Road To Revenue And Happiness With David Meltzer
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Pain is a turn signal, not a stop sign in your life. This is one mantra David Meltzer has always believed in his whole life. David is the Cofounder of Sports 1 Marketing and formerly served as CEO of the renowned Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment Agency, which was the inspiration for the movie Jerry Maguire. Today on The Successful Pitch, he joins John Livesay to talk about his life mission to empower over one billion people to be happy. He also shares how you can be happy and successful without being pushy. Don’t miss this episode and be on the road to revenue and happiness.
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Listen to the podcast here
Road To Revenue And Happiness With David Meltzer
Our guest on the show is David Meltzer, who has many great takeaways for you about how to be happy and successful. He said, “Pain is a turn signal, not a stop sign in your life.” Also, he said that the secret to a great pitch is credibility. Read the wonderful stories he tells about how you can be happy and successful without being pushy. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is David Meltzer. He’s the Cofounder of Sports 1 Marketing, and formerly served as CEO of the renowned Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment Agency, which was the inspiration for the movie Jerry Maguire. I’m happy to have David on board. His life mission is to empower over one billion people to be happy. This simple yet powerful message has led him on an incredible journey to provide one thing, value. In all his content and communication, that’s exactly what you’ll receive. As part of that mission for the past many years, he’s been providing free weekly training to empower others to be happy. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m excited to be on a pitch show. I’ve done so much to help people share a vision and they neglect the pitch so much. I’ve executive produced Elevator Pitch with Entrepreneur the TV show. My TV show is called 2 Minute Drill, which is a two-minute pitch show on Bloomberg and Amazon. I do a Perfect Pitch on my free Friday training as well. It’s nice to have someone that understands the value of whether it’s a 1, 2 or 10-minute pitch.
That right off the get-go is a big value. You need to have variations of your pitch. Most people only have a ten-minute version. They don’t have a 2 or 1-minute version and they get completely overwhelmed. If your ten-minute version, it’s not the first minute of your pitch, it still has a beginning, middle, and end. Before we get into all your expertise around this, let’s go back to your own story of origin. I’m always fascinated to hear if you can go back to childhood, school, college, what was it that made you start your whole journey into business? I want to hear how you came up with your own personal mission statement because I think that’s important for people to realize the why of what you’re doing besides making money is crucial. Take us back as far as you want.
[bctt tweet=”‘Pain is the turn signal, not the stop sign in my life.'” username=”John_Livesay”]
My journey started with money. I wanted to be rich at five years old. My dad had left. Six kids and a single mom, a terrific mom. She worked two jobs as a second-grade teacher, packed her dinner in a paper bag, put us in the station wagon, and filled up the turnstiles at convenience stores with greeting cards. I said to myself, “Someday I’m going to be rich. I’m going to buy my mom a house and a car,” and that was going to make me successful. I wanted to be rich because the only time I wasn’t happy in my childhood was when there was financial stress. I’d catch my mom crying because we didn’t have enough money for food or a summer camp or the car broke down. There’s always something and it always revolved around money and so I believed that money bought happiness and love.
One advantage of that journey is that I was always looking at opportunities to make more money. Unlike a lot of kids, including my siblings whose parents tell them to be a doctor, lawyer, or failure, and they stay limited in their scope of what they’re supposed to do in life, I was completely open-minded because I wanted the highest paying gig. I used to tell people I’d shovel crap with my hands six days a week, twelve hours a day to buy my mom a house and a car. I didn’t care. I wanted to be rich. My journey led me through wanting to be a professional football player. I played football in college but got ran over by Christian Okoye, better known as the Nigerian Nightmare, AFC Player of the Year. That’s when I realized lying on my back, “Doctor, lawyer, failure.”
I thought I’d be rich being a doctor. That’s when my oldest brother who was a doctor gave me the best advice of my life. I told him I hated hospitals. He said, “Dave, you’re eighteen years old. What do you mean you hate hospitals? You’re pre-med. What are you talking about?” I said, “I want to be a sports doctor. They’re not in hospitals are they?” He goes, “David, you need to be more interested than interesting.” That became truly a perspective of mine. I no longer was going to be an interesting person. I was going to learn what I call, “Find the light, the love, the lessons, and everything.” Ask as many questions as I could, which ended up being a great tool not just in pitching, but in selling in general. You are an expert at selling and you know how important it is to be more interested than interesting.
Being Happy: The lens of gratitude will give you the ability to find enjoyment and the lesson in what you’re doing.
I went to law school instead, but while I was in law school, I kept my options open. I ended up with two job offers. One to be an oil and gas litigator, which is one of the highest paying jobs out of law school. I also had found a sales job in this new thing in 1992 called the internet. This new thing piqued my interest and I told my mom, “I’m thinking about taking the sales job. I’m not going to be a litigator.” My mom almost died. She is like, “You’re going to ruin your life. The internet is a fad. Don’t do it.” That’s the next lesson that I like to teach people. Just because somebody loves you doesn’t mean you get good advice. That helped me throughout my whole career. Voting for what you want, not seeking other people’s approval, knowing your own values, these are all tools not only in selling but in pitching in general. To understand what the objectives are, what your aligned values are in seeking advice from people who sit in a situation you want to be in. I took the sales job nine months out of law school, millionaire, bought my mom a house and a car, had a little bit left over to pay my loans.
Here’s the interesting thing. I graduated law school at 24, 25 in 1993. Everything I did reinforced that money bought love and happiness. I became the favorite child of my mom in my mind. 1995 came, we sold the company I worked for $3.4 billion to Thompson Oils. I then went to Silicon Valley and raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the wireless proxy service space, the middleware space. I then became CEO of the world’s first smartphone. I worked with Microsoft. It was a Windows CE device. I worked with Samsung manufactured by them. I was a multimillionaire by 30. I married my dream girl from the fourth grade. Every single thing that I did reaffirmed that money buys love and happiness. That’s when the journey shifted because I then became the CEO of Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment. You’ve interviewed Leigh, the most notable sports agent in the world.
I surrounded myself with celebrities, athletes, entertainers, and I truly started to realize one thing, that I had moved from a world of not enough, where I was a victim. I was always looking at, “Why me? Why does John have that and not me? I’m as good.” I was a victim. I then became a millionaire and it was everything enough for me. If I wasn’t happy, I’d buy things I didn’t need. If I wasn’t happy, I’d buy more things I didn’t need. If I wasn’t happy, I’d buy different things I didn’t need. If I still wasn’t happy, I’d buy things to impress people that I didn’t like. This was not the best world to live in. It wasn’t a world of abundance. I was barely philanthropic. I gave to receive. Everything I did was to help other people, but I wanted something back. I wanted acknowledgment, recognition. I wanted some quid pro quo or trade. I wasn’t living in the world of more than enough.
[bctt tweet=”Be interested, not interesting.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s where my journey took me is I learned to shift the paradigm of value to understand, to receive so I can give. I talk about a world through me to others. I’m always looking from, what am I going to receive? How’s it going to come through me for others? I’m inspired, not motivated, to receive as much as I can. That value paradigm, that value shift, that transformation has helped me. I am a natural salesperson. One who oversold, backend sold, lied, manipulated, and cheated like a lot of salespeople in the name of commissions, territories, and quotas to somebody who provides more value than I receive. I guarantee more value in everything. I carry an energy of providing more value than I receive. That’s the context and basis for why I wanted to come on your show to share these ideas of how we can and truly make a lot of money, help a lot of people, have a lot of fun, create abundance for everyone, and to empower others to be happy.
There’s much to unpack there. Let’s start with the myth that it can be fun to make money. I think a lot of people think, “It’s going to be hard work, grit, pushing, and frustrating.” I think you are showing that is not the case when we come from a place of, “Am I having fun?” That is not mutually exclusive. The concept when we were growing up was you have fun on the weekends and at night, but not at work. Now that the whole wall has come down in a big way and the more fun you are to be with, the more people want to buy with you and hang with you.
I came up with this definition that aligns specifically with what you’re talking about. Instead of attaching my emotions to an outcome to the weekends, to the nights, I have shifted my emotions to enjoying the consistent every day, persistent without quitting, pursuit of my own potential, my own objectives, my own what tied to my own why. By doing so, I don’t believe in the word we’re working more, talk about a shift in the paradigm and perspective that people have. I believe there’s an activity you get paid for, an activity you don’t get paid for, and you should enjoy them equally. You should try to maximize the activity you get paid for that you enjoy more than the activity you don’t.
Being Happy: When we can be accountable as salespeople, we become empowered and in control of everything.
One of the things that you offer are these wonderful quotes on your Instagram account, which is @DavidMeltzer. The one that stands out for me, David, is “Be kind, not right.” Let me tell you why that resonates with me on two levels. One, from being in the traditional sales training, it was ABC, Always Be Closing. I shifted that to ABK, Always Be Kind to the way you talked to yourself so you can be that way to other people. That in a nutshell is a huge paradigm shift. You’ve taken not just be kind, you’ve added this premise of not right. I remember years ago someone saying to me, “The question for you is do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Since happiness is part of your branding as well, I’m completely thrilled to be able to ask you about this whole concept of happiness and choosing kindness over being right, and how that all connects for you.
It connects by the fifth daily practice. The most important daily practice that I have learned over all these years and that’s practicing ending fear. What I realize is we have primary and secondary fears. These are the interferences, the corrosion between us, that unbelievable source of light, love, lessons, and happiness that we’re connected to at all times. It’s the thing that creates resistance, voice, and shortages to the sales that we’re making in our pipeline and energy sucks that exist out there. What I realized was why don’t I have a practice to end the need to be right? I guarantee you, if you take the need to be right or the need to be offended which is closely attached to the need to be right, the need to be separate, inferior, superior, anxious, frustrated, worried, and angry, any of these, if you took the time, emotion, and money that you wasted trying to do these things, it wouldn’t matter how good of a salesperson you were.
You’d be a millionaire, a billionaire if you could get all that time back and harness it towards what you want. I decided what was the higher frequency over being right, over being separate, inferior, superior, offended, resentful, guilty, and all these feelings. It was happiness and kindness. It was a truth that was so much easier to have gratitude in my life. The pain would present itself as it always does when you live in an expansive world and you’re trying hard with what I call the Law of GOYA, Get Off Your Ass, like you and I, people who know how to be productive. We don’t sit around dreaming about what we want. We dream, but we go ahead and we take action to go get it.
[bctt tweet=”Find the light, the love, and the lessons in everything.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When you look at the number, one, gratitude. The lens of gratitude will give you the ability to find enjoyment in what you’re doing. To find the lesson in what you’re doing. What it does is it says, “Pain, mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, financial pain, and pipeline pain which is no closing. You’re an indicator. You’re not a stop sign.” I’m not going to quit. You’re an indicator pushing me to something better. You’re teaching me a lesson. That pain is there to indicate I have a lesson to learn. It’s not a stop sign. It’s a turn signal that there’s a better way to go. A better situation to be in. Using gratitude, it allows pain to be a turn signal in my life. Leading then to forgiveness because if I have forgiveness, I can forgive others.
Most importantly in sales and pitching is accountability. Asking myself two questions, one, “What did I do to attract this to myself?” Two, “What am I supposed to learn from it?” I find the biggest detriment in salespeople’s careers is they lack accountability. They live in a world of blame, shame and justification. When we can be accountable as salespeople, we become empowered and in control of everything. The lessons keep on coming until we learn them, but they start coming bigger, better and faster. We become statistically more successful and productive as well as accessible to others. This is an extraordinary thing. The number one piece of advice is ignored by most people. People think that they have all these different things about a pitch that you should have.
The number one thing you can have in a pitch is credibility. If I was 100% credible, if I could attain 100% credibility, which I’ve never been able to do, maybe in my mom’s eyes. That’s because she thinks I’m better than I am, but 100% credibility, all I would have to do for a pitch is say, “John, wire me $1 million tomorrow and I will wire you back $2 million on Friday.” If I was 100% credible, you’d say, “Okay.” The difference is most people don’t realize when they’re pitching that the minute they diminish their credibility, dissolve their credibility, create overselling, backend selling, manipulating, lying, shortages, avoids obstacles, some sort of insecurity, of credibility, people start harnessing and focusing on that. You create many more obstacles for yourself because you exaggerated something.
Being Happy: Time, emotion, and value are the three reasons people change their minds.
I told you, I had the two TV shows, Elevator Pitch and 2 Minute Drill. This guy gets on, he’s pitching and goes, “Our revenue is up 300% this year.” In my mind, I’m like, “He’s an over-seller.” If his revenue was at all decent, he would have said, “We did $1 million last year. We’re at $3 million already this year, which is a 300% gain.” I’m thinking he did $1 last year. He’s tried to BS me and sell me on an accumulated number. All of a sudden, I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I was trying to pick holes in everything that he said. He had a credible company when I ended up vetting it after the pitch, but he would have lost me if it wasn’t a TV show. People do this all the time. If you’re going to have one takeaway on pitching from me, someone who’s done six episodes of Elevator Pitch, created Bloomberg TV’s new series, 2 Minute Drill. Be credible. Make sure to fine-tooth comb. Eliminate the negatives. Be honest. Don’t oversell, backend sell, manipulate, lie and cheat. You’re going to ruin your pitch no matter how long it is.
We’re certainly going to make that one of the tweets from the show. Credibility is the number one secret to a great pitch. The other tweet I love that you said is, “Pain is the turn signal in my life.” Let’s double-click on that and then we’ll get back to credibility. A big fear that causes the blame shame justification you were referring to that salespeople can fall into is the fear of rejection. I tell people, “You’ve got to stop rejecting yourself.” If someone says no to you, you go, “I must be bad or my product must be bad.”
You take it on personally as opposed to you saying, “That’s a signal, it’s not a stop sign.” That would be helpful for people whether you’re pitching to get a new job, get your startup funded, or get new clients, rejection is part of the journey. You’ve said, “I look at it as a turn signal even if that’s not working. Let me try something else.” As opposed to, “I’m going to give up.” What else do you think about rejection and how we can build up our tolerance especially as it relates to your sports experience? There’s a lot of pain involved in sports.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t sit around dreaming about what we want. Dream but take action to go get it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I have two rules when it comes to no. Number one is a perspective rule. I always tell myself, “I’m 25 noes from getting what I want.” What it does immediately in that framework is when you tell me no, I’m like, “Good.” When I’m at ten noes, I’m like, “All right.” I’m the only one that gets super excited after 24 noes because I know it’s coming. The idea of it is, I’m only many noes from getting what I want because I take the turn steering wheel strategy. I know that pain is indicating I have a lesson to learn. Every time someone tells me no, I have a lesson to learn. I love to learn because I’m more interested than interesting. That great line my brother told me at eighteen has changed my life because it allows me to find the light, love, and lessons, and know because I have an opportunity to grow, accelerate and expand because someone’s telling me no.
The second no rule that I have is interesting because people are made by the people that say no to you if you understand how no works. In the context of someone being interested in the follow-up context, when people waste time and they wonder, “I’ve called him eighteen times.” I say, “There’s a three-time closing rule.” You’ve got through the process. You’re calling for either a meeting or an order, something that has been agreed upon. The person says, “Sorry, I had a flat tire.” That’s one no to me. I’m accountable and honest to people. Even I who’s a student, my calendar, every once in a while I’d miss a call. Usually, it’s an important call that I missed. I don’t know how that happened, but if I miss it, I still count that as a no.
The third no is I love to shift the energy of it. I’ll always tell someone, “This is the right time, emotion or value I’ve been able to convey to you. I have a lot of other people who want to do business and meet with me or close. I’ll tell you what, please give me a call if you’re still interested in moving forward. If not, thank you for your time and consideration.” Fifty percent of the time the guy will call back and close, meet me, or do whatever. The other 50% of the time, I never hear back. Do you know what I say to myself? Think about how much time, emotion, energy, and money I saved. I especially as a younger salesperson who is an aggressive, hyper and persistent person, I would hit my head against the wall 50 times thinking I was doing myself a great service because I wasn’t quitting, instead I went from quitting to allowing the deal to happen.
Being Happy: Don’t hug people and make them feel good. Give them a profit and they will love you.
It’s a turn signal. I allow the deal to happen. I don’t make it or force it to happen. When you’re in that close, three times is enough to get a meeting. When someone’s already agreed on it and gave you a yes, there’s something there. If you allow it to happen, note time, emotion, and value are the three reasons people change their minds. Timing has changed. Their emotions on it have changed, or the value has changed. When someone tells you no, it means they have something more valuable to either spend their money, time or emotion on. That’s all it is. Be honest with yourself. You’re not the priority.
In addition to being an author, which we’ll talk about, you’re also a coveted speaker to major companies and talk about the value changing. It’s a great example to those of us who speak for a living or that’s a big part of our living. We’ve had to go from live events to virtual events. I’ve had the experience where a client will say, “You need to resell me on the value of your fee for it to be virtual versus in person.” Whether you’re a speaker or not, this whole exercise is valuable for everyone reading. How do we reframe value when something’s changed like this?
I take quantitative reasons you want me to speak, the quantitative impact you’d like me to have, and the quantitative capabilities that you’d like me to enhance in the readers. Whether I’m on a stage, in person, on Zoom, or whatever other platform you want to use, it’s all about quantifying the value. I’ll usually break it down to per person. I’ll say, “If I was here on stage, value-wise if I increase production 10% of 1,000 people, what’s the value of that? If I help your closing ratio, one extra sale per guy, if I’m able to have people show up on time. What is the value of people who are happier?” Happier people are proven to produce 41% more in a day if you’re happy than an unhappy worker.
[bctt tweet=”The number one thing you can have in a pitch is credibility.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I utilize open and closed-ended questions to say, “What are you doing today? Where are the quantitative reasons, impacts and capabilities? What do you like about it? What don’t you like about it?” Take out the fact that I’m not there in person. The fact that I’m not there in person, it’s only going to save you money. That’s the only difference between me being a person and me being here and also the capabilities of replay, rewinding, and a variety of other extra values I can bring virtually. What I have found is I am getting paid equal or greater to march of what I used to get in person. People are getting acclimated because I’ve been able to completely quantify. There’s a problem with selling called subjective value. The stage and the virtual stage is a perfect place to talk about it.
People love to feature and benefit dump. They love to be that purple dinosaur that’s a cartoon. We know him as Barney. Everybody knows the big purple dinosaur. I get frustrated when I see Barney sellers. I see it in speaking and authors. People who are overselling, backend selling, feature and benefit. They haven’t gotten to the nuts and bolts of, “Can you see any reason why you want to have me speak to you? I am guaranteeing to be a profit center for you. You may pay $50,000 for me, but I’m guaranteeing you’re going to make $100,000. Can you see any reason you will want to move forward?” A Barney seller, what they do when they speak, write books, consult, or do the things that you and I do is they hug you and they say, “I love you. You love me. Nobody makes any money.” Everybody feels good after you’re done speaking because you’re a Barney seller, like the meeting, you’re a Barney seller. Everybody is feeling great when you leave the pitch because you’re a Barney seller. You walk away and it doesn’t wear well. You’re not selling through the client where they’re going, “That’s life-changing.”
I do it in my executive coaching. I had a client right before the interview, all I did was give him the belief, the shift in the mindset and heart set that he’s charging too little. I have him ten times, he closed two people. Let’s say he was making $1,000 a client. I told him to ask for $10,000. I told him why and how to be a profit center at $10,000 to guarantee that the minimum they’ll make is $20,000 if they pay him $10,000 a month. Two closes where he would have made $2,000 a month for the year, which would equate to $24,000 each. He had a total gross of $48,000 that became $480,000. I said to him, “Can you see a reason you don’t want to pay me $20,000 a month? He has no reason. You can do that virtually on stage. People don’t do the work. They’re Barney sellers. Don’t hug people and make them feel good. Give them a profit. They will love you. You’ll sell through them. They’ll brag to everyone how much money they made from you.
Game-Time Decision Making: High-Scoring Business Strategies from the Biggest Names in Sports
I want to support what you said because if someone’s reading and they’re like, “What does that mean that don’t just give motivation or good vibes?” You need to be tangible. In my situation, I tell people, “I’m going to show you how to tell a case story and whoever tells the best story gets the yes.” If you’re up against competitors, no one’s telling a story and you’re the only one telling a story, that’s going to mean more money, “What’s the average sale? Do you get that? Do you understand their business that well?” One more piece of jewelry. One more airport renovation. Whatever it is they’re doing, you help them win that, then the ROI is great on having you come to speak because it’s not, “Here’s something that would be nice to have.” It’s like, “We’re tired of coming in second place. If you can help us solve that problem, then that’s worth much more money.” That’s another example of what you said in action for people who are still thinking, “How does this relate to me?” I completely support what you’re doing.
You live by it, which is why I wanted to come on your show. What I enjoy about watching your stuff and reading your stuff is that you are the exact same type of salesperson that I am. You create productivity, accessibility and gratitude. You have quantitative value in what you do. You’re able to articulate it in the way that people want to communicate because it’s not what we say as salespeople. It’s what they hear. If you know your stuff well enough to articulate a story that comes to a logical conclusion of, “Can you see any reason you won’t want to do that?” You know how to pitch and you know how to sell like John does.
Thank you, David. You wrote this wonderful book called Game-Time Decision Making. That taps into not only why you, but the why now part of any decision. You talked about time, emotion and value. We’ve talked a little bit about creating value and storytelling creates the emotion. We’re going to end on the importance of timing, how that ties into your book and your upcoming workshops that you do every week on Fridays.
The manmade construct in this vibration is time. Everybody has 24 hours a day, but the productivity, the accessibility within that time of being able to number one, align your values. Your personal non-negotiable values, your experiential values. You’re giving and receiving values to the concept of time. Asking is related to time. If you understand time, you should understand the exponentiality of saying, “Do you know anyone that can help me? How can I be of service or value?” Understanding how time equates to that profit center and the exponentiality of growth, of growing exponentially by asking each person, “Do you know someone that can help me in person, on the phone, email, or media?” When we were young, most people had their card game, their golf group, and their church group. Nowadays on average, some guy you meet on the bus stop has 1,000 people in their network.
If you’re not asking, “Do you know what it can help me?” you’re cutting off your legs. Studying time is paying attention to and giving intention to the coincidence as you want with your time, the activity you get paid for the activity you don’t. Remember, that’s the mathematical equation of luck. Attention plus intention equals coincidence. Another thing about time is do it now. One hundred percent of the things you do now get done. The difference between successful people and others is successful people get stuff done. Ask yourself, “Could I do it now? If not, put it in your calendar to schedule for tomorrow and study that.” Finally, the practice of ending fear, utilizing your time, not to accelerate in the wrong direction, not to create resistance, avoid shortages and obstacles in your life, but to stop, drop and roll when you’re in an accelerated ego-based emotion, like the need to be right.
Kindness will take you back to the center and allow you to roll towards statistical success. More people in your pipeline. More people pitch correctly. More value is provided. More sales are made. More commissions are made to give to others so you can make more money, help more people and have more fun. Time is that manmade construct that you have to work within in order to effectuate that last world, to tie everything together. No more living in a world of, “To me, victimized and not enough.” No more living and buying things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like in the world of enough for me, but utilizing time, you can live as an instant between limitlessness and infinity in the world of more than enough. More than enough of everything for everyone.
When you’re selling and pitching from an abundant attitude that it’s not going to cost you anything, but we’re going to create value between the two of us that there’s more than enough of value for everyone. It’s because I take doesn’t mean you lose. It’s because you lose doesn’t mean I take. Everybody wins in the world of abundance. That’s where we need to pitch from with credibility and emotional judgment. Quantify the reasons, impacts, and capability from a world of more than enough. That’s what you do, John. We hit it off the first minute we ever spoke, we knew a lot of people in the same circles, but you started telling me what you do. I said, “This guy gets it. I’ve got to do more stuff with him.”
If you want more of David and let’s face it, why wouldn’t you want more? For the weekly training, you can go to his website at DMeltzer.com/training. Some of the episodes talk about creating a habit machine, learning to love what you do, and health, happiness and profitability. You walk your talk. The fact that you’re giving this training for free is such a gift to the whole community. I want to thank you on behalf of everyone reading for that. I want to encourage everyone to get this, because why would you not? David, any last thoughts or comments you want to leave us with?
Be kind to your future self and do good deeds. You can always email me at [email protected]. John, thank you for having me on.
Thanks for joining us.
Important Links
- David Meltzer
- Sports 1 Marketing
- Leigh Steinberg – Past episode
- @DavidMeltzer – Instagram
- Game-Time Decision Making
- https://DMeltzer.com/training/
- [email protected]
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Outbounding: Win New Customers With Skip Miller
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Enticing people with your offers through cold calling, email marketing, and other business strategies will take more than just mere persuasion. Instead, much more in-depth and carefully thought outbounding techniques are needed. John Livesay sits down with Skip Miller, the President of M3 Learning, to talk about the ingredients that make up an effective outbounding process. Skip talks about connecting with your target audience through emotions, comparing outbounding to a first date, the power of references, and the importance of tapping above-the-line buyers. He also shares his mission to destroy the term decision-maker and how to let go of your fears.
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Listen to the podcast here
Outbounding: Win New Customers With Skip Miller
Our guest on the show is Skip Miller, the author of Outbounding. He said, “The best sales call in the world is one where you don’t say much. The secret is to get people to be curious when you’re reaching out to them.” He’s on a mission to destroy the concept of there being decision-makers, find out what he means by that as well as a magical question to ask to determine whether someone’s going to take action right away or not. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Skip Miller, the President of M3 Learning, a pro-active sales management and training company based in the heart of Silicon Valley. He’s also the author of Outbounding. As the President of M3 Learning, Skip has provided training to hundreds of companies in over 35 countries. He created M3 Learning to make a salesperson better on each individual call. M3 Learning signature selling methodology ProActive Selling is unique in its high-definition focus on the tactics of selling and proactive sales controls. Skip, welcome to the show.
It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
It’s my pleasure as well. We were having a wonderful chat pre the show talking about our passion for helping salespeople connect better. Before we get into your expertise and the team you’ve created, I love to ask guests their own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, school, wherever you were, along with this concept of, “I like connecting to people or I love sales,” or anything you want to share about your own particular background would be great.
I’ve got a big family, five brothers and sisters so you can’t avoid people in that situation. In college, I worked part-time at a small sporting goods store in Cleveland, Ohio. My job was to go to school in the mornings. In the afternoon, I’d try to go to high schools and bid on their football uniforms, cheerleading and basketball. We were a small little store about as big as an office. We were small. We were competing against big giant sporting goods stores.
[bctt tweet=”Make me curious.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I figured out that junior highs have as much money as high schools. I would go to these junior highs and pick up these orders because it was below the radar of the senior high schools. I had a good time building my little own business that way. When I left college, I became a salesperson and sales manager and stuff. For about twenty years, I was Sales VPs and stuff. The company I was with was a high-tech market research firm called Data Quest got bought by a company on the East Coast. I’m from Cleveland but I’ve been living in California for many years. I didn’t want to go back to the East Coast.
Not an offense to the East Coast people, but I like California. I said, “I might as well as to try to start my own business.” That was many years ago. The second or third month I started my business, I got a good-sized customer and I never looked back. It’s been a fun ride. To your point in the intro, I love walking away. A few years later, out of nowhere, I’ll get an email or a LinkedIn from somebody saying, “Skip, I took your course five years ago and I still use your tools. I want to drop you a note.” It’s hysterical. If you can make somebody a manager or a salesperson better at the point of attack, I feel great. That’s my reward so it’s been fine.
I’m guessing M3 Learning has a story of origin behind it. What does M3 stand for?
John, like you, you start your business and you’ve got to file a form to the states or whatever else saying the name of your business. I know I didn’t want to name it Skip Miller Consulting. It stands for Miller and his three kids. I’ve got three kids. In every one of my books, I call out my kids. When they were in school, they would take their friends to Barnes & Nobles or somebody and show that their name was in my book. They liked it.
Outbounding Techniques: A manager must know when and how to tweak strategies based on market demand, competition, and everything out there.
You’re a rockstar for that. One of the things that we were talking about is this need to feel seen, heard and appreciated. Kids say that all the time, “Watch me jump in the pool, dad or mom,” or whatever. That need to be seen, heard, acknowledged and appreciated does not go away when we go into our job. It may be subconscious. Let’s talk a little bit about that because that’s something that is unique. You and I both have a big passion for that. An awareness of it having both been in the salespeople’s shoes, in management and see those little acknowledgments as opposed to the once a year.
Let’s stand it on its head. People do need to be heard. They do need to be seen. The best sales call in the world is not where you hang up the phone or you get off the Zoom meeting going, “Nailed that puppy. That was a good call. I was on my game. That was good.” While you’re doing that, the customer is going, “What was that?” The best sales call in the world is where you hang up the phone or you get off the meeting and go, “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even use a slide.” The customer is going, “They heard me. They feel great.”
As a next step, you can start doing your presentations but if you don’t get that attachment up front, they’ve taken your call, they’re going to take your meeting, they’re going to take your ten seconds of a cold call, whatever else but you want to make them feel like they’ve been heard. That’s a powerful draw. Everybody, managers don’t reward their salespeople enough. They always were telling them what they’re doing wrong and not right. Take what you said about being heard, felt and standing on its head and that’s a powerful drive for when salespeople need to outbound.
One of the things I love about your book, Outbounding, is how you talk about certain actions and certain ones are things that only inbound people are doing versus what outbound people are doing. There are a lot of crossovers but there’s a big difference. Would you speak to what the big difference is?
[bctt tweet=”Consistency wins.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s all about the buyer. We spend so much time thinking about ourselves, our approach, presentation, demo and our products. From a buyer standpoint, if you get an inbound lead, data shows they’re about 50%, 55% through their biocycle already. They’ve got an understanding that they got to make a change. They’ve somewhat monetized it. That’s why they’ve approved the budget. They’re about halfway through a sales cycle. They know they have a problem and they have to make a change.
Outbound, it’s like throwing darts. Did we get them at the right time? Is the buy window open? Most of the time an outbound, the buyer doesn’t know they don’t know. Once informed, they’re like, “I know I’ve always had a problem there. I live with it. I didn’t know there was a fix.” The approaches must be different. What we do is wrong. What we tell the outbound people is, “Those inbound templates we’re using are great. Why don’t you use some of those things?”
Let’s go to another three-day class where we could teach them more about our products, features, benefits and competitive advantages so you can use those in your outbounding. I don’t even know I have a problem yet. You’re telling me about your competitor doesn’t do this. Great. I didn’t know I had a problem. The messaging, I’m getting a lot of input regarding we can’t door knock anymore. We can’t walk halls. We can’t go to trade shows. You’re limited to social. You’re limited to email or you’re limited to the phone.
What can we do to get better attention? Change your message, change your cadence and your sequence. John, I went up to a salesperson at a meeting. I said, “You want to learn about outbounding? How has it been going for you?” He goes, “I outbound.” I said, “What have you been doing?” He goes, “I sent two people an email last week and I’m waiting to hear back.” I go, “That’s your outbounding. Good luck with that one.” That’s where we’re at with that. The whole point is inbound and outbound is different. We don’t treat it differently and we don’t have the correct management dashboards to reward the rep correctly. The processes are different.
Outbounding Techniques: The best way to get a hold of somebody is obviously referencing a person.
I hear a lot of people saying that are “inside salespeople” reaching out, trying to get business that they’re measured on how many calls they make as opposed to the quality of the calls or the outcome from the calls. I’m like, “What a bizarre thing to measure? If you don’t make X number of calls in X amount of time, you’re not working hard enough.” It goes back to that old stuff of throw a bunch of spaghetti up against the wall and see what sticks, which is not a strategic way to sell at all.
There are control knobs, John. Companies like Zoom with the pandemic, it’s a numbers game, dial, demands high, low-hanging fruit, whatever we want to call it. For that short timeframe, the pitch is good enough, make contact. In normal business times, you have to control outbound quality with competency. We call them frequencies and competencies. It’s doing a lot or a little bad, good stuff. If the market is in hot demand like when Tableau first came out, the whole market for visual analytics was hot. Dial, get an appointment, throw it over the wall and go and that’s not common. For most of your readers, they’re going to be sitting there going, “I can’t do 100 or 1,000 calls a day.”
Let’s work on quality. There’s a mixture of both in your cadence and sequences. We see people’s quality as poor. It’s all about us, what we do. That’s got to start being worked out but there are control knobs. We see people who do good emails but they’re doing five a week. Can you get it to ten? Can you get it to 100? There are control nubs and that’s a great management dashboard. It’s not about the hike. If I can get a meeting, throw it over the wall, that’s my job. It’s the same ISRs or the same SDRs. I want to get the meeting, talk to both the decision-makers and stuff and then throw it over the wall. It depends on where you’re at in the marketplace but there’s no doubt that quality and quantity are control knobs that managers got to tweak based upon market demand, competition and everything out there.
My background was in advertising sales and they were always talking about frequency and reach. The same concepts apply. Like a car company when I would call on them to advertise with me, they would say, “We never know when someone is in the market to buy a car. We have to advertise all year long. Hoping that our ad in a magazine or a commercial or on a website happens to catch somebody at that magical moment when they think, “I might go test drive this weekend.” If you have millions and millions of dollars to do that, you can do that. As a salesperson, that strategy is not efficient to say the least because you haven’t qualified someone or created some content that maybe somebody would even be intrigued enough to even start the journey. They don’t even know they have a problem until you point out there is a solution.
[bctt tweet=”The best sales call in the world is where you say very little.” username=”John_Livesay”]
John, consistency wins. One of the best people out there we’ve seen, they have a salesperson who does a regular sales job and takes a list of 25 people, puts them in a 12-touch 2-week cadence. At the end of the two weeks, they take that 25 out, take the ones out that didn’t respond or who do respond to write out and put that aside. You take a second 25 for a 2-week 12-touch cadence, take that out. They have three 25-touch cadences. I’m going to touch you for two weeks then I’m off for four and then I come back for two. They have a rotating carousel of three 25-touch cadences. It takes a good outbound salesperson who’s always busy an hour a day. If you get the system down and get your messaging down and stop outbounding like you want to get married, “I’m Skip Miller. We have the best product. I’m the representative for seven. You have to see ours. It’s our first day.” Treat it like the first day. Make me curious. Don’t tell me who you are.
I talk about that in terms of going from invisible to irresistible and if it rungs on a ladder like in dating. He’s where I see a lot of people get stuck and I would love to hear how you help them is in the middle of invisible to irresistible is the interesting. Wrong. In the dating world, maybe you say something to somebody and they like, “I’m interested to keep talking to you. I’m not agreeing to fly with you yet.” Salespeople get all excited and they tell their boss, “They were interested. They asked me to send them information,” and then it’s crickets. They’re stuck in the friend zone at work. They don’t know how to get out of it. I tell people storytelling is one way to get out of the interesting friend zone at work. I know from your book and your expertise, you’ve seen this happen all the time, yes?
Yeah, without a doubt. The best way to get ahold of somebody is to reference a person. You know somebody, I know somebody and that’s going to be instant rapport. That’s going to be hard to break. After that, it ties to your interesting comment. I come up with the big five. Here are the five things that you should look at if you’re going to outbound to try to get somebody’s attention. The top of the list, without a doubt, to you is curiosity. Make me curious about my title, about my industry, about things that my company’s doing.
“I’m going to do some homework on Debbie because I’m going to go after Debbie there and find out about Debbie.” That’s a rifle shot. Good luck with that. It can work but also Debbie’s curious about people at her level in other companies. Debbie is curious about other companies that are in her industry. Make me curious, give me a little dab. Don’t give me, “Here are five attachments.” Curiosity to your interesting level makes me go, “Let’s talk some more.” Same with that interesting wrong so make me curious, the great theme for those outbounding touches.
Outbounding Techniques: The passion must come from the salesperson, as well as their mission to tap into that energy for the prospect they’re talking to.
One of the things that you touched on is this concept of emotions at the start of the Inc. article. I am a big believer that people buy emotionally, even back it up with logic, even if it’s a big purchase or a corporate purchase. You talk about greed, fear and pride. A lot of people overlook the unspoken fear buyers have that if I make the wrong decision or pay too much, I’m going to get in trouble and I’m even fired. That concept of fear, uncertainty and doubt has been around since the ‘80s when IBM used it if you bought anything that wasn’t their product. It broke, they would point the finger at the other vendors that were dealing with that. I wanted to get your take on curiosity is certainly in that world of, “We’re out of people’s heads.” How important is emotion in getting people engaged?
Emotion is going to drive energy. I’m a huge energy person. I believe that a sale, it’s like a rollercoaster. You get to the top of the roller coaster and it’s losing energy and then the deal goes dark. It goes south. It goes quiet. It’s not getting energy at the top of the hill trying to push it over. You should have gotten energy earlier in the sales call. That earlier energy is emotion. It’s not so much what we call pleasure emotion. It’s more away from pain. We all want to look for pain points. A classic question is what’s the size of the problem? If you don’t understand a problem, they’re not going to have to change.
If it isn’t broke, I’m not fixing it. Something broke and what’s the size of the gap? Those are great mission statements to be on. I started writing the book and I was probably about 2, 3 weeks into it and I scrapped it and started over. Attitude is important as you outbound. It’s not, “I hope they take my call. I hope I can make my pitch.” A good outbounder believes, especially in a B2B world, they’re making their company money. They’re losing money daily by me not being able to talk to them about their issues and challenges. You’ve got to have that emotional passion to go out. You also got to try to find that emotional passion. It’s great when you get somebody on the phone or on Zoom or they go now that’s the problem.
That’s where you want to get to but if you don’t have that same emotion, that same energy, you’re not going to find it. Great outbounders are looking for emotion in themselves because they’re the top people. The ones who can speak the most or the biggest alpha dog, they’re on a mission to help the customers. My job is to have you listen to ten minutes of me and if it doesn’t fit any problems or challenges you have, no harm, no foul. The buy window is not open. I’ll call you in six months but you owe me ten minutes because I’ve done some homework on your company.
[bctt tweet=”To get the attention of many, changing your message, cadence, and sequence is important.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I was talking at a speech a couple of years ago to about 100 CEOs. I asked them why they would take a sales call and they said they wouldn’t. At the bar, I asked them, “Why would you take a sales call?” A bunch of them sat back and said, “The problem with salespeople calling us is they’re a solution hunting for a problem.” One of the first things they say is, “We can help.” You don’t even know what my problem is and you’re telling me you can help me.
You got to come up with a passion and my job is to listen to your story, to what you’re up to quickly. Maybe we can help or not but you can’t sit back and say, “I’m here to help. My mission is to help you,” but my first step has got to be, “I don’t know if I help or not.” I get a sales call and the guy calls in and says, “We want to train our salespeople. Can you help?” What’s your problem?” We can help in certain areas in certain areas we don’t. That mission has got to be emotional. The passion has got to be from the salesperson as well as their mission to go tap into that energy for the prospect they’re talking to.
There’s a myth that people think, “I lost the sale in the closing.” What I’m hearing you say is you probably lost it at the beginning because you didn’t bring enough energy and passion.
That’s one of the things we don’t teach is closing skills because the close started happening back at Stage 2. If you’re selling proposals, “John, we have a quick technology sales cycle, initial interest discovery, proposal harass,” that’s what we typically do here. It’s, “I want a presentation. Here’s the demo. Here’s the proposal. Buy now and I’ll give you ten points off if you’d make it by the end of the month.” It’s ridiculous. There’s no energy, no emotion, no anything. You’ve got to get over that.
Outbounding Techniques: A good way to handle objections is to agree with the demand direct where you want to take them.
You talk about that there are two decisions in a business-to-business sale, one above the line and one below the line. I like that formula. First teaching people to identify who’s who and there are meetings that happen after the meeting. This awareness that you’re creating and giving people some skills because they hear a bunch of proposals, a lot of presentations and then the decision-makers, “Now what do we all think?” Let’s talk about the ATL, the Above The Line, the Below The Line and what their needs are and how a rep can start to zoom in on that.
I was into buyer’s personas. You’ve got the user buyer, the fiscal buyer, the technical buyer, the executive buyer. There are too many buyers out there. One day I said, “There are three types of buyers, the user buyer, the fiscal buyer and the executive buyer. The user buyer is a feature function. The fiscal buyers create value for me, the executive buyers, market share, market size and still was messed up. I said, “Why don’t we name this?” We’ll call the user buyer Spaniards, the middle buyers Russians, the top people Greeks. You’ve got Spaniards, Russians and Greeks.
If you have a meeting with three Spaniards and a Russian, what language should you speak? The obvious answer is Russian because they’re the top person. That worked well. People were getting a little like, “Why are the Spaniards on the bottom?” We did some work for a company where the entire senior management team was from Russia. They want to know why the Greeks were ahead of them because they’re broken. It’s a metaphor.
Finally, our friends at Google said, “It’s not politically correct and stuff.” We came up with this above and below the line. John, I am on a mission to destroy the term decision-maker. There are two, the below the line buyer is one who says, “I’m responsible for making this work, the support. If we’re going to bring this on, I want these features. I want this security package. I want this. I want that. That’s their job.” The above the line buyer says, “As I look at 2021, our new product is probably got to generate $50 million. I probably got $20 million in the bank. I’m missing $30 million. If we could do something that can make a dent in that $30 million gap, what was the name of that again? Buy one of those things. I don’t care what features and benefits it has. As long as below the line buyer’s above the line buyers where you’re going to find energy. The above the line buyer is the one who says, “I got a gap. Bob, here’s the $50,000 budget. Go find something to make a dent in my $30 million problem.” I don’t care per se. The above the line buyer does care if they’ve been heard.
[bctt tweet=”Treat outbounding as a first date. Make the other person curious.” username=”John_Livesay”]
As you prospect and outbound of the buyer, the goal is not to give them your below-the-line pitch. They don’t speak Spanish. Go above the line and find out what are their initiatives for the next 3, 6, 9 months? What gaps do they have on those initiatives? We call them trains at the train station. Why is the train in the station? If you can make a dent in 2 or 3 of their trains, you don’t have to fix the whole train. Make a dent in 2 or 3, watch how much energy your deal has. Most salespeople go below the line. They want to talk about us. We want to talk about us. We all talk about us but when you go above the line, I’ll give you an executive overview of all the stuff we’ve been talking to below the line on.
It’s different. We’ve got to understand what an above the line buyer wants. What they want is to be able to mitigate risk. They want to be able to make a dent in their problems, on their initiatives or trains that they have in the train station. It’s two different ways of looking at a sale. Overall sales cycles usually are cut in half when this happens because the above the line buyer goes, “We’ve got to get this. We got it. Let’s go. We’ve got to do this now.” Rather than Bob has taken his time, he’s doing a two-month evaluation. Bob’s got the whole thing going. Sales cycles get shorter when you do it.
We’ve turned your book, Outbounding, into a course. I know one of the lesson sessions is about handling objections. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you to touch on how you’re helping people handle objections.
John, objections are always fun because what we hear as you all know, not all the time right now, “Now’s not a good time. We’re fine. We don’t need anything,” those typical objections. What happens is your body’s chemistry wants to go into defense mode, the fight or flight. You’re wrong and here’s why you’re wrong. We have a tool in there called Flow of the River. It’s a martial arts term. Martial arts teaches not to block energy but the flow of energy. When you hear an objection like, “Now’s not the right time,” agree with it, “John, you’re right.” A lot of companies we talked to say, “This is not the right time. However, if you give me ten minutes of your time, you may see where it could be a good time.” I’m asking for ten minutes, John. If you block me, you’re wrong. You’ve got my guard up. If you agree with me, I’m going to let my guard down.
Outbounding: Win New Customers with Outbound Sales and End Your Dependence on Inbound Leads
Call Verizon and AT&T up, “I got a problem with my phone. I can see you’re right. It takes the winds out of your sales and now you’re ready for a conversation. I’m mad. My thing has been out for three hours. What’s your problem? You have a good right to be mad. Thank you.” It puts them defenseless. A good way to think of objection handling right up front is the bottom line is to make sure you think to agree with it and then direct where you want it to take it.
It reminds me of the old statement I heard years ago, “Do you want to be right? Do you want to be happy?”
Let’s put that stake in the ground. That’s not a good stake in the ground.
The book, Outbounding, can be found on Amazon. If people want to learn more about you, they can go to M3Learning.com. You do a lot of speaking to the clients.
We’ve got some training classes. John, I hate writing books. I don’t know about you, but I hate it. It’s 4:00 in the morning stuff for me. It’s Miller time at 5:00 PM. When I see a problem, in 2019, all the low-hanging fruit was going away. People had to start outbounding. You talk to salespeople, “I’d get to 80% of my number. I’m going to have to do a little outbounding.” They wait until November. By that time, it’s late. People were hurting because they’re so fearful of outbounding, fear of rejection, fear of the word no, I got to get six noes before I get a seventh yes. I hate getting noes. Who wants that rejection? I took it as a challenge to try to help the individual salespeople come up.
Don’t be fearful about this. It’s not a big fear thing. Do A, B and C, be on a mission to help your prospects, your customers and managers start measuring the right stuff. You’re measuring old-school stuff. If you want to measure good outbounding practices, given that we’ve got numerous channels, we have mail, social media, direct emails. There are numerous starts putting better dashboards together than the ones you like, “How many calls you make now?” which is hysterically archaic. It’s good but archaic. There are new ways. That’s why I wrote the book, help managers out, help salespeople out. If people want to read it, great. If they’re doing fine, if they don’t have a problem, there’s no reason.
Thanks, Skip, for sharing your knowledge and your insights. I love this concept of being on a mission to destroy decision-makers.
I’m on a mission to destroy the decision-maker because there are two. There’s not one.
That’s a great concept of how to look at all of that and how to reframe it. As you said, “Let go of the fear.” We will let everybody know how to become better at outbounding. Even if your job is not sales, we all have to sell ourselves all the time. There are some real tidbits in that book that will help everyone get over that fear of “the cold call.”
For me, I hate returning things. I go to Target or somewhere and I go, “Did you use this? I’m sorry.” I hate rejection as much as anybody. If I had to overcome it, people will read the book too.
Thanks, Skip.
John, thank you for your time.
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Invisible Solutions With Stephen Shapiro
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Many people advise us to think about our destination, our end-goal, that sometimes, we miss out on the many opportunities that come our way. The author of Invisible Solutions, Stephen Shapiro, joins John Livesay in this episode to share with us the different lenses he’s created to allow us to see the solutions that are right in front of our face but are in fact invisible. One to emphasize how we should focus on the direction we’re going, he tells us some great insights, tips, and tricks towards becoming a lot more successful—from the importance of branding to learning how to ask the right questions. He also shares what a performance paradox is about and how we can use it to our best advantage.
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Listen to the podcast here
Invisible Solutions With Stephen Shapiro
Our guest on the show is Stephen Shapiro, the author of Invisible Solutions. He shares with us all the different lenses he’s created to allow us to see those solutions that are right in front of our face but are in fact invisible. He said that if you focus on your direction you’re going and not necessarily just the destination, you’re going to be a lot more successful. He talks about what a performance paradox is and how we can use it to our best advantages. Sometimes having the answer is not the answer. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Stephen Shapiro. For many years, he’s presented his provocative strategies on innovation, culture and collaboration to audiences in 50 countries. During his fifteen-year tenure with the consulting firm, Accenture, he created and led a 20,000-person innovation practice. He’s the author of five books, including Invisible Solutions. His clients include Marriott, 3M, P&G, Microsoft, Nike, NASA and GE. In 2015, Stephen was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame. He’s also been a regular judge and mentor on the TV show, Girl Starter. We’re going to be talking about stories, how to become more inventive and what the heck is an invisible solution. Stephen, welcome to the show.
John, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
I love to ask people like you to take us back to childhood or school when you started this curiosity factor that you seem to have in spades about, how does the world work and how can things be better? Start anywhere with whatever the story jumps out in your head.
I would say I’ve always been a bit of a tinkerer. I liked seeing how things work so I would take things apart and hopefully, try to put them back together. I did that sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully but that was something I always love to do as a kid. I also love magic because to me, magic is like, how do things happen? How do you do things that are impossible? I’ve always been fascinated with taking things that appear complex and trying to deconstruct them and understand them, then reconstruct them in a way that they’re not so complex.
Take us at the beginning of your college. How did you decide what to major in when you have that interest?
I had two paths that I was going to go down. One was going to music because I was a jazz sax player and good at it, and then the other one was an engineer. I got a lot of advice. In fact, one piece of advice I got from someone which goes counter to what a lot of people might say is they said, “If your passion is music, don’t major in it because once you start having to make a living off of it, it might crush your passion. Choose something that is going to make money and then do music as your true passion on the side.” I became an engineer because I’m a bit of a nerd.
[bctt tweet=”An ineffective question is one that doesn’t give you the results you want.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There’s a lot of similarities between music and math and all that, so that’s not a huge shock. I’ve heard Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity and in her case, it’s writing books like you. She’s like, “If you put too much pressure on your creative outlets to make you a living, it does take the joy away from it.” There’s something to be said there, where we don’t have any pressure on anything we love doing, and then if the money happens to come great. To make that jump in is I advise that a lot of young people are not getting because Robert’s “follow your bliss” situation is a big thing. Let’s jump into those fifteen years at Accenture. You’re based in London some of the time and you’re managing all these people. What kinds of problems were you solving?
The biggest problems that we were focused on were how do we take the mindset of 20,000 people who are much technology-led? A lot of Accenture was much on technology implementation. The group that I was working with was about, whether it’s SAP or some other enterprise management system or some other new technology, how do we get them to focus on value first? How do we get them to think innovatively and then look at the technology as solution? That was the problem we were trying to solve. We did that through a series of programs, books, materials and other things trying to create a greater awareness of how you can, without taking a lot of time, rethink the entire thought process for delivering a project.
You started your speaking career after that. Is that correct?
I had the first copies of my book on September 10th, 2001. It’s a bittersweet day because the next day, things were a little different. I plan to leave the company at that point and left Accenture when my first book came out. It’s been many years that I’ve been doing my own thing. I’ve been focusing on helping companies innovate, solve problems, collaborate and things of that nature.
In your book, Invisible Solutions, you’re wearing a purple shirt and the burqa is purple. There’s a lot of purple on your website as well. Let’s talk about the importance of branding, being known for colors, and certain things. What are your thoughts on that? How did you come up with purple?
I always loved purple. I have these big geodes that are deep purple and I always love those. Even as a kid, I have those. I’ve always loved purple for whatever reason. I hired branding companies that said, “You can’t do purple. Purple’s a bad color for a brand.” I moved away from purple. When the book came out, we decided to go with the purple cover. I went back to what I love. I love purple. To me, it’s a good royal color. I remember one of the first speeches that I gave after I left Accenture, I was in Singapore. I was told that purple is a color for innovation. I was like, “There you go. That worked out perfectly.”
Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems
That’s all meant to be. The cover of your book is fascinating. There’s a guy in a suit and these glow in the dark glasses. What’s the story there?
It’s the variation of the invisible man. The whole book is on 25 lenses, which are 25 different ways to reframe the problem. The fedora, glasses, tie, and jacket, if you look carefully, you’ll see subtly are all 25 lenses written. The whole outfit is made up of the words of the lenses.
It reminds me of Dolce & Gabbana, how they have words and their logos on dresses, purses and things and it becomes immersive like that. My first question is, how’d you come up with the title? Usually, people think, “If a solution is invisible, is that a solution?” We get down in the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole a little bit.
I’ve been fortunate to have a buddy of mine, Adam Lefort, who’s brilliant at technology but he’s also great at coming up with big concepts. One of my books was called Best Practices are Stupid. Adam came up with that title. He came up with Invisible Solutions. The whole idea of the book is the best solutions are right in front of your nose. You just can’t see them because we’re not asking the right questions or we’re looking at the problem the wrong way. He said, “The solutions are there. They’re just invisible. They’re hidden.” That’s how we came up with the title which led to the invisible man, and then the cover was designed by my buddy, John Brunswick, who was at Salesforce. He came up with this concept one day and said, “How about the invisible man as a concept for the book cover?” I’m like, “Cool. Let’s go with it.”
Both in your keynote and in your book, you talk about how we are hardwired to ask ineffective questions. People would say, “We’re hardwired that way?” Let’s start with your definition of what is an ineffective question. I can guess but I’m sure you put a lot of thought into what an ineffective question is.
An ineffective question is one that doesn’t give you the results you want. The reason why we ask ineffective questions is because we probably don’t even ask questions. What we’re doing is we tend to make snap judgments or snap decisions, and then we start moving forward quickly. Part of this is because the brain’s primary function is survival. We need to innovate to survive and we need to adapt to survive, but we tend to innovate and adapt as a means of survival. The primary message of the brain says, “Whatever we did before we were together today, John, didn’t kill us so it’s probably safest for us to continue whatever we’ve done in the past.”
[bctt tweet=”Often, when we’re trying to solve a problem, we think of it too abstractly. We don’t take the time to frame it properly.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Anything new, different, and ambiguous might be risky, and therefore, we don’t want to do it. The brain doesn’t spend a lot of time processing the question. It is more reactionary in many respects. We need to put that conscious mechanism of putting the pause button on and say, “What is the real problem that I’m trying to solve? Where am I trying to go?” Sometimes, in organizations, business, and life, we’re under time pressures, so we think we need to go fast. The problem is if you go fast in the wrong direction, you’re just going further away from the ultimate result that you want to achieve. A little bit of time upfront can go a long way in repositioning you need to go in the right direction.
I’m fascinated by this whole fight or flight response concept. It’s something safe or not and yet, how do we build trust with clients, especially in the sales world? It’s little tricks and tips that we do as speakers, even though we’ve been on many stages. I’d be curious to see if you do this as well. If you have the opportunity the night before you give a talk in the morning, you go into the room, check it out, and maybe even walk up on the stage. You’re telling your body, “This is the safe space. This is not my first time on the stage. I know where the stairs are.” All those things that you don’t want to have to be thinking about survival like, “I don’t want to trip and look like a fool” is an example of that?
Absolutely. I will always go through a rigorous amount of practice the night before, whether it’s in the shower, thinking through certainly the first 3 to 5 minutes of the speech because I want to nail the beginning, and it’s always different. I know some speakers say, “I’ve got my first five-minute story.” I’ve tried that many times to have a starting story and it never seems to land. I don’t think it connects with the audience. I want to talk about, what’s the pain of the audience? What are they going through? I give a lot of thought to that so that when I’m ready to deliver the speech, even if it’s totally different, at least I feel comfortable that I’ve spent the time to think about it.
Yes, I love to practice. We’re on virtual stages so I’m in my office delivering speeches. I don’t know, John, if this is the same for you, but I still get nervous every speech. I don’t care what speech it is and I don’t care who it is. I sometimes do a little biofeedback. I’ll check my pulse in a live event. If I’m in the audience, I’ll be sitting there and I’ll put my fingers on my pulse. I’ll feel my pulse and I’ll control my breathing because I know that nervousness is going to help me explode on stage, but I don’t want to blow up and have my brains all over the place. I like to at least calm myself down a little bit.
I talk about this because a lot of salespeople struggle with nerves when they get up in front of big clients. I call it your Super Bowl of meetings or your Olympic moment. Everybody gets those butterflies in their stomach. My whole advice that I use myself is my whole goal is to get those butterflies in my stomach to fly in formation. I do that by saying, “It’s game time.” It’s my adrenaline kicking in and that fine line between being nervous and excited feels a lot the same, so we get to reframe it. I know what you mean. You’re sitting maybe off stage or standing off stage and they’re writing down the introduction to you and your heart starts beating a little bit faster because you know it’s showtime in a few seconds. You need to ground yourself and realize, “I’m excited. I’m not scared. I prepared for this.”
Let’s come to sales for a moment because one of the reasons why we might get nervous on a stage or in a sales pitch is because we are attached to the outcome. In many cases, we’re attached to the wrong outcome. If I’m trying to do a sales pitch, I might be attached to making the sale. That’s the outcome I want to get from it. If you can shift that outcome to, “I want to connect with the audience. I want to give them as much value as I possibly can, regardless of the sale,” now all of a sudden, that shifts your mindset and probably has. You’d be a better salesperson. When it comes to speaking, if I’m worried about, “Are they going to like me? Are they going to laugh? Am I going to get a standing ovation?” I’m going to fail. I try to remind myself, “I’m there to serve them the best I can. I’m going to give it my best shot. That’s all I can do.” If it’s all about me giving value, not me getting accolades, now I’ve shifted things and I find it helps a lot.
Invisible Solutions: The best solutions are right in front of your nose. You just can’t see them because we’re not asking the right questions or we’re looking at the problem the wrong way.
I went through this the first time I did a virtual talk and of course, everyone was on mute. When I know I get a giggle or a little bit of laugh, I can’t hear it. It took me off my game a tad. I was like, “Okay.” We depend so much on that feedback, energy, and facial reactions you can see people’s faces. I’m curious to know your experience of this, Stephen. Once the talk was over and people could post stuff in chat and take themselves off mute, the people are holier now than they were before the pandemic for connection, inspiration, and new tips. We’re saying how much they liked it. They got more feedback than the applause in a ballroom. I’m fascinated to know your thoughts on that.
People want connection. They don’t want to be in these endless Zoom calls, but they want to connect around something of meaning, purpose, and value. I know some of my speaker friends are 180 degrees from where I am but I love virtual. Partly because what you said that set you back a little bit was you didn’t get the audience reaction. My problem is in a live event, in-person event, I’m watching the audience and I’m thinking, “What are they thinking?” All these things start going through my head.
With the virtual audience, what’s awesome is I can be there. I do a lot of engagement with chat and other things but when I’m delivering the content, I’m just delivering the content. I’m looking at the camera. I’m giving it the best shot I possibly can. I find that the level of engagement and value and my energy goes up. I’m having a blast delivering virtual because it’s a different experience that can create a heck of a lot more value for the audience and for our clients.
I hear a lot of sales teams struggling with getting in what I call the virtual door. A lot of them, especially in healthcare, didn’t have to do it. They could stop by the doctor’s office and bring in some Starbucks or maybe catch the doctor at a hospital between surgeries. All those ways to connect and meet are gone. If they don’t have practice or training on what to say to even get the meeting before you tell a story, it’s a whole new world. I’m guessing you’ve got some ideas around that since you’re always about making sure you’re asking well-defined questions. Any thoughts and suggestions about what people who’ve never had to request meetings virtually before could be asking to show value at the meeting?
The keyword is value. A lot of times, we want a meeting because we have a hidden agenda. We need to move away from these hidden agendas to an explicit statement of value like, “Why would somebody even care to have a conversation with us? Why would somebody want to pay us to give a speech?” Whatever it is. A lot of times, it’s our get out and sell, but people don’t want to be sold. They want to be helped.
That’s what I try to do. I try to reach out to my best clients, my favorite clients, past clients, and people I’ve never done business with before and find something that I can connect to their pain. Unfortunately, I have a tool and a process and everything else that solves most people’s pains but putting that aside, everybody has a way of creating value. It’s not a Starbucks gift card. It’s not, “Let’s have a random conversation.” It has to be something that’s meaningful, timely and relevant for that individual.
[bctt tweet=”If you want to sell more, don’t focus on selling. Focus on serving.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That right now aspect of it. I first learned about this from a publicity standpoint. If you’ve got a book coming out and you’re a publicist and you are looking for what’s in the news and the headlines that are relevant to what I’m saying that pulls it in. When I’ve worked with people on their pitch to get a startup funded, it’s why now? If we think back in 2008, if the economy wasn’t in trouble, Airbnb might not have worked and people would have been open to new ways of having an income. That “why now?” question is valuable for all salespeople or anybody in marketing to put their filter through when they’re looking for the right questions to ask that bring this all up. I know you have 25 lenses that help us reframe things. We talked about reframing nervousness to excitement. What is one of your most popular tools of all these 25 lenses that somebody could possibly dabble with?
They’re all equally valuable. They’re all my children. I love them all equally. There are some that are more applicable. It depends on the type of problem. I’ll give a couple of them. A lot of times when we’re trying to solve a problem, we think of it too abstractly. We don’t take the time to frame it properly. Let’s say it’s a company that’s losing revenues. They might ask the question how do I grow revenues? How do I prevent eroding revenues? Whatever it might be.
The problem is when we ask these big, broad, abstract questions, it’s like trying to solve world hunger. We can get tens of thousands of ideas of which probably none of them have value. We need to, in those situations, break them down into something smaller. We need to reduce abstraction. There are five lenses for that. One which I always use is the leverage lens. It’s lens number one. It’s the most basic of lenses, but it says, “If you could only solve one aspect of this problem, what would it be? What’s going to give you the greatest return, the greatest bang for your buck?”
If you’re trying to increase revenues, you might ask, “First of all, is it revenues you want or is it profitability?” You could grow revenues but erode profitability. That’s a different lens. That’s a substitute lens. Is it revenues or profits? If it’s profits, then we can ask ourselves, “Who are the most profitable customers?” That’s a great start. What we might do is use the reduce lens, which is another lens to say, “Maybe instead of having more highly profitable customers, maybe we want to target fewer highly profitable customers.” Now you can see how we’ve gone from revenues to fewer highly profitable customers.
The last one I want to throw out is the variation lens. If we’re going to say we’re going to put most of our energy into our most highly profitable customers, we need to find a way of serving everyone else. The variation lens says, “We don’t necessarily want to. We probably do not want to use a one size fits all strategy.” How do we serve our most profitable customers one way, yet still offer something of value that might be completely different from our other customers?
For example, if you’re in financial services, maybe for your most highly profitable customers, you have a hands-on service where you provide them financial planning or whatever it might be. Whereas everyone else that’s purely digital, you can’t even walk into a bank. You can’t even do it with a teller or whatever it might be. Now you’ve got a highly efficient margin on one side where it can handle large volumes, and then the other one is high touch but high value. In the variation lens, think about how you would handle different segments, customers and people differently.
Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition
I have an example of this from when I was selling advertising and one of my clients was Banana Republic. They had said, “We’re never going to be Neiman Marcus in terms of service and price points.” The question was, what could we do to target 20% of the clients that we have that are giving us 80% of the revenue? You triggered my memory when you’re talking about, “Let’s look at our most profitable customers.” They tended to be in San Francisco in the Union Square store and in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. They said, “Let’s try and anticipate, what is luxury?” That was the next question. That’s using your process without even knowing they’re using it. Now that I understand your process, it’s fascinating to see this in action. What is luxury besides price point? That’s the big shift. That’s the ineffective question. It’s the norm. Luxury is expensive. What else is luxury?
They came up with a definition that luxury is anticipating a need before you know you need it. From that lens, they said, “Why don’t we test putting in phone charge places in those two locations where the majority of our clients are giving us the majority of the revenue? We’re targeting this 20% of all the people that shop at Banana Republic or we’re going to get a good chunk of them in those two locations, those two big stores. It’ll be a nice way of upping the luxury experience without having to raise our prices or spend a ton of money, but giving them some other little perk.” The results blew them away because sales went up 20%. Not only did the people use it, but they also shopped longer waiting for their phone to fully charge, which they had not even thought of as an outcome. If I understand the takeaway from the book, which I love, Invisible Solutions, that would be it in action?
That’s absolutely it in action. That was a combination of the leverage lens, insights and observation lenses, which are all about, how do we understand what latent needs are? Needs that haven’t been explicitly expressed. That’s a whole bunch of different lenses there. I love that and then you can play with it like, “How do we get them to stay even longer?” Some stores have put in services in retail stores, whether it’s a desk where you could stay and work.
The theory is if you’re staying in the store, even if you’re not shopping, you’re still in the store, then you’d be like, “I see that over there. That’s cool. I want to go get that.” It could be even exclusively for certain clientele. “We got these red stanchions with velvet ropes for special people.” There are lots of different things you could do. The key is to test it out. You can sit around and come up with a lot of cool solutions, but we don’t know if any of them are going to work to do these small experiments.
What are the other things you have in your chapter about, switching elements is a performance paradox? Nobody loves an alliteration more than I do, Stephen. It sticks in my brain. Can you define what a performance paradox is?
The performance paradox is if you want to achieve a goal paradoxically, sometimes the best way to achieve it is to not focus on the goal. If you want to sell more, don’t focus on selling. Focus on serving. I had great pleasure when I was living in London working for a Formula One race car team. I asked them, “How do you get pit crews to go fast?” They said, “We tell them to go fast but what we found is that if we tell them not to focus on their speed, but focus on their style and their movements, they went faster and they thought they were going slower.”
[bctt tweet=”One of the big mistakes we make is we get myopically focused on the future that we forget that the future is not predictable.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There’s a lot of examples of this, whereby shifting from the outcome or the goal to a present moment activity can fundamentally shift your performance because you reduce stress. I’m not a great golfer, but I think about golfing as a great metaphor because when you’re golfing, which one does is look at the pin. You want to look at where you’re going but once you line up, if you lift your head up and look at the pin as you’re swinging, you’re going to slice the ball. You need to focus on the ball. Your eye has to stay on the ball 100% of the time knowing you’ve lined up and it’s going to go to the pin. That’s the way things work.
Don’t you find a lot of us struggle with worrying about the future too much? We’re not in the present moment, which is what a game like golf requires to be completely present. You can’t be thinking about anything, including what’s happening a few seconds after you swing. How does that help us in business when we do have to do projections and we have a big meeting, and yet we need to be completely present?
We cannot be thinking about, “I need this sale to make my quota.” “If I have to show this person another house. I’m going to lose my mind.” I work with people on replacing that negative self-talk or those future fear-based things with some simple mantras of peaceful and calm as you’re listening to someone give you an objection or interrupting them, worst case. “I have your answer. I’ve heard this objection 100 times. Let me cut to the chase. Talk about a way to kill a sale.” That’s one way to do it, right?
Yeah. We did a study once in a retail store many years back and we had two teams. One team, we told them, “We’re going to see who can sell the most.” We measured how much they sold. Another team, we told them they’re there to serve the customer. We’re going to see how well they serve the customer. That means if the customer should go somewhere else, they go somewhere else. Of course, the sales were measured for both teams and the team that was focused on serving the customer sold more than the team that was focused on making the sales. We can make these shifts.
You need to know where you’re going, at least directionally. I say you don’t want a specific destination. You want a sense of direction and then meander with purpose. That’s one of my favorite lines, which means, I don’t know. If you come up with a five-year plan, you’re smoking something because nobody has a clue of a one-year plan, so you need a sense of direction to make sure you’re moving forward with something but then you go each and every day and make these minor corrections in your course. What you’re going to find is you might move in a different direction, but it’s a better direction based on new information. That’s one of the big mistakes we make. We get myopically focused on the future that we forget that the future is not predictable.
I once heard someone describing this concept in terms of driving that when we’re driving on a freeway, we’re making these subtle corrections with a steering wheel to stay in our lane and not go over to the other oncoming traffic. It’s subconscious, we’re not even aware of it, error, correct. What you’re talking about is focusing on the direction we want to go. When I was a kid in family vacations, I’d be in the backseat torturing my parents. “Are we there yet?”
Invisible Solutions: The performance paradox is if you want to achieve a goal paradoxically, sometimes the best way to achieve it is to not focus on the goal.
That’s what salespeople management can do to each other. “Did you hit that number yet? Did you get that sale?” As opposed to, “Let’s keep focusing on customer service. What do they need? How can we solve that problem?” The other thing that you said I’m fascinated with is on both of those examples where there’s the car team changing the tires quickly or the other example of the contest is people perception. “Am I going slower or faster? Is this working or not?” It’s not always accurate. It’s almost like you’re trying to trust your eyesight and you know that sometimes what you see is not the reality.
When you’re working hard, you think you’re making progress. That’s not necessarily true. Some of the things that I’m talking about here go back many years to research that was done by two scientists, Yerkes-Dodson. If you look at the relationship in between, they use the word arousal, but I think of it as motivation. How do we motivate somebody? Their performance looks like an upside-down U for the most part. No motivation and no performance, then there’s that sweet spot where you hit that peak performance, but then if you over motivate somebody, their performance starts to drop.
Let’s say we were lucky enough to get our name picked out of a hat for a basketball game. If you shoot from the half court, you win money or better yet, let’s choose the county fair. Those little basketball games and you win a stuffed doll. A stuffed doll is not a big motivation but now all of a sudden, I give you $100, you’re going to try a little harder. $300, you’re going to try a little harder. There’s a point that will be different for each person but there’s a point where I’m going to give you so much money, you’re going to get a lot worse. If I said it’s going to be $10 million, I promise you, you will not sink the ball because your nerves are going to go out of control. That’s what we see happening is that upside-down U model.
That’s beginner’s luck because they’re unattached to the performance. “If I don’t do well, I’m not going to beat myself up. I’m not going to suddenly think I’m a bad person or not talented. I’m just trying this.” Once we started trying to beat our own records, when I used to swim competitively, that was always the thing. “Here’s your best time for the last three months. See if you can beat it this race.” Ironically, I find myself in a sales career, which is the same thing with quotas. “You hit this number last year, now we’ve raised it X percentage. I’ll try to beat that.”
It is interesting how we find ourselves. That’s why I always love hearing your own personal story of origins. You’re deconstructing things as a child and now you’re deconstructing myths like, “Working harder doesn’t necessarily mean progress,” or getting people to let go of the premise that, “I have to focus on my outcome and not the process.” All of those things that make us more innovative. There are solutions that are in front of us that we just have to get the right lens so that we can see them. Is that a fairly good, accurate summary of you and your book?
That’s spot on. I’m glad you pulled out the performance paradox because I also say there’s the solution paradox, which is the corollary to it. If you want a better solution, stop focusing on solutions. Having the answers is not the answer. We have to have better questions and we need to reframe the questions. The key to high performance is better questions that lead to faster implementation of more valuable solutions.
[bctt tweet=”The key to high performance is better questions that lead to faster implementation of more valuable solutions.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You need to have a certain emotional EQ to be comfortable that you don’t have all the answers, especially if you’re in a management or leadership position. The old way was if you got that job, you better have every answer or fake it. People can see through that as opposed to more collaborative conversations that I see happening. One last question for you because I see this as a big problem in a lot of different industries. I’m guessing you have a tool through your lenses. All the silos that exist in companies.
They’re constantly telling the silos of whether it’s a practice area and an architecture firm or law firms that have different practice areas or healthcare companies that have separate sales teams for each division of whatever the product is. Yet, they’re trying to get the end-user who’s using one division to use all of them and there’s no way for them to even start so they’re all focused on, “We need more new clients,” as opposed to, “Maybe if we weren’t siloed, we could grow some existing clients to use other divisions.” That to me seems like a huge problem that someone like you has to put a lot of thought into. Any thoughts around that before we say goodbye?
We could do a whole podcast on this one topic. It’s a fascinating one. I remember a company that we’re doing some work with, where their on-time product launch was 15% on-time product launch. The reason was because they thought product development, the R&D group was the product but it wasn’t because they would create a product, and then it would go to marketing. They say, “This is not the right product,” and then we go to sales, “It’s not the right product,” or manufacturing, “We can’t make this product.” They would go around in circles. They redefined product development as being six months after a successful product launch. Everyone, legal, sales, marketing, manufacturing, and R&D were all part of that and measured and incentivized on that. What they went for is from 15% to 70% on-time product launch in one year, simply by shifting people’s definition of what the launch of a product was.
Everybody has a vested interest in that.
Exactly.
The book, Invisible Solutions, you can get it on Amazon, and then Stephen’s website is StephenShapiro.com. Thanks for coming on and sharing your solutions whether they be visible or invisible.
It’s great to be here, John. Thanks.
Important Links
- Invisible Solutions
- Elizabeth Gilbert
- Best Practices are Stupid
- StephenShapiro.com
- Invisible Solutions – Amazon
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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