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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers virtual learning session sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales on April 12, 2022, featuring Steven Gaffney. Steven’s books can be found here.]
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STEVEN’S TIP: “Mood matters. Have mood discipline so we can do it on demand rather than by accident. Because let’s face it, for the most of us, our mood is somewhat by accident. Something good happens, we get triggered in a good place, something bad happens, we go down in a down mood. We’re kind of a little bit all over the place. As a sales leader, we have to pay attention to our mood and the mood of our sales folks. It’s really important.
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Steven, we’ve had you on a couple of times during the pandemic. We’ve had you on the IES stage live back in 2018 or 2019, I guess. You’re such a great writer and speaker, and you talk about honesty. We used to call you the honesty guy. Do people still call you the honesty guy? Do you like that?
Steven Gaffney: Yeah, it’s fine. I love talking about that because that’s such a core part of an issue that even with sales and leadership, it’s around the whole biggest problem is not what people say, it’s what they don’t say to each other. It’s where we’re saying even as a salesperson, as a sales leader, why didn’t they just tell me? We can get into that and how to turn that around as well.
Fred Diamond: Well, today, we’re talking about unconditional power. It’s challenging. What’s amazing, Steven, is it continues to be challenging and there’s more things on the horizon and it’s easier to be successful in good times. Everyone rides the waves and we know some people who’ve done really, really well over the last few years, but most people have struggled in so many different ways. We’re doing a Women in Sales conference in two weeks. I just read an article today from the US Chamber of Commerce that 1 million women have left the workforce in the B2B side. That’s crazy, one million women. Anyway, we want to talk today about unconditional power. Tell us about why you’re focusing on that right now and let’s get deep into why it’s such a challenge and how we’re going to help people today.
Steven Gaffney: Sure. In fact, I’m working on a book on this and it’s called Unconditional Power. It’s all around, have you ever noticed that when you’re in a good mood, you’re better at sales or better as leaders? I mean, just think about it. When we’re in a down mood, maybe we haven’t slept enough or I don’t know, whatever is going on in our life, and somebody throws us a problem, we’re like, “Oh, my gosh, here we go again.” But when we’re in good spirits and there’s a problem we’re like, “Hey, I got it handled.” There’s a client issue, or maybe a potential client or whatever you like, “I’m going to get this handled. We’re going to overcome this.”
One of the key headlines I want to just leave people with immediately is how much our mood matters. Mood matters. The whole subject of the book is about how to have mood discipline so we can do it on demand rather than by accident. Because let’s face it, for the most of us, our mood is somewhat by accident. Something good happens, we get triggered in a good place, something bad happens, we go down in a down mood. We’re kind of a little bit all over the place. I don’t mean we’re necessarily moody in a weird sense but we just are all are affected. One of the other key headlines I want to give people is, as a sales leader, we got to pay attention to our mood and the mood of our sales folks. It’s really important. We can get into that even more, because there are three types of overarching mood.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, let’s get started.
Steven Gaffney: The three types of overarching mood. The first type is powerless. That’s where we all can get in that mindset. What difference can we make? We’re only one person here. I mean, I’m going to try to do what I can with my client or potential client but there’s a lot of things I can’t really control and I’m just going to do what I can. The second kind of mood is conditional mood. That’s where I find most people are, but they don’t really realize it. Conditional moods are when we view ourselves as powerful, but it’s subject to conditions. I can get that done as long as they do this, as long as we have more resources. I can hit my sales goals as long as the company gives us enough good leads. I can do this as long as we get enough referrals. There’s always some caveat or condition.
The third type of mindset mood is the desired one and that’s a powerful mood. When we’re in that powerful mood, we recognize our certain conditions, but we are in charge of what we’re going to do about it. We place 100% of our control on what we’re going to do about it. Again, powerful people, powerful mindset, powerful mood, is we understand their conditions, but we are at the driver’s seat of our life. Think of it this way. Powerless is we’re in the backseat. Conditional mindset mood is we’re in the front passenger seat, but we’re guiding it. But when we’re in powerful, we’re driving our car. That’s critical. Here’s the other thing. Our customers want us to be powerful, and we want our customers to be powerful and we can talk about that and how to do this.
Fred Diamond: It’s interesting. It’s been almost like nonstop, something keeps going on. It’s like the movie Apollo 13. Things are solved, and then there’s something else that goes wrong. Steven, we’ve been in this for two years. Again, we’re doing today’s interview towards the end of April of 2022. There’s a lot of factors that we’ve never really had to figure out before.
My question for you is, can the tools that you’re talking about, can they make a lasting shift or things change all day long and hourly in some cases? There’s a war going on right now that affects our business. There’s a possible recession coming up. The great salespeople know how to deal with that but if you’re in the early stages of your career, you’ve never had to deal with any of this stuff.
Steven Gaffney: You bring up an interesting point, how there always are challenges. What my work is about, and even with this mood stuff because they want to be powerful but the idea is to do this consistently. Even my work with leadership teams is about how to be consistently high achieving teams, which they can check out the last podcast we did together. But the whole idea is even when it comes to this mood is doing it consistently because there’s always stuff that happens.
Here’s the key on this. Whenever there’s challenges in life, and we just said, there’s always going to be challenges, people have a tendency, and we all do, to shift to the left. In other words, we go from powerful to conditional, conditional to powerless. We all can feel that way. Let’s say you’re really excited and you’re about to close a big deal and it falls apart. You can feel that your mood slips, it’s hard. Then suddenly, we’re conditionally and suddenly, I’m not sure I’m going to hit my goals. If this does this, and what about my pipeline? We’ve become very dependent on other things.
We all have a tendency to shift to the left towards the conditional and powerless, but great leadership is about shifting people to the right and keeping to the right. As sales leaders, we want to make sure that we stay powerful and when we slip, we’re moving back, and how to make sure that everybody else does and how to inspire, because it’s about leadership. Before anybody says, “Oh, leadership, I’m not a leader.” Wait a minute, we are all leaders. We lead up, we lead down and we lead across, and we lead our customers, we lead our families. Leadership is not a position, it’s a state of mind.
If you think about it real quick, even on that, how often have you met somebody who’s “a leader”, but they can’t lead anybody, and then you probably met people that don’t have that official position but we follow them? What I want to do is, when I’m talking about great leadership, I mean, we lead up, down and across. It’s all around keeping ourselves powerful and persuading other people to be powerful. I can give them four techniques on how to do that too.
Fred Diamond: We have a question that’s coming in here from Jared. Jared says, “How does vulnerability fit into powerfulness?” So, interesting question. Steven, we talk a lot about vulnerability, which means showing where you’re weak, showing where you have like a moment of doubt. Then we talk about that and authenticity, a lot over mindfulness over the last two years because it’s been a new road for everybody, continues to be. For Jared’s question, how does vulnerability fit into the powerful in this unconditional power?
Steven Gaffney: Great question, and here’s the answer, being powerfully vulnerable. People might say, but how does that work? Because if you’re vulnerable it’s kind of like, oh, I’m divulging something, but being powerful, and that is the way we come across. There’s nothing wrong with saying to a customer, in fact, I think some of the best salespeople don’t come in and, “No matter what we’re going to be successful and blah, blah, blah.” Say, “Wait a minute, let me probe here. Let me really find out what’s going on.” In fact, vulnerability really helps us to connect with people.
Think about it this way. Who do you tend to follow as leaders? Are they the people that are vulnerable or not? I would like to suggest that vulnerability is a sign of strength. Not being vulnerable is a sign of weakness. If you think about it, it takes courage to be vulnerable. What I mean by powerfully vulnerable, and I’ll do it as conditionally powerful. Conditionally is, well, we don’t have this, I’ll do what I can to try to help you out. Powerfully vulnerable is, I don’t know the answer to that question but I’m going to do what it takes and I will get back to you in 45 minutes, or by the end of the day, or within 24 hours, or within 48 hours. I’m letting people know exactly what’s going on, rather than just saying, “Oh, I’ve got all the answers, and we can overcome everything.”
It’s like this. Have you ever met a salesperson that does all the talking? You’re like, they don’t even know us. But if they’re vulnerable, it’s different. Something else that’s really fascinating as I’ve done a lot of this work, you can’t be a hero to somebody who knows all the answers. Think about this. Have you ever met somebody who is a know it all, and there’s a crowd, they seem invincible, and you might have an idea for them but you go, oh, they’re used to bringing it up. Seems like they got all the answers.
But when people are vulnerable, and when we say you know what? I need your help, or this could be helpful, we want to help out, we want to reach out. There’s something about when another person is powerfully vulnerable that we want to help out. It gives us a chance to be a hero. That’s the interesting thing about this, is vulnerability is an opportunity as long as it’s authentic and being powerful. But it’s a huge gift you can give to other people and give yourself.
Fred Diamond: Actually, there’s an expression that we’ve heard recently, you know, WAIT, why am I talking? A lot of times when somebody is doing all the talking, it really is that they’re trying to hide some type of fear, if you will. You mentioned four techniques. Let’s get to the four techniques.
Steven Gaffney: The first strategy and we can get many, but I’m going to focus four on today. First one is, make the unaware aware. In other words, I’ve drawn this continuum and people can. Those three buckets, powerless, conditional, and powerful. What you want to look at is making yourself aware of it. Here’s what I mean by this. When I ask people, do you think of yourself as powerful? No matter what the situation, they tend to kind of think they are. But what I’ve really found out by doing all this work is most people are conditionally powerful. Just check out how often somebody says, I’d be great in my marriage but it’s dependent on my wife or my husband or my kids or the circumstances or if I get a raise, don’t get a raise, if I were able to go on vacation. I would be happier if this happens, if they would do this. That’s all conditional behavior.
When I’ve taught this, what’s happened to a lot of organization I’ve done work with is they realize there’s this whole dimension, because although they thought they were powerful, their organization was primarily conditionally powerful. When they realize there’s this whole new dimension, this whole new zone, this whole new gear, it’s suddenly like, they see so much growth opportunity and they’re able to seize on it. Infact, one of my clients is at about 40% growth and they’re about doing that consistently because they’re realizing how do you keep people motivated and doing things consistently? By realizing there’s a whole nother gear?
So making the unaware aware. What does that mean? Share this distinction to other people, and if they want more, they can always contact us about this. But share this with others, make that drawing in front of you, and just check yourself out, where am I? Because we’re not taught this by just being aware of this distinction. We automatically kick into this other gear that we didn’t even know about it. It’s like that other dimension. The first one is make the unaware aware.
Fred Diamond: It’s that consciousness that you have this power. Here’s the thing that’s actually kind of cool and tell me if you disagree or agree. I asked the question yesterday. Yesterday’s show we talked about leadership. The question I gave to the guest, Mali Phonpadith, was, can anybody become a leader? I don’t believe, Steven, that everybody can become a great salesperson. I really do believe it’s a skill, you have to be committed, you have to be passionate, like anything you do in life. But she said, “No.” She said, “I believe anybody can become a great leader.” Do you believe that everybody has the power inside them to have this unconditional power?
Steven Gaffney: Absolutely. In fact, that’s one of the exciting things I can’t wait to get the book out. I love doing this work because what I’ve seen is people live a life that’s so conditional. I’m talking about at home and at work, they don’t realize the greatness. How could that be? Well, there’s just so much stuff out there that contributes to this conditional mindset. Think about this, benchmarking. We hear about benchmarking and best practices. Well, that’s only going to make you as good as that best practice.
I don’t know about you, but my experience is we want to be as equal to somebody else. We all want to feel special, we want to excel. Currently, I’m working with a client right now about change transformation. They had it somewhat framed up that it was about, well, we need to catch up to the competition. I said to them, “That’s not going to motivate anybody.” With your sales force, what you want to do is frame it up. It’s not only catching up, but we’re going to smash the competition or at least excel beyond. We’re going to be the best ever.
The problem with benchmarking is, and I wrote an article years ago to challenge people on this, what if Martin Luther King had benchmarked? Well, my job is I’m just going to be the best preacher. Well, look at what he’s capable of, and what he did and changed the world. What I’ve noticed is if we approach this as we don’t even know how powerful it can be, but one thing is to watch out for conditional power, and that the idea is we want to be unconditionally powerful.
Fred Diamond: You’ve written four books and I loved all your books, which is why we got you on the stage. I actually have two books right now that are at the publisher. I was talking to someone the other day who I suggested you should write a book. They said, “I couldn’t write more than one sentence.” This is someone who’s very talented, very, very successful and I said, “You got it in you,” and they kept pushing back. As you’re talking about this, I reflect back to somebody who was very powerful but couldn’t see their capability to get their message out into the world. All right, make the unaware aware. What’s number two?
Steven Gaffney: I just want to say something on this, because that’s really important. See, I would contend that that person is conditionally powerful. Well, I would get a book out, but I can’t even write a sentence. Instead of realizing, well, how can I write it? I could dictate it and there’s content writers, there’s all kinds of things. The thing is, whatever your challenges in life, I want to just say, how do you know it couldn’t be so much more? For example, I work with organizations and when they say, well, we want about 20% growth. Well, why can’t you double your growth? What if it was 10 times? Well, it’s never been done before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
It was Nelson Mandela who said, things are impossible until they become possible. In other words, the way I interpret that quote is that people say something is impossible until somebody does it, whether it’s Elon Musk, or whether it’s anyone else. No matter what we think about Elon Musk, or some of these other really, people just excel beyond expectations, is they just saw things that we just held as limitations. What are we capable of? And so much of us have these conditions and limit ourselves that we don’t even realize that anything is possible.
Fred Diamond: As we talk about sales professionals, we want to talk about the fact that sales is a career that is wrought with failure. By the way, I don’t know why I just said that because I’ve made a conscious decision to eliminate the word failure from my life. My whole purpose is you don’t really fail, you keep learning. We actually have some people here who are chiming in, Martin says, “30 bad phone calls for the one good one.” Good for you, Martin, for having to go through 30 bad ones to get to the good one but the one good one can lead towards anything that’s possible.
Steven Gaffney: You bring up an interesting point, how do we stay motivated, powerful when sometimes there’s a lot of things that don’t go our way? One of the fortunate things I’ve been able to do in my work is not get limited by an industry. I’ve cut across over 25 different industry market segments. But one of the most interesting companies, well, there’s been many, but one in particular that connects really well is the mining industry. I’ve done work with Barrick Gold, which is the number one gold producer company in the world, or at least it was until recently as far as I know. I worked with the exploration team, which means that was the team that finds the gold of the number one gold company.
I taught them a lot of stuff, but what I learned from them is, how do you stay motivated when you’re basically unsuccessful every day? I mean, think about it. You’re looking for gold. You’re mostly unsuccessful. How do you stay excited? Because I worked with the scientists and the engineers and the way it is, is you enjoy the process. Very important. If we’re only living for the happiness of the sale, then we become conditionally powerful, conditionally happy. But if we say, I’m happy then but you know what? I enjoy talking to my customers, or potential customers. It’s just great.
In fact, one of the things that’s really helped me is framing up sales as just providing value. You know what, just good stuff happens. I’ll get on the phone with somebody because they’ll say, hey, you might want to talk to that person. I don’t try to do the hard sale at all. Say, “Hey, I want to try to help you out.” You know what? If it takes several calls or more or less, the bottom line is I’m just trying to help them out and then good stuff happens. Enjoy the process and ask yourself, “What do I not enjoy about the process and how could I make the process enjoyable?” Then you’ll be powerful all the way through.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, or outsource certain things that are really slowing you down that may be below your pay grade. It reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote, I worked at Apple Computer for a long time, the journey is the reward, similar to the processes. I like what you also just said that, a lot of times when we’ve had guests on the Sales Game Changers podcast, they’ll say they were more successful when they weren’t selling. We like to say that sales is about moving from conversation to conversation. We talk about value, we talk about service. So I like the way you propose that. Again, Steven Gaffney, unconditional power. You have a couple other techniques.
Steven Gaffney: Yeah, let’s jump to it. The next one is intentional disruption. We all think and act in certain patterns and associations, which is great when it’s going for us, but not great when it’s not working. Here’s what I mean by intentionally disruptive. You feel yourself in a down mood. You’ve got to do something to immediately disrupt it. Don’t wallow in it. For example, you read an email or something happened and you can feel yourself being down. There’s two types of intentional disruption. One is physical, and the other is mental. Physical intentional disruption is when you feel yourself acting, you just say, “Well, you know what, I’m going to take a break,” or you call a friend. There’s a buddy of mine, his name is Reza Kundera. He’s one of the funniest people I know. I can be in whatever mood, he’s like a lifeline. Just call Reza and he will make me laugh.
But whatever I do, and whenever we do, we never want to wallow in that mood that’s not productive, and not just fight our way out of it. I’m talking about disrupt, do something different. That’s physical. The other type is mental disruption. Mental disruption is our brain operates under the questions we ask it. If I say what’s bad that’s happening? We’re going to focus on that. If I say what’s good that’s happening? We’ll focus on that. Here’s the reason why. Let’s say you’re about to talk to a potential client, and you feel yourself, I’m slipping in the mood. Wait a minute, what would put me in a good mood, that powerful mood? Because I’m going to act differently on that call and then I want to ask powerful questions. I want to look at things.
One of my favorite questions to ask potential clients is, I ask them, if I gave you a magic wand, and you could get help in any one thing, forget about the work I do, what would you want help in? Now, the importance is, everybody’s heard about the magic wand question but what they fail to often put in is, what would you want help in whether or not I could do it? Because otherwise, they’re going to gear the entire conversation conditionally on what they perceive you can do. But if you ask that question, you get to really connect with people and providing things and that disrupts how we often do conversations into a more powerful conversation.
I’ll share a story. I asked an executive this and he said, “Well, if you could give me an eighth day, that would be great.” I said, “Well, I can’t do that but let me ask you this, what’s bogging down your day?” He told me all the challenges in the organization of which it turned out, I could help them with some of them. We ended up doing a project together that went fantastic. But if I had said, what are your challenges and how can I help you with those, that might have produced the same answer but doubtful, because it wouldn’t have produced the eighth day, and it opens the aperture.
Here’s the thing I love about the magic wand question. Our job as salespeople, as sales leaders, is to really help people. I don’t look at it like it’s got to work. I just wanted to help this guy out authentically. Asking powerful questions disrupts and that’s intentional disruption, mental intentional disruption. As a leader, it’s really important to ask people, what’s the best thing that happened this week? You’re leading into a meeting that’s going to be tense. Why not ask people, before we get to this tense issue, let’s do a quick round, what are some of the wins that people have experienced? It’ll put them in a better powerful mood to attack the same issue. There’s all kinds of ways but my point is, intentionally disrupt the moods that are not servicing you and your folks.
Fred Diamond: When we started doing the podcast every day during the pandemic, the one thing that we realized was, if you’re a sales professional, you now need to be professional. People before the pandemic, it was very easy to say you’re a sales professional because a lot of things were going pretty well. Then the pandemic kicks in it’s like, all right, if you’re a professional, what does a professional do? A professional learns about the industry. A professional learns how to use Zoom now, those type of thing to do those things. How to present online. How to craft their writing better, if you will.
As you’re answering this question, to truly be of service to your customer which the great sales professionals are, you got to be all in, right? You got to say, this is what I am going to be in, and if you get stuck too long, you’re going to lose your ability to provide that value. Last question here. You talk about a power switch. Talk about that a little bit. You talked about how you called a friend. I have a technique, when I find myself going into a rat hole I do this thing, it’s called, breath, meditate for a minute, call a friend. I have a couple of friends similar to you. You’ve actually been that person for me once or twice as well. Talk about this power switch. Is it really possible and what type of technique do you have to just turn it on when you find yourself there? Because I’ll tell you, man, if you’re a quota carrying salesperson, you can’t be there very long.
Steven Gaffney: [Laughs] you’re so right. It’s again, intentional disruption. We could talk about a third technique about reframing. But given what you’re sharing, it’s important to really look at that as intentional disruption. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. When COVID hit, obviously, most people like myself were doing things in person. So obviously, virtual came up. Immediately within my industry, there was a conditional mindset that said in, “Well, you’re going to do the best you can within Zoom.” I decided that isn’t a very powerful question. I asked myself, “How could I use this medium so I’m able to deliver the best value? What if I could do this better than I could even do it in person?”
I wouldn’t allow my mind to wallow in a conditional, “I’ll do the best I can.” I just shifted. I remember talking to a friend of mine who’s a consultant, and she said, “Well, I don’t agree with you. I think it’s always better to be in person.” This is what I said, “Given that right now we don’t have that as an option, I’m not going to allow myself to go with that. I’m going to gear 100% on making the virtual extremely effective.” That’s what I have been able to do with customers. I said, “Now we have these different options” but it’s all because I wouldn’t allow myself to ask disempowering conditional questions. It’s powerful questions.
Let me jump to the third technique, because I know we might be short on time. That’s reframe to refocus. When you feel yourself slipping into that conditional and powerless, what you want to do is what is causing that and to reframe the situation into a more powerful way, which is what I was just sharing related to Zoom. There are three types of reframe. There’s many, but there’s three of my favorites. This can really put yourself in a powerful mindset, powerful mood. The first one is to reduce the frame. I see this a lot in our world in sales and just working with organizations. People have a tendency to make complex problem complex.
