the differences in the supply chain. You can go out and get different suppliers at different rates. What we see suddenly is that this isn't just about selling. This is about an enterprise-wide strategy for the organization. It's about creating visibility for the organization and a better environment to work with. That's a board-level issue as much as the pipeline is. We're here to talk about sales but you did ask me about the strategy piece.

Those are the five measures of a digital organization that you touched on in the book. You talk about, 1) Visibility and recognition in the marketplace, 2) Trust or advisor status for whatever your core competency, and 3) Measurable pipeline, which we will get back to with a discussion on sales for sure. As you say with your HR, access to the best talent in the industry, and finally, employee engagement, leveraging social for employee engagement.

We have had lots of folks on the show. We have been talking about this disastrous situation of employee engagement. There are shocking numbers of people who are either disengaged or actively disengaged within businesses. Getting back to the positive on the sales side, another quote that I liked in the book that is going to keep most of the audiences quite interested is, "Every keystroke that a sales team makes can be measured against revenue and EBITDA." If that's the messaging here, I can't imagine there are too many boards or chief revenue officers out there that wouldn't perk up and say, "I would love to have a conversation about that."

We get a lot of people coming to us and saying that social media is about posting pictures of your lunch and stuff like that, and it's not. The feedback that I've got from most CEOs who have read the book is that this is the first book that shows that there's a connection between active use of social media and revenue. All the other books are about tactics. If you stand on one leg and put on a bandana, and then the algorithm does this, this is irrelevant. This is about your business. We use the term walking digital corridors and having digital conversations. LinkedIn is only 30% of your social graph, the people that you are trying to influence.

I remember going and seeing a friend of mine. I wrote an article about how you could get ten C-level meetings a week using Twitter. I wrote this years ago. It's on my LinkedIn profile. He said that the person that he was trying to get ahold of was a chief people officer. They weren't active on LinkedIn but they were active on Instagram. They were taking pictures. They were big. They had two dogs and they walked their dogs. They were sharing pictures of their dogs on Instagram. All of the skills that we have always had is the same but you need to be able to understand how to be social. It's not about how to use LinkedIn. It's about how to be social, pick that up, and take that to Instagram.

One of the things that we do in our social selling methodology is we do a lot of it on LinkedIn but we also teach people for 30 minutes how to use Twitter or what is now called X. What we're showing them is that this is about being social. We're going to go from LinkedIn to a different social platform. You're going to take all those things that you know and apply them. They go, "This is simple." This isn't about having to go to each platform and learn how to use them. It's about learning how to be social.

Social selling is not about going to each social media platform and learning how to use them. It is about learning how to be social.

We're going to talk a little bit about that. You've got the book, courses, and methodologies to teach people this but we will give them a few tips and tricks, knowing that it all starts with a strategy. One of the things that struck me, and I'll call myself the slow learner on this one, is we did spend a number of years posting. We weren't getting ten CEO meetings a week from posting. It was a fabulous credibility shield. When we were having a conversation with someone and they said, "Let's get to know in the funnel," it ended up being a very good credibility shield in the same way that a website was a good credibility shield years ago.

It wasn't wasted. We did get some inbound leads but the point we didn't grasp was being social. You make a couple of references to, "What if we jumped in the car and went to a place that had all of the best buyers for in-the-funnel?" What would you do if you walked into that cocktail party? Would you walk up dancing and pitching your product? Would you walk up and start having interesting conversations with people about them, their business, what's going on in their lives, and topics? Would you have those interesting conversations? That's what we do. We do the latter.

What we tried to do in the early days was outsource the listening part of social media. We had very junior people in our company doing the listening part of social media. God bless them. They were wonderful but they didn't understand how to respond when somebody said, "We're having this issue where we get first meetings with buyers but we never get a second meeting with buyers." Buyers are unengaged in that first discussion. They don't know what to do next. Where it started to change for us a little bit was when I took more ownership, "We're going to have those conversations." That is something that jumped out in the first half of the book to me big time.

The mistake that people make is that they think what we're going to do is do what we have always done on social media. We're going to take brochures and get the employees to push them out, "Won't that be great?" What happens is nothing because people don't come to social media to read brochures. That's what your website is for. I bet they don't read them on there either.

What people don't have is a strategy in terms of, "I've read an article that I need to post on social media." They post and then do something else. You got twenty likes on that. What did you do with them? They said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You got twenty likes on it. What did you do?" "I don't understand what you're talking about."

I said, "All those likes is a person digitally saying, 'I digitally resonate with your post.' Did you go and talk to them?" "No." "Why not? This is free business." We have been running a piece of research where we have been working out all the posts so that we know exactly what post works on social media, when to do it, and why to do it. What I mean by "works" is I don't mean it gets views or clicks. I mean that it generates revenue for the business.

To clarify, do you know the timing of the post for your business or all businesses?

It's for our business. We're doing it for two people. One of them is us. We know the type of posts that work and the type of posts that don't work. We have a client who got a $500 million deal off the back of posting something on LinkedIn. It is possible to get business by posting stuff but if you do it once, that's luck. What you want is a methodology to say, "I post something every week. Every week, I get a billion-dollar deal."

What we do is teach people to say, "For everything that you do on social media, there has to be a reason. There needs to be a methodology or a process so that you know when you are going to post something, why you're going to post it, and then how you are going to harvest the response that you get from it." For example, human posts work far better than corporate posts because most people see a brochure as corporate propaganda and won't read it.

For example, if you post a brochure, you will get little or no response at all. If you post a picture of yourself holding a brochure, that's something different because it's a human person. You may say, "I've been working for The Selling Well Podcast for six months. I love Mark. He's inspirational. He's empowered me to do these things." Everyone goes, "That's brilliant." We don't see that as selling but what you've done is put The Selling Well Podcast in front of me. What I'm able to do with my content is put that in front of people every single day. If you cold call people, how often a day can you cold call somebody?

It depends on your business and industry but you would have folks out there saying, "Let's get away from the nutty auto-dialers and generic 10 to 15 live conversations."

You couldn't cold call somebody every day or every week.

Not the same person.

You might not even be able to cold call them every month but every day, I put a piece of contract and go, "This is me. Here's the business issue. Here's another business issue. Here's the business issue that you may have." I can do that every single day. People get to know me, like me, and trust me. If I cold called you every single day, you wouldn't know, like, and trust me. You would come around to my house and probably shoot me.

Hopefully, not. You're posting every day and you get those numbers of likes. What do you do when you get the likes? I'll give you a real-world example as well. We did a post at the beginning of Q4. We talked about the importance during the Q4 sprint to recharge your batteries, take a pause, and make sure you stay balanced.

We got a few likes and a few thoughts there. Somebody came back and went, "What do you do to stay balanced?" I said, "Share what you do to keep a bit of balance." Different people were weighing in. Somebody went, "What do you do to stay balanced?" I put a post of a short video of a bar band that I play in where we were playing a gig. To your point, we have never had engagement like we had in that video. It's probably one of the top posts we have ever had.

I'm going to answer the question about content. You asked me to come up with things that your audience can implement straight away. Let me go on that and I'll talk about content. There are three things that you need to know and understand. The first thing is that you need to have a biocentric profile. What that means is that your profile on LinkedIn is a shop window to the world. LinkedIn is about to go past a billion people who are there. They walk past your profile every day. If your profile is the same as everybody else's like, "I'm a salesperson. I've been in President's Club," they're going to walk straight past.

What all buyers are looking for is an expert, someone who can help them. It's not about you or me. This is about them. What we are looking for when I talk about a biocentric profile is a profile that's going to show that you understand the business issues. It doesn't matter what age you are on this, whether you are my age, which is 1,000, or whether you are 23 or 25. You can show that you are an expert and people will stop. What we know is that most people under the age of 34 use social media to search more than they do search engines.

Social Selling: If your LinkedIn profile is the same as everybody else, people will walk straight past it. What all buyers are looking for is an expert and someone who can help them.

There's data produced by a guy called Simon Kemp who's on LinkedIn. He's a great person to follow. He produces data every quarter. It's free of charge. It shows that most people under the age of 34 use social. What we often do when we use search is we know the question to ask. When we use social media, generally, we don't know the question to ask. The problem with search is it doesn't give us the right answer. If I go onto Google and say, "What's the best CRM system in the world," you will get every single CRM vendor buying that search. It's a mess. We come to social media because we know it gives us a far better response.

It's a more authentic response.

It's about your network like the question that said, "What do you do, Mark?" The second new thing that you need is for us to have a wide and varied network. If you are not connected to the people that you are trying to influence or sell to, you are invisible. I would guarantee that if your audiences go out to their sales teams and say, "How many people that we're trying to sell to a week are we connected to," I bet they will say 1 or 2.

BMW is a partner of ours. They've got 100,000 people who work for BMW. How many people should I be connected to, 1, 10, or 100? I don't know but it's more than one. Whenever your leadership is running QBRs or Quarterly Business Reviews and account reviews, one of the questions that they need to ask is, "How many people are you connected to in the account?"

I have a section in the book about how to run QBRs in this digital world. You need to be connected. LinkedIn allows you to connect to about 200 people a week. Your sales team should be maxing that out. When I mean connect, I don't mean, "I come from The Selling Well Podcast. Here are all my wares." That is a spam. This is your ability to have a conversation.

If I could drive you to a room where all of your prospects are, and they're all standing there and holding a drink, what would you do? You wouldn't go up to them and say, "I've got a great podcast for you." You would go, "Where have you been? Have you traveled far? The weather is terrible at the moment." You would have a conversation. That is one of the things that we end up teaching salespeople outside of our social selling methodologies about how to have conversations and run those first meetings on social.

The next thing is social selling isn't about, "You have to do the whole transaction on social media." The whole point of using social media is that you get a meeting like this. I'm on this show through my use of social media. Mark has allowed me to comment here because of what I've done. You need this wide and varied network. The third thing that you need is content. This isn't about brochures, white papers, and stuff. This is about how you as an individual. This is your LinkedIn profile.

In the world of sales, people buy people. Even in the world of AI, people buy people. "I want to know that if I buy something from Mark Cox, he's going to look after me. He's the expert that I think he is. What we're looking for is content like Mark in his band because that shows that Mark is a real person. I would love to be in a band. I never played an instrument. As you can see, all I can do is play the gramophone but I would love to do that. My business partner is a guitar player. Behind him, he has loads of guitars. Funnily enough, all of the deals that he closes are with people who play the guitar."

Isn't that amazing? What we're doing is creating those connections. I'll give you an example of a piece of content that one of my teams put out. He put this piece of content out and said, "My family loves Led Zeppelin. Every Friday night, my wife puts on Led Zeppelin. When I can hear it through the door of my office, I know it's time to start the weekend. I finish whatever I'm doing. We go out and I spend the weekend with my family. What's your favorite Led Zeppelin song?"

People went, "Stairway to Heaven." Mine is Kashmir and Whole Lotta Love. When I tell this story, a lot of people say, "When the Levee Breaks." On Monday, he went to all of the people who responded that he wasn't connected to and said, "When the Levee Breaks is a great favorite of mine. Can we connect? It's a 100% connection rate. There's no connection. This is my product. This is about having a conversation." To all the people that he knew, he said, "We have an interest in Led Zeppelin. Why don't we get on a call?" They all said yes, "He's a Led Zeppelin fan. We're going to talk about Led Zeppelin."

We teach people how to run those meetings. One of my SDRs gets ten meetings. He works for an organization where they insist he makes cold calls and emails. He gets nothing from it. One morning, he will get ten meetings, which is enough for him not to be fired, and then he takes the dogs for a walk in the afternoon. I said to him, "Why didn't you get another ten meetings?" He said, "If I got twenty meetings in a day, they will think there's something wrong with me. I only get ten because that's all I need to do. I tick the boxes and pass the KPIs," which is ridiculous.

It's a great example but let's go back to the three things that Tim spoke about, buyer-centric profile, thinking about your digital territory, and then content. Let's go a little further on the buyer-centric profile because if memory serves, your profile when I took a quick look at it before I jumped on said something about, "Should have played Quidditch for England," or something of that nature. It didn't talk about being a social selling expert. What is Quidditch? My parents are British. I should probably know the answer to this question.

Quidditch is a made-up game that doesn't exist from the JK Rowling books about Harry Potter. It's a game that you play on a broomstick. If you Google your name, unless you have your website, the first thing that will probably come up is your LinkedIn profile, which will show your photo, name, and summary title. Therefore, your summary title is the most visible thing about you on the internet. What you want is someone to go, "What on Earth is that?" The click-through comes through to my LinkedIn profile because I have the professional edition of LinkedIn.

You know who did it.

I know everybody who looks at my LinkedIn profile and anybody who googles me. What most LinkedIn trainers will do is that they tell you to put what you do on that. You are self-harming yourself. People connect to me and say, "I help CEOs with their accounting." I already have an accountant, ignore. "I help CEOs with their physical fitness." I run three times a week, ignore.

This advice is fundamentally flawed and is killing businesses. Your summary title has to work for you. It has to create curiosity. Someone goes, "That person sounds interesting. I wonder what that means. I would like to talk to that person." People are walking across social media and saying, "You look interesting. We've got this problem. You can help me." That's turning into multimillion-dollar deals.

Your LinkedIn summary title has to create curiosity. If people can see your account and get you to help solve their problem, that is the start of multimillion-dollar deals.

Let's go back if we can though. You bring up that point about playing Quidditch for England. Thank you for that. We have permanently lost any of the Harry Potter fans who realized I'm not a Harry Potter fan. They're never going to be reading this again. They have clicked off.

Maybe you get some magic.

Maybe I'll get into it. We also talked about those buyers under 34 who are using social for searching. If your profile has something quirky like that, then how do they find you if they're looking for an expert on social selling?

I have social selling elsewhere in my profile but the way that Google and LinkedIn look at your profile is a string of text. I have social selling in my profile. It's in your job. It's elsewhere within your profile. Your summary title is not what's reliant on search.

We talked a little bit about LinkedIn. Give us a couple of data points as well on Twitter or Instagram. One of the things that I found very interesting in the book was you think Twitter is better for making first contact with some of your buyers than something like LinkedIn. Maybe you can explain why.

If you're selling in IT, which is what I've done, you will find that people are on Twitter or X. You've got a far more ability to have a conversation with them. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is have a conversation because the conversation creates a sale, which leads to conversations and commercial interactions.

What you need to be doing is be part of the conversation, which is retweeting and responding to the comment, "I love the interview that you did with Mark Cox. I learned a lot. I can learn from you. Thanks very much." If you say, "That's great. I've got this great platform," the first thing I'll do is block you but if you say, "That's interesting," I don't find that as scary. Andy Paul says in his book, "If you pitch to somebody, it creates a fight or flight reaction in somebody." What you don't want to do is do that.

That's exactly how I got you on this show. I heard you on Andy Paul's episode, reached out to you, and said, "We've got a show. Here are some other people who have been on it, including Andy." First, I said, "I loved you on his podcast."

You were very nice.

Thank you. For good reason, this will be a great episode for us as well. The book is Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I like the discussion as well on changemakers. Tell us a little bit about the changemaker term and who that individual is within the organization.

Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers

All of the sales methodologies MEDDIC have a term, whether it's a coach, economic buyer, or champion. We see that there's this particular person called a changemaker. This comes from research that Google did back in 2015, which is where they saw this different person. The person tended to be younger, probably less than 40. They could be now in their 40s. They're probably looking for their next promotion. They're not bothered about your solution. Most of the sponsors, coaches, or people like that usually want your solution to come into the organization.

When I was at Oracle, I used to sell to a lot of people who wanted Oracle on their CVs. Therefore, they gave you information to make sure that you were the chosen solution whereas this changemaker doesn't care. What they want is to get the promotion. If you go to a meeting and they tear you apart, it's highly likely that person is a changemaker because what they're trying to do is they're testing your solution and credibility, whether you are trustworthy, whether you lie, or that sort of stuff. They're testing you and they then take your solution into the business.

For example, the Azure people in Microsoft use this technique. They find changemakers within the organization and then say, "Here's a piece of content that you may find interesting," knowing full well that changemaker will then take it into the organization and spread it. The finance director may not be active on LinkedIn but the changemaker does the work for you.

That's early in the book. There are great definitions there. Let me add a left-of-center question. What are you reading professionally?

I am a horrendous reader of books. I've read or will have read 40 books in 2023. The book I'm reading is a book called The Mom Test. If you are starting up a company or you have a business idea, the worst person you can ask about whether it would fly is your mom because she will tell you, "It's a great idea." It goes through how you should ask questions to customers and prospects. You haven't even built a product. It's the type of question that you should ask. It's good.

Isn't that fun? What a great premise for the book.

He has been a startup person himself. He made all the mistakes and said, "This cost me $500,000." He is great at coming up with the scenarios of the questions to ask rather than saying, "Would you like a fitness app?" You would say yes even though you didn't want one. You would say, "I'm a podcaster. Therefore, I'm interested in fitness." With the fact that I asked the question and you lied to me, immediately, I'm lost.

It's Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I learned a ton reading the book and you will too.

Thank you, Mark. It means a lot.

You're very welcome, Tim. We have lots of folks on this show. Many of them are driven because when I read the book, I want to talk to the person who wrote it, not the opposite where we get a guest. Andy has been on our show a few times and I've been on his show a few times. The thing that jumped out was, "How did I miss this?" Like you, I'm a voracious reader. I was kicking myself a little bit. Once I got into it, I started enjoying it because it is a strategic approach. It does get into some tactical coaching on what to do once you understand the strategy behind it. People are going to want to learn more about you and the business. How do they do that most efficiently?

The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm Timothy or Tim Hughes. My summary title is, "Should have played Quidditch for England." They can find me on Twitter or X. I'm @Timothy_Hughes. Our website is DLAignite.com.

Tim, thanks again for joining us.

You're welcome.

It's great to meet you. Folks, thank you so much for joining. We run the show to try and elevate the performance and professionalism of B2B sales but we're trying to improve the lives of salespeople. As Tim mentions in his book, which quotes back to Daniel Pink, one of our other guests, the more mastery you have in something, the more you're going to enjoy it. We run this show for you. If there are ways that we can improve this show, I would like to know.

My email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism. We respond to everybody who gives us an idea. If there's something you like, let me know that's great but if there's something that we could do to improve this, we want to know that. Thank you for doing so. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends. We want to improve their lives too. We will see you next time.

Important Links

• DLAignite

• Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers

• Simon Kemp - LinkedIn

• Andy Paul - Previous episode

• The Mom Test

• TimTi - LinkedIn

• @Timothy_Hughes - Twitter

• Daniel Pink - Previous episode

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Timothy Hughes

Tim Hughes is universally recognised as the world leading pioneer and innovator of Social Selling. He is currently ranked Number 1 by Onalytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, LinkedIn said he was one of the top 8 sales experts globally to follow and Brand 24 announced recently he was the 16th most influential person in marketing globally, based on measured social media influence.

He is also Co-Founder and CEO of DLA Ignite and co-author of the bestselling books “Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers - 2nd edition” and “Smarketing - How To Achieve Competitive Advantage through blended Sales and Marketing”. He has recently launched a second edition of “social selling - techniques to influence buyers and change makers” which has been fully updated.

Kind Folks Finish First: Sales And Career Lessons Toward Success With Sam Jacobs

Salespeople often have a bad rep; they are seen as sleazy, manipulative, and, sometimes, intense in the way they deal with others. It is time to change that misconception. Sam Jacobs, the founder and CEO of Pavilion, imparts the message through the book of the same name: Kind Folks Finish First. You don’t have to be ruthless to get ahead; kindness will get you there faster. In this episode, Sam joins us to tell us more about the book and highlights, along the way, the top sales trends we have seen this 2023. He discusses a value-first approach to sales and business, overcoming the notion of treating relationships transactionally. Sam also gives great food for thought about the way we look at our careers: should you do what you love? Why do you need side hustles? For more sales tips and insights that will lead you to success, tune in to this conversation!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Kind Folks Finish First: Sales And Career Lessons Toward Success With Sam Jacobs

We all know that those of us who have chosen a life in professional sales chose a business discipline that's a little more tumultuous than many others. According to Gardner and others, as we all know, the tenure of somebody who's a sales leader is now less than two years the average tenure. The average tenure of a professional salesperson is also less than two years. It's a unique profession that we've dedicated our lives to.

This episode is going to be helpful to all of us because we're talking with Sam Jacobs. He is the Founder and CEO of Pavilion, a thriving community with more than 10,000 members around the world. Sam has led revenue teams at a number of different firms, including Behavox, The Muse, Livestream, Axial and Gerson Lehrman Group. He also started a very successful podcast called The Sales Hacker Podcast.

He has written a book called Kind Folks Finish First. I'd like to share a wonderful testimonial from somebody that we respect, Daniel Pink. He has been on our show. His book, To Sell Is Human, one of our favorite sales books of all time. Here's what he writes about Sam's book, Kind Folks Finish First, “This is an excellently crafted book with a badly needed message. You don't have to be an aggressive jerk to succeed in business. In fact, if you lead with generosity and fairness, your professional life will be better off and your whole world will be plain better.”

We had a great conversation with Sam Jacobs. I'm aided in the co-hosting duties by our old friend Dave Hanley, who leads sales for AdvertiseCast. Dave has led a number of startups to very successful exits, but he lived through all of the challenges, the ups and downs of being in a sales career as well. He helps me chat with Sam. We're going to be talking about some of the key elements of Kind Folks Finish First, why Sam founded Pavilion, the value people get from the community of sales professionals, how so you need to lead with a value-first approach, and what your values are as a business professional.

We got some interesting thoughts about people in sales nowadays because of that short tenure, we all need back doors. Side hacks, being critically important, we're not entirely dependent on our employers when these changes take place. I enjoyed meeting Sam. It’s a great book. I wish I read this book or had this book when I started my sales career. You should pick it up. It’s a great conversation. I enjoyed chatting with Sam. I think you're going to enjoy this show. When you do, please like and subscribe because that matters to us. Thank you for doing so. Here's Sam Jacobs.

We've got a couple of fantastic guests that I'm going to introduce in a second. We're going to be talking about Kind Folks Finish First, a spectacular book by Sam Jacobs, who is the Founder of Pavilion. It is important for professional sales. This show exists to try and improve the lives of salespeople with education. When we get mastery of what we do, we feel better. As always, we're trying to share some strategies, processes, and tools that help all of us get better. We're going to have a great conversation because Pavilion exists to do the same thing, to help salespeople achieve their potential.

I own a company called In The Funnel. We are a group of sales coaches and consultants that help companies sell better, but I'm delighted to introduce a couple of my guests here. I'm going to first start with Dave Hanley. Many of you know that Dave is a friend of In The Funnel and a longtime client for full disclosure.

Dave is the Chief Revenue Officer of AdvertiseCast, the podcast advertising division of Libsyn. Before entering the podcast industry, Dave co-founded several successful enterprise SaaS businesses in the insurance and risk management space. He was the Cofounder of AdvertiseCast back in 2017 based on his passion for consuming great podcasts. He had great timing. The company quickly became a leader in the space as the first and largest online podcast advertising marketplace. In 2021, AdvertiseCast was acquired by Libsyn. Now Dave works in with Libsyn. Dave, welcome.

Thanks. I'm happy to be here. It’s great to meet Sam. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Thanks for joining. I would like to introduce Sam Jacobs. He is the Founder and the CEO of Pavilion. Many of you already know about Pavilion. He launched Pavilion originally as a revenue collective in 2016, then he bootstrapped the company to $10 million ARR or Annual Recurring Revenue. Before working with Elephant Ventures, he took $25 million in funding in growth financing.

Before Pavilion, Sam spent fifteen years as a Senior Revenue Leader in VC-backed companies in New York, including Gerson Lehrman Group, Axial, and there’s an interesting story there, Livestream and Vimeo, The Muse, and Behavox. Sam's story and journey has been well articulated in the book we're going to discuss here Kind Folks Finish First. Sam lives in the West Village of Manhattan with his wife and two dogs, William and Oswald. We're all pet lovers here. Oftentimes, when we've got Dave Hanley, we can see out his window and his horses in the background. Sam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I'm a happy customer of Libsyn. I’m delighted to be here.

Sam, we're chatting a little bit about the book because I did enjoy this book. I probably read a sales book every couple of weeks for the show as part of the joy of doing it. This one touched and resonated with me on a number of different fronts. Let me throw it over to you and get a little bit of a shorter story of your journey and what led you to write this book.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

It’s my pleasure.

I've been in New York for many years, the second time. I came back to New York to begin working and startups in 2003. From 2003 to 2018, fifteen years, I worked as a salesperson effectively and as a revenue leader in high-growth companies. What happened to me was that, as I achieved what I thought would be greater degrees of success in my professional life, I began to realize diminishing levels of happiness, enjoyment, and job security.

I worked at this one place that was super successful, GLG, for seven and a half years, and then I worked at the places that you mentioned in the bio, Axial, for four and a half years, Live Stream for 18 months, The Muse for 9 months, and Behavox for 10 months. What was happening was that my ten years were shrinking in the opposite way that I expected because when I was growing up, I thought that as you become more senior, you'll become more secure and established. You'll achieve wealth and do all that stuff. It wasn't really happening for me.

The book is about the founding of Pavilion and it was about me coming to the epiphany that I could remove myself from the way that I had thought been taught to live my career and try to, which doesn't mean I'm perfect and I don't think I'm better than anybody, embody a different set of principles and see what would happen. The book starts on Friday, the 13th of October 2017, when I was fired from The Muse. That's another part of the journey, which is that I faced a lot of failures, terminations, and a certainly relevant in an economy like the one we're in for technology.

Kind Folks Finish First: The Considerate Path to Success in Business and Life

I was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike with a dog that's now passed away, Walter, in the back seat and with my partner in the front seat. I got a message from the CEO. I was using my phone. This was before Apple CarPlay became ubiquitous in cars. I was always using my phone as a GPS and Waze. I got a little notification. I pulled over and said, “I didn't even realize you'd be out of the office. Can you come back into the office first thing on Monday?”

I remember thinking, “She's not a morning person. She's not into first thing in the morning.” I'd gotten that three-line email before and I knew immediately what was happening, which was that I was being fired. That was a moment at which I decided to embark on a different journey. That journey led me to begin to build the Pavilion in earnest. I hate to sound too cliché or too woo-woo, as my coach would say, but it was a journey of self-actualization. It was a journey that led to where I am now.

That's effectively what the book was about. Fundamentally, to cut to the chase, the book is about a different set of values that I articulate and that I would share with the audience and with people that would read it that says, “You don't have to behave in a way that you've been taught or maybe some people have been taught. It doesn't have to be a dog eat dog, ruthless competition, or zero some.”

You don't have to treat relationships transactionally. Every time you help somebody, you don't have to get an invoice back in return. You can do things for the good of helping. It's not that it'll make you feel better, but that you'll die a popper, penniless, and destitute. This is a formula for professional success. I've used this formula to build the company that I now run and to help other people do the same.

First of all, there is so much to one pack there. This is what hit me so much. You're in your car. You're driving. You think everything's okay. You've seen it many times. The chapter one's title is Fired At The Rest Stop. You've got that weekend where you're going to go through this and you know you're walking into this meeting on Monday, and then you're going to get fired. This has happened multiple times. We may have been of a generation where we thought, “The longer we do this, the more stable our roles are going to be,” and so on and so forth.

As you aptly point out in chapter two, Gardner tells us the chief revenue officer is going to last eighteen months. Now you're going to go through this whole rigmarole again. For everybody who's going to go through some tumultuous times, there is that adage that said, “It's sunny as after it's darkest. Maybe we have to go through some of these things. Any of us who've had a little more to come of success, you've had some of those challenging times as well.”

It tugged at me. I related to that so much. I had a similar type of journey in some ways somewhere. Maybe I tapped out of companies before I was going to get fired. I was pretty happy at one point in time to tell people, “If I didn't like something, I just walked out of it.” In some sense, I was thinking, “I'm not going to be successful here. I'm going to tap out before they tap out.” Going through this journey, at some point in time, you get quite frustrated and go, “There's got to be a better way,” and leading to this abundance mindset.

Start to say, “It's not about me. It's not about what I'm making. Let's figure out how we put a little kindness into the world here. The fact that abundance begets abundance.” Before this journey, I thought there was some great wisdom in here about doing something you love, and we have a little shared interest. I'm back in my bar band again after years and years. We played at a historic club in Toronto on a Friday night. We went on at 10:00 PM and finished at about 12:15.

In the middle of that show, I realized my bedtime is 10:00 PM and there's a reason for that. I'm a drummer. I could feel my coordination leaving me pretty quickly as I was going through this gig. What did you do before you went into the world? What did it teach you about finding that idea about doing something you love?

As you alluded, I've got a background in music as well. I ran a record label out of school in the late ‘90s. We set up on a horse farm in the middle of Virginia. We thought we were going to start a commune. A bunch of people would come through the commune and record. I reference a bunch of like artists' collectives that people might know about from my indie rock days. What I realized in starting that record label was that, first of all, the music industry is like a pretty bad business. Also, when people say, “Do what you love,” it's not always the most useful advice.

There are a couple of reasons for that. The first reason is I believe in the power of experience. I'm not trying to stifle anybody's fulfillment or actualization. If you're whatever age you are, if you want to go out and start your own business or do your own thing, I support you as I did. I will tell you that the first thing is that I didn't know what I loved when I was entering the workforce. It takes some reps and experience. That's thing number one.

Thing number two is I find that people miscategorize what they “love.” Sometimes they identify the mission of the organization with the jobs to be done in that organization. They conflict with those two things. They say, “I love Lululemon. I want to work for Lululemon as a senior controller.” Being a senior controller in Lululemon doesn't mean you're doing yoga all day and hobnobbing with other celebrities who also love Lululemon. It means that you're looking at financial statements.

People miscategorize what they “love” and identify the mission of the organization with the jobs to be done in that organization and conflate those two things.

The final thing and most important thing is that if we're thinking about professional success, there's a Venn diagram. There are three things that are involved in that Venn diagram. There's what people are good, what they're interested in or what they love, and most importantly, there's where the market is moving. People underestimate or undervalue where the market is moving and what they're good at. They overvalue what they're interested in. I was interested in recording music. I love recording music. I've got a bunch of albums on Spotify. That doesn't mean that I should be a professional musician. That might mean that that's a fun hobby for me.

I needed to look at the fact that I was starting a record label at the rise of Mp3.com. Maybe recorded music is coming back a little bit, but fundamentally, there were about two decades there when the entire economy in the music industry fell apart. It was not a good time to start a record label. That doesn't make me less creative or less artistic. That's the reality of the world. The last thing I'll say in my long-winded way is that people don't distill the daily activities of a function. They put a label on the broad definition of the function. They say, “I don't like finance. I don't like sales.” Let's talk about salespeople. “I like sales,” or, “I would never do sales.”

What is sales? Sales is talking to people, being curious about them, figuring out what their problems are, and then figuring out if your product-solution service might be able to help that person solve that problem. That's one part of what sales is. Another part is, “Do you like long project-based work? You shouldn't work as an SMB seller with 30 days of sales cycles. Do you like instant gratification? Do you like to know that I do something, and very soon thereafter, I see the result from it?” Sales might be a good career option for you.

I find that a long-winded way of simply saying to an early career person, “Do what you love,” is not super helpful. I find that giving people a framework for how to think about it does a couple of things. One of them is it manages their expectations a little bit because the other thing that happens that is happening now with quiet quitting and employee disengagement is that everybody's been misled about the nature of work to a certain extent. Everybody's like, “Why do I not feel like I'm at church and the pastor is singing?” Sometimes, it's just work. Sometimes, that's what it is. It's not that every moment is going to be an epiphany when all you say is, “Do what you love.” It's not super helpful, when you're thinking about, “How do I practically build a career over decades as opposed to over months?”

Your friend, Dan Pink, has been on our show. One of my favorite books of all time, in addition to yours, is To Sell Is Human. It came around at the same time that we started this business many years ago. Dan Pink didn't come from a background in sales, but on the show, I asked him, “Why'd you write this book about sales if you had no background in sales?” He said there was such a disconnect with everybody that he knew in professional sales, but the stereotype of someone in sales as a pitcher, used car salesman, and all this. Everybody knew in professional sales were some of the smartest, most intellectually curious problem-solving people he knew out there.

That book is like a masterclass or an MBA for sales because his research is thorough, but he was trying to find ou. Of the 8 and 9 people in the US who aren't in professional sales, 1 in 9 are and 8 in 9 aren't. What percentage of their day do they spend trying to persuade somebody else to their point of view? It turns out it's 39% of the day. All half of every day, they're trying to convince somebody else to their point of view. Everybody's got this default, “I'm not in sales.”

We hear that often when we're training service technicians or something of that age, “I'm not in sales. I could never sell anybody anything.” It’s something's exactly like what you said. It's helping somebody achieve a better future and business outcome. At the end, I asked Dan, “Where do you see sales going?” He netted it out as saying, “Nowadays, professional B2B sales is management consulting. Anything that isn't that will be taken care of by automation or AI, etc., but true sales is management consulting.” Any of this resonate for you, Mr. Hanley?

I'm thinking about my background and how it relates. I went to school and I thought I was going to get into Finance. I decided after my second-year Accounting course that I hated it. I stumbled into more entrepreneurship. What you realize when you want to start a business and work on a new venture is that a large percentage of what you're doing is sales.

The key is being curious. What happened to my career is if you don't know what you're doing, which I didn't, and I got into an industry that I knew nothing about, I was, by nature, asking a lot of questions because I wanted to learn and curious. That came across as, “This is a great person to talk to. They're interested in our business, and they care about how they can help us.” For the most part, I was trying to learn, but what a lot of salespeople who are new to selling don't realize is that you don't show up and pitch. You have to ask questions, solve a problem, and communicate whether or not you can help add value and solve that problem.

There's a big conference called Collision. It is a technology startup conference. There are 36,000 people in Downtown Toronto. The energy and enthusiasm of walking around a conference like that is spectacular. There are a lot of startups. They've said it up. Startups, mid-tie, and growth organizations and lots of VC. Everybody gets a seat at the table. It's an interesting setup. I probably chatted with twenty startups going through and having conversations.

Not a single person in any of those things asks me a question. The best two questions I got I was somebody said, “What brought you to the conference?” Many said, “Tell me about your business.” I'm not joking. This was the guy taking my order in the coffee truck outside of the conference. This is the only person at the conference who asked me anything.

That makes me upset.

It gave us an opportunity when we were walking around. After I'd have these conversations with these startup founders, I'd share that and say, “Here are a couple of things to do next time if you're open to it. You might want to think about this question and get someone talking to you, plus you'll enjoy it more.” I could see when they were doing their pitch for the twentieth time that day, they were tired. I thought, “Ask a question. Get involved in an engaged conversation.”

I'm going to give a shout-out to the guy taking orders from Fleet Coffee when I was getting my cappuccino. Sam, tell us about the rest stop. Now, we've had this epiphany. It leads to 2016 or 2017. You'd always had a dinner club or a networking club for other people in your role. How does that evolve into what is now, the opportunity with First Revenue Collective and Pavilion? Tell us a little bit about that journey.

The first thing I would say is it began without any sense of expectation. There was either one in Toronto that David was putting together on sales or something like that. There was one in the Chicago Sales Assembly. My point is I didn't think that this was a venture-scale business. This was not some world-dominating master plan.

This was me saying, “I'm not solving backward,” from, “I need to have dominated the world by X, Y, Z year.” It is me saying, “I'm going to check out of the Merry-Go-Round or the carousel that I'm on, and I'm going to build something that I care about and that I love. I'm not going to worry too much about anything other than Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Is there going to be a roof over my head? Can I pay rent? Can I do what I love, which is helping people and connecting people so that they can achieve their career outcome?”

I got fired. It was the fall of 2017. I've written about this on LinkedIn. I said, “I can't be dependent for all of my income on one source of revenue anymore If I'm going to work for somebody else. I need ‘side hustles.’ The world is too uncertain for me to put all of my eggs in a basket that somebody else totally controls and can decide at any moment that I'm no longer suitable for the basket. I'm going to build a consulting business. I'm going to take this dinner club, try and monetize it. I'm not trying to monetize it so that I can be on the cover of Time Magazine. I'm not trying to be Elon Musk. I'm just trying to do something that I care and am passionate about that frankly can't be taken from me.”

That was the origin of it. From there, there were 22 people then. I said, “Everybody, we're going to charge dues on January 1, 2018. Who's in?” 20 out of 22 people said, “I'm in. I’m not sure what I'm paying for, but I'm up for it,” and then we grew from there. People started hearing about what we were doing all over the world and people from other cities started reaching out now. Why did they?

One thing I think is sometimes people don't know why they're successful, but if I had to guess, there was a point of view behind the community. It wasn't networking for its own sake. It was, “What do we believe about the world? How should we align and what do we still believe about the world to this day?” We believe a couple of things. First of all, there has been a little bit of undue influence focused on CEOs and investors and not enough care is taken for the people that run and operate those companies.

As a consequence of that, we still teach people how to negotiate and what they're entitled to when it comes to executive compensation. What I want for everybody is that you don't have to be this founder or CEO to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life. There's a role for an executive operator at a company, but that role needs to be renegotiated because the old deal wasn't working very well. That was a big part of what attracted people to the community, which is that there was a latent point of view that was articulated.

You don't have to be this founder or CEO to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life.

When we do worse in our Incarnation, which is 10,000 people, it's because we're not doing enough to articulate that point of view that we're not clear enough in why we exist and what we stand for. That was one of the big reasons why people begin to come to us. We grew over the course of 2018. I worked one more place full-time, and then I got fired. I was having breakfast with a mentor and I said, “I'm going to try and work on Pavilion full-time, but if it doesn't work, I'll go back to being a CRO,” and he smiled and said, “I think we've tried that experiment at this point.” I won't say the rest was history. It's been a lot of stops and starts, mistakes, and great outcomes.

We're in the middle of our next phase of evolution, which is about getting back to our roots and re-embracing the ideas that got us here in the first place, which is a point of view that we exist for the individual operator first and foremost. We want to train that person not just to be a good employee but to be an actualized and self-realized human. That might mean consulting and advisory business like you've done. We want to teach people how to have a career. A career is not you work one place for twenty years anymore. It's a series of gigs, advisory roles, and consulting jobs. It is the combination of all of those things in the accumulation of all those experiences over time, which hopefully lead to wealth, impact, better relationships with your partners, and that whole thing.

The path there is always, “Are you enjoying what you're doing?” You talk a lot about you weren't fulfilled in many of the roles leading up to it. You have this epiphany. I've always felt the same way that, finally, when I did this, it felt like this is what I was meant to do, but I needed that corporate journey for twenty years to teach me something that was valuable. I needed that experience. I needed to do massive and smaller deals. I needed to run big teams and small teams. I needed to learn something that was valuable if I could add my own unique ability there.

We were talking that there a little bit about the side hustle and consulting. Chapter seven is Every Crisis Is An Opportunity. You do talk about this. This is very helpful for folks reading this, which is the rules of compensation. There's some great coaching in this book as to, “If you're negotiating that next deal, what should you think about?” You have five things that you're entitled to when it comes to compensation. 1) Due diligence. Do your investigation number. 2) Aligned compensation, liquidity by the way. I'm getting options, “Am I ever going to get them out?” We'll talk about double triggers a little later on.

Negotiate the severance upfront and think about that, which is one of the ways you got a little breathing space to get into this, and then consult, talking about how you build something on the side for you that no matter what, you're allowed to continue on doing. With In The Funnel, we work with a lot of people who do exactly that. They may have been a client of ours at some point, like Dave, then over time, they start to work with us because they've got their own consulting businesses on the side. It's a great model for them. It's a fantastic model for us.

Here's the other thing I love reading that chapter about negotiation. Understand what you'd like and then what you're willing to agree with. Most people don't understand how to negotiate. You underlined this a few times. Don't bluff. I don't know where we were taught to negotiate and being tough, mean, and banging at the table. At one point in time, we negotiated a $1 billion deal. I've never been scared in my life, but the one thing I knew I wasn't going to do was lie at the table. I've never been over my head ever. When we're negotiating it, the only thing I had was my character and integrity. Don't make a commitment you can't adhere to. Don't bluff. That is not a TV show. That's very good coaching for everybody out there. Comments, Mr. Hanley?

Mark and I were talking about this piece of the book before. It took me back. I've worked with Mark for many years. I don't remember how many years it has been. One of the original big learnings I had from Mark was on negotiation. You're trying to work a big deal and we said, “The price is X,” and the client is looking for Y. Trying to find that win-win and what's important.

It is asking the question saying, “We gave you a price of $100,000. You want it for $80,000. What else is important? Is it the timing? Can you wait? Do you want it now? What other levers can we pull to get something that works for both of us? Can you pay a little bit upfront as opposed to the back end?” It is asking those questions to figure out how we can negotiate and come to an agreement. We're not lying, bluffing, or throwing red herrings. It's more of asking the right questions and trying to find something that works for both parties.

Make the pie bigger. It's not about a bigger piece of the pie. It is trying to think about, “How do we make the pie bigger?” There's got be that trust and authenticity to have that conversation. I don't know if the book answers directly, but we have a conversation and it seems you are the wisest, most balanced person out there. What was happening that you were getting dismissed frequently or why, in your view, are CRO only lasting eighteen months in their job? Pavilion must see a ton of this with the on-the-bench and so on and so forth. What's going on that the tenure of this role as short?

Let's speak about me first. I don't think I'm blameless at all. I can be a difficult person to work with. When you're a C-level executive working for CEO, what you have to understand fundamentally is that it's their company. They can call it a partnership. You can call it the first team. You can read The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team by Pat Lencioni. It is their company. You work in service to them.

I always joke about where if you're in a romantic relationship with somebody else, they yell at you, but they don't get over grievances with you and they don't leave. They seem to want us to stay. That was me. That was being disgruntled and saying, “I could do it better. If I could do better, I should go do it better because it's their company.” This idea of, “If I was being frustrated with the potential of an opportunity without acknowledging the reality of it, that's my fault. That's not anybody else's problem. Those idiots won't listen to me. That's my problem and not their problem.” That's how I was. I've always felt like I was probably a better startup CEO than I was a startup employee, but I never had anything that I was working on of any size or scale. Now, thank God, I do. Lo and behold, I haven't been fired since 2016 when I got this thing off the ground. That's a great thing.

Let's speak more broadly to the tenure of a CRO. There are a lot of factors at play. I don't think that there's an enemy. There's no bad person or good person in this equation. The first thing is we're working in a world that is changing more rapidly by the day. That's true. We're talking about AI. It's not that AI was invented with ChatGPT, but this hype cycle was created in November 2022. It already feels like we've been talking about it forever. The world is changing more quickly than it used to be.

We're working in a world that is changing more rapidly by the day.

Many of us have watched Mad Men, where Don Draper goes to launch, has three martinis, and then goes to take a nap. That's fine because nothing happens that quickly. They had telephones. They didn't have pager or iPhones. The pace of business was slower. That's one thing I think. The second thing I think is if we're going to work at high-growth companies in particular, we do have to acknowledge that $2 million business that grows to $6 million or $8 million over two years, and this is true for us, we went from $4 million to $17 million over two years, the things that I need an executive to do at $4 million company are different things. It's a different company.

The only reason it's become clear to all of us is because we are choosing to work in these high-growth inorganic environments, but in the old days, that was seen as extraordinary growth. It wasn't true. Things don't grow in 200%. It was technology that enabled this. The last thing I'll say, which is part of the work frankly of Pavilion, is community unto itself is not that interesting. Community with a point of view is more interesting because there's something to rally around.

There's a point of view that founders, CEOs and investors don't know how to make money. In fact, most CRO’s don't know how to make money. What do I mean by that? This is related to what you said about the Bill of Rights about those five things. The second thing that you mentioned was the line compensation. There's this world that we've lived in for a long time, which is the senior sales leader, the chief revenue officer, and the VP of sales should be the highest-paid person at the company. That's because the salesperson brings in all the money, but that's not true.

That's not where money comes from. Money comes from the product, marketing sales, customer success, and partnerships all being in alignment. If you want to add more money, you need happy customers. You get happy customers from a good product. You get people aware of your product because you have great marketing.

This whole idea that, “We're going to hire the savior salesperson that used to work at Salesforce, Adobe, or Oracle. They're going to come in, transform our business, and we're going to pay that person $700,000 a year, but we're going to pay him $350,000 base and $350,000 commission. When that doesn't happen because it's not the senior sales leader, we're going to fire that person. We tried to hire the savior. The savior didn't work, back to the drawing board. Let's find the next savior.”

In fact, the process of building long-term sustainable businesses is alignment across the go-to-market organization, which is another perspective that Pavilion shares. That's part of the education that I'm on. Prior to this session, I was teaching the first session of Pavilion's CRO school. We were developing a theory of enterprise value. What is that about? That is about, “Let's set a foundation for how money gets made.” It's not hiring the salesperson with lots and lots of meetings and no process can still make money for the business.

The salesperson with the absolute best medic process and everything is qualified and put into Salesforce, but if there are no meetings at all, that person will get fired. That is the line on how value is created, but to the point of the eighteen months, lots of people aren't aligned on how value is created. Investors, CEOs and founders, particularly those who come from technical and product backgrounds, don't know what's supposed to happen. They think, “I hire a salesperson and money comes out a month later,” and they understand, “Not really.”

That's a great explanation. We've asked that question 50 times on this show. Does that resonate for you, Dave?

I was thinking about how it relates to what you talk about a lot. Parachute in this amazing salesperson and they can make it rain, but there has to be alignment in terms of going back to the core of what you like to talk about, which is the value proposition of the business. What problems do you solve? All that needs to be throughout every aspect of the organization. Marketing needs to talk to that. Customer service needs to know that. That needs to emanate from them as well. A lot of times, somebody, maybe like the person who's running the business, doesn't even know how to articulate their value proposition, but they expect a salesperson to come in, go out there, and make magic. That's not going to happen.

I created this stuff for the CEO and founders that I advise. I said, “You got to invest in marketing before sales. I don't mean you hire all marketing before you hire a single salesperson, but the function needs to be excellent.” They say, “I got it. I've been doing some research on marketing and I had a director of demand gen because I'm doing what you said, and nothing's happening.” I'm like, “Demand gen is FedEx, logistics, and putting a message in front of a certain group of people at a certain time so that they'll take action. What's the message? What are you putting in the container?” He is like, “What do you mean what's the message?” “Our thing is great and that everybody else is for it.”

That's features and functions.

They come out of meetings where it falls down and they go, “She didn't get it.” In front of a client, they can't articulate it. The client doesn't even understand what they're talking about. It's gibberish. They pointed the client going, “She didn't get it. She's not right for us.” The hard work is boiling the old Albert Einstein. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

If somebody works with your company, “What's unique and different about you?” “Application development shops or 100,000 different application development shops.” How do these people differentiate? It's all the same. The hard work is in capturing this to enable the sales organization to be successful or enable the marketing team. This is hard work. It's not self-evident work.

The last thing I'll say is you give that speech to them and they say, “How long does that take to create the right message?” You're like, “It takes a long time. I don't have a long time. I sold these investors on the promise of proft this year, but I think I'm going to go hire more salespeople.”

That's exactly what everybody's done with the VC money until they're worn anymore, or until you couldn't do it anymore and the prices kept going up, and the model doesn't work. I should point the finger to In The Funnel here. We're in the same boat as everybody else. We came up with value proposition messaging many years ago. It came from me, and we thought it worked, it would go through the organization, and then it became this mantra that everybody was repeating. We were teaching it in our CRO school one day.

Somebody put up their hand and said, “That's not your value proposition because it used to be, ‘We help companies sell better. Companies come to us when revenue growth is stagnated or the sales team is underperforming.’” Our first 50 clients came to us because of that, then we're in this workshop with 60 people in 15 hands go up and go, “I saw why we're here. Our sales team is killing it, but we want to keep them. Your value proposition is wrong.” They were absolutely right. We're coaching people like Dave Hanley, killing it, exiting 2 and 3 times. He's not in trouble at all. He just wants to keep getting better.

Unfortunately, not everybody has clients that'll tell them that. They'll give them that feedback.

There's not a one-time thing and you are refining it after 100 client meetings. It's an ongoing process. It's not complicated. It's not easy. None of this is an easy fix. What would you coach or counsel? We have our pal, Frank Cespedes, from Harvard. You probably know Frank. He hass written 7 or 8 books. The latest one is called Sales Management That Works. In that book, he talks about, “If you graduate college or university today, there's a 50% chance 1 in 2 of those people will have some role in professional sales in their lifetime.” That's what the stats seem to be. He's pulled up the stats.

What would you tell somebody graduating in college or university? Where would they go? When I did it, there were places to get the world's best sales education. I could go to Xerox. I did go to Kodak. That's where I started. I was in a different country at Sales University for 90 days or 4 months before I ever saw a client or IBM. What does somebody do now in your view? Where do they go? Pavilion?

I think so. The truth of the matter is that Pavilion is more an executive community than an entry-level community. You should come to Pavilion if you want to learn how to be an executive. We have this concept of associate and analyst memberships, but those memberships are focused on education. It's a hard question nowadays. If you'd asked me this before, I’d still probably give the same answer that you gave, “Go to work at Oracle, ADP, Paychex, Xerox, or a company that has the resources and infrastructure to train you.” In the same way that before you should go work for a hedge fund, you probably work at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, or Merrill Lynch so that you can get trained in the core foundations of your craft before you move on to a higher level functions.

I'd still say that, but I'm not sure that those people are hiring. The other thing I would caution is that the role of the sales development rep used to be the perfect entry-level role. There are still people who are hiring SDRs, but I do think that that role is challenged more than it has been in the past because the rote automation of all of these technologies that are creating millions of emails and trillions of text messages is diminishing people's attention span and their ability to engage.

That said, I would invest in your own education outside of a core company providing for it. That might be Pavilion, SV Academy or Sales Assembly, but it's something that gives you some exposure. Fundamentally, now more than ever, your career is your responsibility. Nobody is going to be looking out for you in the way that you might hope or expect.

Now more than ever, your career is your responsibility. Nobody is really going to be looking out for you in the way that you might hope or expect.

It's a very good advice. You've got to take control of your own career now. It’s a different one. There are lots of opportunity, but I think that's sage advice. Dave, any final questions for Sam?

Mark and I were chatting about one of the aspects of the book that we already touched on a little bit with compensation. I am wondering if you had any advice for somebody who is a founder that is leading a business and bringing in a sales function. What advice do you give to them on how they should craft a sales compensation plan for a team that aligns properly with what the organization is trying to do? I've been in that situation a few times. It's hard to find the perfect model. I’m curious about your thoughts on that.

A couple of thoughts, the first is that before you hire someone else to sell, you better have done it yourself. That's a prerequisite. It's not, “I have this great product. Go sell it.” You have to have done it. I don't care what you think about your sales capabilities. If you can't sell it, they definitely can't sell it. You have a founder and CEO on your business card or email signature and they don't. You should get between 5 to 20 clients on your own as a founder before you go out and look to invest in the sales function.

The next thing I would say is if you want to hire your first 1 or 2 salespeople, what should be their comp plan? Quota implies predictability. If you don't have predictability, then I don't think we should be talking about quotas. What we want to do is define a very generous commission structure. First, you show that you can sell it, then you need to show somebody other than you can sell it.

You're not going to be able to pay that person very much in base salary. Maybe we give them 20% of every sale. Maybe we give them a year. If they make too much money and we feel annoyed that they need so much money, let's consider that a great success. That would have been way better if they made too much money than not enough.

From there, once we have a little bit of predictability, then we can start to design some comp structure. At scale, 20% of bookings does not work. There are a lot of companies that were paying 15% or 20%. The math of that in an interest rate environment that is normalized as opposed to where there's free money does not work. The number that tends to work better than others is 10%. You need to be able to show that 10% plus base salary equals an amount of money that can pay that person's bills. The benchmarks, which many people know but are roughly 10 times base, should be the quota or 4 times OTE. If you're an account executive and your OTE or On-Target Earnings is $150,000 and that $75,000 base and $75,000 commission, then your quota should be $750,000.

Those are great metrics take away. Those are very helpful.

The main thing I would say is too many people are like, “We're building a revenue model to get to $2 million in IRR.” I'm like, “Below $2 million IRR, the revenue model is interesting, but we should be thinking about milestones the business needs to hit that work towards predictability as opposed to working backward from the spreadsheet.”

The first thing I get into would be your specific curriculum for the CRO school. I'd be very interested in that, given what we do. There are lots of great stuff to share there. We've had a good taste Of Kind Folks Finish First. One of the things that I didn't get when I started in professional sales was a sense of self-esteem or pleasure for being in professional sales. When I started, it felt like a default because at that point in time, I was done with MBA, my friends were in investment banking, and they were lawyers. It felt like I took the easy route until I realized it was the best job ever. I wish I had this book many years ago. You've got it now, Kind Folks Finish First: The Considerate Path To Success In Business And Life, Sam Jacobs with Kerri Linsenbigler. Sam, how do people learn more about you and Pavilion?

You can email me at Sam@JoinPavilion.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn, where some other people have chosen to do that. You can go to JoinPavilion.com.

Dave, how do people find you?

I'm in the podcast business, both on podcast hosting and technology, as well as advertising. The hosting company is called Libsyn.com and then the advertising side is AdvertiseCast.com. Anybody who is interested can check that out.

First of all, thank you very much for joining and taking time out of your valuable time. There's been huge value to the audience. I want to thank the readers. We run this show to try and help improve the performance and professionalism of the B2B sales team and improve the lives of professional salespeople. That's what we're trying to do here. I know there are things we can do to improve. You're the ones who tell me that. We love constructive criticism.

If you like this show, please like and subscribe. That matters to us. If there are things that we can do to elevate this show and make it more valuable to you, please let me know. My personal email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism. Please be direct. Anybody who sends us a note gets a nice note back from us. We'll respond to every piece of advice. Thank you for joining. We'll see you next episode. Sam and Dave, thank you so much for joining. We'll see both of you again soon, I hope.

Thank you so much for having me. Dave, it’s great to meet you. Take care.

Important Links

• Pavilion

• The Sales Hacker Podcast

• Kind Folks Finish First

• Daniel Pink – Past Episode

• To Sell Is Human

• AdvertiseCast

• The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team

• Sales Management That Works

• Sam@JoinPavilion.com

• LinkedIn – Sam Jacobs

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Sam Jacobs

Sam Jacobs is the Founder & CEO of Pavilion. He launched Pavilion as Revenue Collective in 2016 and bootstrapped the company to $10M in ARR before taking on a $25M growth financing round in early 2021.

His early vision of Pavilion was about more than creating a community to help salespeople excel at work. He wanted to turn centuries of so-called business wisdom on its head. Sam believed in a world where reciprocity, generosity, and kindness could be good for business—a world where self-interest was replaced with community and everyone could get ahead.

Pavilion has proven Sam’s hypothesis many times over, growing into a $200 million professional development company that helps its members get through giving. Prior to Pavilion, Sam spent 15 years as a senior revenue leader at VC-backed companies in the New York area including Gerson Lehrman Group, Axial, Livestream/Vimeo, The Muse, and Behavox.

Story Selling: Six Key Principles To Level Up Your Sales Prowess With Bernadette McClelland

All sales leaders and salespeople face three challenges: finding the right level of connection with the buyer, having the right depth of conversation with that buyer, and increasing the rate of conversion. Sales thought leader Bernadette McClelland finds the root cause of these challenges in the stories involved, whether these are the stories we tell ourselves as salespeople or the stories we tell the buyer. In this conversation, Bernadette McClelland unpacks the concept of “story-selling” and shares its six essential principles that will take your sales prowess to the next level. She also talks about the key things discussed in her latest book, SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. Prepare to take some notes as we pick the mind of one of the greatest selling wisdom purveyors anywhere!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Story Selling: Six Key Principles To Level Up Your Sales Prowess With Bernadette McClelland

Thank you very much for your great words of encouragement while we took a little bit of an extended vacation here in the summer. We did take a trip to Italy and eat way too much pizza and pasta, Donna and I, but we’re back at it now, and we’re so excited. We’ve got some wonderful shows coming your way as we lead up to the end of Q4 2023. None better, by the way, than the one that’s coming at you right now. I had a fantastic conversation with Bernadette McClelland. Bernadette is with 3 Red Folders, that’s her consulting company.

She’s written a wonderful book called SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. This is Bernadette’s sixth book and she’s had some great testimonials in her books. I enjoyed this. The core concept we get into this is talking about story selling. That’s opposed to storytelling. We’ve had, as you know, a number of guests on the show talking about storytelling, which for the most part takes us through the hero’s journey.

Bernadette differentiates with story selling, the model she came up with. She did it to actually address three key issues a lot of sales leaders and salespeople face when they’re going to market. 1) Finding the right level of connection with a buyer. 2) Having the right depth of conversation with the buyer. 3) Increasing the rate of conversion as we work through these sell cycles to get to closure. These are three challenges most sales leaders and salespeople face.

The root cause that Bernadette came up with for these challenges is the stories involved, whether these are the stories we tell ourselves as salespeople, the stories we tell the buyer or the stories we elicit from the buyer. Some of the principles of great story selling that Bernadette comes up with and we discuss in this episode are six of them. Story selling inspires change. It’s root cause-focused. It’s a strategy in pictures. It helps to de-risk decisions for the buyer. It increases collaboration and generates wisdom and meaning. It’s a great conversation with Bernadette.

One of our other books, by the way, is called, When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going. What a title. By the way, some good advice. I enjoyed speaking with Bernadette. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy this episode. When you do, please continue to like and subscribe to The Selling Well show and tell your friends because that matters to us. Thank you for doing so. Here’s Bernadette McClelland.

Bernadette, thanks so much for joining the show. It’s so great to meet you.

Same here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

I haven’t completed the whole book, but I enjoyed SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. It’s impossible for that to be a bad idea. We’re going to unpack what story selling means. I love your approach here. Bernadette, to start, let’s talk a little bit about your journey in professional sales. How’d you get here?

It’s been a journey, hasn’t it?

It always has. It always is.

Journey with lots of turn-backs, dead ends, and freeways where you go for it. I’m fortunate I was granted immediate residency to live in the United States. The reason I’m sharing that is because the way that I came over was based on immigration and the US government recognizing the fact that I am an alien. I’ve always been like an alien, but I have an exceptional ability in sales leadership. That means a lot to me because when I first wanted to go into sales in corporate Australia, I was a sales coordinator and I was doing all the commissions and doing all the orders for the sales guys back in the ‘80s. It was like, “He’s earning that much?”

SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom

I applied, but they kept knocking me back by saying that I wasn’t aggressive enough. I didn’t have what it took to be in sales, and I was too nice. I hope that I’ve dialed back the aggressive part that did come out that enabled me to get the job. My journey over the years has taken me from corporate Australia through small business in Australia owning a family business, a wholesale, retail, and importing business, and coming full circle back to running my own consultancy. That’s been the journey.

You’ve got some wonderful testimonials from some of the biggest names in the industry like Jeb Blount and Tony Robbins. Folks will certainly check out those as we move forward. What an interesting piece of feedback back to the ‘80s where somebody would get coaching that you are too nice to be in sales, not aggressive enough. Right now, we wonder why there’s this 50-year-old stereotype about a professional salesperson that’s completely wrong. Of course, it’s wrong. Those of us who know anything about sales know that stereotype is inaccurate.

In fact, it was the impetus for Dan Pink. You quote Dan Pink multiple times in SHIFT and DISRUPT, but he wrote to sell as human. He saw such a gap between that stereotype of professional sales and what he saw when he was interacting with his own personal contacts and professional sales who were intellectually curious, great at problem-solving, and creative. We had him on the show a little while back.

In the end, I asked him why he wrote the book. That’s what he told me. He said, “There was such a gap between the stereotype that didn’t apply and where we are now.” This is your sixth book. In this episode, we’re talking about SHIFT and DISRUPT. Prior to that, The Art of Commercial Conversations. The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself and 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale!. What are the two other books?

When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going.

That’s good coaching.

SMASH Through Your Sales Barrier! was my very first book.

I may get the book wrong, but I appreciated the authenticity of your story. After writing 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale! I think it was Matt Church who asked you and said, “Does this book inspire you?” You said no.

I was doing a lot of work with Matt Church. He’s the Founder of Thought Leaders Global out of Sydney, a wonderful community. He did. I worked with him. The book was The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself. It was my first attempt at moving my writing into a more thought leadership style bringing in my own IP, mental models, and all of that. Matt said to me, “Bernadette, did it inspire you?” I, hand on heart, it didn’t. What I was doing there, in my growth and in my experimentation, was writing, thinking, and bringing some form of wisdom into my writing. It was probably a little bit too much left-brained, and that’s okay. For ourselves to be inspired, there has to be a spark of something.

SHIFT and DISRUPT has brought together the rational thinking that you mentioned. There’s research in there, but there’s also a story. There’s also that inspirational component because not only us as sales professionals but our buyers need that combination as well. When we think about the fact that our oldest form of communication is story and our oldest form of commerce is selling, it made sense to bring the two together, create this portmanteau, and lean into story selling as a concept and philosophy. Not a methodology, but as a philosophy.

I did a little bit of research before I created my model. Everywhere I looked, we hear story selling, but it’s usually about marketing, presentation skills, brand management, or it’s bringing in the hero’s journey. I wanted it to be different and practical. There are some wonderful experts out there in the storytelling space. I wanted to recognize them as well, but I also wanted to bring in a flavor that took a salesperson’s or sales professional’s conversations to not just a higher level but a deeper level because that’s what our buyers are wanting now.

It’s an interesting delineation. We’ve had a number of guests on the show about storytelling and probably one of the more popular books out there is Building a StoryBrand.

Yeah, absolutely.

It always speaks of the hero’s journey. It actually makes that reference and says, “What you’re doing with your storytelling is you’re making the buyer the hero of the journey, but you’ve got to go through that process.” From the book, when you’re trying to differentiate or delineate between storytelling and story selling, which we’ll get to in a second, you actually say story selling is a philosophy that helps a business, its leadership, and its sales team shift how they think and feel about achieving their business outcomes and revenue goals while ethically supporting the buyer.

It helps them see the gaps they didn’t know existed and find puzzle pieces they never knew they were missing. The approach you’re taking here is by going at this way and taking a little bit of a different approach, not only am I helping the buyer but I’m actually helping my team. In doing so as a leader, that means I’m helping myself. Tell me a little bit about how else we differentiate storytelling from story selling.

To begin with, it is based on a model. It’s based on what I refer to as the story-selling circles. To keep it simple, what I’d like to start with is the concept that growth sits at the center of a Venn diagram. We are going to imagine that there’s a Venn diagram. Growth sits at the center. It doesn’t matter if it’s for our buyer. We want to help our buyer and their business grow. We also want our own business to grow as well. Growth is the center.

We then think, “What are the three key challenges that a sales leader faces with their sales team or a sales person faces in going to market?” Those three challenges typically are the right level of connection, to start with. If we think about a salesperson’s role is to go out there and to approach the decision maker. There’s this right level of connection. Once that happens, it’s like, “What’s the depth of conversation? How can we stop playing in the shallows? How can we take our conversations deeper?” Connection is a challenge. The depth of conversation is a challenge and then the rate of acceleration of the pipeline conversion is a challenge. Those are the three challenges that I believe a sales leader faces with their team and also a salesperson faces in going to market.

The root cause of those challenges is found at the intersections. This is where story selling comes into play because when we look at the root cause of the challenges, what’s stopping connection, conversations, and conversions is typically three stories. Those three stories are the stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer, the deal, the complaint, or whatever it may be. It’s the internal stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer. The external stories are the stories the salesperson tells their buyer. Finally, it’s the essential stories. They are the stories the salesperson must elicit from the buyer.

The outcome is growth. We’ve got the three challenges of connection, conversation, and conversion. We’ve got the three root causes. What I’ve done in the book is I’ve built it out even more. I’ve looked at those three root causes and said, “What needs to happen for that salesperson to strengthen their internal stories and elevate their connection? What needs to happen for that salesperson to tell the right stories, collaborate with the buyer, and deepen their conversations? What needs to happen for that salesperson to actually elicit the right stories so that they can accelerate their rate of conversion?” They are the nine-story modes. They are basically the core of SHIFT and DISRUPT.

Let’s unpack a little bit of this. As I’m playing along and the folks at home will, when they buy this book, we take a look at what you identified as that beta blueprint. I know you had a background in neural linguistic programming and you were actually a coach for Tony Robbins at one point in time for a certain region of the world, and he’s very big on this as well. Let’s talk about those first stories or the stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer.

There are three. You are right, I’ve got every piece of conceivable paper known to mankind and womankind.

By the way, they’re not in your office behind you.

No one has ever asked to see a copyright.

We’re going to have to do fact-checking on that after the fact. We’ve got a team who does that. It’s the same people who do research.

You did say that we are not theorists but practitioners. This is the whole thing. I look back over my self journey as well, and I think the realization hit me once I started to dig a little deeper and take my learning to a level that was based on personal leadership. I bring together personal leadership. I’ve mentioned thought leadership and sales leadership so I bring those three attributes together. In the personal leadership component of it, I’d never drunk the Kool-Aid, but I was fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to not just deepen my practical understanding by working with leaders around the world through that vehicle of coaching. I also spent eighteen months doing a diploma in all things coaching, so executive coaching, sales coaching, and business coaching.

That was in Australia and I did that separately. That was where the realization came in around being able to tap into communication at a deeper level and marry in psychology. That’s why I call the story selling circles, I shift and disrupt. The whole philosophy is pretty much based on five disciplines. It’s like a Swiss army knife. I’m bringing in disciplines of definitely story as a component. It’s very much mental models, but psychology neurolinguistics and what I refer to as a coach approach. I’m big on the fact that salespeople, when they can go to market and be able to coach their buyers rather than sell them.

Ultimately, we are there to make a sale but the vehicle to do it can shift. The three stories that fit under the internal stories, those first three that I have identified as being huge red flags, identity, how a sales professional or a sales leader views their identity, how do they show up, and are they congruent with their role. Quite often, there is this belief system that I don’t want to be perceived as a salesperson. If you are going to go into a conversation with a buyer and you have that as a belief, it’s going to play with your energy levels.

We hear this all the time. One of the core missions of our entire business is to align the concept or the verb of selling with exactly what you talked about, which is all we’re selling is helping the buyer achieve a better outcome. Selling is management consulting. The stereotype is 50 years old of selling is pedaling or cajoling, but that’s been wrong for 25 years. It’s 50 years old, but it’s been completely wrong for anybody who sold anything material in the last 25 years.

Yes, I understand the concept of serving the buyer and helping the buyer. That is our role.

It’s educating the buyer. It’s bringing the perspective of how they can run a better business with your solution or how they can run a better business with insight and knowledge.

I agree with that. There is also another component to this in my thinking. It’s all good and well. We are there to serve, to help, and all the rest of it, but we’re also there to help ourselves. This has got to be to serve the buyer and our company. It’s got to be a win-win. If you go in purely with some salespeople, with this whole servant leadership approach, or “I’m there to serve,” that may actually tap into money beliefs. Also, that may impact the ability for a salesperson to not hold margin if we are there to help them and we are being told by the buyer that, “You’re too expensive.” It may be that that salesperson defaults to discounting. It’s little nuances like that.

Serve the buyer and serve the company. It needs to be a win-win.

I do think they’re different things. We’re no different than a management consultant is in to help a client. Helping a client doesn’t mean making sure we do it at a loss or affecting margin and discount, but the reality of it is if I’m taking the right approach as a salesperson to focus on helping them, things like pricing and discounts don’t matter.

I also believe that there’s another thought process I have, which I’ve always believed in. We are playing the long game. There’s a sense of urgency. We mustn’t lose that sense of urgency. In the big scheme of things, we are playing the long game if we are to truly be that respected industry resource. I’m with you there. Identity is definitely part of it. Authority is a second-story mode that we delve into. Money is the third. They are the three key areas that I see that sales professionals probably sabotage themselves the most as far as those internal stories they’re telling themselves about the buyer or the deal

.

We mustn't lose our sense of urgency. But in the big scheme of things, we are playing the long game.

While we’re on that, before we go to the stories that we tell the buyers and the stories we elicit from the buyers, I love that part. If somebody is tuning in to this, what might be a tip or two that they can start to think about in addition to reading the book that might help in those areas? You said you’re seeing some salespeople sabotage themselves. What are some of the things you’re seeing or some of the things that our audience could maybe focus on in this category?

If I was with a salesperson now and we were having this conversation, I would go into coach mode. I would ask them to consider a couple of things. I wouldn’t necessarily tell them to do anything because you know that your audience at the moment, I would rather them contemplate a couple of thoughts. I would rather them think. The question would be, “How are you showing up in front of your buyer?”

Let’s get honest, what part of you needs to be expanded? There would be a part of you that has a belief about your role as a salesperson. Does that need to be expanded? Is there a part of you that resists prospecting? Is there a part of you that pushes back on holding margin? What is that part? How can that part maybe be reduced? There’s an exercise in the book that I’ll get people to go through, but it is looking at the different parts of us. We are almost schizophrenics. We’re made up of multiple parts.

It’s not just me.

No. I used to think it was just me, by the way. I would get them to answer themselves or think about that. Secondly, I would ask them to think about their beliefs around people in authority.

Tell us more about that.

If you were driving along the highway and you looked at your rear vision mirror and you heard a police car with lights flashing, what would you do?

Pull-over because it’s the police. I’d pull over because I’m assuming they’re coming after me.

It’s like, “What have I done wrong?” you’re pumping the brakes, looking at the seatbelt, and they just speed right past you. What is it about the fact that because they were police? We’ve grown up in an environment where we have to respect authority, whether it’s the teacher, the priest, or the police. You then grow up and there’s CEO written on a door. It doesn’t matter if that person is younger than you or not.

Nearly 25% of people have a fear of authority. You roll that out across the sales profession and we start to marry together the identity that some salespeople have that may not help them or serve them as much. Marry that with a fear of authority, and then add into that money beliefs. I think $100 is a lot of money, but I’m selling something for $100,000. How is that going to impact my ability to have those financial conversations? They are the three-story modes that I address so far as the internal stories that salespeople tell themselves. Not just salespeople, but business owners and sales leaders.

Let’s move on to the stories we tell buyers. What are the story modes we need to think of there?

There are a couple of different avenues to go here. 1) We mentioned traditional storytelling where you have your origin story, your signature story, or your connection story. It follows the hero’s journey, and there’s a method in its madness. A case study is different than a success story. A case study is all about you couched around a buyer. A success story is all about the buyer. We know that that is an important part of selling. That’s something that we also address. What I’ve done is I’ve taken it a step further and I’ve thought, “I want this book to shift and disrupt the way a salesperson thinks about telling stories.” When we think that 83% of our processing is done visually and 11% of our process is done auditorly, why don’t we try to capture a story visually?

This is thought leadership coming into it now. The ability for you to be sitting over a coffee with a prospect, listening, eliciting their stories, being able to capture, know how to capture, so this is very much a playbook as well, their story, and grab your pen and napkin. You hear that cliché all the time. “Grab a napkin and do a deal.”

We did a deal back at the napkin.

How can you do that and be able to capture and collaborate on what you are hearing? When you draw something, you are actually drawing someone in. When we think about the fact that as children, our first attempt at art was shapes, triangles, squares, and circles. Why would we not lean into that part of us as well and be able to collaborate? Charlie Munger says that you’ve got to be able to capture your ideas on a framework of mental models. What a mental model does, and we are talking here about a ladder, a 2x2 matrix, or a Venn diagram, is it helps decision-making. It simplifies the complex and it paints a picture. There’s a saying, “A picture paints a thousand words.” What I’ve done in the book, the three modes there are based around progression, tension, and integration. Let me break those down.

Progression. Every one of us wants to progress. We want growth whether it’s personal growth, professional or business growth, or whatever it may be. We’ve all seen Maslow’s hierarchy. We’ve all seen Dr. Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamic. They are examples of progression models. When you are able, you would pre-bake these so you would do your research and you would build these out beforehand because you know your target market. If you are wrong, it doesn’t matter because it’s an opportunity for discussion. You don’t have to do all three of these. You may choose to create a ladder or an aspirational hierarchical model and discuss the growth path for your buyer or for their business. Also, a ladder like Maslow’s hierarchy will always give us why change is important. That’s the why.

The second one, which is all around tension is how do we build intensity into the sales conversation. We want our buyers to be sitting on the edge of their seat. We want them to be thinking, “What do I need to do?” If we look at any 2x2 matrix, the Eisenhower Matrix, time management, and Robert Kiyosaki’s, the labels or the quadrants have tension.

We want our buyers to be sitting on the edge of their seat. We want them to be thinking, “Okay, what do I need to do?”

We want to be able to build intensity into our sales conversations by telling and collaborating a story. A 2x2 is always a what. What do I need to do? When you get to that final top right-hand quadrant, it’s like, “That’s what I want.” In my conversion matrix in the book, it’s like, “I want to accelerate my team’s conversions. I want to build the conversions of my sales pipeline. How do I do that?” That naturally leads to a how.

A Venn diagram is always around how. A Venn diagram is all about how we integrate and how we articulate outcomes. What I’ve shared with you early on, the story selling circles, is my Venn diagram. I will sit with somebody and build it out with them because I’ve elicited their stories along the way. It’s a no-brainer. They then know, “You get me.” They are the three external stories that we tell our buyer using mental models.

You’ve got a well-identified ideal client profile and you focus as a business, you know what these are. Every time you have this conversation, you’re going to get better at it. You have more feedback and input because you’re learning every time you go through this. By the way, here’s something to double underline. Even if we’re slightly wrong with this point of view, it doesn’t matter. It’s this opportunity for discussion and engagement.

One of the tenets of true coaching is there is no right or wrong. When you can go to market with that whole belief system that, “It doesn’t matter what I put down. It doesn’t matter what I suggest. There’s no right or wrong. It’s simply my perception. The buyer will always have their own perception.” When you can collaborate, clarify, be on the same side of the table, and be comfortable and congruent in saying, “I might’ve got this wrong. Let’s talk about that.” You are going to get gold out of that because they are going to know that whole know, like, and trust component is off the charts.

It aligns with so much basic common sense. That’s where a lot of this heads. We’re in for a common sense revolution. Professional sales is coming.

I totally agree.

It leads to I’m not pitching anything except your wisdom. We have knowledge and insight where we’re going to teach them something different, perhaps they haven’t seen before or prompt that discussion. This is where you get your elevating that trust and credibility and all those kinds of good things. All of the walls drop when you’re in this conversation. It’s a different level.

It totally is. When you get it, you can play with it, you can try it on, and you’ll get blisters like a new pair of shoes, that’s okay. They will eventually become such a comfortable conversation. Another vehicle to get there is that third root cause. That is not being able to elicit their stories the correct way. Leaning into the coach approach is how you can elicit those essential stories. When you have this whole coach approach, they do all the talking because you know what you’re doing, you know the questions that you’re asking, and you know why you’re asking them. If we flip into those three-story modes, it’s about expansion, perspective, and decision.

We want to be able to build flexibility into our conversations which is, “How do we expand? What’s the expansion? How do we elicit the stories through showing that flexibility?” As a sales professional and a sales leader, we have to now even, more so than ever, to communicate with so many different levels within an organization. The choke-hold that I’m seeing with businesses out there is that we still talk about, “Don’t talk brochure talk.” You build in this fear of authority and all of this other stuff. You’re finding salespeople will take the path of least resistance, which is going to the level that they’re comfortable talking to.

What are those conversations we have that enable us to move between C-level contextual conversations, operational conceptual conversations, and user-based content conversations? It’s bringing in this flexibility. The person who is able to have the conversation with every level will own the business. I teach how to do that.

It’s great the way you’ve simplified this approach. It’s very much clean set of eyes on some things that have been age-old prophecies as you point out in the book. I think you quote Aristotle about communication. The last point you referenced when you’re dealing with different people in the organization and they have dramatically different personal and professional needs and wants. That goes back to the wonderful days when I had hair in 1991 with strategic selling, frankly. I think it’s actually earlier. It was even fifteen years before me. It was like the ‘80s. That’s where they came up with the buyers. That has not changed in 40 or 50 years. The fact that we have to understand the different folks involved.

There’s a lot of talk now about the buying groups increased. No, it hasn’t, for anything material. If you were selling a widget for $50 or $5,000, maybe there was one person. If you were doing an enterprise software deal or a large outsourcing deal, there were fifteen people involved in that. It was always multiple buyers for anything material. They always had difficulty coming to consensus. You were trying to provide thought leadership and guidance. The main difference would be they did have to take some of their information from you at phase value because they didn’t have access to the global encyclopedia of everything that’s happened up until 2021 through ChatGPT.

Yes, exactly. Even out there at the moment, within enterprise sales organizations, there are still territories that don’t necessarily sell to enterprise. That may be the component of that particular global company or a big company, but the sales team may still be selling to SMB. They still do have that one point of contact. It could be that the salesperson is dealing with the CEO of an SMB, but they’re still talking at the user level. It can be, “My salesperson who only has legal firms or small family manufacturing company, how can I take that particular salesperson and up their ability to be able to have a C-level conversation with that one particular buyer?” It goes across both enterprise sales, where you do have multiple stakeholders and the SMB space as well.

I’m trying to connect some dots and this would be opinion, not fact because I love your research-based approach to this and it certainly aligns with our approach in the funnel. One of the things we are noticing is the increase in mental health issues with professional salespeople. Generally, they’re not happy. One of the things you’ve talked about here is many professional salespeople have this comfort level dealing at certain very tactical levels like users.

For you or me selling to a user is actually at times unpleasant because they’re sitting, they’re used to a demo, they can’t say yes, they can only say no, they’re not strategic, they’re trying to get through every day and maybe worry about what went wrong yesterday. If salespeople want to default to only doing that, then they default to pitching because they’re not getting strategic conversations from typical users. This whole thing is no fun.

My mind is going from a couple of different directions here because I’m thinking, “How do they elevate their connection and make contact?” You think about email as completely spam. A voicemail is an unknown number. LinkedIn is completely spam. There are apps and stuff that you can short-circuit. How do you make contact? That is the frustrating part for all of us. You get a lot of gurus out there talking about the prospecting but they’re not doing it anyway.

How do we make contact with the right person to start with? That’s a question and it comes back to the old days when it was direct mail. Is networking making a comeback? There are all of these different avenues, but that salesperson who’s stuck with the user, their hands are tied for a couple of reasons. Their leadership team won’t bring people in to elevate the learning because in some instances, that leader doesn’t want to be show up for not knowing what to do. It’s a catch-22. I’m with you there. The salespeople need support internally and it’s got to come from all levels. It’s got to be a conversation that has to be had.

We have this conversation on this show that is great, by the way. You and I are going to talk for two hours offline from this show. How do you do that now? Our belief is the automated and the spam is garbage. It’s wasting everybody’s time. There was a time you and I will remember when you and I got 30 voicemails a day. We had days and times when our voicemail could fill out even if we were working. Now, I get 2 or 3 voicemails a day.

If you want to reach me, first of all, it’s got to be a multi-channel approach, but call me. Secondly, do ten minutes of research on me, my business, and my industry. I’m listed as the CEO of In The Funnel. Whether that’s the right or wrong thing, I am. We do get hit 30 times a week. At least five times a week, we get hit by a sales training company that says, “Do you want to improve the way your sales team is selling?” We are a sales training team. If anybody had ever gone to our website, they’d go to a video that tells them how to do demand generation.

We talk about this and all they’d have to do in a voicemail to me and say, “Let me see if your In The Funnel practices work. I noticed that you’ve got three levels of social media. We help with the fourth. This is an opportunity. I love the video you put on YouTube talking about A, B, and C.” I am morally and ethically compelled to respond to that voicemail. It’s so painfully easy. What’s happening in professional sales now is what we want to do is say, “I made 100 calls and I didn’t get any live conversations. Why don’t I try and email blast 300 people tomorrow and we keep doing more of what’s not working?”

We just keep doing more of what's not working.

That’s what I’m saying. Somebody is leading that practice.

The other point you bring on, and I have a lot of empathy for them, you talked about sales leaders aren’t feeling comfortable to bring in somebody from the outside world to coach their team. Folks who tune in to our show have heard me rant on this many a time. The best performers in the world have multiple coaches. The top performers of the world or most successful entrepreneurs in the world are part of either Strategic Coach, Gazelles, or EOS. The best athletes in the world have nine coaches.

It comes back to ego and identity. Everything swings back to the internal stories. It’s a complete circle. I’m going off on a different tangent here. It’s like as I’m going back to that final circle, I talked about building and showing flexibility where we were talking about the CEO. The next story mode, which dovetails into what we were talking about then is based on perspective. That is all about, “How do we identify criteria?” We know the cliché. We all buy unlogged emotion and we back it up with logic. We need a bit of logic before it goes into the emotional, and then it swings back to logic again.

This is using the coach approach. Being able to identify is being able to go from the shallow. If you do picture the iceberg, most salespeople and sales leaders are playing in the shallows. They’re understanding outcomes. Everybody understands outcomes and what a buyer or a sales team member needs. What is it that they don’t want? That’s another question to ask. As you go deeper under the iceberg, being able to elicit those states that are at the value of that particular buyer, their business, or your sales team.

What is important to that salesperson or what is important to that buyer at a personal level? Also, understanding what comes next further under the iceberg is, if growth or profitability is important to your buyer or if support is important to your team member or salesperson, what must have to happen in their eyes to achieve that? We all make assumptions and we think, “Someone says they want support.” “Every Monday morning, come in and have a meeting with me and I’ll go.” “The buyer wants profitability.” “We’ll do X, Y, and Z.” That’s not what they mean. We have to identify the criteria further.

The final story mode is decision. That is, land the business. When we think about decision, it’s all about, “Who makes the decision? Who else apart from yourself? When is a decision going to be made? What’s the process for the decision?” That’s all external. We need to tap into the decision drivers of our buyer. That is at a deeper level as well. Once you identify what those drivers are, then your conversation shifts again. The same applies for the sales leader with the team.

It’s so important. Frankly, if you’ve been doing this a while, it’s so obvious, but it’s not being done. I think there’s multiple reasons for it, but any sales leader tuning in to this show, in the next time you’re having a collaborative discussion with one of your teammates on a deal status and an update, deal strategy, when you say, “Tell me what’s important to this person.” Your salesperson’s response says, “Obviously, they want to do this and this. It’s not obvious unless the buyer told me it. It’s not my assumption.” What did they specifically say and why?

That’s the stories we’ve got to elicit. They are the stories that are so often missed. It’s like having a three-legged stool here. The stool has only got two legs or the stool has only got one. The third leg is what’s missing as well. That’s going to make a rock-solid deal.

One of the things we’ve found, and maybe you can confirm from your perspective, we see many salespeople are afraid to ask that question about what might get in the way of moving forward or what are you worried about. It’s because they think that if I ask the question, I’m going to give the buyer a reason not to move forward. When the reality of it is in this day and age, that buyer has got fifteen reasons for not moving forward that is literally keeping them awake at night. Why not have a conversation about that?

You mentioned Jeb Blount earlier. I spoke at OutBound Conference. I put this up on the main stage screen and used it as an example. When a buyer does give us old term or an objection, I don’t like that word, they’re sharing some concerns with us. What we do instinctively is we justify. Immediately, we go into justification mode. We try to sell. What we need to do is we need to elicit the story behind that consumer. It’s like, “We are a little bit too expensive or our delivery is not on point.” What has happened to make you think that way? That’s giving us data and it’s giving us the story behind the story. Now we can acknowledge that and we can respond with a story of another client who had a similar thought process. It expands the conversation. It’s collaborative, and then we could move on.

You’re absolutely right. However we term it, we need to understand it and that’s part of the collaboration. In fact, for those of us who used to do material deals or very significant deals, one of the things that would happen from a client’s side would be both parties would be working from one business case. At that level of deal went to a multi-hundred million dollar deal. There’s no our perspective in your perspective. There’s our collective perspective. Let’s agree on what we all think is going to happen. That’s what you’re going to use to take up the channel and so forth. Once we’re aligned and we agree, then we negotiate, “How do we split the value?” They’re not afraid to do what’s right for their business, and then I have to be comfortable doing what’s right for my business.

We’re at least aligned on what we believe the facts are. These things are difficult to come to the end game but then we’re having this real conversation about the important points. We’re not coming from two different places. In that way, we know what happens if we get to an impasse and we have this real decision to make. People aren’t going quiet on you. They don’t stop returning calls. They don’t give you a pretend reason or the political reason they didn’t move forward. They actually tell the truth. I’m not prepared to jeopardize, “We’re doing this over here.” I’m not prepared to jeopardize that with this new initiative. It’s going to take some of the same IT resources and some of the same business resources. I don’t think I’ve got the capacity to do it.

That comes back to the risk factor has nothing to do with before signing the order. It’s what happens after the order is signed. That’s where the risk factor is. In the book, I talk about the cost of inaction, the cost of the problem, and all these different costs because that has to come into the conversation as well. That’s way back in the beginning as part of your collaborative understanding. We talked discovery but it is that professional conversation that is business. It’s a business conversation.

All of these conversations are far more fun than pitching a product to a user, and then hoping that user somehow can magically sell your product because you couldn’t. Now you’re hoping they can take it up. Bernadette, I have to be very cautious of your time. I can’t believe the amount of time we’ve spent talking and how fast this has gone for me. What an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Personally, I’ve received enormous value from this conversation. I am darn sure that the people tuning in to this show have as well. First of all, thank you so much for joining.

My pleasure. It’s been fun.

If people want to learn more about you, which they inevitably will, what’s the best way to do so?

Please join me on LinkedIn and mention that you heard me on the show. That would be awesome for Mark as well. My book SHIFT and DISRUPT, it’s on Amazon now. If you are a sales leader and you have a team, go to ShiftAndDisrupt.com because there are bonuses there for sales leaders. I’m also running a webinar, so if you’re on LinkedIn with me, you’ll see the webinar coming up where I’ll be running through this. Those are a few channels.

Please make sure we’re on the list of invitees for that webinar. We’re going to share that with our network as well. They’re going to get lots of value from that.

Thank you.

When you’re thinking about your next keynotes, you’re probably planning for next year in the not-too-distant future, please check out Bernadette’s website because she’s done keynotes for some of the top organizations in the world. Some of the top thought leaders in sales have actually engaged Bernadette to come and do those keynotes. Thank you so much, Bernadette.

My pleasure. It’s been awesome.

Sure has. Thank you, team, for joining. As always, we run the show to try and elevate the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. In doing so, we want to improve the lives of professional salespeople. We hope that you’ve enjoyed this show. If you do, by the way, please like and subscribe to the show because that’s helpful to us. Thank you for that. If there are ways that we can improve this show, I’d love to hear your ideas. My email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That’s my personal email that I check. If you give us some constructive criticism, I am personally going to respond to that email. We love constructive criticism. The more direct, the better. It’s faster. We love it. Thank you for doing that. We’ll see everybody next time.

Important Links

• Bernadette McClelland

• SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom

• When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going

• The Art of Commercial Conversations

• The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself

• 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale!

• SMASH Through Your Sales Barrier!

• Thought Leaders Global

• Building a StoryBrand

• LinkedIn – Bernadette McClelland

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Bernadette McClelland

Bernadette McClelland: CEO – Sales Leaders Global LLC and Influential Speaker on Disruption and Business Growth

Australian, Female, Pragmatic, Inspirational, Compelling, Real!

Bernadette McClelland is a foremost expert in Sales Leadership and Transformation Strategy. With a dynamic career that encompasses an executive role in Corporate Australia, entrepreneurial ventures, and business ownership, she is a beacon in this new Wisdom Economy. Internationally acclaimed, she's viewed as in the top 1% of sales leaders globally by the US Government, among the Top 50 global speakers and honored as one of the Top 35 Most Influential Women in Sales.

Her accolades include coaching Harvard MBA students, mentor for Colorado’s Global Landing Pad, partnerships with industry luminaries like Anthony Robbins, and endorsements from renowned author Brian Tracey. With a legacy that spans from New York City to New Delhi, Bernadette's profound insights and practical strategies offer franchise owners and sales leaders an unmatched perspective for thriving in today's business landscape.

Personal Disruption With Whitney Johnson

Ever wonder why somebody completely disrupts themselves or changes direction even if they were successful in what they'd previously been doing? We see that happen everywhere from sports to entertainment to the world of business. This phenomenon of “personal disruption” is the specialty of Whitney Johnson, CEO of the Human Capital Consultancy Disruption Advisors. Having worked with Clay Christiansen, Whitney took his concept of product disruption and applied it to people. In this episode, you’re going to learn how we can actually disrupt ourselves and what that experience looks like for the individual. In the constantly evolving professional sales space, we need to be constantly changing and developing, so this conversation is deeply relevant to our space. Tune in!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Personal Disruption With Whitney Johnson

Do you ever wonder why somebody completely disrupts themselves or changes direction even if they were successful in what they'd previously been doing? You think of Michael Jordan, one of the best basketball players in the entire world, who retires from the game, and three years later, he is playing baseball in the minor leagues, traveling on buses.

You might think of Lady Gaga, top of the pop charts. The next album she releases is a jazz album with Tony Bennett, where she's starting over again. Sometimes, we force ourselves to disrupt and change and sometimes, events will take place that cause us to disrupt where we are. We are going to learn a lot about that in this episode because our guest is Whitney Johnson and she's the CEO of the human capital consultancy Disruption Advisors.

Thinkers50 ranked Whitney among the top 50 management thinkers in the world in 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2020. She's also a top LinkedIn voice. Whitney is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, and a frequent lecturer for the Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning Division. We are going to be talking to Whitney about her great book called Smart Growth.

The main topic here is personal disruption. We all know about product or market disruption. The Innovator's Dilemma was made famous by Clay Christensen. Whitney worked with Clay Christensen and what she does is she takes that concept of business disruption or product disruption, and she applies it to people. How do we disrupt ourselves and what causes that? Why would we do that? Is it an external factor or an internal factor? What are we going through when that happens?

Interesting conversation with Whitney. One of the things that's so interesting for those of us in professional sales is we do need to be constantly changing, evolving, and developing. Some of the thoughts and concepts in Whitney's book and this conversation will help us with that. I enjoyed speaking with Whitney. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, please like and subscribe to the show because that matters to us, and thank you for doing so. Here's Whitney Johnson.

Whitney, thank you so much for joining the show. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you for having me.

We always like to throw the floor over and ask somebody for a short version of their professional journey. Given what you have done, it's such a super interesting story. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are.

In my professional journey, I majored in music in college and I studied piano. When I graduated, I got married in college, which is pretty unusual, but I moved to New York with my husband. He was getting his PhD at Columbia, and we needed to put food on the table, so I was the designated breadwinner. I went out and interviewed for a job and discovered Wall Street. As I was a music major and because I was a female, and this was the late '80s, I started as a secretary working for a stockbroker.

I would go to work every day and see all of these young, aspiring stockbrokers, aspiring masters of the universe, saying things like, “Throw down your pom-poms and get in the game.” At first, I was offended because I was a cheerleader in high school. The more I listened to them, I realized that I needed to throw down my pom-poms.

I started taking business courses at night, accounting, finance, and economics, and that was the beginning of me disrupting myself and disrupting what I thought was possible. Especially because I had a boss who believed in me and it allowed me to move from being a secretary to an investment banker. I did investment banking for several years and then got disrupted again because my boss got fired, and they probably would have fired me, too, except that I had a good performance review and I was pregnant. That was helpful and so they moved me, but more like shoved me into equity research. I went from being a banker to doing equity research.

It turns out that became a career maker for me. I was very good at making stock calls and building these financial models. This disruption turned out to be very much a slingshot forward for me. I did that for about eight years. I became an institutional investor-ranked analyst. In my parlance, I was at the top of my S-curve and wanted to do something different.

I went to my boss. I said, “We'd like you right where you are.” I'd now read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. I thought, “Disruption might not be about products and services, but also about people,” and so I disrupted myself and thought I was leaving Wall Street forever to become an entrepreneur. It turns out I did that for a couple of years and then connected with Clay Christensen.

I was doing some nonprofit work with him through our church, and he wanted to start a fund to invest in disruptive innovation. I joined him and his oldest son, Matt, and we launched the Disruptive Innovation Fund. I did that for 5 or 6 years. There was this thread of we were using the S-curve to invest and I thought, “The S-curve applies to people, not just the product,” so you are sensing a theme.

I had an article in the Harvard Business Review called Disrupt Yourself. In 2012, I moved into this brand new world of thought leadership, and over the last several years, I have been building a business and now have a co-founder and partner, Amy Humble. It's called Disruption Advisors. We are all about helping you grow your people so that you can grow your business and we have an assessment tool that we use. We do coaching, keynotes, and workshops. Now, I'm very much in the business in many ways back to where I began, but I'm not now about the momentum of stocks. I'm about the momentum of people. That is my career journey in a few minutes.

You have taught me that I have to work on my introductions. That is fed but the most precise and interesting explanation and there are so many things to unpack. We are going to be talking about disrupting yourself. We are going to be talking about the S-curve, but I have got to throw it out and ask, you are on Wall Street in investment banking in the '80s. The egos in that building must have been shocking, and then it doesn't even matter what building you were in.

It's the late '80s, early '90s. If you saw the movie Working Girl, I was the working girl. Even big hair and all and this was the era of Liar's Poker and The Bonfire of the Vanities. I don't know that I saw the big ego piece. I thought it was exciting. I had grown up on the West Coast, and there wasn't Silicon Valley at this point. New York was the epicenter of financial services. I suppose there were big egos, but mostly, it was exciting.

What a wonderful journey. Very quickly Music Major. Did you have an ARCT and piano? Is that what you did at university? Tell us a little bit about the level of your piano studies.

I don't know what an ARCT is. Maybe that's a Canadian thing, but I do have a  Bachelor of Arts in Music, and my emphasis was in Piano, and then I minored in English. I was a classically trained pianist. I discovered a little bit of jazz along the way. I never got as good as I would like to be in jazz, but that was my emphasis. One of my pinnacle achievements was I did a senior recital when I was a senior right before I graduated. That was a great accomplishment. I also got to play in our university jazz band and we performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. It was pretty fun.

Maybe it is. The Royal Conservatory of Music is here in Canada. I also went through musical training when I was younger, and then you'd go up the ranks of the conservatory, and the accreditation was in front of a board from the conservatory. The ARCT would have been the pinnacle. Believe me. I got nowhere near it.

What do you play? What instrument?

Now I play drums, but I was playing piano then and writing musical theory as a young child. As soon as I was allowed to make a few of my own decisions when I was 14, 15, and 16, I stepped on a drum set from playing piano. No more piano. It was cooler. Being the innovator at the time, I thought being in a band would be a nice way of looking cool in front of girls. It turns out even that didn't work for me, but in theory, it was a good strategy. It was poorly executed.

A young fellow has joined a band in hopes of attracting the opposite sex.

It's the only reason you do it. It ended up paying dividends for me years later because, although she won't admit it, my beautiful wife, Donna. When we first started dating, I was on the tail end of playing in bar bands while I was starting my full-time career. I don't think it hurt because I wasn't the coolest dude, but maybe it didn't hurt that I was in those bands.

She saw you behind that drum set. I can see that. That's fantastic.

I needed all the help I could get. Let's talk about such an amazing journey and connecting. We have all heard of Clay Christensen and The Innovator's Dilemma. I love this idea of saying that innovation and progression, that innovation isn't product-centric. It's people-centric. Let's talk a little bit about disrupting yourself. This came to fruit in 2012 with one of what seems like a gazillion articles you have written for Harvard Business Review, but tell us about the concept of disrupting yourself.

To give a quick primer. Disruptive innovation is a term of art that was coined by Clay Christensen. The idea is it's a silly little thing that takes over the world. The telephone did to the telegraph. The automobile did to the horse and buggy. Netflix has done the Blockbuster and now cable TV. For me, in the emerging markets, it was the wireless was disrupting wireline.

That's what it looks like for a product or a service. The insight that I had is that companies don't disrupt. It's the people that disrupt. What does personal disruption look like? It's where you are willing to become a silly little thing to take over the world. The big difference with personal disruption is that you are the Netflix and the Blockbuster. You are the telephone and you are the telegraph because you are disrupting you.

A high-level example is if you are thinking, “What do you mean? How do you picture this?” Lady Gaga is a great example of personal disruption because in 2008 she goes straight to the top of the charts and she doesn't stay there. For an encore, she decides to go to the bottom of a new chart. She collaborates with Tony Bennett on a jazz album. She then does a Sound of Music tribute, so musical theater at the Oscars, and then she collaborates or produces a country album. She gets to the top of a curve, and then she decides to disrupt herself to become a silly little thing.

The reason that we do personal disruption, if you go back to the theory of disruptive innovation, is that when you are willing to play where you haven't played before, your odds of success are 6 times higher, and your revenue opportunity 20 times greater. That was the theory. That was the PhD dissertation that Clay wrote about in The Innovator's Dilemma, but if you want to extrapolate from that, for us as individuals, it's also going to be true if we are willing to take on the market versus competitive risk if we are willing to create something rather than compete with what is.

When you are willing to play where you haven't played before, your odds of success are six times higher and your revenue opportunity 20 times greater.

Can we go through those numbers again? If you are willing to take on that risk, tell us about those two metrics that you shared that he put in his dissertation.

What he found is he analyzed a whole array of companies. I'm fuzzy on the actual details, but here's the top line. He analyzes these companies. He looks at which ones are still in existence several years later, a decade later, versus the ones that weren't. What he found is that the ones that were creating new markets, the ones that were taking on market risk rather than competing with the incumbents, were six times more likely to succeed.

It was only 6% to 36%. There was still a 74% or 64% chance that they weren't going to survive, but 6 times greater. That's a lot. Those odds were not only better, but the revenue opportunity, again, when they were willing to go after and create new markets and new value chains, their revenue opportunity was twenty times greater.

It's 6 times more likely to succeed, and the revenue opportunity is 20 times greater. Extrapolating for us as individuals, when we are willing to take on market risk, we are more likely to succeed because we are not competing with what is. Think about your show. If you try to go do something that someone else is doing, then it's going to be a lot harder to succeed. You create something new and uniquely yours.

That's the idea of personal disruption and bringing it back to an organization. When we, inside our organizations, are thinking about how do we create and how do we take on market risk? How do we play where no one else is playing? I can bring that back to my Wall Street career if you want me to, but how do we play where no one else is playing? If we do that, our odds of success are going to be significantly higher, and we are going to create markets not only for ourselves but for our organizations.

Thank you for that clarity. When we start to hear about this as an individual, we are talking about personal disruption. First, off the bat, it starts to feel or potentially sound a little frightening or scary. “I'm going to be jumping outside my comfort zone. I'm going to be taking on something new. I'm going to be going from the top of the charts to the bottom of the charts in the country, as per Lady Gaga.” Are we hardwired for this type of change generally as human beings? Is this something that's naturally in our DNA or is this something that there's got to be an event that causes us to want to go down this path?

The answer is yes and no. When you think about moving to the top of an S-curve and this S-curve of learning is something that helps us think about what growth looks like. When you get to the top, you are sitting on top of the mountain, you have a dilemma. This is the innovator's dilemma, but in this case, it's our dilemma.

On the one hand, we like being on top of the mountain. It feels good to be the master of all we serve. You have accomplished what we have accomplished. We are at the top of the leaderboard, except that there is something inside of us and there's this deep human longing, urge, and yearning where when we are at the top of the mountain, we are not getting any dopamine, which is a chemical messenger of delight. For us to continue to get dopamine, it requires that we do something new.

That new can be something productive and can be something counterproductive, like sabotaging our peers because we are bored. We now have this dilemma of what am I going to do? Oftentimes, because it is so comfortable to be there and because we are more motivated by what we lose than by what we gain, we can stay there, but that plateau becomes a precipice.

It's always better to disrupt yourself, but frequently in life, we have all had this experience where we get disrupted. Whether or not we disrupt ourselves or whether or not we get disrupted, we are still starting over, and we get this opportunity because now we are going to have the opportunity to get dopamine to grow. A very opening sentence of my book, Smart Growth, is that growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. Sometimes, we help ourselves to grow and sometimes, the universe gives us a little bit of a nudge.

Growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. Sometimes we help ourselves to grow and sometimes the universe gives us a little bit of a nudge.

You start to think about the leaders reading this show and say, “We all have it in our DNA to grow.” They are going to give us feedback that says, “Maybe I have got some members on my team where it doesn't appear like they are growth-oriented.” You said, “Sometimes we disrupt ourselves and sometimes we get disrupted.” How do we help those people with love, caring, and so on to disrupt themselves?

Can it be something where we drive that? Does it have to come internally? I will say that it seems like the best example of something disrupting all of us was the pandemic. Right off the bat, for years and years, we came across hundreds of thousands of folks, if not millions, who said, “I can't learn new technologies.” Suddenly, everybody and their brother is fantastic at video conferencing and managing remote meetings immediately overnight. Weeks later, maybe it was the S-curve, but they are on a huge growth curve in terms of trying to interact with people differently, leverage technology differently, and manage their lives differently. Is that a reasonable example of the outside world forcing us to disrupt ourselves?

It's a terrific example because every single one of us is on this S-curve. It's an S-curve of learning where you have got the launch point, the sweet spot in mastery, and you can draw this S. I would argue that pre-pandemic, we were all at the top of an S-curve. It may have been an S-curve we liked. It may have been an S-curve we didn't like, but it was comfortable nonetheless.

What happened with the pandemic pushed all of us off the curve at the same time, which is part of why emotionally and psychologically was so challenging because there wasn't anybody else who was at the top of the curve to pull us along. We are all at the launch point together. What that meant is that whether we wanted to change or not, we now had been thrown into a sea of change and we got to make a decision.

That, in many ways, was a gift because many of us who had gotten potentially a little bit flaccid with that muscle of disrupting ourselves from doing new things, we now had the opportunity to strengthen that muscle. For many of us, that was a huge gift, which is why, as I think about the next several years, there's going to be so much growth that's going to take place because we all strengthen that muscle, that ability to disrupt ourselves. There were many difficult things about the pandemic, but one of those gifts was that it strengthened our ability to disrupt ourselves. We got better at it because the older we get, the more we can insulate ourselves from never doing anything new, which requires us to do something new.

Is that why you referenced in another HBR article where everybody talked about the Great Resignation? I think that term is a misnomer. We are talking about the Great Aspiration because people have leveraged this event to start thinking about what they want to do. Maybe acknowledging that they can change and they can evolve and things are going to be different moving forward.

I continue to stand behind that is that we were looking at it and saying. Everybody is resigning. When you think about resignation, that's like, “I'm resigned too and I'm going to give up.” Some people do give up whenever there's something difficult. There are going to be people who are going to give up. In general, what we saw were people rallying and saying, “I did this hard thing. I can do hard things, whatever it was.”

Now, when we come out of the pandemic, if someone wants me to go back and do the same thing that I was doing before, I'm like, “No,” because I can do hard things. I have realized that I'm capable and so I want to do more. If we as a leader recognize that in our people, we will harness that and know that they want to grow and develop. If we give people an opportunity to do that, we will not only be able to hire people, but we will be able to retain them because we are going to give them an opportunity to grow.

What a joy when someone hasn't had that, and then, for the first time, they understand, “I can learn. I can develop.” You point to the dopamine, but it's life-changing. It is life-altering. In a funny way, we see a lot of this in what we do, even with our limited sphere or limited line of sight within the funnel. Oftentimes, we get brought into, let's call it turnaround an underperforming sales organization or transition it to a better future. We get to do this with SaaS companies, but we also get to do this with lots of different other industries. Be it manufacturing or industrial services. I have noticed this over the last years when we will come into a manufacturing business. We will start to talk to their sales organization.

There will be an enormous amount of fear. If we can get them through that, where we take them through that chasm and teach them some new skills, they will trigger this life-changing event where people will realize where they have come from in 4, 6, or 8 months and it starts to dawn on them. They can learn anything they want.

It changes everything. I'm not sure where you align with Carol Dweck's work and growth mindset and fixed mindset, but it aligns. To see that in action and I have lived that personally as well. It’s life-altering when you start to say, “Hard work will get me through anything. I will figure this out. It's going to be uncomfortable at times.” It's always uncomfortable at times, but we are going to get there, and then what's the next thing? Then it becomes a matter of saying, “The Great Aspiration.” What do you want to do?

A couple of thoughts are coming to mind. First of all, it must be thrilling for you to be able to be a part of that process and enjoy watching people unlock their potential. I want to acknowledge that. You mentioned Carol Dweck, and then I want to come back to that question of when people are in that place that they are not sure that they want to change.

As I think about Carol Dweck's work, I have quoted her in every book I have ever written. When you think about the S-curve, what it does is you have this growth mindset, but the S-curve of learning allows you to trace the emotional arc of growth. It allows you to say, “When I'm at the launch point, I'm going to feel overwhelmed. I'm going to feel excited, but I'm also going to be afraid, and this is normal. That means I will keep growing.”

It's going to tell me that when I'm in the sweet spot on that steep part of the curve, this is exhilarating. No problem growing here, but it's also going to tell me that when I'm in mastery, this place is where I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish. It tells me I'm a little bit bored and have done it. I need to do something new. I need more dopamine. I need to give myself a challenge so I can continue to grow. I think about the S-curve of learning as a way to operationalize or trace that emotional arc of growth that we experience when we have a growth mindset.

You asked me a question. This is important. I wanted to come back to it is, “What do I do? What do you do when you have got a sales leader who's like, ‘I'm good. My numbers are good.’” You are like, “You could be better.” The way that about it is that when you are at the top of a curve, and we have been talking about dopamine, that feelgood chemical, what that means is that you figure things out. You are good at what you are doing. You have got these thick neural pathways and these comfortable routines, but you are also a little bit bored. When you are bored, your plateau can become a precipice because you start saying things like, “I have dialed this in,” and you are not learning and not growing.

What I do and suggest, and you can do this with your people, is draw this figure and give them a way to say, “Here's where you are. You are at the top of the curve. Your brain needs dopamine because learning is the oxygen of human growth.” You need to learn. Importantly, because you have these thick neural pathways, you have the latent innovative capacity.

Learning is the oxygen of human growth.

This is easy for you. We want to unlock that. The way that we are going to unlock that is to invite you to do 1 or 2 new things, navigate some launch points, get some dopamine, and get your brain with oxygen so you can continue to learn because then you are going to go from being good to even better, or in the words of Jim Collins because my business partner worked with him, from good to great.

