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Today’s show featured an interview with Dan Carusi, Head of Client Success at Sandler. He also leads equine-based leadership retreats for executives.
Find Dan on LinkedIn.
DAN’S TIP: “Many people split into fear, uncertainty, and doubt that really holds them back from being their best at what they do. Don’t fall into that trap. It is a mindset. The world’s kind of crazy today but be on guard for not slipping and you’re letting your mindset slip into that FUD. If you’re pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, you’re going to break the FUD cycle. They do go hand in hand.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m talking today with Dan Carusi, and he’s involved with the enterprise sales side of Sandler, and we met to talk about that. Dan, a lot of times when people think about Sandler, they think about the franchise model and how people have franchise Sandler models all over the country, possibly the world. You’re part now of the team that’s bringing on enterprise sales training solutions.
I want to let people know, I’m going to give them a little bit of a taste of what we’re going to be talking about. When we met to talk about that, we started talking about both of our loves of horses. You talked about something that you do in the area of equine learning. It’s a fascinating thing that we’re going to be talking about today.
We’re going to be talking about how you’ve done some programs for sales and business leaders to get them up on horses and how that has helped with things like problem solving and creative thinking, et cetera. We’re going to get deeper into that, but why don’t you give us a brief introduction? Like I said, I don’t think many people think of Sandler as being an enterprise sales training solution. Give us a little bit of an insight into that as well.
Dan Carusi: It’s a pleasure to be here and the opportunity to share what we’re doing at Sandler and to talk about horses. I think I’m equally passionate about both, so I’m happy to have the opportunity to talk to both topics.
It’s interesting when you think of Sandler and where we are. They have such a deep history of sales training and known in the marketplace for the Sandler sales system and the training they do to help sales people and organizations be successful. But they’ve really been on a transformation and evolution over a period of time, which is why I was excited to jump in there and work with Sandler to help them in this transformation.
I joined back in February as Head of Customer Success and implementing an account management function in support of the larger sales effort. Now we look at Sandler, we think of not just sales training, but sales performance solutions. That’s really the shift that the company’s been making working with its customers.
I think the unique differentiator we’re seeing out there now is moving to more a data-driven approach that’s going to deliver measurable results. What I mean by that is being much more targeted around who are the top performers, who are the high potentials, who are the under performers, and developing performance solutions specific to those different audiences. But then baselining it against an organization’s KPIs and their metrics that they’re helping to measure success against, so we can obviously track progress, but then also help them demonstrate an ROI on the investment.
For many years, sales training was, “Hey, it’s great content. Trust us, you’re going to see an uplift in sales and bookings. It’s all going to work out well,” but it was very hard to demonstrate that success. This data-driven approach allows that to happen now. I think that’s a game changer in the sales performance and sales training. It helps sales enablement, it helps sales leaders say, “Yeah, it’s working. It’s having an impact and we’re getting the outcomes that we’re looking for,” and maybe we should do more in specific areas where we’re starting to see that improvement and uptick that they’re looking for.
Fred Diamond: You can’t just bring someone in and have them teach for a day or two anymore. You need the consistency. You need to understand what’s working, what’s not working, and what modalities. There’s a lot more available to sales professionals now.
What are some of the biggest challenges that are facing sales leaders right now? At the enterprise, at the B2B companies that we’re talking about?
Dan Carusi: There’s a couple consistent themes we see at the enterprise level. The one on the digital sales process, and I’m referring to the technology stacks that so many enterprise organizations have invested into over a period of time. Now they’re trying to justify the investment on those technologies and the value they bring. I’m very skeptical about implementing new technologies and actually going back saying, “Do we need to reduce that tech stack or do things differently?” When you start to look at it, it impacts their sales processes and how they go to market and their overall sales process approach.