You’ve probably seen this. Where even PowerPoint slides that are filled with information like oh, my gosh, my head is spinning, or somebody has 20 million steps to accomplish something. The problem is that it takes brilliance to make things simple, it doesn’t take any brilliance to make it complex. As a leader, and remember, we lead up, down, across, is to take a complex problem and to make it simple. Let me give you an example. I was working with a client that their sales are going down. They were having problems and they said what do you think we should do? I said, you have too many KPIs, key performance indicators. Your salespeople, you’re just asking them to report too much. What are the key ones that are the most important?
Through the conversation, what we realized is the most important thing was going to see the customer. Customer interactions. Whether it’s over Zoom or seeing people now, whatever. I said, “Why don’t you track that? Just hit that home.” Because that was where they were weak at. They were too internally focused. I said, “Just manage people by this one KPI, turn the whole thing around.” It doesn’t mean that there aren’t other important things to consider but you want to simplify a problem.
Think about it this way, you have somebody who’s not doing a great job, we have a tendency to say you’re not doing this right, this right and this right, and that’s going to just make them go downhill. But if you said, “Look, all I want you to do is focusing on returning a customer’s call back within 24 hours or within three hours. Just do that and smile.” Now they can do that. That’s a good way because when people start to feel powerful, they become even more powerful. Simplify it.
Another type of reframe, the second type of reframe is to enlarge the frame. For example, you ever had this experience where somebody said, well, the competitor or whatever, their pricing is less than yours or you don’t have this capability and that’s because the other company has sold them on this capability of pricing. If you say, “Well, we could do that too or whatever.” It doesn’t feel good. Instead, enlarge the frame. You just say, “While that is true, what we do is all of these other things.” See, because if I say, well I’ll try to overcome the objection, it invites defensiveness. If you just let it be, it’s true. But in the scheme of things, when it’s all said and done, we will have delivered three times the investment. We will have done this, we’ve done this, we’ve done this capability.
For example, there’s a client of mine that there’s a competitor that says, their pricing is universal and that’s not going to work in their model. I asked them why, and they said, because they just want to try to attract a client and then they’re going to expand from there. They’re using a manipulative tactic to try to get in low. Instead of saying anything bad to a competitor, you never want to do that. You just say, well, that is the case, they do this. While we’re here, we’ve been here for years, we’ve been able to do this, we’ve had these successes and we know exactly how to make this right, because the truth is that other competitor had just gotten in that market. So you enlarge the frame.
The third type of reframe is you change the frame. Change something that works for you. For example, let’s say there’s something tense, you might say, “Well, you know what? Given that I want you to be completely happy, how can we make this work?” You just change it. Rather than trying to overcome something, you choose a different frame. An example would be, I hired a company that was falling behind in an IT project. I said to them, “When can you get this done?” It was July of two years ago. They said, “We can get it done by November.” I was like, “What? I want it done shorter.”
I said, “Given that I ideally would like it done in a month, what would need to happen?” You know what? Credit to company. Phrase reframe their way and put it in a different frame. They came up with a list of actions, and we were able to get this done in six weeks. So why not this? Given that I would like our revenue to double in the next year, what would need to happen? Somebody says, “But that’s not possible.” Let’s pretend it could. Let’s just try it on. What could absolutely happen? You just choose the frame you’d like people to think about that is more powerful. Does that make sense?
Fred Diamond: It does. Those are great strategies for success. Steven, you’ve provided so much value to IES, Institute for Excellence in Sales members and companies around the globe, live, virtually, hopefully back in a lot of in person coming up in the years to come. You’ve written so many great books, so I just want to applaud you for the value you brought to so many businesses helping them get focused on more better ways to really engage with their customers and help provide value. Steven, we like to end the Sales Game Changers podcast with an action step. You’ve given us 30 great ideas. Give us one specific thing people should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Steven Gaffney: The big thing is that forth technique I was about to get to, so I’ll be leaving with this is the biggest problem is not what people say, it’s what they don’t say. We’ve talked about that at the front, get the unsaid said. Think, what are you wanting to share with others? Maybe it’s an appreciation, maybe it’s a new capability, but what are you not saying? Say that and actually ask other people the questions you really want to ask, and enjoy your life.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo