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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 December 3, 2020. It featured sales expert and consultant Andy Miller of Big Swift Kick.]

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EPISODE 309: Well-Known Sales Expert Andy Miller Gives Crisp Advice on Asking for What You Want

ANDY’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Your courage improves as your pipeline gets bigger. The asking mindset is one way to get there. And you may need to ask 6 times! The problem is salespeople don’t ask and there’s a cost of not asking to you but also your customer or your prospect of not asking. Make sure you ask face to face somehow. Don’t do it on LinkedIn, don’t do it on the email. It’s easy for them to say no and you just can’t project the authenticity that you need to. Ask for some advice, ask for some coaching from them or ask for a chance. Always be clear and specific on your ask and be authentic.”

Fred Diamond: Today we’re talking Optimal Sales Mindset with our good friend, Andy Miller. If you recognize Andy, he has graced our in-person stage numerous times talking about grit, talking about resilience, some of the great attributes that top sales professionals need to have. Let’s get started.

Andy Miller: We want to talk about why you aren’t asking for the deal because this sounds simple and it really is, but we’re not doing it and it’s incredibly powerful. I look at this from two mindsets, some folks are glass half full, glass half empty. Glass half empty: gloom and doom, COVID has shut us down, asking won’t make any difference, I can’t reach anybody. That’s one mindset, the second mindset is hope and possibility. “I still think there’s opportunity out there, acknowledge COVID is here, it’s real but people are still finding a way to make things work and I might as well start asking and see what happens because I’ve never emphasized that in the past. I’ve got nothing to lose so let’s give it a shot, let’s see what happens.” The power of asking, just so you can see, it’s such a simple concept and I can’t believe that’s really what we’re going to talk about.

I’ve got a client that’s in an independent medical exam market, their whole industry, the customers that they focus on are all down 40%, they’re up 5% simply by asking. Another company that I work with does accounting software, their call center upsell went from 6% to 74% which is unheard of in call centers. Another client in worker’s comp, they’re up 50% in a market that only has 3% growth and that’s pretty significant. Then I’ve got a water treatment chemical company, they didn’t give me a number but they said, “Andy, it’s our best year ever.” All of them would say, “It’s due to the fact that you taught us to go ask and we’re actually doing it, we’re taking a chance and we’re asking.”

Let’s talk about that a little bit more. If you remember the story of Aladdin and his magic lamp, the genie popped out and the genie says, “I’ll grant you three wishes.” What would you wish for? What would you ask for in your life from your kids, your siblings, your spouse, industry influencers if we get more business-oriented, your customers, your prospects? It’s really as simple as just asking. Where did this concept come from? A lot of you are probably familiar with the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, that was done by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. What people don’t realize is these guys were sales trainers before they did the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and they did a study on salespeople and how often salespeople are asking. I think you’re going to be blown away by this, how often were people asking for what they wanted? In this case I’m saying you’re asking for the deal, you could ask for other things, ask for an introduction, ask for a referral, ask to speak to the decision committee. There’s lots of things you could ask for, here’s what they found out. 54% of salespeople never asked, how are you going to get it if you don’t ask for it? Only 46% asked one time, then they stopped. 24% asked twice, 14% asked three times, 12% asked four times and only 4% asked five times. The crazy thing is 60% of all deals are closed after asking 5 times, that means you’ve got to ask 6 times or more. How many of us have stopped short?

I had one client who said to me this about three weeks ago and she said, “Andy, I got them on the phone and I asked five times on the same phone call and they finally granted it at the fifth time.” So don’t think, “I’ll try one, I’ll call back again, I’ll try another.” You can make all five or six asks on that phone call, that Zoom call, that interaction. So are we asking for the deal?

Fred Diamond: It reminds me of a statistic that our good friend, Steve Richard at Vorsight once told me his company had analyzed millions of phone calls and I asked Steve, “What is the one thing you learned from listening to a million sales phone calls?” He said, “People never asked, people just didn’t ask and they never scheduled a follow-up.” Here’s your point that you just made, you could ask 5 times on one call. Before you said that, I was thinking, “Okay, 5 steps, two months, I’m going to ask the first week, then I’m going to ask again in three weeks.” You’re even saying that you could put those five asks together in one call and you’re still going to see the same result, that’s very powerful, Andy.

Andy Miller: It really is and again, when I started off our call I said I know you think this concept is simple, it really is simple but knowing what to do and then actually doing it are two very different things. We know to ask, we’ve been told all our career in sales to ask but we’re not asking. Why?

I want to share with you what happened when I started asking. I read the book and Fred, you’re a marketing guy, you know in marketing you come up with your concepts and then you test them. I said, “Okay, I just read this book about asking and I don’t know if I believe it or not so let’s test it, let’s just try it.” I said, “I’m going to make a list of asks.” For those of you who’ve traveled around the world or other countries, you know that the rules in one country are different than rules in another. You go to Mexico, you go to Brazil, you go to Indonesia, you go to France, wherever you go they have different rules. I thought, “I have to pretend that I don’t know what any of the rules are, I’m going to pretend that I’m a Martian – men are from Mars – and I’m going to become an alien. I’m going to be an alien for a week, I’m going to pretend there’s no boundaries to asking and if I step in a pile of manure, so be it.” What I think is most of us don’t even get close to getting in trouble from asking, I thought, “I’m going to try to cross the line as an alien.” I made my list, I pretended to be an alien, I said there’s no restrictions, no boundaries, I’m just going to pretend I’m totally naive and ignorant. I’m going to ask for everything that I want for a week, I’m going to believe that I can get it, I’m going to be relaxed about it, appreciative, gracious and here’s what my alien got me in one week.

Keep in mind I just moved to Europe, I just started a software company, I didn’t know anybody. I did not have a network, I did not have family, I did not speak the language, I did not know the culture. I knew nothing, I was your stereotypical American buffoon and here’s what my alien got me. I talked to publishers of the largest IT magazines in England, Germany, France and Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg. I told them I had this idea and they all agreed that I could write 12 articles, one article a month, they would translate it into their language and I got agreement that I would have an article in all four of those magazines for 12 months. That’s a major coup just by asking. I told them what the topics were and they were hot topics at the time so it was a little easier to grant it, if they had been uninteresting topics I’m sure they would have said no. Second of all, at that time you could not buy a list of the companies that own the kind of computers that my software ran on so I thought, “Who would have a list?” The manufacturer would so I found the product owner for the line that I worked on, called him up, went and had lunch with him, asked him, “Is there anywhere you know I could buy a list?” He goes, “No, you’re new here in Europe, it’s actually illegal to sell a list to anybody.” I said, “Okay, I appreciate it but would you guys have a list I can get access to?” He said no and we talked about that a little bit and I said, “If anything becomes available, I’d love to hear about it. I’d be happy to handle it in an appropriate way, I’d be happy to pay for it.”

One week later in the mail in a plain envelope with no return address and just a bunch of stamps I got a list of all the computers and all their locations in all of Europe, no note, no name, no nothing. It could have only come from one place and that guy could have lost his job by doing that, think about that. And I got an endorsement from their technical division because I called them and said, “Here’s what we’re doing, here’s how we compare.” We worked through it and I got the endorsement. That was all in one week of just playing alien and asking, those are some pretty powerful asks. If you had told me before I read the book that that was even possible, I would have told you you’re smoking dope and of course, in the Netherlands that’s quite possible you were smoking dope [laughs].

Fred Diamond: Andy, I think the other reason why obviously people aren’t asking and we talk about this a lot on the Sales Game Changers webinars. One of the key attributes in sales success if not the #1 attribute in sales success I believe is courage. You and I talked about grit, we talked about creativity and talked about analytics, product knowledge, I think it all comes down to courage. We’re talking here about the courage to ask for something for the next meeting, for an introduction let alone a million-dollar deal, let alone a five thousand dollar deal, you need courage in almost everything to move to the next step. For some reason, it’s a lot easier for some people and for some it’s a lot more of a challenge.

Andy Miller: When you’re a buyer, when you’re out shopping for something, house, car, whatever, you have no problem asking for a discount and if you’re married, I know that at least 50% of you out there asked because somebody had to do the asking. I read a book by a guy named John Goddard who is the real-life Indiana Jones and I just called him up and said, “I want to meet you, I want to talk to you and he goes, “What are you doing next weekend? Because it’s my birthday, why don’t you come on out to California? You can stay at my house, we’re going to have a party.” That was just by calling the guy up saying, “I’d like to meet you.” It’s amazing what can happen and then I’ve got a number of clients right now of equity share in their businesses because I just asked for it, it was part of the deal but it’s amazing what you can get if you’re willing to have the courage to ask.

Fred Diamond: Andy, Joey wants to know what’s the biggest deal Andy has ever asked for. I’m going to ask a corollary to that, was it just as easy to ask for that deal which you’re going to tell us about here in a second generically, as it might be to ask someone for a phone meeting or to meet next Tuesday to have a Zoom call or something along those lines?

Andy Miller: The biggest deal I ever asked for was a $40 million deal. I was representing a client at the time, they’d been working on it for seven years, it had gone nowhere and I came up with a strategy and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Once we’ve gone through the strategy we’re going to go ask for it” and we got it. For some people, 40 million dollars may be small, for others 40 million dollars might be big but I don’t really think it’s about the size of the deal, I really think it’s about the courage. I would add to that, your courage improves as your pipeline gets bigger.

Fred Diamond: As they always say, the first 40 million dollar deal is always the hardest. Let’s keep going here, this is great stuff.

Andy Miller: I want to talk about the five reasons that we don’t ask for deals and I’m going to move through these fairly quickly. The first one is ignorance, ignorance may be too strong of a term but we don’t know what’s possible, we don’t know what’s available, we don’t know what we want and we don’t know how to ask. We would put those in the ignorance category. The second one would be self-limiting beliefs, where do the self-limiting beliefs come from? Your friends, your parents, your school, the TV publications, blogs, YouTube, whatever you watch, your religious practices, your past jobs, your first sales manager, your customers. You’ll have customers who say, “Don’t do this, don’t do that” and then they threaten you, those are where it comes from. Then there’s our self-limiting beliefs around what we can and cannot ask for. Can we ask for the business? Can we ask to meet somebody on the executive team? Can we ask for better terms and conditions? Can we ask for a price increase? Those self-limiting beliefs are both where it came from and what those beliefs are about, all of it has to do with asking. Third, pride, you’ll see this more in men than women – yes, it is a sexist comment but I believe it’s true. “I might look weak, I might look incompetent, people will judge me, I’m too smart to ask, I can do it on my own.” That pride is a killer. Low self-esteem, “I’m not worthy, my needs aren’t important.”

I actually had a client who said, “I got the first deal done but now we’ve got to deliver on it and I’m going to wait 30 days until we’ve delivered before I make my next ask.” I go, “No, you’re not. You asked, you got it, I want you to call them back tomorrow and ask for the second thing, don’t wait 30 days.” They did and they got it, they were like, “Wow.” I was like, “Easy-peasy, right? Just go ask.”

The last one on low self-esteem is, “I’ve lost hope, it’s hopeless, I can’t influence this.” The fifth reason, fear. Fear of rejection, fear of being powerless, humiliation, punishment. I’ve seen customers say, “Don’t do this or I’ll take the business away or I’ll give you a bad rating.” Punishment is real, “I’ll look bad, stupid or afraid of the truth.” What happens if we asked? Was there something in the past that needed to be cleaned up and we didn’t have the courage to go clean it up? Those are the five reasons why we don’t ask and they’re pretty simple but knowing it and doing it, two different things.

How do we deal with fear? I don’t remember which national speaker used this acronym, the acronym FEAR: False Expectations Appearing Real. That’s the nightmare of your dreams and my experience is no matter what I envision it from a fear perspective and asking, it never plays out that way. It never gets nearly as bad as I hallucinate that it’s going to be so you got to give yourself permission to be awkward because too many people will go, “How do I ask it? What do I say? That doesn’t sound very smooth.” Forget about being smooth, just give yourself permission to be awkward and if it feels awkward, just tell them, “I’ve got a question I want to ask you but I have to admit it’s going to be kind of awkward.” When you label it, they’re okay with it so label it, it’s awkward.

Don’t wait for the perfect moment, no such thing exists. What’s the best that can happen and what’s the worst that could happen? This one I got from a client who says, “I realize they won’t take my birthday again.” They’re not going to pull out a gun and cheat you, you’re not going to go to jail for life, they’re not going to take your birthday away. What’s your best case, what’s your worst case? And the worst case is never anywhere near what we define it to be.

Fred Diamond: I’m reflecting here on the point you just made which is that your courage grows as your pipeline grows. As I’m looking at this list here, we have a lot of people logging in today and hopefully there’s a lot of people listening to this as a Sales Game Changers podcast. There’s a lot of people who were booking everything on a deal or one deal to come through or one customer. Imagine if your one customer was AMC Movies in 2020, obviously it’s a tough customer to have in 2020 because all the movie theaters are closed. As you’re saying there, the bigger your pipe, the more courage you have. Every deal isn’t as critical per se and you have some leeway to find others, that definitely goes towards eliminating your fear. Andy, we have a question here from Sue, Sue is also in the DC region. Sue wants to know, “Should I stop asking for things over email?” That’s a great question and you’re one of the experts on picking up the phone and getting through to prospects, let’s talk about asking via anything besides the phone, I guess in person is probably the best way.

Andy Miller: Fred, I want to table that because I’m actually going to address that a little bit later during the presentation, soon we will answer that question and there’s definitely a better way to do it versus a less-effective way to do it.

The asking mindset, you’ve got to get yourself in the right mindset to start asking and I just love this book, The Little Engine that Could, it’s a classic, everybody’s ready. The little engine thought he could so that’s when I look at you’ve got to change your language, you’ve got to change what you say to yourself of, “I can’t do this, it won’t work” to, “I can do this and it will work.” You’ve got to get that positive expectation and I don’t mean that from a Pollyannaish perspective but you’ve got to have positive expectations. Then ask yourself, “How do I make this happen? How do I reach so and so? How do I get that price increase? How do I get a larger piece of the business?” When you start asking ‘how do I’ now you start trying to solve versus ‘can I’. ‘Can I’ is, “Can I or can’t I?” There’s doubt in there but, “How do I…?” assumes probability that it’s going to happen. Another thing, look around. If they can do it, so can I. Look at your peers, if your peers are making things happen, “If so-and-so is doing it, I’m certainly as smart as he or she is so why am I not out there doing it? Let’s go do it.” All you need is to see one person pull it off and all of a sudden you’re going, “If they did, I can do it, I’ve just got to figure out how to do it.”

You can ask for anything and I really mean ask for anything. Figure out what you want, go ask for it and then you get what you ask for so don’t sell yourself short. If you really want something else, don’t ask for less, ask for what you really want and this statement, you’ve heard this a thousand times: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. That’s so true, the problem is we don’t ask and there’s a cost of not asking, there’s a cost to you of not asking, there’s also a cost to your customer or your prospect of not asking. Are you short-changing them by not asking them? Because if you’re asking, clearly you think you’ve got something that’s going to help. My experience is both people want to help, it’s in our nature. When somebody asks for help, we want to grant it and over the year, the one thing that I’ve seen in all my clients is they’re like, “I can’t ask for that” and I go, “Humor me, just go try it.” They come back and go, “I got them on the phone, I asked them and without hesitation they’re like, ‘Sure’ like it was no big deal, no-brainer. All the energy that I had wrapped up around asking and how I thought they were going to respond, it was almost anti-climactic because they just granted it without a second thought.” That’s my point, it’s really that easy, you just have to go do it.

Andy Miller: Let’s talk about the 7 characteristics of askers, these are what askers have in common. The first one is they know what they want, they’re clear on their ask, they go big and they’re intentional about it, they know what they want. They believe they’re worthy, they believe they deserve it, they believe they bring value. Deserving it and being entitled are two different things, I don’t feel entitled, I do believe I deserve it but I’ve got to ask. Third thing, they believe they can get it, they’re focused on the possibility, they believe it’s doable, they love the challenge. Maybe it’s a stretch, but they expect to get it, they believe they can get it. Fourth one, they’re passionate about the ask so they’ve got a strong desire for it, they’ve got some enthusiasm and as you know, Fred, enthusiasm is infectious. When you’re around people who are excited about what’s going on, you like being a part of it and when you ask for something and you’re enthusiastic about it, it makes people feel good. Next, they take action in the face of fear.

There was a book written years ago called Feel the Fear but Do It Anyway. I love that title, that’s what Nike was all about. Fred, you brought this up earlier, they find the courage, it’s courage. Sixth thing that askers know, they learn from their experience so they make their ask, if they didn’t get what they wanted they observe how the people responded and then they ask themselves, “Do I need to make some adjustments? Do I need to go to somebody and get some coaching? What could I do better? How could I approach it differently?” They make the adjustment and then they go back and ask again. Just because you got a no the first time doesn’t mean it’s over, adjust, go back and ask again. The seventh one is they’re persistent. That is you’ve got to ask 6 times to get that 60% close rate, they’re unrelenting in their determination and they refuse to give up. This is what the askers know.

Fred Diamond: Those seven attributes of the askers, those are attributes of great sales professionals. Like I said, we’ve done over 300 Sales Game Changer podcast interviews of sales thought leaders and the commonality that I see with all of them is it’s been a career of courage for getting where they worked and all those types of things. To get to the level of VP, to get to the level of Chief of Sales or Chief Revenue Officer you need to have asked so many people for business, you need to have asked so many partners to be a partner, so many people for the opportunity to present, so many people internally to help you with a deal or a process or those types of things. It all comes down to those seven characteristics and some people do it differently than others. Not everybody does it the same way, one person’s persistence might be another person’s more subtle persistence but it’s still there. Asking is just a common thread of the best sales professionals out there, Andy.

Andy Miller: If you want to see the best askers, watch a two and a half year old or three year old in the shopping cart at the grocery store when their parents take them down the checkout counter that has all the candy or the little toys. You’ll see a master asker at work [laughs] because they’re relentless and they’ll just ask, ask, ask.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to that for one second, professionalism in the asking. When you see that same two and a half year old, if the mom or dad doesn’t say yes to the lollipop in three asks then the kid starts crying usually and then everybody in the supermarket wants to get that kid escorted out.

Andy Miller: [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Talk about that for a second, persistence and professionalism, I’m curious what your view is on the professional salesperson versus maybe someone who’s overly demanding if there’s any value even having this conversation.

Andy Miller: My technique personally is when I get to the sixth ask I start to cry, that’s what I do, [laughs] I’m kidding. Again, I think we give too much energy to the style in which we ask, just be yourself. You know the people you’re approaching, just make a nice, pleasant ask and that’s why we get hung up on, “What are the words I should say? What should my tone be?” Ask like you’re asking a friend, if you think about, “I’m going to ask my buddy Tom if he wants to go to the movies on Friday night”, do you really spend time and energy around what words you need to use and what your tone needs to sound like? You just call him up and go, “Hey, Tom, do you want to go see a movie on Friday?” and Tom goes, “What kind of movie did you have in mind?” That’s how it goes so like I said, I think we get too hung up on technique, style, tonality, just ask. If you’ve been in sales for any length of time, you know how to be pleasant, just be pleasant as you ask.

Fred Diamond: We have another question here that comes in from Jerry and Jerry is up in New Jersey, Jerry is a frequent attendee at our webinars. Jerry wants to know, “How do I not sound like I’m begging by the time it’s the sixth time I’ve asked?” That may go back to what you were saying. I remember one of our speakers once said that a customer is only going to buy if they need what you’re selling, especially now. People are challenged with solving their problems that have been caused because of the pandemic and we talk about this on every Sales Game Changers episode that we do every single day. Every customer in the world has unique challenges now, which is dealing with the COVID side of the pandemic and then, of course, dealing with the financial side. This goes back to the message that if you’re up to the sixth and seventh ask, maybe there’s just not a need or you need to rethink how you’re doing it. Is there a thin line between asking and begging or is it just something that maybe Jerry is overthinking here? Thanks, Jerry for the question.

Andy Miller: Jerry, my comment would be do you have something that they need? Do you have something that offers value? Because if you don’t, I get calls all the time of people asking if I need such and such or if I’m willing to help with so and so and no, I don’t need temporary services. They don’t know me, they don’t know what I need. They called up, they asked, I gave them credit and I go no but there is a difference. If you’re badgering them, don’t badger. If you’re desperate, don’t beg. An ask is just simply an ask, “Can I have some of your French fries? Can you buy me a coffee?” That’s just an ask and they go, “Sure, I’ll help you get a coffee” or, “I’m happy sharing my French fries.” That’s not begging but if you ask them 20 times, Jerry, I would say you really got to look at what you’re selling, who you’re approaching, do they need what you have? Because if they don’t need what you have, there’s no reason to ask 6 times. The answer is still going to be no.

Fred Diamond: Andy, before I ask you for your final thought I want to thank you again for being on today’s webinar. We do have one question here and the question is how can I get better at asking? Again, you’ve worked with tens of thousands of sales professionals in your distinguished career, is there any practice that you could have people do that you recommend? Because there still seems to be a fear of doing some of the things that are required in the sales process. Of course, we’re talking about how easy it is to ask and it is but you’ve still got to get to the point where it’s natural and you’re comfortable and it’s not going to impinge how you do. Is there an action practice that you can recommend people do to get better at asking?

Andy Miller: The next slide is how to ask, imagine that, we should go on the road together. Sue, your question was, “Do I ask via LinkedIn or email?” and my answer to that is no. Don’t do it via email or LinkedIn, I feel like that’s hiding. Do it in person, do it on the phone, do it on a Zoom call but you’ve got to get face to face somehow. Don’t do it on LinkedIn, don’t do it on the email, it’s easy for them to say no and you just can’t project the authenticity that you need to. Ask for some advice, ask for some coaching from them or ask for a chance, be clear and specific on your ask, be authentic, you’ve got to be genuine. Then ask someone that can give it to you, don’t ask the person who can say no but can’t say yes. Ask as if you expect to get it and then be ready to explain why because somebody might go, “Why do you want that?” Be ready with a decent explanation, not a long one, just, “Here’s what I’m trying to do.” Don’t get upset if they say no. By the way, they’re not going to get upset but they may say, “No, not interested” and remember, you’ve got to ask more than five times.

The last thing to your last question is how do we get better at it? Here’s the challenge. My challenge to you is do what I did, be an alien for a week, make a list of your asks, believe you can get it and then go out there and ask, ask, ask. Be gracious, have some fun with it and then I want you to send both me and Fred your success stories. You’ve got to practice, you’ve got to start somewhere and if you’re afraid to go for the big asks, go for the little ones. Build that ask muscle because you’ve got to build the muscle up. Fred, that answered the last two questions that we had so hopefully everybody got what they needed out of that.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 309: Well-Known Sales Expert Andy Miller Gives Crisp Advice on Asking for What You Want first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Please register for Creativity in Sales: Mark “The Sales” Hunter Presents Daily Habits and Practical Strategies to Succeed During COVID-19 on Friday, April 17, 2020 11:00 AM EDT here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 10, 2020.]

EPISODE 223: Creativity in Sales Webcast: Using GRIT to Pivot During Challenging Times with Andy Miller

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Andy Miller’s Sales Game Changers Podcast here.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “GRIT is doing whatever it takes to get the job done, as long as it’s moral, ethical and legal.”

Andy Miller: Today we’re going to talk about GRIT. Part of GRIT is called growth mindset and to me, creativity is a subset of that but we are in challenging times right now. We’re seeing things that none of us have seen in our lifetime no matter what age you’re at so I want to talk about the hard part first. I want to tell a story about how they catch monkeys. The way they catch monkeys is they take a banana, they put the banana in the cage and they lock the cage so the monkey cannot get into the cage and part of this is monkeys are smart enough to know it’s a trap so they’re not going to go in. You put the banana in there, they lock it and then they leave it out in the open. What happens is the monkey comes up, reaches through the cage to grab the banana but the bars are tight enough that the monkey can’t pull the banana out. Then they go and they pick up the cage with the monkey hanging onto the banana and that’s how they catch the monkey.

All the monkey has to do is let go of the banana so the monkey can run away and be free, and the hard part about what we’re going to talk about today on GRIT and creativity is we all have a banana that we don’t want to let go of and in times of adversity, hardship and challenge we got to let go of the banana. What might the name of that banana be? The name of that banana might be we have spending habits at home that causes us to live at or above our means and we need to cut back on that. The banana might be called ‘I need to do more prospecting than I’ve been doing’ and I need to let go of whatever else I was doing and start picking up the phone or get on LinkedIn or however else you market and increase your marketing activity. That banana might be called ‘the need to be recognized’ or ‘the need to feel important’ or ‘the need to have others say that you’re the best’ but you’ve got a banana, we all have it, we all got a banana that we’re holding onto that is getting in our way and sometimes you got to let go to let other things happen.

That to me is part of what GRIT is about. Let’s talk about what GRIT is and actually, Fred, do we have any comments or questions on what I just said?

Fred Diamond: No, we’re good for right now. I’m really interested in GRIT, GRIT comes up all the time. You and I have spoken about GRIT and I look forward to your definition of it. I know that you disagree with some of the more common definitions of GRIT as well so I’m curious on your thought about that.

Andy Miller: This is my definition: doing whatever it takes to get the job done. I can expand on that a little bit as long as it’s moral, ethical and legal but let’s talk about health for a second. Why does somebody have a heart attack and one guy changes his life afterwards because the doctor says, “If you don’t change, you’re going to die” and why does another person not change their lifestyle? To me it’s doing whatever it takes to get the job done, it’s fueled by passion and perseverance and it’s doing what you need to do. I may sneeze here, allergy season, so I apologize for that.

Fred Diamond: Sneeze into your elbow, by the way (laughs).

Andy Miller: [Laughs] I will, hopefully not into the microphone. I look at it and go, one person loses a job and they quickly downsize their life to adapt and another one doesn’t and ends up putting themselves in a pickle, that’s the banana. Why does a child in Rwanda walk 10 miles with a pot on their head to go get water and bring it back? Clean drinking water. Fred, you and I were talking about sports and I do follow mixed martial arts a little bit and there’s a woman named Ronda Rousey, one of the best mixed martial artists in the world amongst men and women. She only had so much money to spend and she had to make a choice and her choice was, “Do I get an apartment and pay my rent or do I live in my car and pay for the training that I want to get from the best trainer that I can find?” and she chose to spend a year living in her car so that she could pay the trainer to get the kind of training she wanted to get so that she could become the best in the world. I think that goes to Mohammed Ali, this quote from him on the slide, “I hated every minute of training but I said, ‘Don’t quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'”

So it is doing whatever it takes. He didn’t say it would be easy, he didn’t say it would be without stretching, he didn’t say it would be without sacrifice but what are you willing to do to get to where you want to be? That could be health, it could be relationship, it could be in the business but that’s what you need to do and I think right now today, based upon what’s happening a lot of people are in fear mode and it’s hard to be creative and productive when you’re fearful. The faster you can get out of fear mode and get into a ‘find a way’ mode, the better off you’re going to be. That to me is a good example of that and I’ve lived it, I’ve lived it in my health, I’ve lived it in my businesses that I’ve had. Let me pause there, any questions or comments?

Fred Diamond: Just curious, we’ve been into this about four weeks now, what would you say would be a success? If I’m a sales professional right now, what would be an idea or two of something that would help me get past the fear that I could say was a success that I’ve accomplished during this particular time?

Andy Miller: In a minute I’m actually going to get to what you can do to get past the fear. I’m not sure how to define what success is, I do think and I’m coaching my clients to what you can do now to build bend strength. If you’ve got a [Inaudible 11:42] in what you’re doing, can you build bend strength? Can you differentiate yourself a little bit better? Can you change how you’re working? I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself but I think there are things you can do to put yourself in a better position and by the way, not everybody’s stuck right now. If you’re in the food industry, you’re growing. If you’re in the medical care industry, you’re growing. If you’re in the transportation business, you’re growing. If you are in the energy business with maybe the exception of oil and gas, you’re growing.
I talked to a guy last week and I’ll talk about this now since it’s come up. He just landed a call center contract to hire 600 salespeople in the next two months and part of what this pandemic is causing is a shift. What he realized was a lot of companies offshore their call centers to India and Philippines and they’ve got the pandemic, too. With their pandemic they’ve had to shut down their call centers which leaves an opportunity.

What this guy realized was call centers are shutting down, they’re not able to fulfill their obligation so he called up companies that had call centers overseas and said, “I’ve got call centers here on the mainland, let me do fulfillment. They were able to break their contracts because nobody was servicing them in India or China and now they’re hiring salespeople and doing well. There are industries that thrive during more difficult times. Any other questions?

Fred Diamond: No, let’s keep going.

Andy Miller: I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit. That’s an opportunity slide, so let’s go next. What does GRIT stand for? GRIT is actually an acronym and to me, it’s growth mindset and no matter who’s model of GRIT you follow – Angela Duckworth is the one that’s most popular, University of Pennsylvania professor. Her GRIT was research done on kids in the academic world, she’s venturing out that a little bit, I follow Paul Stoltz, he studied GRIT in the business world especially for investment bankers and there’s other GRIT models out there. No matter whose GRIT model you follow, the G in GRIT, whatever acronym it may have, always stands for growth mindset. Next is resilience, how resilient are you? I’ll get into that in a little bit.

Initiative, it’s taking action. Some others will call it instinct or they’ll have others for the I but for me in the sales world, in the business world it’s taking action or initiative and then tenacity. When I think of a good example of this, if anybody watched the movie Apollo 13, here you had the accident happen in space, they’re going, “What do we do now? Because we can’t get back to earth, we’re going to die up here.” If you remember, there was a flight team that they pulled into a room and they’re all panicking and fearful going, “This is impossible, this has never happened before, nobody’s ever done this” and then walked in the head of the team and that was Ed Harris. Ed Harris walks in and he says, “Guys, we don’t have an option, we’re going to find a way” so they went from ‘is this possible’ to ‘we’re going to figure it out’ and I really think that’s part of the shift we have to go through of the mindset, shifting from ‘can I’ to ‘how do I’. It’s a very different perspective. ‘How do I’ implies it can be done and now you’re trying to find a way, ‘can I’ implies it can’t be done so you should be asking yourself in this situation ‘how do we’. Again, I don’t care whether it’s personal or in sales or in business, the question really is ‘how do I’ or ‘how do we’.

Fred Diamond: Andy, a comment that came in here through one of our mutual friends, Pramod Raheja, also a past guest.

Andy Miller: Hey, Pramod.

Fred Diamond: Pramod says, “We’re speaking to all of our important pipeline customers as it keeps us top of mind despite the fact that things keep getting pushed back. Just checking in can go a long way.” Thanks, Pramod. Again, if anybody has any other ideas, thoughts they’re doing today, feel free to submit them via the question panel and we’ll discuss them here today.

Andy Miller: I would encourage you to do that if you haven’t done it but you can only do that for so long before it becomes routine so I would encourage you to say, “What value can we be bringing to our clients right now?” I don’t know if anybody gets the Washington Business Journal but they sent out an email right before Fred and I jumped on the computer together and I didn’t get to read it but the subject line was, “What can we do for you?” and that’s exactly what it should be. Touching base is one, “What can we do for you?” is another. Again, I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit but what things do you wish were available but aren’t? You’re going to see some opportunity in there. Let’s go ahead to the next slide. First thing you need to do in terms of growth mindset, in order to be creative you’ve got to put yourself in a good place and – I know they say we shouldn’t touch our face but I did wash my hands – you need to get sleep.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on health but I do need to set the foundation. When it comes to health, the biggest thing you can do for your immune system is 7 to 8 hours of sleep. You can take supplements and all those things but your body starts producing things that fight a disease at the 7 hour mark. Also, I don’t know if you’ve realized this or not but your brain actually relaxes and the little channels or canals between different part of your brains takes out the dead cells so it’s like the trash collector coming along to take out the trash. That immune fighting ability and the brain taking away the trash through the spinal fluid does not happen until the 7 hour mark so you need to get sleep. Exercise, somehow when you’re stressed there’s stress chemicals running throughout your body, exercise burns it off. I don’t care what kind of exercise you do, just do something. The body needs movement, the body needs to burn off those chemicals and exercise is the fastest way to do that.

A little bit of meditation every day, I get up, I do 30 minutes of meditation every day first thing in the morning and part of my meditation is just being thankful for what I have and where I’m at. No matter how bad things get, there’s always something to be thankful for and you’re going to find you can be more creative and you’re going to have a better day if you just spend a little bit of time going, “I’m pretty thankful because there’s people out there who got it way worse than you do” so a little thankfulness and meditation. Diet, garbage in, garbage out. If you’re putting junk in your body, think of the mind-body-spirit connection. Your spirit’s sending you a message, your mind is the receiver and the body is the wire or the airwaves that it goes across so if you’re putting junk in your body that’s like listening to AM static radio. If you’re eating reasonably clean, you’re going to get that clear FM signal. That’s the mind-body-spirit connection. Smoking, let’s be real about the Coronavirus, it attacks your lungs so if you’re worried about getting the virus and you smoke, you may want to stop to give your lungs a fighting chance. The last thing is drinking and sugar, alcohol and sugar impact your immune system so this is purely of health, it’s not a value judgement conversation but there are things that you can do to put yourself in a good place.

Now, once you’ve done that you’re going to be in a better place to do some problem solving and get creative and do some innovation. Let’s talk about growth mindset. To me, some of the things you want to think about is how do I pivot? I’m going to give you some examples here. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with ozone machines but if you’ve ever gone to a hotel and somebody smoked in the non-smoking room or you got a rental car and somebody smoked in the rental car and they shouldn’t have smoked, the companies have an ozone machine. They’ll put it in the car, they’ll put it in the hotel room and they’ll run it for a couple hours and it kills germs, bacteria, viruses, odors. I was talking to a client of mine and I said, “You’ve got a bunch of ozone machines, don’t you?” he said yes and I said, “These hospitals are having trouble, they’re using disposable protective gear that they can’t dispose of because they’re out of supply. Could you create an ozone room like the hotels do where people can go put their protective gear in there, you could run the ozone machine for a couple hours or whatever’s required to kill bacteria and viruses so that they could reuse the disposable stuff? I know it’s not ideal but it’s better than what they have to work with now” and he’s like, “That’s a really good idea.”

Now he’s able to give back to the medical community and he can use that for a little PR. That’s a way of being creative. Could he rent that stuff or sell it probably or donate it? That’s totally his call but if he wants to do something in terms of innovation, that’s innovation. Another one, fraud. This was a couple years ago before the pandemic happened but we had a client who sold business checks and they wanted to sell more of them and I said, “You realize everybody’s going electronic and we’re talking about you’re trying to become a bigger fish in a shrinking pond?” and they said, “Yes, we got a strategy but we need you to buy us a year or two for us to have the other strategy kick into place.” We did a little research and we discovered, since their target audience was small businesses, the large percentage of small businesses will experience $50 thousand dollars in fraud so we had them add fraud insurance to their checks and charge a premium. Their upsell went from 6% to 75% by educating their clients about fraud and telling them, “If you buy our premium checks, fraud insurance is already covered in that and if fraud happens, you’ll have a $50 thousand dollar check sitting in your bank account within 3 days.”

What you’re seeing now, a lot of restaurants are doing curbside delivery or other stores are doing curbside delivery. UV lighting, I don’t know if you know that a lot of heating and air conditioning companies have access to install UV lighting in your heating system and air conditioning system. Basically they put it in the blower unit and that kills germs, viruses, mold, bacteria, mildew and I’m hearing some of the smarter HVAC folks are running ads saying, “If you’re worried about germs, mold, mildew, call us up. We can easily come install UV lighting that will kill all that stuff off.”

Virtual tours, you’re seeing that in real estate but think if you were at Marriott Hotels, they have around 350 sales reps in Florida saying time shares. Nobody’s getting on airplanes, nobody’s coming to hotels, nobody’s coming to Florida, everybody’s worried about quarantine and stay home. It depends on where you are, all of us have different orders but it’s be safe. “We have 350 sales reps that can’t be productive” and I said, “Why don’t you do virtual tours?” It means changing the way that you’ve done it before. “Come on down for a free weekend, come hear our pitch for a couple hours, we’ll lock the door, do our pitch and give you a couple gifts” but now they can do virtual tours. Zoom, this has been a boom business for Zoom and anybody else, GoToMeeting and Webex because now you’re staying at home and we can still do meetings, we’re doing it now. I already talked about the call center shifting from offshore to onshore and entrepreneurs being smart enough going, “You need some help? We can handle that contract for you.” Web design, this was a client a couple years ago, it’s not right now but it’s still applicable with innovation and innovation doesn’t have to be a radical change, it could just be a slight shift. We noticed that he [the client] had done a lot of web design but there were for hospitals and we were like, “Why do hospitals use you for web design?” What he didn’t realize was he had built a website that allowed doctors to log in with different levels of security but each one was HIPAA compliant and nobody else was building HIPAA compliant websites so that was a unique differentiator.

Did he have to go out and radically change his business? No. Did he have to pivot what we has doing in his business? Not really, all he had to do was change his messaging and tweak his target a little bit, be a little bit more hospital-centric and change the message to, “We do HIPAA compliant websites.” Just trying to give you some examples. Here’s the key about innovation, this is something that you need to do with others. You can’t sit down in a room and do this by yourself. You could, but it’s more difficult and I’ll give you an example. I had a client, owns a sign business, he called me up and said, “I think I’ve got to shut down” and I said, “No you don’t, let’s talk about your target audience. You’re focused on parking lots and nobody’s driving right now so parking lots are cutting back on their hours, they don’t have attendance, the ones that are open because they don’t have attendance they’re not taking cash, they’re only taking credit cards.” I said, “Well, there’s a number of things you can do, let’s talk about the kind of equipment that you have.

First of all, you could call up all your garage operators and saying, “Do you need some signing saying ‘limited hours’? Do you need some signing saying ‘cash only’? Do you need to say ‘closed until the pandemic is over’? You can go out to your existing base and do that. Another option you have is restaurants. If they’re doing curbside, it’s really hard to know where to pull up on the curb or I see people getting out of their car, walking up to the door of the restaurant, they’re reading a little piece of paper taped to the window on what do to. You could actually do that in signage so that people didn’t even have to get out of their car, they could call their order in and wait there till somebody brings it out. You could actually go to restaurants and I know you don’t have a list of restaurants but if you get in your car and just drive down the main street, I know you got three blocks of nothing but restaurants. Is that going to set the world on fire and bring in huge cash flow? No, but it brings in some.

Next, I know you’ve got a machine that does wraps for trucks, wraps for cars, you can do magnetic signs. If you’re a real estate agent and still driving around, you could change your signage, a magnetic sign on your car that says ‘come see our virtual tour’ or your HVAC, you could do magnetic sign or change the wrapping, but magnetic would be temporary of ‘worried about germs, bacteria and viruses in your house? Call us for a UV lighting install’. There’s things you could do.” I said, “Next, you’ve got another option. Be a little patient and see what’s going to happen with congress and what stimulus they’re going to put in place and the last thing is, and I know you don’t want to hear it, you could actually shut down. When I think about your passion, your passion is fishing and mountain biking. I’ve heard friends who’ve gone bankrupt say this, when they’re going through bankruptcy it sucks but once they’re bankrupt, they’ve all said this phrase that’s stuck in my mind. Every single person I know that’s ever gone bankrupt has said ‘I feel free.'”

I said, “What would happen when you feel free? You would be free to do anything you’ve ever wanted to do, you love fishing and mountain biking, you could become a fishing guy, you could become a mountain guy, you could start an adventure travel business, but you would be free to do other things that you’ve always wanted to do.” Fred, I’m going to pause there for a second on growth mindset because I just threw out a whole lot of stuff. My point is this, if you get in a relaxed place and you’re willing to brainstorm with others, you have options.

Fred Diamond: Andy, that’s great. We have a lot of people on the webinar who are leading corporate sales teams. Again, the Institute for Excellence in Sales, our mission is to help sales leaders retain, motivate and elevate top-tier talent. A couple people had commented here, “I manage a team with a large corporation” and there’s a couple people who are bag-carrying sales professionals. You gave us some great examples for business owners, let’s shift the conversation a little bit to bag-carrying, quota-carrying sales leaders and sales professionals. On the concept of innovation, individual sales reps, the individual contributor, someone who’s an account manager or new business development person for a $5 billion software company – we have a couple of those people on the line here – what might be some of the things they could possibly be thinking about right now to be more innovating during this time?

Andy Miller: Pick up the phone and call your customers, just have a conversation with them. You would be surprised what comes out of that, they will tell you what they need. Don’t go lock yourself in a room and try to figure this out on your own, this happens by having dialogue with others. It may not be that you have to innovate, it may just mean a slight change in your messaging. You may already have what they need, they just don’t know it and you’ve never thought about it that way.

Fred Diamond: Same thing if you’re managing the team. We have two people who suggested, “I manage a team of younger sales professionals, some of them are brand new in their career.” If I’m a sales leader, let’s say I’m a first line sales manager, let’s say I just got promoted in the last year and we’ve talked about this many times, one of the hardest jobs is first time sales manager because you’re not getting trained. A lot of times you get promoted because you were very good at what you did so now you’re managing a team, you’ve probably never gone through a pandemic before as nobody on this line has. What would be some suggestions if I’m managing a 6 person team, maybe people who are spread out across the country, how can I be innovative if I’m not necessarily talking to customers but I want to keep my sales team motivated and energized?

Andy Miller: That leads to this next slide, Fred. That was a great segue, here’s things you could be asking yourself or you could be discussing with your team. When it comes to innovation, what questions should we be asking? What questions should we be asking ourselves, what questions should we be asking our customers, clients, prospects? To me it’s that Washington Business Journal email I saw of, “Where do you need help? What can we be doing for you?” Next question. What skills do we need? Do we have all the skills that we need or are we missing something? Is something an easy lift but we’re missing the skill? Maybe you’re all used to going face-to-face and now you got to go virtual and you need something like Zoom or GoToMeeing. Let me teach everybody as a leader how to use GoToMeeting.
What knowledge do we need? Are we missing any knowledge that we need right now? You could fill that in, it’s easy. You’ve got podcasts, you’ve got YouTube, you’ve got books you can buy, Amazon is still shipping. Again, the purpose of this is out of discussion will come some realizations of things that you can do. What resources do we need? That’s another question. What options do we have? I would explore the options. Some options you could do yourself, some options you need the company to change, some options are probably too much of a stretch right now but we should consider it for the near future and then other things is who else has done this? Is there somebody that I could call who’s been through this before and have them talk to the team? There are things that you can do to start thinking, “What else can we do here?” and all these are to generate what options we have because there’s always options. I don’t care how bad it gets, there’s always options.
Now, the outcomes may not be ideal but you always have options. Does that answer the question?

Fred Diamond: Yes, that’s great.

Andy Miller: Let’s go to the next, what can you do? Again, this is on generating ideas and innovation. Modify – can you modify your current offering like the UV guys did? Look for what’s missing, is there something that’s missing? Marriott Hotels was started because the original founder, Bill Marriott senior did it because he was traveling with his family and couldn’t find a place to stay. Frustration – Identify the frustration that your clients are having and then find a way to fulfill that frustration because out of frustration becomes opportunity. Use the chance to reinvent yourself like we’re seeing, you could pursue wishes, hopes and dreams, that’s a personal thing. Diversify – do you need to be in other markets? Change the game. Kia did this years ago when they offered a 10 year or 100 thousand mile warranty. If you believe in what you built, why wouldn’t you extend the warranty?

Here’s one thing I would have all of you do and that is watch the curve, they keep talking about, “Let’s flatten the curve for the pandemic”. Once the curve has flattened I’m not sure what happens next but business is going to pick up to some extent so there’s a website you can go to, the website is worldometer.com and you can watch the curve by country or by state. I would encourage you as you see the curve flatten, don’t wait until it’s flat and the news is talking about everybody’s back at work, get ahead of the curve, watch when it starts to flatten and then ramp up your efforts before anybody else is catching on, the curve is flat and it’s now safe to do business. Meditation counsel – this is a little technique that I use when I’m trying to figure out an answer, I will sit down and meditate and then I will bring in three or four, I’m going to call them council members.

I pretend that I have access to anybody in the world that I want access to throughout the ages. If I want to pull in Einstein into my council, if I want to pull in a doctor or nurse into my council, if I want to pull in the greatest salesperson that ever lived into my council I get into a meditative state because that puts your brain in a different place and then I bring in these world-class thought leaders based upon what I want and I ask them their advice. I know it may sound a little woo-woo but the fact is your brain has the answers, you just need to find a different way to access it. The last thing I would do is if you use Net Promoter Score, even if you don’t, Net Promoter Score is a three question survey, 0-10 how likely are you to recommend us, the next question is primary reason that you gave us the score. Here’s the one question that I would ask today: what’s the most important improvement that we could make that would get us to a 10? Forget about the 10 piece, I would be asking my clients what’s the most important improvement that we could make today that would help you? That I can do as a salesperson talking to my clients, talking to my customers, talking to my prospects, that I could do right now. Fred, let me pause there.

Fred Diamond: Someone asks, “Can I ask for business right now?” What are your thoughts on prospecting to people you don’t know? Let’s say you have a target list of a hundred companies or something like that and there’s 80 of them that you don’t know. Is now a worthwhile time to make outreach or is it just going to fall in deaf ears? We had some suggestions before about talking to your existing customers, people you were already in relationship with. What’s the likelihood of being successful right now of going after new business? Let’s say it’s random new business. We’re obviously not going to go after the airline industry or maybe you do, I don’t know. What do you think?

Andy Miller: Maybe you do. Do you have something to provide the airline industry that would really help bail them out right now? I don’t know what everybody sells that’s on the webinar but the question that I would ask is, “Do I have something that would help my target audience based upon what’s going on right now?” It’s a conversation of where they’re at in their industry, where they’re at in their business and what they’re trying to accomplish. Do I have something that would help? I hear this question, Fred, at least twice a week and I guess I’m surprised by it. Why wouldn’t we be reaching out to people right now? When I think of sales, I think of sales as helping others get what they want. I don’t think of sales as selling something to people that they don’t want or they don’t need, it’s helping others be successful.
Do I have something that will help them be successful right now or not? I’m still selling, I’m having last week and the week before 5 CEO conversations a week with people I don’t know. Out of that I got two sales last week, two sales pending this week so I don’t know why you wouldn’t call people. I would be sensitive and say, “Hey, I’m trying to figure out if we should be talking.” When I look at companies, some companies are saying, “Right now we’re playing defense, we’re pulling back a little bit.” Some companies are saying, “We’re playing offense and we’re gobbling up market share” or, “We see opportunity.”

Which position do you guys see yourself in? Here’s what I do for companies in your position, is that something worth exploring? I really think it’s that simple, I think we make it way more complicated than it needs to be.

Let me go to the next slide. GRIT – I knew we were going to spend most on innovation so we are on track for what we need to be doing, but GRIT is an acronym. The R in GRIT is Resilience and I think of Fred Smith as an example of this. Here’s this guy who is Chairman and CEO of Federal Express but what you don’t know is the story of how he got there. When he was 4, his father died. His father was an entrepreneur, he was raised by his mother and his uncles but as a kid he got a crippling bone disease, he was crippled and it took until he was 10 years old to regain his health. As a result of that, he started playing sports because he knew he had to build his body back up and by the time he graduated high school he was a high school football star. Then you probably heard this story if you’ve heard anything about him, he went to Yale and he wrote a paper. The paper was supposed to be about a feasible business idea and his professor gave him a C for the concept of Federal Express saying, “I’m giving you a C because I wanted a feasible business idea, not the hair brain” – I’m making up the hair brain phrase – “Not some hair brain idea of what you came up with.”

As we know, it went on to become Federal Express. Then another example of resilience is in the very early stages of the business he ran out of money, he was down to $5 thousand dollars and the jet fuel bill was $24 thousand so he took a little gamble. He went to Vegas, he played blackjack and he won $27 thousand dollars. Do I recommend that? Not necessarily, but desperate times require desperate measures and he won $27 thousand, was able to pay the fuel and to keep going. The last example of resilience was 9/11 happened, and what people didn’t know is we know them for flying packages everywhere but they had a fleet of trucks all over the country and could still deliver coast to coast via his truck fleet.

When 9/11 happened he went around all the cable shows and said, “The planes are grounded but our trucks are still shipping. Don’t let the terrorists win and keep on doing business, stick it to the terrorists.” That’s what he did. What questions can you ask yourself on resilience? Questions you’re going to ask is what’s the biggest challenge we’re going to face? Have that discussion with your salespeople. Control – what elements do we think are out of our control? Have that discussion, acknowledge that because you have a lot more control than you think you do. What things can we influence the things going on right now? Even the things we think are out of our control, how can we influence those? What’s the worst case scenario and what’s the best case scenario? Talk through that and in terms of what’s going on, how can we minimize the downside and how can we harness what’s going on and push through it quickly? The faster you push through it, the better. Then what does the final outcome or result look like? These are things you can ask yourself on resilience. Fred, I’m going to pause there before I go to the next topic of initiative.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you go on to the next couple slides? Then we’re going to wind us down in about five minutes. Again, if anybody has any final questions for Andy, please submit them and we’ll get to them.

Andy Miller: Next is initiative, taking action. I think Oprah Winfrey is a great example of this. I don’t know if anybody read her book but I think we all know who she is. When you think about her, she was born in Mississippi in poverty, her toy was a corncob doll, she was born to a single mother and she had a lot of hardship. She was raped at 9, became pregnant at 14, the baby died in infancy but somewhere along the way she ended up moving to Tennessee to a guy she now considers her dad and in high school she decided she wanted to get a job in radio. She took the initiative and found a way to get a job in high school which then led to her being a co-anchor on the local news.

She asked for that at age 19 so there’s lots of examples of what she’s done but she didn’t have a mentor to help guide her, she just took the initiative and today she’s considered one of the wealthiest and most influential women in the world. What can you do to ask yourself about initiative? When do we get started? How do I get started? What actions do I need to take? Who has ownership? How do I take ownership of this? Because if we say who, that allows us to placate and put the blame on somebody else but I like the phrase, “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.” Then the last one is how do I get traction quickly?
My last example of GRIT, the T in GRIT is Tenacity. I love Richard Branson for this. Again, you may think, “Here’s this guy who’s rich and famous.” What’s cool about Branson is people don’t realize he’s dislexic and he made a lot of mistakes. In college he started a newsletter that was called Virgin. His team was working together, “What do we call this business?” and one of the guys suggested, “Let’s call it virgin because we’re all business virgins” and that’s where the name Virgin came from. His second business was Virgin Atlantic Records, Virgin Records first and he didn’t collect taxes on the records so the tax authorities came after him and his mother had to mortgage her house to pay his tax bills so that he didn’t go to jail. Interesting, right? Let’s talk about what can we do in terms of tenacity. First thing is refuse to give up. You should be asking yourself, “How long is this going to take?” It may take a long time but that’s okay, get in it for the long haul.

Next, anticipate excuses. What excuses can we anticipate? The next is how do we eliminate that excuse making? Because it’s easy to find excuses. There’s a number of guys that I coach in my business and I’m hearing a lot of excuse making and my belief is there’s still opportunity. If your belief is, “We can’t make it” then your behaviors are going to follow that. If your belief is, “We’ll find a way” your behaviors are going to follow that. Then the last is commit. How do we increase our strength and our efforts and our commitment level to make this happen? I’m going to end with this quote, and you might have heard it before. My question for you is do you believe in yourself? Because Henry Ford had this quote of, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right” and I absolutely believe that

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 223: Creativity in Sales Webcast: Using GRIT to Pivot During Challenging Times with Andy Miller first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 210: International Sales Strategist Andy Miller Gives Pertinent Advice on Hiring, Motivating and Retaining Top Tier Sales Talent

ANDY’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Get curious about everything, get curious about your customer, get curious about their industry, get curious about their business model. I find curiosity to be a really great habit for a salesperson.”

Andy Miller is president of Big Swift Kick, a top sales consultancy and training company.

On today’s show, we talked about acquiring, motivating and retaining top tier sales talent.

Andy gives some tips on how you can acquire and retain your top tier talent and how you as a sales professional can take your career to the next level.

Andy can be found on LinkedIn here.

Andy Miller: Thanks, Fred. In a nutshell, my first sales job was when I was 13, I had a paper route. A lot of entrepreneurial skills are learned there, collections, customer service, if you want to expand your paper route you’ve got to knock on doors and you’ve got to sell. That was really my entry into sales and then when I was 27 I jumped into entrepreneurship, I started a software company in Holland. I’d been in software sales for a couple years before then, but that was my journey.

It was open up an office in Amsterdam and then expand throughout the world and the challenge there was hiring salespeople who worked the way that I wanted them to work but in different cultures and different languages. At that start, I made a fatal mistake, hired somebody I should have not hired and in Holland you cannot fire somebody at will, you have to get government permission so I had to keep her for 8 months while she didn’t show up. That started me on the, “How do we identify top talent, how do we attract them, how do we motivate them, retain them and how do we get rid of them [Laughs] if we thought they were going to be top but they’re not proving out that way?”

Fred Diamond: You’re also an expert on sales professional assessment and that’ll come up over the course of the podcast. You and I have had many conversations about what it takes to be a great sales professional in the right situation and we’ll get to that over the course but do you agree? What do you think are the biggest challenges that sales leaders face today?

Andy Miller: The biggest one at least that I hear about hiring is people don’t even know where to find talent. We want to interview some people, they’re going, “We can’t even find people to interview.” That’s a big one, another one that I hear once they’re hired is, “How do we motivate them?” We’ll get into that in a little bit but, “I know somebody has some talent, I’m just not seeing them give their all” that’s another one. I think a third one would be shifting, the shift that’s happening from baby boomers to millennials, it’s a different mindset even though I don’t think it’s as different as people make it out to be, but there are differences. Then how to retain your top talent when there are so many openings and people are trying to get them to switch and come join their company? How do you make sure that you keep them? That, to me, I see as the biggest challenges.

Fred Diamond: You just used the M word – mindset – what is a sales mindset? What does that mean to you?

Andy Miller: There’s mindsets that support you in sales and there’s mindsets that sabotage you in sales. To me, the mindset predetermines the outcome before you even begin so if you think that picking up the phone and doing cold calling – and yes, people still cold call and yes, cold calling still works. You have to do a lot of smiling and dialing but if you think nobody wants to talk to you then you’re going to act that way, your words are going to come across that way. If you think people do want to talk to you then that matters, too.

Today, we’re right before a holiday and a lot of people are taking off. My experience is today is a great day for cold calling because the folks who are in working are relaxed and have time to talk. That to me is a mindset, the mindset is, “Nobody wants to talk to me” or, “Everybody’s on vacation” or, “There aren’t that many in, but the ones that are in are going to want to talk.” Those are two different mindsets and really the question becomes I can’t tell you which mindset is right or wrong but which mindset serves me better.

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s podcast interview about 15 miles outside of Washington DC in Alexandria, it’s the nation’s capital. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe. Andy, what are some of the challenges with attracting A players? The top performers, if you will.

Andy Miller: Everybody I talk to says they want A players but the question I ask them is, “Are you a company that an A player wants to be?” What people don’t realize is I just saw an article a week ago that said 50% of candidates or potential candidates when they hear there’s an opening, first thing they do is they go to Glass Door to see what your ratings are. My question for you is, whether it’s Glass Door or an equivalent, what’s your rating on Glass Door? Because if you have poor ratings you’re not even going to get a chance to talk to somebody.

I was actually talking to a young kid a couple weeks ago and he said, “I heard of a company, they had an opening, I went and saw the ad, went to Glass Door, their ratings were terrible and I didn’t even try to apply.” I think that’s very true for where things are today, we know Glass Door is a little bit jaded because people who get on and write reviews are typically folks who are disgruntled so it’s a little bit skewed but let me give you some comparative data. Google has a rating of 4.5 out of 5, Slack has a rating of 4.7 out of 5, Amazon has a rating of 3.8 out of 5 and do you think they have problems attracting top talent? No, they don’t. People are lined up and they don’t have the space for all the folks that want to work there.

That’s what you’re competing with, if your Glass Door ratings aren’t up among that range then either A, you’ve got to find a way to improve your ratings or B, you need to lower your expectations and think about how do we get B players or C players or how do we hire diamonds in the rough that we can develop?

Fred Diamond: Interestingly, you also said in the very beginning of today’s interview that companies are struggling with even knowing how to find these people. Let’s say a company decides to advertise to get some top people to come to their company in sales. How should they go about that? What’s the best way to do an advertisement?

Andy Miller: Before we get into advertisement, the strongest thing they can do is pay for referrals, pay their employees for referrals. If you say, “We sent a program, we pay them 200 bucks.” Your best new hires will come from your employees, so increase the referral fee. It’s not uncommon to say they’ve got to be there for 3 or 6 months before the referral fee is paid out, but take it up to 500 or 750 or a thousand because that’s where your best referrals are going to come from. If that’s not working or you’re not getting enough, then you need to run some ads.

Typically they’re on Job Boards nowadays, Indeed, things like that but we like the Ernest Shackleton ad and we can talk about that. Shackleton was a British explorer in a race to Antarctica and there’s some debate about whether he actually wrote the ad or not, but let’s not get into the historic of it, let’s get into the psychology of it. Here’s what the ad basically said. The ad said, “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in event of success.” That was the whole ad, they claimed they got 5,000 respondents, who knows? But if you look at the psychology of it, it talks about the hardest part, the scariest part of the journey and then it talks about the vision or the dream. That’s the power of it, and when you look at most ads that people run it’s kind of vanilla, it’s kind of boring, they don’t talk about the dream and they certainly don’t talk about the heavy lifting that has to occur.

Fred Diamond: What do you want to talk about when you do your ads? Do you want to be honest? Do you want to say it’s going to be tough or, “We’re in a tough marketplace”? How honest do you want to be when you create these ads?

Andy Miller: You need to be honest. What scares some people off inspires and motivates others, some folks are like, “Goodie, sounds like a challenge, I love a good challenge” and that’s what you want. You want people who are inspired by your situation or your scenario so tell them upfront the ugliest, hardest part and then also sell the dream because they still want to know, “What’s in it for me? Why should I take the job? I just don’t want to be a pack animal or a beast of burden.”

I’ll give an example, two years ago I was a interim sales VP for a software company out in the Midwest. They had a brand new product that they were getting ready to release but the product wasn’t finished, they needed to hire some additional top talent so we wrote a Shackleton ad and we went out there and we got a number of applicants. Basically the ad said, “Our product isn’t released yet, we have an idea of who the target market is but we haven’t tested it yet, we haven’t priced the product, we don’t have a commission plan.

Basically it’s a startup with a company that’s been around for a very long time but if we’re successful, you get stock in the company and you have a chance to make a lot of money and it’s not just talk because this CEO has done it twice before.” That’s what we did, we tried to scare them off.

Fred Diamond: Andy, I have a slightly different question here. You’ve worked with hundreds if not thousands of companies over your career, you’ve been doing sales performance improvement for over 25 years, you’ve written great articles, you have some great publications coming out on assessment. We have a lot of Sales Game Changers who are at the earlier part of their career, I’m just curious, I’m going to ask you a couple scenarios and I’m interested in your thoughts on the advantages of working for this situation. Let’s say someone’s in the early part of their career, you mentioned some large, successful companies before. What would be the advantages of working for a Microsoft or an Oracle or a huge technology company that’s already been around for 30, 40, 50 years and is already established?

Andy Miller: I think there’s two scenarios worth looking at. One is do they have a training and development program? When I say training and development I’m not just talking about product knowledge or industry knowledge. Do they really train you? Back in the 80s if you wanted to get a job in sales you would go to somebody like HP, IBM, something like that and they would put you through a year, year and a half mentorship programming. You got a lot of classroom training, you got time out in the field behind the windshield ride-alongs, you’d come back, you get more classroom training, you’d have objectives that you had to hit before you could go to the next level but they really developed their people. Those days are gone but there are still companies out there, for example, memoryBlue who’s somebody I think you interviewed recently. They really believe in developing people so that’s one advantage.

The other advantage is when you work for a big company it gives you some cache but if you want to go from big company to big company to big company, the downside is I’ve seen a lot of salespeople who’ve gone from big brand to big brand and they can’t sell. The reason for that is the brand carried them, they were never developed to meet their potential so they rode the brand and there’s nothing wrong with that as a career path if that’s the way you want to go. For me personally as an entrepreneur I’d prefer the smaller companies, that has a lot more challenge, it’s more interesting for me.

Fred Diamond: For a sales professional out there let’s say in the beginning part of their career, 25, 26 if you will and they want a great sales career, a great sales experience, what would be the advantage of working for that smaller company? Maybe there’s up to a hundred salespeople or 20 or 30, what would be the career advantages of going that route?

Andy Miller: Again, maybe they do development but I really think it comes down to knowing who you are and how you’re wired as a person. If you like places like the bigger companies where you can specialize and they have lots of resources, know that you’re going to be a very focused, almost like a subject matter expert and if you like that specialization, you’re going to be better off at a big company. If you like to wear multiple hats knowing that the smaller companies won’t have the resources and you’re going to have to help figure it out but you’re also going to get to participate more in direction, decisions and shaping things then you’re going to be better off at a small company. I really think it comes down to how you’re wired and in which environment will you thrive, not just get by but how and where will you thrive.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again we’re going to move into talking about motivation. Why are people struggling today? Again, you’ve worked with thousands of sales professionals at this point of your career. Why are salespeople struggling today?

Andy Miller: I think there’s two reasons, I think they don’t know their why, what drives them. A lot of people don’t get out of bed with fire in their belly, they just kind of get through life and then the second thing is I don’t think they’ve been mentored or developed. We over time seem to have gotten away from that at a time when it’s actually more and more important, and we can talk about that after the break.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second, though. You mentioned why, is it important for a sales leader to know his people’s why and what does that mean?

Andy Miller: Absolutely, a lot of sales leaders that I see out there are more managers of data and people and processes, particularly pipeline towards the end of the month and end of the quarter but they don’t know what puts fire in their people’s belly and why they come to work. The goal here is to tie together what does this person want to accomplish personally and how can we help them do that by working with us? I’ll give you an example, sales rep a couple years ago, they had a tiered compensation plan, she was about a thousand dollars away from the next year at which they paid retroactively and we had a week left in the quarter and I said to her, “You’re a thousand dollars short, let’s do the math. Here’s what a thousand dollars does to your commission in your pocket. I know you’re not that money motivated but if you had that money, what could you do with it that you find inspiring?”

She said, “Well, that’s actually a good question and you made me realize I’ve got a leak in our roof that’s leaking into the baby’s room, I’ve had to move the baby in with me so I’m not sleeping that well and that money would pay for a roof repair so I will go out and find the thousand” and she did. You had to connect what was in it for her with why I would like her to produce more and just tie the two together. You need to know their why, what inspires them.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to put you on the spot here before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors. What’s your why? You’ve worked with sales leaders around the world, you’ve worked with thousands, you’ve been in this game for a long time, you’re a studier, you’re a reader, you’ve written some amazing things, you’re easily one of the most thoughtful people that I’ve ever spoken to about sales. I’ve seen you speak on grit and topics like that. Just curiously for the audience here, a lot of people know you probably listening to the show, what gets you up in the morning, what gets you motivated, what is your why?

Andy Miller: I love challenge, I love the impossible. If you tell me it can’t be done, tell me what can’t be done, when you want it done by and then get out of my way. My first job out of college was a special ed teacher, I worked with the toughest of the toughest. When I moved a year up to start a software company everybody told me it couldn’t be done. I had a health issue where I fell six floors down an elevator and was paralyzed for three months, they told me I’d never walk right again and five years later I ran a marathon and same in the sales training business. I like the ugliest, messiest most difficult scenarios because that’s my sport, that’s my why. I love the challenge, give me the impossible.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to throw you off again before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors. I just mentioned grit and you’ve spoken to me about grit many times. Can you just give us a 30 second, 50 second overview on what grit means for sales professionals?

Andy Miller: GRIT to me is an acronym, some people may know the library definition of hard work or gritting up kind of thing but to me, grit’s an acronym and the G stands for growth mindset. Always be learning, always be studying, be curious, learn from your mistakes. The difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, the growth mindset is always asking, “How do I do this? How do I make this happen? What resources do I need?”

The fixed mindset is always looking at why it won’t work so to me, that growth mindset is critical and that’s something I’ve done my whole life by accident. The R is resilience, it’s your ability to weather the storm, your ability to bounce back. You’ll see that in cold calling and rejection. If you get rejected and you take it personally and it wounds you, you may be paralyzed for half the day or the day or the week but you need to be a duck and let it just roll off your back. I don’t know if you remember the little kid’s toys, the weeble wobbles, I want you to be a weeble wobble, we get knocked over but we don’t fall down. The faster you recover, the more successful you’ll be.

I stands for intuition, it’s really about how well you can navigate situations whether that’s intuitively or you get helped to do that, I think of it more as navigation and then T is tenacity. How badly do you want it? How hard are you willing to work for it? That to me really is GRIT.

[Sponsor Break]

Fred Diamond: Andy, what are sales people usually motivated by? Is it money?

Andy Miller: It’s not. It used to be, I have access to data on 1.9 million salespeople and when we look at the trends, somewhere between 2007 and 2011 it actually shifted from money to intrinsic. Intrinsic is basically their own reason, their own internal which goes back to us discussing what’s their why and you’ll see a lot in millennials now, millennials want to work for something that has a social cause or a social justice, that helps them find a why if they don’t have one but they want to work for a cause. There’s something that’s happened in 2011 so that’s been 8-9 years as that shifted so we’ve got to find out what is their reason.

Fred Diamond: How can sales leadership get better? Again, on the Sales Game Changers podcast it comes up that the biggest challenge is acquiring, retaining and motivating top-tier talent. What should sales leaders be doing to get better at motivating their salespeople?

Andy Miller: I think they need to sit down and get to know them. I’m just not seeing that people know their people that much because they’re busy managing the funnel and the forecast – and not doing a very good job at it, by the way. CEO’s #1 complaint is “our forecasts aren’t accurate” so what are we really doing? You need to take time, you need to sit down, you need to get to know your people, you need to get to know what’s going on in their life. There’s that old cliché of people caring, so they need to know that you care.

Once you do that and you can figure out what they’re trying to accomplish in life, they will work for managers that care and you will know how to guide them. We don’t live in a society anymore where people work for a company cradle to grave, they’re going to be with you for a couple years, there’s going to be a point where you outgrow them or they outgrow you and when it’s time for somebody to leave, the employees watch how you handle that. If you’re helping the move out and onto something better, that’s noticed. If you’re brutal and mercenary about it, that’s also noticed and then we’re back to, “Is that an A player culture or not?”

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, you mentioned people aren’t really going to places cradle to grave anymore, it’s very rare to see that for a lot of reasons that our guests know. The younger sales professionals out there, what would be some of the specific things that you might do to retain them, to show them that you really do care?

Andy Miller: I think it comes through in the interview, from the very beginning. There’s a term that’s out there now about the candidate experience, I think that candidate experience starts from the very beginning and it comes from the interview, especially if you’re the interviewing/hiring manager that they’re going to work for, I would want to get to know them. That’s the first thing, as a younger person I’d also want to look for, “Do they develop their people?” and when I say develop it’s not just a three day event on how to enter stuff into our order entry system or our CRM, it’s ongoing repetition, reinforcement, coaching, mentoring, development.

Fred Diamond: You’ve had a really good career, I’m just curious, what would you tell the 25 year old Andy Miller about how to become a better sales professional?

Andy Miller: Two things. We talked about grit already and to me it’s the grit part. Sometimes at 25 you don’t know what you want out of life and there’s people in their 50s and 60s that don’t know what they want out of life [Laughs] so welcome to the club. I think it’s pick a goal even if it’s just going to be a goal for the next couple years, follow the GRIT acronym that we talked about and there’s a book that I read – I was thinking about all the books that I’ve read because I’ve read a lot – the one book that sticks in my mind of really making a difference is a book called The Aladdin Factor like Aladdin and his magic lamp. That was written by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, the guys who did the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, but before that.

The book is focused on salespeople, it was a study on salespeople and the book was about asking. How often do we ask for what we want? Why don’t we ask, why do we ask, how frequently do we do it? It made a profound difference on me because when I read the book I thought, “Is this true?” Let’s experiment, let’s assume what I’m reading in this book is true and I’m going to pretend for one week that I’m an alien that’s beamed down from outer space and I don’t know the culture, I don’t know the language, I don’t know the taboos or the values or the mores so why don’t I just try for one week and ask for everything that I want?

I was dumbfounded on how easy it was, there were famous people I always wanted to meet, I just picked up the phone and tracked them down and got a conversation with all of them. I was shocked at how easily accessible they were. Another one, I was looking for a list of all the computers and I was living in Europe at the time, you could not buy a list of the companies that had the kind of computers we were targeting so I actually called up the manufacturer, sat down with the product manager, asked if I could get access to the list. He said no, we had a great lunch, great time talking and then a week later a list showed up at my office with no name or no return address of all the computers in Europe that I’d been asking for. It’s really amazing how easy it is to get access to what you want if you just ask. What I would tell my younger self: go read The Aladdin Factor and be gritty about what you want.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to check that, that’s pretty powerful. Before I ask you for your final thought to inspire our listeners today, again, I’ve said this many times, you’re a student of sales. As a matter of fact, we actually just spent a little bit of time in your office and you must have had close to a thousand books just on sales and leadership so it’s a pretty enviable bookshelf there that I would like to have at some point. Tell us about one of your selling habits, a selling habit or two that you feel have led to your sales success.

Andy Miller: I’ve got a couple thoughts on that. One is get curious about everything, get curious about your customer, get curious about their industry, get curious about their business model. I find curiosity to be a really great habit for a salesperson. Second thing is always be learning and improving. What I love about sales is you’re either growing or you’re dying, you’ve got to constantly be studying, researching and I don’t care whether it’s about sales or psychology or influence or human relations but always be improving.

Another one, ask for what you want, we already talked about that, asking is a whole lot easier than we make it out to be. The last two thoughts are know your industry better than anybody else, you need to know your industry better than the client knows the industry which now establishes you as a subject matter expert. The last part is outwork everybody. Right now I’ve got an assessment that I sell amongst many different assessments that I sell and I’m ranked in the top 10 out of about 140 and I’m shocked because I’m only doing it part time and they’re all doing it full time. The point I’m trying to make is outwork everybody.

Fred Diamond: We talked today with Andy Miller from Big Swift Kick on the Sales Game Changers podcast, we talked about acquiring, motivating and retaining top tier talent. Andy, I hope I didn’t confuse you and you just gave us your final thought [Laughs] but we’ve got Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, we’re very lucky, we have people all over the world listening to the podcast. Why don’t you give us one final thought? Pick out one, give us one final thought to inspire them today.

Andy Miller: I think professional sales is amazing. Somebody says, “What do you do for a living?” and sometimes I see people shy away from, “I’m in sales” or I look at their business card and it says “business development” or it’s got some fancy term and I go, “Oh, you’re in sales” and they kind of turn red and shy away a little bit. I think professional sales is amazing. The difference you can make for people, the lifestyle that you can have, the learning that you get to make, I think it’s an amazing career. We don’t need to go through all the schooling that a doctor or lawyer has and yet we can live as well, if not better. Yee-haw for professional sales.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 210: International Sales Strategist Andy Miller Gives Pertinent Advice on Hiring, Motivating and Retaining Top Tier Sales Talent first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.