John Livesay, Author at John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer

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Data Fluency With Zach Gemignani

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

16.09.20

Even as we get bombarded with so much data today, many still don’t know how to use it for their business. It is time to change that and start to become data fluent before it is too late. In this episode, John Livesay interviews the founder and CEO of Juice Analytics, Zach Gemignani, about the need for data fluency, learning the language of data and turning it into an empathy tool that will set you apart from your competitors. More importantly, Zach highlights the role of taking action. After all, data without implementation is wasted money. He shares the ways we can present and use it effectively in our business in providing analytics and solutions that can positively impact people most.

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Listen to the podcast here

Data Fluency With Zach Gemignani

Our guest is Zach Gemignani, the Founder Juice Analytics. We talked about the need to be data fluent. It is a language that if you can take data and turn it into an empathy tool, it will set you apart from your competitors. He said, “The last mile that people have to go to make data something that people take action from is the secret sauce.” Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Zach Gemignani, who is the Founder and CEO of Juice Analytics, which is the company behind Juicebox. Zach is passionate about helping organizations present their data in ways that allow them to show it and not just tell it. He’s focusing on using some visualization solutions with his platform Juicebox. He focuses on advertising, media, healthcare, and research. They work with companies like Cablevision, HealthStream, and the University of Notre Dame. Zach has many years of experience in design analytics and data visualization. He’s also the coauthor of Data Fluency. Zach, welcome to the show.

John, I am happy to be here.

Our own little story of origin is quite interesting because I love the story of origins. We connected because we’re both passionate about storytelling. I work with sales teams on how to turn boring case studies into case stories. What you do is you’re turning relatively boring data into stories. That’s what made us want to connect and help clients with a combined solution. Before we get into that, let’s talk about your own story of origin. You can take us back to childhood or school wherever you want. Were you always somebody who loves numbers?

I was someone who was into math early. One of the interesting bits about my origin story comes from my parents. It helps inform a little bit about what we do at Juice and what I’m passionate about. I grew up in a family where my father retired from his job early so he could become an artist. There were a whole bunch of lessons in there for me, both around learning about art and visual representation, but also about pursuing your passion. That was an important lesson growing up for me. My mom was an educator. She’s a teacher. There were things about her passions that I’m sure I picked up in our interest in teaching people about how to communicate data better and doing that visually.

I often think that those two things tied together. As a company, Juice was founded many years ago. I started the company with my brother, Chris. We got to a point in our careers that we wanted to do something together and get out of the corporate world and strike out on our own. We knew we wanted to do something with data. He has a great computer science and data background. He’s the technologist and I am not, but we wanted to do something together. We decided we’re going to start this company. We didn’t quite know what we wanted to do, except that we wanted to do something with data. We found this passion in data visualization and around communicating data. This is a problem we saw long ago, and it’s a problem that organizations deal with still a lot these days. In fact, almost every organization we run into struggles with the fact that they’ve collected a lot of data, but they aren’t great at finding ways to present and share that data in ways that are impactful and useful to the people who should be looking at that data.

Give us an example of a company that you worked with or worked for where you see a lot of time and money is spent collecting data and the whole purpose of collecting that data was to allow management to make better decisions. Otherwise, it’s a stab in the dark of, “Should we do this or that? What do people want?” What happens when you present a bunch of data in a way that’s overwhelming and too hard to consume for top-level management decisions?

[bctt tweet=”Data without implementation and interpretation is really wasted money.” username=”John_Livesay”]

That is the standard mode. People present data in lots of charts and in complex reports. I will often go back to one of our first clients. This is where we found our passion. We were working with a client in the online schooling space. They wanted to understand better their customers and students who were unenrolling and the journey that customers were going through as they were working with this company. We had done a bunch of analysis and put together some results. I remember it was a day before our presentation to be able to share that data. At the time, we were working in my basement because we were just a startup.

Chris and I started to think about how we could share this data in a way that was going to be far more compelling that would capture the imagination of the executives. It’s hard to take a bunch of dry data, get people to understand it, and have an emotional connection with it. What we did through that night was we created an animated movie out of the data that presented how students came and left the schools, where they went, and things that happened to them. We got excited about this and we felt like this was a way to try to hook our audience and help them have more of a visceral connection with the data.

We presented that the next day a little tired having stayed up the night. We were younger then and it did have a great impact. That was the jumping-off point. That was the epiphany for me. If you can get creative with data and visually show it in ways that are going to be far more engaging, you can open up the minds of your audience so that they start to understand what’s going on with that data. That’s what’s going to get them closer to doing something about it. You need to make that human connection and that emotional connection with data.

I love what you said because it’s the same thing that I talk about, which is stories allow us to be compelling, capture our imagination, and have this emotional connection. Everybody buys products and services or changes their behavior emotionally first and then backs it up with logic. The challenge is data are traditionally left-brain analysis where decisions are made. Behavior changes are done on the right side of the brain, which is where imagination lives and all of that potential lives. You bridge that gap. I would say that what you’re doing here is the data without implementation and interpretation is wasted money.

This is something that a lot of organizations don’t necessarily look at or understand, but it’s a fact of a lot of situations where companies have spent a lot of money on gathering data. There’s been a lot of investment in big data and data warehouses, and getting all that information together. There’s no value created out of that data. In fact, that data should be considered a cost up until the point that it is delivered to people who make decisions and those people start to make better decisions based on the data. It’s a concept that we’ve talked about for a long time that we call the last mile of data. It’s that last step of how do you present data in ways that are going to be easy enough for your audience to understand what it means and how it ties to things that they can do in their job?

What actions can they take based on what they’re seeing so that they can make a better outcome for their organization? It’s that last step that a lot of companies struggle with. I’ve theorized that people ran out of energy, in a way. They get the ball to the 2-yard line and they’ve exhausted the resources. If the data part of what you’re doing has been driven by a technology organization that feels like the job is done by simply making the data available, that is also not a success. We’re trying to get people across that finish line or into the end zone so that people are using that data. That’s the key.

Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

It’s a great tweet, “Go the last mile with your data so people can make better decisions.” There’s a book called 212: The Extra Degree and it’s all about water doesn’t start boiling until it hits 212 degrees. When it comes boiling, it creates steam and the steam could move the train engine, let’s say. Many of us get all the way to 211 degrees and then we dial down the heat. This analogy holds up going the last mile. If you’ve got all this time, money, effort, and you’re exhausted, and you’re like, “It’s good enough. We got the Excel chart, let them figure out how to make this mean something.” It’s that extra degree of effort that you’re bringing.

To go back to our combined origin story and talking to you about storytelling, it’s a skillset that a lot of people haven’t yet learned. They need to learn of combining both the understanding of the data, but then how do you connect that to your audience and to people. It’s a mix of skills there that combines understanding the psychology of your audience, what they do in their job, and what does it take for them to be more successful, which is a sales attitude. If you’re in sales, it’s instinctual to understand your audience and what makes them successful. If you’re in a reporting role or a data analyst or something that is not instinctual, it ties to data visualization, which we’re experts at of thinking about what is the best way to present data, and how do you make it intuitive? It ties to the structure of storytelling. A lot of what we think about at Juice is how do we take the concepts of storytelling and bring that into how you present data?

What you described that you are turning this data from the online school into an animated movie, you were taking data and turning it into an empathy tool, which is the key to storytelling and sales? I tell my clients all the time, “Put your empathy hat on. The better you can describe a problem, the better people think you have their solution.” There’s all of that storytelling journey of painting a picture of who, what, where, and when. This is the moment in time that you took and collected the data, and then here’s the problem we discovered.

If you are telling case stories, for example, you tell the solution and then the secret sauce that’s similar to that last mile. What most people don’t use when they’re telling stories whether it’s a case story, their own story of origin, or even an elevator pitch is what is life like after these changes have been made. When you’re telling that story of the online school and seeing the animated film, they then could have empathy for the students and knew what they needed to change to keep students from dropping out or to get the students to give them more referrals, something along those lines.

You touched on a couple of things that are important themes in data storytelling. One is setting those stakes is something that people don’t do. A great story has high stakes. This is why every action movie is about how do we save the world? They’re always cranking up the stakes, but whatever story you’re telling has to matter to people. It has to connect to why is this important to you. This is something that often you’re never going to see in a traditional dashboard or some Excel report. No one’s setting up why this matters, why it’s important, and why if you make that change, something good is going to happen. We do try to incorporate that into the data stories that we created. It’s setting that stage and those stakes, and showing what actions you take. If you take those actions, what the value is.

The other piece that I love to connect to storytelling is the specifics. Data has this nature to it that is an abstraction. Data is taking a bunch of things that are happening in real life and turning those into numbers. Often, we are rolling up, averaging, or summing up those numbers in a way. You get separated from the real thing that’s happening on the ground that you’re measuring. An event that’s related to that is the COVID pandemic. We’re always talking about the numbers and how big those numbers are, but those are real deaths. We talk about 180,000 deaths in the United States. Those are real people.

[bctt tweet=”Whatever story you’re telling has to matter to people; it has to connect with them.” username=”John_Livesay”]

The ability to combine both the big picture, the analytics and the numbers, but also be able to bring in the specifics that are way more likely to create those emotional connections that you’ve talked about. It’s hard to connect to a big number, but if you bring it to a person and you have a human face on something, that’s something where you start to build that bond with your audience and they start to feel what you’re expressing through the data. One of my favorite quotes is, “Specificity is the soul of narrative.” It’s by John Hodgman, another well-known podcaster. He likes to say, “When people tell stories, you want to bring in the specifics because that’s where you do connect with people.”

I work with people all the time when they’re telling a case story of that exposition. I said, “Was this last year, six months ago? Where was it? What city are we in?” Give your client a name. Don’t say, “My client or my customer.” Nobody wants to be thought of as a customer. You don’t want to be thought of as a vendor. If you want to warm things up, give this person a name, say where they work, describe their pain point in such a way that people can see themselves in the story. That’s where the magic happens is when that empathy comes in. Storytelling allows people to change behavior without being pushy because when we tell a good story visually and with some structure to your case stories, people see themselves in it.

Imagine you’re telling another online school or even a major university that had to go online in ways they never expected before and they’re struggling to try and figure out, “How do we justify our higher fees that we have for live classes?” That is much like I’ve had to do as a speaker. What value am I bringing to a virtual keynote that might make it even more impactful than in person? You have to think like that and have that story ready to go so that if you’re struggling to justify your prices as a Harvard or Pepperdine or whoever it is.

Imagine the journey of what this person’s life is like and get specific. If you look at the data, I know a lot of major universities have people from foreign countries coming here to become educated. If that’s not possible and they have to do it virtually, the more specific we get into one person’s journey, then it applies. It’s the same thing when I work with nonprofits. I go, “Don’t tell us about how many meals you deliver. Talk about one person’s story of why they needed a meal delivered in the first place and what would happen to them if they didn’t have the food coming.”

You can zoom out and be like, “That’s happening a thousand or a million times.” You can then multiply that out and it’s powerful if you can connect that stuff to a dollar figure, so people relate to that. Those are great places to start in the stories. One of the things that I’m curious about and that I’ve been surprised by is how much bringing data storytelling can be valuable in the sales process. While we work with lots of clients who are building data products to deliver value to their customers, the customers they already have, and had this data conversation with our customers.

There are many scenarios where it feels like bringing data into the sales process in a way that ties the storytelling can be powerful. It’s the combination of telling those compelling stories of the value of what your product delivers and being able to back that up with often interactive data so that you can have a customized story that creates that foundation of like, “This is a compelling message in our sales.” There’s also this foundation, a solidity to data that some people react to. I’m curious in your experience, how much bringing data have been valuable in the sales process?

212: The Extra Degree

The key mistake most people make when they’re selling is, they start with data. For example, one client was saying, “Our equipment makes surgeries go 30% faster. That’s what we’re opening with. Do you think that’s a good hook?” That’s data. I’m like, “There’s no story there.” I zoomed out and I said, “What is it? Paint the picture. What are they doing? Without your equipment, how long is the typical surgery?” They said, “It is 2.5 hours.” I said, “If we do the math, what’s 30% faster?” “Only 1.5 hours.” You could try and make a case for the doctors. They could do one more surgery and make so much more money, but a much more compelling story was, “Imagine how happy Dr. Higgins was at Long Beach Memorial using our equipment. He could go out to the patient’s family in the waiting room, where every minute is like an hour, and tell them an hour earlier than expected that their loved one did not have cancer.”

It’s the same data point, but it’s wide and that data point matter. That’s what you’re emphasizing.

The visuals that could go with that could be anything. Imagine this person’s telling that story and they have an image of a clock and every minute feels like an hour. If you’ve ever been in a waiting room waiting for a loved one to come out of surgery, you know that’s the truth. That shows empathy. Who you have in your stories? That’s the real secret that we bring to the party. It is the characters that a lot of people don’t even think about. They don’t think about the patient and the doctor. They hadn’t even considered telling a story of what the patient’s family was going through. The doctor then says, “That’s why I became a doctor, for those moments where I could give good news and earlier than expected makes me a hero.” When the salesperson tells that story to another potential doctor, that doctor sees themselves in that story.

It’s bringing humanity and empathy into the equation. I’m sure people in sales struggle with that case. I might argue it’s even more of a challenge in the data world where there’s this separation. People think of things like data and they often create this separation from the people who are on the other side of that data. It is often like, “Go ahead.”

You mentioned something about interactive data. Tell me more about what does that look like to people?

This is fundamental to what we do. We have this technology platform called Juicebox, which is a self-service tool for being able to build interactive data stories, which is a more compelling way of presenting data than traditional dashboards and reports. When we think about data stories, we’re not thinking about a static collection of slides that you might be familiar with a number of charts on it. We’re thinking about giving your audience the ability to navigate through the data in a guided and narrative-driven way. The solutions that we create with Juicebox allow the users of that data to walk through the data where we’re explaining what’s going on with the data, why it’s important, all the things we’ve touched on. We are giving them specific examples. We’re also giving them the power in that interactive data story to be able to choose things that matter to them.

[bctt tweet=”When people tell stories, you want to bring in the specifics because that’s where you really do connect with them.” username=”John_Livesay”]

As the user, everyone who comes to a report or data is going to have their own needs or things that they care about. They’re coming from the perspective of, “I care about this product or this region or these types of customers.” They have their own needs. You’re trying to meet them in a place where you’re telling this guided story through the data, but the user is also empowered in that process to be able to select where they care about. The data is going to change as they select things or as they explore the data. It makes the story relevant to that audience member, which is important. You want people to see themselves in the data or see what’s most relevant to them so that they can understand what they should do about it.

CFO cares about something different than the CMO would care about.

We can argue their stories, there will often be a number of different metrics you’re looking at that are the key metrics for your organization, but a CFO is going to want to drill in on cost-related things. A CMO is going to be worried about leads that are being generated or revenue side things.

“What if we raise our price by X percent and keep selling the same? What would that do?”

You’re mixing. In our data world, we want to be able to have this balance of letting someone explore and customize based on their needs, but in a way that it doesn’t require them to be a data analyst or to be super familiar with the data. It’s a challenging balance to find, but it’s what people want when they’re working with data.

We all are familiar with Excel sheets, which allow you to change one variable and see what the differences are. If you don’t have to be the first person that manually goes in and changes it and then still looks at a chart, but can click to change one thing and then see the visuals of sales going up or down. That’s to me is more engaging than considering looking at an Excel spreadsheet, which is you’re solving a problem.

Data Fluency: Almost every organization you run into struggles with the fact that they’ve collected a lot of data, but they aren’t great at presenting and sharing it in an impactful and useful way to the people who should be looking at that data.

If you send someone an Excel spreadsheet, the chances of them opening it up and wanting to get in there and deal with it are a little low. Making your stories attractive, intuitive, and easy to get started with is important. We’re focused on the design and the user experience so that we can give people data in ways that feel a lot more like the mobile apps that we work with or the modern website experiences we have, rather than feeling like, “I’m opening up a spreadsheet. I got to go figure this out.” Attention spans are short.

You’re like a Sherpa. If you look at the data of climbing Mount Everest, you’re trying to tackle it, get up there by yourself, and you get frustrated and maybe lost even. If you’re the Sherpa who’s been up this mountain many times and knows the shortcuts, you guide them through this data. It almost reminds me of some video games that let you create your own ending. If you click on this, then that completely changes how the story ends.

To go back, I will often think about those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. A data story can be a little different than a traditional narrative that has a clear sequence and gets you to a single ending. In an interactive data story, there’s an opportunity for the reader to decide what they care about and to make some choices in the paths. It should be as compelling as a regular story, but you’re giving that user some amount of autonomy and control of what they’re seeing.

What’s where the title of your book comes from. Data is fluent. There’s a fluidity to it, as well as it being a language. Are you fluent in data as you are fluent in Spanish or something? It’s a clever play on words of thinking of it not being the solid piece of ice, going back to the 212-degree thing, that can become steam and move things if you have fluidity and understand that language in a way that encompasses visuals.

We wrote that book because we saw a lot of organizations gathered a lot of data. They’re trying to figure out how they get value out of that data. They want people in their organization to be data-driven. We hear this a lot, but organizations struggle with how to make that happen. There are a lot of skills and changes in mindset that need to occur to get to this point where you’re using that data. You’re incorporating it into how you do your work, how you make decisions, and how you talk to each other. It’s language-based. You’re trying to teach people both the language of data, but also how to express yourself using data. Talking about it with you, it’s not just about data.

People need to understand that we can talk about data-driven, but that shouldn’t mean that the data tells me something and therefore I do something. Humans are an important part of this. It’s not dictatorial. We don’t want that. We all know where that ends up. It’s the combination of being able to incorporate data into how you think and how you have conversations with clients and so forth, but bringing that human aspect into it. You are recognizing that people are driven by emotion and you need to connect to what’s important to people. All that stuff needs to be in the mix. It’s the combination and it’s powerful.

[bctt tweet=”The magic happens when empathy comes in, and storytelling allows people to get others to change behavior without being pushy.” username=”John_Livesay”]

How did you come up with the name of your company and the product?

Juice Analytics is the name of that company. When Chris and I were thinking about naming the company, we were thinking about how do you extract value from data. We had this concept of extraction and squeezing things out of it, creating the essence of it. That’s how we got to the word juice and we were attacked on analytics that people think we’re making juice. We get a lot of emails for people wanting to sell us juicing equipment.

It sharpens a lot of strange SEO outcomes, I’m sure.

The product itself that we are selling as a self-service platform is called Juicebox. That was a natural extension of taking all of our best practices and thinking about how do you tell data stories and putting that in a box so other people could use it.

Who would you say is your ideal client? Who needs this platform that when they find it, they’re happy?

It’s a broad range. There are a lot of people in organizations. I’ll give you a few examples of people who are working with data. They have an important audience that they’re trying to influence with that data and yet, they struggle with bridging that last mile. Marketing professionals and marketing analysts who are running campaigns and measuring their performance of those campaigns, the most important thing that they need to do at the end is to define what has been the impact of that campaign and how do we improve it next time. Packaging that up, extracting the message, and communicating that to the people who have the budget is critical. Whether that’s a marketing agency or that’s an internal person, that step of showing the value that you delivered and how you can do better or tune it is a common use case for us.

Nonprofits who want to tell their story of what they’re doing is delivering an impact. Sometimes, that’s done in a public way. They want to put it on their website and show that they’ve served an audience and it’s delivering a lot of value. That’s another example. Anyone who’s done consultants and people who do research, done a survey, or gathered a bunch of data, they now need to show the results in a way that is going to demonstrate the value of what they’ve done, and the messages and the conclusions that they’ve reached. We get deep into this because we talked a lot to organizations. It’s hard not to find organizations and people who at some point, don’t need to take some data that they have and have a much better way of being able to deliver that so that they can reach the audiences who should be looking at that data.

The company name is Juice Analytics and the website is JuiceAnalytics.com. The book that Zach co-authored is called Data Fluency. Do you have any last thoughts or quotes that you want to share with us?

I don’t have a quote, but I do appreciate your emphasis on creating those emotional stories. I hope that we continue to work together to learn more about that. That’s a piece that we would love to incorporate even more into how data analysts, and people working with data can make the connection to people and change their minds. It’s been a real pleasure.

Thanks for coming to the show, Zach, and sharing your brilliance.

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

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

14.09.20

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

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Listen to the podcast here

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

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

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

Thank you so much for having me.

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

The Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dream

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

TSP Jeff Hoffman | Growing Your Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work Efficiency

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

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

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

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

Pitching Mistakes To Avoid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream Tank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret To Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks.

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Social Selling And Making Creative Presentations With Mike Montague

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

09.09.20

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

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Listen to the podcast here

Social Selling And Making Creative Presentations With Mike Montague

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

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

Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LinkedIn the Sandler Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

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