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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Optimal Sales Mindset Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Fred Diamond on January 21, 2021. It featured Leadership Expert and Author of “Unstuck” Craig Lemasters.]
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CRAIG’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “To get unstuck, first clearly define the destination. I like a roadmap because again, I think we get stuck along the road and that’s why you see these curves so we’ve got to define the destination. These curves actually are wisdom gaps so along the way. So to be best-in-class in strategic selling, the wisdom buckets are things like, “Do I really have a defined process and metrics?,” “Do I really have a culture of accountability around these topics in terms of incentives and goal setting?,” “Do I really communicate a unique selling proposition in an effective way?”
Fred Diamond: The topic today is getting unstuck. Craig, I did a LinkedIn poll today where the question was, “How long does it take you to get unstuck on the odd occasions that you find yourself stuck?” First option was, “I never get stuck, Fred” and only 4% said that. Next was, “Minutes, I have the power to get unstuck”, 40% said that. “It’s hard, maybe a few hours”, 35% and 21 people were honest, they said, “Longer than that.” Craig Lemasters, it’s great to have you here, it’s good to see you, I’m excited to hear this. A lot of reasons for people to get stuck but there’s even better reasons for people to get past that and move onto what’s possible, right?
Craig Lemasters: Absolutely, thanks for having me first of all, Fred. Love your work and I do come in here with a little bit of bias because of all the leadership and different topics I get to work with, sales is #1 on my list, it’s what I grew up in. I got to run a big company, it’s my background and really where my heart is so thanks so much for having me on and I loved your survey, great data to dive into some of my wacky stuck/unstuck methodologies. Love being here today, thank you.
Fred Diamond: Let’s get started, people are anxious to know what they can do.
Craig Lemasters: It’s important to level set what in the world I mean by stuck and then how we get unstuck and my methodology. If we dive in, the first thing is just a question for you and your audience, if you just jot this down real quick, what’s your go-to piece of business advice? I believe we all have one or two that we go to every day and even more importantly, I want to know where you learned it. I’ll get back to this at the end real quick but this is really important.
The next thing is just a quick perspective check on where I’m coming from. You have wonderful guests on here, a lot of academic folks that give advice, consultings and my perspective hopefully is a little bit of a unique mix and its pure operator advice. I got a chance to run a big company for 11 years – or as I say, 44 quarters because it’s a public company. Then later in life I decided to take this amazing thing that people taught me, I didn’t make this stuff up, I was taught it and it worked. I decided to go help other leaders that I think get stuck and just to start with, I just believe that every leader, if we’re candid about it, no matter what field we’re leading, we do get stuck. I’ll give you my definition but I’d like to start with this simple circle of stuff, as I call it. A lot of people ask me, “I get your definition but how do I know if I’m stuck?” and this is just me, I’m not suggesting this is you or your organization. These are just some symptoms of how I see organizations, how I got stuck and whenever we’re trying to do new stuff – that’s a technical term for adjacencies or new distribution or whatever – that’s when we get stuck the most. I would argue that during the pandemic especially, if you look at the McKinsey data, 75% of leaders say that they’re not only stuck, to use my vernacular, but they don’t really have a pathway out of it post-COVID. I would say that’s stuck.
How do we know? Here are some symptoms that I found. When we get stuck we’re trying to do the new stuff, first thing we do is have meetings – everybody has meetings, nothing wrong with meetings but it tends to pile up. There’s a mountain of priorities, we copy lots of people. If you’ve ever seen that phenomena in email, I had a CEO interrupt me when I was showing this not long ago. He says, “Craig, I didn’t think my organization was stuck, now I do because I just saw an email and there were 357 cc’s on the email.” I’m like, “That’s pretty interesting, how many people need to know?” Of course they don’t, but we get frustrated with that, we tend to go outside, we use consultants, nothing wrong with that, very academic, may not give us the answer. There’s one of my favorites though, Fred, we start the buzz word salad. When you really know you’re stuck, look at your sales organization, are you creating a new terminology? I did, it’s what our organization did.
The last piece is we get to the dreaded part where we say, “We’re going to go to this new place and we’re going to start assigning it to people, who owns it?” You’ll see my age now because I’ll describe it as the moonwalk, that’s pretty risky. We start moonwalking like I’m super risk-averse but these are some symptoms. How I describe it is again, this next picture will give you a sense, where we usually get stuck is our core. Whatever you’re working on and we’re trying to go to new stuff, it’s this gap in between that we get stuck on. When we’re working in our core, same distribution, same sales methodology, whatever it might be which is usually pretty okay but we’ve got to do new stuff. By the way, we’ve got to go do a bunch of new stuff, that’s when we get stuck. My second question to you all as leaders is what is our #1 job whether we’re leading the whole organization or if we’re leading a sales organization? The question is what is our job?
I think that there’s lots of definitions of our #1 job as a leader, mine is we have to make choices. When I think about getting unstuck, and this is context for everything I’ll talk about in the next 30 minutes, it’s simply then answering this question: how can I move faster with confidence to make these tough choices? Make them faster and more effective. I would argue that I found no other methodology than these few simple things I’ll share with you the next couple minutes to do this and that’s my goal, to help leaders move faster, make better, more effective choices and I think it’s driven by confidence. The question becomes how do we drive confidence? Here’s the formula, this is the famous intersection in Atlanta, if any of your viewers have ever been to Atlanta you will recognize this, this is the Spaghetti Junction in 1970. It is under construction and the good news is it’s still under construction so it doesn’t look any different but it’s the famous intersection and here’s the formula that I’ve worked everything off of.
My definition of wisdom, this is the secret sauce I want to share with your audience today is to maybe think about wisdom a little differently in the context of your sales leadership role, that is this unique intersection of both knowledge and experience. Please keep that headset because what I’m going to try to present to you is that if you interject the right wisdom based on knowledge and experience and the right thing that you’re stuck on – I call them swim lanes of wisdom – you will get unstuck faster than you’ve ever imagined and your confidence will soar, you’ll make those choices even faster.
I want to give you just two minutes on how I think about this journey and a lot of the responses on the survey that you put out actually already address this. To get unstuck, we first of all have to clearly define the destination. I like a roadmap because again, I think we get stuck along the road and that’s why you see these curves so we’ve got to define the destination. These curves actually are for me these wisdom gaps so along the way, to get to that B I’ve got to do some new stuff and that’s where we run into trouble, it’s where I ran into trouble. What I want to suggest to you is what do we do when we find these wisdom gaps? You’ll see up in the far right there I like to draw everything in an ecosystem, I’m a very visual person so all I want to do is put the B in the middle. Whatever your B is, start thinking about it, what is that goal, what is that destination that you’re trying to do? Put it in the middle and the next thing I want you to do is just start to populate it with the imperatives. What are the circles, the bubbles of knowledge and experience that you have to have to get to B? Let me show you a quick example of what I mean and I did one just for strategic sales. Again, this is something I’m super passionate about, I love the topic, we do tons of work around it now. And again, I just made up these bubbles because they’re important to me when I think about strategic selling, yours are whatever they are. For me, to be best-in-class in strategic selling, the wisdom buckets are things like, “Do I really have a defined process and metrics?”, “Do I really have a culture of accountability around these topics in terms of incentives and goal setting?”, “Do I really communicate a unique selling proposition in an effective way?”
Again, you probably have tons of others that are important to you but this is just as an example. The question I want everybody to ask is an honest assessment and we actually play a probability game with our clients here saying, “Based on my B, if I want to be best-in-class however you define that, when I look at sales process and concrete metrics, what’s the probability that I have all of the knowledge and experience today either me or my team to get to B?” We usually play this probability game and I’ll tell you, if it’s an aggressive B, aggressive new stuff, the probability is usually less than 50%. Here’s the key, we have to have the humility to admit that I don’t have that swim lane of knowledge and experience. If we move on, if you buy into this then how do we fill the wisdom gaps? Here’s the cool part, one, it’s not that hard and the wisdom is all around us. It’s about being intentional to go find it, if you look at point four, let’s go find some operators. Again, you’ll notice I use the word operator, not necessarily academia or consultants, they play a great role but aren’t there some operators either in my network or somebody else’s network that if I’m super intentional, I go back to that one bubble, metrics around this, USP, there are people that have gone before us that have amazing wisdom. What we do is basically encourage people and do it for them if they need help, but you can do this on your own, to go out and be specific.
If I look at my ecosystem, if you look on the left there – and this is about defining a sales process with concrete message – what is the knowledge and experience that would help me that I don’t have? Let’s be humble enough to admit it. This is actually the profile, you see the little picture up there? I want you to go find that person. Again, lots of techniques to go do that, we have a methodology we use but you can do that yourself, it’s a sales group. We don’t the time and the intentionality to go find that specific wisdom, we do lots of networking, we go to networking events. I would argue if I want to go find that USP person that has the wisdom to do this, if I’m going to a networking event, that’s pretty hard to find. There’s ways to go to this intentionally and I can promise you this, I can’t promise you that everybody will adopt this thinking, Fred, but I can promise you this works. It worked for me and my company on digital transformation on our strategic sales when I ran a big company, we’ve had the luxury of working across 12 industries, hundreds of different topics and the methodology works if you’ll absorb it and be humble enough.
The last thing I’ll show you is this is how I connect the dots, if you think about this making choices, what is it that drives our confidence? Think about that for a second, when you’re really confident about something you’re an unstuck leader, meaning you move with that speed and agility and the quality decisions. We tend to get stuck with this confidence issue when we don’t have the wisdom, the knowledge and experience on that particular topic. Last thing is circle back to what you wrote down, here’s my card, I learned that I’ve got three go-to business principles. This idea about when people resign you should let them go, I won’t really focus on that, it’s incredible wisdom, I use it every day. What’s more important is who taught that to me, Kirk Landon, former founder of the company I grew up with and you talk about a guy that had knowledge and experience in his swim lane on how to manage people. All I’m suggesting is go find intentionally your Kirk Landons on that topic that you’re stuck on and you will blast through it. That’s what I’m up to if that’s helpful, you don’t even have to read the book now because you’ve got the whole story.
Fred Diamond: Craig, that was the fastest presentation that we’ve ever had. Let’s get into some details here, I want to go through the slide where you have the four suggestions. Let’s talk here about the B, here’s a couple of things some people are chiming in with. A number of people during my LinkedIn poll this morning said, “I just moved to the next project, if I’m stuck I move to the next project and that’s how I find myself getting unstuck.” Let’s talk about prioritization, if I’m a sales leader or a sales professional, the B is exceeding quota. Let’s talk about prioritization to figure out what you really need to get unstuck from. For example, you mentioned your comment there about Kirk, I’m going back to one of the notions which is that activity, a lot of people think that if they’re busy and active that’s going to help them reach their goal. In sales, not necessarily. It’s calling the right people and if you don’t have the best targets then everything you do is going to make you feel good but in theory it’s going to be a waste of time. First of all, let’s talk about what should be in that circle. Do you have a hundred circles? Do you have one, do you have three? Give us some advice on that.
Craig Lemasters: You said the magic number. We’ve had a chance to work with all sized companies, Fred, I ran a pretty big company, multinational, all over the world and I love the number three. If you show me an organization, I don’t care if it’s a sales organization or any part of a company that has more than three priorities, I call them destinations but if you have more than three then you’re just being average at a bunch of stuff. This is an important step and again, usually we drill down pretty deep on this. What I love is some people already know this, sales leaders have a super well-defined B, most don’t, though. You said something very important, we would rather work off of lots of activity, that’s why I did the circle of stuck. If you think about the circle of stuck, it’s just activity, it’s work that makes us feel good but it actually doesn’t impact B. My recommendation is get in the room and don’t leave, with your leadership team, until we’ve agreed on one, two, at the most three of these destinations and that’s it.
One other quick idea here and this is really important to me right now during COVID. This is the single biggest cause of stress in organizations right now, I believe, it’s not scientific but hundreds of hundreds of conversations with C-suiters and this is the biggest stress. What we’ve really done is pile on activity during COVID because it’s been really hard so we think more activity is better, and we all agree everybody is super stressed out. I have leaders that have stood up in front of the organization – virtually – and said, “No more, there’s only one, two or three things that matter right now.” By the way, it’s cascading through the organization especially in sales right now. It’s just too easy to say, “Go make a hundred calls versus ten because we’ll feel better.” It goes the other way now, great leaders are going to make more choices right now and I’ve seen companies even in the last month de-stress their employees remarkably by standing up and saying, “No more, there’s one, two things that we care about and this is what we’re going to work on.” I promise you, you will hear the hissing sound of de-stress, it’s not having a virtual happy hour on Friday. There’s nothing wrong with that, but virtual happy hour on Friday and you still have to go back to a hundred priorities, still stressed so it’s a really important topic.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point, in 2020 everybody was experimenting, nobody knew, everyone was trying to figure things out. The virtual happy hour is a great example where everybody was doing virtual happy hours, by November and December you have all these employees who were drunk or suffering [laughs].
Craig Lemasters: That’s a different problem [laughs].
Fred Diamond: Nicky says – “Excellent point, but what if I disagree with my company’s B?” That’s an interesting point right now and you raised a really good point. I remember in the very beginning of the pandemic people were saying, “Go make a hundred phone calls.” Meanwhile, there was nobody to talk to because everybody was dealing with their version of making a hundred phone calls. Here we are, again we’re doing today’s show in January, if you’re listening to this as a Sales Game Changers podcast in the future you could probably understand. Back to Nicky’s question, what if you disagree? That’s an interesting question I want to ask you since you deal with leaders a lot. How do you suggest leaders communicate with their teams right now? Particularly sales leaders because they haven’t seen them in person in 9 months in most cases. Everything is like this via Zoom or phone call, you miss a lot, as we all know, having that being next to each other as a human being.
Craig Lemasters: Absolutely and I’ll tell you this, Fred. What I’m saying is a tremendous separation in great leaders and not so great leaders – in some cases really bad leaders. I think when we’re in crisis times it is going to separate us, that’s point #1 and that’s happening and I hope Nicky is not in that other bucket but she might be and that’s a real problem. What great leaders are doing right now is actually the opposite of communicating too much, they’re listening more than ever, they’re listening to what Nicky’s real issues are, what the real sales environment is, what the real expectation should be. If I think a hundred calls is just better and Nicky tells me, “We’re not talking with more than 10 people this month and this is why”, the great leaders are listening to that and we’re completely recalibrating what our expectations or goals are. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to do worse necessarily, usually it means the opposite but I would encourage anybody that’s got the Nicky situation is to have that candid conversation with their leader right now and say, “Now is the time to listen, we’re the ones that have the heartbeat of this and we understand what’s going on.”
I’ll just tell you one frame, I love visuals and things and I call it the ugly baby conversation. It’s a little bizarre, I will tell you, but it’s always stuck in my mind. Great leaders now are willing to talk at the heart level with people and listen at the heart level to the degree of, “I’m okay telling somebody they have an ugly baby.” How many of us on this call right now have gone to a party, our friend had a baby, we get in the car with our friend or our spouse to drive home and we look at each other and go, “By the way, that was an ugly baby.” Now, the baby is going to grow out of that and all people become beautiful but we do that. I use that example because that’s what organizations have to be doing today, we have to be candid enough to literally say, “Fred, that’s an ugly baby.” “Well, it’s Nicky’s ugly baby.” We’ve got a mismatch in our goals here, your expectation is here, mine’s here or maybe it’s just different, it’s not above or below. Again, candid with your leader, great leaders are going to step up and listen more and we’ve got to have the ugly baby conversation, that’s my advice.
Fred Diamond: We had a guest on the Optimal Sales Mindset in December named Shelly Row where we talked about deeper listening. Give us a minute or two on your advice for sales leaders on how to be a better listener. It’s probably preparation, maybe a little more but listening comes up as the #1 skill for all sales leaders, give us some of your thoughts on how they can get better at that.
Craig Lemasters: I have one go-to, Fred and it’s worked for me and it’s all I’ve got. There’s a lot of theories on this, it may be even better practices but especially in sales I call it the heart level conversations. I want to know how people that are the closest to the market and the closest to the customer are feeling, that may sound sappy and, “Why do we talk about feelings at work?” or whatever, I want to know how you’re feeling about it. I don’t care as much about the tactical part and this is probably heresy in some ways, even the metrics because if these are good salespeople, let’s just assume they are and good sales leadership, they have the best and most accurate feeling for the marketplace, the customers, the environment and I want to know how they’re feeling. I’m not doing that as a leader, they are so what I always lead with is that, “I want to know what you’re thinking but more importantly, I want to know what you’re feeling.” Part of that is driven by – I don’t know why, I’ve always asked this question – is how energized are you to get up every day and go do this right now? That was a hard question the last 9 months and I got some very odd looks from people that we coach and help like, “You want me to ask them that?” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s pretty important.” It’s okay if 90% say, “I don’t feel great getting up” but that opens the door to this heart level conversation of why, why not? The last part is please, leaders, ask, “How do I help you?” What better time to be helping? That’s what I’m supposed to be doing as a leader to begin with, so stop telling for a minute and start asking, “What do I do to help you be a little more successful in a really hard time?” It’s really those two things that I would lead with.
Fred Diamond: We have a question here from Ben in the DC area. Ben wants to know – and once again, this is the Optimal Sales Mindset which is what he’s referring to – “How do I keep my mindset optimal? What are Craig’s opinions for that?” Let’s talk about that for a little bit. You’ve got this beautiful slide here with how to implement best-in-class strategic selling capabilities and define metrics and obviously all those things are critical, but this is the Optimal Sales Mindset webinar. It’s still a trick time for leaders and for individuals because I know you’re down in Puerto Rico, you’re meeting with some clients but not everybody is. We have some people watching today’s webinar who I know aren’t going to be leaving their houses for at least six months to do work. What are some of your thoughts on how to be the best professional right now with all the challenges that we’re facing?
Craig Lemasters: I was passionate about my unstuck work and wisdom based learning before the pandemic, we’ve been doing this a while, I’m even more passionate now because there’s nothing that I have found that helps us optimize more – whether it’s selling, Strategic Selling, finance, M&A, I don’t care about the topic – than having facilitated preferably but direct conversations with wise people that have gone before us. The challenge right now, what I see anyways is confidence is shattered, this is super hard and there are people that have been before us. I’m old enough, I’ve been through some other crisis, we were torn up by hurricane Andrew in Miami, lost a whole company, the financial crisis, there’s been other crisis. Get on the phone, get on Zoom back to that swim lane of wisdom, what are you struggling with? And here’s why this exercise that you have up right now is so important, it’s really simple, but I would really almost beg your viewers right now to put these bubbles and just jot those things down. What knowledge and experience would help you today? Then go find that person, they are everywhere and they’re usually right around us but we never look at it this way. I can tell you there’s nothing more – and this is feedback over the last 4 years that drives people’s confidence and then ultimately performance – than these wisdom based learning conversations. It will encourage you than nothing before and there’s no better time to do it. The McKinsey study is really good if you guys want to look it up, it actually talks about this that I can’t do it on my own right now, it’s too complicated, it’s too hard, I’ve got to find people that have done this. I’m like, “Wait a minute, you just described our little business model.” That’s what I’d recommend.
Fred Diamond: Craig, let’s talk about this question. We have a question here from Gunther and I know Gunther, he’s a relatively new sales professional, he’s with a large company but he’s in that BDR/SDR role. He says, “How do I avoid looking stupid when I ask for these types of advice? We have a lot of young people, people who are early in their sales career. You and I understand this, but talk a little bit about the breakthroughs that you get in asking people for specific advice, even how people would like to be approached so that the Gunthers can get past that fear.
Craig Lemasters: I love that question, Gunther and it’s so important. It’s not just for young people, a lot of our clients are leaders more my age that are running companies and they have the same challenge. I actually put a whole chapter in the book because it’s so important to me on this and it’s this topic of humility, Fred. I really encourage people to study humility whether it’s the little thing that I wrote or anybody, but it’s the #1 thing that prevents us from wisdom based learning. We have to be humble enough to start, when I do these bubbles let just pick one, I don’t have a lot of knowledge and experience on incentive plans from a sales manager, just be humble enough to admit it, #1. #2, be very specific of what you’re asking people. Do your homework, go through this exercise and just take a few notes and then go find the right people, go to your network or to our network or somebody’s network and find the right person and here’s the fun part, this is what I love about our business model. Most people love sharing their wisdom and they don’t get asked in the right way, so be specific in the ask. “I’ve read about you, I’ve seen you, you’re Fred, you’re on TV all the time. You know more about sales incentive than anybody I’ve ever known, would you spend 20 minutes on the phone with me helping me understand it?” You’ll get 90%+ of the people say yes even if you don’t know them. How do I know that? We do it every day in our practice and those same people want to come back and do more work with us because they’re blown away, they’re like, “I love sharing my wisdom, nobody ever asked me or if they do ask me, they don’t ask me in the right way.”
Fred Diamond: What I tell a lot of young people too is, “Go find out who your dad is a friend of, who some of the friends are of your parents because there’s probably somebody who’s in sales, one of your dad’s friends or your mom’s friends who’s successful in sales.” They’re like, “Yeah, I didn’t realize this.”
Craig Lemasters: Let me just take that one step further, we’re in sales so what better way to practice a little bit of boldness than pick up the phone? I do something and it was probably on my last slide there, I put my cellphone number, I put my reach out number, I don’t charge for any of this now in COVID, I want to help people. You would be shocked at how few people actually text me and say, “I saw that, you offered to do this, will you do it?” And I’ve talked to people and they’re like, “I was afraid to do that, I didn’t think you’d have time” and I said I would help you. People want to do this so go find your father’s friend or your mother’s friend, they’ll help you. Ask them in the right way, do the research and know about them, there’s no excuse not to know about them with LinkedIn and other methods now.
Fred Diamond: By the way, if you do call up your father’s friends or your mother’s, call them “mister Lemasters”, they’re not quite “Craig.” I love when my son or my daughter’s friends reach out to me and it’s happened and I always chuckle when they call me by my first name, call me Mr. Diamond. Anyway, I have a couple other quick questions that are coming in here, this is an interesting question, this comes in from Marsha and she’s up in New York. Craig, the question here is, “What are leaders really struggling with right now?” That’s an interesting question and it’s not an obvious question. We actually had a great guest back in May, his name is David Morelli and David said everybody on the planet is dealing with three things: getting past COVID, the health, the being at home. Secondly, everybody’s dealing with the financial repercussions of the pandemic and everybody is dealing with a third thing, whatever it might be, your company, something personal, whatever the third thing might be, something impacting your industry. Give us a little bit of insight, you deal with leaders every day, you’ve built your career working with leaders. We’ve got a couple dozen people watching the webinar, we’re going to have thousands listening to the podcast and watching on LinkedIn. Give us a little deeper insight into what leaders are struggling with right now and I’m not asking that as an obvious ignorant question, “Well, it’s COVID, Fred.” Give us a little more insight so when we have the sales professionals approaching their leaders like we instructed them to do 15 minutes ago, they’ll have a better context in how to have that conversation.
Craig Lemasters: I love that. #1 thing I hear and I hear it every day, it’s why I’m here with a big client in Puerto Rico right now is, “How do I grow coming out of COVID?” #1 topic unless you’re just fortunate and happen to be on Amazon or whatever that is doubling during this but most of us aren’t. I would turn that around, as a salesperson I think USP is more important than ever. If you can show up with a real unique selling proposition that specifically can help somebody grow out of COVID, not even normal, whatever that might be – and again, those bubbles are important there because I would even say do that with clients. We teach this actually as a sales tool with people, “Let’s talk about your B, you want to grow 15% next year, okay.” Show up with the USP, #1. The growth is one bucket, Fred, the second bucket that leaders are struggling with is around communication and again, you don’t realize it but about half of the leaders out there – and there’s a lot of data on this – really aren’t comfortable and great communicators. They know the financials but now it’s more important than ever to communicate so it’s two pieces of it, it’s volume of communication but it’s also something you started with which is we have to prioritize that. I’m in sales now and what we teach is pay attention when you see those priorities of an organization and that’s what I’m selling to because that communication is incredibly hard and incredibly important. It’s like they’re giving us a gift right now and if you look at what most companies are doing, they’re being more candid, the good ones are being more candid than ever about where they’re falling short, what their needs are. All this stuff as salespeople that we have to drag out of people, a lot of them are just saying it now so pay attention to the communication and then use that as we really create a unique selling proposition, a unique offering or whatever business you’re in. Those would be my two buckets to focus on.
Fred Diamond: I just want to make one quick comment, you asked the question before about your guiding doctrine for business and people have heard this before. Mine is, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right” and of course it’s attributed to Henry Ford. The other one that I love is, “Keep moving forward” which was taken from a Martin Luther King speech. I want to thank you, Craig, I want to thank your team, I want to thank Megan and Keri Childers for introducing us. Your website is craiglemasters.com and the book is Unstuck. If you’re listening to this webinar or listening to the podcast, do what Craig said, reach out to him, LinkedIn to him, LinkedIn to me if you haven’t already, we’d love to be able to help you out. Craig, I just want to acknowledge one quick thing before I ask you for your final thought. You may or may not know this but when Keri Childers introduced us, we did some research and got to see who we had in common. I want to let you know in case you don’t know this, you’ve affected tens of thousands of not just sales professionals but business professionals with the work that you’ve done to help them not just get unstuck but take their business to the next level. Everyone’s got challenges, even prior to COVID, even though 2020 was going to be everybody’s best year, everybody’s got issues that they have to deal with. I want to acknowledge you not just for the book but for the work that you’ve done to help tens of thousands of leaders achieve their goals, improve their lives and improve the lives of their customers and the people who work on their team. Give us a final thought, give us an action step, more specifically, something that our listeners can do to take their sales career to the next level.
Craig Lemasters: I would just beg you to take out a pen as soon as we’re done, circle in the middle, write your B on there. If the B is not clear then talk to your leaders and get clarity in B and then have the humility to drive those wisdom buckets. As I do it all day long, it doesn’t have to be a fancy slide, draw the circles and then just go find those people. I love what Fred said, I’ll probably plagiarize this – it won’t be plagiarism because I’m telling you I’m doing it, but it might be your parent’s friends, they’re right around you. If you do the bubbles, you’ll find them and it will change the way you think about learning, your confidence will soar and I promise you’re going to get unstuck on whatever it is. Get that pen out and draw some circles.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo