Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch hundreds of replays!

[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 October 29, 2020. It featured Dr. Brian Harman, a well-known leadership trainer and executive coach.]

Register for Wednesday’s SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE: Insights from Top Sales Leaders for Accelerated Sales Success here.

Find Brian on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 297: Well-Known Leadership Coach Dr. Brian Harman Breaks Down How to Tell an Impactful Story that Will Show Your Customers You Are Truly Listening to Them

BRIAN’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “If you’re going to bring your highest energy into your sales, work, life, and relationships, you should get more involved in hearing other people’s stories because it will help you tell a better story yourself. You’re sharing your story in order to build relational trust which is a reciprocal emotion, you give it to get it. Even though you’re talking, you’re doing so in a way that’s very much about the other person. If you’re going to be of service to others, you have to listen and don’t ever want minimize the behavior and act of listening. Listening is the best gift you can give your customers.”

Fred Diamond: It’s great to see you, Brian. We’re bi-costal today which is pretty cool, you’re out on the left coast and I’m here just outside of Washington DC as I always am. We’ve gotten to know each other over LinkedIn over the last couple of months, we’ve been following each other, we’ve had a couple of great conversations and you had such a great following that I wanted to get you on the Optimal Sales Mindset because that’s what you’re an expert in and that’s what you do. First of all, it’s great to see you, thanks again for being on the webcast today. Brian, everybody needs an energy boost, we’re going to be talking about how you can get this energy to take your sales career, get yourself pumped up and get to the next level.

Brian Harman: Fred, thank you so much, thanks for having me and I can’t wait to jump right in. I want to take a second with you all, we’re going to find our silence, we’re going to take a space to have some silence, we’re going to do a little breather, this 30 seconds here. Take a second to get comfortable, stretch it out, let’s get our best energy, get rid of any of that stuff that you’re holding onto for the day and let’s just find a little space here to have some silence together. Get comfortable in your chair, find your center of gravity about an inch or so beneath your belly button. A couple deep breaths in through the nose, out through your mouth, all the way out. One more time, fill your lungs to 100%, I’d invite you to close your eyes, breath in there for a second and this time you’re going to take that breath from the center of gravity through the back of your lungs all the way up to the crown of your skull. Big, deep breath, fill it up 100% in through the nose. A couple more big breaths, alright.

I like to start off with some silence because when I’m talking about bringing our highest energy into your life, into your sales, into your work, into your business, into your relationships, most importantly it’s about having that space for silence with yourself so you can reflect on your story, you can find your clarity and you can engage in that really crystal-clear mindset that helps you to operate at your best. We’re going to jump right into here, I’m going to tell you a little bit about my story and then I’m going to show you the framework that I use to tell my story. We’ve got some worksheets that will go up in the handout section but let’s just show you what this looks like.

Our story is from birth into what got us into this room together today. In order to find our clarity, we should have a really easy understanding of not just our elevator pitch but the story that drives our purpose and meaning and we want to be able to reflect on that in order to find our highest possible mindset. I’m going to show you mine and then I’m going to show you the structure that I use to tell my story. My name is Brian Harman, I grew up in Los Angeles, I have three brothers, grew up in a big family, I’m married to my first childhood love. This picture on the left is me and my now wife but back in the 8th grade when she asked me to the Backwards Dance I had to borrow that suit from my friend’s dad and I was a perfect gentleman, I kept my hands above the waist, as you can see. This picture on the right is my wife and I – her name is Christina – and we got married in St. Lucia in the Caribbean, that’s us on our wedding day about 10 years ago, we’ve been together for almost 20 years now.

Right when I returned, immediately within 4 days of our return from that wedding I was diagnosed with an ultra-rare bone disease in my spine. While we were out doing snuba, I noticed this pain in the back of my neck and it turned out to be a bone tumor that was causing this clicking in the back of my neck at strange angles. Over the course of four surgeries, 14 screws, 4 rods and a lot of physical rehabilitation and pain, I’m good now. I’m smiling up in that upper-right picture because that first surgery I had gave me two weeks off from a job that I hated. I was so happy to be home from work that I was actually happy to go into the hospital, that’s how much I hated my job. I didn’t trust the people I worked with, I didn’t trust my boss, I didn’t trust the leaders of the company. This is the Vulcan death grip, any Star Trek fans will probably recognize this so even though I’m smiling, it felt like that inside, I was the poster child for success on the outside and inner turmoil in the front. It felt like utter misery and I think we’ve all probably been in these situations where we’ve had a bad boss or we’ve worked for a place that wasn’t all that great for you.

Over the course of those four surgeries it just got very clear to me over the pain and rehabilitation that I didn’t want to do that anymore so I went on a new path. I started getting educated, I opened up my business, I wrote a book, I got some dogs here, my two little Houdini and Lulu, and I went on this new path that helped me to redefine what would be my purpose in my life. This is a picture that I’m happy to share because it took us over two years to get pregnant, ended up doing the IVF process, this is little Benny, he’s now three and a half years old. As a result of me changing my career and getting my PHD, I was able to do three of those Ted Talks, I was able to write for Amazon and for Forbes and teach and work all around the world which has been just beautiful, such an enlightening experience. I now teach at UC Berkeley, UCLA and that University ESAN in Lima, Peru and that’s really the summary version of my story.

I want to give you a quick walkthrough of the storytelling framework that I use to introduce myself, you got the context, the problem, the climax, the falling action and what’s called the denouement and my instruction for you at the end of my story, the call-to-action is to use this framework to tell your story. If we go back to the context in my story, that’s like, “I was born in LA, I’ve got three brothers, married to my first childhood love.” I told you about the complications in my story regarding my health problems, the climax in my story, the turning point was when I started my business and changed careers.

I now work as an executive coach and a corporate trainer, I do a lot of those executive retreats. The falling action, you can sprinkle in some accomplishments, tell us why does that purpose, why does that matter to begin with? How has that changed your life as a result? Then lastly down here at the bottom, act 5, denouement. The way that business stories are different than stories like in the movies is really on using a call-to-action at the end of your story, it’s an instruction, a guidance, a request and the more clear that call-to-action is, the more clear it can become for the person to know what to do with that information that you just gave them. In business you tell stories for a purpose, you tell stories so that there’s something that happens, some action takes place as a result. I use this for business cases, for pitches to my clients, I use this storytelling framework in all kinds of different things, how I even do my presentation formatting and the story is what led me to my clarity. Like I told you before, the story was from birth until today, clarity is about from today to the moment of your death, now it’s future-looking. In the worksheet I’ve provided you with a couple pages that ask you some questions and prompts that lead you up into then creating your vision statement if you haven’t already. Even if you’ve already done an exercise like this before, I still encourage you, re-visit that frequently because on a personal level, your vision statement is values plus your goals and those goals do change because you never know what your highest possible potential is.

Example is I had this dream that I’d become a UC Berkeley professor but then two years later I became a US Berkeley professor and I was like, “Well, what’s next?” So Brian from the past couldn’t envision how much further I was able to go, so that’s why you always have to revisit this vision statement. Again, just take some time to do this. What my clarity is, what my purpose is is I teach leaders how to build high trust, that’s what I do every day. I coach CEO founders and executives and I do a lot of those retreats and even so far on this webinar, a couple things that we’ve talked about, the personal story, this is something that helps you build relational trust. Reason for that is we actually don’t relate with people on their highest achievements but it’s on the dark challenges that they’ve been through.

We want to relate with people on a human level over the challenges we’ve overcome. If you want to have those conversations with your colleagues or even with your potential clients or current clients, you can ask them, “What’s the biggest challenges you’ve overcome in your life?” That’s one way to build relational trust, it’s this unity feeling of ‘we’re all in this together, we’ve all been through stuff’. Whether or not you’ve had a rare bone disease in your spine and had four surgeries, we’ve all had some type of a health issue somewhere down the line. I told you it was difficult for my wife and I to get pregnant, if you haven’t experienced that maybe you know someone who has. Your story gives you all these golden opportunities to create relational trust with the people that you’re speaking with. Then when you go into your vision statement, when you have it crystal clear, when you have a laser-focused purpose in your life, this is another way to build trust because now people know what to expect from you, they can rely on what your future looks like, they can rely on what you want to bring into the world, what intent you have.

Next, what we’re going to talk about is the mindset. Mindset for me is about generating high trust behaviors for my self-trust, for my interpersonal trust, for my social trust, organizational trust and onwards. As you scale out trust, leadership becomes more and more important because of the number of people that are involved so I always say it starts with you. The same way you hear these, “You can’t love unless you love yourself” or, “The amount of love you have to give comes from within”, all that stuff, this is very much a philosophy that I believe in. One of the ways that I bring my mindset, my highest possible outcomes into every day is through this diagram right here. The way that this diagram works is you can picture the red lines being the top of every hour, 12 p.m., 1 p.m., 2 p.m. At the top of every hour I take time to go reset mentally, disassociate from the blast activity that I’m doing, the last client call, whatever that last thing is. Maybe it’s as simple as walking around the house – I’m working from home right now – going to the bathroom, getting some water, grabbing a coffee or a tea, going outside to water the plants. Anything that will give you a mental close out from that last activity, that’s what the red line is for. That can take as little as 60 seconds but it has to be some mechanism to close out from what’s happened before. Here’s where the cool part comes in, I never book meetings hour to hour, I do not believe that back-to-back meetings are the best way for anyone – especially executives – to maintain any level of high performance and highest possible outcomes.

I like to book my meetings off-hour like this or if they’re on-hour, then I gap the time before or after. You’ve got this mental break here, a trip to the bathroom, whatever, then in this zone before your meeting starts – this could be 5 to 10 minutes – let’s say this meeting starts now from 12:10 to 12:50, you’ve got those buffers on both sides. In this section before, every single meeting that I go into I’m constantly thinking, I’m reflecting on my purpose and then I’m thinking, “What’s the highest possible outcome of this meeting?” I do that before every single meeting, and then I create two or three questions that will help me to get to that highest possible outcome, that’s what I do in this gap right here. I call it the HPO, the Highest Possible Outcome, I’m constantly in the mindset of how do I make this the level of excellence, the level of clarity, purpose and deliberate intent that I really set out to in order to achieve my ultimate long-term vision? In here again, highest possible outcome, then you have your meeting and then there’s something that you do afterwards.

This is the pausing to reflect, in that moment there’s a couple things you can do. #1, you can get your follow-ups done and if your follow-ups require more time than that tiny little 10 minute slot, you calendar it so that it’s on the calendar and it’s not just adding up into your not-in-top to-do list that never seems to move. Actually block some time, put it on the calendar, now you know your follow-ups will get done. The second thing you do that I do and that I coach leaders to do is if you’ve hit that highest possible outcome for that meeting, you want to go and send positive feedback publicly. If you did not hit the highest possible outcome, now it’s time for constructive feedback to occur. That can be with yourself or that can be for someone else that was there, depending on the scenario. Then you start over, you do the mental break to disassociate from that last task to get a clear mind for what’s next, then you create your next highest possible outcome for your next meeting.

I’ll just run through this one more time for you, this is how I keep a clear purposeful mindset every day, all day throughout the day. Mental break, highest possible outcome where you pause to plan, that’s what this is for here, then you go through your meeting or whatever that may be and over here you pause to reflect, follow-ups and feedback. Then you start over again and you go into your next meeting thinking, “What is my highest possible outcome?” Sometimes the highest possible outcome can be as simple as “I’m going to listen, I’m going to remove my distractions and I’m going to give this person my focus.” One thing that’s terrible about this pandemic, the worst thing in my mind is that we get on these Zoom calls and we’re multi-tasking. Research on multi-tasking is clear, it is not effective, there are no multi-taskers, there’s just shitty performance. That’s what multi-tasking means, bad performance. If you can focus on one thing, then you’ll always get the highest possible outcome so reduce the distractions and the ways that I like to reduce distractions, one is by actually removing physical distractions.

You might want to set your phone to do certain things like go to theater mode or whatever, but the other way you can reduce distractions is actually just by having clarity. The story and vision that we were just talking about before, it gives you this foundation and base to have clarity on a daily basis which is the mindset at work. I picture clarity as this laser line and when I get anxious or I’m confused or I’m doing the wrong things or I’m spending my time in the wrong places or if I feel busy, that laser line starts to get very blurry for me. I have to then pause and bring that back to that laser clarity that I really want and that my clients deserve. If you’re going to bring your highest energy into your sales, your work, your life, your relationships, I think you should get more involved in hearing other people’s stories because it will help you tell a better story yourself and you should tell your story. You should find your clarity, you should write it down, you should make the word ‘together’ a verb. Sharing your story isn’t even about you, you’re sharing your story in order to build relational trust, trust is a reciprocal emotion, you give it to get it. Even though you’re talking, you’re doing so in a way that’s very much about the other person. That’s why I wrote this here, always be of service to others and your energy will always be at its highest. If you’re going to be of service to others, you have to listen and you don’t ever want to minimize the behavior and act of listening. Listening is the best gift you can give someone and then in the mindset, you want to make those small but mighty changes to how you design your days, that’s the meeting box, don’t go back-to-back. Give yourself that time to pause and plan and to pause and reflect, make those small but mighty changes to how you design your day and then go back to your clarity and your purpose every time you’re generating that highest possible outcome. If you want a free copy of my book, you can feel free to email me, I would love to speak to any of you further if you ever want to have a virtual coffee or if you’re in LA, let’s go do the real thing. It’s been my pleasure to walk you through that presentation and now I think Fred and I will have some conversations about some of the implications of all this stuff.

Fred Diamond: Brian, why don’t we try something different? We very rarely do this but if somebody wants to engage with Brian directly, because what he just described is very powerful, let me know via the question panel and we’ll unlock your phone and allow you to specifically ask some questions. By the way, Brian, I put the handout inside the handout panel so if you’re watching today’s webinar, just go find it under ‘handouts’. Nick says he loves the handout, good seeing you, Nick.

Brian, let’s go back to the slide where you had the story. We do webinars every single day, authenticity is so critical right now because everybody is going through a similar type of challenge. It might not be specific but everybody that we deal with is going through the results of the health and pandemic as it relates to COVID and everybody is going through the results of the financial and economic impact related to COVID. Then as our good friend David Morelli said, everybody’s going through a third thing, whatever it might be. Gina also says she’s loving this.

Let’s talk about authenticity right now, tell us how that plays into the story. You shared some very authentic things and it’s not something that people are naturally able to do in sales, especially prior to the pandemic. A lot of it is scripted, you’re supposed to say something specific to the customer, you shared with us your challenges having a baby, you shared with us your challenges having the spinal tumor. Let’s talk a little bit about your work with leaders and sales professionals on truly being authentic and how that can play to their advantage.

Brian Harman: The way that I picture the word ‘authentic’ is by the act of transparency. Obviously you’re not going to put your social security number up on your LinkedIn profile or anything, but there are some personal details, there are some things that you can be transparent with that do push you a little bit further down the road to demonstrating your truth in the world. When I’m posting LinkedIn videos every couple of days, about half of my content strategy is just to put personal and silly stuff, me and my son dancing or some old wedding pictures with my wife like the ones that you saw in this presentation. There’s no harm to that in my mind because all I’m doing is I’m sharing a part of myself with my potential clients and my current clients and anyone else that’s on LinkedIn. When we’re talking about being authentic, all that really means is just being yourself and if you only show the world the nice polished version of you, we all know that’s not the full self. We all struggle with those things like, “This wasn’t good enough” or, “This wasn’t my best, I want to do more, I want to do better.” I’ve been arrested before, I’ve put that on LinkedIn – now that I’m in my own business and not trying to actively look for a job.

That’s probably further than I would suggest that many of you go with what you put out there, but it’s really just as simple as we don’t want to do business with names of companies anymore, we want to do business people to people and that means I want to know you. I don’t even know what Coca-Cola stands for, most of us don’t even know the word Nike and what that word means, it’s the Greek goddess of victory. Or if you talk about Mercedes or BMW, any of these large brands, how much do we actually know about them? We don’t know a lot. When I’m reaching out to prospective clients, my business is small, there’s four of us but I don’t use, “We’ll get back to you later” like trying to show that I have this big business and I’m a big executive coach and you’re so lucky to work with me”, it’s not like that. It’s me, I’m actually the one reaching out. “My name is Brian, I would love to work with you, here’s why.” That’s not actually the sales message I use but I’m just giving you an arbitrary example that I want to know who the person is on the other side of the line and I want to give my clients that.

Fred Diamond: Brian, a question here comes in. “Go back to the story that you told from hating your job to getting on the path to doing what you love.” It’s an interesting question, thank you so much for the question. We talked about reflecting, prior to the pandemic we did one three hour session on mindset every year at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, now we do a webinar every single week and thank you so much for taking us through the initial stage of your program. Breathing is something that comes up very frequently on the Optimal Sales Mindset, but talk a little bit about how you made the shift because a lot of people are in a place right now where they’re not sure they want to continue working where they are, it’s gotten harder obviously during the pandemic for everybody to be successful. People have taken time to reflect but talk a little bit about that transition that you made because it’s critical for people to be on the path doing something they’re passionate about and love. Talk about that moment in your story where you went from “I hate this, this ain’t for me” to how you eventually went to Europe and eventually got on the path where you have tens of thousands of followers, you’ve written a great book and you’re a very high in-demand consultant and coach.

Brian Harman: The truth is it was a very messy path. When I first got into the whole, “I hate my job, I know I want to do something different”, that was a very self-destructing, self-sabotaging thing that my wife pulled me out of. I went into group therapy, individual therapy, I knew I wanted to leave that company that I was with so I did, I left that company, I tried to find a better company, it turns out that one was pretty similar to the last one but my scope of work increased so I was getting bigger and bigger projects and I was responsible for half a billion dollars in annual spend as a global supply chain manager and director. That was that part, then I thought, “This still isn’t right” so I left the world of construction management to then go into bio-technology and I worked for a company that was actually focused on rare diseases. Because I had the rare disease in my spine, I thought this would drive more purpose in my life so I went into that. Same thing happened there, that was another spring board. “I feel like I’m getting closer but I’m still not at that moment of clarity, I want to bring more high trust into the field of leadership.”

That continued and I started teaching part time, at the time it was UC Berkeley and Berkeley Global, Berkeley Global is their extension program for open enrollment and adults that are working professionals. I taught a couple classes in there and then that turned into different classes and through that process, it started to become clear. This is again 10 years, you sometimes have to let yourself move slowly so that once you do find that clarity, you can move fast and effectively. The transition for me is I knew I needed to change something and I was willing to experiment, I tried some things for a few years until I ultimately landed on, “I know what I’m going to do now, I know what the next move is” and that was opening my business. Even when I opened my business I was doing humor workshops because my dissertation was on how to use humor to build trust. Let’s go back two years now to when I first started doing that, I thought, “This is great, humor that builds trust, I get to go in and work with these executives in these workshops, everyone’s laughing for 8 hours in this awesome workshop.”

Then I still thought, “What’s really the foundation of this work that I’m doing is trust, it’s not about the fun.” If you go into a workplace and you see those walls break down and you see people joking and laughing, that’s only a symptom of high trust, high trust is still the foundation. You’ll see I just kept chipping away at this until I finally found my purpose is to build more trust in leadership. I think you just have to give yourself that space and continue to pause and reflect so you can gain more and more clarity down the road.

Fred Diamond: I hope that answered the question for the person who asked. Another question comes in here about finding your passion, thank you so much. I want to talk a little bit about being coached and the ability to accept guidance from mentors. We have a number of people who are relatively new in their sales profession, as a coach you’ve coached hundreds of business leaders, you’ve coached hundreds of sales professionals and people in all different industries, you have a PHD. Let’s talk from your expertise, how can people listening to this effectively be coached by somebody who can provide them value uncovering some of the things you just talked about? And I’m thinking specifically for the sales professionals who are listening, there’s tons of people out there who could provide them value. Give us some of your insights on how you could be more effectively coached.

Brian Harman: The word coach itself comes from the horse-drawn carriage, it was the purpose to get people to their destinations faster. When I think about any given pillar of my life – health, nutrition, leadership, meditation, LinkedIn video marketing, sales coaching – I didn’t have a history as a salesperson, when I started my own business a couple years ago I had to become the best salesman that I could be. I didn’t have the luxury of spending 10 years learning so I went out and got the best coaches that exist, it drove that 10 year period down to a few months for me and it was the dedication that I put in that made me really good at selling my business now. It goes again back to any part of your life where you want to get faster progress in something, you go out and you get a coach that has the right skillset for you. At this current moment I have five coaches, over the course of my last 10 years I attribute a lot of my growth and being able to find that clarity ultimately to being coached and to being someone that wants to go out and continuously learn. If you don’t have a coach or you haven’t worked with a coach, I’m not saying you have to get a coach but go out there and experiment. There are some tools on LinkedIn called ProFinder. You go into the little top section where it says work and you hit that little dial pad, you can go into ProFinder and you can actually go in and look for coaches. You’ll have some information about the different coaches, the different kinds of coaching, life coaching, career coaching, leadership coaching, executive coaching. Just see what you get back from those individuals, you might be surprised at what you find.

Fred Diamond: Brian, we have time for one more question before you give us your final thought. This question comes in from Nelly and Nelly wants to know, “This handout is great, what’s the best way to ensure I get value from it?” Maybe you could spend a minute or so on your advice on the best way to fill out these handouts that we had submitted.

Brian Harman: Good question, Fred. The worksheet is meant to be very easy to fill out, it’s a fillable PDF so download it, put it on your desktop, I would encourage you to send this to a trusted colleague, a family member, spouse, friend, someone that’s an accountability partner, someone that you can go through this journey together with. The value is you want to get to that place of clarity but it’s about being together, it’s about sharing the energy. If this is valuable to you, share it with other people. You can give this to whoever you want and it’s not like you have to pay for it or anything, it’s there for you. If you have someone that maybe you think they’re in the wrong career, maybe they’re in a job that they don’t love, give them this, it’s an introspective time to reflect and that’s all it’s meant to be. Just fill it out, meditate on it for a little bit, just sit there and give yourself the space to pause.

Fred Diamond: Brian, I want to thank you so much. Lot of actions here, definitely take some time to pause and reflect. I encourage everybody to fill out the handout, I have it actually opened here on my second screen, I’m going to be filling this out right when we end today’s webinar. Give us one final action item, a step that people watching today’s webinar or listening to the podcast sometime in the future should do to take their sales career to the next level.

Brian Harman: One thing you could do, next time you go on a sales call, take that 5 minutes before the call and just visualize what the highest possible outcome of this call is, trust yourself that you will have the knowledge to answer it. Thank you.

Fred Diamond: Once again, the great Dr. Brian Harman, thank you all so much. Reach out to him, follow him on LinkedIn he has a fun LinkedIn show every day, he does provide some great value. To everybody else watching today’s webinar, thank you all so much. Thanks again, Brian, appreciate all the great stuff.

Brian Harman: Thanks, Fred.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 297: Well-Known Leadership Coach Dr. Brian Harman Breaks Down How to Tell an Impactful Story that Will Show Your Customers You Are Truly Listening to Them first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch hundreds of replays!

[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 October 4, 2020. It featured Growth Mindset expert Chris Salem.]

Register for Friday’s CREATIVITY IN SALES: Mark Hunter’s Why You Need a Mind for Sales Now More Than Ever here.

Find Chris on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 280: Growth Mindset Expert Chris Salem Offers a Strategy That Can Help Sales Professionals Grow Richer Relationships Faster

CHRIS’ TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Find out something specific about your best prospects and customers. Do your homework and connect with them on something that in this case has nothing to do with their position or their company first. Not only will they likely become a customer at some point but they’re going to be a great referral source for you. I’ve been doing that for quite some time and it has not let me down. Don’t get me wrong, you go through downturns and people sometimes can’t buy certain things at those times but I encourage people to go out of their way to get to know the person that you’re talking to in something more than just what they do, something that drives who they are as a person.”

Fred Diamond: Chris, it’s October 1, it’s the beginning of Q4, it’s the craziest year anybody that we know has ever experienced unless you were alive in 1918 during the Spanish Flu. Every Thursday at 2:00 o’clock eastern time we talk about mindset, we have sales professionals listening and watching all over the globe, they want some inspiration, they’ve got to get focused. It’s good to see you, we’ve known each other for a while, we’ve had numerous conversations about mindset. You coach companies all over the globe on sales mindset, you just told me you’re going to do a conference for a large audience in Nigeria. You’re out there spreading the word so we’re excited to hear what you’re going to say. Chris, extraordinary thinking creates extraordinary sales leaders.

Chris Salem: Thank you so much, Fred, for having me and again, yes, this is such an important area when it comes to sales. I always like to say when you think about sales and the entire process of it to be successful on a sustainable level, long term, you always have to have a rock solid foundation. You think about a house, you want to build a beautiful home, if you don’t have a strong foundation, that beautiful home is not going to sustain itself for a long period of time. There’s going to be problems and eventually, who knows what could happen and when the house can come falling down? It’s always important that we have a foundation and not only building that foundation but nurturing it and sustaining that. When it comes to sales, we’ve got to look at it that way. In this case, that foundation is mindset so we’ve got to think of sales like we’re building this beautiful home but we’ve got to take care of this each and every day. That’s going to provide us that clarity and that focus that we need to engage and really move the needle in terms of our sale.

With that being said, I’m just going to give people some information about where this is coming from. A little bit about my background, I spent 20+ years in sales either working for companies, representing them primarily in the media business. I spent a large time in aerospace, in aviation, I also had a brief stint in selling aircraft, I used to sell aircraft internationally to remote areas of the world where there were startup cargo carriers looking to develop new routes. I used to sell old Boeing 737’s and 757’s and so on, those were the good old days. I have a sales background but since have moved on to be an executive coach, I’ve always had that training capacity in me as an educator/teacher and I’d love to share this wisdom that I’m going to be sharing with you today. Just to give you a little background about that in terms of where the information is coming from.

I would like to start with when we talk about the foundation, what does the growth mindset versus a fixed mindset mean to you? I gave you a little bit of a hint there but from your perspective without maybe knowing exactly what that is, what would a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset be?

Fred Diamond: Chris, we have a couple of answers coming in here. This is from Martin, Martin is in Dallas, “The ability to grow during challenging times would be a growth mindset answer.” We have a submission here from Mary, Mary is in Pennsylvania right outside of Philly, “Confidence during troubling times.” Confidence, the ability to grow mindset, not letting things get to you, we have one more answer from Milt, Milt is just outside of Los Angeles, “Continuous learning.” We do webinars every day so thank you for joining us today and submitting that answer.

Chris Salem: Thank you, Fred for stating those questions from everyone and I want to thank everyone for participating. As we all engage in this contextual content that we’re sharing it also not only helps us but it helps other people too because they can relate to the answers that you’re providing. All the answers that were provided were really good, spot on in terms of what growth mindset is. Before I get into more of the growth mindset, let’s just talk about what a fixed mindset is.

A fixed mindset is something that you do each and every day on autopilot. Most of the things we do in our lives and our business, in this term sales, we are doing on autopilot from a subconscious standpoint. We don’t realize that consciously so we have to ask ourselves when our roles as sales professionals or managing people in the sales capacity, are you where you want to be? Of course, we could always make room for improvement, that’s what it’s all about, it’s progress in motion but really asking yourself, “Am I really where I want to be? Is there a certain area that I’d like to be in and I need to know how to get there?” A fixed mindset again operates from conditioned thinking, things that go way back to our child development in terms of how we process things, how we relate to other people, how we communicate and then again, sometimes these things could be serving us and in many times it may not.

What a growth mindset – which a lot of people had specified with their answers – is the ability to know that I’m going to be coming out of my comfort zone often to learn new ways of thinking that I could apply that could start to make those changes going forward. As you know, nothing can grow unless you decide that you make certain changes to grow, it’s the same thing when it comes to sales. Yes, we could try different scripts, we could try different approaches, different techniques and all of those things are good, yet if we are operating from a fixed mindset where we’re not focused, we’re not clear. We’re not open-minded to perhaps things that are indirect to what we’ve learned that could help us, then we’re not giving ourselves that opportunity to grow, expand and connect with people at a deeper level where they feel related to and understood versus feeling responded to.

These are going to be some of the important areas where we want to make a distinction, a growth mindset is not a destination, it’s not something that you graduate, from a fixed to a growth mindset and now you can go on autopilot the rest of your life. Yes, it will become your new autopilot but like with anything, we have to nurture it, we have to maintain it. If you want to make it sustainable, we’ve got to work on it each and every day. What are some of the things that we can do that you feel that you can do each and every day to shift from a fixed to a growth mindset?

Fred Diamond: Milt says, “Attending these webinars.” I would agree, taking an hour out of your day every day to participate in a sales growth webinar, we’re doing a webinar every single day mainly to help sales professionals stay focused. Farrah says, “Reading plenty of self-development books.” There’s great books out there, of course. Marie is in DC, she says, “I’m in a mastermind group that has been hugely valuable.” That’s also a great answer, spending time with like-minded and quality people. Answer here from Amy, Amy is also in the Northern Virginia area and Amy says, “Not being afraid to ask questions.” Thanks, Amy, it’s good to see you. That’s actually a really interesting point. We’ve been doing the webinars since March and there’s a couple of words that come up, one of the key words, Chris – and I know you’re going to be talking about this – is fear. We talk about how fear is what stops you in almost anything, fear of asking for business, fear of asking for a conversation, fear of asking for a minute, fear of taking off an hour in the middle of the day to help you improve your sales career. I know we’re constantly working about getting past that, thank you to all the people who submitted the answers and thank you, Amy for that last one as well.

Chris Salem: These were some great answers and it’s yes to all the above that everyone shared. Before I get into what we asked there, Fred, you had brought up a thing about fear. What happens with fear is when fear is triggered through an event or situation, somebody says no when you ask for business or you are gathering some intelligence and someone doesn’t provide you that information, something like that could trigger fear. Fear thrives in the past, in the future from a mindset perspective, it’s not in the present moment, fear can’t reside in the present moment. When we simultaneously get that triggering event that gives us that feeling of fear, that puts us in a fight or flight mode and now we are operating in the past and in the future. That’s where a fixed mindset operates from and a lot of times it’ll go back to the past and start bringing up a lot of the things that maybe we felt about ourselves a long time ago.

That, “I’m not capable of following through, no one wants to buy from me.” I’m not saying to that extreme, but you get the idea that it affects our level of confidence, our level of self-esteem, it also affects how we communicate, how we ask questions or don’t ask specific questions, how we tend to assume and speculate when somebody says no and we think it’s something personal to us when it really had nothing to do with us. These are things that a fixed mindset will tell us based on fear in the past and in the future. When it comes to doing what we can do to shift from a fixed to a growth mindset, I heard a lot of responses that were all phenomenal but they are external things that we can do, which are necessary.

However, what I’m going to share with you today – while masterminds are great, attending webinars like this are great, reading books on self-development, professional development, sales techniques, sales mindset, they’re all going to be wonderful – but there’s one other thing that has to be part of the external side, that’s the internal side. What are you doing internally to develop that growth mindset foundation? Do you have certain habits and disciplines that are in place to not only built and cultivate that foundation but to sustain it over time so that it will affect your level of confidence in a positive way? It’ll improve the way you engage others in terms of communication and listening, how you can relate better to other people, how you can ask the right questions to follow through and so on. Again, I don’t want to use the call to talk about sales 101, but it’s looking at the internal.

Here are some of the things that I’m going to share with you that I do both internally and externally that I’ve been doing for 21 years that led me to have a successful career not only in sales – which obviously I spent a large part of my career in – but also now in executive coaching as a professional speaker and a trainer. The areas that I do every day from an internal standpoint is I wake up every morning at 4:15. I’m not saying everyone here is like, “I’ve got to get up at 4:15”, the reason why I do that is because when I wake up, there’s no distractions at that point in time. I can get up and get into a routine that’s going to nurture that foundation to keep moving forward in the present moment.

The first thing I do when I wake up is I make my bed, I wasn’t in the army, I wasn’t a Navy SEAL, anything like that. It was just that I can do something simple that will get my mind focused in the moment for the day to take on the priorities that matter from a sales capacity. Making sure I’m calling those prospects that are going to be at the highest priority to not only my business but also knowing that I’m going to be able to follow through and spend my time wisely, valuing my time with them. That leaves the other priorities that don’t matter as much even though they are necessary for certain other parts of the day that don’t eat into the core hours. After I make my bed, I meditate. Why meditate? I meditate because meditation, just like if you go to the gym to work out, conditions the mind to become still. It’s taking your mind over time out of the past and the future where the fixed mindset resides to keep you focused, to develop more clarity, I’m going to explain why that’s so important later. Then I journal, think of journaling as a way of taking the things that are not serving you, that could be interfering with your sales performance that I can then take away from a meditation and write down on paper.

Often times when you are in meditation over a period of time and you get into a rhythm, that’s where your subconscious mindset begins to talk to the conscious mindset so you begin to see what’s blocking you, what’s interfering with your level of self-esteem, your confidence. Perhaps your fear of asking questions or the right questions, your ability not to follow through after maybe the first or second rejection, whatever the case may be. You begin to develop a thicker skin because you learned that in the present moment, whatever happens isn’t about you, it’s just that for whatever reason, you were rejected because they didn’t maybe have enough information, it wasn’t the right time, maybe you didn’t ask the right questions but it’s not personal. Being present through those series of habits I just talked about on a consistent basis changes the way your mind thinks and looks at things, it shifts your ability away from the result or the outcome, the expectations and shifts it in the present moment to the process. The results are just a byproduct of what you do each and every day in the moment.

Does that mean you have to have a perfect time to call someone, a perfect situation to engage them, to sell them? No, it’s taking what you know and what you have in the moment and putting it out there and let each day as you do that, roll up weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually to those goals that you set forth. As long as you have a game plan and daily goals, it’ll allow you to follow that moving forward. The problem is that a lot of times because we’re in the past and the future, we are now tied to the outcome which we experience through expectation. What happens with expectations? They often go unfulfilled. We can control certain things but there are many things we can’t control that are part of that process, we end up getting caught up in the things that we can’t control. By coming into the moment through meditation, journaling, making your bed, you have the ability to be more focused in the moment trusting that process, focusing on what you can and letting go of the rest. 

That being said, I do similar things that everyone else said, I go to the gym, I come back, I read a chapter or two out of a book that’s relevant to something I’m working on either personally or with my clients, I go over my daily goals and then I start my day with the top priority first working my way down to the least. That is what I do each and every day no matter where I’m at and it makes a dramatic difference in terms of how I think and then how that thinking produces action that leads to results long-term. Does that mean things are always perfect? No, when things are not going well you’re learning and applying different things to solve those problems in order to create solutions. Learning to shift from a fixed to a growth mindset will help you to establish that foundation so that you can think better so when you have more clarity, you become more decisive. When you’re more decisive, you have the ability to take massive action.

When you’re out there talking with people you’re now not just listening to them to respond, you’re listening to them to actually relate to them. People are not going to give you the permission to know what you can do to help solve their problem until they feel a level of trust that they feel related to and understood. A growth mindset gives you the ability over time to do that, to truly listen, to relate and understand and when they begin giving you more information and you ask the question, “Can I offer some advice? Would that be okay?” Now they’re interested in what you can do to help solve their problem. Is that going to be textbook every time? No, every situation is going to be different but in time, you’re going to see more success than not and any time when there is a setback you’re looking at it as part of the process, not the problem to get better and to improve your situation. Again, how you think is how you act and how you act is the results that you will obtain as part of that process. Before we move on, are there any questions so far from what we shared that anybody would like to comment on or I can address briefly before we move on?

Fred Diamond: Chris, we do have a question here from Cindy, Cindy is in Pittsburgh. Cindy said, “You talked about expectations, my expectations are to get past my quota.” She actually asked a lot more but just to summarize there. What’s interesting is everybody here who’s watching or listening to the podcast is in sales and usually there’s a number that’s attached to it at the end of the day. Today it’s October 1st so we’re starting a brand new quarter, there’s some expectation of you as a sales professional, from your boss and from your company, that you’re going to achieve a certain number. There’s a lot of meaning applied to those expectations if you’re in sales, there’s a lot of meaning if you achieve them and there’s also a lot of meaning if you don’t achieve them. I agree with you about expectations and how it can throw you off. We do webinars every single day and we get dozens and sometimes hundreds of people who come in, then we have thousands of people who listen to the podcast and respond when we post on LinkedIn. “When I want to see hundreds and there’s dozens, I get thrown off of my growth mindset.” Back to the salespeople, if my company expects me to make a million dollars this year in sales and I only make $800,000, there’s going to be some negative repercussions about that. What are some of your thoughts on that?

Chris Salem: The thing is it’s just changing your thinking around the expectation. The whole idea is when you have the expectation, when you’re fixated on the expectation you’re now tied to the outcome and then you get lost in the process. Either way, you’re going to end up worrying and getting caught up in a lot of things that you can’t control which now is wasted energy. It’s not that if your company says you have to have a million dollars and that is the quota that you just say, “If it happens, it happens and if it doesn’t, so what?” That’s not what we’re saying here, what we’re saying is that you can have the results that you seek but you’re not tying it to the expectation because again, the expectation is going to take you now into an emotional state that when things aren’t going your way, you’re going to be part of that roller coaster ride downward tied to it. It’s keeping you in the middle emotionally, you’re not up with the highs and lows, you know the vision, what you have to achieve.

Knowing that I’m here right now and this is what I’ve got to do today, on my goal sheet I have it down that I’m going to make 30 calls today and out of those 30 I’m going to talk to 18 people, and out of those 18 people I’m going to make one sale or two sales a day – again, I’m just using that as an example. These are things that you tie to an expectation which is what we’ve been conditioned to do and it makes sense, nonetheless, ask yourself if that has worked for you on a consistent level. Maybe you have and if that is, so be it but ask yourself, how has it affected you emotionally? How about that stress that you’ve endured? What has that done to your physical body in terms of absorbing that stress? What I’m just saying here is thinking differently where you still have the goal, never lose sight of the goal, but you are focused right here in what has to be done today, not worried about tomorrow, next week, the week after, what happened yesterday.

It’s focused on right now because when there is clarity, you begin to see opportunity all around you. You begin to see even when somebody says no that they didn’t really mean no, they might have just said no because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to do because they don’t have enough information. You perhaps didn’t ask a deeper, thought-out question that would have really got to the problem. This is where the ability to relate and understand first to gain that trust connected on similar values really can work to your favor.

Fred Diamond: Chris, we have an interesting point here that comes in from Farrah. One thing that we’re not going to talk about is sales habits but we will talk about that tomorrow on the Sales Game Changers Creativity in Sales, we’re going to bring on Art Sobczak to talk about some habits you should be doing to be more effective on the phone, etcetera. Farrah asks an interesting question here, thanks, Farrah. “Chris, should we focus on daily activities/habits that done in a disciplined way will lead to success?” Is that your advice, to have the optimal habits?

Chris Salem: Thank you, Farrah, for that question. Yes, again, the series of habits and disciplines that I talked about are your foundation for not only sales but it can be anything in your life. When it comes to sales then we can expand upon that foundation, we can look at different ways that we can then utilize tools and resources better focusing more on our strengths and offsetting our weaknesses. If we find that we have a certain quota every day, every week, every month but we are caught up in things on a daily basis that play to our weaknesses, not our strengths, then you’re not really serving yourself nor are you serving your company or the client or prospect. It’s really understanding what those strengths are, looking at your values. My values are one of transparency, I’m very transparent, I come from the upmost level of integrity doing the right thing when no one’s looking and honesty so I tend to connect and do business with people that share similar values.
If somebody doesn’t share those values, it may not work, they may not be a prospect for me. Maybe I’m not going to connect with them and we’re not going to do business so again, it’s not that you’re going to be everything for everyone, but you will always be something for someone. It’s how we think, how we think is how we can then create what we’re trying to accomplish in that moment. Again, it’s getting honest with your values, who you are, it’s getting honest with your strengths and your weaknesses and if any weaknesses are necessary to succeed and achieve that quota, instead of you getting caught up in that yourself, maybe look at certain resources, certain systems or processes that can help you do that. Maybe there’s a person that you’re working with, that’s a strength for them, they can do that and you can focus on what you do best. I know that companies don’t provide that for everyone but we do our best within our own capability to provide that for ourselves, where can we find that? You’ll find that you’ll get more done and be more valuable and get more business when we can focus on what our strengths are and our values, and align that with people where they feel related to and understood.

Moving along, managing the problem, creating the solution. These are just some of the ideas we talked about, just ask yourself why? What can I be doing different that’s going to change the way I think, change the way I engage people, change the way I follow through, change the way I take calculated risks? If I fear rejection, that I’m not going to take it personally. Allowing yourself to develop that foundation for yourself and what’s going to work for you. When you think about performance, a lot of these people here you probably recognize. Not all of them are going to consider to be in sales but everybody is a salesperson in some capacity and I use these as examples. Look at Tony Robbins, Tony Robbins has sold millions of dollars in information, contextual content that has helped so many people, he’s a master salesperson. The reason why is because he incorporates these types of disciplines and habits on a daily basis. Again, we’re not talking about becoming a monk here, we’re just talking about doing some things differently that you haven’t done before that are going to change the way you think, they’re going to change your level of confidence, change the way you communicate not only with yourself but also with other people shifting away to becoming more empowering with your conversation rather than disempowering.

In terms of a growth mindset, it helps also as a foundation to build a stronger sales culture and the way that is, is because when we can take responsibility for our own roles and duties regardless if our company provides those resources, regardless if they provide seminars like this, webinars, masterminds, that we can do this on our own. When we can be the better example for others, then in turn people tend to make change for themselves from what they observe in others, not by how, what or why to do it. The key is we want to create more interdependency in our sales team versus codependency, we power people through example rather than just doing for them. They key is that people pick up on that and when we really understand our roles and duties in what we do in sales, that’s going to in turn help other people begin to own their responsibilities. This way, we can work together and do it together as a team. Even though competition does fuel growth, we’re incorporating now more collaboration other than competition to make it happen.

Fred Diamond: One of the things that had come up on a previous webcast that we had done with a couple sales leaders was one of the positive results that had come out of the pandemic was people stepping up as either mentors or helping people out. We have almost a hundred people watching today’s webinar, most of them are still at home or not working at an office per se and they’re still in the mode of working from home. It’s been an opportunity for people to become better team players, it’s a challenge managing and growing a team right now because you’re not with everybody and you can’t just pull the team together into the conference room or go grab lunch, it’s beginning to happen but very remotely. People have stepped up, it’s interesting, one of the words that we keep hearing on the Sales Game Changers webinars – and Gene just commented in the field here – is empathy. Empathy is a word that comes up almost every single time but it’s not just having empathy as a seller for your customer, it’s having empathy for the people that you work with.

Chris Salem: That is most important first. When you come from empathy and kindness, that is empowering, that is an interdependent behavior and form of communication versus pleasing or enabling, you could do that with people you work with or people can do it to you, you can do it to customers and that is disempowering, that’s codependent and that becomes exhausting in terms of living or operating in an environment like that. In today’s world, we have all the technology in the world, we have all these communication platforms. We can really bring people together in short huddles that we can do each and every morning, talk about what’s working, what’s not, talk about our values, talk about what we’re really good at, what we’re not and how can we work together to offset that. Really being constructive and transparent in order to grow as a team, that’s collaboration, that’s interdependency and when we can do that, that spills out to our customers and our prospects for sure.

This statement here, “Give without expectation, receive without resistance” is a quote that I came up with a few years ago. Really take that to heart, write that down, it might not mean anything to you right now but if you really look at it and read it every day and really start to operate the way you do business and conduct your life, you’ll see a dramatic change. I know it has for me because I’ve been living that way for 21 years and it has and it’s really turned even some of the most difficult times in my sales career where now I look back and it wasn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, if I hadn’t gone through it I wouldn’t be where I am today. The whole idea about creating an interdependent sales culture is always starting with you, we can’t assume that someone else is going to do it, we can’t assume that our company, our business unit is going to provide this for us. We’ve got to be that change in order to facilitate and help others to do for themselves.

Fred Diamond: We have one last question here and then I’m going to ask you for your final thought. We like to end every webinar with an action step that people can take and implement today to be successful. The question here comes from Gene again, thanks, Gene. Gene says, “It looks like it’s going to be tougher in Q4, what does Chris suggest that we do to be successful? It’s an interesting question. When we started doing these webinars everybody thought, “This is going to be a couple weeks, by Easter everything will be back together” but obviously it’s not and it’s going to be continuing for the foreseeable future. A lot of our members are with big companies, a lot of people looking today, I see the companies they’re with, they’re not sending their people back to the office. Things are going to be challenging from an economic perspective moving forward, again we’re starting Q4 today. Give us two or three things that you think people should really focus on, we talked a lot about the great mindset type things, we talked about what growth mindset means, some things you could do to move ahead with that. You get up at 4:15, I get up at 5:00 o’clock in the morning, not a whole lot going on, it’s the best time to knock things out and then get up on the treadmill or whatever. Give us a couple of sales activities, sales things that you think will work for people right now as it relates to the growth mindset. Then give us a final action step they can take today.

Chris Salem: This is a time to start really getting to know your clients not only for what they’re looking for but get to know them, who they are. Connect with them on those values that we talked about, do you share similar values? This is the year where if we foster and nurture those relationships, they’re going to bear through at some point. Granted, I know we’re going through a difficult time but the reality is we can control only what we know and what we can do, that’s it. You can’t control what you don’t know and what is out of your control, if you get caught up in those things that you can’t control you’re just going to run yourself crazy and it doesn’t matter what you do, the end result is still going to be the end result. The key is that again, you can never go wrong nurturing those relationships. Learning how to really engage people and getting to know them, this is a great sales technique in that people are going to be more likely to know what you do and how you can help them when they feel like you connected with them. Again, people don’t really care what you do until they connect on why you do what you do and what is important to them, focus on doing that. Some companies might not be in position to buy from you right now because of the downturn but because of what you’re doing in those relationships, you’re cultivating that where things can just take off in 2021.

Fred Diamond: Chris, I want to thank you for all the great insights today, I want to thank everybody who’s watched today’s webinar. Chris, give us one action step, one specific thing, again it’s October 1st, it’s about 2:40 in the afternoon, it’s Q4, it’s the craziest year that we’ve ever had to live through, it’s only going to get crazier. Give us an action step that people should take today to take their sales career to the next level.

Chris Salem: I say that you go out and find your top prospects, find out who the decision maker is and find out something about them to the best of your ability. Do your homework and connect with them on something that in this case has nothing to do with their position or their company first, connect on something that’s personal to them. You connect with them on that, not only will they likely become a customer at some point but they’re going to be a great referral source for you. I’ve been doing that for quite some time and it has not let me down. Don’t get me wrong, you go through downturns and people sometimes can’t buy certain things at those times but I encourage people to go out of their way to get to know the person that you’re talking to in something more than just what they do, something that drives who they are as a person.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 280: Growth Mindset Expert Chris Salem Offers a Strategy That Can Help Sales Professionals Grow Richer Relationships Faster first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch the replay!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on July 3, 2020. It featured business innovative genius Alan Gregerman,]

Register for Thursday’s OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET: Virtual Smirtual: Good Selling is Good Selling with Alice Heiman here.

Find Alan on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 262: Business Innovation Guru Alan Gregerman Says Having Goats on Your Zoom Calls Can Lead to a Sales Boost and Here’s Why

ALAN’S TIP TO SALES LEADERS: “Sales people need to make time for curiosity. We can’t just assume that we’re going to go about doing the normal stuff we do and brilliance is going to happen. Make time and even if that means you just start right now with an hour a day or an hour a week and that’s all you can handle, make some time. Even during COVID you can get out, explore a little bit even if it’s just in a park and as places start opening up. Wander around looking for some interesting ideas of businesses that are getting back and doing business and how those ideas could help you and your organization.

The other is I’d like you to get together with your colleagues every week and pose a question that’s a curious question that will spark your thinking and as a group, start to brainstorm questions like, “What do our customers really care about right now?” or, “‘What if we could create the perfect new product or solution, what would be different?” or, “How could we do a better job of using technology?” or, “What would our amazing no-touch customer service look like?” or, “How do we make our customers smarter than they ever imagined possible?” Think about questions like that as a way to regularly spark your team curiosity.”

Fred Diamond: Alan Gregerman, you are the guy, you are the main man who’s going to give people a boost, you’re going to get their creativity going, you are an innovative expert. Alan Gregerman, how are you?

Alan Gregerman: Great, Fred, thanks for inviting me, delighted to be here. I am here live and just like the virus, I’m kind of invisible but I look forward to engaging with everybody, sharing some ideas, getting some feedback from folks. Certainly I’d like to invite everybody who’s on the webcast to connect with me at some point if there are some things they’d like to talk about a bit further or they’d like to get into more depth about some of the challenges they’re facing and how the things we’re going to talk about could be useful to them. In the time we have together I’d like to help people think about things that are really passions for me and that is how do you maintain your curiosity and brilliance in these challenging times when most of us are spending most of our time and most of our business lives living and working virtually?

A few years ago I had the privilege of doing an in-person IES session and the session was called Innovation: Your Secret Weapon to Achieving Greater Sales Success. What I’d like people to think about as we start today is that fundamentally is still an idea that’s really important to me in terms of putting this presentation together. That is the idea that the folks who really win in business and win particularly now even though the rules of the game have changed a little bit are the folks who are consistently thinking in new ways and bringing new ideas and possibilities to their customers and prospects. I want people to think about that understanding deeply what matters to your customers, what are their needs and objectives and how you can be bringing them questions, possibilities, ideas, spark their thinking, help them to stretch in terms of how they achieve what matters most to them with you as a partner in making that happen. Many of the folks who are on this webinar are probably experiencing a little bit of COVID-19 fatigue, it seemed to us we were going to start to go out, maybe we’re not going to go out as much as we had thought we were going to. Still, we’re not able to have the direct connections we’d like to have with customers, prospects, partners, connections who could help us in building our business.

I’d like you to think we still can accomplish a lot, we still can be creative we still can be curious and there may even be a few little ways in which there actually are some advantages to being stuck and I’ll try and go over those as well. Let’s talk about how we keep our mojo and keep our energy going into the holiday weekend and how we can put ourselves in the best and most creative position to succeed. Let me start by enhancing the words of Thomas Edison, a great inventor who said, “Everything comes to him or her” – Edison meant to say, “Or her” as well – “who hustle while they wait.” Only today our hustling is primarily virtual but that doesn’t mean we can’t be awesome. In fact, we can’t be regularly hustling and getting ourselves out there into the world of people and ideas and possibilities. The best salespeople ask the best questions, the best salespeople find the best answers, the best salespeople are regularly the ones who are doing their homework to try and meet the needs of the customers they serve which suggests that our real starting point whether we’re confined or not is the simple notion that the more deeply we understand those we’re trying to serve, the more likely we are to meet their needs.

This is really our target for curiosity and brilliance so this is what we want to be focused on and we need to know this, so I want all of you to think about really what you know about your customers and really, what would be the most remarkable success for your customers. Then use that as we start talking about some tools and techniques for how to unlock your genius and be creative. If you attended the session I did a few years ago or have read my book, The Necessity of Strangers, then you know that I passionately believe that 99% of all new ideas are based on other people’s thinking or the genius of something found in nature.

First, just in case you’re wondering what I look like there’s a cheerful picture of me. So, 99% of all new ideas are based somebody else’s thinking or the ideas that somebody finds in nature, what do I mean by this? Chinese top, 2,000 year old idea, sparked the invention of the helicopter. Birds, something we commonly encounter when we take a hike in the woods were the prime instigator of one of the most popular and useful products known on the planet, Velcro. The Sony Walkman, an incredible creation in 1979 and actually something based on the transistor radio was essential to the creation of the first and every generation of the iPod and now, in fact, the iPhone. A feast for a king in medieval times was part of the spark for you being able to go to Chipotle and get your salad bowl, and so on.

Let me pause for a second and see if anybody has a question about the simple notion that I want you to think about, the idea that 99% of new ideas are based on somebody else’s thinking. I want you to think about this simply because it liberates all of us whether we think we’re particularly creative or not to understand that the world is still with ideas that we can use and combine with what we know best to unlock our genius and deliver value to our customers. Let me pause for a second and see if that resonates with folks and folks see the value of doing that.

Fred Diamond: I’d like to ask all the people watching today’s webcast as well, what’s a way that you’ve been creative? Alan, there’s three big words that we’ve heard over the last three months when all salespeople shifted to working from home. The first word is mindset and again, today’s the Optimal Sales Mindset webcast, you need to have the best mindset. The second word is courage, you need to really be courageous today, you need to bring ideas, you need to be calling your customer and asking them how they’re doing. Related to that is empathy, empathetic conversations and the third word has been creative. Everybody was having their sales processes along the way and then of course everybody had to rethink how they went about this. For all the people watching on today’s webcast, give us an idea via the question panel, submit a way that you’ve been creative over the last three months, something different that you’ve had to do to remain valid as an optimal sales professional.

Alan, people are beginning to send in some ideas. Sue from New York – thank you, Sue – said, “Obviously the use of video.” That’s been interesting, many people hadn’t used things like Zoom or GoToWebinar or GoToMeeting but everybody now is at some level an expert at what we like to say, “Looking at the dot” as they’re doing their presentations. That’s one idea, thank you, Sue. Another idea here from Vincent – Vincent’s from Belgium, Vincent, thank you so much for being on our webcast today – Vincent says, “I’ve been more creative in being empathetic.” Empathy comes up a lot, Alan, throughout the Sales Game Changers webcasts that we’ve been doing. In the beginning it was very easy to just be empathetic asking people how you’re doing, now people have had to be even more creative because you’ve asked your customers so many times, “How are you?” What are some of your thoughts on ways to be even more creative in your communications to your customers?

Alan Gregerman: Those are great questions. Certainly in terms of creative I like the idea that one of the folks, I think Sue mentioned the idea of using video, I think that’s an awesome idea. Not just using the tools we have but actually creating videos that we can send to folks, videos that help them to look at the challenges they face, videos that help them to understand where we might fit in in solving those challenges, I think those are fantastic ideas. Creativity in terms of the information we send – and this gets tied to empathy. When I think about empathy, I think about the notion that as we should always do, we ought to be thinking about our customers and prospects first as people and then second as people, organizations or representatives that we might do business with.

When I think about empathy I think about, “How can I help them in the same situation they’re in that I’m in to manage the world and try and strike some balance in an odd world?” I certainly want to be empathetic about the business situation they want to be in but I also wouldn’t mind being empathetic about the human situation that they’re in. Then I know them well, I might send them a recipe, I might send them an idea of some music to listen to. One of the things I might mention in a little while is the idea, I do a lot of virtual coffees with folks and then I send people some of my favorite coffee, I send them a bag of coffee and I send them a little note that just says, “I hope you enjoy this and you can enjoy it in a little bit of your down time. Here’s what I like about this coffee and being confined has given me plenty of time to learn and study, get a little bit smarter about coffee.” Trying to get them to feel that I think about them as a human trying to balance their life and I think about them as well as somebody that I certainly have and would love to continue to partner with.

Fred Diamond: There’s a couple others here, Alan, I want to share before we move onto your next set of slides. This comes from Ellen Meinhart with the VEDP, thanks, Ellen. Ellen says, “Virtual meetings actually save my clients time and money.” A lot of times we think about how we’re doing things from our perspective but the virtual meetings have actually saved her clients time and money, it’s great for her to be able to call people and, “Convince them to move forward with international sales by using our international contractors to confirm.” That’s an interesting way to think about it, how a lot of the creative ways we’ve been are actually not just helpful for us and being sales professionals but they’re valuable for your customers as well, from the customer angle.

Alan Gregerman: I think that’s great. Let’s face it, everybody has way shorter commutes except for those of us who work from home so we have a bit more time and our ability to be efficient and save people time and still provide value to them I think is an awesome thing. One of the things I’m going to suggest towards the end of the session is the idea that given that we’ve saved ourselves time, I’d like it to be a good idea that you spend a certain amount of that extra time being curious. I’ll share with you how you can do that and it might even be tied to creativity and empathy and getting your customer to feel good and be on the same page, valuable to help them think about how they can spend some of their extra time being a bit more curious. Curious about the challenges they face, curious about the types of solutions available, curious about new knowledge that might help them and their organization be more successful. Even things that we might not be working with them on.

Fred Diamond: We’ve got one more before you move on. Alan here – Alan, thank you so much – talks about the whole concept of doing more research. Alan, one of the key themes that we’ve heard over all of the IES and Sales Game Changers webcasts that we’ve done is how do you be a sales professional during this time? You are a sales professional, how do you be even more of a sales professional right now? You may not be transacting business per se but you’re still a professional so what do you do? The concept of understanding your customer’s challenges and opportunities is something that we’re encouraging salespeople to spend more time on and obviously one of the ways that you do it is by spending time researching the opportunities and challenges that your customers move forward with. One thing that we’ve been suggesting is instead of calling them and saying, “What are the challenges that you’re dealing with?” take the initiative, do the research ahead of time and understand where they’re probably coming from and where they’re probably going to go, and how you can provide value. Thank you, Alan, for that point as well. Alan Gregerman, back to you.

Alan Gregerman: These are great questions, I wish we had more time. Probably most of the people on the call are eager to get on with it and start into the holiday weekend but they’re awesome questions. In an ideal world before the pandemic I would regularly take teams of people, teams of sales marketing people wandering around cities looking for ideas from some awesome world-class companies as well as taking them to museums and thriving neighborhoods and trending new restaurants and world-class performances simply to stretch people’s ideas about what it means to be awesome or remarkable and where brilliant ideas come from. As a way to spark a wider net of ideas and possibilities, I want to challenge you to think we can do almost the exact same thing not as easily as we’d like to and not as fun as we’d like to by actually being out there with our backpacks on wandering through cities but we still can do it.

We just need to have – getting back to the idea of mindset – this curious explorer’s mindset. Tied to what matters to your customers, I want you regularly to be thinking about a bunch of things related to how you meet your customer’s needs. I want you to regularly think about how can you and your company be more remarkable, I want you to think about how you can be more inspiring, how can you be more useful, more helpful? How can you be faster, how can you make it easier to do business? How can you be more compelling, how can you be more engaging so they actually want to spend more time hanging out with you? How can the stuff you do be more sustainable, how can you be more seamless? How can you help your customers to be healthier or happier? How can you offer things that are less expensive? How can you be more impactful? Whatever matters to your customer, it gives you the challenge to ask some questions and then head out in the virtual world looking for folks who have insights to share about how to make those things happen.

Now, in addition to all these  companies that I love to think about – companies like Apple, Tesla and Lush Cosmetics, REI which I adore, IKEA which I used to hate but now I’ve grown to love and a whole host of other companies that can provide great insights for us – there are also a bunch of companies and organizations that as I do my online exploring I’ve discovered, that are showing us some ideas that are particularly tied to the world of COVID and to how in a virtual world we can continue to provide value to our customers. Let me give you a few ideas because I’d like to challenge you to think about exploring these types of places and then thinking about what their insight means for you.

The first I’d like to share is a company that’s simply called frame and the company called frame is a British fitness company, it’s a company that decided when suddenly people couldn’t come to their health clubs that they would build community while people were away. They’d create a fitness club and they’d allow you to stay engaged with the folks you normally worked out and exercised with, they’d make sure they regularly gave you the right programs and routines so you could stay on your fitness path and they decided that they would commit to regularly giving you moral support and guidance through texts and emails that would help you stay on top of your game. I’d like you to think about the idea of something as simple as that and I’d like you to think about the notion of how your company could create some type of cloud or membership, you don’t have to charge anything for it, that helps your customers stay engaged, make real progress and even have a cohort, potentially, of other customers. That’s one.

I’ve one a lot of work in the past with Kaiser Permanente and as most of you know because you’ve had your annual physicals rescheduled to be telemedicine appointments, telemedicine with Kaiser and other companies is not only something we’re going to be doing now but something that’s going to become a bigger part of our lives in the future. It gets to the notion of how we use iPads, technology and what type of interactions could actually even be better served by using these as a way to deliver the right kind of quality and consistency and make sure our customers are okay, routine check-ins, whatever the case is. Again, I want you to think about the routine parts of your business and how the routine parts of your business and your customer support can be done in a way that’s engaging, helpful and reassuring. You might even buy doctor’s smocks for everybody and put a sign that says, “Doctor of customer care.” Something so when they see you, they see the value of doing that. That’s a simple idea, the notion of staying engaged and remaining helpful.

A few days after we all started to go home, one of my favorite local breweries, Denizens Beer in Silver Spring decided quickly to offer no-touch via delivery to our homes. It seemed like a simple and logical idea but they were the first I saw do it and it seemed bold enough to me and certainly a logical thing to do. If you’ve seen any statistics, you know that beer consumption is way up since the pandemic but it also suggests an idea for all of us. That idea is the simple notion that maybe there are some things we can continue depending on our business to deliver in a touchless way that bring joy and surprise to our customers. Delivery both figuratively and literally, I’d love you to think about the simple notion of that. I’d also love for you to think about the simple idea of making customers smarter. Today you may have – and I hope not, for those of you who are on this webinar – started to have webinar fatigue because there seems like there’s no limit to the amount of information we can get online, the number of webinars we can attend. I don’t want you to get fatigued, I want you to think about both the value of you sitting in and learning on webinars but also the value of you putting information out there and consistently even when they’re not buying more stuff, making your customers smarter.

I know it’s a theme that’s been regularly talked about by some wonderful speakers as part of this series, but the idea of doing that. Leading organizations like the Wharton School of Business have committed especially during the pandemic to putting some of their content and lectures up for free with the idea of building their brand and simply making folks smarter. Think about the different things in addition to building your brand by making folks smarter that you might also do to help to get people to see the empathetic side, the value side of what you do. One quick thing I’ll refer you to and I would love it if you had any suggestions for me, is we as a company offer 20% of our time for free to small nonprofit organizations working to improve the lives of at-risk folks and people in our communities in need. You can simply go on our website which is www.venture-works.com, go to this page, scroll down to learn more. If you know a small nonprofit that could benefit from guidance and strategy innovation, creating more compelling customer experiences, please feel free to connect them and send them our way. We’ve been doing this long before the pandemic but the idea for us is the notion that this is a time when all of us should take the skills that we have and make them available certainly to our customers but to folks who could benefit who might not have the resources to get the help they need.

In addition, think about organizations like the Kennedy Center and lots of other cultural institutions which aren’t able to perform but are figuring out ways to get the magic of performance in the hands of all of their customers. The Kennedy Center has put up a robust amount of its past performances including all of the former Millennium Stage performances that you can watch at you leisure at home to feel that you’re engaged in entertainment. Other theater companies are either putting up parts of other performances or having actors from their living rooms or their basements or their attics do readings or performances, comedy clubs are doing the same thing. Think about your ability to perform and entertain and if there’s a possibility to offer some value in terms of inspiring and entertaining your customers.

Then I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer this because this is my favorite one that I’ve discovered during the pandemic. A lot of you are on Zoom calls and you see all of your wonderful colleagues or you see customers or association members that you’re part of on those Zoom calls smiling, looking engaged, looking at your picture, trying to stay focused. A farm in California called Sweet Farm thought they could make a little bit of extra money by leveraging some of their personalities, I know we’re on a call session called GoToMeeting and they’ve created a program called GoatToMeeting in which for $100 dollars you can actually get them to incorporate a goat cam or a sheep cam or a llama cam into your Zoom call. Instead of just watching your friends you could watch and see how a goat behaves listening to the stuff that you guys are working on. It’s all about having fun so think about the ways as well that you can learn from others and have fun engaging with the folks you have the privilege to serve.

Let me pause for a second and see what thoughts people have about ideas that you’ve come up with as you looked around, companies or organizations that you respect and like and think are being creative, or maybe some ideas they have that we can share with folks about how to unlock creativity during these interesting times.

Fred Diamond: Alan, people are home, in some places people are telling their people to stay away from people, Virginia just went to phase three, where we’re basing today’s webcast. I know you’re in Maryland, we’re in Virginia, we just moved to phase three but the governor said it’s safer at home. So, what are some things people can be doing from home to increase their creativity? You said you bring people in walking tours through cities, most people are not going places even still today, a bunch of states just told people to stay away from beaches, they’re closing beaches in various places. What are two or three things that people who aren’t really socializing with a lot of people can do to boost their creativity to improve as sales professionals?

Alan Gregerman: There are so many things you could do but let’s just stick for a moment with the idea that I planted that in better times we’d be out exploring. We can still explore cities, we can do virtual explorations and one fun thing – because I love to travel – that I’m doing right now is I’m identifying places that I hope Americans will someday be able to go back to. I’m starting to plan what’s the ideal three day visit there, for some places even longer. I’m starting to think about what are the things that are remarkable there. I’m googling and searching online remarkable things, I’m going back to travel videos I adore by things like Parts Unknown by the late Anthony Bourdain, by the series that’s on Netflix now, Somebody Feed Phil. I’m actually going to these places through these films as well as going online, pulling up videos about places and looking at the things that are remarkable there, seeing if any of those remarkable things spark any ideas for me about things that I can do or suggest or write about to our customers. I’m attending some webinars for sure, I’m reading some books including books I might not have read before that end up sparking my thinking.

Certainly I’d love all of you to read The Necessity of Strangers but I’d love you to read a book out there called Range which is about the power of being a generalist, it’s a wonderful book out there. I’m reading a fascinating new book by a woman named Lori Gottlieb who’s a psychoanalyst who’s written a book called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone which is about the whole value of psychoanalysis. The reality is often if we’re really good salespeople somebody is going to say to us, “Are you a psychologist?” There are some wonderful insights here about understanding and reading people and how to connect and engage with people. I’m doing all those things, I’m taking some online classes, I’m listening to way more podcasts, I love the Freakonomics radio podcast. I like this podcast Business Model Sandbox which talks about different business models in industries which might help the people on the call think about their basic business models and organizations and how they might tweak it. I read a lot of science magazines, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, I love this magazine AFAR which sparks my thinking about awesome places to travel, it’s a hip, trendy, millennial travel magazine. Those are things that absolutely I’d love people to do. Then I really want people to connect with more people now.

When I mentioned at the outset that I think this is a time when there are a few advantages, one that I found – and I’d be curious about what the other folks on the call think – that’s absolutely true is I think it’s way easier to connect with some remarkable and impressive people right now because everybody is shut. I find when I read about somebody who’s written something interesting or I discover a company that’s done something interesting, I do a bit more homework, then I send a really nice email to the person involved and I say, “Your work is inspiring me.” Then I give them a couple reasons why it’s inspired me and I say, “I’d love to connect.” I’m finding about two thirds of people that I send those notes to, even the heads of large companies or well-known professionals in other fields respond and say, “Sure, let’s set up a coffee, let’s set up a Zoom call.” I think we can absolutely do that, that’s something to do.

Fred Diamond: Alan, someone asked a question here. You’re absolutely right, people are more approachable now because most people are still working from their homes and they probably will be working from their homes at least for the foreseeable future, definitely through the summer. I’ve also taken the opportunity to reach out to some amazing authors that have written some of the best books of all time to invite them to the podcast. Do you think it’s going to continue once we go back at some level to the office and things continue to move back to “normal”? If not or if so, how do we maintain this opportunity to build relationships?

Alan Gregerman: I think it’s going to remain in some significant way. I think one of the things that can in an odd way benefit from the situation we’re in today is people having a greater appreciation for whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, the desire to stay connected to people, the desire to have conversations, the desire to engage people, to learn about people both in terms of them as people and them as business people and professionals. I think people are going to want that and I have a feeling even when things open up most people aren’t going to the office every day, I think more people are going to spend part of the time in the office when they need to and more time in their remote location. They’ve gotten it all organized, they’ve gotten comfortable, they don’t enjoy the commute, they found the things they can do well and the things that are challenges to do in a remote location and I think they’re more open to balancing that as opposed to going into the office 40 hours a week.

Fred Diamond: Alan, we have time for a couple more questions here and by the way, Ellen recommends a book, 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing my Edge and Found Self-Help that Actually Worked. Alan, we’re coming down to the end here. Before I ask you for your final action step that we can take here we do have a couple other quick questions, maybe you can take these relatively quickly. One of the questions here is, “How do I encourage my boss to allow us to be more creative?” That’s an interesting question, thank you so much and that’s from Martin. Thank you, Martin. We get this a couple of times, we have a great speaker who comes on our webcast who gives a couple of great ideas about certain things that could be implemented as part of the process but they’re nervous about going up to their boss and communicating them. What might be some of your suggestions for some of the sales professionals we have watching today’s show to communicate some of these ideas up? You’ve probably experienced some resistance in your career, I’m just curious on some of your thoughts on that.

Alan Gregerman: It’s not possible in the time we have left to transform the corporate cultures of a lot of organizations but I go back to one of the things that we talked about a little while ago and that was the idea that we have plenty of time to get smart about ideas before we bring them to customers or get smart about the needs of customers. I believe we have time now to take an idea and make a commitment to it. Do some homework, do some wrestling with that idea, talk to some folks we know who are out there in the marketplace who are customers, bounce that idea off of them. Then once we’ve got some feedback that, “This is an idea that could have traction if I do it the right way”, then I think I take that idea to my boss. I say, “I’ve invested some time, this isn’t some random idea that I just came up with in the shower, this is an idea I’ve invested in some time, I’ve done some analysis, I’ve done some thinking, I’ve socialized it with a bunch of folks. I’d love the chance to just pilot this idea with a few customers because I think we’re going to get a great result from that.” That’s something I would do.

Fred Diamond: Alan, we’ve got time for about one or two more thoughts from you and we definitely want to get your final thought on what people can be doing today to put some of this into action today on July 2nd, 2020.

Alan Gregerman: If I were to say one thing I’d say what we all need to do – getting back to the idea of mindset – is we need to make time for curiosity. We can’t just assume that we’re going to go about doing the normal stuff we do and brilliance is going to happen and it’s going to push the other stuff aside. I’d like you all to make some time and even if that means you just start right now with an hour a day or an hour a week and that’s all you can handle, make some time. You have the ability to get out, get out, explore a little bit even if it’s just in a park and as places start opening up, wander around looking for some interesting ideas of businesses that are getting back and doing business and how those ideas could help you and your organization. The other is I’d like you to get together with your colleagues or team members every week or every other week in those calls, pose a question that’s a curious question. Pose a question that will spark your thinking and as a group, start to brainstorm questions like, “What do our customers really care about right now?” or, “‘What if we could create the perfect new product or solution, what would be different?” or, “How could we do a better job of using technology?” or, “What would our amazing no-touch customer service look like?” or, “How do we make our customers smarter than they ever imagined possible?” Think about questions like that as a way to regularly spark your team curiosity. Those would be some basic things that I’d think about as stuff I do. Take the weekend off, celebrate and then get back to it.

Fred Diamond: ABC, Always Be Curious.

Alan Gregerman: Exactly. I have another slide but the story is a bit long so I have to save that for a time when I get everybody in person because I love the story but I can’t do it really short.

Fred Diamond: Alan Gregerman, thank you so much, you were a very popular speaker at the IES, we look forward to getting you back on the live stage. Alan, thank you so much. For all the people who’ve been watching today, especially Ralph from Antarctica, thank you so much. Ralph, you’re awesome, Alan, all you people are awesome as well. Have a great weekend, happy July 4th, we’ll see you all next Wednesday on the Sales Game Changers Live. Thank you, Alan.

Alan Gregerman: Thanks, take care.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 262: Business Innovation Guru Alan Gregerman Says Having Goats on Your Zoom Calls Can Lead to a Sales Boost and Here’s Why first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch the replay!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on June 25, 2020. It featured the Small Biz Lady Melinda Emerson,]

Register for Thursday’s OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET: Building the Courage to Make Prospecting Calls RIGHT NOW with Nimit Bhatt here.

Find Melinda on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 260: The Small Biz Lady, Melinda Emerson, Outlines the Nine Optimal Sales Mindset Steps for Reopening

MELINDA’S TIP TO SALES LEADERS: “Focus on what you can control and right now there’s not a lot people can control except for their attitude. You can control your response to your customer. So whether or not your customer had budget last week and all of a sudden their budget got snatched back, you can’t control that. Be pleasant to deal – make sure that they can hear the smile on the other end of the phone or they can actually see your smile and face on the Zoom call. It’s important that you embrace as opposed to react.”

Fred Diamond: Melinda Emerson, it’s so great to have you here on the Optimal Sales Mindset, when I reached out to a lot of the great speakers that we know looking for some great speakers, your name came up from the great Barb Weaver and some other people as well. You’re known as the Small Biz Lady, SBL, [laughs] you’re also living in my home town of Philadelphia and we’ve gotten a lot of excitement from people who want to hear from you and they want to talk to you a little bit via the webcast. Melinda, great to see you, I’ve been wanting to have you on our show and on the IES stage for a long time and we’re thrilled to have you here today. I’m excited to hear about what you’re going to be talking about.

Melinda Emerson: The great thing about COVID-19 is suddenly everybody’s schedule is available, right? [Laughs] I’m glad that we were able to work this out so I could be here with you today, Fred. It’s really interesting, in the COVID-19 era, dare I say the post-COVID-19 era some places around the country are finally opening up at least a little bit this coming weekend. I think it’s interesting because the nature of business has changed, the people are spending a lot of time online, everybody’s streaming everything, everyone’s spending a lot more time on social media and those are very interesting sales channels that we can all look at in terms of where and how we engage our customers.

Selling has changed a little, I think we do have to get more in the service mode of sales as opposed to just, “I have this great solution, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” I think we really have to look at where people are at because in some cases our customers are worried about their job, our customers are worried about is their company the next company that’s going to go bankrupt? There’s a lot of stuff going on out here in corporate America not just obviously in the small business world which is where I reign supreme. I think small businesses are getting crushed right now and unfortunately I do believe we’re going to lose about 50% of them, frankly, before this thing is over. I think the unemployment numbers are really high and I don’t think they’re going to go lower, I think they’re going to go higher so I think there’s a lot of stuff going on.

Unfortunately now that people are working from home or working differently, people have laid off parts of their staff, they’re starting to realize maybe they don’t need them to come back, they’re now lean and mean and can still operate. There’s a lot of different things going on inside all of our customers that we have to be cognoscente as salespeople, as people calling on these guys. It’s a really interesting paradigm right now.

Fred Diamond: We’ve been doing webcasts for the last three months on a daily basis with the exception of Monday and I agree with you, which is why we’re doing a mindset webcast every week. The IES prior to the pandemic would do 50 to 70 live events per year, we did our mindset one in October. For four hours on a Friday morning in October we would focus on mindset and it comes up, of course, throughout. Now we’ve actually devoted a slot every week just for talking about mindset for a couple reasons. One is things are changing, it used to be a daily basis and now it’s kind of on a weekly basis, today it’s June 25th, I was just watching the news before I came onto today’s webcast and there’s been spikes in 27 states. You’re absolutely right where you said as it relates to sales, we were talking about this episode in preparation and we were talking about some ways that people need to grow their mindset but we also acknowledge that these aren’t normal times. We’re going to talk about some things that sales professionals should be doing and thinking about today in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of a huge economic challenge where salespeople, if you’re thinking about closing a lot of business right now, it’s going to be tough especially as your customer shuts down and your customer’s customer’s customer shuts down. But, there are things you can be doing to be a sales professional and you have 9 things lined up for us that we’re going to talk about that are right on track, we’re going to make them pertinent to today as people act today but also as they start moving back out. They’re really going to take their game to the next level.

Melinda Emerson: Alright, let’s jump in, let’s get to it. We’re going to talk about what we call the 9 steps of optimal sales mindset for reopening because if everything was normal, we know what normal sales mindset is but now it’s a little bit different. I think the first thing we’ve got to think about is there are some things that separate great salespeople from average salespeople and their #1 thing is the mindset but it’s also their motivated to sell and they fundamentally identify with the product or service they’re selling and really their company sales process which is really important. When I think about this, the first thing I think about is understanding the why story, not your customer’s why story but your why story and that really goes back. In these COVID-19 times many businesses have had to realign their unique value proposition, how can you figure out how to add value, even more value right now without adding cost? That is realigning your unique value proposition and when I say understanding your why story, I’m saying if your unique value proposition has been tweaked, making sure that you really understand and align with it and have the ability to convey it in a way that is going to get a customer to say, “I need that.” That is what I mean by why story. What do you think, Fred?

Fred Diamond: That’s absolutely true. We talk about the why a lot prior to the pandemic but more from the perspective of understanding, like you said, your customer’s why. We were having a conversation today with one of the members of the Institute for Excellence in Sales and we were talking about how conversations have changed over the last three months. In the beginning it was a lot of empathetic conversations where it’s just about empathy but now we’re seeing a lot of the conversations shift to not, “What are your challenges, what are you going through?” but, “What are you hoping to achieve post-COVID?” We’re talking about reopening today. What are you hoping to achieve, what’s your company hoping to achieve? Because everyone’s had to pivot at some level, even the companies that we know that are doing really well. Understanding what they’re trying to achieve, where they’re trying to take their company is something that salespeople need to be so conscious of right now so that they can go back and give them some value. “This is where you’re trying to get through the end of 2020, let me as a great sales professional think it through and come back to you with some ideas.”

Melinda Emerson: I also think, too, as salespeople we have to be realistic that what people paid for a thing three months ago they’re probably not willing to pay the same amount now. We have to realign that with how we’re packaging, bundling offers and things like that as well because things have changed and everything’s on sale in America right now. You’ve got to make sure that what you’re offering is aligning with that as well. The second thing, I still think no matter what, the world is still waiting on a better mousetrap so there’s no such thing as, “There’s no customers” or, “If I don’t get this sale it’s going to be the end of the world.” There’s always another customer and even in this post-COVID-19 time we have to reject the scarcity mindset, we can’t get all into this trap of, “The country is in a recession, unemployment is high, nobody is going to buy from me” or, “If I don’t get this sale, my job is going to be ended.”

We can’t give into despair. I think at this point we really need to be thinking there’s going to be some winners coming out of this recession and if you play your cards right, if you do the right things, if you stay in communication with your customer you’re going to win and it’s just that. Right now might be, “I can’t get budget approval right now but I know I need you” so you have to keep in touch, massage the conversation, really understand what your customer’s #1 care abouts are so that you can be in position when the budget opens back up. That’s really what it’s about but you can’t fall into despair and I think when times are tight you start thinking, “Oh, no” and that’s not true because your customer needed you before COVID and your customers need you now. They might not need as much, but they still need you.

Fred Diamond: It goes back to the abundance mindset that most of the top sales professionals have that we’ve interfaced with. There’s so many challenges right now, originally it was just about the pandemic, everybody was having their best year ever only three short months ago, then the pandemic kicks in so then every kid is sent home from school and then your spouse who usually travels is now home. Then there’s shortages, then of course there’s been a lot of social challenges over the last couple weeks that have been eye-opening to a lot of people wanting to have different levels of conversation and understanding what’s going on and how that impacts them in the workforce.

Now we’re in the beginning of summer, are we going to reopen my company again? It’s not just, “How do I get better at sales? I need to be a better prospector or build my referral base.” Now there’s so many things that even the best salespeople in the world are having to deal with. That being said, you can’t find yourself in the space of despair like you just said, the top sales professionals, you may not be getting your number right now. Some of the great sales leaders, we deal with are also reducing compensation, commission plans to be real, a lot of the great companies we’re working with are doing their best not to lay people off, to keep people on board as long as they can. The top people that we’re talking to every week, they’re maintaining an aspirational mindset.

Melinda Emerson: You have to have an aspirational mindset, it doesn’t work if you don’t. If you’re a negative-thinking, “Woe is me” kind of person then sales isn’t even for you. When we have so many elements of change and so many things that we can’t control and your boss is still expecting you to perform, that is pressure. We have to acknowledge that, but even with all of that the world is still waiting on a better mousetrap, people still need you, there are still plenty of customers, everybody is not out of business right now. I think that we have to focus on that and serve the people that we can serve and do a great above and beyond kind of job for them.

I do still think it’s necessary to qualify the customer, I do think that there are maybe even more tire kickers out there right now and people who want services but they’re not willing to disclose their budget. I think we still have to stand firm on who we give our time to because the salespeople, we’re time starved and kind of coin-operated so we want to make sure that if we do take the time to develop a proposal for someone there’s a real opportunity. You’ve got to still ask those key questions, “What is your timeline? What is your budget? How is the decision going to be made?” Those things are still really important because I do think that you can be more collaborative with people, you can certainly have brainstorming sessions with people that aren’t necessarily about asking for the deal but you do still want to qualify whether people are worth your time. If they’re not, shut it down quick and move on but you want to be careful that you don’t turn down somebody that’s going to have a $10 million dollar budget in two months [laughs]. You want to do it as kind a way as possible but you still want to make sure that people that are so-so opportunities aren’t eating up all your time.

Fred Diamond: It goes back to what we were saying before. You may not be closing a lot of business right now because of all the challenges in the world but you still need to improve yourself as a sales professional. Qualification, understanding your market, understanding buyer behavior. Melinda, I want to ask you a question. People are asking us, “What should I work on today? What should I do today?” It’s interesting, one of the companies that’s actually not a member of the Institute told us that they recently did some layoffs and they did some layoffs because some people just weren’t showing up to work, the people were just making sourdough bread all day, I guess, or watching Netflix.

Melinda Emerson: [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: They were tracking calls and they saw that a lot of people in their company just weren’t coming so they laid a bunch of them off. What would be the #1 thing that you would do right now to improve yourself as a sales professional? If you only had one thing to do, what would you suggest that they work on? Qualifying, qualification, prospecting, they’re all skills salespeople need to have.

Melinda Emerson: I think just doing like what we’re doing right now, participating in webinars, listening to podcasts on great sales practices, I think this down time is a great time to sharpen your own knife. One of the things that I’ve actually done for myself in the last two years, I actually just finished my executive MBA at Drexel University and that’s something that I always wanted to do for like 20 years. I finally decided two years ago to do it and finish my degree in the COVID era which was really interesting, I went from an in-person class to an online program. I think that there’s tons of webinars and podcasts, even books, all of us have books sitting in our office that people sent us or that we bought on Amazon and didn’t read yet. Tackle some of that, this is a great time to build your skills and sharpen your own knife for sure.

Fred Diamond: Melinda has given us some great ideas here on how to build that sales mindset as we move closer to reopening and as the world, even with all the challenges, begins to get somewhat more normalized from where it was.

Melinda Emerson: #4 is a tried and true one but I felt like I had to throw it in here, you really do have to focus on helping and not sell. If you’re just about closing the sale everybody can feel that and sense that so you really need to be your most authentic self and put yourself in a mindset of, “I’m helping my customer, my customer is having a problem and my solution is going to help them solve it better/cheaper/faster/smarter.” You have to make sure that your solution falls into one of those and make sure that that’s what your focus is. I think the difference between manipulating someone into a sale and helping someone is simply intent and you want to make sure that your motives are pure and that you really are thinking about helping your customer.

Fred Diamond: Susan chimes in here, “Sales is all about service” and that’s something that we noticed right away. The great sales professionals that we’ve dealt with at the Institute for Excellence in Sales and that we’ve interviewed on the Sales Game Changers podcast have always known that they are of service to their customer. When I ask these sales VP’s I interview on my podcast, “Why have you achieved such great things in sales?” they’ve all said the same thing, “Because I’m of service to my customer.” Right now everybody needs help, everybody’s struggling with something, 82% of the planet was stuck in their homes for the last three months, more people are still staying home.

Then like you said before, especially for small companies that are getting crushed, your customer or your customer’s customer, if you want to be a great sales professional you need to be viewing yourself as being of service and part of it is offering the service. It’s going to your customer with, “I’d like to help you take yourself to the next level, how can I help you?” or, “I was thinking that this may help you.” Being proactive in that servicing as well.

Melinda Emerson: I couldn’t agree with you more, I think it’s important. Just trying to manage that or doing sales calls without a bunch of background noise, just all kinds of stuff people are managing and people are dealing with and I think it’s important to be very empathetic to that.

This one dovetails off of that, you really need to make sure that you keep your client’s best interest at heart and by that is don’t sell them something that they don’t need, be authentic about whether or not you are offering the best solution. If you aren’t, be transparent and even give them a referral to a better service, if you know that your product really isn’t going to solve their problem do not sell it to them. In fact, you have more integrity and build a better relationship pointing them to the solution that really is going to be their best bet and I do this all the time.

Sometimes people come to me and they want coaching, for example to boost their business or they want a marketing solution or a social media strategy and I’m too expensive for them, I have a lower level service provider that I refer people to all the time because I’m expensive [laughs] you want to be honest with people but have an alternative. Obviously as salespeople we want the sale, we want the commission but all money isn’t good money and if you take money from someone and they buy a Cadillac when they really needed a Hyundai, they’re going to resent you for it, you’re not going to get repeat business and in fact, they’re going to go out bad-mouthing you to a bunch of people. You want to make sure that you are selling someone the appropriate solution and that starts with having your client’s best interest at heart.

Fred Diamond: It goes back to the notion that sales success is a journey and there are very few shortcuts.

Melinda Emerson: I can’t emphasize this enough, I think this is really about being honest and being transparent if you’re selling a solution that’s something your client needs five years from now and that’s something they don’t need right now, don’t sell it to them, it’s just not worth it. Anybody will buy something once but the point is repeat business and referral business is how businesses are sustained so that’s where you want to get to, you want to be their best referral.

Fred Diamond: You also made a very good point as well, people are looking for solutions for right now to get through this or to help them get to the next stage as compared to where we want to be in 2021, 2022. There was a meme going around that in 2015 today was not the end of anybody’s 5 year plan so nobody said in 2015, “In the summer of 2020 I want to be in the middle of a pandemic with businesses going out of business and being stuck in my home and having to wear a mask and not being able to go to my office and go see customers and only seeing customers through a dot.” You need to be focused on, “How can I help you now or how can I help you get to your next place, Mr./Mrs. customer, where you want to get to?” You’re talking about next year, 5 years, it’s a total waste of time.

Melinda Emerson: That actually dovetails well into my #6 which is focus on what you can control and right now there’s not a whole lot people can control but their attitude. Your attitude is the #1 thing you can control, your response to things are things that you can control so whether or not your customer had budget last week and all of a sudden their budget got snatched back, you can’t control that. You always have to be pleasant to deal with, I think there’s something to be said for doing good work versus being good to work with and I think this is really where the rubber hits the road for a lot of salespeople. You have to make sure that they can hear the smile on the other end of the phone or they can actually see your smile and face on the Zoom call. It’s important that you embrace as opposed to react and I think that’s what it’s about when you talk about that.

Fred Diamond: Melinda, we have a question here that comes from Mary, Mary wants to know, “How is Melinda keeping herself under control?” Melissa Emerson, you’re the Small Biz Lady, you have a huge following on social media, you’ve created the name for yourself as a Small Biz Lady, SBL. When we posted the show we got response from all over the world, people who follow you, look for advice from you and guidance so give us a little peak underneath the cover here. How are you maintaining control? You also need to sell your services for your public persona.

Melinda Emerson: I’ve got to be honest with you. My entire book of business for March, April, May and June got wiped out in March so all the conferences, the key notes and things I was supposed to do went kaboom. Unfortunate because I have a corporate business as well as a direct to consumer, I sell things to small business owners too so I was fortunate in a couple of ways. #1, because my brand is so big I did have some corporations reach out to me to do very high profile national webinars so that saved me a little bit, but also doubled down on my small business marketing efforts. We developed a brand new e-book called How To Recession Proof Your Small Business, put it out there for free for people, we didn’t sell it, we gave it away because I always have been about ending small business failure, being of service but I also invested in building some new funnels. We’re about to do a big launch, we’re going to give away my first book, Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months for free, we’re going to do a free plus shipping offer to my small business customers. I’ve also been diversifying and developing new courses and online material, I’ve been using this down time to get in the lab and build some more stuff. When times come through and people are looking for more training material, online coursewares and things like that, I’m going to have two or three brand new courses to launch.

I do also have a 14 year old son, I am a divorced single parent and my mother’s here too so I’ve got two bad coworkers, my mom and my son, who gang up on me [laughs] so that’s been interesting too. Not necessarily home schooling but managing screen time and making sure my son gets all his tutors and all this kind of stuff, no shortage of craziness going on here but just grateful for this time and space, grateful for the time with my family close by. It was terrible to cancel all of our summer vacations but I’m scared to go anywhere frankly till January so I am in my house feeling like I’m under house arrest but I’m making the most of it because I’ve been working from home for 8 years so it’s not a super big deal to work from home, that’s for sure.

Fred Diamond: Melinda, we have a lot of people around the globe watching us today, “Focus on what you can control.” What’s #7?

Melinda Emerson: #7 is actively listen and this is important because in this day in time a lot of people are hurting and their pride might not let them tell you as their salesperson how bad things really are in their business. Some people are willing up to open their whole kimono and tell you but some people aren’t so you really have to listen to what they aren’t saying and just pay attention to what’s going on in their industry, figure out where you can get other information whether it’s a trained association website. Just look at what’s going on, maybe that might be a way for you to offer a solution for them that has nothing to do with what you sell but something that they might need to be aware of.

For me, one of the things that I’ve done is helped a lot of the people in my circle get the PPP loans and the EIDL loans and know how to fill out the paperwork, what information they need to get from their payroll companies so they can apply and things like that. Obviously I don’t give out loans but I’ve been helping people with other things that they need help with and that might be a great way that you can be of service to some of your customers based on where they are and on what they need.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here from Susan, thank you. The question is, “How can I be a better listener?” and that’s an interesting question. That comes up a lot when I talk to the sales leaders that we’ve had on the Sales Game Changers podcast or in the Institute, active listening, “I have two ears and one mouth, use them in that order”, the 66% solution. Give us a technique that you would tell your customers during normal time or today, how can they become a better listener? It’s such a skill that’s so inherent in great sales professionals yet it’s hard because especially when you talk to someone new you want to get all your features and facts out there. I tell people, “If your customer does 90% of the talking then it’s a successful meeting.”

Melinda Emerson: My father was a salesman for 30 years, he sold for Kraft Foods and my father would say that. He used to say, “If your customer does all the talking it was a good meeting” and I think that’s true but I also think if you’re trying to figure out how to be a better listener, start by asking better questions. Ask probing questions that are going to spark a conversation versus a yes/no answer, sort of like dealing with your kids. If you’re trying to get information about how their day was you don’t say, “How was your day?” because you’re going to get, “Good.” You have to ask, “What did you do today? What was the most impactful thing that you learned this week?” There are ways to ask questions in a way that can draw even a shy person out so it really starts with asking better questions, more probing questions.

#8 is build trust because we all know that people do business with people that they like, know and trust so all of that is really important because at the end of the day trust is the main thing you want to build, you want to friend-raise as much as you’re fundraising. When you make a sale you’re fundraising but when you’re building a relationship, that’s what I call friend-raising and I think it’s about listening, it’s about offering solutions that have nothing to do with what you sell and it’s really just about caring about that person. That person is worried about whether or not they’re going to keep their job or whether or not they’re going to be asked to do three times the work and take a 5% pay cut, that’s a real issue for somebody you might be trying to sell to right now but you’ve got to be sensitive to that, helpful around that if you can be.

One of the things that I try to do sometimes when I’m trying to cultivate a new customer is I find a book that might be helpful to them and mail it to them, I just jump on Amazon. I have a couple of books, I’m a bit of a book person and I don’t like electronic books, I like hardcover books that I can flip through and I’ll just mail somebody a book. “I saw this, I thought it might be of interest to you, it might be helpful to you.” Something little to try to build rapport and to just show that I’m interested in helping them be better. I think that’s a great way to build trust.

Fred Diamond: I hate to put you on the spot, I always hate asking this question, this might throw you off but is there a go-to book that you have that’s been very impactful for you? You’ve created such a name for yourself and you’ve risen to the top of being a consultant to companies selling to small business and also helping small businesses achieve themselves. To put you on the spot, do you have a go-to book or one or two that you’d like to recommend for the audience?

Melinda Emerson: To be honest with you, it depends if I’m dealing with a corporate person or if I’m dealing with a small business person. If I’m dealing with a small business person a lot of times I’ll send them my own book or if it’s somebody that I know has my books and materials I might send them The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber or I might send them Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, those are two books that I like to send people. Right now in this time and space I really like an old book that a person that’s a good friend of mine wrote a long time ago, his name is Barry Moltz and Barry wrote this book called Bounce Back in the early 2000s and it was what happened to him after he got kicked out of a business, he pulled in a business partner and that business partner booted him out of his own business and talked about how he completely reinvented himself and his business and the lessons he learned from it. I’ve actually been sending that book to people because right now there’s a whole lot of people in that situation having to reinvent from the ashes kind of thing. Those are three books I send to people.

I’m a huge Jill Konrath fan so I love her SNAP Selling book is a good one. There’s so many good ones I could just keep going, I’m a little bit of a bookworm.

Fred Diamond: Those are great. Jill’s a good friend of the Institute, we’ve had her on the stage and Michael also says here that E-Myth is his favorite business book. We had today Melinda Emerson, she’s the Small Biz Lady, SBL, she’s up in Philly, I’m down here in Virginia. She’s given us 8 of the Optimal Sales Mindset tips you need to be thinking about as we accelerate towards reopening. Melinda, I know that you have one more that you’re going to share with us and then I’m going to put you on the spot again, I’m going to ask you for one advice. I know I asked you about 30 minutes ago but I’m going to ask you for one action item that all of our guests can do today. Melinda, bring us home here with your ninth and final point on maintaining and growing the Optimal Sales Mindset.

Melinda Emerson: You have to realize that failure is part of the process, you just have to eat no’s for breakfast, you have to know that nobody closes 100%, nobody has 100% close ratio. Failure is part of it but it’s also a numbers game, the more proposals you put out there the more you’ll close and it’s really just that simple but hearing a no is okay as long as you find out why. Why did you lose the business, who won it, go check them out, check out their website, check out their social handles. I’ve actually been a fan of asking the customer if you could see the winning proposal, every now and again they’ll give it to you and I think that’s a treasure trove of information just to see how they lay it out, how their numbers are laid out, what they charge for, that’s the best resource you could have is to get the winning proposal. That’s it, that’s where I’m at in terms of failure is part of it but just learn and keep it moving.

Fred Diamond: I know that you’re going to be turning this into a blog post, I believe you have a slide coming up on how people can reach out to you and you’re extremely successful on all of the LinkedIn, all the social media. Where do you suggest people go to check in with you best and where might you be posting this blog on Monday?

Melinda Emerson: My blog is succeedasyourownboss.com but if you want to follow me on social media you can hit me up on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, I am the Small Biz Lady on all of those places but if you’re a good salesperson, I know you, you use LinkedIn and I am Melissa Emerson on LinkedIn. You can certainly connect to me there or hang out on my YouTube channel as well.

Melinda Emerson: I’m a big fan of what I call a storm starter strategy and that is if you’re a B to B salesperson I want you to make a target 65 list, 65 companies you want to work for, 65 contacts you have and over the next week I want you to hit 5 to 7 of them a day and just send them an email, hit them up on LinkedIn, give them a phone call and you will be amazed at how people are going to respond to it. New opportunities are going to come to you, it’s going to start raining money in your sales practice if you do this. If you’ve been stuck but trying to figure out what to do, call those existing contacts because it’s much easier to get love from someone who already loves you, so do that.

Fred Diamond: Melinda, stay safe, hopefully you’ll make it out of your house, at least walk around the block or something. It’s been a pleasure having you, again to all of our guests today, thank you so much for listening to the Optimal Sales Mindset webcast and the Sales Game Changers podcast. Thanks, Melinda.

Melinda Emerson: Thank you for having me.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 260: The Small Biz Lady, Melinda Emerson, Outlines the Nine Optimal Sales Mindset Steps for Reopening first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch the replay!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on July 18, 2020. It featured Resilience and NLP expert and motivational speaker Klyn Elsbury.]

Register for Friday’s CREATIVITY IN SALES: The Thrive Indicator: Are You Standing in the Way of Your Own Success? with Meridith Elliot Powell here.

Find Klyn on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 258: Resilience Expert Klyn Elsbury Shares Optimal Sales Mindset Lessons Learned Having Been Hospitalized 67 Times for Cystic Fibrosis in Her Scant 32 Years

KLYN’S’ TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Check in with your gut and ask “are you actually a professional?” Because if you are a professional what’s happening right now isn’t going to stop you. You’re going to do the growth work, you’re going to do the trainings, you’re going to get educated and you’re going to leverage it. Recognize what was that superpower that got you to be called a professional and then what is that extra thing you need to reach out and then go for the vision? What I want you to understand is what made you a professional and keep doing that.”

Fred Diamond: Klyn, it’s great to have you on the show. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about you? Give us a little bit about your background, there’s so much interesting about your background that leads to why we had you on the show today.

Klyn Elsbury: Let me give you a little bit of background about myself particularly for my engineer thinkers, my numbers people, I know you guys are busy looking at forecasts all the time and how many calls have led to how many conversations to how many leads, to how many sales. We’re going to do this by the numbers strictly for you today. I want you to know, 32, that’s how old I am, let’s just get that out in the open. 32 years old, I am a millennial. One, that was when I was diagnosed with a condition called cystic fibrosis that is a genetic condition that fills my lungs with a thick, sticky mucus that I cannot cough out. 26 was how old I was when I lost my 6-figure corporate recruiting career and that was agency side, not HR side and I was responsible of running a $26 million dollar recruiting operation strictly involved in reaching out to the sales companies convincing them to hire our recruiters, then recruiting recruiters to become salespeople.

All of that went down. 154 is how many days I spent in the hospital back in 2015, 2016 is when my book became a #1 international best-seller propelling me out of social security disability status. 2019 is when I created my first 7-figure partnership relating to all things sales, all things neuroscience, all things mindset. There’s a little bit by the numbers, I’ve been hospitalized 67 times in my 32 years, on average it’s every single fall and spring and the length of those hospitalizations typically ranges from two days – which is a rarity – all the way up to 14 days. The longest has been 6 months and during that 6 months stint, one entire month was on life support on a ventilator for getting diagnosed with diabetes with a blood sugar of 1,236.

Fred Diamond: You’re also an expert on NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming – which we’ll talk about in a little bit as well. Prior to the pandemic you were traveling all over the place, as a matter of fact one of our past guests on the Sales Game Changers podcast, Pramod Raheja, was actually the gentleman who turned us onto you and said, “Fred, you really get to know Klyn.” You really make a lot of sense for the people who are joining us today, I’m looking at the list here, we’ve got so many sales professionals, we’ve got some people in Europe, we have a couple people in Australia, a lot of people on the east coast of the United States. Quick question here, let’s talk about energy and productivity. We’ve been doing the Sales Game Changers Optimal Sales Mindset webcast, we used to do one event per year on mindset on a Friday morning in October. Now we’re doing the show every single week and we’ve had close to 2,000 sales professionals log in to the show just to get some kind of boost, just to get something going.

Let’s talk about a couple of the concepts, the first one is energy and productivity. Give us some of your insights because as you saw from the poll, more people than in the past were below the mean, if you will. What do you suggest? Again, it’s July 9th, it’s almost the middle of the summer, a lot of the people who are joining us who are sales professionals had to have been homeschool teachers, now they have to be camp counselors, they can’t go to the beach and they can’t go wherever they might be going. What are some of your tips for maintaining the energy and productivity right now?

Klyn Elsbury: Energy and productivity, we’ve never been taxed more than we are right now and we’re taxed from our living rooms so we can’t go out, we can’t meet the prospects, I’m not telling you something you don’t know. What I will tell you that may be new to you is something called baggage. During times like this and dare I say, uncertain, unprecedented – insert your bumper sticker quote here – our baggage or the unresolved things we have never worked with before that we know we need to gets lit up. This is the experience where you come back from the grocery store and you’re feeling stressed because you had to wear the mask or the mask popped off or you had to drop your mask and now your mask is on the floor so you pick it back up and you’re putting it on your face and you’re believing the myth of carbon dioxide in your mask.

Whatever that thing is for you, you will notice that in times of stress something is going to trigger in your mind that you weren’t necessarily expecting to happen, that’s called baggage. It’s okay, we all have it, it occurs whenever there is some high stressers in the environment and it serves as a way of letting you know there’s something going on that you have not dealt with before that you should have dealt with in the past. If you find that you are low energy, what this is essentially saying is your brain is saying, “You’re triggered by something” and this could be something that happened years ago. Interesting story, I was working with a guy and he’s doing all these calls, nothing seems to be happening and he had the audacity to blame it on COVID. If you know me, we’re a no-excuses girl, we belong on the east coast, not San Diego because we like to hit you where it lives. Come to find out, about two years ago he went through a traumatic divorce and he never processed those feelings and now he’s being stuck in home, he’s starting to have this anxiety come up again where he’s not as productive as he once was.

I want to first of all tell you, if you’re feeling low energy or low productivity it’s probably because there’s some unresolved baggage going on in your brain that COVID, protests, riots, whatever you’re watching on the news, it’s exacerbating it. Take a moment to be gracious with yourself and recognize the reason we have feelings is to feel them, feelings are for feeling, that’s it. Take that time, first check in with yourself, say, “Self…” [Laughs] “Where is my baggage right now? What is that thing that I’m trying to work through? What is that thing I’ve been suppressing?” What’s interesting is if you close your eyes, you inhale through your nose, you exhale through your mouth and you ask yourself that question, your gut is going to tell you something and it works constantly. If that is you right now and you’re experiencing the low energy, low productivity, close your eyes, breath in through your nose, out through your mouth and say, “Self, what’s that thing I need to address right now?” That’s going to be your first tip on how to figure out what to do next with that information.

Fred Diamond: By the way, I know you have a way for people to text you to get some of your content. If you want to tell us right now, how can people get some more information from you?

Klyn Elsbury: Thank you, it’s super easy, you just text the word ‘inspire’ to  66866 and you will get access to the free masterclasses, you’ll get access to guided meditations where I actually use the slow voice, we’ve got some for ultimate relaxation to help you zonk out at night and then we have some confidence manifestos in there. If you need to hype yourself up even if you’ve got three minutes, hype yourself up, you’re going to get access to all of that.

Fred Diamond: We’ve got some questions that are actually coming in. Klyn, we have a quick question here which says, “How can I do the breathing when I have two dogs, a spouse and three kids in the house?” I don’t know where this person lives, it’s Jerry, thank you so much, Jerry. Those type of scenarios, normally a lot of salespeople love to go to the office or meet customers because they’re out of the other elements and they’re really in their true element. How can people right now do some of the things that you’ve started to recommend when they’re in either a small apartment or in a room like Jerry says here? He’s in a house with a spouse, three kids and two dogs.

Klyn Elsbury: Here’s the deal, Jerry. What I want you to do is recognize there is somebody else out there in the planet who’s living in a house with 15 dogs, 2 spouses, 3 kids, whatever it is and they’re still able to check in with themselves. First of all, figure out what it is that’s making you not truly want to check in and I’m not asking you to do anything longer than a 15 second breath work exercise. All you do – literally, we can do it right now – you shut your eyes, breath in through your nose for a count of three, exhale through your mouth audibly making the sound for a count of four and say, “Self, please show me what it is that I need to work on first today.” You can do this in the shower, you can do this when you’re using the restroom, you can do this while you’re brushing your teeth – obviously don’t exhale through it. It’s that simple and it’s 15 seconds.

Fred Diamond: Breathing, to be frank with you, is one of the most powerful things you can do and we’ve had 100+ speakers come to the Institute and breathing comes up so often. One of our experts is an expert on prospecting and he recommended you take 15 seconds of breathing before you make a phone call because you want to be present, you don’t want to be bringing in some of the baggage, as you talk about, before you’re dialing with a prospect, you need to be so present. How about when people are getting ready to do Zoom calls? Someone asks here – this is from Kristen, thank you so much, Kristen – she wants to know, “I’m doing Zoom calls all day long, I don’t have time to breathe.” Obviously she probably does but what is some of your advice with that, with the constancy? Everybody I talk to, all the sales professionals, all the sales leaders, everybody is so busy right now because we’re not leaving so we’re going from meeting to meeting to meeting. What are some of your suggestions and mindset techniques to be even more present when, as I like to say, looking at the dot? We’re focused on that not just internally but externally with prospects and customers.

Klyn Elsbury: First of all, you already are breathing [laughs]. You may not be breathing in the level of depth that you want to do but no matter what, you’re already breathing so that tells me if you’re truly going back to back to Zoom calls I get it, I’m right there too. I just did it, I just did a slow, manual breath through the nose, exhale through the mouth, that’s all we’re asking you to do, I’m not telling you to reinvent the wheel, do intense breath work. I’m saying anytime you need to ground yourself inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. Sure, maybe right now it feels awkward, you haven’t done it a lot but it was also probably pretty awkward for you the first time you picked up a phone to make that call. Overtime it just becomes a habit and it’s stored in something called your unconscious, your unconscious is that part of you that you’re not necessarily in tune with and this quick little inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth actually resets your nervous system.

It helps you to understand what it is that you need to be called to do so if breathing intensely is too difficult, that’s fine. By the way, I’ve got 74% of my lungs on a good day. If I can figure out how to breathe while talking [laughs] you all are experts at talking, you can figure this out too even if it’s just as simple as putting a note on a sticky and then putting it on your monitor just saying, “Remember to breathe.” All you’ve got to do is just remember and then it becomes habit and then you don’t have to worry about it.

Fred Diamond: We’re going to start talking about some of the fears that the sales professionals are facing right now and your suggestions for overcoming them but before I do, you’re an expert in NLP and I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time, but I want you to give us a little bit of an understanding of how your brain categorizes information and some of the science behind some of the things that we’re going to be talking about today. Klyn, give us a little bit about the brain science behind this so we can understand why this works the way it does.

Klyn Elsbury: This is part of the thing when you text ‘inspire’ to 66866, you’re going to get a three hour training on this because I light up on this one. Here’s the deal, I’m a master practitioner of something called neuro linguistic programming and one of the things we need to know about mind mapping and how to map our brain is that any given point – and I’m going to go through this very fast, remember, this is a three hour training. Our brains right now, we are experiencing roughly 2 million bits of information per second and you might say, “What is a bit?” By bit, I mean the things that we are picking up through our senses so visual, auditory, the senses in our head, what we’re saying in our itty-bitty committee in the back of our brain. Kinesthetic, what we feel and our emotions, olfactory, sense of smell and then gustatory, sense of taste. Plus, we are experiencing 30 thousand to 50 thousand thoughts a day so you get this entire culmination in any moment we’re experiencing 2 million bits of information coming at us per second but our brains are only able to store 7± bits per second.

From that perspective without going into the science behind it – unless we get the time – every single problem you are experiencing right now, every single fear, every single stuck state when you’re frustrated, you’re angry, you know the thing you’ve got to do but you can’t figure out quite how to do it. Lack of creativity, lack of confidence, any lack of mindset comes from you picked up the wrong bits of that 7± out of that 2 million per second. What we do is we teach you how to rewire your brain to notice some of the other bits that you may have not noticed before because the same mindset that you created when you found out you have a problem, think of it, we wouldn’t know it’s a problem unless we created it. Let that sink in. If we can create the problem there’s also a solution within that same level of creativity and that’s the thing I want you to be aware of today. Wherever you’re stuck for the zero people who said that they’re rock stars, for everybody else, think about right now on this webinar, where is it that you are stuck? Recognize that part of the reason that you are stuck is because you created that stuck state – not necessarily the situation, I didn’t create cystic fibrosis, but I decided not to put me in the stuck state and I started to pick up the other bits of information that I wasn’t necessarily seeing.

Fred Diamond: Klyn, throughout the first couple weeks and months of the situation that we’re all in we told people, “Go back to your existing customers, help them, find solutions for them because everybody’s dealing with their own challenges.” Now people are being told in sales, “You need to start going back to your customers to start prospecting for new ones.” Let’s talk about that specifically, what are some things you think are in the way? Making new prospecting calls right now, it’s summer, it’s July 9th, everybody is dealing with challenges. It’s the first time that we know where everybody we know has challenges but specifically for salespeople, picking up the phone which is always hard. Picking up the phone is one of the hardest things that there is to do in sales. Some people excel, not everybody does but they have to start making more outreach right now. What would be some of your suggestions, this fear and getting past this?

Klyn Elsbury: We’re just going to do the 64% but if you were not part of that 64%, this still applies for you. There are only at the core of every single one of us, two fears in the world. If I were to say all the polls that we put out there, “What’s your fear?” I could say the fear about sales, I could say the fear about your relationship, I could say the fear about who you are, I could say the fear about your body, I could say any of that. No matter how we categorize it, it comes down to two things: the fear of we are not enough or the fear that we are not loved and by not loved it can also mean not accepted. When you tell me that you are afraid of prospecting calls or you have a fear of picking up the phone I’m sure you do, I’m not discrediting that and if you go deeper, is it the fear of the rejection of when you pick up the phone? We’ve all heard that the very first day at our first sales job, “Let’s talk about how to deal with rejection, go for no’s, not for yes’s.”

We’ve all heard this and remember what I said earlier, baggage is lit up in times like this. If you were afraid to pick up the phone before COVID you’re probably more so afraid to pick it up now. I want you to consider the deeper meaning of you’re not enough, meaning you may or may not get the promotions you want, the extra territory you want, the compensation you want so you therefore feel like you’re not enough of a salesperson or is it the fear of them rejecting who you are personally? I heard it too, the very first week when the pandemic hit we all got inside our houses and mind you, most of my stuff is done online. I was told, “Don’t put your funnels out, don’t reach out to your prospects, don’t do any of that because it’s not the time to sell.” We fast-forward three months later, the people who are making it on the upside of this pandemic were the ones who did not listen to that and they did sell, they did reach out to their customers.

My deeper thing is address what it is that’s going on that’s making you afraid to prospect because you’re either at the core of it feeling like you’re not enough or you’re not loved and it stems from three beliefs. #1, if you don’t do it correctly that you will experience less – less income, less territory, less responsibilities, less abundance in the world – you will experience loss and by loss that means your job could be completely eliminated, the product line is completely eliminated, or the feeling of never. Never could be, “You will never pick back up the way it was, your position will never continue the way it was. The new normal is starting to become trendy, the new normal is tapping into the fear of never so right now do that check and we’re going to do it. Breathe through your nose, exhale through mouth and simply ask yourself, “Which fear is being lit up for me right now?” When you do, something triggered for you and that’s what we start to lean into on how to address it.

Fred Diamond: That makes so much sense.

Klyn Elsbury: True story, I’m right there with all of you. Get this, what is my job? I’m a keynote speaker, I was slated for 72 paid keynotes this year, I’m doing webinars [laughs]. Here’s what I want you to know, you are not a tree, you can move. If you have a deep fear that your industry is gone and it is not coming back and you have mouths to feed, you’re not a tree, go somewhere. If we look at it from a company perspective, the job market, there’s a lot of candidates coming on the market but if you’re good at what you do then consider an industry that’s scaling right now. I can list five companies on the top of my head that are desperate for high performing salespeople right now, absolutely desperate because when one industry shrinks, it’s natural, other industries grow.

If you’re at all questioning this, ask yourself, “Do I know anybody right now that’s crushing it?” I do not think that COVID was the worst thing to happen because I do know businesses right now who are seeing the best years of their lives, janitorial companies all time hiring, RV’s, anybody in the RV market, absolutely hiring, any type of warranty product, sky rocketing. Remember, when we started in sales we had that story, “These two guys go to Africa to sell shoes and the one guy goes, ‘no one’s buying shoes’ and the other guy goes, ‘What are you talking about? Nobody’s wearing shoes, everybody will buy.'” Which side of the narrative do you want to be on that will serve you and what is the fear holding you back from making the decision you know you need to make?

Fred Diamond: Klyn, I want to talk about how you achieve goals. You’re an expert on that, you mentioned you had 72 paid gigs that you were expecting to have, we’re grateful for the pandemic to be able to have you – no, that’s not true, we wish everybody was doing what they wanted to. Let’s talk about that, you’re an expert on achieving goals, you go around the world telling people, teaching them how to do that, I know you have five steps. We have about 10-12 minutes left, I know you do this usually a whole half-day type of a program but right now no one’s goals for January are valid. Everybody’s had to rethink their goals, we had a conversation with Frank Dimina from Splunk a couple episodes ago, he said your January and February plan are obsolete and that’s the case for everybody. Talk about the five steps towards achieving any goal to help people start thinking about how they can make 2020 a great year with everything that we’ve just touched on.

Klyn Elsbury: The reality is it is a great year [laughs] and if you’re not buying into that reality, surround yourself with the people who are and watch yourself explode. I don’t want to say it’s that simple and it is so watch this: #1, know your outcome. Some of you listening, I love you [laughs], I’ve got empathy, I’ve watched my entire business – there’s no stages to speak on so I’ve got to know my outcome. An outcome for you can simply be figuring out what it is that your market needs now because maybe the market need has changed for you.

Step 2, know your why. Why gets an interesting rap because of Simon Sinek, I’m not necessarily talking about, “We are designed to help people live better lives and enrich the planet.” I don’t mean the superficial why, what I really want you to consider is why do you care? This will come down to your core values. There’s a worksheet in that number you text ‘inspire’, 66866, and we’re going to give you these worksheets to uncover your core values, your unconscious values. When you understand your unconscious values, decisions can be made in an instant. When you don’t have a why you are in a place of indecision and that creates the stuck state that we were talking about earlier further exacerbated by whatever the baggage tends to be.

Step three, take action. You don’t want to make the prospecting calls right now, that’s great but you’ve still got to take the action. Small daily consistent action outperforms anything else, there’s this story I wrote about in my book, if a plane takes off from LA headed to New York and it’s one degree off, it winds up over 270 miles off course. It’s the daily small consistent actions and take the actions in route of the outcome. Busy work isn’t going to create a profitable career that allows you to give back in the way that you want to. Step four is something called failure as feedback and this is fascinating, you have not failed, you’ve gotten feedback on [why] what you were doing was or was not working. I have not failed as a speaker because there are no events but I will fail as a speaker if I cannot implement step 5 which is pivot and change.

There’s no stages but there’s webinars so think of this, a long time ago radio was the thing, then it became podcasts. You didn’t fail as a DJ, you just did not pivot in route to your outcomes and then you repeat that step, know your outcome, know your why, take the action, take failure as feedback, pivot change and you’re going to do that for the rest of your life. Wherever you’re in a stuck state ask yourself where in those five places are you experiencing frustration, anger, resentment, lack of motivation, lack of productivity, it’s one of those places, take that very next step. It’s a very interesting wheel to get you out of wherever you’re at.

Fred Diamond: What might be two or three things that you would recommend under the take action bullet for the sales professionals watching today to continue to stay as a professional?

Klyn Elsbury: That’s how quickly time travels, right? In addition, got to ask it, check in with your gut, are you actually a professional? Because if you are a professional the pandemic isn’t going to stop you, you’re going to take the growth work, you’re going to take the trainings, you’re going to take the education and you’re going to leverage it. You’re basically on step three of that five steps, you’re going to take the action and there’s few things that come out of isolation, consecration where you re-learn a skill or you tap into something you forgot you’ve already learned and then transformation.

Right now if you really need a thought to cling to, right now you’re a caterpillar in a cocoon, it’s not your time to blossom, that’s fine. Focus on what you can control instead of what you can’t, it’s an interesting paradox, I actually talked about this this morning on Instagram. Interesting paradox: how you’ve got it is how you keep it. If you got to be a professional by doing the work on yourself and mastering sales and going forward and picking up that call and creating the rapport, if that’s how you got to be a professional that’s how you can keep it as your profession.

Here’s where it gets interesting is the paradox and this little twist, like the gut twist. How you got it is how you keep it, also, what got you here does not get you there. It seems paradoxical and what I want you to consider is you wouldn’t have that dream, you wouldn’t have that goal, you wouldn’t have that drive especially in sales, you wouldn’t have that goal, dream or drive unless you had a vision beyond what your current capabilities allow you to have. Recognize what was that superpower that got you to be called a professional and then what is that extra thing you need to reach out and then go for the vision? Because some of your industries are tanking right now and there’s no end in sight, we don’t know when COVID ends, there were thoughts we were on the first wave, there are thoughts that we’re on the second wave, there’s thoughts that we don’t know what’s going to happen when these vaccines are put out there.

I get the fear, what I want you to understand is what made you a professional, keep doing that, figure out step 1, know your outcome because what got you where you are will not get you there, take the time to learn, to study and implement the things that you have been neglecting and you know what it is. Take the thing to implement that you’ve been neglecting and leverage that to get you there and that’ll get you through any pandemic, any protest, any riots, any industry, slump, any failed sales career because if you are truly a master at what you do there’s an abundance mentality that you need to have. You may not be a master on stages anymore but you can master what you have while you learn the skill to get you closer to your vision.

Fred Diamond: Klyn Elsbury, you’ve done a lot of great things in your scant 32 years, you bring so much value with your podcast as well and all your speaking. I do want to say you also have a Facebook group, do you mind if we talk about that for one second? Then I’m going to ask you for your final bit of advice. Again, you talked that you have cystic fibrosis and how you’ve dealt with that and you’ve created a support group on Facebook to help people in relationships with chronic type of illnesses. Do you want to talk about that for a minute or two?

Klyn Elsbury: We talk about pivoting, I had a conversation at the beginning of the outbreak when I found out that stages are gone and a girlfriend, she’s end-stage cystic fibrosis, it means she may not have much longer and her big fear boils down to both, she won’t be loved or enough and she’ll die alone in a hospital. She asked me, “Can we use NLP to help me with this fear?” and I typically use it to help executives sell more so on one side it’s like, “How is this so different?” We created something called the Sickly Confidential, you can find it sicklyconfidential.com and it serves as an empowerment and dating website to help people with chronic illnesses get past the limiting beliefs that they are not enough, that they are not worthy, that they are a burden, that the quality of their life is not tied back to how much it costs them medically to survive.

If we can get rid of that mindset chatter in them then they can develop the relationships that they have been creating for so long and if we really look at it, that same philosophy is no different than building rapport with our customers, it’s the exact same thing. It starts here, so that’s my passion project that I’m so deeply involved in is running the Sickly Confidential. Thank you for bringing that up, that means a lot to me.

Fred Diamond: You’re welcome and again, you’re doing so much good and you’re bringing so much value. Klyn Elsbury, give us one final action item, you’ve given us tons of ideas but give us one action step that our listeners can take right now July 9th, 2020.

Klyn Elsbury: Check in with yourself. We started before with that and I got to end with that. I had something totally different planned for my action step but you’re all going to opt in and get it. Honestly, if you don’t think you have time to breathe, there’s bigger issues there [laughs] so what I want you to do is I want you to inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth, close your eyes and just simply say, “Self, show me what I need to do next.” It’s going to light up for you, trust your gut.

Fred Diamond: Klyn Elsbury, thank you so much. To all our listeners, thank you all so much.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 258: Resilience Expert Klyn Elsbury Shares Optimal Sales Mindset Lessons Learned Having Been Hospitalized 67 Times for Cystic Fibrosis in Her Scant 32 Years first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch the replay!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on June 18, 2020. It featured Executive Coach & Leadership Program Designer/Trainer David Morelli.]

Register for Friday’s CREATIVITY IN SALES: Recovery Strategies for Sales Leaders and Professionals with Tim Riesterer here.

Find David on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 256: Peak Performance Week Co-Creator David Morelli Details Steps Sales Leaders Must Take to Focus on Production Right Now

DAVID’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “We’re all feeling a sense of loss right now, including some of the highest performers. The best way to overcome it is to focus on what you can do for other people, not what you can do for yourself. As soon as you’re self-centered you’re untethered, but as soon as you become, “How can I help other people?” you tend to get a sense of purpose, similar to a vision. Start acting on that and you’ll end up in a lot better spot.”

Fred Diamond: Today we’re talking about mindset, it’s our Optimal Sales Mindset, our guest is David Morelli, he’s with the Peak Performance Week and is the CEO of OwlHub. David, most people are cool most of the time but sometimes not, we have some people who are killing it, the good thing is nobody is below the curve. David, it’s so great to see you, I didn’t mention the Enwaken podcast with over 1.2 million subscribers, that’s how I first became aware of you, I’m a devout listener of that. It’s a great podcast, congratulations on your success and I’m thrilled to be talking to you. I’m not sure if I mentioned it but you also turned me on to Gay Hendricks, my second favorite book of all time, The Big Leap so thank you for introducing me to Gay. First off, you’re in Colorado, I’m based out of Northern Virginia, I got people coming in from all over the planet. How are you doing?

David Morelli: Doing well. My wife and I haven’t seen the light of day in months – no, just kidding [laughs]. It’s been relatively intense with everything that’s going on but we’ve decided to channel our energy towards making the world a bit better with some of the many adventures that we have coming up.

Fred Diamond: We’ll get to those, I’m very excited, you’re an expert in a lot of the transformational technologies. You’ve had a broad career as a professor, you’ve taught, you’ve also consulted, you’ve helped CEOs and organizations, you’ve worked with rock stars to help them get focused and that’s what the Optimal Sales Mindset webcast is all about. The Institute for Excellence in Sales does live programs around the world, we were going to do one program on mindset in October, now we’re doing a webcast every single week. I know you have a lot of great things to share. David, the topic is clearing up your thinking especially with everything going on. When you and I first started talking about you coming on the Optimal Sales Mindset webcast all we had to deal with was the pandemic, ladies and gentlemen.

David Morelli: Right [laughs].

Fred Diamond: And the economic fallout. It’s the middle of June, June  18th right now, there’s been a lot of social action happening over the last couple of weeks, a lot of additional things that sales leaders and their teams have had to focus on that has just caused uncertainty and disruption. First, tell us how you got interested in this topic, give us your background a little bit and then we’ll get details on some strategies that our podcast listeners can take to get focused.

David Morelli: Prior to it being crisis time and wakefulness time, I was at the University of Vermont and I decided that my big passion was volleyball, Vermont not necessarily the primary spot to go if you’re really interested in beach volleyball in particular which was my passion. I had started playing and gotten really interested and decided that I wanted to try my hand at being a professional, so I started training 4 hours a day while in engineering school for volleyball and along the way I had somebody come by and say, “If you’re really interested in being at a high level, you have to work on your mindset.” I didn’t understand what he was talking about so he said, “Here’s one thing. When you and your partner are next to each other and somebody makes a mistake, does that carry over into the next play?” I was like, “For sure.” “Well, that is a mindset moment, that’s a moment where you need to be more in charge of your own mind than having whatever event happen.

You can support one another and you can support yourself based on how you talk.” That was a turning point moment in my life and I started incorporating some of that stuff and my volleyball partner and I ended up moving to California and played two Olympians at the peak of my career together. We took that advice about mindset and it made a huge difference. Then I was working for a startup internet company, I was in sales and the CEO said, “You’re really good at this mindset stuff, why don’t you run personal professional development for the whole organization?” and I was the ripe old age of 20 years old. The reason that he said, “I want you to do this” was because he said mindset is most of the game and he said, “If you can succeed in one area, you can follow a similar formula to succeed in other areas.” That’s when I got really passionate about peak performance, about mindset and then you add crisis on top of that and all kinds of interesting things happen to the brain. I know we’re going to dive into that.

Fred Diamond: We had a guest on the Optimal Sales Mindset webcast, his name is Alan Stein Jr. and he was a high performance basketball coach and he worked with people like Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant and Victor Oladipo and now he’s coaching business leaders but he keeps talking about the concept of next play and moving on. So, how do you move onto the next play today? We have sales leaders from around the globe who are members of the Institute who are coming on the site and asking us for things. Every day there’s something new, there’s thousands of people dying over time and then there’s bad news and then there’s something. How do you move onto the next play in today’s environment?

David Morelli: Today’s environment is really interesting because what happens with the brain is that whenever you’re in fear, uncertainty, doubt or overwhelm of some kind you lose 10 to 15 IQ points. Just to put that into perspective, right now if you had smoked a lot of marihuana and that was in your system you’d only lose 5 points, so you’re two to three times as worse off – and this is not an advertisement obviously for marihuana use [laughs] – you actually have to really pay attention to your brain and what’s happening in the midst of your uncertainty, doubt and overwhelm in particular. Part of it is actually learning how to focus in your attention versus necessarily saying, “That stuff doesn’t exist” or, “Let’s pretend it’s not there” or what have you. I know we’re going to dive into a couple techniques to do that, but that’s the big a-ha as I was looking at the neuroscience research, how much we are vulnerable to disruption, emotion and overwhelm.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that. A lot of people go to your podcast and you’ve serviced so many people over your career. Today specifically, what are you noticing about people and their mindsets? Where do you think people are and what have you noticed?

David Morelli: I’ve found that people are distracted more than ever, they’re irritable, they’re forgetful, they have trouble focusing and those are the symptoms, people don’t really say, “I think I might have lost 10 to 15 IQ points today.” People don’t have that experience, they have, “I can’t think straight and I don’t know what to do next.” “I just feel so overwhelmed I’m just stuck so I turn on Netflix or I binge watch or I binge eat.” Those are the two binges that tend to happen today so people have a hard time focusing and making real progress on things that matter. I’m noticing that, I do a lot of executive coaching and work with teams, etcetera and that’s one of the big things that comes up. “What do I do? I know I should be better, I know I should have more energy, I know I should have all this stuff, what do I do?”

Fred Diamond: We have two types of people, we have sales leaders and we have sales professionals who typically come to the institute and watch our webcasts. What are you telling leaders today? It’s funny, every Wednesday we do a webcast where we interview sales leaders and one of our guests a couple weeks ago said, “There’s no MBA classes on managing your team through a pandemic.” Interestingly when we first started doing the webcast people would say, “I made it through 9/11, I made it through the banking crisis of 2007-2008, we’ll make it through this.” This didn’t shift in a month, this kept on going so what do you see and what do you coach leaders who’s people are like, ‘What should we do, boss?”?

David Morelli: That’s a really good point. There’s a sales leader I was recently talking to about how to structure the team and what the team is focusing on. What they’re focusing on really matters so here’s an interesting thing, the brain can only hold three priorities in any given time and because we have a limited capacity, more than that, there’s a research study that actually shows if you give somebody one priority they tend to get one thing done, one goal accomplished. If you give them two, they tend to get one to two. If you give them three, they tend to get two to three. If you get them four, they tend to get one to two and then so on, then they don’t get anything done on the flip side. The brain really has the capacity for three things at any given time but here’s the thing, the slots are being hogged by the things that are going on so you have at least one priority where your brain is processing, “What do I do in this pandemic and how do I adjust?” At least one of the slots if you’re aware of what’s going on socially, everything on Black Lives Matter and all this stuff that’s going on which is an overdue movement and it’s too bad that it has a tragedy to spark it, but luckily we’re waking up. That’s a second priority, so what I was guiding the sales leaders to do was to really come up with, “What’s the one big thing?” Because the other two slots are hogged, what’s the one big thing that you need to move forward right now?

Most of the time people think, “Is it a to-do list item?” and usually it’s what I call high impact activities. High impact activity is where you put in a little bit of effort and you get a lot of result out of it, versus a low impact activity is a lot of effort for a little result. There are themes of what people can focus on in order to get the most momentum. For sales professionals, if I’m on the phone talking to a client that is probably the highest impact thing you could do. In an ideal world it’s prospecting, it’s talking to a client, it’s closing a deal but relatively speaking you can sort of merge some of those into one big thing, get on the phone or get on a Zoom call or whatever, but there’s a focal point.

These teams facing a pandemic, often what happens is there’s overwhelm so what do I focus on? Sometimes there’s not new buyers that are happening right now so you might have to go to repurposing that sales team to saying either close the tail end of the pipeline, people you have close to a deal and or call out all your customers that you have sold because revenue retention might be more important than new sales right now. Helping sales leaders focus.

Fred Diamond: The Friday programs that we’ve done, a lot of the focus has been going to your existing customers. It’s very difficult to be speaking to new customers right now because they have challenges with their customers and their customer’s challenges. We have a question, David, that came in and you and I were talking about this prior to the show. “2020 was going to be my best year ever and it was only three months ago.” Let’s talk about that for a second. We’re aspirational, we run the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we help people achieve their goals, you’re an inspirational and aspirational coach and leader as well. It was only three months ago that everybody was having their best year ever, we’ve seen all the memes of 2020, how it came in and how it ended. We have great companies that are members and we have a lot of small companies that were emerging, were going to kill it this year. We had 180 people at the last live program we did on March 6th, it’s only been three months so what does that mean from the mindset perspective? Help us understand why we might still be thinking about it in that perspective but here’s the reality of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter and other things that we’re dealing with.

David Morelli: There’s something in psychology – I have a big research passion so I’m taking a doctorate program in all of this stuff – one of the things that we tend to do is called counter-factual thinking and also something called mental account, I’ll dissect each one. Counter-factual thinking, imagine we had up on the screen three winners on the Olympic podium, the gold medal, the silver medal and the bronze metal. The question is who do you think is the least happy?

Fred Diamond: Silver.

David Morelli: Yes, and the reason for that is based on what you compare in your mind, who you compare yourself to. If you’re the gold medalist, obviously that makes sense, “I won above everybody” but you think about between silver and bronze, why is it that the bronze medalist is happier? It’s based on what you’re comparing to so, “I’m up here because I beat the field and I’m on the podium” versus, “I’m the first loser, I’m the one who didn’t get it, if I could have been just a little faster, a little better I would have been standing here.” That mindset of comparison ends up creating unhappiness.

I have a CEO client who through his efforts and his creations has several hundred million dollars but based on who he’s comparing himself to, he calls himself a piker. “I can’t believe I’m so terrible.” It’s a mindset thing, it’s who you’re comparing yourself to. Often, that can help you recover or get a dopamine hit, a good feeling based on who you compare yourself to. We tend to feel bad based on how well we were doing at the beginning of the year, we’re comparing ourselves even to an earlier version of ourselves. The mental accounting part is, “I already figured out how I’m going to upgrade my house or my car or go on a vacation.” You’re planning and it happens in the stock market as well. The more that you do that, the more that you think about where you could have been, the unhappier you are by comparison and it ends up killing momentum.

Fred Diamond: That is a great answer because I’ll be engaging with people and they’ll be so upbeat, “Things are going to turn around” and I’m thinking, “Why do you think things are going to turn around if your customer’s customers are going out of business and your customer’s customer just laid off half the staff?” and then I realized because just three months ago everybody was doing so great. By the way, if I threw you off by answering silver… Don’t you hate when people know the answer to your question?

David Morelli: No, it’s great.

Fred Diamond: I can see that guy, silver person, I keep thinking back to the gymnast from 2016, I forget her name, who had that face. What would be your coaching for those people right now? One of my favorite expressions is the quote that’s attributed to Henry Ford, “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” Under normal circumstances, “I’m not sure if I can get it achieved today” but if you shift that, you can think about, “What are the two or three things that I need to do?” Here we’re in this space where as you said, one third of your brain is focused on this pandemic that’s going on then one third of it is focused on the world falling apart, you lost 20 IQ points already so what might be some ideas to get grounded, get centered so that you’re living in the real world?

David Morelli: There’s a technique that I use, you and I have done it, the center of the head exercise. What it is, is anytime you’re living in the past or you’re trying to live into the future, by the definition you’re not present so you’re not focused on, “What can I do today?” You’re held hostage by your past or you’re strained by your future because it’s not here, you can’t do anything about it. The only place you can really act is in the present so when I work with people one-on-one usually what I do is I guide them to imagine that they have, as weird as it sounds, a magnet in the center of their heads and they can call all of their attention that’s tied up in the past – for those who are following along, take a second, close your eyes – and just imagine bringing all of your energy, your focus, your attention off of the past and into this moment. “What can I do here?” You’re much more likely to create the future that you want when you act in this present moment rather than feel paralyzed by the future so gathering up that attention and bringing it into this moment.

The other one is we tend to scatter our attention. If you could scatter your attention into social media, you can scatter your attention in the news and articles and all kinds of things, part of our attention stays on all that stuff. The grade to which you can focus in on, “Where am I right now and what am I doing?” In this moment you’re listening to this, you’re watching or being a part of this so your focus, if you can change it, new ideas can come up. “What’s the most important thing I could be doing right now?” is a different thing than, “Why am I so stuck? Why did I have to screw that up? What do I have to do in order to not end up on the street and homeless?” There’s strain that happens when you’re not in the present moment so that’s the #1 thing to recover, if you will, IQ points is get present.

Fred Diamond: What’s the most important thing you should be doing right now? That’s a great point, man. We all want to keep moving forward, we don’t want to be living in the past, we don’t want to be nervous about the future. David, the question of fear, we have a bunch of leaders, we have a bunch of rank and file people but I was talking to someone this morning who said, “I don’t want my kids to see that I’m kind of nervous.” By the way, someone just chimed in, “The most important thing you could be doing right now is talking to your customers.”

Obviously on the sales side that’s pretty important, I like what you said before about engaging with your customers and seeing how they’re doing, we talk about that all the time. Talk about fear, we understand why but people don’t want to be showing fear, the kids have been home, of course school’s now over for the most part, camp’s been cancelled everywhere so the kids are going to be home for the summer. You can’t jump in your car because there’s nowhere to go, you can’t go to the office so talk about fear and then talk about overcoming the anxiety and fear.

David Morelli: If you don’t mind, I’m going to share a little bit of research and I’m going to ask you again.

Fred Diamond: Please do.

David Morelli: There was a study done on fear. Imagine on your arm is a giant tarantula, it’s sitting there and usually what I do when I’m giving the presentation is I put the picture up and everybody gasps and tenses. Here was a study, they had three different conditions plus a control condition, try to lower your anxiety or fear in any of these three ways. One was say, “I’m anxious” or, “I’m fearful.” Another one was re-frame it, it’s called reappraisal. “It’s not that bad, the spider is not that big.” The third one is essentially to try and distract yourself which many of us do right now, we watch Netflix, we go on social media, we find all kinds of ways to try and distract ourselves. Number four is obviously don’t do anything. They rated the before and the after of their anxiety levels, do you have a guess as to which one might be the best?

Fred Diamond: Re-framing?

David Morelli: I’m going to call that half true and we’re going to get back to a different study as to what you can do that’s around that. That’s the most popular answer, the one that worked best in this experiment was actually just labeling, “I’m afraid” which sounds weird but it actually makes sense when you start to understand how the brain works. When the brain is in fear, uncertainty and doubt we mentioned you lose IQ points. Uncertainty is one of the elements that the limbic system, the back of the brain hates, it hates uncertainty. By the way, now is a time of grand uncertainty, what’s going to happen? For your brain, if uncertainty drives a drop in your IQ, making something more certain will actually calm the brain. This feeling that I feel, “I’m anxious, I’m afraid”, takes it from an unknown and makes it a known. You can categorize what I’m feeling. Does that make sense in a strange way?

Fred Diamond: That’s powerful.

David Morelli: There’s a phrase, you probably heard it, “The truth shall set you free.” When we tell ourselves the truth and we’re authentic, we all want authentic leaders but sometimes it’s hard to be authentic with ourselves. How are you feeling right now, how are you doing? If you can become real with yourself it takes all that tension and it makes it more grounded and concrete and then you can actually do something about it. That’s one technique. Before I go onto the second, any thoughts about that?

Fred Diamond: Gina says here, “That’s perfect.” Thank you, Gina, for that. Someone said they used not Netflix but tequila.

David Morelli: There it is [laughs]

Fred Diamond: Somebody once said if we make it through the pandemic we’re going to have a great respiratory system but a horrible liver.

David Morelli: [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, we talked about being present, center of the head. What about visualization? That’s something that’s come up before. You talked about being present, center of the head, where you are right now, move past the past, not necessarily think to the future but one of the big techniques that a lot of our guests have talked about prior to this is visualization. How does that work today when we’re in the middle of such turmoil?

David Morelli: Part of it is a lot of times people try and do a positive mindset override on a negative runaway train so internally you’re clickity-clackiting along, you’re trying to be calm and centered so it feels more like a two-step process than a one-step. I think you need to handle the fear ahead of time but then you have to give yourself something better to focus on than the fear and that’s where visualization comes in. There’s a lot of research especially around leadership that when leaders are clear on their vision and they have that vision cast in their mind, “What am I creating, what am I doing right now?” then they’re in action around fulfilling on that vision or mission, that they end up being a lot more calm but also a lot more inspirational.

We don’t realize that our emotions rub off on each other, they’re contagious just like colds – or in this case, viruses – we pick them up by proximity. The more that you either as an individual contributor or as a leader can be grounded yourself and inspirational, the more that you can help people overcome the feelings that they’re having. The research shows that the more that you’re grounded in your vision, the lower your anxiety, the more inspirational you are, etcetera. I would say, “What are you trying to create right now?” is a great question right now. It could be in your career and you have to be careful of the word ‘not’ or ‘I don’t’. “I don’t want to lose the sale”, you’re not going to make the sale versus, “I want to connect more deeply with clients” or, “I want to connect more deeply with my team” and whatever that is. When you’re actively engaged in fulfilling a mission, anxiety goes down, energy goes up, inspiration goes up and people end up getting a lot better results.

Fred Diamond: David, I’m going to take you on a slight diversion here, you work with CEOs but you’ve also worked in your career with extremely successful people. You alluded a few moments ago to a guy who’s created multi-million dollar companies, you’ve also worked with rock stars, you’ve worked with celebrities. What are they going through right now? We’re talking about sales professionals, how you can focus on the sales mindset, you’ve given us some great advice, focus on calling the customer, etcetera. Without mentioning names or anything, some of the people that you know, some of these hugely successful brand name superstars, we see some of them doing concerts from their homes or doing funny videos or whatever but what’s going through their minds right now? Just curious, if you have access to that.

David Morelli: Tremendous sense of loss because most of the people that you were just mentioning have some kind of in-person interaction as we all do but it’s harder to film a movie when you’re locked in your house because all production has basically come to a standstill. Same thing as we know with sports and all kinds of things so people are trying to get a little bit creative but it’s not really working that much. This is going to sound a little bit weird, but often times people at that level are in some ways more fragile than some of us, we don’t realize that. I had one best-selling author who said that they were down in the lobby of this giant hotel signing books and then right after that was done they came up and cried on their bed for two hours because they felt like a fraud.

We don’t think of that, we just think, “Here’s the best-selling author” but actually they’re – fragile is the wrong word, but it’s this way that they’re deeply affected because they have nobody to talk to. I had a friend the other day who had a brand name NFL quarterback who you would know as soon as I would say it and it’s the same thing, “What do I do with myself?” There’s this way that we’re all feeling lost, it doesn’t matter who you are, we all try and overcome it a little bit and by the way, the best way to overcome it is to focus on what you can do for other people, not what you can do for yourself. As soon as you’re self-centered you’re untethered, as soon as you become, “How can I help other people?” you tend to get a sense of purpose, again similar to a vision.

Start acting on that, you end up in a lot better spot. The people that are doing really well in those realms are the ones who are focused on, “What can I do for others?”, the people who aren’t – and there’s many of those – they’re just trying to grapple with, “I am my work”, whatever that work is and they don’t have this sense of self and selflessness that goes along with a more poised life.

Fred Diamond: There’s a couple things that have been themes over the last couple of months and the thing that you just said was right on target about focusing on others and empathy is something that’s been a key word with your customers. What might be some best techniques that you would recommend for that particular thing about focusing not on you but focusing on others?

David Morelli: This is going to sound counter-intuitive. The first thing to do is to write down all the ways that you’re feeling because once you acknowledge that and become authentic to that you can switch into somebody else’s mindset. I was coaching a C-suite person the other day and I said, “What do you think this other person that you’re trying to have a good relationship with thinks?” and they basically said all the things that they were thinking and feeling, their perspective. I was like, “Not quite, good try, write that down, that’s good but now let’s put yourself in their mindset.”

Actually, the person that they were trying to relate to is the head of sales so I said, “What’s on the head of sales’ mind right now?” “Operations and…” No, hang on. Part of it is grounding yourself first and then imagining yourself, it’s a visualization technique where you imagine being in their shoes walking around. What do I get incentivized on today? What’s really important to me? What drives my life? What are the three most important things to me? To a salesperson it’s going to be top line revenue, it’s not necessarily going to be product technical delivery. They’re not thinking, “How can we upgrade our IT system?” They’re thinking, “How do I make another sale?”

Then we were going into, “What do I do with my kids at home?” because they’re living that reality. We were going into that mindset, what’s the three most important things on their mind? You think about again, in sales, what’s on your customer’s mind? Part of the re-deployment of sales resources has been, “Go build relationships with your prospects not about the product, go have friendly calls because when it’s time for them to actually have budget and things, you’re going to be the first person because you cared about them as a person.” It’s that bridging mentality.

Fred Diamond: You’re an expert on mindset and transformational technologies and coaching and guidance. I’m just curious about what you just said, do you have any thoughts on picking up the phone versus Zoom? I’m curious, you’re an expert on how the mind works, we’re all Zoomed out, if you will but what are your thoughts on using Zoom? Everybody who’s watching today’s webcast and who’s listened to the podcast, they’re all in sales, you’ve done at least a hundred Zoom calls today. I’m just curious your thoughts on Zoom versus picking up the phone versus email right now with connecting with people.

David Morelli: I like to send emails that say, “Let’s try something different, how about the phone?” because the brain sorts for novelty. At first, Zoom was really novel. “Let’s have a happy hour, let’s get together, let’s show pictures of our cats and kids” and all that stuff and then at some point it’s, “Oh, god, another Zoom meeting.” In a Zoom session you have to be fully present with all of your channels versus a phone call you can walk around, you can think, often times our attention wanders so let’s try something different, maybe we jump on then phone. Emails tend to be shorter right now because people are overwhelmed, they can’t process as much complex information so shorter emails and something different, usually the phone, versus necessarily having to do another Zoom session because we all have that. Even if I want to talk to this person, I don’t want to have to get ready or I don’t want to have to have them see my background, it feels like an imposition in some ways.

Fred Diamond: David, before I ask you about Peak Performance Week in [Inaudible 38:10], do you have any other recommendations? One thing we like to do is tell people things they should do right now. You gave us some great ideas like the center of the head and picking up the phone. Before you tell us about Peak Performance Week which I know is coming up in I believe October, just give us one thing that everybody who’s watching today’s webcast or listening to the podcast can do right now in the next hour, hour and a half to continue to grow themselves.

David Morelli: I would say to have that one thing, I know we talked about it but the one thing is the most important thing right now. You cannot have your attention scattered so one of the things I like to do is write down a list like a to-do list which we all have because it helps dump that information out on a page, but instead of saying, “I’ve got to get these 18 things done” stepping back and saying, “What’s the next most important thing?” Don’t try and plan ahead too much, don’t try and be too strategic, just focus on that one thing and what happens in the brain is that the more progress you make, the more progress you’re likely to make in the next thing, whatever that thing is. By the way, your brain chemicals, the positive feel-good brain chemicals go way up when you make progress and they go way down when you don’t make progress. The more that you can record the next most important thing, do the next most important thing, the more likely you are to gain positive momentum which is so important right now.

Fred Diamond: Thanks again for all the great insights. Tell us about OwlHub and tell us about Peak Performance Week, what do we need to know about it?

David Morelli: Actually, one of the techniques that we didn’t get to share here I will make sure that we share within Peak Performance Week, it’s how to go from anxiety into excitement. Peak Performance Week is all about this kind of stuff, it’s about mindset, it’s about practical techniques to be at your peak and the reason that we launched this – it’s actually going to cost my wife and I about $100 thousand dollars to put on and we’re doing it for an entire week and there’s a half day every day where you can select from various talks that are going on and you get tools that literally you can implement right away.

It’s for individuals as well as organizations so what’s happening is organizations are realizing they need to help their companies go to the next level so they’re sending it out to all of their company to say, “Here’s a free training” – because there’s not a lot of training dollars out there – “Go ahead and immerse yourself in this and help us take the performance to the next level.” It helps individuals get over some of the stuff that’s going on right now and then it helps organizations.

That was one of our gives of how can we give, what’s our vision, is to help the world. It’s peakperformanceweek.com for those who are interested in it, and my wife and I created OwlHubwhich is a public benefit corporation, it’s a predecessor to a B corp and our whole goal is around equity and leadership, that’s our social mission. When you buy some of our programs you buy a spot for yourself and somebody in an underserved population gets a leadership program as well. We’re in the groundedness and we’ve got to make the world a better place through our efforts so we’re offering the peak performance week for free to everybody and anybody who wants to do it. In some of the following programs we have that buy one get one similar to Tom’s Shoes but this is helping empower leadership throughout the world.

Fred Diamond: David Morelli, I want to acknowledge you for all the great work that you’ve done, you’ve impacted so many people with the transformational technologies that you’ve brought to the marketplace over the last 10-15 years, I know you’ve impacted hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of lives, myself included. I’ve learned so much from you, I’ve learned a ton in the last 40 somewhat minutes following you and listening to your Enwaken podcast and some of the previous work that you had done. Thank you for all the great contribution that you’ve brought to the world and I want to thank all of our listeners today and watchers.

David Morelli: Thanks, Fred.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 256: Peak Performance Week Co-Creator David Morelli Details Steps Sales Leaders Must Take to Focus on Production Right Now first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch the replay!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Optimal Sales Mindset Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 9, 2020. It featured sales leaders Diane Cashin and Mike Schmidtmann.]

Register for Friday’s CREATIVITY IN SALES: Tom Snyder’s Six Keys to Thriving in Transition here.

Find Mike on LinkedIn here. Find Diane on LinkedIn here.

Mike’s presentation begins at the 4 minute mark. Diane takes over at minute 26.

EPISODE 246: Sales Leaders Diane Cashin and Mike Schmidtmann Offer Rich Insights as Re-Opening Accelerates for Sales Teams Across the Globe

MIKE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Every successful person I know has been defined by difficulty at some point in their career that they fought through, that’s without exception. These times are opportunities for us to power through it, to learn from it, to profit from it, this is an opportunity. It is a gift for us so don’t squander it, take advantage of it.”

DIANE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Awareness is the most important pivotal moment for you. When you notice something showing up for you just take a moment and notice it. That observing capacity makes it easier for you then to move and in these moments I’d just invite you to say, “What is one thing that you would do to move yourself forward?”

Fred Diamond: Alright, thank you so much. Welcome to the Thursday Institute for Excellence in Sales, Sales Game Changers webinar, it’s on mindset. We have two great mindset experts, we have Mike Schmidtmann, sales expert and world-renowned sales coach and Diane Cashin who’s the author of Squeeze More Life out of Time.

Mike Schmidtmann: Alright, everyone. Thank you, welcome and thank you Fred, Diane, I’m very excited to hear your session in just a minute. I’m here to talk about five ways to make your mindset your competitive advantage. First of all, Fred set this up, you have age before beauty so I’m the guy who’s lived through a few recessions. I want to talk first about economic cycles having been through a few of these my day. I first got into sales in the 80s and you can see over the past 50 years we’ve had about 6 recessions.

What’s interesting about these recessions is what’s happened, who are the groups and what are the companies that were formed out of this? You’ll see in the 70s, Apple was formed. In the 80s, Dell, in the 90s, Google, in the 2000s, YouTube and then in the last recession, Facebook, Airbnb and Uber. Why is it that some of the biggest, greatest, most profitable, fastest-growing, most influential companies in the world were all formed during recessions? That’s because it forces people to do things differently, it creates opportunities so first and foremost, recessions are opportunities for us. It forces our customers and clients to think differently, act differently and it presents opportunities all the time. This pandemic, as terrible as it is, will have winners and losers so we can choose to take advantage of this then turn this to our advantage.

As Andy Grove says, “Bad companies are ruined by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them.” Andy Grove, the founder of Intel. Every time we have an economic recession like this, there are winners or losers but some of the best companies were formed in the last recessions and 10 years from now we’ll be looking back at this pandemic as why some companies came to the forefront. Similarly, in the last 10 or 12 years this has been the longest uninterrupted growth period in the last 100 years. If ever there were a time that we could withstand a recession, it’s now. Companies have 12 years of profits salted away in many cases, the companies are doing okay and nobody is enjoying this difficult time but having said that, there’s never been a better time for companies to withstand it.

Overall, we’re actually in very good shape to withstand a downturn like this. As a matter of fact, it was going to probably happen whether this pandemic happened or not. First of all, economic cycles can work to your advantage. Secondly, what’s the biggest problem we in sales have all the time? That status quo, urgency. “How do I get my customers to take action? How do I get them to move? I think I’ll just think about it.” Your biggest problem just went away because your customers and clients need to do something now so urgency is working in your favor. People just can’t sit still, they can’t do the status quo. Look at it this way, this is maybe a typical buying cycle so think of an iPhone. I’ve got daughters and they’ll get an iPhone and they love it, and that’s the peak here, they’re happy and then overtime the iPhone gets older, the case cracks a little bit. Within a couple years their friends all have cooler iPhones and now they can’t stand their iPhone anymore, they’ve got to get a new one. Then they’re happy again, then it cracks again and the newer phones have cooler features and once again, so this is a typical cycle. The problem with this from a sales perspective, this is what I call the order taking zone which means all you’re doing is when people get a little bit upset they buy stuff but it’s something easy to postpone. If for any reason you don’t have money, there’s nothing really urgent and critical about what you’re doing and it’s easy to postpone it.

These sales jobs, if you’re in the order taking zone, you’re not making much money because there’s no reason any company would pay you a lot of money to do something that anybody can do. The challenge is for sales, the sales zone amps up the customer expectations higher and when they’re down in despair they’re also more motivated to act. The sales zone is where your customers are more excited than usual, more anticipatory, more opportunistic about the new technologies and services that you offer and the down is when they’ve got to do something. This sales zone actually cures your biggest problem which is status quo, “I think I’ll think about it”, fat, dumb and happy. Your customers’ clients cannot be fat, dumb and happy now so having said that, Fred, I’m just curious from your perspective since you deal with dozens and dozens of sales leaders and hundreds of companies, is this something you’re seeing as well?

Fred Diamond: We are, but we’re seeing a couple different things. By the way, anyone listening to the webinar, watching the webinar’s questions, just go to your questions panel and submit them. We’re basically seeing three things, Mike. We’re seeing some of our members of the Institute for Excellence in Sales, let’s say those who are servicing state and local government, they’re working around the clock right now because medical supplies and things like that are in such high demand. They’re looking for ways for those vendors to supply them, they’re working around the clock and then you have the companies, we have one member that services the entertainment industry so they’re not really buying a whole lot right now, what they’re doing is they’re flipping it to talk to them about planning and things that you might look in the future and they’re beginning to move back into sales.

Then there’s the other 70% that are in the land where you’re talking about right now where the phones aren’t ringing off the hook, the customer is figuring out what they’re going to be doing because their customers are figuring out what they’re going to be doing as well. It looks like that 70% is beginning to get a little bit tighter because people want to get back to business and work. What would you say to those people? The ones where the phones aren’t ringing off the hook and the business hasn’t gone out of business but their normal, standard, “We still have customers, we need to service them”?

Mike Schmidtmann: I’m going to get to that, Fred and that is a great point. At the end of this we’re going to raise that very issue, when people slow down purchases. Again, my message here to everyone on this session is to turn this to your advantage and that’s exactly what I’m going to talk about. If times are slow, how can we turn that to a competitive advantage for us? That’s exactly what I’m going to be talking about. One thing that forces us to do, Fred, when businesses slow down, when they’re scared, when they’re afraid to take risk, they’re forced to innovate. This is where we can come in handy as well, again, the order taking zone for salespeople is when they’re just collecting orders. We’re not in the order taking zone anymore, nobody’s order taking but there are, as you said, pockets of growth and opportunity always. The challenge for us in sales, we’re experts on our services, our products, our solutions and our benefits, the customers aren’t so when customers are saying, “How am I going to deal with this? How am I going to adapt? How am I going to keep my business stable?”

We can be providing them answers and solutions by marrying our solutions, technologies and offers to what the customers need. It’s up to us to do that, the customers are not experts on our business, we are. We’ve got to go to them with ideas and say, “Okay, you’ve got this business problem.” I was just dealing this morning, Fred, with a company that has a big software package for nonprofits, and what’s the big problem with nonprofits? Nonprofits rely on big events with people to raise money.

Guess what? There aren’t any more big events with lots of people to raise money, so the nonprofits are freaking out. Our story to this software company is, “You need to show your nonprofit clients how to raise money apart from group events” and that’s an opportunity for this company to supply technology for that. There’s always opportunity when there’s a challenge so here’s an example of one from years ago, we can use this in illustration. We’re all familiar with Southwest Airlines and many of you have maybe heard the story of how they came up with the idea for Southwest Airlines in Denny’s restaurant. It was on the back of a napkin and they said, “Okay, we’ve got three cities in Texas, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. We’re not going to compete with American Airlines, Delta and United, we’re going to compete with the bus companies. People that want to go from point A to point B fast and cheap, let’s do it.” Southwest Airlines bought four airplanes and they did this.

They had two airplanes going clockwise from San Antonio to Dallas to Houston, and they had two airplanes going counter-clockwise from Houston to Dallas to San Antonio so everybody’s happy. Then the recession hit. At this point, Southwest was doing business pretty much like American and Delta which means that they had a first class, they had a business class, they had assigned seating and they said, “Okay, recession” and they lost one of their planes so they went from four planes to three. They said, “We can’t do our routes with three planes. If we cut back our trips, they’re cut our revenues and we’re going to lose the third plane, then we’ll be down to two, then there’ll be the one, it’s a death spiral.” They realized they couldn’t do business the way they did any further, they had to make a change, so how do we do it? They asked the question, “What if we do the same number of flights with only three planes instead of four?” In doing so, they had to get rid of the old status quo, they had to get rid of business class, coach and first class and they pretty much said, “We have to do the turnarounds instead of an hour and a half at the airport, it has to be 25 minutes.” So instead of assigning all these seats and taking all this time, they said, “Get in line, get in, buckle up and let’s get going” and they would do this again and again.

