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Unlock Tangible Business Results While Sharing Your Message with Angelique Rewers

Episode 116

Angelique Rewers is the CEO of The Corporate Agent and she is “the undisputed champion at helping small businesses land big clients” according to Inc. Magazine.

Having successfully navigated all sides of the corporate buying table for two decades, Angelique and her team have taught thousands of small businesses, including mine, across 72 countries worldwide how to secure 5, 6, and 7-figure corporate contracts. Angelique has been featured by Huffington Post, Forbes, Inc., Lucky, Washington Post, Entrepreneur, CBS, and more.

In this episode, Angelique talks about why people feel compelled to listen to her even when they don’t really care about her message, the bullying Angelique faced both as a child and as an adult that she’s had to overcome, how she’s transformed over the past few years to get to a place where she’s not concerned about what others think of her, the importance of realizing that we always have a choice and control over our actions, why business is going to save the world, the importance of fitting your message into a keyhole in the beginning, the advice she has for those wanting to have a voice of influence, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Angelique Rewers Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

 

Transcript

Hey, Hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  I am so thrilled to have with us today Angelique Rewers.  She is the CEO of The Corporate Agent.  She is “the undisputed champion at helping small businesses land big clients” according to Inc. Magazine.  Having successfully navigated all sides of the corporate buying table for two decades, Angelique and her team have taught thousands of small businesses, including me, across 72 countries worldwide how to secure 5-, 6- and 7- figure corporate contracts.  Angelique has been featured by Huffington Post, Forbes, Inc., Lucky, Washington Post, Entrepreneur, CBS, and more.

Andrea:  Angelique, it is so fun to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Angelique Rewers:  It’s fun to be here.  I know so much about the amazing work that you do in the world, Andrea, and so, it’s genuinely an honor.

Andrea:  Well, let me just start by setting it up that I am one of your clients and the reason that is the case is because when I was at a speaking conference, you happened to be there.  I had no idea who you were.  I didn’t really have any idea of what was going on in the corporate space for speaking.  But when I saw you up on stage, I saw somebody that was really powerful, confident, ambitious, and I thought, “I want to hear what she has to say.”  So, when you had a breakout session, I went to your breakout session.  No interest in your topic whatsoever.  It was you that I was drawn to.  And I think that that is really significant for our listeners today because I do think that it is like people sort of draw people to themselves.

Angelique Rewers:  Yeah.

Andrea:  What is your take on that?

Angelique Rewers:  You know, we actually hear that all the time. People, at conferences, will say “I had no interest in working with corporate clients.  I didn’t think that that was something that I wanted to do.  But you maybe had three minutes, Angelique, on the main stage before your session, or you were on a panel before your session and I was going to skip your session and go check email back in my room.  But after hearing a few minutes, I had a sit in on your session.”

And so I think there are two lessons in that.  I think the first; I mean, this podcast is about the voice of influence. If you want to influence others, you need to have conviction and energy in your message.  It’s electric.  It’s magnetic.  And so people, all the time, they say that they want to hear what I have to say, even if they don’t really give a crap about my topic, because, “You believe in it so much, and there’s just something about it that is inspiring, and I want to be a part of it.”

So, I think if you’re looking to gain influence in the world, you need to not be a wet dishrag.  You need to have conviction.  You need to have energy.  You need to care.  There needs to be a fire in your eyes.  When people look in your eyes, they need to see that something is going on in there because then they want to be a part of it.  Even if they don’t want to be a part of it, they just want to be around you.  That’s number one.

The second lesson for me that’s in it is that when you are out, whether you’re on a podcast or you are speaking in an event or you’re writing articles, if what you’re teaching, Andrea, has integrity and truth in it, it can be infinitely applicable to other fields and industries.  And so people will come to our session, even if they don’t necessarily want to work with corporate, but they’re like “Angelique, the stuff you’re teaching, I can use it in my business anyway because it makes sense.”

There is a degree of, “Oh my gosh, what this woman is saying is legitimate and it is like a breath of fresh air.  So even though I’m not going to sell to corporate, I’m still gonna use what she’s saying in whatever marketing field I’m in.” So, I think if you can make your strategies universal in some ways and then have that fire in you when you’re communicating it, you’re going to gain a lot more influence in your message.

Andrea:  All right.  So where did that come from for you?  What is the fire?  What do you really care about?

Angelique Rewers:  Yeah, people actually ask me this all the time, and in fact, you and I have both been on podcasts on Mindset and you’ve had Mindset guests on and so this comes up a lot.  I think that it’s twofold for me.  I do think that people are born with a degree of fire in their belly.  So, you know, I was kind of a spitfire at five years, four years old, or three years old.  You know, I’ve been a spitfire since I landed on this earth.

Andrea:  I could totally believe all this.

Angelique Rewers:  So, in kindergarten there was a school play.  Now this was when you could still call them Christmas plays.  They didn’t have to be sort of like generic, so it was the Christmas play.  And so they were having these different parts, and they wanted a few kids from each of the grades.  And I went up to my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Persigan-Risick, and I said, “I want to be the narrator.”  And she looked at me and she said, “But Angel, you don’t know how to read.”  And I said, “Well, I’ll just learn tonight.”  And she was just like, “Uhm.”  And so, I’m like, “I want to be the narrator.”

And so she gave me the script for the entire school play and I took it home.  And the next morning I came in, and I went to the audition, and I knew how to read the whole damn thing, and I got the part of narrator at five years old of my school play.  And I thought I was the shit narrating the school play.  Like, I even remember my outfit down to my red velvet skirt, you know. And so there is a part of it that I think you’re born with.  But the other part of it comes from finding something that you care about that isn’t manufactured, that you genuinely care about it.  And I think for me it’s a confluence of caring about business owners.

I care about people in that I don’t like to see people holding back.  I pushed people really to the edge, edge, edge of even beyond their comfort zone because we have one life, so we know.  The clock is ticking.  It’s almost to me like a football match or something where it’s a game, and the clock is ticking, and it’s like, “Well, you better leave it on the field because that’s it.”

So, I care about just getting people out there and doing something with their life. And the place that I’ve chosen as my inflection point of that is by taking these people who are woke and pushing them kind of to really get out of their comfort zone, go into companies, change companies from the inside out because companies change the world.  Not government, not nonprofits, really business is the language of this planet.

So, if I can sort of take this conscious, woke group of people, get them inside these companies, we can really make a difference in this world.  And it’s the place that I think my gifts best serve.  And that’s I guess the last piece of it.  It should be something you care about, but your gifts should align with it.  So it’s somewhere you can really make a difference.  And for me, I speak the language of sales.  I speak the language of marketing, so it’s where I think I can make the biggest difference.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Okay, I’m going to come back to why you think that companies change the world.  But first, let’s stick with the girl that, you know, just learned how to read overnight or memorized or whatever you did to make it happen.  As somebody with that kind of ambition that you always had, that’s like a really bright fire.  Has it ever been dimmed? I mean, have you ever gone through a point where “Gosh, it was smothered” or you know, you felt like you couldn’t be that person?

Angelique Rewers:  Oh, yeah.

Andrea:  Okay.

Angelique Rewers:  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.  I mean, I’m in middle school, so that was kind of who I was all the way up until the seventh grade.  And I know we all kind of have the seventh-grade story.  You know, for me in the seventh grade, things were kind of tough at home.  My mom and I were living with my grandparents. My mom was trying to save up to be able to buy a home, and so we were living in this really tiny little house.  I was sharing a bedroom with my mom.  You know, here I am at twelve, I guess, twelve or thirteen, and I’m sharing a bedroom with my mom.  Can you imagine like, just remember your twelve-year-old self.  We have one bathroom in the house.  I mean this is a teeny, teeny, tiny little house.

And I went to a very, very rough middle school, and I was there because, ironically, they had the program for the gifted and talented kids in this particular school, which was one of like the roughest middle schools that there were in the area.  So, but I had to go there to be part of the gifted and talented program.  So, it was sort of a trade-off.  At any rate, the other girls really did not like that bright fire so much.  As the expression goes, the tallest nail gets the hammer, and so they actually formed a club called Kids against Angelique Rewers, KAAR.

They had a logo. They had buttons. They had what’s called a slambook, which is where they write horrible things about you.  They had meetings.  They had a schedule of who would bully me in between each and every class because we would change periods, you know, from science to math. And they would knock me down, they would punch me, they would push me in the lockers, they’d tear up my homework, they would threaten me.  At one point, the worst was when I was dragged by my hair in the hallway.  I mean, really, really brutal stuff.

And so this went on and on and on and on, and it was really almost a two year kind of situation.  It finally came to an end when I finally spoke up for myself, but I was embarrassed to go to the teachers.  I was embarrassed to go to the guidance counselors.  I hid it from my family.  It finally got addressed, but, boy, it stayed with me for a really long time.  And it probably took until… it was really in 2009 that I had an adult bullying experience, which by the way, I think adults today are almost worse than middle schoolers.

We have just gotten ourselves into a situation in this world where we just tolerate so much bullying online that it’s just unbelievable.  So, anyways, so I had an adult bullying experience, and then I realized I had come full circle.  And so in 2010, I decided to kind of step back into the light.  So that means that from thirteen until twenty-seven, so fourteen years, I sort of hid, and then you know, around twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I started to come back out again.  And then it’s been every year since then, it’s been another step into the light, another step into the light.  And in the last couple of years, I really did kind of go through a transformation of “The hell with it, here I am, World.”  So, but yeah, it really lasts a long time, Andrea.

Andrea:  You know, I have seen that transformation in you in the last couple of years because that’s how long I’ve been around you and your programs.  And I was wondering if you would want to tell us a little bit about that.  It seems like there’s been this fire that’s been lit under you, that’s even greater and you were already doing so much.  You already had such big vision and then something happened or some sort of transformation.  Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Angelique Rewers:  Yeah, I think it was definitely the sort of perfect storm of a few things coming together.  You know, one is age, right?  So, I’m in my forties now and so you become, I think, just increasingly aware of the speed of time as you get older and you’re watching your kids grow up so fast before your eyes.  My twins now are ten.  I’m like, “How did this happen?”  So there’s definitely the age-time thing.  Another piece of it is a couple of years ago, I did do some work, which I recommend that people do, on their shadow side from a mindset perspective.  And I did some shadow side work and that was really liberating to just accept all of who you are.

When you really get to the point that you genuinely accept 100 percent of who you are and you connect in with spirit and really everything you do is between you and spirit, whether you want to call it source, God, you know, universe, whatever works for you.  When you accept all of yourself, and then you connect into your mission and your purpose, if you believe in that.  You know, for me, I do, you’d go “Well, it really doesn’t matter what other humans think about me so much.  This is really between me, my soul and God and you know, what I’m doing on that front.”  And then the other piece of it is I started to put myself in rooms with people like Richard Branson.

So, I’ve been part of the Virgin Unite efforts.  I went to South Africa with Virgin Unite.  I went to Sir Richard Branson’s wildlife reserve in South Africa and spent four days with him, you know, on game drives. And then went to Necker Island and heard from people all around the world who are changing the world.  We’re not often allowed to mention who was there, but these are world leaders who’ve brought wars to an end.  I mean, people literally who’ve brought wars to an end.

And so you put yourself in rooms like that, and you just realize that there’s no difference per se between, I mean, sure everybody has a different talent or a different IQ and et cetera, but at the end of the day, we’re all the same.  We all have the same immense, infinite potential. I think that those things all come together and you just, you know, you make a decision of “Am I gonna let the genie out of the bottle or am I not?”  And I think that the saddest thing is how many people go to their grave really never even coming close to their potential.

Andrea:  Hmm.  What do you suppose is that factor that helped you to see that you really wanted, first of all, that there was a genie in the bottle and then second of all, that you were going to release it?

Angelique Rewers:  I mean, I have to say, I’m very fortunate because even though I grew up in a very low-income household in a blue-collar town, where most people don’t go anywhere, I had the most loving family, I really did.  And my great grandmother, my grandmother and my mother, very matriarchal family and I’m an only child and an only grandchild.  And so there was definitely a lot of support for me as a kid to really go for it.  My grandmother always said, “Go, go do it.  Whatever you want to do, go.”  You know, that was always my word, “Go.”  And she also really understood some universal laws, even though she didn’t know that they were universal laws.

So, she would say things to me like, “Be very careful what you wish for because in this family we create it overnight.”  And so she really understood the power of manifesting and how when we got really clear as women in our family, things would happen.  So, I had some of that going on.  And I think the other thing, Andrea, is just I think everybody has the ability to make the choice.  I mean, I think anybody listening to your podcast right now can go look in the mirror and say, “Am I happy with what I’ve accomplished in my life?  Where am I holding back and do I want more?”  And that’s really it.  I mean, at the end of the day, you just have to kind of go literally have a conversation with yourself and choose.

Andrea:  It seems to me that it’s a choice that almost has to be made more than once.  Maybe there’s like this really big moment where you choose, but maybe there are successions of choices too.  Do you see that for yourself?

Angelique Rewers:  Yeah, well, I think what it is, I think, one, there’s the choice.  I think, one, there’s a choice of how you just want to show up in life in general.  Like, there’s that moment that you make that choice in your life of “I’m going to show up a certain way in life.”  But then there are daily choices that we have to make as to whether or not, you know, we’re really going to do it.  So, I think there is that sort of like universal undercurrent that’s going on in our life, but then everyday we’re given a choice.

And just in the last week, I’ve had probably four of those choices in just the last week.  So, I was in Prague, I was speaking at an international conference.  It was a conference that was really five years in the making for us to land one of those speaking opportunities because it’s that competitive to get there.  So, we kept applying and kept applying and kept applying.

And so this year it was in Prague.  I was thrilled to go and as I was rushing over to the conference center for my session, I wanted to get there for like an hour before, but I was walking over and I could feel like natural nerves.  Anytime we speak, we all get, you know, our adrenaline kind of goes… when we are in a heightened state of stress though, we can’t do our best work, you know.

So, I was walking over, and I stopped and I went to the bridge, which overlooked, you know, downtown Prague and there’s those historic buildings, that beautiful scenery.  And I just took 10 minutes to get present and ask myself what I wanted my session to be like and how I want it to show up in that session.  And I decided I was going to leave it all on the stage, if you will.  That this was going to be a session where I could truly enjoy how far I’ve come, being in Prague, being at this conference. And I was just going to really savor the moment.

And so I had that choice in that moment.  I had another choice when I was at the airport and by 30 flipping seconds…  I mean, I had been traveling for 24 straight hours, it was a nightmare to get back.  And I was in New York City.  I hadn’t had any sleep the night before.  My flight was supposed to leave for San Diego because I was supposed to speak at another conference in San Diego, and by 30 seconds I missed being able to check-in for my flight and checked a bag.  And in that moment, I said to the gate agent, “You know what, just give me a ticket to go home. I’m done.  I’m so tired,  I haven’t slept in 24 hours.  I’m done.”

And so she started looking for a flight for me to come home and then it was like, she found something.  I said, “You know what, that’s not the right choice.  Find me another flight.  It won’t be direct, but you know, find me another first-class seat.  I don’t care what cities you have to put me through.  Get me to San Diego.”  But there was a moment of, “I just want to fucking go home because I’ve been traveling for 24 hours.  I’m dirty. I’m tired.  I’m hungry.  I have a migraine.  I just want to go home.”  And then I was like, “No, I don’t.  I want to go to San Diego and a little bit of sleep will fix this.  And that’s where I’m supposed to be with AT&T and Comcast presenting at this conference with veterans.”

So, we’re presented with these choices all the time every day.  And we’re human, we’re going to have lousy days.  So, you just have to constantly ask yourself, you know, what are you choosing.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Why is business going to change the world?

Angelique Rewers:   Well, we’ve seen it ever since the printing press, right? We actually saw it with the Catholic Church and monks who recreated the Bible, which, you know, church really was kind of like the first business, I mean, in terms of organization and organizational structure and, you know, them creating copies upon copies upon copies.  And we saw it with the printing press.  We saw it with Ford in creating the automobile and how the automobile completely changed our societies, and people moved out of certain areas, and we created suburbs because of that.

We’ve seen it with the internet.  We’ve seen it with mobile communication.  We’re about to see it again with AI and with autonomous vehicles and frankly, even flying vehicles, we’re starting to see it with drones.  You know, business continues to innovate.  Those innovations, despite some of the most repressed societies, you know, really the only country that has completely kept out technology successfully really is North Korea.  I mean, you know, they’ve done the best job of kind of keeping business out, keeping technology out.

But beyond that, technology and innovation and developments constantly cross, you know, any imaginary border we draw on a map. And it creates connectivity, and it creates a shared experience that just like the written word created shared experience.  The automobile created shared experience.  The internet created shared experience.  Technologies like this are changing the world. So, business creates innovations and innovations change society.

We are in a situation right now where we look at the ethical dilemmas that Twitter and Facebook are facing.  We look at the ethical dilemmas that companies like we work are facing.  Even, you know, companies in California who are facing these awful fires and how are they going to respond to that?  We need to get plastics out of the world.  And so how are companies going to respond to that?  So, you know, really companies are what make the world go round.

Every single thing that impacts our daily life, there’s a company behind it, unless we’re in some of the most remote parts of the world.  So, the more we can shift the thought process and the scarcity mindset that drives so many of these poor decisions that companies make, and in addition to that, most people are employed by companies. And so the way that people feel every day, the World Health Organization declared this year that burnout is a global epidemic.  So the world is drowning in burnout, that affects all of us.

So, we have to really make some changes.  And the best way to do that is to take people who are really consciously aware and help guide this.  And so our mission at The Corporate Agent is to really show people how to do that.  But the only way to do it is to actually be able to sell your services, like you have to be able to get into these companies.  You can have the best mission in the world.  You can have the biggest heart and the most brilliant idea.  But if you don’t know how to get to decision makers and get influenced with them and get them to listen to you and buy your products and your services, then you can’t change diddly-squat.

Andrea:  Exactly. Totally.  I think that that is so important, especially, I know that for a long time I felt like I had a message, and then it became evident that I was going to need a way to fund the message.  And that’s what started having me go down the path of business.  And actually, honestly what really has been fascinating for me is seeing myself really be able to start to stretch into other areas of myself that I didn’t know I could do, you know, like to be the CEO of a company, to actually build a business, to have people that are on my team and working with me and coalescing underneath of a mission and a vision and making sure that, you know, all those things, I’m like, “Whoa, wait a second, this stuff is really fun.  This is good.”

Angelique Rewers:  It is fun. It is really fun.  And you know, when we build businesses and we build them from the place that you’re building them, you know, that’s also an impact on the world.  I think one of the things that’s been amazing about you, Andrea, is that you have a message, and then you realize that you have to find a keyhole for your message, and you’ve been really willing to find that keyhole.  You know, there are so many people out there who have a message, but they’re not willing to find a way for that message to fit into the market so that the message can have an impact.

If you’re just shouting out to the world and nobody’s receiving that message, what good is it?  And so you have to shape your key to fit a keyhole and then that unlocks opportunity.  And it’s this strange paradox because people have a big message and one of the things we do at The Corporate Agent, as you know, is we help them take that big message and actually bring it into just one key that they can unlock a door.  Because if you just have this, you know, huge message that nobody knows what to do with, then what good is that?

And you’ve been such an amazing, you know, you really have taken that and run with it.  And as a result, companies are benefiting from your message right now.   People are benefiting from this podcast that you do and you haven’t lost your message. Even though you’ve brought it into a tangible way for companies to implement, you’re still focused on this voice of influence.  And so sometimes when you first, you know, people hear us talk about it, you can even talk to this.  Like sometimes it’s like, “Wait, you want my message to fit into this little box,” but only for a short time, only to get you momentum and then you can let the genie back out of the bottle.

Andrea:  I think that’s really important.  And one of the things that I believe in is that the mission or the purpose that one has is generally something that’s beneath the surface.  So, it’s a concept. Like for me, it’s connecting people’s expertise with the need in the world, “Okay, you could do a lot of different stuff with that.”  And so that frees me up to be able to say “yes” when you tell me to go in a certain direction and say, “Okay, I will try that because I can trust your expertise, and yet still have it fit within the paradigm of my purpose as I see it.”  So, I think that’s really important for your clients because it can easily feel like the purpose has to be a specific thing or a specific teaching, that sort of thing.  Do you see that?

Angelique Rewers:  Yeah, I do.  And I think people are always afraid of sort of losing their purpose when they start making it tangible in the world.  And the opposite is true.  It’s like when you make your concept of that idea that you’re talking about like, you know, that concept that you have, when you start making it tangible that people can do something with it… it just evolves into something beautiful.  But too many people, we call it sometimes loving the baby.  Like, they just love the baby so much about this idea that they have, but they don’t know how to then bring that out into the world in a way that actually has an impact, or that people know what to do with it.

We can all be Marianne Williamson, you know what I mean?  Most people aren’t just going to be a philosopher, and I think that’s kind of the danger when people have a message, they can fall into the trap of just being a philosopher versus understanding how to actually effect change in the world.

Andrea:  Okay, so I had a question for you that, I don’t want to forget to ask this, because it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, ties into what we’re headed towards.  When one sort of steps into the fullness of who they are… okay, that’s the way I put it, the way you put it, what was that… you know letting the light or the genie out of the bottle, when one does that, I think that it can feel like all of a sudden, even in narrowing down your message, it can feel like you’re cutting things out.  You can feel like you’re cutting people out.

Angelique Rewers:  Yeah.

Andrea:   And that can be really hard for somebody that’s particularly sensitive and empathetic.  Has it felt like that to you ever, and I mean, does it ever feel lonely?

Angelique Rewers:  Well, I think those are probably two different questions.  So I’ll take them, you know, maybe one at a time.  The first is that when you’re clarifying your message, assuming you want to be a business owner, you want to be an entrepreneur or you’re working in a company that, you know, trying to make headway somewhere. You can certainly try to empty the ocean with a soup spoon but you’re not going to get very far.  So, I’m just very pragmatic about the whole thing.

If you look at anybody who’s had a world changing mission, they didn’t start with a world changing mission.  Sir Richard Branson is great example.  You know, he just decided in the beginning just to change the record industry, right?  That’s all he wanted to do was change the record label industry with Virgin Records. And then he was like, you know what, he sold that so he could change the airline industry all because he had a bad day not being able to get a flight somewhere.  And so that’s where he started.  And now he’s at a point that he can pick up a phone and talk to almost any world leader.  He did just pick one inflection point.

Oprah started on the radio in Baltimore where I grew up.  She was on the local news WJZ-13.  You know, I remember watching her on like 5 o’clock news.  That’s where she started.  So, you know, I think that we all see these sort of finished products today of these people who are just out there, just so huge, big followings and people aren’t willing to realize that people judge us based on what we’ve accomplished, not on what we dreamed up in our head.

And so you have to have to do stuff, you have to actually make something happen and then you make something else happen and then make something else happen.  I’m not very empathetic around this idea of, “Well, I don’t want to cut anybody yet.”  I’m like, “Well, do you want your mission out there or not?”  Because it’s like, “Do you want to be right about this or do you want to be rich?”  And rich in impact, not necessarily rich in money, but do you want to be right or rich?  And most people want to be rich with impact, rich with significance, rich with, you know, really having a legacy.

So to do that, you’d have to just be practical about it.  It’s like, “Well, get over it,” you know, like, this is what it takes.  This is how it works for almost everybody.  And then in terms of does it ever feel lonely?  I mean, I personally don’t ever feel that my business is lonely or that, you know, I do think that one of the things that people don’t understand about having a successful business, and I can only imagine as you get more and more successful, like I can only imagine… I mean, I’ve spent time with Richard Branson.  I’ve seen the people that he puts around him.  He certainly doesn’t ever seem lonely.

I think the man probably would love to absolutely have maybe a little bit more alone time than he does.  But you know, even he’s part of the Elders and if you don’t know about the Elders, you should look that up.  It’s an amazing thing that he put together with some just amazing people on this earth, people like Desmond Tutu and others.  But I don’t find it lonely, Andrea, because number one, I have an amazing family.  I just have just the most amazing, supportive husband who is my high school sweetheart. We’ve been together more years than we’ve been alive, if that makes sense.

So, you know, over twenty-seven years we’ve been together now.  I have two amazing twin boys who are ten.  I have a really supportive mom.  I have close friends, and I have the most, and I really do believe this, like I have the most amazing community of clients that I think any person out there who’s in the small business space, who has a community of small business owners that they serve, without question.  I think I have the most loving, high integrity, heart-centered… I don’t want to use the word loyal but like just the love in our community, the respect in our community.

I think if, there was some tragedy that happened and you know, I lost my home or whatever, I would have hundreds of clients who would be like, “Angelique, come stay on my sofa.”  Like, “The door is open,” and I think because they feel the love that we pour into them and how transparent we are with them.  And so there’s just like, “I don’t feel lonely at all.”  I mean, Andrea, if I felt like I didn’t have somebody to call, you know, I could pick up the phone and you would talk to me. I just feel just constantly, just a bubble of love around me all the time, even if I’m having a bad day.  I just have this incredible vortex of love.

Andrea:  I can attest to that.  I put something in our Facebook group this week.  Every once in a while I feel the need to reach out and say, “Oh, hey, does anybody else ever feel like this?”  And I had maybe four people reach out to say, “Do you want to talk?”  People that really know what they’re talking about and so it’s absolutely true.  I think though, at some point, did you ever have to recognize that you are going to be spending more time with this kind of person than people that you were with?

Angelique Rewers:  Oh yeah.  Yeah.

Andrea:  That’s a hard thing for people to kind of move through, I think.

Angelique Rewers:  Yeah, you know, I think it is for some people, I’m kind of a loner.  I’m an only child and I think that probably contributes to it. And there were no cousins.  You know, my mom was an only child, so I was an only child.  There weren’t a lot of others around.  And I’ve always been kind of a loner in a way, even though I always have like these amazing people around me.  So, I’m also a very independent person.  I think probably two of my greatest values are independence and intelligence.  Like those are two things I value greatly.  So for me, I empathize with those who feel that way.  I personally didn’t experience it, because I’m actually an introvert, I think.

So, I can imagine that for some folks when they start to change their life, there are people in your life, you really have to, you either distance yourself from where you are or sometimes it’s not even like this conscious uncoupling.  It’s just you don’t have as much in common with them anymore.  And that’s just a natural part of transition.  I mean, we do that our whole life, though.  You know, as we grew up, you know, as soon as we get to high school and we look back and the kids we were friends with when we were in elementary school, they’re in the same school, but we don’t talk to them anymore.  You know, we change and we evolve.

I think it’s a good thing and I think, as we get older, we get to make decisions about people who are toxic or who are sort of energy vampires and we have to make decisions about that.  It can actually be very freeing, like, “Oh my gosh, this is great.  I get a choice in this.  I don’t have to spend so much time with this person who’s really draining and doesn’t respect, you know, my choices.”   So, I think it can actually be really empowering if you choose.  Let me say this and then you can ask me another question, but I think that people forget that we have a choice, the emotions that we assign to something that’s happening in our life.

So we can assign that it feels bad to let go of a relationship or we can assign that it feels good and empowering and you know, exhilarating to let go of a relationship.  We’re constantly making those choices.  We think that we’re just a victim of emotion and that’s not the case.  We actually can make choices about what we’re feeling.

Andrea:  Hmm.  And I think when people have somebody like you to look to who say, “You’re gonna survive, it’s okay.  Keep moving.  This is sort of the light that you’re moving towards.”  I think it’s easier for people to be able to do that.

Angelique Rewers: Yeah, it is.  Well, and you know, it’s interesting that you use the word survive because I think that there’s a moment where people who are in business, there’s actually a shift that happens in entrepreneurial maturity where what feels like a survival energy gets replaced by a “Isn’t this journey amazing?”  Like, “Isn’t this fascinating what’s happening right now?”  And there’s a moment where there’s, sort of, instead of feeling like “I have to survive this,” there’s a new wave that washes over you of, “Oh, I don’t actually have to attach a survival energy to this.  I can actually choose that this is exhilarating; strap on my seatbelt, this roller coaster is fun!”

And you’ve seen that picture that I actually show of me on the roller coaster, the ten different times, and how I was on that roller coaster and I was screaming bloody murder and I was having this miserable experience.  And then I got off and I saw that picture, and I saw everybody else on the same exact roller coaster having a good time.  And I realized in that moment that I decided that I had to survive that roller coaster with my kids.  Everyone else chose to strap in and laugh their way through the roller coaster.  It was the exact same roller coaster, but I was in survival mode and everyone else was in this sort of exhilarated, “Oh my gosh, the wind is whipping through my hair” mode.

And so really what I would say to people, Andrea, so, I do encourage people that “You are going to make it through,” but more importantly what I want them to hear is that, “Choose it to be a different experience.”  You know, choose it not to be survival.  Choose it to be like, “I signed up to be an entrepreneur, and I am doing it, and this is amazing.  And anybody else would be so scared about this and I am badass, and I’m going to just do it.”  And, like, choose that experience.  And we get to choose that every day.  That goes back to what we started with, which is, you know, it’s constantly that choice of the life experience that we’re going to have.  And what I want more than anything I think is for people to be conscious of what they’re choosing.

Andrea:  Hmm.  I love that.  I love it so much.  I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I think it’s a hard choice for me personally, I am more empathetic.  I do struggle with all these things a little bit more maybe, but I have found the same thing to be true.  Okay, so for the listener, you need to know that Angelique, as much as we talked about mindset and experience and influence and that sort of thing, Angelique is really truly an expert in influencing when it comes to sales conversations and business ownership as a small business owner and all those things.

So, Angelique, I know that you have a conference coming up.  Every once in a while you do webinars.  And if anybody really wants to hear your expertise and see that in play and your strategic mindset play, that is a really great place to see that happen.  Can you tell us a little bit about what’s coming up?

Angelique Rewers:  Yeah, absolutely.  So, our website is thecorporateagent.com and as Andrea said, you know, we’ve been talking in this podcast today about the idea that you can have a big mission and a big message, but there has to be a way that you make it tangible and bring it into the world.  And the way that we bring it into the world is by teaching small business owners how to win big clients.  And sometimes those are the really big brands like Starbucks, Facebook, GE, Delta, and Bank of America and all of those.  And sometimes it’s colleges and universities, or government agencies, or mid-market companies, or even a big small enterprise in your backyard.

And so we teach small business owners how to get in front of those organizations, where to start, what to deliver, and how to close those sales, and how to keep those clients for the long term so that they keep buying from you.  So that’s really the tangible way that I bring my message into the world.  And so we do, we have some great trainings coming up in early December.  We’re going to be doing some complimentary trainings via Zoom online.  So, if you go to our website, thecorporateagent.com, if you download one of our resources on there, there some free swipe copy and things like that, then you’ll get on our list and you’ll know about it.

The other thing you need to know about is once a year we do a conference called the Real Deal.  It’s three days of us teaching business owners really how to be empowered in their marketing and their sales in the B2B space.  If they’re marketing to those B2B clients, those corporate clients.  It’s an unbelievable three days, it’s just so full of energy.  People leave walking on air because it’s a combination of just so much content.  They’re always just like, “This is incredible, this doesn’t feel like a conference; this is like a master’s degree in three days.”  But also it’s fun, it’s on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, and the community is unbelievable, and people just feel like “Where is this community been my whole entrepreneurial life?”

So, the event is called the Real Deal and the website is realdealevent.com.  You can also get to it through thecorporateagent.com; it says at the top of the page Real Deal. We would love to see you there.  People have literally come into that event thinking that they were going to go back and get a job because it just got too hard for them trying to figure out how to make their business work.  And they have walked out of there three days later already winning new clients because they knew what they were doing and they were sending emails and getting their business going again.

So it has literally saved people.  One person, and I hope to interview him soon, came to me and said, “Angelique, you literally saved my life because I was about to go get a job and I knew that if I got a job…” and he wasn’t being facetious, he said “It was going to kill me.  I would have had a heart attack.  I was going to have to be on antidepressants.  It literally was like going to just ruin my body because that’s how badly I didn’t want to do it.  I was getting so overwhelmed with depression, stress and you taught me how to fix it in three days.”

So it’s an amazing event, so if you do sell to corporate clients and you’re tired of trying to figure out these content strategies that were never designed for corporate clients to begin with, come spend three days with us and it’ll change your life.  It’ll be the best three days you’ve ever spent at a business conference.

Andrea:  I would agree with that.  We went to the Real Deal in 2018 and it was electric.  It really was.  There was, like you said, so much content, but then at the same time being around the people, meeting people and finding out what they’re doing.  And so if you are in the space, it’s where you need to be.  No doubt about it.

Angelique Rewers:  Well, thank you for that.  It’s so much fun too, it’s really great.  And this year, we’re on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, literally on the beach.  So, in June in Fort Lauderdale, it’s absolutely beautiful, and I’m all about energy and environment.  Like I have to be in beautiful space, like I’m just so impacted by that.  So for us to just find a venue that was so bright and airy, overlooking the ocean, which just felt really good and expansive and, you know, we use the ocean as a metaphor all the time because there is such an ocean of opportunity for people out there.  So it just felt very much in alignment.

Andrea:  Angelique, what tip or a piece of advice would you like to leave with the listener about, you know, the listener who wants to have a voice of influence?

Angelique Rewers:  Say yes, say yes.  People say “no” way too often and I know we’re told to say “no” to, you know… and you should say, you know, we all have to set boundaries.  You know, don’t take on yet another volunteer project at the school when you’re the only person volunteering for the third grade.  But say “yes” to your dream.  Say “yes” to your purpose.  Say “yes” to the experiences that are aligned with your vision.  Don’t say “I’m not ready for that yet.”  Take that out of your vocabulary.  Never again say, “I’m not ready.”  That’s ridiculous.  You were literally born ready.

So just say “yes” to things that are aligned with your vision.  At the end of the day, that’s the secret of people who are successful.  They say “no” to the stuff that is not in alignment and they say “yes” to all the things that are in alignment.  And they don’t give themselves these interdependencies, or “I’m not ready” crap and they don’t say, “Well, I can’t do that because…”  They say, “How can I make this work?”  And they say, “Yes,” that’s what they do.  And so that would really be, you know, my final words of advice, start saying “yes” to your vision and show up every day saying, “yes.”

Andrea:  Hmm.  Let that genie out of the bottle.

Angelique Rewers:  Let that genie out of the bottle.

Andrea:  I love it.  Thank you so much for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.  Thank you for your impact on my life, on my business.  I’m truly grateful!

Angelique Rewers: Thank you!

Posted on

Creating Emotional Connections with Your Brand with Kerri Konik

Episode 110

Kerri Konik is a leading expert, consultant, and speaker on how to catalyze the emotional bonds between customers, brands, and companies to increase revenue, value retention, and advocacy. Kerri has launched and managed six businesses and is currently the CEO of Inspire Fire, a woman-owned brand marketing advisory firm. She is also the CEO of Equality Communications Group. In this episode, Kerri discusses why she chose her field, the importance of understanding the emotional driver of your customer and what emotions you want them to experience when they use your product or service, the four experience stages she helps her clients create a roadmap for, the value of bringing your potential customers to a state of possibility, the most powerful question she asks her clients, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Kerri Konik Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me Kerri Konik who is a leading expert in maximizing the ROI of emotional connection and customer experiences.  I’m super excited to talk to Kerri today.  She is a consultant and speaker on how to catalyze the emotional bonds between customers, brands, and companies to increase revenue, value retention, and advocacy.  Kerri has launched and managed six businesses and is currently the CEO of Inspire Fire, a woman-owned brand marketing advisory firm as well as the CEO of Equality Communications Group.

Andrea:  Kerri, it is great to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Kerri Konik:  Hello, hello.  Thank you so much.  It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Andrea:  All right.  I love emotional connection.  Love this idea.  Why does this topic of emotional connection?  Why did you choose this topic?  How did you get started here?

Kerri Konik:  Uhh, well, I started working with brands and products, consumer products, and groups back when I was in New York, and I worked with the New York Times and I worked with Campbell Soup and services as well as products.  The most valuable component beyond having an item of value, an item of quality is how people feel about it, which became branding, right?  What is the brand relationship between your customer and your product or your service? And yeah, it does a thing, you know; let’s say you bought a shoe polisher.  Yes, a polisher or shoes.  It’s a quality product.  It does what it’s supposed to do, but the relationship actually lives in how they feel about what you enable them to be able to do because of what you did, if that makes sense. So, I start to notice of the most important piece to a brand or a brand’s growth, and this is true for startup brand or a very small solopreneur type brand is the customer connection.  And that connection is an emotional connection.  Like after it’s all said and done, how did they feel now?  Are they like totally in love with that experience?  Do they refer you?  You know the quote by Maya Angelou, “People won’t remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.”

Andrea:  Absolutely.

Kerri Konik:  Yeah, so it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I got the shoe polish and it was great in it polished my shoes.  But what it did was it enabled me to look awesome on that stage and I felt like one million bucks.  So what it did was it raised my courage and my confidence so I could go full out.”  So that’s an emotional _____ what we call the emotional solution you really provide.

Andrea:  I love that.   It seems like it is not the easiest thing to achieve though.  How do you help or what do you suggest or how do you approach this whole idea when somebody calls you and says, “Kerri, we need help connecting with our customers so that they actually feel like whatever we want them to feel like.”  Or do they even know what they want them to feel like when they contact you?

Kerri Konik:  Usually not.  That’s a great, great question.  And actually it’s really, really easy to unpack and get at it once you know what you’re looking for.  Like if you’re going fishing and you know exactly what fish you’re looking for and how they like to swim and if you know the behavior of the fish. So, what happens when we do get those phone calls where they know that their brand or the experience was transactional and one thing, you know, they bought it and they were satisfied.  It was like, “Yeah, that’s great.”  “Yeah, it was fine.  Thanks.”  But there’s no emotional connection like, “Oh my God, I have to tell my friend Andrea about this.”  There’s no like emotional experience.  

So, one thing I say is there’s always an emotional transaction before there’s a commercial transaction. So, what we do is we _____ with the brand and we get at the core of the brand identity.  And there’s four components to that, so we help them look at in what problem do you solve to your product, to your service, and who’s your audience.  Who do you solve it for, and that’s the most important piece.  And then why do you do what you do and that’s more for the business owner or the brand purpose.  And then we look at the why, which is why do you do that, but we look at the _____ behind it and that really helps fuel the brand. But we look at the emotional solutions like, so what’s possible?  And I just demo that a little bit with you, Andrea, with the shoe shine.  It’s like, “Yeah, I bought shoe polish.”  There’s nothing very emotionally connected about that, right?  It’s transactional.  It’s like “My shoes are scruffy.  I wanna look good on stage.  I have to buy this, you know, $6 item.  

But, oh my God, the packaging was incredible.  The customer service was great.  They helped me match my shoes.  And when I got on that stage, I knew I looked like one million bucks from head to toe and I love Kiwi,” or whatever the brand might be.  And so that love figuring out in the core four of the identity, the who, what is your customer emotionally motivated by? So there are two sides to that, a little bit of education here, right?  So, on the one side is what’s the emotional driver like your customer, you know, what do they want?  How do they want to feel?  They should buy a shoe polish.  I don’t want a shoe polish today, but here we are.  Well, she wants to feel confident.  She wants to feel like she’s buttoned up and looks great, right?  

So, she wants to feel confident, let’s just say.  OK, so that’s her motivator.  Nobody wants to spend 6 bucks on shoe polish if they don’t have to.  Nobody wants braces either, you know. So, when you get clear about the driver then when you craft the sales experience, the purchase experience, the product unboxing experience, that I just kind of mentioned, and it’s lovely.  Or it is in alignment with her or his or their emotional driver and you satisfy that driver, you design the moment what we call the touch point in that experience of buying shoe polish where you design what is the emotional goal of that moment.

And so if you know who he, she, or they are and what they’re after and it’s pretty true across the board why anybody would buy a shoe polish, that’s actually a good example for today.  And then when you actually deliver personality or experience or messaging that then resonates and aligns to that, so you’re creating an emotional connection moment that they receive and now there’s a bond and there’s an emotional reaction and an emoting. So, this is where you’re going to say, “Oh my gosh.”  You couldn’t see it, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.  We’re humans, right?  We’re human beings and we’re actually programmed.  

We’re emotional beings.  We respond emotionally, first and foremost every time, from the moment we were pre-verbal, inside the womb, inside being a baby, we didn’t have words.  We didn’t have language.  We had emotion.  So we’re hardwired for this. And so once we work with our clients and we work with small businesses and growing businesses, but once we figured out, OK, who are they, what’s the emotional driver and then let’s architect experience to create experiences with the right emotion at the right time then the customer is like in love.  They’re so loyal, they’re “Oh my gosh, I would never go anywhere else.”  We all have these experiences and I can give you a couple of questions and like boom, I could get you emoting about your favorite brands.

Andrea:  Love it.  OK, so let’s go back to this example that you’re using with a shoe polish and confidence.  So, if in general that is what the customer’s wanting, they’re wanting to feel confident, but you’re saying that there are different touch points at which there might be different emotions that you’re trying to evoke.  What other different emotions you might be touching on when the overall emotion is confidence?

Kerri Konik:  Uhh, great!  OK, so the confidence is what they want for why they’re buying or shopping the category of shoe polish anyway, right?  So, they have an event.  Usually, there’s a reason they’re buying it, right?  Their shoes are scruffy.  Their boots are scruffy.  They have an event.  I used the example of being on a stage.  So, maybe someone, and we can shift genders here, maybe he is going for his big job interview up in New York City and he’s taking a train and everything like just came out of MBA or just came out of undergrad, right? Everything’s riding on this moment, right?  Think of that anticipation.  

Think about the emotions involved with, “Huh, this has to go right.  I’m gonna do everything I can.  I’m gonna iron my shirt.  I’m gonna polish my shoes.  I’m gonna press my jacket.  I’m gonna dry clean.”  So, if you know who the audience is, why would you buy a shoe polish or all these scenarios, but it’s because you want to be spiffy.  You don’t want to be scruffy.  And so confidence might be one and that’s a really nice broad emotional goal, right? So, that’s the shopping experience.  That’s the overall arch, like why would anybody buy that?  I’d rather buy an ice cream sundae.  Nobody wants to spend 6 bucks or 10 bucks on shoe polish.  

So, the question of backing up when you’re a brand and you are a manufacturer of the best shoe polish in the world and when we look at the emotional connection, there are different emotions because they’re not ready to buy when they first find out about you. So, we actually help our clients create a roadmap, you know, you’ve heard the term, the customer journey, where we do emotional customer journeys.  We do an ECX roadmap where we start a stage of marketing and we go into the sales process, because they’re not a customer yet, and I’ll walk you through slower.  And then the delivery, what’s it like to get it, to buy it, to use it.  You know, “What if I’ve never done it before?  Are you gonna send me videos of how to do it well from doing it myself?”  

And then the loyalty of what we call the retention stage. So the four stages we help with; we look at marketing, sales experience, the delivery experience, and then the loyalty or retention experience.  So, for example, I have this big gig in New York City.  I have a big important meeting, my shoes, I pull them out, “Oh my gosh, they’re scruffy.  I need shoe polish.”  So, maybe I’ll take to Google, right?  Or I’ll ask my friend, “Hey, where do you buy shoe Polish?”  So you’re going to ask and then they become aware of you. And so the marketing stage is they don’t know about you before.  They didn’t need you before, now they need you.  

So, now they become aware.  The different emotions of that journey where if you look at the marketing, if they Google and they find your website or they find your product in Target or they find your product on Amazon, they just became aware you can’t sell them confidence.  And we’re not going to look directly at confidence; we create the atmosphere of confidence but they’re not there yet.

Andrea:  Can you hold on just a second, because you just said you do not talk directly about confidence, you create the atmosphere of confidence.  I just want to pause on that for just a second because I think that’s a really an important thing for people to hear.

Kerri Konik:  If it’s OK to switch metaphors, I have a really great example.

Andrea:  Go for it.

Kerri Konik:  All right and we do this all the time.  You have a great keen ear, Andrea, for that because when you’re playing with somebody’s emotions, you don’t go straight at the emotions, especially if it’s a pain point.  And the reality is it’s always a pain point because we’re trying to solve a problem when we’re buying something.  So, you have scruffy shoes.  So, we wouldn’t say if we went head on and we went after the shame that would be a bad idea.

Andrea:  Right.

Kerri Konik:  So, we said, “Are your shoes scruffy?  That’s not very confident, is it?”  What you’re doing is you’re shaming, right?  We don’t go after the confidence straight.  The other example I’m going to give you is we’ve worked with professional organizing brands before where people who hire a professional organizer have kind of lost control of the calm and organization and the peace in their home. And that can be anywhere in the continuum of being just a little bit messy because let’s say their in-law has moved in and their lives have been disrupted or they have toddlers or they added a dog. 

That’s one level of being disorganized or having to like reevaluate flow in your home all the way across the continuum to someone who might be a hoarder, right? Well, you wouldn’t go right after somebody who is embarrassed to have anybody come over to their home, doesn’t have dinner parties anymore, doesn’t go out, or doesn’t invite anybody in because they don’t want anybody to see the state of chaos in their home.  So, you wouldn’t go right after that shame.  What you would do instead is create an atmosphere or you would normalize the problem and say, “We all get disorganized.”  This is really sort of an advance, I’m sorry to go there.

Andrea:  No, I think this is great.

Kerri Konik:  OK.  So, and I have a more severe example as well in which everybody can relate to, but you wouldn’t say “Hi, are you embarrassed?  Are you ashamed of the state of your house?”  So, you wouldn’t do that because someone’s going to run for the hills, right?  They’re not going to resonate and they’re not going to feel OK and they’re certainly not going to invite you in to help.  But if you say, “Hey, all of us have times when our house gets beyond us, we can help.”

Andrea:  Yes!

Kerri Konik:  So, you’re talking to the shame, you’re talking to that part of human being who feels really embarrassed, you’re talking to it, but you’re not adding fire or gasoline to the issue.  You’re adding calm and relaxation and you’re normalizing the problem.  And a more obvious place, let’s say somebody was on a bridge and look like they might want to jump.  If you were going to try to help that person, you wouldn’t say, “Are you going to jump?”  Say “Hey, hey, what’s going on?  Come here, talk to me.  Come here, come here.”  Like you would kind of try to talk them off the ledge.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Kerri Konik:  That’s what we do emotionally at different stages of the connection between two people or two parties, in this case, the brand and the consumer.

Andrea:  Yes.  This is really, really good and it’s really, really important, especially in light of what we’ve tried to accomplish at Voice of Influence.  When people want to have influence, they should not be speaking directly to the shame to make it worse.  But they should be speaking to the shame to calm it down to say, “This happens to everybody, it’s OK,” kind of helping them.

I mean, I think everybody who’s listening right now can feel how, you know, the difference between the tension that you feel when somebody calls you out on something that’s bad versus saying, “OK, look, we all go through this.  This is hard for everybody.  I totally understand and here’s a way out.”  I mean there is so much more.  It’s such an easier path.  Like you said, when people feel better, they feel more emotionally connected to you because you’ve made them feel good like you said.

Kerri Konik:  Yeah.  Like I said, it’s human nature, right?  Now that we’ve planned that out, it’s like, “Oh, it’s OK, I get it.  I’ve been there too,” if that’s true.  But it’s like, “Yeah, no worries.  Hey, we help people with this.  It’s a temporary situation, so we’ll fix it.”

Andrea:  Exactly.  Yes, yes not catastrophizing it.

Kerri Konik:  Yeah.

Andrea:  Not making it like you are this bad person or you are the person who always has scruffy shoes.

Kerri Konik:  So, now that we’ve handled that one, the piece about the marketing, when they first discover you, they try literally tripped onto your brand, your website, or your product and they know nothing about you.  So, what needs to happen is there needs to be a little bit of, they’re not even curious or interested quite yet.  So, the messaging and the connection goal is maybe moving them into a state of curiosity or a state of possibility.

Andrea:   Possibility, I love that.

Kerri Konik:  Yeah and then moving them into being inspired or excited by buying shoe polish and then you can be like be your confidence self, right?  You see this on advertising, a 30 second spot every day, every day.  It can be done very quickly, but it’s the right emotional goal at the right time.  But the overarching, you know, nobody needs or wants to spend money in that category.  And that’s true for most of the stuff we buy, actually.  It’s what we want from the thing we’re buying.

Andrea:  Oh yeah, absolutely that was so powerful.  You just shared so much that applies absolutely directly to the customer experience, but also to our experience of life with people.  So that’s fantastic.  Why do you care about this topic?

Kerri Konik:  Uhh.  Well, I’m really, really most passionate.  I mean, we can brand or we can do marketing and emotional CX for anything, but I’ve chosen to help small businesses in particular.  I used to be a chief creative officer for food, drug, cosmetic, luxury brands, and worked with some of the most emotional icon brands you would all know and aspire to have in your home or in your closet.  But that doesn’t really change the world for me. So, when we were working with, you know, really huge iconic brands that are amazing, that doesn’t really change the world or make progress in the world and we can move the needle, we can sell more volume, but where my heart, my passion, and my purpose lives is leveling the playing field for business owners, right?  

So people who have the courage to set out on their own and do something that they’re looking to accomplish. So, I shifted and bring all my chief creative officer knowledge from big agency strategies and packaged it up and bring it to the smaller underdog, if you will.  And the reason is because I want to level the playing field between the small business owner competing with the really giant marketer.  Let’s say you did shoe and shoe polish and you’re going up against Nike, right?  That’s like a David and Goliath thing. So, I’m not always for the underdog.  But what I’m for is leveling the playing field, so small business owners can not only survive but grow and make the positive impact in the world that they came into make through their business.  That’s my why.

Andrea:  Yeah.  I love that.  So when you’re going through and helping people or helping brands to be able to kind of identify what their why is, or maybe they already know what their why is, how does that connect to the way that you helped them with the customer experience?

Kerri Konik:  I just had a conversation yesterday with a really fast growing brand in the southern hemisphere.  And they’re growing so fast and as you know, at the end of the day, you have to evolve your brand message, your marketing because your purpose needs to be obvious.  And that entrepreneur, the owner said, “Well, my purpose is crystal clear.  This is what it is.”  And I’m like, “Great that you know but the world doesn’t know that, it’s not in your brand messaging.” And so chances are, if a brand has started and they’ve got some sea legs and proof of concept is there and they’re surviving, the purpose is now known.  But it’s not in their appearance.  

So let’s take a big brand like Apple or Virgin Records, right? You can name the founder of both of those organizations and you can then pretty quickly dial right into what they stand for, right?  So what does Steve stands for?  What is Richard stands for? That’s the purpose that as the brand grows, it doesn’t become like the core messaging of like trying to sell the sneakers or sell the iPod or sell the computer.  But it becomes what you stand for and what you’re about and the possibility that you’re creating.  

With Steve, it was about changing the way people relate to each other through technology.  And for Richard, it’s in his book the cover, “Screw it, Let’s do it.”  It’s about empowering going for it and creating something that never existed before.  The pure meaning of creativity, which is creating something that doesn’t exist yet. So, that purpose fuels the brand.  And you know, Apple is 45 years old, and I don’t know how old Richard when he started, about 40 years old also, right?  So that why becomes bigger than the entrepreneur, it becomes the vision of the brand.  So, one of the most powerful questions we ask a brand, and we just put this on Instagram yesterday, is “What are you trying to accomplish?  You know, what would you like to accomplish through your company?”  Which cuts right to the core of the heart and soul of purpose?  “I want to create a lot of computers.”  “Why?”  “So that people everywhere have a voice and can express themselves, you know.”  Boom!

And then as a brand becomes more and more successful, they talk less about product marketing, product promotion, and they talk more about brand marketing.  That’s what we really specialize in is elevating the brand, not necessarily the product.  So, we don’t do product marketing.  We don’t do, you know, the latest sneakers, the latest jeans, or fashion apparel, we elevate the brand.  And not the brand story and storytelling, but more about the brand’s purpose and how it changes you and your life.  That’s how brands grow, really.

Andrea:  Hmm, love it.  OK, Kerri, so how do you work or what are some things that you offer?  I know that you’ve got a podcast that you’re launching.  Tell me a little bit about where people can find you and how they can work with you.

Kerri Konik: Oh, thanks.  Well, Inspire Fire is the name of our core brand and we are launching a podcast hopefully in Q4, yes, yes, yes and it’s going to be about customer experience.  It’s really going to be about inspiring fire and emotional connection that ROI.  What does that mean?  How do you do it specifically for small brands so that they can grow and change more lives, make a greater impact, whether it’s just for your own family, your community, or changing the world, you know, however broad or your ripple effect is. So Inspire Fire, you can Google us.  You’ll find us on Instagram and our websites inspirefire.com and I’m on all of the social platforms as well.  And we love talking to small business owners who are really looking to leverage that big, big, big throttle called emotional connection so that they can like propel their brand forward farther, farther, faster we say.

Andrea:  And you mentioned before we started recording that you even have some, it’s not just a matter of we need to do this really big consulting with you, but you’ve also got for small brands, you have something for them to, is that right?

Kerri Konik:  Yeah, definitely.  The big shift from moving from big iconic brands with huge budgets to small brands with modest budgets is we productize, packaged up our services in what we call Lego modules.  And the two we talked about earlier what I mentioned to you is called Calibrate, which is a CX customer journey auditing discovery, strategic initiative that’s really affordable to any small business including a startup.  Although there’s nothing to look at it with a startup, right?  Not yet. And the other service we do is we architect that Resonance Roadmap where it’s a strategic engagement, but really looking at what is the experience end to end. 

And then we can help them with system.  They identify systems and processes and automation and digital tools that they need to build.  We don’t build those, but we identify those and then we reconstruct or add touch points into what they’re currently doing to really advance the emotional connection.  And you know, pricing, it’s not expensive stuff.  It’s just adding a moment that’s meaningful and memorable into key stages. So, we always add a stage in the shift between marketing and sales.  Because what happens is your prospect or your visitor, their identity changes with you.  Your relationship changes in every stage, so we help you look at them.  In the Resonance Roadmap, when there’s just a browser, they’re just checking out and they shift into being a prospect.  

That’s a different relationship.  And what can you do?  What should you do there?  And then in the delivery, they’ve become a customer.  It’s a brand new relationship, right?  They decided to marry you or get engaged at least and that needs to be memorialized through meaningful moments.  So that’s also a service that even the small businesses can afford to invest in. We’re doing several of these right now and if the brand is up and running, we highly recommend that people do this because it changes who they hire or don’t hire.  It puts in systems.  It puts in technology, what my friend Paul Sokol calls the Digital Plumbing. 

So those services are really affordable.  So it’s not branding.  And people say, “Well, I know you’re a brand expert.  You know, we don’t want to change our brand.  We just want to grow our company.”  That’s what I’m talking about. The other thing, we also really fix is we laser fix the messaging in the marketing state so that positioning statement lands emotionally.  It makes sense to the target audience, phone rings.  That is always upside down.  We literally flip people’s messaging literally upside down.  We focus on making it customer centric and not you, not what we call narcissistic.  It’s never about you in all of the communications throughout the entire journey.  But how do you say what you’re trying to say in a way that’s about them? So we have a messaging offer as well called the Messaging Matrix where we solve for nine distinct verbal marketing messaging assets, and boom, they run with it and they grow more and then they come back and we’ll do some more things with them. 

We try to make really our services are strangely affordable and it’s because like I get it. You know, I’ve started six businesses, and investing in your own brand growth is expensive.  You don’t have a line item for that usually, not yet, you need to.  We make it affordable and we make it modular so you can _____ then you get the ROI.  You know, you sell one or two client engagements, boom, that’s paid for, now let’s do the next one. I just had a meeting before talking to you, Andrea, where they said, “OK, that’s nice to have.  You know what we have to do now and we’ll come back and get that in Q1.”  I’m like “Perfect.”  So you know, we can make it bite-sized or we can take on three-year engagement also.

Andrea:  That sounds awesome.  OK, so you’ve just shared so much with our audience.  I’m so grateful.  Thank you so much, Kerri.  But I’m going to ask you one more thing.  If you could leave this Voice of Influence audience with one tip to help them to grow their voice of influence, what would you say?

Kerri Konik:  Getting crystal clear, clarity on who you serve.  Who’s your client, it’s not everybody.  I know you could probably do something for everybody, like let’s say you work with women.  That’s a really way too big.  Getting clear on exactly what kind of person, what kind of woman or man, who do you work with?  What problem do you solve for them?  Once you know who they are then identifying what drives them emotionally. And we have tried actually, I don’t know if you want to offer this to your group.  There was a great article in HBR that talked about the 10 emotional motivator drivers and I’d be happy to make that available to you, Andrea, and you could share it with your folks.

Andrea:  Sure.

Kerri Konik:  But once we know that, you have a lot more insight to grow, because once you’re clear, “Oh, OK, and I sell shoe polish to anybody who has scruffy shoes and wants more confidence.”  Boom, that alone, that alone would change and move the needle in sales if you knew that and started messaging and marketing around that, around what you say and who you say it to.  And I’m talking psychographically, demographically, where you put that message, where you don’t put that message, who your customer is not, “Come on, stop marketing, stop wasting money,” doing that sort of thing. So that kind of clarity and then you identify their emotional driver and then you look at your own experience and you can architect like what’s it like to call us, what’s it like to buy their thing from us?  What’s the sales process look like?  Do they come through a register and give you a $10 piece of cash and you give them a thing in a bag and say, buy, you know, what is going on?  And then what should go on, right?  And then change it, just little steps. 

If the devil is in the details, the profit and the gold mine is in the… Every detail sends a signal.  If you think it doesn’t matter, you’re killing your brand or you’re killing your sales, everything matters.  And you can consciously decide not to handle something, I get it.  But everything does send a signal because we are sponges, we are emotionally connected and we’re taking in and creating meaning out of everything. That’s a whole other conversation about what happens with the messages that are going into the brain of your client, but they’re noticing everything, not necessarily consciously.  But if you just change one or two things, and every time you get a moment, up-level the next little thing, you’ll see your sales go up.  You can add a zero to your revenue, guaranteed.  It’s what we do every day.  It’s amazing.  That’s what I love to do.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Thank you so much, Kerri!  Thank you for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

Kerri Konik: Thank you.  Thanks for having me.

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How to Not Be Weird When Selling with Liz Dederer

Episode 104

Liz Dederer is disrupting sales for good. As founder and CEO of Selling With Service and the creator of Sales School for Entrepreneurs, Liz and her team have helped clients increase close rates from zero percent to 80 percent in 30 days, and ended the year 50 percent over their plan and have turned around an underperforming sales team from under $300,000 to over $1.2 million in six months. In other words, this woman gets things done! Liz has been featured on the International Women and Money Summit and is currently on her second speaking tour on the Currency of Conversation, empowering women sales teams and business owners to close clients quickly.

In this episode, Liz explains what she means when she says, “How you do money is how you do everything,” the four currencies that impact our money conversations, the quick and easy way she can tell if her potential clients are a “hard or soft currency” person and how that changes her interaction with them, the difference between having a sales energy and a service energy, the true difference between an amateur and an expert and how to know when it’s time to own your expertise, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Liz Dederer Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  I’m really thrilled to have Liz Dederer here today because she is distracting sales for good.  As founder and CEO of Selling With Service and the creator of the Sales School for Entrepreneurs, Liz and her team have helped clients increase close rates from zero percent to 80 percent in 30 days, and end of the year 50 percent over their plan and have turned around an underperforming sales team from under $300,000 to over $1.2 million in six months.  In other words, this woman gets things done. Liz has been featured on the International Women and Money Summit and is currently on her second speaking tour on the Currency of Conversation, empowering women sales teams and business owners to close clients quickly.

Andrea:  Liz, it is great to have you here today with me on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Liz Dederer:  Thank you.  I’m so excited that we get to have this fun conversation together.

Andrea:  I am too.  Every conversation with you is fun.

Liz Dederer:  Yay!

Andrea:  It totally is.  Yes, I’m thrilled to share you with our listeners.  So, Liz, why don’t you kind of give us a little bit more context for what you do with Selling With Service?

Liz Dederer:  The way I explained it to my 7-year-old daughter is that I help mommies make a lot of money.

Andrea:  There you go.

Liz Dederer:  That’s the simplest, mommies and daddies or nonparents, or grownups, right?  So, Selling With Service is really just about helping people be normal in sales conversations and giving them the tools, the talk, and the tech to be able to use their voice in a more empowered way as the expert that they are in sales conversations by shifting their sales mindset and looking at sales for what it actually is, which is really healthy service-based conversation and process.

Andrea:  Now that sounds really appealing.

Liz Dederer:  Yeah.

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah, it sounds really appealing.  OK. We’re going to make sales normal, sound normally.  I mean, in general, how do you do that?

Liz Dederer:  Magic!  It’s shifting your sales mindset.  We look at things in Sales School for Entrepreneurs and in Selling With Service in general, we look at first, what is your relationship with money because how you do money is how you do everything. And to be honest, the reason and the point and the sales process or conversation when people start getting weird is around the money stuff, because we’ve never been taught to speak confidently or competently around about money.  In fact, we’re like totally conditioned on the opposite, “Don’t talk about money.”  “It’s rude to ask people how much they make.”  “They can afford it.  You can’t afford it.” 

All of those things come up. So, we come right out of the gate and we use a proprietary assessment, the eight languages of money so that you understand what your money language is and we talk about the currency of conversation.  So, we just come at it right out of the gate talking about money and the softer side of money.  And then we look at what is sales, so let’s unpack it?  What do you think it is versus what is it really?

You know, there’s a reason I named the company Selling With Service because it’s all about being in service and of service to other people.  And then the results of a healthy relationship or understanding of your relationship with money, understanding and being able to identify it in others as well and having the tools, talk, and tech to be able to navigate a conversation.  The healthy outcome of that is that you’re working with more people because you’re not weird in conversations.

Andrea:  Oh man, I love it!  Yeah, I mean, I had a really hard time with this and have made it over a pretty darn big hump in my own life and my own business on this.  And so I am really excited about what you’re doing because I know that it changes everything.  So, you said this, you said “How you do money is how you do everything.”  What do you mean by that?

Liz Dederer:  So, we look at your relationship with money, and money is one of the four currencies.  And the four currencies, I use the acronym TEMP like temperature; it’s Time, Energy, Money, and People and how you operate with money shows up in the other categories of currency.  If you’re really, really possibly stingy with money, we’ll just use these two kinds of _____ as an example.  If you’re really, really stingy with money that’s likely going to show up in other areas of your life and your business and how you’re approaching conversations and the extent of information you’re willing to give away because you have a hold, a lack mentality on time, energy, money and people;  a fear scarcity based.

Andrea:  OK, so stingy with money could translate into stingy in your conversations and how much you’re willing to offer of yourself or be vulnerable and all those sorts of things.

Liz Dederer:  Exactly.  Yeah, so it can look like, and it’s not an absolute, right?  But it can look like and it does look like and this is what we teach people how to listen and look for.  It can start to show up in the sales process where they say, “Well, I already gave them a free sample.”  “I already explained it to them.”  “I already, you know, did this.”  “They already have what they need.”

But sometimes people just need a little bit more information, and someone who is more on the fear scarcity side is not going to be as willing to maybe get on another phone call, you know, build the relationship a little bit more, give a little bit more energy and put a little bit more into the people bank and the relationship bank because they’re operating through the lens of fear and scarcity, which is not wrong.  It’s not wrong.

In my presentations, I have this diagram.  I’ve got it off the internet where it’s two people looking at the number six and one is saying six and one is saying nine.  And neither is wrong, but it’s your perspective and it’s just about understanding others, you know.  So, the other side of that is if someone is overly generous and overly nurturing and overly giving, me, all soft currency, I’m kind of boundary-less and limitless. And you know, I lose track of time with clients and if someone needs another conversation before they decide if sales was right for them, myself and my team, we’re all ready to jump in.  And yeah, we have to keep track of the time because you know, we have other things going on but I’m not going to say “Nope, gotta go, your time’s up.”  Like if someone needs more coaching, if they need more help or support, we’re very, very flexible and willing and giving because that’s how we are with all of our currencies.

So, two extremes, one is not right, one is not wrong, it just it’s important to notice because when you’re in a “sales” conversation, and I’m using air quotes with sales because any conversation where you know there’s a desired outcome or you want to move an initiative forward.  Getting your kids to pick up their room is a sales conversation, right?  Let’s just be honest.

Andrea:  Totally.

Liz Dederer:  You need to understand what’s most important in those conversations is understanding and speaking the language of the other person.  So, when we recognize what our money language is, what our relationship with currency is then we’re going to know how that’s going to show up in conversations and where we might self-sabotage or etc.  And we’ll also just be aware of it to hear it showing up in the conversation to say, “Oh, is this my language I’m speaking or is this theirs?”

Andrea:  Hmm.  How do you know?

Liz Dederer:  So with the acronym TEMP, I try to make it really simple for people to listen.  I used to teach, you know, and explain the eight languages of money so people could hear that.  And I’m like, “Well, it’s too much.  It’s too much, put a _____.”  We cannot remember our own names at times.  So, I try to make it really simple, just listen for the hard and the soft currency.  Hard currency is time and money and soft currency is energy and people. So, if someone’s using filling words a lot like “This is gonna be so exciting, I can’t wait.”  “This is gonna be great, really looking forward to playing.”  Those are total soft currency person. 

Energy people, if something fun is going on, if there’s people involved; they’ll want to be there, right?  And if someone says, “Well, what time and what are we going to get out of it?”  “What exactly is going on?”  And more precision based language, time, money then they’re going to be a harder currency person and you’ll just want to speak in more detail with them.  But if you start speaking in significant detail with a soft currency person, you’ve likely lost them.  If you’re in the fun zone with a hard currency person, they’re likely not respecting you for being an expert and authority because you sound wishy-washy.

Andrea:  Oh that’s so true.

Liz Dederer:  Right?

Andrea:  I see it in my own family.  Some of us are one way, and some of us are another, yeah.  So, do you have maybe like a couple things that you look for immediately to kind of gauge if somebody is really more of a hard currency or a soft currency kind of person?

Liz Dederer:  Yeah, I mean, in our “sales conversations,” we call them service conversations once you go through the training.  But if I say service conversations you’re going to be like, “What, is their washing machine broken?  What’s going on?”  So, in a sales calls, in a service conversations, you know, I’m talking to business owners, I’m talking to entrepreneurs, I’m talking to coaches, consultants and salespeople; so one of the questions we ask obviously is, you know, what are your numbers?  What was your revenue over the past 12 months or what were your sales over the past 12 months?  And I’ll hear right away if they’re hard or soft currency the way that they answer it.

Andrea:  Sure.

Liz Dederer:  So, if they, you know, come to the table and they have no clue about their numbers or they give me some really roundabout kind of, you know, dodgy answer, definitely it’s a soft currency person.

Andrea:  Hmm.

Liz Dederer:  Hard currency person, like I literally had this answer in a call and they said, “I’m not exactly sure what my numbers are.”  So, I think soft currency right away.  And then they continued, they said, “I haven’t updated my reports and we haven’t run the numbers for the business this week, but as of last week my numbers were dah, dah, dah, dah,” and x y z sense.  And I’m like, “Holy crow, they weren’t confident in their numbers because they hadn’t been updated for that week, so they didn’t want to give me the numbers.”  And I was like, “Wow, you’re really a hard currency.”  “What’s going on?”  That’s great.  That’s good to know.

Andrea:  Sure, sure.  OK, I love that.  I always love it when people have ways that they read people to know where they’re at because, like you said, any conversation where you’re attempting to get somebody to cooperate or to purchase something, it’s still a sales conversation.  It’s some sort of its influence of some kind.  And so, meeting people where they’re at is so vitally important, but yet it’s really hard to do.  I love your hard versus soft currency model that you’re using, and it seems simple enough that people could really grasp onto that and really make something of that, you know, just listening to this conversation.

Liz Dederer:  Yeah.  I did it in a real estate investors’ conference I was keynoting and I had two gentlemen volunteer to do a role play.  And the way that we worked the role play was just these guys hadn’t met.  So, I said, “Just network in front of these thousands of people, please, #nopressure.”

Andrea:  Wow!

Liz Dederer:  So that’s it.  They were just networking and it was great.  I mean it, it was definitely a divinely guided conversation because it’s like you always take a risk when you do something like that, but it worked out really, really well.  

So, one guy was an investor and the other guy was a lawyer and the lawyer was saying, “Oh, you know, I’ve got this client.  He was looking to sell his house.  He’s an artist.  He’s lived in it for 30 years, but I think it was death or divorce or something, he has to get rid of it, but he’s done all these really intricate, cool things to the house but we do need to get it on the market, you know, sooner rather than later.” And then the investors said, “Do you know the value of the house and when is he looking to list it?”  And you could instantly see the lawyer just completely deflated.  

And the audience, it was interesting too, the women in the audience gasped because they were like, “No, you just killed it.  You didn’t speak his language.”  And the men in the audience like, “Doo, doo, doo, doo.”  No idea of what’s going on.  That was interesting.  But this isn’t a man-woman thing and it was just a very interesting thing to notice. But what the women noticed was that the investor did not speak the lawyer’s language.  One was very hard currency, one was very soft currency and all that needed to be done.  

You don’t have to change who you are.  You don’t have to completely change your language, you just have to validate and give them just a little sticky note that says “I hear you and this is how he could have done it.”

So, the lawyer was saying, you know, the artist and all this cool stuff, etc., etc.  All that the investor needed to say was, “Wow, your client sounds really, really fascinating.  Do you know the value of the house or when he wants to put it on the market?”  That’s it, one bridge line.

Andrea:  Brilliant.  I love it.  Alright, Liz, let’s talk service.  How in the world is selling actually service?

Liz Dederer:  Ha ha, great question.  So, the answer, I mean, what are you doing when you’re selling, selling, selling, right?  If you’re just like, “I’m in it for the kill, I’m in it for the money,” then you’re in sales, right?  You’re in it for yourself.  Sales energy is about yourself, “I need to sell this.”  Service energy is about the other person.  And to take it even more _____, sales energy is fear based and service energy is love and abundance based. We’re operating in the line of sales, you’re thinking about yourself, you’re thinking about fear, and you’re thinking about your numbers and there’s an element of fear and scarcity going on, “I need to make my goal.”  “I don’t have enough in the bank,” or whatever it is.  “I need to move more widgets.”  I need to, you know, etc.

When you’re thinking through the lens of service, you’re not thinking about yourself.  I tell my students all the time, lovingly, “Your business ain’t got nothing to do with you.  It’s all about the other person.”  

The purpose of a business is to create a customer. So, service is all about being available and helping the other person.  It doesn’t mean that you can’t exchange hard currency.  It doesn’t mean that money doesn’t get brought into the equation.  It doesn’t mean that we’re all paupers on the street.  It means that you’re thinking in terms of what is in the highest and best interest for all parties involved.

Andrea:  Right?

Liz Dederer:  That’s service.  And you can’t give and give and give and at some point you’re going to have to say, “We need to set an official play date so I can really take this to the next level to help you.”

Andrea:  Hmm.  How do you know what that boundary line is?  Maybe, it’s partly like you were talking about the assessment that you do and how people kind of fall someplace on this spectrum between sort of really soft and really hard currency.   How does one determine when it’s time, like how much to give before they go ahead and ask for the sale?

Liz Dederer:  So, in a service-based business where you’re selling a service, it comes down to really knowing and owning your zone of absolute brilliance, your zone of expertise, and how you do your work, right?  You have to be really, really clear on your deliverable.  And the reason I say that is because there are things that you can do to get a client ready to become a really good client.  And that’s the service part of it.  

We adopt the mindset; we teach in Sales School for Entrepreneurs, we adopt the mindset early and often that they’re already a client. And the goal is you want to make sure that they’re really great client by the time they actually become a client, so whatever you’ve got to do to help them get to that point.  And then there is a point where you say, “This is what we do in Sales School.”  “This is what we do in a strategic planning day when we map out your five points to profit.”  So, you have a strong grasp on who you’re serving and what that looks like and how you’re priced, etc.  That happens in this container.

So, if you’re ready for that, it sounds like you’re ready for that, we can definitely talk about that but that is the next step in me being able to be of service to you is you got to come play in Sales School or you need to set up, you know, a strategic planning day.  

I struggle with the word boundaries because I’m like all soft currency, like water on concrete who just go everywhere.  So, I love the word, one of my mentors, over the years, gave me this word to use instead, which is container.

Andrea:  I really like that.

Liz Dederer:   Yeah, and Sales School is my container where I get to just fire hose and just love on and drip on the students and give them everything.  So, it’s a really healthy, happy container space for me to play in and I know what goes on in there and I know what I can give to people on the outside.  And I also know with anybody there is going to be a point where I can’t give them any more.  They have to come.  You know, I can only splash you with water so much outside the pool, at some point you’re going to have to just jump in.

Andrea:  Hmm, another good analogy.  OK, so there are people out there like you, like me who sort of come from this mindset of service, and this is maybe, you know, prior to getting through all.  I guess, I’m thinking about on the front end before they have really figured out what their container is and all that.  They want to help.  They see lots of opportunities to offer people advice, their expertise and all that sort of thing.  And yet, they maybe start to feel resentment because they’re thinking to themselves, I could have charged for that.

What do you do to help somebody see that, you know, to help somebody get over their resentment toward the people that they actually really do want to serve?  I remember there being such a contradiction that just really robbed with me and I wasn’t sure how to handle that.  What would you tell me back, I don’t know, a couple of years ago before I started to kind of figure that out?

Liz Dederer:  Well, that’s how my company was born is because I was doing exactly that.  I was giving it all away.  I actually have a video on my website, sellingwithservice.com, on the entrepreneurs’ page where I talk about how I was the busiest brokest entrepreneur because I was having great conversations and I was giving it all away and people were like, “Oh my God, you’re amazing!”  And I’m like, “Gee, thanks!”  And then they’d leave and I’m like, “But uh, uh, but uh, I got to eat.”

 

Andrea:  Yeah.

Liz Dederer:   So, that’s how all of my systems and processes were born organically is because I had to protect myself from myself from giving it all away, because what you’re actually doing is a disservice to the other person.  You’re giving them a Band-Aid solution for a bleed and you haven’t fully identified why they’re bleeding.

Andrea:  Yes, so good.

Liz Dederer:  Yeah, and you know, I had to create ways to protect myself from myself because I knew, you know, it felt really good to do the energy exchange and to get the validation and they’re like, “You’re really smart.”  And I’m like, “Oh my God, thank you.”  Because I needed that in my life at the time, so that was my dominant currency is that I needed to be fed validation and energy and it’s not wrong.  

It really built me in a lot of ways and I know a lot of other people go through this too, like “Who am I?”  “What am I doing?”  “Am I really good at this thing,” and all of that. So, the validation, there is nothing wrong and you build your validation bank and at some point you need to start building the money bank.  And that’s where it’s just kind of having a lens to say, “Well, let me pull back for a minute.”  

I’ll suggest people to consider that the expert asks questions, the amateur answers.  So, when you’re having these conversations, you’re going to get to points over time having the same conversations with different people where you’re going to say, I need to ask more questions to understand what’s going on rather than just jump to the gun with a solution.

Andrea:  Why do you suppose that’s the case?  Why do you suppose the amateur jumps to answering questions?  It’s so true, like I totally see it.  Why is that?

Liz Dederer:  Validation?  We want to be proven that we’re right.  We don’t know that we are yet, so we’re looking to build that evidence base, “Am I really good at this?  Can I really do this?  Can I really solve this problem?  Is my salad any good?”  Whatever it is.

Andrea:  Yeah.  That makes a lot of sense.

Liz Dederer:  It’s feeding the soft currency side of things, building the relationships, having the conversations with people, getting the energy exchange, getting information in exchange for validation in return.  You know, it’s working for validation, not cash.  And then there does come a point where I’m like, “I’ve had this conversation before, I know how this is going to end and I also know I can help them.”

Andrea:  Yeah.  I think like you were talking about the Band-Aid on and that doesn’t really stop the bleeding.  I think that’s something that I had to see that for myself in order to get over that hump because when I realized that, when I was helping people for free or for very, very little money and giving a lot of way, I realized that they weren’t taking it as seriously.  They weren’t valuing it and truly doing something with it as much as people started to do once I started actually, you know, charging money.

Liz Dederer:  Well, I’ll offer the lens that they were valuing it as much as you were.

Andrea:  Yeah, absolutely.

Liz Dederer:  That’s in the amateur energy and it’s not bad.  We all have to start somewhere.  No one in social media with a thousand followers, you start with nobody.  Nobody starts in business with all these customers, you start with nobody.  Amateur is not a negative.  It just alliterative to answers, which is why I use that word because the amateur answers, the experts ask questions, you know.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Liz Dederer:  We don’t necessarily understand and appreciate the importance of the energy exchange of validation because it’s non quantifiable.  It’s not visible and there’s not like an actual calculation for it, so we don’t see it.  And we are in business for money, right?  We all have to eat.  It’s the resource, the tool, the evidence that we require in our modern day society.  

But with the energy exchange, it’s still valuable.  It’s so necessary so that when that time comes and you’re like, dress rehearsal is over, you’re totally standing as a confident and authoritative expert versus an empty suit.

Andrea:  Yes.  I really, really appreciate that distinction and I wonder if that, you know, sense of resentment when it starts to come up, if that might be an indication that it’s time to flip.

Liz Dederer:  Yes, yes.  That’s a great way to look at it.  That’s definitely the moment where you can start to step into why am I not owning my expertise or my favorite question is what if?  What if I did that conversation differently?  What if I showed up more in my expert zone versus amateur zone?  What if I started referring to myself as an expert?

Andrea:  So good.

Liz Dederer:  Who’s going to challenge you on that, like who’s going to challenge you on the fact that you’re an expert?

Andrea:  It’s such a hard thing to get over though.  I mean, it really is, and I think you’re absolutely right that the amateur really does need to have that validation, but you’re right.  There comes a point when it’s just, “Maybe, I really need to do this.  Maybe this really is my thing.”

Liz Dederer:  Uh-hmm.  I can stand in absolute confidence and go to toe-to-toe with anyone that I am hands down the best at sales.  I am an expert at sales for everyone, absolutely not.  I am the best at sales for the people I invested sales for.  That’s how you stand and own your expert energy.  You’re not _____ best across the world who ever lived ever.  That’s ego, right?  Expertise says I’m the best at what I specifically do for those that I specifically do it for.  I am an expert in that.

Andrea:  OK, so when you’re doing the Sales School for Entrepreneurs, are you helping people who are amateurs or people who are experts or people who are trying to get over that hump?  How did the people know whether or not they belong in that program?

Liz Dederer:  I’m helping everyone across the board.  I’ve got experts in there who just aren’t necessarily using their voice.  They aren’t necessarily speaking their value yet.  They’re still in sales energy, fear energy because they haven’t been taught or given permission that it’s OK to serve. 

Teaching amateurs for sure, who just had a great conversation with a woman yesterday who’s going to join our conversation creation challenge, which is a free Facebook group to help drum up more appointments on your calendar. And she’s at a really stage of infancy in her business, which is so exciting and she’s just so dripping and ready to learn that I was like, “Please come into this container, we’ll get your calendar booked, we’ll bump up your revenue and then when you’re ready you come play in Sales School.”  

And I was like, “I don’t wanna lose you because you’re an amateur and it comes across and you’ve got so much potential.”

Andrea:  Hmm, cool.

Liz Dederer:  Well, what we don’t work with are people who are just in it for sales, just in it for the money, just in it for kill, don’t have integrity, are not good at what they do, that doesn’t work.  The best people that we work with are those that really, really want to do good work in the world.  They want to help other people.  We can help them.  They’re great at what they do.  They want to be even better at what they do.  And they’re spending so much time getting better at what they do that they’re not spending any time doing it with clients or having conversations about it.  They’re just geeking out in their zone.  Those are the people I want to help because they’re really mad passionate about what they do.  That to me is sexy as hell.

Andrea:  Alright, so the Sales School for Entrepreneurs is it like a program with a certain end date or what is the basic structure of it?

Liz Dederer:  So, we do six weeks kind of cohorts.  We’ve got six week cohorts that run where it’s live training.  And we’re in the pilot mode.  It’ll launch officially in mid 2020.  So, right now, it’s the six week cohorts and then we have teaching Tuesdays and follow-up Fridays. 

To just kind of put this out there, overtime, it will be, you know, your sales don’t go away.  So, I don’t believe your training should either, so we will build in an extended membership component to it and it will likely look like some sort of lifetime membership. I’m still working out the details, but I’m just so crazy passionate about this and the students who are in are getting great results.  But it’s, “We’re gonna get in, we’re going to retrain your brain on how you think about sales, how you have the conversation.”  “You’re gonna get the scripts, the mindset, the words.”  “It’s all in this container and then I’m gonna support you on our follow-up Fridays,” which are kind of the students have been calling them, you know, office hours, just kind of open coaching calls where playing your sales questions to the call.  And I just coach you right on the spot.  

And I’ve literally had a student bring an in process sales situation to the table.  We repositioned her thinking around it and this was on a Friday, and by Tuesday she had doubled her rate with this client who was already in process and she closed it and it was done from Friday to Tuesday.

Andrea:  Awesome!  So, listener, if you’re wanting to get results like that, if you are thinking to yourself, Liz, sounds amazing, I would really like to work with her then follow the next step.  Liz, what’s the next step?

Liz Dederer:  The next step is go to a saleschoolforentrepreneurs.com and we have a waitlist in between sessions and that will trigger our team to reach out to you and have an actual conversation with a real person to see what’s going on, where are you in business, how can we meet you where you are, and support you the best.  It might look like the conversation creation challenge.  It might be some of our other free resources that we keep behind the scenes to get you going.  It might look like jumping in early to the next, you know, cohort, but that’s kicking off.

But we’re just so mad passionate about helping people make more money because I know what it’s like to be the really busy broke entrepreneur and it’s painful, especially when you’re really good at something.  And I just don’t want people to feel like that.

Andrea:  Hmm.  And Liz, if you had one thing that you could leave the audience with, the listener with, what sort of tip or a piece of advice would you have for somebody who really does want to have a voice of influence?

Liz Dederer:  I would say to them, again the expert asks questions and the amateur answers and a voice of influence does not have to look like complete sentences.  You can be crazy impactful by getting someone to think differently and that’s through the process of asking more questions and you can completely demonstrate your authority, expertise, genius influence by shifting the way someone’s thinking through really expert, intelligent questions.

Andrea:  Hmm, so good.  Alright, thank you so much, Liz, for joining us on the Voice of Influence podcast and sharing your voice of influence.  And listener if you have interest and any of this at all, please come to the voiceofinfluence.net.  We’re going to have the show notes available for you there with links to what Liz said and talked about, or go directly to her Sales School for Entrepreneurs, is that right?

Liz Dederer:  Yep, saleschoolforenterpreneur.com

Andrea:  Either one is just fine.  So, I know that this conversation is going to make a real difference in some people’s lives.  And so thank you so much, Liz.

Liz Dederer:  I’m so excited.  Thank you for having me!

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Navigating the Digital Transformation in Sales with Rick McCutcheon

Episode 98

For the past twenty years, Rick McCutcheon has helped hundreds of business-to-business businesses improve their sales results. He is the creator of the Full Contact Selling System that allows sales teams to leverage powerful business development strategies through best practice use of technology. Rick has been awarded the prestigious designations of Certified Sales Professional with Distinction and is a five-time recipient of the coveted Microsoft Dynamics MVP award. As a professional speaker and workshop leader, Rick has traveled globally to deliver his practical yet innovative messages on the digital transformation of B2B selling to thousands of business professionals. In this episode, we discuss what exactly Rick does for his clients, how customer service plays a role in the digital transformation of B2B sales, the shocking statistic about how far along in the buying process a business typically is before they reach out to a sales representative, the importance of utilizing LinkedIn as a sales representative, how he helps his clients implement these digital transformations throughout their companies, the future of digital transformation, and more.

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Rick McCutcheon Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me Rick McCutcheon.  We were both at a conference recently and I was really impressed with Rick, and I’m really excited to have him here today on the podcast.

So, for the past 20 years, Rick has helped hundreds of B2B businesses improve their sales results.  He is the creator of the Full Contact Selling system that allows sales teams to leverage powerful business development strategies through best practice use of technology.  He has been awarded the prestigious designations of “Certified Sales Professional with Distinction” and is a 5-time recipient of the coveted Microsoft Dynamics MVP Award.

As a professional speaker and workshop leader, he has traveled globally to deliver his practical yet innovative messages on the Digital Transformation of the B2B selling to thousands of business profile professionals.

 

Andrea: Alright, Rick, it’s great to have you here on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Rick McCutcheon:  Thank you, Andrea.  It’s my pleasure.

Andrea: So, tell us a little bit about what you do with Full Contact Selling?

Rick McCutcheon:  Yeah.  It’s interesting because you know, the name of my company is Full Contact Selling and I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, but my company has sort of moved in some different directions over the years.  For most of my career, I’ve been in the CRM business, customer relationship management, which is a software category.  And I’ve always sort of focused on the sales force automation component.

So, yes, there is a sales training component to what I do but it’s kind of much, much more.  We work with organizations and we talk about this digital transformation of selling.  We help them understand how to reorganize their sales teams really to, you know, change their processes because customer’s buying processes changed so drastically in B2B over the last 10 years. So we work on the process with them.  We take that process and then we look at the technology.

And I specialize in an area, and this is where my MVP is with Microsoft and there’s Dynamics 365, which was formally called Dynamics CRM.  So, I specialize in Dynamic CRM, but I also bring in other components like marketing automation.  I do a lot of work around LinkedIn, LinkedIn Sales Navigator now to say, “OK, I’m working in the organization.  Here’s how we’re gonna, you know, re engineer their sales process to really fit these new socialize buying models and then what do we do with the technology?”

Now the third piece to this is with the people.  So, now I’m dealing with a lot of, you know, sales people that have been around for quite a long time or sometimes we’re dealing sort of a younger millennial sales force.  How do we now train them to think differently about sort of selling and social selling and contact management in the use of technology so they understand how important these technologies are to the sales process.

Andrea: I know that you spoke recently at this conference about digital experience and customer experience that sort of thing.  How does customer experience relate to and why is it such a big deal now in regards to the digital transformation?

Rick McCutcheon:  So, you know, we met a few weeks ago at CRM Evolution 2019 in Washington and there are some different components to that; CRM, customer service, call center.  And I was speaking in a couple of those categories and it’s a really interesting question you asked because most companies I worked with didn’t start out to reengineer their sales process.  They realize they had to reengineer their sales process because the way the customer wanted to be engaged has changed so drastically.

And I specialize in the B2B world.  So most people think, “Well, that really hasn’t changed that much.”  But that’s not true because B2C, which is the consumer buying completely changed over the last 20 years.  You know, we see Amazon coming and really making other retailers up their game.  We’re seeing the same thing in B2B because people now want to deal with their supply chain and their different vendors really digitally.  They want their own self-serve portals.   They want information when they need it.  They want to be notified when their products need service, so customers are demanding more from organizations today.

Andrea: Hmm.  What are some of the biggest changes then that have taken place do you think?

Rick McCutcheon:  The biggest change is really, there was a study done in 2012; IBM was one of the coauthors of the study.  And in 2012, they showed in their study that the average buyer in a B2B business was 57 percent through the buying process before they actually reached out to a vendor.  And this was true because they could go on the internet and find out everything they need.

Well, other studies had been done since.  But in 2016, I talked to somebody at Microsoft, my main partner and my friend was a marketing director there and she said, “Well, we’re probably closer to 70 percent.”  So that was 2016.  So, I’m thinking we’re now 2019, we’re midyear at this point, how far along the buying process is the customer before they have to reach out to us?  And, really, the answer could be 80 percent or more.

Andrea: Wow!  So you’re saying that they’ve already done their own research?  They’ve already looked at your website and that sort of thing or what other kinds of things are they doing before they even reach out?

Rick McCutcheon:  Well, it really means that you know, something triggers internally in that company saying, you know, “We have to go buy a CRM system.”  “What do we know about CRM?”  They’ll meet as a group.  Talk about, you know, “Well, I’ve used sales force.  I’ve used sales logics.  I’ve used dynamics CRM in the past.”  They’ll have a group conversation and then they’ll send a researcher to the web to find out everything they need to know.

They’ll look at which companies should they deal with.  They’ll look at which partners they may deal with that have it implemented.  They’ll go into user group communities and talk to people who use the product.  They’ll go on sites like G2 Crowd and actually look at verified reviews to see how people like the software.

In fact, at the conference, there was a gentleman there speaking from G2 Crowd, and in his presentation he claimed their study show that up to 45 percent of B2B software buyers are now a 100 percent through the buying process before they actually reach out to a vendor.

Andrea: So they’ve already decided

Rick McCutcheon:  They’re way down the road and they’re really looking at now who can add more value to me or help, you know, move me through this journey.

Andrea: Interesting.  So what do you think that accompanies to have in place in order to be prepared for that kind of, I guess educated or a client that’s taking that much initiative or potential customer that’s taking that much initiative on the front end?

Rick McCutcheon:  We’ve got to reorganize our sales teams for one thing, right?  So, you know, I don’t want to say cold calling is dead, but it’s limping along pretty badly these days.  It’s very difficult to get through on a cold call.  It’s almost like we have to learn to influence the customer, influence the prospect, just like your podcast is named.

So, we have to get out there and get the right content to where they’re going to find it to say, “Hey, there is Rick McCutcheon, Full Contact Selling, maybe he can help me with my CRM.”  Then they looked at my profile on LinkedIn and say, “Wow, he looks like the Dynamics CRM guy.  So, if we’re going with dynamics, he looks like a choice.”  But if they were going with sales force, they wouldn’t pick me, right?

So, if you follow my social media and website, I’ve really focused in on that market I’m going after.  So, when they’re out searching, they’re going to find me and I think companies have to figure out how to do that and look at who’s my buyer and what journey do they go on when they buy and actually have the things out there to be able to impact them.

And then from a sales rep perspective, they better be very, very, very good on LinkedIn because they’ve got to look good.  They’ve got to look like an expert.  They’ve got to look like an authority and they’ve got to look like a trusted advisor in their LinkedIn profile to make sure someone’s going to reach out and accept their invitation to LinkedIn.

Andrea: Yeah.  That’s a really interesting point.  So do you have any specific suggestions about how somebody should utilize their profile on LinkedIn?  You said they should look like this.  Do you have any suggestions about how they can look like that?

Rick McCutcheon:  Well, I’ll give you an example.  I did some work in the mining supply area and was up in Northern Canada doing some sessions with a supply group up there.  And one fellow’s profile had no picture, spelling errors on it, you know, no real background on their LinkedIn profile.  And another person had, you know, the profile was all done with an open pit mine heavy equipment in the background.  All the staff had all the mining gear on in their photographs, all their details were about them working in the mining industry.

So, I went to the one guy who actually hired me and I said, “Look at your profile against that profile.”  And he said to me, “We’re a better company than they are.”  I said, “Yeah.”  And I said, “Well, here’s the problem.  I’m meeting you guys for the first time and the race has started and you’re not even out of the starting gates than this guy who’s a hundred yards ahead of you.” “He looks like a much better supplier than you do, so now you’ve gotta prove to me that you’re better than this person.”  And it all started with maybe, you know, $1,500 investment one company made in their corporate LinkedIn profiles versus somebody who showed they don’t care.

Andrea: That’s very interesting and that’s been something that I’ve paid attention to when working with companies too, how do they show up on LinkedIn and do they even show up on LinkedIn. You can tell the people that have spent a little time on it and you know, invest in that side of things and then people who don’t.  It’s also hard I think to convince people that that’s important, but what you just said made a lot of sense.

Do you think that most people really are going to LinkedIn to look up?  What percentage of people are going to LinkedIn before they make a buying decision?  Any idea?

Rick McCutcheon:  I don’t know. Depends on who we talk about, right?  If we talk about it in the procurement area, they go to social, right?  What social they go to depends, right?  So if I’m dealing with a self-service company and I’m doing 80 percent of my profile through self-serve, my purchase through self-serve, I may never get to LinkedIn.  I may look at the web, I may look at, you know, Facebook, who knows where I’m going to Pinterest, who knows where I’m going to be pulled into this company.

But as soon as I’m a sales rep and I expose myself and I reach out to you, Andrea and say, “Hey Andrea, I’m Rick McCutcheon from Full Contact Selling, I need to talk to you about your CRM system.”  Then bang, they’re coming back to my LinkedIn profile to see if number one, is this a real person or some kind of AI robot reaching out?  Or is this spam or do I know this person, or how am I connected to this person?

So, I say, the vast majority of people are going into LinkedIn, but you know, you hit a note there that I find humorous.  Like if I go into a company and they don’t believe this is happening, I show them some studies from Google, some studies from IBM.  And you know what, if they still don’t think it’s happening, let them hold onto their ideas and let them just drift off into retirement because they’re going to get there very quickly because this B2B process from the buyers’ perspective is changing very, very quickly.  And if they can accept that then I can only bring the evidence to them.  If they don’t accept the evidence, I just move on.

Andrea: Ok, so you mentioned Sales Navigator.  What maybe one or two tips do you have for people in utilizing Sales Navigator to reach out to businesses?

Rick McCutcheon:  Your ability to target, right?  I do work for some incubators.  One fellow built a system for tinnitus, for treatment and it was a hearing system and it was tested at the University of Buffalo.  So, we said, “OK, who do we need to go to out there to test it with their patients?”  So, we went to audiologist who graduated from the University of Buffalo where the study was done on this device.

And we targeted like 3000 people who fit that category and we found them in minutes in LinkedIn Sales Navigator.  In the good old world of selling, there’s no way I could have found them at all and this was instantaneous.  So, if I’m a sales rep or any kind of, you know, company business development and I have to target a specific kind of person, the only way I’m going to find them is LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Andrea: OK, so let’s talk about Microsoft 365 or whenever you’re implementing something like this with a company.  I’m assuming that they already know that they want to use a system like this or do you help them figure out what system they should be using or do they already know when they come to you?

Rick McCutcheon:  By the time they come to me, they typically know they’re using Dynamics 365.  And you know that goes back to my LinkedIn profile. My LinkedIn profile has me as Dynamics 365 guy, right?  So if they’re looking at salesforce.com or a NetSuite or another product, when they get to my profile, I’m not the person they’re going to touch and reach out to.  I’ve done that on purpose.

Andrea: It filters people.

Rick McCutcheon:  Yeah, because people because I want the right people reaching out to me.

Andrea: Sure.

Rick McCutcheon:  So, if I was in a situation where some dealers are more of a competitive market, I may end up in that deal early on.  But the type of work I’m doing, which is the fine tuning of the product, you know, usually comes after the implementation.

Andrea: What is it?  Do you mind just sharing a little bit about the product itself?

Rick McCutcheon:  CRM or my product?

Andrea: Yours.

Rick McCutcheon:  Well, it’s a methodology, right?  So, I’ll start out going through an interview process with the company, understanding what they do, and 99 percent of the time I’m working with senior sales team or senior marketing team.  You know, what they do, who’s their target market, how do they service, did they sell direct, or did they sell through a channel?  Do they sell through some kind of online direct model to figure out what they’re selling, how they’re selling, look at their process today of what they do, how they manage their accounts.

And over the years, I’ve accumulated hundreds of models that I have in these flow charts.  So I go out and say, “OK, here’s the five models we need that fit this company.”  We come back, we customize those models for that company and then we come out with a sort of a punch list of, you know, what do we have to do to the CRM system to be able to implement this process.  What do we have to do a lot of times for marketing automation and LinkedIn, so what are the things we need to do to make this process flow and then I help them with that project plan.

Andrea: Do you ever find that the people that maybe are on the frontlines that aren’t necessarily working with you directly that they have a hard time implementing the changes that they have been asked to implement when it comes to this new technology that they’re using or these changes that they’ve been made?

Rick McCutcheon:  More so in the past.  We’re getting so that pretty much everybody who’s still working today is very fairly computer literate.  I was doing this back in the 90s.  So, back in the 90s, we were working with sales teams with, you know, some completely non-computer users.  But you know, pretty much if you’re still in the workforce today, you’re using computers.

You know, getting people to share their information and change their process is probably more of a challenge.  And we’re moving away from an independent maverick type sales model where, you know, “Here’s a sales rep and I own my customer.”  We’re moving into more of a team selling model where, you know, it’s the marketing of the content, customer service, you know, maybe field service and the sales team really manage that customer together.

Andrea: Yeah.  So, when they are doing that or when they’re trying to move toward that, I guess I’m wondering if you ever have any tips for how to help people to understand why it’s so important and why they should do it.

Rick McCutcheon:  I’ve got a whole program on user adoption.  So yeah, I teach a workshop on it.  So you know, the whole user adoption thing is you got to tell them why.  You know, figure out why they need to do and get them understand that it’s to their benefit to accumulate this data and to understand their data.  You’ve got to get management to manage from the data.

So, you know, if I’m asking my people to use CRM, but I don’t use it myself then there’s a big gap there as well as do I manage from the reports and the dashboards within CRM.  So that’s really important giving them as much training and coaching as they need.

You know, the biggest failures I’ve ever seen is when IT department goes and customizes the software and hands it out to the reps and say, “Here’s your software, go use it.”  So, we typically put a six-week user adoption program together that includes training coaches, videos, and you know, one-on-one follow-up and this is what I strongly suggest to companies.

Andrea: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Rick McCutcheon: Yes for sure.

Andrea: Yeah.  I think that that’s one of the things that can really hold people up and hold the process up when you’re trying to implement something new.  I love that you have a whole program that kind of helps them to implement immediately over the course of that six weeks.  That’s great!

Rick McCutcheon:  I have a good question for you.

Andrea: Yeah, sure.

Rick McCutcheon:  Ask me where all this is going in the future.

Andrea: I was just thinking something like that.  Yes, I’m totally going to ask that.

Rick McCutcheon: Okay.

Andrea: So where is this digital transformation going in the future?  Where are we headed?

Rick McCutcheon:  Well, you know, it gets really interesting we start talking about this topic because you know, are we going to be able to operate without sales teams out there? And I don’t believe so.  I think, there’s going to be a blending of technology, blending of people’s skills and understanding that conversation and helping people to decide, you know, which solution is better for them.

So, I think, you know, sales professionals are still absolutely needed out in the world even though some techies really kind of are trying to get us to believe it’s all about click, try, and buy, right?  We’re finding, it’s really all about more about that relationship, more about trust you’re building with the customer.  And I think LinkedIn proves that.

Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion, I think it was about three years ago now.  And, you know, that’s really a social platform where we can connect with other people and communicate with other people and when we need to talk to other people.  So, I think there’s proof there that, you know, relationships are still wanted in needed in our culture.  So, it’s going to really remain as part of that process.

Andrea: Yes.

Rick McCutcheon:   And not give your customers the platform they need and the ability to self-serve when they want; they’re going to go find other suppliers.

Andrea: You know, it kind of makes me think of the old small town kind of selling, you know, and the idea of the people really want to do business with people they know and trust.  They still do, even if it’s online.

I look at my dad and he does sales in a small town and those relationships and building into the community and doing things for the community and being out there and having conversations in the community, all of that is now just as relevant.  It seems like it’s moved online for the most part, besides the opportunities that people have to connect at conferences and things like that, I suppose.

Rick McCutcheon:  And you know what your dad sells in a small town and I’m sure he has a great little business there too, but you know, the world’s a global place.  It’s amazing how LinkedIn has allowed us to connect to who we need to connect to no matter where they’re located.

Andrea: Yeah.  That’s really cool.  Well, Rick, tell us how can listeners get in touch with you or where should they follow you on LinkedIn, obviously.  We should be following you on LinkedIn.

Rick McCutcheon:Absolutely. If you go on LinkedIn, you look for Rick McCutcheon, there’s a guy who’ a massive body builder and then there’s the CRM sales process guy.  And some people get confused at times, but you’ll see that I’m the sales process CRM fellow.  So connect to me and I do lots of webinars, seminars, and events.  And hopefully, I can help your audience sort of better understand this world of digital sales transformation.

Andrea: Great!  Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with this here at the Voice of Influence podcast.

Rick McCutcheon:  Oh, thank you.  It’s been my pleasure, Andrea!

 

 

END

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How To Be a Servant Leader in Sales with Tiffany Adams

Episode 70

Tiffany Adams has spent most of her professional life working in a corporate setting dealing with human capital management; both before and after they’re hired. She’s previously worked for companies like IBM and is currently the Director of Client Solutions with the Ken Blanchard Companies.

What I love about Tiffany and is that she does this work with a servant-leadership attitude.

In this episode, Tiffany and I discuss what she does for her company and clients, what servant leadership and situational leadership looks like, why the idea and practice of servant leadership means so much to her, what it’s like working for someone who truly believes every single person matters, how servant leadership can help with selling your services and products, the main rule she uses when selling anything, why you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for feedback from clients on the work you’re doing, and more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Today my guest is Tiffany Adams.  I’m so excited to have Tiffany with us today because, first of all, she’s just an absolute joy and you’re going to love her.  And the other thing is that she has so much knowledge and experience around sales and human capital but the first part of this all is with the servant leadership kind of attitude.  So we’re going to learn more about that from Tiffany.

But let me tell you a little bit about Tiffany to give you some context.  When she first started out she was not interested in sales, whatsoever, and yet the very first job she had was as a defense contractor in sales.

Since then she spent the majority of her time in corporate with kind of dealing with human capital management before and after people are hired just helping with the talent.  And that’s most notably in IBM and now with the Ken Blanchard Company.  She’s going to tell us a little more about that.

Andrea:  So Tiffany, good to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Tiffany Adams:  Thank you!

Andrea:  Another kind of fun tidbit about Tiffany is that she grew up in my hometown.  So we’ve actually known each other forever.  She and my sister were really great friends growing up.

So Tiffany, it’s just really, truly fun to have you here especially knowing, you know kind of having seen the arc of your career and seen where you are now, it’s just really fun.  I’m excited to talk to you about what you’re doing.  So can you tell us a little bit what you’re doing with the Ken Blanchard Company?

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah, thank you.  I was just thinking about this last night, Andrea, on the plane home about our journey from being the really annoying little sister’s friend that were always naturally trying to kind of annoy you and sort of get in what you and your friends were doing to where we are now.  It’s pretty fun.

So yes, I am a director of client solutions with the Ken Blanchard Companies, which is a really fancy name for doing two things really well.  How do I take care of our clients that we have and make sure we’re adding value and we’re serving them, and how do I work to spread the message of Ken Blanchard and what we do and be able to help our business grow?

And most importantly for anyone, a new client, how do I wrap my arms around what their person goals are and help them achieve those?

Andrea:   Those are really touchy feely kind of ways and talking about this, I love that.  So tell us a little bit what the company does?

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah.  So Ken Blanchard Companies started 40 years ago.  I mean, you may have heard of Ken as being the one minute manager.

Andrea:  The one minute manager?

Tiffany Adams:  The One Minute Manager is a book that was published 40 years ago and just re-released last year.  It really is what took him from being a professor and he was well known within academia for some of the textbooks he had written.  He just said, you know, we’ve got to make it relevant to people.

So he connected with Spencer Johnson who was actually a children’s book author and said how do we take this message of leadership and management and make it really relevant in the simple truth and how do we communicate that in a way where people can grasp it, act on it, and live it.  And from there, he just kind of kept doing that and that’s what we do still today.  Anyone can be a great leader, anyone can be a great manager and that’s what we’re known for.

Andrea:  And I know that there are a couple of programs in specifically around servant leadership or at least concepts around servant leadership and situational leadership.  Do you want to tell us a little bit about those to give us an idea?

Tiffany Adams:  Yes.  So servant leadership is something near and dear to my heart and always has been.  It’s really the culmination of who Ken is when you think about that.  He had a book published earlier this year called Servant Leadership in Action where he collaborated and invited some amazing people across all walks of life to share what is servant leadership actually looks like in your organization.

What do we do, because it’s kind of this you know when you said touchy feely about this ethereal topic and people talk about it a lot.  But how do we really wrap our arms around it and figure out?  “OK, what do we do about that?  How do we build the culture of servant leadership and then how do we build servant leaders?”

With that book, we’ve been touring right now, putting an event in multiple cities and to talk about what it does look like.  At the core of servant leadership in our minds is becoming what we call situational leader, which if you think about at a very high level, you’ve heard the term different strokes for the different folks, right?  We can just treat everyone the same.  Well, it’s really about different strokes for the same folks, so we lead and we’re responsive based on what people need in their development level for a particular task.

So there’s a lot more when you think about it but when you think about those two things servant leadership and how it connects with what we call situational leadership too that would be the cracks of it.  But you know we really talk about what is servant leadership mean for ourselves.  We have to start with ourselves first because if we don’t take care of ourselves then we can’t take care of anyone and then in a one-on-one relationship or management team and organizational level.

Andrea:  You’re kind of getting behind Ken’s message.  You seemed to have adapted it and you believe in it and now you’re out there promoting it, why does it matter to you personally?

Tiffany Adams:  Great question.  So when I think about this and why it connects with me at such an emotional kind of spiritual level for me, growing up, when I look at my major influencers in life, they were very different people, very different experiences, very different platforms and completely different from each other, honestly.  Their personalities and how they approach life and maybe even the choices they made in life, you know the colorful versus non-colorful language.  But there’s a common thread that I so lived out in each of them and it was that people matter.

So whether it was my grand dad who was a pastor for 40 years in small towns in Western Nebraska, people mattered.  Or whether it was another major influencer in my life that he is travelling the world, speaking to people, building schools, you know, has educated many thousands of kids in Haiti or trained some of internationals top executive leaders all over the globe, people matter.  Or whether it’s somebody that I love very dearly that was a huge part of our national security and I will never actually know all of the details of that.  Why did he do that, because people matter?

So being able to connect with an organization that that’s their mission, vision and goal was such a natural fit for me.

Andrea:  So when you say that people matter, how did they demonstrate that to you, like what did that practically look like?

Tiffany Adams:  Different ways through different people.  So I would say with my grand dad, I remember watching him in a small town build relationships with people that just blatantly didn’t believe what he believed and were very vocal about it.  And while he completely believed in his overarching message obviously, being a pastor, he never let that stop the relationship.  Does that make sense?

So for him, it was just more about people knowing that in his eyes, whether you disagreed with him, whether you agreed with him, whether he could get you to church because he’d always going to ask you to get ready you know.  You could tell him no a million times and he would still going to love you and respect you and want to be there for you.

When his heart was feeling, you know, getting out of the house at 20 degree below weather to get to you, to get you what you needed.  So that was a huge, I guess, just part of my life that I watched play out from the time I was a little girl.  Caleb Lucien is the founder of Hosean International Ministries.  And when he was first starting this ministry, and we talked about this multiple times, he had offers and opportunities from some of the largest pastors that has some of the biggest budgets and influence here today.

I could tell you some of their names and you know you’d be like “Wow, how would you turn that down?”  There are times when were so struggling to make sure we can pay our teachers within Hosean.  But he turned it down and continues to turn down some opportunities that would make personally his life a little bit easier because he will not take his own paycheck for his own family, with two kids in college, to be able to make sure his teachers get paid.  He could do that but he was just like “Tiff, no I mean God has called me to Haiti.  I had to build schools here and bring electricity and how do we build the economy and how do we make sure people can build something of their own legacy here.”

So he did that because people mattered.  I mean, that’s the _____ that have made such a big impact to my life.  You know, Ken is one of the most amazing people because you would think he could command crowds of thousands and draw that.  But he will start telling us stories about flying and spending time with a company and a CEO of an organization with 50 people.

So while he could command so much money and probably make so much money speaking to huge audiences, he’ll take so much time to go sit down with a leader of 50 people, 5 people, 10 people and invest just as much time and energy into them because he knows they’re making an impact on people and it doesn’t matter if it’s a smaller number of people.  That matters.

Andrea:  So every single one of them, every single person matters.

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah, yeah and he doesn’t always need to be onstage kind of preaching that even though he can and he can influence thousands at a time.  That’s not the only thing that drives him.

Andrea:  And it sounds like he lives it out even in conversation with like one-on-one conversation.

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah, he really does and he could speak with anyone.

Andrea:  You mentioned before we’re actually recording that he just gives you all his attention.  Can you tell us what that looks like when you’re the person that he’s talking to?  What does that feel like?

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah.  So long before I came to work in this role, in this capacity, I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with him and his family and it really does go across his family.  But they’re the certain people where we would be surrounded by a crowd.  And whether he was talking to me or whether he was talking to someone else, you were the most important thing in the world at that moment.  His attention is on you.  He is asking questions.  He’s listening.  He’s not just listening where he’s hearing you; he’s hearing what’s just behind your words.  If that make sense you know and then he does something about it and you walk away feeling like “Oh my gosh, I matter.  I mattered to him in that moment.”

Even at a conference surrounded by hundreds of people trying to get his autograph, he’ll just take even a few precious seconds and make you know that you’re really important, that he cares.  There’s been a very few people that I think have the ability to pull that off.  I don’t think I do a great job of that and that is something that, personally, I’ve been working to be more intentional about, whether it’s with my own kids or somebody that is giving me their time on a phone call to just shut everything else down and focus solely in what they’re saying and what they need from me.

Andrea:  Yeah, there’s something really valuable about feeling like that you have been given attention that someone’s full attention is on you.  It’s rare, like you said.  It doesn’t happen that often.

Tiffany Adams:  It’s rare and when you follow that up with somebody who is definitely not prefect but still pure of heart and they’re not listening to you for their own gain.  They’re not trying to get something out of the _____.

Andrea:  Yeah.  They don’t have their own agenda.

Tiffany Adams:  No.  They’re not thinking three steps ahead of you, they’re just 100% there and they’re there for you like there’s something really powerful in that.

Andrea:  Oh my goodness, you’re so right, there is.  I know that part of your job is and has been in the past that you’ve had a lot of experience at least with sales.  And I really want to try these two concepts together because I know that most of us feel like sales people or salesy people are that three steps ahead of you.  You feel like you’re going to be had or something like that.

So when you think about sales, when you’re actually in the middle of talking to somebody about promoting a product that they might buy, which is sales, how did these things interact for you, how do you tie in this idea of servant leadership you know given somebody your full attention that people matter more than the sale maybe.  I don’t know how does this work for you?  What do you think of?

Tiffany Adams:  Well, I think I’ve been really blessed, first of all, to have had some incredible experiences and be able to build relationships with clients throughout my career no matter what I was doing.  So when I was a defense contractor, it was a fairly simple message.  But I started to realize that the people that I was serving, they were trusting me, they were my clients, and they were being able to get purchase orders for what I was selling because I was fulfilling a need that they had.

But then beyond that I got wedding gifts sent to the office from individuals and they were sharing with me information about their kids and about these vacations that they were taking.

Andrea:  These were people that you’re selling to?

Tiffany Adams:  Yes and I’m like “OK, we’ve transcended.  I have something I want to sell you and I need you to buy it from me.”  It wasn’t “I’ve got to take care of you because I know more about you.  I’ve now become emotionally invested in your life and you know sometimes you’re there for a season and sometimes you’re not.  It didn’t matter that I know your wife runs the daycare and at the Olympics and somebody that I ran with in college is competing.”  And so “I know that your kids need the special signs in your wife’s daycare, they somebody that they can connect with and care for.”  You know things like that.  Is it really going to impact your life down the road, maybe or maybe not?

We do have this common _____ humanity.  For example, have clients that I’ve work with for years and none of us are the same organization any longer but I consider them my friends.  I consider them my mentors.  I’m just constantly checking in with them and them with me on life in what are you trying to achieve and where do you want to go because we have this history of helping each other that doesn’t stop because of contract they signed.

So for me, yes, we’re trying to build a business and yes, you Mr. and Mrs. Customer, you’re also trying to build a business so if I can help you achieve your personal goal, your team goals and your organizational goals, I’ve done my job.  But if I can’t, you still have those and there’s probably somebody that I know and I really enjoy being a connector because selling is teaching.  And if you can teach someone and learn from someone, I think that’s a great foundation of a relationship that builds trust and build respect.  And if there’s a way to help each other out, we have that opportunity.

If we don’t, that’s OK because we’re all in this life together.  I know this is just so touchy feely but it’s just how I approach sales because I think it’s very relational.

Andrea:  Yeah, totally.

Tiffany Adams:  And it’s OK.  If I can’t help you then let’s not in any way _____ then great.

Andrea:  OK, we have to go back to something you’ve said just a minute ago, sales is teaching, explain what you mean by that.

Tiffany Adams:  Well, I would always ask my team, “Who’ve you taught this week?”  Because it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to sell somebody, for us it maybe sometimes technology or more the behavioral sciences aspect people but there’s just more than the sale.  There’s more than a contract.  There’s more than a demonstration.

No matter what we’re doing is there something that we know about the job market?  Is there something that we know about why people are attracted to one organization versus another?  Is there something that somebody else might be doing within their organization that I know about that I can connect them with their own colleague because it’s going to impact their lives?

It’s hard for me to sell somebody something if I can’t both teach them something that’s of value to their lives and their jobs and if I can’t learn it from them.  I have a hard time with that because it’s too transactional.  There are definitely those sales and I engage in them all the time.  We all do and it’s necessary and it’s vital and some people are just really good at that and _____.  It’s just not the kind of role I’ve ever had so I don’t have that much experience talking about it.

But if we’re not the one teaching our clients some things, somebody else will be and not just naturally build trust.  And if people don’t trust you, they’re not going to buy from you because what we do impacts people and their organization but it also impacts their future career path and what they’re trying to achieve.

Andrea:  Yeah and if you don’t believe in your product enough, you don’t believe in your service enough that it’s going to help people, you don’t believe it enough to say “I can actually help you” then why would you be selling it?

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah, I personally would have a hard time.  Other people don’t and they’re great at it you know and that’s OK.  My natural style is exactly the way you just described.

Andrea: Yeah, and I think that that’s the listener too.  I mean, listener at home wherever you’re listening, I know that you care about people that’s why you’re listening.  So I realized that the idea of selling something; an idea, a product, or a service, you don’t want to be that salesy person but you’re listening to Tiffany and you’re saying to yourself “Maybe, I don’t have to be that person, I could be Tiffany.”

I can incorporate this attitude of people matter and I’m here to serve and lead in this conversation by offering content, by offering teaching or connection or whatever in order to see things go through.  And you don’t have to blush when you tell somebody that you’re offering them a product, you’re offering to sell them something.  I think that’s what so powerful about this is that you’re not apologetic about actually selling them.

Tiffany Adams:  No, I’m not.  And especially with what I do now if we can teach someone something that helps them have more effective communication with their team or if they’re managing up with their leader, they’re serving both themselves and their leader in doing that, like “Can we work better together and more efficiently and more effectively to serve each other and serve our clients?”  Everybody had these jobs where they’re not fulfilled.  They’re not engaged.  They feel rejected and it’s a weight.

No matter how much we try to shed that weight before we come home at night, it’s still there and it impacts our relationships outside of work.  So if there’s anything that we can do to positively impact that or influence that, I think that’s a beautiful thing because you’re not just a better colleague or a better employee, you can be a better friend or spouse or aunt or uncle, parent or grandparent or a corporate citizen.

I’m just so blessed in the work that I’ve been able to do because it is all about people whether that’s the technology that surrounds it or like what I’m doing now with training, I’m in leadership that really goes beyond the walls of just an organization.

Andrea:  Alright, so we’ve talked about this internal positioning of your own heart and mind knowing that “OK, what I have to sell is important and it can help people but then also people matter and so I’m here to do this, you know, serve through selling essentially and teach and connect through selling.”

Would you bring us down to a really tangible level for us and tell us maybe two or three things that you practically do in the process of selling, maybe just a few tips that would help us to kind of wrap our minds around it, maybe some actionable things that we can even try.

Tiffany Adams:  Hmm good question.  So can you clarify for me or give me a scenario of, are you just building a business?  Do you have a book of business that you’re trying to increase?

Andrea:  So let’s say, we’re talking to somebody who has something like that to offer but they’re not really sure, you know, what are some practical things that they could do in terms of building those relationships and not being afraid of actually putting themselves out there to sell?

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah.  I would say at a very foundational level, I have a personal role that if anyone should ask for anything, let’s say I’ve been pushing my message out there and somebody comes back with a question, if it’s all possible, I try to make sure they know I’ve received their message and they get somebody reach out them in two hours.

Andrea:  OK!

Tiffany Adams:  So that is what I attempt to do.  Now, what’s non-negotiable for me is that I’ll be 24-hour responsible.  If somebody asks me to do something or get something for them, and what’s really cool, this is actually an internal norm at the Ken Blanchard companies, and I didn’t know that until I actually started.  So talk about lining up with my own values.  If I can’t get somebody an answer in 24 hours, I’m continually like communicating with them about what I have found out or what my next steps are to try to serve them with that, right?

We can’t figure out the world’s problems or answer and get the answer that we might be looking for always within 24 hours because people have client meetings, or there’s travel there, or they’re on vacation with their family.  But I can still communicate with my clients or prospects who are always referred to as my clients in my mind and what I’m doing to help them.  I have received feedbacks from multiple clients in the past that I get one deal just based on that alone.

Andrea:  Just because you were in consistent contact with them, letting them know your process and where you’re at.

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah, I was responsive to them and I was proactive.  You know one client that I ended up working with for years and years told me probably like a year and a half after “You know why you got our business, don’t you?”  And I was like “Yeah, because we’re the best ones for it.”  And they’re like “Well, yeah, I mean not, but it’s because you two responded so quickly.  When you ask you a question, you either got us the answer or told us you’re working on it and kept us updated.  So we were able to get five, six, seven pieces of data for you that we needed to make a decision before we had heard back from the other company on the first question.”

So that’s getting into the _____ of what we do in selling but I get really passionate about that and I took your assessment.

Andrea:  Yeah, the Fascinate Assessment.

Tiffany Adams:  Yes, the Fascinate Assessment and it really did line up with my personality.  So I’ve used a lot of emotional language today because that’s the value that I have and I think you have to have your heart engaged to be as passionate about what you do as you can.  But I’m very much process-oriented and I know there are thousand things that need it done and done well for me to actually achieve the end goal.

So I’ve got ton of things and I can actually dive into “How are we gonna do this.”  The other thing too is I’m constantly asking my colleagues and even former colleagues that are still great friends, “Hey, what are you doing that’s working?  What have you learned?”  What helped the clients that I could incorporate because it can always get better?”  And I just learned that from some pretty amazing coaches that I had through high school and college growing up that you can always get better.

Andrea:  And don’t be afraid to ask that’s great.

Tiffany Adams:  Don’t be afraid to ask.  Feedback is the breakfast of champions, so I want to know what I’m doing well so I can keep doing that but also what I can change.  I was in Minneapolis yesterday; we have that servant leadership live in _____ of events and afterwards there was a colleague of mine and he said, “Can I give you some feedback?”  I’m like “Yes, you can.”  He was like “Thank you.”

And we just had this great conversation and I said “Thanks so much for sharing that because I actually was thinking about that point exactly when I walked back into this room and you validated that and you’re totally right and I can change that next week when I get to deliver the same kind of presentation for Denver event.”  I get to do that and he made me better and I appreciate that.

Andrea:  So don’t be afraid of feedback, feedback that might help you get better.  Don’t let your ego get in the way.

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah, I’m always afraid of feedback.  I hate it.

Andrea:  I love that you just said that.

Tiffany Adams:  I get nervous.

Andrea:  I love that you just said that.

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah, I was sitting down with my boss yesterday and she had taken notes about it and there were like six really positive things about what I did, but I was still nervous _____ because she’s just amazing individual, an amazing leader.  But it’s just funny because it’s such a natural human response to be nervous when you’re getting feedback like we don’t have to like it.  We’ve still just have to ask for it because we know it makes us better.

Andrea:  Hmmm yeah.  So feedback is the breakfast of champions.  It doesn’t mean that it’s the donut of champions.  It’s the oatmeal, it’s the…

Tiffany Adams:  Right.

Andrea:  That is so great.  I love that.  Tiffany this has been such a delight.  I love this example.  I love sharing you as an example of what it can look like to really care about people and value people, say that people matter and live that out through the process of your work when you have to be selling and get to sell, get to share these things with other people.

So I really appreciate you bring this to our audience because I think that it’s something that people tend to be a little more apathetic and sensitive maybe, which I think a lot of my audience an tend to be.  We have a harder time diving into that because we’re so worried about what other people saying that we’re going to like I said come off as salesy.

Thank you so much for being such a great example for us and for sharing your expertise around this area.  I really appreciate it.

Tiffany:  Yeah.  You’re so welcome.  You know if I can leave you with one thing as you’re building your business and I love you do this and I love it when I look at what you share.  You really take what you have learned about a particular topic or some insight you just had and you want to share that with others into teaching not selling that help build your voice.

Andrea:  Exactly.  Yeah, content marketing is what we call it in online world.  Yeah, so keep doing that and thank you to the listeners and thank you to you for being here.  Would you like to share with us if people are interested in looking into connecting with the Ken Blanchard Company and servant leadership and all that, do you want tell us anything about that?

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah absolutely!  So you can do a couple of things, just go to www.kenblanchard.com that’s the really easy way to get connected with us and we’ll get you in touch with the right person.  I love connecting with people on LinkedIn.  I can certainly get you connected to the right person that can answer all of your questions as well or just share our own personal stories.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Well, thank you so much Tiffany, I appreciate you and your voice of influence.

Tiffany Adams:  Yeah.  Have a great week!

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Sell Like Crazy While Serving Others and Being Yourself with Jim Padilla

Episode 60

We’re all salespeople whether we identify as one or not. If we want to use our voice of influence in the world, we’ll need to become better salespeople and this week’s guest is here to help with that.

Jim Padilla is the Founder of Gain the Edge, a go-to guy for all things sales, and a master collaborated whose purpose is to help entrepreneurs leverage the power of collaboration to scale their businesses, so they can impact the world the way they intended.

In this episode, Jim discusses his core message, the powerful story that led Jim to create his core message and to use his powers for good, his “park bench” approach to sales, the difference between manipulation and influence, the first thing you need to say during a sales conversation, why Jim focuses more on helping people with unrelated issues than selling them his services, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Jim Padilla Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Today, I have with me Jim Padilla, the founder of Gain the Edge. Jim is known in the personal development and the business coaching world as the go-to guy for all thing sales. You’ll just be able to tell by listening to his voice that he’s passionate and engaging, and you can see why he would be really good at this.

He is a master collaborator whose purpose is to help entrepreneurs leverage the power of collaboration to scale their businesses so that they can impact the world they way that they intended and Jim is known for instilling it to his sales teams, “It’s not what you say, it is who you are being when you say it.” Uh I love that!

Jim, it is so great to have you here on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Jim Padilla: Hey, Andrea, I’m super excited to be here and talk to you and just the total alignment with your brand and your vision here and just a great way to be able to share and connect.

Andrea: I’m curious how you would describe your core message because there are sales involved but you also talk a lot about this collaborative kind of atmosphere. So can you share with us, what is the core of what you are trying to get across with your voice of influence?

Jim Padilla: Yeah, you just actually hit it. The rule #1, the thread that we used to everything in our company is that who you’re being is far more impactful than what you’re saying or what you’re doing. So we’re always checking that. It’s literally something that’s get tested and checked every day.

So anytime somebody reacts in a certain way or result happens, who you were being that led to that result or who you were being that generated that response? Who were you that were constantly focused on how do we stay at or pick elevated state as a human being because from there we make incredible decisions. We make great partnerships and we inspire people boldly. Everybody operates at their best and I just find that in life that it just not how most people work.

[Off-topic conversation]

Andrea: So, who you are, how you’re being in this moment matters to everything else. I love that why that in particular…what is that have to do in sales, what is that have to do with your business? Yeah, tell me more about that? Where did this come from?

Jim Padilla: Yeah, you know, I have a pretty sorted past. My mom was 16 when I was born and she was in pretty unfortunate circumstances. So the way she responded in that situation was primarily with fear and anger. So I grew up getting abused on a pretty regular basis and pretty severely to the point that I was in a poster care at 13. I was on the streets at 16 and in jail at 19.

So it was pretty much then my first 19 to 20 years of my life spending all of my waking moments trying to figure out how to master my environment so that I can influence the people around me to feel safe around me so that they wouldn’t want to hurt me because that was my only self. That was my defense mechanism.

I was always constantly checking in on who might I’m being at the moment, who night being here, who might being there, or how am showing up to this person. It’s something that’s always being able to just regulate and it was mostly because I had to. And then you know, fast forward in 20 years and now I make a lot of money teaching other people how to master the art of the sales conversation by being able to influence the people around them to feel safe and to trust you and want to buy from you.

So we don’t focus on scripts and techniques and tactics, we focus on being-ness. We actually have a sales program called Sales Unscripted. That’s the whole focus of it. It’s all about who you’re being because everybody is selling something all day, all the time. There’s no human being on the planet that hasn’t sold something or influence their environment. It’s just you don’t do it in purpose. So we just try to help you get completely aware so that you’re doing it intentionally.

Andrea: Oh man, I love that so much. So you kind of went from…doing it as a survival mechanism to somehow turning it over the course of the years into business. When did that shift for you? Do you think it shifted or what was that transformation for you that took something that was really hard thing that you did just to survive and then turn it into something that is incredibly proactive and powerful?

Jim Padilla: Well, it’s interesting because there were actually two major shifts. One was that I learned I could do this on purpose and I could do this to my advantage but then you _____ and with the upbringing that I had and I essentially had this power that I could use to destroy people. And so I did, I build businesses. You know, I used to own a _____ company. I ran a mortgage broker shop. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life but I spent most of my time figuring out how to get what I needed from people by using these skills.

So I conquered a lot, made a lot, and burned a lot of bridges, learnt a lot of relationships because that was all about me. I was manipulating my environment so that I would win. Then in 2008 when the mortgage crisis hit, I was at mortgage at the time, I had put a lot of people into loan for they had no business being in because I made a lot of money doing it. And I met a woman where I coach _____ in a high school basketball team. Her grandmother came in to do loan and I put her in a loan, it was a gamble. I knew it was a high risk gamble she didn’t belong in.

So fast forward couple of months or couple of years in a gas station here in Sacramento and her mom comes up to me across the gas station and she was like, “You’re a crook, you’re the devil, and you deserve whatever comes to you.” So my mother was living in that car over there and I knew everything she said was true and accurate and right and I didn’t know what to do. Everything came flashing back, my childhood, all my skills, all the things I’ve done. And I said, “Okay, I’ve got to change who I’m being, because it didn’t get me anywhere.”

Ultimately, I made a bunch of money and end up losing it because we gambled it all the way. I filed bankruptcy and foreclosed on multiple homes. We were back down to zero. So everything I had gained through bad means, I lost. And In that moment, I was like “I have to stop. I have great skills set. I have ability to be able change people’s lives and it’s time that I start using it for others’ benefit instead of mine.”

Right at that moment, I started going to town and said, OK, all the things that I’m doing in the sales process and all the things about sales that I hate that make other feel bad, that make sales people feel bad, I stripped them all out. What was left was all the things that actually serve people and make people feel good and make me feel good. But it was all about the power serving others that leads to the outcome instead of the other way around and that’s how this whole thing got started in 2008.

Andrea: Wow, I’m in total goose bumps here. When I hear you say that in that moment with that conversation, the way that you were using it before us, manipulation, your skills, that you realized that that wasn’t the answer but it could be used for good. Did you ever have a point when you were saying to yourself, could this be used for good? Did you ever question that? Sometimes we have these really big awesome superpowers that can really look bad and feel bad and it’s hard to turn it around and see the good. But did you see that automatically or was that something you’ve ever struggled with?

Jim Padilla: I struggled with it that time. My challenge was I was this kid from the streets who didn’t have anything, who had a mother on welfare. I saw capital, money, and resources as a need. So I was like, “Well, I need to get it at any cost.” So many times, I put people in a loan and I would feel bad about it. We would get people into the mortgage loan.

We’ve shown something on the paperwork and it would still be a little bit different when they showed up to sign at the escrow. But they were irritated enough that they didn’t like it but they weren’t irritated enough that they want to start the process over so they would sign but then we would never hear from again. I never got referrals from them, follow-ups, and callback and ______ do with us and we were just you know chop chop.

But great values were high and my phone would ring all the time, I didn’t care about how I took care of these people because I have more business coming in every day. And I started watching this cycle go on. It was just like eating away and I knew I was doing stuff wrong. The real problem was, I was like in my own island because I couldn’t even share the stuff with my wife.

At the time, I was actually scheming stuffs from my own paychecks. If I had a $15,000 commission, I would bring home like 8 of it and I would take the other 7 and I would invest in some properties or do some stuff and my wife had no clue. She thought I was out doing work. I was living my own lie. I was like, “OK, how can I control this,” and it just started eating at me completely. But I just tried to ignore it because, otherwise, I just had to look at the _____ of who I was being and I don’t want to do it.

Andrea: Oh wow! OK, so how do you go from that point to the point…was there a period of kind of forgiveness and redemption? I mean, now look at your business and how much good you’re doing for people. I mean, it’s incredible to hear about all the different people that you’re helping and I know that the sales process that you have now is legit. So there’s such a huge redemption story here. But what was that in between, how did you get to that point where it was better, I mean even in those relationships or what was that like for you?

Jim Padilla: Well, unfortunately, I was not the guy who learned anything in my life the easy way. Every single lesson I’ve ever learned up until that point was always learned the hard way and including that one because ultimately what happened is my wife…our three daughters are all grown and through college and a couple of them are married now.

But at the time when they were going in college, my wife was also getting her degree and had to apply for ______. And whether you qualify or not, you have to apply. You know, we owned properties and we were debt free. And my wife was applying for loans and she was fully expecting for them to say, “Oh you don’t qualify because you make too much.”

Instead, they called us and said “Hey, we want to let you know, you’ve been declined because you have too much debt.” She was like “What are you talking about, debt?” Because I was planting the market and things aren’t going bad and I had $50,000 invested here and money invested here and I needed _____ credit cards taking cash advances to try to fraud them at these debts because we weren’t making money in the mortgage anymore because _____.

All of a sudden, we’ve got multiple six figures with credit card debt. And my wife said, “What are you talking about, we’re debt-free.” We separated. We filed a bankruptcy. We foreclosed on our homes and I was gone for a year and a half. Literally, I got an apartment. I was basically on my face broken before God every single day. I was like, “OK, I did the first 40 years my way and screwed it all up. I’m ready to do your way now.” It was just daily over and over.

Over the course of a year and a half, in 18 to 20 months, my wife started seeing a difference in me and a change in me. I was thankful because I never thought I would get her back. I was hopeful, but I never thought it would actually happen. She just decided, “Look, if we’re gonna be broken apart, we might as well be broken together.” So we started that next year.

This is why it’s so powerful in the story because it went from me being the financial ruin of our family. My oldest daughter didn’t talk to me for six years and for my wife to be able to say, “OK, we’re gonna do this together.” This really finally pulled our finances together. We never had joint account, nothing before this. I was always running my own stuff then the next year, she was a retail manager for Target _____ in corporate management, she came and said, “Jim, I’m retiring from my job and I’m gonna count on you.”

So for her to come full circle to me being the cause of the problem to now I’m being the sole support of the family. Business was huge because she had to come full circle in my character and who I was being to be able to say, “Yes, I’m in this with you.”

And then that next year, she jumped in a business with me and we did nothing but explode and go skyrocket through the roof. And now, we’ve got this amazing business, this incredible marriage and an amazing family. My daughters are back in fold. My middle daughter didn’t talk to me for about three years after all this. I officiated her wedding last year. It’s just been amazing.

Quite honestly, I wish I had a better answer for this but I’m not out conquering business. I’m just out changing lives and business comes. I promise that’s how it works. I mean, yes, we got some strategy. We’re not just throwing stuff up in the air, but our sole purpose is helping people overcome their challenges because we have overcome so many things to get where we are. There’s nothing that you can’t overcome. You just have to be totally clear on who you need to be to make it happen.

Andrea: Oh Jim, thank you so much for sharing that story. It’s so powerful. I saw Jim at a conference just recently and not just Jim, Jim and Cindy. You guys together were just adorable and powerful. You’re both very engaging, powerful and you were holding hands and all that. It’s so cool to hear the back story on how much work it took and how much brokenness it took to get to that point where now you’re living just such a triumphant kind of life.

Jim Padilla: Very much so!

Andrea: Oh man! And now the core of your message, it sounds like there’s so much about that. It’s so much about this who you are and what you’re bringing in who you’re being. So do you incorporate, I don’t know who you’re talking to if you’re talking to using this message with more than your sales team or with the people that you’re serving, but do you talk about this kind of brokenness? How does that play into the influence that you have with people and how you encourage other people to have influence?

Jim Padilla: We’ve never done a ton of marketing and visibility because we’re pretty well connected and we get great results for our clients so that’s where a lot of our business comes. But this year, we just started to start really getting visible and it’s about sharing that. We’re in a position to hold a lot of the industry accountable because we see things that are going on behind the scenes. I’m like “Look, stop doing it that way, do it this way because this is the people are seeing of you.”

But I haven’t been sharing as much of myself in that publicly and that what’s just starting to happen now. I’m actually launching a podcast next month so I want to start being able to put my message out there and start getting people in tune and holding people accountable to a higher level.

You know, Cyndi and I see ourselves as leaders of leaders. We haven’t been necessarily called to reach people one by one, we’ve been called reaching by the masses and we do that by really reaching influence centers. Most of our clients have massive reach. The more of them that we can impact, the more people we can impact indirectly through them.

Andrea: So true. I mean, if you can have an impact on their message on who they are, they’re being then that impact all these other people, absolutely! Wow! This is really powerful. How do you see this for other leaders, other message-driven leaders like yourself, people who are listening to this podcast to have a vision of some kind?

They have a message and they’re struggling with this I guess balancing or understanding when they’re being manipulative or when they’re not? So they don’t want to be manipulative because who listens to this podcast don’t. They don’t want to manipulate but they do want to influence and that line can get really blurry. Do you have any advice for people on how to differentiate their message so that it is on the side of influence and not on the side of manipulation?

Jim Padilla: It’s interesting because the skill set is the same. The mechanics are really the same thing. It’s all about the intention and this is where people have to really get honest with yourself because we all like to say, “Well, I’m not attached. I really just want to help this person. It’s not as important if I make the sale.” Is that really true? Is that really true, right?

You have to get to the place where you can separate it and say, “I want to impact the person. I want to change that life,” and then watch the results come, I’m telling you. People go, “It’s always easy for you to say, Jim. You guys make millions blah, blah, blah.” I didn’t start making money like this until I started helping people first.

Andrea: So when you’re saying helping people, does that include the sale? Or how do you look at that because I think that’s one of the struggles is we have that internal struggle, but you’re saying get honest with the fact that you do want to sell to somebody?

Jim Padilla: Right. But here’s where it comes down to, I remember you’re posting something about the super problem in the group that we’re in, here’s the key. When we talk about our problem and we talk about what people do and we talk about how we help people, if you’re selling an idea, if you’re selling a vision for something, if you want people to donate to your cause or buy your program whatever, the only thing that you should be talking about is why it matters to them because that’s what they’re going to resonate with.

Here’s an example when I was in mortgage, I wanted everybody to be able to call me to get their solutions for whatever it is. We had tons of people who would move to the area, relocate, get a loan, whatever; and I said, “Look, if you’re looking for a school, a babysitter, a place to get your oil changed, or the best restaurant to go to, call me and I’ll take care of it. I don’t want you to have to look up on things.”

So people would call me for all kinds of stuff that had nothing to do with mortgage. But because they knew I’d care about making sure they got whatever they wanted, I got referrals, I got introductions, or I get invited to barbecues. I was in the people’s community. I was part of their lives and I do the same thing in my business. I make it a point to know what everybody around me does, who does it well. If they don’t do it well, how can I help them do it well, even if they don’t hire me because I want to be able to send people to you, right?

I have all kinds of people come to me because of who we are and because of the positioning we have and I hate turning people away without a solution. So if I can’t help you or you can’t afford us for whatever it is, I want to be able to say, “Hey, look, I know exactly who can.” I don’t want to have them to go anywhere else to look. I want them to come to me and maybe we can help them solve their problem.

The people that we do that for like our best referral sources in our business have come from people that we thought never been our clients. But because they appreciate in how much we value them and respected them in the process that we weren’t trying to sell them anything. We’re trying to help them solve the problem.

Andrea: There you go. So it’s not necessarily about the sale but you’re also being honest about it and it’s ultimately about helping them solve their problem and a genuine desire to be that resource for them.

Jim Padilla: Completely, and I will make this two _____

Andrea: That’s alright. Go right ahead.

Jim Padilla: We ____ with Jesus around here.

Andrea: Yeah, so do we.

Jim Padilla: Okay. We all have gifts. We all have a very specific gift that God has given us, some of us have multiple and most people have it hidden and buried. We need to be breaking that out. All the tumultuous childhood and upbringing that I had was the greatest gift that God has given me because that I know that you can literally overcome everything and that everything is possible to go from where I came from where I am now never should have happened.

I see everybody as a finished product and most people don’t see themselves that way. So I see that’s my job to inspire people to overcome and then help equip them with a skill set to be able to make it happen. Will you just work with me on this for a second, everybody just close your eyes for just one minute and visualize just your immediate community would be like.

If everybody you personally know was doing everything to the best of their abilities, your wife, your husband, your kids, your mailman, the teachers at your kids’ school, your pastor at church, or the police officers in your community, whoever; and if everybody was literally doing their absolute best that they’re capable of, how different will your personal life be? How different with the world around you would be? That’s just in your community.

Imagine the world like that. All of a sudden, we don’t have poverty. We don’t have the crime that we do. We don’t have all of the crazy political turmoil. We literally have a political environment whereby we’re just trying to help each other. We are shining and we become the _____ change in the world as a country. This may sound altruistic but it’s possible if we can just get people there, right? That’s my big mission. That’s what I want and I know that I can impact that kind of change as I see it happen every day.

You know, I was listening to one of your earlier podcast about pain can change because it’s all about perception. It reminds of the book that I read often. I actually just read it again last week and I recommend it to all of our salesman and clients. It’s called Zen Golf by Joseph Parent. Everybody should go get that book. It literally has nothing to do with golf. It has everything to do with how you perceive your environment and it’s all about visualization. He actually calls it imaging because visualization is more about eyes. Imaging is about using all the senses to bring it in.

You can start actually seeing yourself, hearing yourself, feeling yourself in the future, in the moment as a completely processed in winning. Your mind down sees that it can happen and then you start focusing on it. It becomes the new target. It becomes reality because you’ve seen it happen in your mind. You literally recreated reality and now you have to do is just follow the steps and go make it happen. That’s exactly what we need to be doing on a daily basis. That’s what you’re doing in the sales conversation.

Before I got on this call, I visualize, “What would be the mountaintop experience for this call? How can I impact people who would read this? How can inspire Andrea? How could I just say something that people just go “Wow, that’s awesome, I can use that.”” And I do that with every call, every single call. I don’t take anybody for granted.

I have this crazy sense of self-delusion that I believe that every room I walk into is better because I’m there. The conversation I’m in is better because I’m in it. As a result, I have the most…what I said when we first talking today, I live in a dream, right? I have the most friction-free life of anybody I know because I don’t look for it. I see the best in everybody and I do everything I can to help them achieve it.

So I have this circle of people, I have everybody in my life who just, you know, even if you don’t like me, I never see it because people don’t share it because it’s no benefit. I’m not like the center of attention and the life of the party but I’m just like, “I just love people and I love life so I put it out and I get it back all day long.”

Andrea: Gosh, I love that! So Jim, pick me apart for a minute.

Jim Padilla: OK!

Andrea: Because I’m not the only one that struggles with this and this is certainly something that I’ve struggled with in the past. I’m starting to get over it. I think a lot of people out there struggle with this and that is simply just not believing that they’re going to get the sale per se or that they’re not going to have a voice.

So people who want to have a voice for example, they want to have their message make a difference, but they don’t see it happening or they don’t feel like it’s going to happen. They can’t see it. They haven’t seen it before. You know, you’re talking about this visualization and that sort of thing, how do you coach somebody over that into actually feeling like “You know what, this gonna happen and actually make it happen?”

Jim Padilla: Well that one thing that gives us integrity with ourselves. You know, we always hear the _____ fake it till you make it. It’s funny, it’s interesting but it’s _____ that the inner you knows it’s not real so he doesn’t buy it, right? So you need to get into action as fast as possible and only focus on the things that you actually accomplish, right?

Andrea: Yeah.

Jim Padilla: Because every time you’re actually accomplishing, you give yourself real true credits so now you have integrity with yourself. And you say, “Hmm, I was gonna do that and did do it and I was able to do it.” Instead of going, “Oh man, I did 80% of that wrong.” “It doesn’t matter, you did this far right?” So now, how can we do 20% right, 30% right?

You have to learn to give yourself credit in life. “Did you get the right person show up on the phone?” “Yes.” “Awesome.” Okay, maybe you didn’t close them but your messaging was right, you’re in the right ballpark. Now, we just got to focus on who _____ being that led them to believe that you weren’t the person to buy from or today wasn’t the time to buy.

Now this is the key. This is where we focused on the most is you have to stay in action. Action is going to be vital to everybody part of their success because the more you accomplished, the more integrity you have with yourself. And then when you can be standing in that place of, “I am the expert. I own my expertise even if I’ve never had a client. The reason I’m doing this is because I’m great at it and I’m passionate about serving new with it. So whether I can sell this or not, I give myself total permission to screw this up as much as I want.”

And I tell everybody, if you’re talking to people in a sales conversation, the first thing you have to owe them is the truth and that truth can be everything across the board. I’d be first and foremost, “Hey, look I’m just learning how to sell but I’m phenomenal at what I do. Please don’t let the fact that this sales conversation might be a little bit cranky because I’m kind of nervous but I’m a bad-ass coach and I absolutely know how to solve the problem. This conversation is gonna be about how do we help you figure out the problem. Now, you just give me a self permission to screw up everything.” How do you think the person on the other side of this phone is going to respond to that?

Andrea: Uh-hmm absolutely!

Jim Padilla: You’re doing great.

Andrea: They’re falling for you now.

Jim Padilla: Totally. You could _____.

Andrea: Yeah. Try being honest by not being manipulative but by being honest.

Jim Padilla: Exactly and then that honesty has to come out throughout the conversation. I literally have a contract with myself that says, if I get to a place where I have to ask myself should I ask that question, I now must ask the question. Because the only time we ask that is that when you’re nervous about asking it. And usually, those are the most important questions.

So if you’re about to call somebody else on something and you’re like, “Oh I don’t know if I should say that?” Guess what, that might be the most important question you can ask them or the most important piece of insight you can give them and you just caused them the opportunity to take that and nobody else was going to tell that to them, right? And that’s how they buy from you. It’s not about the scripting and your seven-step process, it’s about being super connected and genuine with them and being able to tap into somebody.

The thing that I get a lot when I’m in conversations is I can hear people breathing patterns, you know, you connect with people energetically, right? We are all energetic being that’s on the phone, over Zoom, whatever; we are connected. You know, maybe _____ they’re trained. If they’re going to do _____ attack with somebody with a knife to not look at the person. They’re trained to look at the crown behind the person that’s going to attack because if you’re looking at the person, they can feel you looking at them and then you blow your surprise.

It’s the same thing. You can feel and read people as long as you’re focused on them and not you. When you’re worried about losing the sale, you’re worried about not sharing the message properly, you have to abandon that. You have to abandon that because it hasn’t work for you at this point. So get rid of it and start focusing on the other person and you’ll be amazed because you’ll start hearing them, “Oh they’re talking faster, or their mood has changed.” A lot of times we missed that stuff because we’re so focused on getting to the next part of the script.

Andrea: Totally! It’s interesting because I think I can hear people just sort of settle in and their energy comes up and their rhythm is just so natural and all of a sudden they’re just being themselves, like you’re talking about, just being, how does being is. You can tell when people are motivated by fear or by love and that’s essentially what it comes down to, isn’t it?

Jim Padilla: Totally, and you know, the most enrolling thing you can ever do is being yourself. People buy you all the time; they don’t buy your stuffs. They don’t care about your stuff. They buy you because they trust you to be able to help them get what they want. So you just have to be yourself.

We’ve all experienced this. We’d be on the phone or you’re at the store, whatever and somebody was trying to sell you something and you left the conversation, you’re like, “You know, I like him but there was just something about him, I don’t know what it was.” People don’t know how to identify it but they can sure feel it. So you want them to leave going, “I don’t know what it was with that guy, but I have got find a way to work with him because I love how I feel around him.”

Andrea: Yes, yes!

Jim Padilla: And that’s what I get a lot when I’m working. When I’m talking people on the phone, people get like super inspired. I get them grounded. I get them elevated. They’re like, “Hell yes, I can do this.” People will be sadly disappointed if they listen to my sales call because it’s not a bunch of magic. It’s just me being me. I don’t have a bunch of magic formulas, I’m just totally connected to the person I’m serving and I truly don’t have any concern or the best interest in the outcome, except that I want you better at the end of the call than you were at the beginning. I want you to have crystal clarity on what it is you’re trying to accomplish, why you want to accomplish it, what’s the cause of not accomplishing it and what’s in the way?

Andrea: That was really powerful _____. Can you say it again?

Jim Padilla: Yeah.

Andrea: OK!

Jim Padilla: I call it a Park Bench approach to sales, a Park Bench Philosophy; you as a sales person, which all of you are by the way, you should be able to sit down on a park bench with a random stranger. It didn’t come through a phone, _____, random stranger on a park bench and inside of 30 minutes, you should know what they want, why they want it, what’s the cause of not getting it, and what’s in the way? That’s by having a conversation about somebody you care about.

And then you say, “Hey, I know someone that has that solution.” Or you’ll say, “Hey, I can help you with that and here’s how.” That should be your approach to everybody you talk to. It shouldn’t be about, “Let me see if they’re a good client for me.” I was like, “No, let me see how I can help you solve your problem.”

Andrea: I love that. I do and I know that that can be totally contrary to what can be talked about around these ideas of sales and sales conversation and things like that and yet, there’s something very freeing about that, isn’t there?

Jim Padilla: Yes. Yeah, because your only outcome and agenda is to help them, which is what we’re designed for. So it’s right inside all of our will house, every single one of us.

Andrea: I think that one of the difficult pieces of that is getting to that point where you see that you can help them but then having to put a price tag on your help for them. And maybe that’s a different conversation but I think that there are a lot of people that do actually struggle with this. When do you share something and just share it and help people and when do you put a price tag on what you’re offering?

Jim Padilla: Well, it’s interesting because we just started this Facebook drop-in coaching membership group and it was formed from this idea. I get on the phone with people a lot. There’s a lot of people in our industry that are seven-figure, eight-figure people and they kind of live in the castle on the hill. They’re not accessible to the average Joe and I don’t like that. I totally understand protecting your time, I absolutely get it. But I want to help as many people I can.

So I’ll jump on the phone with somebody who’s expressing that they have specific challenge, “No, I can help you with that. Let’s get on the phone for 10 minutes.” And then we do it but it’s hard for me to do that randomly. So we’ve started this whole membership group just last week and it’s like 47 bucks a month and you get a dollar for the first 30 days. The whole objective here is to just drop in and ask the question and then we can help you. It’s mostly discussed with the admin running the group. But I cannot make money on it, I’m just happy.

And then in that the more we have dialogue and you can go, “Hey, I really like the way he thinks. I like his team or I wanna work with them.” That’s when we started pulling people into something bigger. You can do the same thing. You don’t have to have membership but we can do the same thing. You know, get into groups, get into discussions online or figure out networking.

Start listening instead of talking so much and listening for people’s problem and you got to have at least this one key problem or three areas that you can speak into and say, “Hey, I can help you with that.” And just talk to him. Don’t say, I can sell you that. Just say, “I can help you with that or I know somebody who can. Let me talk to you a little bit more.” The key is when we start worrying about wasting our time, because what happens is, I promise you guys, most people who buy it for me have to pull it from me.

I’ll get on the conversation with them and I’m like “Oh this is great. Oh I’m super excited about that. Here’s how I see this working. Oh, we could totally do that. Here’s what I see you need to do.” And they’re like, “How would we do it?” “Well, here’s how we do it.” “How do we pay for that?” That’s all a lot of my conversation and it’s just because I give this genuine, 100%, sincere passion about helping people. They feel it and they see it.

So you really have to check yourself. If you’re not getting those types of responses because you’re showing up in a way that’s not you, you need to be crystal clear why do you want to help this person or do you want to help them? If not, why not? This is a place you got to do some soul searching and how can I help the most on the people.

Like the event that we were at last week when we met each other there, I had a specific objective. Over the course of two days, I wanted to connect a dozen people. So over the course of two days, I was looking for, “OK, you are a copywriter, you need copywriting, awesome!” “You’re looking for bench members over here, you’re looking for someone else to serve, awesome, let’s connect you here.”

So it has nothing to do with me. It was, how can everybody else get help and then people go “Man, Jim is awesome. He’s a great guy. He really helped me.” And you know what, it leads to referral or at least a phenomenal relationships and leads to people going…

You know, I was on interview last week and the person who was interviewing me, she said, “You know what the first time I met you three years ago were at a Mastermind group, I walked into the room and I was like “Yeah, I got a table with 10 people,” and I said, “I’m really struggling with my sales. I need some help.” She said, “All 10 people at the same time _____,” right? That’s the power of being able to serve and everybody knowing what you do.

Andrea: Oh gosh, Jim, that’s so great. What a beautiful redemption of your story and to see you living in such a…I mean, it’s not totally selfless, I mean, it’s not totally selfless. I don’t mean it be like I don’t know, but it is in the sense. It’s that just giving and desiring to help and all of that. It’s just totally different in your experience before and it’s really beautiful and it’s exciting. I’m just so happy for you and I’m happy for all the clients that you serve and the people of the world at large and for the voice of influence that you have in this area.

Jim Padilla: Thank you! Yeah, I appreciate that I honor that quietly giving my track record in the past. These last 10 years has been whole different life and the first 40 was done my way, the next 40, I wanted to do the God’s way. So that’s really what has been about. I speak a lot, I get interviewed a lot and I’m on a lot of stages and I always get one particular piece of feedback, a 100% at the time. It used to bother me because the macho male ego in me wanted to get something bigger but people always say to me, “Man, I can feel your heart,” or “I could sense so much you care.”

It used to bug me because I want them to say, “Man, you rock,” you know or whatever. But that has subsided. My ego is gone and now I valued us so much and I want people to know that I care. I’m authentic. I’m real because I stopped trying to be Jim the dad, Jim the mortgage broker, Jim the sales person, or Jim whoever. I’m just Jim now. I’m just Jim all the time. I represent time. This is me. If you don’t like this version of me that you’re hearing right now then you don’t like me because I don’t have another version.

Andrea: Hmmm love it! Alright, Jim, so how can people connect with you?

Jim Padilla: I’m in two particular resources on; one, we just talked about it with the membership group. I really recommend it if you’re looking for any kind of influence sales support. Again, it’s in the Facebook group. So basically what we have is if you go to Gain the Edge now, which is our company, gaintheedgenow.com/influence-lab.

I know it’s a mouthful, but gaintheedgenow.com/influence-lab. That’s the membership drop-in coaching group. It cost you a buck for 30 days. Ask as many questions as you want. We’ll you answer stuff. We’ll post videos for you. You can network with other people who are on the same journey, great place to just get connected and get support without having to spend a whole bunch of money on coaching.

The other thing I wanted to include is a resource that, you know, our team does a lot of back of the room sales at live events. So basically, we help people in crowded rooms make powerful decisions, which is not an easy thing to do. I did a video and a PDF on Seven Keys to Making People feel Comfortable in a one-on-one room, so did you feel like you’re alone? It’s about reading people and being able to help them feel like it’s just the two of you ____ 150 around you and you’re freaking out. That’s powerful. I don’t care where you’re at, _____ relationships in your marriage, with your team, and with your clients.

So that one is gaintheedgenow.com/sevenkeys, and that’s a download. Check in, you’ll get on a list. You can opt-out if you want after that but just get the resource, check out the video while you’re there. Check out our YouTube channel that will take you there. What you’re hearing right now, that’s what I do in my videos. It’s just me sharing whatever I can. I’m a content machine so I always have new ideas. I just try to give out as much as I can and get on our world and you get a lot.

Andrea: Love it! So Jim, thank you so much and we will definitely include all of those links in the show notes. So if you’re listening and you’re thinking, “I’ve got to get back to this,” then definitely go back to voiceofinfluence.net and you’ll find the show notes for this episode and Jim’s resources.

Thank you so much for spending time with us today, inspiring us for the way that you have really embraced this life of beauty and redemption and the way that you’re influencing others. Thank you so much!

Jim Padilla: Definitely! Thank you and just one last word to everybody, whatever it is you’re thinking that you can do your wrong, don’t make it happen. Go out and take your responsibilities. Just scale yourself up wherever you need to so that you can go out and do the work that you’ve been called to because the worlds need it. I need it. My soon-to-be grandson needs it. Go out and change people’s lives.

Andrea: Thank you, Jim!

Jim Padilla: Awesome!

 

 

 

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