Business Mastery With Bill Prater

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If you want to excel in business, don’t think like the players in your niche. Instead, figure out what the elite players do and emulate them. Joining John Livesay in today’s episode is Bill Prater, a business owner, entrepreneur, publisher, author, speaker, consultant, and coach. Bill is best known for his long-term success in enabling business owners and leaders to quickly eliminate personal barriers, rapidly reach their current dreams, and embark on a journey of business mastery. Today, Bill shares some insights on how you can think like an elite performer and dominate your market. Enjoy the episode.

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Business Mastery With Bill Prater

Our guest on the show is Bill Prater, who’s an expert at Business Mastery. He tells people not to use the same approach for all problems. He’s got some insights on how to dominate your market and how to think like an elite performer. Finally, he says, “Always be ignorant. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and stay curious.” Enjoy the episode.

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Welcome to the show. Our guest is Bill Prater, who’s a business owner, an entrepreneur, a publisher, author, speaker, consultant, and coach. He’s best known for his long-term success in enabling business owners and leaders to quickly eliminate personal barriers so they can rapidly reach their dreams and embark on this journey of Business Mastery. His own story was that he was excelling in sales, sales training, and sales management at IBM in the computer division as a national sales manager and a partner in the country’s largest oil and gas securities firm. He raised more than $750 million of equity capital in eight years. He recruited, trained, and led more than 100 sales professionals and achieving average revenue growth of 100% annually. I know how hard that is. Bill, welcome to the show.

It’s great to be here, John. Let’s make this happen.

One of the things I want to ask about having sold multimillion-dollar mainframe computers myself earlier in my career is your own story about that. We can start the story before IBM. If you’d like, you can start with school, college, or wherever you got this passion for connecting and sales.

The connecting and sales lineage started back with me being a full-ride football guy at a university. I got a scholarship. I got hurt before the season started. After the first year was over, I had to figure out how to go to school on my own. I ended up working in the land surveying civil engineering field and made pretty good money that I thought, “Why bother going to school?” That’s my first relationship with the value of money. I ended up flunking out of school. I went back and saw the Dean of Men at the University of Washington. I said, “I like to come back into school because I’m a good guy,” and I went through my whole spiel. He said, “No. Why would I let a flunk out in the school when I have these eager young freshmen that want to come into school?”

Business Mastery: If you think you know the answer to something, go ahead and ask anyway. You never really know what you don’t know until you ask.

That was an excellent point. He vented. What he said is, “I’ll let you into night school if you get straight A’s, then I’ll let you go into the day school.” I said, “How do I get straight A’s?” He says, “I don’t know. Ask the professors.” He needs to know I’m dead serious. “Think this through. What kind of students asked the professor how to get an A?” I said, “Probably A-students.” He said, “You got it.” That was my first major learning about effectively, the art of asking questions or, better yet, asking for help. You and I have a sales background, sales management background. You’re stuck with it. I’m still in it, even though I don’t claim I’m a sales guy.

A big major lesson that I got early on is always to be ignorant. By that, I mean, even if you think you might know the answer to something, then go ahead and ask anyway. You’ll never know what you don’t know until you ask. Fast forward, I did ask the professors how to get A’s. I ended up getting straight A’s for the rest of my college career and graduating on the Dean’s List. It’s all because of that simple question, which I asked over and over again. It was amazing the kinds of things these people would do to help me get an A.

They know you’re that committed. What I love about what you said, “Always be ignorant. Ask anyway,” as opposed to assuming you know what the answers are going to be. I’ve helped some people when they’re interviewing for a job ask a question. At the end of every interview, people say, “Do you have any questions for us?” Unfortunately, a lot of the younger people might say, “When’s my vacation start?” I tell them to ask this question, “What would it look like if I were to exceed your expectations in this job?” It is another way of saying, “What do I need to do to get straight A’s?” Most people never ask a future employer that question, nor do they ask a professor that question.

When people are reading this, they can start to think, “What question am I not asking that I could ask that my competition is probably not asking? What set me apart?” Once you have that momentum going in any conversation, whether it’s a sales conversation or trying to get your team motivated to grow and scale, which is your expertise, it completely shifts in the box traditional way of solving things. Also, what I love about that story is your resilience. A lot of people would have given up. “You got a good point. Why should you give it to me when you got all these hungry freshmen? That’s too high a bar. Straight A’s? Forget it.”

[bctt tweet=”Allow yourself to be ignorant and ask questions anyway.” via=”no”]

There are lots of things that come out of that story that starts to give me a little more color and texture, almost like a painting coming to life. I know how hard it was to get a job at IBM. They would test everybody. If you think getting into college was tough, getting a job at IBM was tough. It was the best of the best. You just didn’t get a job. You thrive there. I’m sure there’s a little more context. I specifically want to know when you were at IBM, this premise of scaling 100% out of 100%, there are two things that come up all the time when I’m talking to people who are entrepreneurs, salespeople, or both. One is fear of rejection. The other one is, “I had my best year ever. How am I going to top myself?” That’s where the superstars like you shine, is the consistent growth, not just, “I have a great year. Don’t ask me about next year.” How do you start to help people with that mindset and strategy?

That’s exactly what it is. It’s the mindset. What it is that all of us were programmed as young people to act in a certain way. A lot of that becomes part of our subconscious. Since it’s in our subconscious, we’re able to deal with a bunch of stuff. We don’t have to think, “What color is that light? What color is red?” You know red means stop the car. You don’t process that through. A couple of points about mindset is that it had happened at IBM that I realized what my programming was.

When I was young, I remember vividly that when something would happen in the house where my grandmother lived with us, she’d say, “Billy, do something about that.” I didn’t have any idea what it was all about. I jumped up and took action. I didn’t think. I just responded. That’s lesson number one. I realized that in a company like IBM, there’s a lot of telling you what to do going on all the time. I decided, “No. I’m going to think this through, not be reactive and figure out how can I reduce the amount of time it takes to get something done?” If you remember IBM, they used to be greedy good at giving you performance appraisals.

I was a systems engineer to start with. I get in performance appraisal. My boss, his name is Dave, said to me, “Your score is outstanding.” I said, “That’s great. I’m outstanding. Now what?” He said, “What do you mean now what?” I said, “If I’m already at the top, what’s next to your point?” He flounders around a little bit, frankly. I got him in a box because I was outstanding. I said to him, “If I’m your number one systems engineer, am I the highest-paid systems engineer?” They don’t like to answer that question, but he did, unfortunately, and said, “No.” I said, “I don’t understand how I could be rated number one and not being the number one paid?”

Business Mastery: Most of us were programmed as young people to act in a certain way. A lot of that becomes part of our subconscious.

He went through. He got the old chart out. You’ve seen the charts of how many years and what your score is. The maximum raise you can get. It’s all a Mathematical model. He said, “The only way to get paid what you’re worth in IBM is to be a sales guy.” I said, “Okay, sold.” He said, “No, not so fast. You’re my number one systems engineer. I don’t want to let you go.” I said, “Dave, that is not a good answer. You’ve got it.” He says, “I’ll let you go to sales school if you finish in the top three.” I go, “Okay.”

I got the challenge of finishing the top three. I ended up finishing at the top one. I was number one in sales school. I came back, and I walked into his office. The school ends on a Friday, and I’m back at work on Monday. He doesn’t know anything about what happened. He said, “How did it go?” I said, “It went pretty well. When’s my sales job?” He said, “What do you mean?” I pull out my gold cross pen that has IBM on it and I hand it to Dave, and he uttered a nasty word. I said, “It’s time for sales.” He said, “You don’t want to go now. This is September. You’d have to have a whole half year’s quota.” I said, “Fine.” He says, “You don’t know what you’re saying. You got three months to do a full half-year.” I said, “I want to go now. You’re barking was if I did this, I get there.”

I ended up doing pretty well. I bought myself a Porsche in the whole deal because I completely shut it out. I shut the lights out. You and I talked before we got into our interview about cold calling. I figured I might as well go cold calling people. I don’t know anything else about what to do. I go. One of the very first people I banged on the door of, I walked in, and the receptionist said, “You’re with who?” I said, “IBM.” She said, “I’m sure that David wants to see you. We’re looking for a computer.” That was it.

Once you got into sales management, how did you keep the momentum going when your team would have a good year and the quotas would go up accordingly? This is why I was excited to have you on the show is we can go into this subconscious mindset. I feel from my observations that a lot of salespeople think when they’ve had a great year, it’s a fluke. Therefore, when you were asked to repeat it or exceed it, it’s the same thing for the business leaders you deal with, a new council. They don’t have a plan or a roadmap in place.

[bctt tweet=”Be curious to get insights.” via=”no”]

They say, “Everything started lined up as a perfect storm.” They had a big knee. They had a budget that they’ll never have again. “I can’t possibly find another client like that. With these numbers, I’ll never make it.” You take the mindset and the strategy. It’s not just one or alone. I wanted to get a sense from you when you work with companies. Companies hire you to pick this expertise and give them the scalability issue that you’re great at. Not just growth but dynamic growth. What is it that you do that helps people overcome their initial negative self-talk that they can’t possibly exceed the best year they’ve ever had in terms of mindset? What are they missing strategy-wise?

I’m going to finish up with mindset and then we’ll jump into strategy or positioning. A lot of what you asked me and a lot of the answers I deal with is the notion that we’re originally programmed or taught that we need to deal with the environment we’re put in or the hand that you’re dealt. You’re given a certain quota, a crappy sales territory, a sales team, but half of them are rookies. We can continue to list all of that. All of that, in general for all of us, you and I and the people that are reading, if you think about a bell curve, most salespeople, sales managers, business owners think of themselves as in the middle. In the middle is what’s called the standards or the averages. That’s the way you measure the middle of any industry.

The people that end up looking at the environment through the prism of being in the middle of the bell curve are going to stay in the middle of the bell curve. What you need to do mindset-wise, I found is you’ve got to figure out what the elite players in your niche. If you’re 1 of 140 salespeople, they’re not all performing equally. You don’t think the revenue of the company, divide by 140, and everybody does that Math thing. Instead, there are some super laggards. There’s the mass unwashed middle, and then there are the superstars. What are the superstars doing? One, they’re not waiting until they get their quota in the middle of January. They’re starting day one, minute one. Second, you remember this with IBM, every year, they had a different sales plan. The sales plan was designed to benefit the company called IBM.

They wanted you to sell certain things. They wanted you to add certain kinds of software and a variety of it. They put all that stuff in the sales plan. Step one, minute one, don’t deal with all that stuff, go figure out what the fastest path to the cash is, and go do that. It’s usually a machine they want you to sell etc. Number one is don’t think like the rest of the players in your niche, instead figure out what the elite players do and emulate them. Their mindset is one of mastery, dominance, excellence or extraordinary. Emulate that. Strategy is an entirely different thing than tactics, but a lot of people get that stuff mixed up. For example, a tactical thing to do is to make cold calls on the phone or send out cold emails.

Business Mastery: Once you’ve got the goal and assembled your resources, the next step is to execute.

The question is, why are you doing that? What’s the strategy? What’s the higher-order bid? What’s the reason that you have to go down the road you’re going down? Once you’ve figured out your reason or your strategy, then you can start doing tactics. Maybe cold calling is a perfect fit, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe, instead, what you want to do is go and interview your last year’s customers and have them tell you, for example, here’s the question, “Sir, I enjoyed working with you last year. How could I have served you better?” That’s the question I taught my people to ask. We went and interviewed all of our customers the previous year, ask them how we could do better, how we could serve them better. We got this huge list. We got our whole tactical plan from asking people, “How do I get an A?”

Were there many surprises? Were those things you knew you could do better and didn’t have the resources to do, or was it, “I had no idea that was something people wanted, so we weren’t doing it?”

Mostly surprises. Companies like IBM or Transamerica are large organizations. The senior executives don’t have a clue what’s happening on the street. The people that know what’s happening on the streets are the people that are on the street. Just because the sales plan or the missive from on high says, “X, Y, Z,” that doesn’t mean that something like, “P, R, Q,” is what you should be doing. The only way you can find that out is to ask people that are your customers. Prospects are going to give you the answers too, but they don’t have much context because they haven’t seen what you’ve done in the past.

This Business Mastery system that you’ve been doing for many years, helping companies, small and large, figure out a killer strategy, makes a lot of sense in that context. One of the things you have on here is this wonderful blog about What’s Stopping You From Getting Better Results Every Single Time?, as opposed to, “I’m going to try, be like a baseball player, and hit a certain percentage.” You’ve got four beautiful colored circles, things. Would you walk us through what those are? We’ve touched on them. I want to intrigue them to read this blog. If you described what the four things are and how they all keep going round and round to keep growing, it might be a light bulb moment for some people saying, “No wonder I’m missing this key part while I’m doing 3 of the 4.”

[bctt tweet=”Don’t think like the rest of the players in your niche. Instead, figure out what the elite players do and emulate them.” via=”no”]

Even using baseball or softball, either one analogy is a good place to start. Nobody told you that you had to have a good batting average. Your coach didn’t say that. Nobody said that. That’s not baseball. That’s not what it is. If you’re up for batting, what is the first thing you’re supposed to do? It’s not hit the ball. The first thing to do is get on base. How can you get on base? The ball can hit you then you go on base. You can hit the ball and have nobody catch it or throw you out at first. You’re then good on base, or you can walk. There are at least three different ways.

The point of it is to figure out how to get on base. That’s back to that comment about a tactic versus the strategy. The individual player, the job of the batter, is to get on first. They do have a term in baseball and softball called on-base percentage. That’s much more important than a batting average. It’s the same thing as though in business. What I discovered of a variety of things and I won’t go in order because frankly, John’s describing, it is a cycle, number one, and it fits for any size company in any niche privately held and republic he held but even more magically if it’s in every department in every company. Even more magically, it fits in every team in every department, in every company. It makes my life easier.

Those of us that are in sales is a practical matter. We’re a business owner. We have a geographical territory, some product niche, or specialty. All of that is an entrepreneur’s or business owner’s jive. We already talked about this concept of the environment. The environment is where all your resources are. That’s where you have your tools and potentially some team members. Most people operate their business, territory, job from the standpoint of whatever they have from a resource standpoint. For example, if you’re physically in San Francisco and an opportunity comes for you to service somebody in, let’s say, Baltimore, and you say in your mind, “I’m in San Francisco.” That would be resource restrictive that you’ve allowed yourself to be contained by your environment.

Instead, what you wanted to say in your mind is, “How can I service somebody in Baltimore at a high-quality level?” That’s one of these four phases, which is effective alignment, but most people put that a front of planning. It should be behind plan. Your plan should be the pick of the year. “I’m going to be 300% of quota this year. I’m going to grow my business by 300%. I get 300% more new customers.” That would be effectively an annual goal. Once you’ve got that, it’s time to look at what resources you do need. Not the other way around, make your decision about what you want to do first, then find the resources. For example, we could cold call. We could figure out a way to get a bunch of referrals. We could survey all of our existing customers and all of those.

Business Mastery: Dominate Your Market: How to Quadruple Revenue in Four Steps (Business Mastery Series Book 1)

The temptation a lot of people might have is they’ll hear an idea like that, and they’ll put it in action. It may or may not be a good idea. The way to do it is to do it after you’ve figured out what your goal, objective, or strategy is for the year. Once you’ve got the goal, and you’ve assembled your resources, next is to execute or go get into action and do stuff. Instead of being like, “I did with my grandma jumping up immediately when she told me to.” Think, gather your resources, then execute. The fourth phase is to figure out what in the world happened.

The answers are either red and you fell on your face. Green, you exceeded whatever heck you’re after doing. The third is some Amber or a yellow, meaning you’re just about okay. The cycle is to analyze your situation, figure out a new plan, gather the resources you need, execute. After you execute, analyze the result, adjust your plan, find new resources if you need to, then execute. It’s a cycle. All businesses, departments, projects, individuals with a sales territory, all people with some project that they’re managing, you should run them through that four-phase cycle I gave you.

When we clarify something, we’re not limiting ourselves to one answer, and you zero in on what do we want to focus on first. The thing that I love about this Business Mastery system you’ve created is the alignment. Not just executing without other people’s agreement, understanding. That’s crucial to what you’re doing that makes this fly so much. I did also want to touch on this wonderful quote of yours, which is, “Don’t use the same approach for all problems.” If you go to sales training like, “You get this objection, here’s the answer regardless of who’s saying it or what the situation is.” I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I tell people, “You’ve got to think of your brain like a jukebox with multiple stories ready to go depending on what the problem or the challenge is.” The fact that you talked about this is another wonderful blog about how you bring results to people. Give us a little taste of what this means in terms of some things that require more finesse etc.

Objections are problems. However, most of them are disguised. What I mean by that is most people that you’re having a sales conversation with are not very skilled at giving you quality objections. They may say something, but they’re hoping you’re going to go away. They’ll make a comment to see what you’re going to do. If you say, “I’d give up,” then mission accomplished. What teed up in my mind is whatever you hear from anybody is likely not a well-thought-out response. Sometimes it could be, but you simply need to practice this art of ignorance and say, “Could you elaborate more on what you mean by that? Would you flash that out more?”

[bctt tweet=”What’s stopping us from getting better results is almost always not asking questions or for help. ” via=”no”]

I don’t believe in a Rolodex type of thing where you get a certain question. You need to find that answer and deliver it. That’s what you get when you have a chatbot or something like that running on a robot. All you have to do is be genuinely curious. “I’m surprised you said that. Where did that come from? What’s the backstory of that?” That’s the key. The key is to be ignorant, don’t act like you’ve heard that before because maybe it isn’t quite the same and ask, “Tell me more. May I ask for more? Can you help me out here? I don’t quite get it,” things like that.

Are there any last thoughts? You have this wonderful book that people can get. It’s called Dynamic Growth.

In GetBillsNewBook.com, and you’ll get a chance to get the pre-publication version. It will give you a book form. It will encapsulate a lot of what we’ve been talking about here.

It’s called Dynamic Growth: How to position your business as a 24/7 cash-producing ATM. Who doesn’t want that? Bill, thank you so much for sharing your gifts, including this wonderful book, and more importantly, this awareness that when we’re curious and when we’re not pretending we know something, no matter how much experience we have, get our mindset and our strategy in place, there’s nothing that we can’t do together. Thanks again for being on the show. I’m looking forward to having all kinds of feedback on how many people are going to be giving me insight going, “That was a great episode. Thanks so much for having Bill on.” Nothing makes me happier than to have guests like you that have so much wisdom and a heartfelt passion for what you do.

Thanks, John. I appreciate it very much.

Important Links

• Bill Prater
• What’s Stopping You From Getting Better Results Every Single Time?
• GetBillsNewBook.com
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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