They were able to do just as many flights with three planes as they had with four and because of this, it lowered the cost structure and the rest is history, they’re now the largest US provider of air travel and they’ve maintained that seating policy to this day. In fact, Herb Kelleher, at the time the president of Southwest said, “If we hadn’t had the recession we never would have been forced to make the changes that transformed our company.” This is an example where a business challenge forces you to innovate and try new things, that’s #3. #4, guess what? Fat, dumb and happy is no longer a choice for us, we’ve got to focus so what do we focus on? As Fred said, there are always pockets of the economy even in tough times that are busy so these are what’s called the essential industries and there are 17 of them, and all of these people are essential, they’re busy. If you’ve been to a grocery store you see how busy it is and try and buy toilet paper somewhere, you can’t. I was at a Home Depot over the weekend and they had a line out the door for people going in doing home improvement construction projects. There are sectors of the economy and as you said, Fred, there are several other ones as well that are busy right now.

In any economic decline there are people who are profiting and yes, restaurants are down, catering down, hotels down, travel down. I get that, but food is up. Many categories, there’s a hundred of fast growing industries and then stay away from the ones like apparel or accessories that aren’t essential, they’re down. There’s always opportunity and for those of us in sales, focus on the opportunity that’s ahead of us. That’s four, I’m just wondering, Fred. That ties back to your comment before about focusing on hot industries, anything to add to that?

Fred Diamond: Mike, I have a question for you. Innovation, as we think about our mindset right now, innovation’s a great one and you gave us a great example. Everyone right now is seeing Zoom and other types of technologies that are just killing it right now. I’d like to ask you for two brief examples. Give us a way that a sales manager can be innovative right now, and how about the individual rep? The person who’s the account manager who has a quota, has a territory. Give us one or two ideas on how the sales manager could be innovative. We get it with the companies coming and creating new ideas, but we’ve got a whole bunch of salespeople from around the globe on today’s webinar and they’re giving us an hour of their time thinking about, “How can I thrive, how can I transform?” In some cases, “How can I survive, how can I get better?” Give us one of your ideas, your sales expertise.

Mike Schmidtmann: I think first of all, Fred, that is a great question. That’s actually the last point. How do we take action, what do we do? I’ll just answer it this way, for most people on this call, your biggest problem in the past year or two, whatever, has been, “I wish I could do this but I don’t have time.” You’ve got time now. In my industry, I’m in information technology and I see people running around with their hair on fire all the time. If you’ve been running around with your hair on fire, I’m guessing it’s slowing down a little bit treat that as a gift. Nobody is wishing this on anybody but think of it as a gift, you’ve been given the gift of time. You’ve never had time to do these things, how many people have books on the book shelf that you haven’t read? What can you do with that time?

One is you can learn your market better, you can take that time that you never had before to learn your customers and applications better than ever. You can be profiling people to call, you can be profiling hot applications, hot businesses, you can be spending your time doing research that you never had time for before. Think of all the books on your shelf that you wanted to read, all the books that people have recommended. Guess what? You’ve got time so don’t devote your whole day to reading but maybe an hour a day like Warren Buffet does or Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey. Devote time every day to knocking down that backlog of books or even audio books that you wanted to read. How about a certification? What if you say, “I’d really like to have a sales certification, a products certification, a service. How many of you have certifications that would help you be more credible in your industry but you’ve never had time to do it? Well, you’ve got time now, you’ve been given the gift of time. Use it to get those certifications that will pay of dividends for you down the road. We talked to Fred about the quarantine 15, how about personal habits? All the, “I have been too busy to do this”, now you’ve got time maybe to do the workouts that you always wanted to do, maybe it’s time to implement new habits with your diet, exercise, lifestyle. All these things you didn’t have time for, you’ve got time for now and if you have these small wins, maybe if you lose a few pounds, you get in a little bit better shape when we come out of this recession your head is going to be in a better place because you’ve applied yourself, you’ve achieved something, you haven’t lost ground at all.

You’ve used that time productively to help yourself and your career be more effective so you’ve got that option. You can use this as a gift to do all the things you never had time for before and do it or you can be roadkill and none of us want that so let’s take action and do some things. Fred, we did our podcast a while back on salespeople that earn a million dollars a year or more so how do you earn a million dollars? They have great success habits and if you want to get to that million dollar a year income territory, what better time to start implementing better habits for yourself? Learning your product, learning your applications, learning your market, doing the spade work so when we come out of this you can take advantage of it. It’s a great time to build your network because other people like yourself need the support and your positive example and you can feed from that and find other people who are in the same boat you are, maybe even are going after the same kind of customer you are and you can collaborate and trade leads. It’s a great time to build your network virtually, of course.

My last final thought is think of the economy like bears in hibernation. Yes, they’re not as active but they’re healthy. Yes, they’re not buying as much, they’re not active as much but when the winter is over they’re going to climb out of that cave and they are going to be hungry, and they’re going to want to eat and eat, and they want to get active. If you’re there in the right place at the right time you can take advantage of that when that economy comes back. Who’s going to benefit from it? You will. That’s my sermon for the day, Fred. Economic cycles can work to your advantage, this cures the biggest problem you’d have which is urgency, it forces not just yourself but your customers to be innovative and that provides opportunities. This forces you to focus on what’s important and it’s a great time to take action on all those things you never had time for before. With that, I’ll pass it back to you.

Fred Diamond: Mike, thank you so much. Alright, speaking about Mike’s last point which was you could use this opportunity to read a book, we’re very fortunate to have Diane Cashin. She’s a coach, she’s a consultant, she’s worked for great companies like Cisco, she is the author of a fantastic book called Squeeze More Life out of Time, you can see it over my back shoulder. By the way, Mike was a guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast about a year and a half ago, Diane is also a future guest, her show will be live sometime in the next four weeks. Diane, it’s great to have you on the sales mindset webinar and I’m excited for what you’re going to tell us. Once again, if anybody has a question submit them via your panel. After Diane completes, we’re going to open up the floor for questions for Mike and Diane.

Diane Cashin: Thank you so much for the opportunity and I know that your listeners are getting wonderful sage advice from all of the thought leaders in the sales industry. I have 25 years in sales and business development as a manager and a front line contributor so I can bring that lens but I thought, “How can I really make a difference for them today?” We really want to focus on optimal mindset. Fred knows this about me but a lot of you guys don’t. How can I bring real insight on what an optimal mindset can do? I’ll share with you that last May I was in a near death car accident. After jaws of life and a helicopter ride, a month in the hospital and six months to learn to walk again optimal mindset is how I lived every minute of every day and I did apply the techniques in the book which was great but it really came down to just being in the moment of what is one little thing we can do to keep moving forward. It gets harder to do when there’s so many complexities and things are coming at you from all these different directions and you don’t feel like you have control.

I now live in Delaware and that wasn’t a part of my plan but my whole world imploded in July especially of last year and I’ve had to take a moment to say everything I thought to be true, everything I was working for would change but it’s simply a change. It was big change so my mindset really mattered so what I wanted to do to talk with you a little bit today is I’m going to share some pieces of a multi-day workshop that I do for sales executives and leaders on creating big transformation. A lot of it is we traditionally are looking at what we do every day. What I want to do is take a moment to really go to the mushy marshmallow center of the human experience and what you do every day more from who you are.

We have four parts that we’re going to come through today, we’re going to do it super-fast so buckle up, here we go. I wanted to make it a little fun because the last year for me has been very serious so playful, fun, a little bit of levity but we want to look at four spaces. Who are you being, how are you expanding what you know, from this place of awareness and knowing, how are you continuing to grow? And as we all know, in order to keep growing you have to be in action to do it. We’re talking about this in the context of what’s happening right now in sales. What we’re going to talk about today you can use every single day so uncertainty is always going to be with us, just like Mike shared.

There’s day and there’s night, there’s up and there’s down, the fluctuations are always going to be there so the question is who are you going to be when it’s hard and how do you tap into it? Because we’re all trained with our genius and there’s a lot of people who are excellent in sales but what makes you so unique? I want to share a context to change your perspective of it. When you think about who you are, a lot of our days we get up, we lead with our mind, we’re looking at what we’ve got to do, how we’ve got to do it so we go into thinking about it, creating those to-do lists and then we get into action with our bodies and then we spend most of the day there. 80% of our time, our mind is running our show and we spend a lot of time wishing that we could just find love, peace, calm, quiet, we think about those vacations. How do we find some happiness? Often times when we start our days from this place of ‘what do I need to do’ as a human doing and you’re thinking about that and then you’re in action with your body, you’re creating a place of continual churn.

Sometimes it’s pushing, persevering, striving. You’re in action yet it doesn’t always feel good so sometimes you have to stop for a second and say, “Wait a minute, what if the order is wrong?” We hear all the time we’re body, mind and spirit or body, mind and soul and I intentionally call out four categories. You are body, mind and soul but what if the order is wrong? What if it’s soul, mind and body? If you were to think of the places when we really have the human connection, where humanity, love, peace and joy come from, it’s usually from somewhere like in your heart center area. People can relate to this as your soul, your essence, yourself, your heart, your being, yourself and it’s really what makes you very unique. Some people refer to it as divine spark but this is where we really wake up every morning saying, “I want to create more love, peace, joy, wealth, health, happiness, I want to have a good life” and at the same time we have these fears, pain, sadness and loss. A lot of times our soul, when it gets depleted – this is where our personality, our animation comes from – when it gets depleted we reach to something bigger than us through spirit.

A lot of people through religion, we’ll reach to the creator, their divine source to refill them back up. This is what we look at, who are you, who are you being and what if your soul could then guide your mind? If you think of it this way, your soul is focused on your desires and your purpose in your life. Your mind is in action to create and imagine and then your body is in action to do it but if you just let your mind run on automatic and you step over what your soul truly desires, craves, you can then just become that human doing. When you think about this, the best way to think of your soul is if you were to write down 5 adjectives that really describe who you are when you are your best and your greatest, that’s your unique attributes and talents.

From that place, if you’re not sure of who you are, call five friends and ask them, “Who am I being when I’m my best and greatest?” Write those things down and then keep them handy. I’m going to move to the next part but before I jump there I know, Fred, this is a topic that takes people to the mushy marshmallow center, it’s kind of uncomfortable because we always relate to this part as, “Oh, that’s where your emotions are” and actually, it’s not. It’s where your power is, it’s where your uniqueness is because we can all be great at knowing our product portfolio or being great at selling our solution and competitive knowledge as we all have to do in what we do for our profession every day, but who are you being and what makes you so unique? Are you tapping into that and bringing that to the show when you show up in life and in business? Anything you’re hearing out there and seeing, Fred?

Fred Diamond: Once again, if anybody has any question, submit them. We have a question here. I know that you coach sales leaders and CEOs around the world on how to get the most out of themselves. Again, your book is called Squeeze More Life out of Time and one of the challenges right now is everybody’s home so you’re with yourself 24 hours a day. Of course, we’re always with ourselves 24 hours a day but now you’re really with yourself 24 hours a day and we have this whole world of uncertainty of the world and we have this whole uncertainty about me and my family and then we have this whole uncertainty about my company and me as a sales professional. A lot of times when we coach sales professionals on mindset like Mike does, it’s about how do you get the most out of yourself, how do you stay at a high level, how do you remove things? Right now we have so much time with ourselves so the ability to do what you just said which is to understand that is something that’s quite critical.

Diane Cashin: It’s true and I always think of ourselves as 360 degrees views of our lives. I know we’re talking about the sales aspect of us but most of us are doing some sales profession because we want to support our dreams, our children, our family, our goals, our adventures and such. When you think of 360 degree view of who you are and you are to stand in the circle at the center of your universe, of your own life, what is it you truly want to create? That can come from anything so in this category of knowing there’s only one you in the whole universe and it took all time and centuries and every alignment of the gene pool of your parent’s side that had to come together for you to be created. You’re truly unique and truly miraculous not just when you’re a baby but right now, you’re truly miraculous but you know what is best for you so while you can take all this input and guidance from all these different people as gifts, you have to try them on to see what fits because you have your own superpowers.

You know you have your intuition, your purpose, your dreams, your goals and your unique talents so from that place of knowing, this is usually what is calling to us whispering or sometimes yelling at us what we should be doing. In the midst of all of that 360 degree view of creation we get afraid. Let’s talk about fear because it’s the biggest disruptor that I face with all of my clients no matter how powerful, it could be a solo entrepreneur. We all get afraid, it’s a human natural way of experiencing this and I probably should have made this a poll but often times when we lead with our minds it creates these fears about us, the stories that we have. We have had life experiences, some of it didn’t go so well so we learned to survive and adapt and from these places of fear it will get in your way. I wanted to put a list up of a few things and take a look for yourself.

What are the fears that you have and especially now, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid of losing your job or a reduction in force? Are you afraid you just can’t get a client on the phone? It creates these stories and these narratives that then have you switch out of being your best and greatest. You start getting into hyper performance, you might over-prepare, you might get nervous or anxious, you might be really distracted or not present and you start not being in service to your best and greatest because your fear is now modifying how you can behave. You might talk to people differently, you might get competitive or controlling, you might start micromanaging. There’s all these different ways that we switch from being our best and greatest when fear shows up. Fred, any questions that people are sharing around what their fears might be or what’s showing up for them now especially with the Coronavirus and the economy? There’s a lot going on politically, we’re in the election year so the world is complicated, there’s a lot that can trigger fear that might be getting in the way. Anybody sharing anything?

Fred Diamond: A couple people here chimed in that they agree and you could probably add another 20 things specifically as it relates to the moments that we’re going through right now, so keep going. How do we get beyond this? That’s the whole point.

Diane Cashin: Here’s the secret sauce, this is the recipe. Awareness is the most important pivotal moment for you. When you notice something showing up for you just take a moment and notice it. “I’m afraid of being judged” or, “I’m afraid of losing my job”, “I’m afraid that I might be wrong.” Whatever it is for you and it doesn’t necessarily even need to be fear, it could be, “I’m feeling anxious, I’m feeling depressed, I’m feeling frustrated.” It’s usually a negative emotion that we really want to pay attention to because that’s not serving us any longer, it’s an emotion that isn’t going to be in support of what you want to create and you being your best and greatest. Noticing is really important. “Look at that, look what’s showing up right now, I’m afraid of being judged because I’m going to present right now for IES.” I’m aware that I’m afraid of maybe hyper-performance or a fear of being judged. From that place of awareness I can move to the next part and say, “Okay Diane, what are you winning by feeling like that?”

Usually when it’s something negative that’s in our head creating anxiety, depression, fear or frustration we’re not winning anything. Then you ask yourself the next question, “What’s the cost that I’m paying?” I may not be able to give my gift to the world, I may isolate, I may avoid, I may drink too much. What is the price you pay when this fear or this emotion is showing up? You can also get really clear of what’s missing in the way of what I want so if I can come through this and address that gap or obstacle, then I can really get focused on what it is I need right now. A lot of times it’s easy to step out of it like if you’re on the court or in the storm, whichever way you want to look at it, and you have this sense of awareness, if you extract yourself out and pretend you’re observing your role model with the same situation, “I wonder what my role model would do.”

That observing capacity makes it easier for you then to move forward and often times as sales professionals we are superstars singing for the fences, we are the fearless leaders but sometimes we can over-complicate it and in these moments I’d just invite you to say, “What is one thing that you would do to move yourself forward?” Sometimes it’s a really small thing and I’ll share a little funny story here. Before the accident I used to travel all over the world and jump in helicopters and photograph things but after the accident I had to sleep pretty much in the same position for about three months, I had a commode in my room and it was a simple thing. What was one thing I could do today to make my life feel extraordinary? It didn’t mean make a million dollars. Wherever you find yourself, you can do one thing to move yourself forward and that day the funny story was, “Today my big travel adventure is I’m not going to use the commode, I’m going to try to use the actual bathroom.” That would have been a big win for me and it’s that kind of optimal mindset when you set that intention, my mind would then get into action to get my body to do that. I could create it from that context and leaders are especially good at this, they’re always aware, they’re always noticing but they do this very silently and they stay in this place of these attributes: honesty, sense of humor, ability to delegate and trust people, they’re really great communicators, they’re confident, they’re committed, they’ve got this great positive attitude, they apply a lot of creativity, they trust their intuition and they inspire others. That’s a list from Forbes and I wanted to bring that up here because when we are coming from a place of fear it’s really easy to switch away from those leadership attributes to some of the things I talked about before.

Fred Diamond: Diane, we’re getting a lot of questions coming in from the audience here and we want to be respectful, we told people we would wind down at 2:50. If you want to give your final thought, then I want to get to some of these questions because we’ve got a couple great ones coming in.

Diane Cashin: The last part of this piece because the rest is more how-to stuff I’ll share, but every moment of every day you’re standing at this place of choice. You can do this automatic predictable thing that feels comfortable and sometimes that can create worry, fear, stories, more control because you might be afraid. If you want to really create this future state, as Mike is sharing, of where you’re going, understanding all the things that are happening, the goal is in those moments. What is the most ideal or empowering choice? It doesn’t have to be a big one. When you make the ideal choice it is in service of your best and greatest, you can accept exactly where you are, believe in yourself. It creates more trust and a more peaceful and confident way of being. That’s in the knowing piece and then the growing piece we can answer probably during the Q&A as some of the examples of how to apply these things in addition to the stuff that Mike shared.

Fred Diamond: I want to move to the questions here, I’m going to make myself the presenter. I want to thank again Diane, Mike, we’ve got a couple great questions here. If you can keep your answers relatively brief, what am I losing out by not taking advantage of this time? Interesting question. Mike, you deal with a lot of high-performing sales professionals so what am I losing out if I don’t take advantage of some of the suggestions you had on your last line?

Mike Schmidtmann: What do they lose by not doing this? I think status quo is a recipe for mediocrity and loss, fails. I think if there’s ever a time to change the status quo, now is the time.

Fred Diamond: Diane, I have a question from you that comes in from the audience here. Since emotion is so driving our current lives, jobs and personal situations, how do we project calm to our customers to gain trust and not come off as ambulance-chasing? Mike, you can give your thoughts on that, too. We just ended the quarter two weeks ago which is traditionally a time when a lot of people try to get as many sales as possible but how do we maintain calm? How do we get out mindset focus so that we’re not like, “Please, we’re going out of business, I need you.” How do we focus on that?

Diane Cashin: I’ll do this quick like a bunny but it’s up to you to set your intentions in the morning. Lots of breaths, be excited about what lies ahead in the day and then set your intentions. “Today I need to be confident, today I need to be patient” and then focus on three things only you can do today to move that forward. From that place, when you show up with your clients, I’m going to boldly say it’s not about you at all. It’s not about your number, I know that’s in your head, I know you had a forecast to do but really what it is is you’ve got to show up and just care. You’re hearing this everywhere but when you connect with them, try to do it on voice, try to do it on video, see them, make a connection.

Empathy, patience, kindness all matter, acknowledge them, ask them good questions that start with ‘what’, that’s what your best leaders do, they ask questions. Then what do they need? What can I do to make any difference for you today? What is your biggest challenge today or what do you see on the other side of this? What can I do to begin planning for you? Show them respect for their time because they’re trying to do all kinds of stuff as well as manage their stuff at home, make sure you’re focusing about them and then when you are engaging take any action you can to support them. Understand their bigger context in addition to the deal but you do have situations and you have a relationship where you do have to ask questions because you have to let your managers know about forecast. I would just say you can ask them specifically, “What do you need in terms of this particular sales opportunity in terms of timeline?” Create that respect between each other because they need to understand what you’re dealing with as well. Then if you have a space to say to them, “I hear you want to slide this to the right”, you can start asking curiosity questions of, “What if this…?” or, “What would be different?” and then just be very respectful. Like Mike said, innovate with them. It’s not a push, it’s collaborate and innovate with them and if it does come down that it needs to slide you can have a real honest conversation with your management team. Also, again take good care of your managers as well because they’ve got a lot coming at them. What do they need each day? What do your clients need, what do you need, what does your management team as well as your family?

Fred Diamond: Mike, we have a question for you. I know you’ve worked with a lot of sales managers who manage people who are relatively new to sales and of course people who are senior in their sales career. What would you tell someone who’s in their first or second job? They’re still learning sales, they haven’t been through 9/11, they haven’t been through the 2008 recession, they haven’t been through that whole thing, they’re new to sales. They’re in their first or second job, they’re still trying to figure out their process, their flow, what they’re good at. What would be some of your recommendations for them today to help them take their sales mindset to an optimal level?

Mike Schmidtmann: That is a great question. A high percentage of people get into sales and quit out of frustration so that’s an occupational hazard. The mantra I have for all new salespeople is this and this is exactly your topic today, Fred, it’s a mindset issue. My statement is purely this profession pays a lot of money because it’s hard. If it were not hard we wouldn’t need to pay you a lot of money, we’d pay you minimum wage so the fact that it’s hard is good. The fact that it’s difficult is good, if it were easy it wouldn’t pay much, folks. If you want to earn a lot of money you need to get good at what you do so embrace the difficulty and be glad it’s hard, that’s my mindset issue. If you give up you’re not going to succeed not just in sales but anything, anybody who wants to succeed needs to stick with it and get really good at what they do. The nice thing about sales, there’s nothing that pays more, better, faster than sales if you’re good at what you do.

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Diane Cashin, the author of Squeeze More Life out of Time and Mike Schmidtmann who’s a sales trainer to the many companies around the world, he’s also spoken at the Institute for Excellence in Sales many times, his podcast is available at salesgamechangerspodcast.com/mikeschmidtmann and Diane’s will be available probably in early May. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, we had a lot of people from around the globe watching today. Briefly, just give us one final thought to inspire the people watching the webinar today. Again, this will also be a Sales Game Changers podcast. Diane, give us something positive to leave on.

Diane Cashin: I would just say keep taking exquisite care of yourself, be your best and greatest. I know that’s two, but go out there and love up – not literally – but love up your clients and let them know you care.

Fred Diamond: Mike, why don’t you give us a final thought to inspire our webinars watchers today?

Mike Schmidtmann: Every successful person I know has been defined by difficulty at some point in their career that they fought through, that’s without exception. These times are opportunities for us to power through it, to learn from it, to profit from it, this is an opportunity. It is a gift for us so don’t squander it, take advantage of it.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 246: Sales Leaders Diane Cashin and Mike Schmidtmann Offer Rich Insights as Re-Opening Accelerates for Sales Teams Across the Globe first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.