Scale: Seven Proven Principles To Grow Your Business And Get Your Life Back

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

14.09.20

TSP Jeff Hoffman | Growing Your Business

 

Sometimes, in the pursuit of success, people tend to lose track of what really matters – their life. Jeff Hoffman, the Global Chairman of Dream Tank, joins John Livesay in this episode to talk about what you can do to get your life back and still grow your business. Jeff shares his personal story and how he discovered a straightforward formula to achieve success. Leaning on the notion of working efficiently instead of working all the time, he dives into the details of how this strategy contributed to his success. He also touches on the biggest mistakes you can make when pitching to investors and reveals what approach you need to use to capture their interest.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Scale: Seven Proven Principles To Grow Your Business And Get Your Life Back

Our guest is Jeff Hoffman, who is one of the Cofounders of Priceline. He tells great stories about how he got his philosophy of life, which is to dream big, work hard, and create value. He then goes on to tell us about it’s important when you pitch to not be so dependent on your slides and when you use stories instead of slides to make your point and have logical transitions, you’re going to be much more successful. You’ll find out about what he’s doing to help small businesses during the COVID. Enjoy the episode.

Our guest is Jeff Hoffman who is a successful entrepreneur, a proven CEO, a worldwide motivational speaker, a bestselling author, Hollywood film producer, and a producer of a Grammy-winning jazz album and the Executive Producer of an Emmy award-winning television show. In his career, Jeff has been the founder of multiple startups. He’s been the CEO of both public and private companies and served as a senior executive in many capacities. Jeff has been part of a number of well-known startups, including Priceline.com/Booking.com, UBid.com, and many more. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

We know we have a mutual friend, Brandon Adams, and I know you’ve been involved with producing his show about success but you have so many wonderful examples and lessons to share with the audience in your own story of origin if you don’t mind. Let’s go back to when you were growing up. It could be a child, high school, or college. When did you start getting the urge of what you wanted to do with your life?

The Beginning

I was born at ten years old because my mom couldn’t afford toddlers. I had a single mom, four kids, grew up in the Arizona desert. My mom was always working on multiple jobs. When I was a kid, the concept of independence was big because I didn’t want to bother my already stressed out hardworking mom. When it was time to ride our bikes to the mall to get pizza and go to the movies, I didn’t want to ask her because I knew it was stressful. Early on, I discovered this relationship between hard work and freedom because I would go down the street and say, “Do you need your lawn mowed?” In Arizona, I would go to people who had pools. “Do you want me to clean the leaves out of your pool?”

I delivered the newspapers in the neighborhood. I went out in the hot sun and found a way to get paid by doing hard work. I always had a little roll of money in my pocket that was mine. I realized that working hard is a good way to be independent and make your own decisions. I was doing it honestly to not stress my mom out. Once I did it, I discovered there is a real relationship between how hard you work and how much control you have of your own life. I went to this big public school where even college, honestly, wasn’t that big of a deal. I had this huge educational goal.

[bctt tweet=”There is a real relationship between how hard you work and how much control you have of your own life.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I wanted to go to Yale which my guidance counselor in my own school laughed in my face. She said, “People from here don’t go to a school like that. You go down the street to the community college.” I said, “That’s not what I want to do.” She laughed. I said, “That’s your answer? Are you going to help me or not?” She didn’t help me. My mom had to call the school and say, “Could you fill out the paperwork and give the kid a shot at least?” When I got to Yale, the very first day, I got booted out of class because I didn’t pay the whole tuition. I said, “I gave you my scholarships, my aid, everything I have.” “You didn’t pay,” which is fair.

You can’t pay for 2/3 of your meal at Outback. You had to pay for your meal. I couldn’t go to school. I was faced with my first big defeat. I worked so hard to get into this school and then they’re sending me home and I said, “I’m not going home. Not after all that, not after everything I did.” I remembered that formula. “Why don’t I find some way to do something valuable enough to someone else that they’d pay me to do it for them because that’s the formula?” I later wrote this in three little sentences on my wall, “Dream big, work hard, create value.” I wrote that down back then and I was like, “This has to be the right formula.” You’ve got to have a big dream.

Yale is a big dream for a little kid in the desert. Work hard because you have to work as hard as your dream is big, but create value. If you’re working hard doing something no one cares about, it still doesn’t get you to success. Dream big, work hard, create value. I was like, “I’m going to try that again.” I started my first little company writing software to solve people’s business problems while I was a college student. I funded my entire Yale education and graduated in four years. I never used the word ‘entrepreneur.’ I always thought of it as there’s a way to solve your own problem if you’re willing to do whatever it takes to do that. There’s a saying I saw once, “Everybody wants to be successful just until they find out what it takes.”

“This is harder than I thought. I’m out.” Dream big, work hard, and create value, what a wonderful takeaway right out of the gate. I love that you ended that story letting us know that you got kicked out of Yale in your first day for money challenges and payment issues. You did, in fact, figure out a way to not take that no and finished on time. That alone is a fantastic example of all of that coming alive. Let’s fast forward. You were out of Yale and you’ve got this great experience in computers. How did you apply these principles for Priceline?

The Dream

Let me tell you one story before that. Doing the three things I talked about, I did have a big dream. Since I grew up in a little town where no one ever went anywhere, I wanted to see the world. I heard an old man one day talking about all the countries he visited in his life in different continents. He’d been to 33 countries. I was like, “I’m going to visit 50 countries before I die.” I’m some broke kid in the desert. I had a big dream and I got an engineering job at a big engineering company writing software out of college. The problem was I wasn’t living any dream at all. I went to my cubicle every day and watched the clock because I hated my job. I didn’t hate my paycheck but it wasn’t worth it because I was getting paid to hate my life every day. That didn’t make sense. I was like, “How am I ever going to live this dream of seeing the world while I’m sitting in this cubicle?” My job doesn’t require me to go anywhere but the fourth floor on the elevator every day. Even the cafeteria was already on my floor. I don’t even get to go to another floor.

TSP Jeff Hoffman | Growing Your Business

Growing Your Business: In this entrepreneurial world, if you don’t create value, you don’t eat.

 

For someone who’s got the urge to see the world, that’s not exactly exciting every day.

I walked out and quit. My mom was mad at me. I was completely broke, unemployed, but I was like, “Now that I don’t have somewhere to go tomorrow, I can take a shot at this dream.” I’m going to work way harder on it because, this is in the entrepreneurial world, if you don’t create value, you don’t eat. If I want to keep the lights on, now that I’m unemployed, I better create value for someone so someone pays me. That was where my journey started in the travel industry. It was because I wanted to see the world but I wanted to keep the lights on and pay the bills. I was trying to come up with a solution that enabled me to live my version of an epic life.

We want everybody reading to define their own and live it but be a responsible adult because everyone was yelling at me for quitting my job. I did not want to ask anyone to borrow money when I was broke because I knew they were going to mock me for quitting. I was in the airport, a busy Friday. The ticket I bought to see my mentor, I have an idea it was expensive for an unemployed twenty-something. To get a boarding pass, you had to check-in at a ticket counter back then. It was an hour and I missed a flight. I was upset. I’m at the bottom. There’s no dream. I’m not going anywhere. I’m unemployed and broke. I’m going to have to borrow money for groceries. Everything sucks. All of a sudden, the light bulb went off. Here’s a chance to combine all the things that I told you about.

My big dream, my work ethic, and a way to create value. It took an hour to check-in to get a boarding cart. I got all fired up. I went home and that Friday, I started my first startup. If you’ve ever gone to an airport and checked yourself in at a self-check-in kiosk that prints the boarding pass, that was my first invention. I created those and I started a company, and now they’re in airports all over the world. Instead of sitting in my cubicle all day, my job was to fly to a different country every week because everybody wanted to buy these things. Not only did I get to go to all those countries, I’ve now been to 95 countries, but I got paid to go to them all because they wanted to buy the product. That forage into the travel industry led us to look at the front end of the reservation process instead of printing your boarding pass, which is how I wound up getting involved with Priceline, Booking, and even Expedia before that. I got into the travel business because I wanted to travel.

