Outbounding: Win New Customers With Skip Miller
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Enticing people with your offers through cold calling, email marketing, and other business strategies will take more than just mere persuasion. Instead, much more in-depth and carefully thought outbounding techniques are needed. John Livesay sits down with Skip Miller, the President of M3 Learning, to talk about the ingredients that make up an effective outbounding process. Skip talks about connecting with your target audience through emotions, comparing outbounding to a first date, the power of references, and the importance of tapping above-the-line buyers. He also shares his mission to destroy the term decision-maker and how to let go of your fears.
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Listen to the podcast here
Outbounding: Win New Customers With Skip Miller
Our guest on the show is Skip Miller, the author of Outbounding. He said, “The best sales call in the world is one where you don’t say much. The secret is to get people to be curious when you’re reaching out to them.” He’s on a mission to destroy the concept of there being decision-makers, find out what he means by that as well as a magical question to ask to determine whether someone’s going to take action right away or not. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Skip Miller, the President of M3 Learning, a pro-active sales management and training company based in the heart of Silicon Valley. He’s also the author of Outbounding. As the President of M3 Learning, Skip has provided training to hundreds of companies in over 35 countries. He created M3 Learning to make a salesperson better on each individual call. M3 Learning signature selling methodology ProActive Selling is unique in its high-definition focus on the tactics of selling and proactive sales controls. Skip, welcome to the show.
It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
It’s my pleasure as well. We were having a wonderful chat pre the show talking about our passion for helping salespeople connect better. Before we get into your expertise and the team you’ve created, I love to ask guests their own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, school, wherever you were, along with this concept of, “I like connecting to people or I love sales,” or anything you want to share about your own particular background would be great.
I’ve got a big family, five brothers and sisters so you can’t avoid people in that situation. In college, I worked part-time at a small sporting goods store in Cleveland, Ohio. My job was to go to school in the mornings. In the afternoon, I’d try to go to high schools and bid on their football uniforms, cheerleading and basketball. We were a small little store about as big as an office. We were small. We were competing against big giant sporting goods stores.
[bctt tweet=”Make me curious.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I figured out that junior highs have as much money as high schools. I would go to these junior highs and pick up these orders because it was below the radar of the senior high schools. I had a good time building my little own business that way. When I left college, I became a salesperson and sales manager and stuff. For about twenty years, I was Sales VPs and stuff. The company I was with was a high-tech market research firm called Data Quest got bought by a company on the East Coast. I’m from Cleveland but I’ve been living in California for many years. I didn’t want to go back to the East Coast.
Not an offense to the East Coast people, but I like California. I said, “I might as well as to try to start my own business.” That was many years ago. The second or third month I started my business, I got a good-sized customer and I never looked back. It’s been a fun ride. To your point in the intro, I love walking away. A few years later, out of nowhere, I’ll get an email or a LinkedIn from somebody saying, “Skip, I took your course five years ago and I still use your tools. I want to drop you a note.” It’s hysterical. If you can make somebody a manager or a salesperson better at the point of attack, I feel great. That’s my reward so it’s been fine.
I’m guessing M3 Learning has a story of origin behind it. What does M3 stand for?
John, like you, you start your business and you’ve got to file a form to the states or whatever else saying the name of your business. I know I didn’t want to name it Skip Miller Consulting. It stands for Miller and his three kids. I’ve got three kids. In every one of my books, I call out my kids. When they were in school, they would take their friends to Barnes & Nobles or somebody and show that their name was in my book. They liked it.
Outbounding Techniques: A manager must know when and how to tweak strategies based on market demand, competition, and everything out there.
You’re a rockstar for that. One of the things that we were talking about is this need to feel seen, heard and appreciated. Kids say that all the time, “Watch me jump in the pool, dad or mom,” or whatever. That need to be seen, heard, acknowledged and appreciated does not go away when we go into our job. It may be subconscious. Let’s talk a little bit about that because that’s something that is unique. You and I both have a big passion for that. An awareness of it having both been in the salespeople’s shoes, in management and see those little acknowledgments as opposed to the once a year.
Let’s stand it on its head. People do need to be heard. They do need to be seen. The best sales call in the world is not where you hang up the phone or you get off the Zoom meeting going, “Nailed that puppy. That was a good call. I was on my game. That was good.” While you’re doing that, the customer is going, “What was that?” The best sales call in the world is where you hang up the phone or you get off the meeting and go, “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even use a slide.” The customer is going, “They heard me. They feel great.”
As a next step, you can start doing your presentations but if you don’t get that attachment up front, they’ve taken your call, they’re going to take your meeting, they’re going to take your ten seconds of a cold call, whatever else but you want to make them feel like they’ve been heard. That’s a powerful draw. Everybody, managers don’t reward their salespeople enough. They always were telling them what they’re doing wrong and not right. Take what you said about being heard, felt and standing on its head and that’s a powerful drive for when salespeople need to outbound.
One of the things I love about your book, Outbounding, is how you talk about certain actions and certain ones are things that only inbound people are doing versus what outbound people are doing. There are a lot of crossovers but there’s a big difference. Would you speak to what the big difference is?
[bctt tweet=”Consistency wins.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s all about the buyer. We spend so much time thinking about ourselves, our approach, presentation, demo and our products. From a buyer standpoint, if you get an inbound lead, data shows they’re about 50%, 55% through their biocycle already. They’ve got an understanding that they got to make a change. They’ve somewhat monetized it. That’s why they’ve approved the budget. They’re about halfway through a sales cycle. They know they have a problem and they have to make a change.
Outbound, it’s like throwing darts. Did we get them at the right time? Is the buy window open? Most of the time an outbound, the buyer doesn’t know they don’t know. Once informed, they’re like, “I know I’ve always had a problem there. I live with it. I didn’t know there was a fix.” The approaches must be different. What we do is wrong. What we tell the outbound people is, “Those inbound templates we’re using are great. Why don’t you use some of those things?”
Let’s go to another three-day class where we could teach them more about our products, features, benefits and competitive advantages so you can use those in your outbounding. I don’t even know I have a problem yet. You’re telling me about your competitor doesn’t do this. Great. I didn’t know I had a problem. The messaging, I’m getting a lot of input regarding we can’t door knock anymore. We can’t walk halls. We can’t go to trade shows. You’re limited to social. You’re limited to email or you’re limited to the phone.
What can we do to get better attention? Change your message, change your cadence and your sequence. John, I went up to a salesperson at a meeting. I said, “You want to learn about outbounding? How has it been going for you?” He goes, “I outbound.” I said, “What have you been doing?” He goes, “I sent two people an email last week and I’m waiting to hear back.” I go, “That’s your outbounding. Good luck with that one.” That’s where we’re at with that. The whole point is inbound and outbound is different. We don’t treat it differently and we don’t have the correct management dashboards to reward the rep correctly. The processes are different.
Outbounding Techniques: The best way to get a hold of somebody is obviously referencing a person.
I hear a lot of people saying that are “inside salespeople” reaching out, trying to get business that they’re measured on how many calls they make as opposed to the quality of the calls or the outcome from the calls. I’m like, “What a bizarre thing to measure? If you don’t make X number of calls in X amount of time, you’re not working hard enough.” It goes back to that old stuff of throw a bunch of spaghetti up against the wall and see what sticks, which is not a strategic way to sell at all.
There are control knobs, John. Companies like Zoom with the pandemic, it’s a numbers game, dial, demands high, low-hanging fruit, whatever we want to call it. For that short timeframe, the pitch is good enough, make contact. In normal business times, you have to control outbound quality with competency. We call them frequencies and competencies. It’s doing a lot or a little bad, good stuff. If the market is in hot demand like when Tableau first came out, the whole market for visual analytics was hot. Dial, get an appointment, throw it over the wall and go and that’s not common. For most of your readers, they’re going to be sitting there going, “I can’t do 100 or 1,000 calls a day.”
Let’s work on quality. There’s a mixture of both in your cadence and sequences. We see people’s quality as poor. It’s all about us, what we do. That’s got to start being worked out but there are control knobs. We see people who do good emails but they’re doing five a week. Can you get it to ten? Can you get it to 100? There are control nubs and that’s a great management dashboard. It’s not about the hike. If I can get a meeting, throw it over the wall, that’s my job. It’s the same ISRs or the same SDRs. I want to get the meeting, talk to both the decision-makers and stuff and then throw it over the wall. It depends on where you’re at in the marketplace but there’s no doubt that quality and quantity are control knobs that managers got to tweak based upon market demand, competition and everything out there.
My background was in advertising sales and they were always talking about frequency and reach. The same concepts apply. Like a car company when I would call on them to advertise with me, they would say, “We never know when someone is in the market to buy a car. We have to advertise all year long. Hoping that our ad in a magazine or a commercial or on a website happens to catch somebody at that magical moment when they think, “I might go test drive this weekend.” If you have millions and millions of dollars to do that, you can do that. As a salesperson, that strategy is not efficient to say the least because you haven’t qualified someone or created some content that maybe somebody would even be intrigued enough to even start the journey. They don’t even know they have a problem until you point out there is a solution.
[bctt tweet=”The best sales call in the world is where you say very little.” username=”John_Livesay”]
John, consistency wins. One of the best people out there we’ve seen, they have a salesperson who does a regular sales job and takes a list of 25 people, puts them in a 12-touch 2-week cadence. At the end of the two weeks, they take that 25 out, take the ones out that didn’t respond or who do respond to write out and put that aside. You take a second 25 for a 2-week 12-touch cadence, take that out. They have three 25-touch cadences. I’m going to touch you for two weeks then I’m off for four and then I come back for two. They have a rotating carousel of three 25-touch cadences. It takes a good outbound salesperson who’s always busy an hour a day. If you get the system down and get your messaging down and stop outbounding like you want to get married, “I’m Skip Miller. We have the best product. I’m the representative for seven. You have to see ours. It’s our first day.” Treat it like the first day. Make me curious. Don’t tell me who you are.
I talk about that in terms of going from invisible to irresistible and if it rungs on a ladder like in dating. He’s where I see a lot of people get stuck and I would love to hear how you help them is in the middle of invisible to irresistible is the interesting. Wrong. In the dating world, maybe you say something to somebody and they like, “I’m interested to keep talking to you. I’m not agreeing to fly with you yet.” Salespeople get all excited and they tell their boss, “They were interested. They asked me to send them information,” and then it’s crickets. They’re stuck in the friend zone at work. They don’t know how to get out of it. I tell people storytelling is one way to get out of the interesting friend zone at work. I know from your book and your expertise, you’ve seen this happen all the time, yes?
Yeah, without a doubt. The best way to get ahold of somebody is to reference a person. You know somebody, I know somebody and that’s going to be instant rapport. That’s going to be hard to break. After that, it ties to your interesting comment. I come up with the big five. Here are the five things that you should look at if you’re going to outbound to try to get somebody’s attention. The top of the list, without a doubt, to you is curiosity. Make me curious about my title, about my industry, about things that my company’s doing.
“I’m going to do some homework on Debbie because I’m going to go after Debbie there and find out about Debbie.” That’s a rifle shot. Good luck with that. It can work but also Debbie’s curious about people at her level in other companies. Debbie is curious about other companies that are in her industry. Make me curious, give me a little dab. Don’t give me, “Here are five attachments.” Curiosity to your interesting level makes me go, “Let’s talk some more.” Same with that interesting wrong so make me curious, the great theme for those outbounding touches.
Outbounding Techniques: The passion must come from the salesperson, as well as their mission to tap into that energy for the prospect they’re talking to.
One of the things that you touched on is this concept of emotions at the start of the Inc. article. I am a big believer that people buy emotionally, even back it up with logic, even if it’s a big purchase or a corporate purchase. You talk about greed, fear and pride. A lot of people overlook the unspoken fear buyers have that if I make the wrong decision or pay too much, I’m going to get in trouble and I’m even fired. That concept of fear, uncertainty and doubt has been around since the ‘80s when IBM used it if you bought anything that wasn’t their product. It broke, they would point the finger at the other vendors that were dealing with that. I wanted to get your take on curiosity is certainly in that world of, “We’re out of people’s heads.” How important is emotion in getting people engaged?
Emotion is going to drive energy. I’m a huge energy person. I believe that a sale, it’s like a rollercoaster. You get to the top of the roller coaster and it’s losing energy and then the deal goes dark. It goes south. It goes quiet. It’s not getting energy at the top of the hill trying to push it over. You should have gotten energy earlier in the sales call. That earlier energy is emotion. It’s not so much what we call pleasure emotion. It’s more away from pain. We all want to look for pain points. A classic question is what’s the size of the problem? If you don’t understand a problem, they’re not going to have to change.
If it isn’t broke, I’m not fixing it. Something broke and what’s the size of the gap? Those are great mission statements to be on. I started writing the book and I was probably about 2, 3 weeks into it and I scrapped it and started over. Attitude is important as you outbound. It’s not, “I hope they take my call. I hope I can make my pitch.” A good outbounder believes, especially in a B2B world, they’re making their company money. They’re losing money daily by me not being able to talk to them about their issues and challenges. You’ve got to have that emotional passion to go out. You also got to try to find that emotional passion. It’s great when you get somebody on the phone or on Zoom or they go now that’s the problem.
That’s where you want to get to but if you don’t have that same emotion, that same energy, you’re not going to find it. Great outbounders are looking for emotion in themselves because they’re the top people. The ones who can speak the most or the biggest alpha dog, they’re on a mission to help the customers. My job is to have you listen to ten minutes of me and if it doesn’t fit any problems or challenges you have, no harm, no foul. The buy window is not open. I’ll call you in six months but you owe me ten minutes because I’ve done some homework on your company.
[bctt tweet=”To get the attention of many, changing your message, cadence, and sequence is important.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I was talking at a speech a couple of years ago to about 100 CEOs. I asked them why they would take a sales call and they said they wouldn’t. At the bar, I asked them, “Why would you take a sales call?” A bunch of them sat back and said, “The problem with salespeople calling us is they’re a solution hunting for a problem.” One of the first things they say is, “We can help.” You don’t even know what my problem is and you’re telling me you can help me.
You got to come up with a passion and my job is to listen to your story, to what you’re up to quickly. Maybe we can help or not but you can’t sit back and say, “I’m here to help. My mission is to help you,” but my first step has got to be, “I don’t know if I help or not.” I get a sales call and the guy calls in and says, “We want to train our salespeople. Can you help?” What’s your problem?” We can help in certain areas in certain areas we don’t. That mission has got to be emotional. The passion has got to be from the salesperson as well as their mission to go tap into that energy for the prospect they’re talking to.
There’s a myth that people think, “I lost the sale in the closing.” What I’m hearing you say is you probably lost it at the beginning because you didn’t bring enough energy and passion.
That’s one of the things we don’t teach is closing skills because the close started happening back at Stage 2. If you’re selling proposals, “John, we have a quick technology sales cycle, initial interest discovery, proposal harass,” that’s what we typically do here. It’s, “I want a presentation. Here’s the demo. Here’s the proposal. Buy now and I’ll give you ten points off if you’d make it by the end of the month.” It’s ridiculous. There’s no energy, no emotion, no anything. You’ve got to get over that.
Outbounding Techniques: A good way to handle objections is to agree with the demand direct where you want to take them.
You talk about that there are two decisions in a business-to-business sale, one above the line and one below the line. I like that formula. First teaching people to identify who’s who and there are meetings that happen after the meeting. This awareness that you’re creating and giving people some skills because they hear a bunch of proposals, a lot of presentations and then the decision-makers, “Now what do we all think?” Let’s talk about the ATL, the Above The Line, the Below The Line and what their needs are and how a rep can start to zoom in on that.
I was into buyer’s personas. You’ve got the user buyer, the fiscal buyer, the technical buyer, the executive buyer. There are too many buyers out there. One day I said, “There are three types of buyers, the user buyer, the fiscal buyer and the executive buyer. The user buyer is a feature function. The fiscal buyers create value for me, the executive buyers, market share, market size and still was messed up. I said, “Why don’t we name this?” We’ll call the user buyer Spaniards, the middle buyers Russians, the top people Greeks. You’ve got Spaniards, Russians and Greeks.
If you have a meeting with three Spaniards and a Russian, what language should you speak? The obvious answer is Russian because they’re the top person. That worked well. People were getting a little like, “Why are the Spaniards on the bottom?” We did some work for a company where the entire senior management team was from Russia. They want to know why the Greeks were ahead of them because they’re broken. It’s a metaphor.
Finally, our friends at Google said, “It’s not politically correct and stuff.” We came up with this above and below the line. John, I am on a mission to destroy the term decision-maker. There are two, the below the line buyer is one who says, “I’m responsible for making this work, the support. If we’re going to bring this on, I want these features. I want this security package. I want this. I want that. That’s their job.” The above the line buyer says, “As I look at 2021, our new product is probably got to generate $50 million. I probably got $20 million in the bank. I’m missing $30 million. If we could do something that can make a dent in that $30 million gap, what was the name of that again? Buy one of those things. I don’t care what features and benefits it has. As long as below the line buyer’s above the line buyers where you’re going to find energy. The above the line buyer is the one who says, “I got a gap. Bob, here’s the $50,000 budget. Go find something to make a dent in my $30 million problem.” I don’t care per se. The above the line buyer does care if they’ve been heard.
[bctt tweet=”Treat outbounding as a first date. Make the other person curious.” username=”John_Livesay”]
As you prospect and outbound of the buyer, the goal is not to give them your below-the-line pitch. They don’t speak Spanish. Go above the line and find out what are their initiatives for the next 3, 6, 9 months? What gaps do they have on those initiatives? We call them trains at the train station. Why is the train in the station? If you can make a dent in 2 or 3 of their trains, you don’t have to fix the whole train. Make a dent in 2 or 3, watch how much energy your deal has. Most salespeople go below the line. They want to talk about us. We want to talk about us. We all talk about us but when you go above the line, I’ll give you an executive overview of all the stuff we’ve been talking to below the line on.
It’s different. We’ve got to understand what an above the line buyer wants. What they want is to be able to mitigate risk. They want to be able to make a dent in their problems, on their initiatives or trains that they have in the train station. It’s two different ways of looking at a sale. Overall sales cycles usually are cut in half when this happens because the above the line buyer goes, “We’ve got to get this. We got it. Let’s go. We’ve got to do this now.” Rather than Bob has taken his time, he’s doing a two-month evaluation. Bob’s got the whole thing going. Sales cycles get shorter when you do it.
We’ve turned your book, Outbounding, into a course. I know one of the lesson sessions is about handling objections. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you to touch on how you’re helping people handle objections.
John, objections are always fun because what we hear as you all know, not all the time right now, “Now’s not a good time. We’re fine. We don’t need anything,” those typical objections. What happens is your body’s chemistry wants to go into defense mode, the fight or flight. You’re wrong and here’s why you’re wrong. We have a tool in there called Flow of the River. It’s a martial arts term. Martial arts teaches not to block energy but the flow of energy. When you hear an objection like, “Now’s not the right time,” agree with it, “John, you’re right.” A lot of companies we talked to say, “This is not the right time. However, if you give me ten minutes of your time, you may see where it could be a good time.” I’m asking for ten minutes, John. If you block me, you’re wrong. You’ve got my guard up. If you agree with me, I’m going to let my guard down.
Outbounding: Win New Customers with Outbound Sales and End Your Dependence on Inbound Leads
Call Verizon and AT&T up, “I got a problem with my phone. I can see you’re right. It takes the winds out of your sales and now you’re ready for a conversation. I’m mad. My thing has been out for three hours. What’s your problem? You have a good right to be mad. Thank you.” It puts them defenseless. A good way to think of objection handling right up front is the bottom line is to make sure you think to agree with it and then direct where you want it to take it.
It reminds me of the old statement I heard years ago, “Do you want to be right? Do you want to be happy?”
Let’s put that stake in the ground. That’s not a good stake in the ground.
The book, Outbounding, can be found on Amazon. If people want to learn more about you, they can go to M3Learning.com. You do a lot of speaking to the clients.
We’ve got some training classes. John, I hate writing books. I don’t know about you, but I hate it. It’s 4:00 in the morning stuff for me. It’s Miller time at 5:00 PM. When I see a problem, in 2019, all the low-hanging fruit was going away. People had to start outbounding. You talk to salespeople, “I’d get to 80% of my number. I’m going to have to do a little outbounding.” They wait until November. By that time, it’s late. People were hurting because they’re so fearful of outbounding, fear of rejection, fear of the word no, I got to get six noes before I get a seventh yes. I hate getting noes. Who wants that rejection? I took it as a challenge to try to help the individual salespeople come up.
Don’t be fearful about this. It’s not a big fear thing. Do A, B and C, be on a mission to help your prospects, your customers and managers start measuring the right stuff. You’re measuring old-school stuff. If you want to measure good outbounding practices, given that we’ve got numerous channels, we have mail, social media, direct emails. There are numerous starts putting better dashboards together than the ones you like, “How many calls you make now?” which is hysterically archaic. It’s good but archaic. There are new ways. That’s why I wrote the book, help managers out, help salespeople out. If people want to read it, great. If they’re doing fine, if they don’t have a problem, there’s no reason.
Thanks, Skip, for sharing your knowledge and your insights. I love this concept of being on a mission to destroy decision-makers.
I’m on a mission to destroy the decision-maker because there are two. There’s not one.
That’s a great concept of how to look at all of that and how to reframe it. As you said, “Let go of the fear.” We will let everybody know how to become better at outbounding. Even if your job is not sales, we all have to sell ourselves all the time. There are some real tidbits in that book that will help everyone get over that fear of “the cold call.”
For me, I hate returning things. I go to Target or somewhere and I go, “Did you use this? I’m sorry.” I hate rejection as much as anybody. If I had to overcome it, people will read the book too.
Thanks, Skip.
John, thank you for your time.
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Invisible Solutions With Stephen Shapiro
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Many people advise us to think about our destination, our end-goal, that sometimes, we miss out on the many opportunities that come our way. The author of Invisible Solutions, Stephen Shapiro, joins John Livesay in this episode to share with us the different lenses he’s created to allow us to see the solutions that are right in front of our face but are in fact invisible. One to emphasize how we should focus on the direction we’re going, he tells us some great insights, tips, and tricks towards becoming a lot more successful—from the importance of branding to learning how to ask the right questions. He also shares what a performance paradox is about and how we can use it to our best advantage.
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Listen to the podcast here
Invisible Solutions With Stephen Shapiro
Our guest on the show is Stephen Shapiro, the author of Invisible Solutions. He shares with us all the different lenses he’s created to allow us to see those solutions that are right in front of our face but are in fact invisible. He said that if you focus on your direction you’re going and not necessarily just the destination, you’re going to be a lot more successful. He talks about what a performance paradox is and how we can use it to our best advantages. Sometimes having the answer is not the answer. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Stephen Shapiro. For many years, he’s presented his provocative strategies on innovation, culture and collaboration to audiences in 50 countries. During his fifteen-year tenure with the consulting firm, Accenture, he created and led a 20,000-person innovation practice. He’s the author of five books, including Invisible Solutions. His clients include Marriott, 3M, P&G, Microsoft, Nike, NASA and GE. In 2015, Stephen was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame. He’s also been a regular judge and mentor on the TV show, Girl Starter. We’re going to be talking about stories, how to become more inventive and what the heck is an invisible solution. Stephen, welcome to the show.
John, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
I love to ask people like you to take us back to childhood or school when you started this curiosity factor that you seem to have in spades about, how does the world work and how can things be better? Start anywhere with whatever the story jumps out in your head.
I would say I’ve always been a bit of a tinkerer. I liked seeing how things work so I would take things apart and hopefully, try to put them back together. I did that sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully but that was something I always love to do as a kid. I also love magic because to me, magic is like, how do things happen? How do you do things that are impossible? I’ve always been fascinated with taking things that appear complex and trying to deconstruct them and understand them, then reconstruct them in a way that they’re not so complex.
Take us at the beginning of your college. How did you decide what to major in when you have that interest?
I had two paths that I was going to go down. One was going to music because I was a jazz sax player and good at it, and then the other one was an engineer. I got a lot of advice. In fact, one piece of advice I got from someone which goes counter to what a lot of people might say is they said, “If your passion is music, don’t major in it because once you start having to make a living off of it, it might crush your passion. Choose something that is going to make money and then do music as your true passion on the side.” I became an engineer because I’m a bit of a nerd.
[bctt tweet=”An ineffective question is one that doesn’t give you the results you want.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There’s a lot of similarities between music and math and all that, so that’s not a huge shock. I’ve heard Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity and in her case, it’s writing books like you. She’s like, “If you put too much pressure on your creative outlets to make you a living, it does take the joy away from it.” There’s something to be said there, where we don’t have any pressure on anything we love doing, and then if the money happens to come great. To make that jump in is I advise that a lot of young people are not getting because Robert’s “follow your bliss” situation is a big thing. Let’s jump into those fifteen years at Accenture. You’re based in London some of the time and you’re managing all these people. What kinds of problems were you solving?
The biggest problems that we were focused on were how do we take the mindset of 20,000 people who are much technology-led? A lot of Accenture was much on technology implementation. The group that I was working with was about, whether it’s SAP or some other enterprise management system or some other new technology, how do we get them to focus on value first? How do we get them to think innovatively and then look at the technology as solution? That was the problem we were trying to solve. We did that through a series of programs, books, materials and other things trying to create a greater awareness of how you can, without taking a lot of time, rethink the entire thought process for delivering a project.
You started your speaking career after that. Is that correct?
I had the first copies of my book on September 10th, 2001. It’s a bittersweet day because the next day, things were a little different. I plan to leave the company at that point and left Accenture when my first book came out. It’s been many years that I’ve been doing my own thing. I’ve been focusing on helping companies innovate, solve problems, collaborate and things of that nature.
In your book, Invisible Solutions, you’re wearing a purple shirt and the burqa is purple. There’s a lot of purple on your website as well. Let’s talk about the importance of branding, being known for colors, and certain things. What are your thoughts on that? How did you come up with purple?
I always loved purple. I have these big geodes that are deep purple and I always love those. Even as a kid, I have those. I’ve always loved purple for whatever reason. I hired branding companies that said, “You can’t do purple. Purple’s a bad color for a brand.” I moved away from purple. When the book came out, we decided to go with the purple cover. I went back to what I love. I love purple. To me, it’s a good royal color. I remember one of the first speeches that I gave after I left Accenture, I was in Singapore. I was told that purple is a color for innovation. I was like, “There you go. That worked out perfectly.”
Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems
That’s all meant to be. The cover of your book is fascinating. There’s a guy in a suit and these glow in the dark glasses. What’s the story there?
It’s the variation of the invisible man. The whole book is on 25 lenses, which are 25 different ways to reframe the problem. The fedora, glasses, tie, and jacket, if you look carefully, you’ll see subtly are all 25 lenses written. The whole outfit is made up of the words of the lenses.
It reminds me of Dolce & Gabbana, how they have words and their logos on dresses, purses and things and it becomes immersive like that. My first question is, how’d you come up with the title? Usually, people think, “If a solution is invisible, is that a solution?” We get down in the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole a little bit.
I’ve been fortunate to have a buddy of mine, Adam Lefort, who’s brilliant at technology but he’s also great at coming up with big concepts. One of my books was called Best Practices are Stupid. Adam came up with that title. He came up with Invisible Solutions. The whole idea of the book is the best solutions are right in front of your nose. You just can’t see them because we’re not asking the right questions or we’re looking at the problem the wrong way. He said, “The solutions are there. They’re just invisible. They’re hidden.” That’s how we came up with the title which led to the invisible man, and then the cover was designed by my buddy, John Brunswick, who was at Salesforce. He came up with this concept one day and said, “How about the invisible man as a concept for the book cover?” I’m like, “Cool. Let’s go with it.”
Both in your keynote and in your book, you talk about how we are hardwired to ask ineffective questions. People would say, “We’re hardwired that way?” Let’s start with your definition of what is an ineffective question. I can guess but I’m sure you put a lot of thought into what an ineffective question is.
An ineffective question is one that doesn’t give you the results you want. The reason why we ask ineffective questions is because we probably don’t even ask questions. What we’re doing is we tend to make snap judgments or snap decisions, and then we start moving forward quickly. Part of this is because the brain’s primary function is survival. We need to innovate to survive and we need to adapt to survive, but we tend to innovate and adapt as a means of survival. The primary message of the brain says, “Whatever we did before we were together today, John, didn’t kill us so it’s probably safest for us to continue whatever we’ve done in the past.”
[bctt tweet=”Often, when we’re trying to solve a problem, we think of it too abstractly. We don’t take the time to frame it properly.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Anything new, different, and ambiguous might be risky, and therefore, we don’t want to do it. The brain doesn’t spend a lot of time processing the question. It is more reactionary in many respects. We need to put that conscious mechanism of putting the pause button on and say, “What is the real problem that I’m trying to solve? Where am I trying to go?” Sometimes, in organizations, business, and life, we’re under time pressures, so we think we need to go fast. The problem is if you go fast in the wrong direction, you’re just going further away from the ultimate result that you want to achieve. A little bit of time upfront can go a long way in repositioning you need to go in the right direction.
I’m fascinated by this whole fight or flight response concept. It’s something safe or not and yet, how do we build trust with clients, especially in the sales world? It’s little tricks and tips that we do as speakers, even though we’ve been on many stages. I’d be curious to see if you do this as well. If you have the opportunity the night before you give a talk in the morning, you go into the room, check it out, and maybe even walk up on the stage. You’re telling your body, “This is the safe space. This is not my first time on the stage. I know where the stairs are.” All those things that you don’t want to have to be thinking about survival like, “I don’t want to trip and look like a fool” is an example of that?
Absolutely. I will always go through a rigorous amount of practice the night before, whether it’s in the shower, thinking through certainly the first 3 to 5 minutes of the speech because I want to nail the beginning, and it’s always different. I know some speakers say, “I’ve got my first five-minute story.” I’ve tried that many times to have a starting story and it never seems to land. I don’t think it connects with the audience. I want to talk about, what’s the pain of the audience? What are they going through? I give a lot of thought to that so that when I’m ready to deliver the speech, even if it’s totally different, at least I feel comfortable that I’ve spent the time to think about it.
Yes, I love to practice. We’re on virtual stages so I’m in my office delivering speeches. I don’t know, John, if this is the same for you, but I still get nervous every speech. I don’t care what speech it is and I don’t care who it is. I sometimes do a little biofeedback. I’ll check my pulse in a live event. If I’m in the audience, I’ll be sitting there and I’ll put my fingers on my pulse. I’ll feel my pulse and I’ll control my breathing because I know that nervousness is going to help me explode on stage, but I don’t want to blow up and have my brains all over the place. I like to at least calm myself down a little bit.
I talk about this because a lot of salespeople struggle with nerves when they get up in front of big clients. I call it your Super Bowl of meetings or your Olympic moment. Everybody gets those butterflies in their stomach. My whole advice that I use myself is my whole goal is to get those butterflies in my stomach to fly in formation. I do that by saying, “It’s game time.” It’s my adrenaline kicking in and that fine line between being nervous and excited feels a lot the same, so we get to reframe it. I know what you mean. You’re sitting maybe off stage or standing off stage and they’re writing down the introduction to you and your heart starts beating a little bit faster because you know it’s showtime in a few seconds. You need to ground yourself and realize, “I’m excited. I’m not scared. I prepared for this.”
Let’s come to sales for a moment because one of the reasons why we might get nervous on a stage or in a sales pitch is because we are attached to the outcome. In many cases, we’re attached to the wrong outcome. If I’m trying to do a sales pitch, I might be attached to making the sale. That’s the outcome I want to get from it. If you can shift that outcome to, “I want to connect with the audience. I want to give them as much value as I possibly can, regardless of the sale,” now all of a sudden, that shifts your mindset and probably has. You’d be a better salesperson. When it comes to speaking, if I’m worried about, “Are they going to like me? Are they going to laugh? Am I going to get a standing ovation?” I’m going to fail. I try to remind myself, “I’m there to serve them the best I can. I’m going to give it my best shot. That’s all I can do.” If it’s all about me giving value, not me getting accolades, now I’ve shifted things and I find it helps a lot.
Invisible Solutions: The best solutions are right in front of your nose. You just can’t see them because we’re not asking the right questions or we’re looking at the problem the wrong way.
I went through this the first time I did a virtual talk and of course, everyone was on mute. When I know I get a giggle or a little bit of laugh, I can’t hear it. It took me off my game a tad. I was like, “Okay.” We depend so much on that feedback, energy, and facial reactions you can see people’s faces. I’m curious to know your experience of this, Stephen. Once the talk was over and people could post stuff in chat and take themselves off mute, the people are holier now than they were before the pandemic for connection, inspiration, and new tips. We’re saying how much they liked it. They got more feedback than the applause in a ballroom. I’m fascinated to know your thoughts on that.
People want connection. They don’t want to be in these endless Zoom calls, but they want to connect around something of meaning, purpose, and value. I know some of my speaker friends are 180 degrees from where I am but I love virtual. Partly because what you said that set you back a little bit was you didn’t get the audience reaction. My problem is in a live event, in-person event, I’m watching the audience and I’m thinking, “What are they thinking?” All these things start going through my head.
With the virtual audience, what’s awesome is I can be there. I do a lot of engagement with chat and other things but when I’m delivering the content, I’m just delivering the content. I’m looking at the camera. I’m giving it the best shot I possibly can. I find that the level of engagement and value and my energy goes up. I’m having a blast delivering virtual because it’s a different experience that can create a heck of a lot more value for the audience and for our clients.
I hear a lot of sales teams struggling with getting in what I call the virtual door. A lot of them, especially in healthcare, didn’t have to do it. They could stop by the doctor’s office and bring in some Starbucks or maybe catch the doctor at a hospital between surgeries. All those ways to connect and meet are gone. If they don’t have practice or training on what to say to even get the meeting before you tell a story, it’s a whole new world. I’m guessing you’ve got some ideas around that since you’re always about making sure you’re asking well-defined questions. Any thoughts and suggestions about what people who’ve never had to request meetings virtually before could be asking to show value at the meeting?
The keyword is value. A lot of times, we want a meeting because we have a hidden agenda. We need to move away from these hidden agendas to an explicit statement of value like, “Why would somebody even care to have a conversation with us? Why would somebody want to pay us to give a speech?” Whatever it is. A lot of times, it’s our get out and sell, but people don’t want to be sold. They want to be helped.
That’s what I try to do. I try to reach out to my best clients, my favorite clients, past clients, and people I’ve never done business with before and find something that I can connect to their pain. Unfortunately, I have a tool and a process and everything else that solves most people’s pains but putting that aside, everybody has a way of creating value. It’s not a Starbucks gift card. It’s not, “Let’s have a random conversation.” It has to be something that’s meaningful, timely and relevant for that individual.
[bctt tweet=”If you want to sell more, don’t focus on selling. Focus on serving.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That right now aspect of it. I first learned about this from a publicity standpoint. If you’ve got a book coming out and you’re a publicist and you are looking for what’s in the news and the headlines that are relevant to what I’m saying that pulls it in. When I’ve worked with people on their pitch to get a startup funded, it’s why now? If we think back in 2008, if the economy wasn’t in trouble, Airbnb might not have worked and people would have been open to new ways of having an income. That “why now?” question is valuable for all salespeople or anybody in marketing to put their filter through when they’re looking for the right questions to ask that bring this all up. I know you have 25 lenses that help us reframe things. We talked about reframing nervousness to excitement. What is one of your most popular tools of all these 25 lenses that somebody could possibly dabble with?
They’re all equally valuable. They’re all my children. I love them all equally. There are some that are more applicable. It depends on the type of problem. I’ll give a couple of them. A lot of times when we’re trying to solve a problem, we think of it too abstractly. We don’t take the time to frame it properly. Let’s say it’s a company that’s losing revenues. They might ask the question how do I grow revenues? How do I prevent eroding revenues? Whatever it might be.
The problem is when we ask these big, broad, abstract questions, it’s like trying to solve world hunger. We can get tens of thousands of ideas of which probably none of them have value. We need to, in those situations, break them down into something smaller. We need to reduce abstraction. There are five lenses for that. One which I always use is the leverage lens. It’s lens number one. It’s the most basic of lenses, but it says, “If you could only solve one aspect of this problem, what would it be? What’s going to give you the greatest return, the greatest bang for your buck?”
If you’re trying to increase revenues, you might ask, “First of all, is it revenues you want or is it profitability?” You could grow revenues but erode profitability. That’s a different lens. That’s a substitute lens. Is it revenues or profits? If it’s profits, then we can ask ourselves, “Who are the most profitable customers?” That’s a great start. What we might do is use the reduce lens, which is another lens to say, “Maybe instead of having more highly profitable customers, maybe we want to target fewer highly profitable customers.” Now you can see how we’ve gone from revenues to fewer highly profitable customers.
The last one I want to throw out is the variation lens. If we’re going to say we’re going to put most of our energy into our most highly profitable customers, we need to find a way of serving everyone else. The variation lens says, “We don’t necessarily want to. We probably do not want to use a one size fits all strategy.” How do we serve our most profitable customers one way, yet still offer something of value that might be completely different from our other customers?
For example, if you’re in financial services, maybe for your most highly profitable customers, you have a hands-on service where you provide them financial planning or whatever it might be. Whereas everyone else that’s purely digital, you can’t even walk into a bank. You can’t even do it with a teller or whatever it might be. Now you’ve got a highly efficient margin on one side where it can handle large volumes, and then the other one is high touch but high value. In the variation lens, think about how you would handle different segments, customers and people differently.
Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition
I have an example of this from when I was selling advertising and one of my clients was Banana Republic. They had said, “We’re never going to be Neiman Marcus in terms of service and price points.” The question was, what could we do to target 20% of the clients that we have that are giving us 80% of the revenue? You triggered my memory when you’re talking about, “Let’s look at our most profitable customers.” They tended to be in San Francisco in the Union Square store and in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. They said, “Let’s try and anticipate, what is luxury?” That was the next question. That’s using your process without even knowing they’re using it. Now that I understand your process, it’s fascinating to see this in action. What is luxury besides price point? That’s the big shift. That’s the ineffective question. It’s the norm. Luxury is expensive. What else is luxury?
They came up with a definition that luxury is anticipating a need before you know you need it. From that lens, they said, “Why don’t we test putting in phone charge places in those two locations where the majority of our clients are giving us the majority of the revenue? We’re targeting this 20% of all the people that shop at Banana Republic or we’re going to get a good chunk of them in those two locations, those two big stores. It’ll be a nice way of upping the luxury experience without having to raise our prices or spend a ton of money, but giving them some other little perk.” The results blew them away because sales went up 20%. Not only did the people use it, but they also shopped longer waiting for their phone to fully charge, which they had not even thought of as an outcome. If I understand the takeaway from the book, which I love, Invisible Solutions, that would be it in action?
That’s absolutely it in action. That was a combination of the leverage lens, insights and observation lenses, which are all about, how do we understand what latent needs are? Needs that haven’t been explicitly expressed. That’s a whole bunch of different lenses there. I love that and then you can play with it like, “How do we get them to stay even longer?” Some stores have put in services in retail stores, whether it’s a desk where you could stay and work.
The theory is if you’re staying in the store, even if you’re not shopping, you’re still in the store, then you’d be like, “I see that over there. That’s cool. I want to go get that.” It could be even exclusively for certain clientele. “We got these red stanchions with velvet ropes for special people.” There are lots of different things you could do. The key is to test it out. You can sit around and come up with a lot of cool solutions, but we don’t know if any of them are going to work to do these small experiments.
What are the other things you have in your chapter about, switching elements is a performance paradox? Nobody loves an alliteration more than I do, Stephen. It sticks in my brain. Can you define what a performance paradox is?
The performance paradox is if you want to achieve a goal paradoxically, sometimes the best way to achieve it is to not focus on the goal. If you want to sell more, don’t focus on selling. Focus on serving. I had great pleasure when I was living in London working for a Formula One race car team. I asked them, “How do you get pit crews to go fast?” They said, “We tell them to go fast but what we found is that if we tell them not to focus on their speed, but focus on their style and their movements, they went faster and they thought they were going slower.”
[bctt tweet=”One of the big mistakes we make is we get myopically focused on the future that we forget that the future is not predictable.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There’s a lot of examples of this, whereby shifting from the outcome or the goal to a present moment activity can fundamentally shift your performance because you reduce stress. I’m not a great golfer, but I think about golfing as a great metaphor because when you’re golfing, which one does is look at the pin. You want to look at where you’re going but once you line up, if you lift your head up and look at the pin as you’re swinging, you’re going to slice the ball. You need to focus on the ball. Your eye has to stay on the ball 100% of the time knowing you’ve lined up and it’s going to go to the pin. That’s the way things work.
Don’t you find a lot of us struggle with worrying about the future too much? We’re not in the present moment, which is what a game like golf requires to be completely present. You can’t be thinking about anything, including what’s happening a few seconds after you swing. How does that help us in business when we do have to do projections and we have a big meeting, and yet we need to be completely present?
We cannot be thinking about, “I need this sale to make my quota.” “If I have to show this person another house. I’m going to lose my mind.” I work with people on replacing that negative self-talk or those future fear-based things with some simple mantras of peaceful and calm as you’re listening to someone give you an objection or interrupting them, worst case. “I have your answer. I’ve heard this objection 100 times. Let me cut to the chase. Talk about a way to kill a sale.” That’s one way to do it, right?
Yeah. We did a study once in a retail store many years back and we had two teams. One team, we told them, “We’re going to see who can sell the most.” We measured how much they sold. Another team, we told them they’re there to serve the customer. We’re going to see how well they serve the customer. That means if the customer should go somewhere else, they go somewhere else. Of course, the sales were measured for both teams and the team that was focused on serving the customer sold more than the team that was focused on making the sales. We can make these shifts.
You need to know where you’re going, at least directionally. I say you don’t want a specific destination. You want a sense of direction and then meander with purpose. That’s one of my favorite lines, which means, I don’t know. If you come up with a five-year plan, you’re smoking something because nobody has a clue of a one-year plan, so you need a sense of direction to make sure you’re moving forward with something but then you go each and every day and make these minor corrections in your course. What you’re going to find is you might move in a different direction, but it’s a better direction based on new information. That’s one of the big mistakes we make. We get myopically focused on the future that we forget that the future is not predictable.
I once heard someone describing this concept in terms of driving that when we’re driving on a freeway, we’re making these subtle corrections with a steering wheel to stay in our lane and not go over to the other oncoming traffic. It’s subconscious, we’re not even aware of it, error, correct. What you’re talking about is focusing on the direction we want to go. When I was a kid in family vacations, I’d be in the backseat torturing my parents. “Are we there yet?”
Invisible Solutions: The performance paradox is if you want to achieve a goal paradoxically, sometimes the best way to achieve it is to not focus on the goal.
That’s what salespeople management can do to each other. “Did you hit that number yet? Did you get that sale?” As opposed to, “Let’s keep focusing on customer service. What do they need? How can we solve that problem?” The other thing that you said I’m fascinated with is on both of those examples where there’s the car team changing the tires quickly or the other example of the contest is people perception. “Am I going slower or faster? Is this working or not?” It’s not always accurate. It’s almost like you’re trying to trust your eyesight and you know that sometimes what you see is not the reality.
When you’re working hard, you think you’re making progress. That’s not necessarily true. Some of the things that I’m talking about here go back many years to research that was done by two scientists, Yerkes-Dodson. If you look at the relationship in between, they use the word arousal, but I think of it as motivation. How do we motivate somebody? Their performance looks like an upside-down U for the most part. No motivation and no performance, then there’s that sweet spot where you hit that peak performance, but then if you over motivate somebody, their performance starts to drop.
Let’s say we were lucky enough to get our name picked out of a hat for a basketball game. If you shoot from the half court, you win money or better yet, let’s choose the county fair. Those little basketball games and you win a stuffed doll. A stuffed doll is not a big motivation but now all of a sudden, I give you $100, you’re going to try a little harder. $300, you’re going to try a little harder. There’s a point that will be different for each person but there’s a point where I’m going to give you so much money, you’re going to get a lot worse. If I said it’s going to be $10 million, I promise you, you will not sink the ball because your nerves are going to go out of control. That’s what we see happening is that upside-down U model.
That’s beginner’s luck because they’re unattached to the performance. “If I don’t do well, I’m not going to beat myself up. I’m not going to suddenly think I’m a bad person or not talented. I’m just trying this.” Once we started trying to beat our own records, when I used to swim competitively, that was always the thing. “Here’s your best time for the last three months. See if you can beat it this race.” Ironically, I find myself in a sales career, which is the same thing with quotas. “You hit this number last year, now we’ve raised it X percentage. I’ll try to beat that.”
It is interesting how we find ourselves. That’s why I always love hearing your own personal story of origins. You’re deconstructing things as a child and now you’re deconstructing myths like, “Working harder doesn’t necessarily mean progress,” or getting people to let go of the premise that, “I have to focus on my outcome and not the process.” All of those things that make us more innovative. There are solutions that are in front of us that we just have to get the right lens so that we can see them. Is that a fairly good, accurate summary of you and your book?
That’s spot on. I’m glad you pulled out the performance paradox because I also say there’s the solution paradox, which is the corollary to it. If you want a better solution, stop focusing on solutions. Having the answers is not the answer. We have to have better questions and we need to reframe the questions. The key to high performance is better questions that lead to faster implementation of more valuable solutions.
[bctt tweet=”The key to high performance is better questions that lead to faster implementation of more valuable solutions.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You need to have a certain emotional EQ to be comfortable that you don’t have all the answers, especially if you’re in a management or leadership position. The old way was if you got that job, you better have every answer or fake it. People can see through that as opposed to more collaborative conversations that I see happening. One last question for you because I see this as a big problem in a lot of different industries. I’m guessing you have a tool through your lenses. All the silos that exist in companies.
They’re constantly telling the silos of whether it’s a practice area and an architecture firm or law firms that have different practice areas or healthcare companies that have separate sales teams for each division of whatever the product is. Yet, they’re trying to get the end-user who’s using one division to use all of them and there’s no way for them to even start so they’re all focused on, “We need more new clients,” as opposed to, “Maybe if we weren’t siloed, we could grow some existing clients to use other divisions.” That to me seems like a huge problem that someone like you has to put a lot of thought into. Any thoughts around that before we say goodbye?
We could do a whole podcast on this one topic. It’s a fascinating one. I remember a company that we’re doing some work with, where their on-time product launch was 15% on-time product launch. The reason was because they thought product development, the R&D group was the product but it wasn’t because they would create a product, and then it would go to marketing. They say, “This is not the right product,” and then we go to sales, “It’s not the right product,” or manufacturing, “We can’t make this product.” They would go around in circles. They redefined product development as being six months after a successful product launch. Everyone, legal, sales, marketing, manufacturing, and R&D were all part of that and measured and incentivized on that. What they went for is from 15% to 70% on-time product launch in one year, simply by shifting people’s definition of what the launch of a product was.
Everybody has a vested interest in that.
Exactly.
The book, Invisible Solutions, you can get it on Amazon, and then Stephen’s website is StephenShapiro.com. Thanks for coming on and sharing your solutions whether they be visible or invisible.
It’s great to be here, John. Thanks.
Important Links
- Invisible Solutions
- Elizabeth Gilbert
- Best Practices are Stupid
- StephenShapiro.com
- Invisible Solutions – Amazon
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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The Influence Board With Jay Allen
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Have you experienced being bombarded with cold calls and not knowing what to do with them? Especially when quarantine and social distancing have become the new normal, receiving these calls has probably been a lot more frequent that we just can’t find the time to answer them all. Introducing you to someone who has created a solution to that, John Livesay sits down with the founder of The Influence Board, Jay Allen. He shares with us the platform he has created that helped influential executives deal with cold calls and how he is letting people connect with the right decision-makers and make the world a better place.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Influence Board With Jay Allen
Jay Allen is the Founder of the Influence Board. He noticed that a lot of influential executives were being bombarded with cold calls and they didn’t have time to do that. He created a solution for that. He helped build it with their input, which has allowed it to scale. Find out how he’s letting people get into the right decision-makers, while also making the world a better place.
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Our guest is Jay Allen. He’s founded and managed six major networks of influential business leaders over the years with over 5,000 executive members from the major companies in the US and Europe. He has years of experience as an entrepreneur, strategic advisor, and executive leader. He is an influencer among private companies and large strategic corporations. He’s overseen strategic business development for a number of emerging technologies. He’s also the Founder of the Influence Board. Jay, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It’s great to be here, John.
Let’s go back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood or school. Tell us a little bit about how you got interested in business in general.
It all started with a passion for marketing. I went to college for international marketing and loved it. I grew up in the industry a little bit, but quickly discovered that the salespeople were making a lot more money than me. I transitioned at one point from marketing to sales. It was a tough transition. I’m a relationship person. The impact of rejection of cold calling was tough for me. I had a lot of anxiety about cold calling. I reached a point where I said, “Do I want to do this as a career?” I knew I needed to do something a little different. It was that inflection point in my life where I decided to take a slightly different trajectory. I ended up reaching out to ten executives I had never been able to get a meeting within two years of cold calling. I invited them to lunch to meet each other and I told them, “No vendors. You’re all going to pay for your own lunch.” I was shocked when all ten showed up.
I learned a valuable lesson that day that was a guide to everything I did after that. These influential people have a hard time growing their network of other valuable contacts. The networking events they get invited to aren’t high value because 80% of the people in the room want to sell them something or hand them a resume. The fact that I reached out and said, “These nine other executives want to have lunch with you. We’re going to get to know each other. No vendors. You’re buying your own lunch,” was a completely novel idea to them and something that was of high interest. Over the years, I went from a below-average salesperson that hated cold calling to one of the most connected people in Colorado by becoming a personal networking assistant to the most powerful and influential people in Colorado. That led me to do sales in a different way and continuing sales but not having to cold call the way I used to.
That is valuable for everyone reading. You’re solving a problem, which is what everybody has to put the lens on. The problem is that influential people have trouble growing their network without being inundated with a lot of other people pitching them things or wanting to hire them. They’re talking to their peers and learning from them without feeling like someone is trying to sell them something or get them to hire them. Smart executives realize the value of their network. You need it not when you have a job, but when you don’t have a job. They’re forward-thinking enough to realize, “This is a good use of my time. I might use something I could use in my job. Especially if it’s my peers, we probably have similar challenges.”
You and I were talking about some of the similar challenges that healthcare companies have with COVID. If a pharmaceutical company is talking to a manufacturing company and they’re both realizing, “We’re having trouble getting in the virtual door.” They might have some interesting conversations of sharing some things that are working. You were in that lunch even though they were all buying their lunch, but that’s not when you were pitching. I’m sure that’s the case. I want to reiterate for anyone who’s reading and going, “I’m going to try that.” It’s still not your chance to pitch. You’re just listening.
I coined a phrase, the law of two favors. My philosophy was if I have an ulterior motive or I’m trying to get in the door and close a deal with one of these executives and that’s why I reached out, I can’t tell them that until I’ve done them two meaningful favors. Once I’ve done them those two meaningful favors, I can bring that up and we can have a conversation. Selling to a friend is a much different experience than selling to a stranger. I wanted to establish that relationship of trust and friendship and cross the bridge of them knowing that regardless of the outcome of any transaction, we’re going to be friends. When I do the ask, they can say yes or no and have confidence that it’s going to have zero impact on our personal relationship.
Selling to a friend is different than selling to a stranger, that’s going to be one of our tweets from the episode. The problem I see with many salespeople is they’re short-term focused, “I’ve got my quota this month, this quarter. I don’t have time to make friends.” They’re not seeing the long picture. It’s like, “I’m moving on,” as opposed to maybe a no could be a yes down the road. That is not how you build a successful career, let alone a network. You have to invest. Those relationships are my big takeaway.
I’ll even give you an example. One of the executives in that first group of ten was the head of IT for a large technology company in Colorado. I had never been able to get past his admin. He had a brutal admin. He showed up at this lunch. One thing I discovered in the conversation over lunch is that he was engaged to be married. His fiancé was trying to land a job. I asked some more questions about what she was looking for. I made a few phone calls. I ended up landing her an interview. She ended up getting the job. The executive invited me to their wedding reception. We became fast friends.
I had an opportunity to sell into his company. When he changed jobs, I helped make some introductions for him to transition to a new job. I had some opportunities to sell into the organization that he went to at that time. He moved out of the country. When he moved back to the United States, years later, I was the first person he called and we reconnected and had an opportunity to sell to the new company that he moved into. It’s those long-term opportunities that made a difference in my career.
[bctt tweet=”Selling to a friend is a much different experience than selling to a stranger.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I remember when a client of mine in a healthcare company hired me to speak to their sales team. We had many conversations before and then we met face-to-face. He introduced me to his boss and all of that was the night before the event. He turned to me and he said, “I feel like I’ve made a friend.” I said, “You have.” That’s what you want to have. When you can make somebody look good to their boss or if I was calling on ad agencies and I make them look good to their clients, that’s when people know, “You don’t see me as just another job. You see me as a person.”
That premise of speaking and becoming friends with somebody at one company and they left and went to a competitor and they brought me with them. They’re like, “I want you to do what you did for me at the other company to this company.” Those warm introductions. When someone is hired, they obviously have a little honeymoon period going on. If they say, “I want to bring this speaker or trainer in,” it’s different. They go, “This is your first six months to show yourself and that’s why we brought you.” It’s a great example of all that.
I want to talk about your days at product development at American Express because I’m sure you learned some fascinating life lessons there working for such a big company versus working in other situations. When people get to work for a big brand like that, I know when I was at Condé Nast, you see things. Your resources, for one, are different from smaller situations. What was your big insight from being at American Express?
At American Express, like some of the other companies I was at, I was always part of a small entrepreneurial segment of the organization. Not all companies do that and do it well. American Express was one that did it well. They were interested in branching into a new space, which was the debit card or stored value card space for college campuses. The project I was on was, how do we develop both the platform and the marketing message to go to these college campuses, and provide them a stored value card that the parents could load up and would work at places that accepted American Express around campus? It was a great concept. The team there was entrepreneurial. You don’t often see that within a large company. It went well that that division ended up being acquired by Maritz, a performance improvement company out of St. Louis. I had the option of moving to St. Louis, which I didn’t take. I wanted to stay in the West.
What I find fascinating about you is you have your pulse on the zeitgeist. What I mean by that is like Wayne Gretzky’s quote, he aims his puck for where the puck is going and not where it is. You started the Influence Board years ago. Who could have predicted that the need to help people get appointments with key influencers would be at an all-time high during a pandemic when you can just drop it in office or see somebody between surgeries if you’re calling in the medical things? It’s almost like a relationship. You need to plant those seeds early on. You saw a need for this when you started it. Share with us how you came up with the idea and what it does.
What’s interesting is this concept has been attempted a couple of times in the past that I’ve seen and it has not succeeded. The reason it didn’t succeed is because it was being built from a salesperson’s perspective. I’m a salesperson. I want to access these influential hard to reach executives. I’m going to build a technology platform that allows me to donate to their charities. They build it and then they try and convince executives to come onto the platform. They’ve never been able to get traction. I had a completely different approach. I wanted the executives to build it. I wanted the executives to architect it and to solve the problems that they were having.
The problems they were having is they’re getting 30 calls and emails a day from vendors they’ve never heard, and trying to sell them stuff and get their time. They don’t have that much time. They can’t listen to all these people and figure out if there’s a fit. What they wanted was, “Can I forward all these emails into a system that can inform the vendor on my areas of interest and need? If they’re in the box, they can submit a meeting request. If they’re not, they know and they don’t have to waste their time.” That was part of it.
A lot of these executives are a little older and are at a point in their life where they want to make a difference in the world. They want to give back. They’re sitting on charitable boards. They want to make a difference. They wanted to weave in the ability to support charitable causes and make a difference in the world into the process that we’re building. It took us a long time. We’ve commercially launched just a few months but we have been working on this for years, testing different concepts. We tested an auction concept. We looked at different ways we could implement this and figured out what worked and what didn’t work.
We built it with all the tools the executives needed to meet compliance requirements and everything they wanted as far as the toolsets. When we rolled it out, we got immediate executive adoption because it was everything that they wanted with all the toolsets that they needed. We’ve been onboarding about 100 executives a month. We’re about 900 executives on the platform and that will accelerate. We’re going to see thousands of executives coming on board each month due to the interest level that’s been sparked.
My first big takeaway is when clients build something, they adapt to it quickly. As opposed to, the old way of doing things. An engineering standpoint is the engineers build this, and now marketing has to figure out how to sell it. We haven’t talked to a prospective customer. We don’t have any idea what they want or need or if they’re going to like this, let alone pay for it. You reverse engineered that mindset and that’s why it’s working and growing fast. I’m guessing there were some challenges in terms of the executives still having to answer to a board, even if you’re the CEO. The board is like, “Is this allowed?” It’s the compliance issues. Why is it your charity and not the company’s charity? Something along those lines. Can you get into any of the details of how you navigated that?
At the core of this platform is a means for an executive to offer an hour of their time for an exploratory meeting in return for a meaningful donation to a worthy cause of some kind. The money doesn’t go to the executive. It doesn’t accrue. It didn’t come to them. It’s not taxable to them. The vendor is paying the charity. We came up with a whole list of compliance capabilities and compliance guidance that we would give the executives as they came onto the platform. Things such as you’re not to use this platform for vendors involved in an active RFP. You wouldn’t use this platform for a meeting with a company that you’re already doing business with.
The Influence Board: At the core of The Influence Board’s platform is a means for an executive to offer an hour of their time for an exploratory meeting in return for a meaningful donation to a worthy cause of some kind.
We gave them tools. When they accept the meeting requests, they have the option of checking a box and waiving the donation if they want. If they feel there’s any conflict of interest, they could waive the donation. They can still take the meeting but there’s no donation involved. We recommend they commit 1 or 2 hours a month to this. It’s not a regular process. It’s 1 or 2 hours a month that they’re doing this. If they want, they can take their lunch hour to have the meeting so it’s not on company time.
You got that flexibility. You’ve thought this through.
I’ve been surprised. We got through compliance at Western Union and got greenlighted for their executives, a financial institution with a lot of controls around it. We’ve gotten a greenlight from compliance departments of municipalities, government organizations. We feel we’re on solid ground relative to giving the executives the tools they need to ensure they use the platform properly.
Now that you have some momentum, you’re in my sweet spot, which is turning these case studies into case stories. Also, being able to either post the case stories in written form or maybe even a video where someone’s saying, “I’m glad I took this meeting from the Influence Board. Now I have found a solution to a problem I couldn’t find without having to spend hours and hours of weeding through pitches and things.”
We’ve gotten some good stories from executives and vendors alike. I heard from a vendor that said that they landed a meeting with an executive they had been trying to reach for well over a year unsuccessfully. They were extremely happy. We’re seeing about a 20% to 33% median acceptance rate on the platform. If you submit ten meeting requests, you get 2 or 3 meetings. For this caliber of the executive to make ten cold calls once and get 2 to 3 meetings is unheard of. It’s delivering on the promise.
The other sweet spot for the Successful Pitch theme is on your platform, people have an opportunity to write into the reason for the meeting and upload some information for backup. The ability to pitch yourself and prove to the executive why your bid should be the one they pick, given everything is the same and that everyone’s giving the same amount of money to their charity of choice. To increase your odds, if you’re already getting 10% to 33% yeses, wouldn’t it be great if you knew how to be in that 30% or even make half your requests more irresistible? I thought it would be fascinating for us to brainstorm a little bit for anyone reading because it works for everything, but certainly for people on the Influence Board. What have you seen works and what hasn’t worked?
We standardized the format for submitting a meeting request on our platform. That was intentional. It came from the executives. We asked them, “What do you want the meeting requests to look like?” It came down to three things. Each one of the meeting requests has three parts. You get to make a 300-word bold claim. Tell me exactly how you’re going to solve my problem. Give me the metrics. What percentage improvement can I see? You don’t have to substantiate the numbers. Make the claims. Make a bold claim so that I know where you’re headed as far as solving my problems.
Part two is a video. What they want is a video of you talking to them. They get a sense of who you are as a person. People do business with people they know and like. This is an opportunity to make a human connection. The third part is the boring part, which is you can attach three documents that support the claims you made in your bold claim. Where we’ve seen the creativity is on the video. There was one person who shaved his COVID beard on the video saying, “This meeting is important to me. I’m cleaning up, finally.”
“I’m putting on long pants instead of shorts for this even though you’ll not see it on Zoom.”
There was another guy who knew that the executive played the guitar and was in a little band. He played the guitar on his video and he gave his pitch to music. We’ve seen some interesting creativity. We try and give guidance on best practices. John, you’re the expert at this. If any of your clients are doing it, I’m sure their bold claims are going to be fantastic.
Let’s talk about the two examples. Many of us have seen the Dollar Shave Club commercials. It’s a great use of humor. Humor works when it’s self-deprecating. Not humor at anybody else’s expense. It’s not about telling jokes. Be playful and get people a sense of who you are as a person by willing to be a little self-deprecating. One of my favorite quotes is from Arthur Ashe, the former tennis pro, “The key to success is confidence. The key to confidence is preparation.” The fact that somebody took the time to go find out what that person’s personal interests were and then customize the video through that music language is the extra effort that makes people stand out. Those techniques and then also the basics like have a good lighting and a good mic. Don’t film yourself on a video phone that isn’t professionally done because you still need to come across as professional. That’s the challenge of like, “I don’t need to spend a lot of money on it, but I need to spend some effort on it.” It’s this ability to speak in sound bites. One of my sound bites is when you target people’s heartstrings, they open their purse strings.
[bctt tweet=”Quite frankly, everybody hates cold calling.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One of the things that I would advise everyone who is creating a video for the Influence Board would be, do some research on the charity. Speak to how that charity resonates with you personally in your video, over and above the bold claim you’re making of why you should have the meeting. Those details are what’s going to make somebody trust and like you more and remember you more. Remember, you only have a few minutes. Some of them are probably not going to watch the whole video. You must have a strong opening. I know you and I are brainstorming on creating some basic, three mistakes to avoid. It’ll work for everybody, especially when the stakes are high. Do you ever get the objection from a vendor saying, “We don’t have budgeted money to donate to a client’s charity?” I’m guessing you’re saying, “You probably have a budget for travel and expenses that’s not being used at the moment.”
It’s interesting where people have found the money to do this, from a number of places. Their T and E budget has dropped dramatically. Instead of a $400 plane ticket, you can donate $400 to charity and get that meeting that you need to get. The other thing is a lot of them have stranded event sponsorship dollars because the events didn’t happen. They had budgeted for sponsorship and they see this as better use of funds. They were going to sponsor an event hoping that they would run into the right person at the event, and hoping they would have a conversation and it might turn into a meeting. For the same money, they could guarantee themselves a certain number of meetings on our platform.
At least your target is everything.
On our platform, you pay nothing unless someone says yes to the meeting. You’re only spending the money when you get the outcome that you want.
You’re making a donation to someone’s charity and you’re selling something of fairly high cost, the ROI is huge. Also, I want to take people behind the curtain a little bit of what I did there and what I want to encourage people to do on their videos when they’re creating them for the Influence Board. Anticipate an objection before the person voices it and answer it in your video. I haven’t been in Corporate America like you. We know the objections are we don’t have this budgeted. If you address that in your video, that’s not going to be the objection.
I gave an example of how you get clients. If you think someone has an objection like, “We’re happy with our vendor. You’re more expensive than what we’re spending now.” Address that in the video before you get to the meeting. It’ll make people think, “He’s in my head. He’s already anticipating what my concerns might be.” If you can address those concerns in the video, then they’ll think, “Maybe there is a reason to talk to you.”
That’s a great point.
Any last thoughts or advice you have for people who are struggling to get into the virtual room these days? How can the Influence Board help them?
We try to make it as easy as possible. It’s free to join the Influence Board and takes 30 seconds to create a profile. Once it’s created, you can download our entire database of executives into Excel. You can sort, slice, dice and figure out if there are some good targets for you in there. You could submit your meeting requests. It doesn’t cost anything to submit them. You only donate to charity when you win the meetings you want with the executives that are high priority for you. It’s a seamless process.
It’s fantastic. I’m sure you have wonderful case stories for both the vendors and the executives who are happy that they’re doing it.
We have some superuser executives that love the platform. It’s been fun to see them see this new way to manage the vendor cold calling dilemma. It’s turned into something that they hated. Quite frankly, everybody hates cold calling. The vendor hates making the cold calls. The executive hates getting them. This has turned the whole process into something fun and interesting and has renewed enthusiasm among the executives. When they get a meeting request, “Is the video going to be cool and inspiring?” It creates some intrigue and excitement that hasn’t been there in a while.
The Influence Board: People do business with people they know and like. This is an opportunity to make a human connection.
People like to be entertained, as well as informed and inspired. When we can encourage people to put their empathy hat on to what it’s like to be that executive, getting constant requests. The more you can put yourself in their shoes and think, “What a win this could be for them.” If I have something that can help make their job easier and better and they’re getting something for the charity, they’re going to be happy they took this meeting. If you can convey that emotion in your video, that’s what’s going to make people intrigued enough to want to hear more.
That’s great.
Thanks so much for joining us, Jay. If people want to find you and the Influence Board, where should they go?
InfluenceBoard.com and my info is there as well.
We’re going to look forward to continuing to watch this soar and scale much like you’re helping your clients who are on the Influence Board.
Thank you, John. It’s great to be here.
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