The second one is, when you think of a world now where it’s more cross-functional collaborative efforts team selling to be able to support large customers and large projects, identifying, attracting, and developing that talent to be able to do that. The lone wolf approach to selling doesn’t exist at the enterprise level anymore. Probably went away a long time ago. How do you find someone that thrives in that collaborative effort to do so?
Then you look at the modern buyer and the buying process, much more complex than it’s ever been, the number of decision makers and stakeholders involved in it. We need to develop and find the talent that can navigate this complex buying and buying committee environment. That’s not so easy for enterprise accounts to do. But then you look at, I mentioned sales enablement earlier, they continue to struggle to connect their efforts to real world results.
Sales enablement picked up all this momentum and organizations started building out a sales enablement team. I was part of that in a previous role, leading that effort. Now, CEOs and CROs are starting to ask, “What impact is it having? Is it helping sales sell more, helping buyers buy more?” They’re struggling to make that connection. Now we see a lot of restructuring and changes within the sales enablement world.
Then I think the last theme that’s pretty consistent is the cost of capital. The cost of building out big sales teams is higher than it’s ever been. We see this pressure where organizations are trying to sell with less. They’re reducing the size of their sales teams to be able to afford the capital, but then they’re putting more pressure on them to deliver results, creating that need to get them upskilled and get them the right behaviors, attitudes, and techniques they need to be successful. I think that’s where Sandler can come in and help start addressing these common themes we’re seeing at the enterprise level.
Fred Diamond: You’re also an expert on experiential and equine learning, and I love horses. We also are both from Philadelphia, so we talked about cheesesteaks in our initial meeting and conversation. I went with my daughter cross country, and I live in Northern Virginia, as do you, and my daughter and I drove across the state highways to Chicago. We made our way to Claiborne Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. I’ve always been fascinated by horses. I’ve made road trips around the country to look at them.
I mentioned that to you and you mentioned another big part of your life, which is this equine learning, and how you take business and sales leaders to just figure out how to get better at their business life, whatever it might be, by getting up on a horse and riding a horse. Talk about what exactly is experiential and equine learning, and if that’s the right way to talk about it. Just tell us how it works, and let’s see if this makes sense for some of the people listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Dan Carusi: It’s the right way to frame it, experiential learning and experiential equine learning. The work that I do through my other part of my life, Red Paint Consulting, is experiential learning base. Meaning we will take leaders, we’ll take sales leaders, we’ll take teams looking to improve performance, and we’ll put them in environments that’s outside their comfort zone. That could include outdoor adventures or more specifically horses. I have a horse farm. We have five horses on it. Anyone that has horses know they cost a lot of money. I’m trying to figure out how can I make them earn their money and put them to work.
I started studying the impact of equine therapeutic services, that type of model in the corporate world. I partnered up with The HERD Institute. I received my certification for equine-facilitated learning and assisted learning through The HERD Institute. I started partnering with organizations and leaders to work with horses.
When you think of experiential, it’s learning by doing, but with reflection. Then when you add horses to it, you’re now partnering with horses as part of that program. What I do is I really facilitate the space between the participant and the horse. The horse really is a co-facilitator. They are a partner in this process. By no means are they a tool or something we use for the learning.
Now we have this opportunity to build out these programs where we’ll put teams, either individual leaders or we’ll put leadership teams, sales leaders, teams, and even individual, I had an inside sales team come through and had great success with them, really working with the horses. There’s two approaches to it. There is opportunity to ride horses. There’s ranches I have partnerships with where we can go out and take a team and we can do facilitated trail riding and do events and activities out there. Then what I do on the farm is on-the-ground activities, where it’s a couple people or a team or one-on-one with a horse, on-the-ground activities, learning from the horse. That’s the unique feature to it.
Fred Diamond: When I was doing some research into this for the interview, I read things where it said that equine learning helps leaders with things like decision making and problem solving, creative and critical thinking, self-awareness, empathy. Empathy comes up on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. If we had done the Sales Game Changers Podcast 25 years ago with Sandler staff, I don’t think empathy would ever be uttered, even though it’s probably the most important thing in the history of sales. It’s the number one thing that people need to be conscious of. But we’re talking about things like empathy and then the horse also can help with communication, interpersonal skills, coping with emotions and stress. How does it work?
