Sales Sidekick With Dan T. Rogers

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

Everyone wants to be a superhero, but if you’re prepared, being a sidekick can be just as rewarding. Sales Sidekick is the brainchild of this episode’s guest, CEO Dan T. Rogers. As he says on their company website, “Your customer wants to be a superhero. You become their sidekick.” Together with host John Livesay, Dan explores what he calls “The Sidekick Mentality” We get a look at what experiences Dan drew on when he built his company. We also get their insights on sales and why Dan calls it a transfer of enthusiasm.

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Listen to the podcast here

Sales Sidekick With Dan T. Rogers

Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Dan Rogers, who’s the Founder of Sales Sidekick and also the CEO and Founder of Point to Point Transportation. Dan talks about that every superhero needs a sidekick and that sales is an energy transfer with an informed worldview. He also has a phrase about mistakes at full speed. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Dan T. Rogers, who’s achieved monumental success by helping others realize their dreams. “The best way to get ahead is to help others get where they want to go,” he says. He’s been on the Inc. 5000 list for seven years as the CEO of a Seattle-based company, Point to Point Transportation. “It’s easier and more fulfilling to help someone with their plan than to convince them to be part of mine,” he said. The mindset and mission are part of Dan’s company, Sales Sidekick, which captures his decades of sales and entrepreneurial experience and translates it into actionable steps for leaders to take and grow their own business. Dan, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I love this wonderful sidekick mentality that most people think, “Sales is all about me.” Before we get into that, take us back to this concept of, what’s your own story of origin? Were you always artistic as a child? You can start the story anywhere you want.

I come from modest means, so 5’7″ guide built to barrel-load. I’ve worked through high school and I did primarily manual labor jobs and settled in as a furniture mover. Quite frankly, the mentality started where we would help people get to where they wanted to go. Based on my frame and everything, I was good at transporting things. I don’t know how long that would have lasted, but it lasted for a little bit. I was wired. First, it was just household moving, moving people across town.

I worked for a fairly successful moving company and Seattle was exploding at the time. This is in the late and early ‘90s. We started doing big office moves. I was part of the crew that moved Microsoft into their first building on campus. This is where the physical became abstract. On a regular basis, we would move folks in and double them up in offices, and then come back a couple of weeks later and then move them. We saw this churn of new furniture, desks, and boxes. I’m going to approximate but it’s close to this. We move them off of what was their building negative zero into Microsoft building one that’s still on their campus now. That building was roughly twice the size of what we moved them out of.

Buildings 1 and 2 were both that same size. Buildings 3 through 6 were both twice as big as 1 and 2. Buildings 5 through 8 were twice the size of the previous. I saw that doubling of building, people, desks, and boxes firsthand for about eighteen straight months. It was a thing to watch. That crossover of seeing how we physically transport somebody. It’s been incredibly profitable for the greater Seattle area to be a sidekick to companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Costco, and Starbucks. I’ve been a benefit of proximity. A huge part of my success story is I didn’t move out of Seattle.

Those are all choices we make. I moved to Austin from LA. Where we live has a big influence in who we meet. I often thought when I was in college, “What if I picked a different school?” I would not be having any of these experiences. You’re being a little humble because there’s a lot of people that live in Seattle that weren’t able to capitalize on Microsoft and Amazon. Even a moving company has to pitch themselves.

[bctt tweet=”Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm. Don’t push people, pull them in.” username=”John_Livesay”]

One thing that I was fortunate and I haven’t thought about this a long time, but I was a mediocre football player in high school. Another mediocre football player I played in high school with, we went to high school together. When I was moving furniture out at Microsoft, he was working for Microsoft facilities. These are the actual numbers. I thought I had one over on him because I was making $7.50 an hour and he was making $7. I’m not going to mention his name. As of a couple of years ago, he was still there and his stock options added up a little faster than my $7.50 an hour.

What I saw in that was exponential growth a couple of years later when I was trying to graduate college and I ended up taking a part-time job to accommodate my school schedule at a small little burrito chain. We have three stores and it started with eleven employees. One of the owners took me under his wing and sold me the vision. He’s like, “We want to be Subway with burritos.” I was like, “I’ve worked at Subway before and I can help you recreate that.” I dropped out of college and never did get the degree to roll burritos.

In the next 2.5 years or so, I ended up opening at least four dozen restaurants. I wrote an operations franchise manual, helped them set up a central commissary and figured out how we delivered all the food. That was a firsthand experience of demystifying what business was. These guys were hardworking and they’re honorable about it. They were willing to do anything to be successful. That demystified because what I saw at Microsoft was magical stuff. I didn’t understand what computers are and what Bill Gates was doing.

The three owners were generous and gracious enough to let me in. I got to participate in all the conversations and see that we made decisions with incomplete information or we made decisions that we weren’t sure of, but we had to decide which way to go. In those 2.5 years, I got to see what it was like to run a business. I was done at that point and I was like, “I have to do this at some point in my life.” That was what solidified it for me. As good fate or fortune would have it, by the grace of the universe, they didn’t offer me any equity. The moving company that I used to work for offered me a job in sales. The unlimited conditions were certainly alluring, but the idea that I could go run my own thing and I understood how shipping worked and all that. We moved off of burrito rolling onto sales and specialized shipping. That’s where it all got started.

I love that you say on your LinkedIn profile that your definition of sales is a transfer of enthusiasm. I was up for a speaking engagement against two other speakers and they interview us. We give a pitch and present what our thing is. My agent emailed me and said, “Congrats. They picked you. They liked your energy.” I thought, “What a great reminder that’s what we’re selling.” Not our content, book, course, or whatever. It’s our energy. Money is energy and people respond to that. Later, I was working with him and he said, “You made me feel good. I figured if you could make me feel good on a Zoom call, you’d certainly make 300 or 400 people feel good as well.” They want to learn something and have an ROI, but it all starts with that, doesn’t it?

Absolutely. This is all in the rearview mirror. I have some restraints I try to live by and one of them is mistakes at full speed. I’m talking as if I figured it out in the ‘90s. It’s more looking back and it is systematizing and eventually, we got there. As I settled into sales, what I realized was I was good or bad, right or wrong. I was an expert in this narrow, but deep pool and that was my deep water. If I approached it in an act of service, I could help them uncover for themselves what they were looking for and do that with some enthusiasm. Enthusiasm looks different with different types of people. You want to hit them where they are or whatever.

I was having the same conversation over and over again. I don’t put it on LinkedIn because it’s a little too much information without all the context, but my full definition of sales is it’s the transfer of enthusiasm around an informed worldview. If we think of our product or service or expertise as one thin slice of worldview, what I’m hoping salespeople would do in a selling situation is like, “Are you aware of what your worldview is in this space? Does it serve you? Are you happy with it? Does all this other stuff align to that worldview?” If it does, that’ll lead to happiness and effectiveness. It may or may not turn out that what we do fits into what you what you’re trying to build here, but that’s what it was. One of my other restraints is if you’re bored, you’re boring. Life is 100% optional. It’s like, “If we’re going to do this and it’s not a good time, it’s probably on me more than them.” That’s a little bit of the transfer of enthusiasm as I see it.

Sales Sidekick: What Sales Sidekick tries to do is to hold businesses to a higher standard and say, “Look, you’ve got it almost right.”

That’ll make a great tweet, “Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm with an informed worldview.” You’ve touched on something briefly, so I want to go back because I love this concept. You’ve come up with eight restraints and one of them is mistakes at full speed. I can guess what that means. I’m not being afraid of making a mistake, but I’d love to know how did you come up with the concept of it being restraints?

There’s a sidekick framework that we have. We’re somewhat in the middle of it, which is fine. A restraint is a self-imposed constraint. The way that I would define a constraint for the purpose of this context is a constraint is imposed upon us by the universe or by forces beyond our control. A restraint is my leaning in, learning about it, processing it with some knowledge, getting some understanding, and then based on that understanding, and imposing my restraints.

Good or bad, right or wrong, I have this brain that functions considerably better with guardrails. I talked about it as if I figured it all out. This is all in the rearview mirror. Folks that I worked with or that we worked together in the early 2000s are like, “Dan used to call these Dan’s rules and there were five of them and now he’s calling them restraints and there’s eight of them.” I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s my habit to be effective. I’m not proposing that other people take mine unless they work for them, but they’ve definitely served me well.

For example, I’m talking to a nutritionist and they said, “The kitchen is closed at 8:00 in your house.” You’ll not eat after 8:00. That’s an example of a restraint that you put on yourself.

You got some information and you found out that too many calories are a bad thing, so it’s like, “I’ll self-impose.” That’s a perfect example. To give you a little bit of how my brain works, restraint number eight is you can always add one. How I try to filter that is first, the recognition of good or bad, right or wrong, you can always add one. The boss is super generous. You can think of the largest number you can think of. You can add one and do it again. You can do that forever.

Let’s be careful and intentional about adding one. Are we past diminishing returns? Are we doing this because we’re avoiding doing something else or does adding one make sense? Mistakes at full speed is the bonus restraint. “See restraint eight,” you can always add one. Mistakes at full speed don’t go as fast as you can because that’s irresponsible or maybe even potentially harmful. It’s the idea that going slower will not prevent mistakes that will slow down learning.

That is so powerful. I want everyone reading to imagine that you’re climbing Mount Everest or going on a hike that you’ve never been on before. You think to yourself, “I got to step gingerly every little step because I don’t want to make a mistake and step in dog poo,” or whatever it is. Yet, no matter how slow you go, you might still fall or whatever. Yet, we don’t want to run rapidly without looking around us, so there’s a happy medium here.

[bctt tweet=”It’s actually way cooler to be a link in the chain than it is the tip of the spear.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I use the word mistakes, but I don’t think I process that word the same way that most people do. To me, it’s just all reference points and I want a strong reference. I don’t enjoy big mistakes. I’m certainly an inelegant learner. My face turns red and there are some f-bombs along the way for sure. The reality is I get uncomfortable if I hit too many home runs in a row. I’m probably playing in the wrong league. I want to get too deep into it because it’s not part of the show, but I come from fairly modest means. At one point, I wasn’t the best personnel in the world. I certainly am not now, but I’ve tried serving myself and it was a miserable existence.

Rolling burritos at $6 an hour was an absolute joy and a huge joy. It was just serving the rest of God’s kids. The abundance that’s been provided in my life when I asked the boss, “Why me? What am I supposed to do with this?” I’ve gotten a consistent answer for over 25 years. The answer is, “You’re right, you don’t deserve it, but you get it anyways. Do me a favor. Go make the most of it that you can, share it with the rest of my family, and show everyone how cool I am.” That’s the answer that I’ve gotten. The answer that I’ve gotten is, “You’re right. I’m the luckiest guy in the room.” You can be as lucky as me, but I’ve never met anyone luckier than me.

That’s a huge part about the sidekick mentality. I tried aligning to the universe, trying to get with me on top and it occasionally worked. I’m not saying that I’m proud of what I achieved when it worked, but it does work. You can’t do it. I don’t like the feeling that it generates inside me, the residue that it leaves in my life, but you can do it. When I focus up on things bigger than me about how I can serve those or how I can align myself or how I can align my team, my company, or whatever into something bigger that serves something bigger, it’s a heck of a lot easier to do and it’s so much more rewarding.

Before I bought the company, I won the sales awards and all that other stuff and got to cruises. It was good for half a second, but some of my greatest accomplishments that I would brag about is when I was part of something that was substantially bigger than what I contributed. I was just one of many that made that happen. It’s way cooler to be a link in the chain than it is the tip of the spear. Being a link in a highly functional chain is as good as it gets as far as I can tell. I’ve yet to meet anybody that’s experienced that doesn’t agree with that. There’s a bunch of people that have never tasted it, but I’ve met people that have tasted it and we all look at it the same way.

I didn’t invent the sidekick mentality. It existed long before I got here, but it served me well to serve others and it doesn’t make any sense. It’s like, “How can this be so good for me aligning to other people?” When you think about it, I can’t think of an example. When I tend to share my opinions and my experience, facts are valuable and scientific research is valuable. This is more of my own common sense and my own practical experience. I cannot think of one single example of an honorable individual who’s achieved any success in any walk of life that first didn’t pour substantial value into the marketplace before they began to take deposits out of the marketplace. You can look at athletes, artists, business people, or whatever. There’s this massive pay in and then you produce such value that people cross the room to work with you.

Knuckleheads look at it and go, “That person got this or this.” It’s like, “No, you missed.” Malcolm Gladwell tells us 10,000 hours or whatever. I don’t know what the math is. I just know that substantial value, you put it in. My point is we all understand that as individuals, but then we design companies and we get a bunch of individuals together and we forget the rule. The rule is you put more in than you take out. That’s how you get wealthy. You spend less than you make. We understand that, but we’re thinking too narrowly. Part of what we’re trying to do with Sales Sidekick is hold businesses to a higher standard and say, “You’ve got it almost right. We just need to expand our vision about what value we can produce.” We’ve totally figured out how much value we can take. We don’t need any more work on that. We need more work on what’s the value that we can produce in the communities that we serve.

You and I are so aligned because I talk about when you tell a story of another client that you worked with, you’re not the hero of the story. Your client is. You and Sales Sidekick talk about it in terms of, you become the sidekick and your client is the superhero. It could be the salesperson is Yoda or the Sherpa. That’s what you’re saying here. Here’s the big thing that I love that you have. Every superhero needs a sidekick. That is something that is unique. I’ve not heard anyone say that before. We all know Batman has Robin and all those kinds of things, but I don’t think that we automatically say to ourselves, “I’m the client and I’m the superhero in the story.” I’m like, “Where’s my sidekick? Is it my team or is it an outside person coming in?” Talk a little bit about that because it’s so near and dear to what I talk about.

Sales Sidekick: The rule is you put more in than you take out. Like that’s how you get wealthy. You spend less than you make.

We’re definitely working on the pitch. Restraint number five is copy off the smartest kid in the class. I reserve the right to learn more on this show than any of the readers or you. You’re the pitch guy, so I’m definitely taking notes on how you read packages for us. One test is like, “If you want to be a superhero, do you have a sidekick? If you don’t, then you’re probably not a superhero.” That’d be the first thing. I’m a spiritual person and that’s not for everybody. I’m totally fine with that. There’s a practicality to what we’re offering up.

If we say forget all the woo-woo non-stuff, whatever abundance, reporting to the boss, and all that crazy stuff that Dan talks about. Let’s just look at business like my MBA and all that. Everybody nowadays wants to be a superhero or a social media influencer. If that’s what everyone wants to do, then you can make a ridiculously handsome living supporting that. They can come and go and you can continue to be a sidekick to that.

In Seattle, in the early ‘90s when I was selling specialized transportation and everyone else was in the dot-coms, they were all about their hot technology, all of which is completely irrelevant later. Eventually, we won’t need truck drivers, but we’re going to need trucks until they figure out teleportation. I was like, “It’s not terribly sexy but it’s got some serious staying power.” I’ve always been looking at the foundational piece. Forget all the woo-woo stuff. There’s good, practical common sense to being in a support or a foundational role and taking that perspective. It’s better business to align up than it is down. It’s magnitudes of scale. You get all that largeness working for you instead of trying to create it for yourself.

One of your other restraints is pull, not push. I talked about that with stories, pull people in. My whole thing is when you tug at heartstrings, people open the purse strings. We buy emotionally and back it up with logic. Most people keep pushing out information. How do you help people reframe that as a sidekick? Give me a story of someone that you saw pushing and you went, “We’re going to start pulling people in now.”

I agree with everything that you said. That aligns completely with what I’m going to say. It might not sound like it initially, but we’ll definitely get there. You mentioned the constraints before these things that are imposed upon us. This is an opinion. Physics would support this, no degrees on the wall, but from my vantage point, the universe is 100% pull. That’s how it works. You don’t have to like it. Somebody asked me one time, “Dan, give me an example of that.” I gave some awful examples.

He then said, “What about gravity?” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s exactly it. Gravity is a straight pull.” Not recognizing that as a fundamental source of how the universe works, it’s a bad idea to go against reality and the universe. It’s not a super good strategy. That’s the first part of it. The second part of it is, I have a level. It’s not that I’m Mr. Humble Guy. My arrogance is so other level that I want people to want what we’re doing. I want them to pull it in. That says we have to have such a compelling offer for such a small fraction of people because you can’t have a compelling offer for a bunch of people. You can have iPhones for a few years, but no one lines up for iPhones anymore. Sooner or later, you have to serve a small sliver and work for them, so they want what you have.

We eat our own dog food at Sales Sidekick. We’ve got a couple of folks that we’d love to work with. We’ve made a proposal and we don’t follow up. We’ll follow up after we agree to work together, then we’re working together in a relationship, but we leave every conversation at Sales Sidekick, “The ball’s in your court.” I hope this translates. I’ve mentioned it a bunch of times, so it’s okay to put it out there. I’ve talked to people and I said, “I want to be helpful. I reserve the right to learn more in this conversation than you. I frequently do. If you want me or our team to think about you in between the phone calls, you have to pay us. If not, you can schedule time with us, and we’ll try to be helpful. We could be a lot more helpful if we track on it.” Not frequently track on it, but that’s what it is. It’s 100% pulled.

[bctt tweet=”It’s not about us. It’s about them.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I’ve had people ask me, “Why aren’t you worried about people fill up your calendar?” I’m like, “If that’s what somebody wants to do, God bless them.” That’ll take care of itself. That’s how the pull works for me. I’m not suggesting that you do that stuff, John. I’m still a student of yours, but the stuff that I’ve digested so far, we’re in complete alignment here. Traditional sales is backwards. It’s a lazy premise followed up with some lazy habits, and then the only way to make that work is to push hard. Whereas if we hold ourselves to a little bit more disciplined premise with similar disciplined habits, then we can have people crossing the road to do work with us.

It’s hard to do. You got to first get your business to be viable. You got to get your offer to be viable and all that, and you don’t want to minimize that, but after you get to viability, then you’re silly not to make a 100% pull. I learned this one the hard way. Early in sales, I had way more success than I was supposed to because I accidentally closed people that didn’t want what we had. I had such enthusiasm for what we’re doing and I had such credibility because I knew how to move the stuff that we’re doing so they would buy from us, but they didn’t want what we had. We then had to keep reselling them.

I got to a place, and I won’t use her name, but we had a team of incredible customer service people. One of them, it was like, if this person’s going to upset her, they’re not our customer. She was not difficult, but she was such an embodiment of what we were doing. It’s like, if you don’t jive with her, you don’t jive with us. I then started looking, “Is there a good fit with what we’re doing?” That’s where it got a little bit more nuanced. You’re serving them too. It’s harder.

I have a friend who has a successful business. It’s been around, it’s multigenerational, and he’s the CEO. In order for him to do an estimate for what they offer to the marketplace, he has to have a conversation with the other CEO of the other company. I thought I was wacko. I was like, “Holy smokes.” He’s like, “I want to make sure that our leadership is in alignment because they’re going to enter into my system.” I was like, “Wow.” At first, I thought he was crazy, and now, like everything else, I think he’s brilliant.

It’s a difference between auditioning to get someone to hire you versus them auditioning to work with you, is what are you saying?

Yeah, I’m a happy client. A strategic coach, Dan Sullivan, has got a concept of ABC, always be the buyer. I’ve learned plenty, and he’s got a bunch of great thinking models. There’s some of the stuff that I accidentally or just did prior to becoming a strategic coach client. One of those, before I bought the company, when I was actively selling, I can say unequivocally for the years that I was active, I was far more qualifying them than they were qualifying me. There’s no doubt in my mind that I had gotten to a place that I’m so systematic in how I approach stuff that it was completely me evaluating them.

Which is the opposite of the old way of selling, which is to throw enough stuff up against the wall like spaghetti and see what sticks, that causes a lot of frenetic behavior, and the emphasis is on the quantity of calls instead of the quality and all of that stuff that nobody likes. If you’re being pushed so hard internally, then, of course, that causes the behavior to push potential buyers. The Sales Sidekick is desperately needed. Congratulations on launching it. I can’t wait to be cheering you on and being, hopefully, a part of it and letting people understand these new framework/restraints that are going to make a huge difference not only in the culture but also in their outcome. If people want to find you, there’s a wonderful website. Why don’t you share that with us?

Sales Sidekick: Everybody nowadays wants to be a superhero or a social media influencer. Well, if that’s what everyone wants to do, then you can make a ridiculously handsome living just supporting that.

What we’re doing for simplicity’s sake is everything starts at my LinkedIn profile. If you go to Dan T. Rogers on LinkedIn, that’s a great starting point. There is the website on SalesSidekick.com. You can see some stuff there. We’re also proud of P2Ptransportation.com, Point to Point. As the entire corporate event industry has been impacted by a Coronavirus, we’re fortunate that it’s still a viable entity. That’ll give you a little bit of an idea of what this looks like in real life. Sales Sidekick’s website is a little light purposely, but if you want to see what it looks and feels like and how we did it in reality, P2Ptransportation.com gives you an idea.

One of the greatest compliments that we would get, what we do there is we support corporate events. We were sitting on all these planning meetings and people with ridiculously expensive glasses and incredible haircuts say, “I’m going to deliver a marketing experience.” I’m thinking, “No, we’re going to deliver,” but whatever. Occasionally, when we would get put together, they would look at our website and they would say, “I want to be sure. You are a shipping company, right?” I’m like, “Yeah, we are.” They’re like, “Your website doesn’t look like any other shipping company.” You look at ours, we look like a creative agency website because that’s who our customers are. It’s not about us, it’s about them.

You’re speaking your language. You’ve got superheroes. You’ve got gorgeous graphic colors. You’re pushing the features. You’re selling the emotion of it. I love it.

It’s like, “Do people want to see pictures of warehouses and trucks? Will that make you feel better? We can take some pictures of the warehouse if you want.” As two sales guys, we got to do a couple of sales things. This is where people don’t think it all the way through. I don’t think I’m going to share anything new here. I don’t know who originally said it. Sales 101, people buy benefits, they don’t buy features. They don’t buy drills, they buy holes in the wall. We all understand that. We all agreed to it, but then we violate it everywhere we go. I’m preaching to the choir here. Your whole approach about telling the story and all that, they’re such honor. You’re telling the story to try to connect with the customer in a way that makes sense to this customer, that’s going to bring value to the customer. I enjoyed the conversation, but I don’t think I’m telling you anything that you haven’t already put in play here.

I do love this concept that every superhero needs a sidekick. That’s new. It’s new in bringing it to the awareness. When you think about that, you go, “Yes, of course,” but I haven’t heard it enunciated or framed that way. I love watching that. As a kid, you just take. This is the world you’re in. You don’t analyze that Batman needed Robin. You assumed they figured it out but the keyword there is need, not, “It would be nice to have. He could do it on his own if he needed to, but he’s lonely,” or whatever. It’s way more than that.

In the spirit of being a sidekick, I would also throw out there that sidekicks and superheroes have a lot in common. One thing that they have in common is they both need to story.

Everyone has his own story of origins.

It’s been a lot of fun.

Dan, thanks for sharing your wisdom and your insights on how we can start reframing our perception of ourselves as Sales Sidekicks instead of pushy salespeople.

Important Links

• Sales Sidekick
• Point to Point Transportation
• Dan T. Rogers – LinkedIn
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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