Where Imagination Meets Business With Christopher Kies

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

Mark Twain once said, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” The same applies to the world of business. If you don’t have an imagination, then your venture will be in for rough sailing. In this episode, John Livesay speaks with Christopher Kies, Executive Sponsor at Blue Sky Consulting. Christopher thinks of Blue Sky as the place where imagination meets business, and that is exactly what he focuses on, helping others tap their imagination to succeed. Be inspired to unleash your imagination by tuning in to Christopher and John.

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Where Imagination Meets Business With Christopher Kies

Our guest is Christopher Kies. He has many years of successful corporate sales experience and enjoys using his insight to help others achieve their goals. Many of his clients need a second opinion on a sales opportunity or a specific strategy to enhance a deal. He works with CEOs, entrepreneurs and executives on a wide range of opportunities, all with the same focus in mind, understanding what stops may happen along the way and how to move beyond them. Christopher, welcome to the show.

Thanks, John. I appreciate you having me on.

We met through a mutual friend, Ken Rutkowski, with whom you went to grammar school if I remember correctly.

I met Ken in sixth grade and I don’t care to count how many years ago that was. It has been a long time.

I love to ask my guests to take us back as far as they want to their own story of origin since you have a sales background as I do. We both are from the Midwest. I was interested to hear similar influences, concepts, motivations and all that good stuff. You can start in sixth grade with Ken if you would like or wherever you want to start your story in terms of understanding that you had an interest in communications and connecting with people.

We could start back in my past because things for me have always been about long-term relationships. It’s one of those moments in time where we have a mutual friend and somebody I have known for many years. I kept my relationship with my wife from first grade. I moved at a point in time in our relationship and we stayed in touch. We reconnected when we were in our late twenties. We dated for a while and then decided to get married. We were in our mid-30s. When I talk about meaningful relationships, it does focus on how I help folks. I hope those two little vignettes of my life and the way I communicate with people helps you out with that.

We both had a background selling tech equipment. You were at HP. One of the things that I noticed in that world was an emphasis on that term speeds and feeds in terms of relationships, empathy or let alone storytelling, which is my passion. What was your experience in that world?

That’s a great question because it does boil down to what type of salesperson you are. Are you transactional or relationship-based? Those are the two worlds that I grew up in. Probably, like you, I call those the go-go ’90s. It was back between 1995 and 2000, right before the dot-com boom in 2001. It was when I was getting my foot in the sales world.

One of the things that I saw very early on in my career was there weren’t many older men or women in sales that caught my attention quickly. I was like, “Anybody that was over the age of 45 was either a manager or senior-level executive that I didn’t have a lot of connection with.” Even my direct managers were still in their 30s or barely over the age of 40.

That caught my attention because even some of the older guys that I did work with and I say older back then because I was in my late 20s and they were in their 40s, I saw them get pushed aside quickly when the numbers didn’t match up. How I took integrated information as a salesperson in my younger career was, “This is a short-lived world. I better make hay while I can and enjoy it.”

[bctt tweet=”You are not just enough; you are more than enough. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

I went to relationship-based sales because that’s what I enjoy. I know you like the storytelling aspect because it does create a binder for the person that you’re speaking and communicating with. I take that from a relationship side because I wanted to get to know my prospects and customers. That was my initial focus.

I remember going to see Death of a Salesman play, where the guy stayed in sales way past his prime. It painted such a bleak picture of what it’s like to not be in management and still be in sales at a certain age and carrying a briefcase, quota and rejection, yet I still wanted to be in sales. I did see that you need to reinvent yourself almost like an actor or athlete. There’s a special premium time.

When you’re first starting, you’re in your early twenties. You don’t have enough experience. You get some experience under your belt. In 27 to 35, you’re getting offers left and right. You think it’s going to last forever. You were smart enough to zoom out and go, “This doesn’t last forever. How can I either not just enjoy this but have that awareness?” You’re not so shocked.

I used to see that in the publishing world that even at the top, the publishers would hit a certain age. The magazine is still doing great, but once 50 something happened, they were like, “We’re going to bring in somebody younger. It’s less money.” Everyone thought it wasn’t going to happen to them, especially if they had been in the company for a long time. That awareness, especially at a young age, is quite fascinating.

You have been doing your own consulting, Blue Sky. Let’s start with that name. I have a sense of where the name came from, but I’m always big on asking people stories of origin, including the story of origin around a company name. You could have named your consulting company anything. What made you pick that?

Blue Sky was easy for me because that’s always been me. When I was a kid in grade school, high school and college, I would always look out the window in class. I could take in the information in one ear, listen to it, decipher it relatively well, but I was always dreaming. I was always in another space. I was like, “What would I like to be doing?” I would imagine myself in situations. Blue Sky was what I always looked at. It was wide open. That’s what I look at my organization and company as wide open.

 

I have been in sales for many years. I even manage and run my wife’s business as well and do her P&L. I understand finance very well and also roadblocks. Roadblocks aren’t always about who is stopping you. I find that it is more or less people stopping themselves and not having the imagination triggered. They are focused on their quota, what their lack and limitations are.

I have had this company for years. I would go in and out of it. I would get other offers and opportunities and work with people. Years ago, I finally said, “I’m done. I’m going to dedicate 100% of my time to helping those that are interested.” If you’re interested in what your Blue Sky or dream is, this isn’t a transactional deal. This is you pay me hourly. I’m not a therapist or licensed in any state. I’m just a guy that has been through a lot. I have been through the highs and lows of sales.

I have insights. There are not a lot of men or women over the age of 50 carrying a bag anymore. The insights and relationships that we sometimes have can enable people in our age group that are looking for the next step. That’s what Blue Sky does. It opens up possibilities. To finish that, my tagline is, “Where imagination meets business.” If you don’t have the imagination, I want to help you reignite that, find it again or cultivate it. If you do, look out there because what you think is what you create.

It’s very metaphysical, which is also another reason you and I clicked so fast because I have that same concept of energy and mindset. There is a great Mark Twain quote about, “It’s hard to keep things in focus when your imagination isn’t working.” I think to myself, “Most people think of business as unless you’re hired to be a graphic designer or something, it’s not that creative of a career. It can be extremely creative if you look for solutions where they are not obvious or what else needs to happen to zig and zag.”

If you’re on the left side of your brain trying to analyze things like it’s a math problem, you’re not going to see those. The roadblock is the roadblock. It’s black and white. It’s like, “If you’re doing accounting, it either adds up or it doesn’t. This is a no and it’s a no forever. I’m never going to try again. I’m going to take rejection personally and go down this downward spiral of who I am. I’m not worth anything and anybody else could have done anything else.”

[bctt tweet=”What fun can you bring to your job? ” username=”John_Livesay”]

You’re summarizing what I will say. I’ll contend everybody thinks at the moment. We always go from 0 to 100 miles an hour in the negative. You get down to the space like, “I’m worthless. I’m just lucky to have this job. I’m going to figure out how long I can keep it before I find my next opportunity because my numbers are crap. I’m not selling anything.” I always want to tell people, “Let’s take a breath and pull back. Let’s acknowledge you’re not where you need to be with your numbers. Let’s say that that’s a real thing. Let’s say, ‘What do you want to do?'”

Quite honestly, you have people take a breath for a moment. You and I believe in breathing too. Breath exercises are super helpful. We take breathing for granted because we do it pretty well. Unless you’re on a ventilator, you need support. You don’t think about it. In your life, you must stop and take a breath. That’s where the imagination comes in because it’s asking yourself questions like, “First of all, what am I doing? Is this where I want to be?”

People are like, “I got bills to pay. In the Midwest, it’s ComEd and Nicor. I have got a mortgage to pay and kids to put through school.” I get all of that. You’re young and ambitious. You’re like, “I’m trying to make a name for myself.” Those are all real things. I want to get out of the reality for a second because you’re doing that 99% of the day. Why don’t you take 1% of your day and start to imagine what it would be like if you had fun doing the job you do? Nothing has to change except the idea of having fun.

That’s where I start my clients like, “What’s fun to you in your job?” I have had every person tell me, “There is no fun at all. There is always some fun,” even if it’s your coworkers. It’s anything like, “I like the coffee service.” If you work for Microsoft, you’ll get a great coffee service or somebody still pushes an ice cream cart. That’s one aspect of it. What kind of fun can you bring to your daily routine?

This isn’t rocket science, but we don’t talk about it in business. As you so eloquently pointed out, once you look at your forecast, start getting the numbers and start realizing how many noes you have gotten in 1 week, 1 month or 2 months, your focus is on the lack. It’s a simple redirection. It’s not a trick. It’s like, “Let’s redirect on what’s fun.”

I’ll give you a story. I remember this was years ago and I was working for a company. The guy that was running the company, he and I had a long-term relationship. I had known him for many years. He had asked me to come on board and help him out in the sales area. We had a lot of success early on and then there was a dip. I started realizing that I was taking on the pressures of always being the closer. I would get the award every year for the best closer. I had the highest win percentage and then it became this thing where I was like, “I had to compete against myself. I’m not doing that anymore.”

 

That is such a common thing with all of the sales organizations that hire me to speak to their sales teams. The number one thing I hear is, “I have had this great year. How am I ever going to top my number?” I have been in their shoes and had that exact experience, so they go, “You get us. We want to hear what you have to say.” You think of, “You do this great movie, The Godfather, or you’re Michael Phelps and you have won all these medals. Now what? How do you keep topping yourself? There’s nothing better than a gold medal. You have got eight of them or more.”

In corporate, they can slice and dice your territory. It’s impossible to beat that number even because they don’t want to have to keep paying those bonuses. It’s a fascinating thing. I want to go back to what you said because it’s so important. I want to underline this for everyone. Instead of looking for, “What is this job doing to be fun for me,” you flip the question to, “What can I bring to this job that will make it fun?” It’s a whole different mindset.

The responsibility is not on the individual to make the company fun but to bring what they believe is fun or what they enjoy to the company because it will only make the company better. You will realize that there is not a match energetically and you will move on with complete consciousness that you did everything you could. You feel good about where you’re at and you take that. You have no idea what opportunities open up when you are in the center of having fun.

It’s like when you were a kid. You’re not worried about the bills and your grades. You’re worried about, “Where am I going to have fun? Who am I going to play with?” It’s the same idea. We got trained out of it. There’s nothing wrong with responsibility and wanting to provide the best possible life for yourself, your family and your friends. The point is I took a day off. We have this little pool in the backyard. It was a beautiful July afternoon. I said, “I’m shutting everything down. I’m going to lay in the pool and meditate.”

I laid on this big raft. I had my headphones on. Of all people, I was listening to Tony Robbins and Tony said something very interesting. He said, “I feel bad for people making over $200,000 a year.” It intrigued me. I thought, “What is he talking about? It’s a lot of money for a lot of people.” He goes, “You feel stuck because there are not a lot of jobs out there where you’re going to get paid out of the shoe $200,000. You can’t explore and imagine.”

That’s where I went back to what I was trained in, which was having fun. They had given me a client called Batteries Plus Bulbs. They are a national chain all over the place. We had told them three times, “We don’t want to work with you.” They were looking for a new marketing partner for database, email and digital. The guy that was running the deal left and they gave it to me as a save. I thought, “This is great. We got nowhere else to go but up because we completely embarrassed ourselves. The sales guy that was working with us left.”

The traditional way of doing it was to get 6 to 7 people together in my organization, have a quick meeting, develop a PowerPoint presentation, get everybody online and go do the pitch. I did none of it. My idea of fun was I created a 5-slide deck and the first 2 questions were, “Why do you want to work with us? What aren’t you getting from your current provider that you think we’re going to offer you?”

That’s where I led with and I told the seven people that were coming with me, who are all smart people., “I’m not going to ask you a question you can’t answer. Don’t raise your hand if you don’t know the answer to something. I won’t call on you. Just trust me.” This flew in the face of everything we did. We had everything always planned. It’s always very surgical and strategic. We had success with it.

I walked into that meeting and the first question I asked was, “Why do you want to work with us? We have turned you down several times. We’re not very friendly to what you want to offer. One of the main things you’re asking for, we don’t offer. That was the reason why we turned you down.” The Chief Marketing Officer stood up. She was a tiny little lady. She looked at me and I thought, “This is going to go one of two ways.” She goes, “Nobody has ever talked to us like this.” I said, “That may be the case.” She said, “I like it. Here’s why we want to work with you.”

[bctt tweet=”Build trust through transparency.” username=”John_Livesay”]

They are selling you instead of you selling them.

She laid out why they wanted to work with us and I said, “Here are the things we can do well. Here are the pieces we can’t do well. We never did that as an organization.” I like pointing out what we can do well and what we don’t do well. This company, Batteries Plus Bulbs, had problems and they were going through vendors every year. When you do marketing, you want to have a partner for five years minimum because it takes a while to build up the relationship.

What you said is gold. It’s this concept that when you ask people a question and are completely transparent about what you do and what you don’t do, most people try to hide that. It’s like going on a date. “Do I need to tell them I snore?” If you are that transparent upfront, “Here’s what we do well and what we don’t do,” your credibility, authenticity and trust are off the charts. “They are showing us the whole thing. They are not trying to pretend they are perfect, have all the answers all the time or can do anything.”

It’s when you say, “No, I don’t do that. That’s not what we’re known for. We would do a horrible job at that.” It’s who this is for and who this is not for, including even in a job interview if you say, “That would not be a good job fit for me. If you asked me to sit in a cube and do numbers all day in an Excel sheet, I would go crazy.” People are so afraid of showing when it does the opposite. It makes you magnetic because if you don’t have trust, as you know in any relationship, you don’t have anything. We have to start with trust. That’s a great way to build trust that most people don’t think of.

Even to echo your point further, I always do a post-analysis with a client or somebody I lost the deal to. I like to get information from both because there’s something that wasn’t a fit. I always wanted to be educated. It’s not about, “We can offer you less money.” I’m like, “Tell me what we did wrong. I’m not going to bother you anymore. You would be helping me in the future if I didn’t bring something to the table that we currently do offer.”

When I gave that pitch to Batteries Plus Bulbs, I said, “We’re not a silver bullet. First of all, there is no such thing, but I’m going, to be honest with you.” That was my lead-in. They said, “We’re only going to do a one-year deal and only want email marketing.” Within a month of talking to them and working with them, their team and my team, we sold the marketing database, email, digital marketing campaigns and creative because they needed all of that with that trust that you’re talking about.

 

I said, “Here is the silver bullet that I do have. These are the four areas we’re excellent in and we have many references you can speak to.” They did their due diligence. In that one-year contract, I said, “That’s not a possibility for us.” After I got and earned their trust, I didn’t sign one-year deals with anybody. Other people in my organization do.

I don’t because I was like, “I need three years of your time in investment. Things are going to go sideways. They always do. If we correctly layer this and have the right people working together, we can make it through three years. You’re going to get a better discount on a three-year plan because I can go to management and save you money.” They ended up doing the three-year deal with all of those additional add-ons that we had. That’s one example of many.

To your point, the trust piece is simply, when you have fun, you let go of the tribal BS that you have brought to the table with everybody whispering in your ear as a salesperson or manager. “You need to sell, do and push this.” You don’t need to do anything. You need to be yourself because they bought from my company and team at the end of all of that experience. I represented them, and I don’t want people to forget that.

If you are not in a state of mind before you get into that meeting where you like and trust yourself, good luck selling that. You may be able to fool some people initially, and I have done it. Trust me. I have been in those places where I was like, “I don’t even know what I’m selling them when I go in there.” You have to like yourself. What I do is more about getting you back to understanding who you are, your values, and what you like having fun with.

All of the little tricks and things I can teach you all day. There are nuggets that all good sales and marketing people have that they are willing to share because it’s exciting to see somebody win. You want people to win, but unless somebody is willing to do the work on the front end, all those tricks and tips aren’t going to amount to much because the magnetic part of your personality is the fact that you like who you are.

At the end of the day, what people are buying is our energy if you zoom out and think about that. An example of that was I was up for a speaking gig. It was between two other speakers and me. I got a call from the agent going, “Congrats. They picked you. They liked your energy.” I thought to myself, “Rarely is that clearly stated.” I did my post after they hired me. I said, “What was it about me?” She goes, “I felt so good talking to you that I felt like you would probably make the room feel that good too through the 400 people.”

If we remember that our money is energy and action, that we’re in the energy business as opposed to the pitching business, that will shift your outcomes big time because you approach that from, “The vibe isn’t right. What am I creating here? Am I tense? Are they tense? Can we make this at all fun? Otherwise, why are we doing it and not trying to force something?”

In one of my quotes, Abraham Maslow, the therapist, said, “The only tool in your toolbox is a hammer you tend to go around looking for nails to hit.” The old way of selling was, “If you want to buy, you hammer.” You and I are out in the world telling people, “There’s a whole other way to do this that’s fun and less pushy. We’ll make you proud to be doing it as opposed to, ‘I’m drained.'”

It’s rewarding. You reward yourself, your customers, clients and prospects however you go about it. Let me share something with you. On my website, MyBlue.org, Neil Bohr was a quantum physicist in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He was talking about energy. Going back to what you talked about, “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made up of things that we cannot regard as real.”

I have that on my website because 99.9% of you, me, the room you’re sitting in and the microphone I’m speaking into is energy. 0.1% of that is mass. You don’t have to be a quantum physicist to get excited about the fact that everything is energy. Even the analogy of if we took out all of the space in between the nuclei and atoms that are in our bodies and then all the physical objects, you could shrink the entire globe, this world, into the size of a marble when you get rid of all the space.

[bctt tweet=”This is a short-lived world, and you better make hay while you can and enjoy it.” username=”John_Livesay”]

You’re very profound when you said magnetic, “The energy you put out is the energy you get back.” That’s true. Not everybody is going to want to buy from you. Get out of that mindset. Get into the mindset of, “Where am I aligning myself in terms of how I feel about myself?” The people that are aligned with themselves will come to you. The people who want and feel your energy come to you too. Through your kindness and grace, you help them.

It’s not your job, but your energy helps them and they are like, “I can do this too.” What I found when I was selling was that not everybody was aligned with the way I was thinking, but all of a sudden, all the other salespeople would ask to partner with me after that deal. The account managers that had accounts started coming to me and said, “We have an account going sideways. Would you come in?”

My senior VP at that time was like, “What do you want to create?” I said, “I want to create a hybrid salesperson. I don’t want to just have to carry the bag. I also want to take on challenging clients and opportunities because I thought that was more fun.” Plus, I’m a low-risk guy. The crappier the account, the more fun you can have because if it goes down, it goes down. If you save it, you look like a hero.

No stand-up comic ever goes and tries a new joke out without saying, “What if nobody laughs? Nobody laughs. It’s not the end of the world.” It’s the same thing with rejection. What a treat to get to know your insights and all your wisdom put to use. Any last thought you want to leave us with? People can find you at MyBlue.org for coaching and other potential ways to work together.

It’s a simple support, an hourly rate and nothing fancy. The one thing that I would like to leave folks with is, you’re more than enough. I hear this little statement, “I’m enough.” It’s like, “No, you’re more than enough. You were born perfect. There are elements in this world that will try and train you out of that thinking. It’s not their fault. Nothing is being done to you. These opportunities are being done for you on your behalf for you to create what it is that you want to create. Take responsibility for your situation, own it and say, ‘I can do more. There’s more out there for me.'” That’s what I want to share with people, a simple message that you have so much more. You are not even aware of all the things that you are going to create. You have to get into the mindset that you are capable. You are totally more than enough in terms of being prepared for that opportunity.

If we have that mindset, we won’t ever have the imposter syndrome. That’s great. It’s not just, “I’m enough for this,” but, “I’m more than enough for anything.” Thank you so much, Christopher. Everybody, go to MyBlue.org to find out more.

Thank you, John.

 

Important Links

• MyBlue.org
• Batteries Plus Bulbs
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: Consulting, entrepreneurship, imagination, mindset, Roadblocks, Trust