What great coaching. Those reading, we are always looking for these things strategies, processes, or tools so we can grab them from this show and apply them today, tomorrow, and the next day. There's no question. We have got folks on our teams who have a fixed mindset or are at the plateau of the S-curve.

I love that idea of saying, “Clearly, you are fantastic at this, but you need that next challenge to stay active, engaged, innovative, and physically feel better. You get the hit of dopamine. We are going to give you 1 or 2 things that are going to take you outside your comfort zone.” This is the thing we should all remember when we are in the uncomfortable launch of the S-curve because it's okay to see it on the curve. When you are in the middle of it, it doesn't always feel great.

It feels so horrible to feel like I don't know what I'm doing. We don't like it when we are 15, but people don't like it when they are 35, 55, 65, or 75. It feels so uncomfortable and that's part of why this S-curve is so useful because then you can say to people, “You are at the launch point. It is true that you may not be good at this, but right now, we don't have enough data to know that. All we know right now is you are doing something new and you are probably not very good at doing new things because you don't do it very often. I want you to stay with us.”

We had Seth Godin on the podcast and he said, “When you feel like an imposter, what do you want to say? You want to say good. There's something fulfilling in knowing that you might mess up.” That is so powerful. This is something I was thinking about if I can riff for a second. When you are selling, you are inviting the people that you are selling to be on the launch point of a new curve. It's uncomfortable for them, too. Your job in sales is to help them navigate that new launch point. Buying something from you, working with you, or whatever that looks like, they are scared, too. How do you make it so that they can feel safe doing something new, which is buying what you are selling them?

Is that the first time you came up with that?

Yes, it is.

That is pure genius. I was looking down team while Whitney was speaking because I was writing it all down. It's a complete genius. The challenge we have is we think sometimes, as salespeople, we don't even think of that S-curve. We want to pitch because we think people are already at the peak or they are already at the top, and we want them to move forward as long as they understand what we are doing.

We don't emotionally guide them through this journey, understanding there's risk involved. We don't think of it this way because it's so relevant that you may have heard of a book called The Challenger Sale by a couple of guys, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson. Matt's latest book is something called The JOLT Effect, and what he's saying is, “Deals are going to no decision because your buyers are not making it through the S-curve.” They are launching, but you are not guiding them through it, and they are stopping. Too many companies are coming back saying, “I'd rather miss out than mess up.”

This is exactly the issue in professional sales. You and I need to write an article together for HBR on exactly this topic,n addition to the book Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company. It’s so smart. You have written other books. One is to build an A-team. As we go back to this concept of the S-curve, tell us that we are all naturally inclined to want to innovate, elevate, disrupt ourselves, and grow. How do I apply that when I'm trying to build my next team, whether it's executives or salespeople? How do I take some of those concepts and what are some of those tips for building that A-team?

We have talked about the S-curve as a way to think about personal growth. What you can then do is zoom out a little bit and you can use the S-curve to configure your team. The reason that you can do that is because people at different points along the curve have different strengths. People at the launch point of the curve have asked the question of why we do it like this.

They need training and yes, they are feeling uncomfortable, but they are also saying, why do we do it like this? Which can open the door to innovation. Whether it's people around products and it's around processes. You have people in this sweet spot who are still able to ask, “Why do we do it like this?” They are part of the way up the mountain, but they are not up. They also can execute because they have got some skills and training.

These are people who can both ask why but also answer. Then you have people who are in a master who can say, “Here's why we do it this way.” They are very much the people at the top. They have this perspective or the institutional and tribal memory. What we have used and would suggest you use as a starting point when configuring your team is to use the standard bell curve distribution and have 60% of your people in the sweet spot overall because everybody's going to have a portfolio of curves. They are not on one curve, but overall, they are in the sweet spot because they can ask and answer the questions. In the launch point, you want no more than 20% because they are able to ask, why do we do it like this? They also need training. They need support.

That can be a big tax on your people in the sweet spot in mastery, and then you don't want more than 20% of your people in mastery because, on the one hand, they are able to answer the questions of why do we do it like this? They have the institutional memory, but they are going to need a new curve. That new curve can be doing something and taking on a new role. It can be taking on a new project, but if you have got all your people and master, you are going to have a cliff.

You want 20% at the launch point, 60% in the sweet spot, and 20% in mastery. Now, depending on your team, depending on what your team is trying to accomplish, if you are a startup versus a storage company, and we have a whole bunch of detail on this in the interstitials of the book Smart Growth that may adjust. If you start with 20/60/20, that will allow you to start thinking, “How is my team configured? Am I optimized not only for innovation and growth but also for succession planning, and then you can use this for a talent development conversation.” That's how you can use it to build an A-team to zoom out a little bit and think about the configuration that way, that 20/60/20.

If I can, I will share a couple of challenges. A lot of folks reading the show or maybe dealing with it, and we can talk about how applying these concepts can help. One of the big challenges in professional sales, it's a unique field. If you are a Chief Revenue Officer, which I am, and as part of the In-the-funnel business model, you have the three most important and demanding stakeholders in the business.

You are reporting directly to clients. Ultimately, the most important bar is anyone. Secondly, I'm managing a sales team, which takes active time and effort management, and then finally, I'm reporting to my board or my executive team. Frankly, all three of those groups have very definitive black-and-white metrics by which they can measure my success.

Nobody else on the executive team has such a black-and-white scorecard of, “Are you doing a good job or not?” Also, I don't know the scorecards of everybody else on the executive team, but they know mine. “We are hitting our goals.” “We are not.” This interesting dynamic as a Chief Revenue Officer or VP of sales creates a bit of a pressure cooker.

What we have found in this pressure cooker is two things. One fact-based one. Gartner Group, McKinsey, and others will say, “The tenure of that person is eighteen months.” Think of that for a second. “The Chief Revenue Officer lasts eighteen months.” Who knows where they get on the S-curve for a new business when they take over?

They think they are in mastery. The other problem is they have to project they are in mastery because they are new in the business. They are trying to make an impact. They were brought in because something wasn't working. After all, nothing is ever working in sales. It's this interesting dynamic where my experience has been that individuals won't ask for help.

Sales is a performance art. If they are running a team of performance artists, they don't want to ask for help because it looks weak and they are new in their job. Yet the coaches of some of the best performance artists in the world have loads of help. I'm Canadian. The hockey team I love is the Toronto Maple Leafs. They have a head coach, fitness coach, speed coach, shooting coach, mindset coach, nutrition coach, and strength coach. They will bring in anybody who can help. One of the reasons we have this short tenure in sales leadership is they won't ask for help because they look weak. Maybe they think they are going to look weak if they do. Do you have any thoughts on how we might address that or help some of those people who are reading?

The challenge is that if you are good at what you do, you are getting brought in because you are a domain expert. We know you can sell. Then the question becomes and this builds on the whole conversation that we have been having as you come in new to this role, I know you can sell, but I need you to take a hot minute to figure out who you are selling to in this new role.

I need you to map the territory. Who are your clients? Who are your internal stakeholders? You need all these people internally to help you do this job, and you need the buy-in of the senior executives. What my recommendation would be is to say, “I'm on the launch point of a curve. I knew I only had eighteen months, but I probably have more time than that if I do this.” Start by saying, “I'm going to take a couple of months and I'm going to get to know everybody, but here's what I'm doing.” The challenge is that when you come into sales, you are going to only look at what they sell. You have got to give me another metric in place of that or in lieu of that.

For the first three months, I need you to not focus on this, or maybe it's a month because that will freak them out to do three months, but let's do a month. For the first month, the metric that I want you to measure me by is, “Did I talk to all of our stakeholders? Did I find out what they need?” I'm going to come back and report to you what I learned. That will be my metric for the first six weeks.

After we have done that, we have collected the data. We are at the launch point. We have explored. We have collected the data that we talked about in Smart Growth, and then I will come up with a plan for what we are going to sell, and you can measure me by that. If you bring everybody along in this process of, “Here's my hypothesis, and here's what we are going to learn. We are going to collect and build this together and get buy-in for the metrics by which you are going to be measured early on. That's going to allow you to have the runway that you need to be able to succeed.” It takes real humility and it's important because oftentimes people think that salespeople aren't humble.

That allows you to come in and be like, “Here's where we can go.” You are used to painting this future or on this vision of who and what we can be. That's the pixie dust. That's what's amazing about salespeople, but the initial part is the pixie dust. You have to know who your people are and what pixie dust they need.

What a fantastic answer on the spot. As everybody who reads this show can tell, when I host it, we don't prepare. We prepare for guests but don't prepare questions or anything of that nature. Whether you are a sales leader or a salesperson coming into that new role, the first thing is to say, “I may be at the mastery level in terms of core processes and guidelines for running a sales organization, but I'm at the launch point for running your sales organization with your clients, your industry, and your particular situation and niche.” The first thing I want to do, I'm going to get out there and I need to speak to 50 clients. I'm going to gather some data that's going to help me ramp up that curve and also interview internal stakeholders.

How interesting you landed on that answer. At the core, one of the reasons companies in the funnel exist is because so few sales leaders successfully go in and take over a new environment that after this happens 2 or 3 times, CEOs or boards come to us and go, “What are we supposed to do here?” Our answer is, “I don't know.”

We are in the mastery stage of running sales organizations, but it's the same thing. We don't know you. We don't know your business. We don't know your industry. We don't know your team. Let us come in and interview all of those people for 60 days, and then we will come back and tell you. It's almost our whole business model you came up with on the spot. Tell me a little bit about when we start to think of this S-curve and then I take a look at your vision about the Great Resignation being the great aspiration.

What can I do as a leader continually with those pressures? I have got to hit my numbers. I got to have a full team. We have got to compete and win in the marketplace, but I also want to take that time to develop my people because, for many leaders, that's where the true joy will come from and it pays dividends years from now. What would be some ideas or tactics for me to make sure that's front of mind as many of us are going into a brand new calendar year, this being January of 2023? Do you have any thoughts or ideas for the leaders and CEOs to leverage some of this learning?

For many leaders, true joy comes from developing their people.

The first thing that I would suggest is you look at your computer right now, your phone, and your calendar. Look at your list of things to do and ask yourself, “On my list of things to do, how many are tasks and how many are conversations with people? How many interactions with people? Are there any people conversations on there?” For most of us, like me, it's the task and there are no people. Now, you can keep your tasks, but make sure when you are in the conversation how you are thinking about people. The second thing that I would say is that these people's conversations don't take a ton of time.

I had one. I was on the road with a person on my team. I delivered a keynote at an insurance company. Afterward, this person on my team was having lunch and I started grilling her. Grilling her in the sense of, “Tell me what you care about. What do you like doing? What don't you like doing? Tell me about some personal goals that you have.”

For us, anyway, if we are not able to grow our people internally, then we are not authentic. If I'm telling you to grow your people and I am not growing the people on my team, then there is something seriously wrong, but I digress. Those conversations don't take a lot of time. We were together for half an hour talking about that and then, and it was very organic as part of the conversation.

Here's what I would say to you. If there are people on your team with whom you do not want to have that conversation, that is important data for you. It either means that you haven't done the work to get to know this person or maybe they are not the right person in that role. If you can't get invested enough to have that conversation, there's either something going on with you or there's something going on with them in that role and you need to figure out what that is fast because it's not fair to them, to you, and your organization.

I would look at my list and if I don't have any people on the list, I have a goal to have at least one people conversation a week. If you don't want to have a conversation with any people on your team, ask yourself why. Get curious because there's likely an action item there for you as well. Maybe you have to do some work and maybe they are not the right person in the role or need training, but there's something. There's data there, so make sure you mind for that data.

What a great canary and cold mind. You look at your actual week and there are some meetings you can't wait to walk into and there are other meetings you are not looking forward to. It's a good thing to take a pause and go why. It's funny that I tended to start to think about all of these things so much more when I became an entrepreneur because I felt like I had so much more freedom running in the funnel that I was only going to do things I wanted to do. When I was thinking in the corporate world, it felt like jail at times because there were so many things I didn't have to do, but in my waning years in the corporate world, I took the same approach anyway.

You always have much more control than you think you do.

You do. You have so much more control and you end up being so much better at what you do. The other thing that everybody reading this will resonate. There's so much joy in elevating the capabilities of your team. That wind in your sails is so important because when you feel great when that's happening, that then becomes contagious and you are passing it along and so on and so forth, and then they are building their team.

The truth is, I encourage anybody reading this, I agree with the Great Aspiration. Start with doing what you want to do, but know you can control your environment. You can make a positive impact on your environment. You are not a cog. You can influence what takes place in a positive way. You have to want to do it. You have to make it happen. The joy of this show and everybody knew I say this that I am a lifelong learner. I love learning and I love these conversations.

This conversation, both preparing for this conversation and then having it, has triggered so much for me. Next time I'm going to be doing a ridiculously deep dive into your career and what you have done in all of your books, not just Smart Growth. I'm sure the folks reading are going to want to do the same, but first I want to say thank you so much for joining. How do folks learn more about you? If everyone wants to go out and buy Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company, the title alone tells you why you want this book. In addition to that, how do people learn more about you?

You can go directly to our website, TheDisruptionAdvisors.com, which will give you lots of resources. As you said, in addition to the book, we also have a podcast. That will give you an opportunity to do a deeper dive into this material. Specifically, I would suggest podcast Episode 205, where we talk about an article that we wrote in Harvard Business Review titled Managing Your Organization as a Portfolio of Curves. That could potentially be very useful to you.

Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company

A great place to start is to read the book or go to the podcast, which will allow you to do more work on these topics. You can always email me at WJ@WhitneyJohnson.com or you can do WJ@TheDisruptionAdvisors.com. We changed our website, so I forget which website we are using, but those are probably the best ways to connect.

Folks, buy Whitney's books and have a read. These are excellent resources for you. I took a quick look at what looked like about twenty articles or artifacts at Harvard Business Review. You will want to take a look at those. Whitney and I were referencing something from 2012 and 2003, her initial article called Disrupt Yourself, of which there's a book of the same name.

Folks, take a look there for all of these amazing resources. Thank you again to Whitney for joining me. Team, thank you for reading the episode. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe to our show and tell your friends. If there's something we can do to improve the value you get from this investment in time, please tell me. You can reach me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com and we love constructive criticism. That's my email and we respond to every note we get. Thanks, keep those tips coming our way. We will continue to get better at this and we will see everybody next time on the show.

Important Links

• Disruption Advisors

• Smart Growth

• The Innovator's Dilemma

• Disrupt Yourself – Article

• Liar's Poker

• The Bonfire of the Vanities

• Seth Godin – Past episode

• The Challenger Sale

• The JOLT Effect

• Episode 205 – Past episode

• WJ@WhitneyJohnson.com

• WJ@TheDisruptionAdvisors.com

• Disrupt Yourself

• MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com

About Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors (thedisruptionadvisors.com), a leadership development company, helping you grow your people to grow your business, and was named by Thinkers50 as one of the ten leading business thinkers in the world (2021).

A world class keynote speaker and a popular lecturer for Harvard Business Publishing’s Corporate Learning, she has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2020; her weekly podcast Disrupt Yourself, is in the top .5% globally in terms of listenership.

Whitney is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Press) which Publisher's Weekly described as "cogent...insightful...practical...inspiring."

A former award-winning Wall Street equity analyst, she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with the late Clayton Christensen and has coached alongside Marshall Goldsmith. Whitney understands how companies work, how investors think, and how the best coaches coach.

Whitney is married, has two children, and lives in Lexington, VA where her family grows strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries and enjoys making jam.

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