Let’s say they’re on the ground, are they in a stall mucking it or something? What are some of the things that you do on ground? Then what are some of the things that you do as they’re taking a horse on a trail? I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think I’ve been on a horse in like 35 years, maybe 40 years, but I just love looking at a beautiful horse. You live in horse country in Virginia. I live not far from there. Sometimes I’ll just get in my car and just go drive out to Middleburg, approach the Appalachian, the Blue Ridge, whatever. Give us some insights into what this does and how it does it.
Dan Carusi: Let me start with what it looks like and why it’s so impactful, really from the moment people show up and start the program. We don’t share a lot of what we’re going to do as far as an activity standpoint with the participant. We want them to come in a little anxious, a little nervous, not sure what to expect, coming out of their comfort zone, frankly. They’ll show up a little nervous, asking a lot of questions. We’ll walk down to the barn. We don’t necessarily introduce them to the horses right away, which keeps them a little on edge. Think about it, if you haven’t been around a 1,000- or 1,200-pound animal, that can be pretty intimidating. They’re a big animal and they’ve got a strong spirit and a mind of their own, and they’re a living being, they’re going to do what they do.
We’ll start off with getting folks really in the present moment. We’ll just try to get everybody grounded. No cell phones, no technology, shut everything down. You have to be incredibly present in the moment. The reason for it is because how we show up is going to impact how the horse reacts and responds. That’s the first connection as a sales leader or salesperson when you relate that back to selling. How I show up is going to impact how my prospect or my customer is going to react. We got to be present in the moment and get focused.
We’ll then do a little education on leadership from the herd dynamics, how horses lead in the herd. A little about why we learn from the equine world and the horses. Then we’ll go introduce them and do a herd observation. We’ll have folks just look at the horses out in the field and start to look at which ones do they relate with, which ones do they feel a connection with, which one reminds them of an employee that they have on their team. We’ll just do a lot of reflection and debrief on it.
Then it gets interesting. We ask them to go out and catch a horse. They’ll have to go out and put a halter on a horse and bring it into the riding arena, and that starts the actual activities. Then we design the activities where they have to interact with the horse and partner with the horse to maybe move them across from point A to point B in the arena, put a halter on them, make them go through an obstacle, whatever that may be. They have to get to a point where they have trust, a bond, a relationship with the horse to respond with them. We’ll debrief throughout each activity because it really drives that self-awareness going, “Huh, okay. I think this happened because I was doing this.”
The interesting thing is, if you show up with negative energy, you’re going to get negative energy back from the horse. If you show up with positive energy, you’re going to get a positive response from the horse. If you don’t make that connection and that trust upfront, sounds like you have to do in sales, you have to make that trust and that relationship upfront, that horse will not do what you’re asking it to do. They will not move. You can’t move a 1,200-pound animal by force. They have to want to be part of the process to do it with you. That’s where you get real time feedback. They’re communicating to us at all times in a nonverbal way, and we have to be aware of what that communication is so we can adjust real time.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about the horse for a little bit. As I was thinking about this, this is going to be probably the most ‘duh’ statement I’ve ever made in the history of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, but horses have been around forever. They’re used in so many different ways. There’s horse racing, the beautiful thoroughbreds, and then they mate, they breed. I was driving recently somewhere, in Pennsylvania, Amish country, there are horse driven carts. I see police in DC on horses, and then you have all these various sizes. I live not far from Chincoteague where the beach is, and there’s wild horses. Rolling Stones, “Wild horses couldn’t take us away.”
Talk a little bit about the horses that you have. I’m going to guess, you don’t have wild horses. These horses I guess have been through the ringer, if you will. I like the analogy that you used. We talk about fear, getting past fear, and I had just done a subset of the Sales Game Changers with the author of Crossing the Zone of Fear. We talk about how once you get to the other side of fear, anything is possible.
You’re right, they’re 1,200-pound animals. They are beautiful when you get close to them. But I’ve asked a lot of people who care for horses, if the horses have their own personalities, and they all do. I’m going to guess the horses that you have are able to engage. You’re not going to have a wild untrained horse. You don’t want your sales people to get killed as they go through this. Talk about the personality of the horse. Are they in essence docile animals that respond? You mentioned if you go in without fear of them, they’re going to respond back in kind.
Dan Carusi: They’re definitely trained horses. We would never put anybody in the riding arena with a horse that we thought was going to be dangerous. With that said, each one has a personality. They have different personalities, they have different levels of energy. That energy will be determined by either us as humans and interacting with them, or something in the environment. Winds blowing, temperatures dropped, and it cooled off. There’s distractions on a farm next door, one of the other horses is acting up, their behavior will change with that.
But the unique thing in the relationship with the horses is the human horse connection, that they will find a way to connect with you. Even if you’re not a lover of horses and you’re not comfortable around them, they can sense where you are at that moment. Good or bad. If you’re bringing trauma with you, they may respond to that. A horse that typically would be standoffish may come up and nuzzle next to you, or may not.
What’s interesting about the programs, the same horse never acts the same way each program. My horse, Jake, who’s probably one of the most stubborn horses we have out of our five, many times I’ll put him out there just because I know he’s going to be difficult, so it’s going to be hard for the participants to connect with him. All of a sudden, I’ll see him walking over to somebody and responding to them, and I’m looking there at them going, “Well, he doesn’t do that that often.” There was some connection made, or he sensed something within that person that made him go over there.
The interesting thing on these programs is you can’t script them. We don’t know how that horse and person are going to interact. For what we’ve heard from people is the connection they made was very powerful and for some very overwhelming, that they were not prepared for that level of connections and emotions that they were going to feel. It came from that horse pulling those emotions and making them more vulnerable in that moment, which vulnerability, we talked about empathy, and vulnerability, as a leader, you need to be able to demonstrate that in front of your team and/or in any situation. The horses draw that out with that horse-human connection that we made.
Fred Diamond: Talk a little bit more about that. Talk about what the person’s going through. I’m sure when someone goes through a sales training program, we talked about the courses that you offer in the beginning, you could see where people get ideas. They were motivated by the trainer and they see the possibility and a new approach type of a thing. But you very rarely see people break down and cry with these amazing discoveries and a basic sales training class, but I can visualize that.
Talk a little more about that. I get the horse-human connection, but is it just the release of fear? Is it the visualization of what’s possible? Is it the realization of what might be stopping you in being successful? Give us some more thoughts on that.
Dan Carusi: From what I’ve seen, and I was a Chief Learning Officer for years and designed classroom-based training and leadership programs, but people show up with a wall and a barrier. That you have to present yourself a certain way. You can’t show any signs of weakness. You don’t want to share too much information with your peers or your direct reports. As leaders, we live in that space most of our careers. We don’t let our guard down.
Then you show up where you’re out of your comfort zone, you’re out of the boardroom, you’re out of the office building, you’re in a place that you don’t typically go to, and you’re working with horses that are non-judgmental. They don’t judge who you are. They don’t judge what you’ve done in the past. They don’t come in with any agenda about, “Hey, I’m going to make Fred’s life difficult today and I’m going to be hard.” They’re simply responding, reacting to who you are at that moment.
It teaches leaders to meet somebody or meet the horse where they are at that moment. To do so, it makes them break down and be themselves. They become authentic, and because they get a response from a horse, it’s nonjudgmental. That horse isn’t going to go back and say, “I can’t believe Dan said this or was acting this way.” This becomes this safe zone for them to start letting those emotions out and connecting with it.
I had a participant that went through the program and connected with Jake, and he called me weeks later and says, when he’s in the workplace, and he’s a C-level executive, that all his employees, they’re Jake to him. He looks at them and says, “How would Jake react if I said this or acted this way?” He’s applying that one-on-one connection with the horse to make him slow down and think before he speaks, and to think about what impact it’s going to have on people before he does it. You can’t do that in a typical leadership or sales leadership development program. That’s the power of that connection with the horse.
Fred Diamond: That’s an amazing way to describe it too, because we talk a lot about getting past fear. A lot of times we put meaning into our customer, especially one that’s difficult. We all talk about objections and how come they’re not calling me back? Or how come they didn’t respond to the five emails I just sent? They showed buying signs. While meanwhile the customer is eating lunch or they’re working on other things, or they’re preparing for something. Very rarely are they sitting around saying, “I’m going to not respond to Bill’s email because I want him to get stressed.” They’re thinking about what they have going on. Now it’s up to us to understand what do we need to be doing through the entire process so that we keep it going, and how do we need to show value? How do we need to continue to develop the relationship?
That might take a year longer than we expected. Very rarely is the customer on our timeframe, unless they have a huge deadline, and they said, “Hey, we have this big deadline, we need some solutions. We’re looking at you and a competitor,” or something along those lines. It’s interesting too, because like you said, I love the way you just described it too, where we don’t know what the horse is thinking unless we interact with it the right way, and then hopefully it’s interacting with us. Then when the class is done, the horse is probably thinking about where’s my hay? Or am I going to go run around the yard? They’re not thinking about what is inside the guy’s head that just came through my class.
Dan Carusi: Yeah. It’s so true. What I love is they’re giving real-time feedback. That’s where the self-awareness comes in, where I will just watch it and see somebody being very forward with the horse and trying to move the horse, and come on, come on. You got to go from point A to point B, and I’m trying to do this, and the horse is digging in, not responding, and I’ll just stop and say, “Hey, Fred, does that happen anywhere else in your life?”
“What do you mean?”
I’m like, “Do you do that in the workplace?”
“Well, yeah, I do.”
I said, “Do you get a similar response?”
“Yes, my salesperson fights and resists me in that moment.”
I said, “Well, what can you do differently?”
That horse was giving the feedback that you don’t get in the workplace. Your employees are not going to tell you, “Hey, you’re pushing me too hard,” or, “This isn’t helpful for me.” They just get silent and go do it. Then maybe you lose that employee down the road because you weren’t treating them the right way. You’re going to get that feedback from a horse real time.
That’s when they have those moments, because it’s playing out all in those activities and within the arena where they go, “I get it. By doing this, this happens. I need to change what I’m doing and do something differently.” There you go. That’s the lesson. They get that lesson themselves. I don’t tell them, I ask questions, and through them answering the questions, the self-awareness kicks in where they go, “Okay, I get it. The horse is telling me something and I just wasn’t paying attention to it.”
People leave here wanting to slow down in the workplace and with customers, they want to build deeper relationships. They want to improve their communication. They want to meet their employees where they are, and they learn that each horse is different and unique, that each employee is different and unique. They spend so much time observing the difference in horses, but do you spend that time observing the difference in your employees? All those connections come out and play out real time with that feedback from the horse, which makes those powerful learning moments for everybody.
Fred Diamond: There’s just so many lessons you could take away from that. For the leaders who are listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast, everybody who reports to you wants to be treated the right way. In most cases, I found, especially now as there’s a lot of younger people entering, well, of course there’s always younger people entering, but the millennials or Gen Y, and a lot of them want feedback.
When people like you and I were growing up in the sales world, we got an annual review. I was talking to a sales leader recently who told me that one of his new employees who was in his early 20s wants a review every day. Not a salary increase, well, maybe he does, but he wants to know, “Hey, how am I doing?” This is a guy who’s in a sales role in an organization at a well-known company. He said he wants to know every day, “How’d I do today?”
The same type of a thing. It’s like everybody expects different things. They need to be managed a different way, and it might change. You mentioned things like a sound from a different barn or wind or maybe the horse just got up colicky that day or something. As leaders, it really is up to us to understand how we are.
Before I ask you for your final action step, is there anything else that we didn’t talk about that you want to mention that would be important for sales leaders to know about this process that you go about doing?
Dan Carusi: The only thing I would add is it’s very powerful for sales leaders on how they can be a better sales leader. We see so many sales leaders that are promoted from being a top performer into a sales leadership role, not getting the proper development and education for it. This type of approach would significantly help them be more successful as a sales leader.
But at the same time, it’ll help their sellers. When you think about how their sellers need to show up to their prospect or their customers, and how they need to build those relationships and trust first, and how they need to really meet the customer where they are, and be more in the present moment when they’re speaking to their customers, not thinking about the next five advanced questions they’re going to ask when they’re still listening to the first one, this type of learning will help the seller and teams develop and be better at what they do and improve their performance as well. There’s an opportunity to, not necessarily saying substitute or replace your traditional approach to learning, but as an add-on to really help improve performance and elevate to the next level. This is a unique different way to be able to do so.
Fred Diamond: As we’re doing this interview, I’m thinking about experiential things I’ve gone to with other sales teams, and you go in kind of trepidatious and some people aren’t really thrilled to be there, and some people have other things. You have things going on in your life, and over the course of the day you see transformation if you’re willing to participate, if you’re willing to let the process happen. I’m just more and more amazed at how amazing horses are. I doubt if there’s a program like this with cats. Maybe there is, but the horse is such a hugely amazing animal. The way you described the relationship between the horse and the people going through your program is fantastic.
Dan, thanks again for the update on Sandler on the Enterprise. Thanks again for talking about this. We haven’t discussed this topic on the Sales Game Changers Podcast before, and I think we’re going to get a lot of reaction to this. Congratulations again on all the stuff that you’re doing to help people transform their lives. We talked about you’ve seen people shift their emotion over the course of the day. I can see that. I can see how going in and having to manage a 1,200-pound animal, that you’ve never been close to before, maybe you see it on TV, you’ve never seen them upfront. They are huge and they’re beautiful animals, they’re just remarkable creations. To be able to cause a shift in them, I can definitely see where that will cause a huge shift with a person.
You’ve given us so many great ideas, but give us a final action step, something specific that people should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Dan Carusi: I’d probably look at two actionable things, but the biggest one for me, and I referenced it early on, is stay out of your comfort zone. If you can day in and day out look for opportunities to stay out of your comfort zone, that’s where you’re going to learn. That’s where you’re going to grow. That’s where you’re going to elevate performance. When I look at all my interactions in the sales space, and you can go outside of the sellers and sales leadership, when we get comfortable, we stop learning. We get complacent, our performance becomes mediocre, we’re not growing. Then we get to the point going, “Why am I not performing as well as somebody else, or how I used to?” It’s because we allowed ourselves to slip into that comfort zone. Look for whatever it is for you personally that gets you out of your comfort zone, seek that out as much as you can and keep yourself there. Now, don’t go to the danger zone where you’re freaking out and paralyzed by fear, but find that opportunity to be uncomfortable.
The second one is, in the world we live in today, I see so many people slipping into fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They get into this space of what I call FUD that really holds them back from being their best at what they do. Don’t fall into that trap. Break through the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It is a mindset. Yes, there’s contributing factors out there in the world. The world’s kind of crazy today. There’s contributing factors, but be on guard for not slipping and you’re letting your mindset slip into that fear, uncertainty, and doubt. If you’re pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, you’re going to break the fear, uncertainty, and doubt cycle. They do go hand in hand. That would be my advice to wrap up our conversation, and I think something that’s actionable for everybody immediately.
Fred Diamond: Once again, thank you so much, Dan Carusi, for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo