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Today’s show featured an interview with Frank Passanante, Global Head of Sales at Hilton. Also appearing is Lisa Earle McLeod, author of “Selling with Noble Purpose.”
Find Frank on LinkedIn. Find Lisa on LinkedIn.
FRANK’S TIP: “Purpose is a North Star, it’s a compass, and when it’s aligned, it becomes that source of energy. It should align with where you get energy and it should align with your ability, even through volatile times, to persevere and ultimately to see sustained ongoing performance success.”
LISA’S TIP: “You have really understood, at a very deep level, the way that money and meaning go together. They’re not siloed. The best sales teams don’t have to choose between purpose and profit; they use purpose to drive profit.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: This is going to be a great show and it’s great timing. We’re doing today’s show in Q4, fall of 2025. It’s an interesting time for the selling profession. It’s an interesting time for the world. I’m very excited for this. To remind people, Frank, you may recall when I interviewed you in-person for the Sales Game Changers Podcast, I asked you a question and you answered, “Well, we believe in selling with noble purpose.” I said, “Well, we got to get you and Lisa together.” I know a lot of great work has happened, and I talk, Lisa, as you know, about the concept of selling with noble purpose all the time. That’s one reason why we’ve had such a special relationship with you and your organization.
Lisa, before I turn the reins over to you, Frank, why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction. Tell us what you do with Hilton, tell us what’s going on, and I’m excited to hear what we’re going to be talking about today.
Frank Passanante: Fred, you are a matchmaker of sorts. I did say that sales is a noble profession, and you suggested that, “Well, then of course you have a relationship with Lisa Earle McLeod,” who wrote Selling with Noble Purpose. That was the beginning of what has become a great collaboration. Really appreciate that.
I’m excited to be here. I am the Global Head of Sales at Hilton. Many of you know that we have over, believe it or not, today we crossed a milestone. We will open our 9,000th hotel today. The La Cantera Resort in San Antonio becomes one of our Signia properties. The teams that I lead, the sales teams, represent all 9,000 hotels in all three world regions. I do look after Hilton’s global B2B sales strategy. That’s all regions, but more importantly, across all sales channels. When we talk about B2B selling, B2B selling is no longer just one thing. We’ve gotten really clear on what we do, and that is driving sales strategy across all the channels in which we engage our B2B customers. Really excited about this conversation today, and thanks for having me, as always.
Fred Diamond: I have a trip planned to San Antonio in two weeks, so I now know where I’m going to stay. I’m excited. I always stay at Hilton. Hilton’s a great friend and partner of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, and I appreciate all of your ongoing support as well. Lisa Earle McLeod, why don’t you introduce yourself and then why don’t we go through the questions? Get us started.
Lisa McLeod: I am the author of Selling with Noble Purpose and I work with organizations, largely B2B organizations, and leaders around the world on putting a sense of purpose inside their commercial operation. I get to work with great leaders like Frank. I’m going to use this to segue into the conversation, because one of the things that Hilton has been able to do, I think with some of my help, but it was already innate inside the business, and I think this is really important, is that Selling with Noble Purpose gave a name to something that the best sales teams were already doing. Hilton was doing that. They were really clear. They’re not just in the hotel business transactionally selling rooms to individuals or for big meetings.
When I first met with Frank, he talked about being so inspired by Conrad Hilton’s early writings around filling the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality. That might sound like a gauzy nice-to-have thing, but where I want to go with this interview is how you have used that qualitative feeling and infused it inside a very commercial business. The question I want to start with with Frank is, you’ve gotten the sales trifecta, you’ve had growth, it’s been profitable growth, and you’ve had employee engagement. I want people to think about this. Think about what Hilton has done here, because so often we’re pounding the revenue, revenue, or we’re pounding the profitability, profitability, and the employees are just strung out and don’t like working there. But you’ve had all three of those come together and you’ve done it very consistently. We are in a time of uncertainty, but when you look at the arc over time, Hilton has consistently delivered on those three things. It’s been revenue growth, it’s been profitable revenue growth, and you’ve had employee engagement. How does putting this sense of noble purpose at the center of your business drive those outcomes? How has it done it for you?
Frank Passanante: It’s a great question. Lisa, you did help us put a framework around something that we already very much believed in. At Hilton, we always say it, we are extremely fortunate and blessed to have been given a legacy purpose by our founder Conrad Hilton. That legacy purpose has been to spread that we, ladies and gentlemen, are here to spread the light and warmth of hospitality. That is our North Star. It isn’t just within the sales organization that I lead. It is company-wide. That is our guiding light. It is our North Star.
Lisa McLeod: I’ve been at your meetings and seen everybody, from the general managers of your biggest properties down to the front desk people, they are laser-focused.
Frank Passanante: It guides how we lead. It guides how we sell. It guides how we serve at the unit level, to your point. I think that at the end of the day, when people feel connected to something bigger, they just perform better, which allows us to deliver on those other aspects of the trifecta, profitability and growth. But what it really starts with, again, we’ve got this North Star, but it’s culture. We believe that at Hilton, the secret sauce and the true differentiator is our focus on culture building. You mentioned employee engagement. I think we’ve tallied over 650 great places to work recognitions, 70 number one wins across the globe. We’ve been the number one great place to work in the world multiple times. We are currently the remaining number one hospitality company in the world to work for.
Lisa McLeod: I want people to take this in. A best place to work award is voted by the employees. If you’ve ever worked in hospitality, as I have, all of those things that make it really special and nice for you on the front end, they’re really hard. There are people back there working late hours, doing hard work. The fact that you all were voted by the employees like all these Silicon Valley companies that have the nap pods and stuff like that, they’re not having to bus tables at 2:00 in the morning. But you all have captured that feeling and people have it when they’re doing really hard work. I hope everyone really understands what this means.
Frank Passanante: Thank you for highlighting that. There’s a lot of pride within Hilton, within our team members, for the culture that we have. We know we’ve got something special. But to your point, it’s not easy either. It’s hard. We’re also a very large matrix to organizations when you look at Above Property and all the teams that support the hotels that are in the field. But the reality is that when team members feel empowered, they just deliver exceptional experiences, and that drives revenue. It drives loyalty. It ultimately drives our biggest metric, is market share. When we’re talking about commercial performance, it’s how much of what’s out there are we able to capture? We’ve got some very formidable competitors, it’s a very competitive landscape, but it really is bringing those three things together. It’s understanding that delivering on light and warmth is what fuels the guests’ stay, and it is all empowered by a culture. It starts with our Hilton culture.
Lisa McLeod: As other sales leaders listening to this are taking this in, I want to double down on a couple things you’ve said, because the idea of culture and light and warmth, no one’s going to argue with that. Every sales leader is like, “Yes, we want to have a good culture,” whatever their true north is, they’re, “Yes, we want to have that.” But one of the things that you have done so successfully is what I always say, is combine the money and the meaning. A lot of people tend to look at those things as a duality, where we can have this great culture, we’re all about the employee experience, the customer experience, or we can double down and make money. But you have really understood, at a very deep level, the way that those two things go together and they’re not siloed.
One of the places that showed up was in your innovation. A lot of people talk about solving customer pain points, customer friction points. A lot of organizations talk about that. But you went beyond pain points, because a lot of times when people think about pain points, they’re interviewing their customers, asking their customers, “What are your friction points? What are your pain points?” But you looked at places where friction had become normalized. You gave people the thing that they wanted that they didn’t even know they wanted until you gave it to them. What inspired that approach? Because you have really done some great work with innovation, beyond beautiful hotels, but the customer experience. How’d your team do that and how’d they execute?
Frank Passanante: It’s been a multi-year journey for sure. It goes back to I think 2015 or 2016 when I first came into the global sales environment. We declared a change vision. We realized we had a challenge and we came out and declared that we would be known as the most sought-after sales partner in hospitality. That has been the change vision that then allowed us to reimagine how we engage, not just what we sell. The important part here is, yes, we were solving for pain points and friction points across our B2B customer space, but like many B2B sales organizations, and especially in our very complex ecosystem, the B2B customers aren’t our only customers. That’s why we were very deliberate in saying sales partners because the global sales team, we support our hotels, they are our partners. The owners of our hotels are our partners. My commercial colleagues everywhere else in the organization and our brands themselves and the brand leaders and the brand apparatus, they are all our customers.
Our vision was to become the most sought-after sales partner in hospitality, and that meant for all of our stakeholder groups. What that required is our ability and willingness to challenge the sea of sameness. Oftentimes, and you said it earlier, we’re not just focusing on space, dates, and rates, the tactics, the logistics. That’s not what we do. We actually leaned into a consultative selling approach, really being focused on delivering insights to our partners, whichever customer group or stakeholder group it was, education, providing strategic guidance. We really wanted to elevate our stature to be true trusted advisors, which really then changes the nature of the game, it changes the relationship, and that really was key.
This trusted advisor model, it is all about anticipating the needs of our customers before they surface and not just responding. As a result, we’ve been able to deliver content that they don’t necessarily get on their own, but something that we’re able to enable, which ultimately helps customers make better decisions. That was really at the forefront of how we were able to make that shift. It was declaring a vision and then challenging the status quo and realizing that we just needed to be different. That has allowed us to innovate, listen loudly, and do what we need to do to solve customer problems.
Fred Diamond: Frank, for people who may not understand much about the hospitality industry, can you discuss who some of your partners are so people can put a little more of this into context, if they don’t know your industry specifically?
Frank Passanante: Hilton Worldwide sales, the customers, the B2B customers that we’re working with range from Fortune 500 companies who have business travel needs or corporate travel needs, or meeting and event needs, to gigantic travel companies that procure leisure travel for guests, online travel agencies, traditional travel agencies, the airlines we all fly on. Those crew that fly those planes and service us, they all need places to stay. There isn’t a single person that shows up into a hotel that there isn’t somebody on the B2B buying side that we are engaging with from a B2B selling side. You think about anything that touches one of our hotels, there’s somebody on the sell side.
In fact, when you look at Hilton globally and you think of all the millions and millions of guests that we serve, 51% of all of Hilton is global rooms revenue. Our revenue, more than half is coming from a sales influence customer segment. Somebody in sales, either on my team or within sales, at the individual unit levels, have actually influenced or sold or contracted that business. Sales within our space is a very prevalent way of getting people into buildings. I know sometimes even when you’re traveling on business, you’re like, “Yeah, these are the hotels that I can pick from for my company.” Somebody on my team got us on the shelf, so that it is an option for you to pick when you’re traveling on business. Those are our traditional customers.
But then our partners, I’ve got owners saying, “Frank, how can your teams do better for my hotel? I own it. I want it to be profitable. Help me.” They’re a partner. Our brands, we have 24 trading brands today, I’ve got brand leaders saying, “Frank, how are your teams supporting the Waldorf Astoria brand or the new LivSmart Studios by Hilton brand? What are you doing to help my brand?” That’s a partner. Our stakeholder audience is rather diverse, and it’s our job, which is why it was so important for us to declare that vision early on, that we didn’t want to just be best in the eyes of the end user, the customer. We wanted to be best in the eyes of any partner that we engage with.
Lisa McLeod: I want folks to take this in. A lot of you listening to this probably sell through partners, you have referral sources. Think about your own business model as Frank’s talking. It’s not just you going out saying, “Hey, you want some watches here.” It’s very, very different in that there are so many influencers that are either recommending your product, making the decision, putting you on the list. I want to connect the dots for a couple things and then go to very specifically the sales and customer service teams, but connect these dots that Frank has said here. They have a true north around light and hospitality and bringing that to the earth. That’s their true north. Then what they’ve said is, within that as our true north, we want to be the sought-after partner in hospitality. This is really important.
The language here matters, because they didn’t say, “We want to be the best hotels owner.” That’s part of it, but the sought-after partner. What that did from an innovation standpoint is that puts the whole team’s brain not on their offering, but on what is this particular partner? What does this airline need? What does this company need? What does this particular partner need that they may not have even thought of? Because the thing that Frank said is they’re trying to jump out from a sea of sameness and just differentiating on the product is not going to be enough. They have to differentiate on the sales experience, because too many people try and go for that trusted advisor. I got a couple years on me here, so that’s a phrase that’s been bandied about a lot, something like, “We want to be the trusted advisor.”
“Well, how are you doing that?”
“We’re going in and giving great presentations about our product.”
No, it doesn’t work that way. The reason that Frank’s team was able to get to that trusted advisor status with the customers was he said they were listening loudly. They weren’t speaking loudly. They were going in and doing deep listening with all their different customer types. They had the innovation team. I remember when I worked with your innovation team and we had all the flip charts on the wall about all the different types of customers, and what are the things that they haven’t even thought of that are causing them challenges, day-in-the-life type thing. I want to connect all those dots because too often people say, “Let’s magic wand our people and send them to sales training,” which you and I are about to talk about, and that’s a piece of it. But if you’re listening to this, I want to connect all these dots so you have the true north of purpose, then you’re not just thinking of yourself. You’re thinking about the way the customer experience is, not just the product, but the sales offering.
For you, I’m going to go to this question, purpose wasn’t just a, “Hey, let’s put it on t-shirts and call it a day.” It was really a way of operating. I spent a lot of time with your sales teams over the course of the last couple of years. Can you talk a little bit about how those sales teams and those customer teams live the purpose every day, from a really tactical standpoint? You’ve got sales, you’ve got customer experience. Share a little bit about that, because I think that it was in those day-to-day interactions that it came to life. For a lot of companies, that’s where it goes to die.
Frank Passanante: It’s a great question. We’re fortunate because in our ethos, at its very heart, hospitality is all about people serving people. That is exactly how we lead. But we’ve had to operationalize within our sales teams how we bring this to life in a real way. We’ve embedded noble purpose into all of our sales rhythms. It’s quite simple. Across B2B industries, we share a lot of rhythms. We have account plans. At Hilton, we are deeply committed to a coaching culture. We have coaching conversations. You can call them one-on-ones or catch ups, but we have coaching conversations. We embed purpose into our rhythms, like account plans, coaching conversations, the customer engagement strategies, how we bring customer engagement activities to life within our CEP, our customer engagement plan. It is all designed to ensure that we are not just executing great events, but we are actually embedding a purpose into those events.
We’ve heard what our customers care about. We try to expose not only a demonstration of our own purpose, but try to align with our customer’s purpose, whether it be focus around sustainability or other things that they care about, we try to bring that to life. It’s not just a message, it is a mindset. We align purpose with performance. The game plans that every seller within our organization has that is aligned to their overall account plans, they’re rooted in noble purpose, and they’re reviewed regularly in the coaching conversations that every one of my leaders or coaches has with the players. It isn’t just about hitting targets. It is really about elevating how we show up for our customers. Just as important, because I talked about all those different stakeholder groups, how we show up for each other.
You’ve taught us really well, Lisa, you’ve said, “You shouldn’t just be measuring success by revenue.” Obviously, we are a sales organization. We have revenue targets. Our job is to drive performance. But we also measure success now by customer impact. That is something we took away from several exercises that we’ve done with you, and it is real. We all, literally everybody at Hilton tells customer impact stories. Every meeting starts with someone reciting a customer impact story, meaning we do a lot of stuff and we do a lot of stuff really good. Sometimes we do stuff not so good, but there’s a lot of great what-we-did stories. Someone had a great stay at our hotel.
But the real magic is not just what we did, but how did we make that customer feel, and how did we make them feel in a way that was different at Hilton than at our competitors? That is one of the ways that we measure success. We have embedded into even our sales review process, our performance management cycles. We’ve embedded not just what they do, meaning achievement against the revenue target, but how they do it. That’s aligned with our sales engagement strategy and all of the things that we’re asking them to do as sales professionals that align with how we bring purpose to life. There’s a lot here, I can go on forever, but it isn’t one single thing. It’s a whole bunch of things, but it is not just a flash in the pan. This is just how we operate.
Lisa McLeod: For those of you who might not really fully grasp what Frank is saying about customer impact, and you’re right, when we went through it, people were like, “What’s the one stroke thing?” and we did a hundred things, and you all were already doing a hundred things. But I’ll give people a really concrete takeaway that Frank’s team is doing that anyone can do tomorrow. It’s these customer impact stories.
A typical sales meeting, we say, “Hey, Frank made this great sale. We got this big partnership with American Express, or Delta Airlines, or whoever. Well, that’s going to be great. Woo.” That’s the typical. But what Frank’s team does all around the world and have been trained to do, is they say, “How did it make a difference to the customer?” That customer impact story is a tool to, I’ll tell you the brain science, and I’ve watched it happen live time in a room with Hilton, it ignites the frontal lobes of everybody in the room. It points them to the true north. It says, “Yes, we are making money. Yes, we have to close these revenue targets, and our work makes a difference.” What that does is it keeps the sales team from being transactional all the time. It really infuses that sense of purpose.
One of the things that you talked about, Frank, was insights to customer. A lot of people talk about this, and they try and do these, they’ll say, “We want our customers to have insights.” But I want you to connect the dots for us. Hilton aspires to be the world’s best place to stay. That sounds great. But one of the things you did that was really concrete is you led the charge on the World’s Most Welcoming meetings, research. You said something earlier in here where you say, “We provide our customers with insights that they might not have known.” You all led some research on the World’s Most Welcoming Events. What I want everybody to see here is, Hilton has clarity of purpose, they know who their partners are, they want to be the partner, part of what they deliver is events. They did some research, not on how are we doing events, but what would be the world’s most welcoming event? Can you lead me through why that was so important?
Frank Passanante: This is recent work and it’s been fascinating. Coming out of the pandemic, we observed a clear shift in customer engagement. There’s renewed need for connection and belonging and psychological safety. The entire thesis of why meetings matter, why meetings will always be so critical to drive performance across every industry. This led us to want to better understand the shift. We spoke to event planners, we listened to planners, we also engaged in research and partnered with Ipsos and others, and then brought in some generational experts that we also partnered with. This research that we conducted informed what we as a company could do to help us solve problems for our partners, our event planner partners.
Now, we do our own meetings too. We have tons of events. We do tons in a year. All this research was also informing how we execute our own internal events or the events that we host with our owners or others. But at the end of the day, it’s about giving event planners, professionals that we work with across professional associations, Fortune 500 companies, everybody, with a playbook, tools and resources to actually provide relevant means and experiences that align with this changing customer need.
The way that I think about it, it’s funny because Kelly on my team has been handling this, this initiative is like our love letter to the industry. When people meet, ideas spark, relationships get stronger, transformation begins, and we’ve always felt that meetings can change the world. What we’re trying to do is enable this through taking the research that we learned about what matters to this generation and match it up with a playbook of things we can tactically do as an event planner to bring it to life.
Attendees told us they want to feel more supported and prepared before they go to an event, but there’s a whole list of things that we can do to enable them to feel like they have high levels of preparation. Remember, a lot of people that are going to events and meetings post pandemic, they started their careers on Zoom, and now they’re being asked to go to a conference and they don’t even know how to interact with people. Gen Z, 79% of them actually worry about what they wear at events. We’ve never done a good job of just giving good guidelines to people, like showing pictures of what we expect you to wear to this specific event. It’s not creating silly terms for boho casual.
Lisa McLeod: Snappy casual.
Frank Passanante: It’s actually help someone understand and prepare for what you need. Listen, the attendees, more than 80% of them say they just sometimes need a break, and that we overpack agendas and we’ve gotten really focused on maximizing time away. But the reality is there’s a diminishing point of return. The research told us so many things that we just translated into practical solutions. They sit in what we created, which was called the World’s Most Welcoming Events Playbook. That playbook is a global playbook. We’ve just launched some new research so that we can actually understand trends in more global markets and regions around the world. We’re going to be really excited to be launching the next generation as we turn the calendar year. Again, we’re listening to what’s happening. We’re trying to support our customers and solve problems, and we’re doing it in a way that really does align with what we believe in. This is all about spreading light and warmth.
Lisa McLeod: I’m so glad you circled it back. What I want people to hear, so this playbook that they have, as someone who goes to a lot of meetings, some are amazing, like being at the Conrad in Singapore, that was amazing. It wasn’t just the property, it was just the way the meeting was run. You could feel it, I’m using that word very intentionally, when you walked in the room, and I go to other meetings that aren’t as great, not yours, but people really struggle with this.
What I want you to take in as you’re listening to this, if you are a sales leader, a salesperson, wherever you are in the chain, the thought leadership that Hilton shared, I have taken that and shared it with other people, and it’s Hilton branded, but it’s not a Hilton brochure. It is thought leadership in the space that Hilton plays in. But I could use that to plan a meeting in my home, which by the way, I have. Sometimes I host retreats in my home, and I can use that playbook.
One of the things that Frank and his team have done so well here is this lens of the customer. It’s not, “Here’s how to interact with Hilton.” Again, it’s Hilton branded, but what it does is it gives Frank’s people something to talk about that’s interesting to the customer that’s not just Hilton. They’re talking about the thing that the customer cares most about, and they’re providing insights on that. I think that that’s really important.
This is an example of you guys have just been so innovative in so many ways that show up small and large, the connected rooms, the way you can do a whole host of things. But one of the things that you did was you brought customers into the process. Again, we’re spreading light and warmth. Who are we spreading that to? The customer. We want to do that. Let’s get the customer in the room for innovation. Why was that so important and what did you learn? Or actually, you can just say what you learned, because we all know why it’s so important.
Frank Passanante: Trying to innovate or solve customer problems in isolation is just impossible. We chose different a path, and many others too have also, but it is rooted in partnership, and it’s part of the journey. One of my probably most overused statements, my guys give me stuff about it all the time, is I say, we listen loudly. But I truly believe there’s a difference between hearing and listening. Listening loudly means that we’re focused on active listening. We all know if we come up through a Socratic sales training environment, active listening is the key to everything. That is really where you unlock the opportunity to not just hear what people say, but understand what they deeply care about so that you can match your solutions with what matters.
We aren’t just building tools when we invite them into the conversation, we’re also building trust. That trust comes from inviting them into a conversation early enough and often enough so that they can help inform the things that we do. We have lots of forums. We start with conversations, intentional forums like advisory sessions, or even more informal matchups that we do where we bring people together so that we can hear. We also find some of the most valued information we receive and insights we receive, is not just when we’re talking to our partners and customers, but when we put them in a room and the customers start talking to each other, that’s when the real magic happens. That’s when we learn so much more of what we need to be solving for. That is something that we’ve wrapped into our regular set of rhythms.
Customers don’t just want answers. They want agency. They want to shape the journey, not just react to it. They want to be a part of it. You want to bring people in to a process which gets buy-in. The collaboration itself builds loyalty. It really accelerates relevance. It just continues to strengthen the long-term partnerships we have with so many. It’s critically important to not do it in isolation and to bring customers into the journey. That is the easiest way to know that what you’re devoting limited resources against to solve is what matters most to the customers.
Lisa McLeod: I’m glad you brought that up, having them interact. I went to a conference with you, I think it was in Mexico, and one of the things that I loved, you had some of your biggest partners there, and you gave them a chance to talk to each other. You had content for them, you had insights for them, and you also gave them a chance to talk to each other, which I could see the magic happening.
I want to get super practical. A lot of people talk about purpose. It’s been a thing. I wrote the first book, I guess, 15 years ago, but now it’s a thing. Companies say, “We have this big purpose statement,” but oftentimes it doesn’t make its way to sales, and you all have executed. You’re like my poster child, I talk about you all the time. What advice would you give to another sales leader who wants to embed purpose into their strategy?
Frank Passanante: There’s probably a few things. I’m a huge fan of Lencioni. The one thing that I believe is absolutely critical and very practical is what he talks about in the book called The Ideal Team Player. It really does start with hiring the right sales professionals. When we are talking about aligning around noble purpose and something bigger than just revenue, you cannot just have one of the three virtues that he speaks about. You can’t just have the hungry part of humble, hungry, smart. You have to have all three. We have been guiding our recruitment efforts and interviewing efforts and initiatives around looking for the trifecta of humble, hungry, smart for over a decade. I believe that operationalizing purpose and embedding purpose into our sales strategy starts with hiring the right people and pressure testing the existing talent within your teams against those same three virtues and make the hard decisions if they are not aligned.
What I would say to anybody, these traits are not just desirable, humble, hungry, smart. They are absolutely foundational to building a culture that embraces purpose and where purpose culture can flourish. Hiring the right people and having the right people on the bus is the absolute most critical thing you can do. If you’ve got the wrong people, it’s never going to happen.
Lisa McLeod: It was very obvious to me when I went to work with your people. We were talking about operationalizing purpose, not why we should have purpose in the first place. That was a very different conversation. I go into a lot of companies where they’re like, “Well, we care about sales revenue. What’s this purpose thing?” It’s a lot more work. With your team, they were already there from an ethos and culture standpoint, so we were off to the races. The 10 years you spent on getting hungry, humble, smart, they were there.
Frank Passanante: The other thing that I, when people turn Frank on and Frank starts talking, Frank’s going to talk about nurturing a coaching culture. The way that I look at it, it’s a culture built through clarity, consistency, and accountability. For any sales leader, the starting point is really adopting a coaching mindset, one that absolutely prioritizes daily reflection and feedback and growth, in lieu of just the one-time initiative. Coaching isn’t just a training class or a conference. Coaching is every single day and it’s wanting to start every day by thinking about how do I make my players better? How do I as a coach bring the best out of the players? It’s a mutual commitment to wanting to be better and to make people better.
I think at Hilton, what we’ve been able to do is embed coaching into our rhythms so that it isn’t just a one and done. It actually is something that ensures purpose is lived. It’s not just imitated. Nobody in the Hilton sales leadership ranks would hesitate to talk about how coaching is foundational to how we deliver performance across our teams, that we are committed to making people better tomorrow than they are today. That’s super critical.
Lisa McLeod: I want folks to take in what Frank said. Frank’s the global head of sales. You may be sitting here and you may be a sales manager of a team of five. You can still do exactly what Frank said if you didn’t have a hundred-year-old Conrad Hilton light and warmth of hospitality purpose. I just want to take you through the steps that he said, clarity of purpose, you had a legacy purpose. If you don’t have one, you can identify one just for your team. It’s how do you make a difference to customers? Then the next thing is get the right talent so that they are on board with that and they’ve got that great combination of, using Lencioni’s words, hungry, humble, smart, get the right talent, and then coaching to the numbers and the purpose, so you have that quantitative, qualitative coaching structure. If you think about that, that’s something. If I am a sales manager here with a team of three or five or however many, I don’t have to wait for a Conrad Hilton or a Frank. Now, if you want to, you could, but I don’t have to wait for that. I can do that right now myself as a sales leader.
The last thing that I want to go to is think about sales reps themselves. We have a lot of people listening to this who may be going, “Well, I’m not even the manager.” What is one thing that a seller could do right now? I want to tip the hand a little bit because you told me about, as a child reading Conrad Hilton’s book and being so inspired by it. Having known you now for several years, I see that through line in your whole career of being inspired by that original sense of purpose, that original vision, and you’ve brought it to everything that you’ve done. Using that as a frame, what is one action step that just, I’m listening to this, I’m a sales rep. Tell us a couple things. What should that seller do if they’re not 10-year-old Frank reading this book from the founder?
Frank Passanante: The advice is actually really simple, but I think it’s super powerful, and I think you helped us bring this to light when we were talking to reps, that you’ve got to find what energizes you, what your personal noble purpose is first. You really do. Then you need to understand how it connects to your company’s mission and to your work. It isn’t that hard, because we play these games, these exercises where you start pulling yourself out of the equation. What happens if I didn’t do that? What happens if I didn’t do that? How would that have impacted the customer or not impacted the customer? You start to see how your work actually connects and matters. But you need to understand what your noble purpose is and connect it there. If it’s misaligned, that’s okay. Seek something else. You don’t have to stay in a place where it doesn’t work. Seek a better fit.
Purpose is a North Star, it’s a compass, and when it’s aligned, it becomes that source of energy. It should align with where you get energy and it should align with your ability even through volatile times like we’re dealing with today, the economy and everything else. It should provide for resilience. It gives you that resilience necessary to persevere and ultimately to see sustained ongoing performance success.
I guess closely aligned with that is adopt an always-learning mindset, is what I say to everybody. If I’m talking to reps, just be committed to always learning. There’s nothing more critical in my view, is being open-minded, realizing that the world is changing fast. Seek out mentors, read voraciously all of Lisa’s books, of course, and ask for feedback. Coaching is about wanting to be better. A coaching mindset is wanting feedback and wanting to be better tomorrow than you were today. Don’t just listen to the feedback, act on it, do something. Those are some of the things that I would share.
Fred Diamond: I want to thank Lisa Earle McLeod and Frank Passanante with Hilton. I could probably talk for an hour on my takeaways from what I’ve heard today. Lisa, I remember when we first discovered your book in 2013, 2014, and we brought you to speak in Northern Virginia to the, what we were then called, the Institute for Excellence in Sales. It was such a poignant message to the B2B and B2G sales professionals that have been a part of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. I’d be remiss not to mention your other book, Leading with Noble Purpose, and of course the second version of Selling with Noble Purpose, where you filled in a lot of the blanks as well. This has given me a deeper understanding, although I thought I knew it pretty well, and I’ve read your book at least a half a dozen times.
Frank, I’d be remiss to say also that Hilton is an Institute for Effective Professional Selling Premier Sales Employer, which is one of our designations, Premier Sales Employer. Of the 650 that you’ve been recognized, the one that we’re most proud of is the Premier Sales Employer, and we analyze and review hundreds of selling organizations.
The other message too is I’ve gotten to know a number of the sales leaders and professionals at Hilton over the last couple of years. Gerilyn Horan received our Women in Sales Leadership Award, and we got to know a lot of your people. I’m just thinking to myself, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” all of what you’re talking about here, and I’m reflecting back to our original interview, some of the things that you brought up, with having rooms for role plays, like the ongoing coaching, which not every selling organization does.
The last thing is, besides purpose, one of the big words that we talked about all the time on the close to 800 episodes of the Sales Game Changers Podcast is value. The value that you’re bringing to your customer that they may need a year from now, or down the road, that they don’t even know. It’s not even on their radar. The stuff that you’ve done with finding best practices and how to produce best events, and then bringing them to your customer before they even ask for it. Any of your customers can type into ChatGPT, “How do I run a great event?” and it’ll throw off tons of things. But the point that a sales professional can bring things to them that they might not have ever thought about, specifically for them and for their customer, because you have that deep understanding of purpose than your people do, is really what sets Hilton apart.
Once again, I want to thank Lisa Earle McLeod and Frank Passanante. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo