Profitable Relationships With Dov Gordon
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
When you think of leaders, you often think of the celebrity-like leader—someone charismatic and loud-spoken. They have a big fanbase and are all over social media. While they work for others, they’re just not everyone’s cup of tea. Opposite that, did you know that there is also another type of leader, the under-the-radar type? If you’re someone who’s looking to be more low-key but still get the results you want, then this episode is for you. Join host John Livesay and his very special guest, Dov Gordon, the CEO of ProfitableRelationships.com, as they talk about forging profitable relationships and what it takes to be an under-the-radar leader—someone who naturally attracts the right people because they’re genuinely interested in who you are.
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Listen to the podcast here
Profitable Relationships With Dov Gordon
Our guest is Dov Gordon who has created a company called Profitable Relationships. He talks about a backwards network giving you a laser focus, as well as how you can become an under-the-radar leader. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Dov Gordon who helps consultants get ideal clients by becoming under–the–radar leaders in their industry. He helps them use backwards networking to reach their ideal clients consistently. A lot of experienced consultants know that the best clients come from referrals and relationships, but referrals are unpredictable and relationships take a lot of time. Instead, Dov helps you become this under-the-radar leader in your industry. It gets better because he also shows you how to leverage the relationship marketing he had been doing for free into a six-figure revenue stream. Dov, welcome to the show.
John, it’s good to be here.
I would like to ask you to take us back to your own story of origin. You can tell us where you’re living now, but if you can even come back to childhood or university days where you started learning about the importance of relationships.
I grew up in New York. I live in Israel. I’ve been here for quite a number of years. I never went to college. I never had a real job but I had spent my teenage years reading business books. At some point after getting married at 21 and realizing, “I need to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. How am I going to support this little family here?” I came across the idea of business coaching and somehow that called to me. I’ve never worked for a company. I didn’t know anything, but I knew that I had an ability. I knew that I genuinely cared and I had what I’ll call talent.
I’m going to offer a distinction because an early mentor of mine said to me, “Dov, you’ve got a lot of talent. You need to turn that to develop skills, systems and processes.” I remember it was such a shock because I had never made that distinction. I didn’t understand that at all. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I knew I had the ability. I knew that I could coach people even though I never had a job. That’s the typical thing like, “Who are you?” I’ve got answers for that from many years of doing it. A lot of people suffer from imposter syndrome because of comments like that. I’m happy to address that.
I knew that I had a lot to offer, but I didn’t understand why I was struggling. I didn’t quite understand this whole idea. I remember when he said to me, “You need to develop skills,” I was thinking, “What kind of skills? Playing the piano is a skill. Maybe carpentry is a skill. What kind of skills do I need as a consultant? What does it even look like? What is a consulting skill?” I’d been learning a lot of different things. I never realized that they were skills or I never understood what’s a skill or a skill of asking a good question or a skill of telling a good story as you teach or skill of articulating an idea in such a way that it meets people where they are and then leads them to the next small step. The skill of leading elegant sales conversation, making a recommendation and listening. Each one of those can break down into many different, smaller skills.
What’s a process? What’s a plan? It’s a series of steps that you follow to go from here to there. I was just doing things. The first 7, 8 years that I was trying to make it as a consultant, I had some success but it was like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll right back down, and then you start all over again. I had that frustration and that epiphany that my mentor gave me was one of countless. Thank God, I’m still alive. I still have my epiphanies where I like, “How come I didn’t understand that before?” That’s what happens. I’ve come to understand that’s the way life is. Life is where you keep moving forward despite the fact that you can’t see all the way there. You have to move forward imperfectly. You’ve got to listen to that inner knowing. We all have this conflict, the inner knowing, balanced with the inner doubt. Some days one is stronger and some days the other is stronger, but we all need to keep moving. It’s that forward motion that gives us the clarity that we think we need before we take the next step.
[bctt tweet=”Become an under the radar leader.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s talk about the imposter syndrome since you’ve hinted at it. Who am I? That is something that can haunt you even at the highest levels unless you heal it or work on it. I remember watching Oprah being interviewed once. She said, “I can have the biggest star, CEO on my show, and you think that person needs reassurance?” I know for myself once I was speaking at a summit, there are a lot of other speakers on a two-day event. I started reading the bios of everyone else, which I don’t recommend. There’s a Harvard graduate, a New York Times bestseller and I thought, “I don’t have any of those.”
You can do such a game with your mind where I’m like, “The woman who hired me is going to get fired.” I started stressing out and I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. What do I care about when I hear a speaker? Do I care where they went to school? No. Do I care how many books they sold? No. I care about how they make me feel, think and if I learn anything. I have to trust her that she’s been doing this for several years and that she knows what she’s doing enough to say, ‘I deserve to be on this stage with everyone else.’” That’s how I talk myself out of that imposter syndrome there for a minute. I would love to hear how you help others to possibly do that.
I don’t know that I work on that directly, but when you work on yourself, that definitely improves. I remember during those first eight years, I was leading a strategy project. I started a CEO peer group for companies between $10 million and $200 million to $250 million in sales. I remember asking one of my first clients. I assume he just liked me and felt like I could probably help him with something. My fee was so low that he went along with it. I remember asking him like, “What does a million-dollar business have? How many employees do they have?” He gave me the obvious answer, which is, “It depends on what they do.” At the same time, I was comfortable enough to ask him. I wasn’t afraid to look stupid.
When I was a kid, I learned that if you’re embarrassed, you’re not going to learn. I’m very shy by nature. I’ve overcome it to some degree, but it’s still my nature. Over the years, I’ve come to care less and less about what other people think because I’ve come to realize more and more that these people that I thought are such geniuses are very often idiots. Sometimes they’re incompetent and they don’t realize it. Sometimes they’re incompetent, but they try to compensate with their strong personality, arrogance and disdain for the people that they’re supposed to be serving.
Two things are going on here. There’s a little bit of imposter syndrome and then there’s a shyness issue. One of your attributes and what makes you so likable is you’re confident without being arrogant. You are able to explain your benefits, for example, why you’d be a great guest on the show even without being pushy. If that’s something that a shy person can do, it doesn’t come “naturally” to you, then that inner confidence, that energy you put out when we were getting to know each other, comes through. I’m like, “That’s the energy I want to be with. That’s the energy I want to bring to my show.” There’s a fine line between no confidence and arrogance, especially if you tend to be someone who’s shy or might have in your past the imposter syndrome. I’m trying to give as many different things that people who are reading to go, “That’s me and how did he overcome that?” A lot of it has to do with the awareness that at the end of the day, what people are engaging with is our energy and our likeability factors.
I remember when my speaking agent called me after I was being interviewed for a speaking engagement and she said, “Congrats. They picked you over the other speakers. They liked your energy.” They literally said it that way. We think we were being hired because of our content, our book, our video or what you say in the interview. Later the person who hired me said, “You made me feel good talking to you. I figured if you’ve made me feel good interviewing you, you can make all 300 people in the audience feel good.”
I want to emphasize that as a starting point for these Profitable Relationships, which is one of the companies that you are offer and help people. I’m sure a lot of readers are saying, “John, already get to the question, what is an under-the-radar leader?” Because most people think the opposite, “I’ve got to be everywhere. I want to be on the top of everyone’s radar.” The first person they think of when they think of a sales storytelling speaker, “Bring John in.” You’re flipping that on its head, which I always love. That grabs your attention. You’re saying, “No, be an under-the-radar leader.” What is that defined as?
Profitable Relationships: We’re human beings. We don’t buy the products and services that are best for us. We buy the products and services that are best marketed to us.
I’m not sure where people are coming in with this, but at ProfitableRelationships.com, we talk about helping consultants, experts or whoever become under-the-radar leaders in your industry, as opposed to this famous celebrity type, which is the model that we tend to see more often. I’ve found that it’s important for most of us. It’s not just the right model for most of us. I discovered that myself. You wake up in the morning and you think, “I’m good at what I do. I’ve got a lot of value to offer, but how do I get clients?” You discover that there’s a big difference between being good. People do not beat a path to your door just because you’ve got something good.
We’re all human beings. We don’t buy the product and services that are best for us. We buy the products and services that are best marketed and sold to us. We buy a good story. It doesn’t matter if the story is true or not. Not that it doesn’t matter, but in terms of our decision, we might regret it later on. It’s remarkable. We buy a story and then we convince ourselves that we buy logically. Who is it who said, “A man buys something for two reasons, the reason he tells his wife and then the real reason?” I forget where what that’s from.
This is an important foundational point to get out there. This is not the right path for most people. That celebrity, “Look at me. I’m posting 5 or 10 times a day on Instagram and Facebook.” I came to understand that from frustration, from getting up and thinking, “How do I get clients?” All the models that I saw were people who I felt like there was no way that I could be like that and still be true to myself. I’d have to be faking it. I’m not interested in getting clients because I’m pretending to be somebody who I’m not. I want clients who want to work with me because of who I genuinely am. Most people want that.
The celebrity approach, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s totally fine for people who are naturals at that. That is a fit for their personality and their values. As long as they’re being honest and ethical, that’s what they should do, but the rest of us need to become comfortable being ourselves, which is our greatest competitive advantage. We need to become comfortable and as some would say, “Find your voice.” Another thing is that most consultants, experts or coaches are not looking to build a multi-seven-figure business and scale. That’s not what most people want.
Most people either avoided the corporate world or left it after 10 or 20 years. What they want is to be doing great work with great clients, and making a great mid to upper six-figure income, and have some time to enjoy it with their family, their friends, by themselves or whatever they happen to like. They want to feel like they’re doing good work. They have an opportunity to take the skills that they’ve honed over the years, that they’ve mastered and applied to important projects that matter. People listen and appreciate their expertise, and to be well and fairly paid for it. That’s what people want. When you take those two things together and you recognize that 85% of the people should not be on the path of the charismatic guru. They should be instead on the path of mastery.
Once you realize that, “I’m not even trying to build this multi-seven-figure firm. I don’t need to do what they’re doing. What do I need to do? What’s the value of what I sell? If a new client is worth $5,000, $50,000, $150,000, how much am I trying to bring in?” You develop a very simple model. It’s rough but it does not have to be absolute because things change, but you need something that’s clear enough to be a target to aim for, and then you build simple steps towards it. That is a path of mastery and that comes from a deeper understanding of who your ideal client is, how do you talk to them, and what are the things that get them to move.
Over the years, the idea of becoming an under-the-radar leader in your industry develops because going back several years now, I was shifting from more of a corporate focus to working with other people like me, who I realized that I finally figured a lot of this out. I won’t say all of it. I still haven’t figured all of it out. I see that there are people who are a few years behind me and they’re struggling. I seem to have this ability to suffer through certain things and then teach clearly to others in a way that saves them some aggravation. Everybody’s got to walk across their own hot coals one way or the other.
[bctt tweet=”A backwards network gives you laser focus.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That gives part of the authenticity. If you’ve experienced the pain point that you’re solving yourself, you’ve been in their shoes. That’s the truth for me as a speaker to sales organizations. Having been in corporate sales for many years, I know what it’s like to have deadlines, quotas and all kinds of challenges, internally, externally and politically. My stories and my credibility are much higher than someone who maybe just wrote a book about it. One of the things I teach is your ability to show empathy and describe a problem in such a way that people see themselves in the problem, or they’re going to feel like you’re in your head. That makes you relatable and then they’re leaning into, “If you understand my problem, you probably have a solution for it.”
I would say that this under-the-radar concept is quite revolutionary because if we all think, “I have to be the next Tony Robbins in order to be happy, successful or feel good about myself,” then that’s a very high bar to hit. If you say there are a lot of people that “aren’t famous” that is doing so well that you’ve maybe never even heard of. They’re under the radar for the majority of people, but within their specific niche, there are a few names in the industry that people go, “I know that guy.”
What I came to realize is that if you get to know or if you are known by 30, 50, 100 well-placed people across your industry, you’ll have all the clients you want. You can be as busy as you want. You don’t need to be well known by millions of people. What so many people are aiming for is they’re trying to do things that they think are going to make them internet-famous or they want to have a bestselling book. There are places for all these things. Everything has its place. I never come and say, “This doesn’t work. Do it my way.” I think that’s idiocy. Everything works and everything fails. The question is, why does it work when it works? Why does it fail when it fails? When you have that understanding, then you can devise your own simple system that works for you. That’s what everyone is looking for.
That’s what I came to realize. That was a big insight for me as I came to understand that if you have relationships with well-placed people from several dozen perhaps to maybe 100 or 150. If you want to be a successful leadership consultant, you cultivate those relationships. You can get published in whatever publication you want based on your connections. You can get to any stage that you want. You can get into any company that you want through introduction with this network that you’ve created. It doesn’t mean that anyone’s going to just introduce you for any reason. You have to have a reason.
I know people who know Tony Robbins, but I don’t have a good reason to be introduced to him. I can’t think of what I would possibly do for him. It doesn’t mean that I can’t, but if I woke up and I was thinking like, “I have something that’s good for Tony Robbins. I have people who know him. He knows them in one way or the other. Some have worked with him and some who they’ve been clients of his or whatever it might be.” Not only they’ve attended the workshop but they were higher-level clients. If you have a reason and you have a relationship, then you can get to places that other people can’t get to.
You also talk about backwards networking. The first question I have is how do you define frontwards networking? Is that the normal get an introduction to somebody, go to an event, start hobnobbing? Is that what forward networking is, the traditional way of what we think it is?
I wouldn’t call that typical. That’s typical networking.
Profitable Relationships: People start to feel better about themselves when they get positive feedback or validation from people that they see as on a pedestal.
What’s backwards?
Backwards is what I’m talking about. It’s where you recognize that I don’t need to know everybody. I need to be known by a relatively small number of the right people. There are a few different ways to go about it. I’ve been helping clients do what I’ve done over the years, which is to form what I now think of as an alchemy network. I’ve got two alchemy networks myself right now. One is called the JVMM, which is for more colleagues and we promote each other. If you’re in that network, feel free to say anything you want or ask me anything about it. The other is a network that’s more for consultants who are looking to grow by referral and relationship.
As a consultant, I came to recognize that generally, your best clients come from relationships, referrals, word of mouth. The problem is that referrals are unpredictable. Most people don’t know how to build a system to generate referrals consistently that works. Number two, relationships take a lot of time and you don’t know when it’s going to bear fruit, whether this relationship will lead to anything. On the other hand, it’s not a relationship if you go into it transactionally. A relationship is when two people recognize like, “Let’s get to know each other and let’s move forward in a way that we’re both better off.”
The idea of now forming a network that is comprised either of a network of your colleagues that you’re all working together, marketing to similar audiences, and you can expose each other, introduce each other to your own audiences. That would be one type of alchemy network. Another kind of alchemy network is a network comprised of your ideal clients. People who you serve at a higher level. The third type would be recommenders. For example, a client of mine is a consultant and he does projects at large companies, $500 million-plus for anywhere from $200,000 up to low-seven figures. That’s like a 90-day to multi-year. For him, a decision-maker or the CEO or managing director of a $500 million division does need to be somewhat involved in the decision to hire him because the price is rather steep, but more so because it involves multiple departments in the company. The likelihood that the managing director or CEO is going to be at least somewhat involved in the decision is very high.
I’m mixing a few things together. Let me take a step back. I suggested that he form an alchemy network comprised of recommenders, people who are 1 or 2 levels below the CEO, still in a very senior position, but much easier to reach. Because when you’re forming a network, in his case he formed a network for R&D Directors at manufacturing companies doing $500 million or more. He’s reaching out to these people cold on LinkedIn, but he’s getting a lot of them responding. I remember he told me once that within 48 to 72 hours, he had five of these senior executives from $500 million and $1 billion-plus companies book themselves on his calendar as a result of some cold messaging that we had worked on together, reaching out on LinkedIn, and a little bit back and forth. That intrigued them because he wasn’t trying to pitch them something and so on. I don’t remember exactly what we did in his case, but the idea was that we were telling them about the alchemy network and inviting them to a conversation to see if it was a fit for them.
It would be harder to get a relationship with those people if you were trying to pitch them something on the get-go is what I’m hearing. The tweet I think I like is, “Backwards networking gives you laser focus.” You’re not trying to be all things to all people, whether you’re starting a mastermind free for them or you’re trying to just get to know them by the right people who can do that. That’s the takeaway that I’m hearing. I know you started the joint venture mastermind. Originally, it didn’t cost anything and you just wanted to get the right number of people in there. Now, it has become so desirable to get in that people are willing to pay to be in it. A lot of people think, “Start something for free. That doesn’t make any sense.” Yet it does, if you’re building relationships with people that could eventually help you or hire you in some form. It’s the other takeaway.
There are different approaches. One would be you do this for free, which I did in one of my groups for the JVMM for several years, and then I realized I need to know who wants to be here. It was a very scary decision at the time to switch from free to paid, but we did and it worked out well. We’ve grown stronger and stronger ever since. I don’t charge high. It’s not like a $10,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 a year membership. It’s $1,000 to $2,000 a year. That’s what I recommend for these alchemy networks. It should be relatively easy for either your colleagues, ideal clients or recommenders to say, “Yes, I want to be a part of that.”
[bctt tweet=”If you’re embarrassed, you’re not going to learn.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s a little bit of a different strategy depending on how you’re going about it and who it’s for. The idea of a recommender for this client, Mike, I suggested that he go for recommenders because it would be almost impossible to get a group going for the CEOs. Their area of responsibility is broad and many people and big companies are demanding their attention. If you go a level or two lower, the R&D directors don’t have access as much. He formed a network of R&D directors with who he understands their problems. Some of them will join his network and then from those, he gets to build those relationships.
Suddenly, he finds himself with great relationships with well-placed people across major companies across the United States. He now has backdoor access to many ideal potential clients. It’s like a backdoor to your ideal client’s office. One thing we designed was a simple process where over time as he gets to know them in his network, he helps identify a relatively small project with some of the members when they’re ready. Maybe it’s a $25,000 to $50,000, 90-day program or coaching of some kind, or a little project focused on something that’s within their domain.
For people who are reading and thinking, I need to form my own little mastermind, whether I charge or not,” one of the issues that come up that you probably can help them with is, aren’t a lot of those people competitors and they’re afraid of sharing private stuff or they want to open up the kimono so to speak and share that, “These are my struggles?” I’m trying to put myself in the head frame of the readers who would go, ”Ask him this.” That’s what came up for me, which is when you’re forming a mastermind, in this case, the story you’re telling us is about R&D. I’m assuming some of them might change jobs and go to competitors, and all those same people are in the same mastermind. How do you address that?
That’s definitely a question and it’s less of an issue than most people imagine it would be. The reason is this. No one is going to be asked to share their secret recipe for the cola or whatever. Every industry has associations, events and meetings where they get up and they talk. A lot of them have benchmarking of this or that kind. There are always things that people are willing to share. There’s a line and the point is that there’s enough value.
For example, in the healthcare world with COVID, the salespeople aren’t able to get into the surgeries or go to the hospital and catch the doctors between surgeries like they did. That’s a common problem across pharmaceutical sales and medical equipment sales. Those people could certainly feel free to talk about that as a challenge that the industry is facing, and maybe give some suggestions on how they’re handling it without feeling like they’re giving away their secrets. Is that a good example?
I think that’s a good example.
Cut back to your story about how you helped them and how things took off because I do want to ask you two more quick questions about your own mastermind and how you’re onboarding people in such an elegant way.
Profitable Relationships: Once you curate and bring together the right people, now you need to do things that make it easy for them to have conversations with each other.
Once you have a small project, then your client there feels confident. It’s like, “I’m not just bringing somebody in who I don’t know.” He’s built that relationship. It becomes a profitable relationship and that can lead to an introduction to a $200,000 or low seven-figure project. He’s only looking for 3 or 4 projects a year.
The masterminds are building trust. It’s the outcome of that.
Not only that but when I made that shift to charging for my first network and then I started a second network and started to focus all of my work with clients on helping them also build similar alchemy networks. I don’t use the term mastermind because that can mean so many different things to so many different people. It is a kind of mastermind for sure. Because it is its own little animal, I had to come up with the name, and it’s a way of creating alchemy. You have all these relationships from so many different places. When you bring them together in a way that is good for everybody, it just creates value from nothing or it creates value from things that you’re already doing. Sometimes it makes sense to do it for free, but sometimes it makes sense to charge. If you’re charging $1,000 to $2,000 a year for membership, you end up in a situation where you’ve created a $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 revenue stream from things that you’re likely doing already for free.
JVMM stands for Joint Venture, which is also known as being affiliate partners with people who have courses to promote, and then the MM stands for?
It’s Joint Venture Marketing Mastermind.
I wanted to make sure I understood what it was called. It is a marketing mastermind. Within that world, since I joined it, I’m very impressed with how you onboard people because that’s a big reason why people don’t feel like they want to join something. It’s “I’ll be lost in this. These people all know each other.” I knew you have a whole series of a few detailed personal introductions to the entire group. The thing that surprised me and impressed me the most at the same time was little steps like an email drip campaign, “Let me know when you have reached out to three people you didn’t know before you joined.” It doesn’t count if you’re reaching out to people you already know.
There are group comments and emails to the group of people asking questions, “Let me know when you’ve contributed some answers to that.” You’re thinking to yourself, “This is bite-sized. I can do this.” Yet, if I didn’t have a little bit of a roadmap from you, I would feel overwhelmed. How do I get to know a hundred and some people at once? You’re like, “Pick three and then comment.” I’m guessing there’s more to come. That is so unique and I wanted to acknowledge it, and then also ask you how you developed it.
[bctt tweet=”Everybody’s got to walk across their own hot coals one way or the other.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Thank you and I’m glad that it’s working for you. I appreciate the feedback. It’s good. How I developed it was just listening. That’s the old skill. Most of my creative ideas are just the result of listening and noticing what’s going on. I believe that when you’re forming your own network, whether it’s of colleagues, ideal clients, recommenders or whatever the network is for, they are two things that are valuable. Number one is curation and number two is conversation. The value that I’m bringing to my members, even with my potential clients, when you’re forming a network of ideal clients or recommenders, I’m positioning myself more as an authority rather than as a colleague.
It’s not a coaching program. It’s not necessarily a training program, but there are some elements where you’re bringing some of your expertise in a way that you’re not necessarily doing with colleagues. There are different reasons why people are joining. There are a lot of nuances here. What I came to realize in either case is that what matters in this type of approach more than anything else is curation and conversation. People can’t just pay and join. That’s something that matters. It’s not a very high fee, but if you’re not the right person, I don’t let you in. That’s something that makes us a little bit different from a typical membership community of one kind or another, or an association where pretty much anybody who can pay and has the right title can get in.
That is something that has made the JVMM solid and strong over the years, even when it was free. I’m not charging $25,000 a year for a membership. It’s not like I have the temptation to kill the goose that lays the golden egg by letting somebody in because that’s $25,000. That’s half a decent car or more. It depends on where you live or less. I don’t have that temptation because no one member is going to make any huge difference in my income here, but what does matter is that I am curating. I think a big part of the secret of this is the curation.
I’ve turned away somebody for JVMM who was probably worth about $100 million. Someone introduced us and he was interested. He had sold a start-up about twelve years earlier for over about close to $350 million, $330 million, I think it was. I imagine he had some investors or partners that had to get their piece of it and Uncle Sam had to get his piece of it. Let’s say he ended up with $50 million at the end. Over 10 to 12 years, you can grow that back to about $100 million. That’s what he was worth but in our conversation, he said something at the very end. He got his credit card and was about to sign up. This was all over Zoom. Suddenly, he said something and I said something, and then he pulled back. He wasn’t sure and then he emailed me afterwards. I clarified and said, “This is this and if that, then it may not be a fit.” That’s it. I’m not going to chase him.
What I look for in my members and this is especially key for people with imposter syndrome, sometimes people start to feel better about themselves when they get positive feedback or validation from people that they see as on a pedestal. I’m guilty of that to some degree as well. You have to learn to get past that. That’s a big part of making this work. When you are no longer concerned about that, and you care more about the total goal, the overall goal, then you’re able to curate your group properly. The second value that you bring with your alchemy network is conversation. Once you curate and bring together the right people, now you need to do things that make it easy for them to have conversations with each other. We’re also busy. You asked me how did I come up with this? I think of it as 365 days of onboarding. You’re not getting something every day to do because that would be too much.
I love that, curation and conversation. What a great alliteration and a way for people to start thinking of, are they doing both? They both need to be done. What’s the best way for people to reach out to you or follow you? What sites do we want to send people to?
We have a couple of short training videos on how to become an under-the-radar leader in your industry by starting an alchemy network if you like to. Some of these ideas are beyond that. We put up a link for your readers at ProfitableRelationships.com/livesay.
Thank you so much for being with us sharing your insights and making us rethink not only networking but relationships and whether we need to be above or below the radar.
Thanks for having me.
Important Links
- https://www.DovGordon.net/
- http://ProfitableRelationships.com/livesay
- ProfitableRelationships.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Relationship Selling With Jim Cathcart
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Selling is more than just pitching your product. John Livesay’s guest today is Jim Cathcart, a professional speaker, Hall of Famer, and author of Relationship Selling. In this episode, Jim explains how effective selling combines the elements of storytelling and relationships. Did you know that consumers are guided by their feelings when they purchase? That’s right! So if you’re empathetic to your customers and you have a relationship with them, efficient selling becomes easier for you. Want more strategies on relationship selling? Join in!
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Listen to the podcast here
Relationship Selling With Jim Cathcart
Our guest is Jim Cathcart, a giant and a Leader of speakers and salespeople. He is the author of Relationship Selling. He has spoken to over 3,000 different events over many years and has been to China over 73 times, speaking to those crowds. We talk about the will to win requires the will to work. When you go for creating a story that people feel they are in, that is a success story. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Jim Cathcart, who has for many years written over twenty books and had over 3,300 paid speaking engagements, including 70 plus engagements in China. He has been selected as one of the top five speakers on sales and service. He has delivered many talks in many countries that he is an industry leader. His clients span all industries. He is listed in the Professional Speaker Hall of Fame. He is the author of twenty books but one of the big ones is Relationship Selling. I’m so thrilled and honored to have him on. Jim, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s great to be with you.
Your TEDx Talk has over two million views. Congratulations. That’s the power of a good story.
We are in your line now.
Relationship Selling
You talk about your story of origin in your TEDx Talk. That is one of my favorite questions to open the show with. Would you share with us how you’ve got into the speaking business, how hearing one person sometimes can change your life and who that was for you?
There may well be someone or multiple ones reading this, who get an idea from what we are saying. Nothing necessarily that it’s our idea but that they have an idea because of what they hear. The direction of their life starts to change and becomes profoundly more meaningful and fulfilling than ever before. It certainly happened for me. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was born in 1946. It’s the beginning of the Baby Boom. My dad was a telephone repairman. My mom was a housewife taking care of me, my little sister and my invalid grandfather and grandmother who were with us.
I expected a normal, ordinary unremarkable life. I was not a superior student. I was a good student but not on the honor roll. I never was an athlete. I had not been encouraged to go for the gold ring, try to do a big deal and make my life an epic success. I just figured I grew up, be a nice guy, have an ordinary home in an ordinary neighborhood, be a middle manager at the phone company, retire at 65 and die at whatever the statistical date was for my gene pool.
One day, in my twenties, newly married, no college degree, no money in the bank, 50 pounds’ overweight, two-pack-a-day smoker, new baby at home, I’m working for a government agency, the Housing Authority. I was an assistant to the loan specialist, which was just above entry-level. He didn’t need an assistant. I was bored to tears. I was making $500 a month and had nothing to do most days. One day, I was sitting there. I had read all the books on urban renewal for the Housing Authority. That didn’t interest me so I had read the Bible cover to cover at work in three months.
[bctt tweet=”Nurture your nature.” username=”John_Livesay”]
In the next room, there is a radio playing. The voice I heard was not John Livesay, it was Earl Nightingale, the Dean of Personal Motivation. That day in 1972, he said something that has stuck with me and changed the direction of my life, “If you will spend one hour extra every day studying your chosen field, in five years or less, you will be a national expert in that field.” I thought, an hour a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that is 1,250 hours.
If I studied one narrow subject for that, not one subject like medicine but one like skeletal structure, bone surgeon orthopedist, at five years, take longer than that to get my Medical degree but five years of study only on orthopedics, I would be a very knowledgeable person on orthopedics. I wasn’t interested in medicine. I was interested in what the guy on the radio was doing. I said, “I want to do what Nightingale is doing but I didn’t know what that was. I knew it was the field of human development. This was at the beginning of what became later known as the Human Potential Movement.
There were no such thing as professional speakers. They existed but nobody had categorized them as such. There weren’t many of them. The National Speakers Association hadn’t yet been formed. The self-help section of the bookstore or the library didn’t exist. There were a couple of books, Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Power of Positive Thinking, end of the category. Now, the entire sections of a bookstore would be devoted to that. I didn’t know how to get into his field nor what it meant. I decided to take his advice. I dedicated myself to a one-hour minimum, usually 2 or 3 hours, every day I could, studying what the scientists call applied behavioral science, how to be successful. I read those books I mentioned. I met people who had read those books and that started more collaboration. I heard records, a large disk that has a little hole in them. Kids don’t even know what the records are in a lot of cases. I listened to long play records of Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill and W Clement Stone. This was even before Zig Ziglar. I heard audio cassettes. I became fanatical about the field of personal development.
Within a couple of years, I was leading group discussions on goal setting and interpersonal skills, things like that, in the Jaycees, the Junior Chamber of Commerce for free after working on weekends. After a year or so of that, I’ve got a job leading training courses other people had written. I then was able to go out on my own. Sure enough, five years later, I was a full-time trainer and speaker, teaching courses, at first other people’s courses, and then my own. I bought a psychological research firm. I did my own original research and now I have written twenty books and done more things than I ever dreamed of doing back in the day. There is more to that story if you want to explore it.
Relationship Selling: If you spend one hour extra every day studying in your chosen field, you’ll be a national expert in that field in five years or less.
There is so much to unpack there. Every speaker has an intention, goal and objective of making an impact. To hear a story of somebody well known making that impact, totally changed the trajectory of your life. Think of all the people that have now had that ripple effect. That is part of the reason why I love that story so much and the willingness to do the work.
I co-authored a book with Brian Tracy in 2020 called The Will to Win. My chapter was the theme chapter, the will to win, positioned his first and mine last. Other co-authors did chapters in between. Mine was the will to win requires the will to work, the will to show up, the will to endure the pain, the will to be embarrassed and humiliated from time to time by failing, the will to persist when you feel like there is no hope. Somewhere there is an answer. There are lots of will tools that total up to the will to win. The desire to win is useless. The will to win is a whole bunch of other things that combine.
We are certainly going to make that one of the tweets from the episode, “The will to win requires the will to work.” Nobody loves that alliteration more than I do, Jim. I like that on so many levels. One of your more famous books, certainly something that had a big influence on me is this concept of Relationship Selling. I heard you in another interview talking about there is no such thing as a natural-born seller.
There are natural-born talkers. It’s like your specialty is storytelling. There aren’t natural-born storytellers but there are people who have a natural ability to quickly learn storytelling. Some people find that very difficult to learn but can. Once you understand story structure, concept, how to interact with people, how to articulate a particular story in a way that makes it both emotionally and intellectually appealing, that’s learnable. I went to my 30th high school class reunion some time ago. I remember talking with one of my old classmates who said, “What are you doing now?” I said, “I’m a professional speaker.”
[bctt tweet=”The best story is one where people feel they are in it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
He said, “What do you speak about, just anything?” I said, “Sure. They just pay to hear my voice.” He said, “Did what?” I said, “No. Of course, not. I have a specialty. That is what I focus on. It’s sales and human development.” This guy said to me, “You always were a good storyteller.” I said, “What? I was?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I wish somebody told me.” John, I didn’t know I was a good storyteller. I grew up in a family of storytellers, in a culture in the South, where storytelling was commonplace. I’ve got a kick out of doing it. I enjoyed performing so I had a little flair to it. It was starting to develop even back in high school.
It’s so funny sometimes I will get off the stage, back in the day, literal stages or even virtual talks, people say, “You are a natural.” I used to go, “What? I worked on this.” Now I just smile and say, “Thank you.” That is a very high compliment because you can’t see the word behind it that is struggling.
Let me interrupt for a second and complete the answer to your earlier question, natural-born salespeople. There are eight stages in the sales cycle, preparation, targeting the right people, connecting with them so that you gain their trust, assessing their needs and wants, solving their problem, convincing them to commit to buying, assuring that they are satisfied, managing yourself and managing your sales career. That’s a different skillset. You might be natural at 1 or 2 of those. For the others, you are going to have to learn or buy resources or subscribe to something that will provide that for you.
I’m so glad you went through all eight. For me, the bookends are the two of the most important ones. Let’s start at the end. This is the one I think most people do not even have an awareness of let alone do, which is managing your career and your own persona as a professional and continuing to learn, refining your skills and not being so dependent on anyone’s job to be at that mercy. At the beginning of it is the need for preparation. One of my favorite quotes is from Arthur Ashe, the tennis pro, “The key to success is confidence. Key to confidence is preparation.” I know in my sales career, that was always the key to my success. I was willing to prepare for every single call. Most people, “I have been doing this long enough. I will just wing it. I will see what comes to me in the moment or whatever.”
Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century (Think and Grow Rich Series)
It’s like the person that gets up to give a speech and they say, “I had these notes,” but tear it up and they wing it. Afterward, it just makes me want to go up to them and say, “You could have been so much better.” It’s not that you need to read this. It’s just that if you don’t do that, organize everything and then follow some format, then we are not going to be in on it. What is going on for you?
Do you think Clint Eastwood gets in front of a camera without rehearsal? No. Do you think Tiger Woods doesn’t practice? Of course, he still does. Yet somehow some people think they don’t have to do that. The other thing you talked about is storytelling and selling is those little details. In your TEDx Talk about How to Believe in Yourself that has over two million views for a reason. It’s because you paint a picture in such detail that people see themselves in it. One of the phrases you talk about is going to McDonald’s regularly, getting a relationship going and then everyone’s worst nightmare. You get the audience to describe what that is. I’m going to let you pick the story up there. I think you know the detail. I’m looking for people’s mindset is as opposed to just being a crowd.
I had the habit of going to breakfast alone every morning for many years. I would do that because that was when I would get focused. That is when I would do the business side of selling, which was my first book and that was with Dr. Tony Alessandra. That was the managing sales part of that and managing your career. I went to McDonald’s every morning. I would not take a stack of work. I would take an empty pad. I would write goals and work on them. This is with McDonald’s for the first several years. When I found a cool coffee shop in La Jolla, California, I upgraded a bit on the cuisine.
At McDonald’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma long ago, I went there every morning. One morning, I pulled up and saw what you would hate to see at McDonald’s, which is empty buses in the parking lot. The way I set that up with an audience is I tell them about this habit of breakfast alone. One morning, I saw the sign of my restaurant in the distance and I do the little golden arches. They snicker and then I tell them, it’s McDonald’s. I say, “In that morning when I’ve got to the parking lot, I saw the danger sign.” Now in a McDonald’s parking lot, if you want to eat there, what would be the danger sign to you? Someone always yells out, “A bus.” I pause, I just do the gesture, “Two” and I say, “Two buses empty and a McDonald’s parking lot equals what in the lobby?” They start thinking and I say, “45 people per bus, you got 90 head ready to graze in the lobby of this McDonald’s. I’m about to add one to the mix.” When I’m telling the story, I do it this way, “I squeezed through the door into the crowd. I’m looking for the line that moves the fastest, the one that will always stop if you get in it.” Sure enough, that happened.
[bctt tweet=”The will to win requires the will to work, the will to show up, and the will to endure the pain.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I heard my name, “Mr. Cathcart.” I look around like I’m there again, “Mr. Cathcart” and I look up at the front. It’s the woman that works there. Grandma is her nickname. Her name is Marilyn. I said, “Yes?” She said, “Your breakfast is ready.” I’m leaving out some parts of the story that set that up. She knew me from seeing me every morning and me always ordering the same thing. When the crowd was there, she got my order, fulfilled it and set it off to the side. She said, “Mr. Cathcart, your breakfast is ready,” and went on serving other people. After I have told this story and had some laughs, I go back to the audience and analyze the scene. I say, “What did it cost her to do that?” They tell me it’s the cost of the breakfast. I said, “No.” It took her fifteen seconds of extra time. Since she said the breakfast was free that morning, she didn’t charge me. It took her the net cost of that breakfast. The revenue loss is the gross cost. What do they get? Six years of customer loyalty while I was in Tulsa, followed by 45 years of free advertising, including the ad that I just gave.
You talk about the big takeaway for everyone is we do the majority of things in our life, buy things, return as loyal customers based on how it makes us feel.
We do the things we do to achieve the feelings we want, the feeling of being correct, strong, successful, safe. The feelings we want, not just to attain the things we need.
That is one of my favorite insights into human behavior, which if you understand yourself, that completely changes how you sell. From there, people can have relationships, as you said in your book.
How to Win Friends & Influence People
It also helps you be a better listener and a better empathetic person in selling because if you understand that all people, self-included, do the things we do to achieve the feelings we want then it begs the question. I’m about to make a sales presentation to John. What does he want? What feelings does he want from the things I represent as a product or a service? Does he want the feeling that he is going to be more successful with me because there is a higher margin of profit? Does he feel like he is going to be able to relax a little bit more because I’m saving him time, money and effort? Does he want to be admired more because he is the first on his blog to have one of my products? There is a feeling behind it. If you understand the feeling, everything else will commit to working.
Would you agree then based on what you just said that people buy emotionally and then back it up with logic?
People say, “They buy with logic.” No. They analyze with logic, rationalize, justify and then they make the decision. Do I want it or not? Yeah. Is that enough information? Yeah. That one, just a calculator going, “Do, do, total.” That was a shift from logic to feel. That moment of decision occurs at the feeling level but we get there through the logical passage.
What do you think makes a good story when someone is telling a story either as a speaker or as a salesperson?
[bctt tweet=”We do the things we do to get the feelings we want rather than just the things we need.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They feel they are in it. I have never given that an answer before because I have never had anybody asked me that way, not a fellow storyteller like yourself. The number one element of a story is they feel the moment has been suspended. They are now in the story. I was on my motorcycle. I pull up to the intersection. This guy looks over at me. He hadn’t decided yet, whether I’m a jerk and an idiot for driving a motorcycle or I’m cool. I give him my best Fonzie. He goes, “Hey.” I know I have made it. I just made that up on the spot while we were talking. Didn’t you feel like you were there at the intersection?
I visualized you in a leather jacket. I visualized the Fonzie. I visualized everything. I loved how it was so binary, the choices, it’s very funny. What advice would you have for someone who either wants to get into speaking or wants to grow their speaking career?
I have had a lot of people especially in China put you on a pedestal over there. “Teacher, “Master, what do I need to do to become a great speaker?” First, become a great person and then agree to speak. I’m serious about that. That is not just a flip and answer. If you are not a good person, then your speeches are going to be data dumps or performances. They are not going to be a real sharing between people. If you want to become great at something, figure upfront. You’ve got to become a great person. To achieve and sustain, there is the keyword, sustain great things. Anyone who came by accident hit a homerun one or a homerun once but you are not going to repeat that or even get close to repeating that unless you have got it all together.
How do you become a great speaker? You become a better and better person every day of your life, a more understanding, caring, disciplined, professional, knowledgeable, skilled, practice, structured, playful and interested person. Do you want people to be interested in you? Be interested in them. Like my son, when he worked at a mailbox when he was in college, he said, “Dad, you know how to get a lot of mail? Send a lot of mail.” How do you become an interesting person or get people to be interested in you? Take an interest in them. As a speaker, how do I get rid of my nervousness? Stop thinking about yourself. Think about the message you want them to receive and about how they might best receive it. Forget yourself and your nervousness will disappear.
The Power of Positive Thinking
Stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about them.
Only about them and that takes a lot of learning to do. Also, if you want to be a good speaker, go speak 100 times for no pay in any circumstance that you can find, in a basement of a church, in the summertime, in the South with no air conditioning at 160 degrees and 100% humidity. Go speak on the bay of a fire station to five people that didn’t want to be there and you have got them for half an hour, speaking on behalf of the local civic club. Go speak in somebody’s living room with kids running around and distractions and they didn’t turn off the TV. Go speak in front of a bunch of people that hate being there and resent you and would rather beat you up. Speak in a bar when there is too much noise and the jukebox is playing and people are yelling. I’m talking about giving speeches, not conversation.
Also, never speak to an audience that you can’t bring something valuable. It’s not about making a sound with your mouth. It’s about making sense with your mind and theirs, making that connection. They say, “I’m a good speaker.” Are you a good speaker when someone dies in the audience? Are you a good speaker when the building catches on fire and the rooms got to be evacuated? I have had all these things happen. I have had emergent medical emergencies. Luckily, no one died in the audience. Are you a good speaker when they announced that the founder of the company passed away this morning? Now, here is our guest speaker. Are you a good speaker when the room is four degrees and everybody is just dying to go somewhere warm? What about when they are all drunk? People say, “I’m a good speaker.” Prove it. Let me choose the circumstances. You choose the audience, I will choose the circumstances.
I see so many similarities between what you said about speaking and actors. I finished listening to Matthew McConaughey, his Greenlights book. He is a fascinating, interesting person separate from his acting career.
The Will To Win
He was a student of Og Mandino, one of my former friends. He has passed away now. He is one of my all-time heroes.
Actors are willing to work off-Broadway for very little money or no money to practice their craft. There are a lot of similarities there. I think it’s the willingness to see yourself almost as an artist, which actors tend to do. I don’t know that a lot of speakers see themselves that way. That is what my big takeaway is from what you described.
I went to a meeting in Santa Barbara one time. I was all dressed in a suit looking lovely. I remember the client was a company you never hear about anymore. I don’t know if they exist in that form, Wang computers. Wang was a big corporation back in the day. I arrived at this resort in Santa Barbara. I’m in the meeting room. I’m there early because I’m the keynote speaker. The meeting room was set up completely wrong. It’s set up in a tunnel, like a board meeting for 60 some odd people. That is like speaking in a railroad car. I said to the houseman, “Excuse me. The room is all set up wrong. It needs to be classroom style.”
He said, “Do you want to change it? You change it yourself.” It’s just a few minutes before the people started arriving. I made a snap decision. I said, “Leave my room.” He said, “What?” I said, “Go,” because it was clear he wasn’t willing to help. He left the room and I locked the door. I took off my suit, tie, shirt and stripped to the waist. I reset the whole room. I then went to the restroom. I cleaned up a little bit. I put the suit back on. I unlocked the door. I said, “John, welcome to the meeting. Come on in.” All the people came in. We went on with business as usual.
Relationship Selling: If you want to be a good speaker, go speak 100 times for no pay in any circumstance that you can find.
Doing what it takes, people. That is a great story to leave and on. That is such a visual and a willingness to do what it takes to make it right, not just for the audience but for yourself. Let the audience put you on a pedestal. Don’t put yourself on a pedestal. I know you have been on a pedestal and you have earned that. In China with thousands of people coming to clamor like a Tony Robbins experience. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your passion, wisdom and most of all your humor with us.
You are very welcome. I’m enjoying our new friendship. Since we live in the same area, we’ve got to make plans to get together. I look forward to that. This will be the first of many occasions like this.
If people want to find you, where should we send them? What website?
Send them to Jim Cathcart anywhere on the web. I’ve got Cathcart.com, Wikipedia page, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube. Most all of it is free so dig in and enjoy. Send me a message.
Thank you so much. Thanks again, Jim.
It’s my pleasure. Take care, John.
Important Links
- https://Cathcart.com/
- Relationship Selling
- Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People
- The Power of Positive Thinking
- The Will to Win
- Wikipedia – Jim Cathcart
- LinkedIn – Jim Cathcart
- Facebook – Jim Cathcart
- YouTube – Jim Cathcart
- How to Believe in Yourself – YouTube
- Greenlights
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Bulletproof Selling With Shawn Rhodes
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Take your sales career to a skyrocketing improvement when you learn the secrets of bulletproof selling as told by a war correspondent-turned international expert in improving teams’ pipeline and performance. Shawn Rhodes is a Tampa-based TEDx speaker published in news outlets like CNN, TIME, BBC, and Forbes. He joins John Livesay to share what he knows about the sales industry and the secrets that made him who he is today. For Shawn, his experience in the military jumpstarted his love for sales. He made use of it to continue excelling in the world of business by understanding the whole sales process around pipeline improvement. Uncover the methods to become a successful salesperson, as Shawn outlines what one must understand when making sales in the industry.
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Listen to the podcast here
Bulletproof Selling With Shawn Rhodes
My guest is Shawn Rhodes, the author of Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For the Battlefield Of Business. Imagine if any objection or rejection would bounce off you like a bullet. He has got a great way of reframing how you look at things and creating a pipeline that will keep generating leads for you so that you can come up with a bulletproof offer. Find out how to do this and trim hope from your sales strategy.
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My guest is Shawn Rhodes who’s leveraged his former life as a war correspondent to become an international expert in how the best teams continuously improve pipelines and performance. He’s a Tampa-based TEDx speaker and his work studying teams in more than two dozen countries, in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. He has been published in news outlets like TIME, CNN, NBC and Forbes. His clients have included Deloitte, Coca-Cola and dozens of similar businesses. He’s a nationally syndicated columnist with the business journals and author of a book, which I am a big fan of, Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For the Battlefield Of Business. That is a ton of alliterations. No one loves literation more than I do. Welcome to the show, Shawn.
It is a pleasure, John. Thanks for noticing all the alliterations.
It is just golden, the battlefield of business. It’s a really interesting place to start because people talk about the war, The Art of War, and all these other things. Are you in fact in a battle when you are in a sales situation or has the buyers become more sophisticated? I like to think of it as you are more of a co-pilot as opposed to behind enemy lines. We are going to get to how you came up with the title because before the show, you and I were talking about how we spend so much time and care crafting even with the cover image is going to be, let alone with the title and subtitle are. I want to have you start your story at the beginning. I’m going to give you complete freedom to start that story anywhere. Childhood, college, wherever you want that you were like a lot of kids grow up going, “I see they are covering the war on TV. I want to go there and do that.” How did that even happen?
This is something that a lot of entrepreneurs will recognize. In high school, I had a lot of potentials but really no outlet for it. I knew that if I went to college right after high school, I was going to do a lot of drugs, probably make a lot of bad life decisions and potentially waste that opportunity. Talking with mentors and friends, I realized I just didn’t have some life skills that I might need like self-discipline, integrity, ambition, the ability to define a goal and then plan the steps out to achieve it. Things that make us successful as adults and successful in the world of business.
The choices for me were to wander the country with a flute-like Caine in Kung Fu. That was an option for me. The other choice was to join the military. It’s polar opposites if you will. The military seemed like it would be more regular meals and maybe a place to sleep every once in a while, so that’s the choice that I made. I started looking at the branches because each branch, you will get this as a marketer, they have a very specific pitch. They are looking for a very specific type of recruit. The Army is all about travel. The Air Force, wants intelligent people to work with technology. The Navy, also about travel, got to love the water and being on the ocean. The Marines were the only ones that were communicating this warrior ethos as a recruiting pitch. Honor, courage, commitment, the few, the proud, these tag lines that we really become familiar with, especially the United States and uniform, obviously can’t be beaten.
As I started talking to the Marines, they took a look at my test scores because you take a test to find out where you might belong in the military. Every job you could do as a civilian, they have it in the military. They said, “Shawn, you failed everything, except for verbal comprehension. On that account, you are off the charts.” They looked at all the jobs and they said, “You would fail as an infantryman so we are not going to let you do that. You would not be a good engineer. Everything you built would fall apart immediately so you are not going to do that.” They went down the list of jobs. The one that they had that would be a good fit for verbal comprehension was as a journalist, writer, photographer, broadcaster, what they called a combat correspondent.
[bctt tweet=”Improve your pipeline with a bulletproof offer.” username=”John_Livesay”]
For your readers that have ever seen the old Stanley Kubrick movie, Full Metal Jacket, the 1970s, 1980s movie about the Marines in Vietnam, I was Joker, running around on the battlefield with a camera and a notepad, just capturing the stories like old school. It was so much fun. I’ve got to travel the world. I did two combat tours in Iraq. I was there for the initial invasion in ‘03 and went back for the battles of Fallujah and Ramadi in ‘04. I’ve got to meet a lot of amazing human beings. It really prepped me for the work that I do now because I saw these men and women achieve the impossible every single day.
For those who are reading right now that aren’t familiar with urban combat, it got about a 50% mortality rate. If 50 people go into a building to clear it and there are bad people in there waiting to take them out, only 25 are expected to walk out of that building under their own power. Those are the statistical averages. You think the entrepreneurs that are trying to factor what their conversion rate might be for customer conversion or pitch 50% expected loss. That’s pretty steep, especially when it’s your life on the line. Yet, these Marines and Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets and Air Force Air Rescue men, I’ve got to work with the best to the best. They all had an incredible rate of coming out alive. The military wanted to know how they were able to do that. We recognized it wasn’t because they were hoping that they were going to be successful like so many entrepreneurs do. You think about the high failure rate of small businesses, it’s one lack of conversion, lack of sales, lack of revenue but the underlying issue is so many of us are just hoping that we are successful. We are not taking the time to train, plan, prepare, map out our strategy and then break it down into time-bound tasks that we can execute.
In addition to taking a look, I made that pitch. I’ve either got the funding or I didn’t. I’ve got the customer or I didn’t. What went right? What went wrong? How can I do better next time? These Marines that I was studying every day, that was their life because their life was on the line. They made sure after every mission to debrief and to take a look at how we could get better. What did we encounter that was unique? How do we share that with our sister units as fast as possible so they don’t have to learn the hard way? Look for that tripwire in that particular location, for instance. That allowed me to really begin taking what I have learned and saying, “How can I apply this into something that I’m in love with, which is the world of sales, the world of business?” That’s where the battlefield of business came from. Bulletproof Selling is all about building those types of systems into your sales process so that you can remove hope as a strategy as well.
That’s a great tweet. Hope is not a strategy. This concept of debriefing after every call whether you win or lose, I think that’s where a lot of people think, “We don’t have to take a look at why we won. We won, who cares?” You are missing a huge opportunity there to figure out why you won so you can repeat that process. I guess we’ve just got lucky. Doctors do this when they lose a patient. They have an M&M thing where they literally sit around and talk about, “Was there anything we could have done that we don’t make that same mistake again or was this person terminal regardless?”
I can walk your readers through that process if you would like as it applies to a pitch for instance.
I think that would be incredibly valuable. I have had over 300 episodes, no one has offered that, so, please.
Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For The Battlefield Of Business
Whether you get off of a call or you are pitching your company for some funding, whatever that looks like, there are three places that you need to debrief after a sales meeting. We will just lump those all in the term sales meeting for ease of use here. The first thing you want to do is debrief yourself as the salesperson. What that looks like is, what could I have, knowing what happened, I know all the questions that were asked, I know what my responses were or were not if they ask a question, I couldn’t answer and that tainted, what was that situation. Debrief yourself. Knowing what you know now, what could you have researched, prepared, studied, done going in? What objections might you have really benefitted from in studying? I don’t have enough money or it doesn’t sound like you’ve got enough recurring capital. Your model is not sustainable. Whatever objections you’ve got that either got you the solution you want or didn’t, debrief yourself.
The second thing you want to debrief is your prospect. Debrief the customer on the other side of the call. Knowing what you know about them now, what would have been valuable to have to go in there? What pieces of knowledge do you know at the end of a call where they went to school? Where they live? How many family members they have? What interests they have? What challenges their company is going through? How much budget they do or don’t have for the product or service that you are offering? All of that might have been valuable to know going into you now know. Capture that. You are not going to be able to replicate it because you don’t have a crystal ball. Knowing what questions to ask earlier on in the sales process may be what comes out of debriefing your prospect.
The third thing and this is especially applicable if you work with anybody else, or you work for someone else, debrief your company. What could your company have provided to you in the way of samples, in the way of pricing sheets, in the way of training, in the way of anything that is really the company’s job to provide to you? If you are a team of one, like a lot of us are, that ball is back on you again. If you work for somebody else, what could they have done, provided to you or taught you that would have made a difference? Even if you close that sale, getting a larger margin on it, not having to negotiate down so much or being able to cross-sell, upsell or down-sell into different areas of the organization that you just now have as a customer.
Debrief yourself, your prospect and your company, after every what you might consider a major sales call. If you are an inside sales rep and you are making 200 calls a day, that’s not the process for you. If you are using those calls to drive into sales meetings that do make a difference because money is on the line and maybe half of your calls or a dozen a day or whatever that looks like for you, very valuable process. Debrief those three things after every call.
I really want to double-click on the one you are talking about debriefing the company. Having worked in big companies myself and now speaking to a lot of them and their sales teams, there’s this competition, a little rivalry and resentment between marketing and sales a lot. Sales are like, “We need better whatever. The leads are bad. We need a discount. We need this,” and marketing is like, “We’ve got a brand to protect. We are not going to give you a discount. We legitimately do want to give you some tools but we don’t see you using the tools.” I think that is one big thing if marketing and sales could debrief together without finger-pointing as to why, “Your idea wasn’t good enough, that’s why they didn’t buy. You did a horrible job presenting that.” We can get a place where they are not pointing fingers at each other.
You’ve tapped into what I see and I can’t wait to hear your opinion of this, it’s one of the biggest problems in big companies is that everything is siloed. That lack of cross-selling causes the marketing department to pull their hair out because they’ve got to start from scratch every time. There are no introductions between departments, whether it’s a law firm or a medical firm. They don’t even know what to say or they are suddenly afraid of rejection or ruining their existing relationship. There are so many problems. I would love to hear your thoughts and observations and how you help them solve those problems with Bulletproof Selling, with this debriefing process.
[bctt tweet=”Debrief your sales calls.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I will take you a couple of steps back even before this book because the first book that I ever wrote was called Pivot Point: Turn On A Dime Without Sacrificing Results. It was the story of a mission that we ran in Fallujah with former Secretary of Defense James Mattis. This is back when he was a General of Marines rather than a Secretary of Defense. Briefly, the reason we were in Fallujah with him at all, we were having a lot of trouble in that city. If you know anything about the war in Iraq, Fallujah was a big hotspot. Every time we had to send a patrol in there, we were getting shot at. That didn’t allow us to bring in humanitarian aid to turn the water on. People were just living in bad conditions. Sanitary conditions were just awful for the population of 300,000 human beings. They deserve the same stuff that we have, basic health, sanitation, all that. To bring the parties to the table, we have politics in America where we have to create something big to bring the parties to the table to talk, General Mattis shut it all down for the city. He shut down water, electricity, sewage. He said, “Your tribal leaders need to talk with us because we are not going away anytime soon. If you want your stuff turned back on, we need to be able to access your city without getting shot at, let’s meet.”
The tribal leaders being the smart people that they were said, “We are happy to do that General, but we need you to be the one at the negotiation table. You are not going to have more than three Marines in that room with us. You are going to have a small patrol to bring you into the city of 300,000 very angry Iraqis.” General Mattis is a smart guy. He’s a strategist. He knew that this was an invitation for him to be kidnapped, like Blackhawk down was waiting to happen. The patrol that he was on, they called it the Dead Man’s Patrol because they didn’t expect anybody to come back alive. They needed somebody to cover it on the off chance that everybody survived this thing. I was the journalist that they tapped. It was me and maybe a dozen vehicles in the middle of a city of 300,000 by ourselves.
Just to be clear on your story. Journalists don’t get to have the big red cross on their back that people like, “Don’t kill that person because they are medical.” They don’t know the difference between you and anybody else.
There are civilian war correspondents on the battlefield, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and all that. They normally wear stuff that identifies them as such. It doesn’t keep them from getting hurt, unfortunately. For me, I was a full battle guard with a rifle because I was trained as a Marine. I had a rank and all that stuff. I was in the Marine Corps. We get into the city. The reason I bring it up to answer your question is that you think of this patrol going into the city as the sales team. They were the marketing team, the planning team, the logistics team, the operational team, the warehouse to ask to deliver the product or service, the sales team and selling. All that stuff is happening back at the home base. If the sales team just decides to get a wild hair and take a patrol in the middle of Fallujah without letting anybody know or getting any kind of support, their chances of success are very slim, even if they are the best sales team in the world.
We learned this a long time ago so we definitely were practicing it in Iraq. They had to get together before a big mission like this before a big sales call so to speak and get the input, advice and assistance of anybody that might help them become more successful. Instead of building their plan in a vacuum, which is what I see marketing doing a lot of companies and the same sales team doing in the same company, also building in a vacuum. The planning table involved all the parties that were going to be involved, not just the patrol going in but the artillery, the tanks, the air support, even the intelligence community. What have they noticed there in the last couple of weeks that might be helpful? What routes to take, not to take?
Everybody was at the table so that the Marines that were on the line going in, the sales team, had all of the assistance, advice and preparation they could possibly have to do everything to stack the deck in their favor. If companies began coming to the table like this with a singular goal and objective and letting sales be the tip of the spear but understanding, there are a lot of the spear beside the tip. There are all this stuff going on that really has to come into play, like marketing, operations, delivery, customer service, we would do a better job of solving that problem where people are pointing fingers due to lost sales.
Pivot Point: Turn On A Dime Without Sacrificing Results
The other thing that intrigued me about Bulletproof Selling is this concept of the danger with sales improvement program. It’s not that the information is used once and forgotten. It’s the people who forget what all the salespeople are saying. If you are someone who’s just pushing out facts, figures, and feeds or whatever you want to call it and wondering why no one is remembering anything you say, that is not a good strategy.
No. I think it comes from not putting a client-centric focus on your messaging. I made this mistake for a long time before it was finally pounded out of me due to a lot of lost sales. I was talking about me. Everything that you mentioned in my bio, that’s pretty sexy. It’s not the average person can put a claim to being a war correspondent doing all this cool stuff. I learned to never open my sales calls trying to leverage my uniqueness because nobody cares how unique I am or what a special snowflake I can be. I say that tongue-in-cheek.
What you have said is so valuable. I want to circle and highlight it. If I hear one more sales presentation opening with the cliché, “Thanks for inviting us. I’m excited or we are excited to be here,” I think I’m going to scream. It’s what you just said. No one cares that you are excited to be there. It’s the most boring opening to every sales presentation ever. People don’t put the thought and effort into coming up with something unique. The fact that you are talking about you have this amazing, unique thing and you are not opening it and still not making it about you, how much more interesting your bio is that I’m excited to be here? Still, you don’t use it. That’s what I wanted to take a pause there. You are not using that and other people are falling back to that, “I’m excited to be here,” opening. Maybe somebody should really think about what their opening is going to be now.
I would advise you, just try it differently. Do a split test. If you get to do enough of these types of pitches, open it up the way you have been opening. Maybe even embellish your company, its history, the specifications of your product or service, how many gigabytes of RAM it can pull through in a minute or whatever kind of sexy tech specs you’ve got. Try that. On the other side, try something different. Ask yourself, if someone buys my product or service and they use it, they really get 100% of use out of it, not just lip service but they put it to work in their company or their lives, how are their business and their lives different? What changes for this person on a personal and professional level? Whatever your first answer is, go a level deeper and ask, “Why is that important?”
An example, you are selling an efficient solution to a widget manufacturer. What’s that going to allow them to do? Produce more widgets efficiently? I’ve got more widgets on hand, why is that important? I can sell more widgets. What happens if you sell more widgets? I might be able to hire more people in my community. Put some underprivileged kids to work out of high school. Get a nice pipeline in from the technical college. I could make an impact in my hometown. I’m not selling the efficiency of widgets. If I know that going into a sales meeting, I’m going to do everything I can to highlight that person’s hometown, the impact that it would have if they were able to hire more people. I’m just going to happen to build the bridge to the widget efficiency product or service somewhere in the sales pitch. It’s not going to leave there and end there because that’s not what that person cares about. They care about the end result.
We take the time to learn what that end result is, what the actual mission objective is or what we are trying to sell, it’s going to be amazing. How many more conversations we get in because people are going to be more interested in talking with us because we are talking about what they are concerned with, not what we think they are concerned with. They are going to just pretty much open the treasure chest of all the information that we would have had to pry out of them otherwise. If you can help me reach a big goal I have had in my life, all I’ve got to do is reveal some sensitive stuff, like how much budget I might have for it. I still don’t have to cut you a check if I don’t like it but now, we are talking about stuff I’m interested in. What do you need to know? That’s the attitude I hear. We have tracked this across more than 10,000 sales calls. The data holds up pretty consistently.
[bctt tweet=”As a salesperson, you have to break through the noise until you discover what’s your prospect’s preferred method of communication.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You also talk about a bulletproof offer. I’m sure a lot of people would think, “I know what a bulletproof vest does.” What in the world would be inside a bulletproof offer?
We learned this by studying how car dealerships work. We saw it play out over the military and great salespeople. Let’s say you walk into a luxury car dealership, John. If you ever had that experience, Lexus, BMW, Acura, whatever that might look like, you walk in there, they are not going to ask how much money you planned on spending that day. They might not even ask what kind of car you think you are interested in. They are going to say, “Welcome to the dealership. Here’s a nice cup of espresso if that’s your jam. Let me walk you over to our brand new car. It just got in yesterday.” It’s inside the dealership, nice and air-conditioned. Let’s play around with everything just to get you a feel of this brand. Assuming you didn’t walk in and say, “I need to see this car from this year,” You are just here to look around. That’s how they are probably going to treat you.
When you get done looking at this beautiful car and it’s got everything, the Corinthian leather, the claw that comes out and scratches your head in traffic, the autopilot Tesla features, all that good stuff. They are then going to say, “What do you think? Would you like to dig a little deeper into the financing? What else?” Your questions are going to probably be, “How much is that going to cost? What’s the cost to take this baby home?” “This car with the package you are looking at right now is $85,000.” If you are not planning on spending $85,000, what they are not going to do is ask how much you were planning on spending. What they are going to do is say, “What can you live without that we have shown you? What is a non-essential item in this vehicle?” “I don’t need the Corinthian leather. The claws are creepy. It would probably cause me to get into some accidents.” They might take you outside the dealership to maybe the next model down in the line. They will show you that one. They will keep playing this game with you until you settle on something that’s probably going to be above what you plan on spending going in.
I have seen this happen with homes as well. You don’t have the view and pool, and the grade school system. What are you willing to give up? I worked with Infinity and they renamed it. Instead of test drives, they would say, “Would you like to go on a guest drive?” Trying to get people to feel like you were a guest in their home for the essence of what that brand would be. That bulletproof offer is completely reframing it.
Any salesperson can use it. What most salespeople are doing and this is endemic in our industry, John, with our three-tiered packages, you want to hire me to speak at an event? I’ve got the gold, the silver, and the platinum level package. Tell me which one you want. Everybody’s leaving so much money on the table by doing that. What we learned how to do that really made the difference for us, we studied other salespeople that are doing this. They strip away everything that is frivolous. They build a massive singular package, an all-inclusive offer, you might call it. What is your platinum offer? Somebody had an unlimited budget, unlimited time to implement, they just wanted the full effect of your product or service.
What can you sell them? You build this massive package, dozens of items, training, implementation, online courses, the whole thing. Anything you could possibly throw in there because they are paying for it? Why not offer that out of the gate? All they can tell you is, “That’s too expensive.” Your response can be, “What on that list can you live without?” By the end of it, they might have thought they were going to spend $5,000 on your product or service. They will scrape together every bit of budget they can if you can explain how the items on the list that are leftover help them achieve their strategic outcome to our earlier conversation.
Bulletproof Selling: Take the time to learn what the end result is, what the actual mission objective, or what you’re trying to sell. It’s going to be amazing.
What is the difference it’s going to make in their lives, $5,000? If I can spend $12,500 and get twice the amount of impact, twice as fast, I will take out a loan if I care enough about what I’m trying to buy. All-inclusive offer, we wrap it in the terms of bulletproof offer because it’s bulletproof. The sexy thing, John, is if, at the tail end of one of these conversations, you can ask the debrief process again. Debrief yourself, the prospect, the company to say, “We sold a $12,500 package. It came in wanting $5,000, we made $7,500. How could we have gotten more? How could we have delivered more value?”
Continue to ask those questions even on a great close like that, that’s a bulletproof offer because the economy is going to change. The next pandemic might come along. I pray it doesn’t but I can’t tell the future. I want to learn from every sale that I close or don’t close and shift how I’m selling the language I’m using and the offers I’m putting out to my prospects to make sure that I’m staying ahead of my competition. Do you know what our competitors are not doing? Improving after every single call. They are hoping they remember what happened last time that worked well.
It’s like looking at your footage after a talk like an athlete does. They go, “Maybe that pause there really worked or didn’t work.”
“That joke really pulled off. I would never have said it before. It just seemed funny at the moment,” and now you build it in as a joke in every single speech.
“That works in live events but not so much virtually,” or all those little nuances. Let’s hear a little bit more about your ideal audience and some of your keynote topics.
Bulletproof Selling, the idea behind it is that could encompass a whole host of things inside of the sales process but it’s really around pipeline improvement. We find so many salespeople, so many entrepreneurs are treating their prospecting, their outreach, their closing situations out of a funnel. They are using a funnel to do this. The definition is, “I’m going to reach out to 50 people, maybe I will get in five conversations and close one of them.” That’s a simple funnel. The challenge is, if you are qualifying the people going into that funnel and you only close 5, 45 people are going to buy something that you are selling but it’s not going to be from you and it’s not going to be now. The idea behind creating a real pipeline, you can do this inside of a CRM, a spreadsheet if you are savvy but CRM is built to handle this, any CRM. You can set up multiple stages, multiple funnels so that if someone doesn’t convert out of one funnel, they don’t leave your view, your pipeline. They just go to the next stage in the pipeline, the next funnel and you reach out again.
[bctt tweet=”Let’s start removing hope as a sales strategy.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Which is like what you were describing with the car. “If you can’t afford that, you might want this.” It’s the opposite where someone does buy something and then you upsell them after that. It funnels up and funnels pricing down. I love that you have such a specific niche. When people don’t realize, if you don’t have a niche, “You are a sales speaker, Bulletproof Selling, I get it. I know a lot of speakers that talk about selling.” “No. My expertise is pipeline improvement.”
Suddenly, I think to myself, “That’s not my niche.” My niche is helping people on the actual pitch, tell a better story at that moment. I don’t have anything to do with getting them in the room to give that. I’m all about what story you are telling to be memorable. You are all about, “Let me get you to that point.” Of course, you have great strategies and systems to analyze but you are almost, “Let’s look and see what you said and did that work.” I’m like, “I don’t do that either.”
I know five clients that I have spoken to that I can send or I have clients telling me, “In healthcare, during a pandemic, our team never in their career had to make an appointment. They are used to dropping by the office or catching the doctors between. Any suggestions on how we can even get to the place where we can tell the story?” I have a few ideas but again, not my area of expertise. Now, I know, you should talk to Shawn Rhodes. That’s a pipeline problem. That’s getting in the virtual door problem. Amazingly, a whole generation of people has never had to develop that skill but they didn’t. It’s not just one company. It’s the entire industry.
You have heard the saying, “You’ve got a niche to get rich.” I refuse to niche inside of industry but I love niching inside of expertise because I don’t just want to work with healthcare, manufacturing or services. I love working with all of them. If I only had to work with one, I would probably just get out of the business because I do enjoy being challenged learning new things and that helps me really apply a singular skillset to a lot of different customers. Ask any salesperson or any entrepreneur. If you are an entrepreneur and you are reading this, you are a salesperson. Welcome to the club. I encourage you to look outside of your industry for a potential customer basis to ask yourself, “I do sell to this type of person now but who else is also challenged with their problems that could benefit from my product or service. Maybe it was specifically built for financial services and that’s who I have been selling to but who else is akin, who else is in kind of the network of financial services as an industry that could also use this?” Now you can expand from playing in this little, tiny puddle to now being in a pond. Eventually, you can open it up to a whole ocean.
I have a lot of experience in the healthcare industry but there’s a whole, “Does that really include insurance?” Not necessarily. I have architects saying, “We would love to hear what you have learned from healthcare.” That applies here. If you can connect the dots for people, it allows you to play a bulletproof game.
You mentioned outreach is being a big challenge. I will give you three Ms to remember in outreach. This is something that took me years and years and thousands and thousands of lost sales to be able to figure out. The first thing you’ve got to track with your outreach is movement. We are talking about pipeline movement. Many salespeople enter the conversation, not knowing what pieces of information are missing about the prospect they are about to reach out to. Do I know who the decision-maker is in the company, what the budget is when they are buying my product or service if it is time-based? If you don’t know any of those things, now you know what to ask. If you know a few of them, then you know to focus on the missing pieces to get that person closer. To either let’s get a proposal out now, a quote, whatever that looks like for you or if it can’t happen now, reach out in October. You put that in your CRM for follow-up. Without knowing movement, you are just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping you hit something.
Bulletproof Selling: So many business owners are just hoping to be successful. They are not taking the time to plan, map out a strategy, and then break it down into time-bound tasks that we can execute.
The second piece you need to understand is the type of platform you are on the method of outreach. Many salespeople will revert to their most comfortable form of outreach, email, LinkedIn. Even old-school salespeople will rely on the phone, yet I hear tons of times that old-school salespeople are now selling to a generation of Millennials and Generation Y-ers that won’t pick up the phone. They don’t know what to do. You’ve got to expand your outreach. It’s not to say that you need to only use this new thing that’s out like only try to prospect through TikTok. No, mix it all up. Use the phone, email, LinkedIn, social media, direct mail still and alternate how you are reaching out. That’s the method of outreach. You’ve got to break through the noise until you discover what that prospect’s preferred method of communication is.
You’ve got movement and pipeline method of outreach. The third one, this is the one that you are an expert at, John, is the message. The way that I term it is, what is the client-focused story that I need to tell in my outreach that will drive them to the table to want to have a conversation? How can I educate them? How can I engage them? How can I more specifically find out what they are challenged with that’s within my skillset to help?
The movement, the method and the message. Another alliteration. It makes it memorable, doesn’t it? Also, groups of three, lots of techniques that people may not be aware of and they try to just jam so much information out. They don’t group it. They don’t think of a clever way to package it. They are not aware of even what somebody else’s method is. You have given us a lot to think about. The book again, Bulletproof Selling. If someone wants to reach out to you by your book, they can go to Bulletproof-Selling.com and find out how to get you to come to speak to their audience, how to get the book, there’s a podcast. The whole theme, everything is the same font, the same color scheme because somebody cares, people. Any last thoughts or a quote you might want to leave us?
On that website, if you would like essentially a free chapter of the book, we stood up a five-minute sales assessment. It will ask you to choose between 60-plus different pieces of the sales cycle, then you choose the one that’s most important to you. It will reach into the book, pull out that chapter and deliver it to your email. We made standalone resource pages for every single one of our chapters in that way. If you would like to test the book out, take it for a guest drive, as you said, John. That would be a great way to do it. Other than that, let’s start removing hope as a sales strategy. It works in a lot of areas in life. I love hope. I’m a spiritual guy. We could do a whole other show on that. In my sales and my business, I like to fall back on certainty so that I know I can leave my office and go be with my family without having to hope that things work out in my business. Let’s make selling bulletproof.
Thank you, Shawn. I couldn’t agree more. What a treat. What a great gift, not just a gift but a free customized gift. People, look at all those details. That’s a professional in action right there. Thanks again, Shawn.
Important Links
- Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For The Battlefield Of Business
- Pivot Point: Turn On A Dime Without Sacrificing Results
- Podcast – Bulletproof Selling
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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