The Selling Well With Mark Cox
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Sales is a critical part of any business. So, how do you ensure your sales team is supported so they can perform at their best? Here to share his insight is Mark Cox, the Chief Revenue Officer of In the Funnel Sales Coaching and podcast host of The Selling Well. Joining John Livesay, Mark highlights the impact of mindset on performance by looking into how the sales process is about working together with your team and a relentless focus on the client’s needs. Stay tuned as he shares advice for sales leaders on bringing important strategies to propel your team and your business forward.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Selling Well With Mark Cox
Our guest is Mark Cox who’s the Founder of In The Funnel, which is all about helping sales teams become more productive. He said, “Don’t try to describe a color no one has ever seen before when you are painting a picture, and no one ever goes to a sales call and says, ‘Did I over prepare for that?’” Instead, he said, “You must have a relentless focus on what the client needs.” Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Mark Cox, who has sold, structured, and negotiated some of the largest single-family transactions in North America, including a $1 billion transaction with the top US bank. After several years working for large corporations, he founded In The Funnel, ITF, sales coaching with the mission to dramatically improve the performance of business-to-business sales teams.
With a focus on strategy, process, tools, and discipline, he has helped hundreds of companies achieve predictable double-digit sales growth by implementing the ITF proprietary sales playbook. He’s been named one of the leading sales consultants of 2022 by Selling Power Magazine. He’s also been appointed to partner with the Canadian Professional Sales Association with all of his training content being officially accredited. While he’s not coaching clients to sell better, he can also be found goaltending in the local hockey rink, playing drums, or doing fitness training. When he’s not doing all of that, he hosts his own podcast. It’s called The Selling Well. Welcome to the show, Mr. Cox.
First of all, thank you so much for inviting me here. I have never been as excited about my past as much as when you described it. It sounds so much more exciting when it comes from you.
We try to bring a little passion and energy to everything we described, edify our guests, make them feel welcome, and let the audience know how much of a treat they are in for, which is certainly the case with you. Before you start playing hockey and winning all kinds of sales awards, can you tell us a little bit about how you got into sales in the first place?
This is our second conversation and I was so looking forward to it. I will be honest. I fell into sales. During college and university, I got the opportunity to run a small business, these student franchise companies for painting, and so forth. Way back in the day, years ago, I had that opportunity, maybe even more. It changed my life. It made me realize that my heart that I’m probably an entrepreneur and I loved every aspect of it. It was crazy hard. It was my first introduction to sales.
Even back then, this organization at the time was called AAA Student Painters, and now it’s called the Student Works. They were so good at teaching and coaching on sales, making sure the whole conversation was about the client and their better future after having worked with you. Looking back, I’m amazed at how good that sales training was.
I partied my way through university for a few years, and when I graduated and was looking for a job after starting that company in a couple of different areas in North America, I went full-time into this student franchising. I ended up deciding I had to get back into the corporate world, and the one skill that was easy to translate was sales. I have been an entrepreneur.
When you are applying for a job or talking to somebody in HR about running a business, they have no idea what you are talking about. You are describing a color they have never seen. When you are talking about your capabilities in sales, they could sense that. I started selling photocopiers as my entrance into the corporate world into professional selling with a great company Kodak in the early-90s.
What a phenomenon that company was. Who would have ever predicted they would get out of business? It’s like Google going out of business. That had been around for so long and did so many things right. Also, Xerox had great sales training, I imagine.
They did. They are a good example on the business side. They never wanted to cannibalize their cash cow. When you study them as a business case now, they had traditional film, insanely profitable, and digital film was coming on the table. They invented it, but they’d never invest enough in it because they are always worried about cannibalizing the cash cow.
[bctt tweet=”Have a relentless focus on the clients’ needs.” username=”John_Livesay”]
While they waited to decide what to do, other companies cannibalized their cash cow. Agfa, Sony, and all these guys got into it, but we got hired and we went down to Rochester, New York, and the sales training program was 90 days. Put up in a beautiful townhouse, and we went to a marketing education center, which was a sales university. Each week you had some tests, demos, and recorded sales calls that were being graded. You were rated against the other 80 people in the program every week. Every week, they tapped a couple of people on the shoulder, and unfortunately, they had to go home.
Hearing that is so valuable for people who are in sales to realize that it is a profession like being a lawyer, doctor, professional athlete, or actor that there’s a structure to it, and there are people who don’t always graduate, especially in law school. Also, it helps your mindset go, “My confidence is going to be so much stronger because I’m not just learning product detail. I’m role-playing. I remember when I went through sales training, we were timed.” How long did it take you to give the person your business card in case they forgot your name?
It’s little subtle details like that of trying to anticipate somebody being embarrassed to have you repeat your name again, and you hand the business card back when people did that in a way that the person didn’t have to read it upside down. Taking in a lot of details, especially in my case, I was selling multimillion-dollar mainframe computers and there were so many different decision makers, the financial people, software people, and analyzing.
What I admire about your work is the structure and making sure people don’t forget a step. It’s ironic because if you are baking a cake and you leave out a major ingredient or have it at the wrong temperature, that doesn’t turn out. The same thing is true in sales. I would love you to speak to that. How important is it to have a process and then follow it?
Which mainframe company were you with? Which computer company were you with?
A company called Amdahl that was owned by Fujitsu.
I remember Amdahl. That was a great time to be selling those mainframes. Those were early days for large computing technology. It’s competitive, but those were great days indeed. You described a complex sale. Those were the earliest days of the complex sale with multiple people influencing the decision to move forward.
One of the important things now is that there are steps in any process. Edwards Deming has that comment. I will get the quote wrong but, “It’s not enough to work hard. You have to know what to do and then work hard.” There is this way that you try and engage somebody and build trust and credibility, and then earn the right to proceed with a discussion or conversation about them and their business.
Sales: It’s not enough to work hard. You actually have to know what to do and then work hard.
You can collaborate to figure out how you can help them get to a better future. Whatever that means for their company, and for that particular individual in the company because everybody has these personal and emotional things. They have these things they are trying to accomplish for their client. Whatever role you play in professional sales, whether you are that sales leader, that process is a lot about working with your team and ensuring that, the Liz Wiseman, you are multiplying their capabilities instead of diminishing them when you are trying to coach them and develop them that you are coaching them.
From the salesperson’s perspective, there’s this constant and relentless focus on, “How do I help the other side of the table run a better business?” If they believe your intent is always to help them and that you’ve got some skills, experience, capabilities, and resources to help them do that, I don’t think they go quiet on you. With sales development, the more junior roles in professional sales, but hard now, I do think the checklist and the coaching are so important for them because those poor folks get hired on, get completely lost and overwhelmed, and turn at a shocking rate.
You have a statistic that about 1/3 of salespeople are churned every year. The Great Resignation, the lack of training, overwhelm, and all of those cost companies so much money, doesn’t it?
It sure does. It’s shocking. It’s the bigger cost. You were gracious enough to ask me about my start in professional sales. When I started selling back in the day and I’m selling photocopiers, it was a pretty big deal to get my first corporate job. For my generation, that first start was important and everybody knows you are in that job, and you’ve told your parents or a peer group.
I couldn’t believe how badly I felt for these people at Kodak who got tapped on the shoulder because it didn’t work out. There were tears. This was a major thing and the embarrassment and the impact on self-esteem for young people. That’s where I think about it a lot with the sales teams that we are coaching and developing. We have this responsibility to enable their success.
They have to put the work in. Don’t get me wrong and it’s 51% then, but there are too many environments that have this sink or swim and we’ll hire 30 and hope 15 works out. I don’t like the impact on somebody’s self-esteem or their future when they have got a mishit with the first job they get out of college or university.
When you talk about self-esteem, one of my big purposes and mission now is to help as many people, but specifically, salespeople get off that self-esteem rollercoaster because you get so attached to your results, determining whether you feel like you are a worthy person, let alone worthy salesperson. You are up and down all day long, vetting when you make a sale or not. Many salespeople only focus on the noes and not the yeses. They don’t celebrate the yeses. They move on. Maybe they had a boss that said, “You are only as good as your last sale.” What advice do you give people to make sure they don’t get on that self-esteem rollercoaster?
I’m a big believer in focusing on the positive. I’m no different. Nobody can see us now but I got a little journal beside me here. I do, particularly on a Sunday, sit down and jot down a few of the great things that happen during the week because you and I are entrepreneurs, and the professional salespeople out there are entrepreneurs as well. So much happens in a given week, and you are always on to the next thing. We rarely take a pause and go, “Let’s jot down or write down in a journal all the amazing things that happened this week.” That’s a big one. I like to do that. I find it changes my mindset setting. It gives me energy and enthusiasm for the week.
[bctt tweet=”What is your intent when you meet. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The second thing is in sales we have got a tough job. We do things and we are trying to help people. At the end of the day, we introduce people to something they’d never thought of before, that can help their business in a way maybe they have never even considered before, and we invite them to spend money that they hadn’t budgeted to spend oftentimes. It’s a pretty tough thing to do.
I’d rather focus on the activities that I can control. If I try and do the right things, the outcomes will come. We have been through this for a long time. We have done things and great things have happened for us that maybe we didn’t deserve it. It just came our way. There were a lot of other times when we put enormous amounts of work, heartache, stress, and commitment into something and it didn’t go our way. I do find that everything reverts to the mean in terms of a large enough sample size. Over the course of a career, it’ll even out.
That’s great advice, especially for somebody starting out. I remember when I was interviewing for a job selling digital ads and I had never done digital, only print. I was giving it my all. I learned how to put a PowerPoint presentation together because I used to have an assistant that did that. I did all this research, mock-up, and preparation for this interview.
A friend of mine said, “You are certainly putting in a lot of effort for one interview. What if you don’t get it? Aren’t you going to feel bad?” I said, “I’d feel bad if I didn’t give it my all,” but a lot of people say, “I’m going to give a 50% effort. If I don’t get it, I will not feel bad.” What do you think about that mindset?
It’s so obvious what the right answer is. Have you ever left a sales call or left a client meeting and said, “I over-prepared for that, what a mistake?” I will be honest with everybody. Even at this stage with what I do, I remember a couple of years back, we had a great sales development team and someone said, “We have got this company and they want to talk to you and all of this.” I had a quick chat with the CEO and whether he was distracted, doing three things at the same time, or something didn’t go very well, and he said, “Come and see me.”
I had very little hope for this and the only way I agreed to see him was I was thinking to myself, “He’s in the same building as my gym. I will go in and go see him, and then right after that, I will do my workout and go home.” I remember showing up for that meeting. This was a few years ago. I hadn’t had time for the proper prep.
When I walked into his boardroom, he had our website up online. He’d been watching our digital video testimonials. He’d been contemplating getting us in for sales consulting. I knew the prep he did for the meeting immediately as I walked in. He was more prepared for that meeting than I was and the confidence came right out of my feet. You know that feeling. This was a few years ago, so I should have known better by this point in time.
I probably came out of an event where I was coaching people on now doing the same thing. I always liked that idea, whether it was playing a game of hockey or working out. I like to develop that DNA that says, “I will give it 100%. I’m going to do my best.” Sometimes things are going to go well, and sometimes they are not going to go well, but I will try and coach myself on the mindset that says, “If it doesn’t go well but I did my best, I’m going to sleep like a baby.”
Sales: Have you ever left a sales call or left a client meeting and said, “Boy, I over-prepared for that. What a mistake!”?
A skill is like a muscle. You get stronger and stronger at those presentation skills and interview skills and nobody bats 1,000 for every goal. That big picture zooming out is key. Since you are a Canadian and you play hockey, is it the Wayne Gretzky quote that says, “You anticipate where the puck is going?”
Thank you for making me comfortable by using a Wayne Gretzky quote. That’s the only language we speak as you well know. He said he’s not looking where the puck went. He’s looking at where the puck’s going. The other quote he’s well known for is, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” He was well-known that be shooting from behind the net and somehow would go in.
There’s a lot of positive there. One other note since you brought up our cultural hero, one of the things that he always said he learned when he was playing with a team called the Oilers and they were trying to win their first Stanley Cup. They were going against the team that had been on a roll, winning Stanley Cups, which was the New York Islanders in the US.
They, once again, lost to the Islanders in the final, and they were disappointed. As the Oilers left their dressing room, they had to walk by the Islander’s dressing room. They couldn’t believe what they saw. They saw the Islanders team walking around on crutches. Many of them had limbs in casts. What they realized was they were all warriors playing wounded, giving an enormous amount of commitment, and that woke up the Oilers. They didn’t walk away saying, “We are so talented. We’ll beat them next year.”
They started the next season saying, “We have learned something here about what commitment it takes to win.” They showed us. Thank you, Islanders. In the following year, they beat the Islanders in the final, and the commitment, and all those kinds of good things. I bring it up. When we were talking about self-esteem, sometimes when we have a failure in life, we see it as this scarlet letter.
I have had those failure failures as much as anybody else. When I was in my twenties, I started a business. It failed. It wasn’t like now. Now any startup that fails, it’s like a badge of honor. Back then, it was just a failure. That ever sit with me for a long time. It was because I had a bit of a mindset issue where instead of seeing it as an opportunity to learn, I used it as a judgment against myself and that stung. There’s this real opportunity for all of us to think about that, particularly in sales. If something goes bad, what can I learn from it to apply for the next time?
We talked about two companies we worked for before. In your case, it’s Kodak. In my case, it’s Amdahl. They are no longer here. What if those companies or us as entrepreneurs that are reading, start taking that Wayne Gretzky quote to heart and go, “Where’s the market going? Are print sales dying down? Maybe I need to learn digital. Are we ever going to be able to replace the number of digital sales with print sales? I don’t see a way path for that. What else can we do?”
That anticipation of what clients are needing before it becomes so obvious that the competition’s figured it out and you don’t have a product or whatever it is that’s causing you not to win is valuable. Doctors have meetings after they lose a patient to try and figure out what went wrong, learn from that every time, no finger-pointing. I don’t hear a lot of companies doing that in sales when they lose a sale. It’s a lot of finger-pointing. A lot of, “They beat us on price,” or whatever, and then move on. That’s not an in-depth analysis, is it?
[bctt tweet=”Being good at sales solves any other problem in a business for the most part because it’s going to bring revenue in the front door. It’s critically important. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s not. Maybe it’s because some of those environments aren’t psychologically safe. I have no problem. Everybody jokes that I’m self-deprecating most of the time, but it’s also easy to be self-deprecating when you are running everything. Nobody’s judging me and I don’t feel it that way. I want to want to get better.
One of the things we have to think about is if we are going to do a loss review on an account or even do a strategy workshop, we have to go in and understand the rules of conduct. If we want to work on some collaboration or strategize on an account or a big deal we are working on, that meeting isn’t inspection and judgment about what the quarterback of the deal has or hasn’t done.
There might be a time for a little coaching there but put it into a different meeting. If you kick those things off and it’s not about an inspection or judgment, let’s assume you’ve got three other sharp people in a room here as your think tank to help. Maybe that’s a big topic in sales these days. Do we have environments where there’s psychological safety?
Let me ask a really basic question. Sometimes I have worked with sales teams. First of all, not everyone thinks of themselves as a sales team. I have worked with architects who don’t like to consider themselves sales and they have to go in and present. Some of them are so uncomfortable even standing up to speak. “Can’t I just stay seated and read my notes?” At a certain point, you go because I have told you all the reasons to stand up. Your energy changes. You come up in the room on and on. How do you work with people who don’t even want to stand up?
I will be honest with you. I may not be the biggest expert on that, but I do like to try and focus on the positives. I want to make sure that anyone we are working with knows our intent. A fellow by the name of Dr. Nick Morgan has got a couple of books out. His principle is he says, “When we meet someone, what we are always trying to assess is what’s their intent.” It goes back hundreds and hundreds of years that we shake hands. Remember when we shake hands? It’s to prove I don’t have a weapon where I’m going to club you.
To that extent, I’m always trying to make sure that folks understand the intent is only to help to make you better, but if that’s what you say, then you have to back it up. Am I saying that? I’m walking out of the meeting going, “Mark needs a little work here.” Am I being upfront and honest and practicing Kim Scott’s Radical Candor, but doing it so that you are not leaving a bruise? There’s a real art to that.
Feedback without leaving a bruise is one of my favorite things that you said. You also talk about virtual selling and certainly, with the pandemic, that was a big issue. One of my clients said, “Can you teach my sales team how to look and sound good on Zoom? They are uncomfortable presenting on camera,” especially if the client has their camera off.
It was interesting because I was talking to some of those people and they said, “What if a competitor is listening in?” They started making up all these worst-case scenarios. What if the doctor is not even listening? I’m like, “I don’t think virtual selling is going away. It’s going to be a hybrid like this return to the office.”
Sales: Sometimes things are going to go well and sometimes they’re not going to go well, but try and coach yourself in a mindset that says, “if it doesn’t go well, but I did my best, I’m going to sleep like a baby.”
They will be some people, all virtual, everybody, every day, 9:00 to 5:00, but this hybrid 3 days in 2 days off. We’ll continue the need to be good at virtual selling. That’s one of the things you’ve written about, and it’s one of the pieces of training you offer. Tease us a little bit with what you give people that help them in those situations.
Remember when we were kids and the first time you heard your own recorded voice? We can’t stand it and it’s, “I don’t sound that bad.” When I’m doing a face-to-face sales call, nobody’s recording it. I’m not watching myself in real time. You and I do these podcasts and I’m not sure how many of your podcasts you listen to after the podcast from start to finish, but it’s not that much fun.
We all have these kinds of barriers. None of us like seeing ourselves on camera or hearing our voices. A few of us who do become actors in Hollywood. Maybe you need that personality. A couple of thoughts for the meeting, there’s the Albert Mehrabian stuff that says, “A lot of communication is non-verbal.” With all of your training, you are much more of an expert in that area than me, but ridiculous percentages, well north of 80% of non-verbal communications. Where you are trying to make a connection, it’s important. A Zoom call or a video call sound, believe it or not, is more important than the visual.
It’s far more annoying if you can’t hear the person or there’s background noise and all of those kinds of good things. For all the salespeople out there, think of this. Where are you more compelling? If I’m trying to convince somebody and build a relationship and trust, is it best that I’m physically in their building, or do I want to pick up the phone? Easy answer. I have got to be in the building.
Virtual selling was a bit of a bridge between the phone and being in person. It’s the next best thing. If our intent is to make a connection, communicate clearly, demonstrate some energy and enthusiasm, and also play off some cues of other people, you’ve got to have the camera on. You got to be in the center of the screen. For some, they should be able to see your hands when you are on that call.
There are a bunch of subconscious ticks. Somebody else’s brain is going to be wondering about things, so you’ve got to be cognitive. Stress comes into play if you’ve got a complicated background. They can’t see your hands. You are not staring into the camera. You are not squaring the screen. For all of those reasons, remember that at the beginning of the pandemic, that’s why we are all so exhausted after five hours of meetings. Our brain was processing everything. When you are in a big group and you have the gallery view, so you can see twenty people at a time, it makes your brain tired subconsciously.
There are a lot of those things that come into play, and the only thing I can say to folks on the video side is that we have to get over it. None of us like ourselves on video. I’m not sure exactly why a lot of psychological stuff is in there, but it is critical for a connection. Try and stare into your camera, which is quite awkward because I can’t see you perfectly when I’m staring into my camera, but for you to feel a connection to me, you have to see my eyes and vice versa. Those are a couple of quick tips on the virtual side.
You’ve covered so many great tips. There’s no such thing as ever being over-prepared to relentlessly focus to my favorite, “Give feedback without leaving a bruise,” and now these great virtual tips. Do you have a last thought or quote you’d like to leave us with?
Sales: It’s a bit of a responsibility for all of us in sales today to make sure it moves forward as a profession and not a trade.
My first thought is to thank you, John. Your books are fantastic in terms of the importance of storytelling in sales. I love your focus on helping the self-esteem of salespeople. My last thought for everybody is that it’s a bit of responsibility for all of us in sales to make sure it moves forward as a profession and not a trade.
Applying that focus and some discipline, our relentless focus is on putting a client first or a prospect first and making it all about them. For the most part in most businesses now, the most important line item on a P&L is the revenue. Being good at sales solves any other problem in a business for the most part because it’s going to bring revenue in the front door. It’s critically important. It’s going to continue to be so, and it’s been a pleasure connecting with you again. I appreciate being a guest on your amazing show.
Thanks. If people want to reach out to you, they can find you at InTheFunnel.com where they can learn more about your sales workshops and your wonderful podcast, and explore learning how to be better at sales and drive that bottom line. Mark, thanks so much.
John, thank you. We’ll talk again for sure.
Important Links
- In The Funnel
- The Selling Well
- Radical Candor
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Sell Without Selling Out With Andy Paul
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Sales isn’t a simple job; it takes a lot of skill to earn a buyer’s trust. So how do you sell without selling out? How do you earn that trust? John Livesay dives into sales with help from Andy Paul. With over three decades of experience under his belt, Andy gives us a glimpse at his sales insights. From building trust and communication to training and avoiding persuasion, this episode is one you can’t miss.
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Listen to the podcast here
Sell Without Selling Out With Andy Paul
Our guest is Andy Paul, the author of Sell Without Selling Out. He talks about how influence rules and persuasion drools and that you are either a sales boss that is commanding people or a sales leader that inspires them. Find out how to be a learn-it-all instead of a know-it-all. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest on the show is Andy Paul, who is a leading global sales expert. He has over 180,000 people following his daily posts on LinkedIn. He is the host of the top-rated sales podcast Sales Enablement with Andy Paul, with more than over 1,000 episodes and millions of downloads. His podcast is a go-to resource for sales leaders and producers. He is the author of the Amazon best-selling book Sell Without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms. He has also written other books and he is the Founder of Zero-Time Selling, which is an advisory firm. Prior to that, he had a successful sales career himself in tech startups, where he sold over $600 million of complex systems and services. Andy, welcome to the show.
John, thanks for having me.
Let’s go back in time to when you knew you wanted to get into sales. Maybe you had a paper out or you sold something and you went, “I am good at this. This might be my career.”
I did not know I wanted to be in sales after I had been in it for a couple of years. Up until that, I was not too sure that I wanted to be in sales. Like a lot of people, I fell into sales. I graduated from university and did not have any concrete plans about what I wanted to do. I worked at the college I graduated from during the summer. Fall came around and my parents were urging me to get more serious about things. I went to the career placement center around campus and the jobs that were available were all the major tech companies. They were trying to recruit people into what turned out to be sales. Interestingly, none of them called it sales positions. They are all marketing management training programs, but they were nothing about marketing. They are all about sales.
Marketing people do not have quotas. That is the big distinction I tell people.
It is this whole idea that sales is dirty and, “Who wants to be a salesperson?” It was evident even then. I fell into it and as I described in my book, I was not too comfortable with what I was being taught and how I was being taught how to sell. I reached the point about year two where it started making sense to me and I started to describe or define a way to sell that worked for me. I could start to see a future in it at that point.
[bctt tweet=”A sales boss commands, and a sales leader inspires. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
You and I both have a similar background in that we sold multimillion-dollar tech pieces of equipment. Tell us about that. What was that like in the ‘90s?
I started off selling roomfuls of computer equipment back in the day. They take a lot of space and a fraction of the computing power of our phones these days that major corporations are running their companies on. I swerved into the personal computer industry for a while and worked at Apple in the early days of Apple and a couple of others what we thought was going to be an interesting startup. I worked for a company that made the first battery-powered notebook computer. That was a glorious failure.
Somehow ended up, by default, I was looking for a job after the last company had been with that imploded. I saw a news article in Fortune Magazine about a company that was revolutionizing the satellite communications business with very small aperture satellite dishes for data communications. I cold-called them. That was a Friday. I called them on Monday. I did not have a job in sales. I was an account manager as a customer success person for about the first six months before I moved back over into sales. That was my introduction to the enterprise of selling large complex systems.
What would you say was your biggest challenge as a salesperson? Was it handling rejection, overcoming objections or getting the appointment? What was one challenge that you thought and you saw all the people struggling with?
I spent a big chunk of time in the satellite communications business and the wireless business and did not have a technical background. I was selling to very technical customers.
It was a different language, was it not?
For me, the challenge was internal sales. How did I rally people to support me and help make up for my deficits in a way that was still valuable for the buyer? I got pretty good at that after a while. It was matching the internal selling as well as the external selling. As in any startup, there are tons of competing priorities and people are ultra-busy doing multiple things and it is like, “How do I get this person to invest some of their time and attention in what is important to me?” That was the key for me to be able to rally support internally for big deals I was working on.
Sell Without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms
How did you do that? Do you have any tips for someone who is thinking, “That sounds like my challenge, but I do not know where to start.”?
It is the same challenge you have with customers. I write about it in my book. You have to be able to connect with people on an authentic human level. You need to be able to use your curiosity and understand the most important things to them and how you can help them achieve that by working with you.
It is fascinating because you had said originally that people were like, “I am not so sure you will be good in sales because you are an introvert and an intellectual.” There are a lot of people who might identify as, “I am not extroverted. I cannot be the life of the party and entertain clients nonstop. I should not pursue this career.”
As I tell people that in the course of the first 24 years of my career when I was outselling the large 2/3 of billion dollars, I had dinner half a dozen times with clients. The opportunity presented itself. I was all over the world selling. For the most part, I had great relationships with my clients, but we did not feel like we had to have dinner with each other. It was not going to cement the relationship in a way that we were not doing in the office when we were talking with each other because their ability to trust me was based on what I was doing in the context of work more than anything else. Once I established that personal bond and rapport, I had to prove it every time I interacted with them.
How did you come up with the title of your book, Selling Without Selling Out? Do you feel like a lot of people feel like they do have to sell out in order to be successful?
They do. The simplest way to consider selling out is when you put your interests ahead of those of your customers. That is an external customer buying something from you or your internal customer. Whether you are working as part of a team or collaborating with people on things when you put yourself first, you start to sell out.
Do you have a story or example of that?
[bctt tweet=”Be a learn it all, not a know it all.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Think about it from a salesperson’s perspective. You go out at the start of the month or at some point when you start a relationship with a potential customer or client. You convince them through your actions that you are there to help them. They think you are there to help them, but then you get to that last week of the month and your boss says, “We need to bring this order in order to hit our month.” Early in my career, I was forced to go out and try to accelerate decisions that buyers were not prepared to make.
You start offering discounts and other inducements, delayed payment terms, or whatever the company does. In the mind of the buyer, suddenly, you went from being somebody that is there to help them to be purely transactional. It does not mean they will not buy from you, but they are under no illusion anymore that you are there to help them.
Once that trust is broken, it is almost impossible to get it back.
It is very difficult to get it back. They will stick with you as long as you are handy and convenient for them, but as soon as something better comes along, somebody they trust more or a product that is roughly equivalent to yours, odds are pretty high that you are going to be gone.
You talk about the difference between being a sales leader versus a sales boss. Can you give us that distinction?
A conversation that I had on my show with Stephen M.R. Covey, a great author who wrote the Speed of Trust. He has got a new book out called Trust and Inspire. It is about leadership modes. As he draws, the contrast is there are two dominant modes of leadership. There is the command and control, which we are all very familiar with because we have all been victims of it and then there is trust and inspire. That sums up the difference.
As a sales boss, it is all about command and control. Conformity and compliance are most important to me. Trust and inspire is, as a sales leader, you are going to sell to your person, “Here is your patch and territory. This could be your list of accounts of geographic territory.” I am going to support you the best way I can, but you decide the best way to get this business done in your territory. How can I help you achieve that? Trust people to continue to develop, expand, grow and learn with your support. The other is, “I know best. Do what I want you to do.”
Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything
One of the things both of you and I witnessed and experienced is a top producer is getting promoted into sales leadership without any real training and failing miserably as a leader versus a salesperson because they are different skills. Can you describe what someone should do to prepare to make that transition if they are not getting the training internally?
From my experience, I did a couple of things. I read what I could that was available about managing and leadership. I did not hesitate to ask people for guidance and mentors, internally, people that were more experienced in the role to give me some perspective on what they were doing. I asked the people that I was leading how I was doing.
It is part of your personality and it is not part of most people’s personality, the humbleness to ask for feedback, as opposed to, “I am going to pretend like I have it all together even though I had never done this before.” It is a completely different mindset to approach something with. In order to get feedback from people you are managing and/or your customers, you have to be willing to listen and not think you have all the answers all the time.
This is what I started pointing out in the book in terms of the contrast between a sales boss and a sales leader. One is a know-it-all versus one that is a learn-it-all. That is what you want to be. You want to be a learn-it-all. The humility you talk about is not just being modest and self-effacing, but it is about being intellectually humble. It is acknowledged that you do not know everything.
We put sales leaders, especially people who do not work in big companies that do not know very formal training programs and development programs, which the majority of companies out there put in tough positions. We promote them and then we do not enable them with the tools, the knowledge, and the training to have a better idea about what they are doing.
The thing that is ironic about that is that if you run polls, you look at the polls, surveys and research data, who is the single most influential in the life of an up-and-coming salesperson? It is their immediate manager. The people we should be investing in the most, we do not. According to LinkedIn, we spent roughly about $15 billion a year on sales training in the United States, of which 10% is spent on sales leaders and sales managers.
At least half of it should not be spent on sales managers. If they are the people having the most influence on the development of individual sellers, we cannot invest in them enough. Stop providing that training to sellers because they are going to get the guidance and knowledge they need from watching their sales managers.
[bctt tweet=”We are the sum of all the influences that are out there—our peers, our managers, the things we read, and the other information we absorb.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One of the things you talk about is people who say, “Let’s model what the top producer is doing. Let’s all march to that drum and say exactly what they are saying and try to be a clone.” You are saying, “That is the kiss of death. It is counterproductive.”
It is not like I was the best salesperson in the world, but no one sold like me because it was me. No one sells it like you. People did it better. That is great. I tried to learn from those people, but I had my own unique way of doing it. That has developed because we are the sum total of all the influences that are out there, our peers, our managers, the things we read, and the other information we absorb.
To force everybody into a single niche about how to sell is self-defeating. You have frameworks, you set up and you have expectations, “This is how we conduct business,” but within that framework, as a sales manager, I want to give you the freedom and the flexibility to go experiment and find out things that will work for you based on your unique strengths as a human being.
If you are going on a sales call with a boss and that boss is hyper-critical and expects you to be perfect, you do not have any room for failure trying something on your own, and then you are shutting down someone’s creativity and authenticity.
Selling is one of the most creative professions you can be in. To me, that was the one thing that has kept me in this, that in every situation, your approach is different. The way you present the solution and how you interact with the people will be necessarily different because they are also different if they are buying the same product. It is a fresh problem to solve, not solving the same problem over and over again.
I think of that as a doctor or a dentist. I thought, “How do they not get bored doing the same surgeries and over again?” I realized, much like a salesperson, in every patient and every situation, “We are putting a crown in your mouth,” or “We are removing your appendix.” Whatever it is, the outcome is the same, but there are so many unique things that require you to think, “I have never had to do it quite this way before.”
There are no small things to your customer. To your point, this is not to a patient. There are no small things when it comes to people’s health. As a seller, there are no small things in the buyer’s mind. If you try to serve to glom over those, assuming that they are like everybody else, you damage that relationship and the trust you have built.
Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others
One of the biggest reasons people are buying your book is that you have provided a guide on how to be successful on their own terms without having to fit into this mold of, “You have to be an extrovert. You have to do XYZ. You have to play golf.” All those stereotypical things of what salespeople used to have to do or would do and it is like, “I know what my terms are. This is how I entertain clients or not. This is how I sell. This is how I build rapport that might be different than you.”
It is becoming more essential because we are becoming more diverse in the people we are recruiting into sales. We are not doing enough. We could do more, but they all have different lived experiences. The perspectives people bring are what we need. We need more different perspectives. There is no one way.
You have so many great soundbites. One of my favorites is, “Influence rules, persuasion drools.” The visual on that is great. Tell us what you mean. A lot of people think, “I am going into sales. I am going to persuade you to buy this for this price.”
If you are persuasion-driven, you are putting your own interest ahead of those of the buyers. By definition, that is what you are trying to do. You are trying to persuade somebody to buy your product irrespective of their requirements, their needs and the things they want to achieve because you are in that mode where you are selling hammers and everybody is the nail. Even when you look at the definition of the word persuasion, it talks about prevailing or trying to prevail through force. In the wrong hands, persuasion is meant to be coercive and a little bit manipulative. Unfortunately, a lot of sellers are the wrong hands. That is not how buyers want to deal with the salesperson.
This is a big a-ha moment. I want to take a pause, circle it, underline it and highlight it. I am not in the persuasion business. Nothing against all the wonderful books about how to be persuasive, but let’s reshift this and start reframing how we think of ourselves.
Influence is all about having an effect on the thoughts and actions of others without the apparent use of force. That is what influence is and that is what position we are trying to get into. We are trying to build this connection with a buyer built on some level of trust that when the trust exists, they open up to us. When we bring our curiosity to bear, they will share information with us, perhaps at a deeper level than they would with someone where that trust and connection did not exist. Suddenly, we have more insight into the most important things to them in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they are trying to achieve by addressing those challenges.
When we have that understanding, we can work with the buyer to help shape this vision of success of what it will be like to get the value from the product or service you are selling. If you reach that point, that is something you do collaboratively with the buyer. It is not something you impose on them by trying to persuade them about it.
[bctt tweet=”Humility is not just being modest and self-effacing, but it is about being intellectually humble. It is acknowledging that you do not know everything.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I love that your definition of persuasion is, “I know better than you. I am right. You are wrong.” That is selling out. That is what this book is helping people not do. The opposite is the concept of selling which I have never heard of before. Therefore, there are no assumptions that you know more than they do or even vice versa. Think of it in terms of being a copilot with the buyer and this concept of, “Let’s make sure people feel heard and understood first before we jump into what we think they need.” It’s like when you go to a therapist, sometimes there is something called the presenting problem, which is a couple comes in and they say, “Our love life is not where we want it. That is why we are here.”
The therapist will go, “That is the presenting problem. I bet there are some reasons behind that.” As salespeople, we need to start thinking of ourselves as, “Whatever they tell you upfront, this is why we are changing, looking, upgrading or whatever the reason is for doing a proposal in the first place.” There might be other reasons they are unwilling to share yet, or maybe they do not even know yet. If you can help them discover that, then your trust factor has zoomed up.
Sometimes sellers are a little taken aback when I say this. I said, “You cannot take anything at face value that the buyer tells you.” They are not lying to you. They are not, not telling you the truth, but there is always more to it. If you accept what they tell you, you will hop down one path that is not the path the buyer wants to go down.
Building this level of trust so that they open up to you, as I write about in the book, then they give you permission to stick your nose into their business. What you are trying to get to is deeper level information that they do not readily share with everybody. I was in a conversation with someone on another podcast and they are talking about, “If you ask buyers scripted questions, you get scripted answers.”
If you are a robot, then they are going to give you robot answers.
You have trained them, not you, but sellers in general. Be the difference. This is the thing that I stress in the book. In the majority of instances, buyers oftentimes decide to buy from a seller despite the seller, not because of them.
If we flip that around and make it not in spite of but because we have a new tool in our box.
Sell Without Selling Out: In the majority of instances, buyers oftentimes decide to buy from a seller despite the seller, not because of them. In the majority of instances, buyers oftentimes decide to buy from a seller despite the seller, not because of them.
That is what you are trying to achieve. You become the reason they buy from your company. You, the individual. From supporting data from Gartner, Challenger and Forrester, we know that when customers make their decision, the majority of the criteria or factors in their minds are the experience with the salesperson.
That is everything from a home or the broker you pick to, if you are in Corporate America, deciding what vendor to make your equipment purchase from. People are buying your energy, your passion and your empathy.
How they experience you. Your understanding.
If people want to reach out to you and figure out how to get more coaching, more information and get on your email list, where should they go?
They can email me if they want to at [email protected]. They can connect with me on LinkedIn. Direct message me there. I would love to connect with people that are reading this.
Do you also have programs that you offer on your website?
If you go to AndyPaul.com and learn about the programs that I offer. You can download a free chapter of the book if you wish. We have an assessment that you can take there if you assume that selling out and selling in are polar opposite ends of a spectrum. You can start to determine where in that spectrum you sit. Are you leaning more towards selling out or selling in? It is not super scientific, but it is a fun quiz. Come buy the book on Amazon or wherever you purchase books.
[bctt tweet=”You cannot take anything at face value that the buyer tells you. They are not lying to you. They are not telling you the truth, but there is always more to it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Thank you so much for sharing your insight. We are going to all become people who learn-it-all not a know-it-all. Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with?
One of my favorite quotes is right at the beginning of the book from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Insist on yourself. Never imitate.”
Most people think they have to become a clone in order to be successful. That is not the case at all. Thank you so much for getting us this new awareness and this new ability so that we can be ourselves and be successful at the same time. Who does not want that? Let’s go get the book, everybody. Thanks, Andy.
Thanks, John.
Important Links
- Andy Paul
- Sell Without Selling Out
- Sales Enablement with Andy Paul
- Stephen M.R. Covey – Sales Enablement with Andy Paul Episode
- Speed of Trust
- Trust and Inspire
- [email protected]
- LinkedIn – Andy Paul
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Human Factor Media With Zack Slingsby
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Storytelling is an effective way of getting people to buy into what you are selling. As long as you can harness the human factor in your story, you will always find someone interested in your brand. In this episode, John Livesay teams up with Zack Slingsby, the Founder of Human Factor Media. Zack discusses using literary techniques to gain attention and how to effectively leverage story-telling. Full of great insights, tune in and learn how to use story-telling to create the perfect pitch.
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Listen to the podcast here
Human Factor Media With Zack Slingsby
My guest on the show is Zack Slingsby, who created an agency that does amazing videos using storytelling. He said, “When you create wonder and awe with stories, you pull people in.” Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.
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My guest is Zack Slingsby, who is the Founder of Human Factor Media, focusing on redefining branded storytelling. Zack is a writer, Short Film Creator, and Founder of Human Factor Media, which is an award-winning branded storytelling company that has worked with leading brands and publishers to create videos people want to watch. He graduated from Fordham University, received his MFA from the New School, and published in over a dozen creative and industry publications. He believes the ingredient that makes a literary story great is the same that makes for a great video. Zack, welcome to the show.
John, how are you?
I’m great. It is nice to have someone so creative as you on the show. Let’s go back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, college, wherever you want. Were you someone who loved to read? Obviously, you have a lot of books in your background here. I’m curious as to your own interest and passion for where storytelling got.
My love of reading came a little bit later like early college. Growing up, I loved shows. The emergence of basically TV shows had literary qualities, starting with the West Wing and Sopranos. Everything from the late ’90s through 2010. It was such a great time for television. That got me obsessed with storytelling. I would write the scripts for my favorite shows. Growing up, I would write my own versions of them alone for many hours while my friends were out doing more normal things at that time.
When I’ve got the MFA program after college, which is called the Master of Fine Arts, for those whose background may not be creative, I had been very obsessed with the traditional path for a creative, which is, do great work and try to find an avenue that already existed to push that work out there. In my case, it was literature. Everyone in the MFA is pretty sure that within a year or so, they will be Hemingway. They are pretty positive that it is common. You need to get discovered and write a perfect paragraph. You are side by side with these people. You build each other up and think, “It is not good. It is going to be me. It won’t be these other 30 guys. It will be me.”
Very quickly, that gets deflated. I had a good amount of early success. I finished a book, got an agent, and published some short stories. My book went out to press to be sold to a publisher. We went to all the big guys, and you have to get unanimous consent from an acquisitions board. With some of the big ones, Random House, Picador, and these guys, we had 9 out of 10 people say yes or it is 8 out of 12. It is short of where you want to be. At that time, it was in my early twenties and crushing. As I’ve got older, I went to Washington and started writing.
I saw the way branded content was going. It was a vehicle for storytelling. I thought that I would be very happy to have a career like that. Some friends and I started this thing where we tried to make creative and funny videos, and over time it evolved. We are this group of creatives who make story-driven videos for brands. I do not know if that was a longer answer than perhaps you intended.
[bctt tweet=”Fear kills creativity. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Everyone’s story is not usually linear. You took your love of literature and created something that pulls people in. That is what a good story does, whether you are watching it as a video or listening to someone tell you a story. What are some of the mistakes that you see people making when they create branded videos these days? Is it that they are trying to make it like a commercial? Is it they are making it too long or they are trying to be funny, and they are not? What are some of the things that you see entrepreneurs do that aren’t working?
There are different tiers to this. There is a startup, a brand, and obviously, the established brands. We have gotten worked for both kinds and done a lot of work with nonprofits and startups. We have also gotten to work with some bigger brands like LG, Planet Fitness, and New York Post. Let’s say on the startup front. There is this need to focus on the product because you feel this is your one chance. You have this certain amount of money and are going to do a blast. You have to get home the differentiating features of your product or service very quickly.
I am totally sympathetic to that and understand how that could happen. It is not always the wrong strategy either. Maybe that is where you are but at a certain point, that brands have to ask themselves if they see value in being even tangentially entertaining and some scale going into the entertainment business. The age of the traditional ad, we all agree, is behind us. We need to find a way to access a wonder and awe in the people we want to reach.
Teaming up with actual storytellers to do this tends to be a strategy that is rewarded by the market. Laughter is older than language. Music is older than human speech. When you only appeal to the rational side of consumers, you are leaving all these other things on the table. The new trends are bearing this out more and more.
How did you come up with the name of your company, Human Factor Media?
I do not know. There is a novel by Graham Greene called The Human Factor, which is about spies. There was one passage in that where he said that he could empathize too much with both sides. He can empathize with the communist and the capitalist. It drove him crazy because he could see the human factor in both camps. More to the point is we are trying to find something resonating about a story that moves beyond the product. Those are the stories you could eventually find on a streaming platform.
Human Factor: We are this group of creatives who make story-driven videos for brands
We are trying to find something that relates to people as people. There is an old definition of commerce that you want to lower uncertainty about one another so that we can exchange value. I thought that is what great branded content does is lowers the scale. I know this is primarily an audience of entrepreneurs. I’m sure you know more than I do but the great salespeople I have met were not even doing sales anymore. They found something else to do that simulates the effect of sales. They are not saying over and over, “Can I have five minutes of your time?” They found some creative way to lower the skepticism of the prospect. Narrative video is simply a way to scale that strategy.
It is interesting because, in the core startup world around trying to get investors, the phrase is, “How do you mitigate the risk for an investment?” You are saying the same thing needs to happen even at the consumer level and the B2B level when you are selling a product. Are there certain things that you think a story needs to have so that it, in fact, resonates?
It has to be motivated the way the story is motivated, which is to say that it is not motivated to manipulate an end product. It has to be motivated by a genuine desire to tell that story or create that piece of art, for lack of a better word. That won’t be the priority of every brand out there and fair enough but it will have to be something where you say, “We are telling the story of this woman or this man on this journey.” That has to be all we are in this for and the whole point of this video. It can’t be that 2/3 of the way through, and we give you a list of the reasons why this razor is better than the razor that you are currently using.
Are there any rules about how long a video should be? Thirty seconds is too short. Ten minutes is too long. Anything like that?
I do not think so. I think that people say that maybe. When we do a campaign now, we do long videos, sometimes five minutes. We did a documentary that was 30 minutes. Sometimes they are long but we always break down tons of small content from that. You can take 15 to 30-second clips out of everything. We try to cover the scorcher of the content strategy. I do not know. It is a weird time. TikTok is 15 seconds but Joe Rogan’s got 4 hours and he is the most popular media figure out there. It is so bizarre. What do you think about that, John? Have you had any experiences?
A good story pulls you in and keeps your attention if there are open loops, hooks, and something unexpected. It depends on what platform the story is but in terms of businesses that have hired you, as you mentioned, Planet Fitness and LG, can you tell us a story of what the scope of work was or what problem they were trying to solve, and how were you able to use storytelling to solve that problem?
[bctt tweet=”Lower the risk so you can share value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s say Planet Fitness was integrating a new product into several locations. That was more along the lines of traditional branded storytelling, and they had something they wanted to impart to an audience. It had something to do with the brand itself. It wasn’t a documentary or comedy series as we have done for other companies. In that case, in terms of content length, we did, once again, everything that was the long stuff, 3 to 4 minutes stuff. For the short content for LG, we were brought in similarly to do a product integration video. We’ve got to talk them into letting us do a 90-second to 2-minute vignette to go along with it.
A common pattern is we will start the conversation on the level of traditional branded videos and we will say, “Give us some percentage of the budget over here to do something that is a little more experimental, run that through your channels, and see if there is any value to this.” Oftentimes, the client is surprised and wants to experiment more.
We have case studies on a ride-hailing app that did a comedy music video side by side of a product video. We did this with a couple of nonprofits, a water company that we are doing a documentary for now, and a jewelry brand that did a series of funny videos. In some sense, this is a trend but also, by and large, most companies are still making ads. The market is wide open for these experiments.
Are these videos living on their website and their social media platforms, and that is it or where do they go?
It is everywhere. We are engaged now pretty much ends at the content creation. We do not oversee the distribution generally. Sometimes occasionally, we do, but they are ad assets, social videos, and sometimes website videos. Sometimes, they are sales videos. How weird is that? We are working with one company now in the tree-free paper product space, which is a very niche space. We want to use these to strengthen our prospects or leads because what is better a sales intro than some content that seeks to lower the guard. It is not coming in with five reasons why you should book a meeting with us.
That brings up the point. We briefly discussed the relationship between sales and marketing. That has been a theme that comes up a lot in our conversations lately. You have this strategy for creative content. You live in the clouds, which is fair enough as a lot of us do. How do we connect that to our actual sales strategy? I do not know. Have you experienced that at all?
The Human Factor
Yes. As a storytelling speaker, I often get brought in because they realize that they are not telling stories in the marketing materials or what is coming out of the salespeople’s mouths. Especially in medical tech sales, they love to get stuck into the percentages. This makes this surgery go 30% faster. Speeds and feeds, as I call it, in the tech world. When did you start to get them to tell a story of what is 30% faster means, and who cares about that? Is it strictly an ROI? In one case, I helped them tell a story of how it made a patient’s family not have to wait an extra hour to find out if somebody was going to have cancer or not.
You start going, “It never occurred to us to tell a story and let alone make the patient’s family a character in this story.” Part of what I do is take these facts and figures or even basic case studies and turn them into case stories, and then they start using that as their marketing material. As opposed to listing features, they start having little 2 or 3 sentence case stories about how happy the family was. The doctor, who was the hero of the story, came out an hour earlier than expected and put them out of their waiting misery.
You are doing the human factor the same way we are.
When I start to work with sales teams, sometimes they think, “If I’m going to tell a story, surely I’m the hero of the story.” I go, “No, the goal is to make a potential buyer.” If you are telling a story about a doctor, the doctor is the hero. Another doctor sees himself in the story and wants to go on the journey. People are like, “I thought I was a pretty good storyteller but I have never thought about how to make people see themselves in that story.” When that happens, we are all in.
My ad week about what Super Bowl commercials I think are the best, and it is fascinating to put it through the lens of, “Was it entertaining? Yes. Is it memorable? Yes. Do I remember the product? Whoops, no.” There are a lot of boxes to be checked off besides that was great content but I have no idea who or why that brand should be part of that content.
That is a common thing that we come up against, and it is a fair objection. What do you think is the difference, though, between storytelling on TV and digitally?
For certainly like the Super Bowl that is appointment viewing and what is fascinating about that is the commercials now are released before the Super Bowl. People are literally interested in watching your commercial and seeking it out. Not just the trades are covering it. The Today Show was revealing a new Super Bowl commercial every day before the countdown.
[bctt tweet=”The most coveted real estate now in media is the subscriber base on social channels.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Do you think we have a long time left to do that? Do you think that is dated or that it is going to expire? Do you think we will always do that?
Obviously, the award shows are struggling for viewers but in sports, when people get together, it is a whole experience and eating good foods. It is almost like an American tradition. There is still that window. I saw a brand using storytelling, and they weren’t paying to be on the Super Bowl yet. They were part of the Super Bowl buzz.
I would love your opinion on this. It is called Enfamil, and they work with babies that are premature. They started showing commercials, “This baby was due on February 13th, which is when the Super Bowl was airing but it came two weeks early. We are taking good care of it.” It was very clever marketing on a lot of different levels to get part of that buzz without having to pay the fee to run it on that.
Much of marketing is cleverness like that. I do not think that is our core competency. I wouldn’t have thought of that. I had to leverage what is going on in the country to get attention, for what you are working on is a special skillset. It is not ours. We have an ability to tell stories that will be as impactful as they will be in five years. They can transcend what we do. That is our goal for what we are making and to try to appeal to people the same way your favorite show would appeal to you.
Can you give an example of that jewelry one you said that had some humor in it?
In that case, what we were doing was how can you compete as a jewelry brand. You have Diamonds Are Forever. Kate Spade had a web series. I remember they brought in Tina Fey or Amy Poehler or somebody but products like that are CPG products or luxury products. They only can compete on the story that they are going to tell. The commodity itself is too ubiquitous. We are too used to it as consumers and too commonplace. To me, it is crazy that when you are in a highly competitive market like that, you are not figuring out ways to make the coolest web series.
Human Factor: It is crazy that when you are in a highly competitive market like that, you are not figuring out ways to make the coolest web series. That is the greatest tool you are not using if you are in that space.
That is the greatest tool that you are not using if you are in that space. We tried to do some very small versions of that. You could see how these things can be scaled up or down based on resources and the size of the brand. In that case, it was a smaller one. It is accessible to everyone. To try to use the power of entertainment, you do not have to be Prada or Kate Spade to do that. It is so strange what is happening when you touch on it with the television medium. Movie stars are trying to find television shows to go on or TV series. The TV stars are going to YouTube.
The YouTube stars do not care about anything. Those people who have 5 million to 10 million people do not care. They do not want anything else. They feel they are the kingpins of entertainment. They are right. The most coveted real estate now in media is the subscriber base on these social channels. It has happened very quickly and is bizarre but anybody can try to do that. They won’t all succeed but their barriers to entry are gone. You have to make a commitment to recurring storytelling and genuine entertainment value. We think that, in our humble way, literary style can have someplace in that.
Let’s say you have got this amazing web series you have created for this diamond company. If the salespeople at the retail stores are not aware of that and someone comes in and references it, all that creativity and momentum has gone. If, on the other hand, there are images in the store reminding people of it or maybe they didn’t see it and go to a QR code and download, or the salesperson brings it up, now that is when sales and marketing are working well together. That is what I love to see.
Your whole goal is to get someone to put something on their shortlist of things they are considering and break through the clutter. That is what you are doing. For me, as a speaker, there are some similarities in what you are doing as an agency because every agency I have ever worked with is usually asked to come in and pitch or present. It is between you and 2 or 3 other agencies or other people who do something similar to what you do. We all have to sell ourselves, our company, and what makes us unique.
I certainly have to do that as a speaker. We will tell a story about another talk I gave and the outcomes that happened that people say, “That is what we want.” Do you have any tips for someone? We are all in that. If we do not have stories, my whole line is we are drowning in a sea of sameness. I do not think it is good enough for anybody to go, “Let my work speak for myself.” I have had people hire me from watching my demo videos, my TEDx, which is lovely but we still need the skill to sell ourselves to get picked. People could watch your amazing videos and go, “We want that,” but I’m still guessing you might need to quote, pitch, interview, whatever you want to call it.
We do that every week. We generally get hired through making presentations on spec. We think that we haven’t been an idea. We want to present them and try to get the attention of a brand manager, a CMO or a business owner. I have an incredibly deep respect for salespeople after starting this business that I lacked beforehand. The answer is definitely, yes.
[bctt tweet=”Everything about the creative mindset is in opposition to the act of creation itself.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What is it that you say in those presentations without giving away any of your intellectual property secrets? My belief is that people buy your energy. I think because you are so likable and approachable, they think that this guy has the skills to do it. Probably another agency we are looking at might have the same skills.
At the end of the day, is he going to be easy to work with? Is he going to take our feedback? Is he accessible? Those are some skills and unique selling benefits that we sometimes might overlook. I have literally had given a presentation, an interview by a potential client to hire me, and knew they were looking at 1 or 2 other speakers.
My bureau agent calls me, “Congrats. They picked you. They liked your energy.” Rarely is it that spelled out. I spoke to the client later and said, “That was so nice of you to say shit.” I felt bad. I am better about myself. I felt energized about the possibilities of what you could do at our meeting. I figured, “If you make me feel like this, you will make the hundreds of people that are coming to the ballroom feel the same way.”
All that other stuff gets us to that interview. We have got a referral. They have seen your video. They did not see it at all or whatever it is, then we need to have storytelling. My latest book is The Sale Is in the Tale, which is a business fable. It is a story about storytelling. Your presentations are hiring us. We are going to tell you a story of why we are the best people to create your stories. It is very parallel.
We will have a couple of slides that our accolades, awards, and some brands that we have worked with him. We try to rush through that because it is important to say but it is not something we want to be overly self-conscious about or reference about. We get to a couple of slides on where content is going, how we move from the idea of commercials to the idea of the content, and the skip rate for, let’s say, traditional ads or the amount of money wasted every year on interruption marketing, which we become geniuses at obfuscating as consumers.
We get to the ideas themselves and usually have 2 or 3 ideas. To your point about the energy, I agree, and it is hard to articulate that and even talk about it because it is such a nebulous force. It doesn’t always work in your favor. You almost go through a prism of insincerity before you come out yourself again. You have to go through all these things to go back to who you normally are in your life. When that person comes through again, you are like, “Now I can talk to these people genuinely.” When we first started out, it was very hard for me to feel like I could be myself in those situations. That worked against us. I do not know if you have ever experienced that.
Human Factor: Creatives generally are hostile to routine and discipline. They do not want to be put in a category or a box.
I tell people the gateway to the Imposter syndrome is to start comparing yourself to other people. The minute when you start that, you are down that rabbit hole. If I start to find myself doing that, I go pull up like an airplane. We do not want to go down that path. It is a conscious decision, and it goes back to some core beliefs of who I am is enough. This is what I have to offer, and not needing it. It is like dating. Nobody wants to date anybody desperate and wants to work with somebody who’s desperate.
Sometimes when we pull back a little bit and say, “I may not be the right speaker for you but I probably know somebody who is.” Those kinds of comments as go back to mitigate the risk of working with you because we do not feel like you are being pushy. That goes full circle to why I love storytelling, and I like talking to people like you who make wonderful stories. Stories pull us in. We are not being pushed out a bunch of facts, figures, bells, and whistles to look at this price. “It is 20% off, this weekend only.” You are not creating that content.
That is self-consciousness that gets you into trouble. It is incredibly inherent to the creative mindset. It is a very weird and cruel trick of nature. Everything about the creative mindset is in opposition to the act of creation itself. Creatives generally are open to so many possibilities. It is hard to marry themselves to anyone. They become hyper-aware of cliché. They would rather die than repeat a cliché. They want to try new things but they think most of them won’t work. They generally are hostile to routine and discipline. They do not want to be put in a category or a box.
All these instincts could generally make you a good storyteller. They also can be paralyzing when it comes to something concrete and important like growing a business. It is like you try to convince someone that you have something to offer them. You have to go through that ring of fire to be able to come out of the other side and say, “I can help you here.”
What I heard you say is fear is the killer of creativity, and so you cannot be afraid of whether you get the business or not because then you can’t be creative at the moment. A friend of mine asked me to read the draft of something they are working on. He literally wrote, “That family made lemons out of lemonade.” Please do not say that. There’s got to be a better way to say that. We all need editors. Zack, if people want to find out more about the Human Factor Media, where should they go?
They can go to our website, HumanFactorMedia.co. We have got a portfolio on there as well as a form to contact us. You can also get in touch with me directly at [email protected].
Thanks so much for sharing your insights into what is going on that will continue to grow. I think you are in a good niche there. Congratulations.
Thank you. I appreciate this. It was good to talk to you.
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