I want to analyze what you said for everyone. There are so many great takeaways. First of all, clearly, you’re a great storyteller and you’re taking us on the hero’s journey or in the startup world, that’s called the trough of despair where we reached that low point. We’re like, “I missed my flight. I don’t have money. I’ve quit my job. The stakes are high. What am I going to do?” Most people think, “It’s over for our hero. Poor Jeff.” Then you have that moment of epiphany of, “I’ve had this problem of missing a flight for waiting in line so long, then others have too.” When I coach people on their pitch to get their startup funded, that ability to explain a problem if you’ve been in the customer’s shoes for potential investors makes them feel you have the solution as opposed to trying to imagine the problem.

[bctt tweet=”Dream big, work hard, and create value.” username=”John_Livesay”]

On a personal level, having worked as a ticket agent at TWA at O’Hare years ago, I know what that feels like to be behind the counter and see a line out the door of people asking back in the day, “Smoking or non? Window or aisle?” where you would get stuck or they’d be in the wrong line to buy a ticket and not get a boarding pass. There were so many reasons why those lines were so long. That story resonated with me. It’s so great because that’s the ultimate story of origin that people can start to look at and say, “What problem am I experiencing that many other people can and I get to live my dream?” You’re tying in all your values. “If I want to travel, I’m getting paid to travel. I’m solving a problem for travelers.” It’s so good.

You have to be intentional about it. You have to be thinking about those things or you won’t see that moment.

I know you’ve interacted with Steve Wozniak and many other successful founders. One of my favorite quotes from Steve Jobs is, “You can’t connect the dots looking ahead, only looking back.” That’s why the value of hearing your stories allows us to see how those dots get connected so we can start to, as you said, intentionally set our own vision, goals, and define what that looks for us. You also have written this wonderful book, Scale: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back.

You had this concept of either, “I live my dream and don’t have a job,” or “I do a job I don’t like and I’m getting money.” They seem mutually exclusive to live your dream and make money. This concept of growing your business, “I’ve got to have to sacrifice my life. I don’t have to have a personal life.” This concept, again, you’re mirroring for all of us and mentoring us, if they’re not mutually exclusive. The snippet to get people to want to buy the book is, what is the secret sauce to grow your business and still have a life?

Work Efficiency

I’m so glad you said that because people accept that those things are mutually exclusive. As soon as you accept that, then they are. You have to not accept that. Here’s the thing. Again, I’m glad you picked this topic. When people, entrepreneurs especially and small business owners, brag about their work hours, “I’m an entrepreneur. I work 24/7. I work around the clock because I’m an entrepreneur,” let me tell you something. Working all the time is not a badge of honor, it’s a badge of inefficiency.

TSP Jeff Hoffman | Growing Your Business

Growing Your Business: The biggest mistake is that people don’t tell a story; they give a presentation.

 

One day, I said, “I’ll work around the clock when I have to.” That’s the difference. What entrepreneurs do that you don’t have to necessarily do in other types of jobs is when it’s time to go, we go. I once did three all-nighters. I never went home in three days. I snuck into the gym in the building and showered. When it’s go time, we get it done but don’t accept that. I remember saying to myself one day, “Jeff, I’m giving you a new challenge.” I’ve never referred to myself in third person in my entire life. One day, I gave myself a challenge. I said, “You should try to figure out how to do in two days what it takes everybody else the whole week to do.” The design goal is not to accept that we work like dogs if we’re entrepreneurs.

The design goal is to say, “Can I build a business that is so well run, well designed, efficient, and automated that I could be at the beach three days and the business is running and I’m getting paid?” I’m only in the office two days when I used to be there 6:00 or 7:00. That should be your goal. Again, I’m going to use the word intentionality. If you’re not looking at your business and saying, “What things could I turn from a week to two days? What things could I automate, outsource, and do better?” with the design target of saying, “I want to do as much work as everybody else in way less time than it takes them to do it.” That’s what David Finkel and I wrote that book for. It was to help you go through the list. It’s like a workbook in it of things that you need to do so that your business becomes more efficient and your time requirement goes down.

Pitching Mistakes To Avoid

The value of setting your intentions much defining the culture you’re in and all of those things, people think, “I don’t need to spend any time thinking about my intention. I just want to make money.” That’s never the right vision to have for a company. You and I were talking about a producer friend of yours who’s very successful at creating content and doing the work but struggling a little bit with the ability to tell a story in a way to pitch it to get it funded to make it happen. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making, whether they’re in the entertainment business, trying to get a show made or a startup trying to pitch to an investor to fund their idea?

I was so excited to join you here on your show specifically because you address this elephant in the room. This big topic that so many people do wrong. In this part of my life, I listen to hundreds of pitches all the time, that’s what I’m doing. I see it all the time. Here are some of the things. The most important thing, and you’ve already said it, is to tell a story. People don’t tell a story, they give a presentation. Do you know what I do a lot of times? I have people to take a dry run when I’m helping people get ready for a pitch. I reach over and unplug the projector. They say, “The projector is off. You can’t see my slides.”

I say, “You’re going to give the pitch without looking behind you at your stupid slides.” If you can’t tell the story, if you need a PowerPoint to give a pitch, you’re already way behind. The reason why is you should tell a story not like you’re formerly dressed up in a suit and tie and giving a pitch to investors. You should tell a story like you ran into your friend at Starbucks and he goes, “Jeff, what are you up to?” and the story has to sound like a story. The reason why is pitches and presentations, a lot of times, every slide should come from the previous slide logically and lead to the next on, and they don’t. I’ve been sitting in pitches and people say, “Let’s talk about our forecast.” They say, “We’re going to show you the members on the team.”

[bctt tweet=”Everybody wants to be successful, just until they find out what it takes.” username=”John_Livesay”]

The slide before had nothing to do with the slide after and vice versa. You wouldn’t do that when you were telling a story. If you were in Starbucks and someone said, “Jeff, what are you doing?” I would say “I was in the airport and the line was so long. I missed a flight. I started talking to people and I realized everybody is sick of these lines. I was like, ‘Is there a better way to solve this problem? It looks like this in every airport in the country, in the world right now.’ I went home, did this research, and I was like, ‘The self-check-in kiosk.’” I got some people together and we started a company. My friends were like, “What are you building? How does it work?”

I said, “The kiosks will do this. It will be connected that way.” Your friend would say, “How are you going to sell it to the airlines?” “I’ve got this idea. I’m going to call these people.” I’m telling a friend a story in a coffee shop, “How are you going to make money? How much are you going to charge?” That’s how your story should be to an investor. This is how I always start my pitches. I always use the default assumption that I assumed when I’m walking in to pitch you, what you are thinking is, “Why am I wasting my time listening to this moron? I have a busy day and I’ve already heard twenty morons before him.” Is that true? No, but if you assume that, you will start with a compelling story. You’ve got seconds to get the person’s attention.

Even if they sit there for your whole 25 minutes, they tuned out after minute two, because you didn’t set the hook or you started and then you straight off in a bunch of slides. It’s not a story. The biggest mistake is you should be able to tell your whole pitch with no slides, no PowerPoint, no visual aids because you’re telling it in the logical order that people would ask you questions if you were telling it to a friend anyway. “How do you build these things? How much do they cost? Who’s going to pay for that? You don’t have any money to buy those.” Do it. Tell it to a friend that has no idea what you’re talking about. Make a list of the questions they asked in the order they asked them. That’s the story you should be telling.

“Use stories, not slides,” that says it concisely. When I work with people on their elevator pitch, I completely teach them what you said, be conversational. I teach people to open up their elevator pitch with, “You know how,” and then you go into describing a problem or a person that you helped. Most people start with, “I do this. I’m a lawyer,” or whatever. I go, “No, make it conversational.”

It’s an invitation. You start with an invitation to stand next to me in the airport line when you said you know how. “You know how it takes forever to get to check-in at the airport?” That’s your example. I’ve invited you to mentally stand next to me in the airport line and now you’re with me. I completely agree with you. Start with an invitation.

TSP Jeff Hoffman | Growing Your Business

Growing Your Business: Don’t work around your business. Your business has to work around your life.

 

Dream Tank

The whole goal of an elevator pitch or even a pitch that you get ten minutes in front of an investor group is to intrigue people enough to want that second date. “Tell me more, then we’re going to invite you back,” not to tell everybody everything. That is so hard for people to not boil the ocean. I go back and I tell people, “Remember Amazon sold books first?” If they had launched doing everything now, they would never have gotten there. It does help to do that. I want to touch on what you’re doing now helping small businesses because I’m fascinated with this whole concept. You’re the Global Chairman of Dream Tank. Tell us a little bit about how that started and what you’re doing to help people in small businesses now.

There are three things I spend my time on right now. One is I am the Chairman of the Global Entrepreneurship Network. We now have people on the ground in 180 countries. We launched this with a simple mission statement, “To help anybody anywhere that wants to launch their own business do so.” That’s what the Global Entrepreneurship Network is. We built it all over the world to help people turn their idea into an actual running business and achieve economic freedom. I’m also the founding board member of something called the Unreasonable Group. Unreasonable is the same thing.

That’s named after the George Bernard Shaw quote where he said, “A reasonable person adapts to the world around them. An unreasonable person expects the whole world to adapt to them. Therefore, all progress is dependent upon unreasonable people.” The Unreasonable Group is social entrepreneurship. The Global Entrepreneurship is all kinds of network. In Unreasonable, we help entrepreneurs who are specifically trying to solve some of the world’s biggest problems that align with the United Nations’ seventeen goals. The third one is I’m also the Global Chairman of Dream Tank which is everything I said about with kids. It’s a youth-driven problem-solving network.

We’re trying to engage young people all over the world to come to the table where the world’s problems are being solved and include them in the conversation. Those are the three places I spend my time now because I’ve made a commitment to teaching entrepreneurship to as many people as I can. I don’t even call it entrepreneurship. I’d rather call it self-determination. What is the future you want? What is the world you want to live in? What does the company you want to work for and the job you want to have? Why don’t you create those things? Go design the future, don’t wait for it. It’s about self-determination.

That’s why I like entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not a job, it’s a mindset. That being said, we started in this process, then COVID hit. A lot of these small businesses we work with all over the world were in the worst possible situation. I was on national TV reporting that two million small businesses in America closed their doors permanently in the second quarter of 2020. In 90 days, two million little businesses in the US disappeared. In fact, on TV, I said it’s a pandemic how we’re losing millions of small businesses so we look into it. The government has this program. Everybody knows in the US the PPP program to save small businesses.

[bctt tweet=”Working all the time is not a badge of honor; it’s a badge of inefficiency.” username=”John_Livesay”]

When we look at the numbers, it’s not working. It’s not getting to enough small businesses and it’s definitely not getting to minority-owned small businesses. In this case, my organization, Global Entrepreneurship Network or GEN, and friends of mine that have a small business resource form that is called Hello Alice. We teamed to start giving out $10,000 cash grants to as many small businesses as we can. We’re trying to find the people that if we give you $10,000 cash right now, would that help you for a while? Would that keep you alive so you could at least still eat?

Some of them literally are out of cash. That’s what we’ve been doing with this program. Some of your audience might have seen one of my good friends has partnered with me on this and that’s Pitbull, the Fireball singer. Pitbull and I did a public service announcement on television to try to make sure that small business owners that are hurting knew about it. I’ll end by telling you it’s COVID19BusinessCenter.com. People can go there if they want to apply for some cash from us.

I want to go back to what you said, Jeff, which is your personal mission is to teach people how to be self-determined to as many people as possible. In my case, my personal mission is to help as many people as possible get off the self-esteem roller coaster. You’re only feeling good about yourself if your numbers are up and bad if your numbers are down or things are going well because I was on it and it’s exhausting. When you have a mission statement bigger than yourself, then you can use your creativity to find ways to do that. You and I are both keynote speakers so we get in front of audiences.

My audiences tend to be salespeople and teach them how to get out that self-esteem roller coaster judging your worth by your numbers. I want to touch on your ability to get in front of not just TV audiences but as a speaker. When I give my talks, I see a picture of you with Michael Phelps. I was able to meet him when I was at Condé Nast. Everyone says, “You’re such a great swimmer because your feet are fins. You’ve got this huge lung capacity.” I’m guessing there’s something else. He told me this story of his coach asking him if he would workout on Sundays and he agreed to do it. He goes “We’ve got 52 more workouts in your competition.” That little moment for me was, “That totally dives into your philosophy of work harder.” I asked the audience, “What are you willing to do that your competition is not to be at that Olympic level?”

The Secret To Success

For you, when you met Michael Phelps, he came out narrating and telling his own story in the HBO documentary, The Weight Of Gold. Getting to talk to you at this perfect time is so exciting for me because what he talks about is, who am I after I’m no longer an athlete and the depression that comes along with that. Your whole book is about, don’t let your business define you. Do you have a story about what you tell audiences or to intrigue us to want to hire you as a speaker or anything around Michael Phelps that you want to share?

TSP Jeff Hoffman | Growing Your Business

Scale: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back

No, but you triggered what I am going to share something else. Let me summarize that piece that you said from the book because I finally found a more succinct way to say it. Your career, job, and business should be the vehicle that takes you to the epic life you want to live, not the obstacle that prevents you from it. That’s the point of the book. Many people, when they’d see me and say, “You’re out traveling the world. I’ve got a business to run.” That’s the mutual exclusivity. Most people allow their business to be the obstacle that’s preventing them from living the life they want to live instead of the vehicle that takes them there.

I didn’t look at that like, “What epic things can I do around my business?” I said, “How can I re-engineer or design a business so that I could live my life?” That’s the question you should be asking yourself. Don’t work around your business, your business has to work around your life. People say, “Of course, it’s hard having an epic life.” No one hands you that whatever your own version of epic is. People say to me that that’s hard. That is why I’m so glad you brought up the Michael Phelps swimming on Sunday. I’m going to tell you a different story because it’s how I learned it.

I learned it from an athlete friend. A friend of mine was a boxer and it turned out his left hook was good. His name is Evander Holyfield. Evander and I have been friends for decades. He was the Heavyweight Champion of the World at that time. The people that don’t know boxing don’t know Evander. They all know him because Mike Tyson bit my friend’s ear off. Everybody knows that story even if they don’t know boxing. Evander is training in his house, getting ready to go to Vegas for him to fight for the Heavyweight Championship of the World. He’s doing this exercise that he does 300 reps a day. It is an insane exercise. A normal human being couldn’t do ten reps and he does 300 a day. I think it’s crazy. Why do we need to do that? What’s the point?

I’m spotting and counting. We’re in the gym and I’m like, “299, 300.” At the end of these ridiculous 300 reps, Evander looks up at me and he goes, “Jeff.” I said, “What?” He goes, “Was that 299 or 300?” I was like, “300.” He said, “Jeff, I ask you again, did I do 299 or 300?” I said, “You did 300.” He looks at me for a second and then he goes back to the ground and does another rep. As he’s doing it, he says, “I think that was only 299.” As he’s sitting back up, I rolled my eyes like, “Are you kidding me? You do this every day. It might be 299 now.” I rolled my eyes and when he sat up, he goes, “Jeff, look at me.”

I turned and I looked. I have to tell you, John, I’m looking at this guy. The muscles are rippling and the sweat. I was like, “My life was short-lived. I hope someone will notify my next of kin.” What he said next, and I’m being serious, was a life-changing epiphany moment for me. He turned and he looked me in the eyes and he said, “The difference between 299 and 300 is the difference between being the heavyweight champion of the world and every other boxer.” I had chills. I had goosebumps. He got up and he walked away in silence. I closed my eyes and I didn’t move for ten minutes because I was like, “This has to sink into my soul, into my very being.”

[bctt tweet=”Design the future, don’t wait for it.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I sat there and when I went home, I made a sign. I wrote 299. I put a red circle with a slash through it, no 299s here. I stuck it on the wall. Do you know what’s cool, John? When I speak all over the world, I got one from Bulgaria, someone will take a picture of a no 299 sign on their wall. The times when I feel like good enough is good enough, I’m walking out of my office, and I look at that, no 299, I ask myself, “Did you come in here to do 300 and did you quit at 299?” If 299 is good enough, it’s almost 300. Tomorrow, 298, that’s almost 299.

Michael Phelps is down the street doing 300 and he’s going to kick your butt. The same applies to everything you do in life. I always ask myself and people that know me, sometimes will call and say, “I finished something and I looked at my 299.” I went back in and said, “That was 299. I’m going to do 300.” Winners swim on Sunday and winners finish the 300 every single day. There is no shortcut. I was on TV once and this reporter goes, “Jeff, what’s the secret to success?” I’m like, “The secret to success is there is no secret. Everyone was out trying to find one, I was at work.” It’s like, “It’s not the answer I was expecting.” I was like, “That’s all I’ve got.”

What a wonderful story to end on. You opened with an incredible story of being a paperboy, figuring out your key lessons, not wanting to let your mom down, getting into Yale to now speaking, impacting the world, and helping small businesses. This great line, “Your job is the vehicle that takes you on the epic life you want, not the obstacle.” Jeff, I can’t thank you enough. Your website is JeffHoffman.com. Anything else you want to tell us about how we can find you or learn more?

Thank you, John. That’s the best place. I’m most active on LinkedIn. My email is [email protected]. It’s right there on that website. As I said, those organizations, Dream Tank is DreamTank.co, Unreasonable group is UnreasonableGroup.com, and Global Entrepreneurship Network is GenGlobal.org. Those are all the things that I’m part of. Again, if the $10,000 would help somebody, go to COVID19BusinessCenter.com. Thank you for having me.

It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for doing everything you’re doing to make the world a better place and following your own mission to help us all live epic lives.

Thanks.

 

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Social Selling And Making Creative Presentations With Mike Montague

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

09.09.20

TSP Mike Montague | Social Selling

 

Age old principles of sales hold true even in the era of social selling. Just with traditional selling, it is all about being creative with your presentation – a feat that can only be achieved by knowing what your client needs and building a relationship of trust with them. Joining John Livesay to talk about this is, Mike Montague, Global Head of Content and a Certified Trainer at Sandler Training. Mike is author of LinkedIn the Sandler Way, a groundbreaking book that documents some of the best practices of social selling from Sandler graduates. He also hosts the How to Succeed Podcast. In an in-depth conversation, Mike delves into the world of social selling, dispels the myths and misconceptions surrounding it and gets clear about the principles that really matter.

Listen to the podcast here


 

Social Selling And Making Creative Presentations With Mike Montague

Our guest is Mike Montague. He shares with us his expertise on what it takes to use LinkedIn for social selling. He talks about how to have opportunities, people, and build relationships around that. He also talks about how to avoid sales malpractice and the way to do that is to ask the right questions. He said that the best presentation is the one that your prospect will never see because they don’t need to because you’ve done a good job of connecting with them. Finally, he says negotiate terms, not dollars. Enjoy the episode.

My guest is Mike Montague, the Global Head of Content and a Certified Trainer at Sandler Training. He’s also the author of LinkedIn The Sandler Way, which talks about social selling, as well as the host of How to Succeed Podcast. He’s got a lot of creative ideas he’s going to share with us from his days as a DJ. I can’t wait to hear his own personal story. Mike, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I teased out a little bit about you. You’re an expert in helping people ask better questions. You’ve got a book out about social selling, but I want to start with your creativity background. You and I before the show talked about your days as a DJ and how you’ve come up with all creative ways to grab people’s attention. If you don’t mind, take us back to your childhood. Were you a magician as a little boy? Where did you learn all this creativity?

I did do a little bit of that. My family has a term called Creative Nerdery and I own it. If you want, you can to go to CreativeNerdery.com. What that meant for us was being our authentic natural child self of nerding out and geeking out on something or entertaining the family. We would do fake radio shows, we swim across the pool and then interview how it feels to be the winner and do those weird creative projects. I have a cousin that’s a podcaster, interesting designer, rock musicians. My brother did stand-up comedy and we all nurtured our creative artistic side.

TSP Mike Montague | Social Selling

Social Selling: The best presentations are ones that don’t look like a presentation. The best salesperson doesn’t like one either.

 

I loved music and I found deejaying in college. As soon as I turned 21, it was a cool way to make money and meet girls instead of paying money and sitting in the back, not talking to anybody. I did that for twelve years, made it all the way up to the top 40 radio station here in Kansas City. I was on Mix 93.3 as Romeo because of my last name there. I think entertaining and getting people’s attention and having fun brings interest to whatever you’re doing, but even sales pitches.

This concept of creativity and even a little bit of magic, you hinted that you did something with time travel to entertain people. Tell us that story.

That was the presentation that I did in Orlando right before everything shut down. We set it up as a video pitch for the launch of a new Alexa app that we have. We have a My Sandler skill on Alexa. We did this Alexa Powered Time Travel thing where I did the evolution of dance type of video, but I did it live. We went back to the 1960s. I was a salesperson in the 1960s, and then I was a salesperson in the 1980s and a salesperson in the early 2000s. I changed wigs and changed clothes during the presentation and had to run from stage-to-stage. It was a whole lot of fun. I also thought an interesting way to tell the story and get people’s attention rather than say, “Sandler has been around for 50 years. While you might think we’re old, we have a new voice-activated Alexa app.” That’s great, but that’s boring. Instead, we got some good laughs and had some fun.

Tell us a little bit about what the Sandler Training is. I know that you had mentioned to me the importance of asking the right question because you and I talked about you’re going to have a great presentation, but if it’s in the wrong room with non-decision makers or people who don’t see a need, it’s throwing your pearls before swine. What is this premise of the training that you specialize in at Sandler?

[bctt tweet=”When selling don’t try to get married on the first date.” username=”John_Livesay”]

David Sandler himself started many years ago and he passed away in the 1990s, but he had a rule that the best presentation you’ll ever give, the prospect will never see. What that means is if you do a good enough job of asking the right questions, understanding their needs, talking about how they’re going to make decisions and how your solutions might fit, there might be a chance that you don’t even need to give a presentation that they go, “That sounds great. I’ll buy it.” You don’t do this formal dog and pony show and break out the PowerPoint because they trust you to continue to do what you say, work with them on crafting the solution and you move forward.

The other part of that is there is this old stereotype of the salespeople need to be pushy, that they need to be convincing and they need to jump up on tables and make a lot of noise to get people’s attention. You and I both know that’s not true. That sometimes the best presentations that you give are ones that they don’t even recognize as a presentation. Like in your book, a great story doesn’t feel or look like a presentation. That person doesn’t feel or look like a salesperson. They never even see it coming when you do it that way.

I wanted to ask your opinion around this because my belief is that the premise of people has to get to know you and then they might like you and eventually trust you is all wrong. We’ve heard that phrase, you got people to know like, and trust you. I remember in my days of competing against IBM, we were trained. You have to earn the right even to ask a question. My premise is that people have to trust you first before they will even let you ask them questions. What are your thoughts on that?

I think trust is the keyword in that know, like, and trust. Sometimes people will buy from people they don’t like if they trust them more. All things being equal, people still do like to buy from people that they like. They have to know that you exist. All of those things are relevant, but sometimes they do give the wrong stereotypes or they slow down your sales process because you think, “First they have to know everything about me.” No, that’s not true. They need to know that you exist. They don’t need to know your company history and your background. What they need to know is that you can solve their problem and that they can trust you to do what you say you do. You’re right on there. That’s also a lot of what we do at Sandler is talking about, “Before you give this pitch, how can you thoroughly understand their needs so that you’re solving the right problem?” A lot of times, the problem the buyer brings you is not the real problem. They’re bringing you a symptom of something else. If you pitched that symptom, you’re not solving the real issue and they’ll give you a, “Yeah, but,” answer.

TSP Mike Montague | Social Selling

Social Selling: Sometimes, what a buyer brings you is not the problem, but a symptom of something else.

 

It is much like a doctor who has to ask the right questions to figure out what’s causing the symptom and not just deal with the symptom of things are slow here or there’s no engagement.

We use that doctor analogy a lot because it’s a great one for a good professional salesperson that you can trust. They’re going to ask you, “How long has it been hurting? Does it hurt when you do this? What have you tried to do to fix it?” “Are you taking any other medications?” Those are all great questions as salespeople too. We need to know the whole scope. Otherwise, it is the sales malpractice. You’re guessing at the solution and you’re prescribing an answer before you know what the problem is.

I’ve never heard that combo before. I like that a lot. I want also to ask you about your book. This concept of social selling and that LinkedIn is a platform where that probably works, people run ads on Facebook. I see it now, a lot of sponsored things on Instagram. This concept of social selling, tell us where the concept came from. What’s a big mistake people make when they’re trying to sell on social media platforms?

There are two things. The first one is that we wrote this book with LinkedIn and I teamed up with a guy named Koka Sexton at LinkedIn. It’s authored by Sandler and LinkedIn and you can get it for free at Sandler.com/linkedinsecrets. We wrote it because there’s so much stuff out there about social media marketing. When people hear social selling, they think the wrong thing, they think making sales pitches or blasting out a tweet or update posts that people click on and they buy from you. That’s not what we’re talking about here. I’m talking about salespeople in the sales profession and people that need to build relationships and they want to add more information about a current relationship. I know you did a lot of enterprise selling. If you’re selling to Coke or Pepsi, you’re not going to send out a tweet and have them send you a $1 million advertising contract.

[bctt tweet=”Avoid sales malpractice.” username=”John_Livesay”]

You’re going to need to build that relationship, but you can find out so much more information about the organizational structure of a Coca-Cola by going on LinkedIn. The other thing people don’t do is they don’t listen. If you go on social media to look for opportunities and you see what the other people, your clients and buyers are posting about, that’s where you can find a lot of gold, not worrying about what you’re going to post. That was my way of flipping the script on traditional social marketing and talking about how salespeople can use it as a tool to make headway and get more deals in their pipeline because that’s what we’re all trying to do.

I was up for a speaking engagement for a high-tech medical company. It was between another speaker and me. People don’t realize the irony sometimes of being someone who gets hired to train salespeople or be a speaker at an annual sales meeting is you have to sell yourself to get the job in order to train salespeople. You’ve literally been in their shoes. During that process, one of their regional vice presidents reached out on LinkedIn. I accepted the connection. I took it a step further and started looking at some of the articles he had written or posted, and not only liked them, but commented on them. He said, “That’s what I’m trying to get my sales team to do with the doctor’s posts.” The fact that you organically did it means you’re the right fit for us because you’re doing it. I’m not asking you to teach them something to do that you’re not doing. I wanted your thoughts on that of building the relationship through something. When I say make a comment, I mean not a good job or interesting. Make a thoughtful comment, show you’ve actually read it.

I think even likes and shares do count there. You went above and beyond by making a thoughtful comment. The way I explained it is there are millions and millions of people on social media begging for someone to pay attention to them. If you’re the one that’s paying attention, you’re the one that’s valuable on social media, not the people trying to get attention. What you did is by commenting on their stuff or replying and making messages is you get to start a conversation about sales things and about stuff that’s important to them versus trying to be the one broadcasting messages and hoping that somebody sees it and it starts a conversation with you. It’s a lot more proactive. It’s what people want. They’re dying for people to listen and pay attention to them.

I also have experienced this and I see other people complaining about it. As the expert around this, do you see it? What are your thoughts? Someone that you don’t know invites you to connect with no real reason. Supposedly, if you put a note with your request to connect from your desktop versus a mobile where you can’t make a big difference. When you say yes and then the next thing you get from them is, “Do you want to buy X, Y, Z?” No relationship building at all.

TSP Mike Montague | Social Selling

Social Selling: People are dying to get others to pay attention to them. Comment on their stuff on social media and start talking sales from there.

 

It’s the trust factor. They’ve immediately destroyed the trust because they’re pitching right away. Would you like the other tweetable comment? The other thing we call it is, “Premature presentation syndrome.” Prematurely trying to sell something before you understand if that person has a need, if they have a budget for the year solution and if they have decision-making authority over it, all of that is trying to get married on the first date. What we want to do on social media is that’s the bar scene. We want enough interest to get a phone number, enough interest in a phone conversation to get a face-to-face appointment or a Zoom call, and then enough interest there to get a second one. Eventually, somewhere down the line, we’ll get married. I know that sounds like a lot of work and it sounds like it will take a while, but that’s the only way successful relationships are built. Everything else is transactional.

It’s also interesting that I’ve noticed, Mike, is that a lot of people don’t spend a lot of effort on their LinkedIn profile. They’re like, “I’m not looking for a job. What do I care?” I tell you as a speaker and an entrepreneur myself, I have found that the time I’ve spent making sure that the visuals on my LinkedIn profile are strong, that you instantly know what I do. Seeing me speak in front of a crowd, detailing that I had a sales career, where it was, what accomplishments I had there, that helped me get this speaking engagement. This was between another speaker and me.

The guy said, “You have been in sales. I wanted a speaker that’s been in salespeople’s shoes.” The other speaker just looked like they wrote a book on it. I thought to myself, “That’s not the case in the other candidate, but the other candidate didn’t make it clear. It was buried in a paragraph that they’d done sales. It wasn’t detailed, ‘Here’s the company,’ or anything like that.” What are your thoughts on the importance of a LinkedIn profile and making it clear where you got your credibility from?

A lot of tips here and you can check out a bunch of these in the book. The first thing is to have it filled out and make it look like you know what you’re doing and showing up. The way I relate this is to in-person events. You don’t show up in a T-shirt and shorts if you’re trying to get booked as a professional speaker or somebody in financial services that are always wearing a suit. The old dress for success. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. I think the LinkedIn profile is the same in what you said there, but also a lot of times people fill that out backwards in retroactive looking and we encourage people to make a forward-looking profile about your customers.

[bctt tweet=”Negotiate terms not dollars.” username=”John_Livesay”]

When you fill in your job description and your summary, talk about who you help and the problems you solve for those people versus your background, your track record, your history of success. Those things are all great, but nobody cares. What they’re looking for is, “What can you do for me?” If you put that front and center on your profile, I think you’ll have a lot more success. That’s talking about the job you want, not the job you have, even if that job is working as a speaker or as a salesperson for that buyer.

It’s like a good elevator pitch in your LinkedIn profile. I don’t have to work that hard to understand who you help and what problem you solve to decide whether that’s something I might want.

That’s exactly what you should put in your summary is your 30-second commercial. The other one to note is that the headline area, a lot of people get way too cute with that. They start using resume speak and it’s like, “I help companies increase their revenues and decrease their costs.” I still have to click on your profile to find out what you do. I don’t even know what you’re selling there. I like to position company, industry, major keywords that you’re looking for there, make it simple to know that people found the right person and that you’re a salesperson. There’s one stat that it’s people that have sales on their business card and on their LinkedIn profile sell more than those that don’t. They’re confusing the issue like, “I’m a territory executive representative.” People don’t know if you’re looking to buy, would you contact the territory manager or would you contact a salesperson?

All of these buzz words like I literally have virtual sales keynote speaker, not hiding it, not trying, my title, Better Selling Through Storytelling. I embrace the word, selling, and many people in sales, I’m biz dev, I’m this, I’m that. I’m everything, but a salesperson, because of all the negative connotations around it. My whole premise is, if you embrace it through storytelling, it’s not such a negative stereotype. How about the concept of recommendations on LinkedIn? Another, I believe overlooked key element, what I love about these recommendations are that person has to write it. It’s not something that you can say, “Here’s what so-and-so said about me.” This is something right from their LinkedIn that they have to take the time and it’s a little bit of effort. To me, that makes it even more meaningful.

TSP Mike Montague | Social Selling

Social Selling: Get really good at disqualifying. Do not try to negotiate on bad terms and bad footing.

 

It does for everybody else too. We’re seeing social proof becoming more and more important in the sales process. Whether that’s Google reviews, if you have a retail establishment, LinkedIn reviews and testimonials and enterprise sales that use G2. I think all of those are great when they’re written. Just a thumbs up or five-star on Amazon, “That’s great. We’ll take it.” When you get that personal testimonial and you can see that they will recommend and speak on your behalf to people, I think that’s when it gets powerful and it means something. You don’t have to go out and get hundreds, but I encourage people to get at least five and at least overwhelming support. Whatever that is, you want, ten times more good ones than you have bad ones on whatever reason for review side.

Is there a tip you have for someone who wants to say, “I don’t know that I could be as creative as Mike with the time travel and change the costumes and wigs, but I would like to do something creative maybe. I don’t even know where to start to think creatively.” What recommendations do you have for people?

I think the easiest way to do something novel is to combine other stuff. When we combined the idea of the evolution of dance video with the history of Sandler, it became something that nobody’s ever done before. An example I have given speeches a lot to is if you think about stormtroopers, stormtroopers are a dime a dozen in Star Wars movies. If you think of the idea of a circus that’s been around for a couple of hundred years and not popular anymore. Either wouldn’t even be particularly creative, but a stormtrooper circus would be something that nobody’s ever seen before. If you take 2 or 3 ideas and combine them together, you’ll have a lot of fun. What I did, we did a masked trainer contest in the middle of our virtual sales kickoff.

I put the COVID mask over our presenters from our last meeting and had people guess who was in the picture and we did a trivia game there. It’s easy to combine a trivia game with relevant content to them, anything like that, or you can do a fill-in-the-blank or a word search or other things like that to have people pay attention and listen to your presentation and actively participate. It makes it much more powerful than, “Let’s hear what you got. I’m going to sit back and sleep for the next 30 minutes.”

[bctt tweet=”Sales malpractice is guessing the solution and prescribing an answer before even knowing what the problem is.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Our mutual friend that introduced us, Mark Olsen, talks about in terms of mental real estate and that the premise of, “You’re The Pitch Whisper.” “I know what a horse whisper and a dog whisper is. What’s a pitch whisper?” I moved to Austin and I asked somebody, “Is there a place around here to get your shoe repaired?” He goes, “There’s the shoe hospital.” I’m going just for the name.

You remember those things and it’s proven by human memory that the more connections you make, the more memorable things are. If you tell somebody something they hardly ever remembered, if you tie it to one of their favorite childhood memories of eating a cold popsicle on a hot day, they know what their favorite Popsicle from the ice cream man is when that song starts playing. You run it by and you go, “I’m going to bon bon or I’m going ice cream sandwich.” You know what your favorite is and when you can tie those memories together, those make permanent long-lasting impressions.

My advertising background and jingles and music and emotional connections, that music evokes an emotional connection. You and I had a conversation around the a-ha moment for many people that people buy emotionally, and then back it up with logic. Let me hear your thoughts on that.

It doesn’t have to go long. If you’ve ever had an argument with your spouse or child about what they want. You can tell that they want it because they want it. The rest of it becomes a reason why that’s a good idea. There’s also been a lot of psychological and physical studies about how the brain works and the chemicals in the body. Basically, we make a lot of our decisions on gut instinct and on our buyer feelings. Our brain works to make that true. That can happen in a lot of different ways when we’re talking about goal-setting and what you want for your future is to decide first and then work out the details later.

TSP Mike Montague | Social Selling

LinkedIn the Sandler Way

Even when we’re buying in a short impulse purchase is when you’re walking through the checkout in the grocery store and you see the Snickers bar over there, your body is already decided it wants the Snickers bar. From there, you’re going, “Did I work out today? How can I logically justify the Snickers bar?” I don’t know about you but for me, it’s like, “I had a rough day, I have the extra money in my pocket, I worked out hard or I’m going to be working out this weekend.” You can stretch those reasons far.

It’s true that the voice of justification one way or the other, whether it’s getting us off our goals or keeping us on our goals. It’s important to be aware of how loud we are letting it become. I know a big part of your focus is helping people become better salespeople through The Sandler methods. One of the things you also talk about besides asking great questions so you don’t waste your time, anybody’s time is also you have a lot of focus on how to be better negotiators. I briefly want to get a little snippet to entice people enough to want to know more about your tips on negotiation.

You’re trying to talk somebody into something or talk them out of something, the same rules apply. What we were talking about is when you want something, you will intellectually justify it. If somebody doesn’t want to buy your stuff, there’s no negotiating or talking them into it. We have a gumball analogy. If you think back the old big gumball machines when you were a kid. If you want a green gumball, you put your quarter in and you crank it. If you get an orange one, you can’t get mad at the gumball.

You can’t get mad at yourself. There wasn’t anything you did. There’s nothing you can do to talk that orange gumball into being a green ball. I would say the first step would be you got to get really good at disqualifying and not try to negotiate on bad terms and bad footing. You have to have a willing partner and you have to have somebody that has a problem that you can solve and that wants that problem solved and has the budget and everything. Even when that comes down to it, the other subtle stuff that we were talking about does play a huge difference that you probably again happen with a spouse, a business partner, a child where if they say, “Do we have $100 to go to dinner?” If you say yes too fast, that ask becomes $200. They go, “I should ask for more,” all of a sudden.” There is a little bit of gamesmanship and psychology in this that we work with in Sandler.

We don’t think about it manipulatively or taking advantage of anybody, but sometimes people are going to try and take advantage of you. We think about judo and karate. How do you have defensive moves when people are trying to cut down your price so that you can have equal business stature and maintain the profit level that you set, not take advantage of people, but get your price and make that non-negotiable and negotiate terms instead of dollars?

How can people find out about your book, about Sandler and about following your creativity?

If you want to learn more about Sandler, our sales management and customer success programs, go to Sandler.com/sell. There’s a ton of free resources. You get a year’s worth of access to thousands of podcasts, videos, webinars and stuff that we’ve done from people like Bob Burg, who wrote The Go-Giver, Olympic athletes, the drummer for Pink and cool stuff in there. If you want to get the free copy of my book specifically, go to Sandler.com/linkedinsecrets. My side project, the personal passion thing, is CreativeNerdery.com. It’s a private social media site for people who are trying to be more creative, be more authentic and their real selves and not hide that nerdery passion topic, whatever it is for you, if you like to geek out on stuff, it might be for you.

Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with?

My favorite quote is, “Whatever you are, be a good one.” That’s Abraham Lincoln. To follow that up would be Steve Martin, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” I think those go hand-in-hand that if you’re trying to give a presentation or you’re trying to be a salesperson and you’re upset and frustrated that people aren’t paying attention to you, the question is not what’s wrong with them. It’s what you can do to make yourself more interesting and worthy of being paid attention to.

What a great note to leave it on. Who could have ignored that time travel opening that you gave? Thanks for showing us and not just telling us.

Thank you.

 

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Selling With Flair! With Jeroen Corthout

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

07.09.20

TSP Jeroen Corthout | Salesflare

 

Rarely does it happen when a CRM becomes a salesperson’s friend as opposed to another project they have to do. This is how revolutionary Salesflare has become, a CRM system that automatically fills itself out so salespeople don’t have to waste time manually putting information in. On today’s show, Jeroen Corthout, the Cofounder of Salesflare, joins John Livesay to talk about how you can sell with flair and the importance of building stories that take your clients on the complete journey. Don’t miss this episode to hear firsthand how you can start applying these same principles of storytelling to win new clients for your business.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Selling With Flair! With Jeroen Corthout

Our guest is Jeroen Corthout, who is the Cofounder and CEO of Salesflare, which is an intelligent CRM that’s built for businesses selling to businesses. It’s popular with agencies and SaaS companies. Salesflare itself was started when his Cofounder wanted to manage the leads for their software company in an easier way. They didn’t like keeping track of them manually and they built Salesflare which pulls customer data together automatically. One of their awards is the Most Popular CRM on Product Hunt for its ease of use. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

I always want to ask people their own story of origin before we get into your company’s story of origin. Take us back to childhood days or college days, wherever you want, to start your own story of how did you get interested in software in general?

From childhood, I always like to build stuff. I would do anything, like camps in the woods or build a catapult or all kinds of stuff. I keep build something to see it there and you’re happy with what you’ve created. At some point, I discovered the joy of building websites. That was when I was 14 or 15. That started with the simple GeoCities websites. I don’t know whether you know that. There are websites where you didn’t have to do much. You put some elements there and you built this silly website. It started evolving into building full websites back then with HTML and Flash, there was a lot of Flash going on back then.

I liked that because you could build anything you wanted. Flash disappeared in the meantime. From there, I figured I was going to start my own a web design agency. When I went to the university, I first had a look at Computer Engineering. I did not like what I saw, it looks nerdy and far from reality. I went a different way and went through Electrotechnical Engineering and from there to get it with Business Management. I went into Biomedical Engineering, which was then a totally different thing. It felt more impactful and it felt also like I was learning more but I wanted to start an engineering job. I felt like I want to do something more with customers. I missed that aspect much. I didn’t want to be purely building things.

I wanted to build things for people not being disassociated with the customers. I went to business school. From there, I figured that the best way forward to get some experience is become a product manager in a pharma company. I did that. That was not the right idea. I quickly learned this is a limited role and not at all building your own company or something. When I thought about starting a web agency again, but then for pharma companies, I talked to this guy and he said, “You can join us. We do multichannel for pharma companies.” Everything from websites over CRM, sales, marketing and all that. I did that for four years, did a whole lot of work with Salesforce, for pharma companies internally at the company That’s why I started learning about CRMs and the joy of working with Salesforce. From there, I still figured I want to start my own company. I had a bunch of projects, of which now Salesflare is the first viable one that became a company, all the other ones stopped somewhere.

TSP Jeroen Corthout | Salesflare

Salesflare: If you’re a leader in a business, even a smaller one, you might be surprised that many people in your business don’t know all the things you sell.

 

It’s interesting that you missed the connection and interaction with people as opposed to building things. That’s a part of your personality that’s both engineering-oriented and right brain people-oriented, allows you to have a lot of skills to in fact, run and launch a company. It takes not the tech skill or not just people marketing skills to be successful, you need to have people on your team who complements you where you may not be strong, but also to have that big picture overview which it sounds like you’ve been able to create.

Let’s dig into what made you decide to start Salesflare because I think it’s interesting to hear that typically, you’re first working with pharma companies, helping them with all those different things to make their sales more effective. Yet, Salesforce is something that almost everyone who’s ever had a sales job has used at one point or another. You’re discovering that there’s something not being met because Salesforce couldn’t be customized to pharma or was there something you needed for your own needs that made you want to start this?

It didn’t start from the pharma background. It was more us using Salesforce internally at the consultancy/agency I was working at. That’s also why we have many agencies on the software. A big part of my experience comes from there. We would use it internally. It was my first real CRM. I never understood well how I was supposed to use it as a practical tool. I tried, but I failed. A lot of the things seems like they weren’t built for end users. Certainly, they were built for customization. They were built for organizations to be able to build whatever they like. Let’s say you’re a big enterprise and you want software to adapt to your company completely, then an enterprise CRM like Salesforce is a great choice. When you’re a small company and the company itself is also more interested in something practical, something that’s going to help you sell more, Salesforce is not a great choice. It’s inward-oriented and not so much outward-oriented. It’s organization and not so much end user. I hit a lot of these limits.

What do you mean by agencies? Are we talking ad agencies or PR agencies or consulting agencies?

All of those. We are mostly of marketing agencies, which is partly ad agencies, partly all the types of marketing agencies on the software. On the other hand, also quite some software development agencies.

I used to work in advertising, called on a lot of ad agencies to get them to run their clients’ campaign with the media I was selling. Ad agencies are constantly pitching to win new business. They need something to keep track of their leads, when proposals come in, and all of that kind of thing. Let’s make this concrete for the readers and you graciously offered to do this with me so people can get a real-life example of what you’re doing and how you’re pitching, as an example. You go into an agency. How are you keeping track of your leads? Are you using Salesforce or nothing? What’s your biggest pain point? How do you open up a sales call to get an agency even to consider taking a meeting with you?

[bctt tweet=”Imagine a CRM that fills itself out! Are leads falling between the cracks?” username=”John_Livesay”]

I generally asked what they’re using. I ask how that’s going like if it’s all going to expectations. Are people filling it out to the extent that they are expecting them to fill it out and using this ram to the extent that they’re expecting them to use it? Almost invariably, you will hit a pain point there because nobody fills out a CRM to the extent that they’re supposed to and nobody uses it to the extent that they’re supposed to. That gives me the opportunity to show them that we built a system that fills out itself largely so it’s based on existing data. It’s based on your emails, calendar, phone, social media company database, and it offers the information to you so you can curate it rather than you having to manually input things into a CRM, which then has two big benefits.

One, salespeople are going to use the CRM and make more sales in it because that’s what the CRM can help them with that it’s not dependent on their manual input. Second, for sales managers, that’s often where the story starts, makes it easy for them to create transparency and accountability with their first sales hires or with their existing sales team. Many of our sales conversations start when people hired their first salesperson or first few sales people or when their sales team has outgrown the sheets that they made or something or outgrown the system that they were using. The sales team or the sales manager mostly wants to get a better grasp on what’s happening and it’s not appearing in the CRM. That’s usually where the story starts.

If we’re going to make this applicable to everyone reading, the first thing you need to do is ask questions to find the pain point. Oftentimes, people will ask you, “What’s your secret sauce?” You need to have an answer ready to go whether you’re pitching an investor or pitching a potential new client. What you did well I thought was turned it into a benefit right away. I like that you said the story starts there because what I do with clients is turn these case studies into case stories. If we were to talk about getting someone’s attention even to take a meeting, sometimes it’s frustrating.

A good pitch is clear, concise and compelling. If we were to take what you said and make it slightly more concise so that people instantly get it as opposed to having to wait for the payoffs, they might be a little more intrigued sooner than later. What you could say would be something along the lines of, “I’ve been in your shoes. I worked for an agency, we have a lot of clients like you and then what they’re struggling with.” If you introduce the word struggling, that automatically is typically followed by a pain point so that people lean in and because their whole goal is to get people to see themselves in your story.

“Another agency like you were struggling, because their sales team was not filling out the information. They resented having to do it. They felt like it was a waste of time and we ourselves experienced that. We created Salesflare which instead of having to input something manually, it gives you information and saves you time. Imagine instead of resenting doing something, it was almost as if you had another assistant giving you tips and suggestions so that leads didn’t get lost and things were more organized, which made you more productive so you could make more sales call. Instead of wasting time filling out a CRM so the management can try to understand what you’re doing and what the problems are, you had a CRM that didn’t waste any of your time, but in fact, saved you time.”

I like how you started with it, “I’ve been in your shoes.” You say that I would come to the lean-in.

TSP Jeroen Corthout | Salesflare

Salesflare: People can spot a script right away. Your best people will be the first ones to resist a script because it is disrespectful to them.

 

The fact that I asked you your story of origin gives you credibility. Let’s take an example of turning a case study into a case story. Let’s say that opening new concept there pulls people in because the whole goal of a pitch, even an elevator pitch or the opening pitch, is to intrigue people enough to say, “That’s interesting you’re on. Tell me more.” When you told me that this thing fills itself out, my next question is, is it using artificial intelligence to do that?

Not really. It’s more algorithms.

It doesn’t matter how it’s doing it, but it’s intrigued me enough to ask a question which continues the conversation. It’s not your pitching. Let’s take a client that’s used you. There are four parts to a great story. The first part is the exposition. Do you have a client in mind that hired you a year ago or so? When did they hire you?

Many years ago.

Can you say the name of the client?

I’d rather not share because what I’m going to share afterwards is a lot more personal.

[bctt tweet=”Perfection is not the goal, but being consistently good is the goal.” username=”John_Livesay”]

A marketing company or an ad agency type? Describe what they do. What kind of company?

It’s rather complex to explain what they do.

Are they an agency?

It’s a software development company.

That’s all we need to know because we want to be describing theoretically, you’re calling on another software development company. The case story that’s exactly like this, what I was saying is business. Many years ago, a software development company based in where? Give us a country.

Southeast Asia, I’ll say. Otherwise, it’s too easy to identify.

TSP Jeroen Corthout | Salesflare

Salesflare: If you find yourself having a lot more confidence in the value you offer than how to talk about it, you’re in good company.

 

That’s the opening of your story. That’s the exposition like a journalist, who, what, where, when. What they were struggling with was? Now, fill-in what their pain points are.

They were having a lot of leads dropping through the cracks. They were not organizing this well enough. They didn’t have it visually in front of them, first of all. Secondly, they didn’t know well what was last discussed with each customer. They didn’t know exactly when to fall, but whom, which meant that they were losing quite some money.

Is there anything that you do that Salesforce doesn’t do around those pain points?

Automatically keep track of what’s been discussed. Our software also nudges you to follow-up the right times based on when you were last in contact and emails that go unanswered and stuff like that.

They’ve started using it. What was the solution? Ideally the solutions are the opposite of the problem. After they used Salesflare for 2 or 3 months, they went from leads falling between the cracks to not one lead being lost. Instead of missing follow-ups, they were nudged a day before and because they were following up more accurately, then describe what happens to their business. Their sales go up as a percentage.

They shared with me that their sales went up by $1 million US a year.

[bctt tweet=”Your everyday business conversations are, in fact, a manageable business issue.” username=”John_Livesay”]

How’s morale?

Our morale is good I think. I don’t know what the morale look like.

Remember, good stories have an emotional hook. It’s not all wonders. People are more competent, they’re sleeping, the management’s happier. Morale is up because the sales reps feel like the management’s not mad at them for losing leads. That’s the secret sauce to storytelling. Any potential new client hearing this case story, instead of a case study that’s boring with stats only, is going, “That’s what we want. Not only do we want more sales, but we want our team to instead of fighting with management and getting yelled at for losing leads and not following up to feel happy working here.” They stay.

The whole thing from start to finish would sound like this, “Many years ago, a marketing software company in Southeast Asia was struggling because their leads were falling between the cracks.” They couldn’t visually get a quick snapshot of what was happening. They forgot when they were supposed to follow-up with people. All of that was causing a lot of tension in the company. Sales managers were constantly hounding the reps, “What about this? What about that? Why haven’t you followed up?” Once they started using Salesflare, all of those problems short time. Leads were no longer falling between the cracks. They weren’t having to waste a lot of time to enter the leads because we automatically did that for them and that’s our secret sauce. A year later, sales are up a million dollars. More importantly, everyone’s happier. There’s no more blame game going on because everyone’s feeling more productive, efficient and the team is running smoothly. “Does that sound like the journey you’d like to go on with us?”

For the readers, if you need some help turning these case studies and stories. Certainly, if you need a CRM that’s going to automatically do it, then the two of us could be a resource for you to not only have better pitches, but also to use a tool that being something you resent to something that you are happy, that’s helping you. When that happens, you’re more productive, and more importantly, you’re feeling proud of the work you’re producing because nobody purposely lets leads fall between the cracks, they’re overwhelmed, they need help. It’s not their fault.

Sales where instead of being a burden becomes like a Sherpa helping somebody climb Mount Everest. That’s what we wanted to talk about was how to use story telling a real-life example so that you’re on can now use this for his sales team who’s going out to pitch because, like myself, I have to sell myself to get companies to hire me as a sales speaker. We all have to sell ourselves all the time. the better we describe stories of why we got hired and what is life like after they hired me to speak or hired him to use Salesflare, and they see themselves in the story, then you’re no longer pushing. That’s the magic of storytelling is that you and your team now can describe a story like that and say, “Does that sound like the journey you’d like to go on with Salesflare?” Instead of like, “Do you want to buy?” It’s a different way to sell.

TSP Jeroen Corthout | Salesflare

Salesflare: We need to win hearts and minds inside the organization, just as we try to win hearts and minds outside.

 

It sounds compelling when you said it like that.

Any last thoughts you want to share with us about your own journey growing Salesflare or your goals for the future or any tips you have?

The advice I’d like to give to the readers is to be able to build these stories and journeys that you want to take people on. It’s important to talk to your own customers that you already have to understand their stories and journeys and to do some customer interviews with them. You can select the best customers you’re having. Invite them to have a call and then to understand the full journey, “This is thing I like to follow,” the jobs to be done methodology, but then the version by Bob Moesta from The ReWired Group. They have an interview about the four forces and that’s a play on any buying decision and it helps to uncover those. It goes from there’s inertia, like what kept people on the old solution. There’s the push of the old solution towards the new one, because there’s something wrong with your solution.

There’s the pool of the new solution, like the brighter world and there’s also an anxiety to go to the new solution. When you’re with your questions uncovering these four things, it’s come to interesting conclusions. Plus, it’s good to take this story as long as possible. When I do these interviews, I don’t ask what they were using before Salesflare, but I also asked what they were using before that and understand what the company was like, who was in charge of these decisions, why they were using these systems, how that worked, things like that. You can clearly visualize the whole journey instead of taking this small snapshot out of it they would normally be taking. That informed a lot of our thinking about why people choose Salesflare over other systems, what they compare with which is invaluable information when you’re building these stories, building up your marketing anything towards customers.

If you want to create a story, make sure you’re creating a story that takes your customers on the full journey, not just part of the journey. Thanks for being on the show. We can find you on LinkedIn and your company Salesflare.com.

 

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